The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty (Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology) 3031382250, 9783031382253

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty
Expanding the Archive
The Infinite Extension of Ordinary Reading
References
Chapter 2: Reading as Self-making: Using Mobile Ethnography to Examine the Contemporary Literate Practices of Middle-Class Adolescent Girls in Singapore
Mobile Ethnography as Method
Reading as Self-making
Fandom as Everyday Reading Practice
Cultivating Reading Distinctions
Developing Repertoires of Wide Reading
New Ethnographies of Reading
References
Chapter 3: A Language-and-Materiality Approach to Reading: Reinvigorating Thirty-Year-Old Questions
Revisiting the Materiality of Language in The Ethnography of Reading
The Material Turn: Reinvigorating Questions about Materiality and Language
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Reading Context: On the Ethnography of Translation and Commentary
Translation as Reading
Commentary as Reading
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: A Labor Theory of Reading: Physical Hardship, Intensive Repetition, and the Value Regime of the Dujing Movement in Contemporary China
A Different Kind of Reading Aloud
The Physical Labor of Reading in Dujing
Intensive Repetition and Disciplinary Labor Time in Dujing Studies
The Problem of Laborious Reading and the Value Regime of Labor in Dujing
Conclusion: The Productive but Precarious Labor of Dujing
References
Chapter 6: Reading Foucault at Dusk: Politics of Philosophy in Neoliberal South Korea
Reading Foucault
Vita Activa
The Ethics of Diacritical Politics
References
Chapter 7: Brazilian Black Activists’ Anthropophagous Manifesto: Reclaiming Blackness in Afro-Brazilian History and Culture
Critical Reading as Reparation
Zumbi’s Manifesto
Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Cultivating Socialist Selves: Reading Trotsky Under the Specter of Capitalist Realism
Lightning Bolts on the Horizon of the Future: Context and Argument
Marxist Activism and the Ethnography of Reading
The Ethical Communist Self
Rejection of Capitalist Realism
A Riposte to Capitalist Realism: Rereading Trotsky in the Current Crisis
Conclusion
References
Chapter 9: Together and Apart: Shared Reading as an Embodied and Intersubjective Ritual of Resonance
Reading as a Shared Experience?
Solid Objects
Together
Apart
A Ritual Setting
The Possibility of Resonance
References
Chapter 10: Reading for Sharing
Reading for Sharing in Public Reading Groups
Sensory and Social Reading
Participant Observation and Thick Description in Literary Anthropology
Five Features of Social Reading
The Sound of Reading
Social Riddle Solving
Playful, Proto-Poetic Thinking
Public Groups
Blurred Spaces
“Arbeidsnever” as a Prism for Understanding Self in Society
De-alienation, Recreating an Authentic Public Persona, and Civic Citizenship
References
Chapter 11: From Literary Field to Instagram Feed: Ethnographies of Reading in Delhi
References
Chapter 12: Miracles of the Street
Books as Commodities
Indexical Values: Markets, Migrations, Miracles
References
Chapter 13: The Ongoing Work of New York City Graffiti Writers During the Covid-19 Epoch
The First in 30 Years
Tags, Throw-Ups, Pieces
Reading the Graffiti Name, Accountability, and Disrespect
Writers Read How a Name Was Created
Writers Read the Esthetics of a Name
Writers Read the Labor to Put Up a Name
Writers Read How a Name Is Cared For
Learning About Exceptions
References
Chapter 14: Afterword: The Ethnographer of Reading, Pushing Seventy
Reference
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY

The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty Edited by Matthew Rosen

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology

Series Editors

Deborah Reed-Danahay Department of Anthropology The State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, NY, USA Helena Wulff Department of Social Anthropology Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden

This series explores new ethnographic objects and emerging genres of writing at the intersection of literary and anthropological studies. Books in this series are grounded in ethnographic perspectives and the broader cross-cultural lens that anthropology brings to the study of reading and writing. The series explores the ethnography of fiction, ethnographic fiction, narrative ethnography, creative nonfiction, memoir, autoethnography, and the connections between travel literature and ethnographic writing.​

Matthew Rosen Editor

The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty

Editor Matthew Rosen Department of Sociology and Anthropology Ohio University Athens, OH, USA

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology ISBN 978-3-031-38225-3    ISBN 978-3-031-38226-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration © Artefact / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction:  The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty  1 Matthew Rosen 2 Reading  as Self-making: Using Mobile Ethnography to Examine the Contemporary Literate Practices of MiddleClass Adolescent Girls in Singapore 17 Chin Ee Loh 3 A  Language-and-Materiality Approach to Reading: Reinvigorating Thirty-Year-Old Questions 43 Britt Halvorson and Ingie Hovland 4 Reading  Context: On the Ethnography of Translation and Commentary 53 Andrew Brandel 5 A  Labor Theory of Reading: Physical Hardship, Intensive Repetition, and the Value Regime of the Dujing Movement in Contemporary China 69 Yukun Zeng 6 Reading  Foucault at Dusk: Politics of Philosophy in Neoliberal South Korea 89 Shinjung Nam v

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Contents

7 Brazilian  Black Activists’ Anthropophagous Manifesto: Reclaiming Blackness in Afro-­Brazilian History and Culture109 Antonio J. Bacelar da Silva 8 Cultivating  Socialist Selves: Reading Trotsky Under the Specter of Capitalist Realism125 Ahmed Kanna 9 Together  and Apart: Shared Reading as an Embodied and Intersubjective Ritual of Resonance149 Charlotte Ettrup Christiansen and Anne Line Dalsgård 10 Reading for Sharing171 Cicilie Fagerlid 11 From  Literary Field to Instagram Feed: Ethnographies of Reading in Delhi195 Rashmi Sadana 12 Miracles  of the Street207 Matthew Rosen 13 The  Ongoing Work of New York City Graffiti Writers During the Covid-19 Epoch225 Amina Tawasil 14 Afterword:  The Ethnographer of Reading, Pushing Seventy251 Jonathan Boyarin Index259

Notes on Contributors

Jonathan  Boyarin  is Diann G. and Thomas A.  Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University. He is the author most recently of Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side (Princeton University Press, 2020). Andrew  Brandel is Associate Instructional Professor of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Moving Words: Literature, Memory and Migration (University of Toronto Press, 2023) and co-­editor of Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality (Fordham University Press, 2021). Charlotte Ettrup Christiansen  is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, Iceland. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Aarhus University in 2021 and has published several articles on literary reading and writing in Denmark. With a Carlsberg Internationalisation Fellowship, she is now studying the creative practices of Icelandic writers. Antonio  J.  Bacelar  da  Silva  is Associate Professor in the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona. His book, Between Black and Brown: Anti-Racist Activism among Afro-Brazilians (Rutgers University Press, 2022), 2023 Winner of the Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (LASA, Brazil Section), offers a fresh look into Afro-Brazilians’ racial positionality between brown and black in the era of affirmative action measures that aim to promote racial equality.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Anne Line Dalsgård  is Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is the author of the prize-winning book, Matters of Life and Longing: Female Sterilization in Northeast Brazil (2004), and numerous articles and book chapters on emotion, embodiment, temporality, and more recently, literary reading. Cicilie  Fagerlid  is Associate Professor at VID Specialized University, Norway. Her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology (University of Oslo) was on performance poetry in Paris. She has conducted extensive participant observation in public libraries and discussion book clubs and has been a Postdoctoral Fellow in Library Science. Fagerlid has co-edited An Anthropology of Migration and Belonging (Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, 2020) and two volumes on public and academic libraries. Britt  Halvorson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. Her research examines issues of global Christianity, materiality and language, moral imagination, and race. She is the author of Conversionary Sites: Transforming Medical Aid and Global Christianity from Madagascar to Minnesota (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and, co-authored with Josh Reno, Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest (University of California Press, 2022). Ingie Hovland  is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Religion, University of Georgia. She is a cultural and historical anthropologist who is especially interested in women and religion, the histories and effects of Protestant Christianity, and the interplay of bodies, things, spaces, and words in social situations. She is the author of Mission Station Christianity (Brill, 2013). Ahmed Kanna  is Professor of Anthropology at University of the Pacific; notable publications include Dubai, The City as Corporation (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Rethinking Global Urbanism (Routledge, 2012, with Xiangming Chen), and Beyond Exception: New Interpretations of the Arabian Peninsula (Cornell University Press, 2020, with Amélie Le Renard and Neha Vora). More recent publications include articles on anthropology, Marxism, and revolutionary socialism in Focaal, Monthly Review, and Left Voice. Kanna is currently working on a book on the materialist critique of American anthropology. Chin  Ee  Loh  is Associate Head and Deputy Head (Research) at the English Language and Literature Academic Group at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. She is the

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author of many books and articles on literacy and equity, with a focus on reading, technology, and school libraries as informal learning environments. Shinjung  Nam  is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea. She is an anthropologist with a PhD from Princeton University, specializing in Korean politics, intellectual culture, and the ethnography of reading. Her research focuses on the organization of informal schools for adult education in critical theory in relation to the national history of democratic movement in South Korea. Matthew  Rosen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Ohio University. His research interests include visual and media anthropology, the anthropology of art and literature, the ethnography of reading, and cities and urbanism. He is the author most recently of Tirana Modern: Biblio-Ethnography on the Margins of Europe (Vanderbilt University Press, 2022). Rashmi Sadana  is Associate Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University. She is the author of The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure (University of California Press, 2022), English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India (University of California Press, 2012), and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Amina  Tawasil is Lecturer in Anthropology and Education in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is currently doing ethnographic research on graffiti crews in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Her book manuscript, Paths Made by Walking: The Work of Howzevi (Seminarian) Women in Iran, which develops an ethnographically grounded theory of reading as practice, is forthcoming with Indiana University Press. Yukun  Zeng is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan. Trained in linguistic and semiotic anthropology, Yukun is also interested in the anthropology of value, education, and knowledge production. Currently, Yukun is working on transforming his dissertation Reading Classics, Alternative Education, and the Movement of Eternal Wisdom in Contemporary Chinese Societies into a book manuscript.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2

Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3 Fig. 12.1 Fig. 12.2 Fig. 12.3 Fig. 12.4 Fig. 12.5 Fig. 12.6

Screen grabs from Ganyu’s video 23 Screenshot of Omniscient Reader from Ganyu reading on her phone (left) and author reading on iPad (right). The first shows how a reader would scroll up to read the text and the second shows how extra information is provided to give the reader contextual information that is specific to Korean culture 27 A screengrab from BookTok and Aoi’s reading 30 Iris’s images of her print and e-book reading 32 Beomgyu’s recreational reading entries over four days 33 The first page of the first chapter of The Analects used by dujing students 75 Mr. Kim pointing in his library to a framed photo of himself in his early twenties posed with a book in his hands. (Photo by author)90 A Sahitya Akademi bookshop at the Kashmere Gate metro station in Delhi 197 A “scroll-call” of books to be found, read, and returned on the BooksontheDelhiMetro Instagram page (2020) 200 A typical billboard in Delhi featuring (from top to bottom), Urdu, Hindi, and English in Arabic, Devanagri, and Roman scripts204 A visual fieldnote—Mihal’s bookstall 211 Abundant, visible, and asking for explanation 214 Indicators—International trade and the domestic product 215 Index of things—Saturday morning market 217 Index of places—Biblio-urban landscape 218 Index of persons—Hektor Metani, bookseller 219 xi

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List of Figures

Fig. 13.1

Fig. 13.2 Fig. 13.3

This is an example of a wall with a sticker, various types of throw-ups that have been written over tags, tags that have survived throw-ups, and elevated throw-ups that force the audience to ask the question, how? (Photo courtesy of the author)230 This is an example of a highly stylized masterpiece being done by SOZE on a legal wall. (Photo courtesy of the author) 234 ZEXOR, a Bushwick native, was a well-known writer who died in 2019 at the age of 29 from heart failure. The reverence for Zexor’s name in a throw-up is depicted here, lodged between two masterpieces. His throw-up has been untouched since his death. This photo was taken in Newark, NJ, which indexes he was well-respected beyond Brooklyn. (Photo courtesy of the author)235

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty Matthew Rosen

The first copy of The Ethnography of Reading I handled belonged to the collection of NYU’s Bobst Library. It was November 2004 and I was in my first semester as a student in the anthropology program of the New School for Social Research (then called the Graduate Faculty).1 What 1  With my New School ID card, I had access to all the member libraries of the Research Library Association of South Manhattan, including Bobst. As a graduate student on a budget, I put off buying The Ethnography of Reading until May 2012, when in preparation for leaving New  York (and access to the consortium libraries), I ordered my first copy from Amazon. In 2016, I received a second copy from my friend and colleague Marina Peterson. On close examination, I noticed minor differences between the two copies. For example, the flysheet of one listed information about the Designer (UC Press Staff); Compositor (Asco Trade Typesetting Ltd.); Text (10/12 Baskerville); Display (Baskerville); Printer (Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group); and Binder (also Maple-Vail). Lacking those details, the copyright page of the other said, “This is a print-on-demand volume. It is manufactured using toner in place of ink. Type and image may be less sharp than the same material seen in traditionally printed [editions].” Both copies were printed on alkaline (acid-free) paper, giving them a life expectancy of over 500 years.

M. Rosen (*) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rosen (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0_1

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brought me to Floor 9 of the library that day was a short conversation with Liisa Malkki, an invited speaker for the New School’s Fall lecture series, “Anthropology, History, and the Critical Imagination.”2 During an informal meeting before the talk, I made an admiring comment to Malkki about her contribution to the 1997 book Anthropological Locations. What I liked, I said, was the idea that talking with people about their books (or more generally, about what and how they read) could open a way to unexpected but valuable connections that, in Malkki’s phrase, “anthropology’s fieldwork has so often missed” (1997, 100). I’m not sure how clear I was about what I wanted to do with that idea, but Malkki seemed to understand. She pointed me to The Ethnography of Reading, a book edited by Jonathan Boyarin and published in 1993 by University of California Press. Reading around the book for the first time, I registered a serendipitous thrill when I came to the author bio printed on the back cover. There I learned that the editor Jonathan Boyarin was once an affiliate of the Center for Studies of Social Change, New School for Social Research.3 With a poem penned by Ursula Le Guin to set the tone, the collection consisted of an editor’s introduction, ten research papers, and an afterword by Brian Stock. The discussion in the papers concerned the meanings, uses, pleasures, and challenges of reading in different times and places. The volume as a whole explored fields of interaction around readers and texts in contexts ranging from biblical and rabbinic study in ancient Israel (D. Boyarin 1993) to the breakdown of communication between a white teacher from the East Coast and a group of students in a grade school classroom on the Kashaya Pomo Indian reservation in California (Sarris 1993). As I read past the table of contents and into the introduction, a new picture of ethnography began to take shape in my thoughts. At the point where Boyarin connected his choice of title to scenes of reading and discussion surrounding the books Writing Culture (which I had read) and Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking (which I had not), I started to see how reading itself could become a fleshed out focus of ethnographic research. If what applied to writing and speaking also applied to reading, a person could enter a library or a bookshop as an ethnographer enters a field site. For me, this was an exciting realization. The idea of immersing 2  As it happens, Anthropology, History, and the Critical Imagination was also the name of a book series edited by Ann Stoler for Palgrave Macmillan in 2004 and 2005. 3  Though this information was not printed on the book, I now know that Jonathan Boyarin also received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the New School in 1984, thirty years before me.

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myself in a social world of “living textuality” (J. Boyarin 1993a, 2) had an undeniable charm. But I think what appealed to me even more was the prospect of doing ethnography without making a fetish of difference. As someone who enjoyed reading and identified as a reader, participant observation with other readers seemed like a good way for me to join my interest in ethnography with the intersubjective “ethics of reciprocity, of sharing, of living together” (Ricœur 1992, 187). Looking back, I can see this perspective running through my professional life. In my PhD research, it helped me connect with the newspaper readers I met in a network of roadside libraries in urban India (Rosen 2015). In my next project, it allowed me to form enduring personal relationships with the independent publishers I met in a bookstore in postsocialist Albania (Rosen 2022). Most recently, it brought me into contact with the other contributors to The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty. If a main theme of the 1993 volume was that anthropologists and literary scholars could benefit from attending to what Boyarin, in his field-­ defining contribution, called “Voices Around the Text” (1993b), the organizing principle for the present collection can be summed up well with the words Johannes Fabian (1993) chose for the title of his explicitly future-oriented contribution: “Keep Listening.” Bringing together new research and critical reflections from an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars who have kept their ears tuned to the voices in and around the texts they encountered and constructed in the process of ushering the ethnography of reading into the twenty-first century, the book itself now exists as a point of intersection from which new connections can extend outward. As a version of the sort of group activity that the late Nicholas Howe described as a performative event in which “reading and interpreting texts has the social effect of creating a community” (1993, 59), the present collection can also be seen as a secular variation on the task of Jewish study Jonathan Boyarin discerned through his original ethnography of reading at Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem—that is, “to create community … through time via language” (1993b, 230). With this general aim in mind, the chapters collected here explore a wide range of twenty-first-century reading practices. These include, in order of appearance, the self-fashioning practices of young adult readers in Singapore (Loh); old and new questions about the linguistic-material operations of reading (Halvorson and Hovland); how words and worlds are woven together in translation and commentary (Brandel); how laborious reading creates social value in sites of alternative education in China (Zeng); the

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ethics and politics of reading out and listening to critical theory in South Korea (Nam); the anti-racist rereading and rewriting of national cultural texts in Brazil (Silva); the lessons Marxist readers lean on as they try to live principled communist lives in the United States (Kanna); moments of togetherness and reflection in shared reading spaces in Denmark (Christiansen and Dalsgård); the inner and outer dynamics of reading and discussing literature with others online and in person in Norway (Fagerlid); how to read a city like Delhi as both a text and a container of texts (Sadana); the kinds of stories you can pick up from looking at the books on the street in Tirana (Rosen); and what we can learn from the social codes of graffiti writers in New York City (Tawasil). Given the many forms of reciprocity intrinsic to the work these contributors have done, I’ve come to see the ethnography of reading as a kind of “studying sideways.” Though the term usually refers to the anthropological study of peer professions (Hannerz 1998; Ortner 2009), what I have in mind here transcends the bounds of professional identity. Cutting through the problem of mapping fixed types onto real people, studying sideways in this context means drawing on a side of oneself that identifies as a reader to build rapport with and learn from interlocuters who see a side of themselves in similar terms. By placing people known as “readers” at the center of an ethnographic account, the horizontal axis of the ethnography of reading can theoretically extend all the way from the residual events of fieldwork and writing into the emergent time of reception. This is another special property of reader-centered ethnography. It calls on all parties of the ethnographic equation—actor, researcher, reader—to stand together on a kind of shared ground. The simple statement all reading is relational is thus charged with a deeper significance. Being true by definition (if you define “reading” as an activity that involves a relationship between a reader and a text), the relationality of reading is usually seen as being too obvious to be of interest or too general to matter. But it only takes a step back to consider the relations moving through any specific instance of reading to put that assumption in doubt. In each of the particulars I mentioned about my first contact with The Ethnography of Reading, for example, there are many layers of relation—not just between a reader and a text but between a reader and other readers, listeners, organizations, institutions, ideas, feelings, places, technologies, and materials—which, if followed with care, could inform a thick cultural analysis. The point, as Britt Halvorson and Ingie Hovland also emphasize in their contribution, is that however singular the story of

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my encounter with The Ethnography of Reading may be, there are countless other stories just like it still waiting to be told. If following the trail of one person’s comment about a book can open onto a picture of their social world, their sense of self, their tastes, beliefs, values, goals, desires, and ethics, surely the ethnography of reading should have an important place in a field like anthropology. But though there is a long tradition of anthropological scholarship on literacy, writing, and other forms of inscription (Debenport and Webster 2019), an empirical interest in studying the everyday practice of reading has remained more or less on the margins of the discipline. Given the broad professional consensus on the social importance of literate communication, it’s not clear why more anthropologists today don’t ask the basic sociological questions of “who reads what, how people read, and how their reading relates to their other activities” (Griswold et al. 2005, 127). Some of us do, of course, as is evident in the chapters that follow. Indeed, in the thirty years since The Ethnography of Reading first named and carved out a space for the field, scholars working in anthropology, social history, education, literary theory, migration studies, religious studies, and many other fields have produced illuminating accounts of reading in context.4 The fact remains, however, that we have much more work yet to do. A good indicator of the current status of the field can be found in the social and technological infrastructure of the 2023 Joint Meeting of the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropological Society. Of the 583 keywords panel organizers were given as choices to describe their proposal submissions, the word “reading” was notably absent. Writing was there, along with language, communication, literacy, literature, poetics, translation, media, and social media. Why then was reading—a practice that is today among the most common ways for people all over the world to take in cultural information, interpret it, and figure out its importance in their lives—missing from the list? Intended or not, the omission raises more questions, as Andrew Brandel also notes in his contribution, about whether or where to draw a line between tightly focused ethnographies of reading and ethnographic engagement with the 4  There isn’t space here for a complete bibliography, but readers who are interested in exploring other relevant work from the contributors to this volume can see, for example, J. Boyarin (2020); Brandel (2023); Christiansen (2021); Dalsgård (2021); Ee Loh (2013); Fagerlid (2020); Halvorson and Hovland (2021); Rosen (2022); Sadana (2012); and Tawasil (2019).

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practices of people for whom reading is but one of many related matters of concern. And though I continue to believe that we can all benefit from noticing and talking with one another about the dispersed forms and uses of reading that surround us every day, I also take Adam Reed’s critical point that the otherwise laudable effort to expand and unsettle “what counts as literature” (2018, 35) can dilute the impact that ethnographic attention to a clear-cut case like fiction reading could have on the re-­ emergent field of literary anthropology. But even as I support Reed’s call for thicker accounts of specific literary cultures and communities—as exemplified in his pioneering book Literature and Agency in English Fiction Reading (2011)—I still think, with Karin Barber (2007), that there can be many different ways to go about doing that. It was thus with a broad view of potential issues and approaches related to anthropological perspectives on reading in media, communication, literary, and literacy studies that I composed the Call for Contributions I posted to the AAA Communities platform in January 2022. For the call, I drew up a list of fourteen open-ended topics, ranging from “empirical studies of reading in specific historical contexts and geographic locations” to “online reading communities and practices.” Inviting short form essays and original research chapters, my hope was to include as many voices and as much variety as possible. Though the act of reading sits close to the center of each author or co-author’s account, what I think we stand to learn from the papers collected here has less to do with what goes on inside the head of any given reader than with how particular people use specific texts for various (and interrelated) personal, social, economic, and political purposes. And though the relative emphasis differs from chapter to chapter, the contributions all combine empirically grounded accounts of reading in context with theoretical reflection on the ethnographic material they discuss. In so doing, the chapters come into a generative relation, collectively renewing and extending the essential contribution Brian Stock identified when he wrote, in his afterword to the Boyarin collection, “The only way to move beyond the limits of our present understanding is to expand the archive of known reading practices” (1993, 271).

Expanding the Archive Although the book can be read in many different ways, I thought it would be helpful here to identify three broad themes that provide a kind of theoretical frame for the volume as a whole. The first concerns the role reading

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plays in the connected processes of self-fashioning and social transformation. This theme runs most clearly through Chin Ee Loh’s look at the reading practices of adolescent girls in Singapore (Chap. 2), Yukun Zeng’s analysis of re-emergent forms of Confucian classical education in China (Chap. 5), Shinjung Nam’s work on collective reading as social critique in South Korea (Chap. 6), Antonio Bacelar da Silva’s discussion of anthropophagic or cannibalistic reading in Brazil (Chap. 7), and Ahmed Kanna’s description of the reading and discussion practices of socialist activists in the United States (Chap. 8). The discussion in these chapters underlines the crucial relationship between reading—whether for pleasure, distinction, moral improvement, or social change—and complex processes of subject and group formation. Taken together, these contributions reveal the power and potential of ethnographies of reading both as a qualitative method of social research and as a reflexive strategy for social critique. Chin Ee Loh opens the way, in Chap. 2, with an account of reading practices that simply did not exist thirty years ago. Embracing the new method of mobile ethnography, Loh explores the multimodal reading practices of twelve high-achieving secondary schoolers at a prestigious girls’ school in Singapore. The account starts from Loh’s observation that “technological changes have implications for both reading and the method of studying reading.” This is an important perspective for us to take, especially now, when so many people are reading in formats that defy the conventional categories of book, journal, magazine, newspaper, or website. Of the many interesting findings Loh picked up from her conversations with the students she enrolled in her study, I think the one that resonated with me most (because I heard it as a kind of invitation for future ethnographies of reading) was that “unless [the students] are explicitly prompted to think about other forms of reading, they revert to a conception of reading that is limited to longform fiction and non-fiction texts.” Beyond the valuable nuance the chapter adds to the field of adolescent literacy studies, the broader takeaway that came through with the most force for me thus related to the spirit of inquiry Loh described as “a willingness to engage in new practices around reading and an openness to exploring new ways of conducting research.” In Chap. 5, Yukun Zeng describes a method of reading that resembles the textual practice known as grs in the linguistic field of rabbinic literature, which, as Daniel Boyarin explained in his contribution to the 1993 volume, means “to repeat over and over again and thereby memorize” (1993, 16). Zeng’s account of the Chinese dujing (reading classics)

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movement thus also resonates with the example of Qur’anic recitation that James Baker used to bring out the difference between the abstract exercise of comprehension and “the real time spent engaged in the process of actualizing what has been preserved in writing” (1993, 108). Despite these similarities and overlaps, I think Zeng is correct in anticipating that the scene of reading he describes may appear to some as something out of a science fiction scenario. The account centers on a kind of “reading” where the point is not to try to understand, translate, or make sense of the text at hand but just to learn it by heart and repeat it. The very strangeness of this pursuit brings into relief certain ideologies of reading that many of us, myself included, may sometimes take for granted. Departing from the sense of reading as a pleasure and a delight, with dujing we are confronted with reading as demanding bodily labor, causing participants to lose their voices and become nearsighted. Adding a new dimension to the notion of “time work” that Anne Line Dalsgård (2021) explored in relation to literary reading in Denmark, Zeng analyzes the structure of a dujing day in conversation with labor theories of value. The result, I think, is a major new contribution to the field. In Chap. 6, Shinjung Nam describes what goes on in an expository reading seminar in the South Korean capital. Here we return to a kind of reading in some ways so familiar—in its intent to unsettle neoliberal logics of knowledge production and intellectual subject formation—that I couldn’t help but turn the questions that emerged from the collective (but mostly non-dialogic) reading Nam describes back on myself. If there was ever a question that the ethnography of reading can be practiced as a form of cultural critique, Nam’s contribution should put this question to rest. In her conclusion, Nam quotes someone from the seminar discussion who asked, “What forms of diacritical politics are we already fully engaged in as scholars and teachers, as readers and writers? And against what form of governance?” In the context of the “one-way traffic of non-cross reading” Nam describes, these questions invite a strong form of critical reflection. If as a reader you find something unsettling about this, I would venture to say this was precisely the point. And though the implied task of decolonizing anthropology and philosophy can feel at times as daunting as it is necessary, in Chap. 7 Antonio Bacelar da Silva offers a true glimpse and model of how we just might succeed. If Nam’s ethnography of reading Foucault in Seoul posed for us the problem of how “we” are to decolonize ourselves, our practices, and our institutions, Silva shows us a practical way forward. The account

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describes how a language arts teacher affiliated with Instituto Cultural Zumbi (an activist organization associated with the broader Brazilian Black movement) created the conditions for her students to reread and rewrite Oswald de Andrade’s 1929 “Manifesto Antropofágico” in alignment with their values and experience. In so doing, it presents a compelling case for how ordinary people can move from the idea of reading school textbooks against the grain to writing their own texts to realizing “the dream and quest for racial justice,” as Silva summarizes the Zumbi manifesto. In Chap. 8, Ahmed Kanna brings us into a social world where it is normal and expected for people to read deeply and discuss intelligently what they make of various texts, including but not limited to socialist periodicals and Marxist classics. Here we meet members of organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America and Socialist Alternative with whom Kanna has worked for many years as an observant participant. In conversation with Bay Area interlocutors, Kanna pursues the deeper significance of reading and discussion that is so much a part of the social life of the community in question. Taking The Transitional Program written by Leon Trotsky in 1938 as a key example, Kanna provides a sensitive and reflexive account of the logic of his comrades’ emphasis on “correct reading.” Using thick description to good effect, Kanna’s narration of the role reading plays in the lives of committed Marxist interlocutors helps us understand something of what life is like for a socialist activist in the United States today. The second theme I want to underline goes back to the idea that all reading is relational. While this idea necessarily runs through any ethnography of reading, the explicit emphasis on reading as a means of forming relationships between people, places, ideas, times, contexts, and materials of all kinds comes into clear focus in four of the chapters in this volume. In Chap. 3, Britt Halvorson and Ingie Hovland help us think through a set of questions about relations between reading and materiality, or between the word and life. Reflecting on their earlier work on the reading practices of two groups of Protestant women (2021), Halvorson and Hovland write, “These insights about reading’s irreducible ties to readers’ situated identities and material circumstances led us to think about new ways to link language and materiality—or, put differently, to see reading a text as a selective and positioned material engagement with the world.” Continuing along these lines, in Chap. 4 Andrew Brandel guides us on a tour of how texts move through practices of translation and

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commentary, prompting us along the way to ask what counts as reading in a given context, and what happens when one reading context, however defined, blends into and transforms or is transformed by what surrounds it. Referring to the passage from Stanley Cavell that serves as an epigraph to his chapter, Brandel writes, “Words are … both a matter of inheritance, something we discover, and for which no rule or definition provides a guardrail. We don’t know ahead of time whether using a word in this context will ‘fit.’ But we also come to know, or even come to weave, a context, through our use of language.” I decided to place the complementary essays by Halvorson and Hovland and Brandel together near the front of the volume because I think the theoretical frames they develop may help to prime the reader for deeper engagement with the more ethnographic chapters that follow. Returning now to the theme of relationality, in Chap. 9 Charlotte Ettrup Christiansen and Anne Line Dalsgård’s discussion focuses on shared reading, which the authors define for us succinctly as “a group-­ based literary technique in which prose and poetry are read aloud with breaks, allowing time for open discussion.” In their finely observed account, Christiansen and Dalsgård show how the embodied and intersubjective dynamics of shared reading make it possible to register, in the visible and audible interactions between the text being read and the participants reading it together, “the translation of inner experience into emergent thinking.” Here one of the great pleasures of doing literary anthropology also comes through in the authors’ evident enjoyment of reading, discussing, and seeing unexpected connections, for example, in the short stories of Virginia Woolf. Thus, in a note the authors write, “In some versions of this story [‘Together and Apart’], it says ‘throwing a green light on what human fellowship consisted of.’ At first we were thrilled also to find the color green in this story. As with the piece of green glass in ‘Solid Objects’ with which we began, the color green here seemed to suggest a certain simultaneous open-ness and clarity in which the experience of beauty is still possible.” In Chap. 10, Cicilie Fagerlid invites us to dwell longer in scenes of shared reading, both online and off. Fagerlid coins the term “reading for sharing” to describe the purposeful action (which can take different forms in different contexts) of reading specifically “to share your reactions with others.” In her account, Fagerlid pursues a set of questions about relations between the individual and society, theory and ethnography, and what she calls “the existential ponderings prompted by reading fiction aloud with

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strangers and the possibility of increased civic engagement.” The chapter provides a moving analysis of material Fagerlid collected in reading groups organized through public libraries in Oslo, Norway. Like Nam’s account of para-academic life in Seoul, Fagerlid’s ethnography of reading foregrounds reflexive issues about the precarious realities so many of us working in the humanist tradition now face under conditions of late capitalism. The third and final theme from the volume I want to highlight here brings the ethnography of reading into conversation with Jennifer Robinson’s (2013) call for a more global urban studies. Reading the “urban now” across three different cities, the papers that round out the collection connect the broader theme of the book to public acts of reading and sense-making in urban India, Albania, and New York City.5 This last set of papers takes us to sites like the Delhi Metro, the outdoor book markets of Tirana, and Transmitter Park in Brooklyn. In so doing, these contributions also pick up on two issues that Brian Stock identified in his 1993 afterword as meriting more extensive discussion—that is, “the investing of places with the qualities of readable texts, and the varied roles played by memory within different reading communities” (1993, 274). In Chap. 11, Rashmi Sadana looks to the Delhi Metro not only as a site of reading ordinary things such as posters, signs, screens, books, and newspapers but also as a place that creates new kinds of “reading beings.” Such beings include, for example, the thousands of Metro riders who have become linked through digital platforms such as “Books on the Delhi Metro” into communities of readers who cultivate their ethic of sharing around the directives to TAKE, READ, and RETURN the books identified, distributed, and read by an informal network of people known as “book pickers,” “book fairies,” and “book lovers.” Through snapshots and soundbites of what an attentive Metro rider might find on any given day in Delhi, Sadana constructs an evocative image of the Delhi Metro as a kind of “moving library” that invites all kinds of questions for future ethnographies of reading. The main idea in my own contribution, appearing as Chap. 12 in this volume, is that the circuit of books on the street in Tirana can be read as a kind of index, just like the index in the back of a book. When you’re wandering around in the Albanian capital, you can’t help but notice the presence of the outdoor book markets. Then you look at one particular book 5  I use the term “urban now” in the sense Jennifer Robinson (2013) developed in conversation with Walter Benjamin’s (1999) analysis of urban modernity.

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and think: what does it point to? The indexical values I discuss in the chapter include the country’s history of harsh communism (1944–1991); the massive out-migration of Albanians that started in the 1990s; and the informal networks linking the city’s many book vendors and collectors, all of whom have their own stories to tell. Finally, in Chap. 13 Amina Tawasil looks to the code of ethics beneath the visible surface of graffiti in New York City. Tawasil opens her account by posing the question, “how does a person read what is unwritten from what is written?” Drawing on fieldwork she conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, the answer Tawasil provides in her contribution proceeds through an intimate person-centered ethnography of a veteran graffiti writer from the South Bronx, who teaches the ethnographer, who conveys to us, how graffiti writers read the context around a graffiti name and so hold themselves accountable to an elaborate code of ethics grounded in mutual values of respect, care, concern, and reverence for the art and labor of the past and present community of graffiti writers in the city.

The Infinite Extension of Ordinary Reading I opened with the story of my first contact with The Ethnography of Reading for two reasons. First, I wanted to convey in concrete terms how the book helped me see that participant observation with other readers could be a legitimate focus of ethnographic research. Second, I wanted to show how that idea relates to the intersubjective ethics of studying sideways. As I come to the end of this introduction, I want to mention just one more important lesson that I drew from the 1993 volume. If the stimulus for making a field around the practice of reading was something I found and can locate in Boyarin’s text, what pushed me toward the footpath libraries in urban India where I had my first real field research experience can be traced to something that was largely absent. Whereas the main focus of the 1993 volume can be described, in the words of an anonymous reviewer of the manuscript, as “the reading of important work—literature or sacred texts,” the absence that served as inspiration for my PhD research was “reading as a daily activity, and of routine stuff” (1993a, 7). As I have written elsewhere, I registered this absence not as a problem but as an invitation to take up the ethnography of ordinary reading (Rosen 2015). What I found when it came to actually pursuing an ethnography of reading as a daily activity, however, was that it was a very difficult thing to

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do. In practice, for me, ordinary reading worked better as a point of entry than as an object of ethnography. From my interactions with Pune newspaper readers, I thus developed the general concept and method of “reading nearby” (which means seeing talk about reading as a way into social relationships and social life, both as a technique of ethnography and in relation to all kinds of other projects and partnerships that extend outward from a reading practice). Through the application of reading nearby in a specific social setting, I later developed the idea of “biblio-ethnography” (which just means writing the relationship between books and people). Through reading nearby and biblio-ethnography I was able to write a book that follows the development of the Tirana publisher Pika pa sipërfaqe (Point without Surface) and shows how book circulation, reading, translation, and publishing create social relationships (Rosen 2022). While the original task I set for myself proved to be more difficult than I expected, through a commitment to the ethnography of reading, I eventually found a way forward. And so, much as an anonymous reader prompted Jonathan Boyarin to write in his introduction that the focus of the volume he edited “might obscure other areas that demand the same kind of critical attention” (1993a, 7), I would like to take a moment to address similar issues as they relate to the book at hand. In this case, a helpful reviewer for the publisher raised important questions about the scope and emphasis of the collection. Noting that “it is difficult to speak of ‘obvious omissions or gaps’ when the field is so wide open for investigation,” the reviewer suggested that the introduction should explain why most of the chapters deal with reading in organized groups and why there is an uneven representation of geographic locations. The simplest explanation I can offer is reflected in the way the volume came together. As I have indicated, this book did not originate from anything like an exclusive seminar. Rather, it started from the call for contributions I posted to the AAA (All-Member and Society for Humanistic Anthropology) Communities online platform (reaching approximately 11,500 members). Wanting to ensure that established specialists were aware of the call, I followed my initial posting by emailing it directly to authors I identified as having recently published ethnographies of reading based on research from all over the world. While all the responses I received to those emails expressed interest in the project, many of the authors I contacted were simply unable to contribute due to other writing commitments. After the general call and targeted invitations, the last source the volume drew from was the panel “Critiques from Iran to Brazil:

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Ethnographies of Reading as Social Action,” which Shinjung Nam organized independently for the 2022 AAA Annual Meeting in Seattle. I hope this will make it clear that rather than seeking a particular area focus for the volume, I sought precisely what the reviewer identified as “a diversity that indicates possible directions for future research.” Likewise, rather than wanting the prevailing focus on reading in groups to limit anyone’s vision of the way the ethnography of reading could be developed as a field, I hope it invites innovative responses to the gap that remains between the growing theoretical consensus on the importance of studying ordinary reading practices and the real methodological difficulty of constructing a field around reading in unstructured contexts. Indeed, while the contributions to this volume that are grounded in organized spaces of shared reading, alternative schooling, and activist discussion each produced valuable results in their own right, if the relative weight in this volume on reading in groups prompts other researchers to pursue ethnographies of reading of a different kind, that will be all the more to the good. After all, the ethnography of reading is a limitless field. In the Boyarin collection alone there are countless trails that can be picked up and pursued enroute to ethnographies of reading that have yet to be written. The contributors to this volume have picked up some of those trails and pursued them in exciting new directions. I can only hope, going forward, that The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty will also be read, discussed, thought about, and written about in ways that will inspire future ethnographers to continue the work started thirty years ago with the force of Ursula Le Guin’s simple statement: “It’s allowed.”

References Baker, James N. 1993. The Presence of the Name: Reading Scripture in an Indonesian Village. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 98–138. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barber, Karin. 2007. The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boyarin, Daniel. 1993. Placing Reading: Ancient Israel and Medieval Europe. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 10–37. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Boyarin, Jonathan. 1993a. Introduction. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 1–9. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1993b. Voices Around the Text: The Ethnography of Reading at Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 212–237. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2020. Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brandel, Andrew. 2023. Moving Words: Literature, Memory, and Migration in Berlin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Christiansen, Charlotte E. 2021. Does Fiction Reading Make Us Better People? Empathy and Morality in a Literary Empowerment Programme. Ethnos. Dalsgård, Anne Line. 2021. Reading Times: Temporalities and Time Work in Current Everyday Reading Practices. Poetics Today 42 (2): 207–227. Debenport, Erin, and Anthony K.  Webster. 2019. From Literacy/Literacies to Graphic Pluralism and Inscriptive Practices. Annual Review of Anthropology 48 (October): 389–404. Ee Loh, Chin. 2013. Singaporean Boys Constructing Global Literate Selves through Their Reading Practices in and Out of School. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 44 (1): 38–57. Fabian, Johannes. 1993. Keep Listening: Ethnography and Reading. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 80–97. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fagerlid, Cicilie. 2020. When Author Meets Audience: The Potentiality of Literature to Re-Narrate Selves, Belonging, and National Community. In A Literary Anthropology of Migration and Belonging: Roots, Routes, and Rhizomes, ed. Cicilie Fagerlid and Michelle A. Tisdel, 71–96. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Griswold, Wendy, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright. 2005. Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century. Annual Review of Sociology 31 (1): 127–141. Halvorson, Britt, and Ingie Hovland. 2021. Reconnecting Language and Materiality in Christian Reading: A Comparative Analysis of Two Groups of Protestant Women. Comparative Studies in Society and History 63 (2): 499–529. Hannerz, Ulf. 1998. Other Transnationals: Perspectives Gained from Studying Sideways. Paideuma 44: 109–123. Howe, Nicholas. 1993. The Cultural Construction of Reading in Anglo-Saxon England. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 58–79. Berkeley: University of California Press. Malkki, Liisa. 1997. News and Culture: Transitory Phenomena and the Fieldwork Tradition. In Anthropological Locations: The Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, 86–101. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Ortner, Sherry B. 2009. Studying Sideways: Ethnographic Access in Hollywood. In Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, ed. Vicki Mayer, Miranda J.  Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell, 175–189. New  York: Routledge. Reed, Adam. 2011. Literature and Agency in English Fiction Reading: A Study of the Henry Williamson Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2018. Literature and Reading. Annual Review of Anthropology 47 (1): 33–45. Ricœur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robinson, Jennifer. 2013. The Urban Now: Theorising Cities beyond the New. European Journal of Cultural Studies 16 (6): 659–677. Rosen, Matthew. 2015. Ethnographies of Reading: Beyond Literacy and Books. Anthropological Quarterly 88 (4): 1059–1084. ———. 2022. Tirana Modern: Biblio-Ethnography on the Margins of Europe. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Sadana, Rashmi. 2012. English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sarris, Greg. 1993. Keeping Slug Woman Alive: The Challenge of Reading in a Reservation Classroom. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 238–269. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stock, Brian. 1993. Afterword. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 270–275. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tawasil, Amina. 2019. Reading as Practice: The Howzevi (Seminarian) Women in Iran and Clair de Lune. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 50 (1): 66–83.

CHAPTER 2

Reading as Self-making: Using Mobile Ethnography to Examine the Contemporary Literate Practices of Middle-Class Adolescent Girls in Singapore Chin Ee Loh

In her influential contribution to The Ethnography of Reading (Boyarin 1993), Elizabeth Long showed how the dominant idea of “the solitary reader” had been reified through iconic images in Western art, thus suppressing the collective and social nature of reading. As a corrective, Long called for academic analysis of the social aspects of reading, including the “social infrastructure” necessary for “enabling and sustaining literacy and sustained reading itself” (Long 1993, 190). Long located the social infrastructure of reading within immediate social relationships (e.g., between parents and children or between teachers and students) and in wider social systems (e.g., of book production, distribution, and valuation). An

C. E. Loh (*) National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rosen (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0_2

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important component of the perspective Long advocated was the notion that the social practices around reading had the potential to influence cultural change by shaping the values, actions, and beliefs of the next generation. My argument in this chapter takes inspiration from Long in three ways. First, just as Long’s argument started from an analysis of images of reading, I too draw on images, but of a different kind. Instead of iconic art, I rely on documentary photographs that students at an all-girls’ school in Singapore took with their smartphones. The method of data collection is telling of the times. In 1993, when The Ethnography of Reading was first published, the word “smartphone” had not yet been invented (BBC 2014), and the now ubiquitous acts of reading and looking for information on a palm-sized electronic device were not yet part of anyone’s day-­ to-­day practice. Fast-forward to 2023, and it would be inconceivable to most adolescents in Singapore and many parts of the developed world that they would walk out of their house without a smartphone in their palm or pocket. These technological changes have implications for both reading and methods of studying reading. Whereas traditional ethnographic research would have required my intrusion into homes and schools, the mobile ethnography app I used for the present study allowed me to observe intimate aspects of family and school life with minimal intrusion. The student-generated images provided access to participants’ homes and screens, across various physical and online spaces. Mobile ethnography, as such methods of data collection are called (Muskat et al. 2018), allowed me to examine the students’ everyday practices through photographs, videos, and notes they made to document their own reading, both in print and digital formats. Second, I draw on Long’s conception of social infrastructure as a lens through which to understand the everyday practices of adolescent readers. As an educator working at the intersection of equity, literacy, and technologies of reading, I am invested in tracing and mapping the taken-for-­ granted “ways of operating” (de Certeau 1984, 30) that influence the development of reading as a form of popular culture embodied in everyday practices. These acts of reading are what Rosen (2015) has called “ordinary” in the sense that they are “intimate, particular, informal, routine, and ephemeral” (1064). Structured within the girls’ home and school habitus (Bourdieu 1977, 1984), the reading practices I explore in this chapter in turn structure the ways of thinking and acting that are etched

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into the girls’ identification of themselves as particular kinds of readers and individuals. Third, I expand Long’s infrastructural metaphor to consider the technological infrastructure within which these girls have access to the resources they use for their reading pleasures and identity-shaping purposes. I argue that reading serves as a self-making practice that is embedded in an infrastructure that is both social and technological, within which networks and layers of relationships and things interact. The notion of technology opening up new spaces for reading is not new. From the Gutenberg Press to Project Gutenberg, the history of reading has been punctuated by projects dedicated to expanding the reach of books through technological innovation. Of particular relevance for the readers in the present study are the new technologies and recent smartphone advances that have opened the textual territory of reading to a variety of platforms and formats optimized for reading on the screen and designed to encourage interactivity. From digital fanfiction (Black 2009) and webtoons (Lynn 2014) to #bookstagram and #booktok (Dezuanni et  al. 2022; Jerasa and Boffone 2021; Thomas 2021), the contemporary technological infrastructure supporting the girls’ reading practices provides new ways of engaging with and talking about texts that exist alongside and in conversation with traditional print technologies, thus expanding possibilities for self-making practices through varied ways of reading.

