Anthropology and Responsibility 9781032283807, 9781032364544, 9781003332077

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgement
Introduction: Anthropology and Responsibility
References
1 Edgy Imaginaries: “Ghost” Orangutans, Extinction, and Responsibility in a Plantation Landscape
Edgy Imaginaries in Orangutan Conservation
Fragility Or Resilience? Edgy Questions in Conservation Strategies
Apes On the (Anthropogenic) Edge
“Ghost Orangutans”
Life and Responsibility On the Edge
Unsettling Scholarly Edges
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
2 The Responsibility to Consume: Excessive “Environmentourism” Against Rhinoceros Extinction in South Africa
The Responsibility to Consume: Excessive “Environmentourism” Against Rhinoceros Extinction in South Africa
Methodology
Environmentourism and Philanthrocapitalism
Environmentourism
Philanthrocapitalism
Environmentourism Against Rhinocide?
“Only Tourism Can Save Them”: Appeals to Tourists’ Responsibility
Saving Rhinos and Racial Inequality
Environmentourism Beyond the GKA
Conclusion: Responsible Consumption and Giving in the Environmentourism Bubble
Notes
References
3 Responsibility Versus Responsibilization: Mafiacraft, Witchcraft and the Rise of Conspiracy Thinking Today
Mafiacraft – Or How to Grasp a Phenomenon That Wants to Remain Hidden?
From Mafiacraft to Witchcraft
The Responsibility of the Anthropologist
Conspiracy Theory Now and the Anthropologist’s Responsibility.
Notes
References
4 In the Wake of Disenchantment: Silence and the Limits of Ethnographic Attentiveness
Disenchantment
Silence
Attentiveness
Conclusion: a Constellation of Concepts
Notes
References
5 The Vulnerability Vortex: Health, Exclusion, and Social Responsibility
Social Determinants of Health
Structural Violence
The Vulnerability Vortex
Indigeneity and Multiculturalism
Assessing Vulnerability
Conclusion
References
6 Keeping Things Under Control: Responsibilities Toward Things, Homes, and People in Hoarding Disorder
Introduction
Pathologies of the Uninhabitable: Responsibilities Toward Homes
Burdened By Treasures: Gendered Responsibilities Toward Things and People
Conclusion
References
7 Racialized Positionalities: Ethnographic Responsibility and the Anthropology of Racism and White Supremacy
Introduction
Racialized Positionalities, a Proposal
Position I – The Ti Fi Blan (White Girl)
Position II – The Translator of Discriminatory Practices and a Racialized Language
Position III – The Writer, Ethnographic Weaver
Conclusion
References
8 Of Calcutta, Death, and the South: Juxtaposing Three Calcuttas/Kolkatas
Introduction
What Is the “South”? A Scalar Problematic
From Salt Lake to New Town
Two KMDA/CMDAs
Of Margins and Representations
Death, Legibility, and the South
Notes
References
9 The Countess’ Diaries and Taonga Maori: Twenty-First Century Collaborations Around Nineteenth Century Collecting
A “Kit” to Carry Potatoes
Responsibilities to Taonga Maori in Museums
Collaborating With the Keith-Falconers
The Tukohu
The Hei Tiki
The Keith-Falconers and the Hei Tiki
The Hei Tiki and Matua Tonga
Responsibilities to Absent Taonga
Conclusion
Notes
References
10 Responsibility and Complicity in the UK “Hostile Environment”
Introduction: “Go Home!”
Pinball Logic
Colonial Responsibilities
Metaphorical States
Monsters
Games
States of Complicity
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Anthropology and Responsibility

This book explores the role and implications of responsibility for anthropology, asking how responsibility is recognised and invoked in the world, what relations it draws upon, and how it comes to define notions of the person, institutional practices, ways of knowing, and modes of evaluation. The category of responsibility has a long genealogy within the discipline of anthropology and it surfaces in contemporary debates as well as in anthropologists’ collaboration with other disciplines, including when anthropology is applied in fields such as development, medicine, and humanitarian response. As a category that unsettles, challenges, and critically engages with political, ethical, and epistemological questions, responsibility is central to anthropological theory, ethnographic practice, collaborative research, and applied engagement. With chapters focused on a variety of cultural contexts, this volume considers how anthropology can contribute to a better understanding of responsibility, including the ‘responsibility of anthropology’ and the responsibility of anthropologists to specific others. Melissa Demian is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK. Mattia Fumanti is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK. Christos Lynteris is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK.

ASA Monographs

World Anthropologies in Practice Situated Perspectives, Global Knowledge Edited by John Gledhill Living Beings Perspectives on Interspecies Engagements Edited by Penelope Dransart Shifting States New Perspectives on Security, Infrastructure and Political Affect Edited by Alison Dundon and Richard Vokes The Time of Anthropology Studies of Contemporary Chronopolitics Edited by Elisabeth Kirtsoglou and Bob Simpson Re-​Creating Anthropology Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination Edited by David N. Gellner and Dolores P. Martinez For more information about this series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/​ ASA-​Mon​ogra​phs/​book-​ser​ies/​SE0​127

Anthropology and Responsibility Edited by Melissa Demian, Mattia Fumanti, and Christos Lynteris

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Melissa Demian, Mattia Fumanti and Christos Lynteris; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Melissa Demian, Mattia Fumanti and Christos Lynteris to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781032283807 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032364544 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003332077 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003332077 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of figures Notes on contributors Acknowledgement Introduction: Anthropology and Responsibility

vii viii x 1

M E L I S SA D E MIA N , MATTIA FUMA N TI, AN D CHR ISTOS LY NT ER IS

1 Edgy imaginaries: “Ghost” orangutans, extinction, and responsibility in a plantation landscape

13

L I A N A C H UA

2 The responsibility to consume: Excessive “environmentourism” against rhinoceros extinction in South Africa

37

S TA S J A KO OT

3 Responsibility versus responsibilization: Mafiacraft, witchcraft and the rise of conspiracy thinking today

57

P E TE R G E S C H IE RE

4 In the wake of disenchantment: Silence and the limits of ethnographic attentiveness

73

YA N A S TA I N OVA

5 The Vulnerability Vortex: Health, exclusion, and social responsibility A . DAV I D N A P IE R A N D AN N A -​M ARIA VO L KMANN

90

vi Contents

6 Keeping things under control: Responsibilities toward things, homes, and people in hoarding disorder

110

R E B E C CA H E N DE RSO N A N D L AURIN B AUMGAR DT

7 Racialized positionalities: Ethnographic responsibility and the anthropology of racism and white supremacy

128

S O FÍA U G A RTE

8 Of Calcutta, death, and the South: Juxtaposing three Calcuttas/​Kolkatas

147

D E B A RU N SARKA R

9 The countess’ diaries and taonga Māori: Twenty-​first century collaborations around nineteenth century collecting

166

K I RS TY K E RN O H AN

10 Responsibility and complicity in the UK “hostile environment”

185

J O E L W H I TE

Index

205

Figures

.1 5 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 9.1 9.2

“The Vulnerability Spectrum” Case Definitions of Vulnerability The Vulnerability Vortex Health Vulnerability Assessment Procedure Key Components of the Vulnerability Assessment Data Collection with the H-​VA Tūkohu, University of Aberdeen Museums ABDUA:4100 Close Up of Tūkohu’s Label, University of Aberdeen Museums ABDUA:4100 10.1 The Border Regime Monster (Corporate Watch, 2018: 49: copyright free) 0.2 Right to Remain –​Asylum Navigation Board 1

94 98 99 102 103 105 167 168 194 195

Contributors

Laurin Baumgardt is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. Liana Chua is a social anthropologist and Tunku Abdul Rahman Assistant Professor in Malay World Studies at the University of Cambridge. Melissa Demian is a senior lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Mattia Fumanti is a senior lecturer in social anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Peter Geschiere is emeritus professor for the Anthropology of Africa at both the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University; he is also co-​editor of Ethnography (SAGE). Rebecca Henderson is an MD/​ PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology/​College of Medicine at the University of Florida. Kirsty Kernohan received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Aberdeen in 2021, and currently works as a Teaching Fellow in anthropology and museum studies. Stasja Koot has been working with indigenous groups in southern Africa, predominantly Namibia and South Africa, since the late 1990s, as a researcher and a practitioner in community-​based tourism. Christos Lynteris is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. A. David Napier is Professor of Medical Anthropology at University College London and Director of its Science, Medicine, and Society Network. He is co-​editor of UCL’s Culture and Health book series, and author of several books and numerous articles on liminality, vulnerability, and human well-​being. Debarun Sarkar is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Mumbai.

Notes on contributors  ix Yana Stainova is an interdisciplinary scholar interested in art, migration, and the lived experience of violence in Latin America. Sofía Ugarte is Postdoctoral Fellow and Affiliated Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Anna-​Maria Volkmann is the Global Research Lead for the Cities Changing Diabetes Programme, Vulnerability Assessment Lead for the SoNAR-​ Global Network, and Senior Research Fellow at University College London. Joel White is based in Glasgow and works at The University of Edinburgh, where he recently completed a PhD with a thesis entitled “Holding Space: Friendship, Care and Carcerality in the UK Immigration Detention System”.

newgenprepdf

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the ASA Committee for selecting and supporting St Andrews in hosting ASA2021, our colleagues at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of St Andrews for their wonderful support in the process of preparing and running the conference, and Audrey Bruce, the St Andrews ACE team, Rohan Jackson, Triinu Mets and the NomadIT team, and the student volunteers for their help in realising this conference under the extremely difficult conditions of the Covid-​19 pandemic. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback on this volume and Katherine Ong at Routledge for her support and guidance in this publication. We are very grateful to the Ladislav Holy Memorial Trust and to the Wellcome Trust for funding elements of this conference. Finally, a big thanks to all the participants of ASA2021, and for making this first ASA annual conference to be held entirely online such a rewarding experience.

Introduction Anthropology and Responsibility Melissa Demian, Mattia Fumanti, and Christos Lynteris

Who is responsible? Where does responsibility lie? Between whom? Towards what? Who shares responsibility and upon whose authority is responsibility named? These are questions that are pressingly contemporary in nature, and which formed the core of the annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK in 2021, hosted by the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of St Andrews. The category of responsibility has a long genealogy within anthropology. It has been central, for instance, to historical debates about sorcery and witchcraft, kinship, and the organization of economic and political life, where it often becomes entangled with questions of “agency” (Laidlaw 2014). It surfaces in contemporary debates within the discipline and in anthropologists’ collaboration with other disciplines, including how anthropology is applied in fields like development, medicine, conservation, and humanitarian response (Beck and Kühler 2020; Brandner et al. 2017; Davis 2018; Dolan and Rajak 2016; Johnson 2010; Pink and Lanzeni 2018). Questions of responsibility are regularly encountered both in the field and in the archive, in relations with bureaucracy, and with anthropology’s multiple and diverse audiences. As a category that unsettles, challenges, and critically engages with political, ethical, and epistemological questions, responsibility is central to anthropological theory, ethnographic practice, collaborative research, and applied engagement. The meditations on responsibility offered in this volume are derived from papers originally presented at the (ordinarily) annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK (ASA). The organization of the conference itself had become an artefact of a renewed consciousness of our immunological responsibilities to one another: originally scheduled to occur in St Andrews in 2020, it was first postponed for a year and then moved entirely online in 2021. The crisis conditions under which the conference was held came to inform every aspect of its eventual manifestation, in both expected and unexpected ways. In order to act responsibly in relation to our colleagues and students, we had to become adaptive, creative, and nimble in the way we conceived and executed the conference. As an online event, it attracted a level of participation far outstripping that of most ASA DOI: 10.4324/9781003332077-1

2  Melissa Demian, Mattia Fumanti, and Christos Lynteris conferences, attracting over 450 participants from 55 countries and every inhabited continent. In addition to its keynotes from Aparecida Vilaça (who delivered the ASA’s Raymond Firth Memorial Lecture) and Peter Geschiere (who gave St Andrews’s Ladislav Holy Memorial Lecture), the conference hosted two plenaries on the themes of “Anthropology and Epidemics” and “Extinction”, and 75 parallel sessions that included film screenings, laboratories, and roundtables in addition to the traditional paper session format. The hundreds of scholars who presented their work over the course of the conference showed what was possible to do within the virtual space of a conference that was streamed into the more intimate spaces of participants’ homes and offices around the world. A sense of lost opportunities to host our participants in St Andrews was replaced with a sense of expansive and expanding possibilities for the ways in which we could engage with each other. At the same time as our plans for the ASA conference were being shaped and reshaped by conditions into which the entire world had been thrown, unbeknownst to us there was also an American Anthropological Association conference occurring on the theme of “Truth and Responsibility”. When we eventually learned of this coincidence, we understood ourselves to be participating in a wider moment of reckoning across the field of anthropology that was emergent in these conference themes. It is, however, an uncomfortable reckoning, as it can be hard to resist the temptation to congratulate ourselves on the current affordances of infrastructure that seem to allow for more and faster circulation of ideas, images, and events –​such as an online or hybrid conference, where space becomes obviated and the participation of more colleagues in a wider range of places can itself appear as a responsible outcome. But as Sameena Mulla (2021) warns in her assessment of the AAA conference themes, “Technology will not save us…Technology does not ask us who we are, to whom we belong, and to whom we owe our responsibility”. She refers specifically to the way that a proliferation of technologies of surveillance appear to offer instant pathways to justice and accountability, but the very foundations of trial justice that these technologies rest upon –​witnessing, testimony, and evidence –​already constrain possibilities for who can speak, who will listen, and what can be spoken of. As with justice-​seeking frameworks, so with the humble academic conference: when anthropologists or any other group of scholars gather to discuss our responsibilities, no matter what the scale or scope of our efforts, there remain problems of how we keep our own relationships in view. Mulla challenges us to ask, to whom do we belong in these moments? How are we located within our mutually constitutive and overlapping obligations to institutions, research communities, students, and colleagues? How indeed do these obligations intersect with the wider social worlds to which each of us belongs? As Deborah Puccio-​Den (2017) observed towards the beginning of what might be called a turn to responsibility as a key concept in anthropology, this

Introduction  3 moment represented a definitive migration of the concept out of the domain of law and into that of society. This migration offers both a theoretical and a methodological set of challenges to the way anthropologists and others conceive of responsibility if it is not to be limited to the apportioning of blame and liability in the wake of harm, “a particular means of connecting a subject to actions that will henceforth be considered as theirs” (2017: 18, emphasis in original). This retroactive version of responsibility, she argues, has always also carried a potential for future connections of this kind. Drawing a through-​line of ideas about responsibility from Lévy-​Bruhl to Malinowski to Douglas, she shows that anthropologists have always been concerned with the futurity of responsibility. “Projected into the future”, she writes, “responsibility becomes detached from punishment and is attached to risk, to prevention, and to the principle of precaution” (2017: 19). It is precisely this future-​oriented version of responsibility that has come to the forefront in anthropology since Puccio-​Den’s observations, and that was reflected in the contributions to the 2021 conference. That is, if responsibility is a mode of connecting events to persons as a relation akin to ownership, what does it mean for anthropologists and our interlocutors to prospectively own this connection, as a way of forming the relationship itself? If describing the responsible relationship as one of persons owning events (or even as the inverse, events owning persons) is too restricted a framing for some, it may be worth considering how –​prior to the resurgence of interest in responsibility –​anthropologists were discussing an adjacent concept, ethics. As one might expect, the anthropological preference for an ethics of relationships unfolding in real time over a deontology of adherence to norms meant that the moral evaluation of events and actions could only emerge from a field of others responding to others, and could never originate from the perspective of the individual actor. Take, for example, Webb Keane’s (2010: 68) observation that To one who is in the midst of the action, the entire range of possible explanations for other people’s actions and possible outcomes of one’s own can never be fully apparent. Lacking the view from nowhere, people are likely to find themselves responding to the surfaces of things, to their forms or semiotic modalities. Assessing the ethics of an action or event may ramify into the future of the relationships in whose ambit the event takes place, but the act of assessment itself is retrospective in nature. Pushing this idea to one possible conclusion, we could say that intentions themselves cannot be ethical or responsible: only their outcome produced as an event can be evaluated as such, and this evaluation will always come from outside of those who act. All this is to say that as “owners” of the ASA2021 conference, and editors of this selection of contributions to the conference, an evaluation of the conference’s own claims to responsibility is still in the process of emerging and cannot

4  Melissa Demian, Mattia Fumanti, and Christos Lynteris be made by ourselves. Where we have endeavoured to situate the conference and this collection, however, is in its dialogue with the wider discussions of responsible action and of theorising responsibility in ethnographic terms to which anthropologists have turned our attention. In their field-​ defining volume on the subject, Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle (2017: 1) reflected on how “calls to be responsible pervade contemporary life” noting that “the increasing pervasiveness of responsibility in contemporary discourse, and often the lack of reflexivity about its inherent social worth, are precisely what necessitates a closer examination of this concept”. Where Competing Responsibilities sought to “reclaim the diverse meanings and enactments of this concept by placing advanced liberal governments’ emphases on responsibilization alongside other prevalent ways that responsibility is currently enacted” (2017: 3), this ASA Monograph Series volume is more closely nested in the post-​2016 world, where talk of “post-​truth” or about the predicament of expert knowledge, alongside talk about the challenges of the Anthropocene, the Covid-​19 pandemic, the crisis of democracy (Trump, Brexit), the crisis of austerity, and the war in Ukraine have folded into particular discussions of responsibility. Drawing on new and groundbreaking papers presented at the ASA2021 annual conference by keynote speakers and established and early career scholars, this edited volume aims to unpack, explore, and enact the scope and scale of responsibility as both an emic and etic category for anthropology, to ask how responsibility is recognized and invoked in the world, what relations it draws upon, and how it comes to define notions of the person, institutional practices, ways of knowing, and modes of evaluation. What are the contexts that substantiate particular meanings of responsibility, prioritising some potentials of our use of this word while perhaps silencing or muting others? And what are the “distinctive kinds of interconnectedness” (Laidlaw 2014: 201) or more broadly relating fostered or challenged by different kinds of responsibility and their allocation? Given the diversity of deployments of responsibility as a category that is good to think with and which is operationalized at multiple scales in the world, this volume asks how anthropology contributes to a better understanding of responsibility, including the “responsibility of anthropology” and the responsibility of anthropologists to specific others. The ten contributions to the volume all engage with the conference’s theme whilst advancing a set of critical reflections for anthropology as a discipline, recasting responsibility in an ethical, methodological, and epistemological sense. The first contribution to the volume, Liana Chua’s “Edgy imaginaries: ‘Ghost’ orangutans, extinction, and responsibility in a plantation landscape”, explores the complex re-​ articulation of the meaning of responsibility in an age of mass extinction. Focusing on a small population of “ghost” orangutans living in the plantation landscape of Borneo, the author explores how these ghostly presences disrupt conservation imaginaries and the responsibilities that come with it. Orangutans, Chua argues, are

Introduction  5 well-​positioned in the conservation imaginaries of the species “at the edge”, standing for extinction and mass biodiversity loss. This powerful image writes Chua, has galvanized and mobilized global audiences to act and take responsibility to avoid their extinction. However, the orangutans’ ghostly presence challenges the very notions of conservation and “by extension, what responsibility at the edge of extinction entails when that edge is no longer so clearly defined” (Chua, this volume). In building on and yet moving from anthropology’s literature on haunting, Chua argues that orangutans are not spectres that haunt the Borneo’s landscape but agentive social others. This shift from the metaphorical and symbolic to the pragmatic and material realms, she argues, disrupts the global conservation programmes and for the re-​articulation of responsibility from a single human-​saviour figure to the multiplicity of actors involved, “across a spectrum of human, nonhuman, and more-​than-​human elements” (Chua, this volume). Rather than focusing on pulling the orangutans from the edge, conservationists’ efforts need to focus on how “to diffuse responsibility for their lives and well-​being along and across multiple edges” (Chua, this volume). This transformation in conservation’s practices raises unsettling questions for anthropology’s own scholarly and ethical edges. Chua allows us to think of the productive ways these interactions, by embracing tensions, open the possibilities to reconsider our responsibilities. Rather than critically dismiss these unexpected collaborations between conservationists and orangutans as “corporate greenwashing” or “neo-​colonial biopolitical projects”, Liana Chua compellingly invites us to see these unexpected multispecies interactions and to think of the different scales, forms, and temporalities that responsibility might take in an age of mass extinction. The second contribution to this volume explores the theme of extinction and responsibility in tourism and conservation programmes to “save the rhinos” in South Africa. Stasja Koot’s chapter, “The responsibility to consume: Excessive ‘environmentourism’ against rhinoceros extinction in South Africa”, explores how a particular brand of tourism, “environmentourism”, is at the heart of the anti-​poaching campaign in South Africa and neighbouring countries in the region. Based on the excessive consumption and commodification of nature, environmentourism is a form of elitist tourism that focuses on creating authentic experiences for tourists as “responsible” conservationists and global citizens. In the practices of environmentourism luxury lodges and resorts create a set of conservation experiences for the rich, invariably white tourists from Europe and North America, resting on the tourists’ fantasies as “white saviours”. These experiences steeped in racialized language pit the “good” and “virtuous” tourists against African poachers’ “brutal” and “immoral” practices. Moreover, in the “tourist” bubbles of high-​end lodges and private nature conservations, tourists are encouraged “to save the rhinos” through practices of gift-​giving and philanthropism. These activities, however, remain anchored within capitalist practices of exclusion, inequality, and racism. Rather than focusing on

6  Melissa Demian, Mattia Fumanti, and Christos Lynteris community projects, environmentourism rests on the “reductionist articulation of the rhino poaching crisis” (Koot, this volume), whilst obfuscating and depoliticizing the long history of racial and socioeconomic inequalities that continue to blight post-​apartheid South Africa. Environmentourism, the author concludes, “legitimizes privatized, luxurious tourism and pushes for exorbitant consumerism and giving as a solution for social and environmental crises, often framed as a responsibility of this privileged elite” (Koot, this volume). Chapter 3, “Responsibility versus responsibilization: From ‘mafiacraft’ and ‘witchcraft’ to conspiracy thinking today” by Peter Geschiere raises important issues for anthropology’s relation with responsibility. Geschiere’s reflections on “mafiacraft”, witchcraft and conspiracy theory foreground the challenges for anthropologists studying “what does not want to be known”. Geschiere argues that to grasp an unnamed agency that insists on hiding, anthropologists studying QAnon, just like anti-​ mafia judges and powerful ngangas need to shift from the idea of responsibility to responsibilization. While responsibility, argues Geschiere, insists on hanging onto a powerful moral implication, responsibilization allows for exploring broader ethical and moral approaches to these complexly ambiguous and dangerous fields of study. Responsibilization, Geschiere argues, has a double advantage. First, it is always a process. One that allows for responsibility to move from fixity to negotiation and struggle. Second, responsibilization raises the question of “who is being held responsible, exposing the deep ambiguity notions of responsibility always have” (Geschiere, this volume). Building on Deborah Puccio-​ Den’s seminal work on the Sicilian mafia (2021) and his long-​term research on witchcraft in Cameroon, Geschiere explores the profoundly unsettling and ambiguously moral positioning for anthropologists studying these different but comparatively similar phenomena. How should anthropologists engage with and represent these phenomena? Furthermore, what is their responsibility? As Geschiere shows, for anthropologists studying the mafia, a clear moral stance against it is easier to take because anti-​mafia judges and activists risk their lives against a criminal organization, a position against witchcraft is less straightforward. This is because the ngangas, healers, as the anti-​witches, are witches themselves. Their moral ambiguity is striking. Anthropologists studying witchcraft face double moral conundrums between “condemning it” and “going along with it”. However, both examples, Geschiere argues, have the potential to direct anthropologists’ engagement with QAnon and other wild conspiracy theories. As in the study of witchcraft and mafiacraft, an approach towards responsibilization opens the possibilities of dismantling what appears to be natural givens but has a complex and tortuous history. “Perhaps”, Geschiere argues, “the responsibility for the anthropologists lies not in contradicting conspiracy theories, but rather in following them in detail through time and space, and contextualising their shifts and the struggle towards epistemology closure” (Geschiere, this volume). Studying responsibility as

Introduction  7 responsibilization thus has the advantage for anthropologists in revealing realities that express precarious claims about accountability ascribed to actors who try to remain hidden. The fourth contribution by Yana Stainova explores the complexity and limits of ethnographic responsibility. Stainova’s chapter, “In the wake of disenchantment: Silence and the limits of ethnographic attentiveness”, reflects on anthropologists’ dynamic engagement over time with fieldwork and with changing notions of responsibilities. In starting from the recognition of the role of enchantment as an ethnographic method, Stainova’s analysis underlines the limits of enchantment. In encountering violence in the field, the author shifts her attention to how enchantment gives way to disenchantment and how this transformation harbours the possibilities of novel ways of thinking about ethnographic responsibilities. Here Stainova advances the concept of attentiveness as a better way to articulate changing and contrasting notions of responsibility over time as she underlines, “attentiveness emphasizes the dynamic, always incomplete project of relating to others, especially our interlocutors” (Stainova, this volume). In this sense, attentiveness allows for a form of responsibility responsive to others, the past, and the anthropologist’s own personal and intellectual transformations –​a contribution that relates to and expands on the enduring debate about the relation between reflexivity and responsibility in anthropology (Bourdieu 2022). Stainova argues for a self-​reflexive approach that admits and acknowledges the limits of our positionality and the ways anthropologists reproduce power, underlining that “ethnographic attentiveness is built on supportive and transformative forms of relationality but is also riddled with the gaps, unheard silences, blind spots, and mistakes that characterize all relationships” (Stainova, this volume). The following contribution by David Napier and Anna-​Maria Volkmann assesses the relationship between social responsibility and health interventions in times of crisis. In “The vulnerability vortex: Health, exclusion, and social responsibility”, the authors remind us how, in the context of a crisis, such as the current Covid-​19 pandemic, health resources become scarcer, putting individuals and whole communities at risk. Moreover, in times of critical and rapid transformations, “not only are inequalities often exaggerated, but compounding risk factors fuel the rapid transition from a person barely hanging on, to a state of pure calamity coping” (Napier and Volkmann, this volume). Here the health crisis is, to follow Dider Fassin (2021), irreducibly a crisis of ethics. For in a crisis, people’s vulnerabilities and resilience are tested in novel ways affecting people’s capacities to cope. In recognizing that vulnerability is complex and multi-​layered, in flux and transformation, the authors argue that in a crisis, both vulnerability and resilience can augment and mitigate certain factors and allow for the possibilities of developing ways to cope and transcend the limits of vulnerabilities for all communities and individuals. Here the authors introduce the concept of “vulnerability vortex”. This concept is central to our understanding of vulnerability, its

8  Melissa Demian, Mattia Fumanti, and Christos Lynteris drivers, and its mitigating factors whilst also showing how individual actors and health systems can support vulnerable people and communities. This is key for developing measures of preparedness that can ameliorate the emerging conditions of inequality in a time of crisis. In this respect, critical anthropological approaches to responsibility and ethnographic techniques help enhance communities and individual resilience. Napier and Volkmann argue that deep knowledge of the lived experience on the ground is crucial to avoid how exclusionary practices that emerge in a crisis push people into abjection and calamity. In this sense the “vulnerability vortex” should be understood as a “device for visualizing the effects of a crisis on those already marginalized” (Napier and Volkmann, this volume). In Chapter 6, “Keeping things under control: Responsibilities towards things, homes, people in hoarding disorder”, Rebecca Henderson and Laurin Baumgardt, explore how hoarding as a disorder brings competing notions of responsibility to homes and things. Within emerging biomedical discourses and practices of hoarding as a pathology, the authors show how hoarders’ households become a contested space in which discourses on health, well-​ being and responsibility emerge. Against the pathologization of hoarding and emerging reductionist rational discourses on responsibility, the authors show how “home-​making” and “hoarding disorder”, “become mutually constituted through evaluations of hygienic standards and household management, notions of (unin)habitability, mental diagnoses, objects’ family histories, and waste disposal” (Henderson and Baumgardt, this volume). In building on feminist literature challenging normative notions of home, the authors show how “hoarders” create and develop contested and competing relationships with homes and between themselves and treasured objects to create and contest meaning. In this way, Henderson and Baumgardt bring to bear how responsibility emerging in multiple forms beyond a set of rational capacities comprise a range of nuances and affective relationships, which makes multiple visible scales of responsibilities. “Hoarding disorder”, they conclude, is a pathology that forces into conflict responsibilities toward homes, social relationship and material objects; by drawing attention to the ways these registers of responsibility may be in competition, it highlights subtle relationships between different kinds of responsibilities and demonstrates the ways that we are all responsible, at varying levels and to different degrees, to the social and material worlds around us. (Henderson and Baumgardt, this volume) In Chapter 7, “Racialized Positionalities: Ethnographic responsibility and the study of racism and white supremacy”, Sofía Ugarte reflects on the practical and ethical challenges of doing research in unequal and racialized settings without reproducing racial oppression and injustice. In conducting fieldwork in her hometown, Santiago, the author experienced the increasing and quotidian forms of discrimination against Haitian women in Chile. These experiences prompted Ugarte to reflect on her

Introduction  9 positionality and responsibility towards her research participants and challenge anthropology’s methodological and epistemological practices that continue to reproduce racialized forms of oppression and colonial practices. In embracing feminist epistemologies, decolonial projects in anthropology, and critical race/​whiteness studies Ugarte argues for the “consideration of research positionalities as intrinsically racialized”. She argues that the development of racialized positionalities as a methodological toolkit has a double relevance for the theme of responsibility. First, racialized positionalities advocate for ethnographic responsibility by anthropologists doing research “at home”. Second, they push anthropology’s responsibility to interrogate “racism beyond racialization”, how white supremacy functions, “along with the responsibility to address the consequences of imperial legacies on white supremacy’s practical realities and acknowledging how it remains sedimented in anthropology’s institutions, theories, and research practices” (Ugarte, this volume). In reflecting on three research positionalities that renders visible the complexities of racial negotiations during fieldwork, Ugarte shows how participant observation means getting involved in the experiences of racialized Haitian women of colour, as well as witnessing racism and consolidation of white supremacy, in ways that destabilize the practice of ethnographic research and anthropological knowledge making. Racialized positionalities thus challenge anthropologists to confront past and present practices of responsibilities of ethnographic practice, individual and collective. “Taking responsibility for one’s role in the production of new forms of racial knowledge”, Ugarte concludes, “involves the recognition of one’s self, one’s place and one’s time vis-​à-​vis others” (Ugarte, this volume). In Chapter 8, Debarun Sarkar’s “Of Calcutta, death and the South: Juxtaposing three Calcuttas/​ Kolkatas”, explores responsibility in relation to the burgeoning literature on southern urbanism. Sarkar’s critical take on this scholarship underlines how the evoked scalar imaginaries of speaking “from the south” or “for the south” obfuscates the vital issue of “speaking to the south”. In Sarkar’s view, the evocation of these scales, deployed especially in postcolonial and subaltern studies, becomes a way of recentring old dichotomies within the emergent frame of the global north–​ global south dichotomy. Sarkar sees in this approach a quest for legibility and one that brings forth enunciations of “the south” as evidently a scalar project. As Sarkar underlines, “a project which evaluates and promotes a particular object as the legible object and location of enunciation” (Sarkar, this volume). This framing, argues Sarkar, obviates and erases the complex and messy realities of the social, while promoting a “repetition of methodological nationalism”, through an articulation that is legible only from a particular geographical location. Sarkar’s argument is developed in response to Roy’s City Requiem, Calcutta (2002), by analysing ethnographically the building that houses the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority. Against Roy’s efforts to represent the building through a linear and legible narrative, Sarkar’s analysis underlines the importance of engaging with state urban planning archives, their messiness, fragmentary and non-​exhaustive

10  Melissa Demian, Mattia Fumanti, and Christos Lynteris nature, to disrupt the coherent narratives of “missing documents”. Sarkar sees in the acknowledgement of state practices of remembering and forgetting the possibilities of producing new relationalities. His argument foregrounds the idea that illegibility and messiness are at the heart of the social, “as is the desire to map and comprehend it” (Sarkar, this volume). Against the usage of categories, such as global south, designed to “fit the messy world of the social into neat commodifiable narratives to make them easily comprehensible” (Sarkar, this volume), the author argues that it is the “recognition of illegibility” that opens the opportunity to think of responsibility in different ways. This is a responsibility that would allow for more equal and just representations. This novel approach, argues Sankar, means acknowledging the presence of death in the evocation of responsibility and the limitation of the ethical implication of the “other”. Sarkar’s critique of the conventional approach to the “ethics of the other” speaks to central issues in the anthropology of ethics and responsibility, especially in current academic debates on anthropology’s decolonizing project and the reckoning with its past. Kirsty Kernohan’s “The countess’ diaries and taonga Māori: Twenty-​ first century collaborations around nineteenth century collecting”, explores “the potentials, pitfalls, relationships, and responsibilities”, which arise when indigenous and European scholars must collaborate with museum collections and with the voices from the archives. In reflecting on the “kit”, a series of artefacts which Sydney, Countess of Kintore and her daughters brought to Scotland from their travel from Aotearoa New Zealand, and now housed in the University of Aberdeen museum, the author explores how collaborations on museum collections can be fruitful, allowing for “colonial documentation to intersect with Māori knowledge and histories” (Kernohan, this volume). Kernohan shows how her work with Awhina Tamarapa, a museum professional, weaver, and fellow researchers, on the Aberdeen museum’s collection, create relationships “which connect taonga in museums with researchers, knowledge, and communities beyond them and facilitate an awareness of institutional responsibilities when caring for taonga Māori” (Kernohan, this volume). Kernohan explores the potential of framing this work as “intergenerational collaboration”, with archival voices like that of the countess, and how these voices influence research direction. These collaborations are complex and fraught with ambiguities and pitfalls, especially when these archival voices are brought into dialogue with contemporary knowledge and collaborative goals. In a rich and detailed engagement with the countess’s diary, Kernohan brings to the fore how the countess’s words directed the research through her control over documented narratives and choosing which taonga to donate. The countess’s words and her contemporary descendants’ choices raise essential questions about anthropologists’ responsibilities and ethics in archival work and the role of institutions that care for these objects and their narratives.

Introduction  11 The final contribution to the volume by Joel White, “Responsibility and complicity in the UK ‘hostile environment’ ”, confronts the double of responsibility and complicity in the daily struggles of asylum seekers confronting state practices in the context of Britain’s anti-​immigration laws. The chapter explores how people interpret and act on ideas of responsibility and complicity within an often-​opaque system. White’s analysis is attentive to the complex negotiations that asylum seekers must develop with the UK Home Office to navigate the system’s deep uncertainties and violence in their lives. While the anthropological literature on responsibility is crucial to investigating asylum seekers’ life trajectories in the UK as well anthropology’s own responsibilities, White convincingly shows that notions of responsibility need to be expanded to consider complicity whilst being attentive “to mutual forms of involvement that may also imply harm or collusion” (White, this volume). In so doing, White argues it is possible to explore not only how asylum seekers navigate through the UK immigration system and “think like the Home Office”, but also what relations of responsibility and complicity emerge through this, as well as how narratives of responsibility and complicity complicate ideas of harm, care, friendship, and community. Ultimately, White argues, this has broader methodological implications for anthropology’s responsibility and complicity with wider inequality, oppression, and exclusion systems. White concludes, “rather than attempt to stand apart from the questions of complicity asked by those we encounter as anthropologists, a critical or methodological complicity can instead show ways to engage in the world with them” (White, this volume). This has broader implications for anthropology’s own epistemological and methodological projects and for engaging with anthropology’s past and present responsibilities and complicities with unequal forms of power.

References Beck, Birgit and Michael Kühler (eds.), Technology, Anthropology, and Dimensions of Responsibility. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag, 2020. Bourdieu, Pierre. Retour sur la réflexivité. Paris: Éditions EHESS, 2022. Brandner, Susanne, Wiebke Stritter, Jacqueline Müller-​ Nordhorn, Jalid Sehouli, Christina Fotopoulou and Christine Holmberg. “Taking responsibility: Ovarian cancer patients’ perspectives on delayed healthcare seeking.” Anthropology in Action, 24(1) (Spring 2017): 41–​48. Davis, Elizabeth Anne (ed.) Special Issue: Global side effects: Precarity, responsibility, and mental health. Medical Anthropology, 37(1) (2018). Dolan, Catherine and Dinah Rajak (eds.). The Anthropology of Corporate Responsibility. Oxford: Berghahn, 2016. Fassin, Didier. Les Mondes de la santé publique. Excursions anthropologiques. Cours au collège de France 2020–​2021. Paris: Seuil, 2021. Johnson, Barbara Rose. “Social responsibility and the anthropological citizen.” Current Anthropology, 51, Supplement 2 (October 2010): S235–​S247.

12  Melissa Demian, Mattia Fumanti, and Christos Lynteris Keane, Webb. “Minds, surfaces, and reasons in the anthropology of ethics.” In Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action, edited by Michael Lambek, 64–​83. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2010. Laidlaw, James. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Mulla, Sameena. “Ten things about truth and responsibility.” Anthropology News, December 20, 2021. Accessed at https://​www.anthr​opol​ogy-​news.org/​artic​les/​ ten-​thi​ngs-​about-​truth-​and-​res​pons​ibil​ity/​ Pink, Sarah and Debora Lanzeni. “Future anthropology ethics and datafication: Temporality and responsibility in research.” Social Media +​Society, 4(2) (April–​June 2018): 1–​9. Puccio-​Den, Deborah. “On responsibility.” Translated by Sam Ferguson. L’Homme, 223–​224(3–​4): 5–​32, 2017. Puccio-​Den, Deborah. Mafiacraft. An Ethnography of Deadly Silence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Roy, Anania. City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Trnka, Susanna and Catherine Trundle. “Introduction. Competing responsibilities: Reckoning personal responsibility, care for the other, and the social contract in contemporary life.” In Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life, edited by Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle, 1–​24. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

1 Edgy imaginaries “Ghost” orangutans, extinction, and responsibility in a plantation landscape Liana Chua

In an essay accompanying a recent BBC documentary series on orangutan extinction and conservation, evolutionary biologist and media presenter Ben Garrod wrote: You don’t need me to recite facts and list endless depressing research here. The truth is that every year, there is less and less forest in South East Asia. The truth is that palm oil production can claim a lot of responsibility. The truth is that orangutans are on a knife-​edge right now, staring into the precipice of extinction. Their numbers are dropping, their homes disappearing. Extinction is not reversible. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.1 This image of the orangutan teetering on a “knife-​edge” is pervasive and compelling throughout the Global North. Since becoming an international conservation concern from the mid-​twentieth century, the orangutan has now become a powerful synecdoche (Heise 2016: 39) for extinction and mass biodiversity loss. In recent decades, its fate has been progressively tied to the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations across Borneo and Sumatra –​ processes that many activists, organizations, and the media hold directly responsible for the destruction of its rainforest home. Indeed, there are few more striking visual encapsulations of orangutans’ “edgy” existence than these plantations, their clean lines and “modular simplified forms” (Tsing et al. 2019) starkly juxtaposed again lush, green, apparently untouched forest. More than marking physical borders, these edges simultaneously indict and galvanize, signaling both human culpability for driving orangutans toward extinction and human responsibility for saving them from it. The most common response to orangutans’ population decline has been to pull them back from these spatial, temporal, and moral edges –​often through interventions that enclose them within other, safer, boundaries such as protected areas and rehabilitation centers.2 In this chapter, however, I aim to unsettle such edge-​based conservation imaginaries and the models of responsibility that they undergird. I do so by thinking through the case of a small population of “ghost orangutans” that have inexplicably continued DOI: 10.4324/9781003332077-2

14  Liana Chua living in a plantation landscape in Malaysian Borneo. These orangutans, I suggest, can be seen not only as specters of a forested past haunting the plantation present, but also –​like many other ghostly presences in Southeast Asia –​as agentive, autonomous beings that make claims on and demand responses from humans. I then contemplate the pragmatic, if controversial, ways that conservationists have grappled with the immediate problem of ghost orangutans (and those in other plantation landscapes) –​often by working with corporations and governments to secure forest patches and corridors for their survival. How, I ask, do the maneuvers of both these orangutans and conservationists push us to rethink not only the edgy imaginaries of conservation but also the edges of our own scholarly projects? And what might these imply for our understandings of responsibility in an age of mass extinction?

Edgy imaginaries in orangutan conservation Western (and international) depictions of orangutans have taken multiple forms over the centuries: once cryptic, exotic beasts described by seventeenth century travelers, they became prized trophies and collectibles for colonial explorers and naturalists, and later humanlike objects of curiosity and experimentation in twentieth century zoos (see Cribb et al. 2014). It was from the second half of the twentieth century that orangutans emerged as objects of concerted conservation concern (e.g. Harrisson 1962) that –​like many other species –​had to be saved from “the verge of extinction” (Fisher et al. 1969: 19). Concerns about orangutan population decline mounted from the 1980s (e.g. Rijksen and Meijaard 1999), as their Bornean and Sumatran rainforest habitats were increasingly logged, fragmented by infrastructure and development, and converted into plantations, mines, and other extractive sites. Today, proximity to extinction plays a constitutive role in portrayals of orangutans in and beyond the Global North; put differently, orangutans that are not on the edge of extinction are unthinkable. The key drivers of orangutan extinction range from deforestation to human–​orangutan conflict to hunting to poaching for the illegal wildlife trade (Ancrenaz, Gumal et al. 2016; Voigt et al. 2018). In recent years, however, these have been eclipsed in the popular imagination by a single figure: palm oil, which became linked to orangutan extinction by a number of NGOs and activists in the mid-​2000s (e.g. Buckland 2005; Greenpeace 2010). Through a combination of advocacy, public protests and campaigns, and work with conservation professionals, these NGOs and activists drew a direct causal link between the consumption of palm oil-​containing products in the Global North, the establishment of oil palm plantations in Borneo and Sumatra, the destruction of rainforests, and the consequent demise of orangutans (see: Chua 2018a; Fair 2021). Its ubiquity in everyday products such as confectionary and toiletries made palm oil a powerful target for ethical, yet feasible, action: individuals in the Global North, it was implied,

Edgy imaginaries  15 could save orangutans by making the right consumer choices and either boycotting palm oil or buying only “sustainable” palm oil-​ containing products. Over the past decade, this causal link between oil palm/​palm oil and orangutan extinction has been cemented in popular Western understandings of orangutan extinction and conservation, giving rise to the almost axiomatic assumption that palm oil kills orangutans. This causal logic is conveyed through the entire “visual economy” (Poole 1997) of orangutan conservation, in which text (such as Garrod’s essay), images, ideas, tropes, and calls to action circulate, accrue meaning, and reinforce each other. It is manifested, for example, in a short excerpt on palm oil from the BBC documentary series mentioned earlier.3 This excerpt segues from close-​up images of animals in “rainforests that are home to a wide variety of species”, to aerial footage of a lush green forest edge that gives way rapidly to the stark, clean lines of a newly established oil palm plantation (“[rainforests] are being destroyed to make way for palm oil plantations”), and then to close-​up footage of orangutans, “one of the worst affected species” by these developments. A similar visual progression occurs in Greenpeace’s short animated feature, Rang-​tan (2018), which features a dialogue between a young girl and a baby orangutan that has sought refuge in her room because its forest is being destroyed for palm oil (Chua 2018b). In a series of flashbacks, we see a digger belching black smoke, zooming down a newly cleared road toward the edge of a forest, tearing down the first tree in its path, thus killing the orangutan’s mother. Eventually we see the orangutan sitting on a branch in the canopy, looking out over a devasted smoking landscape almost directly below it. This is followed by an aerial view of a truck driving down a straight earth road between neat, closely planted rows of oil palms on both sides. While quite distinct, both videos draw on and reproduce a set of narratives and visual tropes that pervade the media circuits of environmentalism and conservation. In these representations, edges are doubly significant. First, they visually demarcate two diametrically opposed worlds: the forest, with its messy profusion of multispecies life and vitality, and the plantation, with its ordered, simplified forms, deadening effects, and row after monocropped row of homogenous, soil-​ sapping plants. The edge, then, is man-​ made, marking the clean, unnatural boundaries of the plantation form, but also –​ as implied in Rang-​tan –​its insatiability, its infinite potential to expand into the defenseless forests beyond it. This edge is thus not merely spatial. It is also temporal and moral, marking the point at which the orangutan may fall –​or be pushed –​into that “precipice of extinction”. The frequent interlacing of these edgy tropes is exemplified by a passage in a National Geographic photo essay on Borneo (White and Klum 2008), published just as awareness of the palm oil/​orangutan connection was mounting. Following a lyrical, almost mythical description of Borneo’s abundant rainforests and wildlife, it switches to an aerial

16  Liana Chua view of oil palm plantations, like those used in the BBC clip and Rang-​tan, and notes: see how quickly the unruly forest gives way to neatly planted rows of oil palm trees, stretching for mile after mile in all directions. The palm plantation is lush and green, and the arching fronds of the trees give it an exotic beauty, and for the incomparable biodiversity of Borneo it is inexorable death. (White and Klum 2008: 43–​44) Infused with the sense of elegy and tragedy that, Heise (2016: 34) notes, characterizes common imaginaries of extinction, sketches like these inculpate humanity in the imminent loss of a unique, magnificent species. The plantation’s rapidly expanding edges point to a moral failure in humanity’s relationship with orangutans and their forests. Edge imaginaries and the portrayal of palm oil as the main villain in orangutan extinction thus go hand-​in-​hand. Unlike more shadowy, less easily visualized, drivers of orangutan population decline such as human–​wildlife conflict and the illegal wildlife trade, edges –​especially when captured from above –​condense the spatiality and temporality of extinction into a single contrast: forest/​plantation; natural abundance/​artificially cultivated monoculture; life/​death. As such, they visually manifest what –​to repurpose Bryant and Knight’s notion of a “threshold of anticipation” (2019) –​we might call a threshold of apprehension. Unlike the image of an ever-​receding horizon, a threshold “implies both the imminence of the future and the idea of pressing forward into it, potentially crossing into it” (Bryant and Knight 2019: 35). Anticipating, then, “becomes a collective way of stepping into the future, of trying to transform one’s own future or the future of the collective before it occurs” (ibid.: 42–​43). In the visual imaginaries of orangutan conservation, the affective imminence (ibid.: 35) of such a future sweeps up a whole range of nonhumans: orangutans, forests, biodiversity. This is a dreaded future, regarded with apprehension rather than anticipation –​and one in which orangutans no longer roam the earth. But just as thresholds of anticipation precipitate the reorientation of past and present (ibid.), thresholds of apprehension can incite and structure preventative action. In the Global North this generally involves various forms of activism and awareness-​raising, raising funds for and donating to orangutan-​related causes, and, of course, initiating palm oil-​related consumer campaigns. These actions reflect the capacity of edge imaginaries to galvanize: to compel their audiences to take responsibility for an ape whose imminent extinction they make visually, and sometimes viscerally, thinkable. Fragility or resilience? Edgy questions in conservation strategies Such popular (mainly Western) edge imaginaries both draw on and reinforce conventional approaches in orangutan science and strategy. Historically, the

Edgy imaginaries  17 most common approach to saving orangutans has been to seek to stop or slow the edge’s encroachment, while also pulling orangutans away from it. Key measures to this end include advocating for the establishment or expansion of protected areas in which orangutan populations can dwell safely, campaigning against the opening up of forest concessions to industrial interests or the fragmentation of forest landscapes through development and infrastructural projects, and translocating orangutans from anthropogenic spaces such as farming areas and plantations to safer, more intact forest blocks –​literally shifting them away from the edge. While reflecting the edge imaginaries discussed above, these strategies also build on several decades of research on orangutans in relatively intact forests (Meijaard 2017), beginning with pioneering field studies carried out from the 1970s (e.g. Galdikas 1985; MacKinnon 1974; Rijksen 1978) that in turn inspired further field-​based research on orangutan behavior and ecology in similar, often protected, areas (see, e.g. Knott 1999; Wich et al. 2009). Over time, as Erik Meijaard notes (2017), all these gave rise to what is still an enduring image of the orangutan as a highly intelligent, semi-​ solitary (or semi-​social), arboreal ape that relies on large tracts of primary or mature secondary forests to survive. This image also came to infuse growing international conservation concerns about orangutans, and concomitant efforts to mitigate the main threats to their existence –​which, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, were mainly commercial logging and large-​scale land conversion for industrial agriculture. In an abbreviated compilation of its famous “Red Data Book” (also known as the “Red List of Threatened Species”), the International Union for Conservation of Nature thus explained: For its survival the orang [sic] is dependent on a certain type of primary or old secondary forest, and it is doubtful whether it will ever adapt itself to any other type of habitat; but in recent years much of the suitable indigenous lowland forest has been used for commercial timber production. As a result, the orangs have been either destroyed or driven from their natural habitat, and forced into regions, such as mountainous areas, that do not contain the rather specialized food…on which they feed, or that are unsuitable for other reasons. (Fisher et al. 1969: 44) Similar concerns were expressed in the 1999 Orangutan Action Plan –​a WWF-​ sponsored document to which leading orangutan scientists contributed –​in which it was noted that Long term survival of the orangutan does not appear to be compatible with human resource extraction; therefore we strongly recommend that extraction of orangutan food resources, particularly keystone resources, be prohibited in parks and reserves. (Andayani et al. 1999: 4)

18  Liana Chua The plan concluded with a list of conservation priorities, the top three of which were: 1) Improve protection in existing parks and reserves … 2) Establish new protected areas in areas with significant wild populations (including corridor establishment to link populations) 3) Improve protection in areas outside parks and reserves. (Ibid.: 12) This association of orangutan survival with intact forests and orangutan extinction with anthropogenic landscapes has persisted across scientific research, popular depictions, and environmental activism up to the present (see also: Meijaard 2017; Spehar et al. 2018). Over the past two decades, however, this image of orangutans as fragile, forest-​dependent creatures has been complicated by a growing body of research on their survival and reproduction in heavily modified landscapes (e.g. Ancrenaz et al. 2004, 2005, 2015; Seaman et al. 2021; Sherman et al. 2020a), including logged forests (e.g. Husson et al. 2009), industrial timber plantations (e.g. Meijaard et al. 2010; Spehar and Rayadin 2017), and agricultural areas (e.g. Campbell-​ Smith et al. 2011). While not negating the basic fact that orangutans need forests to survive, these studies are pushing scientists and conservationists to reconsider earlier assumptions about orangutans’ lack of resilience and adaptability, and therefore their capacity to survive beyond (the edges of) intact forests. This has in turn provoked vigorous discussions about the principles, scope, and design of orangutan conservation (Palmer 2020) –​ and, by extension, what responsibility at the edge of extinction entails when that edge is no longer so clearly defined. By way of illustration, I now turn to one such example: a fragmented, degraded, anthropogenic landscape in Malaysian Borneo and the orangutans that haunt them.

Apes on the (anthropogenic) edge Orangutans have lived in anthropogenic landscapes and with anthropogenic pressures (notably hunting) since the late-​Pleistocene, when their populations shrank from a much larger area covering southern China and mainland and maritime Southeast Asia to their current range in Borneo and Sumatra (Spehar et al. 2018). These pressures greatly intensified from the nineteenth century, particularly with the advent of colonial-​era hunting and collecting expeditions and, in recent decades, through extensive deforestation, infrastructure development, and the growth of extractive industries. These more recent developments have wrought drastic changes on the Bornean and Sumatran landscapes, vastly reducing or fragmenting orangutans’ rainforest habitat (see, e.g. Gaveau et al. 2014), and leading to a precipitous decline in their population (see, e.g. Santika et al. 2017; Voigt et al. 2018). Although protected areas such as national parks remain a cornerstone of

Edgy imaginaries  19 both Indonesia and Malaysia’s orangutan conservation strategies, a significant proportion of orangutan populations live outside these areas (Wich et al. 2012), thus raising important questions about how to ensure their survival alongside development, extractivism, and other activities in these anthropogenic landscapes (Sherman et al. 2020a). The Lower Kinabatangan floodplain in the East Malaysian state of Sabah was, from the 1960s, among the earliest landscapes in Borneo to undergo large-​scale industrial conversion –​first for logging and more recently for oil palm and other plantations. Originally covered in dense forests inhabited by orangutans, this >500,000 hectare floodplain is today dominated by plantations, with fragmented and degraded forests covering less than 15% of the area (Abram et al. 2014; Ancrenaz et al. 2021). From a distance, then, it appears to be the very definition of a “blasted landscape” (Kirksey et al. 2014) –​one incapable of sustaining orangutan and other life. Since 1998, however, a Sabah-​based nongovernmental research and conservation organization, HUTAN, has been tracking the existence of small numbers of orangutans that –​against all expectations –​have continued to live in this plantation landscape (see, e.g. Ancrenaz et al. 2004, 2021; HUTAN/​KOCP 2018; Sabah Wildlife Department [SWD] 2020).4 Using a combination of aerial nest surveys and ground-​level observations, HUTAN’s researchers observed various forms of orangutan presence and activity in the area. They noted that some orangutans had continued to live in large forested areas adjacent to oil palm estates, and regularly entered or travelled through plantations –​moving across the ground or arboreally, from frond to frond –​foraging on ripe palm fruits and young leaves and building nests in the palms. They also discovered at least eight resident female orangutans living in very small, isolated forest fragments of no more than 50 hectares within or between plantations; these had been there for more than ten years and successfully raised offspring in them. Male orangutans, on the other hand, were found to travel extensively into or through plantations, roaming widely in search of food and breeding opportunities (HUTAN/​KOCP 2018: 3–​4). These findings paint an intriguing picture of both habituality and adaptability among orangutans. Female orangutans are philopatric, that is, tending to remain resident in their natal areas rather than dispersing when they mature (van Noordwijk et al. 2012). What appears to have happened here is that “some of the females who survived the initial deforestation took refuge in natural forest patches that were retained within their original range in this newly modified landscape” (Ancrenaz et al. 2021: 3). Some fragments may also have been recolonized by females from nearby source populations (ibid.). Conversely, as has been observed elsewhere (e.g. Seaman et al. 2019), male orangutans have dispersed widely across this landscape, “penetrating deep inside the plantations that likely were once a contiguous part of their territory” (HUTAN/​KOCP 2018: 4), moving across the ground, through plantations, and along waterways or roads (Ancrenaz et al. 2021: 3).

