Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Subjectivity

Autism

Felix Stein — Sat, 07 Sep 2019 10:21:03 +0000

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Initially published 7 Sep 2019

Abstract:

The concept of autism is historically contingent. It did not exist, in any proper sense, before it was invoked by medical and mental health professionals in the twentieth century. This entry aims to shed light on this relatively recent concept. First, it contextualises autism within the broader social, epistemological, and political circumstances of its emergence and ongoing negotiation, showing autism to be a dynamic concept, whose meaning is constantly in flux. Second, it revisits some of the more insightful or influential analyses that autism has received over the years in anthropology and adjacent disciplines. And third, it illustrates that anthropologists have been particularly attuned to everyday experiences of autism, comparing it to other forms of human difference while occupying an ambivalent stance towards biomedical approaches to it. A discussion on how autism might matter for the discipline of anthropology features very briefly in the conclusion.

Disciplinary landscapes

Research into autism tends to cluster around two main analytic poles (see Solomon 2010). The epistemic gap between these analytic poles is considerable, and is sometimes discussed as a barrier to the advantageous progression of autism research at large (e.g. Orsini & Smith 2010, Raz et al. 2017, Yergeau 2010). On one end of the spectrum of autism research are the biomedical disciplines, which typically construe the condition as a neurodevelopmental disorder, and focus on those aspects of autism which they perceive as cognitive and social deficits. Research in these areas tends to address questions relating to the causality of autism, its underlying mechanisms, its symptoms, and its prevalence. Consequently, it promotes interventions of different kinds, working towards the development of better standardised diagnostic procedures for autism, technologies for early detection, methods of behaviour therapy, and in some instances, pharmacological treatment.

On the other analytic pole, there are those disciplines which include anthropology, sociology, history, rhetoric, geography, communication, gender studies, and disability studies. Scholars working in this tradition tend to view autism as a socio-political category, and a central component of individual experience and of social interaction. Studies produced within these disciplines thus focus on such spheres as language and sociality, identity and subjectivity, care work and expertise, knowledge-making and meaning-making, while others go about challenging literature in the biomedically-inclined disciplines.^[1]Moreover, within this analytic pole, autism self-advocacy occupies a crucial position, whereby autistic authors employ their experiential expertise, as well as social and literary theory and an oftentimes keen sense of social and cultural critique, to produce valuable scholarship.

The anthropological study of autism can be grounded in the broader field of the anthropology of disability. The anthropology of disability has been slow to include cognitive disabilities within its purview (with the notable exception of Edgerton 1967). This may be the case because attempting to theorise cognitive difference anthropologically requires challenging one of the discipline's rarely disputed assumptions: that human beings all share similar cognitive capacities (McKearney & Zoanni 2018). Nevertheless, a body of literature has emerged over the past decades that focuses on such topics as dementia, intellectual disability, and mental illness, thereby accepting the challenge of envisioning collective life without assuming psychic unity. Anthropological studies of autism, in particular, can be said to constitute a cornerstone in this emerging anthropology of cognitive disability (McKearney & Zoanni 2018). They have also contributed to broader conversations in such subfields as psychological anthropology (e.g. Mattingly 2017), medical anthropology (e.g. Kaufman 2010), linguistic anthropology (e.g. Ochs & Solomon 2008), as well as social and cultural anthropology more broadly (e.g. Grinker 2007).

In what follows, anthropological insights on autism will be joined with important insights from other disciplines. While anthropological engagements with autism are not necessarily unique in their underlying assumptions or styles of argumentation, they do share some distinct analytical and epistemological commitments. First among those is a systematic engagement with the narratives, experiences, and everyday actions of autistic people, as well as with the distinct social worlds they inhabit. Anthropology's insistence on ethnography carves an important analytical space that acknowledges the role of agency, controversy, and creativity in the category's enactment and negotiation. Also typical in the anthropology of autism are frequent reflections over the type of difference that the category of autism represents, and its comparability to other forms of difference – mainly, culture – with which the discipline has traditionally engaged. Thirdly, anthropologists working on autism have usually remained ambivalent towards the claims of the biomedical disciplines. Their general reluctance to either wholly reject these disciplines' expertise or to uncritically accept it has afforded anthropologists a privileged position from which to attend to the epistemological dynamics surrounding autism.

The emergence of autism

The shifting meanings of autism – as a concept with which to make sense of certain atypical tendencies, a label with which to characterise those who hold such tendencies, and a category into which those so labelled are typically classified – derive from the historical processes of its emergence and subsequent negotiations. The history of autism therefore illustrates its fluid and dynamic nature and highlights the centrality of socio-cultural processes to the category's emergence.

Though a detailed social-historical account of autism remains outside the scope of this entry (but see Evans 2017, Eyal et al. 2010, Feinstein 2010, Nadesan 2005, Silberman 2015, Silverman 2012, Waltz 2013), a brief outline seems warranted. The concept of ‘autism’ had made its first appearance in medical literature in 1911 in the work of the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, when it was construed as a symptom of childhood schizophrenia. The concept had mostly retained this meaning until 1943, when the Austrian-born American psychiatrist Leo Kanner published his article ‘Autistic disturbances of affective contact’. This was the very first publication in which autism (then ‘infantile autism’) was described as a distinct disorder, preceding by a single year a publication by Hans Asperger, a German psychiatrist, in which he described a quite similar condition which he termed ‘autistic psychopathy’.

In the 1960s and 1970s, studies into the 'new' syndrome were becoming increasingly common, yet there was still much confusion. Many researchers and clinicians still interpreted it as a type of schizophrenia, while diagnosticians often associated autistic traits with brain dysfunction, mental retardation, or child psychosis. The 1980s saw an increase in systematic research into autism, as researchers began to demonstrate a clear biological factor to the condition, refuting previous assertions about its supposed psychogenesis. By the 1990s, more rigorous evaluation criteria were being devised, and it became increasingly recognised that autism may be a life-long condition. Subsequently, the condition re-emerged as a neurological developmental disorder – the framing that governs much of the academic discourse today.

An often-told fact about autism is the steep rise of its prevalence rates over the past three decades. It is this rise which has helped fuel false claims about the cause of the condition, including those concerning an alleged link between autism and vaccines (for critical accounts of such claims see Kaufman 2010, Offit 2008, Orsini & Smith 2010, Sobo 2015). Gil Eyal et al. (2010), however, convincingly attribute this rise to the widening of the diagnostic criteria for autism, as well as to improved access to diagnostic services. The authors provide a focused review of the entries for autism in the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association, demonstrating that its diagnostic criteria were becoming more inclusive with every new edition (see also Eyal 2013). It is through these broadening criteria that autism was increasingly being stretched into a 'spectrum', an idea originally coined by Lorna Wing & Judith Gould (1979) that has since become almost synonymous with the condition itself.^[2]

Autism's ontological status

Currently, the term 'autism spectrum conditions' has indeed come to represent a broad range of cognitive and behavioural atypicalities. Though it is generally accepted that the traits associated with the category of autism are shaped by genetic factors (e.g. Geschwind 2009), a focus on biological processes is fundamentally unsatisfactory in fully accounting for the phenomenon. The understanding, representation, and framing of autism significantly depend on variations in any society's hegemonic values, conceptions of normality, dominant norms of social interaction, and organising structures of knowledge and classification. Autism, therefore, is an emergent product of interrelated social as well as biological processes (e.g. Eyal et al. 2010, Grinker 2007, Nadesan 2005, Silverman 2012).

A popular way of making sense of the interplay between the natural and the socially constructed nature of autism is Ian Hacking's (1999) ‘looping effect’. Hacking conceives of people as ‘interactive kinds’ in the sense that they react to the categories, concepts or ideas which relate to them, and change as a result. Consequently, these categories and concepts need to be adjusted to these changes, in a continuous circle. Elsewhere, Hacking (2009a) has demonstrated a mechanism through which autism is thusly constantly reconstituted. This occurs as autobiographies by autistic authors affect the ways their autistic readers come to understand their own experiences as autistic.^[3] Eyal et al. (2014) further acknowledge that the looping effect of autism goes beyond shaping its meaning formalistically through classification and description. Rather, the practical meaning of the label is constantly negotiated as shifting understandings of autism shape – and are then in turn shaped by – autistic people's experiences of their bodies, for example, their styles of interactions, and their daily habits.

Another way to think about autism while considering both its biological and social-structural components is proposed by Elizabeth Fein (2015a). Fein holds that the condition we refer to as autism is at least in part shaped at the interface between a person’s natural tendencies and their social environments. She suggests that in many of today’s Western societies, where social relationships are based on choice rather than obligation, social difficulties at an early age might lead to exclusion and loneliness, as a child’s peers deny her their friendship. This social isolation leads to the exacerbation of the sometimes-subtle tendencies people may have already experienced, and so they are ultimately more likely to fall within the autism category. Damian Milton (2012) similarly focuses on the role of relationality in determining what constitutes autism. He reflects on the fact that both autistic and non-autistic people lack insight into the perceptions of the other, a disjuncture in reciprocity to which he refers as the 'double empathy problem'. Yet despite this being a problem of reciprocity, the power imbalance between the groups enables one group to deem themselves normal, while the other group is reframed as indicating a social deficit.^[4]

Self-advocacy and the neurodiversity movement

Contrary to the view of autism common in the biomedical and psychological disciplines, which considers it a deficit or impairment, approaches based on neurodiversity consider autism to be a natural expression of human diversity (see Bagatell 2007, Chamak 2008, Grinker 2007, Lawson 2008, Savarese 2013, Waltz et al. 2015). This view partly stems from the social model of disability (Ginsburg & Rapp 2013, Oliver 1996, Shakespeare 2006), which acknowledges the crucial role of society and culture in shaping, if not constructing, the category and experience of disability. Neurodiversity advocates further suggest that much as there exists a diversity of gender or ethnicity, so there exists a diversity of cognitive structures; that is, of ways of being (see Arnold 2017, Baggs 2010, Limburg 2016, Milton 2012, Ne'eman 2010, Prince 2010, Yergeau 2010, 2013, 2017). Autism, therefore, according to such claims, should be accepted, even celebrated.^[5]

While the neurodiversity paradigm and its accompanying discourses are varied and nuanced, several of its generally-accepted principles bear mentioning. First, neurodiversity proponents maintain that autism is an inseparable and integral part of the autistic person. It is in light of this view that many autistic authors express their explicit preference for identity-first language (i.e., autistic person), over person-first language (i.e., person with autism) (e.g. Lawson 2008, Milton & Lyte 2012). Moreover, imaginaries of a potential cure for autism, or of technologies of its prevention, are seen to constitute a form of intolerance and oppression. Another common attitude in neurodiversity discourse is a rejection of functioning labels with regards to autism. Advocates maintain that the binary distinction between high-functioning and low-functioning autism is not only simplistic, but that it may be wholly misleading (e.g. Milton & Lyte 2012, Murray 2009, Savarese & Savarese 2010, Yergeau 2010). ‘Functioning’, in the end, is contingent on societal expectation, access to support services, available assistive technology, and changing levels of comfort. Functioning may therefore not be a property of an individual, but a relational category (e.g. Williams 2006). Importantly, neurodiversity advocates further assert that autistic people ought to be included in all public discussions about the condition, from scientific inquiry, through media representation, to legislation and policy making: as per the central idiom in many disability rights movements, 'nothing about us without us'.

Identity, community, and subjectivity

The idea of autism as a form of alterity lends itself to questions of identity, subjectivity, citizenship, activism, and community, which have indeed stood as the basis of numerous anthropological studies. A major paradigm from which autistic people draw their self-definition is the neuroscientific discourse; for example, in adopting the view that autism implies an atypical wiring of the brain. According to Francisco Ortega (2009: 426), this preference reflects a diffusion of neuroscientific claims that extends beyond the laboratory and into various social domains. This cerebralised self-definition of autistic people may constitute the very basis of popular claims for ‘neurodiversity’ (see also Ortega 2013, Ortega & Choudhury 2011).^[6] Yet alongside the neurodiversity discourse, which values taking pride in one’s difference, there also exists the biomedical discourse, which values sameness, normalcy, and efforts to conform. Nancy Bagatell (2007) has thus pointed out that what best characterises the process of identity construction among autistic people is the active and difficult orchestrating of these mostly opposing voices. In other words, assuming an autistic identity is ultimately an active process driven by personal agency and choice.

Such biology-based discourses on autism might also serve as a powerful source of resistance. In assuming an identity constructed around neuroscience, members of the neurodiversity movement question the notion that impairment is objective or absolute (Brownlow & O’Dell 2013). Activists thus appropriate whatever biological basis autism may have – precisely that which according to a deficit model would be considered the cause of disability – and negotiate its meaning, turning it into a positive. Biological essentialism here serves to claim a natural difference between themselves and the hegemonic majority. Citizenship, the authors claim – neurobiological citizenship, in this case – is reflected by people asserting the freedom to negotiate a governing regime, and alternately reject it, accept it or withdraw from it entirely.^[7]

The distinctive possibilities for sociality supported by digital media have offered people with disabilities new opportunities for self-expression and self-determination. Such collective creations play a role in producing social spaces that are inclusive of the fact of disability, thereby expanding our understanding of what it means for people with disabilities to be human (Ginsburg 2012). Autistic people’s shared experiential backgrounds, along with a shared identity as autistic, are thus conductive of a collective voice (Davidson 2008). It is significant that these processes occur online; a social landscape where the communication difficulties associated with autism become less emphasised. Online media, moreover, has allowed autistic people to communicate freely without ‘betraying their autism’ (Antze 2010: 317) by obliging themselves to make eye-contact, for example, or suppressing their atypical body language; without, that is, pretending to be ‘normal’. Under the mostly discursive, predictable, and asimultaneous conditions of online communication, autism need not be an obstacle to communicating successfully, nor to forming relationships or establishing communities.^[8]

Yet while the role of the internet in affording the emergence of autistic communities should not be downplayed, such community building is not restricted to online spaces. Notable examples of actual spaces designed by autistic adults in order to accommodate the preferences and tendencies of those on the autism spectrum – conducive of what might be called an autistic culture (Dekker 1999, Sinclair 2010) – include Autreat (see Sinclair 2005), and its British counterpart, Autscape.^[9] A fascinating example of one such social spaces is a summer camp for autistic youth dedicated to live-action roleplaying games, which was explored ethnographically by Fein (2015b). A ‘folk healing system’, as she deems it, the camp, with its games and accompanying mythologies, offers a rich assemblage of cultural resources: characters, themes, and narratives. Players draw from these sources to metaphorically conceptualise and express their turbulent experiences. Fein further notes that this sociocultural ecology of the camp – with its predictable structures and relational commitments – allows campers to reformulate the challenges associated with autism, transforming them from sources of estrangement into opportunities for mutual recognition and shared enjoyment.

More insight on subjectivity and citizenship in the context of autism comes from authors who engage with the autism rights movement from a gender perspective. Kristin Bumiller (2008) considers the implications of the attempted normalization of autistic people – which among other things includes attempts to eliminate supposedly ‘wrong’ gender behaviour – and analyses autistic activists’ rejection thereof. She argues that the neurodiversity movement offers a unique contribution to the democratic political system, in illustrating that notions of citizenship need not be based on sameness (as it is sometimes imagined) nor on difference (as notions of diversity in other contexts often imply). This is because both sameness and difference imply a ‘norm’ against which people’s individual value is measured. Instead, autistic people's 'quirky' citizenship is to be based on inclusion, acceptance, and individual roles and contributions to civic life.^[10]

Language and sociality

Autism is characterised by an equivocal relationship with typical, i.e. symbolic and conventionalised, language. For both Dawn Prince (2010), an autistic anthropologist and Amanda Baggs (2010), an autistic self-advocate, conventional language is neither natural nor intuitive but partial and constraining. In their respective works, the authors articulate their preference for unconventional linguistic structures: modes of non-symbolic connection to the world that nevertheless capture its beauty and the richness of worldly experience. In light of these different linguistic styles commonly found among autistic people, they often experience difficulties in their attempts to make sense of social etiquette. And although many autistic people work continuously to uncover the underlying principles of social rules, they frequently remain unsuccessful in putting this knowledge into practice. As a result, they turn to shaping their social environments in an attempt to redefine the terms under which the appropriateness of their actions is evaluated. Failure to abide by etiquette should therefore be taken not as mere lack of success, but at least in part as deliberate action and contemplative craft (Belek 2018).

Elinor Ochs et al. (2004) have also discussed their autistic interlocutors' difficulties pertaining to 'social function'. They note that the skills required to converse successfully with each other exceed knowledge of interpersonal communication, to also involve the 'socio-cultural knowledge' necessary for appropriately inferring indexical signs. Autistic people's reduced ability to make sense of some utterances or events, and to react in a conventionally appropriate manner, is to a large extent due to their difficulty in drawing upon knowledge of social context. Such social misconduct, and how autistic children account for it, is the focus of a study by Karen Sirota (2004), who demonstrates the ways in which parents use various expressions of accountability (such as justifications, apologies, or excuses) when instructing their children on how to navigate breaches of etiquette. Yet seeing as accountability is a highly context-specific practice, its effectiveness as a remedy depends on understanding the particular conditions of its use. In the context of autism and the frequent unpredictability that accompanies it, the success of this strategy is limited (see also Ochs & Solomon 2008).