Mobile Ethnography as Method Ethnography can reveal insights into the social worlds of participants, whether in another society or, as in the present case, closer to home. The material I discuss in this chapter is part of a larger study that included surveys and interviews about adolescent reading in Singapore. Here I focus on the data drawn from a mobile ethnography study of twelve girls’ reading practices. Using an interactive mobile ethnography app, the students were tasked with taking ten images or videos of their reading in print and on their laptop and smartphone devices over two weekdays and two weekends.1 For each entry, I asked the participants to provide information on where and when they read, who they were with when they read it, and if 1  We made use of a qualitative research app called dscout for the mobile ethnography. After evaluating three possible apps, we decided on dscout as it was the most user-friendly and intuitive for the students.

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they had any additional comments for the researchers. I also asked them to share images or videos of their bookshelves. The interactive platform allowed me to ask real-time questions as the girls were collecting their own data. Follow-up interviews and focus group discussions using photo-­ elicitation methods allowed for greater insight into the observations. I also asked the participants to complete a short survey of their reading habits and device use patterns. After composing a narrative vignette on each student using the survey and mobile data, I conducted follow-up interviews with them to learn more about their reading practices. To this study, I brought my perspective as an educator, a researcher of literacy practices, a parent of a tween and a teen, a woman, a reader, and a Singaporean. Despite the degree of access made possible by my positionality, I acknowledge my status as an outsider whose social experience is different from that of 14- and 15-year-olds growing up in a world where online connectivity has become increasingly pervasive. Data analysis began with coding the mobile data according to the categories and definitions suggested by McKenna et  al. (2012) and Baron and Mangen (2021) as either print or digital and short- or longform reading. The mobile ethnography app allowed for easily tagging and counting the kinds of texts students read and the devices on which they read them. This made it possible to identify the variety and frequency of the particular forms and ways of reading they practiced. Sorting what participants read in this way underscored the emergence of new genres, such as digital fanfiction and webtoons. I then mapped each student’s print and digital reading practices on an A3 sheet of paper. This provided a way to identify distinctive patterns and practices, which I compared across the cases. These included the themes of identity formation, fandom, markers of distinction, repertoires of wide reading, and the role of new technologies, each of which I submit to closer analysis in this chapter.

Reading as Self-making In her study of middle-class reading in the United States, Janice Radway argued that a person’s choices about whether and what to read can be seen as a form of “self-fashioning” or “identity formation” (1997, 324). Radway explained how reading books provided by the Book-of-the-­Month Club was “an exercise in social training and pedagogy” (262) subscribed to by aspiring middle-class individuals to demonstrate their acquisition of suitable knowledge in the form of the right kind

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of books. Writing about identity formation, Holland et  al. (1998) note that individuals make their everyday decisions within “figured worlds” where individual agency intersects with historical structures to constrain their options. According to this perspective, individuals improvise behavior and revise their senses of self through their participation in specific activities and communities. In my study, the choices students made about whether and what to read were similarly constrained by the girls’ histories and daily practices of reading. At the same time, their access to resources allowed them to independently improvise their reading practices, exercising their agency to shape their reading identities and habitus. The practices the girls used for self-making were evident from the start of the study, beginning with their choice of pseudonyms. In the names they chose for themselves, the girls revealed aspects of their personalities and affiliations. The girl who called herself Ambien Toast said her choice was based on a performance she watched by StarKid (an American musical theatre company) combined with what she ate for breakfast. Ganyu named herself after a character from Genshin Impact (an action-role playing game). Katheryn Elizabeth Harris created her pseudonym by combining the names of her favorite characters from different books. All these names provided clues to the various “affinity spaces” (Gee 2004) the girls occupied in their leisure time. Practices of reading and self-making cannot be disconnected from the sociocultural and economic contexts within which a person’s identities and practices are shaped and enacted. While seemingly divorced from the minutiae of flipping the pages of a book or scrolling through one’s mobile phone, context always matters when it comes to understanding culture. It is thus important to note that the girls are growing up in a relatively stable Singapore, which ranks as one of the wealthiest countries in the world (Ventura 2022). Moreover, they attended the prestigious Meadows Girls’ School, which only accepted top performing students with strong academic performance from the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE), a high-stakes test taken by all Primary Six (12-year-old) students in Singapore.2 In the school-wide survey, 83.2% of the students reported that they liked to read, a high percentage compared to 64.5% reported in a larger survey across seven Singapore schools (including Meadows) with different profiles. This makes sense in a context where the need to plug into global markets has ensured that the education system prioritizes  A pseudonym is used for the school to preserve anonymity.

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fluency in English (Loh 2021; Silver 2005). Thus, the girls’ acquisition of English language proficiency was a key factor for their academic success. In the survey administered prior to the mobile ethnography, all twelve students reported that they enjoyed reading. Of the twelve girls, eight reported having more than 100 books at home, one reported having 51–100 books, two reported having 21–50 books, and one (Smiley Bear) reported having only 11–20 books. Even then, Smiley reported frequent public library visits, suggesting that although she reported having fewer books at home, she was familiar with public library resources and used them often. Glancing at the bookshelves of the majority of the participants and reading through their entries and transcripts, I was struck by the abundance of books and reading resources in their homes and the practices of what I have called intensive immersion (Loh and Sun 2020) in a home culture of books and reading. The girls’ parents, who were often readers themselves, purchased books for their children or brought them to the library to teach them to find books to read. The parents were role models of reading and managed their children’s time by putting aside time for reading and teaching their children to read. Teaching included habits of book finding and selection, often through visits to bookstores or libraries. By providing children with devices such as Kindles for reading, downloading reading apps, or restricting their use of smartphones and tablets for other activities, these parents used technology to cultivate their children’s reading habits. The profusion of books available at home and through visits to bookstores and libraries also meant the girls had more opportunities to find good reads. As a result, the girls saw reading as a viable recreational habit, leading them to read for enjoyment, to learn something, or when they “had nothing to do.” In a video Ganyu shared (Fig.  2.1), some of the shelves appeared to bow in the center due to the weight of the books. She estimated that her family had more than 400 books on the shelf, of which 120 belonged to her. She explained that “some of my favorite books are kept in my room instead.” The proximity of favorite books serves as a reminder of the kind of reader she is and marks her identity as someone who likes books and reading. Of her family reading habits, she reported, “My mom enjoys reading religious books and testimonies while my dad reads manga, like me. My brother prefers non-fiction books about science.” Enjoyment of books was a taken-for-granted family disposition, with the girls referring to shared encounters of reading with family members. Aoi reported visiting the library on a monthly basis with her mother,

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Fig. 2.1  Screen grabs from Ganyu’s video

where she often saw her mother “borrowing books pertaining to motherhood and the bond between mothers and daughters.” Ambien and her mother read Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens together as they were both interested in it and had conversations about the book. The unquestioning belief in the value of reading was most evident in Smiley’s narration. When asked if her family read, Smiley expressed incredulity, saying in her video post: “How can they not read?” The responses shared by the students indicated that what the girls saw as natural dispositions toward reading were, in reality, cultivated as part of the habitus (Bourdieu 1977, 1984) of their home life and the broader social context in which they were brought up. In this way, the girls’ attitudes and practices exemplified how the home environment shapes future reading practices. Growing up in a “rich home literacy environment”

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(Buckingham et al. 2014), the girls had been socialized into reading from a young age. As they moved into adolescence and were granted greater independence to manage the time they spent on their personal smartphones, the girls made use of their access to smartphone and internet technologies to develop new reading practices.

Fandom as Everyday Reading Practice New technologies can enable new ways of producing and distributing reading material and encourage new ways of reading. For example, transmedia storytelling across multiple platforms, mediated by the smartphone, allows new ways of experiencing reading. In a study of Singapore adolescent reading in 2017 (Loh and Sun 2019), participants reported reading fanfiction on Wattpad and Archive of Our Own (AO3). In the present study, the girls reported reading Korean manhwa on webtoon. The changes that surfaced in the four years between the two studies underscore the speed in which new reading practices emerged in this community. The popularity of Korean manhwa distributed through webtoons is part of the broader Korean Wave (or Hallyu) of pop culture exports from South Korea (Jang and Song 2017; Jin and Yi 2020). While Korean manhwa has a longer history, the webtoon format developed in the mid-2000s transformed the production and distribution of the medium, contributing to its recent global reach (Kim and Yu 2019). In the last few years and partially fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic, the webtoon market share has grown exponentially, with a huge market share in Asia (Fortune Business Insights 2021). Returning to the idea of a social infrastructure, new technologies enable new ways of production, new stakeholders, and correspondingly new ways of reading. When examining the adolescent practices of reading manhwa, it is striking how these new formats amplify a fandom mindset, where individuals follow their favorite authors or series. The idea of following a favorite author or reading around one’s favorite series is not new. Martens (2016) documented how publishers mobilize digital media around books, the most well-known case being the Harry Potter franchise, which has engaged fans in “affective labor around the books they love by participating in peer-to-peer reviewing and marketing, and by contributing user-­generated content” (2016, 2). Gaining a following here is seen as a formula to ensure continued readership. The longevity of Harry Potter, beyond its literary merits, can be explained in part by the ongoing media engagement and

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pushing out of new content to extend the story world and the lives of characters in the world. Technology thus extends the sociality of reading by expanding possibilities for interaction around and about the texts people read. Likewise, the social practices around manhwa reading are shaped by the device, format, and serialized nature of its regular delivery of new content. Published in a vertical strip optimized for scrolling on the smartphone, webtoons are rendered in vibrant colors and sometimes feature music and animations. All this encourages followers to engage in intense and routinized reading practices. Although the serialized release of webtoons is similar to older popular forms such as Charles Dickens’s serialization of his novels in weekly journals (Grubb 1942) and The Baby-Sitters Club series of novels released by Scholastic (Mackey 1990), the technology of the smartphone enabled by the internet supports worldwide reach and greater immediacy. User-friendly features include the organization of the manhwa into genres for easy selection and the abundance of content to suit readers with different tastes. Participatory opportunities abound: crowd-sourced translations enable participants to be involved as translators of works, and the system of user rating and comments encourage online sociality to help potential readers find new reads. Other than the story and text, the webtoon reading engine is social by nature, with rating systems and comments helping potential readers with the selection process of finding new reads. The visual element or “art style” of the manhwa is vital, as LWT explains in the quote below: I read webtoons. Webtoons are only available online. Like, as soon as people write stories, we just read it … When choosing a webtoon, the first thing I’ll notice is the art style. If I love the art style, maybe I’ll start reading it … [Since] I’m more into drama, I’ll go to that genre, and I’ll just search.

The affordance of the smartphone and the design of the webtoon platform are technological infrastructures that encourage particular ways of reading. Reading within this media ecology encourages the habit of following the series. Followers check in when new chapters are launched and might binge read multiple chapters at one go. Liking or finding, whether through self-exploration or recommendation, is the precursor to following. Being a follower results in active searching behaviors, where the readers actively look for more reading materials or information about the object of their interest. These behaviors are part passive and part active.

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Turning on notifications results in pop-ups that nudge the reader to click and read. At the same time, readers actively look for new material by scrolling through the different stories. The format of the platform is designed to facilitate ease of continued reading, with clear genre divisions, invitations to subscribe, notifications about updates of new chapters, multi-platform marketing, and cross-over media. Iris explained she decided to stop reading manhwa to concentrate on her studies because she felt the constant checking for updates was “taking too much time” and was “distracting.” Ganyu said she worked around the system by “waiting for it to update a few chapters before continuing to read it.” She thereby devised a strategy to manage her time for reading. The social aspect of reading remains important for manhwa. Students often discover reading materials through recommendations from friends or chance encounters on social media or online. Phxtxm encountered screenshots of the manhwa Father, I Don’t Want This Marriage on TikTok and was enticed by it to search for the manhwa online. YY’s friends introduced webtoon to her when she was in Secondary One and she started reading fantasy and romance comics on webtoon. Cross-media explorations were common. Beomgyu, who was reading The Star Seekers at the time of the study, explained that she was following three stories at one time. She said she started reading two of them because “they are based on K-pop idols in real life” and the genres of fantasy and adventure appealed to her (Fig. 2.2). Exploring one online platform often leads to reading on other platforms and in other formats. For example, Ganyu started out reading manga and manhwa. When she learned that the comics she liked originated from Chinese and Korean web novels, she “decided to try out the novel” and discovered she liked to read web novels as well. Ganyu was likewise drawn to explore cross-cultural texts, widening her knowledge of transmedia texts and contexts through extensive reading of Asian comics and web novels. Writing about convergence culture, Jenkins (2006) observed that new media technologies encourage consumers (readers or viewers) to move across multiple platforms, interacting both globally and locally. This sort of convergence, he said, “represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections across dispersed media content” (2006, 3). In these fandom practices of manhwa reading, we see how Singaporean girls embrace the mobility of the smartphone, using the technology to plug into new reading materials. Reading as media experience (Fuller and Sedo 2013) is here

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Fig. 2.2  Screenshot of Omniscient Reader from Ganyu reading on her phone (left) and author reading on iPad (right). The first shows how a reader would scroll up to read the text and the second shows how extra information is provided to give the reader contextual information that is specific to Korean culture

amplified through the smartphone format, with access to new ways of consuming popular culture, across formats, media forms, and contexts.

Cultivating Reading Distinctions Research on consumption practices as cultural capital has suggested cultural shifts over time—from consumption of highbrow markers of distinction to a kind of cultural omnivorous-ness where elite status is marked by a capacity to “appreciate and critique [a form of cultural production] in the light of some knowledge of the genre, its great performers and links to

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other cultural forms, lowbrow and highbrow” (Peterson and Kern 1996, 904). One’s inclusion or exclusion from privilege is increasingly based on learning what Khan (2012) called “ways of knowing.” School-valued ways of knowing include what Bourdieu referred to as an “aesthetic disposition” (1984, 28), or the ability to attend to and critically evaluate rather than immerse oneself in a work. The girls often demonstrated just such a critical literary identity, distancing themselves from a text to evaluate its quality, thereby carrying school-valued ways of reading (Collins and Blot 2003) into their leisure reading choices and practices. The girls distinguished their identities as serious readers through the choice of the texts they read as well as how they read them. For example, when discussing her reading choices from primary school, Katheryn distinguished between serious and “popcorn” books: Keeper of the Lost Cities, to me, it’s like a popcorn movie … It’s just something you can snack on, and you can keep yourself entertained … There is a fantasy world. People have powers. Everyone is beautiful. There is romance. And it’s just very simplistic. Okay, I don’t want to insult the author. And she tried. And I know, she tries to make everything, like, very complicated. Maybe there’s some ethical dilemmas to it. But even so it’s all very cliché. And it’s very easy to understand.

Katheryn compared books suited for “snacking” to having a small bite that would be temporarily satisfying but not necessarily nutritious. Mat built on Katheryn’s definition, explaining that popcorn reading was “mindless reading.” The girls distinguished between reading for entertainment, which was easy, and reading to learn, which required effort. In the quote above, Katheryn further exemplified the practice of critical reading, referencing the book’s simplicity and cliché storyline and characters as reasons for saying the book belonged to the “popcorn” category. The distinction the girls made between light and heavy reading can also be seen in Aoi’s rationale for how and why she was simultaneously reading One of Us Is Lying, a Young Adult crime novel by Karen McManus, and Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, a translated Japanese classic: Currently, I am reading One of Us Is Lying as I need a faster-paced, more easy to understand book to get out of my reading slump, which started after I read a few pages of No Longer Human. No Longer Human is a book that covers very heavy subjects, and I found it to be a confusing read. So I

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decided to take a break by reading One of Us Is Lying, which is a thriller/ mystery book that is straightforward.

While the girls engaged in practices of light reading for entertainment, they also saw reading as a goal-directed activity for developing their critical and literary selves. For example, Ambien was trying to “read a bit of Coriolanus by Shakespeare.” Owing to the difficulty of understanding the Shakespeare text, she took breaks with fanfiction. With a PDF copy of Coriolanus and the AO3 app both on her phone, it was easy for her to move between reading materials of varying difficulty to stay engaged. Ambien said she also enjoyed reading novels that allowed her to learn about Greek and Norse mythology. She was particularly pleased to discover that the book she was reading, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, “is a modern classic,” which “made it cooler” for her. Like elite Norwegian students in Pedersen et al.’s (2018) study of cultural capital, reading classics or being identified as “nerdy” was seen as an acceptable identity within the girls’ social and schooling context. Another form of distinction beyond the kinds of texts participants read was the book-related affinity groups they joined, including online communities. Interestingly, both Aoi and Ganyu discovered No Longer Human through BookTok, a subcommunity on TikTok where readers share their opinions about literature and books (Dezuanni et al. 2022). This literary affinity space (Gee 2004) makes reading cool, in part due to the way the content is presented (Jerasa and Boffone 2021). Both Aoi and Ganyu (who did not know each other) were recommended BookToks about No Longer Human. With their interest piqued, the girls separately purchased hardcopies of the book at Kinokuniya, one of the largest bookstores located in town. Figure  2.3 shows a screen grab from a BookToker’s review and an annotated page from Aoi’s book. As we can see, Aoi applied literary techniques of reading, such as close readings and annotation, to work through her understanding of what was to her a difficult text, demonstrating the permeability of home-school practices. The students’ selection of No Longer Human as reading material is situated within digital and physical ecosystems of publishing, marketing, and sales where classic texts endorsed by BookTokers are shared and turn up as personalized BookTok recommendations. Here, the girls opted into a technology that is widely used but distinguished themselves through their choice of content, personalized through the app’s algorithmic infrastructure. In this case, technology both expands students’ options for joining

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Fig. 2.3  A screengrab from BookTok and Aoi’s reading

new affinity groups and creates new possibilities for them to mark distinctions through their reading practices. At the time of the mobile ethnography study, a visit to Kinokuniya saw No Longer Human prominently displayed and promoted within the physical space of the bookstore, showing how both digital (global) and physical (local) ecosystems cohered toward the promotion of similar books. By choosing to plug into these book communities, the girls actively pursued strategies of reading as self-making.

Developing Repertoires of Wide Reading Across the students, there were many different interests, showing a diverse range of reading, from books to online blogs and fanfiction. There were also similarities, with many girls reading fiction, non-fiction, and manhwa on webtoon apps. Although many fit in with the view of girls (or women) as readers of fiction (Taylor 2022), they also read non-fiction and other genres. Non-fiction titles listed by the girls included The Diary of Anne Frank (Katheryn), Colors of the Mountain (Mat), and A Wolf Called Romeo

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(Ambien). However, what was most striking across the students’ entries and interviews were the wide repertoires of reading they were developing and their utilization of technology to extend their reading repertoires. Being encouraged to read from a young age, having a strong proficiency in the language, and seeing reading as an enjoyable activity encouraged the girls to read more and to read widely. These findings support the notion that increased reading volume has a reciprocal effect and “unlocks a lifetime of reading habits” (Cunningham and Stanovich 1998, 7). More recently, Hwang (2020) distinguished between “highbrow consumption,” “omnivorous consumption,” “technical capacity,” and “social competence.” Drawing on Lareau (2003), Hwang pointed to a body of research that suggested that middle-class families’ cultivation of activities such as reading, completion of homework, and organized sport are associated with “various indicators of social competence and technical capacity” (2020, 467). In other words, recreational activities such as reading can be seen to be aligned with the cultivation of skills necessary for school and future work (Araújo and Costa 2015; Chiu et al. 2015; De Graaf et al. 2000; Sullivan and Brown 2015). Examining the girls’ reading practices closely, it is clear that they are developing a “flexible” (Loh 2013) relationship with texts, having acquired a reading toolkit to help them tackle new and different texts, whether in print or online. The foundation of the girls’ wide reading is cultivated from their historical and continued engagement with books, which can be observed in the number and variety of texts the girls read. Even as the girls engaged in reading a wider range of mobile texts, a majority retained their habits of reading longform fiction, at least on weekends. To get a concrete sense of how much and what kinds of reading the girls did, I created an operational definition of traditional print and digital texts and counted the number of mentions of each during the course of the mobile ethnography.3 Over the four days, I counted sixteen instances of reading fiction and non-fiction in print and six instances of reading digital fiction and non-fiction. Of the twelve students, only four (Ganyu, Koala Bear, LWT, and YY) did not engage in any novel reading, although they did read other fiction in the form of manhwa and non-fiction blogs, news, and articles. Recent studies in Australia (Merga 2014; Rutherford et  al. 2018) and Singapore (Loh and Sun 2019, 2022) have found that students who enjoy reading read more in print and digital formats, a trait also demonstrated by these girls. 3

 Interested readers can see Loh et al. (2023) for a detailed analysis.

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The girls were able to make use of both traditional print and digital technology to access books. Although they often preferred reading longform texts in print when the option was available, they sometimes made use of e-books to extend their opportunities for reading. Katheryn preferred print books but purchased e-books when she didn’t have a book on hand. Ambien had both print and e-copies of The Song of Achilles. She said she preferred to read print but saved a PDF copy on her phone so she could re-read it at her convenience. Similarly, while Iris said she read Better Than the Movies using the NLB app because it was “convenient” to pick up her phone to continue reading, she also reported re-reading her print copy of Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus as a way to relax (Fig. 2.4). The students all reported using devices to support their reading. Each student reported spending at least three to five hours on their smartphones each day, with four of them (Katheryn, Aoi, Phxttxm, Ambien) spending more than five hours a day. The same four students were also avid readers, reporting that they spent at least an hour a day reading print books, e-books, or comics. For example, over the four days, Ambien revisited the fictional

Fig. 2.4  Iris’s images of her print and e-book reading

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Hatchetfield Universe on AO3, read a PDF copy of Coriolanus, re-read her duplicate PDF of The Song of Achilles, and read To Hell With You on webtoon “for entertainment” and to study “the art of stories.” On top of this, she read the news, revised for her examinations using notes on Google Drive, participated in a text-based version of Dungeons and Dragons, and scrolled through Tumblr, reading blog entries. Ambien explained that she brings her phone with her “most places” and sees it as a “source of entertainment, enrichment, and communication.” Although smartphones may distract some students from reading (Loh and Sun 2022), they are seen as a resource for these girls, providing easy access to more reading materials, as long as they had internet connection and battery life. Beomgyu’s recreational reading posts (Fig. 2.5) illustrate the wide mix of print and digital reading resources that she turns to in her leisure time.

Fig. 2.5  Beomgyu’s recreational reading entries over four days

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Having more than 100 books at home, she was able to re-read old favorites such as books from the Harry Potter series to re-live her most pleasurable reading experiences. While she was willing to read books online or in print, she preferred print, which she said was “less troublesome” and did not “strain the eyes.” Other than her longform fiction reading, Beomgyu read webtoons and checked out her idols on Instagram. Not captured in the entries but in the interview was her reading and writing of short stories on Wattpad. Reading for her was a default recreational activity, in conjunction with engagement in other media forms. This notion of reading as relaxation was a recurrent feature of the dataset. Smiley reported reading “aloud in her mind” a book of poetry before bedtime to “relax a bit, on my bed.” Iris was “happy” to re-read her well-worn copy of Percy Jackson. At the end of Smiley’s interview, she exclaimed: “We read a lot of things, yah!” I argue here that these girls are picking up a way with texts, both print and digital, by engaging with multiple formats and genres on a daily basis. The amplification of their reading possibilities is supported in part by their early literacy acquisition resulting in their confident language proficiency (Loh and Sun 2020). Having been immersed in print books at an early age, they have developed the confidence to explore reading materials online. This is in keeping with Notten and Becker’s (2017) findings that children with rich early home literacy environments were more likely to exhibit stronger informational online reading behavior. Having learnt how to look for books offline, they bring these skills to the online domain. When considering these accounts of reading with ease across multiple formats, it is worth recalling that these girls were fortunate to have families who could provide material support for their reading habits, including money to purchase print and e-books, and devices that could be used for reading. Katheryn provided a telling indication of this when she said she regularly purchased e-books from Apple Books at school but was not aware of how the payment system was set up to allow her purchase. This too must be considered as part of the wider sociality of reading within an ecosystem where books and technology are seen as necessary and thus provided within the home to support the students’ development of their identities as frequent, wide, and flexible readers.

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New Ethnographies of Reading Examining these contemporary practices of adolescent girls’ reading, I was struck by the continuity and changes in both reading and the study of reading since Long first outlined her conception of reading as social and collective. New technologies have supported new ways of reading through new platforms and new formats, as well as new ways of socializing around texts. Technology has extended the sociality of reading through conversations and interactions around books online and through social media. Cultures of fandom have been amplified in everyday practices of reading, with new formats and increased frequencies of distribution through online means. But these new technologies of reading have not relegated books “to the dustbins of the past” (Graff 1987, 393). Rather, technology has expanded the resources from which individuals can build their repertoires of reading and develop their reading selves. As demonstrated by the reading choices and practices described in this chapter, the participants in the mobile ethnography saw being a reader and reading particular kinds of texts as essential parts of their identities. They were socialized through their family and school habitus to turn to reading as a possible source of leisure and learning. Their constant immersion in reading allowed them to develop a robust and flexible reading toolkit, which included greater reading proficiencies, the ability to look for books and information online, and a critical mindset when approaching books across different reading contexts. Technological infrastructures extended their reading possibilities in various ways, by expanding their access to texts (e.g., through e-books) and by allowing them to develop new ways of reading (e.g., through new platforms and formats such as webtoons). Their reading flexibility can ultimately be seen as a form of mobility, allowing them to expand their repertoire of reading practices. Although large-scale studies suggesting that adolescents are reading less (Schleicher 2018) have raised concerns for many national educational systems, ethnographies of reading can help to add nuance and context. For one thing, as shown in the chapter, adolescents are reading in different web formats, which the broad sweeps of a survey may not capture. I have

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found in my conversations with students that unless they are explicitly prompted to think about other forms of reading, they revert to a conception of reading that is limited to longform fiction and non-fiction texts. Changing technologies and new ways of reading may also make it hard to compare changes in reading enjoyment and volume over time. It is, of course, imperative here to consider how class, gender, and new technologies intersect to create new forms of reading within specific sociocultural contexts. As Johnsson-Smaragdi and Jönsson’s (2006) longitudinal study of book reading in Sweden showed, the effects of new media on reading habits often vary according to socioeconomic status and gender. Thus, while the experience of middle-class girls from reading homes in Singapore should not be generalized, it is still instructive to note how these girls’ reading practices are changing. Specifically, the technology of the smartphone, with its mobility and ease of access to online reading resources, has enabled new practices of reading that are adopted by these girls to extend their reading possibilities. Reflecting more broadly on ethnography as method, this study highlights new approaches that can provide insight into the reading lives of adolescents. In earlier studies I made use of reading diaries sent via email (Loh 2013) and short text messages and images sent over WhatsApp (Loh 2015). However, as a real-time observational tool of students’ actual readings, co-producing research data through mobile ethnography allowed for a depth of insight that was not possible with the earlier methods I used. Though not as comprehensive as time diary (Bartlett and Milligan 2015), the timed requests for entries provided a snapshot of reading practices that differed over time and place. For example, I learned that students tended to spend more time reading books over weekends, when they had longer stretches of free time. During weekdays, they were more likely to read in snippets, preferring to “snack” on online reading resources because their days were packed with schoolwork and extracurricular activities. The student-­generated images also offered a glimpse of how the students saw their own reading practices, attesting to the importance of the visual (Rose 2016) for insight. For example, the screenshots the students shared highlighted the important role images played (perhaps most evident in the art style of manhwa) in capturing and sustaining their attention. Methodologically, what has not changed across time is the need for ethnographic immersion in the life worlds of readers. Ethnographers are drawn by the need to understand social processes and to make visible the organizational principles of the social world (Puddephatt et al. 2009). To

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do so, we need to find ways into the worlds of those being studied. In the area of reading, this means understanding through engagement with contemporary practices around books and reading. In a study mentioned earlier, in addition to reading the texts the students read, I also chose to watch the musical Wicked on YouTube to better understand adolescents’ cross-media reading practices (Loh 2013). For this study, I subscribed to Korean manhwa on webtoon, watched a K-drama, and read a related web novel to better appreciate the reading worlds of these adolescent girls. It is only through participation, however partial, that I began to understand these new technologies and ways of reading. I have thus come to see a willingness to engage in new practices around reading and an openness to exploring new ways of conducting research as necessary dispositions for the ethnographer of contemporary reading practices. Returning to the concept of technological infrastructure, this chapter has highlighted the importance of situating studies of reading practices within contemporary infrastructures of production, distribution, and consumption where new ways of reading and interacting around texts are formed. Some of the new forms replicate traditional print media, but in the move to online models, they extend their reach by increasing ease of access and creating more opportunities for interacting with other readers. Yet others, such as Wattpad and webtoons, create new modes of production and distribution. This forces consideration of what counts as reading and how these different ways of reading may matter for each milieu. To inform our understanding of reading and its implication for scholarly work and practical impact in fields of publishing, sociology, anthropology, and education, scholarship of reading must continually adapt to new times, theorizing and rethinking how new ethnographies of reading can deepen our understanding of the practices of contemporary readers. Acknowledgments  This work was supported by the DEV02-20 LCE Designing School Libraries of the Future Study. Ethics approval was obtained (IRB2019-03-026-04). The views expressed in this chapter are the author’s views and do not necessarily represent the views of the National Institute of Education nor the Singapore Ministry of Education. The author wishes to express her gratitude to the school, teachers, and participating students. Many thanks to Ms Erna Sia Jingyun and Taina Teravainen, research assistants on the project, for their assistance with  data collection and analysis.  The data for the study is deposited at https://doi.org/10.25340/R4/PJKLSK and may be obtained by writing to the author.

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Fuller, Danielle, and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. 2013. Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture. London: Routledge. Gee, James Paul. 2004. Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. London: Routledge. Graff, Harvey J. 1987. The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Grubb, Gerald G. 1942. Dickens’ Pattern of Weekly Serialization. ELH 9 (2): 141–156. Holland, Dorothy C., William S. Lachicotte Jr., Debra Skinner, and Carole Cain, eds. 1998. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hwang, Karam. 2020. Investing the Time: Group Differences in Cultural Capital Development Among U.S.  Adolescents. Social Currents 7 (5): 465–486. https://doi.org/10.1177/2329496520925499. Jang, Wonho, and Jung Eun Song. 2017. Webtoon as a New Korean Wave in the Process of Glocalization. Kritika Kultura 29: 168–187. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jerasa, Sarah, and Trevor Boffone. 2021. BookTok 101: TikTok, Digital Literacies, and Out-of-School Reading Practices. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 65 (3): 219–226. Jin, Dal Yong, and Hyangsoon Yi. 2020. Transnationality of Popular Culture in the Korean Wave. Korea Journal 60 (1): 5–16. Johnsson-Smaragdi, Ulla, and Annelis Jönsson. 2006. Book Reading in Leisure Time: Long-Term Changes in Young Peoples’ Book Reading Habits. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 50 (5): 519–540. Khan, Shamus Rahman. 2012. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kim, Ji-Hyeon, and Jun Yu. 2019. Platformizing Webtoons: The Impact on Creative and Digital Labor in South Korea. Social Media + Society 5 (4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880174. Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Loh, Chin Ee. 2013. Singaporean Boys Constructing Global Literate Selves Through Their Reading Practices In and Out of School. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 44 (1): 38–57. ———. 2015. Building a Reading Culture in a Singapore School: Identifying Spaces for Change Through a Socio-Spatial Approach. Changing English 22 (2): 209–221. ———. 2021. Lived Experiences of Literacy Learning in Singapore from the Past to Present and Lessons for the Future: The Relationship Between Familial and Institutional Habitus in Situated Contexts. In Charting an Asian Trajectory for

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Literacy Education: Connecting Past, Present and Future Literacies, ed. Su Li Chong. London: Routledge. Loh, Chin Ee, and Baoqi Sun. 2019. ‘I’d Still Prefer to Read the Hard Copy’: Adolescents’ Print and Digital Reading Habits. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 62 (6): 663–672. ———. 2020. Cultural Capital, Habitus and Reading Futures: Middle-Class Adolescent Students’ Cultivation of Reading Dispositions in Singapore. British Journal of Sociology of Education 41 (2): 234–252. ———. 2022. The Impact of Technology Use on Adolescents’ Leisure Reading Preferences. Literacy 56 (4): 327–339. https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12282. Loh, Chin Ee, Baoqi Sun, and Fei Victor Lim. 2023. ‘Because I’m Always Moving’: A Mobile Ethnography Study of Adolescent Girls’ Everyday Print and Digital Reading Practices. Learning, Media and Technology 0: 1–20. https://doi. org/10.1080/17439884.2023.2209325. Long, Elizabeth. 1993. Textual Interpretation as Collective Action. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 180–211. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lynn, Hyung-Gu. 2014. Korean Webtoons: Explaining Growth. https://apm. sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2016/02/HG-­L ynn-­K orean-­Webtoons-­K yushu-­ v16-­2016.pdf MacKey, M. 1990. Filling the Gaps: ‘The Baby-Sitters Club,’ the Series Book, and the Learning Reader. Language Arts 67 (5): 484–489. Martens, Marianne. 2016. Publishers, Readers, and Digital Engagement. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McKenna, Michael C., Kristin Conradi, Camille Lawrence, Bong Gee Jang, and J. Patrick Meyer. 2012. Reading Attitudes of Middle School Students: Results of a U.S. Survey. Reading Research Quarterly 47 (3): 283–306. Merga, Margaret K. 2014. Are Teenagers Really Keen Digital Readers: Adolescent Engagement in Ebook Reading and the Relevance of Books Today. English in Australia 49 (1): 27–37. Muskat, Birgit, Matthias Muskat, and Anita Zehrer. 2018. Qualitative Interpretive Mobile Ethnography. Anatolia 29 (1): 98–107. Notten, Natascha, and Birgit Becker. 2017. Early Home Literacy and Adolescents’ Online Reading Behavior in Comparative Perspective. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 58 (6): 475–493. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0020715217735362. Pedersen, Willy, Vegard Jarness, and Magne Flemmen. 2018. Revenge of the Nerds: Cultural Capital and the Politics of Lifestyle Among Adolescent Elites. Poetics 70 (October): 54–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2018.05.002. Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M.  Kern. 1996. Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore. American Sociological Review 61 (5): 900–907.

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Puddephatt, Antony J., William Shaffir, and Steven W.  Kleinknecht. 2009. Ethnographies Revisited: Constructing Theory in the Field. London: Routledge. Radway, Janice A. 1997. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rose, Gillian. 2016. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. London: Sage. Rosen, Matthew. 2015. Ethnographies of Reading: Beyond Literacy and Books. Anthropological Quarterly 88 (4): 1059–1084. Rutherford, Leonie, Andrew Singleton, Leonee Ariel Derr, and Margaret Kristin Merga. 2018. Do Digital Devices Enhance Teenagers’ Recreational Reading Engagement? Issues for Library Policy from a Recent Study in Two Australian States. Public Library Quarterly 37 (3): 318–340. Schleicher, Andreas. 2018. PISA 2018: Insights and Interpretations. https://www. oecd.org/pisa/PISA%202018%20Insights%20and%20Interpretations%20 FINAL%20PDF.pdf Silver, Rita Elaine. 2005. The Discourse of Linguistic Capital: Language and Economic Policy Planning in Singapore. Language Policy 4 (1): 47–66. Sullivan, Alice, and Matt Brown. 2015. Reading for Pleasure and Progress in Vocabulary and Mathematics. British Educational Research Journal 41 (6): 971–991. Taylor, Helen. 2022. Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives. London: Oxford University Press. Thomas, Bronwen. 2021. The #bookstagram: Distributed Reading in the Social Media Age. Language Sciences 84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. langsci.2021.101358. Ventura, Luca. 2022. Richest Countries in the World 2022. Global Finance Magazine. https://www.gfmag.com/global-­data/economic-­data/richestcountries-­in-­the-­world.

CHAPTER 3

A Language-and-Materiality Approach to Reading: Reinvigorating Thirty-Year-Old Questions Britt Halvorson and Ingie Hovland

In 2019, the two of us discovered that we had both been spending hours doing archival reading about Christian women reading Luke 10:38–42. This biblical passage—which describes the sisters Mary and Martha hosting Jesus—had taken on a life of its own, quite separately, in 1920s Norway and the 1950s US. Why were white middle-class Protestant women spending hours reading and discussing, both individually and in groups, other women’s appraisals of this passage in magazines and pamphlets—and then writing up their own takes (including some where Martha was reimagined as sweeping and cooking food in suburban US homes)? What we found was that Mary and Martha presented two different examples of Christian

B. Halvorson (*) Colby College, Waterville, ME, USA e-mail: [email protected] I. Hovland University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rosen (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0_3

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piety that women in these two communities were struggling to reconcile with shifting norms for gendered labor, especially work outside and inside the home. Reading the passage was in itself an embodied activity that held possibilities for women readers, who were working as teachers, farmers, store clerks, volunteers, and caretaking for children and families, to relate in a variety of ways to Mary and Martha. Yet, both communities also emphasized that women’s bodily work was a problem to be worked with and worked through in reading (Halvorson and Hovland 2021). These insights about reading’s irreducible ties to readers’ situated identities and material circumstances led us to think about new ways to link language and materiality—or, put differently, to see reading a text as a selective and positioned material engagement with the world. Though we drew together a variety of theoretical and ethnographic works, it is arguably the path-breaking volume The Ethnography of Reading (Boyarin 1993a) that gave us some of the best inspiration. It laid out an approach to reading that neither sacrificed attention to the subtleties of discursive knowledge-making through language nor the lived spaces, roles, and relationships activated in reading. In this chapter we explore how work in The Ethnography of Reading negotiated the interaction between language and materiality in reading and consider which questions remain unresolved from this scholarship. We briefly review some of the conceptual frameworks employed in the volume that helped to frame reading as a dynamic process of shaping meaning in a social-material context. This was a significant shift in the anthropological conversation on reading. Yet, thirty years later, we believe some of the original questions posed by this volume could be reinvigorated through recent work from the “material turn,” such as the anthropological approach to language as infrastructure or the shift to new materialism and posthumanism in literacy studies. Where have conversations on materiality as well as materiality and language gone since the original 1993 volume? What could a language-and-materiality approach contribute to some of the volume’s original questions? We also want to turn the question around and ask: What can The Ethnography of Reading contribute to our conversations today?

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Revisiting the Materiality of Language in The Ethnography of Reading The volume The Ethnography of Reading broke new ground by naming reading as a focus of anthropological attention. But, contrary to what this might imply, its project was not one of creating a new domain of analytical inquiry, per se. Rather, it is the volume’s intriguing, subtle, and important insistence on the sociality of reading, or the way that reading was always already caught up in a variety of other material and political projects, that we wish to draw forward for discussion. One of the mechanisms through which the volume’s authors produced awareness of the density of material and social relations within acts of reading was through the dynamic relationship of text and context. In “Voices Around the Text,” Jonathan Boyarin describes how Jewish students at New York City’s Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem “actualize” the biblical text through “images from popular culture” and “the geography of the Lower East Side” (1993c, 217). One among many memorable moments comes when a participant jokes about mishearing tizke lemitzves as “fistful o’mitzvahs,” referencing the Clint Eastwood movie Fistful O’Dollars and drawing an indirect but effective contrast between the students’ pious orientation to mitzvot (good deeds based on religious duty) and an outside world’s attraction to money (1993c, 225). Though Boyarin does not explicitly identify this as being about language’s materiality nor necessarily how it acquires meaning in relation with nearby places, such as movie houses or Wall Street, he makes clear that Jewish textual tradition is always enlivened by intersubjective ties between readers and places. Through such ties, a complex dialogue is set up between texts—“records of dialogue” themselves—and readers (1993c, 222). The classroom scene that Boyarin richly describes also works against what Elizabeth Long in her chapter calls the modernist stereotype of the solitary reader, disconnected from their material and social relations in the circumstance of reading. In Long’s analysis, influential cultural images “privilege a certain kind of reading” (1993, 181), especially its analytical and intellectual (rather than embodied or collective) dimensions. During the commercial expansions of the nineteenth century, Long notes that European paintings often portrayed women’s leisure reading as a middle-­ class consumption role, rather than a higher-status, masculinized activity of textual production or distribution. What Long so persuasively demonstrates here is that the cultural hegemony of solitary reading is a European

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modernist construction that walled up reading acts, using them to illuminate private, domestic, and interior bourgeois spaces, while preventing full recognition of their political-economic, classed, raced, and gendered qualities. She calls these ideologically hidden yet central aspects of reading its “social infrastructure” (1993, 191), a concept that encompasses elements as wide-ranging as the circulation and sale of books to the classed hierarchy of taste that may deem certain texts more “worthwhile” than others. The material spaces and effects of reading are expanded on in other book chapters by James Baker and Greg Sarris. In Baker’s work, public Quranic recitation in Tidore, eastern Indonesia, is a way of “giving value to the written words” (1993, 107). Here, the Quranic words themselves, including foreign Arabic names, are “received” in public performances, lending shape to a communal commitment to Islam. Baker contends that uttered name lists operate similarly in other contexts where they establish indexical relations between ancestral figures and the local territory, becoming a lived form of historical memory tied to the immediate environment. In the volume’s final chapter by Greg Sarris (1993), it is the material disconnections of reading to colonized spaces that are instead examined in a Kashaya Pomo Reservation classroom in northern California. There, the author finds twenty-six K-8 children roundly rejecting their white nonnative teacher’s effort to introduce a Kashaya traditional story. Sarris observes that the text provided in the classroom was written down as an encapsulated narrative, stripped of many of the stylistic and contextualizing details that would be used if it were spoken aloud. Along with the instructor’s pedagogical approach to reading, this had the effect of discouraging the students from making connections between their experiences and the story, a practice with a colonizing history in Kashaya education. In this case, in contrast to Baker’s discussion, students were disinclined to create material connections to the local environment, each other, or their ancestors, making the story an alienated material artifact. Through this necessarily cursory look into a rich, multifaceted volume, we wish to highlight that one of the underlying themes in The Ethnography of Reading is attention to how reading a text dynamically inflects and shapes the lived material circumstances of readers. The chapters we discuss insist on approaching reading through what Boyarin refers to in the book’s introduction as a “field of interaction” (1993b, 2). In revisiting the volume now, we can see this theoretical intervention as an important legacy that can be fruitfully put in dialogue with the more recent “material turn.”