20  Liana Chua Drawing on evidence from Kinabatangan and other plantation landscapes in Borneo (e.g. Meijaard et al. 2010; Ancrenaz et al. 2015; Spehar and Rayadin 2017), HUTAN’s researchers and their collaborators suggest that this combination of (female) residence and (male) dispersal has been vital in sustaining a metapopulation –​that is, a group of populations –​of orangutans in one anthropogenic landscape (Ancrenaz et al. 2021; Seaman et al. 2021). Intriguingly, these orangutans are not merely getting by, but appear reasonably healthy, with balanced diets and the ability to reproduce within highly degraded and fragmented landscapes (Davies et al. 2017; Oram 2018). Cumulatively, these findings give rise to a somewhat different picture of orangutans to the ecologically fragile, forest-​bound victims that dominate contemporary imaginaries of their extinction and conservation (see also: Meijaard 2017; Spehar et al. 2018). Although it is clear that orangutans need forests, these apes –​like others elsewhere (Hockings et al. 2015) –​ appear to be more resilient and adaptable than they were previously given credit for. Such recent findings from Borneo and Sumatra and other range areas have precipitated new conversations in primatology and conservation biology about the challenges of human–​primate coexistence in anthropogenic landscapes –​a burgeoning field into which I cannot delve here. What I want to turn to now, however, is the way that these small, diffuse groups of orangutans in the Kinabatangan have been transformed into objects of serious ethical and strategic conservation consideration, and what this shift implies for both the edgy imaginaries of extinction and notions of responsibility in the planetary present. “Ghost orangutans” Strikingly, the orangutans observed by HUTAN in Kinabatangan’s forest fragments and plantations do not exist –​or at least, not in conventional maps of orangutan distribution (e.g. Wich et al. 2008) and most orangutan conservation management plans. They were not included in the state’s orangutan population estimate baseline surveys in the early 2000s (Ancrenaz et al. 2005), because they were then not seen as “viable” (Ancrenaz et al. 2021; Sherman et al. 2020a: 475; Sherman et al. 2020b: 8), that is, their numbers fell below the minimum threshold for orangutan populations to survive (ranging from 50 to 250 over the years). Not expected to endure in such a degraded landscape, these orangutans were assumed to have already fallen over the edge of extinction. It has only been in recent years that they have become visible and legible as objects of conservation concern. In Sabah’s Orangutan State Action Plan for 2020–​29, which leaned heavily on HUTAN’s research, these apes were described as “ghost” orangutans (SWD 2020:8) –​orangutans about which little was known and that had never been surveyed because they were thought not to exist or be capable of surviving in these areas (Ancrenaz pers. comm. 20 March 2021). Their description as such chimes with the concept of “ghost species” –​that is, “creatures that

Edgy imaginaries  21 scientists conclude to be extinct but which continue to be reported by observers” (McCorristine and Adams 2020: 103; see also: Heise 2016: 38–​39; Searle 2021). Often used to refer to recently extinct species –​the sightings, memories, or traces of which remain in the present –​the term evokes a complex mixture of loss and lingering, absence and presence (McCorristine and Adams 2020: 104). Like many of their human counterparts, particularly in the Euro-​American imagination, ghost species are remnants –​sometimes revenants –​that haunt the places where they were, even after those places have been radically transformed. Ghosts, in short, defy temporal and existential edges: manifesting the past in the present, they traverse the lines between life and death, presence and absence. The spectral or ghostly dimensions of extinction have garnered considerable attention in the humanities and social sciences. In their introduction to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene, Gan et al. (2017) reflect on the hauntedness of anthropogenic landscapes, and the way that ghosts prevent us from forgetting a landscape’s multiple pasts, even as it is comprehensively remade. “Ghosts”, they write, “remind us that we live in an impossible present –​a time of rupture, a world haunted with the threat of extinction” (2017: G6). Meanwhile, a growing conversation in human geography and the environmental humanities has explored how ghosts and “spectrality on the brink of extinction” (Searle 2021: 515) precipitate moral reflection and intervention on the part of humans. Propounding the need for “geographies of extinction” –​“haunted geographies” –​Garlick and Symons propose treating the figure of the ghost as “an increasingly productive conceptual tool within and beyond geographies of loss, bereavement and landscape” (2020: 312). Similarly, McCorristine and Adams note that “species that are imagined as being closer to the boundary between absence and presence [=​extinction] assume a spectral status” in conservation narratives and actions (2020: 107). As such, they suggest, these species and their imminent extinction engender a form of “ecological haunting” that could “provid[e]‌grounds for hope in inspiring people to conservation action” (2020: 107). In some ways, ghost orangutans slip easily into these conversations. While not the last of their species, they are –​despite, or perhaps because of, their statistical invisibility –​traces of an earlier Kinabatangan, the forest-​ that-​was, haunting the plantation present. And like ghosts, there is a certain inexplicability or uncanniness to them.5 Somehow they are there. Nobody expected them to be, and nobody quite knows how, but they are (interview with Marc Ancrenaz, 10 December 2020). Against all expectations, they have not fallen over the edge of extinction. Through their elusive, ghostly presence in this blasted landscape –​captured fleetingly through nest-​surveys and ground-​level sightings –​they create grounds for hope, possibly even repair (see below). But the spectrality of these ghost orangutans is only one aspect of their existence. More than being glimpses of the past and portents of a possible

22  Liana Chua future, they are also living, breathing creatures that move, dwell, and reproduce in Kinabatangan’s plantation landscape. Here, I suggest, we broach the limits of “spectral” renderings of extinctions, which tend to approach ghosts in lyrical, poetic, and affectively compelling terms as “evocative tropes” (Lincoln and Lincoln 2015: 196); “apparitions, visions, and representations that mediate the sensuous and the non-​sensuous, visibility and invisibility, presence, and absence, reality and non-​reality, being and non-​being” (ibid.: 192). In this capacity, ghosts may serve as “welcome, if disquieting spurs to consciousness and calls for political action” (ibid.: 191). But, as Lincoln and Lincoln note, such approaches also consign ghosts to the realm of metaphor: they are “recode[d]‌as persisting in texts, memory, and uneasy silences…[and located] inside the consciousness of those they ‘visit’ ” (ibid.: 196). Such scholarly approaches, I suggest, reflect what is essentially a Western prototype of ghosts as insubstantial, ephemeral traces of the past (Johnson 2016: 85), the fleeting encounters with which provoke particular affective, psychological or existential experiences in humans. What get elided in these narratives, however, are “ghosts qua ghosts” (Lincoln and Lincoln 2015: 195), and the concomitant possibility of engaging with them as “something other than metaphor” (ibid.: 196). Yet, as a significant body of ethnographic work suggests, ghosts in many other contexts are far from metaphorical (e.g. Århem and Sprenger 2016; Bubandt 2009; Chua 2009, 2011; Couderc and Sillander 2012; Johnson 2016; Kwon 2008; Strange 2021; Vitebsky 1993). They are often apprehended as, and engaged with, as ontologically real, agentive subjects with their own intentions and motivations. As such, they can engage in sustained relations with, respond to, and make claims on humans and other social subjects. Ethnographies of more-​ than-​ human socialities across Southeast Asia offer ample evidence of how ghosts, ancestors, spirits, and other such beings can play full relational roles in humans’ lives. Andrew Johnson, for example, describes how Thai devotees can cultivate kin relations with dangerous, violent ghosts, creating affective bonds of mutual obligation and care with “the very sources of death, danger, and pollution to which they are subject” (2016: 83). Nils Bubandt reveals how ancestors, especially of dead sultans and other powerful figures, were regularly consulted and enrolled in political campaigns by his interlocutors in North Maluku in Indonesia, such that they too became influential political players (2009). Borneo itself is replete with similar examples. The contributors to a volume on ancestors in Bornean societies, for example, tease out how “ancestors in Borneo characteristically tend to retain a strong presence in the immanent world of the living” (Couderc and Sillander 2012: 38), often being called back from the afterlife as guardian or community spirits, or appearing unbidden in their descendants’ lives through possession or unexpected encounters (ibid.). My own work (2009, 2011) on Bidayuhs’ shifting cosmologies and moral frameworks in Sarawak (south of Sabah) explores how similar relational

Edgy imaginaries  23 principles inform villagers’ interactions not only with indigenous ghosts, spirits, and malevolent beings, but also, more recently, with God, Jesus, and other Christian personages. These more tangible and quotidian figures of ghosts as autonomous subjects offer a different vantage point on what is at stake in the plantations and forest fragments of the Kinabatangan floodplain. The ghost orangutans that inexplicably dwell in this anthropogenic landscape are not merely specters that haunt the present; tragic and elegiac (Heise 2016) fodder to human stories of extinction. Rather, approaching them in the way that anthropologists have approached ghosts in Southeast Asian contexts –​that is, as agentive social others –​shifts our attention from their metaphorical or symbolic significance to the more immediate, pragmatic question of what they can do and what to do for them. Such a shift, I suggest, disrupts the edgy imaginaries that have hitherto dominated the global workings of orangutan conservation, pushing us to rethink both fragile, passive victim-​ like understandings of the orangutan and what responsibility at this edge of extinction might entail.

Life and responsibility on the edge As mentioned earlier, a common conservation strategy for “saving” individual or small “non-​viable” populations of wild orangutans from degraded landscapes has been to preemptively translocate them to larger, contiguous forest areas with more abundant food sources and fewer anthropogenic threats (Sherman et al. 2020a, 2020b; Wilson et al. 2014). A time-​consuming, labor-​intensive affair involving skilled rescue and veterinary teams tranquilizing and transporting these apes, translocation literally involves moving orangutans away from the (physical and temporal) edge of anthropogenic landscapes into “large forest blocks presumed to be more suitable for their survival” (Ancrenaz et al. 2021: 3). In many ways, then, this practice builds on and reinscribes dominant expectations of orangutans as fragile creatures unable to survive beyond forest edges. In this view, the only responsible conservation intervention is to pull them away from the brink. Translocation is, however, neither unproblematic nor uncontroversial (see Palmer 2020: 119–​32). In recent years, concerns have been raised over its long-​term viability and possible detrimental effects. What little post-​ translocation monitoring data there is suggests that translocated apes –​ especially philopatric females –​generally struggle in their new surroundings (Ancrenaz et al. 2021: 3; Sherman et al. 2020b). Introducing them into areas with existing orangutan populations can cause social stress, competition for food, and conflicts. Moreover, the use of translocation as a default solution to orangutans’ presence in anthropogenic landscapes can have unintended knock-​on effects (Palmer 2020: Chapter 5; Sherman et al. 2020a, 2020b). First, it may “creat[e]‌the expectation that people need not accept living near these animals” (Sherman et al. 2020a: 474), thus diminishing efforts

24  Liana Chua to promote long-​term human–​orangutan coexistence. Second, translocating orangutans from forest fragments may reduce the protection accorded those fragments because they no longer contain orangutans (ibid.: 475), thus causing the loss of more wildlife. Ghost orangutans complicate this picture further. Written off by earlier conservation metrics, they have, we might argue, taken responsibility for themselves –​finding ways to move, survive, and reproduce along and across plantation edges. Rather than merely serving as spectral allegories of a vanished past, these orangutans –​like ghosts in Southeast Asia –​are real, animate beings with their own (surprising) autonomy and agency. Accordingly, they do not only haunt but demand engagement and elicit responses. Reflecting on these apes, Marc Ancrenaz, director and co-​founder of HUTAN, acknowledged that he and his colleagues were only just starting to understand a complicated, unexpected situation, the long-​term outcome of which they could not predict. But in the meantime, those orangutans were still there, living in that landscape, and “we need to find ways to sustain them”. This thus signaled an urgent need for “pragmatic thinking”: something had to be done about these orangutans (interview, 10 December 2020). For him, as for many others working in this field (see Palmer 2020), doing nothing was not an option. These reflections point to how ghost orangutans –​as well as their counterparts living in other plantation or agricultural landscapes (e.g. Campbell-​Smith et al. 2011; Meijaard et al. 2016) –​are precipitating a rethink about what conservation on the edge might entail. More specifically, I suggest, they are pushing conservationists to consider not only how to take responsibility for small orangutan populations in anthropogenic spaces, but also how to be responsible and responsive to them: how, in other words, to work with these apes’ presence, actions, and –​it would seem –​desire to remain in situ. These responses have taken various forms. For a start, scientists have had to develop new data-​gathering methods and research frameworks (Erik Meijaard, pers. comm. 20 February 2022) for studying and analyzing such populations and their habitats. Such research can have policy implications: HUTAN’s findings, for example, have been used to underscore the conservation value of degraded forests, and thus persuade the state to maintain rather than convert them to industrial uses (Marc Ancrenaz, pers. comm. 22 February 2022). Conservationists have also developed various interventions and landscape-​level experiments aimed at improving these orangutans’ health and well-​being: increasing crop and plant diversity to enrich orangutans’ diet (Ancrenaz et al. 2021: 3; Meijaard et al. 2016: 183), for example, and devising methods for mitigating human–​orangutan conflict in and around plantations, villages, and smallholdings (ibid.: 3–​4; Campbell-​Smith et al. 2011; Meijaard et al. 2016: 182). Moreover, rather than preemptively translocating small, isolated orangutan populations, some conservationists have increasingly worked to maintain forest patches around and within plantation

Edgy imaginaries  25 and other industrial landscapes, and to retain or create “forest corridors” that connect these patches with each other and larger forest blocks nearby.6 A long-​term aim in places like Kinabatangan is to create and maintain “habitat stepping stones within larger multifunctional landscapes” that can connect forested areas (patches or larger blocks) and different orangutan populations, so as to “boost the chances of survival for the metapopulation as a whole” (Ancrenaz et al. 2021: 4; see also: Ancrenaz et al. 2016; Meijaard et al. 2016; SWD 2020). Just as humans in many Southeast Asian contexts engage pragmatically and responsively with ghosts, such conservation strategies are pragmatically responsive to ghost orangutans’ actions and agencies: their spatial memory, mobility, behavioral and dietary adaptability, and capacity to crisscross multiple landscapes. Like similar conservation projects in situ, these efforts work with “the very ethos of a species, its members’ learned cultural practices of survival and flourishing”, thus opening it up “as a domain of power and knowledge, intervention and production” (Chrulew 2021). Here, forest corridors, forest patches, and even plantation spaces constitute multispecies “reconciliation infrastructures” that “strive to generate situations that enable animals to incorporate these structures into their own lifeworlds through habituation and use” (Barua 2021: 1477). Instead of pulling orangutans away from a clear-​cut spatiotemporal edge of extinction, these assemblages sustain orangutan mobility, habitation and reproduction on, along, and across those edges, in effect helping them take responsibility for themselves. Viewed through this lens, ghost orangutans inhabit an altogether blurrier spatiotemporal landscape than can be discerned in dominant edge imaginaries of orangutan extinction. Through their presence and mobility, ghost orangutans decouple the physical lines of plantations from the temporal, moral, and allegorical edges of extinction, offering instead new, tentative refigurations of life –​perhaps even hope (Kirksey et al 2014: 50) –​along edges. Rather than serving as stereotypical, pristine orangutan habitats, the Kinabatangan and other plantation landscapes are, by necessity, becoming inhabited sites of experimentation and responsivity. Blurring the binaries of dominant extinction imaginaries –​life vs death, viability vs non-​viability, habitat vs non-​habitat –​they prompt us to consider how edges might be reconceived in spatial, temporal, and directional terms. Are edges only about finality and irreversibility? How can they be moved across or lived alongside rather than simply fallen off? And how might they be transformed –​ diverted, dissolved, perforated, extended, multiplied –​possibly into or in tandem with other spatial possibilities, such as corridors, patchworks, or clusters? What, then, does responsibility entail at these blurred, uncertain, experimental edges? If orangutan conservation isn’t a straightforward project of saving a particular species from an edge, what other scales, units, and processes come into play here? In the Kinabatangan case, scientists point out

26  Liana Chua that what matters are “orangutan metapopulation dynamics and gene flow in mixed-​use landscapes” (Ancrenaz et al. 2021: 5). Accordingly, they argue, “the conservation unit to be managed should then not only be the animals in relatively well-​protected larger forest areas, but the metapopulation that is ranging across the entire mixed protected-​privately administered landscape as a whole” (ibid.). Here, responsibility is not concentrated in the hands of a single human-​savior figure. Rather, it is diffused across a spectrum of human, nonhuman, and more-​than-​human elements: the multispecies infrastructures that make up forest corridors and patches, philopatric female and roaming male orangutans, conservation scientists and practitioners, the state, faraway publics, and, importantly, the oil palm and other companies that manage these plantation landscapes. Here too, however, ethical and political complications become unavoidable. To save ghost orangutans and others of their ilk, conservationists have to work with multiple stakeholders in these plantation landscapes, notably the state and oil palm and other companies. Such cooperation takes different forms, and can include setting aside protected “high conservation value” (HCV) areas within concessions, developing methods and training programs for mitigating fires and human–​wildlife conflict, and establishing reforestation and forest enrichment programs, corridors, and other more-​ than-​ human infrastructure to benefit locally resident orangutans (see, e.g. Meijaard et al. 2016). Conservationists engaging in such pragmatic partnerships are acutely aware of both the risks of “greenwashing, enabling business as usual to continue unabated” (Barua 2021: 1477) and the sheer irony of collaborating with the very players that destroyed orangutans’ habitat in the first place (Ancrenaz interview, 10 December 2020; Meijaard interview, 6 August 2019; see also Palmer 2020: 173–​78). And yet, with a significant proportion (25–​30%) of orangutans living in landscapes earmarked or used for large-​scale oil palm development (Wich et al. 2012), conservationists in these areas do not have a great deal of room for maneuver. While all agree that the presence and maintenance of large-​scale forest areas are vital for orangutan survival, many (though not all; Palmer 2020: 174–​77) accept that engagement with industry is a necessary means to a crucial end: the continued existence of orangutans that might otherwise be lost (see, e.g. Ancrenaz et al. 2016; Meijaard et al. 2016). In landscapes where the boundaries between life and death, survival and extinction, are less clear-​cut than they once seemed, the challenge for conservationists is not how to pull orangutans away from an edge, but how to diffuse responsibility for their lives and well-​being along and across multiple edges. These efforts, as I suggest in closing, do not only unsettle orangutan conservation’s dominant edgy imaginaries, but also raise unsettling questions about anthropology’s own scholarly and ethical edges.

Edgy imaginaries  27

Unsettling scholarly edges As animate, somewhat unpredictable, beings that defy edges and “normal” expectations, ghost orangutans are not mere specters that make fleeting appearances to haunt the present. Rather –​like other ghostly entities in Southeast Asia –​they are lively, agentive others whose resilience, behavior, spatial memories, and movements demand responses from their human observers. Such responses, however, rarely appear in prevalent imaginaries of orangutan extinction, which continue to be bifurcated by an edge that is simultaneously spatial, temporal, and moral: that of the plantation as the brink of extinction and the chief perpetrator of orangutan population decline. One reason for this, I suggest, is that ghost orangutans and efforts to sustain them transgress the good-​vs-​evil framings of extinction narratives. As Erik Meijaard, a conservation scientist who has worked with a number of oil palm companies, put it: “It’s a nice image –​evil crop, corrupt government and elite, poor people, poor orangutans, hero organizations trying to make a difference” (interview, 6 August 2019; see also: Meijaard and Sheil 2019). Resilient, adaptable orangutans that have in effect saved themselves and “hero organizations” that work with purveyors of that “evil crop” cannot be contained within these polarizations. As such, they lay bare the limits of edgy, binary thinking, while foregrounding the tensions and dilemmas that infuse orangutan conservation today. More than problematizing edgy thinking, however, the question of ghost orangutans foregrounds an impossible tension between different moral priorities and responsibilities in these areas: Whatever scholars think of oil palm, extractivism, and capitalism’s excesses, these apes are there. If something is not done to sustain them, they are likely to perish. Accordingly, they make concrete and immediate ethical claims on conservationists, necessitating a pragmatic, but necessarily experimental, response to their presence. As Ancrenaz put it in an interview with the environmentalist website Mongabay: “I cannot say that they are viable. I cannot say that they will survive there forever…But if we can give them a chance, this is the best we can do” (Cannon 2021). To be clear: my point is not to defend oil palm companies and other extractive industries or downplay the risks and complications involved in the “ontological ethopolitics” (Chrulew 2021) of these experiments in sustaining life in plantations. Indeed, I have at times found it intensely discomfiting to think and write about the fates of these orangutans and conservationists’ efforts to work with the very forces that destroyed their habitats. In this, my reactions probably mirror those of other left-​leaning, anthropologists with an abiding suspicion of techno-​fixes and capitalist promises. And yet, like the scientists who have tracked Kinabatangan’s ghost orangutans for over two decades, this research process is pushing me to peer beyond the

28  Liana Chua edges of both my own convictions and assumptions, and ongoing scholarly conversations about multispecies life, death, entanglement, and extinction. It is to these that I turn briefly in closing. Proliferating across anthropology, human geography, the environmental humanities, and other cognate disciplines, these recent conversations have gone some way toward disrupting the edge imaginaries that still pervade understandings of extinction and conservation in the Global North. Drawing attention to multispecies world-​making (Tsing 2015) and feral emergences (Tsing et al. 2021) in disturbed landscapes, exploring interspecies care and vulnerability in the sixth mass extinction (e.g. Parreñas 2018; Münster et al. 2021; van Dooren 2014), and using science–​art collaborations to “illuminate how diverse organisms are entangled in political, economic, and cultural systems” (Kirksey et al. 2014: 2), these writings explicitly refuse and disrupt the “onto-​epistemic” nature/​culture, nonhuman/​human binaries that have undergirded humans’ (post-​/​neo-​)colonial management and exploitation of multiple environments (de la Cadena 2015). Yet, while refusing certain edges, such interventions often draw their own moral lines, via the adoption of an overtly anti-​capitalist stance, which readers are assumed to share. In their Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet introduction, for example, Gan, Tsing, Swanson, and Bubandt write: While we gain plastic gyres and parking lots, we lose rainforests and coral reefs. How much longer will we agree to step aside in silence as masters of the universe turn us into property, write our contracts, rape our bodies, sell our histories? How much longer will you and I choose extinction? (2019: G4; italics in original) Similarly, Kirksey, Shapiro, and Brodine’s meditation on “hope in blasted landscapes” takes the “the ills of global capitalism” (2014: 45) –​epitomized by the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico –​as its apocalyptic backdrop while celebrating the artists and other “organic intellectuals” and “creative agents” who attended their Multispecies Salon and “generated openings for more audacious hopes” in a catastrophic present (2014: 57). “These tinkerers”, they write, found hope in blasted landscapes by twining their dreams with particular plots of land, specific neighborhoods, and small stretches of coastline. Being present with significant others in the world –​learning to live with goats, hermit crabs, and multiple other species –​artists forged connections with the native soil and shorelines of the City That Care Forgot [New Orleans, where the salon was held]. (2014: 56–​57) These passages exemplify a widespread tendency in extant scholarship to extol multispecies entanglements –​“learning to live with” –​as the only

Edgy imaginaries  29 viable ethico-​political responses to the catastrophic anthropocentric, (post-​/​ neo-​)colonial, exploitative capitalist forces that have plunged the planet into the sixth mass extinction. Here, extractive capitalism, neocolonial or neoliberal conservation, and the biopolitical management of life and death can only be rendered as culpable others: the source of the problem, and problematic modern binaries, but never the source of a viable response. To be clear, again, these are views that I –​and probably many other anthropologists –​instinctively agree with. My concern, however, is that by instinctively applying these familiar and often deeply-​felt ethico-​political framings onto specific ethnographic dilemmas, we risk throwing certain pressing realities and possibilities off our own analytical edges. My concerns chime with Stef Jansen’s ruminations on what he calls “anthropological replications of hope” (2016: 451) –​that is, the tendency for anthropologists’ efforts to use hope as method (following Miyazaki 2014) in a way that is presumed to be “congruent” with those of their research subjects (Jansen 2016: 451). Such an assumed congruence, he points out, necessitates “empirical selectivity”: “anthropologists have always tended to focus on hopes they like” (ibid.). The problem with this approach, then, is that anthropologists “risk selectively flattening interlocutors into figures of epistemological positionings” (2016: 459). Jansen’s caution, I suggest, aptly applies to the case of ghost orangutans and conservationists’ efforts to save them. In many ways, these conservationists could also be seen as “creative agents” and “tinkerers”, experimenting with more-​ than-​ human infrastructures and (all-​ too-​ human) negotiations with companies to help orangutans survive in severely disturbed landscapes. Yet it is hard to take their efforts seriously –​or at least not immediately explain them away –​within scholarly frameworks that are constitutively anti-​capitalist. As collaborations tainted by capitalist and neocolonial forces that anthropologists generally do not like, such conservation interventions do not “reverberate” (Jansen 2016: 451) with us in the way that, say, artistic experimentation or multispecies co-​becomings do. As such, they can too easily be pushed off the edges of our scholarly and ethico-​political attention, dismissed as nothing more than corporate greenwashing or neocolonial biopolitical projects. But while such critiques leave our ethical sensibilities intact, they leave us with an impoverished ethnographic grasp of what is at stake for the humans and nonhumans in these plantation landscapes. Like ghost orangutans, these conservation interventions and collaborations are there. How should scholars respond to them? What, then, can we gain by not throwing ghost orangutans and conservation–​ industry collaborations off the edges of our scholarly attention? To loop back to the theme of this volume, I suggest that these unexpected, yet urgent, multispecies interactions push us to think more carefully and creatively about the different forms, scales, and temporalities that “responsibility” might take in an age of mass extinction. Ghost orangutans and efforts to work with their agency and mobility invite us to explore that

30  Liana Chua messy space between “apocalyptic despondency” and “techno-​managerialist optimism” (Ginn et al. 2014: 117), where individual orangutans’ lifespans and spatial memories matter as much as the fate of the species over decades and centuries (see, e.g. Meijaard 2017; Spehar et al. 2017). In this space of multiple, sometimes conflicting, imperatives, it is possible –​and indeed necessary –​to hold different ethical impulses and modes of responsibility in suspension. The long-​term imperative to dismantle the global extractive capitalist apparatus that has decimated orangutans’ habitat is one thing; the more immediate impulse to do something about the continued presence of orangutans in plantation landscapes is another. My point, however, is that these are not divergent or incommensurable; they do not cancel each other out. Rather, I suggest that it can be productive for anthropologists to also undertake that sometimes discomfiting work of holding divergent imperatives –​and the means of addressing them –​in tension. Doing so underscores how neither anthropologists nor our interlocutors are removed from tangles of responsibilities and other relational pressures, which may not always align, and indeed may contradict each other. Foregrounding rather than eliding such discomfiting tensions thus prevents us lapsing into familiar modes of critique and analysis, pushing us to attend to how our own scholarly edges are drawn, enacted, and reinforced. What ethnographic configurations and complexities might be revealed by peering over those edges? And what analytical and conceptual possibilities might these engender?

Acknowledgments Research for this chapter was carried out as part of The Global Lives of the Orangutan project, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant agreement No. 758494). I am grateful to Richard Irvine and Daniel Knight (who organized the ASA2021 plenary on Extinction, where this piece originated), my co-​panelists Genese Sodikoff and Dace Dzenovska, and the audience for their wonderfully engaged comments. Big thanks too to Christos Lynteris for roping me in and providing excellent editorial guidance and encouragement. Finally, I’ve learned a great deal from conversations with Marc Ancrenaz and Erik Meijaard, whose feedback and suggestions have greatly improved this chapter.

Notes 1 www.bbc.co.uk/​pro​gram​mes/​artic​les/​5zpj​Mqtm​CtxM​BnWj​XZvj​nGk/​ora​ngut​ ans-​ext​inct​ion-​is-​fore​ver. For the BBC series see: www.bbc.co.uk/​pro​gram​mes/​ p066p​d3n 2 Often supported by foreign charities and run by locally registered organizations, such centers “rescue” orangutans from situations of human–​wildlife conflict or the

Edgy imaginaries  31 illegal wildlife trade, treat them, and –​in the case of orphaned young orangutans –​ train them to survive in forests that are ideally but not always protected. More information about rehabilitation and reintroduction schemes can be found in Palmer 2020. 3 www.bbc.co.uk/​pro​gram​mes/​p066p​d6w 4 Emerging out of a 1994 study, which revealed a surprisingly large number of orangutan nests in heavily degraded landscapes, HUTAN was set up specifically to study the question of how orangutans adapted to habitat disturbance. Co-​founder Marc Ancrenaz recounted how, at the time, this was a relatively unconventional and unpopular view, in large part due to the orthodox scientific expectation that orangutans could not survive outside intact forests (Marc Ancrenaz interview, 10 December 2020; pers. comm. 21 February 2022). 5 Indeed, the same could be said of other small, fragmented, and undocumented orangutan groups or individuals, sightings of which occasionally enter historical and contemporary records –​sometimes in the guise of locally recognized figures such as the gugu or orang pendek (see, e.g. Forth 2014; Meijaard et al. 2021). 6 These measures are not unique to orangutan conservation, and reflect a broader shift in conservation strategy away from an excessive reliance on protected areas towards developing various forms of human–​wildlife coexistence (e.g. Hockings et al. 2015).

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36  Liana Chua Wich, Serge A., S. Suci Utami Atmoko, Tatang Mitra Setia, and Carel P. van Schaik. Orangutans: Geographic Variation in Behavioral Ecology and Conservation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Wilson, Howard B., Erik Meijaard, Oscar Venter, et al. “Conservation strategies for orangutans: Reintroduction versus habitat preservation and the benefits of sustainably logged forest.” PLoS ONE, 9(7) (2014): e102174.

2 The responsibility to consume Excessive “environmentourism” against rhinoceros extinction in South Africa Stasja Koot

The responsibility to consume: Excessive “environmentourism” against rhinoceros extinction in South Africa1 Since 2007, rhino poaching grew rapidly in and around Kruger National Park, South Africa, until 2015, when rhino casualties started to go down again. Many attempts to curb this poaching crisis, and the concomitant, oft-​proclaimed extinction of the rhino, have been taken by government, civil society, and private actors, including the dehorning of rhinos, “educating” local communities about nature conservation and, most prominently, the militarization of conservation areas (Büscher 2016; Büscher and Ramutsindela 2016; Duffy et al. 2019; Hübschle 2017; Lunstrum 2014, 2018; Morais et al. 2018). Increasingly, the tourism industry has also started to play an important role in curbing the crisis. I contribute a “philanthrocapitalist” analysis of several recent anti-​poaching initiatives set up by the high-​end, privatized, or “excessive” tourism industry, informed by anthropological theory on giving, ethnographic data and discourse analysis. The tourism industry is excessive in the sense that it promotes elitist lifestyles in which exorbitant material consumption has become the standard: “late capitalist societies (whether in the West or Third World) are characterized by the normalization of excess –​the desire for the best, biggest, tallest, richest, most original” (Kapoor 2020: 16). Such lifestyles raise important questions of the responsibility that exorbitant consumption and related giving patterns highlight: the wealthy are often considered as having a big responsibility to curb environmental crises since they are also the biggest polluters. This chapter addresses the question how this responsibility is articulated in the culture, social relations and real-​life situation of the South African tourism industry in relation to rhino poaching and what the consequences of this are. On the private nature reserves to the west of Kruger –​an area referred to as the “Greater Kruger Area” –​the already high number of luxury tourist lodges keeps growing (Hoogendoorn, Kelso, and Sinthumule 2019). And many tourists, when they learn about the rhino poaching crisis, “in some way want to be involved in the fight against poaching” (Lubbe et al. 2019: 14). DOI: 10.4324/9781003332077-3

38  Stasja Koot Therefore, the discourse of the rhino as close to extinction has set in motion many philanthropic initiatives to “save” the species for tourists to provide financial gifts as well as in-​kind support. Subsequently, tourists can now, for example, physically take part in activities to “chip” rhinos and their horns, that is, to implant microchips in the horns and ears so as to build a national DNA database and potentially track down criminals (see for instance Kings Camp n.d.); visit and donate gifts to a rhino orphanage (Rhino Revolution n.d.); do a tour to an anti-​poaching unit; visit the world-​famous, all-​female, and unarmed anti-​poaching unit the Black Mambas (Pondoro 2017); or join a translocation of rhinos to “safer” havens, often combined with large gifts for the translocation project. I investigate discourses of extinction and how these are used to articulate an ethical responsibility for wealthy tourists, who are urged to consume such activities to “do good” and to give financial gifts. My analysis of what I call “environmentourism” provides for a further conceptualization of this niche type of tourism, in which the impact of tourism itself on an environmental problem (in this case rhino extinction) is at the core of the tourism experience (cf. Baptista 2017). Exorbitantly luxurious, excessive tourism activities tap into fantasies of the white saviour of African nature. Its conceptualization is informed by literature about philanthrocapitalism (Bishop and Green 2010; Edwards 2008; Kapoor 2013; Koot and Fletcher 2021) and anthropological notions about “giving” (Hites 2019; Mauss 2002). Thus far, anthropological literature has hardly engaged with philanthrocapitalism (notable exceptions are: Hites 2019; Vasquez 2021). This gap is addressed in this chapter, bringing together political economy with (economic) anthropology, focused on ethical responsibility and giving. In environmentourism, wealthy tourists are not only persuaded to forms of excessive consumption and giving to “good causes”, they come to see this as their ethical responsibility. In this way, new niche types of ethical tourism are portrayed as sustainable and “responsible”, all the while legitimating the further expansion of neoliberal capitalism as something innately good (cf. Duffy 2015; Fletcher 2011). However, in this chapter I argue that environmentourist activities function to depoliticize the rhino poaching crisis from its socio-​ economic and historical context, thereby legitimizing luxurious tourism and exorbitant consumerism as a solution for social and environmental crises.

Methodology The findings of this chapter are based on a combination of ethnographic research and critical discourse analysis (CDA). The ethnographic research was focused on tourism in relation to the rhino poaching crisis and the broader “wildlife economy” on and around private nature reserves in the GKA. Fieldwork took place between September 2016 and June 2019 for almost five months in total. During this time, I conducted 87 semi-​structured interviews. Interviewees were selected based on their involvement in either

The responsibility to consume  39 the wildlife economy and/​or rhino poaching, after which a snowballing method was used by asking for more potential interviewees at the end of interviews. Thirty-​nine interviewees work(ed) in the tourism industry (e.g. lodge owners, managers) and these form the core of the empirical results informing this chapter. Furthermore, I participated in some of the high-​end tourism “anti-​poaching” activities, including a visit to a rhino orphanage, a visit to a “poacher’s garden” and an activity organized by a lodge to visit the Black Mamba’s all-​female anti-​poaching unit. Additionally, CDA was an important methodology (Fairclough 2012; Van Dijk 1993). CDA focuses on “the role of discourse in the (re)production and challenge of dominance [which is] the exercise of social power by elites, institutions or groups, that results in social inequality, including political, cultural, class, ethnic, racial and gender inequality” (Van Dijk 1993: 249–​50, emphasis in original). CDA very specifically investigates “what structures, strategies or other properties of text, talk, verbal interaction or communicative events play a role in these modes of reproduction” (Van Dijk 1993: 250; see also Fairclough 2012). Its focus on the (re)production of social power is important in this chapter; it aligns with an explicit critique on philanthrocapitalism, namely its concentration of power (Edwards 2008; Kapoor 2013), and an analysis of discourse as presented by “those in power” is therefore an important addition to the ethnographic material. In my selection, I focused on popular and marketing outings (i.e. travel magazines, websites) by the tourism industry about ethical, nature conservation activities offered to tourists, with a focus on private nature reserves and tourist lodges in the GKA. More specifically, I centre on the South African rhino poaching crisis targeted at high-​end tourists, particularly if these initiatives were presented as having a positive impact on the crisis. However, it soon became clear that many linkages were to be found with other areas in, and sometimes outside of, South Africa, due to the often regional and/​or (inter) national work of the philanthropic initiatives. One thread of media sources that is especially important for this chapter is the African Ark project with actress Uma Thurman and Wilderness Safaris, which was covered by the popular magazine Town & Country (Glowczewska 2015a).

Environmentourism and philanthrocapitalism Environmentourism Tourists travelling to Africa do this mostly from a relatively safe “tourist bubble”, “created to host visitors, the arrangements for their travel, stay, well-​being and above all for their safe return home” (Van Beek and Schmidt 2012: 13). Most tourism in southern Africa, whether focused on backpackers or more on high-​end lodges, is nature-​based with a specific focus on wildlife in the large amount of national parks, game reserves and other protected areas. Much of this, however, has developed in enclaves, often separated

40  Stasja Koot from local communities (Mbaiwa 2005). A past of colonialism, racism and apartheid has left its traces in the region and today tourism is still a predominantly white-​dominated industry (Koot 2016; Koot, Büscher, and Thakholi 2022; Mboti 2019). This reflects in white articulations of belonging in and beyond tourism (and nature) all over southern Africa (see e.g. Burnett 2019; Fumanti 2021; Gressier 2015; Hughes 2010; Kepe 2009; Koot 2015), showing clear traces of former colonial and apartheid structures in society that have perpetuated until today (Alexander 2002; Bundy 2014; Koot, Büscher, and Thakholi 2022; Mboti 2019; Mpofu-​Walsh 2021; Saul and Bond 2014). The rhino poaching crisis is loaded with imagery of suffering animals, which are in urgent need of protection (Büscher 2016; Lunstrum 2014), and this protection can now ostensibly (partly) be achieved through what I term “environmentourism”. The neologism “environmentourism” is inspired by “developmentourism” (Baptista 2017), in which the focus of the development impact of tourism itself is crucial, since “the merging of development and tourism” into one single practice means the two are not distinct, and thus “should appear as a single word and a single morpheme” (Baptista 2017: 94). In environmentourism, tourists can tap into fantasies about themselves as responsible white saviours, who are needed to save African nature from brutal, mostly black, poachers (Abidin et al. 2020). Based on colonially grounded, racial inequalities, conservation creates “space for white saviors to make their mediagenic interventions” (Abidin et al. 2020: 10; cf. Mbaria and Ogada 2016). Environmentourism differs from other types of ethical nature-​ based tourism, including ecotourism. As a niche type of tourism, environmentourism lacks a core characteristic of ecotourism, namely that “local communities” are included to be “developed” and benefit from the tourism activities (see West and Carrier 2004). While ecotourism has a specific focus on sustaining “the well-​being of the local people” (The International Ecotourism Society 2015), environmentourism only focuses on addressing environmental concerns, and thus ignores local communities’ well-​being. Furthermore, like ecotourism, recent articulations of “responsible tourism” are different from environmentourism for the same reason: responsible tourism also attempts to create tourist experiences “through more meaningful connections with local people” (Goodwin 2014). As this chapter shows, the involvement of “local people in decisions that affect their lives and life chances” (ibid.), another core characteristic of responsible tourism, is largely absent in environmentourism, despite appeals to tourists’ feelings of responsibility. This does not mean that specific lodges might not also support some type of “community project” elsewhere, but an environmentourist activity itself is one solely targeting a specific environmental problem. And although environmentourism overlaps with other types of ethical tourism such as volunteer tourism, it still shows important differences: when compared to volunteer tourism, environmentourism has a stronger focus on a nature-​based

The responsibility to consume  41 tourist experience infused with wealth and luxury, thereby taking place in an environment of excesses and exorbitance. Furthermore, while it also “creates value in the trade of experiences in or with ‘nature’ ”, environmentourism still differs from volunteer tourism because “voluntourists” are mostly “young people [who] will gain experiences necessary to compete in a highly competitive economy” (Brondo 2015: 1405–​06). Volunteer tourism projects thus target ecological projects that are also opportunities for self-​development (Strzelecka et al. 2017). Environmentourism, however, is focused on people who already have become successful in the economy (i.e. wealthy people), most of whom are not “young” anymore and who do not need to gain self-​ development experience anymore to become successful in today’s competitive economy. Philanthrocapitalism Environmentourism strongly aligns with some core principles of philanthrocapitalism, in which former types of philanthropy are regarded as largely ineffective, due to their limited integration of basic business principles (Bishop and Green 2010; Farrell 2015). Philanthrocapitalism has become an important element of the contemporary global political economy. According to Bishop and Green (2010: 2), “much philanthropy over the centuries has been ineffective. They [philanthrocapitalists] think they can do a better job than their predecessors [by] trying to apply the secrets behind that money-​making success to their giving”. “Giving” is thus a central feature in philanthrocapitalism. Anthropological literature has shown that gifts are important in cultural and social processes (Malinowski 2002; Mauss 2002; Rosman and Rubel 1972). Following Marcel Mauss’s essay on the gift, when someone gives something to someone else, one tends to put oneself in a superior position, thus making the other “smaller”, a characteristic highlighted by anthropological analyses of gift-​giving generally (Mauss 2002). Indigenous gift-​societies were long considered self-​destructive and irrational under colonialism (Wolf 1999). However, Mauss (2002) showed how gift societies functioned beyond competitive capitalism as a form of social cooperation. Giving provides an important sociocultural role in the obligation to reciprocate in indigenous gift economies. This contains a struggle by “Big Men” for dominance that aligns with philanthrocapitalists’ attempts to distribute gifts under their control (Hites 2019; Sahlins 1963): an important point of critique on philanthrocapitalism is that it allows for a concentration of power and prosperity among the wealthy (Edwards 2008). This concentration of power is evident because, based on “private visions of the public good” (Raddon 2008: 38), philanthrocapitalist funding is not democratic: decisions are taken by a wealthy elite, and the ideology behind philanthrocapitalism infuses competitive principles into civil society (Dean 2005; Edwards 2008; Giridharadas 2018; Reich 2018). Thus, there is a lack of accountability and political legitimacy, which ignores attention

42  Stasja Koot for structural social changes in the broader political economy (Edwards 2008). This is especially relevant when investigating the articulations of philanthrocapitalists’ responsibility and what the consequences of their actions are. In the end, efforts to counter contemporary ecological problems have increasingly been addressed by engaging the same capitalist markets and mechanisms that are for a large part responsible for these environmental problems (Fletcher 2014; Büscher et al. 2012). Complex social and environmental issues are presented in a simplified manner, leading to commodification of the problems, and presenting markets as “common sense” (Farrell 2015). Despite these important critiques, philanthrocapitalism’s influence is growing (Giridharadas 2018; Reich 2018). Often framed as successful, philanthrocapitalists set a standard for a much larger culture of consumerism: although philanthrocapitalism is conventionally associated with the “very rich”, “the essential features of philanthrocapitalism” can today be made available “to everyone” (Bishop and Green 2010: 239). Therefore, it is “not just billionaires and their mega-​ foundations that command attention” (Reich 2018: 9). Seen as a “movement led by these super rich” (Bishop and Green 2010, xi, emphasis added), philanthrocapitalism is followed by many others (Koot and Fletcher 2020), including wealthy tourists. Therefore, it is relevant to ethnographically study philanthrocapitalist behaviour of excessive consumerism and giving from an anthropological point of view to better understand why and how such an ideology translates in a real-​life setting.

Environmentourism against rhinocide? Since apartheid was abolished in 1994, disparities in wealth in South Africa have endured, particularly regarding land, which is still largely controlled by a predominantly white minority (Bundy 2014; Burnett 2019; Green 2020; Koot, Hitchcock, and Gressier 2019; Mpofu-​Walsh 2021). An important reason is that private interests have become prioritized, including those of mining, agriculture and tourism. Communities around the GKA suffer from bad public services, and at times have set up protests on the entrance roads towards Kruger National Park. By closing roads with debris and burning tires, they have prevented international tourists to enter the park, at times throwing stones and intimidating tourists (De Villiers 2018). The protests did not necessarily seek a response from tourists, but by affecting tourism a quicker response is expected from officials. This situation led a tour operator to explain that tourists “have to sometimes give up their dream of having one day in the Kruger National Park”, while the industry has “become pawns in the non-​delivery protests, and I wonder when the police and government are going to act and protect us?” (ibid.). Against this background, several interviewees explained they lost trust in the government to address the issue of (rhino) poaching, due to corruption and disinterest. As a lodge owner stated, “I think the private operators,

The responsibility to consume  43 the lodges, are doing far more than the government does” (interview, 15 November 2017). Especially the Sabi Sands private reserve was often presented as a role model, since it “is relatively affluent and can therefore afford higher anti-​poaching costs when compared to most other reserves”, resulting in much lower poaching numbers. This is regarded as “marketing for our owners, who can explain this to their tourists” (interview, 25 June 2018). However, the protests as described above are part of the broader racial, socio-​ economic and political context in which contemporary environmentourism thrives. Although it is not my intention here to say that the specific examples in this chapter are directly related to these activities, or that the industry is to blame for them, I suggest that the industry plays a crucial role in local and national politics: as a white-​dominated industry in post-​apartheid South Africa, it needs to legitimize its own presence and influence in the area, and the implementation of environmentourist activities supports this legitimization. For many tourism operators, neighbouring Botswana is considered a better place for nature conservation. For this reason, a lodge and landowner explained he had donated an airplane to the government of Botswana to support their anti-​poaching efforts. Moreover, he is involved in rhino translocations to tourism property in Botswana together with another wealthy philanthropist from Europe. He explained that the enormous growth of luxurious lodges in the GKA is disturbing from an ecological point of view and therefore “Botswana is great: at a certain point they have made the choice for top class tourism with high prices so that much money will trickle back into the industry without creating an overload” (interview, 10 November 2017). However, this high-​ value/​ low-​ volume tourism has received substantial criticism (Magole and Magole 2011; Mbaiwa 2005), including on how at one point it led to a shoot-​to-​kill policy in protected areas under the Khama administration (Duffy et al. 2019). But this was quickly dismissed by the same interviewee as “very exaggerated […]. It is not as if the Batswana government are just shooting at everything and everybody there, but if they are being shot at, they will shoot back” (interview, 10 November 2017). Environmentourism’s activities are thus not separated from their wider social and political context, and the activities themselves have important consequences for nature and people. I now zoom in onto one project, described as Afrika’s Ark in the popular magazine Town & Country.

“Only tourism can save them”: Appeals to tourists’ responsibility The high-​ end tourism company Wilderness Safaris has long cooperated with the Botswana government, in particular the Botswana Defence Force (BDF), which provides military transport planes and soldiers to assist with rhino translocations. As one of the biggest high-​ end tourism operators in southern Africa and a self-​declared “leading conservation and tourism

44  Stasja Koot company in the industry today” (Wilderness Safaris 2015, emphasis in original), Wilderness Safaris initiated the Botswana Rhino Reintroduction Project in 2001 as a solution against the local extinction of the black rhino in Botswana (Wilderness Safaris n.d.). The project takes a central position in a magazine article called Africa’s Ark, marketing this project as a tourist attraction in which tourists can experience “[e]‌ight adrenaline-​fueled days rescuing rhinos in South Africa and Botswana” (Glowczewska 2015b). The popular magazine, Town & Country, is all about luxury, style, travel and leisure, presenting rhinos as facing extinction due to poaching by 2024 (Glowczewska 2015b), since “wildlife experts estimate they may be gone in just 10 [years]” (Glowczewska 2015a: 159). Furthermore, the urgency to act is emphasized by Wilderness Safaris’ CEO explaining that “[w]e have to do this now” (cited in Glowczewska 2015a: 163, emphasis in original). Booking company Explore Inc., which is where this eight-​day trip can be booked exclusively, also emphasizes the importance to stop “the seeming unstoppable rhino holocaust” (Briggs n.d.). To join this fight against extinction, tourists are offered the eight-​day rhino relocation trip. Described as a “safari like no other”, this trip provides tourists “[a]n unprecedented opportunity to participate in the most dramatic conservation story of the 21st Century” (Glowczewska 2015b). The magazine article (Glowczewska 2015a) and the description of the trip on the Town & Country website (Glowczewska 2015b) are both focused on potential high-​end tourists, attempting to lure them into the Botswana Rhino Reintroduction Project. Dramatic narratives about helpless rhinos, their expected extinction and ruthless poachers are easily alternated with descriptions of the safari as luxurious and exorbitant, and how one should act responsibly and become part of the solution. The trip starts off with a charter flight from Johannesburg to the Royal Malewane safari lodge at the Thornybush Private Nature Reserve in the GKA, which is “as opulent as safari lodges get [and where you can b]eat your jetlag with a massage or a swim at the spa” (Glowczewska 2015b). The lodge is a proud founding member of the Greater Kruger Environmental Protection Foundation (GKEPF), a military anti-​ poaching initiative that would not “be possible without the valuable patronage of our guests, many of whom generously contribute additional funds after coming face to face with these majestic creatures [rhinos] at Royal Malewane” (Royal Malewane n.d.). By doing this, guests thus also support the increase of militarized interventions to prevent poaching through giving. During the first three days at Royal Malewane, tourists receive an introduction to nature conservation, they do several game drives, a walking safari, sundowners and star constellation watching. On day four, they fly to Johannesburg and stay there for one night. In the afternoon and evening, they can consider any type of “urban” activity, to continue the journey to Botswana the next morning. Alternatively, tourists can choose to book a charter from Royal Malewane (at additional cost) straight to Wilderness’s Mombo Camp in the Moremi Game Reserve, Botswana (Glowczewska 2015b). Just like Royal

The responsibility to consume  45 Malewane, Mombo Camp “is luxury au naturel: canvas tented suites on raised wooden walkways, indoor and outdoor showers, 100 percent solar-​ powered (Wilderness Safaris walks the sustainability talk), with private and public bars, generously stocked” (Glowczewska 2015a: 172). Here the tourists stay for the last three days. On arrival, tourists receive a briefing on how Wilderness Safaris supports rescuing rhinos during high tea; they can experience a (relocated) rhino capture from a helicopter; they can monitor their whereabouts and health; they can fit the animals with tracking devices; if lucky, they can even witness the release of a rhino back into the wild. Furthermore, because it is “largely Botswana’s diamond wealth that enables its exemplary conservation stance” (Glowczewska 2015b), it is also possible to visit a diamond mine run by the world’s second-​largest diamond company DeBeers. The trip is expensive: US$ 18,655 per person and a tax-​deductible gift is required of US$ 25,000 per person for the Wilderness Wildlife Trust to Rhino Conservation Botswana (Glowczewska 2015b; see also Wilderness Wildlife Trust n.d.). Importantly, the project was supported by Botswana’s former President Ian Khama and his brother the former Minister of Environment, Wildlife and Tourism, Tshekedi “T.K.” Khama. While the protection of natural resources in Botswana used to be the main mission of the BDF (Glowczewska 2015a), former president Khama is one of the shareholders of Linyanti Investments, a subsidiary of Wilderness Holdings, and his nephew and lawyer are also on the board of Wilderness Holdings (Ntibinyane 2011). This could explain why Wilderness Safaris is Botswana’s “longtime partner” (Glowczewska 2015a: 161), in the country where T.K. Khama proudly articulated the urgency to shoot potential poachers if “they do not surrender their arms immediately on request” (Glowczewska 2015a: 201). Political and economic elites were complemented by further including Hollywood actress Uma Thurman. In the Town & Country article, the eight-​day trip is promoted with “tough girl” Thurman as “the tourist”. Her support is meant to attract “passionate travelers with a deep interest in conservation”, whose trip “will closely parallel Uma’s adventure” (Briggs n.d.). Thurman agreed to support the prevention of what she dubbed “rhinocide” (in Glowczewska 2015a: 161). In the extensive article, she also functions as a model on pictures, branding luxury clothes and jewellery with their prices, including Purdey, Ralph Lauren, Rolex and Chopard (Glowczewska 2015a). This shows the opulent character of the high-​end tourism industry, related media, and private nature reserves, but seems to be taken as a given. As Thurman reflected on the trip, she concluded: “[t]‌here is always hope” (Glowczewska 2015a: 202). The eight-​day trip, or environmentourism more generally, is an important exponent of this hope: appealing to feelings of responsibility, it promises tourists that they can be an important part of the solution against poaching by joining luxurious tourist experiences and giving large donations. And in some cases (potential) tourists are literally alerted to their responsibility to take part in the fight against rhino poaching,

46  Stasja Koot which they can address by consuming environmentourist products or giving. Wilderness’ CEO, for instance, explains “how crucial all tourism in Africa is to the survival of wildlife and the wilderness. [Without tourism,] African communities will lose the jobs tourism generates” (Glowczewska, n.d.). The owner of Explore Inc. added that, “this is what ‘tourism’ is all about –​conserving the last havens for wildlife in our fantastic natural world. African wildlife is under siege [and o]nly tourism can save them” (Briggs, n.d., emphasis added). This core idea –​that tourism is crucial to solve rhino poaching –​is widely shared among lodge owners and managers in the GKA. One lodge owner and investor in several reserves explained that he is often blamed for his high prices, but that this is needed to protect the animals: “If you as tourists do not want to pay for it, then there won’t be any rhinos anymore. […] The tourist also has a big responsibility here: a tourist must be willing to pay for this” (interview, 10 November 2017, emphasis added). Saving rhinos and racial inequality Tourists’ excessive consumption patterns thus also potentially include giving, and this has now also been articulated as a “responsibility”. However, these environmentourist activities forsake in-​depth analysis of broader racial and socio-​economic structural problems relating to the rhino poaching crisis. This includes often deplorable labour circumstances at the private nature reserves and in conservation, often failing public services and racial and socio-​economic inequalities, and land ownership injustices that have historically been created under colonialism and apartheid (Hübschle 2017; Kepe 2009; Mboti 2019; Morais et al. 2018; Mpofu-​Walsh 2021; Ramutsindela 2015). One could argue that such structural inequalities are crucial causes of poaching, but that does not withhold some tourism entrepreneurs to regard “the rich” philanthropists as the saviours, as several of them explained that this income was crucial to save the rhino or for conservation more generally. Others, however, are very critical about “selling” environmentourism as “philanthropic”, and they do not consider such activities conservation but simply business. In this line, Ramutsindela (2015: 2260) calls this type of environmental philanthropy “extractive”, meaning that it achieves three interrelated objectives, namely “to push back land claims, to give wealth-​generating activities a human face, and to control a labour pool for purposes of upmarket ecotourism ventures”. However, an owner of various lodges in the area, who is himself involved in several philanthropic endeavours, considers large-​scale land privatizations (that are essentially in conflict with a variety of land claims) as “very important for the numbers of wildlife and the ecology” (interview, 10 November 2017). Nature is thus often prioritized, and environmentourist activities disentangle it from socio-​economic structures,

The responsibility to consume  47 especially racial inequality (Thakholi and Büscher 2021), and disregard problematic histories. By doing this, environmentourism legitimizes the existence of high-​end privatized tourism, its excessive consumerist lifestyles and the land it needs. This gives the capitalist activities an “ethical” twist and a “conscience” (cf. Farrell 2015). It raises the question, however, whether tourists and the tourism industry should also be held accountable and responsible for these problems. Most tourism operators point at the government and consider corruption the main problem. This does not mean that they are not aware of racial inequality or problematic histories, and some are indeed engaged in small community development projects to address these problems. However, awareness about their own structural role is often lacking, for example in relation to the land they occupy or the cheap (mainly black) labour they benefit from. This does not mean that lodges and reserves do not collaborate with communities, for example by setting up community tourism camps (that operate separately from the luxurious lodges) to provide local people with jobs. These are based on the classic philanthrocapitalist idea that “the only way to make this a success is to run it as a proper business” (interview, 10 November 2017). However, one lodge manager emphasized that community tourism and the jobs that tourism generates more generally are very limited, and that structural issues are more demanding, explaining that “you can’t have this disparity between very poor people and extremely rich people literally a mile apart” (interview, 15 November 2017). Furthermore, in the highly competitive GKA with a growing number of high-​end lodges, it becomes increasingly important to show your “uniqueness”. Simply more luxury is not enough anymore and although it remains attractive, it clearly has its limits. An extinction crisis, however, can reinvigorate a unique tourism possibility, fulfilling one’s search for meaning and creating a potential to philanthropically fulfil one’s ethical responsibility, either by consuming ethical tourist activities and/​or by giving donations. Environmentourism beyond the GKA The examples given above do not stand on their own. For instance, the two luxury tourism companies &Beyond Phinda Private Game Reserve and Great Plains Conservation collaborate in a project called Rhinos Without Borders; an initiative that “calls on all members of the travel industry to join hands in order to make a difference” (Rhinos Without Borders, n.d. (a)) to be able to translocate rhinos from private game reserves in South Africa to Botswana. Similar to Wilderness Safaris, it also presents the rhino as nearly extinct, offering tourists a “fundraising safari”, to support 100 rhinos’ translocations “from South Africa to safe havens in Botswana” (Africa Discovery 2014b), which, according to the Great Plains CEO, “has an excellent security system in place” (Africa Discovery 2014a).2 In fact, “both

48  Stasja Koot Great Plains Conservation and &Beyond will announce specific fundraising initiatives to enable tourism stakeholders, travel partners, tour operators and guests to help save this iconic species” (Africa Discovery 2014a). In this case, an eleven-​day safari costs “only” USD 13,200 per person, including a gift for Rhinos Without Borders, but if a tourist is willing to donate between USD 250,000, and USD 1 million he/​she also receives a nine-​day safari for two people (Lunstrum 2018), showing how a big gift can reciprocate. Additionally, there are possibilities to book a “rhino conservation experience” (including de-​horning and rhino notching/​tagging), a “rhino notching experience” or a three or four-​day “rhino conservation safari” (including darting and notching) (Rhinos Without Borders n.d. (b)). Environmentourism is not limited to southern Africa or the rhino. &Beyond, for instance, has now started “more interactive itineraries such as the Phinda Impact Small Group Journey and the Oceans Without Borders Small Group Journey or our Travel With Purpose tours in South Africa and East Africa” (McNicoll 2018). Some safari lodges offer the opportunity to tourists to fit elephants with GPS collars to reduce human–​wildlife conflict in Tanzania. Promoted as “safaris with a purpose”, tourists can join a four nights/​five days full board safari, including game drives, all meals and beverages, gin, archery, wine tastings and tennis from “USD 19,464 for 4 people plus a tax deductible contribution of USD 25,000 per person” for the collaring project (Singita n.d.). Again, philanthropic gifts are promoted as an important element of this type of tourism. Moreover, tourists can also experience exposure to “high tech anti-​poaching headquarters, training with the new canine unit, learning more about the Environmental Education Centre and other community outreach projects”, all the while enjoying luxurious accommodation facilities (Singita 2018). Collaborations with communities, however, should, according to the CEO of &Beyond, be done with community development committees that are “as apolitical as possible” (McNicoll 2018, emphasis added). This again confirms findings in critical literature regarding the continued marginalization of surrounding communities and the de-​politicization and de-​historicization of structural causes of the rhino poaching crisis and conservation more generally (Hübschle 2017; Ramutsindela 2015). Moreover, it disregards problematic aspects of neocolonial, racial and ethnic power inequalities within the South African tourism industry (Koot 2016; Morais et al. 2018), an important issue in philanthrocapitalism far beyond South Africa (see, e.g. Brown 2012). De-​ politicization, in this context, refers to “the removal of public scrutiny and debate, with the result that issues of social justice are transformed into technocratic matters to be resolved by managers, ‘experts’, or […] celebrities” (Kapoor 2013: 3). Environmentourism thus provides for unique, de-​ politicized and de-​historicized consumption experiences. I now move to the conclusion of these findings in relation to philanthrocapitalism, giving and dynamics of responsibility.