Some autistic authors articulate their arguably unique connection with animals (e.g. Grandin & Johnson 2009, Prince-Hughes 2004). Interactions with horses, for example, are said to enable various types of social behaviours and "open-up" autistic children to interactions they would otherwise typically avoid (Malcolm et al. 2018). Equine therapy thus facilitates a form of multi-species intersubjectivity, leading the way to novel possibilities for dynamic attunements between autistic and non-autistic people.^[11] Recently, the increasingly popular imaginaries of social robots as appropriate companions for autistic children has also been attended to. This notion is grounded in the persistent view of human sociality – especially where autistic people are concerned – as somehow mechanistic (see also Milton 2014). Yet others (e.g. Richardson 2018) contend that human to human attachment is in fact crucial to happiness and wellbeing. A successful therapeutic relationship depends on mutual trust, compassion, and empathy, and is therefore not replaceable by the ontologically divergent interactions between human and machine.

Body and senses

Various bodily attributions are common in autism: sensory sensitivity; a tendency towards repetitive movement, sometimes referred to as self-stimulating behaviours or ‘stimming’; and an atypical gait or posture, to name just a few examples. Autistic children have been shown in some cases to assume a laborious role when attempting to coordinate their (often atypical) bodily actions with societal expectations (Solomon 2011). Analysing video footage of a 9-year-old autistic girl interacting with classmates in the playground, Ochs (2015) has noted this minimally verbal child's continually alternating bodily responses to the social situations developing around and towards her. This constant awareness of one's own body – as an experiencing subject as well as an object exposed to the gaze of others – is what Ochs refers to as a form of corporeal reflexivity. In a similar engagement with corporal reflexivity in autism, it has been shown that autistic adults work to produce distinctions between bodily experiences of distress that they previously experienced as undistinguishable (Belek 2019a). Through a process of bodily cultivation, autistic adults come to design a specialised vocabulary – which includes such terms as trigger, overload, meltdown and shutdown – through which to attune more precisely and concretely to their atypical somatic sensations.

Autism around the world

Until quite recently, the anthropology of autism has focused primarily on the sociocultural conditions and implications of the category in Anglophone settings. This regional bias can be said to have set the tone for the discipline's engagement with the topic at large, further evidenced by scholars' frequent lack of acknowledgement that such a regional bias does in fact exist. Majia Nadesan (2005), among others, accentuates the crucial role that specific sociocultural, political, and epistemological developments in twentieth century Europe and North America had played in the emergence of autism. These include major shifts in psychiatric paradigms, as well as changing formulations of the category of childhood and the resulting alterations of the perceived goals of early education. ‘Autism’, she thus argues, ‘could not have emerged in the nineteenth century … because within the diagnostic categories of nineteenth century (and earlier) thought, autism was unthinkable’ (2005: 3). Although Nadesan does not press this point, her historical narratives indicate that the statement holds equally true concerning not only the temporal, but also the geographical and geopolitical locations of the category's emergence. However, over the past two generations, autism diagnoses have become increasingly common throughout the world (e.g. Elsabbagh et al. 2012).

Consequently, several anthropological studies have set about to explore the particular enactments of autism in more diverse geographic, cultural, and political contexts.^[12] Ariel Cascio (2015a) is one example, as she analyses the use of the concept of rigidity by Italian professionals involved in providing therapy for autistic children. These practitioners frequently describe their clients as rigid, and consider rigidity a potential pitfall in their own work in autism service provision. By creating this semantic overlap between the experiences of people on the autism spectrum and their own, professionals open up a space of similarity between neurotypicals and autistic people, a rhetorical strategy which allows them to reflect more closely upon their work, while working to bridge the gap between the two groups.

In South Korea, local connotations and interpretations of autism lead mothers to resist thinking about their children as autistic (Grinker & Cho 2013). These South Korean mothers frequently attempt to battle exclusion and mitigate stigma in a society that values conformity, while also having to excuse their children’s difficulties in school in an environment that reveres academic excellence. Owing to their understandable reluctance, under such circumstances, to accept the label of autism, a local lay diagnostic concept has emerged; that of ‘border children’. Inconsistent with Western diagnostic classification, this emerging label has proven powerful in allowing mothers to reconcile their ambivalence to the label of autism with its implications of permanence and certainty, framing the condition instead as uncertain, contingent, and temporary.

This rejection of the label of ‘autism’ has also been described in an American context. Challenging the ethnic bias in the anthropology of autism, Cheryl Mattingly (2017) focuses on a family forced to deal with both race and disability: an African-American mother and her autistic child. Here, racial stereotyping, joined with a narrow view of autism, confines the child's conceivable future possibilities; thus teaching the child, in his mother's view, to internalise the fearful potentiality of his ‘becoming nothing’. Structurally visible threats associated with race and class are thus shown by Mattingly to play a central role in the opportunities presented to an autistic child as they enter adulthood.^[13] In light of this, it is claimed that refusing to accept an autism diagnosis might be the most logical means of protection from the pernicious threat posed by the entwinement of race and disability in certain social settings.

Conclusion

Anthropologists studying autism approach their object of study as they do other forms of human difference. They have employed such common heuristic frameworks as phenomenology, ethnomethodology, interpretivism, and critical theory to explore autistic subjectivities, experiences, bodies, and narratives, as well as the motivations and significations of other actors involved in shaping the condition. Yet one aspect of the phenomenon we call autism seems to call for a specialised interpretive framework: namely, its existence as both a historically contingent social construct, and as a name and category for underlying biological, neurological, and genetic conditions. It is predominantly this tension, never quite resolvable, that has led scholars to characterise autism as an uncertain entity (Hollin 2017b), a disability of context (Prince 2010), a disease and an epidemic of signification (Kaufman 2010, David & Orsini 2013) and an epidemic of discovery (Grinker 2007).^[14] Indeed, Ian Hacking may not have exaggerated when proposing, in reference to autism, that ‘we are participating in a living experiment in concept formation of a sort that does not come more than once in a dozen lifetimes’ (2009b: 506).

The anthropological literature recounted above constitutes a crucial step towards our better understanding of autism and of the people to whom this concept is said to apply. Yet the notion of neurodiversity might suggest that anthropologists should go further. They may want to incorporate their emerging understanding of autism into a broader analytical perspective in which the category of autism is no longer thematically and theoretically isolated. What may be needed is not only an anthropology of autism, but an anthropology with autism. As it was put by Richard Grinker,

We need to focus attention on the anthropological study of a form of difference that has previously been conceived of as lying outside the realm of the social. The concept of "diversity," with all its positive connotations of acceptance and celebration of difference, need not only apply to gender, race, ethnicity, and religion. We can also begin to celebrate a diversity of minds (2010: 177).

Acknowledgements

I thank the entry's editor and reviewers for improving greatly on this text. Especially, I am grateful for their pointing out to me the discipline's bias to studying autism predominantly in Western English-speaking settings.

References

Arnold, L. 2017. A brief history of ‘Neurodiversity’ as a concept and perhaps a movement. Autonomy 1(5), online (available at: http://www.larry-arnold.net/Autonomy/index.php/autonomy/article/view/AR23/html).

Angell, A.M. & O. Solomon 2017. ‘If I was a different ethnicity, would she treat me the same?’: Latino parents’ experiences obtaining autism services. Disability & Society 32(8), 1142-64.

Antze, P. 2010. On the pragmatics of empathy in the neurodiversity movement. In Ordinary ethics: anthropology, language, and action (ed.) M. Lambek, 310-27. New York: Fordham University Press.

Asperger, H. 1991. 'Autistic psychopathy' in childhood (trans. U. Frith). In Autism and Asperger syndrome (ed.) U. Frith, 37-92. Cambridge: University Press.

Badone, E., D. Nicholas, W. Roberts & P. Kien 2016. Asperger’s syndrome, subjectivity and the senses. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 40(3), 475-506.

Bagatell, N. 2007. Orchestrating voices: autism, identity and the power of discourse. Disability & Society 22(4), 413-26.

——— 2010. From cure to community: transforming notions of autism. Ethos 38(1), 33-55.

Baggs, A. 2010. Cultural commentary: up in the clouds and down in the valley: my richness and yours. Disability Studies Quarterly 30(1), online (available at: http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/1052/1238)

Belek, B. 2013. I believe it can change the way things are. Identity constructions among video-bloggers with Asperger’s syndrome on YouTube. Diemen: AMB Publishers.

——— 2017. I feel, therefore I matter: emotional rhetoric and autism self-advocacy. Anthropology Now 9(2), 57-69.

——— 2018. Autism and the proficiency of social ineptitude:probing the rules of ‘appropriate’ behavior. Ethos 46(2), 161-79.

——— 2019a. Articulating sensory sensitivity: from bodies with autism to autistic bodies. Medical Anthropology 38(1), 30-43.

——— 2019b (forthcoming). Autism from an anthropological perspective. Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology.

Bettelheim, B. 1967. The empty fortress: infantile autism and the birth of the self. New York: Free Press.

Bilu, Y. & Y.C. Goodman 1997. What does the soul say?: metaphysical uses of facilitated communication in the Jewish ultraorthodox community. Ethos 25(4), 375-407.

Brezis, R.S., T.S. Weisner, T.C. Daley, N. Singhal, M. Barua & S.P. Chollera 2015. Parenting a child with autism in India: narratives before and after a parent–child intervention program. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(2), 277-98.

Brownlow, C. 2010. Re-presenting autism: the construction of ‘NT syndrome’. Journal of Medical Humanities 31(3), 243-55.

——— & L. O'Dell 2006. Constructing an autistic identity: AS voices online. Mental Retardation 44(5), 315-21.

——— & L. O'Dell 2013. Autism as a form of biological citizenship. In Worlds of autism: across the spectrum of neurological difference (eds) J. Davidson & M. Orsini, 97-114. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bumiller, K. 2008. Quirky citizens - autism, gender, and reimagining disability. Signs 33(4), 967-91.

——— 2009. The geneticization of autism: from new reproductive technologies to the conception of genetic normalcy. Signs 34(4), 875-99.

Cascio, M.A. 2015a. Rigid therapies, rigid minds: Italian professionals’ perspectives on autism interventions. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(2), 235-53.

——— 2015b. Cross-cultural autism studies, neurodiversity, and conceptualizations of autism.Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(2), 207-12.

Chamak, B. 2008. Autism and social movements: French parents’ associations and international autistic individuals’ organisations. Sociology of Health & Illness 30(1), 76-96.

Cheslack-Postava, K. & R.M. Jordan-Young 2012. Autism spectrum disorders: toward a gendered embodiment model. Social Science & Medicine 74, 1667-74.

Clarke, J. & G. van Amerom 2007. 'Surplus suffering’: differences between organizational understandings of Asperger’s syndrome and those people who claim the ‘disorder'. Disability & Society 22(7), 761-76.

Daley, T.C., T. Weisner & N. Singhal 2014. Adults with autism in India: a mixed-method approach to make meaning of daily routines. Social Science & Medicine 116, 142-9.

Davidson, J. 2007. ‘In a world of her own…’: re-presenting alienation and emotion in the lives and writings of women with autism. Gender, Place and Culture 14(6), 659-77.

——— 2008. Autistic culture online: virtual communication and cultural expression on the spectrum. Social & Cultural Geography 9(7), 791-806.

——— & V.L. Henderson 2010. ‘Coming out’ on the spectrum: autism, identity and disclosure. Social & Cultural Geography 11(2), 155-70.

——— & M. Orsini 2013. Introduction: critical autism studies: notes on an emerging field. In Worlds of autism: across the spectrum of neurological difference (eds) J. Davidson & M. Orsini, 1-29. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

——— & M. Smith 2009. Autistic autobiographies and more-than-human emotional geographies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(5), 898-916.

——— & S. Tamas 2016. Autism and the ghost of gender. Emotion, Space and Society 19, 59-65.

Dekker, M. 1999. On our own terms: emerging autistic culture. In Conferencia en línea (available on-line: http://www.autscape.org/2015/programme/handouts/Autistic-Culture-07-Oct-1999.pdf). Accessed 9 December 2018.

Draaisma, D. 2009. Stereotypes of autism. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 364(1522), 1475-80.

Edgerton, R.B. 1967. The cloak of competence: stigma in the lives of the mentally retarded. Berkley: University of California Press.

Elsabbagh, M., G. Divan, Y. Koh, Y.S. Kim, S. Kauchali, C. Marcín, C. Montiel-Nava, V. Patel, C.S. Paula, C. Wang, M.T. Yasamy, & E. Fombonne 2012. Global epidemiology of autism. Autism Research 5, 160-79.

Evans, B. 2017. The metamorphosis of autism: a history of child development in Britain. Manchester: University Press.

Eyal, G. 2013. For a sociology of expertise: the social origins of the autism epidemic. American Journal of Sociology 118(4), 863-907.

———, B. Hart, E. Onculer, N. Oren & N. Rossi 2010. The autism matrix: the social origins of the autism epidemic. Cambridge: Polity Press.

———, D. Fitzgerald, E. Gillis-Buck, B. Hart, M. D. Lappé, D. Navon & S.S. Richardson 2014. New modes of understanding and acting on human difference in autism research, advocacy and care: introduction to a special issue of BioSocieties. BioSocieties 9(3), 233-40.

Fein, E. 2011. Innocent machines: Asperger's syndrome and the neurostructural self. In Sociological reflections on the neurosciences (eds) M. Pickersgill & I. Van Keulen, 27-49. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

——— 2015a. 'No one has to be your friend': Asperger's syndrome and the vicious cycle of social disorder in late modern identity markets.Ethos 43(1), 82-107.

——— 2015b. Making meaningful worlds: role-playing subcultures and the autism spectrum. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(2), 299-321.

Feinstein, A. 2011. A history of autism: conversations with the pioneers. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

Fitzgerald, D. 2013. The affective labour of autism neuroscience: entangling emotions, thoughts and feelings in a scientific research practice. Subjectivity 6(2), 131-52.

——— 2014. The trouble with brain imaging: hope, uncertainty and ambivalence in the neuroscience of autism. BioSocieties 9(3), 241-61.

——— 2017. Tracing autism: uncertainty, ambiguity, and the affective labor of neuroscience. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Foucault, M. 1998. The will to knowledge: the history of sexuality vol. I. London: Penguin.

Geschwind, D.H. 2009. Advances in autism. Annual Review of Medicine 60, 367-80.

Giles, D.C. 2014. ‘DSM-V is taking away our identity’: the reaction of the online community to the proposed changes in the diagnosis of Asperger’s disorder. Health 18(2), 179-95.

Gillis-Buck, E.M. & S.S. Richardson 2014. Autism as a biomedical platform for sex differences research. BioSocieties 9(3), 262-83.

Ginsburg F. 2012. Disability in the digital age. In Digital anthropology (eds) D. Miller & H. Horst, 101-26. London: Berg.

——— & R. Rapp 2013. Disability worlds. Annual Review of Anthropology 42, 53-68.

Goldman, S. 2013. Opinion: sex, gender and the diagnosis of autism—a biosocial view of the male preponderance. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders 7(6), 675-9.

Grandin, T. & C. Johnson 2009. Animals in translation: using the mysteries of autism to decode animal behavior. Albany: SUNY Press.

Grinker, R.R. 2007. Unstrange minds: remapping the world of autism. New York: Basic Books.

——— 2010. Commentary: on being autistic, and social. Ethos 38(1), 172-8.

——— & K. Cho 2013. Border children: interpreting autism spectrum disorder in South Korea. Ethos 41(1), 46-74.

Hacking, I. 1999. The social construction of what? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

——— 2009a. Autistic autobiography. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 364(1522), 1467-73.

——— 2009b. How we have been learning to talk about autism: a role for stories. Metaphilosophy 40, 499-516.

——— 2009c. Humans, aliens & autism. Daedalus 138(3), 44-59.

Hart, B. 2014. Autism parents & neurodiversity: radical translation, joint embodiment and the prosthetic environment. BioSocieties 9(3), 284-303.

Hollin, G. 2014. Constructing a social subject: autism and human sociality in the 1980s. History of the Human Sciences 27(4), 98-115.

——— 2016. Social studies of autism. eLS (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470015902.a0026603).

——— 2017a. Failing, hacking, passing: autism, entanglement, and the ethics of transformation. BioSocieties 12(4), 611-33.

——— 2017b. Autistic heterogeneity: linking uncertainties and indeterminacies. Science as culture 26(2), 209-31.

——— & A. Pilnick 2015. Infancy, autism, and the emergence of a socially disordered body. Social Science & Medicine 143, 279-86.

Jack, J. 2011. "The extreme male brain?" Incrementum and the rhetorical gendering of autism. Disability Studies Quarterly 31(3), online (available at: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1672/1599).