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The Material Turn: Reinvigorating Questions about Materiality and Language As we look back at the thirty years that have passed since The Ethnography of Reading was published, the shift that stands out for us is the so-called material turn that has taken place over the past two decades (e.g., Bennett and Joyce 2013; Henare et  al. 2007). We recognize that the “material turn” is a vague, catch-all term, and that it has the potential to be misleading insofar as anthropologists (including those writing for The Ethnography of Reading) were certainly interested in material objects, bodies, places, practices, and circumstances before the material turn. But we use it here to think about the broader interest that has emerged across the humanities and social sciences in elevating the material to the same analytical importance as the discursive. From this perspective, assemblages of material things and beings may shape social life as much as systems of ideas, if not more. We are especially interested in how this renewed attention to the material has introduced a new openness to thinking about how materiality relates to language. We think this casts new light on some of the underlying themes that were explored in The Ethnography of Reading, allowing us to reexamine how the material and linguistic come together in events of reading. By way of example we mention two specific instantiations of the material turn here: the renewed attention to materiality in linguistic anthropology and the shift toward new materialism in literacy studies. First, in the edited volume Language and Materiality, linguistic anthropologists Shalini Shankar and Jillian Cavanaugh make the case for “examining language materially” (2017, 1). By this they mean a consideration of the sensual forms of language, such as its sound, appearance, or format, as well as its embeddedness in a political economy—its material power and effects, for example, on class relations or gendered subjects. They argue that this focus on “language materiality” (2017, 1) can deepen our analyses of how the linguistic and the material do not exist alongside each other as two distinct entities in everyday human life but instead combine in processes of valuing and meaning-making. From a different angle, linguistic anthropologist Courtney Handman has also examined how language and materiality might be viewed together in an anthropological analysis. She has used an infrastructural approach to language in her work on Christian groups in Papua New Guinea, exploring how Christians relate to language and roads in similar ways (Handman 2017). The “soft”

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infrastructure of language and the “hard” infrastructure of roads both enable (and disable) channels between places. Moreover, they overlay and merge into each other in multiple ways, for example, as words take on material form in order to be passed on, as speakers move, or as communication is made possible by a road. If we follow this infrastructural circulation we notice chains of media that create channels between entities as diverse as remote valleys and urban centers, Bible readers, and God. The second instantiation of the material turn that we want to highlight comes from literacy studies. Educational researchers Kim Lenters and Mairi McDermott have observed that scholars who study literacy have recently become especially attentive to how learning to read is “an affective and embodied process emerging in a particular place” (2020, 1). This shifts our attention away from conceptualizing literacy as a cognitive act and toward a focus on the imbrication of the discursive and material in literacy processes. Lenters and McDermott explore this shift by drawing on concepts from new materialism in their edited volume Affect, Embodiment, and Place in Critical Literacy. While new materialism is a loose umbrella term for a number of approaches that center the material (e.g., actor-network theory, object-oriented ontology), they draw especially on posthumanism, that is, the analytical orientation of decentering human agency. Lenters and McDermott present the classroom—and, by extension, we might think here of any scene of reading—as “an assemblage of people, objects, materials, ideas, policies, practices, texts, events, and places, each with its own histories and trajectories” (2020, 4). The intersecting trajectories of these discursive and material elements create a certain unpredictability when reading happens. In this view, reading is much more than a linguistic act of decoding texts. Instead, reading is an encounter undertaken by “bodyminds” (e.g., Schalk 2018) who may find that the encounter leaves them not just knowing something new but perhaps feeling, doing, or being something new in their relations. These brief glimpses into two instantiations of the material turn are necessarily quite abbreviated. But we hope they can gesture toward how our vantage point today, following the material turn, enables us to reinvigorate some of the original questions posed by The Ethnography of Reading. In our view, some of the most interesting questions take up the key ideas from the above paragraphs: How do the tangible forms of a text interact with the political process of subject formation? How does our view of reading shift if we think of it as a moment of circulation, made possible by and making possible a certain infrastructure or connection

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between places? What are the affective processes of any given bodymind that is reading, and what are the effects of these affects? Let us sketch one possible way of working with such questions by using the example of our comparative research on Protestant women reading the biblical story of Mary and Martha, described at the beginning of the chapter. Protestant women in 1920s Norway and the 1950s US drew complex connections between their lives and the figures of Mary and Martha as they read and discussed the passage in groups, facilitated by numerous written commentaries. These commentaries in turn often placed Mary and Martha, who operated as moral exemplars to differing degrees, vividly within readers’ lived worlds. They might be placed, for example, in the gendered pressures of 1950s homemaking in US communities, furthering the idea that they were relatable figures. Moreover, readers were encouraged through the linguistic and narrative elements of these texts to forge certain affective relationships to Mary and Martha. They were drawn to Mary’s stillness as she sat quietly listening at the feet of Jesus, a clearly “good” figure in many readings of the story. They were sometimes critical of Martha who busied herself with housework, though they still devoted, almost defiantly, considerable time and words to appreciating Martha’s position. These affective stances seem to have felt empowering to many readers. But at the same time, they maintained gendered, raced, and classed hierarchies, for example, when readers defined the morality of their own housework over against the racialized, “othering” foils of “heathen” women or less nurturant mothers. White middle-class Protestant women in 1920s Norway and the 1950s US were not simply involved in an encapsulated experience of solitary reading, in other words. Instead, their bodyminds were engaged in an act that was inseparably shaped by linguistic and material factors. These included authoritative discourses within their own communities about working women, contemporary redefinitions of more or less worthy forms of Protestant women’s work “at home,” the material circumstances of their daily labor, religious organizations that made possible and disallowed certain textual interpretations, and political-economic structures that made reading an act of Christian service in the world but also enabled some women more than others to devote “free” or leisure time to contemplative study. In each case, the women’s reading would have been a different reading if they had not been part of particular infrastructures— such as Lutheran organizations with published periodicals—or if they had not perceived connections between themselves and certain religiously

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significant places—such as “mission fields.” In sum, asking these questions led us to a language materiality approach that explored the far-reaching ways that reading is a thoroughly cultural act, both material and discursive. Creative work is required by scholars to bring all these elements back into the scene of reading, challenging the ideological cordoning off of reading as cognitive, solitary, and free of cultural and political influences.

Conclusion We have concentrated on how we might pick up questions from The Ethnography of Reading and extend them in light of the material turn that has taken place since that edited volume was published. The book’s original questions can be reinvigorated through these new conversations, especially the issue of the relationship between language and materiality. But in conclusion we would like to turn the tables. Is there something that our conversations today can learn from the thirty-year-old volume? The edited collection as a whole maps ways to appreciate the materiality of reading, though the contributors did not name it as such. They drew in a wide range of materiality as they sought to weave an ethnographic understanding of reading, without pausing to self-consciously disarticulate the “material” from the “discursive.” Today there may be a certain tendency to theorize these separately, partly due to the material turn, so that an examination of characters in a story might perhaps be separated from an examination of reading bodies, or an examination of plot development might be separated from an examination of sites in which reading takes place. Perhaps this is where we have something to learn from The Ethnography of Reading. The volume points toward how the particular linguistic-material operation of reading has the potential to integrate these theoretical conversations that might otherwise pull in different directions. The chapters handle elements as diverse as textual and intersubjective ties to local geography and popular culture, the social infrastructure of reading, read names as indexical ties to ancestors and the local territory, and dematerialized reading in colonized spaces. They show us that there might be something to be gained by not halting to define the limits of what counts as “materiality” or even to separate it cleanly from the “discursive.” Rather, their analyses of the conjoining of language and materiality encompass diverse bodies, figures and characters, concrete places and imagined spaces, handled and circulated documents and stories, and much more.

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At the same time, the volume is finely attuned to the mechanisms within reading that enable or disable this interplay between language and material bodies, places, objects, structures, and infrastructures. The chapters show that some critical work is required to “[put] language and materiality together at the center of analysis” (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2017, 1). The material dimensions of reading can unobtrusively recede into the background or be pushed to the side. For example, we can gain further insight from observations in The Ethnography of Reading—such as in Sarris’ chapter—that certain aspects of reading practice can disincline or dissociate readers from the material and social relations of reading, arresting meaningful connections between the lively, material implications of read plots, places, tales, and characters. It is then not so much the case that the material infrastructure of reading is readily available to all—even if hidden ideologically due to the influence of modernism, as Long describes— but that specific mechanisms can selectively highlight or dim awareness of the materiality of language within acts of reading.

References Baker, James N. 1993. The Presence of the Name: Reading Scripture in an Indonesian Village. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 98–138. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, Tony, and Patrick Joyce, eds. 2013. Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn. London: Routledge. Boyarin, Jonathan, ed. 1993a. The Ethnography of Reading. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1993b. Introduction. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 1–9. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1993c. Voices Around the Text: The Ethnography of Reading at Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 212–237. Berkeley: University of California Press. Halvorson, Britt, and Ingie Hovland. 2021. Reconnecting Language and Materiality in Christian Reading: A Comparative Analysis of Two Groups of Protestant Women. Comparative Studies in Society and History 63 (2): 499–529. Handman, Courtney. 2017. Walking like a Christian: Roads, Translation, and Gendered Bodies as Religious Infrastructure in Papua New Guinea. American Ethnologist 44 (2): 315–327. Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, eds. 2007. Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge.

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Lenters, Kim, and Mairi McDermott. 2020. Introducing Affect, Embodiment, and Place in Critical Literacy; Mapping Posthuman Concepts. In Affect, Embodiment, and Place in Critical Literacy: Assembling Theory and Practice, ed. Kim Lenters and Mairi McDermott, 1–27. New York: Routledge. Long, Elizabeth. 1993. Textual Interpretation as Collective Action. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 180–211. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sarris, Greg. 1993. Keeping Slug Woman Alive: The Challenge of Reading in a Reservation Classroom. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 238–269. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schalk, Sami. 2018. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shankar, Shalini, and Jillian R. Cavanaugh. 2017. Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction. In Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations, ed. Jillian R. Cavanaugh and Shalini Shankar, 1–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Reading Context: On the Ethnography of Translation and Commentary Andrew Brandel

A word has meaning against the context of a sentence. A sentence has meaning against the context of a language. A language has meaning against the context of a form of life. A form of life has meaning against the context of a world. A world has meaning against the context of a word. —Cavell, The Senses of Walden, 112

In the introduction to The Ethnography of Reading, Jonathan Boyarin (1993a) pointed to the need to study reading and writing as activities socially embedded within historical and cultural contexts. This commitment simultaneously led him to reimagine the possibilities for dialogue between contemporary anthropology and literary studies. If one approach to such an exchange was to apply ready-made anthropological concepts to a rarefied terrain set apart as literature, Boyarin and the other contributors

A. Brandel (*) Division of Social Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rosen (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0_4

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to the volume were instead interested in what they thought of as a “collaborative exploration of a shared human field”—a collaboration in which it seemed like the anthropologists were primarily invested in plumbing “living textuality” while scholars of literature traced the “textual remains of the past” (1993a, 2). Boyarin felt that what anthropology had to offer by way of complement to literary studies was a manner of attending to “shifts of meaning in context” produced through “processes carried out by active subjects and not merely enactments of a superorganic structure” (3). Inspired as well by the ethnography of speaking, the volume demonstrated how this point of view could also help anthropologists compare social practices across different contexts as processes rather than things. Elsewhere I have argued that the pertinent sense of context here is not so much a rigid frame within which a practice or event unfolds but something produced through the concrete use of language (Brandel 2023). This point of view means attending to shifts in the meaning of reading itself rather than beginning from a sharply bounded and pre-given definition. Said otherwise, one important aspect of the ethnography of reading is an exploration of what counts as reading, which we come to discover by scrutinizing its ordinary use in varied contexts. And because reading in turn is embedded within a whole form of life, with each example, and each context, reading activates a different network of related concepts. These might include readerly actions such as memorizing, reciting, publishing, editing, performing, or sharing but also more dispersed things like walking, eating, praying, and cooking. This is especially true for those of us interested in how texts, practices, and ideas travel into new contexts. In many cases, ethnographers have seen these differences reflected in (changes in) the materiality of reading. Bérénice Gaillemin (2011), for instance, has shown how in communities like Padocyo in Bolivia, whole texts of the Catechism brought by missionaries are memorized for recitation by reading small clay figurines arranged in spirals on the ground that function as syllabograms. Their use, Gaillemin argues, requires the reader to decipher the code by switching between semantic and phonemic registers and relies heavily on homophones in Spanish and Quechua. Reading in this context is bound to a place, and since the circles are arranged in a specific way throughout the room, different groups of readers are physically located at different moments in the story. And while texts are read aloud lexical sign by sign, they are simultaneously read at a glance as readers and students glean meaning from spatial arrangements and the motivation of certain signs. Likewise, in his book on the Jewish Orthodox

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publishing house ArtScroll, Jeremy Stolow (2010) has argued that innovations in design and publication technology have enabled a “voice of Haredi authority”—a stringent “scripturalist” interpretation of law—to take a more confident and central position in broader English-speaking Jewish public arenas. These shifts, Stolow shows, have come with attendant changes in books’ mode of address, the ways they are used, and even the social contexts and manners in which they are read. In recent years, ethnographers have also shifted attention beyond the formal contexts of specialized reading and toward other scenes within the everyday (Rosen 2015, 2019).1 Matthew Rosen points in particular to ethnographies of the state, especially those focused on the lives of documents. This includes work like Matthew Hull’s (2012) with bureaucrats in Pakistan and their manners of reading (or not reading, having others read, or detecting who had read) piles of government papers. One could add examples from research on courts, as Serra Hakyemez (2017) has done on the 1980 military court trials of Kurds, showing how prisoners circulated small notes toward the production of a collective defense, and read and commented on each other’s poetry on the backs and margins of paperwork, as well as how the writings of the first Turkish president were read aloud to prisoners every day. Other examples include reading street signs in diasporic communities (S.  Das 2020), newspapers in teashops (Cody 2011), self-study of religious texts to fight legal battles over seizure of property (Khan 2012), or word cards in a language classroom (Stebler 2020). While such examples are often not written explicitly under the sign of the ethnography of reading, as Rosen notes, the breadth of ordinary reading practices can offer important insights into the social worlds in which they are situated and potentially illuminate one another. 1  Two further points of specification are worth note. The first is Reed’s (2018) important caution that the tendency to dissolve particular concepts into more general ones can have the effect of obviating the specificity of certain practices. In the case of the ethnography of reading, Reed argues, this has been an issue for studies of fiction-reading, which remains relatively understudied compared to the reading of bureaucratic documents, even if the latter, as Rosen (2015) points out, is less frequently interpreted within the contours of ethnography of reading. My own interest is in the way each example also tests how much flexibility a concept like reading can tolerate as we move from one context to another, including our sense of when it does not fit (Brandel 2021, 538). Second, much has been written on the notion of the everyday in anthropology, especially in relation to ethics, and it would be a worthwhile addition to these discussions (though beyond my scope here) to think through what we mean by the term, as well as others in its domain, like the ordinary.

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The point is that in each of these very different cases, attention to what counts as reading opens connections to other contexts and to other subfields and disciplines, whether the history of the book, folkloristics, painting, material culture, the anthropology of the state, law, or ritual. But given the density of this network of meanings in context, their similarities and differences, what enables us to see connections? How, in other words, do we describe the particularity of “lived textuality” in this context while remaining attentive to its overlaps with others? Is it that all instances of reading have some feature in common, that they share a basic element, or rather, as I am given to think, that these connections are more like “family resemblances” (Wittgenstein 1953, 32e), where the connection between one example of reading and another might be different from what connects each to a third? What allows us to see something as reading, to feel that concept “fits the facts” in a particular context? Aren’t our criteria that allow us to project concepts from context to another also grown from particular forms of life (Brandel and Motta 2021)? The question seems to lurk somewhat below the level of comparison. To think through this issue, I turn to examples from recent work on reading practices associated with the movement of texts into new contexts through practices of translation and commentary. But rather than a restricted view of translation (as a transposition of meaning from a source to a target) or of commentary (as writing on writing), I approach these practices as forms of reading, within which different pictures of movement in language emerge.

Translation as Reading Consider Roma Chatterji’s (2020) work on Gond art that developed in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, in the 1980s. As Chatterji shows, this work involved a set of practices that “emerged self-consciously in the precinct of a modern institution, Bharat Bhawan, at a time when modern art the world over was questioning its European legacy” (2020, 108). J.  Swaminathan, the group’s founder, worked closely with a group of young adivasi artists to develop a new vernacular aesthetics, a style of painting borne of local craft traditions. The Pardhan-Gonds, Chatterji explains, were the “bards of this group and have a tradition of epic singing and storytelling” (16); as bards, they would travel to the homes of patrons in specific clans to tell stories about specific lineages and kings (40). The Pardhan-Gonds were said to have special access to the mythic universe,

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but given the complexity of the pantheon, they never developed a systemized iconography. But the introduction of new media and forms of painting “allowed an iconography to emerge, an iconography that was flexible and unhampered by rigid codification” (41). These artists saw their work as tapping into an existing narrative tradition without simply depicting stories. Rather than connecting multiple figures through a scene or trying to capture movement in time through the display of successive actions, the first generation, for instance, used color and surface designs to suggest their interrelation. If the stories and images occupied different narrative registers, neither was fully autonomous, and neither merely illustrated the other. What’s more, these works moved again as these repertoires of stories were taken up by the state, the market, and new media, which acted to sustain this practice as “traditional” art through transformations that “suit[ed] new tastes and forms of community” (120). The result is a narrative universe constituted through the encounter of overlapping forces— an aesthetic grammar of tradition, the creative work of individual artists, the pressures of institutionalized art-worlds. While not usually considered an example in the ethnography of reading, how should we describe these successive mediations? Does it seem right to say that in approaching these images we are reading a story, one constituted by this weave of various media, genre, and contexts? And if so, what do they offer to its theorization? Chatterji suggests one possibility through the question of translation across genres. If genres often serve to orient readers, to help attune them to aspects of a text that suggest interpretations, what happens in a situation where the performer and audience come from different performative and textual traditions? Or as she puts it: “can genre speak across the gulf” (214)? This, it turns out, was something already well theorized within the performative traditions she describes, in which storytellers and artists approached the incorporation of new events, practices, and motifs through thematic connections and specific grammatical devices, as a continuation of a tradition rather than its rupture. In lieu of the idiom of loss and gain familiar to studies of translation, Chatterji’s view shows how the extension into new contexts transforms textual practices while preserving their inner constancy. “From this perspective,” she writes, “text production itself could be seen as a mode of reading. New texts, new genres of expression even, may grow out of creative interactions with texts. In fact the full potential of a genre may only be revealed through the process of its translation into another medium or another genre” (215). For Chatterji, these movements are acts of

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translation (material, narratological, and linguistic) because they transform the scope of stories, and they allow stories to travel in new forms. Translation in this context connotes a process of self-translation that discloses a “neighborhood of otherness” already present within the story. It allows different details to come to the fore, new arrangements or repetitions to take shape, and new reading publics to be activated. If translation has often been problematically positioned as a metaphor for ethnography itself, important work in the last two decades of linguistic anthropology has demonstrated the need to think the two together without collapsing them.2 Among the most influential has been Silverstein’s (2003) classic argument that ethnography provided a necessary “route of transduction”—that is, movements in the tone and “indexical penumbra” of an utterance from one context to another, which he distinguishes from grammatical translations of referential meaning. The difference, in turn, relies on a fine distinction between movements between cultural worlds and linguistic systems, the boundaries of which are sharpened and brought to life by ethnographic contextualization (Leavitt 2014). Scholars working in the traditions of the ethnography of speaking and ethnopoetics have emphasized that this implies the need for collaboration not only to move content from one cultural context to another but also to facilitate understanding the ways texts are made and accompanying “local” theories of meaning. For McDowell (1998), for example, the “ethnographer [contributes] linguistic and literary expertise, the native associates [provide] orientation to local meaning and understanding” (299). From the point of view of the ethnography of reading, several additional questions are worth putting on the table. Why should we assume that the anthropologist’s expertise and theory of language are movable, whereas their collaborators remain local examples of a more general theory? Can the ethnographic example play a different role in the making of 2  I won’t rehearse in full the critique of this position here since it is well-trodden territory in the literature but note only how formative Asad’s (1986) early essay on this literature has been. If earlier scholars thought of anthropology as itself an act of translation between cultural contexts, some, like Ernest Gellner, worried that anthropologists might be tempted to lend “too much” coherence to concepts in other societies that were, by their nature, incoherent. Asad pointed out, however, that among the problems with this view was that it gave the anthropologist/translator a kind of privileged authority to ascribe an inner sense, or coherence, to other societies. Asad points out that there is a deep “inequality of languages” evinced in, among other things, the “fact that there are asymmetrical tendencies in the pressures in the languages of dominated and dominant societies” (1986, 164).

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a theory other than as an illustration of a claim? How might it help us interrogate those theories (Boyarin 1993b, 222)? Relatedly, is translation primarily an activity undertaken by experts, or can we think of it instead as a normal part of life in language in many contexts? How different would such collaborations and the descriptions and translations they produce look if we started from a different picture of language itself? Could we think of ethnography as a site in which different practices and concepts of reading (including the ethnographer’s) cross, even if to displace, contest, complicate, or complement one another (Morris 2000)? And what role do everyday practices of translations play in the making of political or ethical contexts, in addition to the religious and artistic (Odabaei 2019)? The promise of ethnography on this score is that it helps us explore the different ways societies imagine what a language is and what it does, what it means to be in language, and how to see movements of various kinds within and across languages. We can look for inspiration especially to collaborations in the production of translations of the kind undertaken by Anthony Webster (2014) with the poet Rex Lee Jim (among others), which highlight how such conversations help attune the ethnographer to subtleties of meaning and offer important correctives and critiques of hegemonic theories of language. Webster’s practice is illuminating here not only for the descriptions it offers of Jim’s interventions in the anthropologist’s efforts but also because it juxtaposes the different pictures of translation available in the encounter. In an essay on the use of ideophones in Navajo poetry, Webster offers an extended example which includes the use of a device that often follows ideophones in reduplicated sets and which he glosses initially as “it sounds, it sounded.” The poem itself also embeds a pun through the reduplicated ideophone; the word “mouse” can be morphologically analyzed as something akin to “the one who goes about sucking.” The final word is ambiguous semantically, Webster explains, and can be glossed either as “it kissed,” “it sucked,” or “to perform a sucking rite.” The result is the following gloss: Mouse suck, suck sounding kiss

Webster describes how the gloss is the result of the collaboration: for example, Jim suggests “sounding” instead of “that’s how it sounds” since

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it has the sense of an ongoing activity. But Webster also compares Jim’s translations over time with his own in a way that highlights the limits of translation, especially where the materiality of language is concerned. Webster shows how Jim offers a range of “creative transpositions” in different contexts: English poems that resonate semantically with a Navajo “original” at the expense of resonances in sound and stress. In this sense, Webster (2016) argues, both “fail” as translations. But their failures, he goes on to suggest, bring “into relief the ofness of language, its materiality, its physicality, its muscularity,” the importance of which has long been elided in dominant Western theories of language. Alexandra Jaffe’s (1999) work on a public debate among Corsican translators about the translation of French novels is another important example. Corsica, like many parts of Europe, was undergoing a shift from so-called regional languages to the language of the state, to which ethnonationalists responded with a program of language revitalization, shaped by what proved to be shared assumptions about the relationship between language, identity, and national autonomy. In a highly mediatized controversy over the publication of Jean-Joseph Franchi’s (a Corsican writer) translation of the French novel Knock, critics voiced disagreement about the use of translation in a “project of resistance to French language domination.” Jaffe shows how translators and culturels not only offered an important critique of the linguistic ideology of normative monolingualism but also put forward a way of thinking about the relationship between personal artistic freedom and collective projects of emancipation. “Translation,” she argues, “is metalinguistics and metacultural activity which makes explicit contrasts and conflicts between modes of discourse and models of linguistic value and power which are able to remain buried or implicit in much of everyday life and in some other forms of writing.” If the translation (and mistranslation) of literature and, particularly, poetry has been a perennial concern, ethnographers have begun to look at translation practices in other contexts as well. Cristiana Giordano (2008), to take one important example, has demonstrated how practices of translation in an ethnopsychiatric clinic in Italy reflect and refract different assumptions about citizenship. Institutions like hospitals, shelters, schools, and courtrooms, Giordano argues, all proved sites in which translations were undertaken that served to “produce an intelligible account of the migrant.” This approach allows Giordano to trace the different conceptions of citizenship staked in the production of a criminal report or in a psychiatrist’s formal diagnosis. But such scenes also make available another

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picture of translation, one that did not correspond to conventional binaries of Western philosophy (i.e., the full translatability of natural languages on the one hand and irreducible opacity on the other). “Being caught in webs of translation,” Giordano writes, “was a quotidian experience for me and the people with whom I did research.” And it is from this quotidian experience that offers another way to think about movements in language. In my own research on literary culture and mobility in Germany, I have traced how practices of fiction and poetry reading can carry profound political stakes for those moving through the migration system (Brandel 2020, 2023). For example, it was possible for some writers to secure expedited asylum, housing, and stipends, if they could make their work legible to the state. But this required performing their suffering and their alterity according to anticipated forms of expression; in short, accepting translations of their lives and words they might have found inadequate or violent. In the genre of a letter of petition, for example, writers might draw direct parallels between their experiences as a writer with those of writers who fled Nazi violence or evaded Stasi surveillance. When Liao Yiwu, for instance, found himself persecuted by the state in China for his “seditious poetry,” he wrote an open letter to then Chancellor Merkel: My Name is Liao Yiwu, I am a writer from the bottom of Chinese society … perhaps you [Merkel] were trampled upon, humiliated, had your freedom restricted [because you once lived in dictatorial East Germany], and have some understanding of how I feel at this very moment. When the Berlin Wall fell you were 35 years old, I was 31 years old; that year the June Fourth massacre also happened; the night it happened I created and recited the long poem, “Massacre” [unofficial English translation of 屠杀, Tusha]. For this I was arrested and imprisoned for four years. (Modified from the excerpt cited in Brandel 2023)

Drawing parallels was also central to the work undertaken in salons, interviews, and bookstore signings. It showed up too in practices of translation. And while many were willing to accept these terms for themselves, to take on readings of their work and biographies that typically operated by means of one-for-one exchanges with European “equivalents,” in order to reach new audiences and secure legal protections, there were also some who refused. For the writers I knew who were unwilling to be read on these terms, costs could be severe and included the loss of funds and social exclusion. One writer I came to know well and who had been living in exile in Germany for a decade told me she was so hurt by the translations

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of her work, by their erasure of the “myths in her language,” by their sole interest in “political headlines” and not “the real things,” that she has stopped working with translators all together. She felt she neither could write in her first language, since she had been cut off from that society by exile, nor wanted her work in German, and so started writing in English, though she struggled to find a venue for her work. Her use of English was in turn subject to derision by critics and translators with powerful institutional backing. In a sense, she found herself cut off twice. There were also writers I knew who wanted their work to be read in such a way that the usual picture of translation would be unsettled, if not wholly reimagined. Instead of starting from the assumption that a certain closure exists around distinct languages, only to be overcome by expert translation or literary magic, there were those who saw the coexistence of languages through apparatuses internal to a language, importantly, to the feel of words. In this way, activities described as translation aren’t figured as a pressure from the outside but rather a potential already within the grammar of a language. One writer whose work I return to frequently, Yoko Tawada, poses a question of how to think not only about the usual figurations of language crossing, like code-switching, but also about the force of contingently proximate languages, as in the case when one is riding the bus, or the subway, or overhears a conversation in a restaurant, and “two sentences … one right after the other penetrates my ear by chance don’t yet occupy a common space” (2016). One often sees nowadays, she explains, different words and even different worlds “standing next to each other” (Nebeneinanderstehen) but for which we do not yet have a “corresponding frame.” Consider one crucial example: When I hear two words that sound similar, from Japanese and from Germany, gathered together, they needn’t be historically related. A kind of noodle soup is called for example in exactly the same way as the German word “Rahmen.” A restaurant where one can buy these noodles, could be called “Rahmenhandlung.” These two words have of course nothing to do with each other historically. Therefore such a phenome- non is not taken seriously and dismissed as coincidence … people with stiff brains would ask me: why do you have to busy yourself with such a word game?

Literary critics have pointed out that the coincidence of the sounds and the simultaneous use of interlingual and intralingual homonyms point to

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an experience of the indeterminacy that issues from perceiving multiple possibilities in a word at the same time, such that we can listen in different ways to the same sentence (Yildiz 2013). Multiple aspects are preserved in this case because the distinction is not marked inflectionally or morphologically, and yet there is a shift in what it is possible to perceive thanks to the twinning of sounds. The example itself also theorizes the situation. Rahmenhandlung, as it is used here, can also mean a framing story or narrative. The connections that arise do not dissolve into pre-existing frames then but rather create and are created by a frame—their coincidence and surprise generating new kinds of conditions and new perceptions, or “poetic correspondences,” through the crossings of words or sounds from many different languages. They acquire depth in this way, Tawada says, quite different from the idea of depth uncovered by historical or philological points of mutual derivation (Brandt and Tawada 2005).

Commentary as Reading If the translation of poetry or migration institutions are obvious places to look for reading practices where movement in context is theorized, commentarial traditions are perhaps less so. In his own contribution to The Ethnography of Reading, Jonathan Boyarin describes the social processes “around” a text in a yeshiva classroom on the Lower East Side of New York. In so doing, he offers an important vantage on the imbrication of reading strategies in what he calls “general strategies of personhood in a world of multiple and conflicting cultural demands” (1993b, 215). Boyarin shows, for example, how the group’s teacher might combine patterns of intonation common to oral study of Talmud with a term from an advertising campaign or adopt an interpretative strategy from a rabbinic source like Rashi to incorporate examples from Rogers and Hammerstein in making a Biblical verb legible. Such efforts at elaboration, interpretation, and movement are testament to the fact that “the work of translation,” in space but also in time, is never exhausted and instead “needs to be constantly taken up and renewed” (225). Boyarin’s point is that the dialogic reading undertaken in the classroom is not limited to what is “inside” the text, though these too are of course multivocal. As with the example from Chatterji above, the everyday life of the text, its ongoing creation, and even dispute are not breaks from but are essential to their textual logic. Opening space for reading the voices “around” and “inside” the text together—and perhaps complicating our assumptions about the

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strict opposition in the first place—extends moreover our understanding of who or what counts for the ethnography of reading. Jonathan Boyarin’s focus on voice is inspired by his elder brother Daniel Boyarin’s (1986) work on the dialogical quality of early rabbinic commentaries on the Bible, which offers a “reading of a reading” of one narrative where multiple voices contesting one another constitute a literary unity while preserving an essential heterogeneity. Here the voices of commentators appear as an echo of the voices in the texts they are reading. In his own contribution to The Ethnography of Reading, for example, Daniel Boyarin (1993) examines the meaning that accrues to reading, it’s “semantic affinities and fields” in Biblical Hebrew texts as opposed to those located in “modern European culture.” His approach involves comparing scenes of reading in the Bible (where relevant terms describe performative speech acts that occur aloud, including to command, call, proclaim) and in the commentarial tradition (where a host of linked terms are used to indicate activities including repetition, training one’s eyes, inviting, lecturing, calling, reciting, to perform a ritual) alongside its meaning in the likes of Augustine, Aristotle, and Dante. Daniel Boyarin here appeals to ethnography as a way of interpreting the connection between semantic fields and world making; in other words, how an analysis of linguistic behavior in texts tells us something about the worlds in which they are embedded. The rub, he argues, looks at one level like a classic one in ethnographic theory, about the relationship between models internal to a language or culture and “observed practice.” But we can assume that what counts for the observer (say that Biblical narrative appears as fiction) is a salient concept for authors or characters (e.g., the distinction between historiography and fiction) or that it can be extended in the same ways. Our capacity to read a text as something, or to see a practice as reading, tells me something important about this language and this world. The aim thus becomes a description of the crisscrossing of concepts from different domains of experience, from vernacular and anthropological registers (V. Das 2020), even when tokened by the same sign. This insight can take us in several interesting directions but let me mark two. In his important work with members of the Henry Williamson Society, Adam Reed (2019) has shown how something like an interest in a minor character, for example, can be an important way in which people confront their place in the world, their feelings of neglect, or their anxiety about imminent death. These characters are not contained to the bindings of the book; they are people and voices Reed’s interlocutors live with, to accompany, sympathize with, respond, and attend to—they are

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“actualized”—real persons, whose experiences are bound up with their readers and with history. Writers and readers have described similar experiences in my own research in Berlin. One writer I knew well, for instance, described a character who had been particularly difficult to live with: “She makes me nervous, sometimes I go to a café only because that is what she wanted. They live with us. For me, the characters in a novel, they live with me. I see her, I think about her, what she will do, what she wants” (Brandel 2023). This “lived engagement with characters in the world” (Reed 2019), this “ontological commitment” (Benoist 2021) of readers, requires ethnographic engagement to extend to the voices and characters of texts then too. The second point is that not only is the distinction between “inside” and “outside” the text—between readers with one another and with what’s read—complicated by a view from the ethnography of reading (a concept of which is itself simultaneously extended by the example), so too is connection between one text and another. Might we then think of an ethnographic sensibility in the approach to one text’s reading of another? In his extensive body of work on the commentarial tradition of classical China, Michael Puett has shown how the collectors, authors, and editors of late antiquity theorized the movement of texts into future contexts and worlds, particularly when they are read as the works of a great sage. For example, Puett (2017) shows how uses of single lines from the Shijing (Classics of Poetry) would be taken up and read in different, often counter-­ intuitive ways in different contexts, and that one seldom encounters a reading of a full poem. Especially creative uses could then be built upon to yet further ends. The same was true of characters in stories. Rather than debates about putative facts about what happened in the past, the interest is in the possibilities for rearrangement. In this way, collecting and commenting on a text became less a matter of ascribing authorship and internal meaning of a whole, and more a question of how some aspect, line, or detail can be moved into new contexts, without denigrating the greatness of the sage who originally collated it. Sagely authority, in other words, was a claim made through a process of curating repositories of significant knowledge and not, by contrast, completed or perfect truth or views (Puett 2009). “Instead of a process of texts being written as texts, to which commentaries would later be affixed,” what results is “a process by which early self-defined commentaries defined the texts they were commenting upon” (Puett 2017, 115). In this sense, the activity of reading appears as writing, and even as translation, since both “involve moving a body of material into a new register and re-reading it accordingly” (Brandel

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et  al. 2023). Even texts that appear to suggest readings that run quite counter to these movements—like the Laozi, which has no marked references, allusions, or quotations—can be seen as commentaries, when we begin to notice how, for example, the speaker of a particular line or even a narrator is substituted, or read as someone else, in subsequent contexts— as in the case of Laozi, which is also read as written by the Way itself or by Buddha.

Conclusion In the passage that stands as the epigraph to this chapter, Stanley Cavell (1972) offers a powerful way of thinking about how our words locate us in a world. For Cavell, what matters is how a word creates a world or how the creation of a world, as he puts it, “is a matter of succession, as words are.” It is not only that a word has a context in light of its position within a world, or even a system of grammar, as though these were a given, but that a world has a context in a word. Words are, as Cavell was always wont to remind us, both a matter of inheritance, something we discover, and for which no rule or definition provides a guardrail. We don’t know ahead of time whether using a word in this context will “fit.” But we also come to know, or even come to weave, a context, through our use of language. Reading context, I have argued here, means looking to see in each case what counts as reading, and this in turn provides a critical vantage on how contexts are built into human worlds. In each of these examples, we’ve encountered a different way in which movement in language is pictured as an activity of reading. While each seems intuitively to “fit” the concept of reading, each also extended the concept in different directions. Notably, in many of the cases I cited, movement into new contexts was not seen as a rupture but as reflecting the inner constancy of a practice. The ethnography of reading attunes us thereby not only to diverse practices of reading and makes them available for comparison but also to the meaning of reading and its entanglement in contexts across time and space.

References Asad, Talal. 1986. The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology. In Writing Culture, ed. J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus, 141–164. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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———. 2021. Toward a Contextual Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boyarin, Daniel. 1986. Voices in the Text. Reveu Biblique 93: 581–597. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1993. Placing Reading: Ancient Israel and Medieval Europe. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 10–37. Berkeley: University of California Press. Boyarin, Jonathan. 1993a. Introduction. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 1–9. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1993b. Voices Around the Text: The Ethnography of Reading at Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 212–237. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brandel, Andrew. 2020. The Prosody of Social Ties: Poetry and Fleeting Moments in Global Berlin. Current Anthropology 61 (4): 514–543. ———. 2023. Moving Words: Literature, Memory, and Migration in Berlin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Brandel, Andrew, and Marco Motta. 2021. Introduction: Life with Concepts. In Living with Concepts, 1–28. Fordham University Press. Brandel, A., Das, V., and Puett, M. 2023. Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere. Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions 1–35. Brandt, Bettina, and Yoko Tawada. 2005. Ein Wort, ein Ort, or How Words Create Places: Interview with Yoko Tawada. Women in German Yearbook 21: 1–15. Cavell, Stanely. 1972. The Senses of Walden. New York: Viking Press. Chatterji, Roma. 2020. Speaking with Pictures: Folk Art and the Narrative Tradition in India. Delhi: Routledge India. Cody, Francis. 2011. Echoes of the Teashop in a Tamil Newspaper. Language & Communication 31 (3): 243–254. Das, S. N. 2020. Transliterating cities: the interdiscursive ethnohistory of a Tamil Francophonie. Signs and Society 8 (1): 125–154. Das, V. 2020. Textures of the ordinary: doing anthropology after Wittgenstein. Fordham University Press. Gaillemin, B. 2011. Images mémorables pour un texte immuable. Les catéchismes pictographiques testériens (Mexique, XVIe-XIXe siècles). Gradhiva. Revue d’anthropologie et d'histoire des arts 13: 204–225. Giordano, Cristiana. 2008. Practices of Translation and the Making of Migrant Subjectivities in Contemporary Italy. American Ethnologist 35 (4): 588–606. Hakyemez, Serra. 2017. Margins of the Archive: Torture, Heroism, and the Ordinary in Prison no. 5, Turkey. Anthropological Quarterly 90 (1): 107–138. Hull, M. S. 2012. Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Univ of California Press.

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Jaffe, A.  M. 1999. Ideologies in action: Language politics on Corsica (Vol. 3). Walter de Gruyter. Khan, Naveeda. 2012. Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Leavitt, John. 2014. Words and Worlds: Ethnography and Theories of Translation. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 193–220. McDowell, John. 1998. Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morris, R.C., 2000. In the place of origins: Modernity and its mediums in Northern Thailand. Duke University Press. Odabaei, Milad. 2019. The Outside (kharij) of Tradition in the Aftermath of the Revolution: Carl Schmitt and Islamic Knowledge in Postrevolutionary Iran. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 39 (2): 296–311. Puett, Michael. 2009. Sages, Gods, and History: Commentarial Strategies in Chinese Late Antiquity. In Sages, Gods, and History, 1000–1017. ———. 2017. Text and Commentary: The Early Tradition. In The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature, ed. Wiebke Denecke et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reed, Adam. 2018. Literature and Reading. Annual Review of Anthropology 47: 33–45. ———. 2019. Reading Minor Characters: An English Literary Society and Its Culture of Investigation. PMLA 134 (1): 66–80. Rosen, Matthew. 2015. Ethnographies of Reading: Beyond Literacy and Books. Anthropological Quarterly 88 (4): 1059–1083. ———. 2019. Reading Nearby: Literary Ethnography in a Postsocialist City. Anthropology and Humanism 44 (1): 70–87. Tawada, Yoko. 2016. akzentfrei. Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Translation, Transduction, Transformation: Skating ‘glossando’ on Thin Semiotic Ice. In Translating Cultures, ed. Paula G. Rubel and Abraham Rosman, 75–108. Oxford: Berg. Stebler, Joséphine. 2020. La lecture, un jeu d’enfants: scènes d’apprentissage et d’anthropologie. PhD diss, UNIL—Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland. Webster, A. K. 2014. Rex Lee Jim’s ‘Mouse that Sucked’: On iconicity, interwoven-­ ness, and ideophones. Pragmatics and Society 5 (3): 431–444. ———. 2016. The art of failure in translating a Navajo poem. Journal de la Société des Américanistes 102 (102–1): 9–41. Stolow, Jeremy. 2010. Orthodox by Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the ArtScroll Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: The Macmillan Company. Yildiz, Yasemin. 2013. Beyond the Mother Tongue. Fordham University Press.

CHAPTER 5

A Labor Theory of Reading: Physical Hardship, Intensive Repetition, and the Value Regime of the Dujing Movement in Contemporary China Yukun Zeng

Weaving its special texture from anthropological and literary threads, The Ethnography of Reading (Boyarin 1993a) begins with Ursula Le Guin’s handwritten poem “Loud Cows” (1993). Although the poem appears in print, it was written to be performed, to be read aloud, and to squirm out of the textualized cage. In a later talk on the poem titled “Off the Page,” Le Guin (2004) summarizes the social dimension of reading poetry aloud in relation to the social misogyny that seeks to silence women’s voices: It was men who first got poetry off the page, but the act was of great importance to women. Women have a particular stake in keeping the oral functions of literature alive, since misogyny wants women to be silent, and

Y. Zeng (*) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rosen (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0_5

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misogynist critics and academics do not want to hear the woman’s voice in literature, in any sense of the word. (2004, 119–20)

Reading “Loud Cows” against the social conditions and regimes of interpretation in a male-dominated literary community underlines one of the core arguments in The Ethnography of Reading—that is, that reading can be a social act imbued with power. For Le Guin, reading poetry out loud is a particularly meaningful feminist social act. Reclaiming reading as voicing, or more precisely, noising, the syllabic selection of “Loud Cows” intentionally mimics the meaningless mooing of cows. The pragmatics of reading the poem aloud thus exceed the denotational transference of the meaning of the verses; it performs the pure sounding—mobilizing tongue, ear, vocal cords, breathing, bodily demeanors along the meters, capitalized lexicons, prolonged syllables, and other poetic devices created by Le Guin to occupy a certain time of reading and listening. While the poem spans only about fifty lines of verse on the page, I spent about five minutes in each of my attempts to read it aloud.1 As a non-­ native speaker of English, it took even more effort for me to discern and scan the handwritten poem. This is all part of the labor of reading, which is necessary to instantiate the creaky noise that “Loud Cows” allows.

A Different Kind of Reading Aloud Let’s follow Le Guin’s anthropological imagination to another scenario: imagine a group of alien beings sitting together, each with a scriptural text in front of them; the beings are voicing aloud, or making noises, since they seem to care little about the meaning of the text; they continue in this manner not for five minutes but for eight hours a day, and not for the few days an anthropologist might conventionally identify as a ceremony or ritualized event, but day after day, for years. This scenario is not science fiction but something I have observed as a participant in dujing 读经, an educational movement devoted to reading mainly Confucian (but also Daoist, Buddhist, and even some Western) classics in Chinese. Dujing literally means to read classics (du 读: Reading; jing 经: Classics). Since its emergence in Taiwan in 1994, the dujing movement has spread throughout Chinese societies, especially Mainland China. Originally an 1  In the handwritten version in The Ethnography of Reading (1993), there are forty-five lines; in the printed layout of “Off the Page” (2004), there are fifty lines.