The responsibility to consume  49

Conclusion: Responsible consumption and giving in the environmentourism bubble Environmental problems such as rhino poaching are often presented in a reductionist and simplified manner, disregarding important social, political economic and historical contexts. These are also largely neglected in environmentourism, a niche in nature-​based tourism that focuses on wealthy tourists’ responsibility to join in solving such problems. But, as this chapter has shown, focusing on one responsibility can mask one’s role in other “responsibilities”: taking responsibility by “doing good” can divert attention from one’s role and responsibility in larger, structural issues. Environmentourism contains two core characteristics. First, tourism itself impacts a specific environmental problem, and second, this happens in an elitist environment. Regarding the latter, Hübschle (2017: 440) explained that current conservation initiatives are often based on “archaic and elitist preservation and conservation paradigms that discount the potential for harmonious relationships of local communities and wildlife”. The rhino poaching crisis was commodified through the presentation of solutions, dressed-​up as tourism spectacles, that people urgently need to take part in through “doing” as well as “giving”. However, the translocation of rhinos to “safer haven” Botswana indeed used to be safer for rhinos due to a shoot-​ to-​kill policy directed at people. Moreover, the Botswana style of tourism, which is focused on the promotion of high-​end luxurious tourism, is often considered the solution against extinction, despite the creation of “enclave tourism”, the removal of profits from Botswana, the ownership of many tour operators by foreigners, and separating large parts of the rural population from natural resources (Magole and Magole 2011; Mbaiwa 2005). Nonetheless, this type of tourism is what many reserve and lodge owners envisage in the GKA. In line with philanthrocapitalist ideology, many private operators stated a broad distrust in the (South African) government and civil society, and they generally believed they could do much better. Excessive environmentourism in the GKA has thus become an important form of “ethical consumption”, based on self-​ congratulatory rhetoric about its beneficial outcomes while obscuring environmental and social consequences (Fletcher 2014). This goes even further when industry representatives say that wealthy tourists are responsible for saving the rhino through consumption, so that without doing their “duty”, the rhino would go extinct. Such a narrative promotes philanthrocapitalist ideologies for many others to “buy ethically”, ensuring that “consumers are induced to become de facto philanthropists” (Kapoor 2013: 66), boosting corporations’ brands and giving them legitimacy. The urgency of the rhino poaching crisis creates an anti-​intellectual attitude that urges people not to think, but to do, unquestioningly accepting the status quo as presented by the tourism industry.

50  Stasja Koot This acceptance is also the case when giving (extra) donations to specific causes: wealthy tourists decide which causes are to be supported, and which ones are not. In this case reciprocal giving then happens within relatively closed elitist networks (environmentourists, tourism operators, conservationists, journalists, celebrities). In that sense, philanthropic giving in environmentourism indeed keeps the other smaller (Mauss 2002), but with the important note that “the other” in this case remains absent from the interaction. The gift is done to support an environmental cause, to save rhinos, and local people are nowhere to be seen in these initiatives, unless as cheap labourers. At this level, however, gift-​giving (and consumption) also functions as an important form of social cooperation, just as it did in indigenous societies (Hites 2019). In this social structure, one takes responsibility for the rhino poaching crisis, but simultaneously disregards responsibility for socio-​economic issues that are a crucial cause behind poaching. In contrast to Mauss’ description of indigenous gift-​giving societies, however, philanthropic giving in environmentourism does not go beyond capitalism, but is an essential part of it, keeping capitalism going despite its destructive socio-​economic and environmental effects at the global and local level. In that sense, philanthrocapitalist gift-​giving societies are self-​destructive and irrational through the continuous promotion of consumerism, something that indigenous gift societies have been accused of under colonialism (Wolf 1999). The presentation of Uma Thurman as a “Big Woman” of nature conservation shows how celebrities play a crucial role in reproducing elite social networks (Brockington 2009). They create opportunities for “everyday people” to mimic the powerful and famous (Igoe 2017). Typical of philanthrocapitalism is that celebrities and their charity work function as a promotion of capitalism as the solution to contemporary social and environmental problems, leaving the governing elites not responsible for their role in larger structural environmental and social issues (cf. Kapoor 2013). Thurman’s modelling for luxurious brands, aimed at wealthy tourists inspired by the African Ark story, shows how “the excess of the powerful and wealthy itself serves as advertisement, spurring mimetic consumption by those at the middle and bottom of the social ladder” (Kapoor 2020: 104). However, most of the burden of an exorbitant lifestyle is put on marginalized groups around the world, for example, through the climate crisis or abhorrent labour circumstances in sweat shops or because their access to land and natural resources is severely limited. Today, “opportunities to participate in philanthropic activities, are often part of the appeal of nature experiences that tourists choose between” (Igoe 2017: 30). The safe African tourist bubble created for the consumption and commodification of nature provides environmentourists a platform on which they can have such “authentic” experiences of being responsible, a means to address their fantasies of themselves as white saviours through creations in the tourism industry. Altogether, this leads me to argue that philanthropic

The responsibility to consume  51 environmentourist activities are based on a reductionist articulation of the rhino poaching crisis, depoliticizing it from its socio-​economic and historical context. Meanwhile, it legitimizes privatized, luxurious tourism and pushes for exorbitant consumerism and giving as a solution for social and environmental crises, often framed as a “responsibility” of this privileged elite.

Notes 1 Parts of this chapter also appeared in 2021 in “Enjoying extinction: Philanthrocapitalism, jouissance, and ‘excessive environmentourism’ in the South African rhino poaching crisis” (Koot 2021). 2 In 2020, after tourism had reduced tremendously due to the COVID-​19 pandemic, the number of poaching incidents were rising in Botswana. The Great Plains CEO blames this on the absence of safari tourists and subsequent reduced human presence (Maron 2020).

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3 Responsibility versus responsibilization Mafiacraft, witchcraft and the rise of conspiracy thinking today1 Peter Geschiere In their recent collection on Regimes of Responsibility in Africa, anthropologists Alexander Jedlowski and Benjamin Rubens (2020: 4) highlight a contrast in the way “responsibility” is used in newer philosophical studies –​“forward looking, positive” –​versus its use in judiciary traditions, “retrospective, negative”. This contrast helped me to understand why in my work on “witchcraft” and its capacity to graft itself upon modern changes I have always tended to shy away from the term, feeling also quite uncomfortable with the recent “moral” or “ethical” turn” in anthropology (Zigon 2008; Lambek 2015; Laidlaw 2013; Fassin 2014).2 The problem for me was the quite surprising amoral tenor witchcraft discourses seemed to have in various parts of Africa (and elsewhere), combining a highly moralizing tone with great ambiguity in practice. What seemed to be positive often turns out to be highly negative in practice, and vice versa. While the judiciary notion of allotting responsibility is of course highly relevant for the way people try to deal with occult aggression, the anthropological emphasis on responsibility as related to ethics and morality can easily lead to simplification, as in the work of classical anthropologists emphasizing the “eu-​functional” working of witchcraft ideas.3 In this dilemma, I found Deborah Puccio-​Den’s approach most inspiring, both in her general explorations on “responsibility” (2017) and in the way she applies this in her recent book Mafiacraft –​An Ethnography of Deadly Silence (2021). Going back to the judiciary use of the notion –​the effort to establish “accountability” –​she shows how this can be used by an anthropologist to understand general issues of agency, in varying manifestations in time and space. Inspiring is especially the way she uses the related notion of “responsibilization” –​as some sort of complement to “responsibility” –​for following the difficult struggle for the anti-​mafia movement (judges, lawyers, journalists) to discover “the mafia” as an actor behind the endemic violence in Sicily. In Mafiacraft Puccio-​Den compares regularly with the field of “witchcraft studies”, including my work. And there are indeed parallels (and differences) that raise intriguing questions. In this chapter I want to further develop this comparison and its implications by adding a third component, the recent explosion all over the world of conspiracy theories with global DOI: 10.4324/9781003332077-4

58  Peter Geschiere allure. The sometimes overwhelming force such theories acquire with new social media makes the urgent question of the responsibility of the anthropologist all the more urgent. The central question for this chapter is to what extent can anthropological studies of “mafiacraft” and “witchcraft” help outline a responsible positioning of anthropologists in the face of ever wilder conspiracy theories that the social media are letting lose upon us now? An additional aim of this chapter is to explore to what extent “responsibilization” can help to balance the moralizing implications that cling to “responsibility”.4 Of course, anthropologists have worked with the responsibility notion in widely varying ways, not just in its more positive meanings. But the more positive meaning seems to cling to the term and the way it is used. Responsibilization seems to have certain advantages. First of all because it refers to a process; thus it brings out that responsibility is never a fixed or uncontested state, but rather a process of negotiation and a continuous struggle. Responsibilization raises also the question of who is being held responsible, exposing the deep ambiguity notions of responsibility always have.5 As anthropologists, we mainly work with everyday notions. This is one of the attractions of our work since it puts us in direct contact with what is going on in society. But this also means that we are not free to define or fill in these notions as we please. It remains important to be conscious of the connotations such notions have in everyday use, giving special twists to our supposedly neutral use of them. The positive charge that clings to “responsibility” and “morality” are good examples of this.

Mafiacraft –​or how to grasp a phenomenon that wants to remain hidden? Puccio-​Den’s challenging book Mafiacraft shows how to deal with responsibility without being trapped by its positive connotations. Her book tells the story of the long, historical struggle for trying to grasp what the mafia was and is. Central in her book are what she calls “grassroots processes of responsibilization” (2021: 26). She speaks also of “allocating” and “attributing responsibility” (ibid.).6 I find this take very useful for doing full justice to the ambiguities of the responsibility notion. Indeed, Puccio-​Den’s starting point is quite different from other mafia studies. In her introduction, she announces that she will be studying the mafia “not [as] a social fact fixed once and for all … [but] as a cognitive event shaped by silence” (2021: 2). In her historical sections she shows how difficult it was to discern the mafia as a phenomenon. It was clear that, since the nineteenth century, Sicily was marked by a special kind of violence. But who (or what) was behind all this? The “craft” in her title refers as much to the craft of the mafiosi (their hidden violence) as to the work of what she calls “the anti-​mafia”: a movement of judges, lawyers, journalists and also a few academics struggling to get this hidden thing in the picture.7 Thus her book becomes a seminal guide to all the problems of getting to know something that does not want to be known.

Responsibility versus responsibilization  59 Puccio-​ Den notes striking shifts in time of what this “mafia” was supposed to be. For a long time, a culturalist, folkloristic perception dominated: the mafia as a Sicilian particularity, a traditional “Sicilianness”. She notably quotes the Sicilian folklorist Giuseppe Pitré who in the early 1900’s characterized the mafia as “a Sicilian way of behaving, an attitude, a code of honour” (2021: 6) that forbade Sicilians to talk to the state. For Pitré there seemed to be no explicit organization behind all this. Like many others, he had, moreover, a tendency to cherish this Sicillianness against the invasion of new forms of rationality from North Italy after the unification under a national Italian state. In Puccio-​Den’s view, it was notably the judges, supported by journalists, who took the lead in trying to bring the mafia into the public eye, often at the cost of their own life. Since the 1960s, a concerted “anti-​mafia” movement took shape with its own martyrs, and its own memorials and celebrations. This “anti-​mafia” was determined to show that, behind all the acts of violence, there was an organization active with its own hierarchy and strategies. A turning point in the “discovery” of such an organization was the pact judge Giovanni Falcone managed to strike during the 1980s with Tomasso Buscetta, a mafioso who accepted to become a pentito (“repenter”; Puccio-​ Den 2021: 52, 163). In the 1970s Buscetta faced problems because he was on a collision course with the Corleone family who gradually managed to take over the mafia (also because of their connection with the US; ibid.: 62, 131). He tried to hide in Brazil, but was arrested there again in 1983 and extradited to Rome. Then, after some hesitation, he accepted to talk to judge Giovanni Falcone (ibid.: 154). One of the high points of Puccio-​Den’s book is her anthropological reading of the gradual sounding out between the two men. Crucial, in her view, was that Buscetta accepted Falcone as “a man of honour” to whom he could talk. Only then was he willing to teach Falcone about the mafia. It was typical that he justified his “confession” to the judge by emphasizing that not he but the Corleones had broken the rule: they had become “men of dishonour” (ibid.: 137, 166).8 The main thing Buscetta revealed to Falcone was the grid of the Cosa Nostra organization, its hierarchies and the way it guarded its secrets.9 What came to be called the “Buscetta theorem” thus confirmed that there was after all a unitary organization. This idea of the mafia as a coherent organization was definitively corroborated a few years later –​in 1992, only a few months after the Court of Appeal had confirmed the conviction of the mafiosi Falcone had put on trial –​by the most spectacular attack by the mafia ever, blowing up a whole highway stretch at Capaci (near Palermo) when judge Falcone and his wife were driving there on their way home, killing them on the spot (ibid.: 84). In Puccio-​Den’s analysis, the Capaci attack meant the definitive end of a vision of the mafia as just an attitude, a form of Sicilianness. Now it could no longer be denied that there was a concerted organization behind it that could be held accountable. Of course, the Buscetta theorem did not bring the end of “the mafia”. Moreover, a terrible irony is that the very

60  Peter Geschiere success of the anti-​mafia at “responsibilization” led to destructive actions by mafiosi of an unprecedented scale (like blowing up a whole part of a highway). Yet, the veil over Cosa Nostra was finally torn away –​after the Falcone–​Buscetta collaboration, there was no more denying that the mafia was an organization, hidden in silence but all the more effective.

From mafiacraft to witchcraft Of course, the above offers an all too short and simplistic summary of a very rich and sophisticated book. Puccio-​ Den keeps setting up challenging comparisons with key moments in the history of anthropology.10 Here I want to pursue the parallels Puccio-​ Den draws throughout her book between studying mafiacraft and witchcraft. These parallels are especially enlightening for the switch from responsibility to responsibilization. But first two general remarks about studying “witchcraft”. One concerns the terminological problems that are, indeed, overwhelming in this field. “Witchcraft” is a very problematic term just like sorcellerie, feticharia, stregoneria and so on (Geschiere 2013: xviii). These are Western terms that are problematic translations of local ones. For instance, for the Maka of Southeast Cameroun, where I do research since 1971, the local notion djambe is much broader, combining positive and negative aspects in kaleidoscopic confusion (ibid.: xvi and 4). Yet, all over Africa (as elsewhere in the world) these Western terms have been so widely appropriated locally that it is futile to try to refuse them –​we would then risk to distance us from very lively discussions in societies concerned. Rather than endlessly debating what would be the “right” term, the solution is rather to try and follow how such translations affect the meaning of both the local and the imported terms. Translation is a productive process, producing constantly new meanings (see Geschiere 2013; Meyer 1999). A second, more general remark concerns the relation between this precarious assemblage that both anthropologists and many Africans label as “witchcraft” on the one hand and “kinship” on the other. This relation has always been central in anthropological approaches to witchcraft, mostly as some sort of opposition: witchcraft as anti-​kinship. Max Gluckman set the terms for such a vision in his usual powerful style: An Anglican anthem demands “see that ye love one another fervently.” Beliefs in the malice of witchcraft and in the wrath of ancestral spirits do more than this as an act of grace; they affirm that if you do not love one another fervently, misfortune will come. (Gluckman 1955: 94) Kinship was a central topic in Ladislav Holy’s work. Both in his first monograph on the Berti in Sudan (1974) and in his magnificent overview of anthropological perspectives on kinship (1996), he opened up the notion

Responsibility versus responsibilization  61 with due attention to the ambiguities of personhood as an unsettling element in all efforts –​both by the people concerned and by anthropologists –​to close kinship as a coherent system. For me, when I tried to make sense for my Ph.D. research in the early 1970s of what my interlocutors in Maka villages told me about “kinship” and “witchcraft”, such a more open approach, less bent on deducing a closed system from what informants say, would have been most helpful. I remember my sense of disorientation when people told me that the most dangerous attacks in the djambe world came from inside “the house” –​that is from inside the family. Since they spoke of this djambe also as sorcellerie (French for witchcraft), I had automatically assumed that it was the opposite of bjel (kinship) –​that in the Maka order of things is also the key of social relations. It took endless discussions with my dear assistant Meke Blaise, whom I must still thank for his patience and kindness, and with other key informants to make me to realize that the djambe was part and parcel of their kinship order, –​not the opposite but rather an occult force that thrives precisely inside the house, expressing basic ambiguities in the relations between relatives. In my first English book on the topic (Geschiere 1997) I came to describe witchcraft therefore as “the dark side of kinship”. Such ambiguities can further explain why, in her struggle to grasp “mafia-​ craft” Puccio-​Den keeps coming back to parallels with witchcraft studies. Both have to deal with the challenge of grasping something that does not want to be known. And, indeed, the results are often equally confusing. My first attempts at classifying witchcraft as anti-​kinship –​(irresponsibility versus responsibility) –​did not work at all because my interlocutors kept mixing kinship and witchcraft, –​apparently for them domains that were impossible to separate The most dangerous form of djambe turned out to be, as said, the djambe le ndjaw (from the house); witches were supposed to have a special hold over their relatives, and healers would therefore always look for the “witch” inside the family. Later on, I understood that the Maka are certainly not exceptional in this. In my second English book on the topic Witchcraft, Intimacy and Trust –​Africa in Comparison (2013) I tried to show, through comparisons with case studies from all over the world, that “witchcraft” can be read as the terrible realization of hidden aggression from close by. Witchcraft discourse is about the ambiguity of intimacy as both wonderful and life-​giving but also as deadly dangerous, precisely because it is so difficult to protect oneself against attacks from close by. In such a perception of witchcraft, the parallels with the mafia will be clear. Both work in hiding, inside highly ambiguous family networks allowing for constant turns and twists. But there are also clear differences, which may be crucial for our focus on responsibilization. First of all: Who or what is the anti-​witchcraft equivalent to the “anti-​mafia” that plays such a key role in Puccio Den’s analysis? An obvious candidate in the world of witchcraft would be the healer. In nearly all contexts in Africa and beyond, whenever one feels attacked in witchcraft, the normal thing to do is to go and look for a healer who can “see” what is going on (just like Puccio-​Den’s “anti-​mafia”

62  Peter Geschiere was trying to “discern” the mafia). In many parts of Africa, the crucial step in the initiation of a healer is, indeed, the acquisition of “a second pair of eyes” (Geschiere 1997: 54; 2013: 72; see also De Rosny 1981). It is only because of this extra vision that a healer can “see” the witches and force them to lift their spell. Yet, there is a basic ambiguity here. My Maka friends would always explain to me that one had to have a very powerful djambe (witchcraft) in one’s belly to support such a “second pair of eyes”. I came to see this as a striking example of the powerful circularity that marks ideas about occult aggression all over the globe: for the Maka, protection against the djambe is to be found inside the djambe itself. This means also that healers (nganga) are witches themselves –​in order to be able to heal they have to be able to also kill (the parallels with medical doctors in the West will be apparent already; after all, their oath of Hippocrates is necessary precisely because their knowledge can heal but also kill). In such a vision, responsibility and responsibilization are closely intertwined. My friend Ms Mendouga, at the time the most powerful nganga (healer) in the district where I came to live, explained to me that she had gone to her “professor”, much deeper into the forest in order to get initiated because she was so angry that her son was driven mad in the army. So she felt “responsible” for her son. But she used the powers that her “professor” had made her swallow (notably his saliva) first of all to “see” –​to see who was responsible for her son’s grief and later her clients’ misfortune. In this case, as in so many others, witchcraft is a discourse about hidden forms of action (there always has to be a hidden actor behind the client’s misfortune) and about sniffing out this witch –​all too often hiding “inside”. But Mendouga could only “bear” the terrible knowledge her professor imparted her, because she had already developed a very powerful djambe in her belly (my interlocutors would describe her as a djindjamb [witch] “who had beaten all records”; Geschiere 1997: 50ff). This ambiguity can also explain another turn that came to me as a surprise. After their initiation, healers have to take great distance both from their professor and their kin since they have become so dangerous that they will kill both if they stay too close. All this makes it impossible to see the nganga as anti-​witchcraft figures. In many respects they are rather the main representatives of “witchcraft” in the daily world. They are combatting the witches (at least that is what they say), but certainly not witchcraft as such. And they are very ambivalent figures to their environment: they can heal (indeed they will always insist that they swore to their professor that they will use their knowledge to “see” and heal, and not to kill) but there is always the risk that the basic drive of the djambe –​that is, to kill and “eat” –​will break through. Of course, there have also always been anti-​witchcraft figures denying witchcraft altogether, certainly since the subjection of these societies to colonial rule (but probably also before). In Africa, missionaries have been very vocal as anti-​witchcraft champions increasingly denying its very reality (Geschiere 2013: 89). Thus, the problem for the churches established under

Responsibility versus responsibilization  63 colonial control became that they seemed to be powerless in dealing with witchcraft, for many people an all too real threat (ibid). The main reason behind the wave of Pentecostalism overrunning large parts of Africa ever since the 1980s was that Pentecostals see witchcraft also as most real. For them it is the work of the Satan, and thus they know ways to deal with it. Most Pentecostal prophets never tire of celebrating their prowess in combating witchcraft/​Satan. But this means, at the same time, that the Pentecostal movement has become a powerful factor in confirming the reality of witchcraft, indeed as an omnipresent force (Meyer 1999; Tonda 2002; Marshall 2009 and passim). In general, academics –​as defenders of scientific knowledge –​tend to opt for an “anti-​witchcraft” position, seeing it as a delusion. But anthropologists play a special role in this sense. About a year ago Arjun Appadurai put me in contact with Devi Nathan and his wife Govind Kelkar, two prominent Indian economists who were working on a book on “witch-​hunts” as a worldwide phenomenon (Kelkar and Nathan 2020). Appadurai thought I would be interested in economists working on witchcraft –​and, indeed I was. I did also a blurb text for the book when it came out. However, reading the book, I was a bit ill at ease. Nathan and Kelkar certainly offer an interesting global view, but for them witchcraft is one-​dimensionally evil. Their main interest is how to put an end to it. So they created a truly global alliance “to end with-​hunts”. Of course, in itself this is a very sympathetic aim that merits all support. Still, I had difficulty writing my recommendation. Apparently, as an anthropologist, I have acquired a more ambiguous attitude towards witchcraft. Personally, I am deeply shocked by all the misery these notions have created for Maka friends whom I know now for more than 50 years. Yet, the problem is these notions’ ambiguity which makes it not so easy –​and also not so right –​to convince people that they are simply deluded.

The responsibility of the anthropologist Reading Puccio-​Den’s book I had a feeling of recognition when she describes how it came to a dialogue between judge Falcone and his main pentito Tommaso Buscetta. As said, Puccio-​Den follows how Buscetta was testing the judge; only when he recognized Falcone as “a man of honour” was he willing to talk. I would not dare to say that my interlocutors on witchcraft (Maka friends and elsewhere) did see me as “a man of honour”, but there was certainly some testing whether I would be able to get the message. In retrospect I think the main test was whether I was genuinely interested: whether I would not consider what they could tell me as just nonsense. Once they were convinced that I was serious in my interest they were prepared to share secrets, and from then on it seemed they could not stop talking “witchcraft” (but this may be special to the Maka). For this reason I have become more and more surprised by Evans-​Pritchard’s well-​known statement that “witchcraft is an imaginary offense since it is impossible: A witch cannot do what

64  Peter Geschiere he is supposed to do and has in fact not real existence” (1935: 418). That is strong language! Of course, EP could only say this because of his conceptual separation of witchcraft and sorcery for the Azande (a separation that is problematic in most societies). Yet, one cannot help wondering how he managed then to make his interlocutors talk about a topic that he qualified as impossible? A suggestion of “false consciousness” is never helpful for a dialogue. Most anthropologists have a different attitude. Think of Michael Taussig in what for me is still his best book, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man (1987). A major theme in this book is how he allows to be “taken along” during the wild, nocturnal yagé-​sessions with his Amazonian nganga, Don Santiago. But then the question becomes of course how far one allows to be “taken along”. On this point anthropologists have given very different answers, yet an open attitude towards the reality of things that worry our interlocutors seems to be a first condition for dialogue and fieldwork. The main difference between anti-​mafia and anti-​witchcraft might be in the impact of the actions involved. The results of witchcraft in everyday life remain always highly contested, not only for us, as outsider anthropologists, but also for the people involved. Indeed, I have always been struck by the constant scepticism that surrounds debates about witchcraft in any African setting. People are constantly testing the outcome of oracles, a healer’s diagnosis, or his prescriptions for healing. No outcome or solution goes uncontested, all the more so since often different parties are involved, each with their own views and interests. In the Maka villages I was always surprised by the unpredictability of great witchcraft “palavers” (village courts), one accusation mobilizing another, often leading to exchanges that seemed to be about completely different things. I remember one palaver in 1971 during which a young man –​a “son of the village” living in the city and studying law there, but on holiday in the village –​told the speakers that they should stop adding things that confused the issue for which the palaver had been convened. Whereupon the elder who was leading the discussions reprimanded him sharply: “Didn’t he know that a palaver was like women fishing in a pond? They move a lot and make a lot of noise to make the fishes come out of their hiding places –​the more the better…”. In contrast, the 1992 blowing up a whole stretch of a Sicilian highway to kill judge Falcone was an event whose “reality” cannot be denied. In Puccio-​Den’s analysis, it was the constant prodding of the anti-​mafia –​by judges and journalists, but also by the support they got from people who came out to mourn these same judges and journalist as anti-​mafia martyrs –​that drove the Cosa Nostra leaders to a degree of violence that tore away the cover of secrecy obfuscating its acts. After the Capaci attack there was no denying possible anymore: the Mafia did exist! This difference with witchcraft has of course direct implications for a central issue in our debates: the responsibility of the anthropologist. For Puccio-​ Den there is hardly a problem here. The horror of the Cosa Nostra violence

Responsibility versus responsibilization  65 and its stranglehold on Sicilian society made it for her self-​evident to support the anti-​mafia activities and to oppose the folklorist view of the mafia as just an expression of Sicilianness. But for anthropologists similarly supporting witchcraft raises problems. If “going along” is a condition for fieldwork on the topic, some acceptance of its reality becomes a logical consequence, and this became indeed a principle for me during fieldwork. But for authors like Kolkar and Nathan, cited above, such an attitude means condoning witch-​ hunts. In similar terms, historian Wolfgang Behringer in his magisterial global history of witchcraft (2004), reproaches anthropologists for their endless theoretical debates about terminology, thus in practice condoning ongoing witch-​hunts all over the globe. And, indeed, accepting “epistemological pluralism” can put anthropologists before uncomfortable dilemmas when they are cited as witnesses in witchcraft palavers. It is interesting that, in my experience, such dilemmas are less uncomfortable when one is cited as expert in asylum requests on witchcraft threats in Euro-​America than when it concerns local palavers in Africa. Does more distance make it easier to opt completely out of witchcraft discourse? The position is even more complicated for anthropologists –​ever more numerous nowadays –​who opt for being initiated by a local nganga/​healer. Some see this as a condition to be able to work on the topic. These days there seem to be “initiations” in many forms and shades with great variations in duration and intensity. However, whatever the degree and the authenticity of the initiation, there are clear ethical problems that do affect the responsibility of the anthropologist. Interestingly, it is in practice the step of “seeing”/​diagnosis (remember the second pair of eyes mentioned before) much more than the subsequent step of healing that creates problems. Of course, there are degrees in this as well. Healing can involve very nasty counterattacks. But it can also remain limited to working with herbal concoctions and with rituals to effect reconciliation. However, “seeing” always requires identifying a perpetrator. Remember what was said earlier on witchcraft as a form of action. A healer can only heal once he/​she has identified from where the attack is coming. Moreover the perpetrator is often sought close by, thus the healer’s identification of the witch may sow discord in people’s intimacy. In such a context, urgent questions emerge about the responsibility of the anthropologist. The idea of reality as multiple is hardly a way out of such predicaments when, as an initiated healer, the anthropologist is expected to be able to “see” who has caused the harm. Initiated anthropologists have tried to solve such questions in very different ways. A convincing example that such dilemmas can be solved –​ but also of the impressive intellectual labour required for this –​was (and is) for me Father Éric de Rosny, a Jesuit who worked since the 1950s in Douala but also allowed himself to be initiated as a nganga. He claimed to have the second sight and used it to heal people during his consultation hours, but also in his own radio programme where people could call in. He wrote beautiful books on his initiation and his healing practices (see especially

66  Peter Geschiere De Rosny 1981). What makes his work convincing is that he depicts his initiation as a long, drawn-​out battle full of uncertainties and dangers. He powerfully described what getting the second pair of eyes meant for him concretely: waking up to a world so full of violence that only his training as a Jesuit helped him through this terrible realization. Clearly there are great difference in what “pulling away the veil” means in witchcraft and mafia studies –​different possibilities and different dangers. Yet, De Rosny’s shocking description of having his eyes opened to an almost insupportable realization of violence all around him, seems to converge with Puccio-​ Den’s detailed ethnography of how pentito Buscetta opened judge Falcone’s eyes to all the violence condensed in the mafia organization. The dangers involved were different –​as became clear afterwards (Éric de Rosny, my much-​regretted friend, died in 2012 in France, 82 years old; judge Falcone was brutally killed only a few months after the end of the court case). Yet the moment of acute fear may have been similar.

Conspiracy theory now and the anthropologist’s responsibility. Clearly the shift from responsibility to responsibilization raises ethical questions for the anthropologist that are difficult to solve. Especially in witchcraft studies, it evokes a precarious dilemma: The anthropologist must take the stories people tell most seriously, but does this not imply accepting accusations that can have horrible consequences? Such dilemmas acquire new urgency now that the explosion of new social media seems to set the stage for a global proliferation of conspiracy theories, also and most emphatically in the West. One could say that both mafia and witchcraft studies focus on some sort of conspiracy thinking, struggling with the reality of a hidden phenomenon that is invoked by the people involved as an explanation for misfortune. Are there any implications for present-​day challenges now that we seem to be overwhelmed by conspiracy thinking that acquires a new intensity and a new spread? Let me take a quick example with which we all have become familiar lately: QAnon. Its central message is clear: QAnon adepts –​on the Internet but also during demonstrations –​call for a struggle against a “Deep State” (also called “The Cabal”), that is taking over the world.11 It may remain fairly fuzzy what this supposed “Deep State” is exactly but certain characteristics come back all the time: it is secret and speaks in codes; it is a conspiracy of paedophiles, sometimes with cannibalistic tendencies; it is linked to Jewish protagonists, from the Rothschilds to Soros; and it launched the coronavirus in order to take over the world. For many, Trump is still the main hope in the desperate struggle against this conspiracy. Remember the role of the bear-​hat figure (with impressive buffalo horns) at the invasion of the Capitol in January 2021, identifying himself as a “QAnon shaman”.12 QAnon followers use a language with strong apocalyptic and evangelical overtones –​for instance announcing “The Storm” as a moment of truth that

Responsibility versus responsibilization  67 will lead to the execution of the Deep State people and a paradisical “Great Awakening” for others (Hannah 2021: 1). I am not at all a specialist on QAnon, but, following some of the news on it, I was surprised at how recent it is. All the more striking that it became a global movement in a few years (Aliapoulos 2021: 1). There are now very active Facebook groups all over the world; in the Netherlands they announce themselves as QAnon-​NL.13 Yet, it was only in 2017 that an anonymous person Q (QAnon stands for Q Anonymous) started to post messages on Internet forums like 4Chan, later 8Chan and then 8Kun. The person behind this Q is sometimes identified as the owner of these internet forums, a certain Jim Watkins.14 The name Q would be a secret code (“Q clearance”) indicating that this person has access to official documents (Hannah 2021: 3). An intriguing aspects of the messages on these forums is the use of “Q-​drops” (Hannah 2021: 5). Information is not provided in detailed messages but in “drops” offering allusions to links and facts that are taken to be self-​evident. When outsiders ask for clarifications, they are told to check for themselves on the Internet: “dig deeper” (Hannah 2021: 5). Of course, this is a more general feature of present-​day conspiracy thinking. For instance, on Dutch TV “corona-​deniers” are getting very impatient when they are questioned about the information at their disposal and often reply that the answers are there on the Internet if only you take the trouble of looking for them. Well, what are we to make of this? How should anthropologists position themselves against the sudden popularity of such ideas? Can the dilemmas in mafia or witchcraft studies, as sketched above, be of any help here? A young Dutch colleague, Jaron Harambam, published in 2020 the book Contemporary Conspiracy Culture –​Trust and Knowledge in an Era of Epistemic Instability, based on intensive fieldwork with conspiracy-​thinkers in the Netherlands. He has interesting advice to give, all the more interesting for us anthropologists since he sees an ethnographical approach as vital for making sense of their stories. First of all, he emphasizes the great variety among conspiracy-​thinkers. He reproaches observers (academics included) for focusing on the wildest and most aggressive forms (as I have been doing just now). Secondly, he emphasizes the need for taking their ideas seriously, as befits a good ethnographer on any topic. Remember the reference above to Michael Taussig and the need to “go along” with witchcraft if you want to study it. In the same line, Harambam insists on the futility for academics to try and debunk such theories warning that reasoning from fixed knowledge hierarchies –​that is, taking the superiority of academic knowledge for granted –​does not work any longer in “post-​truth times”. However, Harambam also recognizes that with the more ambitious conspiracy theories, like QAnon, this idea of “going along” can run into difficulties.15 “Going along” may be a basic guideline for anthropological fieldwork, but apparently has its limits. So, what is the responsible thing for the anthropologist to do? To what extent is our preceding comparison with mafiacraft and witchcraft helpful

68  Peter Geschiere here? It may be important to signal, first of all, that the arrows are pointing in very different directions in our three examples. As said before, for Puccio-​ Den things are quite clear: Anti-​mafia was right in identifying a coherent organization behind all the violence. No wonder that, as an anthropologist, she is on the side of the anti-​mafia in breaking the silence. It is self-​ evident that, in this case, the anthropologist has to side with the people who risk their lives by trying to pull away the veil hiding the mafia. With witchcraft, things turned out to be more complex. The “healer” –​apparently the main anti-​witchcraft ­figure –​is working as much in secret as witchcraft itself. Anti-​witch-​hunters are non-​equivocal in their positioning, yet they are hardly exposing witchcraft since they deny it “really” exists. Anthropologists seem to be balancing between the two positions –​radically denying witchcraft’s “reality” versus going along with it –​depending on the context. In the QAnon case, it is not only the target, the “Deep State”, that remains hidden. Also its denouncers remain partly hidden in the anonymity of the Internet. What role is there then for anthropologists in the face of such double secrecy? What kind of transparency can we create? Is it our brief to take accusations seriously only in order to be able to better refute them? But how? And even more importantly, what is the use of refuting? Clearly, showing that something is historically incorrect or physically impossible will hardly stop people believing in it. In this sense, the balance of witchcraft studies is not very promising. Confer, for instance, the tenacity of rumours in the West about Satanist child abuse at primary schools, often maintained against all physical proof. In one such a scandal in Oude Pekela, the Netherlands, dragging on for several years after 1989, the parents concerned stuck to their suspicions after one of the judges had ordered digging up the ground underneath the school. Even after it was clear that there was no physical trace of any subterranean chambers (where the Satanic rituals were supposed to have taken place), the parents stuck to their accusations (Beetstra 2004; see also LaFontaine 1998). So, Harambam certainly has a point that trying to refute such suspicions is often useless. The question might rather be why certain ideas are so convincing? Why do they acquire such visceral power? To continue with the QAnon example, we have to get further than the obvious explanation that QAnon stems from a proliferation of images through the Internet and social media plus the Covid-​19 pandemic. As anthropologists, we must come up with more detailed analysis of contextual factors and techniques of persuasion that make certain ideas “work”. Let me end by means of an example. Together with Dr Rogers Orock, a younger Cameroonian colleague (now teaching at the University of Witwatersrand) I am working already for some years now on a project Freemasonry, Homosexuality and Illicit Enrichment –​Postcolonial Imaginaries from Central Africa (the title of a book that we are finishing now).16 Our starting point is the sudden moral panic in Cameroon,

Responsibility versus responsibilization  69 beginning in 2005, about a supposed proliferation of homosexuality (with Gabon following somewhat later). This seems to be the umpteenth example of the wave of homophobia overrunning the continent since the early 2000s. However, in Cameroon and Gabon this panic has particular traits (Geschiere 2017; Geschiere and Orock 2020). Special to both countries is that accusations come from society and target state elites, rather than the other way around. We explain this by the link people make with Freemasonry: The state elite is supposed to be deeply involved with Masonic networks and, as elsewhere in Francophone contexts, Masons are associated with same-​sex practices. Hence people are referring to the national elite as les pédés de la République (“the faggots of the Republic”; Ndjio 2012). So we are faced with a particular conspiracy theory that has moreover substantial effects in everyday life in both countries. It is also a conspiracy theory that is clearly able to produce ever weirder rumours. People in Cameroon speak now also of an anusocratie (the rule of the anus) –​anal penetration being in all sorts of ways related to the spectacular forms of enrichment of the new elite that create so much jealousy among the rest of the population. Both Rogers Orock and I felt some sort of Schadenfreude at the recent explosion of conspiracy theories in the West. Apparently, it is not only in Africa that people are swept away by wild ideas. QAnon shows that “modern” people in Euro-​America are prepared to take even stranger things for granted. For our project discovering the “truth” behind these rumours or even trying to refute them is again of limited value. We are rather interested in historicizing them. In this case, it is possible to follow the rumours over a longer period –​even back to independence in 1960. What is striking in such a historical perspective, is the twists and turns in the rumours’ trajectory over time. The new national elite emerging after independence –​and especially their drive towards ostentatious consumerism –​had been all the time the target of nasty rumours (Orock and Geschiere 2021). But Freemasonry has been introduced to rumours as a recurrent element only since the 1980s, and homosexuality was brought in even later (after 2000). Such shifts, having an impact of their own, can be related to historical turns, which may help to make the idea of a coherent complot less self-​evident. Perhaps the responsibility for the anthropologist lies not in contradicting conspiracy theories, but rather in following them in detail through time and space, and contextualizing their shifts and the struggle towards epistemological closure. It is only by presenting what are historically quite disparate elements as an organic, natural whole, that such theories acquire the self-​evidence that is the secret of their power. In this sense, work on the mafia and witchcraft –​both phenomena that present themselves as natural “givens” but have in reality a tortuous history and can therefore be read as difficult struggles of responsibilization –​might serve as a guide for facing the present-​day wave of conspiracy theories.

70  Peter Geschiere

Notes 1 This chapter is based on the Ladislav Holy Memorial Lecture I delivered at the ASA conference in St Andrews, on March 31, 2021. Holy’s pioneering work on kinship was of great help for me in my struggle to make sense of the relation between “witchcraft” ’ and kinship in my research in Cameroon. 2 See below for the great terminological problems of the term “witchcraft”. 3 See Gluckman 1955: 94; see further Geschiere 1997: 218. 4 In her chapter in the Regimes of Responsibility collection on “Responsibility in Kinshasa’s Pentecostal Worlds”, Belgian anthropologist Katrien Pype (2020) notes, for instance, that un responsable in Congolese French is a leader, or at least an adult (man) –​as in so many places in the world. She adds that the Pentecostals give a special touch to this meaning, by making responsibility the end goal of the “moral movement” –​their term for conversion, which is an all-​ overriding theme in Pentecostal discourse. 5 Actually, the very etymology of the notion, going back to Roman law, outlines the ambiguity of the notion. The Latin term responsalis referred to a person who answered for another in court (for instance, for one of his/​her “slaves”, see Ballentine’s law dictionary). In this sense the notion had moral overtones, but not necessarily positive ones. 6 Cf. also her reference to Mary Douglas (1980) –​commenting on Evans-​ Pritchard’s classic Azande study on “witchcraft as a system of accountability”. 7 Apparently, this title was suggested to the author by Giovanni da Col the founder of the HAU journal. 8 Cf. the beautiful film Il Traditore by Marco Bellocchio about the Buscetta/​ Falcone tandem (2019). 9 See Puccio-​Den 2021, ch. 7 “The Busctta Theorem”. 10 For instance, Puccio-​Den (2021: 133) compares her approach towards “discovering’ the mafia also to the –​contested –​way in which Marcel Griaule obtained access to the esoteric knowledge of Ogotemmêli, the Dogon wise man, in the 1940s. 11 See for a general overview on QAnon: Harambam 2020, ch. 3; For details see Aliapoulos and others 2021 and Hannah 2021. 12 https://​en.wikipe​dia.org/​wiki/​Jake​_​Ang​eli 13 https://​ w ebca ​ c he.google ​ u ser ​ c ont ​ e nt.com/​ s ea​ r ch?q=​ c ache:iDyms​ Z KA4​ 2IJ:https://​nl.wikipe​dia.org/​wiki/​QAnon+​&cd=​1&hl=​nl&ct=​clnk&gl=​nl. 14 h t t p s : / / ​ w e b c a ​ c h e . g o o g l e ​ u s e r ​ c o n t ​ e n t . c o m / ​ s e a ​ r c h ? q = ​ c a c h e : O B o J h​ dMz_​WkJ:https://​en.wikipe​dia.org/​wiki/​Jim_​W​atki​ns_​(busi​ness​man)+​&cd=​ 2&hl=​nl&ct=​clnk&gl=​nl 15 see Elżbieta Drążkiewicz Grodzicka’s and Jaron Harambam’s 2021 special issue of Journal for Cultural Research; see also Harambam, 2020 and 2021. 16 See also Orock and Geschiere, 2021 and Geschiere and Orock, 2020; the following two paragraphs are a condensed summary of these two articles.

References Aliapoulios, Max, Antonis Papasavva, Cameron Ballard, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Gianluca Stringhini, Savvas Zannettou, and Jeremy Blackburn. “The Gospel according to Q: Understanding the QAnon conspiracy from the perspective of

Responsibility versus responsibilization  71 canonical information.” 2021. www.resea​rchg​ate.net/​publ​icat​ion/​348675626_​ The_​Gospel_​According_​to_​Q_​Understanding_​the_​QAnon_​Conspiracy_​from_​ the_​Perspecti​ve_​o​f_​Ca​noni​cal_​Info​rmat​ion Beetstra, Tjalling A. “Massahysterie in de Verenigde Staten en Nederland: De affaire rond de McMartin Pre-​ School en het ontuchtschandaal in Oude Pekela.” In Mediahypes en moderne sagen: Sterke verhalen in het nieuws, edited by Peter Burger and Willem Koetsenruijter, 53–​ 69. Leiden: Stichting Neerlandistiek Leiden, 2004. Behringer, Wolfgang. Witches and Witch-​Hunts, A Global History. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2004. De Rosny, Éric. Les yeux de ma chèvre –​Sur les pas des maîtres de la nuit en pays douala. Paris: Plon, 1981. Douglas, Mary. Edward Evans-​Pritchard. Glasgow: Fontana, 1980. Drążkiewicz Grodzicka, Elżbieta and Jaron Harambam (eds.). Special Issue: What should academics do about conspiracy theories –​Moving beyond debunking to better deal with conspirational movements, misinformation and post-​truth, Journal for Cultural Research, 25(1) (2021): 63–​75 Evans-​Pritchard, E. E. “Witchcraft.” Africa, 8(4) (1935): 417–​422. Fassin, Didier. “The ethical turn in anthropology: Promises and uncertainties.” HAU, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(1) (2014): 429–​435. Geschiere, Peter. The Modernity of Witchcraft. Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997. Geschiere, Peter. Witchcraft, Intimacy and Trust –​Africa in Comparison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Geschiere, Peter. “A vortex of identities: Freemasonry, witchcraft and postcolonial homophobia.” African Studies Review, 60(2) (2017): 7–​35. Geschiere, Peter and Rogers Orock. “Anusocratie? Freemasonry, sexual transgression and illicit enrichment in postcolonial Africa.” Africa, 90(5) (2020): 831–​851. Gluckman, Max. Custom and Conflict in Africa. Oxford: Blackwell, 1955. Hannah Matthew. “QAnon and the information dark age.” First Monday, 26(2) (2021) https://​doi.org/​10.5210/​fm.v26i2.10868 Harambam, Jaron. Contemporary Conspiracy Culture –​Trust and Knowledge in an Era of Epistemic Instability. London: Routledge, 2020. Harambam, Jaron. “Against modernist illusions: Why we need more democratic and constructivist alternatives for debunking conspiracy theories.” Journal for Cultural Research, 25(1) (2021): 103–​121. Holy, Ladislav. Neighbours and Kinsmen: A Study of the Berti People of Darfur. London: C. Hurst, 1974. Holy, Ladislav. Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship. London: Pluto Press, 1996. Kelkar, Govind and Dev Nathan. Witch Hunts: Culture, Patriarchy and Structural Transformation. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2020. LaFontaine, Joan. Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Laidlaw, James. The Subject of Virtue, An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Lambek, Michael. The Ethical Condition –​Essays on Action, Person and Value. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Marshall, Ruth. Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2009.

72  Peter Geschiere Meyer, Birgit. Translating the Devil –​Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Ndjio, Basile. “Postcolonial histories of sexuality: The political invention of the libidinal African straight.” Africa, 82(4) (2012): 609–​631. Orock, Rogers and Peter Geschiere. “Decolonization, freemasonry and the rise of ‘homosexuality’ as a public issue in Cameroon: The ‘return’ of Dr. Aujoulat.” African Affairs, 120(478) (2021): 26–​56. Puccio-​Den, Deborah. “On responsibility.” L’Homme, 223/​4 (3/​4) (2017): 5–​32. Puccio-​Den, Deborah. Mafiacraft –​An Ethnography of Deadly Silence. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pype, Katrien. “Diverting Makila Mabe: Understanding responsibility in Kinshasa’s Pentecostal worlds.” In Regimes of Responsibility in Africa. Genealogies, Rationalities and Conflicts, edited by Benjamin Rubbers and Alexander Jedlowski, 160–​180. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2020. Rubbers, Benjamin and Alexander Jedlowski (eds.). Regimes of Responsibility in Africa. Genealogies, Rationalities and Conflicts. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2020. Taussig, Michael. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study of Terror and Healing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Tonda, Joseph. La guérison divine en Afrique Centrale (Gabon, Congo). Paris: Karthala, 2002. Zigon, Jarett. Morality –​An Anthropological Perspective, London: Routledge, 2008.

4 In the wake of disenchantment Silence and the limits of ethnographic attentiveness Yana Stainova

It is one of the last days of summer. A new year of Zoom teaching is about to begin. It is a cool day in Vancouver, a sign that summer is slipping away. The cold air seems to nip at barely healed scars from a pandemic year of dark winter nights in repetitive isolation, from the hopelessness and terror of worrying about the health of loved ones, and the barriers to travel that rip at the seams of an immigrant’s global community. I open the Voice Memos app, look for a recording called “El Cigarillo”, and press “play”. It’s the first time I’m listening to it. I’m disappointed to find out that my voice, because the phone was closest to me, is the most audible. Instead, I wish I could hear more clearly Alma’s guitar accompaniment and the trained voice of Julia, our vocal anchor. The coordination is wobbly at first, until we find our rhythm: Anoche estuve conversando Con mi cigarillo //​ Last night I was having a conversation With my cigarette Sung in a low register with an urgent rhythm, “El Cigarillo” is Julia’s favorite song. When she was a child back in Venezuela, her mother taught her the song and Julia sang it almost every day. The song, written by Mexican singer Ana Gabriel, is about a lonely woman telling her troubles to a cigarette. At some point in the recording, I heard my mother, who has been learning Spanish ever since I started doing fieldwork in Venezuela, chime in, holding on to a couple of words she recognized: Le conté de tus beso[s]‌y de mis esperanzas Le conté de tu olvido y mis lagrimas tantas //​ I told it about your kiss[es] and about my hopes I told it about your oblivion and my many tears DOI: 10.4324/9781003332077-5

74  Yana Stainova This recording was made in the living room of my childhood home in Bulgaria, when two of my interlocutors from Venezuela –​Julia and Alma –​ were visiting.1 It was late at night on the last evening of their stay. The day had been oppressively hot and the brick walls of the south-​facing apartment building emanated heat even in the darkness of the cooler night. We were all in our pajamas –​my mother and I on the couch; Alma sitting on a chair, holding the guitar in her lap; Julia on the bed. When we finished this song, we continued singing other Venezuelan popular music songs. Because of the precious memories of being in community the songs held for us, I had done everything possible to find a guitar for Alma to play in Bulgaria. A childhood friend had offered his guitar, which was in rough shape with a missing string. I bought a string that turned out to be too short. Together, Alma and Julia brainstormed a way to switch the place of two strings so that the shorter string could be wound, making the guitar playable. We were brought together that summer in our respective longings for a home. I, an immigrant in North America, was back home to spend time with my mother. Julia and Alma had not been able to visit Venezuela in five years. When they walked into my mother’s kitchen, they exclaimed that it gave them a feeling of home. The songs we played together also carried memories of their childhood in Venezuela, from a time when they had sung them with their families. For me, they brought memories of fieldwork in Venezuela but also, most prominently, from my follow-​up trips to visit my interlocutors in Paris, where many of the musicians had sought refuge from the humanitarian crisis in their homeland. There, the isolation of immigration drew them to the songs of their youth. To be able to welcome my interlocutors in my childhood home was a rare moment of anthropological reciprocity: after being a guest at their parents’ homes for almost a decade, I was finally able to be their host. *** During my fieldwork in Venezuela between 2011 and 2015, I arrived at the notion of enchantment to describe my interlocutors’ relationship to music (Stainova 2021). For 16 months, I carried out research with young musicians who were members of El Sistema, a Venezuelan initiative that provides free classical music education and instruments to almost a million people all over the country. “Me encanta”, my interlocutors would say about music, meaning that they love it, that they are enchanted by it. To be enchanted is to experience wonder and fascination, to be smitten by something. Moments of enchantment are supported by the daily labor of learning to play an instrument. Enchantment was also contained in the musicians’ dreams: to immigrate abroad to access better education and to become famous. The co-​experience of enchantment –​in music and in dreaming –​surfaced as an ethnographic method for sensing the world-​building potential of people’s engagement with music practices (Stainova 2019).