——— 2014. Autism and gender: from refrigerator mothers to computer geeks. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Kanner, L. 1943. Autistic disturbances of affective contact. Nervous child 2(3), 217-50.

Kaufman, S.R. 2010. Regarding the rise in autism: vaccine safety doubt, conditions of inquiry, and the shape of freedom. Ethos 38(1), 8-32.

Kim, H.U. 2012. Autism across cultures: rethinking autism. Disability & Society 27(4), 535-45.

Krahn, T.M. & A. Fenton 2012. The extreme male brain theory of autism and the potential adverse effects for boys and girls with autism. The Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 9, 93-103.

Lappé, M.D. 2014. Taking care: anticipation, extraction and the politics of temporality in autism science. BioSocieties 9(3), 304-28.

Lawlor, M.C. & O. Solomon 2017. A phenomenological approach to the cultivation of expertise: emergent understandings of autism. Ethos 45(2), 232-49.

Lawson, W. 2008. Concepts of normality: the autistic and typical spectrum. London: Jessica Kingsley.

Limburg, J. 2016. ‘But that’s just what you can’t do’: personal reflections on the construction and management of identity following a late diagnosis of Asperger syndrome. Life Writing 13(1), 141-50.

Malcolm, R., S. Ecks & M. Pickersgill 2018. ‘It just opens up their world’: autism, empathy, and the therapeutic effects of equine interactions. Anthropology & medicine 25(2), 220-34.

Mattingly, C. 2017. Autism and the ethics of care: a phenomenological investigation into the contagion of nothing. Ethos 45(2), 250-70.

McDonagh, P. 2013. Autism in an age of empathy: a cautionary critique. In Worlds of autism: across the spectrum of neurological difference (eds) J. Davidson & M. Orsini, 31-52. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

McKearney, P. & T. Zoanni 2018. Introduction: for an anthropology of cognitive disability. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 36(1), 1-22.

Milton, D.E. 2012. On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society 27(6), 883-7.

——— 2014. Autistic expertise: a critical reflection on the production of knowledge in autism studies. Autism 18(7), 794-802.

——— & Lyte 2012. The normalisation agenda and the psycho-emotional disablement of autistic people. Autonomy 1(1), online (available at: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/62638/).

Molloy, H. & L. Vasil 2002. The social construction of Asperger syndrome: the pathologising of difference? Disability & Society 17(6), 659-69.

Murray, S. 2008. Representing autism: culture, narrative, fascination. Oxford: University Press.

——— 2009. Autism functions/the function of autism. Disability Studies Quarterly 30(1), online (available at: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1048/1229).

Nadesan, M. 2005. Constructing autism: unravelling the “truth” and understanding the social. Abingdon: Routledge.

——— 2013. Autism and genetics: profit, risk, and bare life. In Worlds of autism: across the spectrum of neurological difference (eds) J. Davidson & M. Orsini, 117-42. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Navon, D. & G. Eyal 2014. The trading zone of autism genetics: examining the intersection of genomic and psychiatric classification. BioSocieties 9(3), 329-52.

——— 2016. Looping genomes: diagnostic change and the genetic makeup of the autism population. American Journal of Sociology 121(5), 1416-71.

Ne'eman, A. 2010. The future (and the past) of autism advocacy, or why the ASA’s magazine,The Advocate, wouldn't publish this piece. Disability Studies Quarterly 30(1), online (available at: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1059/1244).

Ochs, E. 2015. Corporeal reflexivity and autism. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 49(2), 275-87.

———, T. Kremer-Sadlik, K. Gainer Sirota & O. Solomon 2004. Autism and the social world: an anthropological perspective. Discourse studies 6(2), 147-83.

——— & O. Solomon 2008. Practical logic and autism. In A companion to psychological anthropology: modernity and psychocultural change (eds) C. Casey & R.B. Edgerton, 140-67. Malden: Blackwell.

——— 2010. Autistic sociality. Ethos 38(1), 69-92.

O’Dell, L., H. Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, F. Ortega, C. Brownlow & M. Orsini 2016. Critical autism studies: exploring epistemic dialogues and intersections, challenging dominant understandings of autism. Disability & Society 31(2), 166-79.

Offit, P.A. 2008. Autism's false prophets: bad science, risky medicine, and the search for a cure. New York: Columbia University Press.

Oliver, M. 1996. Understanding disability: from theory to practice. London: Palgrave.

Ortega, F. 2009. The cerebral subject and the challenge of neurodiversity. BioSocieties 4(4), 425-45.

——— 2013. Cerebralizing autism within the neurodiversity movement. In Worlds of autism: across the spectrum of neurological difference (eds) J. Davidson & M. Orsini, 73-96. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

——— & S. Choudhury 2011. ‘Wired up differently’: autism, adolescence and the politics of neurological identities. Subjectivity 4(3), 323-45.

Orsini, M. & M. Smith 2010. Social movements, knowledge and public policy: the case of autism activism in Canada and the US. Critical Policy Studies 4, 38-57.

Osteen, M. (ed.) 2010. Autism and representation. Abingdon: Routledge.

Pinchevski, A. & J.D. Peters 2016. Autism and new media: disability between technology and society. New Media & Society 18(11), 2507-23.

Prince, D. 2010. The silence between: an autoethnographic examination of the language prejudice and its impact on the assessment of autistic and animal intelligence. Disability Studies Quarterly 30(1), online (available at: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1055).

Prince-Hughes, D. 2004. Songs of the gorilla nation: my journey through autism. New York: Crown.

Raz, A., K.R. Jongsma, N. Rimon-Zarfaty, E. Späth, B. Bar-Nadav, E. Vaintropov & S. Schicktanz 2018. Representing autism: challenges of collective representation in German and Israeli associations for and of autistic people. Social Science & Medicine 200, 65-72.

Richardson, K. 2018. Challenging sociality: an anthropology of robots, autism, and attachment. New York: Springer.

Rios, C. & B.C. Andrada 2015. The changing face of autism in Brazil. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(2), 213-34.

Runswick-Cole, K., R. Mallett & S. Timimi (eds) 2016. Re-thinking autism: diagnosis, identity and equality. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Sarrett, J.C. 2015. Custodial homes, therapeutic homes, and parental acceptance: parental experiences of autism in Kerala, India and Atlanta, GA, USA. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(2), 254-76.

Savarese, E.T. & R.J. Savarese 2010. ‘The superior half of speaking’ - an Introduction. Disability Studies Quarterly 30(1), online (available at: http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/1062/1230).

Savarese, R.J. 2013. From neurodiversity to neurocosmopolitanism: beyond mere acceptance and inclusion. In Ethics and neurodiversity (eds) C.D. Herrera & A. Perry, 191-205. Cambridge: Scholars Publishing.

Shaked, M. 2005. The social trajectory of illness: autism in the ultraorthodox community in Israel. Social Science & Medicine 61(10), 2190-200.

——— & Y. Bilu 2006. Grappling with affliction: autism in the Jewish ultraorthodox community in Israel. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 30(1), 1-27.

Shakespeare, T. 2006. The social model of disability. In The disability studies reader (ed.) L.J. Davis, 197-204. Abingdon: Routledge.

Silberman, S. 2015. Neurotribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity. London: Penguin.

Silverman, C. 2008. Fieldwork on another planet: social science perspectives on the autism spectrum. BioSocieties 3(3), 325-41.

——— 2012. Understanding autism: parents, doctors, and the history of a disorder.Princeton: University Press.

Sinclair, J. 2005. Autism Network International: the development of a community and its culture (available on-line: http://www.autreat.com/History_of_ANI.html). Accessed 5 May 2018.

——— 2010. Being autistic together. Disability Studies Quarterly 30(1), online (available at: http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/1075/1248).

Sirota, K.G. 2004. Positive politeness as discourse process: politeness practices of high-functioning children with autism and Asperger syndrome. Discourse Studies 6(2), 229-51.

Sobo, E.J. 2015. Social cultivation of vaccine refusal and delay among Waldorf (Steiner) school parents. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 29(3), 381-99.

Solomon, O. 2010. Sense and the senses: anthropology and the study of autism. Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 241-59.

——— 2011. Body in autism: a view from social interaction. In Language, body, and health (eds) P. McPherron & V. Ramanathan, 105-42. Berlin: De Gruyter.

——— 2012. Doing, being and becoming: the sociality of children with autism in activities with therapy dogs and other people. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 30(1), 109-26.

——— 2015. "But - he’ll fall!”: children with autism, interspecies intersubjectivity, and the problem of ‘being social'. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(2), 323-44.

——— & M.C. Lawlor 2013. “And I look down and he is gone”: narrating autism, elopement and wandering in Los Angeles. Social science & medicine 94, 106-14.

Treichler, P.A. 1987. AIDS, homophobia and biomedical discourse: an epidemic of signification. Cultural studies 1(3), 263-305.

Waltz, M. 2005. Reading case studies of people with autistic spectrum disorders: a cultural studies approach to issues of disability representation. Disability & Society 20(4), 421-35.

——— 2012. Images and narratives of autism within charity discourses. Disability & Society 27(2), 219-33.

——— 2013. Autism: a social and medical history. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

———, K. van den Bosch, H. Ebben, L. van Hal & A. Schippers 2015. Autism self-advocacy in the Netherlands: past, present and future. Disability & Society 30(8), 1174-91.

Ward, M.J. & R.N. Meyer 1999. Self-determination for people with developmental disabilities and autism: two self-advocates’ perspectives. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities 14(3), 133-9.

Williams, D. 2006. The jumbled jigsaw: an insider's approach to the treatment of autistic spectrum 'fruit salads'. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Williams, E. 2004. Who really needs a ‘theory’ of mind? An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the autobiographical writings of ten high-functioning individuals with an autism spectrum disorder. Theory & psychology 14(5), 704-24.

Wing, L. & J. Gould 1979. Severe impairments of social interaction and associated abnormalities in children: epidemiology and classification. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 9(1), 11-29.

Woods R., D. Milton, L. Arnold & S. Graby 2018. Redefining critical autism studies: a more inclusive interpretation. Disability & Society 33(6), 974-79.

Yergeau, M. 2010. Circle wars - reshaping the typical autism essay. Disability Studies Quarterly 30(1), online (available at: http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/1063/1222).

——— 2013. Clinically significant disturbance: on theorists who theorize theory of mind. Disability Studies Quarterly 33(4), online (available at: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3876/3405).

——— 2017. Authoring autism: on rhetoric and neurological queerness. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Note on contributor

Ben Belek is a research fellow in social and medical anthropology at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His previous project focused on the ontological status of neurological diversity among autistic adults in the UK. In his current project, he explores the shifting values of blood constituents in the Israeli blood economy.

Ben Belek, The Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel 9190501.

[1] Examples of the critical strand of literature include Eyal et al. (2010) Fitzgerald (2013, 2014, 2017), Gillis-Buck & Richardson (2014), Hollin (2014, 2017a), Hollin & Pilnick (2015), Lappé (2014), Nadesan (2005, 2013), Navon & Eyal (2014, 2016), and Silverman (2012). For a review, see Hollin (2016). Other studies aim their critique at popular theories in cognitive neuroscience. These include Hacking (2009), Jack (2011), Krahn & Fenton (2012), McDonagh (2013), Milton (2012), Milton & Lyte (2012), Williams (2004), and Yergeau (2013, 2017).

[2] Grinker (2010: 173) has discussed the benefits of imagining autism as a spectrum, whereby the old image of the nonverbal, mentally underdeveloped, and unaffectionate male child has given way to the understanding that autism constitutes a broad range of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and sensitivities. However, the use of the spectrum metaphor does have several disadvantages, as noted by Hacking: ‘To the mind of a physicist or a logician … spectra are linear and autism is not. Autism is a many-dimensional manifold of abilities and limitations.’ (2009b: 503)

[3] Other studies focusing on the representation of autism in various media and its impact on understandings of the condition include Davidson (2007), Davidson & Smith (2009), Draaisma (2009), Hacking (2009b, 2009c), Murray (2008), and Waltz (2005, 2012); as well as the studies featured in an edited volume by Osteen (2008).

[4] The relationality inherent in the notion and category of autism, and its opposition to socially contingent understandings of that which is 'normal' has been similarly addressed by Belek (2019b), Bagatell (2007), Eyal et al. (2010), Grinker (2013), Lawson (2008), Milton & Lyte (2012), Molloy & Vasil (2002) and Nadesan (2005), among others.

[5] Studies which explicitly take this stance on autism as their starting point, are occasionally grouped together under the umbrella of "critical autism studies" (CAS) (O'Dell et al. 2016, Davidson & Orsini 2013, Runswick-Cole, Mallett & Timimi 2016, Woods et al. 2018).

[6] For a comparable analysis of autistic subjectivities as representing a ‘neurostructural self’, see Fein (2011). For autism as neuroqueerness, see Yergeau (2017).

[7] Other studies emphasising the active and often creative nature of constructing positive identities in autism include Badone et al. (2016), Bagatell (2010), Brownlow (2010), Davidson & Henderson (2010), and Fein (2015b).

[8] The affordances of digitally mediated environments in the context of autism were also explored by Belek (2013, 2017) Brownlow & O’Dell (2006), Clarke & Van-Amerom (2007), Giles (2013), Pinchevski & Peters (2016), and Ward & Meyer (1999), to name a few.

[9] See www.autscape.org

[10] Other notable studies focusing on gender in the context of autism include Cheslack-Postava & Jordan-Young (2012), Davidson (2007), Davidson & Tamas (2016), Goldman (2013), and Jack (2014).

[11] Solomon (2010, 2012, 2015) has similarly explored the ways sociality in some autistic children is facilitated and realised through social interactions with animals.

[12] Other examples of studies which engage with autism in various geographical contexts include Brezis et al. (2015), and Daley et al.'s (2014) work in New Delhi, India; Sarrett (2015), comparing ethnographic data from Kerala, India and Atlanta, US; Kim (2012) comparing Canada, Nicaragua and Korea; Rios & Andrada (2015) in Brazil; and Bilu & Goodman (1997) Shaked (2005), and Shaked & Bilu (2006) writing on autism in ultraorthodox Jewish communities in Israel. For a review, see Cascio (2015b).

[13] The intertwinement of parenting, autism and ethnicity from a phenomenological perspective has also been addressed by Angell & Solomon (2017), Lawlor & Solomon (2017), and Solomon & Lawlor (2013).

[14] The latter two drawing on Treichler (1987).

Voice

Felix Stein — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 12:38:17 +0000

Marlene Schäfers

University of Ghent

Initially published 27 Oct 2017

http://doi.org/10.29164/17voice

Abstract:

Voice is a salient category in our contemporary lives. We speak of marginalised groups ‘lacking voice’ and celebrate their efforts at ‘raising their voices’; we are advised to listen to our ‘inner voice’ and be ‘vocal’ in our opinions. Such idioms closely associate voice with individuality, agency, and authority. Anthropologists have sought to denaturalise these associations, showing them to be the product of a particular ideology of voice that is neither universal nor inevitable. At the same time, they have also studied the effects that such associations have on imaginations of subjectivity as well as public and political life.

As an explicit category of conceptual and ethnographic focus, voice has entered the anthropological literature relatively recently. This entry charts out some of the principal ways in which anthropologists have approached voice, and the kind of literatures they have drawn upon to do so. It identifies the move to study sonic voices in tandem with metaphorical figures of voice as central to anthropological investigations of voice. It considers how doing so allows investigating the role of voice in the making of subjects, publics, and ideologies, as well as the impacts that sound technologies have on these processes. This entry suggests that voice is central to many key concepts in anthropology and social theory and that an explicit focus on voice is therefore of broader relevance for the discipline and beyond.

Introduction

Voice is a salient category in Euro-American modernity and beyond. Familiar idioms attest to its significance: we speak of marginalised groups ‘lacking voice’ and celebrate their efforts at ‘raising their voices’; we ‘give voice’ to our ideas and ‘have a voice’ in matters of our concern; we are advised to listen to our ‘inner voice’ and be ‘vocal’ in our opinions. Such idioms closely associate voice with individuality, agency, and authority. In its consideration of voice, anthropology has sought to denaturalise these associations and point to alternative ways of understanding how voice may relate to identity and agency. Instead of accepting voice as a universal category, anthropologists have shown voices – both as sound objects and as metaphors – to be culturally and historically constructed, and hence variable. This recognition has allowed for the interrogation of broader issues, including questions of agency, representation, identity, and power, from the vantage point of actual voices and vocal practices (Weidman 2014a: 38).