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offshoot of contemporary Confucianism, dujing requires participants (including children as young as three or four years of age) to repeatedly read classic texts aloud, without interpretation. Adopting the rote method of reading, dujing promises access to the perennial wisdom of the classics, as opposed to the temporary knowledge of common books. Although dujing first appeared in Taiwan as a supplementary afterschool activity, Mainland dujing has taken a more radical form in which students are required to read aloud eight hours a day. As with my endeavors in reading “Loud Cows” aloud, practicing dujing can be seen as a form of labor involving physical effort and an investment of time and energy. In contrast to reading one short poem at the head of an anthology, however, dujing is a form of “intensive” reading in Roger Chartier’s sense of “reading applied only to a few texts” (1992, 57). Chartier contrasted this with “extensive” reading, which he defined as “consuming many texts, passing without constraint from one to another, granting little consecration [sacralité] to the object read” (57). According to this oppositional typology, it makes sense to see the reading of any “classic” or “canonical” literature as intensive, insofar as the focus necessarily falls on a limited number of designated texts and often involves efforts of repetition, recitation, and interpretation. However, for the sake of identifying the particular labor dimension of dujing, I approach the intensity of reading not just in terms of the number of texts that are read but with respect to how much time is spent on reading. “Reading applied to only a few texts” entails reading these texts repeatedly. Therefore, reading is no longer a meandering journey unconstrained by the demands of time. Instead, it involves “hardship,” “discipline,” and “work.” These concepts, which are familiar in our academic institutes, capture the labor dimension of reading I am after. Here reading is experienced and considered as physical and temporal, as a matter of sacrifice and investment that entails measuring value in terms of labor time and reckoning progress toward knowledge or wisdom. In addition to physical effort and an investment of time and energy, then, the labor of reading is necessarily entangled with and enchanted by value theories. Theorizing reading as labor thus opens to further questions. What can a laborious process of reading achieve? Under the modern ideology of reading which trivializes reading or relegates it to the consumption pole of the production-­ consumption dichotomy (de Certeau 1988), how would one valuate the labor of reading? How do labor-intensive practice of reading challenge these ideologies of reading? In the case of dujing, I show how participants

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mobilize concepts like keku (刻苦, “to overcome the hardship”) to shift established ideologies of reading, to reconcile labor and reading, and to carve out a different value regime, in which readers invest time, labor, hope, and struggle in pursuit of an elusive Confucian moral personhood. Juxtaposing reading and labor, I simultaneously question the presumed lightness and heaviness of these practices. In this way, I seek to renew the concepts of both reading and labor. By engaging the category of labor, I attend to the transformative potentiality of reading—not only within a given social framing but also regarding its potential to challenge and change what is given. And though I am wary of mapping Western concepts onto the socially and historically specific agendas of dujing, like other non-Western movements based on literacies (Mahmood 2005; Cody 2013), I find it useful to approach dujing according to the established social science concept of social movement (Diani 1992). However, given the amount of time, energy, and value participants invest in dujing, I am especially interested in the question of how the dujing movement is carving out a productive yet precarious space for a new kind of labor. Moving from social to labor, then, I attend to the way dujing unsettles the comfortable zone of reading that most (Chinese) people presume. Building on scholarship in the anthropology of labor that delves into the conceptualization, mobilization, and operation of forms of labor that are different from labor in the modern industrial scenario (Povinelli 1993; Ingold 2000; Sargent 2021), I follow the ideology, practice, and movement of dujing in an effort to show how it redistributes the complex relations between reading, understanding, text, personhood, knowledge, and wisdom.

The Physical Labor of Reading in Dujing My first encounter with the physical dimension of dujing reading came in 2015. This was my first experience sitting in a dujing classroom. Although it was a summer camp instead of a long-term dujing school, the physical shock I experienced there still impresses me. The school is called Liqian, and it is located in a remote suburb of Beijing.2 Its campus is composed of a main building and surrounding fields. As a summer camp introducing students to dujing education, Liqian 2  Other than socially prominent figures like Professor Wang Caigui, the names of all dujing practitioners and institutes have been anonymized.

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offered intensive reading sessions. All students were required to read the Analects 100 times a month. The summer camp even bore the name “Analects 100.” There were about 200 students in total, divided into 6 classes. Most were high school or college students, with a roughly balanced gender ratio. The students’ socio-economic backgrounds and academic performances varied. Since Analects 100 was designed to popularize dujing, most were newcomers to dujing education. The Analects 100 at Liqian featured the then popular method of dujing: candid, intensive reading of the classics. Most students (or their parents) had been interested in dujing before the summer camp. All of them recognized the value of ancient classics. Some of them were unsatisfied or even critical of official education. Some were already devoted to dujing. All were willing to experience the “authentic” dujing training offered by Analects 100, a program endorsed by Professor Wang Caigui. Before describing my physical encounter with dujing, I want to explain the ideology of reading in dujing. I use the term ideology of reading vis-­ à-­vis the concept of language ideology from linguistic anthropology, the local understanding, and rationalization of language (Silverstein 1979; Gal and Irvine 2019). Thus far, I have used the ideology of reading to capture the dujing community’s understanding of what, why, and how to read classics. We (students) learned the reading ideology of dujing in the first week’s evening lectures and learning on dujing theory. What did we read? Classics—the best conveyers of the perennial wisdom in human history. Contrary to the nationalist stereotype of dujing, besides the Confucian classics, the corpus of dujing also includes the Daoist Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi, selections of Buddhist classics, and even Western classics like Plato and Shakespeare. But among them, the most important are the Confucian classics, of which the Analects is the acme. Why do we read the classics? In one of the evening study sessions, we were assigned Professor Wang’s famous The Study of Education Wisdom (2007). In this book, he argues that the most valuable component of the classics is the perennial wisdom, or unchanged dao, which is contrasted with the temporary knowledge that non-classical books hold. To access this wisdom/dao, classics should be reread rather than just read once (e.g. Haeri 2013). And instead of interpreting the text, the best way to access the wisdom is to memorize the classical texts, then wait for their revelation in the critical moments of one’s life. This is far more important than

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immediate understanding of the texts through philological and philosophical interpretation. Reading the Analects and other Chinese classics is considered difficult for a modern Chinese reader, because of the semantical, lexical, and grammatical differences between ancient and modern Chinese. For a native Chinese reader, the common way to read an ancient text is to read one sentence and check the corresponding annotation, usually printed at the bottom of the page. For complex and profound texts like classics, the reader may also check important exegesis and consult experts. For dujing, the entire mental labor process of interpreting and understanding is alleviated. Does this mean that dujing demands no labor? Figure 5.1 is a page of an Analects text used by dujing students. This edition of the Analects is formatted for dujing. Professor Wang describes this edition as “big characters, pinyin transcription, no annotation, traditional Chinese characters” (Wang 2010). By virtue of the big characters, this edition of the Analects appeared to be quite readable. However, when I sat in the classroom and tried to read, I soon found that the seemingly readable text still demanded significant effort. Without annotations, the readability was merely phonological. Although no semantic content is expected to be processed in dujing, to read aloud entails extra effort to ensure the proper pronunciation. Due to the differences between classical and modern Chinese, some characters with which modern readers are familiar are expected to be pronounced in specific ways in Chinese classics. For instance, in the first page of my Analects, the ninth character 弟 of the second chapter usually is pronounced as /dì/ in modern Chinese. But in ancient Chinese, it is pronounced /tì/. Another example is polyphonic characters. Modern Chinese readers have no trouble determining the meaning of a character, given the context in a modern Chinese text. However, deprived of the familiar semantic ground, one is uncertain of which pronunciation to render it in a classical text. For instance, the twentieth character 樂 bears two pronunciations—/lè/ and /yuè/. One needs to just remember that it pronounced /lè/. Apart from pronouncing individual characters, the unfamiliar phrase and syntactical structures offer modern readers no immediate way to segment, pause, and intonate the sentence being read. Difficult as such, for newbie readers like us, the instructor’s guidance and monitoring are necessary. Reading, then, ceases to be an individual action but becomes subject to social attunement. Our teacher would project a sentence aloud at a controlled pace. We would follow the sentence,

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Fig. 5.1  The first page of the first chapter of The Analects used by dujing students

striving to imitate his vocality and pace. We would even be instructed to point to the characters as we read them. If the teacher noticed any disfluency in our reading, he would repeat the sentence, until we had adjusted to the sound and rhythm. This mode of reading is known as “guided reading” (领读, lingdu). After we had read through the Analects several times, the teacher would ask each student to read one or two lines and “pass the reading” to the next student seated behind them. This mode of “alternate reading” necessitated that each person listened to the other’s reading. Each person had

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to attend to not only their own reading but also the sound and rotation in the classroom. After a week, the teacher stopped leading us. The dominant mode of reading now was “simultaneous reading” (齐读, qidu). At this stage, we were familiar with the sound of each character and the intonation of each sentence, but not yet the connections between sentence and sentence, paragraph and paragraph, chapter and chapter. The Analects, like many other classics, is a collection of sayings and interactions from various contexts, roughly compiled around similar themes, but never in the modern sense of a scientific cataloging. Its structure may convincingly inform Borges’ labyrinths of reading, be it the odd Chinese encyclopedic classification in The Analytical Language of John Wilkins (1964) or the sinological deciphering in The Garden of Forking Paths (2018). However, the real experience of repetitiously reading a book like the Analects never brings the intellectual joy of Borgesian metafictions. It demands bodily labor to channel the flow of the book and more effort to solidify the channeling. We read together. We read repeatedly, strengthening the muscle memory of vocalizing the flow of text. This was the routine of the rest of the month. I soon felt the fatigue of reading by finding myself falling asleep on multiple occasions. A third of the students lost their voices. As I later noticed, many dujing students also became nearsighted after years of dujing. After all, reading classics not only costs labor but also causes work injuries.

Intensive Repetition and Disciplinary Labor Time in Dujing Studies Dujing involves a range of physical labor: vocalization, control of voice and rhythm, efforts of mimesis, attention to the classroom environment, and muscular movement toward the training of muscle memory. These processes all happen with repetition. Along with reading without understanding, repetition is another composite feature of the cross-cultural practice of reading classic or canonical texts. As the previous section shows, reading without understanding demands physical labor. In this section, I show that it is useful to understand repetitious reading as labor in order to understand dujing. The dujing movement launched in 1994 when Professor Wang Caigui started offering weekend reading sessions in Taipei County. From early

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on, his basic method of reading has been repeatedly reading aloud without understanding. But the repetition was not so intensive in the early years of dujing. According to one of Professor Wang’s famous talks from 2001, reading half an hour per day was sufficient. However, the amount of reading skyrocketed after a series of intensive dujing methods were invented in Mainland China in the 2010s. One of the most famous intensive methods was called the method of “seven sessions, five rounds” (七节五轮法, qijie wulun fa). It was invented in 2010 by Mr. A, a former truck driver who had become an enthusiastic dujing teacher and promoter. This method entails seven reading sessions per day. Each session lasts sixty to seventy minutes, thereby scaling the reading time to eight hours a day. The entire volume of a classical text to be read is then divided into seven parts. The volume of a dujing classical text ranges from 20,000 to 40,000 Chinese characters. Divided into seven, each part contains about 3000–6000 Chinese characters. Each reading session focuses on one of the parts. In a one-hour reading session 3000–6000 Chinese characters would be a reasonable amount of reading to be repeated and memorized. Moreover, simultaneous work on different parts of the book prevents the problem of only memorizing part of the book. The “five rounds” usually consist of one round of guided reading, two or three rounds of simultaneous reading, and one or two rounds of individual reading. Each round lasts from several days to one or two weeks. Gradually, the reader combines the divided parts of the text. For instance, in round two, the reader would combine the first two parts of the I Ching and repeat the combined text during both the first and second sessions. Moreover, as each reader’s progress may differ, they allowed and encouraged to manage their own reading, which is called individual reading (自读, zidu). Eventually, the reader memorizes the text being read as a complete piece. Table 5.1 shows the schedule I collected from Liqian, but the same structure could also be found in many other dujing schools. There are seven major reading sessions on this schedule, each lasting sixty to seventy minutes. Although the format of this dujing schedule resembles schedules in typical classroom settings, there is no differentiation between disciplines in dujing. Students focus on reading one classical text for several months. Only after the full content is memorized can they move to the next classical text. This means that one has to spend about eight hours a day confronting the same text hundreds of times for several months. The goal for students who stay in dujing schools full time is to memorize thirty classical texts. Then they are qualified to apply to Xiashang Academy, the higher

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Table 5.1  Daily schedule at Liqian 5:20 5:50–6:15 6:20–7:10 7:15–8:00 8:00–9:00 9:10–10:20 10:30–11:30 11:30–12:20 12:30–13:50 14:00–15:00 15:10–16:20 16:30–17:30 17:30–19:00 19:00–21:00 21:00–21:30 21:50

Wake up, wash up Morning exercises Dujing Session I Breakfast Dujing Session II Dujing Session III Dujing Session IV Lunch Nap Dujing Session V Dujing Session VI Dujing Session VII Dinner Lecture, Film, Study Washing, Lights off Bed check

Dorm, bathroom Field Classroom Dining hall Classroom Classroom Classroom Dining hall Dorm Classroom Classroom Classroom Dining hall Hall or classroom Bathroom, dorm Dorm

education institute established by Professor Wang Caigui. This process usually requires three to five years of full-time dujing. It would be misleading, therefore, to describe dujing as merely repetitious rote reading. In order to mold repeated readings toward the productive goal of memorization, dujing demands more sophisticated arrangement of repetition, from shorter cycles to longer cycles of reading and memorizing. As such, dujing’s arrangement of time slots for repeated reading is reminiscent of manufacturing labor in modern industrial societies, as Moishe Postone points out: What characterizes manufacture is the fact that the labor process is based on the division of handicraft operations into specialized partial, or detail, operations, which are carried out by specialized workers using specialized instruments of labor. This form of the division of labor ties workers to single, repetitive, simplified tasks, which then are closely articulated and coordinated with one another; it thereby increases greatly the productivity of labor by increasing the specialization of each worker and lessening considerably the amount of time necessary to produce commodities. (Postone 1996, 330)

The essence of the method of “seven sessions, five rounds” is to divide the whole volume of a classical text into shorter, simplified portions for repetitive memorizing. This expedites the reading and memorizing by focusing

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readers’ repetition on each portion of the text. Also, as in Postone’s writings on the acceleration “treadmill” nature of productivity (347), the dujing movement has undergone several waves of reading methods intensification. For instance, Professor Wang (2010) once dubbed the highest method of dujing the “double ten” method (双十读经法, shuangshi dujing fa), reading ten hours a day, for ten years. When I conducted my fieldwork in Mainland China between 2017 and 2019, the most popular method of dujing was called reading classics “candidly and intensively” (老实大量, laoshi daliang). Although reading eight hours a day is the base level to be considered “reading intensively,” in practice, many of my dujing student informants told me that they read ten to twelve hours a day. Moreover, to “read candidly” means to “just read” (purging all non-­ dujing activities from the curriculum). While the “candid method” allows participants to use tricks like enticement and rhyme, discipline, and punishment are also used in dujing schools, another element that could be found in factories. Dujing has been criticized as factory-like by other supporters of Confucianism. In 2016, for example, Ke Xiaogang, a well-known Confucian intellectual lambasted dujing as “modern alienation” and “mechanical mass production” (Ke 2016). Ke contrasts dujing to the mode of Confucian education he regarded as authentic: the humanistic self-cultivation with little control or discipline. Although my purpose here is not to judge whether dujing is an authentic Confucian pedagogy, I think it is worth noting that repetition and discipline are two major features often borrowed from traditions of canonical reading. For instance, in his classic study of imperial Chinese education, Miyazaki writes: A class usually consisted of eight or nine students. Instruction centered on the Four Books, beginning with the Analects, and the process of learning was almost entirely a matter of sheer memorization. With their books open before them, the students would parrot the teacher, phrase by phrase, as he read out the text. Inattentive students, or those who amused themselves by playing with toys hidden in their sleeves, would be scolded by the teacher or hit on the palms and thighs with his fan-shaped “warning ruler.” The high regard for discipline was reflected in the saying, “If education is not strict, it shows that the teacher is lazy. Students who had learned how to read a passage would return to their seats and review what they had just been taught. After reciting it a hundred times, fifty times while looking at the book and fifty with the book face down, even the least gifted would have memorized it. (Miyazaki 1976, 15)

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That is to say, intensive repetition and discipline had always contributed to the practice of reading classics. Apart from the Confucian tradition, reading a classical or canonical text several hundred times under disciplinary labor conditions has also been observed in the Islamic madrasa tradition (Eickelman 1985, Moore 2006), Buddhist monasteries (Dreyfus 2003), and other contexts (Baker 1993; Boyarin 1993b). However, most of these traditions have anchored the intensive repetition of disciplinary labor in an institutionalized sphere, be it priest-training, ritualized prayer, or socially recognized schooling. For dujing, the civic examination system in imperial China that Miyazaki wrote about had been such an institutionalized sphere. But the civic examination was terminated in the waning years of the last imperial dynasty (the Qing) in 1905 when the modern Western education system was introduced as the new pathway toward civil enlightenment, creativity, and democratic knowledge transmission. It is because of this rupture, and the ensuing absence of an institutionalized sphere of intensive reading, that I argue dujing is better understood as a social movement. Furthermore, this rupture conditions the desire of dujing and other Confucian promoters like Ke to revitalize Confucian classical traditions. At the same time, the rupture also engenders confusion across readership over how to read Confucian classics, especially how to regard the intensive repetition and the disciplinary labor in dujing. In the next section, I situate this confusion in the context of a clash over different ideologies, arguing that dujing can be understood as a particular ideology and value regime.

The Problem of Laborious Reading and the Value Regime of Labor in Dujing For Ke, to read Confucian classics is to cultivate one’s ethical self through wandering in the wise works of Confucius and Mencius (2016). It also includes extensively reading other books, as well as understanding, thinking, and discussing. In this picture, the reader is an active wanderer instead of a toiling laborer. A good reader should read lightly and delightfully. Theories of reading are rife with such contrasts: extensive wandering versus intensive toiling (Chartier 1992, Iser 1980), light versus heavy literature (Calvino 1986, 1988), active use versus passive consumption (de Certeau 1988). Where does dujing fit in these binaries? In Chartier’s (1992) scheme, dujing falls rather unambiguously into the category of

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intensive reading as a kind of labor that focuses on only a few (usually canonical) texts. However, Calvino’s distinction between light and heavy reading introduces some ambivalence. For example, in Why Read the Classics? (1986), Calvino uses the early education of Leopardi, who he praises elsewhere as excelling in literary lightness (1988, 24) as an example of the ideal of classical education. In his father’s rich library, the young Leopardi could immerse himself in Greek and Latin antiquity, classical Italian and French literature, and science books that were already archaic at the time, like Buffon and Fontanelle. In his freedom to wander, Leopardi might glance through a classic text that caught his interest, reading with delight. Labor—with its emphasis on discipline, physical hardship, and repetition—rarely finds a place in a library like this. But if the required reading in dujing is grounded in discipline and repetition, for Calvino the practice of “rereading” the classics is seen as a delightful wandering back and forth. The antagonistic relationship here between “heavy” labor and “light” reading points to the unequal distribution of literacy across high and low classes, a core theme in the studies of reading and literacy (Collins 1996). Indeed, in its plain sense, labor is historically disentangled from reading. The literary and literacy practice of reading is usually perceived as a privilege or distinction of the bourgeoisie. The working class, defined by modern industrial intensive labor, is deprived of the “leisure” and “enlightenment” brought by reading. For an example, let us read Jack London’s vivid depiction of Martin Eden’s exhaustion after the toil of washing: And Martin did no reading that night. He had seen no daily paper all week, and, strangely to him, felt no desire to see one. He was not interested in the news. He was too tired and jaded to be interested in anything, though he planned to leave Saturday afternoon, if they finished at three, and ride on his wheel to Oakland. (London 1909, 147)

As the reader of Martin Eden will know, London’s protagonist wanted to read because he craved literary success. Martin Eden worked hard, first as a laborer, then as a reader. But when his pursuit of a literary career eventually succeeded, it came at the cost of his alienation from working-class life. Nihilism then plagued Eden’s life until he eventually committed suicide. Despite this outcome, the process of reading hard and writing hard did bring him social mobility.

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As a phrase still meaningful in educational settings, “work hard!” captures the conceptual compatibility between labor and reading. In the context of dujing, the Chinese counterpart of “work hard” is keku (刻苦, “to overcome the hardship”). This phrase metaphorically maps the reading entailed in studying on to physical labor. Keku is a common Chinese phrase used across domains of education and work to moralize hard work. In my own schooling experience from elementary school to college in China (1997–2012), for instance, a saying from American inventor Thomas Edison was inscribed in student pamphlets and on the classroom walls to encourage teachers: “genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-­ nine percent perspiration.” As Thomas Edison (1847–1931) was a contemporary of Jack London (1876–1916), this saying likely verbalizes pre-WWII US working ethics. But it also resonates with traditional Chinese celebration of diligent studying. On the same classroom wall, inscribed next to Edison’s saying is often the Chinese idiom “To tie one’s head to a beam, to prick one’s thigh with an awl” (头悬梁锥刺股, touxuanliang zhuicigu). Behind the eerie imagery is the value of hard work (and physical strategies to avoid falling asleep). As Gal and Irvine (2019) remind us, language ideology is perspectival. The same can be said for reading ideology. Although keku rationalizes the compatibility between labor and reading for Chinese students in general, for dujing participants in particular it does more than merely provide a rationale for the ethic of hard work. In the context of dujing, the discourse of keku moralizes and mobilizes reading toward more intensive repetition, often to a degree considered as irrational by outsiders. A popular saying among dujing participants is: 人一能之己百之， If another man succeed by one effort, you will use a hundred efforts. 人十能之己千之。 If another man succeed by ten efforts, you will use a thousand efforts.3

Although the saying is originally from the Confucian classic The Doctrine of the Mean, the function of this saying is not to hold on to the center (or the “balance of mean”) but to emphasize excessive investment in repeated reading. Xiaodou is a typical dujing student I interviewed. He described 3  I follow the translation of The Doctrine of the Mean by Wing-tsit Chan in A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1969).

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his successful method of dujing as shua bianshu (刷遍数, “to brush times [of reading]”). The term shua (“brush”) captures the mechanical labor entailed in repetitive reading. Xiaodou “brushes” most of his reading at the Liqian dujing school, an institution famous for its leadership in reading classics “candidly and intensively.” It was common for students at Liqian to spend twelve hours a day on reading. But why would Xiaodou and his fellow students spend so much time on reading? Although the reading ideologies of dujing reify the labor of repeated reading with physical hardship, the enormous costs of dujing differentiates it from other reading practices which share similar ideologies of intensive reading. The Confucian revival in contemporary China is a state project. Therefore, it is common for ordinary Chinese citizens to keep a copy of Analects on their shelf, which they might read once or twice per year. They may also read it with little understanding and recite a sentence several times to memorize it. In keeping with the saying, “When others can do one, demand that you do one hundred,” dujing participants distinguish themselves through intensive investment of time and labor. Reading more than eight or even twelve hours a day means no time for other matters. Thus Xiaodou had to withdraw from official schooling. Given that official schooling is mandatory and alternative education is now illegal in Mainland China, the stakes for engaging in dujing are enormous. Again, why would someone choose to pursue a dujing education in the face of such high socio-legal risk? To understand Xiaodou’s choice in the context of the reading ideology and value regime that mobilizes high-­ stakes educational investment in dujing’s intensive labor, it may be helpful to consider his broader dujing journey. The story began in 2011 when Xiaodou, then ten years old, was in fourth grade. One day, he found that his best friend in the class had disappeared. Calling her on the phone, Xiaodou was told that she had quit school for dujing. Having encountered dujing in this accidental way, Xiaodou soon urged his mother to check what dujing was. Xiaodou’s mother was a middle-school teacher fond of traditional Chinese culture. But she never imagined the possibility of letting Xiaodou engage in reading classics full time. However, she was familiar (and therefore unsatisfied) with the official schooling’s taxing courses and homework, which had been afflicting Xiaodou. Dujing, which entailed reading the most “valuable” books and no homework, appeared to be a desirable and valuable alternative worth trying. They agreed to send Xiaodou to a local dujing school to have a try. Soon, he could memorize entire paragraphs of classics. Encouraged by his reading achievements, and

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without any homework, Xiaodou also felt happier than before. Xiaodou, his mother, and then his father recognized the inherent value of dujing. They eventually conducted a family conference and decided to fully devote to dujing. Xiaodou encapsulated the logic of the family conference with an idiom when I interviewed him: yi ben wan li (一本万利), namely “to make big profits with a small amount of capital.” Indeed, if accepting that the value of wisdom achieved by dujing encompasses all other knowledge, investing in dujing is much more desirable than unhappily attending official schooling. It is worth mentioning that a correlated dujing theory which influenced their educational choice was from developmental psychology. According to Professor Wang (2007), given that children outperform adults in memorization, one should seize the critical period for reading and memorization, and read as much as possible during childhood. The advantage of the memorization function is the leverage to maximize the “profit” on “capital.” However, the input to dujing is not in the form of capital. Particularly for Xiaodou, dujing is not alienable capital but is embodied in his everyday labor. He did admit that sometimes he also got exhausted in dujing. But once the fatigue subsided, he would continue. The method of “seven sessions, five rounds” granted him a concentrated yet manageable pace of laborious reading. This progress in dujing received lauds and encouragement from teachers and the greater dujing community. In turn, it validated dujing methods like “seven sessions, five rounds” and “reading candidly and intensively.” In this mutual reinforcement between Xiaodou’s labor investment and the dujing community’s recognition, the value regime of dujing expands and mobilizes more people to invest in dujing (after attending a promotion lecture featuring Xiaodou’s mother, for instance). One year after Xiaodou began his dujing journey, Professor Wang Caigui founded the Xiashang Academy, a higher educational institute for dujing. Though it could not grant a socially recognized certificate, Xiashang was designed to let senior dujing students continue their studies under the supervision of Professor Wang. To be accepted into Xiashang, students had to memorize at least twenty volumes of classics. This amount of memorization became Xiaodou’s first target. Eventually, after a long and laborious (but not taxing) journey of copious reading, Xiaodou entered Xiashang in 2015. Xiaodou’s constant progress in memorizing classical texts registered his labor in reading as concrete progress in memorizing classics, long-term

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approximation toward wisdom, and “profits” for his family. Each of these constituted a value regime of labor for making sense of reading labor for Xiaodou. Although Xiaodou had suffered from the taxing labor of learning in official school, the seemingly more laborious dujing, he said, had saved him. He thus became an active subject of laborious reading.

Conclusion: The Productive but Precarious Labor of Dujing Starting from a discussion of “Loud Cows” meant to show how reading aloud can be a social and political act, the main argument of this chapter has emphasized the physical and temporal dimensions of labor entailed in dujing. While similar forms of labor can be found in other cases of intensive reading, I maintain that dujing is a particularly productive case for working out a labor theory of reading due to the especially rigorous repetition it demands. As the “seven sessions, five rounds” method indicated in the daily schedule at Liqian (Table  5.1) shows, Dujing practitioners have developed systematic methods to segment and perpetuate the labor time of reading, which formally and functionally resemble the discipline of labor time in industrial factories. The structural similarity between dujing and factory labor may create some dissonance for intellectuals drawn to “classic” and “canonical” texts for the humanistic joy of reading. Under the dominant rubric which contrasts the lightness of literature with the heaviness of labor, reading and labor can only marry in terms of educational hardship. Yet, although educational hardship can be encoded in discursive reading ideologies like the Chinese discourse of keku and the American idiom that emphasizes perspiration over inspiration, the actual labor of reading often exceeds the coded reading ideology. This can be seen, for example, in the way participants mobilized sayings from The Doctrine of Mean to justify their full-time commitment to dujing. Drawing on the long tradition of anthropological theories of value (Bohannan and Bohannan 1968; Appadurai 1986; Graeber 2001), I use the concept of the value regime to describe the social circle of dujing’s labor value transformation, or how dujing provides a whole system of meaning that connects embodied experience, short-term recognition, and a long-term telos to a theory of value that correlates the labor of reading with the production of social value. In keeping with this specific value regime, while participants were engaged in intensive, repetitive,

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mechanical labor, they did not see this as meaningless or taxing but rather as a meaningful investment that would allow them to absorb the perennial wisdom of the classics. Ultimately, however, the labor of reading in dujing proves to be as precarious as it is productive. Thus in 2021, after six years of studying at Xiashang Academy, Xiaodou decided to withdraw and return to his hometown to self-study the official schooling curriculum. Here, again, Xiaodou’s choice reflects broader social conditions. The dujing movement in recent years has undergone governmental shutdown, internal splits, doubts from inside and outside the movement, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Xiaodou’s family confronted all of these, as well as all the time and labor they had spent on dujing. Now his aim was to prepare for the national exam. The pressure to secure a diploma had finally triumphed. Still, Xiaodou said he believed that the years of dujing had afforded him the quality of keku, which he could employ in other forms of study. More broadly, the classical wisdom he had absorbed would guide him into the future. For him, dujing was the effort he had exerted rather than a match to be judged as either success or failure. The labor theory of reading I have outlined in this chapter thus concerns how labor, as a productive yet precarious dimension of human life, is a useful lens to understand why and how people read. It reminds us that reading can also involve and conjure physical hardship, intensive repetition, moralized reckoning of the outcome of labor time, and the hope and despair associated with all of these.

References Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baker, James N. 1993. The Presence of the Name: Reading Scripture in an Indonesian Village. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 98–138. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bohannan, Paul, and Laura Bohannan. 1968. Tiv Economy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964. Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952. Translated by Ruth L. C. Simms. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2018. The Garden of Forking Paths. Translated by Donald A.  Yates, Andrew Hurley, and James East Irby. London: Penguin Classics. Boyarin, Jonathan, ed. 1993a. The Ethnography of Reading. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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———. 1993b. Voices Around the Text: The Ethnography of Reading at Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 212–237. Berkeley: University of California Press. Calvino, Italo. 1986. The Uses of Literature: Essays. Translated by Patrick Creagh. San Diego: Harvest. ———. 1988. Six Memos for the next Millennium. Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chan, Wing-tsit. 1969. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chartier, Roger. 1992. Laborers and voyagers: From the text to the reader. Diacritics 22 (2): 49–49. Cody, Francis. 2013. The Light of Knowledge: Literacy Activism and the Politics of Writing in South India. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Collins, James. 1996. Socialization to Text: Structure and Contradiction in Schooled Literacy. In Natural Histories of Discourse, ed. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, 203–228. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Diani, Mario. 1992. The Concept of Social Movement. Sociological Review 40 (1): 1–25. Dreyfus, Georges B.J. 2003. The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eickelman, Dale F. 1985. Knowledge and Power in Morocco. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gal, Susan, and Judith Irvine. 2019. Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1993. Loud Cows. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, vii–viii. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2004. Off the Page: Loud Cows, A Talk and A Poem about Reading Aloud. In The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination, 117–126. Boulder: Shambhala Publications. Haeri, Niloofar. 2013. The Private Performance of Salat Prayers: Repetition, Time, and Meaning. Anthropological Quarterly 86 (1): 5–34. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Iser, Wolfgang. 1980. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ke, Xiaogang. 2016. “Dangdai Shehui De Ruxue Jiaoyu: Yi Guoxuere He Dujing Yundong Wei Fansi Anli” (The Education of Confucianism in Contemporary Society: Taking the Craze for Chinese Traditional Culture and the Movement

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of Reading Classics as a Reflection Case). The Journal of Education Science at Hunan Normal University 15 (4): 34–40. Long, Elizabeth. 1993. Textual Interpretation as Collective Action. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 180–211. Berkeley: University of California Press. London, Jack. 1909. Martin Eden. New York: Macmillan Publishers. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Miyazaki, Ichisada. 1976. China’s Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China. New York: Weatherhill. Moore, Leslie. 2006. Learning by Heart in Qur’anic and Public Schools in Northern Cameroon. Social Analysis 50 (3): 109–126. Postone, Moishe. 1996. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 1993. Labor’s Lot: The Power, History and Culture of Aboriginal Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sargent, Adam. 2021. Ideologies of Labor and the Consequences of Toil in India’s Construction Industry. Signs and Society 9 (3): 300–323. Silverstein, Michael. 1979. Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology. In The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels, ed. Paul R.  Clyne, William F.  Hanks, and Carol L.  Hofbauer, 193–247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Wang, Caigui. 2007. Jiaoyu De Zhihuixue (The Study of Education Wisdom). Nanjing: Nanjing University Press. ———. 2010. Xue Yong Lunyu (The Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Analects). Beijing: Beijing Education Press.

CHAPTER 6

Reading Foucault at Dusk: Politics of Philosophy in Neoliberal South Korea Shinjung Nam

On a Saturday afternoon in July 2016, I visited Mr. Kim at his family home in a region north of Seoul for an interview. We were sitting in a small room that was part library for him and part sewing space for his wife (Fig. 6.1). I was conducting research on a kind of collective studies—what I call para-academic practices or projects—which South Korean scholars have been organizing outside and against the official academic institutions since the year 2000. As an avid student of these para-academic projects for decades now, Mr. Kim has cultivated a deep feeling for philosophy (ch’o ̆lhak). “Philosophy,” he said, “is what you turn to when faced with the questions of why we live and how we must live. It’s necessary for developing the way we view mankind and the world.”1 The world to which Mr. Kim

1

 All the Korean words have been Romanized according to the McCune-Reischauer system.

S. Nam (*) Sunkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rosen (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0_6

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Fig. 6.1  Mr. Kim pointing in his library to a framed photo of himself in his early twenties posed with a book in his hands. (Photo by author)

referred—and where I, too, belonged—was intensely social and undeniably political. Crammed next to stacks of patterned fabrics and a desk displaying a pair of scissors, a hole puncher, and a large sewing machine, a bookcase stood firm with Mr. Kim’s memorabilia from his youth. From the bottom of the bookcase, he took out Philosophy Essay (ch’o ̆lhak essei), shelved between the Korean translations of E. H. Carr’s What Is History (1973) and François Barret’s History of Labor (1968). Philosophy Essay (1983) is an introduction to historical materialism written for a broad audience in an accessible Korean language without any explicit citation of significant authors like Marx or Engels. The publisher had released it at the height of the

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anti-­Communist military dictatorship without dare mentioning the name of the author, a twenty-four-year-old Cho Sŏng-Ho, for fear of the latter’s imprisonment by the state for causing “public disorder.” Prior to the completion of this text, Cho was already expelled from Seoul National University—the most prestigious school in the country—for his participation in the student protest against the 1980 military junta that took over the government after assassinating South Korea’s first military dictator (r. 1960–1979) only to renew the fascist regime. It was not until 1988, after direct election was implemented, that Mr. Kim got hold of an actual copy of the book. During the mid to late 1980s, especially among young adults like Mr. Kim who belonged to the class of 1983, Philosophy Essay was one of the core curricular texts for underground reading circles. Mr. Kim and his colleagues’ reading circle was officially registered at their university as “a community service group” to avoid institutional surveillance, with appropriate papers thus signed by a professor of education and two professors of philosophy. When Mr. Kim finally bought the actual copy, he was a grown-up man, working in the white-­ collar sector and raising two children. He had bought the book to commemorate the June 10 Uprising of 1987, which marked the end of the country’s decades-long military dictatorship. On the title page of Philosophy Essay, he had written a note marking his impressions of the world in which he found himself. 1988. 6. 10. [Bought] in the town of Sŏch’o [in Seoul]. The first anniversary of the 6.10 Uprising. Students tried to go to Panmunchŏm [bordering North Korea], and state authorities stopped them with tear gas. Politics would not function properly except to hold congressional meetings now and again.

Based on my analysis of ethnographic research conducted in Seoul since 2013, this chapter demonstrates the historicity of “philosophy” (ch’o ̆lhak) as practiced by people like Mr. Kim in the academic margins and across the urban fringes of Seoul since the mid-1980s. The formulation of philosophy as a social practice, in which critique of norms is central, dates back to the neocolonial era of Cold War geopolitics when students and intellectuals had forged underground pedagogy for political activism against the anti-Communist state of South Korea and the US military dominance in the Asia Pacific region. “Social philosophy” (saheo cho ̆lhak) meant not only a socially engaged practice of philosophy but the study of Marxism.

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Philosophy as such was one of the main arteries of the 1980s’ underground intellectual movement known as “social science studies” (sahoe kwahak kongbu). In the winter of 1989, a renowned publishers’ journal printed an article reflecting on Marxism, the hallmark of the “social sciences literature” (sahoe kwahak toso ̆h): The blood stains from the 1980s led South Korean contemporaries to reflect upon the nature of state authority with skepticism, and upon the political sway of the United States, while increasing their desire to look back at their social reality scarred by “the contradictions of national divide and class struggle,” through a new and scientific lens. As you may have all guessed, by “a new [and scientific] lens,” we mean the introduction of Marxism. (Publishing Journal 1989, 6)

Students and intellectuals thus articulated a Korean national historiography with Marxist historical materialism. In the process of this articulation, they conceptualized the national subject of liberation and democratic revolution in the figure of “the oppressed common people,” known as minjung,2 and wielded “the worker,” toiling behind the labor-intensive manufacturing lines and in heavy industry, as the true representative of this collective identity (Lee 2007). In post-dictatorship South Korea, when philosophers and other humanities scholars began to organize para-­ academic projects for adult education outside of universities, they did so in the spirit of this 1980s’ tradition of counter-establishment intellectual culture. At the start of my research in 2013, I found at least thirteen para-­ academic projects in Seoul. Organized by scholars (including many who were exploited for their flexible labor as contingent faculty within the academic institutions), these projects were nested in relatively less expensive neighborhoods surrounding the commercialized centers of campus towns. The Community for Alternative Studies (CAS), where I conducted much of my fieldwork, was one of them. Philosophy majors and graduate students training in the humanities and social sciences in official universities 2  I intentionally avoid the expression “the subaltern” when translating the Korean word “minjung” (trad. 民衆) into English. The Mandarin Chinese reading of mínzhòng has a derogatory moral connotation, referring to the lowborn; “the subaltern” in Gayatri Spivak’s scholarship has been, partly for this reason, translated into a Mandarin Chinese word shùmín, which in South Korea (so ̆min) connotes “people without socioeconomic and political privilege” (personal correspondence with Jing Wang).

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and colleges gravitated to these projects seeking theory beyond the modern genre, which typically stopped at the works of Hegel and Marx, sometimes reaching as far as Henri Bergson. A younger generation of scholars returning from their doctoral research overseas, mainly from Germany and France, would also come to the projects to teach. Joining them were working adults who held affective memories of the 1980s’ underground pedagogy for Marxist student and labor activism. The socioeconomic and career backgrounds of the students I interviewed varied—from a nurse and mother of two, to a young female schoolteacher, to a male transport worker participating in union protests, to a former head of a foreign company’s human resources office in Seoul. They would all travel to places like CAS after work, even from afar, well beyond Seoul, to take evening courses with a renewed interest in philosophy. In what follows, I provide an ethnographic analysis of a collective reading performed at CAS by the Ph.D. scholar I call “Dr. H.” Highlighting parts of the social infrastructure (Long 1993, 190) of South Korean para-­ academic studies in philosophy, I follow an expository reading seminar in which Dr. H.’s main pedagogic practice consists of reciting the Korean translation of Foucault’s Les Mots et Les Choses—The Order of Things, out loud, word by word, before his listening students. He occasionally emends the translation with his own commentaries on power, modernity, and philosophy. Adapting the ethnography of reading to the task of listening closely to this auditory pedagogy, my overall aim in this chapter is to show how public intellectuals in South Korea engage the problem of the political as an ethical practice whose virtue lies in critique.

Reading Foucault The later thought of Michel Foucault (1997a, 1997b, 1997c, 2007) has been foundational to many overlapping strands of cultural theory and moral philosophy, including the contemporary anthropology of ethics (Faubion 2001; Laidlaw 2002; Zigon 2007), emergent debates in feminist critical theory (Butler 2002; Zerilli 2019), and, as I suggest in this chapter, the ethnography of reading (Boyarin 1993a). Extending Zerilli’s (2019) bid for scholars to recognize critique as a collective and collectively concerned practice of the political, I provide here an analysis of philosophy as an ethical practice of critique at once addressing the political and involving a collective form of reading. Such an analysis is indebted to the ethnographic studies of reading found in religious contexts that have examined

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complex modes of subordination as central rather than antithetical to subject formation (Boyarin 1993b; Mahmood 2005; Bielo 2009). Some of the conceptual tools I deploy as methodological frameworks come from these studies, such as the concept of “textual ideology” that James Bielo draws out from his reading of language ideology for the analysis of evangelical Bible studies in the United States (2009). Most importantly, this chapter is theoretically and in practice inspired by the ethnographies of reading found in areas of life beyond the religious proper, spanning from anthropological fieldwork (Fabian 1993) to local book clubs (Long 2003) and literary societies dedicated to translation and publishing (Rosen 2022). These ethnographic studies on collective forms of reading non-­ religious texts have not only paved interdisciplinary links between anthropology, literary studies, and the sociology of books but hinted at how secularism continues to haunt modern taxonomic practices within the American academy, including anthropology, which has theorized reading as social practice mainly in relation to studies of “world religions” and thus located in a “sacred time” outside the temporality of Western modernity (Fabian 2005; Asad 1993; Scott 2018). My ethnographic analysis of collective reading in Seoul likewise partakes in a larger project of building intra-disciplinary connections in anthropology between reading, ethics, and politic. Focusing on the South Korean para-academic practice of philosophy, which takes critique as its primary virtue, the discussion continues in the spirit of Michael Jackson’s “anthropological critique of the project of philosophy” (2009). Jackson’s text diagnoses philosophy’s present impasse in terms of the confinement of its strategy for self-renewal to genealogical refurbishing. He defends the intersubjectively grounded work of anthropology as a companion to philosophy in the process of the latter’s revitalization. At the same time, his text calls for the liberation of philosophy from philosophy by redefining it, in the age-old spirit of Paul Radin (1927), as “neither a privileged vocation nor an activity that takes place in a protected location” (2009, 245), including the cartographic imaginary of the West, but rather as “a mode of being-in-the-world” that goes beyond the boundaries of “self-conscious thinking” (246). Extending Jackson’s provocative engagement with philosophy, my ethnography of Dr. H’s reading of Les Mots et Les Choses in the presence of his listening students builds up a picture of critique qua ethical practice that is simultaneously social and collective. As a form of action carried out in and for the public sphere, the concept of critique that comes through the analysis thus accords with the tradition of Kantian political

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philosophy that extends, for example, through the work of Foucault (1989, 2007), Arendt (1969, 1989), Butler (2002), and Zerilli (2019). As I will show, Dr. H’s reading is an ethical practice of critique, enacted in such a way that is audible to the non-academic philosophy audience. This practice gives voice to the tacit assumption that Asian humanities lack agency to philosophize or theorize (Sakai 2010). Dr. H.’s project of fashioning himself into an ethico-political subject of public intellectual and para-academic scholar in South Korea is, I argue, a form of “diacritical politics” that relentlessly troubles “the microphysics of power relations” (Sakai 2010, 445) inscribed into and operationalized through (a) the language of addressee found in widely read theoretical literature, such as Foucault’s, (b) American universities’ academic syllabi that assign these texts to students, and (c) the network of their unilateral circulation around the globe. The term “diacritical” emphasizes the under-valued significance of oral reading, such as the one performed by Dr. H before his students at CAS, and of what is spoken over what is written, as in “diacritics,” or signs that suggest, when marked above or below a letter, a difference in pronunciation from the same letter without the mark. Having attended Dr. H’s reading of Les Mots et Les Choses in the presence of his student-witnesses, I hope my readers find themselves moving, with me, along at least two arcs of critique: one, with respect to the privileged place and time of philosophy, and the other, with respect to that of the political as a frame of reference for understanding collective forms of reading. For too long, “the West” as a cartographic imaginary and “a relative designation” (Sakai 2010, 445) has claimed the status of the origin par excellence of (true) philosophy. Through the optic of “its putative unity” (450), “the West” has thus operationalized a normative definition of philosophy as a Western meta-discourse of the general and the non-Western particulars. Only by listening contemporaneously to today’s readings of philosophy conducted elsewhere may we begin to reflect upon those conducted where we are, especially in the American university, and the geopolitical intimacies between them. Before we enter their classroom to learn what it takes for a philosopher to be and become a public intellectual in Seoul, let us observe first how, under what social, historical, and political economic conditions South Korean scholars have been made para-academic.

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Vita Activa The economy of South Korea developed in the decades after the Korean War on the strength of labor-intensive manufacturing and heavy industries. These industries depended on public investments in education to produce a skilled workforce.3 After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, however, the consensus view at the state level was that the industrial sector had reached its maximum capacity and held little promise for future economic growth. With conditional support from the IMF, the South Korean state thus set out to reshape higher education in an effort to transition the country into a more market-driven, knowledge-based economy. In reality, the restructuring of higher education in South Korea resulted in the corporatization of universities. Business magnates now sat on boards of trustees, deciding on administrative matters, including tuition rates, tuition usage, allocation of private and public funding, and re-prioritization at the department and program level. In the midst of this renewed foundation of neoliberal governance, humanities disciplines were deemed “obsolete” and “economically inefficient” for the future. The discipline of philosophy was especially hard hit by this nationwide neoliberal turn. The erasure of philosophy from the academy alarmed the country’s current and prospective students, their parent generation, and scholars alike. Philosophy has long held a special value in South Korea’s social movement tradition. Indeed, as mentioned above, philosophy in the 1980s was understood to be a highly politicized practice committed to awakening and revolutionizing Korea’s everyday intellectuals. In the year 2000, a group of scholars of humanities disciplines, led by philosophers, created a para-academic project called Philosophy Academy. Since its inception, Philosophy Academy has been dedicated to teaching the wider public various schools of thought, without a diploma or tenure-track system. In its inaugural year alone, Philosophy Academy 3  For example, in its first five-year economic development plan (1962–1966), the South Korean government implemented a large-scale literacy project through which the government made public investments in establishing mandatory primary, and later secondary, education. While the main purpose of this project was to produce an educated workforce for the industries, I imagine that compulsory education was well received by the majority of the population, who had been excluded from literacy as a form of moral, political, and socioeconomic distinction from the pre-colonial era to the end of Japan’s colonial rule in 1945, when the literacy level of the South Korea was just around 20 percent. By the end of the 1950s, the literacy level of the South Korean population rose to nearly 74 percent (You et al. 2016, 33).