In the wake of disenchantment  75 I became separated from Venezuela, the site in which enchantment first blossomed, after my interlocutors immigrated to Europe. This separation was widened by two pandemic years that have put fieldwork –​and life –​on hold. As I contemplate enchantment from a distance, as I trail in its wake, I gravitate toward another term “ethnographic attentiveness”. The notion of attentiveness describes relationships of care that bind people together over the course of many years and across historical, political, and social shifts. Acts of attentiveness supported friendships, such as Alma’s and Julia’s, and their extended network of El Sistema musicians who now lived in Paris. Attentiveness also described their sustained dedication to their parents, most of whom were still in Venezuela, a country floundering in political and economic crises. I also experienced my own striving for ethnographic attentiveness: on the one hand, toward my interlocutors, who over the years had become dear friends and whose well-​being is a continuous concern of mine; on the other hand, toward the past captured in my ethnographic labor, which, in its dynamism, asked of me to consistently revisit my analytical frameworks and positionality. I am drawn to the notion of attentiveness because it describes acts of striving –​and at times failing –​to experience with, listen, care for, and be with others. I am especially interested in ethnographic attentiveness in the context of experiential separation that always, by definition, marks the encounter between anthropologist and interlocutors. For me, this ethnographic separation, and the concomitant aspirations to bridge it, was intensified by immigration (my own and that of my interlocutors) and the sudden interruptions to fieldwork imposed by the pandemic. Attentiveness resonates with what Kathleen Stewart has called attunement, “a kind of attending to the textures and rhythms of forms of living” or a “noticing” (2008: 71).2 While attunement implies that we are already “in tune with”, that we are vibrating at the same frequency as someone or something, attentiveness draws out the labor of attention, the always-​incomplete project of understanding another, and its long temporal horizon. Our improvised singing of “El Cigarillo” gestured at these different facets of attentiveness. The musical collaboration at the center of the piece –​Alma and Julia’s playing and singing –​embodied their close friendship. Their relationship was transposed from Venezuela, where they were both members of El Sistema’s top orchestras in Caracas, onto the precariousness of immigration in Europe.3 There, friendship had morphed into an existential responsibility for their collective survival. The song also carried embodied memories of the past, of Venezuela: of Julia’s childhood, her mother, and her grandmother.4 The song evoked family members whom Alma and Julia had not seen in years, yet maintained close ties with, and cared for, through daily check-​ins and remittances. My own connection to the song, which I had been singing on my follow-​up visits to Paris, signaled my long-​term friendship with my interlocutors. My slowly improving ability to sing the song over the years was symbolic of a positionality in constant flux, a desire

76  Yana Stainova for attunement with the lives of my interlocutors, and a state of vibrating with, achieved only intermittently. I choose attentiveness as a term with which to write about and trouble the theme of responsibility that holds this volume together. Responsibility, according to Merriam-​Webster, is “the state of being the person who caused something to happen” and “something that you should do because it is morally right, legally required, etc.”.5 Institutional review boards oversee these formal practices of responsibility, holding anthropologists up to certain levels of behavior and accountability. At the same time, anthropologists have acknowledged that the immersion into the lifeworlds of others, frequently people in a more precarious position than ourselves, implicates us in social dynamics that are complex (High 2011; Bell 2014). As any other social interactions, our involvement in fieldwork rarely provides easy and clear-​cut ways of behaving responsibly beyond any doubt, if only because we become witnesses to injustices in a globally unequal world, if only because we are (usually) the relatively more powerful actors, if only because our agency is also limited. As alternatives to the institutional and juridical underpinnings of responsibility, anthropologists have proposed care (Cox 2015), love (High 2011), and reciprocity (Mulla 2021) as values that animate our relationships with our interlocutors. As Holly High (2011: 230) notes, “I only add that in embracing an anthropology of love, we need to be frank about the complex and often ambiguous terrain to which it leads”. Such ambiguous terrain does not lend itself to clear notions of responsibility. I add attentiveness to the constellation of concepts that nuance notions of responsibility in anthropological research. Attentiveness, I find, speaks instead to the etymology of the term responsibility: the Latin word respondere means to “respond, answer to, promise in return” (Online Etymology Dictionary). I lean toward the roots of responsibility because they remind us about a dynamic dimension of the term promising a response, rather than a clear answer, a sensibility, rather than certainty. “Even if I have never participated in anything that would support torture or the violence perpetrated in riots that are a regular feature of Indian life, I can never imagine I have led a blameless life”, writes Veena Das (2016: 183, cited in Mulla 2021). It is perhaps such a state of mind –​one that always considers the possibility of harm, even if unintentional –​that enables attentiveness. Das concludes: Our responsibility to the present, when we live in such unjust societies and feel helplessly compromised by the shame we feel, may well lie in open acceptance of such a life without turning it into the useless grumblings that sometimes pass for criticism. (Ibid.: 183) With the notion of attentiveness, I hope to recognize connection with others as an ethnographic aspiration, while remaining cognizant of the limits of relationality.

In the wake of disenchantment  77 In this chapter, I unpack the relationships of attentiveness embodied in our collective performance of “El Cigarillo”. I contemplate how acts of attentiveness allow people to piece together selves and collectivities from the past and the present, across different geographic spaces, and in response to disenchantment. In contrast to Max Weber’s use of disenchantment to describe a historical shift away from religion and toward rationalization, I think of disenchantment as affective experiences of disappointment and disillusionment that may coexist with enchantment. I discuss how disenchantment may reorder how we see the past and illuminate gaps in our capacity to be attentive. I end with a reflection on ethnographic attentiveness and its limits.

Disenchantment Years after I had finished fieldwork, an interlocutor who I had met briefly and only rarely been in touch with over the years called me on the phone. After an exchange of updates, Ramona began telling me a story I was not prepared to hear: the testimony of her sexual abuse at El Sistema. This testimony was part of a wider #MeToo wave in Venezuela that revealed sexual abuse as a systemic problem in El Sistema, illuminating a macabre parody in the name of the program. This conversation felt like an earthquake. It powerfully disturbed the columns of fieldwork and writing that held up the notion of enchantment, my own and that of my interlocutors. Among those was my book that was going into production with a university press. What I found most difficult to grapple with was that Ramona’s abuser was a violin teacher that I, like many others in the community, had respected. As an inexperienced anthropologist, all I had to hold on to were people and the stories that they told me. Those were people in whose hands my life had rested in a country wrought by everyday violence and political turbulence. Never had this trust been abused –​until now –​and only in retrospect through violence done to another person. Encountering the pain suffered by Ramona produced horror in me, even more so because I had been unaware of that pain –​an unconscious witness to it. In retrospect, I can reconstruct the image of the pain that lingered in the room like invisible smoke. Others, if not I, had tried to talk to her about it, to ask her about her aura of sadness, but at the time she had refused to speak, had not been able to speak. Here, I am reminded of Elaine Scarry’s powerful The Body in Pain. Evoking the image of being in the same room with someone who is in pain while partially or wholly unaware of it, Scarry poses the question: “How is it that one person can be in the presence of another person in pain and not know it?” (1987: 12). Pain does not always translate into sound or words and, most often, those who carry the pain struggle to articulate it in words. In fieldwork, we often rely on verbal testimony to connect to our interlocutors. What about experiences that have not yet, or simply cannot,

78  Yana Stainova find their way into words? During my fieldwork and later, when writing, I posed such questions when making sense of the musical practices the El Sistema musicians often described as going beyond words. I asked this question in reference to collective enchantment and joy. I did not, at the time, think of asking it about experiences of pain. Today, I wonder what silences exist in our fieldwork materials: What were our interlocutors not able to express in words? What might we have missed hearing? To anthropology, this question is not new. Veena Das (2006), in writing on violence, masterfully transcends our discipline’s method of reliance on words to craft an ethnography of the muted language and silences of violence. In studying the social fabric in the aftermath of violent events in Indian history, Das traces how violence is engaged in ordinary life in more and less visible ways. Remnants of past violence emerge unexpectedly to mark the present, such as when a woman on her deathbed breaks with tradition to indirectly enunciate a history of betrayal. Encountering another person’s raw traumas of the past that resonate forcefully in the present breaks the clear boundary between present and past. It reveals how “selves and experiences […] are not comfortably situated in the past, present, or future” (Reese 2019: 70). At different points in time, the past sharply punctures the present, invades it, and makes space for itself. These seismic shifts that layer the past onto the present force us to reconsider the past, see it in new light, or ask us to assume different modes of responsibility for the past. In confronting Ramona’s trauma, I felt the gaps in my ethnographic attentiveness in the past. At the time, my own youth, lack of sufficient experience, and a still-​ nascent intellectual and perceptual acuity were probably what prevented me from discerning the specific social dynamics of her abuse. Added to that was the widespread invisibility of sexual abuse, frequently tangible only to the one experiencing it. My first reaction was to think that I could have somehow prevented this, to blame myself for not acting. When I shared these feelings with a trusted mentor, they responded: “My instinct is to rush to tell you that you need not feel guilt, because systems of injury and traumatization possess power far beyond what any single individual (you, me, your interlocutor) can reasonably diagnose, much less correct”. My mentor’s words made me think about what Judith Butler (2020: 10) calls the “force fields of violence” that our relationships are entangled in and that may reproduce the logics of violence. Deflecting, refusing, or even acknowledging these dynamics is a process of constant negotiation from within forms of relationality. Butler writes on nonviolence: When the world presents as a force field of violence, the task of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate that world and offer no way out. (Ibid.: 10)

In the wake of disenchantment  79 Sometimes, understanding the violence undergirding relationships involves the labor of reckoning with the past, making space for its manifestations in the present, and allowing it to rearrange the ground on which relationality rests. For me, it involved being able to let go of what I idealized as the relationality of musical mentorship. Certain events cast new light on the past, revealing shadows and silences we were previously unaware of, putting limits on what we can fondly remember. In retrospect, I realize that a heroic wishful imagination of how I could have prevented the abuse –​as a young graduate student who only spent a couple of weeks in this particular fieldsite –​is exaggerated and centered on me. A more modest aspiration would be to think about how in confronting the limits of my ethnographic attentiveness I may transpose my ethnographic responsibility in the present.6 I see one modality of responsibility in the present as sitting with the discomfort evoked by the impossibility of repairing the past. Another lies in the sustained labor of attentiveness: remaining present to my ethnographic relationships and supporting the current needs and initiatives of my interlocutors, even long after my research has formally ended. Here, I am drawn to care as a modality of attentiveness because it preemptively assumes the possibility of vulnerability or unacknowledged pain on the part of those we engage with. Attentiveness captures acts of caring, but also the uncertainty of whether, how, and when to give care; whether and in what form such care is needed or wanted by another. Attentiveness describes the striving to experience with but also the gaps in this striving across disparate life worlds and across shifting historical, political, and temporal tectonics. While care has long been a topic of study in anthropology (Ticktin 2011), I am interested in the capaciousness of the term to describe a model for methodology (Cox 2015: 26) and a form of relationality that guides our behavior in academic spaces (Cheng 2016). Unlike Weber’s model of disenchantment that is totalizing and complete, I embrace disenchantment without altogether dismissing the past as an illusion. Instead, disenchantment allows me to listen for the silences and gaps of knowledge that mark the past and will continue to be part of ethnographic fieldwork, and any form of relationality, in the future.

Silence The abuses of power within El Sistema led me to revisit the concept of silence, and the question of what it means to listen to silence, that have long occupied my imagination. My book chapter “Sonorous Silence” begins by recounting the story of an El Sistema performance of a Shostakovich symphony where the bass clarinet failed to sound (Stainova 2021: 176). The technical error had threatened to disturb the delicate balance in the orchestra, and sparked an intense collaborative effort on the part of the other instruments to keep the musical piece together. In the chapter, I think about the disjuncture

80  Yana Stainova between how the musicians experienced the concert –​as a failure, as a process of imaginative effort, and intense collaboration –​and how both the Venezuelan government and the opposition portrayed the concert. The state media heard in the concert “a triumph” and the opposition heard in the El Sistema performances only a “silence”, understood as political passivity and reprehensible disengagement in a time of political crisis. In the book, I argue that in order to recognize the creative processes taking place in the moment of collaborative performance, one needs to be able to listen. Important here is a contrast between listening and hearing articulated by Jean-​Luc Nancy (2007): listening “hovers on the edge of meaning”, while hearing is “fixed, predetermined, and coded” (in Stainova 2021: 176). Both the Venezuelan government and the opposition heard the music through their own political vocabulary. In contrast, I conceptualize ethnographic fieldwork as a process of social and sensorial listening that makes such silences audible, sonorous. “The sonority of silence heard through fieldwork uncovers processes of artistic and social creativity that have material reverberations in the world”, I write (2021: 180). It allows us to listen to people without attempting to make them fully legible, allowing for a lack of fixity. Building on this framework, in my book I conceptualized fieldwork as dependent on attentive listening, as a way of uncovering, but also participating in, processes of collaboration and creativity that might be overlooked by dominant narratives. Such attentive listening, for example, would reveal the friendships and life stories that lie behind the sounds of our performance of “El Cigarillo”. It is a modality of listening that relies on –​and results from –​building friendships and nurturing them over the years. The act of striving to listen to another’s life, much like listening to their voice or instrument sounds while playing together, forges relationships. But this kind of listening also plays a political role: it amplifies voices that are softer, silenced, and marginalized by dominant narratives and political and economic orders. If during my fieldwork and later writing, I thought about listening to silence as a type of synchronized attunement taking place in real time, today I turn that listening ear toward the past. Listening to the past, in contrast to listening in the present, is a temporally disjointed process. It is a listening to fragments, gaps, and silences, to the in-​betweenness of events. It is a listening that rests on rumination, on cyclical returns, a rewinding and replaying of the past. To borrow a metaphor from music, listening to the past comes closer to listening to a musical recording than performing live music. While the ethnographic record is by definition already fragmented, shaped by what we could –​and could not –​hear at the time of our fieldwork, it is also in a dynamic relationship with the present, constantly being rewritten: a patchwork of temporality. “Significantly, the ethnographic work also made it possible for the anthropologist to return to this other ‘home’ and to know it, through the work of time, anew”, João Biehl tells us (2013: 371). Biehl writes these words in

In the wake of disenchantment  81 his afterword, published with the second edition of his book Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, eight years after the original publication. His multiple returns to his central interlocutor Catarina and her story forbid the possibility of “any false sense of closure or certainty” (ibid.: 371) and allow him to learn from the “inexhaustible richness” of these encounters (ibid.: 371). Biehl’s multiple returns to his fieldsite, both literal and figurative, reveal the present as “embattled and unfinished” (ibid.: 370). As I was summoned to reflect on a fieldsite I had not visited in person in more than ten years, I was inspired to think about the past on those terms as well –​as open, unfinished, and in flux. Listening to the ethnographic past has enabled me to perceive it in its dynamism, in its continual potential to disturb and punctuate the present. It has made tangible the silences in the past, as well as their sonorous traces in the present. Ramona’s testimony left such a sonorous trace, making the past audible in the present. Moreover, by articulating what could previously not be expressed, it had the effect of illustrating moments of the past as silence. “If loss is known only by what remains of it, then the politics and ethics of mourning lie in the interpretation of what remains –​how remains are produced and animated, how they are read and sustained”, write David Eng et al. (2003: 2). Such openness to the past resists the impulse to “create fixed and totalizing narratives” from fleeting images of the past (ibid.: 2). My ethnographic ear to the past was mediated by long-​term friendships that acted as musical strings. Once vibrating, they touched and rewrote both present and past. It is these strings of relationality that connect spatially and temporally disparate moments, the ethnographic past and present. Independently and collectively evolving lives and destinies –​my own and my interlocutors’ –​helped me understand the ethnographic present in what Eng et al. (2003: 4) call the present’s “ongoing and open relationship with the past”.7 Since writing the chapter “Sonorous Silence” in my book, I have felt the limits of ethnographic fieldwork as a medium for enabling listening to the sonority of silences. My optimistic view of ethnography was shattered by Ramona’s testimony. Instead, I sat with disenchantment, understood not only as the absence of enchantment but the violence of being disappointed by something we loved and believed in (Stainova 2021). I sat in silence: silence not only as the absence of sound, but as a lack of awareness. It was a silence only revealed to be silence retroactively, once the traces of what I had not heard in the past came to the surface in the form of an interlocutor’s words in the present. If enchantment took place in the ebullience of sonority, disenchantment was veiled in silence as a metaphor for what I could not hear. Silence was also the visceral and corporeal response to disenchantment. Listening to silence helped me understand my ethnographic responsibility to the past as an insistence on keeping my senses open to the shifting and dynamic nature of the past, an aspiration to compensate for the inevitable gaps in my ethnographic sensorium at any given moment.

82  Yana Stainova I experienced the process of working through the violence of silence and disenchantment as a form of mourning. In “Mourning and Melancholia”, Freud writes that “mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, and ideal, and so on” (1917: 243). I was mourning the violence done to another person and how this would mark the rest of her life; how this violence was inscribed in a system that perpetuated and enabled such violence; the loss of a certain degree of innocence; the loss of trust; a lost moment when I could have listened to the surreptitious violence. Finally, I was mourning the loss of some aspects of a theoretical framework and concept –​enchantment –​that I had believed in. Fred Moten asks us to think about “how mourning sounds” (2003: 66). Sometimes, it sounds like silence. As disenchantment, my own and that of my interlocutors, started to arise in response to encounters with abuse and violence, I was overcome by bouts of regret and cynicism about my theoretical frameworks and doubts whether they had, in some way, contributed to my incapacity to properly discern the nascent violence in my fieldsite. If I had not participated in the suspension of disbelief that accompanied enchantment, would I have had a more discerning eye for the dynamics of power and violence that were taking place in the field?8 Would I have been able to hear the silence?

Attentiveness The disenchantment and disillusionment that trails in the wake of states of enchantment colliding with structural violence raises questions of ethnographic attentiveness. It is commonly understood that an anthropologist’s ethical duties extend well beyond what is dictated by ethics boards, the institutional entities that oversee our research practices. On the one hand, these responsibilities are intellectual. They are about choosing a conceptual lens that would lead us to ask questions and articulate interpretations that undo systems of power and coloniality (Simpson 2014) and to foreground “power, domination, and the injustices of existing hierarchical systems” (Dominguez 2006: 933). They are also about how we choose to represent our interlocutors in our writing and about making our positionality in the field transparent in our ethnographies.9 However, perhaps, where an anthropologist’s greatest burden of responsibility lies is beyond the borders of the written page, beyond what is made visible in our academic products: it is in sustaining, nurturing, and remaining responsive, long after our research is over, to the relationships that underpin our ethnographic labors.10 It is at the scale of interpersonal relationships that our knowledge is produced. It is at the same scale that our main responsibility lies. “How do we research situations of flux and fragmentation even as we are experientially and structurally part of the story?” Kay Warren asks in 2002 (391). I read this question in two ways: on the one hand, it acknowledges

In the wake of disenchantment  83 that as anthropologists, we are exposed to the dynamics of violence and precariousness that mark our fieldsites (see also Maček 2018). On the other hand, it emphasizes the fact that anthropologists frequently hail from countries in the Global North that contribute to the instability in the very regions being studied.11 Throughout my research career, I have felt in more accentuated form either one dimension of this question or the other. In my first forays of fieldwork, finding myself in an unstable country with a high homicide rate, I was tempted to exaggerate my own shared vulnerability with my interlocutors. With age and experience, I have come to lend less weight to such moments of shared precariousness. At the end of the day, in my own ethnographic research, my access to stability was incomparable, and shared vulnerability described only brief moments in time. Today, as I am spatially and experientially separated from my sites of fieldwork due to the pandemic, I feel more acutely how the global inequalities I participate in (and to a large extent benefit from) exacerbate the precariousness in which my own interlocutors find themselves and contribute to the relative safety I live in. In other words, “how I am structurally part of the story”, as Warren puts it. When I left Venezuela at the end of fieldwork, I stretched the bonds of friendships that were as significant as any other ones I had made in my adult life. On the other end of those threads stood people who would enter increasingly precarious contexts, as their lives were hit by a humanitarian crisis, forced migration, and institutional violence. Over the years, I listened to my friends mourn the deaths of their parents to preventable diseases, made lethal only by the absence of a stable medical system. I contended with abuses that had taken place in my fieldsite. My responses to pleas for financial support always felt insufficient compared to the enormity of the task at hand.12 “[…] anthropologists learn about systems by entering into relationships with those whose social life they were studying”, Marilyn Strathern reflects (1995: 13). The difficult consequence of this beautiful way of building knowledge is that those very relationships then bear the pressure of the unequal global systems they are a part of. As global inequalities played out on the scale of the interpersonal, their violence was more palpable, their horror greater. Even when first articulating the concept of enchantment, I knew that it had important value in describing, but also protecting, certain forms of experience. I tried to portray the concept as capacious enough to hold disenchantment and disappointment, as well as their dynamic fluctuations. In addition to constituting a moment of being moved deeply by music, enchantment is also rooted in the everyday labor of working toward a goal. More than a product of my own theoretical fancy, the concept of enchantment holds the labor, efforts, and dreams of many El Sistema musicians. These dreams are not ones I, nor anyone, can decide to take for granted. They are the fragile, yet stubbornly persistent, efforts of people on the margins of Venezuelan society to build livable futures. An exercise in ethnographic attentiveness

84  Yana Stainova was to listen to these finer tunes and melodies, frequently drowned out by structural forces. Such was my experience of listening and playing “El Cigarrillo” with Ana and Julia. Philosopher Amia Srinivasan reminds us that it is impossible to always strive to resolve the “putative mismatch between individual lives and political commitments” (Haas and Srinivasan 2021). Attending ethnographically to my interlocutors’ enchantment as a mode of dreaming taught me that there is a valuable aspirational quality to ideas and ways of life that are oriented toward the future, toward what is beyond our (current) lived experiences, both individual and communal. For my interlocutors, the aspirational quality of everyday life was an animating aspect of experience. Perhaps, we can gesture at something similar about the modes of academic concept-​making that point toward a future. Thinking of attentiveness as a modality of ethnographic responsibility that recognizes forms of relationality in flux also points us to the inherent instability of the concepts that emerge from these relationships. Rather than a position of certainty and stability, ethnographic attentiveness looks more like a commitment to listen and acknowledge the ethnographer’s own experience of the gaps between aspiration and practice. Engaging with aspirational concepts requires courage, a hope in the future, but also intellectual flexibility, a fine choreography between suspending ­disbelief while remaining cognizant of systemic violence. An aspect of this flexibility is the acknowledgment that concepts need not be all-​encompassing but, much like my interlocutors’ enchantment, ambiguous and in a dynamic relationship with disenchantment. Translated to anthropology, our efforts at concept-​making might require that we acknowledge the gap between conceptual aspirations and our lived experience, attempting to bridge it slowly, always incompletely. It might require that we reconsider and nuance previous frameworks without needing to discard them entirely. The long temporal horizon of our relationships with our interlocutors presupposes that over the years new challenges will arise in response to evolving forms of structural violence and to the audibility of certain voices augmented by emerging social justice frameworks. This sociopolitical dynamism by necessity evokes shifting responses from anthropologists and interlocutors alike. For example, perhaps what had given power to #MeToo movements in Venezuela’s El Sistema was the progress of these movements on a global scale. As the movements gained momentum, they gave women in Venezuela the vocabulary to make sense of their past abuse, denounce it publicly, and seek institutional reform. As violence appears from the folds of history and gains visibility in the present, I felt new claims of accountability were made on my scholarship, interpretations, and theoretical frameworks. Most importantly, I was faced with my own inability to sense currents of violence that underwrote my fieldwork –​or the limits of my ethnographic attentiveness, both conceptual and methodological.

In the wake of disenchantment  85

Conclusion: a constellation of concepts In this chapter, I offer the notion of attentiveness to conversations about ethnographic responsibility. Attentiveness emphasizes the dynamic, always-​ incomplete project of relating to others, especially our interlocutors. I illustrate how articulating notions of ethnographic responsibility require responsiveness to others, to the past, and to our own personal and intellectual transformations. Such attentiveness is only possible when we are self-​reflexive in a way that admits our, by definition, imperfect ethnographic positionality and the ways in which we are implicated in –​and often reproduce –​dynamics of power. An orientation of ethnographic attentiveness emerges from the scholarly critique of the principles of “no-​harm” that undergirds our discipline (Bell 2014) and asks us to reimagine our ethnographic positionality as a way of being responsive to the various impacts we have in the field. Ethnographic attentiveness is built on supportive and transformative forms of relationality but is also riddled with the gaps, unheard silences, blind spots, and mistakes that characterize all relationships. Assuming that these gaps will be there because of shifting intellectual paradigms, social dynamics, and the slipperiness of human relationality may hone our instincts and sensibilities to respond to them. Our ability to act upon certain intellectual commitments is enhanced –​but also curtailed by –​processes of personal transformation. Ever since I began my ethnographic practice at the age of 23, I have matured intellectually and emotionally, personally and professionally, each of these overlapping fields reinforcing one another. As a result, I have undergone a gradual process of revising my personal and professional positionality and, consequently, my research. For someone like me, who hails from Bulgaria, a country still undergoing its own slow racial and gender awakening, these growing pangs have been challenging. I continue to struggle with the gap between my own upbringing in a postcommunist context in the 1990s and the intellectual social justice currents that I became a part of in North America in the 2000s. My expanded life and academic experience have brought my capacity for social discernment closer to my intellectual frameworks. Nevertheless, I am still hesitant to speak and write with absolute certainty, for I know that in the future I might need to revisit or nuance my position on a subject. I see the ability to admit that I was –​and will be –​wrong, as crucial to articulating a dynamic and flexible notion of ethnographic attentiveness. This flexibility is part of a commitment to unlearning (brown 2020) that is essential to efforts to decolonize the academy. Our knowledge of one another is always incomplete and acknowledging each other is a process that occurs over multiple instances in time (Das 2006: 6). With each new instance of acknowledgment, new and unforeseen pressures are exercised on our ethnographic interpretations in response to dynamically changing circumstances and evolving personal and interpersonal

86  Yana Stainova dynamics. Rather than discarding concepts and theoretical frameworks that fall short of capturing newly emerging ethnographic complexities, I am interested in the process of growing constellations of concepts that complement one another. In the examples I shared, rethinking enchantment in conjunction with the related concepts of disenchantment and attentiveness to dynamically unfolding ethnographic circumstances was a necessary corrective to remapping the topography of memory. In writing about the life work of anthropologist June Nash, Kay Warren discusses the concept of “repositioning without capitulation” as defining of Nash’s intellectual orientation (2005). In my reading of the term, it describes a mode of doing scholarship that is dynamic and responsive to the demands of changing political and social dynamics, posing challenges to stable academic paradigms. The notion of intellectual and methodological repositioning implies a commitment to consistently revising our intellectual orientation. Embracing repositioning implies having a clear eye for the contradictions and sometimes irresolvable complexities that animate our fieldsites. Moreover, it perhaps implies cultivating academic spaces that encourage ambiguity and admitting that we were –​and will be –​wrong, rather than valorizing unassailable arguments that by assumption are also immutable and permanent. Without taking away from the rigor and commitment to social justice, contemplating our own always-​ incomplete process of ethnographic repositioning perhaps requires forgiveness –​of ourselves and others.13 I am not advocating for a totalizing forgiveness that strips us of responsibility, but one that allows for reimagining our ethnographic practices and commitments differently in the future, in conversation with others, in response to what we have learned and unlearned. As part of the effort to bridge ethnographic practices and aspirational concepts, I return here to the notion of care, so widespread as a concept we encounter in “the field” and often so far removed from how we organize our academic spaces. In the context of academia, it would manifest in making space for modes of collective learning and growth that avoid harsh criticism, blame, and shaming (see Cheng 2016). Care, more so than chastising, creates fertile ground for intellectual flexibility, allows us to acknowledge the limits of our ethnographic attentiveness, and encourages us to persistently look for ways to expand it through newly emerging conceptual, interpersonal, and intellectual constellations.

Notes To protect the anonymity of my interlocutors, all names are pseudonyms. 1 2 I am also influenced here by Zadie Smith’s description of attunement as the confluence of circumstances that unlock our capacity to appreciate the beauty of something we previously found uninteresting (2012). 3 See Bahar and Dooley (2019).

In the wake of disenchantment  87 4 Ethnomusicologists have explored the connection between music and memory. See Thomas Turino (1999) and David Samuels (2004). 5 “Responsibility.” Merriam-​Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-​Webster. www. merr​iam-​webs​ter.com/​dic​tion​ary/​res​pons​ibil​ity. Accessed on February 25, 2022. 6 Many stories, like Ramona’s, inspired an article in The Guardian by two prominent music scholars (see Baker and Cheng 2021), an important step in the direction of holding accountable both El Sistema and the larger system of injury that made abuses like hers possible and invisible. 7 This is a formulation that the authors use in writing about melancholia and I transpose to the field of ethnography. 8 Geoffrey Baker’s warning about enchantment as a theoretical lens has contributed to this intellectual preoccupation (see “Enchantment and disenchantment”). 9 For a recent example, see Accardi et al. (2021). 10 This formulation is inspired by conversations with Laura McTighe. 11 Warren is based in the United States, a country that contributed to the instability in Guatemala, where she conducted her research. 12 For more on the efforts and powerlessness of anthropologists to change the circumstances our interlocutors live in, specifically situations of war, see Maček (2018). 13 In writing about forgiveness, I am inspired by the work of William Cheng (2016), who calls for cultivating care within the academy –​not only a notion we write about but also, essentially, a defining feature of our relationships to other scholars.

References Accardi, Dean, Binish Ahmed, Omer Aijazi, Nosheen Ali, Mona Bhan, Dilnaz Boga, Haley Duschinski, Mohamad Junaid, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Hafsa Kanjwal, Bhavneet Kaur, Deepti Misri, Goldie Osuri, Cabeiri Robinson, Mehroosh Tak, and Ather Zia “Statement on anthropologist Saiba Varma.” Medium (September 19, 2021). https://​med​ium.com/​@Rese​arch​ethi​csin​Kash​mir/​statem​ent-​on-​ant​ hrop​olog​ist-​saiba-​ varma-​f1bd0474d470 Bahar, Dany and Meagan Dooley. “Venezuela refugee crisis to become the largest and most underfunded in modern history.” Brookings (December 9, 2019). www.brooki ​ n gs.edu/ ​ b log/ ​ u p- ​ f ront/ ​ 2 019/ ​ 1 2/​ 0 9/​ v enezu​ e la-​ r efu​ g ee-​ c ri​ sis-​to-​ become-​the-​largest-​and-​most-​underfunded-​in-​modern-​history/​ Baker, Geoffrey. “Enchantment and disenchantment.” https://​geof​fbak​ermu​sic. wordpr​ess.com/​el-​sist​ema-​the-​sys​tem/​el-​sist​ema-​blog/​ench​antm​ent-​and-​dis​ench​ antm​ent. Accessed on March 21, 2022. Baker, Geoffrey and William Cheng. “The ‘open secret’ of sexual abuse in Venezuela’s famous youth orchestra program is finally exposed.” The Washington Post (May 27, 2021). www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/​opini​ons/​2021/​05/​27/​venezu​ ela-​me-​too-​yo-​te-​creo-​ sexual-​abuse-​el-​sistema-​youth-​orchestra/​ Bell, Kirsten. “Resisting commensurability: Against informed consent as an anthropological virtue.” American Anthropologist, 116(3) (2014): 511–​522. Biehl, João. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013. brown, adrienne m. We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2020.

88  Yana Stainova Butler, Judith. The Force of Non-​Violence. London and New York: Verso, 2020. Cheng, William. Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Cox, Aimee Meredith. Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Das, Veena. Life and Words. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006. Das, Veena. “The Boundaries of the ‘we’: Cruelty, responsibility and forms of life.” Critical Horizons, 17(2) (2016): 168–​185. Dominguez, Virginia. “Commentary on Kulick, Don. ‘Theory in furs: masochist anthropology’.” Current Anthropology, 47(6) (2006): 933–​952. Eng, David L., David Kazanjian, and Judith Butler (eds.). Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. “Etymology of responsible.” Online Etymology Dictionary. www.ety​monl​ine.com/​ word/​resp​onsi​ble. Accessed on February 25, 2022. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and melancholia.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, translated and edited by James Strachey, 243–​258. London, England: Hogarth Press, 1917. Haas, Lidija. “A woman and a philosopher: An interview with Amia Srinivasan.” The Paris Review (September 22, 2021). www.the​pari​srev​iew.org/​blog/​2021/​09/​ 22/​a-​ woman-​and-​a-​philosopher-​an-​interview-​with-​amia-​srinivasan/​ High, Holly. “Melancholia and anthropology.” American Ethnologist, 38(2) (2011): 217–​233. Maček, Ivana. “Experience, empathy, and flexibility: On participant observation in deadly fields.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of Death, edited by Antonius C. G. M. Robben, 237–​248. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2018. Moten, Fred. “Black Mo’nin’.” In Loss: The Politics of Mourning, edited by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, 59–​ 77. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. Mulla, Sameena. “Ten things about truth and responsibility.” Anthropology News (December 20, 2021). www.anthr​opol​ogy-​news.org/​artic​les/​ten-​thi​ ngs-​about-​truth-​and-​ responsibility/​ Nancy, Jean-​Luc. Listening. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2007. Reese, Ashanté M. Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-​Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, DC. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Samuels, David William. Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2004. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1987. Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Smith, Zadie. “Some notes on attunement.” The New Yorker (December 9, 2012). www.newyor​ker.com/​magaz​ine/​2012/​12/​17/​some-​notes-​on-​att​unem​ent Stainova, Yana. “Enchantment as method.” Anthropology and Humanism, 44(2) (2019): 214–​230. Stainova, Yana. Sonorous Worlds: Musical Enchantment in Venezuela. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2021. Stewart, Kathleen. “Weak theory in an unfinished world.” Journal of Folklore Research, 45(1) (2008): 71–​82. Strathern, Marilyn. The Relation. Cambridge, England: Prickly Pear Press, 1995.

In the wake of disenchantment  89 Ticktin, Miriam I. Casualties of Care. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011. Turino, Thomas. “Signs of imagination, identity, and experience: A Peircian semiotic theory for music.” Ethnomusicology, 43(2) (1999): 221–​255. Warren, Kay B. “Toward an anthropology of fragments, instabilities, and incomplete transitions.” In Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change, edited by Carol J. Greenhouse, Elizabeth Mertz and Kay B. Warren, 379–​392. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Warren, Kay B. “Repositioning without capitulation: Discussions with June Nash on identity, activism and politics.” Critique of Anthropology, 25(3) (2005): 217–​228.

5 The Vulnerability Vortex Health, exclusion, and social responsibility A. David Napier and Anna-​Maria Volkmann

Social determinants of health The past few years have, rightly, witnessed significant progress in our understanding of the importance of the social determinants of health (Marmot 2015; Marmot et al. 2008, 2014, 2015; Marmot and Wilkinson 2005; Wilkinson and Marmot 2003; Wilkinson and Pickett 2010; World Health Organization 2013). There is hardly a public health department in any country, state, region, or city that does not now at least cast a casual reference to the social determinants and the importance of “how people are born, grow, work, live, and age” on health outcomes; and even the World Economic Forum has adopted the concept as foundational. As noncommunicable diseases outpace infectious diseases in global mortality and morbidity (even in light of COVID-​19), we increasingly must come to terms with the fact that health is made or lost largely outside the health sector. But changing our understanding of the broad influences of our lives on health has proven more challenging at the level of policy. Less attention has been paid to culture in particular, even though The Lancet firmly acknowledged within its biomedical focus that “the systematic neglect of culture in health and health care is the single biggest barrier to the advancement of the highest standard of health worldwide” (Napier et al. 2014). While the use of “culture” as a concept in health contexts is often considered problematic by anthropologists themselves –​out of a rightful fear of stereotyping, it here refers not solely to ethnicity or identity and group affiliation, but to any and all shared conventional understandings (ibid.); that is, to those contexts within which we make meaning, enact shared values, and establish laws that guide what is “appropriate” and “normal” (Napier 2014). At the same time as the social determinants of health have become central to our understanding of how health is created, Health-​in-​All-​Policies (HiAP) approaches have been gaining traction both at local and national levels in governments around the world: not only because “policies made in all sectors can have a profound effect on population health and health equity”, but because promoting equity across sectors contributes significantly to DOI: 10.4324/9781003332077-6

The Vulnerability Vortex  91 “social inclusion and security” (World Health Organization 2013). Thus, being mindful of “culture”, and “cultures as practices of shared values” in particular, is not an outdated fancy, but a necessity if we are to make the shift from disease prevention to health promotion. For our shared conventional understandings shape our approaches to health policy—​meaning that the way we frame human suffering guides how we define the limits of caring, our responsibilities for caring, and even what caring itself means. Indeed, such values are foundational and determinant of our health and well-​being (Fischer, Napier, Johnson, et al. 2021). But in spite of ongoing calls for HiAP approaches (Ståhl 2018), demonstrating the profound impact of our shared conventional understandings on health policy has been lacking, making ongoing calls for collaboration across sectors infrequently successful. There are many reasons for this failure: working across boundaries requires various kinds of risk-​taking and trust-​making –​traits that are especially challenged where governments struggle to meet obligations on limited resources; where siloed policy sectors remain entrenched in administrative prestige hierarchies that encourage seeing the practices of others as less important; and where administration itself grows logarithmically while the numbers of those actually providing care is static or even plummets proportionately. Moreover, HiAP policy initiatives are especially hindered by health policy discussions that become plagued by concerns about cutting costs. Indeed, with jobs on the line, the threat of cutbacks does nothing but push wary employees into working to contract –​following one’s job description quite rigorously so as to remain employed. It is, just to give one example, hard for nurses working on hospital wards to view transportation as a high-​order health challenge –​that is, as an immediate challenge to hospital care –​when night shifts reduce numbers of frontline workers to often dangerous levels for patients, and where staff, therefore, must prove themselves above and beyond normal skill levels. Such cross-​sectoral considerations have, however, been ongoing for those arguing that health is created or lost outside of health care systems. In fact, HiAP directives can be traced back to ideas introduced during the Finnish presidency of the European Union in 2006. And acknowledgment of the consequences of how we live on how we care were already present in the Declaration of Alma Ata (World Health Organization 1978), its focus being primary care. As Rifkin pointed out in her 40-​year review of the historic meeting, The Declaration made Primary Health Care (PHC) the official health policy of all members countries. Emerging from the conference was the consensus that health was a human right based on the principles of equity and community participation. Alma Ata broadened the perception of health beyond doctors and hospitals to social determinants and

92  David Napier and Anna-Maria Volkmann social justice. In the following years implementing this policy confronted many challenges. (2018) Moreover, the document also tied community engagement centrally to the ability of any health care initiative to achieve success –​a fact that has challenged global health not to lose sight of the role communities play in both creating health vulnerability and in producing health resilience. Alma Ata, therefore, not only formally endorsed the foundational role of culture (as shared conventional understandings) in creating or limiting health resilience, but codified to this day the critical role played by social contexts in health promotion (Bedson and Abramowitz 2021). So why, after more than four decades, have we done less well at bridging sectors than we might have? Yes, scarce resources and entrenched cultures of practice provide two explanations –​they’re necessary in understanding a lack in cross-​sectoral responsibility and why we’ve been held back. But are they sufficient? To understand why we have done less well at promoting collaboration and accepting responsibility for that in the real world, it is necessary to understand cultures not only as shared conventional understandings, but also as sets of practices that determine and moderate what we value and what we consider ourselves responsible for as health advocates. For sharing practices and levels of empathy are not only subject to changing beliefs, but to changing views about those we are responsible for serving –​that is, about insiders and outsiders; about who gets included on our shift; about where our caring ends and someone else’s begins. That is, “culture” invariably frames the moral economy of health care provision. For this reason, social determinants should be reframed hereon as “sociocultural”. Because equity is directly related to social inclusion, which determines how we distribute what we have available, especially in a crisis when resources are strained. For at such times social groups can become much stricter about who qualifies for increasingly scarce resources. And when that happens the otherwise underrepresented may find themselves excluded completely as systems close their own doors on responsibility.

Structural violence Competitive social systems by definition support structures of advantage and disadvantage; the best do better, the rest less well. This rule holds fast not only across examples of crass self-​interest (where inequity leads to real bodily harm). It also holds fast among those who broadcast a personal devotion to equality and equity, while energetically engaged in their own prestige hierarchies. But there is no sense in talking about equity from a position of safety; for few have the moral high ground when it comes to fairness, including even many working toward creating an equitable and just world.

The Vulnerability Vortex  93 By definition, provider environments are themselves quite uneven, leading to internalized prestige hierarchies that exaggerate charitable actions, as institutions require everyone to demonstrate value (Pfeiffer 2003). Under such pressure, any one of us may find ourselves focusing more on professional advancement than on making an equity difference, blaming structures rather than ourselves so as to hide the unfair security that can make it easier for us to speak out—​to have and “give voice” as we say. As Fanon once concisely put it, “taking means in nearly every case being taken” (1966: 182). Thus, promoting equity means much more than “fighting for rights and equality”. It also means being aware of one’s own security –​acknowledging how one’s own views of personal achievement, and the prestige hierarchies that facilitate personal advancement, occur within cultures of practice that are achievement focused. Such exclusivity –​no matter how much we may support affirmative action on disadvantage –​does not reduce our own dependence on those very prestige hierarchies that are by definition exclusive. It exacerbates them. That is, our silos of practice distract us chronically from HiAP approaches; because our achievement values do little to alter the landscape of health responsibility, no matter how much we rhetorically argue about “caring”. In short, culture is not only critical but unavoidably central to understanding the limits of equity. But the playing field itself is only half of the picture, if an important half. The other part concerns the way social stressors on that field at a given moment limit some of us, while advancing others (Farmer 2004). That is, resilience and vulnerability to adversity are not fixed; for the impacts of inequity are variable and subject not only to advantage and disadvantage, but to often variable daily practices of inclusion and exclusion. They are not stigmas or permanent conditions, but dynamic processes, in which distinct sets of cultural, social, environmental, and biological risk factors come together to make it more likely than not that a person will experience poorer health in the future. That is how we define vulnerability. Because these drivers are themselves not static, so too are our ongoing needs to step back and observe how they are working at any given moment. Resilience is not only an inherent strength; and vulnerability is not a fixed stigma. Importantly, vulnerability occurs across a spectrum—​ a moving border defined at any moment by the effects of combined stressors. Even those with significant social security, by example, can be made surprisingly vulnerable from a health perspective when certain factors combine and fuel one another unexpectedly. Those labelled in some presumptive definition to be health vulnerable (say, the elderly, for example) may rise up to be far more resilient than any of us might have imagined, especially if they live independent lives, have stable pensions, and are not forced into contagious social environments–​as we witnessed repeatedly throughout the COVID-​19 pandemic. Because resilience and vulnerability are not fixed states, they occur for diverse yet specific reasons that we need to devote ourselves to understanding.

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Resilient

Somewhat vulnerable

Vulnerable

Very vulnerable

Vulnerability spectrum

Presence of social and cultural factors

Biological risk factors

Figure 5.1 “The Vulnerability Spectrum”.

Some, considered vulnerable in one context, may emerge as resilient –​even innovative, if not path breaking –​in another. Work on African American resilience provides one important example (Graham et al. 2020). Here, the assumption that social disadvantage should give rise to higher losses in terms of mental health and well-​being is undermined by the reality that throughout COVID-​ 19 African Americans have had better mental health outcomes that whites, and much better outcomes when low-​income Blacks and whites are compared. This is a long-​standing observation that goes back at least as far as Stack’s landmark work on poor families (1974). Indeed, that is the hopeful part: that we learn something from the challenging nature of vulnerability that can help us become more resilient. This acknowledgment –​of the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion –​is perhaps most critical in what we call “a health crisis” such as COVID-​19; for these are moments when our sense of responsibility is tested most. A crisis is named as such because, when resources and systems are stressed, inequalities are less frequently levelled than exaggerated. That is, a crisis is defined not only by an actual event, but by resource scarcity and the pressing awareness of pending vulnerability. That is why people

The Vulnerability Vortex  95 so often stock domestic provisions when a crisis is pending; why hoarding toilet paper is an excellent way of measuring social insecurity and potential inequity. It’s also why the first response of policymakers is often to invoke equality and the notion that we are somehow “all in this together” –​even if we know deep down we are not. A crisis by definition challenges our sense of responsibility and what is fair. Depending on the severity of a crisis, the size and scope of what is considered “outside” our remit can, therefore, grow alarmingly as inclusion criteria become more rigorous. In times of true stress, outsiders may not only include those we see as foreign, but those living on the other side of the tracks, or even across the very streets on which we ourselves live. So, without acknowledging the impact of stress on shared conventional understandings –​that is, on “culture”, the idea that structures are somehow actively or latently “violent” becomes meaningless; for structures themselves are dynamic, allowing broader inclusion in moments of safety, but narrowing quickly under stress. So too are people, making attributing volition to structures a neat way of sidestepping hierarchy, while at the same time blurring one’s own advantage by lumping the microaggressions on which all hierarchies depend with outright criminal abuse. As Wacquant says in his critique of structural violence, the challenge of blaming structures is that such blame: conflates fully fledged domination with mere social disparity and then collapses forms of violence that need to be differentiated, such as physical, economic, political, and symbolic variants or those wielded by state, market, and other social entities...Nothing is gained by lumping under the same heading “steep grades of social inequality, including racism and gender inequality,” that may operate smoothly with the consent of the subordinate with, say, wife beating and ethnic rioting or “brute poverty” with, say, invasion and genocidal policies. (2004) The point being, that while inequality is a serious and critical variable in human vulnerability, social isolation may be more critical still. A health vulnerability assessment carried out by us with colleagues in Tianjin, China, by example, makes the importance of social isolation clear. Asked whether low income, unemployment, the absence of medical insurance, and/​or low rates of reimbursement (proxies for equality) negatively affected an individual’s experience of long-​term care, 34.5% of 229 individuals assessed in person and in depth said that these constraints on receiving equal care had an impact. When asked whether lack of community support, lack of friends and family support, and lack of social support (proxies for isolation and exclusion) negatively affected an individual’s experience of care, that percentage among the same cohort rose to a stunning 92.6% (Chen et al. 2019) –​that is, nearly everyone.

96  David Napier and Anna-Maria Volkmann Indeed, throughout our work on the sociocultural drivers of health vulnerability and resilience we have witnessed over and over the fundamental impact of social isolation, exclusion and inclusion, and social trust/​mistrust on human agency, as well as the “time poverty” readily evidenced when compounding risk factors limit human agency during calamity coping. Though much harder to measure than more traditional social determinants (e.g., education level, income, family background), these sociocultural factors are arguably more foundational and “determinant” when it comes to understanding health vulnerability and resilience. While equality is critical, it is, therefore, only the first step in addressing the more pervasive challenge of isolation and social exclusion and their crippling impact on health, especially where resources are strained and inequalities exaggerated. Because as inequalities increase under community stress, so too do the boundaries of the included tighten dramatically, leaving many to narrow the scope of their civil responsibilities, saving themselves and their families, as one would naturally expect, before looking across the street. As rationing of resources occurs, one would hope that those who need them least, or who may least benefit from them, would rightly be helped last (the principle of triage). But this is often not the case where definitions of inside (“us”) collapse from the global to the national; from national citizenry to regions, provinces, reservations, and states; from states to population centers such as cities; from cities to neighborhoods; and from neighborhoods to families, and even within families to which family members get attended to first. Moreover, social inclusion can shrink along lines of religion, race, ethnicity, gender, and even age. With decreased availability of essential goods, any one of these boundaries may be invoked in deciding who gets served and who does not. This dynamic shrinking during a crisis means that invisibility also inevitably increases (e.g., Ellison 1952; hooks 1994; Carter 2010), putting in jeopardy the health and well-​being of those somehow less “us”, however defined. Indeed, even the elderly may come to be seen as a burden on resources unless the moral and ethical definition of insider has guaranteed their inclusion. Likewise, those perceived as already having had more in the way of opportunity may also be pushed out, as when reactionary groups shun education, or encourage open revolt against those with more. In Cambodia, remember, key murder targets of Pol Pot were doctors themselves (Alvarez 2001). To understand vulnerability, therefore, one first needs to acknowledge the ways in which a crisis can create a run on resources. Second, and more important at the level of identifying those most vulnerable, it requires an acknowledgement of the need to assess potential vulnerability before a crisis –​that is, before overt exclusion is set in motion and a sense of responsibility for others diminishes. For once a crisis happens, those already on the edge can soon become difficult to find –​both because they increasingly lack capability and opportunity, and because (as a crisis continues to stress

The Vulnerability Vortex  97 resources and individual resilience) the notion of insider gets increasingly smaller (Napier 2003). Indeed, if “insiders” who lead communities are not aware of those among them who are most at risk before a crisis, they will be hard put to do much for the needy after the onset of a run on resources. This is why vulnerability assessing matters beforehand (Napier and Fischer 2020), and why reviewing what we can learn from our experiences of COVID-​19 is now critical –​especially before broadscale vaccination availability lulls us into ignoring the very exclusionary processes that fuel vulnerability and challenge resilience.

The Vulnerability Vortex Individuals within social systems become more or less resilient or vulnerable depending on compounded challenges that fuel one another and limit human capability, opportunity, and motivation (Michie et al. 2014). This means not only that the boundary between resilience and vulnerability shifts, depending on the presence and cumulative effect of specific factors. It also means that the possibility of engaging in behavior change is determined by social factors that affect any group’s identity. Indeed, this is precisely where the question of social responsibility intersects with cultural identity; for as the definition of what constitutes an “insider” shrinks, so too does accessing resources become more difficult for the excluded. That is, not only are the effects of multiple and diverse risk factors compounded in creating vulnerability, but the growing alienation also compounds incapability and shrinks opportunity. Agency itself may even wholly disappear once one crosses the vulnerability threshold; for in real time, risk factors compound one another, eventually pushing any one of us into calamity coping where the very thing that may get us in the end is eighth or ninth or tenth on our list of immediate concerns, if it makes that list at all. Draw any line you want across a list of heterogenous risk factors; add new columns of economic, psychological, or any other factor domain; compound multiple factors in a single column; and one can easily create what we call “case definitions” of vulnerability. These are the prevailing archetypes in a given sociocultural setting in which compounding factors severely limit if not eliminate anyone’s capability to self-​actualize. For life is not a randomized control trial in which variables are eliminated to determine pure causal mechanisms. It is a messy, inchoate, and always variable thing in which diverse factors have compounding impacts on human agency. Set these compounding factors within a crisis context in which resources become scarce and it is easy to understand the dynamic ways in which a person can be pushed into becoming vulnerable. For as ideas about who we are become increasingly exclusive, so too do the vulnerabilities of the most challenged become hidden. Indeed, in a crisis, community leaders are sometimes last to recognize true vulnerability, because those experiencing it may

98  David Napier and Anna-Maria Volkmann

Biological factors

Social factors

Geographical factors

Cultural factors

Age

Education level

Structure of neighbourhood

Food habits/culture

Health history

Access to care

Environmental givens

Activity attitudes

Herd immunity

Access to resources

Distance work-home

Trust in government/health care

Mental health

Employment status

Isolation

Stigma

Immuno-compromised

Health insurance

Access to food

Rules about sharing

Chronic co-morbidities

Economic status

Access to water

Attitude towards illness

Acute comorbidities

Home environment

Availability of transport

Altruism

Genetic factors

Community integration

Access to green spaces

Levels of self-interest

Figure 5.2 Case Definitions of Vulnerability.

have already been redefined as “other”. The normal tropes of governments and humanitarian agencies about “working with communities” and their “leaders” is, thus, challenged by what stress itself does to local values, and how that stress impacts shared understandings as well as practices of sharing (Harrell-​Bond 1986). Refugee camps provide a distressing example (Long 1993). As community representatives more often than not represent majority populations within camps, those who lack representation may find themselves sidelined and most vulnerable. Equally vexing, camps set up in already challenged environments sometimes incites poor locals to compare themselves to arriving refugees (Chambers 1986), while assumptions about the sedentary nature of places of origin can lead to confusion about those who migrate (Bakewell 1999). Broad scale social welfare must, then, be promoted before a crisis if we are to assure that social bonds can hold when stress seems insurmountable. John Maynard Keynes called the effects of such unpreparedness the “Paradox of Thrift” –​that tendency of leaders and their policymakers to cut resources at a time when the public sector cannot step in to make up for the withdrawal of assistance from the state in crisis (Skidelsky 2009). Keynes labelled this “paradoxical” because it is precisely at such crisis moments –​when people need equity assurance –​that those who profess to be working in the interest of citizens are paradoxically withdrawing support. In short, the decline in social welfare needs to be halted in moments of stress, even at the risk of state bankruptcy, if the public is meant to shoulder suffering in a crisis. Otherwise, the culture of “us”, however defined, shrinks

The Vulnerability Vortex  99 alarmingly; for those who claim to represent “us” must ensure a destabilized public that equity prevails within a culture (national, state, local, whatever) –​ not only in resource-​rich moments, but in moments of stress. Perceived economic efficiency so fails in a crisis because it uses “normal” frameworks to determine what is and is not expendable, and in so doing renders systems of care ill-​prepared to sustain equity when social stability is challenged. That is, neoliberalism thrives in contexts where welfare preparedness can be eviscerated in the interest of short-​term gain, but fails fabulously almost everywhere else. Like resilience, vulnerability, therefore, depends on the local context in which it emerges. Those already disadvantaged may be drawn in more quickly (the elderly, those with preexisting conditions, the immunocompromised), but even those presumed otherwise resilient may also fall prey to becoming vulnerable, as in COVID-​19, when job-​secure doctors and penthouse dwellers sharing the same air in carbon neutral buildings fell victim also to the deadly virus. That is, a few compounded risk factors can catch out even those presumed to be most secure and resilient. Vulnerability, then, is a dynamic condition defined by inequity. It is like a vortex –​a maelstrom on the edges of which we struggle to make ends meet, but at whose center we quickly and uncontrollably descend into calamity coping –​a place where we may be all but denied the capability, the opportunity, or even the motivation to act at all.

Full social integration

Fully capable of behaviour change

Formal networks Complete agency

Socially fulfilled

Socially isolated

Community networks Belonging Vulnerability threshold Basic survival needs

Social exclusion/ alienation

Figure 5.3 The Vulnerability Vortex.

Agency spectrum

Integration spectrum

Self-actualization

Minimal or no agency

No options for behaviour change

100  David Napier and Anna-Maria Volkmann

Indigeneity and multiculturalism Because the identity of a community can narrow –​even collapse –​in a crisis, those given or claiming alternate identities are often put at risk. Ignatieff attributes this narrowing process to what he calls the “ordinary virtues” –​ things like tolerance and forgiveness, and trust and resilience, and caring and generosity (2017). These are virtues, he argues controversially, that are both natural to human beings, but also limited –​where the doors of the inn are flung open to help others, only to see those doors closed once the inn is full. But this shifting of the lines of inclusivity is not only fueled by resource scarcity; it is also fueled by a need to rationalize that rationing. As any crisis signals (and is signaled by) a run on resources, minorities are by definition placed at risk –​not only because they may be increasingly deemed “outsiders”, but because this rejection displaces them internally. It’s an old problem for those internally displaced. And it’s this dynamic change that Fassin describes as moral reasoning (2011) –​a practice in which we objectify those “othering” processes that can limit our ways of defining care, even excluding the very groups we had once worked to assist, and for which we felt previously responsible (Ticktin 2011, 2017). But accepting the reality of such processes forces another uncomfortable conclusion –​this being that, while multiculturalism may thrive where resources are abundant, it can be threatened by exclusion when they are not. For defined as “other”, even indigenous groups may be excluded as societies adopt arbitrary but stringent inclusion criteria, as when homeless migrants are told to seek services in their places of origin, or when First Nation peoples in the United States are referred to The Indian Health Service. This dynamic “othering” is also why some health care systems have mainstreamed previously separate health services. In Switzerland, for instance, the Hospitals for Equity movement (www.hospi​tals​4equ​ity.ch/​) is built around the notion that migrant needs are equity needs that we all share by degrees. Things like clinical competency, health communication, and understanding lived experience are needs that every user of services has, but that some require diverse equity measures to engage. Here, “othering” systems are dissolved in an effort to assure that when resources are stressed, “othering” becomes more difficult. For if social stress shifts the goalpost on who is considered “us”, governing structures may, when resources are stressed, not only alienate, but further polarize, groups already at risk of exclusion. Indeed, such fragmentation of health care is especially acute within privatized migrant services, where money is lost or gained through profit-​driven inclusionary and exclusionary practices (Lethbridge 2017). In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt (1951) argued that the concept of the state is built on the assumption that it is there to protect citizens; that statelessness implies being unwelcomed; and that human rights interventions should apply specifically to those not attached to a nation.