Voice has only emerged as an explicit focus of ethnographic research and theoretical concern to anthropologists over approximately the last two decades. Even if not explicitly, however, voice has long featured in a broad range of literatures. From a sonic and linguistic perspective, voices are the focus of studies in (ethno)musicology, linguistic anthropology, and media and technology studies. Ethnomusicological studies, for example, show how vocal variations such as pitch, amplitude, rhythm, and melody constitute culturally specific means of aesthetic expression and social communication (e.g. Feld 1982; Urban 1988), while sociolinguistic frameworks focus on how specific grammatical aspects of speech indicate or engender social relations (e.g. Agha 2007), or how specific formal and stylistic aspects of speech cohere into recognizable types (e.g. Agha 2005; Bakhtin 1981). Fields like postcolonial theory, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, on the other hand, have studied voice mainly through its associations with subjectivity and representation. Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988), for example, has cast lasting doubt on the empowering potentials of the endeavour to ‘give voice’ to the marginalised in her famous intervention ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, while psychoanalytically-inspired scholarship has emphasised the uncanny character of voice as both of the self (emerging from one’s own body) and other to it (resonating outside the body’s limits) (Chion 1999; Dolar 2006). Anthropological considerations of voice draw on this wide variety of literature in order to bring insights regarding actual voices and vocal practices to bear on critiques of voice as a representational trope.

This entry aims at outlining what a distinctively anthropological approach to the voice might entail. It traces how anthropologists have brought to bear analyses of voices’ sonic and material aspects onto broader social phenomena. In this way, it explores voice both as ideologically and practically constructed and as constructive of subjects, publics, and ideologies.

Voice in Euro-American modernity

The starting point of much anthropological scholarship on voice has been the attempt to destabilise a number of powerful assumptions about it. These can be summed up under two headings. First stands ‘the idea of voice as guarantor of truth and self-presence, from which springs the familiar idea that the voice expresses self and identity and that agency consists in having a voice’ (Weidman 2014a: 39). Linguistic anthropologist Miyako Inoue (2003: 180) has summarised this idea as ‘I speak, therefore I am'. The idea here is that the voice is a direct expression of a person’s intimate emotions and opinions, which renders the act of speaking an expression of human agency and, in certain contexts, resistance.

Related is a second assumption, which holds that the voice is but a channel in order to transmit a more important message (Weidman 2014a: 39). In this view, the content of the message prevails over the sonic aspects of the voice, or its form. Philosopher Adriana Cavarero (2005) has demonstrated that this tendency to listen to voices primarily for what they say rather than how they say it can be traced through some of the most influential works of Western philosophy from Plato to this day. This second assumption about the prevalence of signifying content over vocal form directly sustains the first, because it allows for imagining the voice as a transparent channel that gives immediate access to a person’s inner life without having any significance itself.

Linguistic anthropologists Bauman and Briggs (2003) argue that the opposition between signifying speech and a sonic vocality outside of meaning solidified into a hierarchy during the European Enlightenment, with the former clearly valued over the latter. The speech-vocality opposition moreover became mapped onto a number of parallel dichotomies such as male versus female, coloniser versus colonised, urban versus rural, or white versus black, which, as Bauman and Briggs argue, were sustained and legitimised in this way. From this perspective, voice needs to be understood as an ideological construct that has crucially shaped the modern (post)colonial world and has contributed to legitimising relations of domination and abuse (De Certeau 1988; Inoue 2003).

In order to highlight that the way we understand and give meaning to vocal phenomena is historically and culturally constructed, and that such constructs have crucial social and political impacts, anthropologists have coined the term ‘ideology of voice.’ As defined by Amanda Weidman, ‘ideologies of voice’ are

culturally constructed ideas about the voice… [They] set the boundary for what constitutes communication, what separates language from music, and what constitutes the difference between the intelligible and the unintelligible. Ideologies of voice determine how and where we locate subjectivity and agency; they are the conditions that give sung or spoken utterances their power or constrain their potential effects (2014a: 45).

Indeed, we can trace how ideas of voice specific to Euro-American modernity have had a forming impact on knowledge production and science. Take anthropology, our own discipline: its hallmark methodology of ethnographic fieldwork largely relies on soliciting informants’ voices in face-to-face encounters as a means of accessing their lifeworlds. Voice features here as an important index of authenticity and as a standard for judging the originality of anthropological works. Psychoanalysis is another example. Institutionalised since the late nineteenth century, it centrally relies on the notion that a patient’s interior life is accessible through his or her actual voice, elicited by the psychoanalyst in therapeutic sessions. We also encounter similar ideas in contemporary truth and reconciliation commissions that have been set up to uncover past wrongdoings and achieve justice. In such settings, victims’ voices are construed as a relatively unproblematic means that, when elicited, are all it takes in order to gain access to past injuries, hidden truths, and authentic suffering (Slotta 2015). Anchored in the popular conviction that ‘speaking is healing,’ truth commissions participate in a discourse that equates victimhood with silence and proposes ‘giving voice’ as a means to heal, find redemption, and bring about reconciliation (Posel 2008).

These examples highlight two issues: (1) that ideas about language, speech, and voice are not natural or universal, but historically and culturally specific constructions and (2) that such ideas have important repercussions for social and subjective life because they determine how voices are heard and recognised. How, then, are we to study the ideologies that determine how voices are produced and received?

The sonic and material voice

In an article published in 1994, Steven Feld and Aaron A. Fox pointed out the need to develop research perspectives that would link a ‘phenomenological concern with the voice as the embodiment of spoken and sung performance, and a more metaphoric sense of voice as a key representational trope for social position and power’ (1994: 26). Their call makes clear that if we are to understand the role of voice in social life, it is imperative to study not only how voices routinely function as metaphors but also their sonic, embodied, and material dimensions. Concomitantly, the anthropological project of denaturalising voice crucially hinges on studying how voices are produced by discourse, physical bodies, and technologies and how these actual voices sustain, reinforce, or challenge specific figurative understandings of voice.

Linguistic anthropologist Judith Irvine’s study of Wolof speech registers is an early study that, even if it does not explicitly conceptualise voice as such, usefully lays out how the study of actual voices can reveal understandings of voice alternative to the assumptions outlined above. Irvine (1990) describes vocal practices that run radically counter to the adroit association between voice and self posited by Euro-American ideologies of voice, and in this way highlights the latter’s cultural particularity. She argues that Wolof speakers in Senegal have at their disposal two different ‘registers’ or styles of speaking that are connected to social status and situation. The speech of noble and upper caste Wolof is typically marked by a lack of affect, translated into linguistic features that include simple or even ‘wrong’ syntax, slow tempo, low volume, and a breathy voice. Lower caste Wolof and griots (bards) employ an opposing register that is marked by heightened affect, expressed through a high-pitched voice, fast and fluent speaking, and the use of complex syntax and morphology. As Irvine highlights, these registers or ‘voices’ are not inherent properties of individual speakers but strategically employed in order to mark relative status difference in a particular context (1990: 131-132). They operate as a resource available to all Wolof speakers in order to define a given situation and relationship. A noble Wolof who employs a restrained register of speech when talking to a griot might, for instance, switch into a more agitated register when asking a noble kinsman for a favour. In addition, griots often act as spokespersons for Wolof speakers of higher standing, using their own voices to express the opinions and emotions of their patrons. Voice is in such instances decoupled from a person’s self and interiority. Instead it becomes a cross-individually available resource for the performance and negotiation of social status and relations.

In classical anthropological fashion, Irvine presents her readers with a cultural framework that links voice and identity very differently from Euro-American models. The more recent work by Nicholas Harkness (2013) on voice and identity in the context of Evangelical Christian South Korea further investigates how specific identities or cultural tropes come to be linked to and eventually indexed by specific vocal qualities. He shows how many Christian Koreans invest enormous efforts in making their voices sound less ‘rough’ and ‘husky’, since these qualities are understood to represent a traditional, ‘unclean’ Korean voice that is associated with a past marked by suffering and backwardness. By listening to Christian sermons, singing in church choirs, and participating in further musical schooling, many Koreans seek instead to acquire a voice with qualities resembling that of European classical singing; what is commonly described as a ‘clean’ and ‘pure’ voice. This requires conscious and sustained work on how singers use their vocal apparatus. The ‘harsh’ or ‘rough’ tones of traditional Korean singing are produced by pushing air through tightened vocal cords, while the ‘clean’ voice of Western classical singing requires an open larynx and vocal cords. These specific ways of using the vocal apparatus become mapped onto specific sound attributes (harsh, rough vs. clean) and bodily experiences (tense, painful vs. healthy, natural) with their attendant ideological connotations, such that strained vocal cords and a tense throat come to index a troubled, pre-Christian, Korean history (Harkness 2013: 92-102).

What Harkness’s study demonstrates is that not only ideas about voice but also voices’ sonic and embodied qualities are malleable and can become the target of conscious transformation. As such, we may understand voices, as Steven Feld and his colleagues have put it, as ‘material embodiments of social ideology and experience’ (Feld et al. 2004: 332). Materiality here refers to a voice’s actual sound as well as the production and reception of this sound through bodily processes (Weidman 2014a: 40). Even if we cannot see or touch it, the sound of a voice is material insofar as it is the result of vibrations that propagate as waves through physical matter, typically air. These vibrations, in turn, are produced by our vocal cords when we speak (or sing, hum, cry, shout, etc.). When described in this way as a strictly physical and mechanical process, it may appear that the voice is simply the outcome of an objective or pre-cultural process of employing one’s vocal cords. Yet, as Harkness’s description begins to indicate, the way in which we employ our vocal cords and receive the sonic waves produced by others is in fact thoroughly encultured. How so? When we hear a voice, we ascribe meaning to it. We may, for instance, find it ‘clean,’ ‘manly’ or typically ‘black.’ Such acts of ascribing meaning to other voices influences the way we modulate our own, as we consciously or unconsciously tune our voices in relation to specific voice types or ideals. Norms, values, and ideologies in this way come to bear on the production of vocal sound (Eidsheim 2011: 149).

Voice and the making of socio-political identity

Both Irvine and Harkness’s studies highlight that the ascription of cultural meaning to voice often occurs when a number of sonic qualities become bundled into voice types, which in turn become associated with sociopolitical identities (such as the Wolof griot or the aspiring Christian Korean) or broader cultural tropes (such as modernity or sincerity) (Agha 2005; Fox 2004; Gray 2016; Keane 2011; Porcello 2002; Samuels 2004; Stokes 2010). Timbre is one category that allows for the exploration of how such processes of association occur. The term refers to the quality or ‘tone colour’ of an instrument or voice and is often described by highly culturally-specific words such as bright, dark, warm, harsh, creaky, husky etc. In her work on African-American opera singers, musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim (2008) argues that timbre is a key mechanism that regulates how voices are matched to bodies. Specifically, Eidsheim shows how the common perception that ‘black’ voices have a specific ‘sound’ or timbre works to continuously reinscribe racial difference onto African-American bodies. She describes how, when training as singers, African-Americans are regularly taught to reproduce the timbre or vocal ‘sound’ expected of them, with the effect that each vocal performance further reinscribes the expected association between race and voice. This process obscures how timbre is socially constructed, rendering it a seemingly natural and innate characteristic of specific bodies. Vocal production in this way contributes to naturalising racial difference as inherent and immutable.

What this discussion exemplifies is that voice as a sonic and material entity not only marks existing socio-political categories, but also contributes to their making. This is an important claim for the anthropological project of destabilising the seemingly natural link between voice and self or identity. From this perspective, voice does not just express identities but also constitutes them. In this sense, the voice represents a disciplining force capable of generating social categories and subject positions: ‘Vocal practices, including everyday speech, song, verbal play, ritual speech, oratory, recitation, can be viewed as modes of practice and discipline that, in their repeated enactment, may performatively bring into being classed, gendered, political, ethnic, or religious subjects’ (Weidman 2014a: 44).

This also highlights that the distinction between an actual or sonic voice, on the one hand, and a metaphoric or figurative voice, on the other hand, can be but an analytical one: in social life these two aspects of voice are intricately linked, one sustaining and continuously (re)producing the other. Nicholas Harkness has expressed this idea through the term ‘phonosonic nexus,’ referring to the necessary interdependence of voice as it is phonically produced on the one hand, and sonically received, categorised, and given meaning to on the other hand (2013: 12-21). As a nexus or point of convergence, the voice links specific bodily actions (e.g. a specific way of modulating one’s voice) to specific sonic frameworks (e.g. what is considered to be a ‘clean’ voice) and ultimately to categories of social identity (e.g. a healthy and aspiring Korean Christian).

Miyako Inoue’s (2006) research on ‘Japanese women’s language,’ a feminine speech style associated with the image of urban middle-class women, further illustrates how vocal practices can generate social categories. Inoue demonstrates that such ‘women’s language’ is less a Japanese cultural tradition of ancient origin, as is commonly assumed, than a cultural construct adroitly linked to Japanese capitalist modernity. Based on historical research, Inoue reconstructs how speech styles that are today understood as distinctively feminine were largely invented at the turn of the twentieth century by male Japanese intellectuals. These intellectuals overheard speech patterns they considered to be vulgar and crude and ascribed them in their writings through quotation and reported speech to young women. Over time, this so-called ‘schoolgirl speech’ became idealised as refined rather than vulgar, and reconceptualised as a speech style befitting ideal middle-class femininity. Inoue’s study thus highlights how speech forms, even if invented, are able to create specific subject positions that people eventually come to inhabit, a process that she calls ‘indexical inversion’ (2006: 51).

The voice as excess

While acknowledging that the voice frequently functions as a disciplinary practice that (re)produces social categories and identities, a more psychoanalytically inspired body of literature has argued that it is impossible to ever fully discipline or capture voice. Because the voice is a sound object that lilts and sways, pitches and cracks, it asserts a presence of its own that cannot be reduced to the referential meaning expressed in speech or cultural associations that link vocal sound to socio-political categories (Nancy 2007; Schlichter 2011). In this sense, the voice may be described as ‘in excess of speech and meaning’ (Dolar 2006: 10). From this perspective, the singing voice is a particularly interesting object of study, because it highlights that voices have effects that go beyond the communication of meaning. In opera, for example, the voice’s impact greatly relies on it surpassing or even disrupting the necessities of meaningful communication (Duncan 2004).

In conceptualising the voice as excess, this body of literature has primarily been concerned with deconstructing Western metaphysical assumptions that accord primacy to signification, rationality, and the mind. From an anthropological point of view, however, this literature at times problematically ascribes a universal, pre-cultural quality to the voice’s disruptive potential. In this context, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier’s (2014) study of aurality in nineteenth-century Colombia usefully grounds assertions about vocal excess through a meticulous historical study. Ochoa Gautier argues that in nineteenth-century Colombia – a newly independent state keen to craft a national citizenry out of multiple constituencies – the voice was construed as ambiguously standing between nature and culture. This rendered it a central mechanism for determining where the boundary between these two realms ought to be drawn, and consequently also for how the categories of non-human and human, primitive and civilised, were to be distinguished. Various European and Colombian scientists and intellectuals, for instance, repeatedly described the sounds produced by the boat rowers of the Magdalena River, who were of mixed African and Amerindian descent and used rhythmic stamping and call-response vocal patterns to coordinate their labour, as ‘howls’ resembling the sounds of animals. Ochoa Gautier shows that linguistic policies like the standardization of pronunciation and orthography were employed by Colombian elites as a means to tame and hominise such ‘barbaric’ voices in order to forge ‘proper’ citizens for the new state. Yet she insists that such projects to discipline ostensibly untamed voices were never fully successful, since some voices refused or failed to conform to the standards laid out for them. It is in this failure or refusal to conform to disciplinary frameworks that Ochoa Gautier locates vocal excess.

Sound technologies and the mediated voice

So far we have looked at how sonic voices are shaped by and shape in turn the representations through which people make sense of them. What we have not taken into consideration yet is how voices are, in their capacity as sound objects, inherently mediated: at the very minimum, they rely on air as a mediator that transmits sound waves. Many of the voices we encounter in our daily lives are mediated by more complicated technologies, though: radios transmit distant voices into our living rooms, microphones amplify them to reach large audiences, tape recorders render them durable and re-playable, while digital programmes modify them. From an anthropological perspective these technologies are of interest because they highlight a condition that characterises all voices, whether technologically mediated or not: that voices are able to circulate separately from the (human) bodies that produce them. This ability throws up the question of how circulating voices ought to be matched to their origins. Ideologies of voice determine what kinds of answers people will find to that question and where they consequently locate subjectivity and agency. In this sense, studying sound technologies can be a particularly productive entry point for studying reigning ideologies of voice.

Yet while separability as a condition characterises all voices, sound technologies allow voices to circulate independently of their origins in unprecedented ways. As such, they are capable of bringing about novel social formations; an aspect that much anthropological work has focused on. What kinds of anxieties and what kinds of desires does the heightened circulation and amplification of voices engender? How are reigning ideologies of voice able to accommodate such new forms of vocal circulation, and how might they transform in order to give meaning to new technological phenomena? These are some of the questions that anthropologists as well as scholars from neighbouring disciplines have asked (Fisher 2016; Gitelman 1999; Kunreuther 2010; Spitulnik 1998; Stokes 2009; Weheliye 2005; Weidman 2003).