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offered courses on Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, Rousseau, Descartes, contemporary French epistemology, Nicomachean ethics, Marx’s Capital, Korean Neo-Confucianism, modernity and post-modernity, cyberpunk and metaphysics, Hinduism, reading literature through philosophy, and many more. And as the elimination of philosophy and other humanities disciplines in South Korean universities has not ceased, so the mobilization of para-academic projects has continued.4 After a decade of work at Philosophy Academy, one of its founding members, Yi Chŏng-Wu, embarked on another para-academic project with non-academic professionals including the editor of the Korean translation of Le Monde Diplomatique and a former journalist of twenty years. The project they organized became CAS. This time, however, Dr. Yi had specifically appealed to the wider public’s call for humanities studies to be offered by CAS vis-à-vis a philosophy program called “paideia,” a term inspired by the education of (male) citizens in ancient Greece. Here is the final passage of his memorandum for CAS titled “Paideia, the Return of the Humanities: Now We Must Begin Everything Anew”: While the mid-twentieth century capitalism has captured [blue-collar] workers, neo-liberalism has succeeded in capturing scholars and universities. … Humanities studies “that make no money” have no place to stand, lost for direction. … But there exist numerous people attempting to protest and create lines of flight from such a reality. (Yi 2011a, par. 8)

The formation of Philosophy Academy in 2000 and later CAS in 2011 thus signaled the beginning of a new direction for South Korea’s para-­ academic projects. Whereas the 1980s’ studies focused on Marxist-Leninist theory and were organized around the semantic axis of the social sciences, the contemporary post-Marxist and post-structuralist projects are organized around the axis of humanities. Today’s para-academic humanities projects have a special emphasis on contemporary French philosophy (hyo ̆ntae pŭuransŭ ch’o ̆lhak). This genre 4  In a 2013 protest against the school administrators’ undemocratic decision to terminate their department, philosophy majors at a private university in South Korea carried out a mock funeral procession on campus, carrying portraits of renowned philosophers, from Mencius to Socrates. As of October 2022, news of a similar fate was about to fall upon another private university in Seoul well known for its history of foundation by Buddhist monks in 1906.

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of philosophy first gained the attention of South Korean intellectuals in the late 1980s when the country was entering a post-authoritarian era. In addition to the changes taking place in the local public sphere, the disjunction between early Marxist theory and historical changes that followed the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc also played an important part in this shift. Dr. Yi, the architect of the paideia philosophy program at CAS, saw Foucault as “the Marx of our age” (2011b, 88, emphasis original), the age of neoliberal capitalism supported by electoral democracy.5 The para-­ academic projects for the humanities, while looking back to the legacy of the 1980s’ social sciences studies, have varied in curricular format, membership, and pedagogic agenda without diverging drastically from their shared dedication to adult education in radical thought, including post-­ structuralist genres of contemporary French philosophy.6 Thus the original notion of philosophy as an intellectual practice dedicated to engaging social reality that addresses ordinary audiences and relations of power beyond and against the barriers of the academic establishments has lived on in the contemporary projects. Despite these continuities, a crucial change has taken place in the socioeconomic ecology of South Korean para-academic studies: it is no longer repressive powers of the state that places the lives of para-academic 5  Some of the active para-academic projects have grown out of a much more visceral relationship to the 1980s’ social science studies than others. One such project is Multitude Intelligence Garden (tajungchiso ̆ngeui cho ̆ngwon). One of the key engines is their publishing house, established in 1994. Its main organizers were student activists during the 1970s and 1980s who even then used and circulated the expression “humanities social sciences studies.” 6  With Jesook Song (2014), I acknowledge the ways in which today’s para-academic humanities studies represent a continuation of the 1980s’ underground social sciences studies. However, there are also several discrepancies between the two traditions that I think are worth considering. First, today’s humanities studies welcome adult students who underwent socioeconomic mobility after the 1980s, a transformation that would qualify them, according to the 1980s’ social science studies, as petit bourgeoisie. Second, some of the leading scholars of today’s para-academic humanities projects address and seek to include in their pedagogy the broader South Korean “citizens” (simin) rather than the narrower “oppressed common people” (minjung), whose liberation and militarization were central to the 1980s’ tradition of social sciences studies. Finally, as detailed in the previous footnote, the sociopolitical and historical backgrounds of the key organizers vary in ways that effect significant differences in their practices of reading and translation, with some leaning heavily toward certain national, or nationalized and continentalized genres of radical thought (such as “European” philosophies, especially “the French” contemporary type), of pedagogy (e.g., some prioritizing official credentials as the basis of one’s authority to teach in class), and, hence, of radicality.

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scholars at risk but precarity resulting from the state’s restructuring of higher education and their displacement out of the universities’ ever-­ shrinking humanities disciplines. Without a tenure or diploma system, student enrollment has always fluctuated at any given site within the topography of the para-academic humanities, and students continue to move from one project to another, forcing their intellectual teachers to be as socially flexible, physically mobile, and continuously adaptable to change. Situated in this way in a position of authority and subordination in relation to their student consumers, para-academic scholars are ever more obligated to exercise their expertise in line with the social demand for critique as the virtue of philosophy in their pedagogic practice.

The Ethics of Diacritical Politics With eight rooms spread across the second floor of a small office building, the Community for Alternative Studies (CAS) has stood its ground in a street on the outskirts of a busy college town since 2011. Courses offered to the public range widely in format, from multi-year-long expository reading seminars to seasonal introductory lecture series and student-led discussion groups. The genre of courses has grown much more diverse over the years, including religion, film, architecture, and even performative arts, not just philosophy. One February evening in 2016, six students, including myself, and Dr. H were sitting in the biggest room at CAS for his weekly expository reading seminar on Foucault. Dr. H was a fan of shabby T-shirts, worn under unbuttoned collared shirts, left slightly open. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy in France and wrote his dissertation and many other texts on Foucault. Dr. H was, and is, known in South Korea as one of the few Foucault experts (p’uko cho ̆nkongcha). Among the regular attendees for the seminar were a photographer in his early fifties; a Korean literature student in his early thirties; an art curator in her late forties; two doctoral students, one studying the history of economics and the other the history of biology; and a lady in her early forties working in the publishing business. The last was a long-time member of CAS in his late fifties who had studied Korean literature in college and was now leading his own student discussion section on Walter Benjamin. For this particular evening, Dr. H had come prepared with printed copies of his essay on structuralism, which he handed out to us. He then spent the next two hours reading his essay out loud, word by word, while making unpredictable trajectories of

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critique throughout the course. This non-dialogic yet collective reading of a text led by the philosopher was not new to the class. While the usual text would have been Les Mots et Les Choses in Korean, today’s class consisted of a special lecture on structuralism. It marked a transitional phase for the course since the class had just finished Chapter 3 “Representing” last week. In the middle of the lecture, Dr. H openly placed himself at the tip of his sharp tongue. “The fact that I can lecture [now in front of you] because I have a Ph.D. in French Philosophy,” he said, “means that [South Korean society] does not listen to those without such a degree conferred by a South Korean or some other national institution. This is, for sure, a sort of a mechanism [of governance].”

Dr. H regularly assessed himself and the system of qualification through which he was accredited to exercise this privilege to be heard before a group of listening students and the hierarchy of power naturalized by this norm in South Korea. At the same time, in the midst of such a critique, he still performed his distinction as a trained reader of philosophy. What he said next was a direct citation of Foucault, as it were, by way of intimating the latter’s voice. “There is one thing Foucault wants to say,” Dr. H spoke using addressee honorifics only to drop it altogether as he summoned “P’uko” (Foucault) in a voice of casual speech and direct communication with his students. “There is no such thing as innate qualification. Don’t follow [them]. Who determined them? How did these qualifications get determined?” His eyes were cast into the thin air in the middle of the classroom. “The discourse of qualification is that of the establishment.” It was only after he switched back to using addressee honorifics that I, for one, sitting in the classroom noticed that he stopped being “P’uko.” The object of critique that emerged throughout his recitational reading of Foucault’s text for the seminar often went beyond pedagogic authority. On the day we finished Chapter 3, after the ten-minute break, Dr. H had hurried to resume the class by returning to his desk facing the students. The second hour of the seminar had to start promptly so that the class could celebrate their conclusion of “Representing” over late-night snacks and rice wine at a nearby restaurant. He began by reading aloud a passage in Section 6 of Chapter 3, titled “‘Mathesis’ and ‘Taxonomia.’”

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If the Western world did battle with itself in order to know whether life was nothing but movement or whether nature was sufficiently well ordered to prove the existence of God, it was not because a problem had been opened up; it was because after dispersing the undefined circle of signs and resemblances— ‘meaning after the Renaissance,’ Dr. H interjects—and before organizing the series of causality and history—‘and this is modernity, right, During the Classical Age’—the episteme of Western culture had opened up an area to form a table over which it wandered endlessly, from the calculable forms of order to the analysis of the most complex representations.7

“There is, definitely, this sort of nuance, you see,” he looked up from the text. His amusement toward the radicality of Foucault’s thought, wrapped up in this passage, quickly led him off the course of reading the rest of the passage. So [to get it straight] because the undefined circle of signs and resemblances dispersed, and because of this setup, through this dispersion, the area to form a table opened up, and because such an area opened up, organizing series of causality and history became possible. And because of this series of history, now in place, a new order of language and structure was, again, opened up. This book is saying something this crazy!

Dr. H leaned back, as if too stunned to attempt refuting the impressive craziness of Foucault. After finishing the rest of the paragraph, he commented on Foucault’s radicality, this time dubbing him, as it were. One of the most important things [Foucault] has said is ‘I do not speak of anything that is without a map or a calendar. I write a history of that which appears to transcend the map and the calendar. And so, the history of life or the history of madness is not the history of nature [nor a natural history], but it is a history of the human conception of nature. It’s all a social, political, and historical construct. I only write about [the constructed].’

7  The italics are to index Dr. H’s recitation of the text before him. However, unlike all the other transcriptions I have made for this chapter, these italics come directly from the Vintage version of The Order of Things (1994, 75). I opted for this transgression in the otherwise actively transcriptive practice required of an anthropologist to help lead any of my English-­ speaking readers directly to her Vintage version, if available at hand, thereby evoking a sense of contemporaneity in Dr. H’s and her readings comparatively.

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Speaking of the constructed, made legible by Foucault in the form of proper nouns throughout his text, Dr. H went on to describe his approach to reading Foucault, exciting a sense of textual ideology in me, a young scholar who has also wrestled with Foucault’s work. In the last twenty years, I have been highlighting in green all the proper nouns in Foucault’s texts. Blue, especially, for those that belong to modernity. If you start like this, you have to start highlighting, for example, ‘the seventeenth century,’ ‘Classicism,’ ‘Renaissance,’ and ‘resemblances’ all green, right? And then, ‘man,’ ‘modernity,’ ‘the end of the 18th century,’ all of this you have to highlight in blue.

I tried taking a peek at his text from where I was sitting, which was much more colorful and messier than the one on my desk. He continued. But then, I realized that I would have to highlight in either green or blue all the proper nouns in this text! ‘Art’ is a proper noun. ‘Economy’ is a proper noun. ‘Value’ is a proper noun. These are figures, Foucault is saying, figures unique to Western modernity.

Throughout the seminar, Dr. H not only read the text, word by word, passage by passage but also critiqued it while blazing tangential soliloquies along the text, like the one I just quoted. While he often expressed his amusement toward Foucault’s radicality, the way he had after reading the passage on “the episteme of Western culture,” Dr. H’s fascination with Foucault was often accompanied by his deep-seated discontent with the seeming impossibility of emulating this thinker’s methodology for making sense of, and making change to, Korea. Such an impossibility, he acknowledged, was exacerbated by what Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon call “the regime of unilateral translation” (2006, 2). Right after finishing the last paragraph of the chapter, Dr. H went on to say the following: In a sense, the East Asian version, or more narrowly, the Korean version of Les Mots et Les Choses may explain King Se-Jong’s creation of the written language [known as hunmin cho ̆ngŭm] according to a sort of an epistemic shift Foucault talks about. But this kind of epistemology is not something that can be written by any Korean scholar. For one, [the near impossibility] has to do with the language barriers—one has to be thoroughly capable of sinology [in the East Asian context]. But more importantly, that person has to know biology, economics, philosophy, and linguistics, along with all

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other Western languages [that have influenced our thinking since the turn of the twentieth century].

What aggravates Dr. H even more is the imperialist and neocolonialist reality of unilateralism that obstructs any truly active cross-reading. Addressing his South Korean audience, he continues his dialogic monologue of social criticism: This [unrealistic task of having to know it all] is a blessing and a curse of the governed. The West only has to know its own [traditions]. Maybe today is different. But professors at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, or Columbia would choose a collection of so-called Classics on world history without including [the Chinese scholar] Sima Qian’s text [The Records of a Great Historian].

The word “Princeton” startled me as I was not expecting a reference in this context to the institution that had certified me a professional ethnographer. He continued to critique the impossible prospect of putting to practice Foucault’s methodology and the plight of doing so as an “East Asian” scholar. His critique lay at the psychological level with respect to the effect of being always on the other end of a unilateral reading. Say, a person used to take himself to be a lack, the ultimate qualification of the governed, in relation to the governing empire. The moment when he no longer considers himself a lack, the world changes. It’s similar to everyday life. Say, a person used to think that, because he can’t be like his father or his older brother, he is flawed. But what he can do, they cannot [do], right?

Dr. H rhetorically asked and brought up an anecdote that illustrated a “yes” to this question. I turned in my dissertation on Foucault and modernity. My advisor [in France] told me that this sort of critique is what they wish from students coming from outside of France because the French cannot see what others may be able to. In France, modernity is such a matter of course that they can’t take themselves objectively, as an Other (t’aja). They don’t ask whether there may be a different kind of modernity apart from the Western type. When I read Foucault saying “we” or “our tradition,” that “we” does not include me! There are two types of “we” operating here [the French and the European]. And “we” always functions as the general. I’m saying, we aren’t some lack of somebody else. Each of us is an original in and of itself. This is

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what Yuk Sang-Sŏn said in the sixteenth century. He said, “Yuk-kyŏng, the text I write, is the footnote of my life. I’m not living in order to be like Confucius. I read Confucius in order to live my life.” It’s as if saying “I’m the original text, and the Bible is the reference.”

In his critical reading of Foucault, Dr. H brings to the fore a kind of “textual ideology” embedded in the author’s text that is enacted as soon as it employs its unique language of addressee. Foucault may have let himself off the hook, so to speak, when he declares that the object of his analysis is confined to “the episteme of Western culture” (1994, xxii); the dynamic of inclusion/exclusion excited by his use of the pronouns we, our, and ours should not, therefore, be (mis)understood as an operation of violent erasure. However, the unspoken social fact, which Dr. H excavates from this textual ideology, is that this “we” does not simply function as the general “we.” It circulates through the one-way traffic of non-cross-­ reading. Indeed, the discourse public represented by the “we” in Foucault continues to multiply and proliferate through a politics of citation that simultaneously prevents the authorial voices among the discourse public unrepresented by the “we” from having a voice in “the very discourse that [should otherwise] give it existence” to knowingly borrow the authority of Michael Warner’s words (2002, 51). In his critique, Dr. H gives his students a note of encouragement to fight the tendency to identify themselves as a lack mirroring the relative absence of a non-Western “we” in the regime of non-cross-reading.8 He reminds the class that this tendency is a condition fed by our contemporary reality of unilateral translation and hegemonic representation of the West as a singular source of theory and the author of world history. He then continues his critical note on the modern geopolitics of philosophy beyond the authorship of Foucault: Such is the problem of modernity. Things have been put in place as if there is no other kind of modernity other than the Western kind, right? Modernity 8  During the seminar, Dr. H’s reading of Foucault does not go so far as does, for instance, Naoki Sakai, who wrote, “Let me note in passing that, despite an alluring analysis of ‘the empirical-transcendental doublet’ called man, the notion of Western culture or its unity is never under suspicion anywhere in Foucault’s career, nor did he ever interrogate the putative unity of the West in relation to modern humanism” (2010, 451). Yet, the chapter was concerned with what, as much as how Dr. H makes legible in his reading of Foucault, based on his unspoken, if not unquestioned, assumption of this “putative unity of the West.”

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is the ruling apparatus. Modernity is Europe’s ruling apparatus, and globalization is the United States’ ruling apparatus. What we must do is simply walk our own path. It’s a problem of the general, the universal, and when the problem of the conflict between the universal and the particular gets reset, a new kind of scholarship becomes possible. In Heidegger’s 1955 text “What is Philosophy,” the philosophy he speaks of is, itself, already Greek in its origin so that any other kind of philosophy that is non-European, non-­ Western with no etymological root in Ancient Greek is, by definition, impossible. By definition. Any etymological argumentation is a linguistic argumentation based on language, and it is valid in so far as it belongs to that cultural boundary of [the community sharing] the language. The fact that such a linguistic argumentation [as Heidegger’s, which is] valid in this limited way is taking up the problem of the universal is non-sensical to begin with! So, I gave a long name to this non-sensical practice. The fallacy of Heideggerian etymological argumentation. A fundamental fallacy.

It is clear that Dr. H’s critical reading of Foucault, his effort to make the text legible to the non-academics, goes beyond the task of helping his students understand its semantics or its textuality in the context of Foucault’s oeuvre or even the post-war French philosophy. His commentary has taken his students on a ride across the geopolitical plane of knowledge production and intellectual subject formation, in which the very practice of reading (and writing) philosophy is inextricably implicated. This chapter invited its readers, as Johannes Fabian has done in his contribution to The Ethnography of Reading (1993), to listen closely to a South Korean scholar and his students’ reading of philosophy in their classroom in Seoul. It is here that one finds “the microphysics of power relations” undergirding today’s matrix of knowledge production and circulation, academic institutions, and precarity—in which we all, if not equally, belong—subject to intense critique or diacritical politics. Diacritical politics in the context of the expository reading seminar in Seoul constitutes a mode of critique that is at once a form of critical pedagogy intended to rejuvenate other readers’ consciousness in regard to multilayers of hegemonic cultures, including the academic one, and an ethical practice of self-fashioning as a public intellectual held responsible for the problem of how to read philosophy in light of its stakes in the making and unmaking of the contemporary, and contemporaneous, world. By describing this critical practice as ethical while subsuming diacritical politics as essential to this ethics, I challenge normative conscriptions of the political to “the presumed locus of social change, i.e., large and organized

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aggregates of people” (Long 1993, 187). “What forms of diacritical politics are we already fully engaged in as scholars and teachers, and against what forms of governance?” With this question raised by the South Korean para-academic readers of philosophy, we return to the place of our everyday ethics.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1969. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking Press. ———. 1989. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Edited by Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bielo, James. 2009. Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study. New York: New York University Press. Boyarin, Jonathan, ed. 1993a. The Ethnography of Reading. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1993b. Voices Around the Text: The Ethnography of Reading at Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 212–237. Berkeley: University of California Press. Butler, Judith. 2002. What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue. In The Political, ed. David Ingram, 212–226. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Cho, Sŏng-Ho. 1983. Philosophy Essay. Seoul: Tong-Nyŏk. Fabian, Johannes. 1993. Keep Listening: Ethnography and Reading. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 80–97. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2005. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Faubion, James. 2001. Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of Autopoiesis. Representations 74 (1): 83–104. Foucault, Michel. 1989. Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution. Economy and Society 15 (1): 88–96. ———. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1997a. Friendship as a Way of Life. In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al., 35–140. New York: New Press. ———. 1997b. On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress. In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al., 250–280. New York: New Press.

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———. 1997c. The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom. In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al., 281–301. New York: New Press. ———. 2007. What Is Critique? In The Politics of Truth: Michel Foucault, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroch and Catherine Porter, 23–82. New York: Semiotext(e). Jackson, Michael. 2009. Where Thought Belongs: An Anthropological Critique of the Project of Philosophy. Anthropological Theory 9 (3): 235–251. Laidlaw, James. 2002. For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8: 311–332. Lee, Namhee. 2007. The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Long, Elizabeth. 1993. Textual Interpretation as Collective Action. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 180–211. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2003. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Publishing Journal. 1989. The Ideology Pursued by the 1980s Ideological Literature: A History of the 1980s Seen Through Changes in the Social Sciences Literature. Publishing Journal 52 (December): 6–7. Radin, Paul. 1927. Primitive Men as Philosopher. New  York: New  York Review Books. Rosen, Matthew. 2022. Tirana Modern: Biblio-Ethnography on the Margins of Europe. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Sakai, Naoki. 2010. Theory and Asian Humanity: On the Question of Humanists and Anthropos. Postcolonial Studies 13 (4): 441–464. Sakai, Naoki, and Jon Solomon. 2006. Introduction: Addressing the Multitude of Foreigners, Echoing Foucault. In Traces IV: Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference, ed. Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon, 1–38. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Scott, Joan W. 2018. Sex & Secularism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Song, Jesook. 2014. The Humanities Studies Movement in South Korea: A Different Perspective on the Crisis in the Humanities and a Caution to Imagining Anti-Capitalist Community. The Review of Korean Studies 17 (2): 125–141. Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. Public Culture 14 (1): 49–90. Yi, Chŏng-Wu. 2011a. Paideia Mission Statement—Paideia, the Return of the Humanities: Now We Must Begin Everything Anew. Community for Alternative Studies, March 7, 2011. https://cafe.naver.com/paideia21/4.

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———. 2011b. Tradition, Modernity, and Beyond Modernity: Between Lines of Flight and Return. Seoul: Green-Bee. You, Sŏngsang, Dajŏng Chŏng, and Yi Hwajin. 2016. Adult Literacy Education of Civil Society Organization Organizations—From Liberation to 1960s: [A] Focus on the Activities of Korean Christian Literacy Association. Korean Journal of Education Research 54 (3): 31–61. Zerilli, Linda M.G. 2019. Critique as a Political Practice of Freedom. In A Time for Critique, ed. Didier Fassin and Bernard E.  Harcourt, 36–51. New  York: Columbia University Press. Zigon, Jarret. 2007. Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities. Anthropological Theory 7 (2): 131–150.

CHAPTER 7

Brazilian Black Activists’ Anthropophagous Manifesto: Reclaiming Blackness in Afro-­Brazilian History and Culture Antonio J. Bacelar da Silva

As a contribution to our discussion about the anthropology of reading, this chapter explores a form of critical reading among Afro-Brazilians in the era of affirmative action in Brazil. Theoretically this form of critical reading brings up resistance as a central problem in the ethnographic study of reading, which Jonathan Boyarin writes about in his introduction to The Ethnography of Reading. In that introduction, Boyarin reflects on the empowering nature of reading. Rather than a disembodied decoding of inherent meaning in texts, reading is better understood as “living textuality” (1993, 2). The study of the relationship between the reader and text is much like the study of oral interaction, a social practice carried out by active subjects:

A. J. B. da Silva (*) University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rosen (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0_7

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[O]rality and textuality, far from being opposite poles, interact in complex, multidirectional ways … dissolving the stereotype of the isolated reader, showing that not only is all reading socially embedded, but indeed a great deal of reading is done in social groups. (3–4)

Any adequate analysis of a reading event must grapple with an important property of reading, that is, the interactive relationship between the spoken and the written. Reading as illustrated in Boyarin’s seminal collection is understood to be a communicative event, and as such, in the study of reading some of the same questions arise in relation to the analysis of the spoken: What are the broader socio, economic, and political contexts in which reading takes place? What is the topic and the purpose? When and where is reading taking place? Who are the participants? What is the language, linguistic variety, tone register, and so forth, of the interaction? What about content, cultural norms, and so forth? Working with reading along these lines will continue to be of great import in the study of communication and social life. With that in mind, I answer to Matthew Rosen’s call for us to “explore the broader effects of reading as a social activity” (2015, 1076). My focus is on one example of what we might term anthropophagic reading in reference to Oswald de Andrade’s 1929 “Manifesto Antropofágico” (Anthropophagic Manifesto). In anthropophagic reading, readers critically and selectively appropriate what is being read and then create something new out of this process. My example comes from my fieldwork among Black community organizers in Salvador (Bahia, Brazil) in 2009–2010. In the example, a language arts teacher and her students (who are affiliated with a local community organization called Instituto Cultural Zumbi, or Zumbi for short) critically read Andrade’s manifesto, which marked the beginning of Brazilian modernism. In the manifesto, Andrade critiques Brazil’s cultural dependency on Europe. As Leslie Bary (1991, 35) notes, Andrade’s manifesto “has been widely cited in Brazil as a paradigm for the creation of a modern cosmopolitan, but still authentically national culture.” Andrade uses the cannibal metaphor to problematize national and cultural identity in the post-colonial context. He urges Brazilians not to merely copy European culture, but to use it critically to create an original national culture of their own (Bary 1991). The language arts teacher and her students, in turn, engage in an anti-racist reading of Andrade’s manifesto, and using compositional strategies, such as quotations and allusions, they intertextually recreate the manifesto. Anti-racism

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consists in openly identifying, critiquing, and challenging racism and racial discrimination, and to support policies that work to promote racial equity. Zumbi’s pedagogical activities consistently established anti-racist objectives and goals, including challenges to students to keep their own racism in check, to monitor their own and other’s actions and words that reproduce racism, to scrutinize policies for their potential to create or further advance racial inequity, and to support policies that promote equity. They used the same approach to other forms of oppression that often intersect with race, such as ablism, classism, sexism, and so forth. The intertextual dialogue between Andrade’s original manifesto and the newly recreated manifesto, intended to be read as a broad statement of the views and aims of Zumbi’s anti-racist project, thus becomes a site for critical, anti-racist reading of Brazilian society itself. Brazil’s racial inequality and racial exclusion are strikingly vast, and the country’s education system is central to the situation. After the end of the military dictatorship and the return of civil society, over a 30-year period, the Brazilian Black movement racked up several victories, including the passage of legislation that requires schools across the country to teach Afro-Brazilian history and culture. Black activists have concentrated mostly on building collective capacity within the local Black population through supplemental instruction and Black consciousness-raising. The various Black organizations have specific goals and operate different programs, such as college-admissions preparatory classes, out-of-the-­ classroom support in math and sciences for high-school-age youth, vocational classes, as well as teacher development courses. They have organized instruction around notions of the social construction of race and the reality of discrimination, always putting race at the front and center of their instruction. In many of our conversations, much in line with Paulo Freire’s ideas about education, the organizers talked about how Brazilian education upheld the status of those in power, while keeping marginalized people “in their place.” They viewed their role as “non-traditional” educators who fostered critical consciousness among their students. Their critical pedagogy included at its core understanding aspects of critical race theory to prepare the mostly Black youth to think critically about their personal struggles over the acceptance and negation of Blackness, and ultimately to fight against racial inequality. Zumbi has been involved with the local working Black population since the early 1990s. At that time, Black organizers in Salvador devoted their free time after work to preparing Afro-Brazilians of all ages for college

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entrance exams. This outreach project evolved into a community organizing dynamo in Salvador serving the população negra (Black population) who could not afford the ever-increasing cost of college preparation. Briefly summarized, Zumbi has served as a model in providing supplemental education with consciousness-raising, and as a springboard from which trained and experienced anti-racist activists went forth to educate, and to help establish similar organizations in Salvador and in other parts of the country. Zumbi defines its mission as the promotion of affirmative action for the advancement of the local mostly Black population. They listed the following as the key components of their mission: to foster awareness of racial injustices among their students, challenge them to reflect and critically analyze their individual situations, and how these relate to racial injustices locally and nationally. The institute offers a combination of college preparatory classes and Black consciousness-raising education. During my fieldwork there, Zumbi offered two college admissions preparatory classes: a year-long evening course for working adults and a three-year-long after-school program for high-school age students. The school was academically strong, and teachers and staff consistently tried to promote a supportive atmosphere toward achievement. During an interview, I asked Danda, one of the directors and an instructor at Zumbi, to tell me more about her organization’s goals. To explain why Zumbi had been drawn to an education-based initiative, she described what she saw as the grim reality of Brazilian public schools. “The nation’s commitment to its school-age poor youth is flagging, particularly at the run-down schools that serve the Black population,” she said. In my many conversations about curriculum development, especially in terms of including Black consciousness and citizenship as key components of instruction, I repeatedly heard people in the three organizations, including the students themselves, complain that in Brazil’s public schools basic skills were being taught less and less. They also complained that stereotyped portrayals of Black people and Afro-Brazilian culture were constantly presented in teaching materials and daily interactions. Critical thinking (about issues like gender, race, class, and urban violence), they often added, was practically non-existent. Emphasizing the consciousness-­ raising mission of the school, César Silva, Zumbi’s current director and co-founder, repeated a common refrain within the organization, “Zumbi is not a college preparatory school that offers conscious-raising classes, but a consciousness-raising school that offers college preparatory classes.” To accomplish its goals of consciousness-raising education, Zumbi developed

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a variety of activities in the classrooms that assisted students to engage critically with issues of privilege and oppression and to better understand their position in Brazilian society.

Critical Reading as Reparation In this chapter, I return to an example I wrote about in Silva (2022) to reanalyze and discuss the material more explicitly as a contribution to the ethnography of reading. The example comes from my observations of one of Zumbi language arts classes whose teacher I call Jamile. The example involves what is generally described as critical reading. In our conversations, Jamile repeatedly talked to me about the existing cultural inequalities among Brazilian people, particularly how poorly education textbooks in Brazil treated African and Afro-Brazilian history and culture. At that time, she and her students were working on a new project, “Semana de Arte Negra” (Black Art Week). She explained that the event would be the product of the series of class activities that challenged the information in “regular” textbooks. She further elaborated that the idea in all class activities was that through the critical reading of textbooks, her students could appropriate and reappropriate dominant narratives of what it means to be Black in Brazil. Rather than being passive consumers or mere receptacles of what textbooks say about Black Brazilians, her students were encouraged and challenged to critically explore the dominant texts and to (re)construct something different from what the authors had in mind. This chapter examines one of Jamile’s pedagogical activities. Jamile’s activity is interesting theoretically because it brings up a central problem in the anthropology of reading. With its general concern directed by an interest in the role people play in the activity of reading, a major emphasis in the anthropology of reading relates to the agency of readers, or how the act of reading transforms that which is being read. As Michel de Certeau (1984, 169) notes in “Reading as Poaching,” it has generally been understood that readers are passive consumers of texts (whether scientific, economic, or political) “without putting one’s own mark on it, without remaking it.” De Certeau critiques this assimilation of reading to passivity and associates the role of all people in reading to poaching: “the text has a meaning only through its readers; it changes along with them” (170). One can clearly see how the concerns voiced by those who stand critically against the passivity of the reader find an analytical solution in De Certeau’s use of the metaphor of poaching for the activity of reading.

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Approaching the same issue from another angle, Saidiya Hartman (2008, 4) writes about the problem of the silence of the voice of the peoples from Africa in the historiography of the African diaspora. She argues that considering their untold stories in the present can be a “form of compensation or even … reparations.” In reading the archives of slavery of African people in the Atlantic world, Hartman faced the daunting task of recuperating the story of the lives of the enslaved when there are exiguous details about who they were, except for numbers, ciphers, and fragments of discourse: “It is an impossible writing which attempts to say that which resists being said” (12). Beyond the questions of the impossibility of constructing an alternative story, Hartman pondered the ways to go about the task of historical representation under these conditions, the ethics of doing so, as well as the purpose. Here Hartman makes a case for what she describes as “critical fabulation.” By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-­ presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done. By throwing into crisis “what happened when” and by exploiting the “transparency of sources” as fictions of history, I wanted to make visible the production of disposable lives (in the Atlantic slave trade and, as well, in the discipline of history), to describe “the resistance of the object” … [and ultimately to interrogate] the production of our knowledge about the past. (11, 14)

From the problem sketched above, one gets the idea that critical reading and writing may be understood as a form of reparation. My example from Black community organizing in Salvador is what can be termed a quest to resist and make visible the attempted erasure of Blackness and Black Brazilian history, culture, and identity, and to guarantee Black Brazilians’ rights to presence and visibility.

Zumbi’s Manifesto When I started fieldwork with Black organizations in 2009–2010  in Salvador where I have done fieldwork for the past twelve years, I met Jamile, professora de Português, language arts teacher, and her high-school students in one of the organizations. I was a participant observer in one of

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her classes. As in many other activities that I observed at Zumbi, the problem with the textbooks was a continued theme in Jamile’s language arts lessons. This chapter examines one of Jamile’s pedagogical activities, which she and her students were working on for the Black Art Week. The Modern Art Week of 1922 is part of the language arts curriculum in Brazil. Known as Semana de 22 (Week of 22), it was a landmark festival of Brazil’s modernist movement that took place in São Paulo in 1922, and it remains part of Brazilian collective memory as an oppositional event and landmark of Brazil’s modernist movement. During the week of February 11–18, 1922, the city of São Paulo was home to many live music venues, dance performances, poetry recitations, and fine arts exhibitions. Brazilian artists provided a showcase of some of the most counterculture works ever seen in Brazil. The festival subverted traditional forms of art, art appreciation, and beauty, changing Brazilian cultural and political life in important ways (Camargos 2002). In a recent critique published in the São Paulo press, Brazilian writer Luis Augusto Fischer (2021) criticizes the “divinization of the Week of 22,” warning his readers against the belief that the counterculture themes and discussions depended on the São Paulo Week, while systematically downgrading or even erasing the value of artists in other parts of Brazil, including Rio de Janeiro. For Fischer, it is time to hear other voices from a period of strong cultural unrest. The metaphor of anthropophagy later adopted in Oswald de Andrade’s ([1928] 2019) “Manifesto Antropofágico” (Anthropophagic Manifesto) was closely associated with Brazil’s modernist movement. Anthropophagy, or cultural cannibalism, was used to describe the subversive appropriation of the culture of the colonizers for the purpose of producing an independent national culture. As Bary (1991) describes it, this is not about aping nor rejecting European culture, but critically combining the strengths of foreign culture with the strengths of local, indigenous culture. Attuned to the country’s changing social and economic reality of the time, the goal was to construct a modern Brazilian identity by converting foreign ideas into locally reusable cultural material. For several generations, schools have taught Brazilians about this important moment in the creation of Brazilian national culture, and it is often part of college entrance examinations. It was also on the list of topics in Jamile’s language arts class. However, she thought that it was not the best use of class time to approach the significance of the 1922 event as commonly presented in the pages of school textbooks. Instead, she decided that her group of students should be critical readers of Andrade’s

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manifesto. Jamile’s lesson plan included having the class dissect Andrade’s text before reconstructing it to write the Brazilian Black experience in terms that communicated their political message while reflecting on Brazilian society in its totality. By dissecting the text, she meant identifying and annotating strengths and weaknesses through the lenses of critical race theory. The reconstruction exercise consisted in, first responding to the various points of critique, and then writing their own manifesto in continual exchange with the original one. People at Zumbi were aware of the existence of dominant, exclusionary voices in the Brazilian narrative of the nation, and they were taught to listen to (that is, read) those voices with defiance. The adaptations in Jamile’s students’ reconstruction of Andrade’s manifesto reveal the power of multivocality—the existence of many and various voices or points of view even within a single word—in the activity of critical reading in which students reposition themselves amid different ideas, opinions, beliefs, and interpretations regarding Blackness and whatever contributions Black people have made to Brazilian history and culture. The power of change in their reading and writing lay in their desire to free themselves from the prison house of dominant representations from which they learned (through critical reading) about the key to escape. As we will see, the central thread that runs through Zumbi’s manifesto may be summarized as the dream and quest for racial justice, materialized in the changes to the original text. Here again, as de Certeau reminds us, “[t]he autonomy of the reader depends on a transformation of the social relationships that overdetermine his relation to texts. This transformation is a necessary task” (1984, 173). And this transformation is only possible when readers can push the limits of their relation to texts and reimage themselves not just as readers but as critical readers. This was exactly what Jamile and her students aimed for. One way for them to attain this power of critical reading was by making the text a space for questions and actions. During in-class activities, Jamile and her students examined issues of power. She challenged them to allow their own biases to surface and challenge them. She explained how oppressive structures have alienated them. She often offered strategies for digging into received texts and thinking of reading them as a form of action. One of the products of her critical-reading activities was the­

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(re)construction of Oswald de Andrade’s manifesto. Two excerpts of Zumbi’s manifesto can plunge the readers of this chapter right into it.1 Cambaleantes na sua própria escuridão onde foi colocado e esquecido pela sociedade e pelo mundo, a população negra vaga sem ter uma grande representação artística, literária e histórica, manifestando em nós, jovens negros, a inconformidade pela exclusão feita pela sociedade para com a nossa ancestralidade. Swaying in its own darkness where they were placed and forgotten by society and the world, the Black population drifts without strong artistic, literary, and historic representation, generating in us, Black youth, outrage at the exclusion of their ancestry by society.

This excerpt is compelling in its powerful reorientation of everyone to the frustrations of Black Brazilians about their underrepresentation in Brazilian art, literature, and historiography. In the reading of the original and the creation of new manifesto, students grappled with the silence and lack of knowledge about Black people in Brazilian historiography. The Brazilian ideology of racial mixture allowed Brazil’s oppressive elites to question the existence of racism in the country and therefore to silence mobilization for racial justice. Thus, for Jamile and her students, a commitment to tackle this silence could have wide-reaching social implications. There is a shared poetic cadence in the compositional character of Zumbi’s piece with Andrade’s, as seen above. Their shared poetic cadence further reveals their intertextuality—or how a given text is always in dialogue with other texts, past, present, and future (Kristeva 1986, 64–65). Compare with the following lines from Andrade’s original text: Filhos do sol, mãe dos viventes. Encontrados e amados ferozmente, com toda a hipocrisia da saudade, pelos imigrados, pelos traficados e pelos turistas. No país da cobra grande. Children of the sun, mother of living. Fiercely met and loved, with all the hypocrisy of longing: by the immigrated, by the trafficked, and by the tourists. In the country of the big snake.

As the rhythmic similarity and the likeness between the two manifestos became more evident, the students’ imitation of images in Andrade’s manifesto took on the task of a critical interpretation of colonial relations 1  I kept the original in Portuguese to provide the reader familiar with Portuguese the opportunity to appreciate the nuances of the analyses of the different linguistic features.

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(past and present). This highly reflective close reading and re-writing activity also revealed the oppositional nature of the relationships between the authors, the texts (manifestos), and their respective audiences. Several things could be said about the relationship between the two manifestos. First, it lays bare a critical appropriation through a deliberate intertextual resemblance, which points to the fact that Zumbi teachers and her students drew inspiration from Andrade. But beyond that, the appropriation implies a critical reception of Andrade’s text and a remake with Zumbi students’ own marks on it. The broader implication of the appropriation is that it enabled Zumbi students to engage with Andrade’s ideas as a (re-) articulation of a self-reflexive, anti-racist intervention into his manifesto. The intertextual appropriation also highlighted the continued struggles of Black Brazilians with the foundational problem in the history of Brazilian race relations: anti-Blackness. Parts of the manifesto also read a bit like a people’s history of Brazilian race relations, where Jamile and her students voiced the sentiment of a population that was left out of, or misrepresented in, Brazil’s mainstream historical narratives. Here Hartman’s (2008, 11) insight that critical readings strive to “displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done” seems particularly apt. And as I often heard during fieldwork, echoing Paulo Freire, Zumbi took the responsibility of conducting the education of Black youth not as transfer of knowledge (mere preparation for college entrance exams), but as a space for the construction of new understandings of the world they live in. Later I will share more of Andrade’s original piece to allow us to better grasp Jamile’s and her students’ critical reading of it. Here is another segment of Zumbi’s manifesto. In this segment of the (re)constructed text, the students talked about the African gods. In my article “Exu is not Satan–The Dialogics of Memory and Resistance among Afro-Brazilians” (2019), I combine memory studies and critical race theory to illustrate Black activists’ efforts to dispute what they see as misconceptions about Black people and Blackness that are present in the dominant narrative conceptions of Brazilian society. Zumbi’s teacher and her students address the issue of how the African gods have been historically overlooked or misunderstood due to racism: As histórias brasileiras devem ser contadas assim como os mitos gregos. Os deuses africanos devem ser venerados assim como os deuses do Olimpo. Deve-se acabar

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com as camufladas castas das expressões artísticas, com o falso moralismo ainda predominante, o mito da democracia racial. The Brazilian stories must be told in the same way as the Greek myths. The African gods must be venerated in the same way as the gods of Olympus. We must end the camouflaged casts in the world of arts, with its false moralism, the myth of racial democracy.

To make visible the important role that African-derived religions, such as Candomblé, and their associated traditions, in the formation of Afro-­ Brazilian population and Brazilian society, the new manifesto states that “[t]he African gods must be venerated in the same way as the gods of Olympus.” In doing so, it critiques the limits of dominant representations through the act of reading (and writing). At stake in this act of reading (and writing) is an anti-racist critique of the marginalization of Black cultural production and, ultimately, establishing who Black people are in opposition to who they have been. More experienced Black activists have socialized Black youth in Salvador to go against the grain of Brazilian racist habitus and challenge misconceptions about Black people and Blackness (Silva 2019). For Zumbi members, the representational logic of the elite cultural production is based on the myth of Brazilian non-racialism. The false idea that all Brazilians are a blend of African, Indigenous, and European peoples and that there are no racial divisions or other forms of racial discrimination in Brazilian society thus needs to be resisted for the true inclusion of Brazilian Blacks to be accomplished. After all, at the intersection of the long history of Brazil’s ideology of racial mixture and the avoidance of the dark (Davis 1999, 15) lies the ideal of whitening, of Brazil becoming more European, an idea that permeated Brazil’s entire nation building project. The students’ critique of Brazilian non-racialism and the whitening ideal highlights the ways their Zumbi classes have supported student’s critical sense particularly regarding the ways in which the ideas of non-­ racialism and whiteness in Brazil have worked. This was consistent with the approaches used in the other Black organizations I worked with during fieldwork. To recover a suppressed collective memory and Black identity, and tell a new story, Jamile and her students filled in missing pieces in Afro-Brazilian history and culture. The dramatic (re)construction continued:

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Se a Bíblia diz que somos a imagem e a semelhança de Cristo, desejamos a imagem do Cristo negro em todas as entidades que seguem a doutrina. If the Bible says that we are the mirror image and likeness of Christ, we wish the image (or statue) of a Black Christ to be present in all establishments that follow this doctrine.

In the affirmation of the subversive character of reading, here the new manifesto evokes the biblical passage that says people have been molded in the image of Christ. The authors of Zumbi’s manifesto alluded to Andrade’s words to orchestrate points of comparison and to register what was partial and incomplete and to bring into view the subalternation of Blackness in Brazil. In doing so, they push forward a call for Brazilians, and Afro-Brazilians in particular, to assert themselves by filling in the gaps of European post-colonial cultural domination. As an example, consider Andrade’s lines, “Se Deus é a consciência do Universo Incriado, Guaraci é a mãe dos viventes. Jaci é a mãe dos vegetais.” (If God is the conscience of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is the mother of the living. Jaci is the mother of vegetables). Andrade clearly exposes the differences in cosmovision, or worldview, between Christians and natives, posing opposition and confrontation between them (Tosta 2011, 223). Interestingly, both manifestos express a need to restore the history and collective experience of Brazilians. However, by establishing specific conditions that set limits on religious/cultural whiteness, the new manifesto disturbs the dominant narratives. In juxtaposition, Zumbi’s manifesto articulates their own vision for Brazilian society. Note how Andrade’s use of the conjunction “if” (i.e., given that) establishes Guaraci and Jaci as part of God’s universal conscience. Similarly, in the Zumbi manifesto, if (given that) is used to frame the assertion that all of us, including Black people, were created in the image of Christ. The notion of intertextuality is useful again here. Formed by derivation, Zumbi’s manifesto works back and forth between the original and the reconstructed manifestos to critically dialogue with Andrade’s critique of colonialist thought (civilization vs. barbarism or modern vs. primitive), pointing out gaps in his text and offering an even more subversive point of view. The new manifesto thus challenges Brazilians to create a truly post-­ colonial national identity. By alluding to syntactic elements of Andrade’s manifesto to surreptitiously bring about the desired intertextual effect, Jamile and her students expressed their concerns and conflicts over

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whiteness as the norm. Exploring the possibility of offering a counterpoint to such ideas, the new manifesto continues: Queremos apresentar e deslumbrar para o grande público as diversas manifestações que tiveram que permanecer em silêncio … . Vem dos jovens do Instituto Cultural Zumbi a vontade de fazer uma transformação na sociedade em que vivemos, apresentando para a nação uma pluralidade de cultura, artes e pensamentos que estavam aprisionados dentro do seu próprio eu. We want to show for the fascination of the public a variety of works that were kept in silence … . The youth at Zumbi Cultural Institute want to make transformations in our society, presenting to the nation a plurality of culture, arts, and thinking that were imprisoned inside their own selves.