The Vulnerability Vortex  101 While the idea is critical for protecting vulnerable migrants (as outlined by the Kampala Convention [2009]), it does less well at protecting internally displaced peoples (IDPs). For the latter are the presumed responsibility of states that, good or bad, are still recognized as such. States are autonomous, and their “internal affairs” are often, in turn, deemed beyond the bounds of global governance mechanisms that they, by the way, directly fund. Group vulnerability and social exclusion, therefore, must be parsed along migrant and internally displaced lines. This tendency to sidestep internal displacement as a “national” issue is captured by the idea of the “Fourth World” –​those marginalized groups within countries or societies whose members neither have full citizen rights, nor international human rights protection. “Fourth World” peoples are far too common in developing contexts, but they can emerge anywhere. For example, identifiable First Nation, indigenous, and aboriginal groups lacking autonomous rights qualify as members of the “Fourth World” if they lack a recognized, legally protected cultural identity. In a crisis, such groups risk becoming internally displaced persons and in turn excessively marginalized and excluded. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre there were already a decade ago more than 41 million IDPs globally, many of whom suffer from human right violations beyond the reach of global organizations (Asplet 2013). Indeed, as COVID-​19 pushes the most vulnerable into complete invisibility, the question becomes less one of determining how IDPs can garner the same human rights concerns that apply to migrant refugees, than of how we can identify those vulnerable IDPs at all. As so many global health and humanitarian aid organizations know too well, COVID-​19 has pushed many indigenous populations into absolute and abject obscurity (Fischer, Napier, and Johnson 2021). And when that happens, not only does humanitarian aid become a gesture with no target; but the most vulnerable of groups fall far into that darkness where no well-​ intentioned humanitarian response can be formulated intelligently (Napier and Fischer 2020). In the absence of being prepared in advance for a crisis, we stand helpless in the face of our own ignorance. COVID-​19 has revealed many such instances –​especially in countries where the poor have little or no opportunity to communicate online or via mobile technology.

Assessing vulnerability Not only must vulnerability, then, be seen as dynamic; making the vulnerable invisible means that understanding erasure must precede its manifestation. Moreover, because the most vulnerable are caught in calamity coping, the need to reach beyond standard forms of community engagement becomes critical for identifying those who become structurally excluded. That was the driver behind the development of the Health Vulnerability Assessment

102  David Napier and Anna-Maria Volkmann by University College London in the aftermath of working with the United Nations in Myanmar following the 2008 Cyclone Nargis disaster. Since that time, the strategy has been employed in a number of contexts where exclusion emerges as a driving determinant of neglect. These include, among others: rural and remote community health needs; natural disasters; noncommunicable diseases; migrant health; infectious disease outbreaks (COVID-​19); and antimicrobial resistance. Though the contexts are diverse, the common vulnerability challenges aren’t, being built upon now tried and tested assessment protocols that are ethnographically based and embedded within assistance programs and known health data sets (Post-​Nargis Periodic Review I 2008). But what is a Health Vulnerability Assessment (H-​VA)? It is an in-​depth data collection instrument designed to explore, define, and characterize the drivers of health vulnerability and resilience in specific populations, having a particular focus on social and cultural factors and how they impact biological health and human well-​ being. Ideally embedded in local stakeholder and community engagement efforts, the H-​VA is classified as a rapid assessment instrument, being oriented toward swiftly implementing actions and interventions based on assessment insights. It provides real-​world evidence on the ground that is both timely (synchronous with humanitarian relief efforts) and scalable (applicable to broad population health data). Moreover, it seeks to identify specific contexts within which action-​oriented health responses can emerge and be nourished. The core of the H-​VA is a semi-​structured interview protocol designed to elicit detailed information about various influences on a person’s health, well-​ being, and capacity to engage in resilient behaviors. The interview protocol is structured specifically for field-​based data collection by trained fieldworkers in local settings, but can be adapted to be remotely administered

Local stakeholders/ steering groups

H-VA insights

Action/intervention to reduce vulnerability/ promote resilience and health Study population/ local community

H-VA data collection

Figure 5.4 Health Vulnerability Assessment Procedure.

The Vulnerability Vortex  103 (e.g., online, via video conference where such technology is widely used). The interview itself addresses a range of topics relevant to health and well-​ being through a series of closed-​and open-​ended questions and prompts across three main domains of inquiry: • • •

a Formal (public sector) Domain a (local) Community Domain; and a Vulnerability (resilience) Domain

These domains parallel exactly the structure of the Vulnerability Vortex. In the Formal Domain, service utilization is explored to determine who gets served and who doesn’t; to establish if services are short-​or long-​term; and to see how processes of inclusion and exclusion are experienced in real time. The Community Domain, by contrast, examines so-​called social and cultural capital. In the absence of state welfare who steps in at local levels? That is, how do communities innovate under stress? What role might the private sector play in the absence of formal services (e.g., Wilkinson, A. et al. 2020)? Are innovations possible, and, if so, are they temporary or permanent? Are they exclusive or inclusive? Are they unhealthy or healthy? And if they are healthy, are they scalable? When criteria for inclusion become rigid or limited, what happens to those who are excluded? How do we find them? And how do we characterize the vulnerability threshold, so as to identify the sometimes small changes that can allow human agency to emerge again? Because vulnerability may strip the most vulnerable of their health agency, it stands to reason that no understanding of that threshold can be gained

Demographic survey questions

Diabetes vulnerability assessment– vulnerability domain (V) (V1) Illness understanding/interpretation

(VL1) Please explain your understanding of diabetes

(VL2) In your opinion, who do you think is most likely to get diabetes?

Formal domain • Service utilization patterns and barriers Community domain • Community structures, actions, and adaptations Vulnerability domain

(VL3) In your opinion, what makes people develop diabetes?

• External and internal stressors

Ethnographic observations

Figure 5.5 Key Components of the Vulnerability Assessment.

104  David Napier and Anna-Maria Volkmann without going out and finding those too vulnerable to self-​actualize and express their needs. Therefore, any assessment also includes demographic data that integrates ethnographic observations generated by fieldworkers into a comprehensive summary for each assessment participant. But how does one begin, especially in a crisis context where communities are in turmoil or have collapsed beyond recognition? This is actually not at all complex; for one can carry out assessments initially with a predefined cohort meeting well-​known criteria –​as, for example, the broadly recognized categories of vulnerability relevant to the protection of women and children. These include, as an example, such well-​established categories as (Post-Nargis Periodic Review I 2008): 1. Households with malnourished children 2. Households with school-​age children not attending school 3. Households with reduced utilization of resources (land, housing, income, etc.) 4. Households with children living in substandard accommodation 5. Female-​headed households with young children 6. Households in which main domestic carer is male 7. Households in which male carer is less than 18 years old 8. Households in which the main carer is a grandparent 9. Households that now consist of members of different households 10. Households with an adolescent girl who is unrelated to the head of household Though these recognized categories can form the foundation of an assessment, they are not its specific focus; for vulnerability manifests itself locally in unique ways that can only be unpacked through systematic fieldwork designed to identify and characterize the lived worlds of those most excluded. Its focus is on using these generic categories to identify locally valid experiences, with the goal of bringing lived experience to the level of evidence. In this way, a vulnerability assessment functions as a tool to assist relief efforts directly, by describing locally valid case definitions, and indicating immediate needs in a rapid manner. It is, in other words, a means of characterizing health responsibility in real time and identifying how health inclusion and exclusion takes place both under stress and at local levels; while at the formal level, it unpacks hierarchical and hegemonic forms of moral reasoning to understand how exclusionary process can unknowingly be fueled even by the very humanitarian practices designed to assist communities in need. Thus, participant recruitment is iterative and adjustments to the initial interview protocol during the course of the study occurs; for health advocated and so-​called “stakeholders” frequently shift over time as the

The Vulnerability Vortex  105 depths of local vulnerability and the pathways to regained resilience are revealed. In summary then, the aims of H-​VAs are to: • • • •

identify local factors that reduce or augment health vulnerabilities develop local case definitions of vulnerability and resilience extrapolate from participant cohort to wider population (scaling up) and suggest locally meaningful actions and interventions (if applicable, via stakeholder/​community involvement)

In short, assessments are iterative practices that sufficiently characterize the drivers of vulnerability and resilience, so as to minimize the knock-​on effects of compounded risk factors in real time. They also function to improve our collective understanding of how inappropriate humanitarian actions can themselves (even unknowingly) create new vulnerabilities. For without gathering real-​world evidence about how vulnerabilities are compounded during moments of social stress, there is no way of responsibly fulfilling any society’s obligation to assist those in significant need. Indeed, here, responsibility may depend wholly on specifying what drives social inclusion and exclusion. Because crises often exaggerate inequalities and alienate vulnerable groups, ethnographic techniques that go beyond community engagement strategies are required, as fractured communities may themselves withdraw, pushing already marginalized peoples into abject calamity coping.

Data collection

Data analysis

Interpretation of findings

Write up/ publication

Action/ intervention

fee d

Figure 5.6 Data Collection with the H-​VA.

Wr it pub e up/ lica tion

Act inte ion/ imp rvent lem ion ent atio n

Inte find rpreta ing tion s of

ctio n ts Re bac por t to kf sta rom lo and keh old cal ers inte Pla rve nnin ntio go ns f act and ion s

Da t 2) a coll e igh ins the r Fur

Firs

t in sig 25% hts a o fter coll f data ect ed Re fee dba por t ck from to an d sta lo keh old cal ers Re vis par ions ticip of sam ants plin g inte Rev rvie isio w p ns o roto f col

Da t 1) a coll

ect

ion

Standard study procedure vs health vulnerability procedure

106  David Napier and Anna-Maria Volkmann Any assessment must, therefore, involve asking an individual or household being assessed to identify someone experiencing their same challenges, but lacking agency and the capability to engage. Such individuals must be sought out on the ground in order for fieldworkers and policymakers to understand what gates must be opened to make it possible for deeply vulnerable individuals to participate in productive engagement and be included socially. For vulnerability not only involves a distinct set of social and biological risk factors that come together to limit human capability, but a spiraling process –​a vortex –​that can quite quickly move those just managing into complete calamity coping.

Conclusion Social responsibility is typically defined along ethical, legal, and economic lines. But these categories are easily unsettled in crisis contexts in which moral obligations are subjected to reconsidered notions of inclusion and exclusion. In such contexts, not only are inequalities often exaggerated, but compounding risk factors fuel the rapid transition from a person barely hanging on, to a state of pure calamity coping. A key assurance against jump-​starting this spiraling process of social exclusion rests in the development of responsible preparedness measures that ameliorate in advance the isolation, mistrust, and lack of agency that emerge when unanticipated pressures on limited resources fuel inequality. Because these processes are dynamic, understanding health vulnerability and resilience means aligning crisis emergence with the ways in which local circumstances can limit agency in moments of stress. Enhancing resilience, therefore, should be tied to a knowledge of lived experience on the ground, and especially to an understanding of those vulnerability thresholds that can limit if not entirely erase the ability of any person to have agency. Self-​ actualization cannot emerge where agency has been denied either by forms of social inclusion/​exclusion or by the compounding of risk factors that can lead any one of us into pure calamity coping. COVID-​19 has provided a lesson for all of us regarding how quickly anyone can slip into the Vulnerability Vortex, becoming not only vulnerable, but even invisible. For when calamity coping limits human agency the very thing that may eventually kill you may fall far from your list of concerns. Just recovery is a misnomer; for just preparedness becomes the only viable way of assuring that fewer amongst us will be sidelined, ignored, or even socially erased within the very communities in which we live when our community’s inclusion criteria shrink under stress. To prevent such exclusionary practices from taking root, a better understanding of the tipping points that push the marginalized into calamity coping is required. For this reason, the Vulnerability Vortex should be understood as a device for visualizing the effects of a crisis on those already marginalized.

The Vulnerability Vortex  107

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6 Keeping things under control Responsibilities toward things, homes, and people in hoarding disorder Rebecca Henderson and Laurin Baumgardt

Introduction The woman on the television screen hands her daughter a plastic plate, and the three children eat their dinner in bed, the only space available for them. The woman’s voice quavers. “This house is not a home,” she bemoans. We, the viewers, are expected to agree. After all, the subject of this reality show is their domestic space: a house so filled, floor to ceiling, with boxes, bags, piles, and heaps that there is nowhere else to serve the children dinner but in bed. This is A&E’s Hoarders, and the mother on the screen is at risk of losing custody of her young children because of her unsafe, unclean and “uninhabitable” household. In short, this mother is deemed socially irresponsible, incapable of caring for her children and managing her household and possessions. Since the 2013 publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, or DSM-​V, hoarding disorder (HD) has been classified as a unique and discrete problem, brought out from under the umbrella of obsessive-​compulsive disorders (OCD) and related disorders and given its own set of diagnostic criteria. Estimates of the prevalence of HD range from 2.3% (in the United Kingdom) to 5.8% (in Germany) and some estimates hold that up to 25% of older adults may exhibit hoarding behaviors (Dozier and Ayers 2017). HD is beginning to be characterized globally and transculturally, in such diverse places as the United States, England, Brazil, Japan, Spain, and India (Chakraborty et al., 2012; Nordsletten et al., 2018). Although HD has been described clinically for decades, its recent diagnostic reclassification means that it in some ways represents a “new” psychiatric disorder, which is dynamically taking shape in the minds of clinicians, patients, and family members. As HD has been increasingly recognized as a biomedical problem, the homes of patients diagnosed with HD have become contested sites for domestic, psychological, bureaucratic, and medical interventions, and are spectacularized through depictions of “hoarders” living in squalor amid their unmanageable possessions. In this chapter, we will explore the notion of responsibility by thinking through/​of/​with individuals with HD. In this DOI: 10.4324/9781003332077-7

Keeping things under control  111 discussion, we understand the notion of responsibility as a complex set of dispositions and obligations of humans to not only other humans, but also toward objects, possessions, and even personalized spaces like homes. To clarify, we are not suggesting that these responsibilities and obligations are to be misunderstood as “choices” a patient suffering from HD might have; we conceive of HD as a disease. As Annemarie Mol has shown for type 1 diabetes patients, we are situating HD not within a “logic of choice,” that suggests an individualistic, autonomy-​driven, consumerist notion of patients, but rather within a “logic of care,” which is more processual, attentive, and interactive (Mol 2008). We thus argue that, within this “logic of care,” HD as a biomedical disease presents itself with and as a set of demanding responsibilities and obligations. With the ontological turn, human relationships with and toward things are most often framed in terms of their “agency” and in terms of our “care” and “attachment” for and to them. In this paper, however, we prefer to write about the unusual and conflictual “responsibilities toward” things and homes to highlight the complex sense of moral and affective obligations and dispositions people with HD develop toward their possessions. We thereby follow James Laidlaw’s favoring of “processes of the attribution of responsibility” over “agency as a pseudo-​technical jargon word for action” (2010). We are thus less concerned with the control or agency things hold over people but with how people respond toward their controlling hold. When Cheryl Mattingly (2017) discusses autism phenomenology, she describes this response as an “agentive responsiveness” in the face of a call –​whether this call is a hold in the form of an object, category, memory, or speech act. Departing from Mattingly and Mol (2008), however, we are also not equating “responsibility” and “care,” because people with HD, as we will highlight below, can certainly feel responsibilities toward their possessions without necessarily having a caring relationship with them. Responsibilities toward things and homes can be experienced as caring or uncaring, attached or unattached, attentive or inattentive. Exploring the “nuances of multiple responsibilities,” we are building on the discursive power of responsibility as it widely and increasingly features in collective debates while it, at other times, can be the most invisible and taken-​for-​granted assumption (Trnka and Trundle 2017). Responsibility, in our understanding, cannot be reduced to a set of rational capacities or accountability judgments, but comprises a much wider range of nuances and affective relationships (Trnka and Trundle 2017). We will further operationalize the distinction between “responsibilities toward homes” and “responsibilities toward things” –​a distinction that can be at times conflated but often gains explanatory value regarding questions about socioeconomic status, capacities for domestic management, homeownership, and rental living conditions. We, therefore, write in terms of a “thingly responsibility” which is understood as an obligation, a caring/​uncaring relation, toward objects that, in HD, may trump other social responsibilities.

112  Rebecca Henderson and Laurin Baumgardt In our work, we use an analysis of popular media depictions, 30 interviews with clinical and academic experts on HD, and 60 individuals who meet the criteria for hoarding, to argue that hoarding as a disorder is defined by demanding material obligations –​in which individuals pathologically prioritize their responsibilities to things over their obligations to their homes and to people. In HD, a woman may risk losing her children to protect her ability to save used clothes, a couple may divorce because of one member’s sense of obligation to her dead parent’s furniture, and friends are not invited to visit because their space is occupied by objects. We further argue that the responsibilities and relationships between “hoarders” and their things are not unique to the disorder, but are rather extreme reflections of larger patterns of responsibilities toward objects, things, homes, hygienic norms, and domestic labor. First, using 30 semi-​structured interviews with experts on hoarding, we begin by examining the process of diagnosis, viewing the standards of diagnosis of HD to be, in part, a reflection of norms and values relating to appropriate relationships with objects and homemaking. Next, we draw from 60 semi-​structured interviews with individuals who fit the diagnostic criteria for HD, who may or may not identify as individuals with HD, in which they describe their notions of responsibility to things and household, and how their possessions come to make, and unmake, their living spaces into homes. Rather than engage with questions of pathology, we follow feminist scholars (Young 2005) in critiquing normative notions of home in order to foreground the relationships that “hoarders” develop and establish with their home spaces and between themselves and treasured objects to create or contest meaning. We pay particular attention to the defining forces of homemaking as a conflictual terrain on which responsibilities toward objects understood at once as waste and treasure can possibly create comforts, securities, and attachments, but also overwhelming demands, impairments, and loss of control and sociality (Young 2005; Dolezal 2017; Pink 2004; Kilroy-​Marac 2018; Grohmann 2020). In this chapter, we will make three main points. First, using an examination of biomedical discourse by clinical experts, we will show that hoarding –​more than perhaps any other disorder –​is a pathology of the home. As a pathology of the home, the diagnosis of hoarding, and its diagnostic pressures, are not felt equally by everyone. Secondly, we build on this argument to show that hoarding is a pathology of conflicting responsibilities –​toward objects, homemaking, and other people. Finally, we will attempt to demonstrate the pressures –​and rewards –​of these unusual responsibilities, and of creating such “uninhabitable” homes.

Pathologies of the uninhabitable: Responsibilities toward homes HD is first and foremost a disease of materiality, and material responsibilities, which at its core is centered around home as a disordered living space. It is not simply that the cluttered homes of people with HD are reflections

Keeping things under control  113 of inner psychiatric pathologies –​the homes themselves form a key part of realizing, and diagnosing, this pathology. As such, HD represents a curious instance of a mental illness that is diagnosed on the basis of spatial, thingly, and homely responsibilities –​a mental illness that is, in part, actualized outside the patient’s mind. In the 30 interviews, we performed with clinical experts in HD, most of these mental health professionals made clear that pathological home spaces were needed in order to make the diagnosis of HD. Although individuals may hoard information, emails, or electronic data, as of the current diagnostic criteria the home itself is a core part of the diagnostic process, to be examined almost as if it were a part of the patient’s body. To be diagnosed with HD, the pathology must be seen and documented in the home. As one expert put it: If we suspect hoarding disorder, we always ask for photographs of the home … . We have them take pictures of their home or we have them go to their home and we do FaceTime, so we can see what their home looks like. In this way, the main manifestation of HD from the perspective of clinicians is not, or not only, behavioral or cognitive –​it is material, located within the patient’s domestic space. HD can only be diagnosed by examining an individual’s home and assessing the level of clutter surrounding the person. This is built into the DSM-​V criteria for HD, which read: “The difficulty discarding possessions results in the accumulation of possessions that congest and clutter active living areas and substantially compromises their intended use” (APA 2013). It is difficult to think of another disorder in which diagnosis is dependent on external materialities in this way; as Kilroy-​Marac puts it, in hoarding “The disorder is the disorder” (2018). Some clinical experts interviewed felt that if a person’s home was not “really” cluttered, they could not diagnose them with HD –​even if they came in complaining of hoarding problems, difficulties discarding, or excessive acquisition. In fact, several clinicians told us stories of patients who reported having hoarding symptoms, but, when their home spaces were examined, clearly did not have HD despite their reported thoughts and behaviors. Although exceptions within the diagnostic criteria allow for clean homes in certain circumstances, hoarding as a diagnosis usually requires a messy home –​a patient with the same thoughts and worries with a normal home would not be diagnosed with hoarding. Thus, in the case of HD, the person’s cluttered space is not just a manifestation of the disorder, it is the criteria for the disorder itself. The use of the person’s home as a fundamental index of their disease presents problems that entangle living spaces, social facts, and pathologies. For example, what if a patient is rich enough to afford a mansion or several storage units? In this case, they might have enough space or domestic help that their home might never reach the level of clutter necessary for them to

114  Rebecca Henderson and Laurin Baumgardt meet the criteria for diagnosis. And indeed, some clinicians felt that such a patient would not have HD. More than one clinician gave examples of cases they had personally encountered in which a very wealthy patient had successfully managed to fill mansions with things –​in one case, employing a butler to constantly organize their “collection” so that it never became a “hoard.” We also presented them with the example of a couple, like the real-​ life partnership of Herb and Dorothy Vogel, whose one-​ bedroom New York apartment was so filled with art that they had to get rid of their furniture. Yet when their “hoard” was examined, it was found to be full of priceless early works from important artists and was donated to the National Gallery in Washington, DC (Martin 2012); in an instant, the hoarders were transformed into collectors in the public eye. Yet most of the clinicians we interviewed felt that if the couple’s home space was unusable, they indeed had HD, regardless of the value of their possessions. As their objects prevented the “appropriate” use of their home space, they would meet the criteria for HD. It was the state of their home, rather than the state of their objects, which would make the difference. In her work with professional organizers in Toronto, anthropologist Katie Kilroy-​ Marac probes the margins between normative collecting and pathological hoarding, and notes that the most important distinction between a hoard and a collection is the fact that collectors manage and care for their objects according to public values and for display functions (2018). While there is certainly not always a clear-​cut distinction between hoards and collections, her distinction points to “a specific set of directives about appropriate object management and thingly care in contemporary North America”; that is, a set of responsibilities that each of us have toward the objects we own (Kilroy-​Marac 2018: 441). However, our interviews suggested that the distinction between a “hoard” and a “collection” may be more gradual, fluid, and processual than this distinction implies. One interviewed individual with HD complicated the distinction between hoards and collections in both ways by stating that: Clutter is also collecting things, and so there’s probably a fine line between the cluttered and the collector. A lot of collectors are clutterers. I know that for fact, because I am one. But I’m also a collector, so I appreciate certain things. (…) And you would have to ask the psychiatrists because I’ve met collectors that are just obsessed with what they collect. Now, I’ve collected a little bit of this and a little bit of that and a little bit of this and a little bit of that. So I’m not obsessed with it ... I won’t say it became a hobby, but then I became a collector. Then at the same time, I’m also a clutter person, so everything clutters up. I don’t just save one thing, but I save maybe thirty different things. The management and care of objects, or, in other words, the various responsibilities people develop toward things, are perhaps not the only crucial

Keeping things under control  115 features for how to tell “collections” from “hoards.” Instead, we argue that the distinction between collections and hoards constitutes not just responsibilities to how we treat objects –​through organization and display –​but also, how they entangle home spaces. It is not just that we have responsibilities to treat objects with a certain care, as Kilroy-​Marac points out, but we also must manage our home environments in a responsible way. Home spaces may sometimes appropriately store or display collections, but it is when objects transgress on the fundamental features and functions of domestic space that they become a hoard. How individuals meeting the criteria of HD spatially transgress domestic functions is described by Neil Maycroft in his essay “Not moving things along”: The hoarder (…) breaks with these conventions ‘storing’ their things in the non-​marginal domestic space itself, slowly filling rooms up, usually working from periphery to centre, sometimes carving out elaborate pathways or structures in order to enable functional day to day living and, often, more hoarding. (2009: 358) However, generalized spatial descriptions like this do not necessarily account for the particularities of fundamentally different home environments, or the pressures put on different homes. It erroneously assumes a general subject identity, which Maycroft describes as “the hoarder.” In other words, the responsibilities toward home care are not equally easy for everyone to manage. In contrast to the example of the eccentric millionaire with a mansion, multiple storage units, and a butler, of course, an impoverished person in a very small apartment would need relatively little clutter to fill their reduced space, and would be unable to purchase additional space, such as storage units, for managing unruly possessions. The poor and disadvantaged struggle more to maintain a responsible dwelling not just because their homes are smaller, and thus more easily cluttered, but because they have reduced time and energy to spend ordering possessions and space, and are usually unable to employ others –​maids, butlers, cleaners, or professional organizers –​to help manage their space. Clinical experts acknowledged this effect, but felt that ultimately these differences would be irrelevant as individuals who truly have HD would eventually fill all their living space, no matter how large. However, individuals of lower socioeconomic status are also differently impacted by HD for another reason: renting an apartment makes the accumulation of objects more difficult, and allows outside intersession to survey the home and enforce responsibilities toward a living space. One individual who met clinical criteria for hoarding described his relationship to his apartment: Thus far, the 125 inspections that I’ve had in the twenty-​two years that I’ve lived here… actually, probably closer to 200 [inspections]. But every

116  Rebecca Henderson and Laurin Baumgardt time they’ve come in, it’s never been actionable. It’s been embarrassing, but whatever. I’ll put sheets over the piles and clear walkways. And I keep the walkways clear, for the most part. Better than goat trails. And the kitchen and the bathroom are always spotless. And like I say, there was nothing unsanitary, it’s just that I have too much stuff. It’s clutter. So my landlords, I mean, so far, if I saw the notice [of inspection] today, I would go into this hyper focus, hyper drama, high blood pressure, and I would scoop it up and form it and make it look passable, doing this nonstop overnight and then through the morning until 11:00 when they knocked on the door, walked in, looked around, and then, you know, they left. In contrast, when asked if she had ever experienced conflict over her possessions, another woman responded, “No, because I’ve owned this house for about nineteen years, I think. It’s my house and it’s inside, mostly. I am getting embarrassed about my front yard, but it’s not to a point that a neighbor would complain.” For those who do not own their own homes, responsibilities toward home spaces can be enforced, even if responsibilities toward objects –​to keep them ordered and maintained –​cannot. Up to a certain extent, hoarding can be concealed by the fact that home spaces are not visibly impaired and are not accessible to others. Hoarding practices can be temporarily hidden from view behind closed doors, in cellars, attics, closets, cupboards, or beneath sheets and makeshift arrangements when the next inspectors come in. People who meet the diagnostic criteria of HD can publicly manage their problem by temporarily or occasionally appearing to maintain their responsibilities toward their home spaces even if they excessively accumulate certain possessions. Even if diagnosed, they can continue to respond with ingenious attempts to control the uncontrollable incursion of things on homes; to hold out when faced with controlling authorities and regulatory regimes. This is especially true because individuals with HD rarely seek treatment for the disorder themselves, and often do not identify their behavior as a problem, a phenomenon described within psychiatry as having “low insight” into their disorder (Mathews 2014). Thus, many of those who “seek help” for their hoarding tendencies are forced to do so –​either by concerned family members (Tolin et al. 2008) or due to repeated evictions or intercession by social services or housing authorities. For example, one study suggests that the prevalence of HD among those who are faced with evictions is much higher (around 20%) than the rate of hoarding in the general population (around 2.5%) (Rodriguez and Herman 2012). Renting an apartment, therefore, makes ones living space more tenable and more open to the assessment of others, and forces the enforcement of domestic responsibilities. Similarly, the diagnosis of HD in the unhoused population is extremely high, as HD often makes the ability to stay in housing much more difficult (Grieg, Tolin, and Tsai 2020).

Keeping things under control  117 Likewise, the diagnosis of HD in young people is more complicated and difficult because of their different responsibilities toward things and homes. One researcher described this problem as it pertained to the difficulty of recruiting undergraduate students into research studies, a staple of psychological research for other disorders: Young adults and college students are these really fascinating group… our core diagnostic criteria of clutter is absolutely worthless with that group of young adults because they A) haven’t had time to collect enough stuff and B) they’re living in a controlled environment –​they are living in like a two by two foot dorm room with a roommate. The young have had less time to accumulate items, and like the poor, they tend to have much less control over domestic spaces. They are not yet (or perhaps will never) be able to afford homeownership and therefore are subject to more temporary and mobile living arrangements and dwelling practices. As one individual with hoarding tendencies described: Well, actually, in high school I was in a boarding school… I had three different roommates. We didn’t really have any real issues [about hoarding] back then that I can remember. We weren’t allowed to have much stuff. We had constant inspections and stuff. That kind of helped keep things in control. Clinical research has demonstrated that the prevalence of HD seems to increase with age (Cath et al. 2017). We asked clinical experts in our interviews if they thought that this was because the disorder was truly late-​ onset, that it worsened with age –​or if it was because older adults simply had accumulated more stuff? Perhaps, they were simply more likely to live alone in the same place for a long time? Within our interviews with individuals who would be considered hoarders, we found the stories of older adults whose children gone, leaving the objects of childhood behind, or whose parents had died, leaving them to sort through a jumble of inherited possessions. Experts disagreed on whether hoarding was more prevalent in the elderly because, as some researchers think, it was related to cognitive dysfunction and dementia, or simply because it takes a lifetime for a home to accumulate enough items to be diagnosed. Some agreed that both were likely at play. As these examples demonstrate, the ability to have, and the responsibility to maintain, a certain sort of domestic space is intertwined with the possibility of a diagnosis of HD. Yet this kind of a home is also predicated on normative notions of homeownership, which arose in American culture after the Second World War. These homes have always been differentially available to different kinds of people, notably along the lines of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic division (Taylor 2019). Furthermore, this kind of home fits within

118  Rebecca Henderson and Laurin Baumgardt ideals and cycles of consumerism and of consumptions. As Joshua Reno writes, “the aspirational middle-​class home is simultaneously a dwelling for consumers and an object of consumption” (2016). The homes of individuals with HD are unable to fulfill the public display function of the appropriate domestic space; the diagnosis of HD is structured around notions of appropriate consumption, homeownership, and home maintenance, which are socially and historically situated. By making the diagnostic criteria reliant on a particular kind of accumulation, and on a particular type of home space, the diagnosis of HD is materially entangled with socially embedded objects and spaces. The responsibilities of maintaining a home space are enforced preferentially on individuals who occupy spaces in certain ways, and are more negotiable for others. One of the ways that clinicians negotiated this dilemma was to talk about “appropriate use” of the space. The DSM-​V criterion, again, reads, “The difficulty discarding possessions… congests and clutters active living areas and substantially compromises their intended use” (APA 2013; emphasis ours). In reference to this criterion, clinicians were asked how they determined the “intended use” of a space? Intended by who? For example, if I do not cook, what is the appropriate “intended use” of my kitchen? Could it be storage? As Neil Maycroft asks: The intentional design of living spaces is historically and culturally so variable that breaches of normative functionality are commonplace. If hoarding becomes manifest when the disruption of the ‘proper’ ordering of things in space is adjudged to have occurred, how can the contravention of such a culturally variable norm be justified as a basis for the intervention of outside agencies into the lives of individuals? (Maycroft 2009: 359) Clinicians’ responses were, in this case, a sort of litany of responsible inhabi­ tance. For example, as one put it, it is … the extent to which you can actually do the things you need to do in a house. So can you sit in a chair? Can you sleep in your bed? Can you eat a meal at a table? Can you cook in the kitchen? Can you open the door to your home to get out quickly if you need to? … . Those are the kinds of questions that I use to make that determination. These criteria, clinicians make clear, go beyond simple messiness. Individuals with HD do not just have messy spaces –​they have spaces that are “uninhabitable” (despite the fact that they inhabit them). Responsible habitability also depends on who occupies a home. Healthy ways to inhabit homes are different if you are elderly, or if you have children in your home; the amount of clutter needed, in those cases, for a diagnosis of hoarding is, according to some clinicians, lower. Older people, they

Keeping things under control  119 suggested, may fall, or may struggle to get out of their homes in case of a fire; children require healthy, clutter-​free environments that are clean and safe. Furthermore, the consequences –​loss of custody, loss of autonomous living, and elder abuse –​are higher in homes that contain certain types of people. On the other hand, living alone made it easier to develop a hoarded home. As one participant with hoarding symptoms put it, “If a person lives with other people, normally those other people are not going to be hoarders and are going to complain. It’s easier to hoard things when one is alone.” Hoarding behaviors, as we shall explore further below, intersected with relationships and responsibilities to other people. At the same time that homes are experienced as pathological to different people in different ways, homes are also meant to be social spaces. As another clinician described, There’s tremendous variability in everyday housekeeping by most people … but I guess I can give you an example. If someone comes to the door, a friend, and wants to stop in to, I don’t know, invite you out or something. If you can’t happily sit them down in some comfortable space in your home because you have to run around and move boxes and stuff in order to make it possible or whatever, then you’ve got a problem. It is impossible to healthily inhabit a home, in this case, in which you cannot make social space; sharing one’s home with others is necessary to healthy inhabitance.

Burdened by treasures: Gendered responsibilities toward things and people One of the most striking things about speaking at length to people with HD has been how much we could relate to their descriptions of value and saving. We at first did not understand how or why anyone could save so much that it becomes a burden. It was only after we listened to individuals describing how and why they save that we began to see the links to the ways we all save, to the ways we all “housekeep.” The differences for those who have HD are often of degree, rather than of kind. It appears that individuals who meet the criteria of HD feel more responsible, in degree, toward saving and caring for their objects than they “should,” often allowing this sense of responsibility to displace other social norms and obligations. These individuals seem to be facing the contradiction of feeling so attached and responsible for their possessions that they lose (in)sight into other obligations and social responsibilities. Above, we have explored the ways that this disjunction might reprioritize responsibilities toward homes and home spaces; here, we turn to relationships with things and people. Saving in hoarding is often imbued with deeply normative responsibilities. In the behavior of individuals with hoarding, we can often see our own

120  Rebecca Henderson and Laurin Baumgardt notions of domesticity, value, and saving, but in some ways magnified or distorted. By continuously accumulating diverse and unruly possessions, HD creates a magnified reliance on the home as the space of storing, guarding, valuing, neglecting, or caring for acquired and saved objects. Whatever individualized value is attributed to people’s domestic possessions becomes a responsibility. The sheer magnitude of these thingly responsibilities affixes people to their homes. With Igor Kopytoff, one can say that people diagnosed with HD “deactivate” commodities and resist cultural classification of value; the ways that objects are valued in HD are different than the ways they are valued by society. Rather, these individuals create their “own universe of value attribution” (Kopytoff 1986: 76). For example, many of those we interviewed felt that they could not get rid of items because the objects were a part of their responsibility toward maintaining family or personal histories. As Shelly Mallet writes in her critical literature review on understanding home, “Home is a virtual place, a repository for memories of the lived spaces. It locates lived time and space, particularly intimate familial time and space” (2004: 63). As one middle-​ aged woman described her situation, objects carry memories or heritage and represent responsibilities toward maintaining a memory of important relationships: It becomes, when you are the depository of family things, my mother would say .... She passed away and left me a lot of things, but she would say, “It’s just stuff. It’s just things” but, somehow, you feel obliged to watch out for it and it goes beyond just sentimental to, I don’t know what the word is that I’m searching for, but it’s beyond sentimentality and becomes almost an obligation to preserve whatever the memory is. In other words, she felt a responsibility to her items in terms of an obligation toward memories of important social relationships, toward valuing one’s family ties through safeguarding their objects. In making homes, individuals with HD are overburdened by the meaning of items, with a sentimental attachment to things that has weight and power over them as individuals and supersede other responsibilities. The sense of items as imbued with memory, with the memory of a family or a culture or tradition, and the sense of responsibility for maintaining these memories, is deeply normative and as feminist scholar Iris Young notes, is deeply gendered. Young writes: The work of preservation…involves teaching the children the meaning of things among which one dwells, teaching the children the stories, practices, and celebrations that keep particular meanings alive. The preservation of the things among which one dwells gives people a context for their lives, individuates their histories, gives them items to use in making new projects. (Young 2005: 142)

Keeping things under control  121 Perhaps, this gendered responsibility for homes and domestic memory in part accounts for the fact that women are more likely to be diagnosed with HD than men, and to have more severe hoarding (Dozier and Ayers 2017). While the men we interviewed also were sometimes highly invested in sentimental attachments to objects related to memories and family, they were more likely to be concerned with usefulness, waste, and with fixing broken items. As one elderly man, his house full of broken appliances and rusty tools, said: Other things, like old clocks I’ve bought, and I have a tendency to say, “Well, I’m going to learn how to fix these clocks,” because sometimes I get them for a few bucks a piece because they’re not working, and I say, “Well, I’m going to learn how to fix them,” but I have a tendency never to get around to learn how to fix them. The urge to repair things, to make them useful again, and to keep from being wasteful was at the heart of saving decisions by these individuals. In this case, the urge to save items was structured around a sense of responsibility to render discarded objects useful, to use them up completely, to get all of their value, and to see them well-​used and well-​loved. Another woman talked through the reasons she saved: Sometimes I think I get too attached to things and then don’t want to give them up… Sometimes it’s something that I’ve spent a lot of money on and even if it’s not useful to me, I keep it just because I spent a lot on it. Or somebody gave it to me, it’s sentimental or emotional attachment. But if I step back and think, then I probably should just part with it. And I think it does make me feel a little better if I give it to somebody. If one of the kids says, “Oh, I like that picture mom”. And I’ll say, “Okay, here have it”. Then I know that what I liked went to them and is still loved, I guess. As much as hoarding is depicted as a disease of capitalism and overconsumption (Kilroy-​Marac 2018), these individuals did not see themselves as classic consumers, but instead as rescuers of lost items, reusers, recyclers; our interviewees worried about “practicing a particular kind of subjectivity: that of an informed, moral, caring consumer” (Bohlin 2019: 1). Many of the individuals we interviewed about their hoarding problems described their issues as, in part, a reaction to the overconsumption and waste they saw around them. One woman said of her problems discarding: It’s much easier for me to donate things than to actually throw them away. So it’s helpful if I could donate and think, “Okay, somebody else can use this”. And it can be better used by somebody else than just putting it in a landfill. That upsets me for the item and it upsets me for the

122  Rebecca Henderson and Laurin Baumgardt world because we already have so many waste problems so it’s much harder for me to throw things away. But sometimes, that’s what you have to do if it’s an old shirt with holes in it, you really can’t donate that. Sometimes my partner will tell me to take a picture of it or, it’s okay and just get rid of it. And I find that, of course, even though I think I’m going to be tormented, I don’t even remember all the things that I’ve thrown away. I’m not tormented. Our interviewees described feeling torn apart, “tormented” by responsibility that tied them to items. These responsibilities were not only to the items themselves –​to find them good homes, return them to usefulness, and rehabilitate them –​but also social responsibilities, through object ownership, to maintain memories and relationships with those who had given them the items, used them, and loved them, as well as responsibilities to society, and to the world, which related to consumption and discarding. Instead of feeling joy when looking at their items, individuals with HD inhabit a curious paradox. As noted earlier, they frequently recognized their homes as abnormal, and this was often a source of shame and stigma; they mourned the loss of their homes as a place of sociality. However, as in the earlier example, they feel burdened, even “tormented” by their responsibilities toward items, and by the ways these responsibilities conflict with their responsibilities toward homemaking and other people. They describe hiding their homes from friends and family, creating rifts and social isolation, and often yearned for domestic spaces that fit normative notions of domesticity. Indeed, their items were sometimes perceived as a tremendous burden. Multiple individuals interviewed described wishing that their stuff would simply vanish or get destroyed, relieving them of the responsibility of sorting through their clutter and finding good, useful homes for each item. As one woman put it: Our house got flooded in [a hurricane]… But most of [my clutter] was the upstairs so it was fine, but it almost would’ve been a blessing had I lost a lot of stuff. But I didn’t… . It’s just so shameful because it’s stupid, it’s just stupid. I know it but I can’t. Everyone’s like, “Just get a dumpster”. But I have to go through it, I have to figure out what it is, I have to find homes for everything. It’s a process and I have to do it. But nobody understands it and everybody thinks it’s crazy, and it is crazy. Her responsibility to dispose of items in a particular way was overwhelmingly demanding. Items could not be simply disregard in a dumpster but instead needed to be known and sorted; items needed “homes” for themselves even as their presence undermined her own sense of home. Receiving gifts, likewise, became a burden for these individuals, who often said that they could never throw away something they had been given as a

Keeping things under control  123 gift. In the classical anthropological sense, gift-​giving and gift-​receiving here seem to constitute a social relation that demands and creates its own complex network of social and thingly responsibilities, or reciprocities (Mauss 2002; Sahlins 1972; Ferguson 2015). As one individual with hoarding symptoms said, a lot of times I’m given things as gifts that I hold onto out of probably more ... what’s the word I want to use? I feel bad because I don’t like them, but I hold onto them, you know. Gifts represented an area where social and material responsibilities merged, and obligations to relationships with people merged into responsibilities to things, making them impossible to discard. As anthropologists have long noted, gifts form social bonds, and for individuals with hoarding symptoms, discarding a gift was akin to discarding this bond. In addition to the sometimes-​policed responsibilities toward the home and home space described in the previous section, individuals also experienced the conflict between their responsibilities to people and their responsibilities toward things as acutely painful. Indeed, in our interviews with individuals who exhibited these tendencies, the social impairment and shame caused by hoarding was the most painful part of the disorder. As one described: I’m at a place where I’m embarrassed to invite anyone into my house, so I’ve quit inviting people over for tea or meals … . I quit inviting people to my house. My best friend is allowed in, but that’s all… I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed. I’m ashamed. Even when individuals themselves denied being bothered by their clutter, they recognized that others would view their homes as unacceptable. In fact, this social stigmatization was one of the most major motivators they reported toward seeking treatment. Another example of the ways individuals with hoarding behaviors experienced the conflict between responsibilities to people and things was through a reoccurring fear among the often-​elderly individuals who we interviewed that their responsibilities to their items would be passed on to their children. As one said, It’s feeling like a problem because I’m beginning to worry that, you know, I’m older and I’m having friends to pass away and I’m thinking, “Oh my God, if my son had to deal with this, if something happened and he had to deal with this, this would be awful for him”. The incredible burden of responsible object ownership weighed on these individuals not only in terms of their own lives, but in terms of their legacies. One older gentleman we interviewed reflected on this idea, and through it,

124  Rebecca Henderson and Laurin Baumgardt on the toll his encumbering responsibilities toward possessions had taken on his important social relationships. So I guess there’s a legacy in being a hoarder, but you don’t want it running in your family. I don’t want my daughter to have all these things .... It doesn’t help their personal relationships. I’ve already found that out. When they become a hoarder like me, they don’t get along in the family very well. So it takes a certain type of personality to be able to build up the encumbrance of collections and hoarding at the same time without .... And still be able to get along with everybody in your family. That’s the key to it all. And I would say that if I’d been a really good family man and not a good hobby man, I probably would still have a lot of my immediate family around me rather than at distances on this Earth right now. And that’s kind of strange, but that’s the way things work out. If you have a lot of family, sometimes you don’t have a lot of time to do other things than to deal with your family. So anyway, right now I’m at that age where I’m making all these realizations, and realize this and realize that, but it doesn’t do me any good because I’m sort of over the hill. In reflecting on a lifetime of being caught between the dueling responsibilities toward people and things –​and of constantly prioritizing the hobby of collecting objects –​he realized that these priorities had resulted in a breakdown of his important social relationships. As a “hobby man” and not a “family man,” he reflected sadly that he was ending his life amid the belongings, and not people, to which he was responsible. Individuals with hoarding symptoms often described the disturbed relationship between their responsibilities toward people and their items; in the absence of social relationships, they sometimes acknowledged that their things had come to replace people, or fill social needs. As one elderly woman described, I’m beginning to recognize that I need people more than I realized I did, and that a lot of those [hoarding] activities were kind of replacements for intimacy that I don’t have in my life .... I had this vision that this whole bunch of clutter in my house was kind of like a nest that I built around myself that kept ... in some way, helped make my world safer, as a nest would make an animal feel when they were in it. Reminiscent of Gaston Bachelard’s poetic-​phenomenological descriptions of homes as “nests for dreaming” and “shelters for imagining” (1994), some individuals with HD like this elderly woman seem to experience their home environments as stable and intimate refuges. At the same time, homes and items become for others a more prison-​like burden, which overwhelms and inhibits social connection. As we have described in this second section, the multiplied and magnified conflicts between thingly and social responsibilities turn people’s homemaking endeavors into a fundamentally ambivalent,

Keeping things under control  125 affectively challenging, and psychologically straining process. “Home is thus,” as Steph Grohmann so poignantly put it in The Ethics of Space, “not only a contradictory concept, but one suspended between extremes, from the place of highest aspiration to that of the deepest despair” (2020: 92).

Conclusion The households of individuals with HD have become problematic landscapes in which occupants may be overwhelmed by dueling domestic forces, unable to balance different competing responsibilities: the desire for sentimental memories, the need to keep homes clean, the beauty of items, and the urge to have a social space. In this way, “homemaking” and “HD” become mutually constituted through evaluations of hygienic standards and household management, notions of (unin)habitability, mental diagnoses, objects’ family histories, and waste disposal. Responsible/​irresponsible homes become at once biomedical indicators, the locus of social tensions and refusals, and spaces of immobilities and rejections, in which goods refuse to circulate. In this chapter, we have not only explored HD as a fluid pathologized practice that differs from, but can also resemble, practices of collecting, cluttering, or being messy, and is fundamentally intertwined with the distinction between responsibilities toward homes, things, and people. Our interpretation of the individually configured tensions between these multiple responsibilities –​to homes, things, and people –​can help explain how individuals with HD live with and think through their diagnosed pathology, and how their socioeconomic status, youth or age, gendered behavior, and social isolation, obligation, and aspiration constitute their selves as much as their homemaking endeavors. In short, HD makes and unmakes homes and selves. Individuals with hoarding symptoms often acknowledged their conflicting responsibilities and desires. In describing their homes, they often aspired to socially acceptable normative spaces. Especially recently, with COVID-​19 and quarantine, in which these individuals were literally stuck inside cluttered homes filled to the brim with their things, they often felt lonely, burdened, and oppressed by the items. But at the same time, they were unable to part with them. As one older woman described her home space: Oh, I would love it to be neat and tidy, and be able to open the door and invite anyone in instead of having to move stuff off the couch, so that somebody could sit on it. That I’d be able to say, “Oh, come in. Have a seat”. I’d love for my desk to look clear. I would love to feel if I want something I know where it is, I can get to it easily. I would like to feel like I’m unburdened with some of the stuff I keep…I’d really like to feel more spacious. It’s a feeling kind of like this stuff is making me feel crammed… . But that’s the problem. I like all the stuff. To me, I guess you would say it’s pretty important [to feeling at home]. I can’t decide what to get rid of because it makes up the home.

126  Rebecca Henderson and Laurin Baumgardt In expressing her desire for a home that is “neat,” “tidy,” and “clear,” this woman with HD articulates a desire to make space, literally, for social responsibilities and homey connections. By tying individuals to burdensome items and cluttered materiality, HD can leave little room for desires, aspirations, and imagining that involve people, rather than things. At the same time, these responsibilities cannot be reduced to a set of rational capacities, but comprise a much wider range of nuances and affective relationships which make visible the multiple scales of responsibilities we all have to things, places, and people (Trnka and Trundle 2017). For individuals with HD, as for all of us, responsibilities to comfortably host family members must be weighed against the responsibility to preserve the memories imbued in heirloom, and the responsibility to properly treasure a gift must be balanced against those to host a friend’s birthday party, care for a child, or contribute to a landfill. HD is a pathology that forces into conflict responsibilities toward homes, social relationships, and material objects; by drawing attention to the ways these registers of responsibility may be in competition, it highlights subtle relationships between different kinds of responsibilities and demonstrates the ways that we are all responsible, at varying levels and to different degrees, to the social and material worlds around us.

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7 Racialized positionalities Ethnographic responsibility and the anthropology of racism and white supremacy Sofía Ugarte

Introduction Between 2016 and 2018, face-​to-​face interviews and training sessions were the predominant mechanism through which employers recruited Haitian migrants in Santiago, the capital of Chile. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork for my doctoral research project at the time, where I accompanied Haitian women to job interviews for offers on signs in the street, through WhatsApp and Facebook messages, and recruitment agencies. In most of these encounters, potential employers rejected Haitian women because of their foreign origin and their apparent failure to demonstrate they could understand and speak Spanish fluently. When it came to training sessions that prepared migrant women for the job market, low and middle-​class Chilean women sought to shape Haitian women into what they considered “appropriate workers”, transforming how they looked, talked, and showed emotions in the workplace. In these situations, Chilean women used racialized ideals of good work, imbued by hierarchical beliefs that positioned Haitian women as the most devalued workers in the economy –​primarily due to the intersection between their gender, skin color, foreign origin, and language –​and Chilean women as superior, cleaner, “whiter”, and more intelligent than them. Together with migrant Haitian women, my research also consisted of interviewing and conducting participant observation with Chilean women and men who interacted and worked with them daily. In conversations with social workers and recruitment agents who oversaw the placement of migrant women in Santiago’s job market, they told me that Haitian women’s lack of employability was because they performed poorly in job interviews. According to them, this group of migrant women had language and attitude problems. Many Haitian women did not fully understand Chilean Spanish, and their insecurity when answering questions in another language was a deterrent for employers. Aware of discriminatory practices against Haitians, social workers, psychologists, and municipal agents trained Haitian women for interviews in different settings, teaching them how to show “the correct DOI: 10.4324/9781003332077-8

Racialized positionalities  129 attitude”, masking their language differences through nonverbal manners. By doing so, training experiences reinforced Chilean white supremacy and anti-​Black racism in the job market by shaping migrant women’s speech forms, attitudes, and how they looked, transforming how they styled their hair and what clothes were appropriate to wear. As a Chilean woman conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the city where I was born and had been my hometown for years, I felt prepared for fieldwork upon my arrival from the UK to Santiago. I learned Haitian Creole with a friend from Port-​au-​Prince who lived in the city, which allowed me to connect and build meaningful relationships with Haitian women who had migrated on their own, with friends, or with their families. As fieldwork progressed, quotidian forms of discrimination against Haitian migrants –​ and against women in particular –​became more evident and violent. Stories in the media portrayed their stay in the country as “difficult” because they did not share the same language and culture with Chileans like other Latin American migrants, and news about the abuse and death of Haitian women living in the country became recurring. In the context of rampant anti-​Black racism against Haitian migrants in the hands of Chilean nationals who felt threatened by a growing migrant population in the country, my position as a Chilean researcher turned epistemologically problematic because I was able to access and analyze the opposing perspectives of racism: the point of view of those who suffered the emotional, material, and social effects of racial discrimination and abuse, and that of the people who exerted racist violence against them. In this chapter, I depart from my experience researching Afro-​Caribbean migrant women in Chile –​a “white-​mestizo” country in Latin America. I reflect on the practical and ethical challenges of participant observation and ethnography in providing the tools for studying highly unequal and racialized settings without reproducing racial oppression and injustice. I do so by proposing the concept of “racialized positionalities”. Based on past and recent work on feminist epistemologies, decolonial projects in anthropology, and critical race/​whiteness studies, I argue for the consideration of research positionalities as intrinsically racialized. By positionality, I mean the reflexive and transparent exercise of positioning oneself within its field and topic of study as a methodological and epistemological device for the process of knowledge production in anthropology (D’Amico Samuels 1991; Hastrup 2004; Ulysse 2007; Chua 2015; Çankaya 2017). By racialized, I refer to the process of racialization, the social construction of race and racism that has profound material and existential effects on people’s lives (Banton 2005; Hall 1980; Gilroy 1987; Fanon 2008; Du Bois 2015). For Robert Miles, racialization refers to “the existence of a social process in which human subjects articulate and reproduce the ideology of racism and engage in the practice of racial discrimination” (Miles 1982: 177). Racialized positionalities then come forth as ethnographic devices that incorporate the complex and intersectional dimensions of “race” as a

130  Sofía Ugarte process of categorization that justifies colonial forms of exploitation and white supremacy. In doing so, they make evident the configuration of structural inequalities (Bonilla-​Silva 1997) within research practices and the everyday situations that impact racialized persons’ interpretations of dominant perspectives (Essed 1991), relevant for participant observation and knowledge production in anthropology. The development of racialized positionalities as part of anthropology’s methodological toolkit dovetails with past and present calls in the discipline to advocate for ethnographic responsibility by anthropologists considered “local” or “native” and as part of wider decolonial projects in the discipline (García 2000; Lokyitsang 2016). Racialized positionalities are also attuned to calls for anthropology’s responsibility –​and obligation –​to interrogate racism beyond racialization and consider how white supremacy functions (Mullings 2005), along with the responsibility to address the consequences of imperial legacies on white supremacy’s practical realities and acknowledging how it remains sedimented in anthropology’s institutions, theories, and research practices (Beliso-​De Jesús and Pierre 2020). I begin this proposal by framing racialized positionalities conceptually within feminist epistemologies, recent efforts to decolonize anthropological knowledge, and critical race and whiteness studies. Based on my experience researching racialized encounters between migrant Haitian women looking for work and Chilean nationals, I then outline three different positionalities that emerge throughout participant observation and ethnographic analysis. I argue that studying racism and white supremacy from its victims and perpetrators’ points of view requires the complex navigation within racial identities, reciprocal relations, and its negotiations during fieldwork. It also means acknowledging participant observation’s ambivalence between proximity and estrangement and between taking part in a racial system and witnessing the performance of racial inequalities. Finally, racialized positionalities involve blurring the social, temporal, and spatial boundaries between fieldwork and ethnographic analysis. I conclude this chapter by situating racialized positionalities within a discussion of research responsibility on the reproduction of racial injustice and colonial modes of knowledge production in anthropology.