In studying technologically-mediated voices, anthropologists have drawn from insights produced by media and technology studies regarding the capacity of technologies to create new subjects, publics, and forms of authority and discipline. In particular, social and cultural histories of modern sound technologies such as the radio, gramophone, or telephone have proven useful resources for anthropological inquiries (Connor 1997; Erlmann 2004; Frith 1996; Gitelman 1999; Sterne 2003). Particularly influential in how to approach the role of technologies in transforming vocal ideology and practice has been the work of media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1990), who argues that the notion of an ‘inner voice’ associated with subjective interiority was the outcome of new pedagogical practices (such as silent reading) connected to changing family organization and reading practices in eighteenth-century Europe.

Amanda Weidman’s (2003, 2006) research on Indian Karnatic music illustrates how a focus on sound technologies and their effects allows for the unearthing of a particular ‘politics of voice’ and its centrality for discourses of modernity, nation, and authenticity. Weidman argues that Karnatic music is not, as is often claimed, an ancient Indian cultural tradition that predated British colonialism. Instead, she shows how its codification as ‘classical’ emerged from the colonial encounter and the ideals of cultural authenticity it produced. Modern sound recording technologies were crucial in shaping these ideals by introducing previously unavailable notions of sound fidelity. Before the introduction of such technologies, Karnatic musical practice had largely relied on face-to-face encounters between musical masters and disciples, performers and listeners. Recording technologies like the gramophone, which were widespread in India by the middle of the twentieth century, profoundly transformed these practices and the social relations they sustained. The gramophone posed a threat to the authority of musical masters, because it took the monopoly of music teaching and performance out of their hands. Disciples and aficionados no longer relied on the personal encounter with masters, because they could now listen to recordings whenever and wherever they wanted. At the same time, recordings became a new standard for judging the fidelity of performers to what could now be conceived of as ‘classical’ musical originals. These new standards regarding musical fidelity, Weidman argues, paved the way for an entirely new social sense of fidelity to tradition and loyalty to one’s roots (2006: 246). Ideas of national heritage and cultural authenticity are, from this perspective, fundamentally intertwined with the history of sound recording technologies.

Another aspect of Weidman’s (2007) research demonstrates how sound technologies can formatively shape ideologies of gender through the politics of voice they sustain. The codification of Karnatic music in the early twentieth-century centrally relied on crafting a class of women performers who would fit ideals of middle-class feminine respectability that became current at the same time. This required, in particular, distinguishing women singers and dancers of ‘classical’ music from devadasis, musicians and dancers who did service at Hindu temples and were sometimes romantically or sexually involved with their male patrons. Simultaneously, with the emergence of the respectable, middle-class ‘family woman,’ lower-class devadasis became stigmatised as prostitutes. In this context, the availability of sound recording opened up a new avenue for high-status Brahmin women to become involved in musical performance. Because gramophone records allowed women to be heard without their bodies being seen, ‘it provided a way to sing for the public without appearing in public and jeopardizing their respectability’ (Weidman 2007: 140). In addition, the technology of the microphone created a new sense of intimacy between singer and listener, which sustained understandings of the voice as a pure and natural expression of interiority, thereby further dissociating it from the performer’s body (Stokes 2009). Sound technologies like the gramophone and the microphone in this way created the conditions that allowed linking a notion of ‘natural’ or ‘pure’ voice with the chaste female body. As such, they contributed to shaping an ideology of the female voice that sustained specific notions of femininity and embodiment.

Public voices and intimate publics

Weidman’s work shows how sound technologies do not ‘just’ amplify, record, or transmit voices, but that in doing so they profoundly influence how voices are able to sustain notions like authenticity and feminine respectability, which in turn powerfully shape social reality. Because they greatly amplify the circulation of voices, sound technologies also crucially shape public spheres. Laura Kunreuther’s (2014) work on the central role that different figures of voice have played in the recent history of Nepal demonstrates this aspect in ethnographic depth. Kunreuther notes that the liberalization of Nepal’s political system and economy since 1990 has introduced a liberal discourse of voice, which associates voice with political participation, consciousness, and agency. This political sense of voice, she argues, relies upon and produces a second figure of voice – ‘intimate voice’ – that is associated with interior feeling, emotional directness, and authentic communication. Yet paradoxically, as Kunreuther shows, this intimate voice is in many ways an effect of publically- and technologically-mediated interactions (see also Porcello 2002).

Kunreuther (2014: 124-214; also Kunreuther 2006, 2010) examines FM radio stations as one crucial site where this happens. FM radio began broadcasting in Nepal six years after the adoption of parliamentary democracy in 1990. In contrast to the state-controlled Radio Nepal broadcasting nation-wide on AM airwaves, FM stations are more local in scope, privately owned and commercially run. Crucially, moreover, they are not allowed to cover political content. Kunreuther nevertheless identifies these radio stations as having political effects, because they contribute to creating the kinds of subjects befitting the newly created liberal political sphere. Locally anchored, they support a high degree of interaction between radio hosts and listeners, and often directly broadcast their listeners’ voices. For listeners, this creates an image of the radio as a transparent and direct form of communication. FM radio broadcasts also employ mainly informal and unrehearsed speech, emphasise personal life-stories, and feature as platforms for the sharing of listeners’ private thoughts and feelings. One radio show, for example, asks listeners to send in letters with their personal stories, some of which the show’s host then presents on air. Kunreuther argues that such shows educate their listeners to present their private lives in a public form, in this way shaping new subjectivities that are marked at once by a sense of interiority and a desire to share such interiority in public. By thus creating ‘intimate publics,’ FM radio stations, even though not explicitly political, are crucial for perpetuating a politics of voice that thrives on notions of immediacy, transparency, and participation and feeds into larger trends of political and economic liberalization.

Daniel Fisher’s (2016) ethnography of Aboriginal radio production in Australia similarly highlights how radio technology is capable of sustaining intimate networks of kinship and relatedness, here in the face of an Aboriginal reality marked by violent colonization, displacement, and assimilationist government. One way in which this happens is through request shows, where listeners call in to request a particular song and dedicate it to kin dispersed across immense distances, often as a result of incarceration or other forms of governmental intervention (Fisher 2016: 43-79). Older ideas of kinship are ‘mediatized’ by these radio programmes in distinctly modern ways as the sound of country music and the voices of callers, radio hosts, and singers conjoin to address a geographically dispersed yet collectively imagined Indigenous public. While these programmes do not feature explicitly ‘Aboriginal’ content – both hosts and callers speak in English and callers generally request American-inflected blues and country music – they nevertheless sustain a distinct Indigenous public sphere by evoking characteristically Aboriginal networks of relation and address.

As both Kunreuther and Fisher explore in detail how the practices of radio broadcasting render the voice an object of technical as much as bureaucratic intervention, their work usefully highlights that the seemingly immediate and transparent radio-broadcast voice is in fact the outcome of complex processes of technological as well as governmental mediation. This draws attention to the fact that the material practices, technologies, and institutions through which voices become audible crucially determine how voices are understood and heard. This insight usefully challenges prevailing notions of orality as more direct, sincere, or transparent than writing; what historian of technology Jonathan Sterne has called ‘the audio-visual litany’ (2003: 15-19). Opposing the ear to the eye, hearing to writing, this ‘litany’ is a powerful Euro-American assumption that posits the oral/aural as more immediate and hence more ‘authentic’ than the visual. As a discipline, anthropology has long seen itself responsible for studying so-called ‘oral societies.’ Showing the immense complexity of cultural and literary production, memorial techniques, and ideologies brought forth by these societies, anthropologists have gone a long way in challenging stereotypes about oral societies being ostensibly simple or primitive (e.g. Barber 2007; Finnegan 2007). The emerging anthropology of voice equally contributes to dispelling engrained stereotypes about the oral. It does so, however, by approaching orality not as opposed to technologies of writing, inscription, and recording, but as fundamentally mediated by and intertwined with these technologies. Such an approach promises to be productive for challenging not only the oral-visual, hearing-writing divide, but a whole series of dichotomies that regularly get mapped onto it, including nature versus culture, body versus mind, primitive versus civilised, female versus male, etc.

Conclusion: The wider relevance of voice

The anthropological record shows that voice is a salient category in many communities and repeatedly functions as a potent metaphor in relation to questions of power, agency, and subjectivity, though in ways that are neither uniform, nor predictable. Given this salience, anthropological studies of voice and vocal practices carry relevance for other subfields of anthropology and the social sciences. What renders such studies particularly productive is the move of considering metaphors of voice in tandem with actually sounding voices. This allows anthropologists to complicate common understandings of voice as a means of empowerment and agency and to ethnographically ground broader concepts in social theory to which voice is central yet remains unexplored.

Attention to vocal practice, for instance, can be a productive starting point for challenging human rights projects that seek to ‘give voice’ to the powerless by exploring the often ambiguous and contradictory effects that such projects produce. An analysis of the relation between material voices and their metaphorical mobilization in political struggle is also important for understanding how social movements are or are not able to make their voices ‘matter’ (Faudree 2013; Minks 2013). Considering the impact of technological mediation on the circulation and uptake of voices, moreover, appears imperative for our grasp of how social media and new technologies shape new subjectivities and practices of social interaction. More broadly, this points to the reframing of voice under conditions of neoliberalism. Neoliberal policy tends to position voice in a framework of choice, creativity, freedom, and transparency (Kunreuther 2010; Weidman 2014b). Anthropological attention to the actual vocal practices that such claims enable and foreclose promises important insights into how neoliberal discourse and practice shape subjects and determine frames of action.

References

Agha, A. 2005. Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15, 38-59.

——— 2007. Language and social relations. Cambridge: University Press.

Bakhtin, M. 1981. Discourse in the novel. In The dialogic imagination (ed.) M. Holquist (trans. C. Emerson & M. Holquist), 262-349. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Barber, K. 2007. The anthropology of texts, persons and publics: oral and written culture in Africa and beyond. Cambridge: University Press.

Bauman, R. & C.L. Briggs 2003. Voices of modernity: language ideologies and the politics of inequality. Cambridge: University Press.

Cavarero, A. 2005. For more than one voice: towards a philosophy of vocal expression. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Chion, M. 1999. The voice in cinema (trans. C. Gorbman). New York: Columbia University Press.

Connor, S. 1997. The modern auditory I. In Rewriting the self: histories from the renaissance to the present (ed.) R. Porter, 203-23. London: Routledge.

De Certeau, M. 1988. The writing of history. New York: Columbia University Press.

Dolar, M. 2006. A voice and nothing more. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Duncan, M. 2004. The operatic scandal of the singing body: voice, presence, performativity. Cambridge Opera Journal 16, 283-306.

Eidsheim, N.S. 2008. Voice as a technology of selfhood: towards an analysis of racialized timbre and vocal performance. Ph.D. thesis, University of California, San Diego.

——— 2011. Sensing voice: materiality and the lived body in singing and listening. The Senses and Society 6, 133-55.

Erlmann, V. (ed.) 2004. Hearing cultures: essays on sound, listening and modernity. Berg: Oxford.

Faudree, P. 2013. Singing for the dead: the politics of indigenous revival in Mexico. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Feld, S. 1982. Sound and sentiment: birds, weeping, poetics, and song in Kaluli expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Feld, S. & A.A. Fox 1994. Music and language. Annual Review of Anthropology 23, 25-53.

———, T. Porcello & D. Samuels 2004. Vocal anthropology: from the music of language to the language of song. In A companion to linguistic anthropology (ed.) A. Duranti, 321-45. Oxford: Blackwell.

Finnegan, R. 2007. The oral and beyond: doing things with words in Africa. Oxford: James Currey.

Fisher, D. 2016. The voice and its doubles: media and music in Northern Australia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Fox, A.A. 2004. Real country: music and language in working-class culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Frith, S. 1996. Performing rites: evaluating popular music. Oxford: University Press.

Gitelman, L. 1999. Scripts, grooves, and writing machines: representing technology in the Edison era. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Gray, L.E. 2016. Registering protest: voice, precarity, and return in crisis Portugal. History and Anthropology 27, 60-73.

Harkness, N. 2013. Songs of Seoul: an ethnography of voice and voicing in Christian South Korea. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Inoue, M. 2003. The listening subject of Japanese modernity and his auditory double: citing, sighting, and siting the modern Japanese woman. Cultural Anthropology 18, 156-93.

——— 2006. Vicarious language: gender and linguistic modernity in Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Irvine, J.T. 1990. Registering affect: heteroglossia in the linguistic expression of emotion. In Language and the politics of emotion (eds) L. Abu-Lughod & C.A. Lutz, 126-61. Cambridge: University Press.

Keane, W. 2011. Indexing voice: a morality tale. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21, 166-78.

Kittler, F.A. 1990. Discourse networks 1800/1900. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Kunreuther, L. 2006. Technologies of the voice: FM radio, telephone, and the Nepali diaspora in Kathmandu. Cultural Anthropology 21, 323-53.

——— 2010. Transparent media: radio, voice, and ideologies of directness in postdemocratic Nepal. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20, 334-51.

——— 2014. Voicing subjects: public intimacy and mediation in Kathmandu. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Minks, A. 2013. Voices of play: Miskitu children’s speech and song on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Nancy, J.-L. 2007. Listening. New York: Fordham University Press.

Ochoa Gautier, A.M. 2014. Aurality: listening and knowledge in nineteenth-century Colombia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Porcello, T. 2002. Music mediated as live in Austin: sound, technology, and recording practice. City and Society 14, 69-86.

Posel, D. 2008. History as confession: the case of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Public Culture 20, 119-41.

Samuels, D.W. 2004. Putting a song on top of it: expression and identity on the San Carlos Apache reservation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Schlichter, A. 2011. Do voices matter? Vocality, materiality, gender performativity. Body & Society 17, 31-52.

Slotta, J. 2015. Phatic rituals of the liberal democratic policy: hearing voices in the hearings of the Royal Commission an Aboriginal Peoples. Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, 130-60.

Spitulnik, D. 1998. Mediated modernities: encounters with the electronic in Zambia. Visual Anthropology Review 14, 63-84.

Spivak, G. C. 1988. Can the subaltern speak? In Marxism and the interpretation of culture (eds) C. Nelson & L. Grossberg, 271-313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Sterne, J. 2003. The audible past: the cultural origins of sound reproduction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Stokes, M. 2009. Abd Al-Halim’s Microphone. In Music and the play of power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia (ed.) L. Nooshin, 55-73. Surrey: Ashgate.

——— 2010. The republic of love: cultural intimacy in Turkish popular music. Chicago: University Press.

Urban, G. 1988. Ritual wailing in Amerindian Brazil. American Anthropologist 90, 385-400.

Weheliye, A.G. 2005. Phonographies: grooves in sonic Afro-modernity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Weidman, A.J. 2003. Guru and Gramophone: Fantasies of Fidelity and Modern Technologies of the Real. Public Culture 15(3), 453-76.

——— 2006. Singing the classical, voicing the modern: the postcolonial politics of music in South India. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

——— 2007. Stage goddesses and studio divas in South India: on agency and the politics of voice. In Words, worlds, and material girls: language, gender, globalization (ed.) B.S. McElhinny, 131-55. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

——— 2014a. Anthropology and voice. Annual Review of Anthropology 43, 37-51.

——— 2014b. Neoliberal logics of voice: playback singing and public femaleness in South India. Culture, Theory and Critique 55, 175-93.

Note on contributor

Marlene Schäfers is a social anthropologist and FWO [PEGASUS]² Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Ghent University’s Middle East and North Africa Research Group. She holds a PhD degree from the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation investigates Kurdish women’s attempts at making their voices heard in intimate, public and political spheres in Turkey, while her new project explores Kurdish politics of loss and mourning.

Dr. Marlene Schäfers, Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Universiteitstraat 8, 9000 Gent, Belgium. marlene.schafers@ugent.be

Resistance

Felix Stein — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 14:21:43 +0000

Fiona Wright

University of Cambridge

Initially published 6 Oct 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16resistance

Abstract:

With images of protest and dissent widespread and frequently circulated in news broadcasts and social media posts, resistance to prevailing power structures seems to be an expected and regular feature of contemporary life. This entry explores how anthropology has linked these spectacular moments of resistance to broader social questions. It further explains how identifying a particular practice or process as a form of resistance is not always straightforward when broader context is thus taken into consideration. I do this by considering how resistance has appeared (or has been neglected) as a topic of study through the history of anthropology until the present day, and how prevailing theoretical frameworks and political contexts shaped what anthropologists made of resistance in different periods.

The entry begins from early political anthropology’s avoidance of questions of conflict and social inequality and moves through paradigm-shifting moments in the discipline – in particular, post-colonial and Marxist analyses – whereby resistance and social change became central concerns. It then examines how anthropologists began to study ‘everyday resistance’ and to emphasise how ethnography can reveal many small and subtle acts as forms of resistance, and as linked to more obvious and public forms of protest. Questions of consciousness and intentionality in political practice that are raised by everyday struggles are then considered in connection to the problem of defining resistance. In light of a focus on unconscious practices or acts that simultaneously challenge certain power structures and reinforce or create different ones, resistance is framed as that which constitutes a subversive relationship to forms of domination or systems that reproduce inequality, but that is not necessarily intentional or outside of prevailing political structures. Additionally, I consider anthropologists’ changing relation to resistance – from one of neglect to the position of activist or engaged researcher – as shifting forms of media and communication highlight researchers’ involvement in shaping perceptions of more and less organised forms of political struggle.