Through parallelism—that is, the use of successive verbal constructions that correspond in grammatical structure and meaning, such as “queremos” (we want)—the new manifesto draws attention to features in the original text, guiding the sense we make of the striking resemblance between this segment and Andrade’s words, “Queremos a Revolução Caraíba. Maior que a Revolução Francesa. A unificação de todas as revoltas eficazes na direção do homem. Sem nós a Europa não teria sequer a sua pobre declaração dos direitos do homem.” (We want the Caraíba [or Caribbean] Revolution. Bigger than the French Revolution. The unification of all the efficient revolts for the sake of human beings. Without us, Europe would not even have had its meager declaration of human rights.) Through repetition of “queremos” (we want), Jamile and her students allude to what has been included (and excluded) in Brazil’s historical narrative, and at the same time, expand on the expression of desire for transformations posed by Andrade. As I mentioned in my previous analysis (Silva 2022), “Caraíba Revolution” is Andrade’s term for the utopian transformation that would be driven by the natives of the Americas in their struggles against the degradations imposed by the colonizer. Further exploring parallelisms, between the two manifestos, the new manifesto makes obvious the cultural transformations that Jamile and her students worked diligently at. By reading critically the basic elements of Andrade’s manifesto, by re-­ presenting the issues Andrade was concerned about from an anti-racist point of view, Jamile and her students attempted to extend the limits of what is possible in Afro-Brazilians’ relationship with Blackness.

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Conclusion The anthropology of reading is a rapidly developing area of social inquiry, with important analytical tools to describe, analyze, and explain the impact of the person of the reader on what is being read and how what is being read, in turn, shapes personhood. The excerpts analyzed here offer a sampling of how scholars go about examining the emancipatory potential of anti-racist reading and writing. The language arts teacher and her students at Zumbi introduced key elements of their anti-racist views of Brazilian race relations in their reading of Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagic Manifesto” and their writing of (re)constructed version of it. The intertextual back and forth between the original and the reconstructed manifestos created a discursive space the challenge the exclusion of Blackness from the established narratives in Brazil, which has been a powerful tool of Black oppression and, at the same time, a staple for holding the racial democracy and mixed-race ideologies in place. The many ways that the two manifestos interact and intersect, especially the way that Zumbi’s updates Andrade’s with a call for Brazilian society to stop reproducing the colonialist mindset that for too long has obliterated Blackness from Brazilian history and culture, is striking. Of specific interest is how anti-­ racist reading and writing pedagogy can create a space for Black Brazilians to understand the workings of power and culture in individual and collective lives and to challenge narratives of race relations in Brazil that favored the racial-mixture framework while downplaying Blackness as a vital component of national identity. By scrutinizing the representational issues in a racism saturated culture, Black Brazilians are interrogating their own self-­ identity vis-à-vis Brazil’s historical obliteration of Blackness.

References Camargos, Marcia. 2002. Semana de 22: Entre Vaias e Aplausos. 1. ed. ed.Semana de vinte e dois. São Paulo, SP: São Paulo, SP: Boitempo. de Andrade, Oswald. 2019. The Cannibalist Manifesto (Manifesto Antropófago). In The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. James N. Green, Victoria Langland, and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, 300–308. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bary, Leslie. 1991. Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’. Latin American Literary Review 19 (38): 35–37. Boyarin, Jonathan. 1993. Introduction. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 1–9. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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de Certeau, Michel. 1984. Reading as Poaching. In The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall, 165–227. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davis, Darién J. 1999. Avoiding the Dark: Race and the Forging of National Culture in Modern Brazil. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate. Fischer, Luis Augusto. 2021. Consagração Da Semana de 22 Impôs Falsa Ideia de Que São Paulo Foi o Berço Do Modernismo. Folha de S.Paulo, Ilustríssima, December 11. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ilustrissima/2021/12/ consagracao-­d a-­s emana-­d e-­2 2-­i mpos-­f alsa-­i deia-­d e-­q ue-­s ao-­p aulo-­f oi-­o -­ berco-­do-­modernismo.shtml. Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12 (2): 1–14. Kristeva, Julia. 1986. Word, Dialog and Novel. In The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, 34–61. New York: Columbia University Press. Rosen, Matthew. 2015. Ethnographies of Reading: Beyond Literacy and Books. Anthropological Quarterly 88 (4): 1059–1083. Silva, Antonio José Bacelar da. 2019. Exu Is Not Satan – The Dialogics of Memory and Resistance Among Afro-Brazilians. African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal: 1–14. ———. 2022. Between Brown and Black: Anti-Racist Activism in Brazil. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Tosta, Antonio Luciano de Andrade. 2011. Modern and Postcolonial? Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Antropofagia’ and the Politics of Labeling. Romance Notes 51 (2): 217–226.

CHAPTER 8

Cultivating Socialist Selves: Reading Trotsky Under the Specter of Capitalist Realism Ahmed Kanna

What keeps me going [as a socialist] is just walking down the street in this system. —E, a young socialist activist in San Francisco, 2016 [Kshama Sawant’s victories] are lightning bolts on the horizon of the future. —K, a union militant, revolutionary socialist, Oakland, 2016

In the summer of 2022, at a local branch meeting of a Bay Area workers’ and immigrants’ rights organization of which I am a member, an argument broke out about the value of a particular kind of reading. This organization defined itself as socialist, and socialist organizations tend to prioritize political and “theoretical” reading as a way to shape and sharpen members’ analyses of political current events and their participation or “intervention” in wider social movement spaces. At the meeting, several A. Kanna (*) University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rosen (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0_8

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comrades complained that a particular set of documents on the character of the state in the Peoples Republic of China, written by other members of the organization, was too dense and time-consuming for busy workers, especially given that attention during this time was focused on the recent US Supreme Court decision overturning legal abortion. Although the argument got somewhat heated and diverted us from the topic at hand, in the end branch members saw it as helpful in developing their activist work and participation in the organization. It clarified the importance, for rank-­ and-­file members, of the need to read (and write) about theoretical topics that seem at best indirectly related to ongoing contemporary events. The contribution that helped resolve the tension was made by a long-­ time rank-and-file member, who offered that, while the discussion of whether China was imperialist or not may seem distant from the heat of contemporary anti-oppression struggles in the United States—in reality, he said, it was not—it obviously mattered to comrades and others involved in working-class struggles internationally, especially in the Global South, site of important Chinese investments and, consequently, heightened worker exploitation. What kinds of Marxists are we if we are not internationalist, asked the comrade. The conversation, he added, offered lessons in what it meant to be a member of a specifically Marxist organization. Questions of class exploitation and their relationship to oppression and to imperialism, are these not the core concerns of Marxist politics? And are they not deeply complex? How else, except through a specific kind of reading—a collective, engaged, highly participatory reading of texts written by comrades experienced in class struggle—were we to develop our specific Marxist politics, politics that would set us apart from the mainstream progressive reformists?

Lightning Bolts on the Horizon of the Future: Context and Argument I conducted the fieldwork and interviews upon which this essay is based during the height of the so-called revival of socialism in the United States, mainly during 2016 and early 2017.1 Although the United States is ruled  The type of research I conducted has been called “militant ethnography” by Juris and Khansnabish (2013). The ethnographer conducts this kind of research both within and without activist organizations, and often takes the position of political support of the project in which their interlocutors are engaged. I expand upon the complexities and opportunities offered by this method for anthropological knowledge production in Kanna (2023). 1

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by one of the world’s most (seemingly) stable and reactionary ruling classes, its population is far from right wing. By 2012, Gallup polls of United States residents had already begun showing strong support for socialism, with nearly 40 percent expressing favorable views of it. By 2019, the figure had risen to 43 percent. Among young people, 54 percent viewed socialism favorably in 2010, a figure that rose to 58 percent in 2019 (Moody 2022, 57). As the Marxist political scientist Kim Moody has discussed, Bernie Sanders’s team carefully studied these shifts of public opinion ahead of his 2015–2016 campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination (2022, 57). It was in these years, in an echo of the so-called New Communist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Elbaum 2018) that perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in the United States from diverse backgrounds began to move toward and join volunteer socialist organizations such as, prominently, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and others to their left, such as Socialist Alternative and the (now defunct) International Socialist Organization. Other important movements such as the Black liberation current, under Black Lives Matter and other banners, as well as the youth-led Sunrise (climate) movement, counted tens of thousands of socialist and socialist-­ sympathetic members among their ranks. While I myself have, at least since my teenage years, identified vaguely with the left, for me the inspiration to become an active participant in socialist organizations also came at this time, but it was not related to Sanders. I first learned about, and was inspired by, the socialist Seattle city council member Kshama Sawant, a member of the self-described Trotskyist Socialist Alternative, during her successful 2013 campaign. After reading about the campaign in the popular socialist magazine Jacobin, I reached out to the Socialist Alternative branch in my home city of Oakland. I became active in that organization’s East Bay, California branches between the summer of 2014 and the spring of 2017, when I decamped to the DSA. Though by 2018, turned off by their too close relationship with the Democratic Party, I also left DSA, I continue to be active on the left in the East Bay and often collaborate with my former DSA comrades, though not so much with those of Socialist Alternative, on projects of common interest, such as support for abortion rights, reproductive justice, and immigrant rights. My interlocutors for this essay and for the wider ethnographic project of which it is a part (Kanna 2023) were mostly members of Socialist Alternative, mainly in the Bay Area but with a number from other cities

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such as Chicago, New York, and St. Louis. Most were young, mid-30s or younger, at the time of our interviews. They self-identified as either working class or downwardly mobile middle class. They were students, healthcare workers, union organizers, transportation workers, logistics workers, and in one case an artisanal crafts worker. They tended to be white, although there were interlocutors who identified as Black, Latinx, Indian-­ American, and Arab-American. My research involved both open-ended interviews and participant observation in public political events, such as the November 2016 anti-Trump protests following the election and the Women’s March in early 2017, both in downtown Oakland, and anti-­ fascist mobilizations in Berkeley in 2016 and 2017. I avoided doing research during internal meetings and on internal communications and stopped doing the research after I left Socialist Alternative in March 2017. However, my experience and continued involvement in Marxist and socialist activist work in the Bay Area since then has informed and enriched my scholarly work. I left Socialist Alternative mainly over differences in how to relate to social movements and also out of the simple burnout that is a common feature of radical political activism, but I continue to critically respect the work they, and in particular Sawant, do. I was mainly interested in members’ life stories, how those influenced their socialist activism, and, more specifically, how their reading interests and practices informed and grew out of that activism. What they said to me can as easily have been said by a member of DSA or any of the numerous other organizations where people who have chosen to critically confront the US capitalist system come together. My argument in this chapter is in two parts. The first relates to what the socialist political analyst Richard Seymour has characterized as the conservatism of bourgeois institutions. Quoting the sociologist Frank Parkin, Seymour writes that “an emphasis on conservatism (among the working class) as a puzzle to be explained was misleading. The real question, given the conservative nature of the dominant institutions—from the church to the military to parliament—was how anyone turned out to be a socialist” (Seymour 2017, 98). While Seymour’s emphasis in the passage just quoted is ideological—the seeming puzzle of radical consciousness within societies dominated by reactionary institutions—and is poignantly relevant to the United States in 2023, my emphasis is different. Institutions with

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social hegemony, regardless of their class character, do not only shape ideology. They provide a framework for the cultivation of the self. And that self in the contemporary United States is profoundly individualized and alienated (Fisher 2009). One of the main reasons that interlocutors joined socialist and communist organizations was because they offered a path of struggle against the profound alienation of life in the United States for working and poor people—often coterminous categories. If “capitalist realism,” as the culture critic Mark Fisher has put it, inculcates passivity— “there is no alternative,” in Margaret Thatcher’s words—Marxist praxis, including specific forms of reading, expresses a radical refusal. It models and materializes a vision of non-alienation. Marxism prefigures liberation, which in turn keeps activists inspired through seemingly hopeless times. This sentiment was beautifully expressed by one of my interlocutors, who described Sawant’s electoral successes as “lightning bolts on the horizon of the future.” Second, an analysis of Marxist reading culture sheds light on the related areas of the ethnography of reading and ethnography of literature (Reed 2018). While earlier approaches tended to focus on readerresponse theory and saw the reader as “active meaning maker,” more recent approaches have expanded this framework to include alternative reading practices, more oriented toward the critique of the social status quo and the cultivation of specific kinds of ethical, pious, or political selves (Mahmood 2005; Luhrmann 2012; Ahmad 2017). In the second part of the chapter, I look at the ways in which Socialist Alternative interlocutors engage with one of the central texts of the modern Marxist tradition, the so-called Transitional Program, written by the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky and his comrades from the US Socialist Workers Party in 1938 to inaugurate the founding of the Fourth International. The document is presented as a party program outlining “tasks” for the nascent revolutionary socialist movement of the time (Trotsky 1938). My argument is that activists in this tradition approach the text in ways that blur the line between reader-response (meaning co-creation) and what more recent work on the ethnography of reading has called “absorbed reading” (Reed 2018). In the latter, the emphasis is the deployment of “correct lessons” from the text as a means for cultivating an ethical self. In the Marxist context, the latter is often referred to as “being a principled socialist or communist.”

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Marxist Activism and the Ethnography of Reading In pioneering ethnographic work among Jewish yeshiva students and scholars in New  York’s Lower East Side in the late 1980s, Jonathan Boyarin had already begun to highlight the ways in which reading can be collective and intersubjective (Boyarin 1993). Boyarin’s work was a salutary critique of understandings of the practice of reading as primarily solitary and of textual meaning as mainly determined by the author of the text, so-called author-centered models of textual meaning. For Boyarin, reading was deeply dialogical and intersubjective. One relational effect of this dialogism, according to Boyarin, was the formation of social identity. His interlocutors’ reading practices invite us to think about “the ways people mark themselves as distinct groups through unique recombinations of various cultural genres” (1993, 213). In a recent survey of the anthropology of literature and reading, Adam Reed notes that literary anthropology remains a “puzzling” area of research and that what an ethnography of reading might look like remains an open question (Reed 2018, 34). How, Reed asks, should anthropologists approach “reading cultures”? Expanding upon Boyarin’s notion of reading as dialogical meaning creation, Reed offers a critique both of author-centered frameworks and reader-response theories. Drawing on religious studies, Reed highlights aspects of reading to which Boyarin and reader-response approaches have generally paid less attention. In turn, he proposes a framework that highlights cultures of “absorbed” or “enraptured” reading (2018, 37). Reed’s interlocutors, a London book group reading a novel by a middling English postwar novelist, approached the text by identifying with its main protagonist, cultivating a consciousness for language, landscape, and the past, as well as for their daily relationships in ways interlocutors perceived to be similar to those of the protagonist. Similarly, Tanya Luhrmann has highlighted processes of “enraptured or absorbed reading” among US-American evangelical sects who embrace a fictional reading of the Bible and, in the process, cultivate the imagination and a sense of a personal relationship with God (Reed 2018, 39; cf. Luhrmann 2012). Rather than assuming that reading is centered on meaning creation, Reed’s notion of “absorbed reading” invites us to see it as a form of self-­ cultivation. This resonates with my Marxist activist interlocutors’ reading (and writing) practices. Like Reed’s or Luhrmann’s interlocutors, Marxist activists attempted to imaginatively “learn lessons” from past progressive

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struggles to both cultivate what they saw as ethical socialist selves and to understand and intervene in political events. Socialist groups such as Socialist Alternative, DSA, and others within the US progressive and left activist milieu prioritized deep, political, and theoretical reading.2 Weekly branch meetings usually had a “political discussion” on a recent political or historical event in which activists considered an important class or social struggle. Less frequent but larger meetings, such as regional or national conferences, were organized around a set of more complex theoretical texts. Periodic reports from leadership, known as perspectives, were almost always framed in relation to theoretical or historical debates within the socialist movement. Moreover, activists consistently read the prominent periodicals of the socialist movement, such as Jacobin, Tempest, Spectre, Left Voice, New Politics, and others. Articles in these publications are almost always distinct from what activists call “the bourgeois press” in the seriousness with which they attend to situating analysis of events within contexts of class struggle and theoretical and historical socialist debates. Of course, no seriously committed Marxist would equate reading with praxis, or active intervention in one’s material reality guided by Marxist theory. Indeed, many critiqued, as utopian and liberal, the praxis-free equation of reading and posting articles online with “dissemination of socialist ideas.” Nevertheless, Marxists prioritized a specific practice of reading, “theoretical” and collective, as a sine qua non of good Marxist praxis. This in turn, I argue, generated a disposition among activists which both militantly rejected succumbing to capitalist realism (Fisher 2009) and helped them cultivate an ethical socialist self.

The Ethical Communist Self In The Romance of American Communism, a memoir and profile of US communism based on Communist Party USA members’ reflections on their activism between the1930s and the 1970s, Vivian Gornick tells an anecdote that captures the spirit of what I am calling “the ethical communist self.” Of the working-class milieu which gathered at her parents’ Bronx apartment in the 1940s, she writes:

2   See, for example, Cosmonaut (n.d.), https://www.tempestmag.org, and Workers’ Voice (2022).

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When people sat down at the kitchen table to talk, Politics sat down with them, Ideas sat down with them, above all, History sat down with them… . They were not a people without a history, they had the Russian Revolution. They were not without a civilizing world view, they had Marxism. Within such a context the people at my father’s kitchen table could place themselves; and if they could place themselves—compelling insight!—they could become themselves. (Gornick 2020 [1977], 7–8, emphasis original)

The isolation of daily life in the United States, capitalist “belly of the beast,” and the seeming hopelessness of confronting the power of the capitalist class, these are feelings that are as real today as they were in the days of Gornick’s youth. Arguably more so: radicals today no longer have the living memory of the Russian Revolution or the militant mass workers’ movement it inspired as concrete examples of alternatives to capitalism. While present day Marxists read the revolutionary classics to glean, as they say, lessons for today’s struggles, they also read because through doing so, they can stand side by side with “Politics, Ideas, and History.” This, in turn, inspires activists to engage in consistent, daily political acts on the spectrum between the uncomfortable and the risky. Such acts include, for example, speaking in front of large protest audiences, flyering at mass protests in the hopes of engaging skeptical attendees in political discussion, taking to the streets to confront neo-Nazis, driving cross-country to support Indigenous water protectors, breaking curfews during antiracist/Black Lives street marches, and much more.3 In between these episodes of heightened activity, these interlocutors and tens of thousands like them deeply involve themselves in the daily activity of building and running independent (of capitalist parties, nonprofits, etc.) activist organizations. This, in summary, is the daily practice of cultivating the ethical communist self. Interlocutors did this, importantly if only partially, through specifically Marxist practices of reading and writing. It was seen, if indirectly, as a response to the generalized hopeless that capitalism generates, the condition of “capitalist realism.”

3

 All of these were actions in which either I or my comrades, or both, directly engaged.

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Rejection of Capitalist Realism Mark Fisher writes that, although his work owes a debt to Jameson’s Postmodernism, there has been a qualitative change in the culture of late capitalism since that seminal text appeared in 1991. “What we are dealing with now … is a deeper, far more pervasive, sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility” (Fisher 2009, 7). Fisher succinctly outlines three related reasons for this. First, there is no longer an outside to capitalism as in the social, anti-war, and student movements of the 1960s or in the 1980s when, for all its flaws, “Really Existing Socialism” still represented that “outside.” Second, unlike in the postmodernist moment, capitalism under the reign of capitalist realism no longer confronts or clashes with modernism. It does not need to: “it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted” (2009, 8). Third, having now absorbed the potential of actually existing socialism, “capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable” (2009, 8). Marxist interlocutors were both keenly aware of this conundrum and, paradoxically, organized their activist lives around going against its grain. Doing so was both an ethical and a political choice, a disposition captured well by queer theorist and left activist Dean Spade. Spade writes: While conditions deteriorate in our daily lives with worsening climate crisis, skyrocketing rents, childcare costs, health costs, and still-growing carceral infrastructure, we are also experiencing a layer of isolation and individuation that makes all these things more dangerous. Being alone in our suffering, believing suffering is the fault of those in crisis rather than systems that put people in crisis, and having no faith that coming together with others could make it possible to live in a better way, is a significant threat to our slim chances of reducing suffering or surviving. (Spade 2022, 6)

Interlocutors often discussed how it was this very condition—mainstream capitalist society’s constant drilling of the idea that “there is no alternative”—that motivated their Marxist political work. N is an activist with Socialist Alternative who identifies as a socialist feminist. She is in her mid-­40s and works as a freelance editor. Her parents, she says, were working class and were sympathetic to a lot of the socialist program but were too in thrall, as she puts it, of the so-called American dream and Cold War Zeitgeist to think that socialism was achievable or even desirable. She herself grew up thinking that working hard would lead to a fulfilled, successful life. She recalled identifying with the myth of American meritocracy,

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but as she grew out of her twenties, she said, she came to question the capitalist roots of this vision. She began one of our interviews, in summer of 2016, by discussing what she—like most other activists I came to know—regarded as the most profound crisis caused by capitalism, the crisis of global warming and environmental destruction. Interestingly, she went on to connect this to a crisis of meaning. “I think more and more,” she told me, about “the basic issue today. We’re totally barreling toward environmental destruction and the extinction of the species. Can we even remediate this problem, with Marxism or anything else? Are we too late? The only chance, maybe, is Marxism, but unless we’re in time it might be too late. “The problem with liberal approaches,” she continued, “is that they accept the basic system [of capitalism] and want to only make tweaks, which is pure fantasy. Liberalism does not provide structural change.” Liberals, as Fisher would say, are incapable of thinking outside the limits of capitalist realism. At this point, N made a connection that resonated with Fisher’s meditation. She said that “while on one end of the spectrum, it’s a basic fight for survival, on the other end of the spectrum, even when [life under capitalism] is good, it’s bad. Even when you have a good job, when you’re not doing backbreaking labor, work is so alienating. Why should we live like this? We’re alive for such a short time. I don’t want to spend it like this!” To emphasize the point, she paraphrased a line from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx [1844]1992), asking “why can’t you spend your time making art or riding bikes in the mountains if you want to?” “One of the great things about Marxism,” she continued, “is that it doesn’t tell you what you should do with your freedom. You might want to spend your time reading and writing, I might want to spend it cooking or whatever. Time is a precious resource. You realize that as you get older. One of the tragedies of capitalism is that it allows so few people to fully self-actualize and self-develop. What would the world be like if everyone were allowed to do that? Marx was a great lover of  the arts, he wrote poetry, he read Shakespeare, he appreciated all the best humans could produce. The irony is that Marxism is always caricatured. You’re going to have this drab existence, everyone is equally miserable. Its promise is so far from that.” Ironic, she added, that the system, capitalism, that forces a “drab, miserable existence” on almost everyone projects this image onto socialism.

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E, a queer-identifying newer activist in their mid-twenties, similarly pointed both to the drabness and psychological devastation wrought by capitalist society. This was a condition that a sociological monograph helped them better understand and articulate. “There’s a book called Coming Up Short [Silva 2013] about how all the neoliberal institutions have failed my generation. We still think of adulthood as moving out, getting married, getting a home, a stable job,” said E as we sipped coffees in a San Francisco café one afternoon. They continued that, “for the majority of my generation, this is unattainable. Public education has changed. You have to go into thousands of dollars in debt. You’re stuck paying off debt. Public sector unions and even private sector unions have been demolished. There are few stable, long-term jobs. The author [of Coming Up Short] interviewed hundreds of working-class millennials. Very few were able to succeed in following their definition of adulthood. [The book talked about] the huge psychological impact of this system.” The book that E mentioned is one that they’re “independently” reading, meaning that it is not part of the reading “required” for members of Socialist Alternative and therefore not part of the collective structure of weekly branch meeting discussions. The latter category usually consists of official party texts. This is not to suggest that comrades are not encouraged to read and explore other texts on their own, far from it. Socialist Alternative members valued both the reading material produced by their organization and that which they did on their own. The former, party material, included articles for the website/newspaper, which members both wrote and discussed at branch meetings. Indeed, the writing process is co-equal to that of collective reading and discussion at branch and other organizational meetings. As several interlocutors discussed, writing articles played a number of important roles in their development as good socialists. It sharpened their analytical skills by promoting their engagement both with Marxist “classics,” such as texts by Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, and more contemporary material published by other comrades. It also helped develop their argumentation skills. This was especially important given the enormous pressure of what interlocutors called “reformist” and liberal ideas—from putting workers’ trust in elected bourgeois politicians or parties to liberal analyses of oppression or climate crisis—which they saw as disconnected from material contexts of class and capitalist power. But reading outside of this party material was also an activity in which many interlocutors avidly engaged. As N put it, “the way I draw upon my

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reading [in my political work] happens in an organic way.” Recently, she said, she has been reading a lot of Marxist feminist literature, such as books by Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser. She expanded upon this by meditating on how reading radical texts can help erode political passivity or conservatism, which often takes the name of “common sense”: I’ve been thinking about Gramsci to try to grapple with how ideas become so powerful, compelling and hegemonic. Certain ideas cross over into this category of common sense, like gravity is just a given. For a long time, capitalism was like this. This might be changing now, especially with young people who don’t seem to have this kneejerk hostility to socialism or communism. When I was young, not questioning capitalism was so ingrained. [You were always told] this is the best we can do, the USSR “proves that,” and trying to prove otherwise is like trying to jump off your roof to prove that gravity doesn’t exist.

When it came to the project of launching an organized intellectual attack on the common sense that capitalist realism tries to impose, interlocutors accorded a leading role to a seemingly unlikely text, written over eight decades ago. Far from being a dead text, the text in question, the so-called The Transitional Program, written by Leon Trotsky and his US comrades in the 1930s, is more aptly seen as a ghost. It is “there but not there,” crossing decades to enter into the daily work of radical politics (Tsing 2015, 76).

A Riposte to Capitalist Realism: Rereading Trotsky in the Current Crisis J, a queer-identifying exchange student at a Bay Area college, met and connected with other young Socialist Alternative activists through their campus work. They had been active in socialist activism in their home country in northern Europe for years and were particularly passionate about queer feminism and bringing this perspective to communist and socialist spaces. However, they found that other prominent socialist groups, of which the Bay Area has a surfeit, were less open to this perspective, while the Socialist Alternative activists they met were much more open-minded. Another prominent group whose meetings they also attended for a time, they said, was “more dogmatic and narrower. [There was] less room for [queer feminism]. They tended to see gender as

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subordinated to class, they did not take it as seriously as I liked to, they didn’t see it as a [distinct form of oppression].” However, the main attraction to Bay Area Socialist Alternative “was the culture.” The other group had “a quite formal and serious culture. A bit too serious, a bit duty-­ oriented. [They argued that] you were active politically because you have to, not because it’s fun.” This narrowness expressed itself, importantly, as a discouragement to read “unapproved” texts or to have open discussions. “Asking ‘stupid’ questions or ‘blasphemous’ questions wasn’t encouraged. You felt like you couldn’t participate without reading a lot of ‘approved’ specific texts.” Similarly, for B, a media worker in his mid-thirties and transplant to the Bay Area from the Deep South, it was the accessibility and affirming atmosphere in Bay Area Socialist Alternative at that time (2015–2016) that contrasted to his prior experience with various lefts. He was disenchanted, in particular, with the academic left he experienced at a large public university in the South: I was in a milieu of unconsciously leftist (people). They would prominently display Derrida and postmodern theory on their bookshelves. … I became disenchanted with the left, which I saw [at the time] as very elitist, all about jargon, about feeling superior to ‘right-wing idiots.’ They were all kind of rich and none, I’m not sure if none of them, but it’s surely close to none of them, really continued with radical politics after college. … [By contrast] when I joined Socialist Alternative, I hadn’t read a lot of Marxism and that was okay with them. [They were] more interested in building a mass base, as opposed to other socialist groups, which seem focused on theoretical purity and sectarianism. Sawant talked about it at the time, [about] building an independent non-capitalist mass left party. But it’s also … the left is really hard to get involved with. An entry point is hard to find. Socialist Alternative seemed like a good entry point. An accepting environment.

Interlocutors often connected this “accepting” organizational culture and their outward facing activist interventions to their Trotskyist political and theoretical tradition. In short, to a kind of reading of the movement’s literature in a “correct” way, which in turn helped them cultivate a specifically Marxist activist self. Although activists read widely in the socialist tradition, arguably the most important text shaping what they described as “their method” was The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, or, as it was more commonly referred to, The Transitional Program. This text, written by Trotsky in collaboration with

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comrades of the US Socialist Workers Party in 1938, was almost constantly referenced by interviewees and accorded prime status as a touchstone of the Marxist movement as they understood it. This text, so fundamental to the Trotskyist movement in the United States, so venerated as a classic of that movement, has unsurprisingly generated often radically different interpretations (Flakin 2021; Hallas 2013; MacNair 2007). The Socialist Alternative interlocutors profiled here gave their own organization’s spin on the text, which, as I would later discover in conversations with Marxists from other organizations, is vigorously contested. My purpose here is not to weigh in on the correctness or validity of this or that interpretation. Rather, drawing on Asad’s (1986) notion of a “discursive tradition,” my interest is in how followers of an inherently plural tradition (in this case not only the various Trotskyisms in the United States and globally, but also other Marxisms, including Marxism- Leninism, Maoism, and social democracy) “maintain coherence and establish correct practice” (Schielke 2018). Interlocutors centered the Transitional Program not only to distinguish their organization’s identity from that of others. After all, an organization needs distinction to recruit new members, in part by attempting to compete for recognition in the crowded space of social media. They did so, as well, because this was a persuasive riposte to the conundrum of capitalist realism. As mentioned, interlocutors were aware of what Fisher has highlighted as the basic message of a capitalism paradoxically both in decline and in hegemony: “there is no alternative.” While interlocutors often acknowledged versions of Spade’s (2022) anarchist solution (which draws on Kropotkin’s notion of mutual aid) as valuable but incomplete, it was Trotsky’s Transitional Program that they described not only as anticipating much of what Fisher has diagnosed but also providing a collective path out of the morass. Like more recent texts such as Fisher’s and others (Magdoff and Sweezy 1987; Davis 2005; Federici 2010; Harvey 2004; Tsing 2015; Brenner 2020), Trotsky was writing at a time, the latter half the 1930s, in which capitalism was seen as being in a state of terminal decline. Fisher, as mentioned, writes of a crisis so deep that it makes it impossible to imagine alternatives to capitalism. This was anticipated in the work of Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, Silvia Federici, Mike Davis, and David Harvey, all of whom have profoundly meditated on a crisis of capitalist profitability so protracted and deep that its marked characteristics were “surplus populations,” low to zero growth, and primitive accumulation as the primary

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means of reviving profit. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has, similarly, brilliantly described a capitalism which thrives on disrupting human–nonhuman entanglements, in which precarity has become pervasive and possibilities for imagining progressive alternatives foreclosed. All of these radical scholar-activists would find much that is familiar in Trotsky’s statement that the era of “progressive capitalism”—a capitalism built upon continuous growth and which, consequently, underpinned expansion of living standards and democratic horizons—was at an end. Also, like the more recent texts just mentioned, The Transitional Program points to a deep legitimation crisis within the leadership of capitalist societies. Trotsky focuses on the crisis of the union leaderships and of the self-nominated revolutionary leaderships of the working class, in particular the Stalinist Communist Parties then dominant on the left. Moreover—again we hear echoes of more recent discussions—“the bourgeoisie itself sees no way out.” War is inevitable in this context. As Trotsky writes, “international relations present no better picture. Under the increasing tension of capitalist disintegration, imperialist antagonisms reach an impasse at the height of which separate clashes and bloody local disturbances … must inevitably coalesce into a conflagration of world dimensions.” An observation that reverberates with our own day, as the capitalist crisis sets the stage for new rounds of inter-imperialist rivalry. Most of my interlocutors have read the Trotsky text but not the others. My point here is to show that they feel, through their own everyday experiences of capitalism—“just walking down the street” as E says—and intellectually comprehend, through recognizing the echoes between Trotsky’s text and their own experiences, that capitalism is in at least a protracted, if not terminal, crisis, and yet, paradoxically, that it has so colonized the mind that it forecloses the possibility of imagining alternatives. Where The Transitional Program differs from more recent, generally more pessimistic texts, makes all the difference for interlocutors. Unlike most of the others, Trotsky’s text glows with revolutionary optimism. The context in which Trotsky was writing was, like ours, bleak. It was in the aftermath of Hitler’s rise to power, made possible among other things by Stalinism’s sectarian and ultraleft “Third Period,” in which communists attacked social democrats as “social fascists,” followed by its volte face toward “popular front” collaboration with bourgeois forces. Throughout, Trotsky, ever faithful in the capacity of the proletariat to self-organize, committed to a program of working-class independence and leadership of the movement for human liberation.

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Further, and for interlocutors, inspiringly, The Transitional Program concretizes the path of liberation. It does this by making a key distinction, that between social democracy’s “minimum program” and revolutionary socialism’s “transitional program.” Social democracy, as exemplified by the main electoral workers’ parties of Western European countries during his time, limited itself to pushing for reforms within capitalism while leaving the system intact. But, Trotsky writes, it is the very system of capitalism “in its death agony” that will inevitably bring any reform program to grief. Reforms are necessary, but it is naïve to imagine that they will be accepted by a capitalist class in crisis. It is therefore necessary for the revolutionary socialist party “to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demand (sic) and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.” Activists to whom I spoke organized their political work around this core idea. It was through consistent reading of the political and economic news and by talking to workers wherever possible—in workplaces, schools, union spaces, and at tabling events—that activists collected qualitative data about what they called “the mood of the working class.” This mood was, in turn, seen as an index of the material struggles and concerns of workers, broadly defined as those who depend upon a wage to survive and those—whether unemployed or underemployed—who were left out of even this minimally survivable condition. This outreach work in turn provided topics for branch discussions, editorial choices for articles, and slogans for banners, t-shirts, and other printed materials, which—party organizers tried to ensure—were to prominently feature the socialist red and be of a clean, angular, striking aesthetic quality and with simple, powerful, “transitional” slogans.4 “Transitional,” interlocutors explained, referred to Trotsky’s concept of demands that bridge the immediate, mass needs of the working class with the necessity of the assumption of power by the working class. Such demands did this work by showing, in the 4  The Socialist Alternative newspaper can be found here: https://www.socialistalternative. org/paper/. For examples of banner aesthetics, see: https://www.socialistalternative. org/2022/06/27/how-to-unionize-your-workplace-a-step-by-step-guide/ and https:// www.socialistalternative.org/2022/06/27/we-need-action-now-to-defend-abortionrights/.

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process of struggle, the unwillingness of the ruling class to accede to them, thereby clarifying class lines and sharpening class consciousness. Two activists I’m calling P and C described transitional demands to me during a conversation near UC Berkeley’s campus. This was in 2016, before a $15 minimum wage was common throughout the Bay Area and California, as it is today. It had only been recently won in Seattle, a campaign in which Socialist Alternative and their city council member, Sawant, were prominent. P, a tech gig worker, and C, a public school teacher, were in their late twenties. They were partners who shared a radical critique of US imperialism and capitalism and who joined the party together. As they put it, the demand for a $15 minimum wage is puzzling, from a Marxist perspective. In what way is it revolutionary? P explained: “what socialism and Marxism bring to the table is a critique of the current system that explains why we can’t solve [climate crisis, inequality] from within this system. We can learn why capitalism perpetuates these problems. That’s a really important starting point.” But understanding the system’s “responsibility,” as interlocutors often put it, is not enough. An organization must have a “dedication to meeting workers in struggle and building movements around issues that are relevant and important to those workers. That’s a really good way to build resistance. You see that in our 15 work, which doesn’t have much to do with Marxism or with how we change the world. But it’s a good starting point.” C added that a really important part of being in Socialist Alternative, what it means to be active in the organization, is “the practice of making transitional demands. We’re open about that. We say that 15 is good because it helps workers, but it’s also a good way to organize [for further struggle].” To which P added that “the reason we fight for [transitional demands] is because they’re a site for increasing consciousness and encouraging organization.” T, a labor lawyer in his mid-30s based in Oakland and a member of Socialist Alternative, expanded upon the concept of transitional demands and cited Trotsky, in particular. I asked him, as I had other interviewees, to talk about writers or texts that were an inspiration to his work. He suggested that Trotsky’s Transitional Program helped him connect diverse struggles, both ones about which he was reading and ones in which he himself was involved. He said he particularly liked “Chomsky, especially interviews with David Barsamian. [Richard] Wolff’s Occupy the Economy. Howard Zinn. Angela Davis. Seize the Time by Bobby Seale. I really like Howard Zinn.” In summer 2016, he started going through the Socialist

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Alternative’s recommended readings list and found Mumia Abu Jamal’s work on the Black Panther Party of particular interest. “Trotsky’s Transitional Method (sic) was also very interesting.”5 Before he moved to Oakland, T lived in Seattle and was active in Sawant’s first electoral campaign in 2013. That was “before I read the Transitional Method. I thought of Seattle, and also Paul Murphy (of Anti-­ Austerity Alliance in Ireland and member of the Irish affiliate of Socialist Alternative) and the fight against water charges, as a model.” Here, T is referring to the uprisings since 2014 in Ireland against the introduction by the main utility company of water usage fees. Those protests turned out hundreds of thousands in the streets. For T, this campaign and the ones around the minimum wage in the US are examples of successful transitional demands. He explained: “find an issue that resonates with a lot of people, help build around that issue, make it a clear demand, use that energy to say that ‘voting for a candidate is not just voting for that candidate but voting for that issue.’” He added, “now I’m reading the Transitional Method. It basically describes what happened in Seattle and Ireland. It’s basically the transitional method. By helping people struggle for an issue, you help raise consciousness and [people’s] power.” For R, a university student and food services worker in San Francisco, Kshama Sawant’s campaigns in Seattle were good examples of the parliamentary deployment of transitional demands, or, to put it in more explicitly Leninist terms, revolutionary parliamentarism, in which communists participate even under the most inauspicious parliamentary conditions, not because they believe in bourgeois democracy, but to highlight its true class nature, to educate and organize the masses and heighten working-­ class consciousness (Lenin 1920). Before Sawant’s election, R says, he was wary of socialist groups, whom he felt were determined to remain cloistered “talk shops.” Sawant’s election, by contrast, “captured me.” He added: Kshama wasn’t just elected (to a city council seat). I could see in her press interviews, she was speaking about socialist revolution, about things that I 5   Socialist Alternative members sometimes made this slippage between Transitional Program and the term “transitional method.” The latter was usually meant to highlight that the text should be read not just, or mainly, for its context specific programmatic points, such as the demand for a sliding scale of wages or forming farmer-worker alliances, but for the deeper dialectical method that informs it. The latter was seen as the main lesson of the text that could be applied beyond its specific historical context.

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later identified with Trotskyism and the transitional method. [She was saying] ‘Yes, here I am, I’m for socialist revolution and I’m for the 15 dollar minimum wage.’ I thought that there was no way that 15 would succeed politically. I thought there was no force politically for it. I was still embittered by the lost opportunity that was the first Obama administration as well how Occupy dissipated. Occupy seemed like … at the time we were calling it the American Fall [with reference to the Arab Spring]. It was nothing like that even though it was a source of interesting ideas.

R expanded on this, framing transitional demands and communists’ participation in electoral politics as the paths to the larger goal of forming a workers’ party in the United States: Ultimately a revolutionary party is necessary, it will be a key engine for revolutionary overturn of society. But in the United States, because of its history, we do need the masses of the working class to experience a reformist party and to experience the limitations of a reformist party. Because of the absence of a reformist [social democratic] party in US history. The socialist movement in the US was always at the extreme margins. Even at the heyday of the Communist Party, it was clear with the Smith Act, that the state would be able to crush communist organizations, not just in [their] political form [as a party] but also the cultural idea of socialism. So the US working class is starting at the lowest political level of any advanced nation’s working class.

Conclusion In the winter of 2017, as I drove him home from a DSA organizing meeting in Oakland, a comrade I will name P discussed with me a reading group proposal made by one of our other comrades, Y. Comrade Y was a leader in the socialist education working group of our local DSA chapter and was well regarded as a highly intellectual activist who read widely in Marxist literature. P, a self-identified unorthodox Trotskyist, was also an avid reader and knew the Trotskyist oeuvre better than most of the people I encountered in the Bay Area socialist movement. Y had proposed texts for the reading group such as those by André Gorz, an Austro-French neo-Marxist philosopher most famous for his concept of “non-reformist reforms.” For Gorz, working toward non-reformist reforms was a way of grappling with the supposed stability of the capitalist state in the latter half of the twentieth century, which, he theorized, had become immune from the kind of revolutionary assault waged by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Gorz’s

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core idea was that the masses in an “advanced capitalist society” could elect a cadre of socialists to government who would pass a series of reforms that, cumulatively, would add sufficient pressure for a transition to socialism. This was an idea that was again becoming popular among the Bernie Sanders-supporting mainstream of the DSA, who found in Gorz a theoretical justification for Sanders’s project of bringing about socialism through the electoral path. P, the more “orthodox” Marxist here, rejected this. While he respected Y’s intellect, P said that he found his seemingly never-ending quest to discover innovations to “authentic” Marxism to be problematic. As a Marxist, he said, “I’m less interested in innovative ideas than in the correct ideas.” I admit that I was taken aback by so blunt a statement of the truth value of “authentic Marxism.” The latter is a term that was often used by Trotskyist activists and usually referred to the principles of working-class independence and self-emancipation, along with the method of historical materialism, as articulated in the Communist Manifesto, Engels’s “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done and State and Revolution, along with Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and Transitional Program, among others. Or, to bring this back to the conversation on that Oakland winter evening, it means rejecting the notion that socialism can be brought about either by bourgeois elections or by reforming the bourgeois state. For P, Lenin’s statement that the socialist revolution must “smash” the capitalist state and replace it with a workers’ state inspired by the Paris Commune was sacrosanct. To me, this exchange summarizes the approach to reading that my Marxist interlocutors took. It would be tempting to interpret this as dogmatism or close-mindedness. Doing so would be too facile, however. My interlocutors were almost in all cases avid readers, questioners, and seekers. They read not only the “Marxist classics” just mentioned but widely in non-fiction and fiction, from sources well outside of Marxism. Knowing that I am an anthropologist, Y engaged me in deep conversation on the works of James C. Scott—far from a Marxist—among other topics. Indeed, part of what has made this ethnographic work so invigorating for me has been the enthusiasm with which comrades, in various organizations, have had for reading about history and politics, and their consistent engagement with international questions. Having moved to the United States from the Arab world and having lived in Europe for long stretches, this was an aspect of life in those parts of the world that I truly missed in the United States. Through their reading and their exceptional international

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knowledge, my Marxist interlocutors have helped create a sense of home in a country that, for me, has strong pragmatic, not to say anti-intellectual, tendencies. To understand in a more nuanced way the meaning of my comrades’ emphasis on “correct reading,” a better method than that of truisms about “open-mindedness” is required. This method I have tried to enact here through my thick description of the questions asked by committed Marxists and their attempts to answer them through reading. Like Reed’s, my interlocutors see their reading practices as “absorbed” rather than as co-constitutive of meaning. They refer to Marx, Engels, and Lenin as “our teachers.” But this is not meant as veneration. It is a leap into the historical, social, and political conundrums that the leading lights of the movement confronted in their time, and an effort to understand how they navigated them. These are the lessons that Marxist readers lean on as they try to enact the ethical communist self in the United States today. Angela Davis described membership in the Communist Party as “an anchor, a base, a mooring” (cited in Dean 2019, 3). It bespoke a commitment to something deeper, more intensive, and more consistent than the generally episodic, politically broad, and ephemeral culture that characterizes much of the United States left, in the time of Davis’s youth as well as today. For my interlocutors, reading in a Marxist way, a historically materialist way that centered class struggle, and participation in party-like socialist organizations, provided such a mooring. I imagine that the Trotskyists’ like-minded, socialist-leaning peers in the Black liberation, immigrants’ rights, queer liberation, indigenous liberation, and climate movements (categories far from mutually exclusive) also find Davis’s insights deeply resonant.