Racialized positionalities, a proposal Since the 1990s, ethnographers have become used to the transparency of acknowledging the circumstances in which they conduct participant observation within their corresponding fieldsites throughout their research. This positioning exercise often includes the researcher’s gender and sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, nationality, class, language proficiency, previous and ongoing relationship to the people and places they study, and the sources of research funding. More often than not, positioning also reflects on how the researcher’s essential and contingent characteristics impact the process

Racialized positionalities  131 of data collection, such as fieldwork relationships, access to specific kinds of information, research dilemmas and failures, and personal events that marked the researcher in particular ways (D’Amico Samuels 1991; Ulysse 2007; Çankaya 2017; Fumanti 2021). Positionality is a methodological device in the production of anthropological knowledge that acknowledges the messy circumstances in which ethnography is entangled, including the random encounters, interactions, and contingencies that determine what and how people say what they say and do what they do (Chua 2015), and what kinds of ethnographic data becomes accessible and available for study by researchers (Navaro-​Yashin 2012). In this line of thought and based on the work of feminists on reflexivity and knowledge such as Elizabeth Grosz (1986), Sandra Harding (1991) and Donna Haraway (1991), feminist geographer Linda McDowell suggests, “we must recognize and take account of our own position, as well as that of our research participants, and write this into our research practice” (McDowell 1992: 409, emphasis in original). Thus, becoming aware of the multiple positionalities anthropologists can adopt throughout fieldwork and how it affects data collection, analysis and writing also situates researchers within the social, temporal, and spatial landscape that they study and, as a result, the way each ethnographic account is subjectively constructed (Hastrup 2004). Inspired by old and new feminist epistemologies, I propose that an ethnography about the experiences of Haitian women in Santiago and their efforts to make a life worth living in a white-​mestizo society requires specific research positionalities: racialized positionalities. Racism and whiteness are heterogeneous, relational, and slippery objects (M’charek 2014) that have material and real-​life consequences on people’s lives (Gilroy 1987) –​ including the ethnographer. For this reason, it is crucial to configure a methodological device that accounts for the racial underpinnings of research positionalities concerning research participants and the process of knowledge production –​data collection, analysis, writing, and dissemination –​so as not to incarnate and perpetuate white supremacy and racial oppression in our research practices. Feminist objectivity relies on knowledge that is situated and limited and is based on the critical positioning within heterogeneous and gendered social spaces (Haraway 1991). Donna Haraway’s proposal for an epistemology of location, positioning, and situating –​against scientific claims of universal objectivity (Haraway 1991) –​allows us to envisage the production of knowledge from the complexity and contradictions of (racialized) bodies and (racialized) positions within unequal societies. A focus on the subjective, affective, and material dimensions of knowing and known subjects with their interests and their situatedness (Jaggar and Bordo 1989; Tuana 2017) can provide tools with which to assess the kinds of information and data on racism a racialized ethnographer can access, and the standpoint from which ethnographic evidence is analyzed and transformed into anthropological

132  Sofía Ugarte knowledge and narratives. Moreover, the reflection upon power relations within research contexts contributes to the acknowledgement of diverse and conflicting axes of difference –​gender, but also race, class, nation, sexuality, and others –​and the practice of ethnographic research informed by a politics of social justice (Davis and Craven 2016). A proposal for racialized positionalities in ethnographic research is attentive to the contradictions in using and relying upon racial categories when studying racism and white supremacy, which can become complicit with racial thinking and hierarchies (Radhakrishnan 1996). Racialized positionalities work with and against racialized categories by making meaningful connections between the production of knowledge, myriad experiences of racism, and the power relationships that sustain them (Radhakrishnan 1996; Gunaratnam 2003). Racialized positionalities speak directly to critical race/​whiteness studies and recent efforts to decolonize anthropological knowledge in the ethnographic study of white supremacy. In doing so, they can undertake the limiting effects of an anthropological theory of the social construction of race devoid of relationships and structures of power and the problems that emerge when anthropologists separate themselves from their fieldsites to produce ethnographic knowledge of (racialized) “others” The recognition of unequal fieldwork relationships and colonial power structures in ethnographic practices and knowledge production is not new in anthropology (Asad 1973; Das 1986; Harrison 1991; Obeyesekere 2012; Pels 1997; Trouillot 1991; all quoted in Sinha 2021; also in Brodkin et al. 2011; Todd 2020). Anthropology’s constitutive inequality stems, in part, from its kinship with colonial and imperial enterprises in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Galtung 1967; Gough 1968) and the persistence of anthropology’s “savage slot” (Trouillot 1991) with its “underlying logic of difference, otherness, exoticization, and stigmatization” fortified by “other blind spots like racism, sexism, and elitism” (Sinha 2021: 265). Moreover, the coloniality of anthropological knowledge is also constituted by the historical relationship between anthropologists and their fieldsites since Malinowski invented participant observation as a fieldwork method (D’Amico-​Samuels 1991), which embedded notions of “evidence” and “discovery” to racialist imperial logics based on the social conditions of white privilege and otherness (Beliso-​De Jesús and Pierre 2020: 69). This relationship has prompted the break from fieldwork during ethnographic writing for knowledge production (Gibson and Sauma 2021), what David Mosse describes as the anti-​sociality of anthropology’s method (Mosse 2006), and anthropology’s need to reposition racism and white privilege at the center of its research, data collection, and writing strategies (Beliso-​De Jesús and Pierre 2020). Connecting efforts to decolonize anthropology with concepts such as “coloniality of power” (Quijano 2000), including the racial and gendered underpinnings of knowledge production (Lugones 2008; Maldonado-​Torres 2007) and critical race and whiteness studies (hooks 1997; Alcoff 1998;

Racialized positionalities  133 Hartigan 2000; Leonardo 2004; Frankenberg 2001; Applebaum 2010) is essential for the configuration of racialized positionalities. Research on racism and white supremacy among researchers that become implicated in racist systems, even as anti-​racist scholars, has the risk of creating knowledge that speaks for marginalized and racialized others (Alcoff 2006; Ortega 2006) and thus turning into “oppressive talk” (hooks 1990: 151). On the other hand, researching racism and whiteness can contribute to perpetuating racial asymmetries and the reification of whiteness (Frankenberg 1993). Hence, I propose racialized positionalities in a plural sense: studying racism from the points of view of those who suffer racial discrimination and violence risks speaking for others and studying white supremacy from the points of view of those who perform and sustain racism risks perpetuating or even masking systems of white privilege and racial oppression (Leonardo 2004). How, then, can we research and write as anthropologists with ethnographic responsibility and without reproducing racial injustice and colonial modes of knowledge production? Based on my fieldwork experience with racialized migrant Haitian women and their encounters with racist Chileans, I reflect on three different positionalities that render visible the complexities of racial negotiations during ethnographic research, show how participant observation entails taking part (participant) and witnessing (observation) racism and the consolidation of white supremacy, and provide tools to navigate the process of writing about whiteness and racial violence in a changing social landscape.

Position I –​The ti fi blan (white girl) My first position seeks to make racial negotiations visible during ethnographic research (Harrison 2019). In doing so, I analytically fix racial modalities in a particular research setting characterized by fluid and heterogeneous processes and practices of difference. In Latin America, racial hierarchies constitute “race” as an absent presence, a relational assemblage connected to histories of coloniality that are made present and absent simultaneously (Wade et al. 2014; M’charek et al. 2014), affecting the practice of participant observation in a racialized fieldsite. Between August 2016 and January 2018, I spent 18 months in Santiago studying Haitian women’s efforts to make a life in Chile. I conducted participant observation with them as they navigated bureaucratic and immigration paperwork and searched for jobs as shopkeepers, hotel cleaners, janitors in shopping centers, domestic workers in private homes, waitresses in small restaurants, and carers of elderly and sick people. I also accompanied Haitian women as they went to the hospital and local surgeries when they were pregnant or fell ill, as they went out to the streets to sell food and second-​hand clothes, went shopping to the local street-​markets, church, and school, and as they hung out at home. As my research progressed, I looked

134  Sofía Ugarte closer at their experiences with Chilean state agents, their potential and current employers and co-​workers, the neighbors with whom they shared houses and hostels, their pastors and fellow parishioners from church, and their teachers at school and voluntary language courses where I also taught them Spanish. During fieldwork, I also did a brief internship at the Migration Department in the center of Santiago. I collaborated with the regional office of the Ministry of Labor in the analysis of their customer service statistical information. Along with these other forms of ethnographic data collection, I conducted over forty in-​depth interviews with state agents from different institutions, migration experts, policymakers, consultants at international organizations, NGO workers, volunteers, and recruiters of migrant workers in private and municipal job centers. Being an intern and a collaborator with state institutions was one of the multiple facets I acquired during fieldwork in Santiago. For Chileans, I was a student, a researcher, a volunteer, a colleague, and at times, an expert, with whom they confided their personal views and (mis)appreciations for Haitian women and men, many of them based on local racial ideologies that marked stark differences between locals and foreign migrants. I sought to understand the Haitian experience in Santiago from an intersectional perspective. For Haitian women, I was a friend, a confidant, a translator, a language teacher, a fake employer, a guarantor, and a godmother. Most importantly, for Haitian women and Haitian migrants in general, I was a ti fi blan (white girl). Thus, I conducted ethnography amid beauty practices such as hair braiding and manicures, hospital visits and pregnancy check-​ups, and when Haitian women imagined business and professional ambitions to become independent in a society that turned them into the most devalued and disposable workers in the Chilean economy. However, even if I was constantly changing my position as I conducted fieldwork in Santiago with Haitian women and Chileans, I was always a white Chilean woman hanging out with black migrant women from Haiti for my doctoral research. My position as a “white” girl is ethnographically salient because at the time of fieldwork, anti-​Black racism against migrants in Santiago, mainly from Haiti, became a pressing issue that informed everyday life for Haitian women trying to make a life worth living in a new country. During fieldwork, the number of Haitians in Chile grew dramatically, becoming one of the most prominent migrants after Venezuelans and Peruvians. The growing number of Haitian migrants in Chile sparked new forms of discrimination, as the media targeted them as culpable for the country’s “immigration crisis”. Here, Chilean nationals from diverse backgrounds threatened Haitian women’s sense of wellbeing and security in the country, primarily due to their skin color, foreign origin, and their lack of fluency in Spanish, Chile’s official language. The increasing visibility of Haitian migrants in the streets and the media makes them targets of everyday forms of racism and violence.

Racialized positionalities  135 During fieldwork, it became evident that Chilean whiteness was a location of structural advantage and privilege from where Chileans saw themselves and others (Frankenberg 2001; Leonardo 2004), making clear the racialized differences that impacted participant observation and anthropological research. The increasing number of Latin American and Caribbean migrants affirmed Chileans’ self-​perception as “whiter”, “superior”, and “cleaner” than incoming migrants (INDH 2017). This self-​perception reconfigured a postcolonial Chilean racial ideology borne from a homogenizing mestizaje that assimilated indigeneity and erased African ancestry to assert a national “white” identity superior to others (Illanes 2003; Walsh 2015; Webb and Radcliffe 2015). In doing so, the denial of Chile’s blackness followed the mestizaje logics in Latin America, a mixture based on assimilation as a whitening process founded on anti-​Black racism (Moreno Figueroa 2020) despite the mainstream belief at the time that “Chileans were not racist” and “racism was not a real problem”. Thus, following Ruth Frankenberg’s work, we can see how Chilean whiteness becomes instantiated as an unmarked category, a powerful and yet invisibilized mirage tied to colonial narratives that mark (foreign) others as inferior to national selves (Frankenberg 2001). Acknowledging my “whiteness” (Alcoff 1998) in a Latin American setting involves my position within a hierarchical racial ideology, which is based on mixture, anti-​blackness, and white supremacy. Even if I dis-​identify myself from a white Chilean race, I was still granted privilege and became racialized as a Chilean white (Leonardo 2002). For this reason, it became evident that part of my ethnographic responsibility when conducting research within this particular, and at times shifting, racialized positionality involved what Zoe Todd has stressed as attuning to my self-​knowledge and recognition of the diverse collectivities with which I dwelled in reciprocal relations throughout fieldwork (Todd 2020; cf. Mulla 2021). My presence (Chua 2015) affected the encounters between Haitian women and their Chilean others in Santiago. Moreover, my racialized position impacted the way I navigated highly unequal social landscapes and collected data in contexts where racism transformed the lives of my research participants in crucial ways.

Position II –​The translator of discriminatory practices and a racialized language My second position reflects on my peripheral involvement as a personal translator in racist encounters between Chilean nationals and Haitian women looking for work in Santiago. Here, I examine how participant observation in job-​search experiences entails taking part of and witnessing racist treatment toward Haitian migrants and the ways in which white supremacy among non-​elite Chileans unfolds in ways that implicate me as a Chilean researcher. With this data, I analyze how racialized, gendered, and class-​based hierarchies shape encounters between Haitian women looking

136  Sofía Ugarte for work to obtain a residence permit and Chilean women in charge of the recruitment for cleaning jobs in private offices and small hotels. In doing so, I destabilize my racialized positionality during these uncomfortable, shameful, and problematic situations to evidence the impossibility of blamelessness (cf. Das 2016; Mulla 2021; Fumanti 2021) when conducting research among those who perpetuate racial violence. In the winter of 2017, I accompanied a migrant Haitian woman named Alexandra to a group interview for a janitorial position at a company specializing in institutional cleaning services. I had met Alexandra in a Spanish course I organized in a neighborhood committee in the center of Santiago, where she asked me after class if I could go with her to help her if she needed a translator. Alexandra had been looking for a job for over three months with no success. Like many other Haitian women I met, she could not secure a long-​term position but only sporadic engagements that lasted less than a month and hence were unable to secure a long-​term resident permit. Alexandra’s older sister, with whom she lived, had found out through acquaintances about this opportunity and had passed it on to her. Alexandra explained in Haitian Creole while we walked into the building where the interview would take place, “It’s a cleaning job, but they make good contracts after a month’s work”. Alexandra knocked on the door of the recruitment office. As the door opened, we saw three women waiting for an interview. A Chilean woman welcomed us and asked, “Good morning, what brings you here?” to which Alexandra hesitantly replied in Spanish, “I am Alexandra; I’ve come to the interview”. With a troubled expression, the Chilean woman scanned her from head to toe with disgust and explained impatiently and, in a hurry, Uy, yes, I spoke with you on the phone earlier today. I already told you that you are not suitable for the job because your Spanish is awful. You won’t last in the job; you’ll be fired immediately. Even right now, you can’t follow my instructions. You still showed up. You can’t understand orders in Spanish, do what you’re asked to do. Alexandra stood there listening motionless. The Chilean woman turned around briskly, inviting the three women inside a meeting room; they were Spanish-​speaking migrants and had witnessed the exchange silently. Alexandra and I were left on our own. Her eyes filled with tears; she swallowed her emotions and smiled at me with difficulty. The encounter was brief and violent. The woman shunned Alexandra and me the opportunity to explain why Alexandra was fit for the job –​she had worked as a cleaner in many places before –​and how she was learning and practicing Spanish –​ myself being proof of her new skill. Alexandra had always worked in Spanish-​speaking environments, she had temporary residence documents necessary to work legally in the country, plus experience working in Chile. Nonetheless, Alexandra was unable to

Racialized positionalities  137 explain this to the interviewer during their brief encounter. She had not qualified as a valid applicant because, according to the interviewer, she could not understand Spanish in one phone conversation. Alexandra was humiliated and felt ashamed by her lack of fluency in Chilean Spanish to the point it almost made her cry in front of strangers. Even though Alexandra had arrived at the interview without an invitation, further questions remain about why the recruiter specifically humiliated her in such a way, without a chance to prove she was fit for the job. Alexandra’s experience of explicit discrimination in a hiring process is based on the idea that she lacked communication skills is common to other Haitians in Chile. The inability to speak Spanish the way Chileans expect marked Haitians’ speech and racialized them, equating accents, “bad” grammar, and “mixing” with bad habits and laziness (Urciuoli 1996), but also an inability to follow orders or be docile, such as in Alexandra’s case. Haitian Creole’s racialization positioned Haitian women within ideologies of language and languagelessness (Irvine and Gal 2000; Rosa 2016) that resonate in the Chilean imaginary of a national identity that excludes indigenous and non-​ Spanish forms of communication (Gundermann 1997). Chilean recruiters’ assessment of Haitians’ lack of language proficiency invoked ideas of incompetency at work, but also, more profoundly, their illegitimacy as persons who deserve respect from others. The recruiter’s refusal to have a conversation with Alexandra and her assumption that her silence and her accent meant she was not fit for the cleaning job was an act of discrimination against Alexandra because she was a Haitian woman. As a Chilean woman, I felt ashamed for the violence and treatment Alexandra received from the recruiter only because she showed up for an interview. With its unpleasantness and pain, shame shaped our reaction of immobility and silence in the face of racist verbal violence. However, my feelings of shame are different from Alexandra’s emotions as a victim of racial discrimination. Thus, we “pull ourselves together” (Hage 2009) in disparate manners despite sharing the emotional experience of shame amid racism. While Alexandra’s shame came from the individualized perception of wrongdoing borne from being the victim of racial discrimination, my shame as a Chilean ethnographer came from the racist behavior of someone with whom I shared a national and colonial history. Moreover, my incapacity to respond and defend Alexandra on the spot made me feel unprepared as an ethnographer, and most of all, a bad friend. On another occasion, I accompanied a Haitian woman named Emeline to a job interview at a three-​star hotel in a commercial high street in the city’s eastern part. Emeline worked as an assistant in a neighborhood grocery shop for the minimum wage. Tired of not getting a raise, she looked for a job that paid more. Emeline thought that tourism and restaurants were good options because she spoke French and English, and her Spanish was more fluent than when she had first arrived in the country. Emeline found out about this offer through a Dominican friend who worked as a housekeeper

138  Sofía Ugarte and connected her with Mrs Claudia, the manager. We met Mrs Claudia in the hotel lounge, where I explained to her that I was accompanying Emeline as her friend, and walked together to a small room at the back of the reception hall for the interview: Mrs Claudia:  Do you have work experience in Chile? Emeline:  [With a stern expression] Yes. Mrs Claudia:  [Looking at her] Where have you worked? Emeline:  I worked as a janitor in different places. Mrs Claudia:  [With a worried expression] And, how good is your Spanish? Emeline:  [Quietly] Yes. I am finishing high school here. Mrs Claudia:  [Losing her patience] Are you interested in working as a housekeeper in this hotel? Emeline:  Yes. [Long and silent pause.] Mrs Claudia:  I’ll be honest, I’ve had Haitians working as housekeepers here before. It has been tough to teach them the trade. They are slower than the others. We have only migrant women working as housekeepers. There aren’t any Chilean women who want to do the job. Haitians, however, are the hardest to work with because of the language. [Emeline nodded silently] When I started working as a housekeeper, I was also shy and quiet. If you want to work in the hotel business, you must be more willing and motivated, not indifferent, because it’s very competitive. I don’t know if it is your Spanish, but you seem to be uninterested, and this job is more challenging for Haitians. It’s always the case. I’m going to ask you for a two-​day trial with us and see how you get on. Come here on Tuesday next week, eight in the morning. You will get paid for the days you work. I cannot offer you anything else. [Mrs. Claudia turned to me for the first time when she made this offer] Emeline:  Thank you, Mrs Claudia. When the interview was over, Emeline and I walked outside the hotel. She was silent, and her body was trembling. I took her by the arm to calm her and asked her why she had been so brief in her answers to Mrs Claudia, leaving the impression she could not speak Spanish. “I was so nervous”, Emeline explained. Her nervousness –​manifest in her silence and her concise answers –​made Mrs Claudia think Emeline was indifferent to the job and ungrateful for the opportunity she was offering her. Emeline’s shy and vague answers gave Mrs Claudia the impression she was not fit for the job. Yet, Mrs Claudia constantly pushed Emeline to show motivation for the job while also claiming Haitian women like her were slower and incompetent. Emeline endured Mrs Claudia’s violent utterances, boxing her into a racial stereotype that intimately structured Emeline’s feelings and responses and devalued her as a worker compared to other migrant women in the

Racialized positionalities  139 Chilean economy. Throughout the interview, Mrs Claudia’s attitudes effectively made Emeline into the stereotype of Haitian women that Mrs Claudia expected, perpetuating latent racism and labor hierarchies through gestures and utterances of her superiority over Emeline. A week later, I heard from Emeline that she had failed to pass the trial. I have tried to unpack the work of whiteness in Chilean society by evaluating the effects of researching racism when access to ethnographic data is based on racial identification and unintended complicities with racist participants. The ease with which Mrs Claudia treated Emeline based on racial and gendered stereotypes of slowness, incompetency and bad work in that office makes me think about the many situations during fieldwork in which I was part of and witnessed a private racist encounter behind closed doors. Here, I wonder whether my presence impacted Mrs Claudia’s attitude toward Emeline: Did I incite her xenophobic comments and remarks? Did I ameliorate them? Was Mrs Claudia masking her racism through benevolent job advice and an offer for a tryout? Emeline and Alexandra’s experiences point to the way encounters between Chilean employers and Haitian women looking for work normalize white privilege over Haitian migrants. Charles Mills’s work on the epistemology of ignorance and his question, “How are white people able to consistently do the wrong thing while thinking that they are doing the right thing?” (Mills 1997: 94), problematizes how systematic white ignorance (Applebaum 2010), in the form of racial stereotypes against Haitian women, remains unchallenged. Here, whiteness produces a false sense of shared understanding between myself, the ethnographer, and racist Chileans, and affected the kinds of data I obtained by participating in, being part of, and observing (witnessing) these situations that positioned Haitian women as racialized and devalued migrants in Chile.

Position III –​The writer, ethnographic weaver The third position speaks to the conjuncture of writing about Chilean white supremacy and anti-​Black racism in a changing social landscape. I finished my fieldwork in January 2018, and a lot has happened since then, transforming my approach to ethnographic data and how I write with it and about it. Writing about my research involved incorporating new events, forms of thinking, social movements, and economic and health crises. Political authorities consolidated anti-​Haitian migration policies in Chile, the Covid-​19 pandemic reconfigured migration flows within Latin America, and the global outreach of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement sparked old and new racial consciousness and desires for social justice in the Global South. Following Liana Chua’s reflections on anthropological knowledge-​ making, how the fieldsite changes during the writing and analysis of ethnography urges the need to bracket ethnographic encounters within the larger

140  Sofía Ugarte relational and historical field of which they are part of (Chua 2015: 643). In doing so, it can contribute to the ethnographic exercise of writing without reproducing racial injustice and colonial modes of knowledge production. This position then, seeks to reflect on a methodology that incorporates the changing nature of fieldwork and fieldsite. These changes involve the blurring of distinctions between field and desk (Mosse 2006) –​and between data collection and the genre of writing –​and the expanding and revisiting of ethnographic archives (Fumanti 2021) to articulate new forms of racial knowledge (Hartigan 2000) and write about anti-​Black racism and Latin American whiteness with ethnographic responsibility and from the point of view of situated subjects. Since March 2018, the right-​ wing administration of President Piñera imposed different political measures and racist policies targeting Haitians in particular. These measures were founded in a national interest to have ordered, safe and regular immigration flows and curb the increasing number of Haitian nationals entering as tourists to live and work in the country. From April 2018 onwards, the Chilean government imposed restrictive visas to visit the country, such as a consular visa for visitor tourist entries and a humanitarian visa for family reunification, which could only be requested in the Chilean consulate in Haiti. Throughout 2018, less than 250 consular and humanitarian visas were granted to Haitian nationals, compared to the 111,761 Haitians who entered the country as tourists and visitors in the previous year. Together with the restrictive and targeted visas to Haitian nationals, since November 2018, the much-​advertised Programa de Retorno Humanitario (Humanitarian Return Program) sought to return Haitians to Port-​au-​Prince on military aircrafts. This plan disguised in a humanitarian narrative was directed toward migrants and refugees who voluntarily decided to return to their home country, transporting them freely with the condition that they did not return to Chile within a certain period. Even though this policy was designed for migrants from all nationalities, the government focused on Haitians, the most prominent group of repatriates. Until May 2019, many returned to Haiti from Chile through this government plan. Restrictive and expulsive migration policies, everyday forms of racism, limited job opportunities and access to housing accompanied the ongoing political unrest during the social uprising since October 2019 and the economic and health crises that came in the wake of the pandemic. In this context, life for Haitians in Chile has become harder to endure. The anti-​ Black and anti-​Haitian racism that I witnessed during fieldwork in 2016 and 2017 solidified in the shape of racist and anti-​Haitian state policies of border control and migration management. In 2021, the prospect of a right-​ wing populist and anti-​migrant presidential candidate motivated thousands of Haitians to take a gamble and make the 4,700-​mile journey north to the Mexico–​US border. Moreover, the resurgence of BLM protests, social media coverage, and mobilizations in the Global North as a response to the murder of George

Racialized positionalities  141 Floyd in Minneapolis (US) increased the social consciousness of systemic racism and injustice against people of color around the world, including Chile. In this context, Haitians, along with other Latin American and Caribbean migrants and Indigenous populations –​particularly the Mapuche people –​became exemplars of institutional violence and systemic racism in Chile. The figure of Joane Florvil, a Haitian woman who had died under police custody during fieldwork, flourished as a symbol of gender and racial oppression and the victim of white supremacy and police violence. As a result, the global movement positioned racialized migrants and Indigenous populations as relevant political subjects and victims of human rights abuse within the social uprising’s demands for a dignified life, more equality, and social justice. In light of the changing nature of participant observation, it became crucial to weave together the experience of racial discrimination and the performance of a specific form of gendered white supremacy not only with Chile’s history of racial hierarchies as a postcolonial republic, but also with the complex events that came about in the country and the world in the years after fieldwork. Even though migrants in Chile did not participate as a collective in the political protests that began in October 2019 and were appeased when the pandemic started in March 2020, growing demands for racial justice accompanied the fight for dignity and equality. The effort to re-​embed the encounters between Haitian women and Chilean nationals –​ myself included –​made the ethnography both permeable and vulnerable (Chua 2015) to current debates around racial structures of oppression, contemporary iterations of Latin American whiteness, aspirations for a dignified life in a post-​neoliberal society, and the tragic effects of the pandemic on Haitian migration flows within and beyond Chile. Weaving together fieldwork encounters with the knots and threads of past and ongoing transformative events follows Gina A. Ulysse’s ethnographic quilt (Ulysse 2007) because it situates the complexities of situated pieces of knowledge in anthropology, as one navigates racialized fieldsites, remembers and reflects on racist experiences, writes about the configuration and effects of race work (Calvo-​Gonzalez 2019), and become vigilant to the articulation of anti-​racist projects and narratives (Yancy 2008). From this perspective and within the framework of racialized positionalities, ethnographic writing involves the responsibility of weaving together the ethnography of Emeline, Alexandra, and many other Haitian women trying to make a life worth living in Santiago and their encounters with Chilean nationals into a narrative of intersectional (in)justice as part of Chile’s unequal social landscape.

Conclusion Alexandra and Emeline’s experiences looking for work in Santiago are marked by gender and racial biases based on anti-​ Black racism and

142  Sofía Ugarte a particular form of Chilean white supremacy. Mrs Claudia and the anonymous recruiter’s ideals of good work and propriety are sedimented on stereotypes against Haitian migrant women, ideologies of languagelessness toward Haitian Creole, and a history of mestizaje that involves the careful selection of Europeans against Latin American and Caribbean migrants, the assimilation of indigeneity, and the erasure of Chile’s constitutive blackness. Moreover, anti-​Haitian racism and ideals of Chilean superiority concerning Afro-​descendant migrants affect the aspirations of Haitian women trying to make a life worth living in Santiago. Here, the shattering experiences of everyday racism (Essed 1991; Hage 2009) and its structural determinants (Bonilla-​Silva 1997) impact their pursuit of a job that will provide security, certainty, and dignity. In this sense, conducting participant observation as a Chilean woman means getting involved in these experiences in ways that destabilize the practice of ethnographic research and the meaning of anthropological knowledge, posing the complex challenge of how to research racism and white supremacy with responsibility and without reproducing racial oppression and colonial modes of knowledge production. A proposal for racialized positionalities within anthropology’s research practices means navigating complex racial identifications within the fieldsite’s history and social landscape and considering how they impact the process of data collection and analysis. Racialized positionalities also involve facing the uncomfortable challenges of participant observation with both victims and perpetrators of racial violence, and thus concerns for understanding participants’ points of view and racial ideologies risk perpetuating oppression and injustice and speaking for racialized others. Moreover, this proposal means taking into account that the study of heterogeneous and fluid objects such as “race” and “whiteness” (M’charek 2014) requires researchers to weave together fieldwork encounters with events and debates during the process of dissemination and writing to become attentive to marginalized voices, ongoing narratives, and projects that pursue social justice. In doing so, it becomes possible to envisage an ethnography of racism and white supremacy that contributes to the fight against racial oppression worldwide. Racialized positionalities speak to the past and present responsibilities of ethnographic practice and knowledge production, one that is individual (ASA 2021) and collective, as anthropologists circulate within organizations, research centers, and educational institutions. Taking responsibility for one’s role in the production of new forms of racial knowledge involves the recognition of “one’s self, one’s place, and one’s time vis-​à-​vis others” (McCarthy 2007: 4). This responsibility is both to ourselves and others because it is based on reciprocal relations within uneven social landscapes, which form the collectivities “to whom we are beholden” (Mulla 2021). In doing so, it comprises the acknowledgment of racialized positionalities –​with its affordances and limits –​as valuable devices for the development and transformation of anthropological practices and the discipline’s constant engagement and attunement with what matters to the people we study.

Racialized positionalities  143

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8 Of Calcutta, death, and the South Juxtaposing three Calcuttas/​Kolkatas Debarun Sarkar

Introduction There is undoubtedly a “southern turn” underway in the discipline of urban studies. The turn is visible in the slow and steady canonization of “southern urbanism” through the publication of edited volumes (Bhan, Srinivas, and Watson 2017; Parnell and Oldfield 2014; Miraftab and Kudva 2014), the increased recurrence of the signifier of “global south”, its visibility in conference programs and funding, and so forth. The southern turn has been accompanied by a burgeoning literature concerning responsibility (Martin 2021; Khader 2019; Saffari 2016) which has called for acknowledging the disparities between “global north” and “south” while building on postcolonial theory (Power 2009; Raghuram, Madge, and Noxolo 2009; Robinson 2003). One of the primary concerns of the “southern turn” is to locate the situatedness of different urbanisms across the “globe”, with an explicit focus on context (Patel 2014) and the margins (Bhan 2019) which cannot be framed within existing narratives of urbanisms that emerge from the “global north”. This situatedness of knowledge-​production is evoked to suggest not just “difference” but also to evoke and critique the “structural logic of epistemic and geopolitical power” (Roy 2020: 20). For Bhan, the southern is an “ethos of inquiry”, of thinking and locating from the “periphery” and the “global South is … a relational geography” not “just a collection of previously underdeveloped countries or the boundaries of the post-​colonial world but a dynamic and changing set of locations” (Bhan, Srinivas, and Watson 2017: 5). This chapter in no way tries to engage with the vast literature on southern urbanism, nor does it try mapping and critiquing the existing constellations of such literature. The intent is more precise. It seeks to interrogate one of the foundational texts of southern urbanism by Ananya Roy, City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (2003). Over the past few years, I have had a chance to visit some of the same places that Roy visited during her early and later works. The paper juxtaposes the office of Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority (KMDA) and DOI: 10.4324/9781003332077-9

148  Debarun Sarkar the search for planning-​documents in the archive by juxtaposing my and Roy’s (2003) narrative of it. The chapter then goes on to juxtapose Roy’s work with Ruchir Joshi’s essay-​film, Tales from Planet Kolkata, in order to show two divergent possibilities of talking about and approaching Calcutta/​ Kolkata, which brings to fore the problematic of il/​legibility. The problematic of il/​legibility is necessarily a relational concern, which is haunted by the figure of the “other”. As the chapter will argue, the “other” remains at the heart of any call to responsibility and it is in the invocation of the “other” that the problematic of il/​legibility necessarily emerges as a limit to thinking and/​or representation as such. Roy and Joshi’s divergent approach towards representing Calcutta/​Kolkata brings to light this link between responsibility, other, and legibility Through the above detours, the paper argues that the posturing that goes with doing theory “from the south” effaces the political economy of subjectivities (Bourcier 2012), which allows for the framing of “where one comes from”, or “what one is relationally”, that is, the scale to frame oneself through. The accent on the location of the researcher and the research object as coming from the “north” or studying the “south” effaces the messiness of the social (Latour 2005). In responding to the burgeoning literature around responsibility, Jazeel and McFarlane (2010: 110) note that calls to responsibility in academic knowledge production can quickly and too simplistically become demands for research to be more relevant to those “on the ground” in the global South at the expense of intellectual freedom, as if there is an inverse relationship between the two. Despite noting the limitations of the rising call for responsible research on global south that is done in the global north –​as Jazeel and McFarlane do –​the scalar and in-​the-​process discursive limitation that such calls to be responsible produce for researchers in the “south” studying the “south” has not garnered much attention. At the heart of the discourse of “responsibility” is a response that is evoked towards the “other”. For Derrida (1995) the movement of the response is intimately tied to guilt because of a double-​movement: a movement that is infinite, of infinite love, and a movement that is an apprehension of death and finitude. This contradiction invokes guilt, for one can never be infinitely good or express infinite love. It is this formulation of guilt that drives the southern urbanist discourse –​as is evident in the framing of Jazeel and McFarlane’s critique of their own delimitation of their frame of argument, even if heuristic, being concerned with research on global south in the global north. Jazeel and McFarlene remain unable to make a jump beyond the responsibility discourse because they fall back on the liberal evocation of “privilege”, an euphemism for “guilt”. Social science research requires the shedding of shame and guilt while building on the axiomatic foundation of equality which necessitates an

Of Calcutta, death, and the South  149 interaction that is not built on where one comes from or where the “other” is rather being open to an egalitarian arrangement (Rancière 2004). It is important to move beyond the ethical, for, as Badiou (2001: 3) succinctly puts it, ethical thought today is “a threatening denial of thought as such”. The ethical concern of the “other” and its contemporary stress on difference remains an empty call of “cultural sociology preached, in line with the new-​ style sermons, in lieu of the late class struggle” (ibid.: 23). In contrast to the banality of difference the philosophical and political difficulty today “lies on the side of the Same” (ibid.: 27), the inarticulable, and illegible common. Notwithstanding the above critique of responsibility and its evocation of an “other”, as noted before, the global discourse on the “global south” which is circulated largely by scholars educated or situated in the “north” or are responding to the “north” acts as a limitation for researchers from the “south” studying the “south”, scaffolding a scalar narrative within which one is expected to interact with the “north”. The “southern” problematic, to paraphrase Ruchir Joshi (1993), is not a southern concern at all but a “northern” concern within which scholars from the “south” are framed. The chapter develops a tripartite argument that highlights the need of undoing binaries like north–​south, centre–​periphery, and so forth, by maintaining a sceptical stance towards scalar valuations that obscure the messiness of the social for legibility. A call for scalar scepticism could be construed as responsibility. But to be sceptical of scalar valuations allows such a response to interrogate the adequacy of dominant scalar narratives without an invocation of the “other” as a crutch. As I will argue later, the “southern” articulation is concerned with the problematic of legibility and in turn legitimacy, more than the problematic of égalité. It is precisely this limitation of the responsibility discourse that undoes its efficacy. It is this problematic link between responsibility, other, and legibility that my chapter aims to highlights. First, in this chapter, I juxtapose an ethnographic representation of the building that houses the KMDA against the representation of the same site by Ananya Roy in her text City Requiem, Calcutta (2003). I argue that the radical posturing of “speaking from the south” needs to be interrogated not only as an epistemic location, but also as a relational and scalar strategy. “Speaking to”, I argue, is as important as “speaking from” which introduces the problematic of legibility. Second, I juxtapose the representational strategies deployed to overcome the representational problematic of the city of Calcutta/​Kolkata, that of poverty as Hutnyk (1996) develops, in Roy’s text and Ruchir Joshi’s essay-​film Tales from Planet Kolkata (1993). I argue that Roy merely defers the problematic of marginality of Calcutta/​Kolkata by imposing another marginality in relationship to Calcutta/​ Kolkata while Joshi questions the very desire to represent Calcutta/​Kolkata as a symptom of one’s inability to act on one’s surrounding in the “north”. Lastly, I juxtapose the ending of the two texts of Roy and Joshi and how the figure of death manifests in the texts and how they deal with it, so as to argue that Roy fails

150  Debarun Sarkar to grasp the weight of death as a threshold of il/​legibility as Joshi frames it. This leads Roy to make what I will argue are irresponsible demands in her recent texts, which fail to address the problematic of il/​legibility that forever haunts the university.

What is the “South”? A scalar problematic The “south” is in many ways a shorthand for the erstwhile, “underdeveloped”, “developing”, and the “Third World” despite the rhetorical strategies commonly deployed to erase the older signifiers. When used as a shorthand, the “south” is always already political as it is framed as both deterritorializing and reterritorializing, descaling and rescaling, molar and molecular. Consider for example an author such as Prashad (2012: 9), whose text highlights the duality of the “southern” frame. He notes: The “global South” has come to refer to this concatenation of protests against the theft of the commons, against the theft of human dignity and rights, against the undermining of democratic institutions and the promises of modernity. The global South is this: a world of protest, a whirlwind of creative activity. This text may be then contrasted with the following: At the 2006 Havana NAM summit, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez called for the creation of a new commission to study the current situation and propose an agenda that “will not be thrown to the wind.” He nodded to the South Commission, whose work in the 1980s set in motion the theory of the “locomotives of the South” –​although its own report, The Challenge of the South, published on the day Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, is little read. (Ibid.: 9) I here quote Prashad (2012) at length to foreground the crux of the “southern” perspective, which allows mobilizing a particular history of high politics or geopolitics while at the same time mobilizing a more mundane, political articulation of it. It is worth going back to such reference of high politics because “the south” is deployed today in academic writing to frame rather mundane articulations. References to geopolitics are sometimes made (see for example Roy 2020) while also deploying rhetorical strategies to obfuscate the geopolitical concerns.1 For example, the “southern urbanists” frame their project distancing the signifier of “south” from its geographical indexicality. Such a framing usually locates itself as an epistemic location. For example, in Bhan (2019: 4), another US-​educated academic located in India, this “situating” is articulated through two necessities, to interrogate “the contexts from which

Of Calcutta, death, and the South  151 they speak” and to frame the “south”, following Comaroff and Comaroff (2016), as “not just as a set of places but as a set of moving peripheries” (Bhan 2019: 4). Arif (2015: 53) notes the obvious limitations of radicalizing theory “within the containment of preordained geography” and of framing it within the existing binaries and “classificatory systems that decide the “enunciatory location” of theory or its alleged “reversal” (ibid.: 54). I argue that it is not merely “enunciatory location” or “situatedness” that limit the articulation of doing theory from the “south”, but it is also the addressee of this enunciatory framing that limits the legibility of enunciation. While the “global south” is a scale that has emerged as an effect of a range of overdetermined processes, it has also emerged as a frame (Sarkar 2021) through which academics, policymakers, and also professional activists locate their own enunciatory locations, their situations, and the locations and situations of the addressees. This “scale-​effect” and “scaling as a frame” of the “south” has various risks and limitations as Arif (2015) notes in the case of framing the world in preordained geography and, at the same time, it repeats what Simpson (2002: 196) evocatively refers to as “reproduction of a purely pastiche democracy, an assertion of legibility and accountability that has mostly been neither earned nor deserved and that closes off rather than opening up any further analysis”. In redeploying the existing binaries, the messiness of the “social” is traded off for a neat classificatory model to locate and place articulations in a manageable system to evaluate. The process of evaluation is at the heart of every scalar-​relational process (Sarkar 2021) one which Bhan (2019) alludes to in calling the southern ethos a relational ethos. But what Bhan glosses over is the underlying risk of evaluation that undergirds every scalar-​relational process as Simpson (2002: 196) notes lucidly, “we situate others mostly in order to dismiss them or identify with them”. Scales such as global, national, urban, regional, and so forth are not mere discursive effects but also are material and affective effects that have real consequences. A sceptical and critical stance towards scalar undertakings, that is, valuing, ordering, classifying, assembling bring to light not just the productive and constructive nature of scalar processes, but also demystify scalar undertakings as radically contingent. Arif (2015: 54) conceptualizes “theorising as an active process, which has an effect on the inadequacy of concept” while noting the inadequacy of the global south concept. She goes on to note that, “validating inadequate concepts in our work is as much a participation in hegemony” (ibid.: 61). To that extent this chapter follows such a call to highlight the inadequacy of the global south concept and follow the call to move “from oppositional thinking that has guided and crafted forms of knowing and validated inadequate concepts, simply by retaining the terms of those concepts” (ibid.: 54). Scalar debate over the past two decades has made evident the limitations that scalar scaffoldings place on knowledge articulations while enabling the perpetuation of existing scalar scaffoldings.2 The paradox of the responsibility discourse towards the

152  Debarun Sarkar global south remains that, in evoking an “other” and reifying a scale for the “other”, it limits the possibilities of altered configuration to be articulated for the sake of legibility. A scalar outlook then cannot let “southern urbanism” off the hook even if the claim to being a mere epistemic perspective is made –​as is usually the case in the more sophisticated articulations such as that of Bhan (2019) –​because by doing so southern urbanists bracket off the value of their project by projecting it only as an epistemic position. Such a bracketing off has consequences because by doing so they delink a signifier with its affective and material relationalities. “South” is not an empty signifier for the southern urbanists because the signifier of “south” and “southern” is tactically deployed at a particular historical juncture when the signifier of “global south” has accrued immense value from the World Bank to the United Nations. The “south” is a particular dissection of the globe, a scalar classification in the same way that the national or the urban is. Southern urbanism rehashes a whole slew of rhetorical strategies developed by what goes by the name of postcolonial studies (see, for example, Roy 2020) while supplanting the colonizer–​colonized, east–​west dichotomy with the global north–​global south dichotomy.3 This close link between postcolonial studies and southern urbanism is explicitly articulated by Swati Chattopadhyay, another US-​educated academic working in the United States. In her second book (Chattopadhyay 2012) she announced her affinity to southern urbanism while acknowledging her journey through subaltern studies. Southern urbanism repeats the postcolonial rhetoric in a repackaged manner while bypassing the critiques of postcolonial studies which questioned the efficacy of dividing the world into east and west (Chibber 2013). This bypassing is accompanied by the effacement of the fact that the signifier of “global south” has come to play a hegemonic role in the knowledge market. The whole “southern” project then is evidently a scalar project, a project which evaluates and promotes a particular object as the legible object and location of enunciation. This framing does not just erase the messy realties of the social but at the same time risks a repetition of methodological nationalism (Beck 2007) by promoting only one articulation as the legible articulation from a particular geographical location. As the next sections demonstrate, in a search for legibility, Roy missed out on presenting or apprehending one of the crucial aspects of one of the sites in question. Roy’s search for legibility was not framed as theorizing from the “south” but it laid the groundwork for her later articulations about “informalization”. I juxtapose two images of a site to suggest that it is not merely where one comes from –​which has been the dominant framing of theorizing from the “south” –​but also whom one addresses that determines the limitations of knowledge articulations. “Speaking to” then, and not just “speaking from”, is also part of relational moment. And it is precisely in this speaking-​to that one falters and risks being illegible.

Of Calcutta, death, and the South  153

From Salt Lake to New Town At the heart of Salt Lake City, a planned town developed during the 1960s, north of the Central Park, the town houses a host of governmental buildings. One of them, going by the name of Udayan Bhavan, houses the offices of KMDA (previously CMDA) and some ancillary bodies.4 I frequented the building during my time of fieldwork to visit the Central Library of KMDA, which has a non-​exhaustive though crucial collection of planning reports in its collection. The nature of the collection provides crucial hints about the changing nature of urban planning in the region and its relationship with the archive. The building that houses the main offices of KMDA exists at the centre of Salt Lake City opposite the Central Park. Salt Lake City, a new town developed in the late 1950s and 1960s through infilling of a salt lake was planned by a Yoguslav planner Dobrivoje Tošković (Banerjee 2012) when a Yoguslav company Invest-​Import won the bid for planning the city (Chattopadhyaya 1990). The city was a result of the dominant perspective of developing counter magnets to decongest Calcutta at the time. Salt Lake is divided into five sectors, three of them being the central sectors, the fourth one a small outlier, and the fifth was reserved for industrial zoning which has over the years developed into a prime enclave for IT service offices, government offices, research centres, and private educational institutes. KMDA’s office is housed inside a building named Udayan Bhavan, painted in blue, the dominant colour of the city since the centre-​left populist party All India Trinamool Congress came to power in the state. On the side that opens up to the main road, a metro has been under construction for close to a decade and almost nearing completion. The metro line would connect Salt Lake to Sealdah and Howrah station, two of transport hubs of the city connecting the city-​region to India at large and to the suburbs and neighbouring towns. The entrance on the main road looks barren and is sparsely used by the employees primarily to enter and exit when boarding or deboarding from buses. But, the other entrance, on the western side, opens on to a smaller lane and there are road stalls of the usual kind near offices, servicing the employees and the visitors of the office with meals, cigarettes, tea, and snacks. To suggest that the building is in a disarray is not at all an exaggeration. As a statutory planning body, especially being one of the first one in postcolonial India, it is surprising to see the building in its present condition. Planning and architecture institutes tend to have flashy design that makes them stand out, but the KMDA building is a rather generic nondescript government building. This is not to suggest that other planning bodies in India are in any great shape, but it is worth noting the state of these institutions and how they are housed. The affective atmosphere of the building is resonant with an air of unkemptness. The toilets on the ground floor, for example,

154  Debarun Sarkar which are generally used by the general public and employees on occasion, are rarely ever cleaned. It is easy to come across employees talking about their salaries not being paid on time and pensioners have their own share of complaints. The ground floor of the building is adorned with countless union posters. The library is housed on the first floor beside the Nabadiganta Industrial Township Authority’s (NDITA) offices. NDITA manages the Sector 5 of Salt Lake which was divided due it its particular character. The library is small with its funding dwindling. The librarian could not stop complaining about the lack of funding that the library received at the time. The librarian was a recent recruit and his absolute dismay at the condition of library was evident. He tried his best to catalogue all the reports that were present in the library and rearrange them. He could not help but recount his failed attempts at requesting various officers to submit their old reports when they retired, but none of them did so. On paper, the officers are supposed to submit a copy of every report to the library which the library employees noted was rarely ever done anymore as there also exists a secondary black market for such reports. This absolute state of disarray went right up to the top with frequent changes of the leadership positions. One of the library assistants, an ageing man, who has seen the library function differently noted the past in considerably different way. This cannot merely be attributed to his left-​ leaning ideology or nostalgia as the evidence spoke for itself. The library was extremely well stacked with the reports from late 1970s and early ’80s. The documents of those era attest to this fact. There is an effort to make the reports presentable, almost historical. A report from 1980s, for example, has some of the most illuminating aphorisms concerning planning practices. The reports are printed on good quality paper and are well-​bound, although they are crumbling now, with innumerable maps provided. The reports are material testament to the historical planning practice. The old assistant in his ruminations would constantly hark back to the days when the babus would stay back late in the night to work and use the library. Such memories of a different speed, rhythm, and temporality of the work at the office can be gauged by the material output of the reports that were made during those years. Planning reports of those years were aware of the historical act of planning. Every major report would tend to start with a rather long introduction to the city of Calcutta and what had already gone into planning it, before venturing into summarizing the current status of the city and the new plans that the report would attest to. This is in stark contrast to the absolute dearth of planning reports post 1990s in the collection of the library. The way the reports are stored, archived, and presented changed a few decades later. For example, the Vision 2025 (Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority 2005) document in the library is a copy which is spiral-​bound, printed on A4 size sheets. One is also presented with similar documents when one goes looking for the New Town Project Report to the Housing Infrastructure Development

Of Calcutta, death, and the South  155 Corporation (HIDCO) office in New Town. New Town –​with its generic name –​is situated east of Salt Lake City, east of Kolkata. The land-​use morphology of New Town is starkly different than Salt Lake. New Town is structured as a polycentric city with multiple intensive land use (MILU). Various clusters of work and leisure exist but towards the centre of New Town is the central business district (CBD), which houses a large cluster of offices, SEZs, educational institutes, and a proposed financial centre situated close to a convention centre. HIDCO is a government owned joint-​stock entity currently acting as a land-​holding body of New Town and also functions as the planning body. The director of the HIDCO is also the director of New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA) which functions as an urban local body. New Town has still not transitioned into a municipality because of the low permanent populations. New Town, though a contiguous area has spaces carved out of it, villages to some extent remain untouched so that they can function as “service villages” according to the project report (West Bengal Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation 1999). These carved out villages are still governed under the Panchayati Raj. During my fieldwork, a panchayat election took place in 2018, which a lot of the villagers thought would be the last panchayat election before these villages would be merged into a municipality. The HIDCO office is situated at the central intersection of New Town, the Narkel Bagan crossing. A glass-​clad facade adorns the building in the front. The building does not resemble the blue government buildings and the architecture of the building does not stand out much in this city. It could pass off for any sort of an office building. In their writing, Dey, Samaddar and Sen (2016) reserve a tone of disdain for such architecture and fantasize posters pasted over them during a protest someday. But what they fail to identify, and this is crucial, is that, as Ong (2011) notes, such buildings, whether grand or not, come to represent the arrival of these urban spaces, and developing nations on the global stage for its citizens. This is not to discount the resentment against HIDCO that the villagers still share for the land acquisition drive. Yet such architectural changes are not a result of mere elite desire, but are themselves desiring-​machines (Deleuze and Guattari 1983) producing lines of desire. The project report of New Town was handed to me by the Chief Planner, who sat in front of a massive map of New Town behind him. On the ground floor two rooms had “New Town archive” written over them but was still under a process of construction. Through repeated inquiries, I was told that the archive would eventually house all the maps and documents to help researchers, but it was yet to be functional while I was in the field. With the shift in planning energies eastward, an altogether new archive seems to be emerging. The aesthetics of this archive is yet to be seen and would certainly be needed to be studied later. However, the fact that a new archive is at all being made attests to the historical shift that has marked

156  Debarun Sarkar this region concerning what it knows is worth archiving, remembering. Since the demise of the industries in the Calcutta region due to the freight equalization policy (Chakravorty and Gupta 1996; Mohan 1983) the region has witnessed a gradual shift eastward with a focus on the service sector. Planning, it appears, is still aware of the sheer historical role it plays by generating an archive however non-​comprehensive and fragmented. Planning and the archive are intimately tied no matter how fragmented for it is the very presence of the archive that attests to the discipline precisely, without which one would be left with mapping and tracing sedimentations of planning or its absence through various proxies as Ananya Roy (2003) lamented during her fieldwork.

Two KMDA/​CMDAs Ananya Roy’s book City Requiem, Calcutta, one of the few book-​length monographs about the region which address the concerns of urban planning has long paragraphs and pages where she laments the lack of planning documents that she could not access during her fieldwork at the turn of the millennium in Calcutta. Despite being able to mobilize social networks far higher in hierarchy than I could mobilize during my fieldwork, Roy was surprised by the “informal” quality of the state and urban planning something that she harkens onto as being unprepared for having been trained in urban planning in American universities.5 This line of reasoning in Roy’s book emerged out of a very particular problem of an American-​ educated researcher who currently works in the United States. Published in 2003, City Requiem, Calcutta never once deployed the signifier “south” or “southern”. Despite this lack of an explicit championing of southern urbanism in the book, the core argument of the book, the informality of urban planning in Calcutta will go on to inform Roy’s later work. In the previous section I presented my “representation” of KMDA and the changing nature of archive and urban planning in the Calcutta region. Ananya Roy too visited the same KMDA offices during her fieldwork. Halfway through the book, Roy (2003) provides an evocative ethnographic scene where she visits the offices of Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) in 1997. After a reference from a well-​respected officer, she hoped that the officers at the Land Acquisition Cell would help her locate the land records for the southeastern periphery of the city. To her dismay, she learnt that no centralized records of land ownership and acquisition existed for the southeastern fringes. The Senior Land Officer tells her in the scene, “no one really knows which part of which plot is vested. Not even I. There are no maps or boundaries. We deal with it on a case-​by-​case basis” (ibid.: 134). The aporia of mapping and planning emerges as the crucial axis around which Roy’s book stands. Roy’s later conceptualization of “informalization”

Of Calcutta, death, and the South  157 (Roy 2009, 2005) where she abstracts away from the particular of Calcutta to a broader scale of India, though argued and framed differently, is clearly inspired by these early encounters in the field. This framing of urbanism allows locating a peculiar relationality of the state, capital, and land. The lack of access to documents in the planning-​archive was not a first articulation of this type as Roy cites Chakravorty and Gupta (1996) to attest to the fact that “most CMDA planning documents and accompanying maps—​ from the Mega City Program to the Calcutta 300 Plan—​ have been classified as top secret, shielding them from all public scrutiny” (Roy 2003: 135). But as can be gleaned from the previous section of my chapter, there is a qualitatively distinct nature of the planning-​archive in the Calcutta-​ region when viewed longitudinally, that is, across time. The archive displays a higher density of reports and documentation and a different aesthetic presentation throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I am suggesting that a longitudinal view of the spatial development and its relationship with the planning-​archive foregrounds a different problematic by bringing to light what the state deems worth remembering and what it deems worth forgetting. Such an act of remembrance and forgetting is certainly productive of new relationalities but also provides an insight into the changing contours of planning–​knowledge–​practice and its own self-​representation. It is in no way to suggest that Roy’s KMDA does not exist or that Roy’s conceptualization of informalization lacks efficacy. My intent rather is to highlight the effacing of this significant body of documents available to the public in the KMDA library. To talk about these documents, however fragmentary and non-​exhaustive, would disrupt the legible narratives of missing documents. This difference cannot be made sense of only by the situatedness of the ethnographer, of “where one comes from”, but also whom one is addressing. In addressing the “global north”, the proponents of the “global south” in no way address the “other”, but turn their back to speak to the “empire”, the “north”, what have you. As noted, this problematic mobilizes the scalar dichotomy to categorize the world and in turning back to speak to the “north” or acknowledge the privilege of the “northern position”, the “south” is quickly abandoned. This is a common problem when thinking the “other”, as Haraway notes in the case of Derrida and his attempt to think a cat where “shame trumped curiosity” (Haraway 2008: 102). Haraway’s statement is valid for the “south” as it was for a cat, that “shame is not an adequate response to our inheritance … even at their most brutal” (ibid.: 107). The evocation of the location of enunciation and the addressee is explicit in Roy (2005: 148) where she argues that “such issues” –​informality –​“are of relevance not only in Third World contexts but also to American planners concerned with distributive justice”. This argument eventually found its full-​ blown account in Roy (2009: 82) where she drops much of the rhetorical

158  Debarun Sarkar pretence of justifying her argument to an American readership. She engages in a dismissal of American planning theorists by naming a journal, “an article in the flagship Journal of the American Planning Association by Judith Innes, Sarah Connick and David Booher (2007)”. The scalar nature of her project is evident in the development of the above argument, Roy’s situatedness allows her to first claim access to certain kind of knowledge which is of relevance to not just a reader or a planner in India but also in America. And, by the end of the journey to use her own words, her work becomes a “proxy” (Roy 2009: 80) for planning in India and beyond. I will not delve into the nature of the above argument. I am more interested in this interpellation of American planners in Roy’s texts and the constant reference in her book to her American education and the deployment of such rhetorical strategies. My account of KMDA led me to think of the nature of state-​planning and its relationship to the archive and the nature of remembrance and forgetting. This dwelling on the planning-​assemblage’s remembrance and forgetting can be easily framed within a historical account of global south, or India’s neat narrative of liberalization (which it is not so neat as Chatterjee (2008) and Drèze and Khera (2017) argue differently), a narrative that can be neatly told as one of moving away from the era of Nehruvian modernity (Banerjee 1998; Chibber 2006), or a narrative of the changing nature of the Left Front government from the 1970s to 2000s. But to pretend to exhaust or even claim such a causality forecloses the possibility of dwelling on remembrance and forgetting. Why can messy stories not be allowed to remain that way? Why must they be tied neatly into expected linear narratives? The limitations of the “southern” framing become evident in such moments, wherein the illegibility of this moment can be swiftly erased to package it into a “southern” narrative to address the “north”. Roy’s (2020) recent turn towards a critique of the business (regretfully she does not use the word) of academic publishing needs to go further than the figure of a subversive intellectual in whom she places much faith. A more radical question would be to pose as to what is the need for citationary strictures in disciplines which are not “scientific”? Why pretend to contribute to knowledge systems that are clearly always already bureaucratic in their classificatory regimes? The “southern” urbanist response remains confined to mobilizing a “preordained geography” (Arif 2015: 53) which in turn fuels the discourse on responsibility towards the “global south” (Jazeel and McFarlane 2010).