Introduction

It might seem like resistance is both a frequent occurrence and something that we recognise immediately when we see it. Images of protesting crowds, confrontations with police and military, workers’ strikes, or silent vigils attest to the ubiquity of resistance as various ways in which people organise themselves to challenge systems of inequality and oppression. Scenes such as massive crowds at Tahrir Square following the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, or of demonstrations and strikes in Greece opposing public spending cuts and other austerity measures, seem to define and pervade contemporary life in diverse global contexts. Anthropologists have explored the nature of these events and their political effects, understanding them as instances of resistance against domination by states and other powerful institutions as well as economic systems more broadly. The discipline has also, however, been interested in understanding the broader everyday contexts that make these spectacular events and moments possible. Seeing resistance as one element in a complex system of power relations, anthropologists have sought to describe and explain acts of resistance within the rich social, cultural, and economic fabrics in which they take place.

At the same time, anthropologists have approached the idea of resistance with some caution: do protest movements and uprisings really have subversive outcomes? And conversely, how do people resist and challenge the status quo in unintentional and seemingly un-political ways? Recognising a particular act or practice as resistance is often linked to the broader theory of power and politics employed. For example, following the famous dictum of feminism, ‘the personal is political’, anthropologists have considered women’s acts within the intimate domain of their domestic relationships as involving forms of resistance. Or, when analyzing protest movements, that people’s personal lives impact upon their capacity to act within public and organised politics. On the other hand, anthropologists have also tried to see resistance where it is less expected. This has often involved stepping back from overarching theoretical frames such as feminism or Marxism when describing and analyzing resistance.

In the following essay, I trace the history of the anthropology of resistance – from its beginnings as a moot concept within a discipline concerned with understanding order, to its attempts to analyze the contemporary proliferation of protest movements. In this way I explore how resistance can be an unintentional, unconscious, and ambiguous feature of the everyday, as well as the desired outcome of organised political movements.

Order and rebellion: resistance in the shadows

Early anthropological attention to resistance was framed in the terms of the dominant political anthropology of the time (up until the late 1950s), which emphasised the maintenance of social order and avoided questions of oppression and conflict. In light of this focus, those anthropologists who did analyze points of friction tended to depict them as the temporary release of social tensions. This would allow those who were discontent or found themselves in subordinate positions to then be re-absorbed into the normal social fabric with the threat of potential upheaval removed. A key work in this vein was Max Gluckman’s Rituals of rebellion in South-east Africa (1954), in which fertility rituals and ceremonies humiliating royal leaders among Zulu, Tsonga, and Swazi peoples were treated as moments in which social taboos can be broken and rebellious drives aired so that all involved – both the weak and the powerful – can continue in their assigned social roles without revolution. Social hierarchies are thus in fact protected, Gluckman claimed, by socially sanctioned expressions of discontent, or at least by the recognition of the existence of inequality within a society and ritualised attempts to deal with it.

This approach from political anthropology was picked up and elaborated into one of the most influential contributions to the anthropology of ritual and religion, by Gluckman’s student Victor Turner. Based on his fieldwork with the Ndembu of Zambia, Turner combined Gluckman’s attention to the cathartic dimension of rituals of rebellion with his own interest in rites of passage that marked, for example, the change from youth to adulthood, to suggest the idea of ‘liminality’ (1969). In the liminal phase of ritual, Turner argued, status roles could be reversed and subjugated members of a society can assume powerful positions, as ‘anti-structure’ is allowed to prevail over ‘structure’, and a temporarily egalitarian status of ‘communitas’ – a fervent and powerful feeling of group bondedness – is reached. Unlike Gluckman, though, Turner took this model and applied it to various social movements and cultural phenomena in other times and places, notably to secular contexts and to the groups in Europe and North America, such as the artists and poets of the Beat Generation and their successors the ‘hippies’, citing Bob Dylan as the ‘authentic voice of spontaneous communitas’ (Turner 1969: 165). In framing such phenomena in this way, and arguing that their enactments of different kinds of power relations were basically utopian moments that could not be sustained within the political and economic systems in which they operated, Turner maintained a conservative view of social order that made resistance seem like an anomaly or even a naïve and youthful aspiration to social change that could never be realised.

Resistance as it is generally considered - as a challenge to power or domination - was thus largely written out of anthropology of this period. When it did appear, it reinforced the view of prevailing political anthropology approaches at the time: that societies were rather static and maintained a basic equilibrium. This went hand in hand with the almost total absence in these writings of the colonial authorities’ presence in the places where anthropologists were working. The ways in which European powers maintained their rule but also faced persistent challenges to it by colonised peoples emerged later, as Marxist and post-colonial theoretical approaches gained ground in anthropological work.

From order to conflict: Marxist and post-colonial anthropology

Along with the discipline in general, political anthropology underwent a fundamental change in the wake of the national anti-colonial movements of the mid-twentieth century, and so too resistance began to take a more central place in analyses of political systems. As power began to look less static, both in the formerly colonised countries and with the anti-war and anti-capitalist movements elsewhere, two key theoretical approaches shaped anthropological takes on resistance. Marxist and post-colonial perspectives both introduced a profound historicisation of anthropological knowledge, sometimes in differing and sometimes in converging ways, such that no approach to power or to resistance could now render society or culture as unchanging or uncontested systems that simply reproduce themselves.

On the one hand, a Marxist emphasis on modes of production informed a generation of political anthropologists who paid attention to how people’s labour and material circumstances affected their social and cultural practices, beliefs, and relationships more broadly. Eric Wolf’s (1982) and Sidney Mintz’ (1985) work on the entanglement of local economic and political processes with global markets and systems of inequality provided key reference points for those who wished to understand how changing global economies led to sometimes unfamiliar and often ambivalent forms of resistance.

Michael Taussig’s The devil and commodity fetishism in South America (1980) remains a provocative example of this kind of work, as he argued that in the rapid change from peasantry to work on sugarcane plantations in Colombia, workers’ beliefs about money earned as wages and their integration of these with the Christian symbol of the devil expressed an indigenous critique of both capitalism and the religion of the Spanish colonisers. Increased productivity, and thus higher earnings, were thought to emanate from a pact with the devil, and the worker concerned was said to suffer a painful, early death. Taussig thus argued that plantation workers were expressing and condemning the suffering brought about by the new economy through the idiom of the pre-commoditised relationship with material objects they had as peasants, when workers and the material things they made and circulated were entwined with their very person. The banknotes earned as wages in the plantations are thus symbolised as having a magical quality that can cause suffering and bad fortune, in Taussig’s twist on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism.

The point of studies like these is at least partly to disturb a historical narrative that sees the growth of global capitalism and its attendant securing of hegemony as a linear process. By pointing to expressions of resistance on the part of workers, of more and less conscious forms, and with greater or lesser immediate impacts, this focus on resistance has attempted to lend ethnographic richness to broader theoretical framings of political economy, as well as to undermine modernist accounts that anticipate such developments as inevitable and universally similar. At the same time, though, another intellectual trend to come out of this historical period questioned the sometimes unexamined assumptions of these texts about the false consciousness of workers and the ability of the ethnographer to truly know what the intentions or understandings of the people with whom they did research actually were.

Emerging mainly out of historical studies of colonial India, the subaltern studies school of thinkers suggested that much of the ethnographic record and anthropological theorising that came with it relied too heavily on elite and colonial knowledge. It was unable to take into account the vast majority of the world’s ordinary, colonised people – the subalterns – and the ways in which they were not represented in most scholarship. The subaltern studies scholars attempted to study the resistance of groups such as peasants and the way hegemony was never complete in colonial societies, in a way that classical Marxism could not do because of its assumptions about class structure and historical change. The subaltern studies school differed from the Marxist notion that an individual’s political consciousness was determined by their position in the class system, and that this would eventually lead to collective struggle aimed at forwarding class-based interests. Rather, they proposed, different forms of individual and political consciousness existed in non-Western histories that universalist theories such as Marxism were unable to comprehend. Thus, the proposition of subaltern ‘autonomy’ (Guha 1983) – a domain of consciousness outside of elite and colonial representations – was offered as the neglected side of uprisings against the colonial state and raised issues of agency and will in resistance. This line of thought opened significant questions about the nature of consciousness, agency, and knowledge in resistance and political struggle. What do we make of acts that look like resistance, but are not interpreted as such by those performing them? Does the idea of ‘false consciousness’ provide an answer, or can we think about ways of thinking outside of systems of power and domination? With increased attention towards such forms of intention and perception in anthropology more broadly, as well as in the study of politics, the question of resistance became salient in new ways, not least because traditional theories of domination and class struggle had been shaken by emerging scholarship in the wake of decolonisation.

Culture, identity and symbolism: everyday resistance

In light of the interest in histories of resistance that had previously gone unwritten, the 1980s and 1990s saw a wave of work focusing on resistance where it had not been seen before. James Scott’s work was key in creating an analytical framework of ‘everyday acts of resistance’ that saw individual acts that were not formally part of any insurgent political movement as ways in which people resisted domination in banal and often unnoticed ways. Scott’s study built on Marxist and post-colonial attention to peasant studies, arguing that a lack of mass political action or violent uprising did not mean that resistance was not occurring. Based on his fieldwork in Malaysia, in Weapons of the weak (1985) Scott claimed that although outwardly compliant with rich local landowners, poor villagers were not taken in by inequality and domination but rather chose when and how to express discontent through low-level sabotage and private gossip that could be considered an everyday form of class struggle and resistance. In the later Domination and the arts of resistance (1990), he elaborated on these ideas and introduced the concept of ‘hidden transcripts’ – the ‘offstage’ criticisms of the powerful that show that subordinate groups are not mystified or falsely conscious, as in classical conceptions of hegemony. Among his wide-ranging examples of hidden transcripts, Scott offers the case of slaves’ ‘theft’, arguing that their taking of crops of livestock was seen as a kind of reclaiming of that which they had produced, although it was described as theft or pilfering by slave-owners or overseers. The point of taking such produce without being detected was not only to avoid punishment or to satisfy hunger but also to achieve an invisible culture of reclaiming ownership over the fruits of their own labour that subverted slave-owners’ narratives of property and theft. With this work Scott not only intervened in debates within Marxism, but also drew anthropologists’ attention to the banal forms of being dominated and resisting that domination, and offered a way of investigating these questions with the detail of ethnography rather than broad political theory.

Some of the most influential ethnographic work in this vein took this preoccupation with the everyday to classic subjects of anthropological fascination, such as symbolism, religious practice, and spirit possession, and re-read these phenomena in the light of this lens of domination and resistance. Thus Jean Comaroff, for example, studied the rise of Zionist churches among the Tshidi of South Africa as tied up in the persistence of indigenous cultural categories through colonial rule and capitalist transformations (1985). Comaroff’s argument is not that Tshidi ‘culture’ survives untouched by what are presumed to be external political forces, but that both mutually shape each other, and that the encounter is contained and expressed in various symbolic and ritual practices, which thus articulate a subversive manipulation of signs of racial and class inequality. Zionist ritual dress, for example, is adopted but transformed by Tshidi congregants, by changing its colours to those of pro-colonial symbols, or through Tshidi women wearing garments traditionally donned by male Protestant bishops. Whilst certainly still concerned with finessing Marxist concepts such as ideology and hegemony, this anthropological approach also exploited the banal nature of these phenomena to analyze how resistance takes place in the embodied and subjective realm of cultural practice, and thus Comaroff also called on other influential theorists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault, in her analysis of how politics permeates the everyday. Similarly, Aihwa Ong’s Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline explores gender and female sexuality as the site of both domination and of resistance, although often of an unwilled nature (1987). In tune with the influence of feminist theory on the anthropology of gender, kinship, and production, Ong argues that Malay women factory workers’ frequent spirit possessions on the factory floor were a mode of defiance against their control by non-Malay male supervisors. Along with small acts that decrease the women’s productivity, as in Scott’s framing of the various acts and forms of speech that constitute hidden transcripts, the affliction of spirit possession and its temporary release of women from their workplace is interpreted as an unconscious resistance against capitalist power and patriarchy, within the context of their family and village lives as well as in much broader spectrums of power within the global economy.

This anthropological work resonated with the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, who, although not anthropologists, led the field in producing ethnographic work sensitive to the often small-scale reverberations of much larger political and economic structures, mostly focusing on British subcultures and working class life. Paul Willis’ Learning to labor (1977) is a close study of twelve white working class English school boys, ‘the lads’, and analyses how their rejection of the system of academic achievement offered by the formal education system contributes to the reproduction of their class position and future as working class labourers. Unlike Scott’s ‘hidden transcripts’, though, Willis’ emphasis on the lads’ irreverent approach to authority and the political ramifications of their clowning around represented a more ambivalent take on resistance even as he similarly rejected the idea that these boys were duped or mystified by power. The ways in which they resisted power became, with a bitter irony, a key part of why they continued to be oppressed by it. The question this interpretation raises, then, as with the anthropology of everyday resistance, is, is it really resistance? If resistance is either not named as such by those engaging in it, or contributes only to reinforcing domination, the sense of the term becomes less clear, particularly for anthropologists interested in being true to their ethnographic material rather than only advancing a theoretical or political argument. As everyday resistance seemed to proliferate, then, anthropologists also began to take a step back and cast a critical eye on this burgeoning field of work.

Too much resistance: power and subjectivity

In light of the growing anthropological attention to resistance, in its spectacular as well as everyday forms, critical questions about this field of study began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, anthropologists reflected on what acts may truly count as resistance, and whether scholars had begun to pre-determine their analyses by looking too hard for it. Lila Abu-Lughod was one of those who critically re-evaulated earlier work, including her own analysis of women’s and young men’s love poetry and other practices among Egyptian Bedouins as subtle forms of defiance against local hierarchical and patriarchal moral codes (1986). In her later article, The romance of resistance (1990), Abu-Lughod influentially argued that resistance is not external, or in opposition, to power, but is rather a ‘diagnostic’ of it: a reflection of power structures within a given context. Thus she suggested that the resistance to local hierarchies in her earlier ethnography entailed an entanglement or complicity with another form, such as the state or global markets, which could tell us about the shifting political economy of Egypt at the time. She cited Foucault’s argument that power, rather than being only oppressive or negative, is productive of all kinds of practice, subjectivity, and knowledge, and is diffused through all spheres of life rather than held and imposed top-down by the state or other entities (Foucault 1979).

This characterisation of anthropological work on resistance as romanticising was echoed in other writing during this period, which examined the investment on the part of anthropologists in certain moral or political projects. Some claimed that this propelled them to insist on an idealised picture of the oppressed as heroically standing up against those who dominate them (Brown 1996), while others defended such ethical engagements on the part of the anthropologist but argued that they required greater reflexivity about this positionality as well as more complex ethnographic description to capture ambivalence in projects of resistance (Ortner 1995; Scheper-Hughes 1995). Similarly, anthropologists started to write about cases in which practices of resistance could simultaneously challenge existing kinds of oppression and contribute to the creation or reproduction of other kinds of hegemony (Jean-Klein 2001; Kulick 1996; Theodossopoulos 2014).

The study of resistance becomes, in these critical perspectives, the starting point for broader questions of political agency and subjectivity. For, if we cannot identify resistance or acquiescence as clearly distinct from one another, and if both can be present in the same set of practices, this has significant implications for theories of how people act, and with what kind of consciousness or intentions, within political systems. The gendered aspects of resistance and politics, and feminist theory’s contribution to our understanding of it, were the subject of much anthropological work that considered these issues. Begoña Aretxaga’s study of women’s roles within working class Catholic struggles against British rule in Northern Ireland considered resistance within its nationalist and gendered context, arguing that women neither passively receive nor freely navigate these dominant political tropes (1997). Motherhood, for example, was held up as a central symbolic value in the communities Aretxaga worked with, and although she cites maternal suffering as a subjective motivation for political action among Catholic women, it was also a trope through which they collectively challenged husbands’ and sons’ dominance in political activism. That is, whilst being able to draw power from the potent nationalist and Catholic symbol of the mother who suffers the pains of her son, the legitimisation of women’s involvement in politics through such symbolism also contributed to their reconfiguring of domestic and intimate relations with their husbands and children. The ideology of motherhood thus bolstered women’s participation into political struggle at the national level whilst also helping to transform some of its key social and economic underpinnings. Further, Aretxaga analyzed women prisoners’ participation in the ‘dirty protest’ in Armagh prison, and the use of their menstrual blood as a transgression of powerful taboos governing the expression of female sexuality.^[1] Aretxaga suggests that whilst women’s actions were conscious and intentional, they also relied on unconscious and emotional motivations of rejecting gendered humiliation, a level of personal experience which thus becomes part of the political realm and practices of resistance.