References Ahmad, Attiya. 2017. Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Asad, Talal. 1986. The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. Washington, DC: CCAS Georgetown University. Boyarin, Jonathan. 1993. Voices Around the Text: The Ethnography of Reading at Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 212–237. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brenner, Robert. 2020. Escalating Plunder. New Left Review, May/June. https:// newleftreview.org/issues/ii123/articles/robert-­brenner-­escalating-­plunder.

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Cosmonaut. n.d. About us. https://cosmonautmag.com/about-­us/. Davis, Mike. 2005. Planet of Slums. New York: Verso. Dean, Jodi. 2019. Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging. New York: Verso. Elbaum, Max. 2018. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che. New York: Verso Books. Federici, Silvia. 2010. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books. Flakin, Nathaniel. 2021. In Defense of the Transitional Program. Left Voice, April 4. https://www.leftvoice.org/in-­defense-­of-­the-­transitional-­program/. Gornick, Vivian. (1977) 2020. The Romance of American Communism. New York: Verso. Hallas, Duncan. 2013. Trotskyism Reassessed. Socialist Worker, October 18. https://socialistworker.org/2013/10/18/trotskyism-­reassessed. Harvey, David. 2004. The ‘New Imperialism’ and Accumulation by Dispossession. Socialist Register 40: 63–87. Juris, Jeffrey S., and Alex Khansnabish, eds. 2013. Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kanna, Ahmed. 2023. Enlisted in Struggle: Being Marxist in a Time of Protracted Crisis. Focaal 95: 61–73. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. 1920. Should We Participate in Bourgeois Parliaments? In “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder. https://www.marxists.org/ archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch07.htm. Luhrmann, T.M. 2012. A Hyperreal God and Modern Belief: Toward an Anthropological Theory of Mind. Cultural Anthropology 53 (4): 371–395. MacNair, Mike. 2007. Transitional to What? Weekly Worker, August 1. https:// weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/684/transitional-­to-­what/. Magdoff, Harry, and Paul M.  Sweezy. 1987. Stagnation and the Financial Explosion. New York: Monthly Review Press. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marx, Karl. (1844) 1992. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. In Karl Marx: Early Writings. Translated by R. Livingstone and G. Benton. New York: Penguin Classics. Moody, Kim. 2022. Breaking the Impasse: Electoral Politics, Mass Action, and the New Socialist Movement in the United States. Chicago: Haymarket. Reed, Adam. 2018. Literature and Reading. Annual Review of Anthropology 47: 33–45. Schielke, Samuli. 2018. Islam. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, October 30.

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Seymour, Richard. 2017. Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics. New York: Verso. Silva, Jennifer M. 2013. Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty. New York: Oxford University Press. Spade, Dean. 2022. All Together Now. The Anarchist Review of Books 3 (Winter/ Spring): 6. Trotsky, Leon. 1938. The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Workers’ Voice. 2022. Historical Documents Related to the War in Ukraine. https://workersvoiceus.org/2022/07/06/historical-­documents-­related-­to-­ the-­war-­in-­ukraine/.

CHAPTER 9

Together and Apart: Shared Reading as an Embodied and Intersubjective Ritual of Resonance Charlotte Ettrup Christiansen and Anne Line Dalsgård

In “Textual Interpretation as Collective Action,” Elizabeth Long (1993) argued against the dominant idea of the solitary reader within theories on literary reading and contemporary culture (1993, 181). At her time, reading in groups had been largely ignored by academics. The notion of solitary reading placed literary reading in the private life of persons, in the home, in the living room, sofa, or the bedroom, a misrepresentation which counterposes literary reading to the public sphere’s potential for fostering social identity and social change (1993, 185). This, said Long, ignored the way literary reading has a social infrastructure (190). Long showed how reading is a socialization process and reading practices are socially framed. C. E. Christiansen (*) The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, Reykjavik, Iceland e-mail: [email protected] A. L. Dalsgård Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rosen (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0_9

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Readers talk with other readers and find stimulation in literary milieus. What is worth reading and how to read and interpret it is determined in certain social communities (191–192). Reading groups and literary circles and societies empower members, create community, engender new ideas, and challenge tradition. The group holds shared values, and the text often serves as a pretext to engage in conversation with both the author and the other readers (193–194). A kind of kindler, you could say. Thus, Long stated, reading in groups is a communal and active process for participants (194). In Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life, Long (2003) further described the transformative potential of reading in groups. She emphasized the mechanisms of reflective self-interrogation as a way of fashioning subjectivity through intersubjective creation (2003, 153). The central action in the book clubs she followed was the conversation, which enabled participants to discover who they were, their values and stances (145). Within the women’s book clubs, issues often focused on career choices, motherhood, and women’s voices in society. Notably, the discussion rarely reached any kind of closure or agreement (146). Long showed how members of reading groups often use books as “a lens into the lives of the other group members, similarly using other members’ personally associative interpretations of the literary characters as a lens into the books, and taking as much or as little from the discussions for their own personal insight as they are moved to do” (Long 1993, 199). In this chapter we aim to add an extra dimension to Long’s insights, namely, the embodiment and intersubjectivity of a reading in process. The chapter unfolds experiential aspects of intersubjectivity in collective reading by exploring qualities like “presence” (Gumbrecht 2004) and “mood” (Gumbrecht 2008) and how these can lead to participants’ oscillation between immersion into such experiential qualities and withdrawal to a more observing, delimited state of reflection. We draw on fieldwork in shared reading groups in Denmark over the years 2016–2022, primarily in groups meant for young people with so-­ called mental vulnerabilities.1 Shared reading is a group-based literary technique in which prose and poetry are read aloud with breaks, allowing time for open discussion. The discussion is facilitated by a “reading

1  Some data stem from fieldwork conducted among solitary readers and audio-book readers. Readers who are interested in a more detailed account of this data can see Dalsgård (2021).

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guide.”2 The method was developed in Liverpool, England, around 2002 by literature teacher Jane Davis. Later, the charity organization The Reader was also formed there to proliferate the method. It was brought to Denmark in 2011, where its sister organization the Danish Reader Society (DRS) was established. Now, shared reading is being practiced in several contexts in Denmark, both by the Danish Reader Society and by librarians, priests, and teachers, among others. It is being offered to different target groups, such as young people struggling with loneliness, psychiatry users, or pregnant women, and in groups open to anyone interested. Previous research indicates that shared reading, not unlike Long’s analyses, can both generate a sense of social community and promote individual processes of change (Billington et al. 2013; Dowrick et al. 2012; Steenberg 2016; Skjerdingstad and Tangerås 2019; Billington 2019). Specifically, it has been reported that shared reading can foster existential meaningfulness and well-being (Billington et  al. 2013; Longden et  al. 2015; Christiansen and Dalsgård 2022) and even counter depression and anxiety symptoms (Billington et al. 2013; Dowrick et al. 2012). To dive a bit more into these potentials, we paraphrase literary scholars Skjerdingstad and Tangerås’s definition of shared reading. They regard shared reading as a “distinct ecology” characterized by features of the text, the reading guide, and group participants. This ecology works as a kind of “affordance nest” that enables the creation of meaning in a transpersonal space, involving embodied, affective, and cognitive processes (Skjerdingstad and Tangerås 2019, 16). Shared reading fosters a kind of “creative inarticulacy” (Longden et al. 2015) in which we may observe in the interactions between text and participants the translation of inner experience into emergent thinking. In their assessment of literature-based health interventions, Longden et al. (2015) described shared reading as a group effort in which “some moments of the most profound achievement appeared as a ‘relay of thinking,’ wherein members collaborated round the text to share, complete and develop diverse thoughts and perspectives in the manner of passing a baton” (Longden et al. 2015, 116). While the therapeutic benefits of participating in shared reading are seen as secondary gains in the eyes of the Danish Reader Society, this notion of creative inarticulacy remains important to the creation of a communal space in which literature can be experienced. 2  The term used by The Reader is “reader leader,” while in Denmark it is called a “reading guide” (læseguide).

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The chapter begins with a contextualization of our field, that is, reading in Denmark. It then moves on to its focus with a description of a reading session in Aarhus, Denmark, where Virginia Woolf’s short story “Solid Objects” was read aloud. The reading group was part of a collaboration between the Danish Reader Society and researchers from Aarhus University, in which groups of young people who had experienced mental vulnerability met once per week to read together.3 We conducted participant observation in the groups and interviewed most participants more than once (see Christiansen 2021a, 2021b; Christiansen and Dalsgård 2022). Drawing from our fieldnotes we provide an overview of the oscillating movements we have observed in shared reading groups broadly. Here we zoom in on moments of togetherness and a more distanced reflection among readers. We then discuss the underlying mechanisms behind these oscillating moves and point to ritual features of shared reading that contribute to these dynamics. As we wrap up the chapter, we bring in the notion of “resonance” (Rosa 2019), which on reflection we found to be an apt description of that open, undefined space that shared reading makes possible.

Reading as a Shared Experience? In Denmark, book clubs are a well-known phenomenon. The Danish tradition of “people’s enlightenment” grew from the beginning of the nineteenth century onward in the shape, among other things, of local Reading Societies. Here, ordinary people had the possibility of borrowing books and discussing these with each other. This has had a great influence on the development of the Danish welfare society and ideas of reading as a social and democratic lever. The women’s movement and Danish women’s right to vote in 1915 can be traced to the Women’s Reading Society, and the Danish Worker’s movement grew strong in the Worker’s Reading Society (Steenberg 2023). Such cultural and educational initiatives were often supported by the Danish state as an enlightened population was seen as an important part of building a cohesive and strong nation state (Kaspersen 3  The project “From Participant to Reader leader” (2018–2021) was an interdisciplinary research project, combining empirical reading research, psychology, and anthropology. The project had a praxis component through the collaboration with the Danish Reader Society. The aim of DRS was to develop an empowerment program for mentally vulnerable and marginalized youth. The project was funded by the Velux Foundation.

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and Ottesen 2001, 125). Although the contemporary Danish Reader Society has not been named with an eye to these earlier organizations, it builds on values of democratization, through fostering equal dialogue and social cohesion (Steenberg 2023). Many Danes today meet and discuss books they have read in book clubs similar to the ones Long studied. Librarians we have interviewed estimated that most participants in these groups are women over fifty years of age who do not have small children at home. However, reading collectively, understood as the actual reading aloud and exploration of a text together immediately after, is not a common phenomenon in contemporary Danish cultural life. Although reading aloud for children is a culturally valued practice in Denmark, and this activity has been determined to be a crucial aspect of learning to read, both as a cognitive and cultural process, most Danes have later been introduced to solitary, silent reading in school as the primary reading form. Perhaps this is the reason why adult Danish readers are generally unfamiliar with shared reading. The images readers create when reading, the sensation of certain words, or the “tone” of a text are often said to be difficult to explicate verbally. A certain intimacy is tied to them as they are experienced privately (Dalsgård 2021). In our studies of reading in Denmark, we have interviewed readers like this woman in her forties who said: I’m not talking to anyone about what I read. It’s just something I have for myself. It is a very private thing, really, I don’t need to share it at all. Because I can’t, I simply can’t. I can say this is amazingly good. And so maybe one of my friends will read it too, and then we might as well share something emotional around it. But to sit and say, “so, and so, and so, and so,” we don’t. I simply don’t agree with that. I feel sorry for the book. (Dalsgård 2019, 3)

This respondent even found it too intimate to read a used book, with the stains and other traces of the previous owner visible. Another reader, a young woman in the beginning of her thirties, said that she would never write in her books in case someone else found them after she died—it would be like exposing a secret, a personal relationship (Dalsgård 2019, 3). Others have told us about how they discuss books with friends and family. Or they sit in the same sofa, each with a book to read. “A fine form of passive togetherness,” as a young man said. Another used the word hygge (coziness) about this kind of sofa-sharing. A third told how on their winter

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holiday the whole family would sit in the same room and “swallow” their books, as they did not have the energy to talk all the time. But also these readers do the actual reading alone. They chew the words, ponder the images, and yes, swallow the stories. They tell family and friends, “This book is really good! You should read it!” Only with selected persons close to them do they share their experiences in more detail. “Someone you know and trust,” as a reader said. There is a certain hesitation to the sharing. When the second author of this chapter was introduced to shared reading, she also hesitated to engage in the exchange of impressions and thoughts about the text read. It felt too intimate and somehow unnecessary. The meaning of the narrative in question (a short story by Alice Munro) seemed evident. What more was there to say? Only when another began to speak about parts and aspects of the story that she had not at all observed did she suddenly find herself engulfed in the conversation. It became clear to her that readers can do something together in a shared reading group that they cannot do on their own, as Skjerdingstad and Tangerås had also observed (2019). But what? Eva, who participated in a shared reading group, explained it like this: I’m not used to the spontaneous. When I have discussed texts with others, we have read it from home. Then you have prepared a thought about it, or questions. [In shared reading] we didn’t know how the text ended when we talked about it, so it was more ongoing.

We will explore this aspect of emergent meaning making in the following ethnographic account of a shared reading session that took place in Denmark in May 2018.4

Solid Objects On an early evening in May our group was gathered for its weekly shared reading. We were Katrine (the reading guide), Sonja, Karen, Joan, Laura, Eva, Solveig, Emilie, and Charlotte (the anthropologist), all women between their late teens and early thirties. The weather had been almost summer-like in the past days, and many of the readers were tanned and lightly dressed. The community house where the meeting took place was 4

 This reading session is also briefly mentioned in Christiansen (2021b).

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located in the center of a larger urban area in Denmark. It housed several different cultural and literary activities and festivals. In the daytime, the large room they occupied was used as a creative writing school. The women were sitting in a circle, on different and worn second-hand chairs. Paper copies of today’s texts were either in their hands or spread out on small tables between them. On the tables were also thermos bottles with hot water, as well as tea and coffee, and Katrine had bought snacks on her way over, today it was Oreos. Without any introduction, Katrine began to read. The text described two men walking together and discussing politics on a beach somewhere. They flung themselves down next to a black pilchard boat. One of the men, John, began to examine the sand. Katrine read aloud: John, who had exclaimed “Politics be damned!” began burrowing his fingers down, down, into the sand. As his hand went further and further beyond the wrist, so that he had to hitch his sleeve a little higher, his eyes lost their intensity, or rather the background of thought and experience which gives an inscrutable depth to the eyes of grown people disappeared, leaving only the clear transparent surface, expressing nothing but wonder, which the eyes of young children display. No doubt the act of burrowing in the sand had something to do with it. He remembered that, after digging for a little, the water oozes round your finger-tips; the hole then becomes a moat; a well; a spring; a secret channel to the sea. As he was choosing which of these things to make it, still working his fingers in the water, they curled round something hard—a full drop of solid matter—and gradually dislodged a large irregular lump, and brought it to the surface. When the sand coating was wiped off, a green tint appeared. It was a lump of glass, so thick as to be almost opaque; the smoothing of the sea had completely worn off any edge or shape, so that it was impossible to say whether it had been bottle, tumbler or window-pane … It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore.5 (Woolf 1989a, 102–3)

“Break,” Katrine said, and there was a brief contemplative silence punctuated by the sound of chairs being moved a bit and the turning of photocopied pages as some reviewed the story. “Do we learn something about the persons?” Katrine then asked. Solveig said that we learned that the names of our two main characters were Charles and John. That we were 5

 The text was read in a Danish translation.

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probably in England because they talked about Elisabeth I. Then the group moved on to how important the glass seemed to be to John. “He puts a lot of thought into that glass, where it came from,” Joan said. Emilie commented that the description of the glass gained an almost fairytale like character. The group thought this contrasted with the two friends’ heated discussion of politics and their otherwise grown-up lives. Katrine told how she used to observe ladybugs forever when she was a kid, while the other day she just threw one out of the window. You never just look at a leaf or grass anymore, she noted. Emilie, however, answered that she could still sit for twenty minutes and look at birds and plants. Just like John, in the story. The talk circled around John and the piece of glass for a long time. Several noted how much he appreciates that it was a hard, concentrated object compared to the murky, indefinite sea. Katrine picked up where she left off and read another chunk of the story. John’s friend, Charles, was not impressed with the glass. But John slipped it into his pocket and brought it home. The group still thought his actions resembled a child’s. John’s further destiny unfolded, as Katrine read aloud, chunk after chunk, with the group discussing it along the way. John left politics and his seat in the parliament altogether and became rather obsessed with collecting different random objects. He put them beside his first piece of glass on his mantelpiece at home. John and Charles drifted further apart, as Charles realized how John’s neglect of his duties damaged his political career beyond repair. The group talk touched upon many things during the breaks in the reading: the upper class in England, now and back in Victorian times; different castles that readers have seen in Denmark and how expensive such places are to upkeep; a museum exhibition about the former Danish West Indies, where still today people pick up all kinds of pieces of porcelain left behind by Danish colonizers; flea-markets and how expensive second-­ hand has become; how politics is about the masses and tends to forget the individual. These comments always returned to John’s curious actions. Why did he become so preoccupied with the totally useless objects he found on the street or the beach? At one point, Laura said: But you also get kind of sad, in a way because … this thing about, sometimes, when people stand apart from that box of normality … if someone starts to get a different hobby or you sit down and just watch some grass … . Is it just because we try to fit in so much, you can’t stand apart? You can’t give each other permission to exactly go out and dig in some piles of soil … because it would be weird?

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By the end of the story, John had become obsessed with his collected objects. He was no longer invited to social gatherings and had become generally “tired.” His few visitors were not impressed by the growing collection on his mantelpiece. Katrine asked the group if they liked the story. Most of the participants did. The group discussed a bit more, centering on questions of whether it was fair that John was not invited to dinner parties anymore. Emilie suggested that perhaps he has just become a strange man and a boring guest. “But we don’t get to know what the truth is behind it,” Katrine said. “It’s also a good question, I think. You want to know. But that—there’s probably not an answer.” “But then it’s open for interpretation,” Emilie added. “Yes,” Katrine laughed. “I hope he’s having a good time.” Katrine then revealed that the author was Virginia Woolf. This prompted Eva to suggest a completely new interpretation, where John was a gay man and all the collected objects were metaphors for other men he had loved. No one added more to that. So we took out our other photocopied text and read a poem from the contemporary Danish poet Theis Ørntoft. The poem described an apocalyptic post-climate crisis society. We talked about it for a short while, then cleaned up all the cups and snacks and said goodbye for the evening. The shared reading session described above was the fourth time this group of women met, which meant that participants knew the typical form and shape of shared reading by then. Charlotte, the participating anthropologist, noticed how the conversation was not as strained compared to the first sessions—people took turns taking over on a given subject or question, bringing out their observations or thoughts without hesitation. There was more joking and laughing. Joan and Laura made themselves comfortable, drawing their legs up in their chairs. Importantly, by then the group had built up a small set of shared texts to refer to—a shared library almost, which they pointed back to in their talk. Some participants commented on general themes they saw emerging across several texts, for example, that they were not very “cheerful” but rather touched on climate crisis or social critique. During the reading, the group sought to dive into the text, to imagine and feel what the characters did, what co-readers thought and expressed, and to relate the text to their own lives. They let Woolf’s long sentences and many semicolons work upon them. Yet, an interpretive distance also became evident. There seemed to be a limit to how much the participants

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felt they understood. They later described in interviews how during the readings the talk moved on to a new topic before they got to say anything, or someone related a feeling they could not recognize at all. Questions were many, and perspectives shifted. It was not really clear why the main character John gave up his political life and ended up only looking for pieces of shattered porcelain, broken iron, and stones. John, or at least his social role, disintegrated more and more, as he collected his increasing amount of small, solid objects. In the reading group, a sense of sharing emerged as a presence in the room, a shared aesthetic experience. And in that process, individual readers’ selves could also be said to be put into the background, almost disintegrating, while something solid arouse among them. Through the shared reading practice, such collective movements, giving over to a common experience, can happen. But repeatedly, the experience of delimitation toward other readers returns when you realize that you think differently than the others. Perhaps in the same way as the short story still mirrors John’s actions in the friend Charles’s skeptic witnessing of his actions. John does not only happily submerge himself in his quest for objects; his disintegration is also described through society’s critical view. We will explore this oscillation in perspective below.

Together Reviewing what we have learned after studying shared reading in different settings since 2016, one of the broader and more useful insights to materialize has to do with this kind of “presence”, which emerged in the groups (Christiansen and Dalsgård 2022). The young reading group participants, which we followed, did not only interweave their own life narratives with the narratives presented in literary texts and with the stories told by fellow readers, as we have seen above. Texts were reflected upon and compared with readers’ own lives in this way, deployed as “equipment for living,” as Long (1993, 199) put it, but what stood out was rather the way shared reading created a shared atmosphere. We found that while participants dealt with mental health issues and some heavy life experiences, and the texts themselves often touched upon heavy themes, participating in the reading group was almost always a positive and cheerful event. And in this event, texts, readers, and characters kind of blurred (Christiansen 2021a, 8; Christiansen and Dalsgård 2022, 13). As the reader Sonja said:

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Coming in the reading group has been a positive experience. A kind of nice environment to come to, a relaxed atmosphere, and some nice people [laughs]. It has been pleasant …. Pleasant just to participate, you don’t need to prepare a lot, and you can say exactly what comes to your mind or what you feel.

While the everyday with all its demands, actions, and boredom returned as the readers stepped out of the literary moment of presence, the text and the affective impression from the reading session would sometimes linger. For example, the reader Karen talked about how a text could suddenly come to her, many days after reading it. When asked about an example, she mentioned “Solid Objects.” I think the one we read with the guy in the English parliament who found a stone. It was really awesome. I liked it so much. This thing about seeing the little things in everything. The unique and beautiful in the big picture …. It was so good and I became so happy from reading it. To appreciate other things than what other people say and expect from you. I really just want my mantelpiece of meaning. And what is meaning? It’s really just a stone, but what does it mean to me? … It was a really fine conversation. So lovely.

The reader Emilie also referred to “Solid Objects” when asked if there were particular texts she remembered. In response to the question of what in particular about the story made an impression, she said, “This thing about becoming intensely occupied with something. I can recognize that a bit. I thought it was kinda fascinating.” To unpack this empirical material, we have drawn on phenomenological reader-response studies. Particularly Louise Rosenblatt’s (1978) definition of  poetry  reading as a “living through” of the content of a text (Christiansen and Dalsgård 2022, 4). In Rosenblatt’s view, the text becomes a poem in the process of reading: “  ‘The poem’ is what the reader, under the guidance of the text, crystallizes out from the stuff of memory, image, thought, and feeling which he brings to it” (Rosenblatt 1964, 126). Thus, as the text is brought to life through reading, it becomes an “event in time.” We also found core inspiration from the literary scholar Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. He has written against the idea that readers read (only) for the plot (see Brooks 1992). They also read to immerse themselves in the moods and atmospheres that emanate from texts. “Texts, as meaning realities and material realities, quite literally surround their

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readers, both physically and emotionally” (Gumbrecht 2008, 216). As readers read, they can take part in a presence, defined as becoming lost in intense aesthetic experience (Gumbrecht 2004, 104). However, we also saw how the experience of “living through” a text was broadened in the collective engagement in shared reading (Christiansen and Dalsgård 2022). While the text certainly was crucial, the reading guide’s facilitation of the reading and talking and the co-presence of other readers in the room contributed to the particular atmosphere arising in reading sessions. Particularly the bodies of others, their gazes and voices, their laughter or tears were part of the materiality of the reading. As was the lit candle in wintertime, the arrangement of tables and chairs that defined the distance between bodies, and the candies, which the facilitators persistently brought to the group sessions and which had an important function, namely, to fill out otherwise uncomfortable silences or too still nervousness. The photocopied texts often served a similar purpose. You could look down on the page when you did not know where to put your gaze. Here follows an impression from a reading session in which the other anthropologist (Dalsgård) participated: Once again, we sat in the room together. Four bodies together. One so slender, the area above her breast so naked and fragile, yet somehow enormously strong in its exposure. The light in her face, the small spot around her mouth as if she had licked it too much. The energy in the body. Another body rounded, a happy smile, a space between her front teeth. Her eyes flickering. A third body with thicker limbs and a certain softness, a warmth that could seem lazy but didn’t. A fourth so delicate, her hair curlier than before (had she had a haircut?), tight-fitting cardigan and jeans. And myself, so much older. Towards the end, when we talked about days when you think, “this is a not a good day to die, because I haven’t cleaned at home,” we laughed a lot.

In moments like this, we realized how shared reading is a certain literary technology which bears a temporal mechanism: temporal in the sense of creating a presence in which the reader merges into a shared atmosphere, leaving the diachronically and often disturbing narrative self behind.

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Apart The togetherness in the groups could be felt and appreciated when others, by the warmth from their bodies, the vibration in their voices, and caring gazes, led one to feel, even just fleetingly, that everything was okay. But there were also moments of distancing and withdrawal, as when in the reading session just described, doubt entered the relationships. Here is the anthropologist’s narrative: We continued till six o’clock. Emma left first. Then Rikke and Morten together. I followed quickly and when I reached them on the stairs, I said something foolish about the cake. About reading about overweight people while eating a heavy cake. I was not the first to see the irony, Morten had already commented upon it. But it wasn’t funny at all, and they did not respond. I felt how I acted as a clown most of the time during the reading, as if not really finding my place. But I also said something quite serious about some letters that I had written to my kids before going on my first long-term fieldwork in Brazil, in case I would die, and Anna had looked at me with her strange wondering eyes. She herself had not said much during the reading, perhaps because body weight (or lack of it) was a tricky issue and one of the others seemed to feel uncomfortable about it. Strange how doubt can come between us sometimes. We went down the stairs, said goodbye, and parted.

Even though there were heightened moments of presence, we also have to account for such distances in shared reading. Participants quickly realized that within the form of shared reading, they needed to accept that they would never fully know what the others were thinking, what the author’s intentions were, or why the characters acted as they did. As in the reading of “Solid Objects,” when we discussed without ever reaching a conclusion, what the meaning with John’s obsession with glass and other objects actually was. The group accepted that we could not know why John did as he did. And we could certainly not know what Woolf had meant. As when the reading guide Katrine ended the talk saying, “But we don’t get to know what the truth is behind it …. You want to know. But there’s probably not an answer.” This feature, many readers noted, distinguishes shared reading from reading in school or other academic settings, where there were typically more or less correct interpretations of a text or an author. Shared reading presents certain values for reading: all opinions are valuable; there are no

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right or wrong views of a text; everyone should be heard; and not least, the reading guide seeks to always return to the text after more personal accounts from participants (Skjerdingstad and Tangerås 2019, 8; for a longer explanation of the moral values of the Danish Reader Society, see Christiansen 2021a, 9). This left readers (and anthropologists) with a lot of rumination on what the others were thinking—sometimes a lingering sense that you might have overstepped some unspoken boundaries. As reading group participant Jakob pondered in an interview: “All these personal anecdotes that we like so much [in the reading group]. Where is the border for how close we can get?” Karen had similar reflections in an interview. She was also curious about her fellow readers. Yet, she accepted that how much you shared of yourself was up to the individual reader. She recalled a reading, where she had felt she had to decide for herself how much to share. It was a short story by the Danish author Adda Djørup that described a psychotic episode for the main character. People had talked and asked about psychoses, and Karen had explained some of her personal experiences with psychoses. She had been in a great dilemma whether she should share it, but she knew she would have regretted on the bus home if she had said nothing. It was a “great relief,” she said, but also an emotional moment. She felt that the reading had another reality to her than to the others in the room. When we read the short story by Ernest Hemingway “Now I Lay Me” (in which traumatized soldier Nick Adams refuses to fall asleep) another participant spoke about his inability to sleep. Afterward, other participants referenced this as a particularly rich moment where someone showed himself vulnerable, but the participant himself felt he had taken up too much space, being too self-­ centered, and felt exposed. The method of shared reading also made evident how differently readers reacted to and interpreted texts. The participant Wilma recalled a reading where a poem had said that “little boys were not properly looked after.” This led the group to fiercely discuss whether it was harder to be a woman or a man in society, with the guys saying they thought it was tougher to be a man and vice versa. These insights have brought us further in our exploration of shared reading as a certain (spatiotemporal) literary technology which can be marked by distance or nearness. The reading group was often described, in explicitly spatial terms, as a “free space” (frirum) (Christiansen 2021a). Yet, this free space also included a distance to other readers which could be emotionally unpleasant or sometimes sought for. This means that there

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were oscillations between intense coming together in a shared presence and moving apart, experiencing others as truly Other. This mechanism was also touched upon by Long, who noted how reading groups, through the conversations where perspectives and opinions were shared, could sometimes emphasize difference and the distance to other people’s experiences, and not only foster empathy. Long brings an example where white, middle-class Texan readers read about the history of slavery in the US (2003, 186). The distance could also be said to exist on a temporal scale: readers could think back on things they had said or done after the reading ended. Or they might contemplate what to say (or not say) during a reading, thus entering a more reflective mode than  the one evoked by Gumbrecht’s “presence.” To sum up, we have learned that there is an oscillation between these two states: On the one hand being present in the moment, feeling a deep and almost material connection, giving yourself over to the felt experience of the text, as it is brought to life through reading it aloud and discussing it in breaks. And on the other, being narratively interpretive, finding meaning or not, identifying more or less with text and others, and perhaps leaving in doubt. Readers experienced being alternately together and apart—to borrow a phrase from another of Virginia Woolf’s short stories to be discussed in our conclusion—at once communing with and differentiating themselves from fellow readers, characters in the text, and the author.

A Ritual Setting In our view, the ritual aspects of shared reading play a crucial role in the creation of this oscillation. By ritual aspects we mean the rather fixed ways of conducting shared reading that we have described above, drawing on both our empirical material from participating in reading groups and other scholars’ descriptions of shared reading. To return to Long, this could be called part of the “social infrastructure” offered by the Danish Reader Society. The general template for a reading session is as follows. The reading facilitator prepares the room (coziness is often strived for in a Danish context and the reading situation, including shared reading, is no exemption (Linnet 2011; Dalsgård 2021)). Texts must be printed, preferably without any identification of the author, and somehow even the rather casual and at times perplexing print quality adds to the setting. “Literature” here can be touched, curled, stained (as when you happen to spill some coffee on

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your papers). You can bring the papers home, keep them for later. You never know what the text will do, or what you yourself or others will say. But you know that the facilitator will start reading without much ado, and then stop, whereupon a silence most often will arise. Then one participant speaks and soon another. The reading session ends at the set time, and people leave typically without much small talk. No introduction to each other in the beginning; you learn the first names of the others while the reading develops, if at all. In our view, it is the simple but recognizable procedure including silences and the security, which the facilitator represents, that allow for the experiences of immersion and doubt. Oscillation between immersive comfort and distanced doubt is not specific to shared reading; in fact, it seems to be a general feature of ritual activities. Roy Rappaport defined rituals as “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers” (1999, 24). Anthropologists who have studied rituals have argued against an overt focus on performances as symbolic “cultural texts” that could be interpreted in the ways that they reflect the real world outside of the performative space. As Schieffelin (1996) argued, performances do not represent but create new realities (see also Jackson 1983). According to this perspective, ritual performances “alter moods, attitudes, social states and states of minds” (Schieffelin 1996, 59). They are transformative events, exactly due to their inherent open-endedness. Not unlike Gumbrecht’s descriptions of reading for the atmosphere and intense aesthetic presence, Schieffelin described how ritual performances create heightened, intense experiences, standing apart from everyday life. Importantly, it is not in its presentation of clear meaning but in its impoverished language that the power of the ritual lies: participants have to be actively engaged to make sense of it all and take bits to use for solutions to issues in their own lives (Schieffelin 1985, 721). According to Seligman et al. (2008), rituals are not necessarily religious, and it is not necessary to believe in them for them to “work.” Actually, they note, in the twenty-first century, rituals have reemerged in many sectors of society. Instead of focusing on the sincerity and authenticity of rituals they focus on ritual as doing and the ritual framing of this doing, the performativity of the words uttered, and how they act and create little pockets of order (2008). The shared reading sessions were not religious, but they presented the idea that photocopies of good literary fiction could give something to participants, if approached in the right manner. Instead of being either-or,

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ritual “precises” ambiguities and teaches us how to live within and between, even to transcend, boundaries (Seligman et al. 2008, 7). In the way of suggesting subjunctive “as if” worlds, Seligman et al. argue, rituals are similar to play, art, and festivals. Participants in shared reading can thus be said to be invited to step into the as-if realm of the ritualized reading, in which the imaginary worlds of the literary texts are explored together. Yet, this exploration does not happen in a completely smooth way, as readers are constantly reminded of the fictitiousness and the ambiguities in the technology (Christiansen 2021b, 4). The ritual aspect of reading was already touched upon in Digges and Rappaport’s chapter in The Ethnography of Reading (1993). They studied how leaders of ethnic-rights movements in Cumbal, Colombia, used both oral and written evidence to argue for rights to land toward the Colombian state. Their choice of written material as evidence was highly guided by ritual and practical considerations. Actually, Digges and Rappaport conclude that an ethnography of reading cannot be written without considering ritual. The meaning of the texts used by the movement leaders emerged as they enacted it in ritual performance (Digges and Rappaport 1993, 140). There was a “circular and constant movement between literacy and orality, between orality and ritual practice” (149). This came about as “word, act, and image” were unified in the performative event of reading aloud and reenacting acts of law (151). As we described, participants experienced and remembered a reading session as a cohesive embodied experience, including the stepping out of the immersion. We argue that the oscillation between making sense and just succumbing to an intense (ritualized) experience is not particular to shared reading: it bears many resemblances to ritual practices as described by anthropologists treating both literary and non-literary practices.

The Possibility of Resonance In a comprehensive account of the term, Hartmut Rosa (2019) frames the notion of resonance as a “mode of relation” that displays four features: that of being affected (primarily explained as some inward, aesthetic experience), of experiencing self-efficacy (mostly in terms of outward movement and response), of adaptive transformation (when affected or influenced by something or someone others), and of uncontrollability (Rosa 2019, 164–74). Rosa describes uncontrollability as not only an issue of not knowing what the experiential outcome of the transition is but also in terms of

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the practical and emotional difficulties of adjusting to a particular change. Resonance depends on “a tangible limitation of autonomy” (183, our italics), and yet, it requires your willingness to participate as resonance is “produced only when the vibration of one body stimulates the other to produce its own frequency” (165, italics original). Resonance is the “other” of alienation, as alienation can be seen as “a process of dampening, in which vibration or oscillation of the entities involved is not reinforced, but rather weakened or disrupted” (178–9). In such a state, the voices of self and other (being people or other entities) become inaudible, and the subject and the world confront each other as rigid or mute (179). Here toward the end of this chapter, we wish to introduce Rosa’s notion of resonance as a description of the relation, which may or may not arise in the ritualized setting of shared reading. As Rosa points out, resonance has a transformative effect. Elsewhere we have described this effect more fully and reflected on its transience and possible reverberations in the body and feelings of participants (Christiansen and Dalsgård 2022). The transformative mechanisms of collective reading were also pointed out by Long, but while we have noticed the affective resonance, we read her as focusing on interpretation and critical (self)reflection and the way these reflections can be transported into everyday life as a kind of equipment for living. Our difference in focus, which is not an opposition but rather an interest in complementary processes, may have to do with the spatiotemporal processes of the readings. While Long studies the retrospective shared reflections upon solitary reading, we have studied reading in situ. This has allowed us to explore atmosphere and bodily presence as integral aspects of emerging understandings and divergences, along with the oscillation between being together and apart. Long’s informants relate their reading to their diachronic narrative (who am I, my past, my future?), while the shared reading we have observed and participated in also provided a momentary alternative to the diachronic sense of self. As we have shown, our interlocutors often mentioned the immersive aspect of shared reading as particularly important. This appreciation of immersion and relationship may gain importance against the backdrop of the accelerated world today and the alienation it prompts (Rosa 2019, 181). As one reading facilitator explained in her description of the reading groups’ role: Okay, we have this society, people are racing down Nørrebrogade [a busy street in Copenhagen], it’s four pm, what’s happening, have I brushed my teeth, woah, and suddenly, we’re sitting there [in the reading group].

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Where Rosa describes the acceleration of society as that which forces us apart even from ourselves (2019, 181), we have here looked at the oscillation between resonance and doubt, with alienation lingering as a constant possibility, at the micro-level of the reading group. The title of this chapter echoes the title of another short story by Virginia Woolf, “Together and Apart” (1989b), which was also read by the reading groups. In this story the reader meets a middle-aged man and woman, who stand at a window exchanging their youthful impressions from Canterbury at one of a summer’s numerous dinner parties. It seems they almost reach a human connection and the possibility for a romantic connection, but in a short moment, the female character Ruth Anning decides to withdraw and shut down: So things came to an end. And over them both came instantly that paralysing blankness of feeling, when nothing bursts from the mind, when its walls appear like slate; when vacancy almost hurts, and the eyes petrified and fixed see the same spot—a pattern, a coal scuttle—with an exactness which is terrifying, since no emotion, no idea, no impression of any kind comes to change it, to modify it, to embellish it, since the fountains of feeling seem sealed and as the mind turns rigid, so does the body. (Woolf 1989b, 193–4)

But a moment before shutting down, Ruth Anning was still in between yes and no: Fibres of her were floated capriciously this way and that, like the tentacles of a sea anemone, now thrilled, now snubbed, and her brain, miles away, cool and distant, up in the air, received messages which it would sum up in time so that, when people talked about Roderick Serle (and he was a bit of a figure) she would say unhesitatingly: “I like him,” or “I don’t like him,” and her opinion would be made up for ever. An odd thought; a solemn thought; throwing a queer6 light on what human fellowship consisted of. (Woolf 1989b, 191)

6  In some versions of this story, it says “throwing a green light on what human fellowship consisted of.” At first we were thrilled also to find the color green in this story. As with the piece of green glass in “Solid Objects” with which we began, the color green here seemed to suggest a certain simultaneous open-ness and clarity in which the experience of beauty is still possible. However, uncertain about which wording was the original (queer or green), and because the Danish translation we read said “aparte,” meaning queer, we opted for that.

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In this “queer” light Ruth Anning sees her relation to the man at her side. Her brain, cool and distant, may eventually choose one or another attitude toward him, but in the moment everything is still open and present. As she stands there at the window, not knowing whether she will allow resonance with a stranger or withdraw, she embodies the vibrating, unstable, and yet very lively experience of sitting in the same room, reading together, somewhere in Denmark.

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———. 2008. Reading for the Stimmung? About the Ontology of Literature Today. Boundary 2 35 (3): 213–221. Jackson, Michael. 1983. Knowledge of the Body. Man 18 (2): 327–345. Kaspersen, Lars B., and Laila Ottesen. 2001. Associationalism for 150 Years and Still Alive and Kicking: Some Reflections on Danish Civil Society. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 4 (1): 105–130. Linnet, Jeppe. 2011. Money Can’t Buy Me Hygge: Danish Middle-Class Consumption, Egalitarianism and the Sanctity of Inner Space. Social Analysis 55 (2): 21–44. Long, Elizabeth. 1993. Textual Interpretation as Collective Action. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 180–211. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 2003. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Longden, Eleanor, Philip Davis, Josie Billington, Sofia Lampropoulou, Grace Farrington, Fiona Magee, Erin Walsh, and Rhiannon Corcoran. 2015. Shared Reading: Assessing the Intrinsic Value of a Literature-Based Health Intervention. Medical Humanities 41: 113–120. Rappaport, Roy. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosa, Hartmut. 2013. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2019. Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2020. The Uncontrollability of the World. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rosenblatt, Louise M. 1964. The Poem as Event. College English 26 (2): 123–128. ———. 1978. The Reader, the Text, the Poem. The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Schieffelin, Edward L. 1985. Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality. American Ethnologist 12 (4): 707–724. ———. 1996. On Failure and Performance: Throwing the Medium out of the Seance. In The Performance of Healing, ed. Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman, 59–90. New York: Routledge. Seligman, Adam B., Robert P. Weller, Michael Puett, and Bennett Simon. 2008. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skjerdingstad, Kjell Ivar, and Thor Magnus Tangerås. 2019. Shared Reading as an Affordance-Nest for Developing Kinesic Engagement with Poetry: A Case Study. Cogent Arts & Humanities 6 (1). https://doi.org/10.1080/2331198 3.2019.1688631.

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Steenberg, Mette. 2016. Literary Reading as a Social Technology: An Exploratory Study on Shared Reading Groups. In Plotting the Reading Experience: Theory/ Practice/Politics, ed. Paulette M.  Rothbauer, Kjell Ivar Skjerdingstad, Lynne McKechnie, and Knut Oderholm, 183–198. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ———. 2023. En skønlitterær praksisform. Fælleslæsningens hvad og hvordan. In Steenberg ed., Litteratur i virkeligheden. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Woolf, V. 1989a. Solid Objects. In The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick, 2nd ed., 102–107. London: Harcourt. ———. 1989b. Together and Apart. In The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick, 2nd ed., 189–104. London: Harcourt.

CHAPTER 10

Reading for Sharing Cicilie Fagerlid

How can reading for sharing in reading groups lead to a fuller grasp of not only the self but also the self as part of society? How can a collectively constructed understanding of the self in society lead to a less alienated, more authentic public persona? To examine the individual and social dynamics of discussing literature in public reading groups, this chapter first visits an online shared reading meeting before going in-depth into a physical meeting, both connected to a public library in Oslo, Norway. The productive and transformative interface between inward meaning making and outward search for comprehension and acknowledgement characterizing reading for sharing seems particularly present in open, public literary discussion groups. When the participants are strangers to each other they appear freer to practice an authentic public persona. For some, the two-­ dimensional mediation of online sessions brings a further layer of anonymizing freedom (Fagerlid and Vannes 2022).

C. Fagerlid (*) VID Specialized University, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rosen (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0_10

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We enter in medias res a digital shared reading meeting, relocated from a public library during the Covid-19 lockdown. The facilitator, Mari Vannes, has just finished reading aloud and slowly, in accordance with the shared reading method, a translation of James Joyce’s “Eveline.” “This is as much about disempowerment,” Emma, an academic in her late 30s says. “It’s a very good description of not having a choice.” Some in the group have suggested the protagonist suffered a panic attack. Adam, a civil servant about the same age as Emma, had stated that Eveline faced a moral choice between duty and her own happiness. This rational reading prompted Emma’s reaction. “But she carries out a choice,” Adam replies in his usual, carefully selected, slightly formal language. “What leads her to do what she does? Duty and love for the ones at home become more important. The only thing she knows for sure is what waits for her at home.” Emma unmutes her mike. Elinor, a recently retired library manager, cuts in, but Adam continues. Emma starts to say, “I didn’t experience—” when Adam invokes Elinor’s name, handing the conversation over to her. Video-­ mediated discussions can be messy at times. Mari, who has several years of experience reading aloud and leading physical and digital literary conversations, notices Emma and calls on her to speak. “I think I’ll stick with my feeling that it was in the cards for Eveline,” Emma says. “It wasn’t possible to go through with it. I don’t know how to put it intellectually. I very much recognized myself in the way the body is held fast. The feeling of not having any room for agency.” Mari then rereads the ending, drawing everyone’s attention back to the words on the page: All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing. ‘Come!’ No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish! “Eveline! Evvy!” He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition. (Joyce 1904)

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“Actually, she is dead stuck,” Elinor says, supporting Emma’s interpretation. She cites Joyce’s image of “clutching the iron railing as all the seas of the world tumbled about her heart.” Other participants join in. Astrid, a recently retired gestalt therapist who, earlier in the discussion, questioned why Eveline needed a man to discover the world—“a knight on a white horse,” Elinor had added—now says that it isn’t a mythological siren but a man who calls for Eveline. Elinor, who had earlier emphasized Eveline’s search for happiness as a reason for wanting to flee, now suggests that “she lacks courage” and “her happiness fails her.”1 “Emma,” Mari says, again noticing her unmuted mike. “It is a bodily reaction, like an animal’s,” she replies. “There isn’t much going on in her head. It’s the way it’s written. It comes from the gut.” By now, all seem convinced by Emma’s interpretation. Astrid, the therapist, bolsters it: “The same happened when her mother died. She had to flee. Now that fear is back. She can’t make the changes. We act instinctively when we are afraid.” Even Adam agrees to this. “The fear response is ingrained in us for us to act fast,” he concludes. “It’s her body reporting. It is right of her to trust her gut reaction. Morally, I would say that she doesn’t have any obligations, but there are other forces at play that one should listen to.”