Of margins and representations Roy suggests early in City Requiem, Calcutta that she was tired of the representations of Calcutta through the lens of poverty and her inability to surpass that trope after reading Hutnyk (1996) which provided the most comprehensive account of the “rumor of Calcutta”: that of poverty. The

Of Calcutta, death, and the South  159 rhetorical strategy to justify the title of her work is framed as a parody, an ironic adage to the existing representations of Calcutta: I mean the idea of requiem in more than simply a funeral for Calcutta. I also mean it as a satire on the very trope of the dying city, and as a critique of the icon of the chaotic Third World metropolis, always in trouble, always needing remedy. One other note: a requiem is as much about the act of composition as it is about death. In other words, it signals the crucial need to uncover the complicities that constitute the production of a city. […] if my opening move was to present Calcutta as the periphery of the world-​system, then I now seek to re-​present Calcutta at the margins, and indeed the margins of Calcutta, as much more than simply a site of powerlessness. (Roy 2003: 7–​9) One could still ask why does Roy requires this trope of marginality to frame Calcutta at all? Does it not repeat the existing tropes of Calcutta, a metropolis of the erstwhile abandoned empire, whose margins in turn in a two-​step distance once again one seeks to place? Being unable to overcome the trope of the margin, Roy merely defers the “other” to the margins of Calcutta. Ruchir Joshi (1993), in his essay-​film titled Tales from Planet Kolkata, a response to Louis Malle’s film Calcutta (Malle 1969) questions the very desire to represent Calcutta in film. Calcutta, or Kolkata, for Joshi is a place where maybe one arrives at because of one’s inability to act on one’s own surroundings in the city back in the North. He asks, “Why does the North need Calcutta?” and he answers echoing and paraphrasing Frantz Fanon: If Calcutta did not exist, the North by North West in Los Angeles, New York, or London would have to invent it. […] Make no mistake. Calcutta is a drug. You need Calcutta, but Calcutta doesn’t need your seeking, your horror, your addicted attention … There is a Third World inside every First World. There is a First World inside every Third World. (Joshi 1993) Joshi in turn provides a lucid response to the spectacle of horror and pity that has come to frame Calcutta: “Calcutta is about the same thing New York is about. Business as usual”. I make the above juxtaposition between Roy and Joshi to allude to two divergent possibilities of framing the problematic of representation of Calcutta. On the one hand, Roy, acknowledging the existing limitations of representing Calcutta on the margins and still going on to use the same trope by taking it one more step further to speak of the margins of margins. And the other hand, Joshi, turning the tables to suggest that the vector of what is classified or signified as First World or Third World traverses the globe and breaks up the neat classificatory regimes of centre and periphery.

160  Debarun Sarkar This daresay, illegitimate or illegible articulation of Joshi is important because it challenges what the southern urbanists do by creating a new hierarchy, a new valuation of what knowledge from the “global south” ought to be like and speak of and how it must position itself. Joshi writing from outside academia lucidly cuts through the mess without doing away with the messiness of the social.

Death, legibility, and the south Roy (2020: 2) in her rebuttal of citationary practices in the “north” notes that there is a tendency to appropriate postcolonial critique, feminist and queer theory, black geographies, and latinx geographies “as specialized (rather than universal) traditions of thought” which are then often “folded into the self-​narration of geography”. Her argument hinges on the asymmetries of citationary practices and the practices of citationary alibi that perpetuates in respectable politics of the academy. For Roy (2020: 20), “postcolonial approach to urban studies is not the recovery of different pathways of urban transformation but rather is analytical attention to political economy constituted through historical difference”. This focus on historical difference is followed by a celebration of “the figure of the subversive intellectual”, which Roy, following Harney and Moten (2013: 6, quoted in Roy 2020: 3), notes that “the university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings”. Roy’s (2020: 3) attack on citationary practices and what she calls “professionalization of pedagogy” and “bureaucracies of respectability politics” falters at this precise moment. Though she frames the university as that which cannot accommodate the subversive excess, she continues with the insistence that the subversive figure is expected to engage with the university. The fantasy of subversion that Roy (2020: 3) holds, in her words “subversion[s]‌that are necessary to impede such reproduction”, retains a focus on the subversive in relationship to the university. This relationship remains unwilling to think through the problematic of il/​legibility that forever haunts the business of knowledge production and circulation. Citationary practices today are after all more than merely an epistemic concern. Instead they are intimately linked to the industry of academic knowledge production and circulation. Illegible knowledge-​articulations, that is, messiness, is at the heart of the social, as is the desire to map and comprehend it. All that the categories, such as “global south”, do is fit the messy world of the social into neat commodifiable narratives to make them easily comprehensible, and to stage a narrative without contradictions. To suggest that the messiness of the social is effaced by neat and linear narratives does not mean that illegible articulations are incoherent. Illegible knowledges and their claims to universality are actually much simpler than what bureaucratic academic discourses make it out to be. Simpson (2002: 196) links this problem with the current obsession to situate. He

Of Calcutta, death, and the South  161 argues that “the mandate toward complexity” has resulted in a disavowal of “apparent simplicities”. He notes that it is only “brutal determinations such as death, sickness and unemployment” (ibid.: 196) that challenge the persistent calls for situatedness. Simpson echoes Deleuze’s reading of Dickens (Deleuze 1997), that it is precisely the neighbourhood of death (among other phenomenon such as sickness and unemployment) which destabilizes the notion of situatedness to open towards the immanence of life bereft of the mundane and petty identities of the living, evoking an illegitimate, inarticulable common. The trope of death is at the heart of both the above texts of Roy (2003) and Joshi (1993). Roy begins the end of her book by going back to her framing of the book as a requiem and situating it in her own life’s trajectory: If a requiem is as much an act of composition, evoking pleasure, as it is a performance of death, then my compositional strategies have emerged within a transnational cartography. My first ending, that which encompasses all others, makes explicit this location, for it is situated at the intersection of home and field, research and teaching, Calcutta and Berkeley. (Roy 2002: 221) In this case, the performance of death is only one part of the requiem, composition being the other. But this framing of death is quickly juxtaposed and deferred by situating oneself between Calcutta and Berkeley and the requiem is abandoned for a confession to make one’s location explicit. This is starkly different to the way Joshi (1993) begins the end of his film. As the film draws to a close the film returns to the death of Joshi’s friend in an elliptical manner, Joshi announces towards the end of the film that “death is not in not being able to communicate but in no longer being able to be understood” (ibid.). Death is at heart of Joshi’s film too, yet not as a parody, or a performance, but as the death of his friend, the poet Deepak Majumdar. The film begins as an elegy, or rather the difficulty that Joshi was facing to write an elegy for his friend. The film quickly changes gears and becomes a response to Louis Malle’s film and other media representations of Calcutta/​Kolkata, eventually returning to the trope of death towards the end. Joshi announces in a prophetic statement that death is in not being able to be understood. It is precisely in the neighbourhood of this inarticulable common, the possibility of responsibility, even in death, traverses the spectrum of non/​sense (Deleuze 1997). In staying on the side of the legible, in framing the location of the enunciator and the addressee, a “southern” response as already noted is primarily concerned with the problematic of legibility and in turn legitimacy. Roy’s (2020) fantasy of “the figure of the subversive intellectual” that she wishes to somehow enter the university is a cruel demand for this precise reason. To wish such a figure’s entry to academia is to wish death upon

162  Debarun Sarkar them because the university today is a part of the knowledge industry that requires packageable and legible articulations. To acknowledge the presence of death in the evocation of responsibility, as noted in the introduction, necessitates acknowledging the limitation of the ethical implication of the “other”. The south–​north dichotomy finds itself stuck in the above problematic. To begin to articulate a politics worth égalité requires acknowledging the illegible and inarticulable common that is shared, difference being mere platitude today. The discourse of responsibility that the north–​south discourse hinges on forecloses precisely this illegible and inarticulable common for a bureaucratic classification of life. And to harken onto the university as a space for the subversive intellectual is nothing short of a cynical defence of the university, effacing the role that the university plays today as just another site of commodity production, “business as usual” (Joshi 1993).

Notes 1 See Sparke (2007) for clear articulation concerning the global south’s location being “nowhere” yet “everywhere”. 2 See Marston (2000), Brenner (2001), Marston and Smith (2001), Marston, Jones III and Woodward (2005). and Jones et al. (2017) for a clear articulation of the dogmatic scalar view and its critiques. 3 Dirlik (2007) identifies a clear link between the “global south” and the Third World while also noting certain differences. 4 Salt Lake City is officially known as Bidhannagar with its own municipal corporation which is named after the first chief minister of West Bengal, Bidhan Chandra Roy. The town is administratively situated in the district of North 24 Parganas which borders the Kolkata district to the north. The name Salt Lake refers to the older salt lakes which were infilled during the construction of the city. In common parlance, the town is referred to as Salt Lake by residents of the Kolkata region. 5 Roy (2009) developed the argument concerning informality in greater detail in later years, a point later echoed by Ghertner (2015) being the case with Delhi and an argument which in many ways echoes Chatterjee’s (2004) arguments concerning political society though there are differences in conceptualization

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164  Debarun Sarkar Jones, John Paul, Helga Leitner, Sallie A. Marston, and Eric Sheppard. “Neil Smith’s scale.” Antipode, 49(S1) (2017): 138–​152. Joshi, Ruchir. Tales from the Planet Kolkata. Ruchir Joshi for HIT Films, 1993. Khader, Serene J. “Global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 5(2) (2019) https://​doi.org/​10.5206/​fpq/​2019.2. 7282 Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority. Vision 2025: Perspective Plan of KMA –​2025. Kolkata: Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority, 2005. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-​Network-​Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Malle, Louis. Calcutta. Criterion, 1969. Marston, Sallie A. “The social construction of scale.” Progress in Human Geography (2000). https://​doi.org/​10.1191/​030​9132​0067​4086​272 Marston, Sallie A, John Paul Jones III, and Keith Woodward. “Human geography without scale.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30(4) (2005): 416–​432. Marston, Sallie A., and Neil Smith. “States, scales and households: Limits to scale thinking? A response to brenner.” Progress in Human Geography, 25(4) (2001): 615–​619. Martin, Vladimir Cotal San. 2021. “Dismissing class: Media representations of workers’ conditions in the Global South.” Nordicom Review, 42 (s3): 35–​55. Miraftab, Faranak, and Neema Kudva. Cities of the Global South Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Mohan, Rakesh. “India: Coming to terms with urbanization.” Cities, 1(1) (1983): 46–​58. Ong, Aihwa. “Hyperbuilding: Spectacle, speculation, and the hyperspace of sovereignty.” In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global¸ edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, 205–​26. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2011. Parnell, Susan, and Sophie Oldfield (eds.). The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Patel, Sujata. “Is there a ‘south’ perspective to urban studies?” In The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, edited by Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield. 37–​47. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Power, Marcus. “The Commonwealth, ‘development’ and post-​colonial responsibility.” Geoforum, Themed Issue: Postcoloniality, Responsibility and Care, 40(1) (2009): 14–​24. Prashad, Vijay. The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. London and New York: Verso, 2012. Raghuram, Parvati, Clare Madge, and Pat Noxolo. “Rethinking responsibility and care for a postcolonial world.” Geoforum, 40(1) (2009): 5–​13. Rancière, Jacques. “Introducing disagreement.” Angelaki, 9(3) (2004): 3–​9. Robinson, Jenny. “Postcolonialising geography: Tactics and pitfalls.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24(3) (2003): 273–​289. Roy, Ananya. City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Roy, Ananya. “Urban informality: Toward an epistemology of planning.” Journal of the American Planning Association, 71(2) (2005): 147–​158.

Of Calcutta, death, and the South  165 Roy, Ananya. “Why India cannot plan its cities: Informality, insurgence and the idiom of urbanization.” Planning Theory, 8(1) (2009): 76–​87. Roy, Ananya. “ ‘The shadow of her wings’: Respectability politics and the self-​ narration of geography.” Dialogues in Human Geography, 10(1) (2020): 19–​22. Saffari, Siavash. “Can the subaltern be heard? Knowledge production, representation, and responsibility in international development.” Transcience, 7(1) (2016): 36–​46. Sarkar, Debarun. “Of scale and social: Between Mofussil and New Town.” Passerelles SHS, 1 (October 2021) https://​doi.org/​10.48649/​PSHS.111 Simpson, David. Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From. Post-​Contemporary Interventions. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Sparke, Matthew. “Everywhere but always somewhere: Critical geographies of the Global South.” The Global South, 1(1) (2007): 117–​126. West Bengal Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation. New Town, Calcutta: Project Report. Kolkata: West Bengal Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation, 1999.

9 The countess’ diaries and taonga Māori Twenty-​first century collaborations around nineteenth century collecting Kirsty Kernohan

A “kit” to carry potatoes On the evening of February 24, 1893 Sydney, Countess of Kintore and her teenage daughters Ethel and Hilda Keith-​Falconer walked through Rotorua, Aotearoa New Zealand returning to their hotel from a visit to the Māori Land Courts. Earlier stormy weather had cleared to a fine evening and as they walked back through the popular tourist town, known for its geothermal activity, the three women watched Māori families cooking in hāngī (earth ovens) and ngāwhā (hot pools). As Sydney describes in her diary, they were offered hospitality as they stopped to watch the cooking process: a whole community were seated round their ovens where we could hear the food cooking in the bubbling water below & in the next pool were potatoes tied up in bags & boiling away merrily –​while we waited up came an old old woman with snow white hair cut short her lips & chin deeply tattoed –​In her hand was a whole basket full of live cray-​fish which she lowered into the water –​& lo! In 2 minutes they were red –​ she offered us two each –​which we eat & found them very sweet.1 Hilda also commented with satisfaction on the meal, explaining that the woman: “brought a basketfull of crayfish she’d caught in the lake –​& in 1 mini they were boiled. Gave us Each 2 to eat –​Excellent they were!”.2 Having enjoyed their meal, Sydney, Ethel, and Hilda returned to their hotel. After their visit to Aotearoa New Zealand was over, the three women departed for Adelaide where Sydney’s husband Algernon, 9th Earl of Kintore was serving as Governor of South Australia (1889–​1895). Shortly after, the women returned to the United Kingdom where Sydney and Algernon’s two young sons were at school. Thirty years later, in 1922, the Keith-​Falconer family made a large donation of objects from their home of Keith Hall in Aberdeenshire to the University of Aberdeen Museums. Among this collection was a woven bag with a handwritten label sewn on to it, likely written by one of the Keith-​Falconer women. It reads: “Maori ‘kit’ –​made DOI: 10.4324/9781003332077-10

The countess’ diaries and taonga Māori  167

Figure 9.1 Tūkohu, University of Aberdeen Museums ABDUA:4100.

of grass in which we carried our cooked potatoes from the Hot Springs. Rotorua, N.Z”.3 Although there is nothing to connect this kete (bag) directly to the kete in which the potatoes and crayfish were cooked in 1893, it seems likely that the family’s label relates to the same visit to Rotorua. In February 2020 –​a hundred and twenty-​eight years after the Keith-​ Falconer women enjoyed an evening snack in Rotorua –​I walked into the stores at the University of Aberdeen Museums to meet Awhina Tamarapa, a museum professional, weaver, and fellow researcher who had helped me enormously with my doctoral fieldwork in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2018. Now Awhina was visiting Aberdeen as part of her doctoral research with Māori textiles in international museums. With our research interests intersecting around the taonga Māori (Māori treasures) in the Keith-​Falconer collection, Awhina and I were keen to engage collaboratively with these taonga. Lying on the table in front of Awhina was the “kit” bearing the Keith-​Falconers’ label. Excited to see an object with which I was familiar, I leapt eagerly to recount what I knew from the Keith-​Falconers’ journals. As I described Sydney’s visit to Rotorua, I became aware that, as was so often the case, my contribution was limited to the voices, experiences, and knowledge of the Keith-​Falconers: nineteenth-​century colonial travellers whose collecting practices had brought taonga far away from Aotearoa New Zealand.

168  Kirsty Kernohan

Figure 9.2  Close Up of Tūkohu’s Label, University of Aberdeen Museums ABDUA:4100.

This chapter explores the potentials, pitfalls, relationships, and responsibilities, which arise when Māori and Scottish scholars in the twenty-​first century must collaborate with a vice-​regal countess and her family in the nineteenth century. Reflecting on the “kit”, which Sydney, Ethel, and Hilda brought back from Rotorua in 1893 –​now identified as a tūkohu (cooking bag) –​I consider the ways in which collaborative approaches to taonga in museums can be fruitful: allowing for colonial documentation to intersect with Māori knowledge and histories. These kinds of collaborations create relationships, which connect taonga in museums with researchers, knowledge, and communities beyond them and facilitate an awareness of institutional responsibilities when caring for taonga Māori. I argue that these engagements with taonga constitute a form of intergenerational collaboration, in which archival voices like the Keith-​ Falconers’ influence the direction of research and provide vital provenance information while still being contested and challenged in dialogue with contemporary knowledge and collaborative goals. However, drawing on another example of taonga acquired by the Keith-​Falconers in Rotorua –​a hei tiki (pendant) purchased in 1893 –​I argue that such engagements with archival voices can prove more frustrating than collaborative. The potential for contemporary research and

The countess’ diaries and taonga Māori  169 responsible collections care around taonga in the Keith-​Falconer collection has been thwarted as often as facilitated by the family’s choices about what to record in their journals and labels. Although they offer different outcomes, the stories of the tūkohu and the hei tiki both illustrate the rich details and human complexities which emerge from collaboration across the centuries, and offer pathways to responsible engagements with taonga Māori in museums.

Responsibilities to taonga Māori in museums To understand the responsibilities that taonga create for the people who work with them and discuss why collaborative approaches are both urgent and essential, it is necessary to describe what taonga are. Paul Tapsell defines taonga as: […] any item, object or thing which represents a Maori kin group’s […] ancestral identity with their particular land and resources. Taonga can be tangible, like a greenstone pendant […] or they can be intangible like the knowledge to weave […]. As taonga are passed down through the generations they become more valuable as the number of descendants increase over time. All taonga possess, in varying degrees, the elements of ancestral prestige (mana), spiritual protection (tapu), and genealogically ordered narratives (korero). (2000: 13) The taonga in the Keith-​Falconer collection are tangible things possessing mana, tapu, and kōrero. They also reflect intangible taonga in the skills of those who made them and the lives of those associated with them. There are comparatively few taonga Māori in the Keith-​Falconer collection: they number only 16 objects among the family’s collection of approximately 650, acquired across 38 countries between 1873 and 1945. Although a very small proportion of the collection, the taonga acquired by the Keith-​Falconer family are significant. Many of these taonga are mentioned individually in Sydney and Hilda’s journals, which are particularly detailed for the family’s two trips to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1890 and 1893. Consequently, they are among the easiest objects in the collection for which to explore historical provenance and contemporary connections. The taonga in the Keith-​Falconer collection do not create responsibilities simply because of their detailed documentation, however. As Arapata Hakiwai points out: […] our taonga have a whakapapa, they have a genealogy, they have a history, or relationships. Also, taonga have a mauri (a life-​force) […] it’s not just a customary word or concept: rather, Māori feel that we have to actively nurture this quality and develop it, and we have to respect it.

170  Kirsty Kernohan Part of the whakapapa of taonga is our responsibility to our taonga, as kaitiaki, or guardians. (In Hakiwai and Diamond 2015: 110) These responsibilities towards taonga, Hakiwai emphasizes, are not only important for kaitiaki Māori but for everyone who works with taonga in museums: “[t]‌he thing that museum professionals have to remember is, these taonga are not just artefacts, they are living ancestors intimately connected to us, and not just to our past but our futures” (Hakiwai and Diamond 2015: 112). Taonga, as Tapsell and Hakiwai make clear, are part of lives, stories, and relationships. They are not, importantly, simply evidence for historical relationships with the potential to create contemporary connections. Rather, taonga enact (Schorch 2017: 37) or “constitute or instantiate social relations” (Henare 2005: 2, 6), across time and space. Taonga separated from these relationships in geographically distant museums, like the University of Aberdeen Museums, cannot be nurtured. They are prevented from offering support and inspiration to Māori, resulting in a sense of “displacement, dislocation, and alienation” (Hakiwai in Hakiwai and Diamond 2015: 111) and creating distance between people and their kōrero (narratives) (Mead 1984: 29). However, as Awhina Tamarapa notes, when the kōrero, whakapapa (genealogies), and relationships of taonga in museums are recognized, they can “inspire and enrich future generations” (2007: 94). It is important to note here that there is no consensus about what things constitute taonga. The term has been historically used by Māori to describe things “belonging unquestionably and inalienably to them” (Smith 2011: 12) but is often used, as by Tapsell, to describe exclusively prestigious things. Some highly valued objects, like hei tiki, will have significantly more prestige than everyday objects associated with cooking like the tūkohu (pers. comm. Awhina Tamarapa, June 3, 2020). However, understanding Māori objects as taonga, particularly in museums, can emphasize and contextualize the responsibilities and relationships which taonga need and create. For the purposes of this chapter, I will consider both the hei tiki and the tūkohu as taonga.

Collaborating with the Keith-​Falconers To work in an engaged and responsive way with taonga in museums which, like Aberdeen, do not have kaitiaki Māori as members of staff requires collaboration with those outside the museum. Working with the tūkohu with Awhina Tamarapa allowed for research, which was shaped by her priorities as a Māori researcher and weaver and drew on a wider network of people with knowledge about this taonga. However, this kind of collaborative research also required collaboration with Sydney and Hilda Keith-​Falconer. Before turning to detailed discussions of how these intergenerational collaborations

The countess’ diaries and taonga Māori  171 shaped our work with the tūkohu and hei tiki, it is worth exploring the practice of collaborating with the Keith-​Falconer women. Treating work with nineteenth-​century journals and museum labels –​whose writers are long dead –​as collaboration sounds counterintuitive. However, two elements of my experience with taonga and the Keith-​Falconers have led me to consider my research as collaborative. The first of these is rooted in the way in which taonga develop relationships and maintain connections. As Amiria Henare writes, drawing on research which includes taonga: “artefacts collapse spatial and temporal distance, bringing people together who would otherwise remain quite literally out of touch” (2005: 6). Albeit unknowingly, the Keith-​ Falconers became entangled in the relationships of reciprocity, and responsibility, which are created when taonga change hands (Henare 2007: 48; Maihi 2019: 43). By acquiring, transporting, documenting, and donating these taonga, the Keith-​Falconers are part not only of these taonga’s histories but their ongoing stories. The second context in which I have come to think about my research with the Keith-​Falconers as collaborative is drawn from my experience of reading their archives and museum documentation. Historical and museum anthropologists have treated museums and archives as sites of ethnographic fieldwork for decades (Marsh 2019; Hallam 2016; Gosden at al. 2007: 16; Southwood 2003: 3; Des Chene 1997; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992) offering a well-​established context in which to approach archival research as a collaborative practice. As a researcher works, Maria Tamboukou suggests, archives become: “a dialogic space wherein the writer of the document and the researcher as reader meet, interact and negotiate meaning about subjects and their world” (2017: 91). The sense of meeting and encounter that Tambouku evokes resonates with my experience of reading the Keith-​ Falconers’ archives. In search of information about their collection, and with a desire to follow the nuances of their lives and relationships as they had unfolded, I decided to read the family’s journals and scrapbooks chronologically insofar as I could. Beginning this task, I had anticipated some feelings of unease as I pried into the family’s private lives. However, it quickly became apparent that Sydney and Hilda had anticipated an audience, at least of friends and family. Their journals had been drafted, edited, cross-​referenced with other family members’ notes, carefully organized, and illustrated. I rarely felt like I was peering into intimate secrets, but rather that I was being guided by the family through a curated representation of their knowledge and experiences. Consequently, the extent to which I was able to “negotiate meaning” in the archives felt very much on the Keith-​Falconers’ terms. Describing her relationship with the diaries of Molly Spotted Elk, a twentieth-​century Penobscot woman, Bunny McBride argues for an approach, which situates the archival researcher as a responsive storyteller (2009: 424). For McBride, this approach allows her to engage with Spotted Elk, prioritizing and centring her voice. In the context of the Keith-​Falconers, however, I was

172  Kirsty Kernohan compelled to respond to their knowledge and tell their stories in the context of colonizing histories. I relied heavily on the Keith-​Falconers’ narratives for provenance information as well as descriptions of how taonga were used and acquired. Which taonga I could engage with and the questions I could ask of them were dependent on the Keith-​Falconers’ choices. I had to pursue lines of enquiry on the basis of their narrative priorities, without asking for clarification or redirection. It was not that the Keith-​Falconers neglected to mention their acquisition of taonga –​they did so at great length –​but they offered very specific accounts which often did not resonate with the knowledge and perspectives which I sought. I found myself involved in collaborative research with the Keith-​Falconers in which they offered information generously, yet frustratingly, across geographical and temporal divides. As I began to work with Awhina Tamarapa, and to discuss the responsibilities that we had to taonga as researchers, it became apparent how significantly the Keith-​Falconers shaped what I could bring to these conversations. Our twenty-​first century collaborations, I discovered, depended on inconsistently cooperative nineteenth-​century collaborators, too.

The tūkohu In some instances, my uneasy collaboration with the Keith-​Falconers lent itself to fruitful conversations with Awhina and allowed for research centred around contemporary responsibilities to taonga in museum collections. Our collaborative work was relatively informal, emerging from our respective visits to museums in Aberdeen and Wellington. My aim was to prioritize ethical care of the taonga in the Keith-​Falconer collection, and to understand the knowledge, narratives, and relationships that could be foregrounded in museum documentation and research around taonga. With this goal in mind, Awhina and I worked together as part of a process of knowledge sharing: I shared what I knew about taonga mentioned in the Keith-​ Falconers’ archives, while Awhina generously discussed her own knowledge of the taonga in the Keith-​Falconer collection and called my attention to protocols of respect and care. The tūkohu –​in which the Keith-​Falconers carried potatoes in 1893 –​allowed Awhina, the Keith-​Falconers, and I to bring very different kinds of knowledge to such productive conversations. I had initially developed an interest in the tūkohu –​although I did not know it by that name –​before meeting Awhina: I was intrigued by the Keith-​ Falconers’ descriptions of cooking in Rotorua and their handwritten label. When Awhina and I began to discuss the tūkohu in February 2020, the Keith-​ Falconers offered significant information about its provenance and use. As well as connecting the tūkohu to Rotorua, its label indicates that this tūkohu was used by the Keith-​Falconers to cook, likely with help from Māori hosts; their label describes it as the bag “in which we carried our cooked potatoes from the Hot Springs”. Hilda’s journal entry also offers details about the cooking process, describing people “going down to a boiling pool, carrying

The countess’ diaries and taonga Māori  173 open-​work baskets full of potatoes, which they put into pool for 30 min”.4 This is valuable information, both describing the general use of tūkohu and offering a glimpse into the particular experience of this tūkohu: grasped by the inexperienced hands of the Keith-​Falconer women, weighed down by water and potatoes, and perhaps smelling of sulphur as it became part of a hospitable exchange. The tūkohu and its label offer material insight into the guiding and hospitality for which Māori in the Rotorua area were well known (Te Awekotuku 1981), and the role that taonga like tūkohu played in these exchanges. Consequently, the Keith-​Falconers’ words brought significant detail to our discussions about the provenance and life of the tūkohu. The details of the Keith-​ Falconers’ documentation, however, offered limitations as well as insights. In Sydney’s description of cooking in Rotorua, she describes the woman who offered them crayfish in exoticizing terms, focusing on her age and moko kauae (chin tattoo) rather than recording a name or any details which might help link the taonga in her collection to an individual. The language that the family used on the tūkohu’s label has also proved restrictive. As I have argued elsewhere (Kernohan 2021: 175), the personal emphasis on this label foregrounds the Keith-​Falconers’ experience of their holiday to the exclusion of the role of the tūkohu as taonga. It is not a tūkohu but a generic “kit”, “in which we carried our cooked potatoes” (my emphasis). This is not, of course, a surprising way for a family to describe a souvenir of their trip but –​physically sewn to the tūkohu and replicated as its description in the museum’s online catalogue –​the Keith-​ Falconers’ words have come to displace the tūkohu’s other narratives and relationships. For the tūkohu, it is these elements of the Keith-​Falconers’ descriptions, emphasizing their exoticizing view of Māori and their experience as passing visitors, which remind contemporary collaborators of the colonial contexts in which they acquired their taonga. Despite the Keith-​Falconers’ colonial emphasis, Awhina and I were able to draw on their words alongside the tūkohu itself to pursue lines of enquiry grounded in the tūkohu’s significance to Māori. In part, these discussions diverted from the Keith-​Falconers’ documentation. Although Awhina was interested in Sydney and Hilda’s descriptions of cooking, she also drew attention to material elements of the tūkohu that they did not recognize. Pointing out that it had an exceptionally fine weave, which she had not seen on similar kete, Awhina measured the whenu (strands) at one millimetre. At this thickness, she suggested, the tūkohu could have other uses like straining juice from berries. Awhina’s knowledge as a weaver allowed for an exploration of the tūkohu’s potential uses and histories –​beyond the Keith-​Falconers’ experience –​as an example of beautiful, practical, and durable Māori weaving. Awhina’s knowledge and relationships with other weavers also allowed her to work together with the Keith-​Falconers’ descriptions to discover more of the tūkohu’s kōrero (narrative): in this instance, its name. The Keith-​Falconers’ label describes it as a “kit”, a rendering of the Māori kete

174  Kirsty Kernohan (bag). Awhina recognized the tūkohu as a particular kind of kete but did not know the name for it. However, she reached out to other weavers through a Facebook group set up to share information and photographs of taonga, which she encountered during her research in British museums. She included photographs of the tūkohu as well as the Keith-​Falconers’ label, and I was able to share information drawn from the journals in the group’s comments. Having seen the photographs, a member of the group, John Turi-​Tiakitai, identified the kete as a tūkohu, a name specific to Te Arawa and local to Rotorua.5 The name led Awhina to a description of a tūkohu by Mākereti Papakura, a twentieth-​century Māori anthropologist and guide who lived and worked in the Rotorua area before studying at the University of Oxford: Kumara, potatoes, or taro would be placed in a tukohu, a basket made for this purpose from the leaves of the toetoe (pampas grass) and the plaited string at the top would be pulled, so closing its mouth...This would then be placed in a parekohuru (boiling spring) and the end of the string would be tied to a peg in the ground near the edge of the hole. (1938: 166) Papakura’s description corresponds to the weave and structure of the tūkohu in the Keith-​Falconer collection –​which has a distinctive drawstring top –​as well as Sydney and Hilda’s descriptions of cooking in Rotorua. It also adds new information, naming the fibre out of which the tūkohu is made and placing the tūkohu as part of the daily lives and skilled practice of Te Arawa. The tūkohu offers a clear example of fruitful collaborative work around taonga in museums. The Keith-​Falconers’ journals and label offered uneven and colonial accounts of the tūkohu, which, nevertheless, facilitated conversations about its provenance, use and name. Consequently, the Keith-​ Falconers’ narratives have become part of a much wider exchange of the kōrero surrounding the tūkohu. They were integral to collaborative practices across temporal and geographical divides, and part of conversations which spanned museum stores, Facebook groups, and emails in the twenty-​first century; nineteenth-​century archives; and twentieth-​century Māori scholarship. These conversations will change how the tūkohu is understood and cared for in the museum. Where the Keith-​Falconers’ descriptions have dominated documentation of the tūkohu, new kōrero and its name can be included in the online catalogue, drawing on both the knowledge of contemporary weavers like Awhina and the regionally specific account of Papakura. New relationships between the tūkohu and contemporary weavers have also been established through Awhina’s research, allowing the tūkohu to be valued and nurtured as it inspires current weaving practices. These collaborations have resulted in shared knowledge and connections, which allow collections care and future research to reflect ongoing responsibilities to taonga.

The countess’ diaries and taonga Māori  175

The hei tiki While working with the tūkohu largely illustrated the potential of collaborating with the Keith-​Falconers, the family’s accounts of a hei tiki –​purchased by Sydney 1893 –​gave rise to more roadblocks than collaborative possibilities. Hei tiki are pendants made in a human shape, often carved from pounamu (greenstone). They are prestigious and valuable taonga, which have been established as an instantly recognizable visual representation of Māori art and culture since the nineteenth century (Austin 2014: xiii; Kohlstedt 2016: 8). Although hei tiki have been made for sale to tourists since the nineteenth century, they are significant taonga. A hei tiki like the Keith-​Falconers’, acquired from a Māori family, will possess mana, tapu, and kōrero. Hei tiki tend to be passed down in families, accruing mana from previous generations, and are associated with rank and status, burial, grief, fertility, and protection (Austin 2014: 36–​8). Hilda Keith-​Falconer describes her mother’s purchase of a hei tiki in Rotorua, on March 1, 1893, five days after they had enjoyed crayfish and potatoes cooked in a tūkohu. In Hilda’s typically brief style, she records: Raining & windy. Granny interviewed cook’s man –​settled up accounts –​ bought an old tiki for £10 (which was got off an old woman dug up in her grave on Mogoi island –​) and by 11.30 all off to Okoroire by coach.6 Hilda’s entry is concise but, like her family’s accounts of the tūkohu, it offers substantial and specific provenance information about the hei tiki: that it was purchased by Sydney in Rotorua, and that it belonged to a woman who was buried on nearby Mokoia Island. Unlike the tūkohu, however, the hei tiki is absent from the University of Aberdeen Museums. There is no record of it ever being donated to the museum, and it seems likely that it was either kept by the family or, due to its potential value, sold. Rather than offering scope for collaborative research, which could reconnect this taonga to people from the area, therefore, Hilda’s words offer a frustrating story of loss. The physical presence of the tūkohu softened the dominance of the Keith-​ Falconers’ words in our collaborative work. With the hei tiki absent, however, the power of the Keith-​Falconers’ words became acute. Accepting the extent to which I was reliant on the Keith-​Falconers for information about the hei tiki, I chose to copy large sections of their family’s journals in full. I created time and space in which I could pay close attention to their words and “negotiate meaning”, in Tamboukou’s terms, as far as possible. As Arlette Farge evocatively argues: “[r]‌ecopying is time-​consuming, it cramps your shoulder and stiffens your neck. But it is through this action that meaning is discovered” (2013: 17). Sitting in the Wolfson reading room in Aberdeen, I read Sydney and Hilda’s accounts: my hand moved across my notebook as theirs had

176  Kirsty Kernohan moved nearly a hundred and thirty years before and stories surrounding the absent hei tiki unfolded under my pencil. Rather than offering insight into the hei tiki’s kōrero, these narratives illuminated the ways in which the Keith-​ Falconers understood the taonga that they acquired. Transcribing the Keith-​ Falconers’ accounts was an embodied, painstaking, and frustrating process as we worked across geographical and temporal distance; they to convey their knowledge and experiences, and I to understand them.

The Keith-​Falconers and the hei tiki Although Hilda does not record her mother’s acquisition of a hei tiki until 1893, Sydney first mentions hei tiki in a journal entry from her first visit to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1890. Stepping back three years from Hilda’s note, Sydney’s entry describes her desire to obtain a hei tiki as well as her knowledge about their significance to Māori and their contested place in tourist markets. On February 18, 1890 in Auckland, Sydney tried to buy a hei tiki but was unsuccessful: I strolled into Auckland to hunt for Greenstone ornaments –​but the man at the foot of the Hill turned out such a rogue even to my inexperience, that I toiled up the Hill home again thoroughly disgusted. When one travels in the country one hears on all sides that gemstone tikis are not to be bought –​that the people would part with anything other –​ almost their lives –​& yet in every shop tikis are exposed for sale. The genuine article descends from father to son & is buried with each chief […] It is almost an insult to ask a Maori what he will sell his tiki for –​& the reckless tourist who tells the interpreter to ask the question rarely has it translated.7 This passage brings important context to Hilda’s account of her mother’s purchase three years later. Suggesting that Sydney’s acquisition of the hei tiki was not a passing fancy but a long-​time goal, it also illustrates her clear understanding of hei tiki as taonga: Sydney notes the importance of hei tiki to Māori and their unwillingness to sell them and describes the practices of passing them to future generations and burying them alongside their owners. Perhaps Sydney’s failure to acquire a hei tiki –​blamed on the “rogue” seller –​ allowed her to engage more enthusiastically with hei tiki as guarded taonga. Distancing herself from the “reckless tourist” by emphasizing her knowledge about hei tiki, Sydney transforms herself from an outwitted tourist to a knowledgeable traveller. Such scruples did not appear to trouble Sydney when she successfully purchased a hei tiki on a rainy March morning in Rotorua three years later. Tucked in Hilda’s list of her mother’s morning errands –​all conducted before they left for their next destination at 11:30am –​Hilda describes the purchase of the hei tiki succinctly, with no attention to her mother’s

The countess’ diaries and taonga Māori  177 knowledge, motivations, or feelings at the successful purchase. She does, however, include two key pieces of information: the hei tiki was bought by her mother for ten pounds (expensive, but well within Sydney’s budget), and it was, allegedly, dug up from a grave on Mokoia island. Had the hei tiki been in the University of Aberdeen Museums, Hilda’s description would have proved invaluable, providing the date and location of its acquisition as well as the gender, approximate age, and place of burial of the woman with whom it was buried. This knowledge might have facilitated collaborative work, which could have established the identity of the woman and contemporary links between the hei tiki and her descendants. However, in the hei tiki’s absence, this detail could only guide me back to Sydney’s reflection on the significance of hei tiki in 1890 and the uncomfortable knowledge that although Sydney knew how strongly many Māori would object to her acquisition of such an object, she decided to buy it anyway. As well as emphasizing Sydney’s longstanding knowledge of the hei tiki’s significance, Hilda’s comment calls attention to the probability that this particular hei tiki was stolen or acquired through unethical practices. It is unclear from Hilda’s description whether she understood the hei tiki to have been stolen from the grave on Mokoia Island or already disinterred to be passed to someone else. As Sydney notes in her 1890 description, hei tiki were sometimes buried with people and they could be disinterred and passed on to new owners, bringing with them the mana of their ancestors (Robley 1915: 73; Tapsell 1997: 336; Austin 2014: 38). It is perhaps likely that the seller of the hei tiki was advertising its burial and disinterment as a mark of authenticity: a prestigious hei tiki worn, buried, and valued by Māori owners would appeal far more to Sydney than the rows of hei tiki for sale in shops for tourists which she noted in 1890. It is certainly possible, however, that it had been stolen from the grave. It is also possible that it had not been dug up from Mokoia Island at all. The story may simply have been a sales pitch. However, Sydney’s decision not to acquire a hei tiki from a tourist shop or the “rogue” seller in Auckland –​and the connections and reputation which she enjoyed as the wife of the Governor of South Australia –​suggest that she would have had the wherewithal to purchase a more valuable hei tiki. Whether stolen directly from a grave or sold into a tourist market despite connections to living family members, Hilda’s description points towards a hei tiki that did not come into the Keith-​Falconers’ hands through ethical means. Consequently, I have chosen to consider Hilda’s provenance note as probable and, as a result, a frustrating hint at the lost potential of collaborative and restorative work.

The hei tiki and Matua Tonga During the week in which Sydney purchased the hei tiki, both Sydney and Hilda wrote about another taonga connected to Mokoia Island. Although neither woman offers a link between these stories of Mokoia Island and their

178  Kirsty Kernohan hei tiki, these accounts emphasize their mutual knowledge of the significance of taonga, the importance of Mokoia Island, and the potential harm caused by disputes around stolen or misappropriated taonga. On February 26, Hilda refers to the significance of Mokoia Island: “Nearly every tribe here has a claim on the island but the land is so sacred to the Maoris that they wont even let it into the Land Court”. She follows this comment with an account of a dispute over a taonga associated with the island ten years previously: Quite near the shore is a little wooden house in which is kept an old stone “image” so “tapu” the Maoris that formerly it had to be kept buried deep in the Earth. One night when the Maoris were all away the “pahikas” [she adds underneath “white men”] dug it up & took it to the mainland, before the Maoris discovered their loss. There was such a row, that the Government had to interfere & restore the “image”. So many “Pakihas” having now seen it, it is no longer the same thing to the Maoris –​& altho’ carefully kept in the little wooden house under lock & key anyone who likes may see it.8 Sydney also describes this taonga in her journal entry for February 21, 1893. She recalls the story slightly differently to her daughter, attributing the theft to Māori rather than Pākeha: […] one tribe stole this sacred monster from the other & removed it to the mainland […] since the theft the Govt have supplied the Maoris with this meat safe in which to lock their treasure, but he would look far handsomer standing up under a tree like a rude statue.9 These descriptions refer to a stone carving, Matua Tonga, linked to the settling of the Rotorua region (Smith 1910: 175). The dispute which Hilda and Sydney describe occurred in March 1883. Local papers reported that a Pākeha man, Robert Graham, in collaboration with two Māori men who claimed ownership of Matua Tonga, Petira Pukutaua, and Wi Kupi Ngawhahui, dug up the carving and removed it from Mokoia Island to the Lake House Hotel in Rotorua. It was seized some days later by government officials and returned to Mokoia Island as belonging to the whole hapu (group) rather than individuals (The Press, March 26, 1883; Auckland Star, November 1, 1898). The event caused significant upheaval in an area in which tourism interests had already caused longstanding disputes between Māori and Pākeha (Henare 2005: 191), as a newspaper article from March 1883 notes: There is great excitement both among Maori and Europeans, the former because they look upon the disinterment as a gross outrage against their most sacred relics, the latter because the illegal action of Mr Robert

The countess’ diaries and taonga Māori  179 Graham jeopardises the relations between themselves and the Maoris here. (Wanganui Herald, March 24, 1883) The theft of Matua Tonga is not comparable to Sydney’s purchase of the hei tiki. They are different taonga with different relationships, mana and tapu, and the hei tiki’s removal was not likely to result in a community outcry and government involvement. However, Sydney and Hilda’s decision to record the story in their journals shortly before the purchase of the hei tiki allows their readers to make connections between their knowledge of taonga and Sydney’s choice to acquire the hei tiki. The elements of taonga disinterred from Mokoia Island cut across the family’s accounts of Matua Tonga and the hei tiki as they nestle close to one another in their journals. In both stories, taonga taken from Mokoia island are subsumed into the plans of Europeans in Rotorua: Robert Graham wanted Matua Taonga for his hotel and Sydney wanted a hei tiki as a souvenir. Most significantly, Sydney and Hilda’s accounts of Matua Tonga illustrate their understanding of the concept of taonga, which is not included in Hilda’s quick note on the acquisition of the hei tiki. Sydney describes Matua Tonga as “sacred” and a “treasure” and Hilda describes Mokoia Island as “sacred” and Matua Tonga as “tapu”, notably using a Māori word. Their accounts show that, as they visited Mokoia Island, they learned about the significance of taonga and the potential damage caused by the theft of such treasures and thought enough about this new knowledge to record it at some length in their respective journals. Both women make clear to readers that they possessed both the ability to recognize the significance of taonga and simultaneously to disregard the ethical implications of acquiring a hei tiki openly advertised as “dug up” from a grave on Mokoia Island.

Responsibilities to absent taonga As I sought more information about the hei tiki, Sydney and Hilda led me from Hilda’s brief note of the purchase on March 1, 1893, to the family’s visit to Matua Tonga on Mokoia Island several days earlier, to Sydney’s failed attempt to buy a hei tiki in 1890, and finally to the theft of Matua Tonga in 1883. In the absence of the physical taonga, Sydney and Hilda’s words led me to the hei tiki’s provenance, the family’s developing knowledge of taonga Māori as significant, treasured, and tapu, and their ability to disregard the implications of this knowledge for the sake of their own acquisition. To follow this trail, I became familiar with the Keith-​Falconers’ accounts over hundreds of hours of close reading and careful engagement. Amy Cox Hall describes her experience of reading and transcribing colonial documents from Latin America as: “a profoundly social one, a tangle that connected me to beings and ideas and emotions long past” (2018: 134). I had a similar experience; Sydney and Hilda’s developing knowledge became

180  Kirsty Kernohan easily familiar to me, as did their idiosyncratic spellings and expressions, and the relationships to the people, places, and things around them which they described. This familiarity is the stuff of ethnographic nuance: it was invaluable for my wider project of examining the Keith-​Falconer family’s colonial practices, and it allowed me to engage with the Keith-​Falconer family in a way which acknowledged my responsibilities to them as interlocutors. Immersed in their words and expressions, bound up in a social tangle with them, I could take the time to listen carefully and respond critically. But a method that was indispensable for engaging with the Keith-​Falconers offered difficult knowledge to bring to collaborations around their taonga. Unlike the tūkohu, whose presence allowed the Keith-​Falconers’ words to be contextualized, expanded on, and challenged, the hei tiki had no such defence. My responsibility as a researcher, both to the hei tiki and to my collaborative relationship with Awhina Tamarapa, could only be directed through the Keith-​Falconers’ words. Cox Hall notes that, brought into temporally displaced relationships with colonisers through their archives, she felt her writing become imbued with their turns of phrase, seeping through her hand and thoughts after hours of transcription (2018: 143). I found the Keith-​Falconers’ words similarly seeping into my conversations and correspondence around their taonga. In conversations with Awhina around the absent hei tiki, I could only offer Hilda’s brief but provenance-​rich description and my own reflections on just how much the Keith-​Falconers must have known about the significance of this taonga which they acquired. Awhina and I have discussed the hei tiki on several occasions, and Awhina has engaged with the family’s descriptions, discussing the general significance of hei tiki with me and confirming Sydney and Hilda’s comments about practices of burial and disinterment. But each time we have spoken about the hei tiki, the Keith-​Falconers’ words have offered disappointments rather than a path to collaborative work that centres around contemporary responsibilities to the hei tiki and those with connections to it. The Keith-​ Falconers have been, in short, uncollaborative. Their words offer no clue as to the current location of the hei tiki, only detailed records of the family’s knowledge and their role as part of the wider removal of taonga from Aotearoa New Zealand in the nineteenth century. Ultimately, the Keith-​ Falconers tell a story of a hei tiki, belonging to a woman buried on Mokoia Island, which has been isolated from the knowledge and relationships that could nurture it since 1893.

Conclusion Throughout our mutual work with the Keith-​Falconer collections, Awhina Tamarapa and I –​alongside others within and beyond the University of Aberdeen Museums –​have engaged in collaborative research practices shaped by pressing responsibilities to taonga Māori in museums. We have worked to recognize taonga as treasures, to situate them in their local

The countess’ diaries and taonga Māori  181 historical contexts, to establish and re-​establish connections between these taonga and people in Aotearoa New Zealand, and to establish collections care and documentation within the museum which supports the nurture and respect of their mauri (life force). Despite these priorities, the Keith-​ Falconers’ words were never far from our conversations; my attention was directed by Sydney and Hilda’s descriptions, knowledge, and emphases, and it was their narratives which I brought to our dialogue. These narratives have offered scope for nuanced ethnographic engagements with their practices of travel and object acquisition, their own relationship to the taonga which they acquired, and their hypocrisies. However, they also allowed the Keith-​ Falconers to have significant control over the direction of our contemporary conversations and the taonga with we could engage most fruitfully. Nevertheless, reading their journals closely to follow the stories of specific taonga scattered through hundreds of pages was a labour-​intensive task that brought valuable information to our conversations. My role became to collaborate with the Keith-​Falconers, to meet them in their archives and negotiate with their representations, experiences, priorities, and knowledge. This element of our broader collaborative work has proved both illuminating and frustrating, supporting and hindering efforts to engage responsibly with the taonga that the Keith-​Falconers acquired. The Keith-​ Falconers described the tūkohu by a general name, emphasized their personal experience, and described their Māori hosts in exoticizing language. However, their accounts offered provenance information which led Awhina to the name of the tūkohu and the description of its use by Papakura, in addition to her own emphasis on its beautiful and practical weave. Collaborating with the Keith-​Falconers alongside Papakura and contemporary connections allowed us to contest the Keith-​Falconers’ assumptions and priorities, situate the tūkohu within a local historical context, contextualize its museum documentation, recognize its beauty, and establish relationships between the tūkohu and contemporary weavers. Each of these effects help open the door to the responsible and nurturing engagements with taonga which Hakiwai identifies as essential. The Keith-​ Falconers’ accounts of the hei tiki and Matua Tonga also allowed me to engage deeply with their relationship to the taonga that they acquired, their understanding of taonga as taonga, and their capacity to cause harm through their acquisition of taonga. However, they did not offer the same scope for contemporary and responsible collaborations. In contrast, their accounts –​rich in provenance details –​served to emphasis the gulf between this hei tiki and responsible research practices or nurturing relationships. Describing significant taonga which have been given, rather than taken, beyond the range of Te Arawa, Paul Tapsell evokes the metaphor of a comet. These taonga, he explains, were “launched on an unknown, comet-​like trajectory”, and perhaps came back many years later “returning home to their descendants in a blaze of rediscovery” (1997: 338–​9). In the interim, he notes, the mauri of these taonga was protected by karakia (chants) and the

182  Kirsty Kernohan understanding of the taonga’s recipients The hei tiki was not sent willingly from Te Arawa, but perhaps it may one day return in a similar way. If it is ever reconnected with the Keith-​Falconer collection, the provenance information in their journals could facilitate such a return. Collaborations with them might then take on a different character: their words would become part of shaping the comet’s long trajectory home, just as Sydney’s decision to buy the hei tiki cast it away from Te Arawa and Aotearoa New Zealand towards Scotland. No longer roadblocks, the Keith-​Falconers could become part of further collaborative practices, which work towards responsible engagements with taonga in museums. This chapter reflects only on a moment in the lives of the hei tiki and the tūkohu, the Keith-​Falconers’ journals, Awhina Tamarapa’s research, and my own. Collaborating with Awhina and the Keith-​Falconers around the hei tiki and tūkohu illustrates the extent to which efforts to work ethically with taonga across geographic and temporal boundaries can be rewarding, hopeful, frustrating, and unpredictable. Our work with colonial archives and taonga –​present and absent –​in the University of Aberdeen Museums emphasizes the ongoing responsibilities which fall to museum staff, researchers, and all those who encounter taonga in museums.

Notes Sydney Keith-​Falconer, 24th February 1893. UOASC MS 3064/​3/​9/​1 (4) 1 2 Hilda Keith-​Falconer, 24th February 1893, UOASC MS 3064/​3/​9/​1 (2) 3 Bag, University of Aberdeen Museums ABDUA:4100 4 Hilda Keith-​Falconer, 24th February 1893, UOASC MS 3064/​3/​9/​1 (2) 5 Te Arawa are people from related iwi associated with Rotorua and the Bay of Plenty in the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. 6 Ethel and Hilda frequently refer to their mother as “Granny” throughout their diaries. The reason is never made clear. Hilda Keith-​Falconer, 1st March 1893. UOASC MS 3064/​3/​9/​1 (2). 7 Sydney Keith-​Falconer, 18th February 1890, UOASC MS 3064 3/​9/​1. 8 Hilda Keith-​Falconer, 26th February 1893, UOASC MS 3064/​3/​9/​1 (2). 9 Sydney Keith-​Falconer, 21st February 1893, UOASC MS 3064/​3/​9/​1 (1).

References Museum objects Bag, University of Aberdeen Museums ABDUA:4100.

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The countess’ diaries and taonga Māori  183 Keith-​Falconer, Hilda. Notebook with notes on trip to Australia 1889/​1889, to New Zealand 1893, and from there to Japan, the USA, and Canada 1893, MS 3064 3/​ 9/​1 (2), Papers of the Earls of Kintore, University of Aberdeen Special Collections. Keith-​Falconer, Sydney. Continuation of journal of trip to New Zealand 1890, MS 3064 3/​9/​1 (1), Papers of the Earls of Kintore, University of Aberdeen Special Collections. Keith-​Falconer, Sydney. Journal, Australia, February –​March 1893, MS 3064/​3/​9/​ 1 (4), Papers of the Earls of Kintore, University of Aberdeen Special Collections. The Press. “The disputed Maori image.” (March 26, 1883): 3. https://​pap​ersp​ast.nat​ lib.govt.nz/​new​spap​ers/​CHP1​8830​326.2.19 [accessed 27/​09/​2021]. Wanganui Herald. “Seizure of a Maori image.” (March 24, 1883): 2. https://​pap​ersp​ ast.nat​lib.govt.nz/​new​spap​ers/​WH1​8830​324.2.13 [accessed 27/​09/​2021].