The role of the unconscious and the emotional, or affective, in resistance, and the ways in which political contexts shape these aspects of subjectivity, raises important questions about how social change and individual action or experience are linked. The feminist philosopher Judith Butler, herself influenced by both Foucault and psychoanalytic thought, argued that agency is made possible only through the workings of power, as people can only speak and be heard through the language and cultural forms available to them within specific historical, and political, contexts (1997). Resistance and social change, in this theory, are the consequences of modifications – whether intentional or accidental – of dominant forms of expression and practice. This theoretical model of agency has been influential in political anthropology, but has also been questioned because of the way it emphasises agency as linked primarily with social change and resistance. Saba Mahmood, in her work on an Islamic women’s piety movement in Egypt, argued that this aspect of Butler’s work reflects a broader problem within Western liberal feminism, in its assumptions that freedom and agency have to imply opposition to authority (2005). Mahmood demonstrated ethnographically how the women she worked with in Cairo were often interested in living up to Islamic moral teachings, rather than challenging them, and argued that this need not mean that these women were therefore reproducing their own oppression, but rather that agency does not always equate to resistance.

When resistance is seen as a subjective as well as social encounter with power, then, our view of politics and its transformations become an ever richer field of investigation, whether one is skeptical of resistance studies or argues for more attention to the ambiguities and complexities within it. With this area of intimate and embodied experience opened up as a legitimate domain of anthropological thought, these critical takes on resistance promoted a new set of theoretical vocabularies that contemporary anthropologists have been able to draw on as historical events once again made resistance a key concern for the discipline.

Imagining different futures: contemporary anthropological approaches to resistance

From the late 1990s until the contemporary moment, the prominence of anti-globalisation protests, the events of the ‘Arab Spring’, and the rise of socio-economic and racial justice movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter, have brought about a renewed interest in resistance, social movements, and activism in anthropology. Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of this recent work has been its focus on media and communication technologies, both as a factor in how resistance plays out, and relating to the potential for anthropologists to be politically engaged and in dialogue with the people with whom they conduct research. Although anthropological accounts have undermined popular understandings of these movements as driven by social media, pointing to the very real and often risky presence of protestors’ bodies in public spaces, they have also not underestimated the possibilities for activism opened up by technologies such as Facebook or Twitter, and have considered how virtual networks contribute to novel forms of political organisation. An example is the ‘hashtag activism’ in the protests that followed the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, and in the Black Lives Matters movement that grew after this and other similar killings in the USA. This kind of engagement became a key way in which people across the country and elsewhere expressed solidarity with those demonstrating in Ferguson (Bonilla & Rosa 2015). This online activism exposed and played with dominant media stereotypes and racist language and allowed for users to actively re-inscribe the meaning of the black body, unlike in physical confrontations with police in demonstrations where it is often cast as threatening and dangerous.

Other work has pointed to the different qualities of various kinds of online communication and media, arguing that whilst email list-servs and web fora were crucial in building and maintaining activist networks in the anti-globalisation movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s, social media such as Facebook and Twitter have been less useful for in-depth communication among activists working closely with each other but have contributed to the spread of movements such as Occupy beyond typical activist circles and have helped to create feelings of solidarity and collectivity across wide and disparate social contexts (Juris 2012). The participation of broader publics in socioeconomic justice and antiracist movements in the ‘real time’ of social media has also prompted anthropologists to write shorter and open-access pieces for audiences outside of the academy as well as within it. These are generally published faster than traditional academic articles and aim to contribute to public debates about these protests and the power structures they hope to challenge. The journal Cultural Anthropology, for example, has established the ‘Hot Spot’ forum on its website, which has published collections of essays by anthropologists and activists on the Occupy movement, the Egyptian revolution, and Istanbul’s Gezi park protests, among others.^[2]

What happens to participants during resistance, and how that in turn shapes its political effects, is also affected by its modes of communication and performance. Studies of contemporary activism have considered the collective experiences of humour and spontaneity, joyfulness and a sense of possibility, as crucial aspects of activism and as playing into a movement’s broader trajectory (Haugerud 2013; Rasza & Kurnik 2012; Sitrin 2013). These analyses sometimes recall older anthropological notions such as Durkheim’s ‘collective effervescence’ (1995 [1912]) – the embodied passion and fervor that comes from communal, out-of-the-ordinary action – and Turner’s ‘rituals of reversal’, and sometimes draw on more recent theoretical concepts such as ‘affect’ and ‘becoming’. In what has been labelled the ‘subjective turn’ (Rasza 2013), a central argument has been that the ability of activists to imagine and sense different emotional and inter-personal relations in the forms of non-hierarchical organisation is vital for the potential of a political movement to offer and demonstrate alternative forms of social organisation to prevailing capitalist and neoliberal politics. This perspective also provides a good example of how anthropological analysis of movements such as Occupy or the Gezi park protests constitute resistance: by adopting a broadly critical stance on contemporary capitalism, neoliberalism, and state violence, these perspectives tend to echo activists’ analyzes of certain formations of power and thus frame protest and social movements acting against them as resistance.

Persistent inequalities and enduring effects of past violence on social interaction, however, are also felt within activist groups even as they aim to resist domination. Scholars attentive to how class, gender or racial difference continue to be reproduced and enacted within protest movements have advocated for a ‘decolonizing’ approach, which aims to bring a consciousness of historical injustices of different kinds into activism that might unwittingly repeat similar patterns of domination (Liu 2013). These approaches relate to an older notion of ‘identity politics’, which has been criticised for the way in which it can reinscribe certain essentialist and even exclusionary notions of identity, and suggest that whilst more universalist political goals can be shared by various people in a resistance movement, activists must remain vigilant about questions of difference and power structures within the group. These issues were particularly visible in writing about indigenous activism and struggles for land rights and self-determination, where the very means of resistance – by recourse to legal technologies and vocabularies of rights, citizenship, and territory – involve speaking the language of the powerful in order to make certain claims (Jackson and Warren 2005; Muehlebach 2010). Thus certain members of a community, as well as the anthropologist, may, paradoxically, be more able to articulate and represent ‘indigeneity’ than those who speak only the language of the colonised. Equally, there is concern about the ways in which protest movements are represented and perhaps even appropriated in scholarship, as academics seek to capitalise on political events so as to prove the relevance or timeliness of their work whilst at the same time silencing and exploiting the knowledge and labour of local academics and activists (Abaza 2013).

The anthropology of resistance, then, is grappling with a new set of questions that have arisen from contemporary political events. Although some older conceptual questions – about social change and stasis, false consciousness and agency – remain pertinent, recent work on resistance has also been formed by different concerns. Alongside shifting theoretical frameworks, anthropological perspectives on resistance are being transformed by widespread acknowledgment of researchers’ responsibility to research participants, as well as reflexive awareness of their own roles in shaping local and global politics.

References

Abaza, M. 2013. Academic tourists sight-seeing the Arab Spring. Cultural Anthropology website (available on-line: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/242-academic-tourists-sight-seeing-the-arab-spring).

Abu-Lughod, L. 1986. Veiled sentiments: honor and poetry in a Bedouin society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 1990. The romance of resistance: tracing transformations of power through bedouin women. American Ethnologist 17(1), 41-55.

Aretxaga, B. 1997. Shattering silence: women, nationalism, and political subjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton: University Press.

Bonilla, Y. & J. Rosa 2015. #Ferguson: digital protest, hashtag ethnography and the racial politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist 42(1), 4-17.

Brown, M. F. 1996. Forum: on resisting resistance. American Anthropologist 98(4), 729-35.

Butler, J. 1997. The psychic life of power: theories in subjection. Stanford: University Press.

Comaroff, J. 1985. Body of power, spirit of resistance: the culture and history of a South African people. Chicago: University Press.

Durkheim, E. 1995 [1912]. The elementary forms of the religious life. New York: Free Press.

Foucault, M. 1979 [1976]. The history of sexuality volume 1: an introduction. London: Allen Lane.

Gluckman, M. 1954. Rituals of rebellion in South-east Africa. Manchester: University Press.

Guha, R. 1983. Elementary aspects of peasant insurgency in colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Haugerud, A. 2013. No billionaire left behind: satirical activism in America. Stanford: University Press.

Jackson, J.A. & K. Warren 2005. Indigenous movements in Latin America, 1992-2004: controversies, ironies, new directions. Annual Review of Anthropology 34(5), 549-73.

Jean-Klein, I. 2001. Nationalism and resistance: the two faces of everyday activism in Palestine during the Intifada. Cultural Anthropology 16(1), 83-126.

Juris, J. 2012. Reflections on #Occupy everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation. American Ethnologist 39(2), 259–79.

Kulick, D. 1996. Causing a commotion: public scandal as resistance among Brazilian transgendered prostitutes. Anthropology Today 12(6), 3-7.

Liu, Y.Y. 2013. Decolonizing the Occupy Movement. Cultural Anthropology website (available on-line: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/87-decolonizing-the-occupy-movement).

Mahmood, S. 2005. Politics of piety: the Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton: University Press

Mintz, S. 1985. Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history. New York: Viking-Penguin.

Muehlebach, A. 2010. What self in self-determination? Notes from the frontiers of transnational indigenous activism. Identities 10(2), 241-68.

Ong, A. 1987. Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline: factory women in Malaysia. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.

Ortner, S. B. 1995. Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1), 173-93.

Rasza, M. 2013. The subjective turn: the radicalization of personal experience with Occupy Slovenia. Cultural Anthropology website (available on-line: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/74-the-subjective-turn-the-radicalization-of-personal-experience-within-occupy-slovenia).

Razsa, M. & A. Kurnik 2012. The Occupy Movement in Žižek's hometown: direct democracy and a politics of becoming. American Ethnologist 39(2), 238-58.

Scheper-Hughes, N. 1995. The primacy of the ethical: propositions for a militant anthropology. Current Anthropology 36(3), 409-40.

Scott, J.C. 1985. Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.

——— 1990. Domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Sitrin, M. 2013. Occupy trust: the role of emotion in the new Movements. Cultural Anthropology website (available on-line: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/76-occupy-trust-the-role-of-emotion-in-the-new-movements, accessed 2 February 2015).

Taussig, M. 1980. The devil and commodity fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.

Theodossopoulos, D. 2014. The ambivalence of anti-austerity indignation in Greece: resistance, hegemony and complicity. History and Anthropology 25(4), 488-506

Turner, V. 1969. The ritual process: structure and anti-structure. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Willis, P. 1977. Learning to labor: how working class kids get working class jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wolf, E. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Note on contributor

Fiona Wright is an anthropologist interested in activism, dissent, and ethics, and how they are linked to sovereignty and violence. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Israel/Palestine and is currently researching the politics of debates over free speech in British universities.

Dr Fiona Wright, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. fcw28@cam.ac.uk

[1] Developing out of their ‘no-work’ protest and refusal to wear prison uniforms, the Armagh dirty protest took place from 1980-1981, and involved women prisoners refusing to bathe, to use lavatories, or to clean their cells over long stretches of time. Combined with hunger strikes and Republican male prisoners’ similar acts at a different prison, the dirty protest was one of the more violent and tense episodes in the history of British rule in Northern Ireland.

[2] See Cultural Anthropology website: http://www.culanth.org/conversations/4-hot-spots (accessed 28 February 2016).

Citizenship

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Sian Lazar

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16citizenship

Abstract:

What is citizenship? The word itself is now used in a wide range of arenas, from citizenship education in schools to development agencies’ programmes of good governance, and public statements from multinationals about their ‘corporate citizenship’. It is being used, it seems, to evoke virtues such as equality in rights, respectful engagement between citizen (individual or corporate) and wider national society, participation in and knowledge about institutions of government, the right to vote and be elected, etc. Yet at its most fundamental, citizenship names political belonging, and here I argue that to study citizenship is to study how we live with others in a political community.

Introduction

The sociologist T.H. Marshall gave the following definition of citizenship in 1950:

Citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed (Marshall 1983 [1950]: 253).

He equated community with the nation, and viewed membership of that community as primarily an individual ownership of a set of rights and corresponding duties. His version of citizenship has a distinguished pedigree: from Locke onwards, liberal citizenship has been seen as a status of the individual. The rights associated with this status in theory allow individuals to pursue their own conceptions of the good life, as long as they do not hinder other’s similar pursuits, and the state protects this status quo. In return, citizens have minimal responsibilities, which revolve primarily around keeping the state running, such as paying taxes, or participating in military service.

However, liberal citizenship is not the only form of citizenship that we can find globally. Indeed, insights from ethnography complicate this normative picture of liberal citizenship, as anthropologists have insisted on the specificity of citizenship in different contexts. Alternative possibilities might be civic republican or communitarian forms of citizenship. This is because political membership is related in complex ways to day-to-day practices of politics, and citizenship is a mechanism for making claims on different political communities, of which the state is just one. One important consequence of this is that anthropologists denaturalize liberal citizenship and ask questions about the actual constitution of political membership and subjectivity in a given context. In the move from political philosophy to anthropology, we see an important analytical shift take place from the normative to the descriptive: from what citizenship and citizens should be to a critical analysis of what they are.

The political community

The concept of citizenship has a long trajectory within political philosophy. Like anthropologists, political philosophers ask: how should we live with others in a political community? Here I trace some key moments in this enduring debate within political philosophy, a debate which informs most anthropological discussions of citizenship today. Aristotle (2013) is my starting point, as the most celebrated proponent of a civic republican tradition of citizenship that began in the early Greek city states. In the Politics, he discusses three very important issues: first, the question of how precisely to constitute membership – and exclusion; second, the nature of the citizen as person; and third, the nature of politics itself. The first question of membership was a particular problem in early Greek philosophical thought because of the presence of slaves, often in important bureaucratic positions in the government of the city. Aristotle’s assertion in the Politics that ‘man is a political animal’ was not an inclusive one, but referred only to certain men, those who were not slaves (women were quickly dismissed and then ignored, along with children). He described the citizen: a member of the political community (polis) who participates in government in the sense that he ‘gives judgement and holds office’. Secondly, Aristotle discussed in great depth the development of the citizen as a particular kind of man capable of living in the collectivity, who held and cultivated the associated virtues, such as respect for law and for others and a passion for politics. Finally, politics itself was intimately linked with speech in Aristotle’s thought. Discussion and debate were absolutely central to Athenian politics and personhood. So, citizenship was constituted through political practice, and political practice was constituted through speech and deliberation.

The key points here are, first, that citizenship is more than simply a status denoting membership of a polity but is constituted through a set of practices associated with participation in politics. Second, political subjectivity is something that cannot be assumed to exist but that must be created. For Aristotle, political subjects – citizens – are inherently collective and also eminently moral.

The second set of foundational philosophical texts I want to highlight are those of the social contract philosophers and the Liberal tradition. For Rousseau and Locke, social order can only be achieved through the acceptance of all to live via the agreement of the majority for the benefit of all. This is principally in order to protect property rights, as in the state of ‘natural freedom’ (Rousseau 1971) prior to the establishment of a state, property is always subject to the threat of what Locke called ‘the Invasion of others’. To overcome this danger each individual ‘puts into the community his person and all his powers under the supreme direction of the general will’, thus creating ‘civil freedom’ (Rousseau 1971). The political community therefore comes into being when individuals voluntarily subject themselves to the collectivity (meaning the state and the rule of law). As with Aristotle, political subjectivity is not to be assumed, but is created, and is intimately linked to moral questions of personal virtue. The American Declaration of Independence^[1] (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man^[2] (1789) were more radical, in their willingness to question the inevitability of the existing regime of state power and sovereignty; and then to claim sovereignty for ‘the people’. They did so by claiming the equality of men (sic.) in the name of individual rights, especially those to ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ and ‘liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression’. The political context meant that they needed to claim liberty so that they could change sovereign power, but liberty could also be interpreted in the light of Rousseau and Locke’s position that true freedom comes through the respect for the rule of law, not through the absence of law (for Locke, see his Two Treatises of Government, 2003).

The question of property was also fundamental for the authors of these Declarations, and the role of the state as guarantor of individual property rights became a central question of citizenship in Republican and Liberal regimes from the late eighteenth century on. In the first place, property was a fundamental criterion for membership, as only male property holders were defined as citizens. But also questions of property-holding often created practical difficulties for the implementation of individual, universal ideals of citizenship. For example, Latin American constitutions and legislation of the nineteenth century often attempted to abolish collective land-holding in favour of individual property rights, but this proved very unpopular, especially for indigenous communities in the region. For example, Andean communities were less keen on equal individual rights as defined by their rules, than they were on retaining customary forms of land-holding that protected their members and shared out access to resources (Platt 1984). Anthropologists have done a great deal to illuminate our understanding of the complexities of these processes in the contemporary world, giving due import to their historical, economic, and political background.

In the dominant Liberal narrative of the nineteenth century, liberty of one’s own person would be achieved through citizenship based on individual rights, which superseded institutions perceived as backward, such as slavery or collective property-holding. However, in practice, citizenship was continually negotiated, and collective traditions were not peculiar only to indigenous communities. In fact, the historical development of citizenship is linked to the coalescing of modern nation-states (which often took liberal forms) out of earlier city-state formations built on civic republican traditions. But even the most radical of modern nation-states mixed the two traditions of citizenship together.

One common aspect of both traditions has been the inherent connection of citizenship to exclusion from membership. The exclusion of women from liberal citizenship was denounced from its beginnings by early feminists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft or Olympe de Gouges. Contemporary feminist political philosophers, historians, and other social theorists also point out that the ‘abstract’ individual citizen of Liberal ideals turns out to be in fact a very particular kind of white male property-holding individual citizen.

The debate about the abstract individual of contemporary Liberalism has provoked responses from communitarian political philosophers as well as from feminists. Both emphasize the embedding of subjects within collectivities; they recognize that in real life we are not merely individual subjects or ‘unencumbered selves’ (Sandel 1984). Rather, and now I use more anthropological language, we are part of a whole network of social relations of care, obligation, rights, kinship, and so on.

However, as anthropologists are only too well aware, a community is not always welcoming and egalitarian. Feminist and queer political theorists, among others, have pointed out how the notion of community often leaves little space for individual variability. More importantly, it hides from view the internal power relations that constrain the ability to define what ‘a community’ is and what ‘it’ thinks best. Who speaks for ‘a’ community? Are any communities so homogeneous as to suppress difference within them, and what does that mean for their members?

For anthropologists, this is a crucial point, which has come out in debates as varied as those centred on individual or collective notions of the self, the interplay between ‘indigenous’ or ‘customary’ legal jurisdictions and national ones, human rights and property rights, and the practice of ‘development’. While many anthropologists have felt an affinity with subaltern groups and so have defended group rights from a perspective of cultural relativism, it has long been acknowledged that societal and legal recognition of group rights may inhibit individual claims to justice. Anthropological study takes the discussion beyond abstract principles, not least through the recognition that conflicts between group rights and legal regimes that are based upon Liberal notions of individual rights often happen in grey zones imbued with complex power relations. Examples of these grey zones are issues of land rights and the exploitation of natural resources.

In a classically liberal approach, individual rights constitute citizenship of the national political community and group rights undermine that civic belonging; while in political thought more influenced by communitarianism, smaller communities define their members. Contemporary liberals have modified the first position, to argue for liberal versions of community membership that protect both individual and group rights. Yet the tension remains largely unresolved. Anthropology’s distinctive disciplinary history and methodological approach, relying as it does on comparisons between different kinds of cultural, social, and economic practices, means that anthropologists are well placed to explore these contrasting notions of political community in both urban and rural spaces.

Anthropological approaches: (i) citizenship as subject formation

When we study how citizenship operates in different contexts, we see that political subject formation is a key element. Ethnographic work shows that political subject formation happens through both top-down and bottom-up processes. Aihwa Ong summed up this insight in an important early article, when she suggested that citizenship is a ‘process of self-making and being-made’ (1996: 737).

One prominent thread in the anthropology of citizenship uses a Foucauldian analysis to examine how states and other entities make citizens under various citizenship regimes. To research this, we can examine encounters between people and state officials or policy, and one area where a considerable amount of work of this type has been done is in immigration. Immigration is perhaps where boundaries between citizen and non-citizen are most contested, but immigration encounters are not solely punitive and exclusionary: governments also put in a lot of work to ‘assimilate’ different groups of migrants and refugees.

The interaction between assimilation and respect for difference was investigated early on through the concept of ‘cultural citizenship’, first brought to an anthropological audience by Renato Rosaldo. For Rosaldo, cultural citizenship ‘refers to the right to be different (in terms of race, ethnicity or native language) with respect to the norms of the dominant national community, without compromising one’s right to belong, in the sense of participating in the nation-state’s democratic processes’ (1994: 57). In a series of research and activist projects with Latino immigrants to the US, he and his collaborators discussed immigrants’ experiences of second-class citizenship, and their struggles for better citizenship quality, which they often defined in terms of respect and dignity. He firmly located the struggle for cultural citizenship within a political struggle for rights in the face of exclusionary definitions of national identity.

State policies towards immigrants are not the only form of cultural citizenship regime in operation today. By citizenship regime, I refer to legal, bureaucratic, ideological, and material frameworks that condition practices of, and ideas about, government and participation in politics. States and NGOs all attempt to construct particular kinds of citizen, in policy areas such as development intervention globally and welfare policy at home.

One of the most important ways that states create citizens is education – or, better, schooling. National schooling systems have long been recognised as central to the development of national identity and civic commitment. Although so closely associated with nation-building projects, today education is transnational, and a key area for development intervention: from provision of universal primary education to human rights education programmes, for example. Still, the virtues promoted through schooling vary from country to county, valuing different languages, bodily and emotional dispositions. Schooling may create specific kinds of citizens explicitly through civics classes but also in the ways that pupil–teacher relationships are constructed and students’ bodies disciplined. They may promote certain gender roles, a hierarchical relationship with authority or a commitment to democracy as a value in itself. Schooling is always a moral project, even when that moral quality is hidden behind seemingly technocratic language as with the example of ‘human capital’. However, schools may not always succeed in producing the kinds of citizens envisaged by dominant ideologies, and anthropological analysis is very good at exposing the unintended consequences of educational policies.

Education continues to be inherent to citizenship, whether implemented through schooling or political participation, participation in local voluntary projects, or citizenship classes for immigrants. Other cultural and moral projects of citizenship construction include those that produce the citizen as consumer – of public services, goods, lifestyles; as knowledge worker in the information economy; as auditor of transparent government; as soldier or ex-soldier. These projects work in the interface between people, policy, markets, and the state.

Importantly, though, the processes of subject construction are not only top-down. Ordinary people frame and make claims of the state – for example, for disability benefits for those affected by the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor (Petryna 2002), or for regularization of land titles in the peripheral neighbourhoods of São Paulo (Holston 2008). These studies bring out the complex relationships between people and state bureaucracy, and between people and law. The room for manoeuvre that citizens enjoy is not completely free, but constrained by legal and political regimes.

Citizen action is also shaped by the languages of political action available to actors. In some spaces, the processes of claims-making are articulated through a local language of citizenship, as in South Africa, where HIV/AIDS activists have successfully mobilized using the language of citizenship to demand antiretroviral treatment from the state. The language of citizenship as a means of articulating claims usually names a claim to rights: rights to medical treatment, to legalization of property, to self-government, etc. As a result, for many theorists of citizenship, including anthropologists, the link between citizenship claims-making and rights is irrefutable and exclusive.

However, although the connection between citizenship and rights is often assumed, citizenship is in fact linked to languages of rights in quite specific political contexts. Indeed, political claims and talk of membership (i.e. citizenship) can also be articulated through different languages, such as obligations, or the naturalized membership of a collectivity. This may reflect a non-liberal vision of citizenship. The recognition of languages of citizenship other than that of rights opens up analytical space for research into non-normative citizenship formations themselves.

Anthropological approaches: (ii) where are our political communities?

People are members of varying political communities, not just those governed by national or even local states, and they are subject to forms of government that originate from different entities. Therefore, although citizenship is classically considered as related to the state, anthropological study reveals that this applies under particular political conditions of belonging, but is not always the case. This is especially evident when we take globalization into account. Given the contemporary importance of transnational and sometimes global political entities such as corporations or religious networks in the government of citizens of different nation-states, can we argue that citizenship is merely the relationship between the individual and the state? If we wish to argue that citizenship is participation in government, in the taking of decisions that affect our lives, then the citizen’s position regarding a range of governing entities becomes crucial in an assessment of the quality of his or her citizenship under a given political regime.

For most citizens, the dominant political community is the nation-state. In practice, though, there is no reason to yoke citizenship solely to the nation-state, and indeed we should question the scale at which we perceive a given political community.

In early modern Europe, the dominant political community was the city, and today some of the most relevant political communities of advanced capitalism operate on a supra-national scale. This may be global, as in the ideas of cosmopolitanism, world citizenship and human rights, but also transnational as for activist groups, citizen-migrants, diasporic groups and religious networks. Work on transnational migrants links many of the questions of citizenship discussed here, including membership, nationality, identity, cultural citizenship, and political practice.

As with the transnational dimension, local citizenship of the city is of equal theoretical importance to citizenship of the nation. David Harvey (2012) has argued that claiming the right to define the city is a crucial contemporary site for resistance to capital. Such action may not simply be urban protest or social movements, but may also be citizens making a life for themselves in the city. Urban public spheres include the streets, where people demonstrate and work, but also the many forms of association where citizens negotiate the building and defining of society, even act violently towards one another. Thus, the location for the practices of citizenship is a key question for the analysis of citizenship. The logical realm for political action for most citizens has always been their local area, and people are often suspicious of those who choose to extend their political action beyond that, and become professional politicians rather than citizens. Through ethnography we can examine which political collectivities are important in citizens’ lives at any given time and place.

Anthropological approaches: (iii) membership and exclusion

However we define the political community, though, it is clear that citizenship as a language names membership. It is also a means of claiming membership, and commenting on the quality (or content, extent) of membership, as we can see when people make distinctions between full- and second-class citizenship or formal and substantive citizenship.^[3] Liberal citizenship has held out the promise of universal equality achieved through universal formal citizenship, at least for particular categories of persons; but despite this promise, citizenship regimes have developed differently in different historical contexts.

Holston (2008) shows how Brazilian citizenship developed historically as differentiated, but suggests that occupants of peripheral settlements of São Paulo have challenged their differential treatment from the mid-twentieth century onwards by claiming citizenship rights to property. They do so by struggling to legalize their homes, which have been built on land that was first occupied illegally. Holston calls this an ‘insurgent citizenship’, and their demand to legalize property ownership is a claim to hold rights just like elite citizens do. There is an irony here, since land-holding has been one of the most important aspects of citizen inequality in Brazil throughout its history.

Rights claims have been a feature of campaigns by other, more organized, social movements in Brazil and Latin America, especially since the 1990s. Specifically, the concept of citizenship has been used in campaigns by indigenous, feminist, urban, and LGBTQ+^[4] social movement activists, who demand that they be recognized as active social subjects with the right to have rights and – crucially – the right to define what those rights are. This is a claim to participate in government and decision-making; to participate in political processes too often closed to these groups.

As non-citizens claim citizenship, or second-class citizens claim full citizenship, the nature of citizenship itself changes. Indeed, often the struggle for inclusion (or against exclusion) is what changes the nature of the political system. This could be by creating new laws or constitutions, new categories of people and political subjects, or by changing public opinion. Social and political practices of membership are a crucial part of this dynamic.

But if citizenship is a means of claiming membership or better quality membership, it is also a means of excluding others from that membership or shaping them in contrast to the normative citizen. Citizenship is constituted by both the virtue of the individual citizen as political actor and the nature of political practice. Recognising that non-citizens are excluded from the political community can lead to a positive politics of dissent and resistance and to the broadening of citizenship, but the ‘othering’ can also be highly restrictive, not to say violent.

The archetypal non-citizen is the foreign migrant, but ‘migrant’ is in practice not a simple identity category, not least because migration is often constituted within the force field of colonial and neo-colonial relations. The transformation from colonial subject to imperial citizen and then immigrant other is the outcome of a set of political choices that have a history. Most migrants have travelled to their host country for reasons of labour, and restrictions on their citizenship status that keep them as resident aliens often enable exploitation in the form of low wages and poor working conditions. They are especially vulnerable to abuse by state officials and, where migrants are kept wholly illegal, they are subject to the insecurity of constant risk of deportation. Culturally, the presence of ‘outsiders’ within an imagined ‘national body’ is often not constituted as a problem for the dominant group of citizens, but for the non-citizens themselves. They become ciphers, representing threat, hypersexuality, cultural backwardness, or diversity and multiculturalism (e.g., Partridge 2008). They are marked out, subject to discrimination and racism, which persists even when they have become fully legal citizens, over generations.

Such operations of sovereignty are the other side of the coin to the operations of top-down subject creation discussed earlier. They may become violent, as when groups use languages of native belonging to justify attacks on others, who are seen as migrant interlopers regardless of long-standing histories of mobility and transnationalism. Thus, as boundaries are drawn between citizens and non-citizens, and legal frameworks mobilized to emphasize one group’s otherness, the status of citizen and non-citizen can become hardened, and citizenship restricted not amplified.

Taking a fresh look at citizenship

One of the results of recent developments in the anthropology of citizenship has been a proliferation of new concepts which work by adding a qualifying adjective to the term citizenship. Scholars have studied biological citizenship, flexible citizenship, agrarian citizenship, insurgent citizenship, therapeutic citizenship, urban citizenship, pharmaceutical citizenship, formal and substantive citizenship, etc. The qualifying adjective is important, because it recognises the diversity of citizenship today and acknowledges that liberal citizenship is one form among many. However, in the proliferation of adjectives we still risk assuming that we know what citizenship itself is, that the key is the ‘biological’, ‘urban’, ‘differentiated’ aspect, and that citizenship does not require explanation as a concept in its own right. Indeed, we should be wary of all essentialisms and acknowledge that ‘liberal citizenship’ must itself be plural, as attested by the varieties of liberalism both in historical reality and political thought.

At its most elemental, a focus on citizenship is a way of approaching the political, and one of the most exciting anthropological contributions to the debate is the way that we come to put into question the normative formulations of citizenship and explore the languages and practices of political membership, agency, and constitution of varied political communities, without assuming Liberal parameters for either. However, we must be careful, for two reasons. First, although it is important to take a critical position to normative understandings of citizenship, we do risk ending up in an enclave of cultural relativism where the only argument we can make is that citizenship there is different from citizenship here. While this is undoubtedly an important argument, anthropology has significantly more to contribute to our understanding of citizenship. Second, we should not lose sight of the political implications of such a strategy. Studying citizenship as political practice often obliges us to take a political stand, whether that be alongside those advocating for rights at individual or group level, or critical of mainstream (or even counter-hegemonic) notions of citizenship.

Nonetheless, if we recognize that from time to time our view of what citizenship is can be heavily coloured by a normative assumption about what it should be, we are then better placed to see how citizenship is configured in practice, and to explore the historical, material, and cultural reasons for that configuration.

References

Aristotle, 2013 [1984]. Politics (trans. C. Lord). Chicago: University Press.

Harvey, D. 2012. Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution. London: Verso.

Holston, J. 2008. Insurgent citizenship: disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton: University Press.

Locke, J. 2003. Two treatises of government and a letter concerning toleration. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Marshall, T.H. 1983 [1950]. Citizenship and social class. In States and societies (ed.) D. Held, 248-60. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Ong, A. 1996. Cultural citizenship as subject-making: immigrants negotiate racial and cultural boundaries in the United States [and Comments and Reply]. Current Anthropology 37, 737-62.

Partridge, D. 2008. We were dancing in the club, not on the Berlin Wall: black bodies, street bureaucrats, and exclusionary incorporation into the New Europe. Cultural Anthropology 23, 660-87.

Petryna, A. 2002. Life exposed: biological citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton: University Press.

Platt, T. 1984. Liberalism and ethnocide in the Southern Andes. History Workshop Journal 17, 3-18.

Rosaldo, R. 1994. Cultural citizenship in San Jose, California, PoLAR 17, 57-63.

Rousseau, J.J. 1971 [1782] The Social Contract (trans. M. Cranston). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Sandel, M. 1984. The procedural republic and the unencumbered self. Political Theory 12, 81-96.

Note on contributor

Sian Lazar is author of El Alto, rebel city: self and citizenship in Andean Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2008) and editor of The anthropology of citizenship: a reader (Wiley, 2013). She works on social movements, political activism, and citizenship in Bolivia and Argentina.

Dr Sian Lazar, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. sl360@cam.ac.uk

[1] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration

[2] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp

[3] Substantive citizenship is the ability that citizens have in reality to claim rights that they possess through their formal status as citizen: ‘formal membership, based on principles of incorporation in to the nation-state’ contrasts with ‘the substantive distribution of the rights, meanings, institutions, and practices that membership entails to those deemed citizens’ (Holston 2008: 7).

[4] LGBTQ+ is an umbrella term for a wide spectrum of gender identities, sexual orientations and romantic orientations that experience discrimination.

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Subjectivity

Autism

Disciplinary landscapes

The emergence of autism

Autism's ontological status

Self-advocacy and the neurodiversity movement

Identity, community, and subjectivity

Language and sociality

Body and senses

Autism around the world

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

References

Note on contributor

Voice

Introduction

Voice in Euro-American modernity

The sonic and material voice

Voice and the making of socio-political identity

The voice as excess

Sound technologies and the mediated voice

Public voices and intimate publics

Conclusion: The wider relevance of voice

References

Note on contributor

Resistance

Introduction

Order and rebellion: resistance in the shadows

From order to conflict: Marxist and post-colonial anthropology

Culture, identity and symbolism: everyday resistance

Too much resistance: power and subjectivity

Imagining different futures: contemporary anthropological approaches to resistance

References

Note on contributor

Citizenship

Introduction

The political community

Anthropological approaches: (i) citizenship as subject formation

Anthropological approaches: (ii) where are our political communities?

Anthropological approaches: (iii) membership and exclusion

Taking a fresh look at citizenship

Further reading

References

Note on contributor