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184  Kirsty Kernohan McBride, B. “The spider and the WASP: Chronicling the life of Molly Spotted Elk.” In Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native Histories, edited by J. S. H. Brown and E. Vibert, 407–​430. North York: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Mead, S. M. “Nga Timunga me nga paringa o te Mana Maori: The ebb and flow of Mana Maori and the changing context of Maori art.” In Te Maori: Maori Art from New Zealand Collections, edited by S. M. Mead, 20–​36. Auckland: Heinemann with the American Federation of Arts, 1984. Papakura, M. The Old Time Maori. London: Victor Gollanz, 1938. Robley, H.G. Pounamu: Notes on New Zealand Greenstone. Kingston: T.J.S. Guilford and Co., 1915. Schorch, P. “Assembling communities: curatorial practices, material cultures and meaning.” In Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities, edited by B. Onciul, M. L. Stefano and D. Hawke, 31–​46. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017. Smith, H. E Tū Ake: Māori Standing Strong. Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2011. Smith, S. P. “Easter Island (Rapa-​nui) and Rapa (Rapa-​Iti) Island.” The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 19(4, 76) (1910): 171–​175. Southwood, H. A Cultural History of Marischal Anthropological Museum in the Twentieth Century. PhD Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2003. Tamarapa, A. “Weaving a journey: the story of a unique cloak.” In Looking Flash: Clothing in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by B. Labrum, F. McKergow and S. Gibson, 94–​111. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007. Tamboukou, M. “Archival rhythms: Narrativity in the archive.” In The Archive Project: Archival Research in the Social Sciences, edited by N. Moore, A. Salter, L. Stanley, and M. Tamboukou, 71–​95. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. Tapsell, P. “The flight of Pareraututu: An investigation of taonga from a tribal perspective.” The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 106(4) (1997): 323–​347. Tapsell, P. Pukaki: A Comet Returns. Auckland: Reed Books, 2000. Te Awekotuku, N. The Sociocultural Impact of Tourism on the Te Arawa People of Rotorua, New Zealand. PhD Thesis, University of Waikato, 1981.

10 Responsibility and complicity in the UK “hostile environment” Joel White

Introduction: “Go Home!” It was at the start of my first day with Ginika at the “Participant Action Research” (PAR) group that she began calling me “Donald Trump”. This was after she had recognized me on arrival, eyes wide in mocking incredulity: “Oh fuck! It’s you that is coming!” She had turned to Sophia, who was facilitating the session that day, laughing, “Why didn’t you say?”. Her voice boomed around the space, a bright and functional converted shopfront, with sofas and curtains in loud primary colours, tea and biscuits, and a projector. I had passed another group leaving as I had arrived, finishing a weekly cookery class –​at other times you might have found an IT skill-​share or a drop-​in about Universal Credit. The group I had joined that day comprises 10–​15 people in the immigration and asylum system, meeting weekly for several hours. Our official task was to work on a resource for NHS Scotland, aimed at educating healthcare workers about the challenges facing asylum seekers in Glasgow, though this often became secondary to sharing general news and tips about the Home Office, catching up, hanging out and gossiping. This was early on in my 12 months of fieldwork in Glasgow, but several years into my involvement in migrant solidarity and anti-​racist organizing in the city. As such, I had met many of the people in the group before, including Ginika, but in settings that were less formal: “activist” planning meetings, friend’s birthday parties and community meals. This is what she was joking about as she arrived, pointing at me and the door, voice rising: “If I’d known it was you I’d not have agreed!”, she laughed, “You better go now!” “Go where?”, I had asked, performatively offended, but clearly unable to compete with her exuberant resolve. “Go home!”, she shouted, laughing. “That’s what the Home Office say!”. Another laugh. “Go home!”.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003332077-11

186  Joel White Thankfully, I was allowed to stay, though Ginika’s style of joking attack didn’t relent, and each time we said our names in a circle she would cut in before me, giggling: “Donald Trump! His name is Donald Trump!”. Despite general amusement, the nickname didn’t catch on, but Ginika’s comedic contortions of the language of state power –​from the UK Home Office to the then US president –​stuck with me. *** Interactions like these point towards particular questions of responsibility, complicity and “the state”, along with how humour and play can be important ways to navigate such ideas. Here, notions of collective and self-​responsibility around asylum claims overlap with questions about a “hostile environment” for migrants, which seek to render a proliferating number of people “complicit” in the “illegality” of others –​across education, healthcare, housing and public life. People navigating this system regularly articulate and share their own critiques of responsibility and complicity, levelled at non-​governmental organizations (NGOs), campaign groups, Home Office representatives, political figures and academic researchers. Based on 12 months of fieldwork, between 2018 and 2019, with people going through the asylum system in Glasgow, this chapter will investigate how people interpret and act on ideas of responsibility and complicity, within a system that is often opaque. I ask: how do people moving through the UK immigration system navigate and “think like” the Home Office? What relations of responsibility and complicity emerge through this? How do these interact with longer histories of divisions between the state and statelessness, responsibility and irresponsibility? How do such narratives of responsibility and complicity complicate ideas of harm, care, friendship and community? And finally, what are the methodological implications of thinking about responsibility and complicity –​is ethnography also always complicit? Anthropological scholarship that unpacks “responsibility” has often focused on the interplay between moral and legal systems (Cooper, 2018; Kelly, 2011; Trnka and Trundle, 2017), and how this links to an increasing “responsibilization” of individuals under forms of neoliberal governance (Rose, 2007). While such work is often nuanced in looking to the locality and plurality of “competing responsibilities” beyond “neoliberalism’s emphasis on a particular kind of individual cultivation of the self” (Trnka and Trundle, 2017: 3), it can be expanded through an attention to mutual forms of involvement that may also imply harm or collusion. Considering complicity extends the analytical as well as methodological questions illuminated by a lens of responsibility, as well as making room for the often critical and contested ways in which people narrate and frame a state that can feel harmful and necessary at once. Thinking through complicity also immediately points to the differentiated ways in which groups of people are held responsible and to how states claim (or disclaim) responsibility for them. Questioning who is complicit with a state entity like the Home Office

Responsibility and complicity  187 necessitates asking not just what or who makes up such a body, but also how people are held at the margins or edges of its power. Complicity was central to the legislative context of my fieldwork: Theresa May’s Hostile Environment Policy. Introduced through the 2015 and 2016 Immigration Acts, this put in place a system of extractive civil fines for workplaces, landlords, healthcare workers and migrants themselves in order to police the movement and lives of those deemed illegal (see Goodfellow, 2019). Such legislative shifts emerged from a longer history of “everyday bordering and ordering” (EL-​Enany, 2020: 26) stretching back through the afterlife of the British Empire (Bailkin, 2012), and drawing on longer-​still histories of the “responsible citizen” (Kelty, 2008; McKeon, 1957; Trnka and Trundle, 2017), often imbued with a responsibility to name the non-​citizen. Neoliberal responsibilization here overlaps with the demarcation of what Bridget Anderson calls a Community of Value, “defined from the outside by the non-​citizen, but also from the inside, by the ‘Failed Citizen’ ” (Anderson, 2013: 2–​ 4), sometimes “scrounger”, “criminal”, “workshy” or “single mother”. Those excluded from such communities of value may actively seek strategic forms of complicity with such systems, in order to gain necessary recognition or incorporation, at the same time as advancing critiques of the terms of such inclusion and exclusion. Alongside this, people regularly create forms of care, friendship and relatedness that involve ideas of ethical responsibility and mutuality that are not easily incorporated within normative legal formations, partly due to the necessity of living outside or at the edges of legality. While citizenship itself can be a site of contestation over “virtuousness” and diasporic community-​making (see Fumanti, 2010), people are also engaged in experiences of ethics and communality that do not easily map onto divisions of “citizen” and “non-​citizen”. Attending to responsibility and complicity in the everyday lives of people like those I met throughout my fieldwork can illuminate much about how people consider the state and its margins, along with questions of harm, care, friendship and methodological complicity. I overview each of these topics through this chapter, starting with a focus on how people conceived of the state through ideas of discernible logic, inhuman unpredictability and as a serious game. While being clear about the racialized violence and harms of the British border regime, I try to also show the ways in which people like Ginika were able to play with and disrupt the power of such systems in their lives, often through a focus on a shared, if differentiated, complicity. I argue that political as well as anthropological work that aims to critique and ultimately dismantle such regimes needs to be alive to these nuances, allowing for forms of critical or strategic complicity within a system that denies as much as generates responsibilities. A focus on ethnographic complicity is not an invite to guilt and naval-​gazing, however, but an opportunity to engage with the ethical and political worlds of those we encounter in a mutual dialogue with them –​to avoid either reductive notions of objective distance or overstated ideas of activist-​academic utility. Naming complicity

188  Joel White always means questioning one’s own, along with the shape or form of that which we are complicit with.

Pinball logic I spent a lot of time in NGO offices throughout my fieldwork, scattered across the varying parts of Scotland’s refugee sector. At one training early in the year, whilst nibbling M&S flapjack bites and fresh fruit in a flashy glass office, a group of us watched a PowerPoint presentation: An Introduction to Immigration Detention and the Detention Estate. Later that day, a woman from the Board of the visiting group who were running this training told us a story about a man in detention whose family used to fly up to Scotland once a month from Bristol for a visit. She explained how people end up inside Dungavel –​Scotland’s only Immigration Removal Centre, about an hour away from Glasgow –​from all over the country. She spoke slowly, her sentences resonating with stern, solemn indignation: “It seems to be completely random”. “I have learnt over the years –​that to imagine there is intelligence or humane strategy on the part of the Home Office would be completely fatuous –​once you’re in the system, it’s like a pinball machine”. “It’s frustrating; you can’t understand what’s happening”. Later in the year, I found myself in a slightly less glossy office, with a different NGO, hand-​drawn pictures on the walls, sketched maps of Scotland and Glasgow. The woman doing this training had come up from London for a full-​day session, and we all left with bundles of notes. Much of the day was spent looking over case studies, real people’s files with the personal details blacked out. The PowerPoint slides were full with text and information: Section 95, Section 4, The Destitution Test, Asylum Support Tribunals, Schedule 10, how to understand various parts of the asylum support process. At one point, before a break, she gathered us back together –​“it all comes back to this at the end of the day” –​flicking to a jarringly spacious slide, just five words: “Think like the Home Office” *** How do you think like a pinball machine? What does it mean to act or feel like a state? How might “thinking like” blur into “becoming” the Home Office? What relations of responsibility and complicity emerge through this? The opaque logic of the Home Office was a source of constant discussion and consideration throughout my fieldwork. NGO caseworkers would try and trace different strategies in order to help people in the system, often balancing between the need to think like the Home Office and fear of becoming complicit in state practice. In trainings and everyday action,

Responsibility and complicity  189 caseworkers would hone their ability to pre-​empt and discern the legal machinations of the Home Office, often framing this as a responsibility to those they represented. This regularly blurred into worries about becoming complicit in the bureaucracy and othering of the system. Questions of imitation and identification went beyond knowledge alone: a number of NGOs in Glasgow had prominent staff members who originally entered the sector through working for Home Office subcontractors, while many charities took on different kinds of state funding and provision (see Tyler et al., 2014). In a more complex sense, as one friend who worked at such an NGO told me: we just keep hiring young women … young white women, often from London or down south. Everyone has great CVs, they can do the admin so efficiently, lots of them have done a Masters in something very specifically relevant. And they care a lot too, it’s not just a job. At some point though it’s also just the office culture replicating itself –​we all work well together. She spoke here to an anxiety around how forms of sameness could entrench divisions between caseworkers and clients, whilst blurring lines between the sector and the Home Office. People like Ginika and the other members of the PAR group were very aware of the utility of such NGOs, encouraging each other to find the “good” and “knowledgeable” people within them, along with creating their own strategies for discernment, for drawing on or calling out such “sameness”. This often acknowledged the racialized limits of such work, as Ginika told me once: I would always go and sign [the regular reporting people must do with the Home Office] with my [NGO] support worker, with a witness. I don’t like to say it, but if you come, then it is better. Two black people? They don’t take that seriously. But if I come with a white person, they will not detain me that day. Through all of this, the shifting, hard-​to-​place figure of the Home Office is registered through a kind of mirroring narrative –​as random yet repetitive, unthinking yet discernible, mysteriously distant yet knocking on the door. What or who the state is becomes difficult to demarcate in such instances, linking to anthropological work that posits the state as “neither a clearly bounded institution nor a unitary and autonomous actor” but a “multilayered, contradictory, trans-​local ensemble of institutions, practices and people in a globalized context” (Hakyemez, 2020: 71; see also Sharma and Gupta, 2006; Gupta, 1995). Abrams (1988) famously argues that ideas of the state form a discursive mask, whereby the state is not a reality behind political practices and contestations, but a reified projection that prevents us seeing such processes. Yet much recent anthropological work has shown the

190  Joel White importance of holding onto the everyday ways in which people treat states as distinct things, whether inflected with ideas of protection, oppression or sovereignty (Aretxaga, 2003; Hansen and Stepputat, 2005; Navaro-​Yashin, 2002; Mitchell, 1991). Such work argues for anthropologists to be open to how the people we work with understand and frame the state, along with being attentive to wider emic understandings of the political in general (Curtis and Spencer, 2012; Hakyemez, 2020). For the people I worked with this meant a constant and at times intense unpacking of who and what the Home Office was, drawing out questions of logic, responsibility and complicity. Discussion of the Home Office became a way to tell different stories about what states are, which in turn helps expand our understandings of the kinds of subjects such states produce, always in a multidirectional process. One of my arguments in this chapter is that such stories are a large part of how people experience the state, and of what a state in some sense “is”. This is a fairly classic anthropological story in itself (Abrams, 1988; Taussig, 1992), but one that extends to daily praxis: acting like, playing with and embodying the state in different ways. Of course, state actors “with a big S” (Taussig, 1992: 112) may ultimately have the power to detain people or act a certain stateness in more overt ways, but an ability to partially take on or make sense of such power is still very important to those at the margins of the state. “Thinking like the Home Office” thus creates experiences of stateness in varied, but differentiated ways, reflected in the different kinds of complicity available to different people. Central to this were complex tangles of colonial history and contemporary sovereign responsibility.

Colonial responsibilities Thinking like the Home Office for those navigating its systems of legal recognition often meant attempting to work through histories of colonial responsibility and hierarchies of stateness. Here, people’s attempts to claim recognition from the Home Office were usually met by state attempts to shed sovereign responsibility to a country of origin or so-​called safe country. This takes place within “a global state system which requires mutual recognition by states” (Anderson, 2013: 113) that emerged through histories of colonialism and Empire that positioned colonized people as a responsibility of the “motherland” (see Bailkin, 2012). The history of how migrants have been legally incorporated into the British state is partly a history of refractions and changes in these intrastate responsibilities through the period of the overthrow of Empire: from the early days of the 1905 Aliens Act, to the partial incorporation of Citizens of the UK and Colonies through the British Nationality Act of 1948, and their gradual exclusion through subsequent immigration acts in 1962, 1968 and 1971. As Luke De Noronha’s argues, this led to a particular contemporary idea of “postcolonial” independence within the British metropole, as:

Responsibility and complicity  191 “the racialized global poor are governed not as colonial subjects but as citizens of independent nation-​states […] in this context, discourses on sovereignty prove ideologically pivotal, obscuring historical continuities through references to the apparently independence of formerly colonised nation states”. (2020: 194) In practical terms, this would mean that people like Ginika and the other members of the PAR group, all of whom were from ex-​colonial states, juggled pride in decolonization movements with frustration about a seeming amnesia or unwillingness from Britain to acknowledge such shared histories. To think like the Home Office was to have to subdue or compartmentalize such frustrations and engage with an institution that celebrated its own rationality and made it a personal responsibility to provide rigorous evidence in specific legal terms, usually focused on risk of persecution or familial connection. While the idea of thinking like the Home Office implies a mysterious logic to such systems that is mirrored in the state’s own pronouncements of rationality and efficiency, counter-​narratives such as the “pinball machine” imply both inhumanity and irrationality. This too links to longer histories of how the rationality of dominant states has often been posited through the disavowal of an “irrational” and “stateless” Other. The contradictions of colonial expansion often involved attempting to construct state apparatus at the same time as denying the capacity for colonized polities to function or operate as “modern” states, in ways that echo in contemporary narratives about “failed states”. Chakrabarty’s famous takedown of historicist thinking in European social sciences, whereby he invites us “to unlearn to think of history as a developmental process in which that which is possible becomes actual by tending to a future that is singular” (2000: 249), thus also means considering the ways in which historicist ideas of stateness are built into contemporary border regimes. This is, of course, a deeply racialized process, as sciences of “the state” and technologies of the border emerge concurrently with a genealogy of what Sylvia Wynter frames as enlightenment “Man”, a particular white, masculine notion of humanity as a normative, biologized default (2003). As Denise Ferreira da Silva puts it in an analysis of Wynter and Foucault, this was mapped geographically as well as on particular groups of people, “from [the Enlightenment] on, the rational /​irrational pair would then remap the ‘space of otherness’ [to Man] and, significantly, be represented by the bodies and territories subjected to colonial power” (2015: 94). Hanging over all these theories are deep metaphors of stateness that often get taken for granted, particularly “embodied depiction[s]‌ ” (Cooper, 2019: 48) of the body politic, rendered most famously in Hobbes’ Leviathan. Such visions help demonstrate that the various threads in this section are often held together through depictions of Man as state, and state as Man –​always presuming a stateless, irrational other.

192  Joel White Thinking, acting or feeling like a state in this context thus points towards WEB Du Bois’ notion of “double consciousness” (1986: 364–​365), and to what Frantz Fanon would call the “corporeal malediction” of a dehumanized, racialized subject being rendered in “crushing objecthood” (1986: 84, 82). Complicity for racialized groups here means the possibility of being othered and objectified, having moved from inclusion through hierarchies of colonial power to exclusion in a presumed network of equal postcolonial states. Attempts to discern the logic or rationale of the Home Office emerge from such contexts, as people are expected to reify a British state that has been cast as historically superior and rational, but is experienced as random, inhumane and irrational. We see how the complicities of “young white women” in refugee NGOs can take very different forms to the majority of their clients, who would often critique or express confusion at the complex divisions of race, gender and class they encountered. Any analysis of complicity within the systems of bordering must then consider the fact that the “modern state is a racial project, bound up with the making and maintaining of racial difference, and immigration controls are deeply implicated in this project” (see Anderson, 2013: 47; Goldberg, 2002). Thinking like the state is thus a fraught and complex process, particularly when faced with deportation to states depicted as intrinsically unstable, often involving narratives and counter-​narratives of rationality and responsibility. I turn now to consider how people I did fieldwork with often tried to conceive of the state, and complicity with it, through repeated metaphors: of “inhumane” monsters, mysterious shadows, environments and atmospheres, or some kind of game, trap or lottery.

Metaphorical states Monsters Asylum accommodation in Glasgow was often spoken about by people I met in terms of its inhumanity –​“it’s not fit for a dog”, “we are human beings, but we are not treated that way” –​and its carcerality: “it is as if I am in prison”. Alongside this, the ever present threat of being sent to immigration detention was regularly figured as a shadow or cloud hanging over life, anchored on particular state actors who seemed to hold the power to incarcerate, itself evoked through ideas and images of locks, keys and walls. Such environmental, and in a sense non-​human, metaphors are a shift from bodily depictions of the state, impacting how people strategized or read the signs of Home Office logic. Discussion of avoiding being detained was particularly common among people I got to know, as one man put it to a group discussing concerns about reporting, “my friend, he knows a lot about this, he has been detained a lot, and he said this, if it is quiet when you sign watch out, it means they are detaining people”. Silence was here a metaphor for state presence, and learning to read this was charged with the sense of having

Responsibility and complicity  193 being caught out once, but hopefully not again. Often, key NGO workers, community figures and legal representatives would become metonymically imbued with knowledge of the state, based on successes, communication and rumour, usually spread through word of mouth. But such figures were also presented as having mysterious access to this capacity to read signs, almost like weather-​forecasters or magicians. One Nigerian lawyer based in London, who ran a very popular YouTube channel and Facebook live stream, became a particular source of such mysterious insights for a number of the friends I made over the year. “She knows the secrets of the Home Office”, they would tell me and each other, recounting particular bits of advice that had been dispensed in the previous evening’s video. The state here is both hyper-​rational and magic, human and mysteriously beyond-​the-​human. Such considerations of the dark magic of the Home Office shows how everyday ideas of the state are often attached to particular people, places and processes. However, the fantastical or even phantasmic power of states was drawn upon in wider ways, often through countervailing metaphors of the non-​human. Tabloid and government pronouncements have long drawn on fascistic descriptions of migrants as swarms, waves and plagues, linking to a longer history of state depictions of “monstrousness” and “multitude” (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000: 39). Journalists interviewed for the Bad News for Refugees book project explaining how common it was to be sent on “monstering jobs” (Philo, Briant and Donald, 2013: 10), writing racist attack articles about asylum seekers that spread fear and violence. Yet, as we see through Aretxaga’s summary of state fantasies, this is not an unlinear process, as she argues “the state and its enemies are created and recreated as powerful fictional realities”, which can lead to narratives that draw on particular monstrous metaphors of the state such as “witches, vampires, zombies, and ghosts” (Aretxaga, 2003: 402). A popular and well-​ used activist handbook about the UK Border Regime (Corporate Watch, 2018) during my fieldwork depicted the system as “a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster”, explaining: it has teeth and does real harm to people’s lives. But it is not unstoppable. It is made up of many parts, many of which are weak or rusty, many of which don’t work well together. When we can identify its joints and weak points, we can see where it is vulnerable and can be beaten. (Corporate Watch, 2018: 49) The book demonstrates this with a drawing (Figure 10.1): Before explaining how although “the teeth include actual uses of force: border stops, raids, detention, deportations”, they work alongside a rung of “civil society” institutions, surrounded by wider processes of surveillance, consent and legitimacy: “a monster [cannot] be all jaws and teeth” (Corporate Watch, 2018: 50). The state here is depicted in a metaphor aimed at both demonstrating its power, and showing its possible

194  Joel White

Figure 10.1 The Border Regime Monster (Corporate Watch, 2018: 49: copyright free).

weak spots for campaigning and pressure, in an uncanny rendering of older Hobbesian Leviathans that spoke to both strength in “organic unity” and the constant threat of breakdown within this. This composite Frankenstein reminds us that state metaphors implicitly always speak to “the relationship between bodies and parts” (Cooper, 2019: 51), with people able to make claims at different scales of integration within the whole. This could involve disavowal, as with the many Home Office and subcontracted state actors I would encounter, whilst trying to get information or support for a friend, who would exclaim “I’m not the Home Office”, or “I’m not Serco [the private company managing asylum accommodation at the time]!”, often wearing a Serco or Home Office lanyard. Being a –​human, individual, somehow powerless –​part of the whole could involve veiled critiques of a certain irrationality, even monstrousness to “the system”, but more regularly was simply a denial of responsibility. To really “know” the system here means being able to deny any complicity in its powerful machinations. This is registered even in the very framing of the hostile environment, itself a pervasively non-​human metaphor, in some sense reifying the state, but also treating it as diffused into the everyday. While Theresa May (whose robotic style of presentation became folded into ideas of the system she espoused) was a key representational figure for this “environment”, it is telling that the more dominant image was of “Go Home” immigration vans, which

Responsibility and complicity  195 drove around urban centres emblazoned with a message saying, “In the UK Illegally? Go Home or Face Arrest”, showing a disembodied handcuff and Home Office Badge. Ginika’s jesting with me to “Go Home!” myself emerges from this context –​in which even those directly employed by the system seek to disavow responsibility for its relentless activity, yet the power to act upon such a demand is so clearly held in differentiated ways. Games The other common set of metaphors used to engage with the Home Office and state more generally were centred on games and lotteries, as we saw in the ideas of the pinball machine. This implied lack of rationality and sense of being thrown around extended to other game-​inflected language of winning, beating and losing legal cases, along with tabloid narratives about “gaming” the asylum system. During my fieldwork, “Right to Remain”, an NGO who produce the most regularly used and thorough lay persons guide to asylum and immigration procedures (itself called a “Toolkit”, with a cover showing a “maze”) brought out a board-​game-​style Asylum Navigation Board, as a way to help talk through and explain the different stages of the processes of applying for asylum in Britain (see Figure 10.2).

Figure 10.2 Right to Remain –​Asylum Navigation Board.

196  Joel White Here, despite the aesthetics of boards, cards and wooden figures, we find a purely pedagogic tool, stripped of chance or luck, where people can work through the various parts of applying for asylum in their prescribed, predictable order. Such initiatives offer a distorted mirror to what Patrick Page, a senior caseworker in public law at Duncan Lewis Solicitors, argues in an article for the “Unlocking Detention” website is “the gamification of immigration enforcement” (Page, 2018) within the Home Office. He cites the “eerily video game” evoking names of immigration enforcement initiatives –​Nexus, Perceptor, Magnify, Gull, Vaken, Adoze, Dickens, Crag, Gopik –​along with describing how: Home Office whistle-​blowers have spoken out about a big poster on the Bootle (Liverpool) office wall “of a winding road with a plastic toy car attached, which was moved to indicate progress towards the 10,000 target [of clearing the backlog in asylum claims]”. (Page, 2018) This links to stories such as that of the Home Office caseworker “who revealed that a toy gorilla, called the ‘grant monkey’, would be put on the desk of any case-​owner who had granted asylum, as a badge of shame” (Page, 2018). Echoing such ideas of punitive gamification with a return to “randomness”, one former caseworker told the Guardian in 2018: “It’s just a lottery […] There was one particular guy who had a reputation for never granting anything. He kind of took pride in that as well. On the one occasion when he did grant someone, I think someone brought him in a cake”. (Lyons and Brewer, 2018) Such articles were widely shared around during my fieldwork through WhatsApp groups and email lists, met with tragi-​comic responses: “I’ve always said this”, “they are evil”, simultaneous emojis of crying laughter and red-​hot anger. The metaphor becomes more than a linguistic or narrative flourish here, the game or lottery is the logic, and thinking like the Home Office becomes a serious kind of play, in which learning “the rules” becomes a personal responsibility, and everyone is somehow already complicit. The regular discussion of feeling “trapped” and “stuck” takes on another sense here too, still deeply informed by ideas of prison-​like spaces of the immigration system, but situating the game as a trap. As Seaver argues in an article about an anthropology of algorithms that resonates with the Home Office “operations” and Immigration “direct capture” noted earlier, “If the tragedy of entrapment begins when prey first, unwittingly, interact with the trap, then landscape traps produce environments where prey is already effectively caught […] enclosed, known, and subject to manipulation” (2019: 432).

Responsibility and complicity  197 Here, within “infrastructures [that] are already traps” we also see remnants of game theory that attempt to map and condition human behaviour through notions of homo economicus and rational choice theory (Seaver, 2019: 432). The history of an Enlightened state and its lawless other sketched earlier in this chapter are deeply influenced by such theories, espousing rules that people interpret in their everyday theories of the state through ideas of risk, luck, skill and lottery. As with any game, winning or making a “successful” bid for asylum could be charged with feelings of complicity or guilt (“why did I ‘win’ whilst my friend did not?”), but narratives of a game allowed for strategic forms of complicity that involved mixtures of discernible “strategy”, different scales of stuckness and trap, and pin-​ balling unpredictability.

States of complicity After several weeks attending the PAR group I used to open this chapter, I became aware of just how quickly ideas of gaming and playful renderings of state and border could become far more sombre. Running late to one session towards the end of my time with the group, I entered to an angry silence, which Ginika was first to break: “Which day did they put Belinda on the plane?”. Her voice was hushed, mournful. “Saturday”, replied Sophia. I remember looking at my feet, unsure of what to say, trying to sit with the silence. Belinda had been detained before I joined the group, when she had gone to sign at the Home Office reporting centre. Two of her close friends, Amber and Iris, arrived to the session shortly after me, carrying a wheelie-​ trolley of Belinda’s things. They were the youngest members of the group, always together, usually a bit shyer and quieter than the others. They left that day after a few quiet chats and updates, at which point the sadness and frustration of the group poured out, “like a valve had popped”, I wrote in my diary. People shouted over each other –​fraught, nodding, sighing, pointing at nothing in particular. I jotted down several phrases, not keeping track of who was saying what: “The caseworker is wicked to do this! You ruin someone’s life!” “But it is normal! It is normal”. “They are at risk these girls! They are single, no children, the Home Office rejects their cases. It was very quick; she was only here one year”. “But they do not talk about it, they are silent. Even today they are quiet. We tried to help, told them to contact their MSPs their MPs”. “A problem shared is a problem solved”.

198  Joel White “No man is an island”. “If you go searching down a path without a map, you will be lost. Without help, how will you find a way?”. “Immigration is not a joke”. The sadness and frustration was difficult to register, let alone convey. People were clear that the blame lied with the Home Office, but also in a perceived inaction, an impermissible silence or quietness, interpreted as a failure to take responsibility, to take advice. *** Blame feels like the wrong word now; the anger was at the situation, the limits of explanation, coupled with a need to feel there was still some use in plotting strategies together, swapping tips –​in trying to discern the logic of a system that would detain and deport a young woman in this way. My sense of the discussion that followed was of deep sadness, an almost vicarious sense of being detained as well, particularly for those who had been inside detention themselves, especially if they had been to Dungavel, where Belinda was held. As another member of the group, Jane, put it to me in a subsequent chat, “it’s like it’s me that is there, it could happen to me as well”. Such moments, flashpoints of shared frustration, were often times when people feel compelled to share their own strategies and ways of coping with the threat of detention. These were as diverse as the group itself, ranging at the narrative level from wise aphorisms to granular specifics, tools, names and useful tips. Thoughts about avoiding detention were rehearsed, names of useful NGO workers repeated. Marcel, one of the older members of the group, spoke for a while on the importance of making contact with Members of Parliament (MPs) and Members of Scottish Parliament (MSPs), taking things to a political register. He told a story about his friend, “Romeo […], he went to address parliament. Then how could they say, he is not gay, he went to talk about those issues at Scottish parliament. These are the things you need to do. He has status now”. Marcel’s phone background was a picture of him smiling with Nicola Sturgeon, one of at least five or six people I got to know through the year who had similar photos with the First Minister of Scotland. Proactively drawing upon MSPs, MPs, councillors, community groups and NGOs was framed by the group as a personal and collective responsibility in the face of a Home Office that was “wicked” but “normal”. Friendship and interpersonal connection, stretching from small-​scale support groups to Scottish political leaders, is charged here with necessity. Attempts to hold such figures to account for inaction or a lack of responsiveness involved public discussion, gossip and overt political campaigning, which regularly involved general criticisms of who was complicit with the hostile environment. There were mutual forms of recognition and responsibility going on here then, however partial, that extended to academic researchers like myself, with an

Responsibility and complicity  199 expectation of support, knowledge sharing and commitment that became read in the light of events such as Belinda’s deportation. When one of the group says, “no man is an island”, this is what they speak to: thinking like a state in order to avoid its worse violence requires drawing upon figures who “know” and can act as or upon a multifaceted state in different ways. Such aphorisms, expressed in what Cheryl Mattingly calls a “deliberative ethical moment” (2014: 27), helped to centre simultaneous collective and personal forms of responsibility: “a problem shared is a problem solved”. For Simon, who had recounted his own traumatic experiences of detention to us a number of times, always with a confident exuberance that seemed to wrestle back control over the things he was retelling, the only solution was through the problem itself. As he would say, fists balled, laughing but with a wetness to his eyes: “If you don’t have problems, you won’t get knowledge. As you have problems, you get more knowledge!”. Marcel called the style of delivery Simon was using here “crying laughing”. As he explained during the discussion, “we have to laugh and cry!”, going on to relay an anecdote about refusing to leave a detention cell when threatened with deportation, smacking his hand on the table and crunching up his body, grimacing but laughing. The outpouring of emotion and strategizing that accompanied the detention or removal of a friend took many forms then, but was charged with a sense that such suffering could still be learned from, that it had to have some kind of point. For Marcel, and many of the others in the group, clarity around this was ultimately found in God. As he told me: Before I have fun. Before I submit a form. Before I do –​I talk to Jesus, in my head”. He gestured at me as he spoke. “Before we did that funding application together, before we press submit. I talk to God. I am with God and God is with me. Even when I think, will I have to leave this country? God answers. I am here, God has meant that to be. God is hope, confidence. Faith was absolutely key to many of those in the PAR group, both in terms of active engagement in religious groups, and in this wider way, of making sense of the Home Office’s unpredictability and disavowed responsibility. There was definitely a religiosity to the concerns expressed about people “lapsing” or “faltering” in their proactive work on their cases or with community support groups, and to the metaphors and aphorisms deployed. Such an ethic also speaks, I think, to reiterate the purpose and promise of the PAR group itself, at a moment of grief and anger, when the friendships and intimacies held within the space seem insufficient to stop Home Office actors who can decimate such relatedness. Hence, a responsibility to the group and oneself is both affirming and fraught, and perceived inaction on this front can be read as complicity with a state that must be constantly collectively mapped. Framing things analytically as complicity here also then shows the

200  Joel White difficulty in standing apart from such accusations: I was in that room, I had known about Belinda’s detention for a while, could I have done more to involve myself in her case, contact politicians, support her friends? But also, why didn’t I do more to question the narrative of her being somehow at fault in that moment? Moreover, how much are we all complicit in a system that can deport a young woman away from her home and friends with such speed and ease? To attempt to know or name another’s complicity is to question one’s own, especially in collective settings where the emphasis is on shared support. Key repeated themes of personal responsibility and “self-​care” (a big focus of several PAR group sessions) blurred with attempts to “think like” or embody an entity seen as harmful, blurring any clear divide between care and harm. Overt opposition to the state was reconfigured in such moments as a complicity of a different kind, bordering on self-​ harm, recalling one woman whose words (from a different, adjacent community group) echoed around my mind afterwards: “you know the Home Office is in my head, when I fight them, I fight myself, I hurt myself”. Thinking like the Home Office takes on a different quality here, linking back to Du Bois (1986) and Fanon (1986) on the harm of inhabiting a logic that splits or colonizes the mind. Submitting to the system may mean being complicit in its continued colonization of one’s subjectivity, but “fighting” also seems to mean complicity: in risking being destroyed by a system that most people felt (at different times and to different degrees), was trying to break them. Here, we see complicity is often deeply contested: at different times “not fighting enough” and “fighting too much” could both be seen as being complicit in systems of bordering, depending on the moment, and political context of a discussion. Agreement that the Home Office was monstrous, random, inhumane and racist –​“always out to get black people”, as one PAR member told me –​could overlap with thinking of it as discernible and malleable to certain kinds of individual and collective work. Questions of complicity were central to giving shape to the Home Office in such moments, as well as giving meaning to how people encountered and resisted it. Collective responsibility within something like the PAR group was also not reducible to questions of the state, as it also functioned as a space that could feel outside purely legal (or legally anticipatory) forms of ethical responsibility. The group itself had routines, in-​jokes and deeply held relationships that were as much a testament to somehow getting through the brutality of the system as it was a place to share ideas on how to go forward in it. As Ginika reflected at one session, her friends humming and nodding in agreement –​it was the group itself, and the relationships made within it, that had an essentially life-​sustaining effect for her and others: “It is better than medicine, it is very important”. “These groups, the friends we make, they do more than medicine”.

Responsibility and complicity  201 The group may have been making resources for the NHS, but its primary meaning for most of the participants was as “medicinal” and relational in itself. The threat of detention was experienced as a challenge to this in both form and content: a place of isolation, trauma and negation of state responsibility, but also something that immediately fractured support groups like this. The state emerges in such groups, and at key deliberative moments, such as Belinda’s forced removal, as multifaceted and multi-​sited, with internal frictions that should be proactively drawn upon but are threaded with complex forms of complicity. This tells us something about the ways in which questions of complicity can be a key way that people imagine and interpret the state, as something to avoid or strategically engage with. But it also raises important questions about the methodological complicity of anthropological work.

Conclusion Paying attention to the differing and sometimes competing forms of complicity in an ethnographic context like the British border regime means acknowledging anthropological complicity at different scales. The discomfort of sitting in a discussion like the one in the previous section, debating how someone could have better avoided deportation within a system that seems geared towards such violence, is met by a discomfort in naming this as complicity. Moments of blame and accusations of collusion are a fraught but regular part of navigating such a system, but not easy to frame without feeling complicit oneself. However, I include the example despite such discomfort because I think it shows the ways in which this system pushes people into deeply difficult and ethically painful territory, and because of how important questions of becoming complicit were to people I worked with over my year of fieldwork. My attempt to here join with their questions of complicity, and show how they illuminate everyday understandings of the state, is then also a political decision to share such complicity in some way, to show how it can operate. People I met formed complex individual and collective frameworks for discerning, pre-​empting and potentially joining a legal and political system of bordering that worked to push them to the edges of stateness, predominately via detention and deportation. Thinking of complicity as a method means considering one’s own position within such systems and attempting to work and write in ways that can contribute to such emic strategies of complicity. Day-​to-​day, this meant for me being available for regular tasks, voluntary casework and group support, even when this did not completely align with my own political critiques of the border. It required being open to seeing the state as discernible and bounded when this was important or useful to those I met. At its most difficult, it required sitting with people who were facing impossible choices, in a system where care and harm were not easily disentangled, without trying to extract oneself from the webs of complicity that make up such systems. In a more playful way, it meant engaging in the kind of teasing retooling of language

202  Joel White and stateness that began this chapter: being able to laugh at “Go Home!” “Donald Trump” with a woman who illuminated the imbalances of power she saw every day. Questions of complicity also point to edges or margins of stateness in complex ways. As I have outlined through the chapter, ideas of complicity reflect differentiations of race, gender and class –​with racialized and former colonial subjects of the British border regime being exposed to particularly difficult questions of complicity within a system that on some level aims towards their assimilation or eradication. But while some analyse this through concepts of bare life and surplus population, as Gargi Bhattacharyya argues, such terms “can represent an internalization of the logic of usefulness and of disposability” (2018: 34). Instead, as pointed to at the end of the last section, we can see how collective forms of responsibility amongst people in such precarious situations can involve forms of care, friendship and support that are not reducible to complicity with the state. Here, Judith Butler’s work on mutual, if differentiated, vulnerability could help expand further work on complicity. As she reminds us, “vulnerability takes on another meaning at the moment it is recognized, and recognition wields the power to reconstitute vulnerability” (2006: 43). Political recognition and ethnographic recognition have an overlapping potential here: to acknowledge the ways people navigate shared vulnerability, friendship and care day-​to-​day, and to become implicated in such processes, not simply “witnessing” but being relationally and politically complicit in the worlds and lives we encounter. This chapter has shown how people in the UK immigration system navigate and “think like” the Home Office in a number of ways: through playful evocations of state rhetoric, critical metaphors of monstrousness and inhumanity, and through learning the “rules” of a serious kind of “game”. Attending to questions of complicity within such narratives illuminates their contours and shifting forms, along with the ethical and political meanings people bring to such processes. Questions of rationality and irrationality, responsibility and irresponsibility, and logic and randomness percolate throughout these discourses, linking to long histories of colonial incorporation and exclusion. Differing scales of responsibility –​the individual, collective and global intrastate –​overlap in complex ways here, as people attempt to establish recognition from key figures and institutions who often disavow responsibility. Rather than attempt to stand apart from the questions of complicity asked by those we encounter as anthropologists, a critical or methodological complicity can instead show ways to engage in the world with them. To name complicity is to question one’s own, and anthropology could learn a lot from doing both.

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Index

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 70n8 refers to note 70 on page 8. Abrams, Philip 189 accountability 2, 7, 41, 57, 70n6, 76, 84, 111, 151 activism (activists) 6, 13, 14, 151, 185, 187, 193; environmental 16, 18; migrant solidarity 185 aesthetics 155, 157, 196 agency 1, 6, 24, 29, 57, 76, 96, 97, 99, 103, 106, 111 algorithms 196 Ancrenaz, Marc 14, 18–​21, 23, 24–​7, 31 Anderson, Bridget 187 anthropogenic 17–​21, 23–​4 anti-​blackness 129, 134, 135, 139–​41 Aotearoa (New Zealand) 10, 166–​9, 176, 180–​2 apartheid 6, 40, 42, 46 archive 1, 9, 10, 140, 148, 153, 155–​8, 171, 172, 174, 180–​2 artefacts 10, 170, 171 assemblage 25, 60, 133, 158 asylum (asylum seekers) 11, 65, 185, 186, 188, 192–​7 attentiveness 7, 75–​9, 82–​6 Auckland 176–​8 authenticity 65, 177 bag: kete 167, 173–​4; tūkohu 168–​75, 180–​2 Badiou, Alain 149 Bhan, Gautam 147, 150–​2 Biehl, João 80–​1 Black Lives Matter (BLM) 139–​40 Borneo, Malaysian 4, 5, 13–​16, 18–​22 Botswana 43–​5, 47, 49 British Nationality Act 1948 190

burden 82, 119, 122–​4 burial 175, 177, 180 Buscetta, Tommaso 59, 60, 63, 66, 70n8 Butler, Judith 78, 202 calamity coping 7, 8, 96, 97, 99, 101, 105, 106 Calcutta (Kolkata) 9, 147–​62; Calcutta City Requiem 9, 147, 149, 156, 158–​9, 161 Cameroon 6, 68–​9, 70n1 capitalism 5, 27–​9, 41, 47, 50; and anti-​capitalist scholarship 28, 29; extractive 29, 30; see also philanthrocapitalism carcerality 192 care 10, 11, 22, 28, 75, 76, 79, 86, 87n13, 91, 95, 99, 100, 111, 114, 115, 126, 172, 181, 186, 187, 200–​2; see also health Chile 8, 128–​42 China 18, 95 citizenship (citizen) 5, 96, 98, 101, 155, 187, 190, 191; non-​citizen 187 collaboration 1, 5, 10, 28, 29, 48, 60, 75, 80, 91, 92, 166–​82 colonialism (colonial and coloniality) 9, 10, 14, 18, 28, 40, 41, 46, 50, 62–​4, 82, 130, 132, 133, 135, 137, 140, 142, 153, 167, 168, 173, 174, 179, 180, 182, 190–​2, 202; neocolonial 5, 28, 29, 48 community 6, 11, 22, 40, 47, 48, 73, 74, 77, 91, 92, 95–​106 complicity 11, 132, 139, 159, 185–​8 concepts, constellation of 76, 85–​6

206 Index conservation 1, 4, 5, 13–​29, 31n6, 37, 39, 40, 43–​50; conservationists 5, 14, 18, 24, 26, 27, 29, 50 conspiracy 6, 57–​69 consumption 5, 14, 37, 38, 46, 48–​50, 118, 121, 122 control 10, 63, 97, 111, 112, 116, 117, 181, 192, 199 Corporate Watch 193–​4 Countess of Kintore 10, 166 Covid-​19 (coronavirus) 4, 7, 51n2, 68, 66, 67, 90, 93, 94, 97, 99, 101, 102, 106, 125, 139 Cox Hall, Amy 179–​80 crisis 1, 4, 6–​8, 37–​40, 46–​51, 74, 80, 83, 92, 94–​101, 104, 106, 134 critical race studies 9, 129, 130, 132 Das, Veena 76, 78 death 10, 16, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 29, 83, 129, 148, 150, 159, 161, 162 decoloniality 9, 129, 130; and decolonizing 10, 85, 130, 132, 191 De Noronha, Luke 190 deportation 192–​4, 201 Derrida, Jacques 148, 157 De Rosny, Éric 65, 66 development 1, 14, 17–​19, 40, 155–​7 diagnosis 8, 78, 110, 112–​14, 116–​18, 120, 121, 125 diaries, 10, 166, 171 difference 147, 149, 157, 160, 162, 192 disenchantment 7, 77, 79, 81, 82, 84, 86 dreams (dreaming) 28, 74, 83, 84 DSM-​V 110, 113, 118 Du Bois, W.E.B. 192, 200 Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre 188, 198 elegy 16, 161 elites 6, 27, 39, 41, 45, 50, 69 empire 157, 159, 187, 190; imperial 9, 130, 132 enchantment 7, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81–​4, 86 encounters 22, 81, 82, 128, 130, 131, 133, 135, 139, 141, 142 environmentalism 15; environmentalists 15, 27 equality 5, 92, 93, 95, 96 equity 90–​3, 98–​100 ethics 3, 7, 10, 14, 20, 26, 27, 29, 30, 57, 81, 82, 125 ethnography (ethnographic) 4, 7–​9, 22, 29, 30, 37–​9, 42, 66, 67, 74–​86, 102,

105, 128, 129, 131–​4, 139–​42, 149, 156, 171, 180, 181, 187, 201, 202 evidence 2, 69, 102, 104, 105, 131, 132, 191 excess 5, 27, 37, 38, 41, 42, 46, 47, 49, 50, 113, 116, 160 exclusion 5, 8, 11, 93–​7, 99, 100–​6, 187, 190, 192, 202 experience, lived 95, 100, 104, 106 extinction 4, 5, 13–​16, 18, 20–​3, 25–​9, 37, 38, 44, 47, 49 Falcone, Giovanni 59, 60, 63, 64, 66 Fanon, Frantz 93, 159, 192, 200 Farge, Arlette 175 feminism 8, 9, 112, 120, 126, 160; feminist epistemologies 9, 129–​31 fieldwork 7–​9, 64, 65, 67, 73–​84, 102, 104, 106, 129–​35, 139–​42, 153, 156, 167, 171, 185–​8, 192, 193, 195, 196, 201 food 17, 19, 23, 98, 133, 166 forest 13–​28, 31n2, 31n4 forgiveness 86, 87n13, 100 Fourth World 101 freemasonry 68, 69 Freud, Sigmund 82 friendship 11, 75, 80, 81, 83, 186, 187, 198, 199, 202 games 187, 192, 195–​7, 202; game theory 197 Garrod, Ben 13, 15 gender 39, 85, 95, 96, 119–​21 ghost 4, 5, 21, 22, 193; see also orangutans gift 5, 38, 41, 45, 48, 50, 122, 123, 126 Glasgow 185, 186, 188, 189, 192 Global North 9, 13, 14, 16, 28, 83, 140, 147, 148, 152, 157 Global South 9, 10, 139, 147–​52, 157, 158, 160 God 23, 199 Graham, Robert 178–​9 Greenpeace 15 Haiti 134, 140; see also migrants Hakiwai, Arapata 169–​79, 181 Harambam, Jaron 67–​8 Haraway, Donna 131, 157 harm 3, 11, 65, 76, 85, 92, 178, 181, 186–​9, 193, 200, 201 health 7, 8, 24, 45, 73, 90–​106, 139, 140; Health-​in-​All-​Policies (HiAP)

Index  207 90, 91, 93; social determinants 90–​2, 96; see also healthcare, mental health healthcare (health care) 90–​2, 98, 100, 108, 185–​7 hei tiki (pendant) 168–​71, 175–​82 Henare, Amiria 171 hoarding 8, 95, 110, 112–​19, 121, 123–​5; disorder 110–​13, 116, 117, 123 Hobbes, Thomas 191, 194 Holy, Ladislav 2, 60, 70n1 Home Office 11, 185–​204 home 2, 8, 13, 15, 74, 80, 112–​26, 133, 161, 185; homemaking 112, 122, 124, 125; homeownership 116–​18 HUTAN (NGO) 19, 20, 24, 31

kōrero (narrative) 169–​76 Kruger National Park 37, 42 Laidlaw, James 1, 4, 111 landscape 4, 5, 13–​31, 131; blasted 19, 21, 28; social 133, 139, 141, 142 legibility 9, 148–​61 luxury (luxurious) 5, 6, 37, 38, 41–​51

joke (joking) 185, 186, 198, 200 Joshi, Ruchir 148–​50, 159–​61

mafia 6, 57–​69; mafiacraft 6, 57, 58, 60, 67 Māori 10, 167–​81; kaitiaki 170; taonga 10, 167–​82 margin 83, 147, 187, 190, 202 marginality 149, 158–​9 marginalization 8, 48, 50, 53, 80, 101, 105, 106, 133, 142 marketing 39, 43, 44 Mattingly, Sherryl 111, 199 Matua Tonga 177–​9, 181 May, Theresa 187, 194 McBride, Bunny 171 Meijaard, Erik 17, 27 memory 22, 25, 86, 111, 120, 121 mental health 94, 98, 113 mestizaje 135, 142 method 7, 29, 74, 78, 132, 180, 201 methodology (methodological) 3, 4, 9, 11, 38–​9, 79, 84, 86, 129–​31, 140, 143, 152, 186, 187, 201, 202 migrants 100–​2; Haitian 128–​42; see also activism (activists) migration 3, 83, 134, 139–​41 Mokoia Island 175, 177–​80 Mol, Annemarie 111 monster 178, 182–​3 Moten, Fred 82 mourning 64, 81–​3, 122, 197 Mulla, Sameena 2 museum 10, 166–​77, 180–​2 music (and musicians) 74–​5, 78–​83

Keane, Webb 3 Keith-​Falconer, Ethel and Hilda 166–​82 Keynes, John Maynard 98 Kinabatangan (Malaysia) 19–​21, 23, 25 kinship 1, 60, 61, 70n1, 132 knowledge 4, 8–​10, 25, 62, 63, 67, 70n10, 79, 82, 85, 106, 151, 152, 157, 158, 160, 168–​81, 189, 191, 193, 199; production 82, 129–​33, 139–​42, 147–​8, 162

Nancy, Jean-​Luc 80 National Geographic (magazine) 15 National Health Service (NHS) 185, 201 nationalism 9, 162 nature 28, 37, 39–​41, 43, 46, 50 nature reserves 17, 18, 37–​9, 43–​7 non-​governmental organizations (NGOs) 14, 19, 134, 186, 188, 189, 192, 193, 195, 198; caseworkers 188–​9

ignorance 101, 139 illegality 186, 187, 195 illegibility 10, 149, 152, 160, 162 imaginaries 4, 5, 9, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 23, 25–​8, 68, 137 imagination 14, 21, 79 immigration 74, 75, 140, 185, 192, 194–​8; (anti)immigration laws 11, 187, 188, 190, 202; hostile environment 11, 186, 187, 194, 198; see also migration, migrants inclusion 91–​6, 100, 103–​6, 187, 192 India 110, 150, 153, 157, 158 inequality 5, 8, 11, 39, 95, 106, 132; racial 46–​7 informality 156, 157, 162n5 Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs) 4, 100–​1 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) 17 intimacy 2, 61, 65, 120, 124, 138, 171 isolation 74, 95, 96, 98, 106, 122, 125, 201

208 Index obligation 2, 22, 41, 91, 105, 106, 111, 112, 119, 120, 123, 125, 130 oil palm (palm oil) 13–​16, 19, 26, 27 orangutan 4, 5, 13–​31; ghost orangutans 13, 14, 20–​7, 29 othering 100, 189 postcolonialism 135, 141, 192 postcolonial theory 9, 68, 147, 152, 160 Papakura, Mākereti 174, 181 Paris 74, 75 parody 77, 159, 161 participant observation 9, 128–​30, 132, 133, 135, 141, 142 philanthropy 38, 39, 41, 43, 46, 48–​50 philanthrocapitalism 37–​9, 41, 42, 47–​50 plantation 4, 13–​30; see also oil palm play 186, 190, 196, 197, 201, 202 poaching 5, 6, 14, 37–​40, 42–​6, 48–​51 positionality 7, 9, 75, 82, 85, 129–​36, 142 possessions 110–​20, 124 Prashad, Vijay 150 provenance 168–​82 Puccio-​Den, Deborah 2, 3, 6, 57–​61, 63, 64, 66, 68 QAnon 6, 66–​9 race (racial ideologies) 6, 8, 9, 39, 40, 43, 46–​8, 85, 96, 117, 129, 130, 132–​5, 138–​42, 192, 202; see also anti-​blackness, critical race studies, inequality, violence, whiteness racialization 5, 8, 9, 128–​42, 187, 189, 191, 192, 202 Rang-​tan (film) 15–​16 rationality 59, 101, 192, 194, 195, 202 reciprocity 74, 76, 123, 171 recognition 9, 10, 63, 132, 135, 187, 190, 198, 202 reflexivity 4, 7, 85, 129, 131 relationality 7, 10, 22, 30, 33, 76, 78, 79, 81, 84, 85, 131, 133, 140, 147–​9, 151, 152, 157, 201, 202 resilience 7, 8, 18, 20, 27, 92–​4, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106 responsibilization 4, 6, 7, 57–​62, 66, 69, 186, 187 responsiveness 85, 198 rhinoceros 5, 6, 37–​51 risk (risk factors) 3, 7, 26, 27, 91–​101, 105, 106, 110, 127, 151, 197

Rotorua 166–​8, 172–​82 Roy, Ananya 147, 149, 156 rumour 68–​9, 193 Sabah (Malaysia) 19, 20, 22 safari 39, 43, 47, 48, 51, 55 Salt Lake City (India) 153–​5, 162n4 scale 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 29, 126, 148, 151, 152, 194, 197, 201, 202 Scarry, Elaine 77 Scotland 10, 182, 185, 188, 198 Serco Group plc 194 sexual abuse 77–​9, 82, 84; #MeToo 77 shoot-​to-​kill policy 43, 49 silence 7, 22, 28, 58, 60, 68, 79–​82, 85, 137, 138, 197, 198 social justice 48, 84–​6, 92, 132, 139, 141, 142 social media 58, 66, 68, 140 South Africa 5, 6, 37, 39, 42–​4, 47, 48 souvenirs 173, 179 sovereignty 190–​1 spectrality 21, 22, 24 Spotted Elk, Molly 171 Srinivasan, Amia 84 state 10, 11, 59, 80, 95, 96, 99–​101, 103, 134, 140, 157, 186–​202; “deep state” 66–​9; statelessness 100, 186, 191 stigma 93, 98, 122, 123, 132 Strathern, Marilyn 83 subjectivity 121, 148, 200 Sumatra 13, 14, 18, 20 Tamarapa, Awhina 10, 167, 170, 172, 180 Tamboukou, Maria 171, 175 Tapsell, Paul 169, 170 Te Arawa 174, 181–​3 theft 150, 178, 179 Third World 37, 150, 157, 159, 162n3 Thurman, Uma 39, 45, 50 tourism 5, 6, 37–​51, 137, 178 trauma 78, 199, 201 Trnka, Susanna 4 Trundle, Catherine 4 Turi-​Tiakitai, John 174 urbanism, southern 9, 147, 152, 156, 157 Venezuela 73–​5, 77, 83, 84, 134 violence 7, 58, 59, 64, 66, 68, 76–​9, 82–​4, 129, 133, 134, 136, 137, 142, 187,

Index  209 193, 199, 201; racial/​racialized 133, 136, 142, 187; structural 82, 84, 92–​7 vulnerability 7, 8, 28, 79, 83, 92–​106, 202; vortex 8, 99, 103, 106 Warren, Kay 82, 83, 86 weaving 10, 139, 141, 142, 167, 169, 170, 173, 174, 181 whiteness 5, 94, 129, 130, 132, 133, 135, 139–​42; white privilege 132,

133, 139; white saviour 38, 40, 50; white supremacy 8, 9, 128–​35, 139, 141, 142 wildlife 15, 16, 24, 26, 30, 44–​6, 48, 49; economy 38–​9; illegal wildlife trade 14, 16, 31n2, 31n6; see also poaching witchcraft 1, 6, 57–​8, 60–​9, 70n1 witch 6, 15, 61–​3, 65, 193; witch-​hunt 63, 65, 58 Wynter, Sylvia 191