Reading for Sharing in Public Reading Groups This chapter examines the inner and outer dynamics of the practice I call reading for sharing. It does so, first, by examining participation in shared reading groups as an intertwined individual and social undertaking with both private and public effects. Second, it provides a thick description and social analysis based on long-term participant observation in a field that until now has been dominated by health-related clinical concerns (Billington et al. 2013; Longden et al. 2015; Bundesen 2021). Finally, it 1  Elinor’s response would also seem to reflect her feelings about moving from a town where she has lived for a long time to a village where she knows only her daughter’s family. In line with her appreciation of anonymous freedom, she did not disclose these or any other personal details in the discussion. However, for Mari and I who knew about the move, it was possible to observe her identification with Eveline, for example, when she said in the group, “Eveline is moving. She’s hopeful but understands that there are things she is going to miss.” I return later in the chapter to examine further the question of how inner and outer dialogues connect in contexts of shared reading, drawing attention to how much of the inner dialogue remains hidden, as an underwater iceberg where only the tip is exposed.

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traces connections between an inward, existential de-alienation and an outward, authentic public persona, perhaps also engaged in civic activities. Reading to share your reactions with others is different from reading alone, and sharing your thoughts with strangers is different from sharing them with people you know. Reading groups exist in many formats: public and private; online and physical; reading alone beforehand and reading aloud together, with and without a facilitator. In some reading groups, the discussion focuses on literary qualities, such as style, plot, and characters, while others use the storyline as a prism for discussing societal and psychosocial issues. Most of the shared reading groups based in Norwegian public libraries—including those discussed in this chapter—veer toward the latter. When I first joined a reading group, I was reminded of the slam poetry sessions I attended for my PhD research in Paris. Although the content was different, the atmosphere of anticipation that comes with not knowing what will happen next was something reading groups have in common with other participatory art forms, including performance poetry. Ultimately, what happens always depends on the participants themselves. While I am interested in the participatory dynamics of reading groups in general, due to limited space and a desire to explore the inner and outer dynamics of participation in detail, I include in this chapter only ethnography from so-called “shared reading” groups. In contrast to traditional reading group models, where participants typically read a longer work of fiction in advance of meeting to discuss it, in shared reading a facilitator reads out a few short texts, usually a story and a poem, very slowly, in situ, interrupted by a gently led discussion. When I use the term “reading groups” in this chapter, I refer to reading groups in general, including shared reading, but when I use “shared reading,” I mean this specific format. Bringing a detailed account of reading for sharing into a wider societal frame, this chapter proceeds as follows: First, I establish shared reading as a sensory experience and a social activity. Next, I outline my methodology, including participant observation, interviews, autoethnography, and thick description. I then discuss shared reading in relation to sound, social riddle solving, playful proto-poetic thinking, publicness, and blurred spaces. After that I delve into ethnographic examples that show how multilayered participatory dynamics play out in a literary conversation, resulting in a better understanding of life under late capitalism. To conclude, I draw together questions about relations between the individual and society,

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between theory and ethnography, and between the existential ponderings prompted by reading fiction aloud with strangers and the possibility of increased civic engagement.

Sensory and Social Reading In an interview shortly after the group’s shared reading of “Eveline,” Emma explained how she experienced the discussion: It concerned to what degree the main character felt disempowerment or not. I thought Adam strongly read reflection and rationality into the protagonist’s choice, while I recognized myself in the sensation of standing between two equally bad choices and that disempowerment. It became so strong emotionally that I felt I wanted to say something about it. One doesn’t necessarily have a choice. There are feelings coming up and underlying things. I don’t know if it’s a good explanation. I’ve felt, in these groups, that there are themes that concern me strongly on a personal level. I become very engaged emotionally; it is important to me. There is so much at play.

Emma’s experience exemplifies an embodied or kinetic reading (Cave 2016, as cited in Skjerdingstad and Tangerås 2019, 4–6), with the metaphorical language making her feel the descriptions in her own body. If we follow phenomenological neuroscience, Joyce’s description of Eveline resonates with Emma’s own body memory of similar situations. The body, through neurological mirroring mechanisms, simulates and comprehends the fictional situation read aloud (Gallese 2009, 533). Furthermore, reading and discussing Joyce’s short story provided Emma with a language for thinking through and maybe talking about her own gut reactions. In other words, talking about Joyce’s narrative helped Emma to narratively and “retro-affectively” reconstruct the nonverbal body memory of her experiential self (Bundesen 2021, 67, 70; Gallagher and Zahavi 2021). The philosophers Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi (2021) emphasize how cognition is embodied, embedded, and extended, which means that the mind and the self are inseparable from the body, situation, and wider environment.2 From a phenomenological and psychological perspective, Gallagher and Zahavi explain the dual self as divided into one part that is “minimal,” incessantly experiencing, pre-reflective, embodied, and 2

 For a similar and more anthropologically founded argument, see Bateson (2000 [1972]).

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world-­immersed and another that is self-aware and linguistically informed (2021, 145–175, 231–250). According to this perspective, the linguistically informed self, which can be called the person, is continuously constructed through self-interpretation and informed by narrative understandings (Gallagher and Zahavi 2021, 236–239). Referencing Husserl’s description of “communicative intertwinement”, Gallagher and Zahavi trace this notion of “narrative personhood” to the Latin term dramatis personae and the original meaning of persona as the mask worn by actors on stage in the Roman theatre (2021, 240). Building from this perspective, I use the term “persona” to highlight the narratively informed, socially embedded enactment of selfhood. For Emma, the “inner” resonances between yet unarticulated body memories and emergent narrative reconstructions of the self gain a further dimension through “outer” resonances when the other participants acknowledge her interpretation. An acknowledgment marks an inscription into reality that supports not only her literary interpretation but also her emergent narrative reconstruction of self—without her having to share any intimate details with the strangers in the group. Longden et al. (2015) call this simultaneous inner and outer process prompted by reading and discussing literature a “reverse-switching of awareness,” in which participants become involved in a comparative private world while reading and where the significance of that world is determined by engagement with the text. Furthermore, through ‘sharing’, the inner world becomes a shared world, with external relevance and resonance within the group. (5)

In the interview following the shared reading, Emma explained how the literary conversations served as a practicing ground for her—a practice she felt she lacked in her professional life, where discussions quickly became personal and where “it’s hard to find the balance between taking up too much space and too little.” She said her “working class background without much cultural capital” has not prepared her for “the cool, calm, and collected attitude of the middle-class cultural elite” she meets in academia. I noticed that someone [in the reading group] remarked “like Emma just said.” I became embarrassed because I thought I had taken up too much space, and now it was me who had decided what we’d talk about. At the same time, I felt that it was good to have someone on my side, or, yes, it means something that the others respond. Because when one says some-

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thing, and no one can find anything to say, and there is a long silence, then … that’s different.

Emma went on to elaborate how the literature in the reading group speaks directly to her present life situation: Something hit, and it felt okay that I managed to put it into words in a way, yes, that my opinion was different, and the feelings overwhelmed me. [The] story hit me so hard about the things that concern me now—to follow a different path from academia, which I’ve got messed up in. There were some existential themes that hit me strongly. To be there and actually share this with others who seemed nice… . It was surprising how cool I felt about it. I needed this in every way.

Emma’s commentary on the “Eveline” event underscores several themes relevant to the discussion in this chapter. It shows how literary images can touch and move you, how a narrative can resonate especially strongly, reverberating through your body when read aloud and discussed in a warm, welcoming, and playful environment, and how expressing oneself in an atmosphere of mutual listening and acknowledgment can create a fertile ground for restructuring the self and practicing a public persona built on a deeper self-understanding. To add a wider societal dimension to the analysis, I turn in the last part of the chapter to examples drawn from a shared reading of Jan Kristoffer Dale’s 2016 short story “Arbeidsnever” (lit. “Laborer’s Hands”). Here the “reverse-switching” between story, individual recollection, and the public sharing that took place in the group meeting prompted me to ask the questions: How can literary reading and conversation lead to a fuller grasp of not only the self but the self in society? And how can a collectively constructed understanding of the self in society lead to a less alienated, more authentic public persona?

Participant Observation and Thick Description in Literary Anthropology The intellectual, sensory, and social thickness of reading groups begs for the encompassing approach of participant observation. Furthermore, anthropology’s holistic outlook, connecting social and individual dimensions of human life, goes hand in hand with how the micro and macro

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interweave in literature, lived life reflections, and literary conversations in reading groups. However, apart from Boyarin (1993) and Christiansen and Dalsgård (2023) there is little ethnography from these contemporary ritual-like events.3 This chapter builds on long-term participant observation with six traditional reading groups and at online and physical shared reading meetings, all connected to public libraries in Oslo. My methodological emphasis on observation, participation, or introspection varied from meeting to meeting. Sometimes I wrote down most of the action (e.g., at “Eveline”), sometimes I participated fully (e.g., at “Laborer’s hands”), and sometimes I noted personal reflections during and afterward. I also conducted semi-structured group interviews with more than 30 participants and 20 individual interviews. The interviews started with the participants’ background and life story in brief followed the meaning of reading, reading groups, and the public library. I audio-recorded five physical shared reading meetings (e.g., “Laborer’s hands”) and video-­ recorded nine digital meetings. Much of the data material stems from my one-year long fieldwork in Oslo’s public libraries in 2017–18, whereas the video recordings were undertaken as part of a research project with reading facilitator Mari Vannes during the 2021 Covid-19 lockdown. In open reading groups in public places, like the library, the participants protect their privacy, with many stating how they enjoy a sense of freedom of anonymity, which the majority also guarded in the interviews. To get at the interplay between inner and outer worlds, I thus turned to the method of autoethnography, drawing my own experience and reflections into the analysis. While this chapter builds on material from reading groups, particularly shared reading, my previous research on convivial, noncompetitive slam poetry circles in Paris, France, has shaped my perception of participatory dynamics. There, I discovered how expressing oneself and being listened to can have individually and socially transformative effects when experiences are being transformed through poetry, spoken about and “integrated in reality” (Fagerlid 2012, 228). 3  To mention just one direction this work might go, Bruce Kapferer’s (2010, 1) view of rituals and events having a power to reformulate persons and social realities would be a fruitful perspective to apply to reading groups.

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Five Features of Social Reading The five partially interconnected features of participatory dynamics in reading groups and shared reading I outline below comprise the effects of 1) hearing literature read aloud, 2) social reading as interactive riddle solving, 3) playful, proto-poetic thinking, 4) open, public groups, and 5) blurred reading group spaces. The Sound of Reading Several shared reading theorists, including Longden et al. (2015), say that reading aloud slowly and in situ without preparation surrounds the story in a sense of anticipation, liveness, and performativity. Skjerdingstad and Tangerås (2019) highlight the double modality of listening and following a copy of the text; the listening recalls early humanity, joined around a fire, as well as many participants’ childhoods, sitting close to an adult reading to them. Billington et al. (2013, 29) draw on literary critic Wolfgang Iser’s analysis that “the reading mind ‘travels along inside that which it has to apprehend.’” Traveling along the storyline in live reading, interrupted by convivial collective interpretation, accentuates the text’s performative liveness. In her analysis of the popularity of audio books, Lucy Bednar (2010) builds on Walter Ong’s analysis of the effects of oral versus written communication on human consciousness and perception. Starting from Ong’s (2002 [1982]) claim that sound “is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent” (31–2), Bednar concludes that listening to an audiobook therefore requires closer attention and more active involvement in the moment than reading a book through the modality of vision. If this is the case, then listening to a non-rewindable live voice likely requires even more attention. A particular performativity exists in the slowness, live listening, and conversation about essential things in shared reading, even in its digital format (Fagerlid and Vannes 2022). It is partly for this reason that participants in shared reading events often evoked a sense of having “done something important,” as Emma once put it.

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Social Riddle Solving Nicholas Howe (1993) notes that the word “reading” originally indicated a public, spoken act performed within a community. Reading was neither silent nor individual, and it meant to “advise or counsel, ‘to exercise control over something,’ and ‘to explain something obscure,’ such as a riddle” (Oxford English Dictionary, as cited in Howe 1993, 61). Scholars of reading likewise emphasize that reading is not solitary. Cultural sociologist Elizabeth Long (1993) coined the term “the social infrastructure of reading” (191) to highlight how reading is both taught and takes place within specific social relationships. Similarly, library and information scientist Catherine Sheldrick Ross (2018) writes, “People have read books aloud to each other, given books as gifts, talked about books with family and friends, and reviewed books” (207). Indeed, reading group participation reiterates the etymological roots of reading as a public, spoken act that contributes to constructing an interpretive community (Howe 1993). Elsewhere, I have argued that discussions create a “shared perception of reality, not necessarily agreement but an understanding that others can perceive the same reality differently” (Fagerlid 2020, 299). A regular shared reading participant and student in library science, Christian Klungland, reflected in an interview on the collective interpretative process in shared reading (also present in traditional reading groups): It is exciting to hear how the others interpret the text compared to how I interpret it, and it is exciting to hear if they experience it differently from me. This is the most exciting thing about shared reading. It is not to underscore my own opinions and experiences, quite the contrary. I’m there to have them challenged, to see how other people have experienced these texts. It’s always exciting because there are at least two, three, four interpretations of the same text, and none of them are the same as my interpretation.

“Meetings are best when we disagree,” an 88-year-old participant said, expressing a common attitude in reading groups. Importantly, however, disagreements were expressed politely and with a generous ethos of curiosity, active listening, and acknowledging others’ views with smiles, nods, repetitions, questions, and comments. Christian and I talked further about how different interpretations build on each other and create a “relay of thinking” (Longden et al. 2015, 4). Other people’s perspectives, as well as the slow tempo, help you discover meanings you would never have

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recognized if you had read the story alone. “Hasty makes wasty,” as one participant said (Fagerlid and Vannes 2022). Christian extended this perspective to a more general commentary on human contact and social connection: Yes! It makes literature much more accessible to everybody. You don’t have to be an expert in literature. It makes literature more fun, more interactive, and social than it was before. That’s important in this century because now literature not only must compete with TV but also with computer games and social media. What these three things [online gaming, social media, and reading groups] have in common are human contact and human social interaction. In Shared Reading groups, literature gains this element. Then you’re not alone in it but together in a community. That’s what interests me the most with shared reading.

Christian’s statements underscored how reading groups make reading interactive, or participatory, and unite readers. Unsurprisingly, and like other young people I have talked to in youth reading groups, Christian used to write fanfiction on online writing platforms when he was younger. Moreover, the interactivity of shared reading, in which the slowly unfolding storyline alternates with a “relay” of tentative interpretations, gives the sensation of being on a quest together to solve a riddle. As with riddles, we strive to unknot the story’s enigmas through associations. Ong (1982, 52) writes that the “riddle belongs in the oral world” and is the opposite of the self-contained logic of syllogisms; to solve a riddle, after all, “one draws on knowledge, often deeply subconscious, beyond the words themselves” (52). Literary critic Northrop Frye (1957, 270–81) connects lyrical language to riddles, noting that both spark off subconscious associations. Poetic language consists of two sensory affective elements: sound and visual associations. The first, which includes rhythms, assonance, alliteration, and other sound aspects (what the Greeks called melos), is most effective when uttered aloud. The second, which includes mental imagery like metaphor, metonym, and kenning (opsis in Greek), creates visual associations through using “an object of sense experience to stimulate a mental activity in connection with it” (Frye 1957, 280). For example, the metaphor the “seas of the world tumbled about her heart,” from Joyce’s “Eveline,” is a mental image, opsis, where visual, kinesthetic, tactile, and other sensory associations stimulate experiences in the reader or listener. Emma solved this

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riddle through associations with past bodily experiences. However, it was another participant’s (over)emphasis on “reflection and rationality” that passed Emma the baton in a “relay of thinking” (Longden et al. 2015, 4). Playful, Proto-Poetic Thinking A lighthearted atmosphere plays several roles in participatory art. A 65-year-old academic and patient in Birgit Bundesen’s psychotherapeutic writing groups noted that it allows the participants to “play instead of intellectually controlling the situation” (Bundesen 2021, 66). Bundesen (2021) argues that the atmosphere of joyful play helps patients bypass defense mechanisms and approach suppressed past experiences. She takes a Freudian notion of playfulness, defining it as “a world of thought that is made alive with material from the outer world, but that is still kept separate from the outer world” (Bundesen 2021, 67). The relationship between the world of thought and the outer world recalls the distinction Didier Fassin (2014) makes between literary “true life” and worldly “real lives.” To support his general argument, Fassin quotes Martha Nussbaum’s definition of literature as an extension of life not only horizontally, bringing the reader into contact with events or locations or persons or problems he or she has not otherwise met, but also, vertically, so to speak, giving the reader experience that is deeper, sharper, more precise than much of what takes place in life. (Nussbaum 1990, 48, as cited in Fassin 2014, 41)

A literary truth that is “deeper, sharper, more precise” (41) springs thus from Freud’s notion of playfulness and world of thought. This literary truth can be felt through a kind of “vertical” aesthetic resonance between the self and the world and can be active in “the modus of prayer or in engagement with art” (Rosa 2017, as cited in Bundesen 2021, 62). Playfulness, therefore, not only bypasses defense mechanisms as in Bundesen’s (2021) example. It also kindles a kind of poiesis, revealing truth, in the moment of creation as well as in moments of comprehension, as Emma recognized when she spoke of how it felt “to not have a choice.” The facilitator’s open questions and accepting attitude combined with the good-natured conversation to create an “atmosphere of wonder” and an acceptance for thinking aloud (Skjerdingstad and Tangerås 2019). Longden et  al. (2015) refer to the slowly evolving, playful thinking and tentative interpretations “creative inarticulacy” that mirrors “the intrinsic

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spirit of literary thinking itself” (4). In other words, the participant in shared reading approaches the experiential self through linguistic and emergent narrative reconstruction (Bundesen 2021; Gallagher and Zahavi 2021). Interpretation can thus be seen as a creative act, “transforming and translating inner experiences into emergent thinking” (Longden et  al. 2015, 4). Providing an example from a shared reading group at a mental health institution, Billington et al. (2013) show how a patient, through thinking aloud and “feeling her way into the poem” (34), indirectly put her secret pain into words, releasing a “hidden creative power” (34). Stuttering and stumbling to make sense of one’s not-yet-articulated experiences and thoughts consolidates, by proto-poetic means, a reality both inward and outward. Inscribing inner worlds into a common reality can be empowering. Likewise, when Emma makes sense of Eveline’s—and her own—wordless disempowerment and translates it into language, she empowers herself. Public Groups The urban sociologist Richard Sennett (2010) describes the public realm as “a place where strangers meet” (261), which helps explain how anonymity can lead to a sense of freedom in public reading groups. The public ream offers people a chance to lighten the pressures for conformity, of fitting into a fixed role in the social order; anonymity and impersonality provide a milieu for more individual development. This promise of turning a fresh personal page among strangers has lured many immigrants to cities. (Sennett 2010, 261)

When The Reader Organisation in Liverpool first developed the Shared Reading method, they focused on people in vulnerable life situations in fixed groups and closed institutions, such as mental healthcare facilities, prisons, and elderly people’s homes. In comparison to applications in closed groups (Billington et  al. 2013; Longden et  al. 2015), people in open, public groups often choose not to share personal details (Fagerlid and Vannes 2022). Guarding their anonymity and impersonality allows them to turn “a fresh personal page” (Sennett 2010, 261) and develop an authentic public persona more freely.4 As Emma said, participating in  The freedom of anonymity also lures some participants to the even more impersonal format of digital shared reading (Fagerlid and Vannes 2022). 4

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Shared Reading offers training in taking up space in the conversation, balancing what to share from one’s inner world, and how to communicate it. Blurred Spaces Reading group participation as simultaneously individual and social activity produces intertwined inner and outer effects. Long (1993) describes reading groups as blurring categorical distinctions between “politics,” “culture,” and “society,” as well as between public and private, as they are forums for critical reflection and the negotiation of social identity: “For many, joining a reading group represents in itself a form of critical reflection on society—or one’s place within it—because it demands taking a stance towards a felt lacuna in everyday life and moving towards addressing that gap” (Long 1993, 198). I have previously termed reading groups “tiny publics” to highlight the correlation between participation in public book discussions and engagement in civil society, while stressing their convivial and semi-personal environment (Fagerlid 2020). Approaching the issue from a linguistic angle, David Peplow (2016), likewise highlights how reading groups challenge simple distinctions between informal and formal contexts as the “highly organized spaces, focused on joint enterprise” are dominated by informal, “amicable disagreement” (55). Looking to examples in history, Catherin S. Ross (2018) argues that concerns with education and self-improvement have always played an important part in the formation of reading groups and book clubs. The television celebrity Oprah Winfrey’s emphasis on reading with both “mind and heart” and using novels in transformative self-empowerment is thus nothing new (Ross 2018, 209–12). Ross refers, for instance, to the historian of reading Patricia Lehan Gregory, who underscored continuities between contemporary feminist reading groups and nineteenth-century women’s clubs and literary societies whose members came together “to educate themselves and incidentally acquire the organizational and public speaking skills that allowed them to agitate for causes in the public sphere such as temperance and women’s suffrage” (Ross 2018, 208). Emma’s use of shared reading as a practicing ground can thus be seen as part of a long history of emancipation through self-understanding and practice in reading groups. The connections between and blurring of inner and outer, the self and the social, private and public, sensation, reflection

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and creativity, play and education—these all characterize the reading group space. This total, composite character makes reading groups a fruitful ground for self-understanding and self-narration on the “inside” and for practicing a full, authentic public persona on the “outside.” Adding the other four participatory effects—the performativity of reading aloud, the collective quest to solve a literary riddle, playful proto-­ poetic thinking, and freedom of anonymity to (re)formulate an authentic public persona—sets the stage for a powerful everyday ritual.

“Arbeidsnever” as a Prism for Understanding Self in Society I turn now to a shared reading that took place in the backroom of a public library on an afternoon in mid-September 2020. Oslo was cautiously open between a long lockdown in spring and a looming rise in contagion. We were eight—five women and three men—in addition to the facilitator, Ellen. She was a first-time substitute for Mari Vannes, who started the group as a volunteer. As is typical, all participants but one were more or less regulars. The age span ranged evenly from late 30s to early 70s, which was atypical for daytime groups but occurred because many were working from home. Instead of gathering around the table, we spread out in the room, following social distancing regulations. There were bottles of hand sanitizers available, but no shared snacks or hot drinks. The facilitator handed out copies of the short story herself instead of sending them around. Except for a few remarks, we talk little about the Covid situation. Dialects and sociolects revealed that people had come from various parts of the country and different walks of life. We knew almost nothing about each other, except from details gathered in small talk before and after the meetings and snippets shared in the discussions that serve as experiential evidence for our arguments. These snippets were, in most cases, carefully cut tips of icebergs in the participants’ inner worlds. The featured story was “Arbeidsnever” by the award-winning Norwegian author Jan Kristoffer Dale. The discussion turned to the story’s psychosocial and sociopolitical aspects. Participants shared slightly more personal details than is usual in open, public reading groups (Fagerlid and Vannes 2022). Our conversation thus provided particularly rich material for tracing the “reverse-switching of awareness” (Longden et al. 2015, 5) between story, inner recollection, external contemplation, and sharing

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in relation to understanding the self in society and recreating an authentic public persona. The analysis I present here centers on three accumulating dynamics. First, in keeping with the notion of reverse-switching of awareness, the participants’ arguments built on mostly undisclosed personal recollections, connecting their inner and outer dialogue. Second, participants constructed a sociopsychological and sociopolitical analysis together, collectively creating a shared, though not necessarily agreed-upon perception of reality. Third, the collectively sustained understanding of society and, indirectly, of the self in society supported a reconstruction of the self and of an authentic public persona. As is common in shared reading, the facilitator reads a short story and a poem very slowly, with primed pauses for explorative conversation. The story centered on Trygve, a young man from a family with “laborer’s hands,” who, lacking practical skills, chose general education high school but dropped out and has been sorting bottles at a brewery on short-term contracts since. His unemployed cohabiting girlfriend is two months pregnant, and his father-in-law suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Christopher, a regular participant in his early 40s, called Trygve’s working conditions “meaningless, totally alienated, wrong circadian rhythm, cold and hopeless.” Others described the atmosphere as “dreary” and “bleak,” and the writing style is “grinding, with few bright spots and little brio.” Still, judging from the vivid discussion, Trygve’s situation spoke directly to many of us. During the conversation, the participants used different tools for interpretation, based on their different icebergs of inner recollection. Christopher drew on an arsenal of allegorical personal anecdotes and references from popular culture. One such anecdote spoke to the sociocultural and generational differences between the protagonist and his working-class family. Prompted by our talk about the different perceptions of labor expressed by Trygve’s family, the derogatory demeanor of the temping agent, and the permanently employed overseer, Christopher contemplated, “My granddad once said to my mom, who worked at Norwegian Telecom her whole life, that he couldn’t at all comprehend how she could get tired from working in an office all day. No way! It was just vanity.” Later in the conversation, Christopher returned to the memory—showing again how a “reverse-switching of awareness” between inner and outer

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world was taking place. Note his stylistic repetition and voice animation (a skill he also nurtures in song writing and amateur theatre) in his following contribution: I just realized something, if I may digress here. My granddad had said to my mum that he couldn’t at all comprehend how she could get tired. But I remember when I worked at elderly people’s homes. After my first duty.—I hadn’t known that people could live like that. “The seventh ancestor” [referring to a familiar fairy tale] was just mild. Many strange fates, I remember.—I lived at my parents’ place, and I just lay down on the floor when I got home “Oi, this was just the wildest” [with a mild, surprised voice]—when my mom came: “No one is so knackered that they have to lie down on the floor after work!” [aggressive voice]. And I remember I just said: “Now listen here, pen-pusher!” [aggressive voice, too. People laugh]. But she was capable of saying that. I haven’t thought about that before— what my granddad told her. It travels down generations.

During the discussion, at least three participants shared experience of manual work. Christopher says Trygve’s working conditions reminded him of his seasonal delivery job with “endless parcels.” He had to wake up at five to be at work at seven, and “Oh, God, it’s 9.30 pm, I must get to bed. It was totally against my nature.” He recounted how another worker took pride in cramming the van with parcels up to its ceiling, illustrating the worker’s tempo by snapping his fingers rapidly: He loved it, while I wasted a lot of thinking on “ugh, I should be doing something better,” and that’s why I worked slower. He just accepted and worked fantastically and seemed genuinely, beamingly happy. I get the impression that the guy [Trygve] is more like me.

Encouraged perhaps by the group’s convivial laughter, Christopher would return to his experiences and his empathy with the protagonist on several occasions. Two other participants also built arguments, though more briefly, on their experiences of routine manual work. Based on a year in the fishing industry in his youth, Adam stated that he sometimes missed hard manual work. It kept him fit, he said, unlike today’s office work—which he illustrated by sinking down into his chair, miming computer work. Trying to explain the belittling treatment of the temping agent and overseer, he

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argued that “discipline and outer motivation” were necessary in Trygve’s kind of job. Oline, about the same age as Adam and Christopher, and with experience from a slaughterhouse, disagreed. Oline’s contribution highlighted manual work as craft: It can be as much inner motivation in practical work as elsewhere, I feel. And about authority, I disagree that you need an authoritarian person on the outside if it is practical work. It’s a craft, in a way. Sorting bottles is a ­practical skill, a craft. The protagonist did not thrive with this kind of task. He’s also temporary and at the bottom of the social ladder. I think we would have had a different description by one of the permanently employed. The overseer, for instance, she had been there for ages. If Trygve had been permanently employed, there’d probably be a completely different sense of community. The picture we get is the worst of the worst. In addition, he doesn’t want to be there, even a tiny bit.

Oline added that she herself “thrived at the slaughter line” and that practical labor can produce “a sensation of flow.” By the time the facilitator read the final part, we had touched upon the temping agent’s unsympathetic, slightly threatening, and inhuman treatment of the workers, the lack of ordinary workers’ rights in temping agencies, how it feels to be “replaceable,” and even issues of rights concerning sick pay and vacations in temping agencies. Then came a question that drew us back to the literature and prompted a particularly dense moment in the conversation: “Why doesn’t Trygve want to go to work the next day?” Some suggested he was just tired. Then the newcomer, a neatly dressed woman with a short haircut, around 50, who had jotted down notes on a piece of paper, captured the situation. She took up the final scene where Trygve and the father-in-law teamed up to cover for each other. The older man, ill with COPD, has been smoking, and Trygve just pretends to be ill. It is so nice how Trygve and his father-in-law support each other [several participants say “yes” in agreement]. It shows that he has at least one ally. Because I think that his mother is working class, and he has had a wish to break away from that by choosing general education high school, but he didn’t succeed, and he’s not getting any support. And he feels that he fails to achieve his true potential. And now he’s with his girlfriend, who is pregnant, and that’s the end … . And he must take responsibility for that. The day before he turns in ill, the girlfriend’s sister phoned and talked about how

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they [she and her husband] live out, perhaps, the [middle-class] life he wished for. But Trygve never got that opportunity. He resigns and just says, “I’m sick.”

Jens, a long-time regular and sharp literary interpreter around 50, started saying, “That’s exactly how it is. It’s so sad—” but he cut himself short. Some murmured, “Yes.” Christopher broke the hushed atmosphere by recounting a lighthearted incident from a TV documentary about the working poor in the United States: “It was just like she didn’t have time to eat. ‘How can I eat a salad while I drive one hour to get to my next job?’ It’s Burger King, then, and oh, a vicious circle.” An older woman, Eva, said she will watch the episode when it is aired on linear TV. “Was she the one who was asked what was important in everyday life and responded that it was small things, like getting laid in the weekend?” Jens asked, laughing. He said he had recently binged on the whole series. He connected with what Christopher said by reiterating his description: “Bleak it is, with all these who don’t have a job, and they have the will, the abilities, and the desire, but no job. It wasn’t like that before. Then they had faith in the future.” Christopher recounted another funny anecdote of how watching a YouTube clip led him to explore a small town in Ohio on Google Earth, where he was struck by the dilapidated houses. Jens latched on, describing another interview he watched on YouTube. “It was fascinating,” he said. “They don’t blame anyone. They take responsibility. They’ve made a small mistake, something at work, and can’t pay the rent and are thrown out. It takes so little. It’s painful. They take so much responsibility.” The connection with the short story was clear, and the social scientist in me felt compelled to spell it out, with implicit reference to Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman (2000). “There’s nowhere to build up the old working-­ class solidarity,” I said. “Because they’re only responsible for themselves. There are no structural problems. There’s only you who can’t handle it.” I was thinking of how long-term insecurity and temporary employment, in manual work but also in academia, can lead to what Sennett (1998) calls “a corrosion of character,” of the withering of mutual commitments, loyalty, and a sense of being useful—in short, “of what we value in ourselves and for which we seek to be valued by others” (10). I know that the sensation of being merely a replaceable cog can lead to doubt in one’s own capabilities and to alienation from colleagues and the workplace, as Sennett describes. Parts of Sennet’s study play out at a café where

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sacked IT programmers talk about what happened to them. By talking, they create what Sennett (1998) calls “coherence and a solid authorial ‘I’” (134). Sennet claims that the “preservation of one’s own active voice is the only way to make failure bearable” (134). Creating a coherent narrative about the events is therapeutic. Despite not sharing even the tip of my inner iceberg, I sensed how collectively making sense of Trygve’s difficulties within a wider sociopolitical frame spilled into my inner world and consolidated my analysis of my own experiences with long-term temporary employment “at the bottom of a ladder.” The way we broadened and mutually confirmed our multifaceted understanding of Trygve’s situation seems to simultaneously broaden and confirm my interpretation of my own experiences. Oline responded directly to my comment on the lack of solidarity in temporary employment: “At least until he gets a permanent position. If he stays. But he can’t handle staying long enough to get a permanent position. He’s been there a year, but obviously, he’ll have to endure longer.” In addition to acknowledging my interpretation, Oline added a further point about the protagonist’s silence and unwittingly furthered my inner reworking: “Tone [the girlfriend] is in a different world. She wants to refurbish the bedroom, but with one income. He doesn’t talk about his worries.” While the corrosion of one’s character, one’s relationship with the world, goes on as a sense of personal failure and inadequacy, there is little to talk about, except ressentiment or self-blame. But through the practice of reading for sharing and, as we built our own first-person narratives in response to one another’s interpretations of “Arbeidsnever,” we were each regaining our active voice, reinterpreting the wider circumstances of our own lives, and collectively writing this revised version into reality. Christopher related personally to Trygve’s situation again: “I wonder how [the girlfriend] would react if he loses the job. I’ve thought about it myself. If one risks being scolded by an uncomprehending partner.” The newcomer furthers the analysis: And then he works at a place where other academics come from Lithuania and Romania. And the paradox is that they, I don’t know how to explain it, they have been forced out of their own countries and forced to take employment in something they’re not educated for. While he is forced into it because he hasn’t been able to—. In Norway today, you have the possibility to get a higher education, but he is in a way locked into his background, his class. There’s something there that makes me wonder.

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“That’s what his girlfriend’s sister aims for,” Oline added. “He has nothing to say to that. It probably hits hard.” “That’s what I thought!” the newcomer responded. “It shows that the opportunity is there, but—” “Yes,” Adam jumped in. “One inherits the social position. ‘Loser parents get loser kids,’” he said, quoting Trygve’s girlfriend’s sister. “That’s an unacademic way of saying it, but it’s true. It’s a headache in Norwegian policy and in the Norwegian school system, particularly—that one isn’t as good at creating social mobility as one wishes. Even in a social democracy like the Norwegian.” We continued to discuss the unspoken solidarity between the in-laws and the protagonist’s silence with his girlfriend about difficult issues until the facilitator said we were over time. She handed out copies of a poem before reading it aloud twice, which is the standard way to conclude shared reading sessions. The poem was by the Norwegian poet Rolf Jacobsen. While Dale is from a new generation of working-class authors who depict life under late capitalism, Jacobsen belongs to the modernist tradition, portraying living conditions and factory work in early twentieth-century Oslo. Jens was quick to interpret the poem as a description of a strenuous and monotonous job that wears you out. “Yes,” Eva says several times, as if to prepare herself. Finally, she mustered enough strength to continue: “My associations go to this corona situation. To just take it all out.” She struggled to find the right words. With encouragement from the facilitator, Eva continued, interspersing lines from the poem with self-disclosure: “Up and down,” like your courage. Maybe I just have to admit that, right now, I’m rather marked by it. I feel so unfree. [Several mutter “Yes”] I feel locked up. I’m retired, but I have very many interests. I do many things. But right now, I’m anxious about going out. And I thought to myself, Shall I come here today? I’ve sons and grandchildren and family. They say, “Get out! Keep your distance!” But I have angst and fear here [she lays a hand on her chest] or in the stomach. “The anticipation, but then disappointment, and dread.”

“Perhaps I watch too much news,” Eva said with a smile to take the sting out of her anguish. This drew some compassionate laughter from the group. Christopher picked up on the final part about the news and talked

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about how the media still focuses on contagion, despite the positive statistics in Norway. “It’s good to say it,” someone says, directed at Eva’s main concern. “It’s good to say it,” Eva repeated. “I had a bad day, and it was good to get out of the house.” Reflecting on this exchange brought home to me the fragile nature of reading group communication. Christopher did not really acknowledge Eva’s angst and confession. Instead, he latched his own concern about Covid media coverage (which he and I discussed before the meeting) onto her final, apologetic comment. Yet she said it loud, inscribing it into reality, and someone confirmed her courage. She was not met with silence. And that made a difference, as Emma also suggested in her commentary on the “Eveline” event.

De-alienation, Recreating an Authentic Public Persona, and Civic Citizenship This chapter has analyzed how reading for sharing in public reading groups leads to a fuller grasp of not only the self but also the self as part of society. The space of shared reading comes alive and is imbued with meaning through the story and poem read slowly and aloud, letting the listener’s mind travel along. Inwardness alternates with the participatory quest to solve the literary riddle, creating a collective, multifaceted understanding, or interpretive community. At the “Eveline” event, Emma recognized, articulated, and was acknowledged for her analysis of the physical sensation of disempowerment. Eva experienced how Jacobsen’s poem resonated with her sense of imprisonment and shared her fear through proto-poetic, or emergent, thinking. At the “Arbeidsnever” event, we followed Trygve with our individual past experiences, which we filtered into the conversation, together creating a fuller and collectively resonant, if not identical, grasp of working conditions and life under late capitalism. For me, and perhaps for Christopher and others, a narrative reconstruction of the self in this society helped to rework the alienating experience of being a replaceable cog. The open, participatory, playful, and convivial space of public reading groups provided the freedom of anonymity and set a stage set for interactions between vulnerable yet empowered authentic personae. Can the collectively resonant understanding of the self and society that emerged from reading for sharing events help participants create a less

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alienated, more authentic public persona outside the reading group? Can public reading groups sustain life quality and engaged citizenship? The relations I have traced here between self-understanding, narrative self-­ reconstruction, empowerment, and collective interpretation inscribing inner worlds into a common reality show that the transformative effects of reading for sharing can extend beyond the immediate education- or health-related concerns that have been the focus of most shared reading interventions in school or clinical settings. Together with other recent contributions to the field (Christiansen and Dalsgård, this volume), the findings presented in this chapter suggest we have much more to learn through the ethnography of reading for sharing.

References Bateson, Gregory. 2000 [1972]. The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 440–456. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bednar, Lucy. 2010. Audiobooks and the Reassertion of Orality: Walter J. Ong and Others Revisited. CEA Critic 73 (1): 74–85. Billington, Josie, Philip Davis, and Grace Farrington. 2013. Reading as Participatory Art: An Alternative Mental Health Therapy. Journal of Arts & Community 5 (1): 25–40. Boyarin, Jonathan, ed. 1993. The Ethnography of Reading. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bundesen, Birgit. 2021. The Affective Resonance Processes in Creative Writing-­ Groups: Retroaffective Restructuring of the Self in Creative Writing for People Suffering from Schizophrenia-Spectrum Disorder. InterCultural Philosophy 1 (December): 59–72. Christiansen, Charlotte Ettrup, and Anne Line Dalsgård. 2023. Together and Apart: Shared Reading as an Embodied and Intersubjective Ritual of Resonance. In The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, ed. Matthew Rosen. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dale, Jan Kristoffer. 2016. Arbeidsnever. Oslo: Kolon forlag. Fagerlid, Cicilie. 2012. The Stage Is All the World, and the Players Are Mere Men and Women. Performance Poetry in Postcolonial Paris. Oslo: University of Oslo. ———. 2020. Democratic Coexistence, Tiny Publics and Participatory Emancipation at the Public Library. In Libraries, Archives and Museums as Democratic Spaces in a Digital Age, ed. Ragnar Audunson, Herbjørn Andresen, Cicilie Fagerlid, Erik Henningsen, Hans-Christoph Hobohm, Henrik Jochumsen, Håkon Larsen, and Tonje Vold, 285–304. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Fagerlid, Cicilie, and Mari Vannes. 2022. Livskvalitet og lavterskel litteratursamtale i året som ikke telte. Digital Shared Reading under pandemien. In Shared Reading i Skandinavien: forskning og praxis, ed. Torbjörn Forslid, Anders Ohlsson, Kerstin Rydbeck, Kjell Ivar Skjerdingstad, Mette Steenberg, and Thor Magnus Tangerås, 329–371. Oslo: ABM-Media. Fassin, D. (2014). True Life, Real Lives: Revisiting the Boundaries between Ethnography and Fiction. American Ethnologist 41 (1): 40–55. Frye, Northrop. 1957. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. 2021. The Phenomenological Mind. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Gallese, Vittorio. 2009. Mirror Neurons, Embodied Simulation, and the Neural Basis of Social Identification. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 19 (5): 519–536. Howe, Nicholas. 1993. The Cultural Construction of Reading in AngloSaxon England. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 58–79. Berkeley: University of California Press. Joyce, James. 1904. Eveline. http://www.online-­literature.com/james_ joyce/959/. Kapferer, Bruce. 2010. In the Event  – Toward an Anthropology of Generic Moments. Social Analysis 54 (3): 1–27. Long, Elizabeth. 1993. Textual Interpretation as Collective Action. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 180–211. Berkeley: University of California Press. Longden, Eleanor, Philip Davis, Josie Billington, Sofia Lampropoulou, Grace Farrington, Fiona Magee, Erin Walsh, and Rhiannon Corcoran. 2015. Shared Reading: Assessing the Intrinsic Value of a Literature-Based Health Intervention. Medical Humanities 41 (2): 113–120. Ong, Walter J. 2002 [1982]. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Peplow, David. 2016. Talk About Books. A study of Reading Groups. London: Bloomsbury. Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. 2018. “Adult Readers.” In Reading Still Matters: What the Research Reveals about Reading, Libraries, and Community, by Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Lynne McKechnie, and Paulette M.  Rothbauer, 137–229. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited. Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W. W: Norton & Company. ———. 2010. The Public Realm. In The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 261–270. New Jersey: Blackwell Publishing. Skjerdingstad, Kjell Ivar, and Thor Magnus Tangerås. 2019. Shared Reading as an Affordance-Nest for Developing Kinesic Engagement with Poetry: A Case Study. Cogent Arts & Humanities 6 (1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983. 2019.1688631.

CHAPTER 11

From Literary Field to Instagram Feed: Ethnographies of Reading in Delhi Rashmi Sadana

In good anthropological fashion, Jonathan Boyarin’s idea of an “ethnography of reading” posits the written text as being in an always evolving relationship with the readers of that text. Further, reading is seen as a set of social practices, whereby texts are stories reaching out to the public and books are material objects in circulation. Or as he puts it, “textuality” is “a field of interaction” (Boyarin 1993, 2). Reading Boyarin in the early 2000s, when I was studying how novels from India were being read transnationally, the volume helped me to think anthropologically about texts. In my ethnographic case, it meant to see the languages of the text (written in English but describing lives lived in Hindi) as a way to document and analyze postcolonial language politics (Sadana 2012). Getting out of the text was my first real anthropological instinct—to unravel these novels’ social and cultural contexts at regional, national, and international levels. This meant studying book reviewers, prize committees, translators, publishers, editors, lay readers and more. But then I realized I could go back R. Sadana (*) George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rosen (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0_11

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into the text as well, to see how, why, and by whom it was read and interpreted. I analyzed the Urdu world depicted in Ahmed Ali’s English novel Twilight in Delhi, the politics of the Hindi translation of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, and the Hindi original and English translation of the novel Mai by Geetanjali Shree. The method that I discovered by doing so—one that took me in, around, and outside of texts—led me to term my own study as more of an “ethnography of literature.” How the literary text could be unpacked and brought down to earth, specifically to the multilingual streets of Delhi. The more fieldwork I did the more people and institutions there were who laid their hands (and eyes) on texts. The text had stakes beyond the literary, ones that had to do with regional language politics, as well as caste and gendered relationships to language. Ideas about “Indian” literary culture as a national-level enterprise had an abstract representation on the “global” literary stage: all the books promoted and prizes won happened to have been written originally in English. This was strange for a place that has over twenty-two major literary languages other than English. Boyarin’s edited volume helped me imagine and then inhabit a bridge between cultural anthropology and literary studies. There, I undertook an ethnography of Delhi’s literary field, using methods that included textual analysis but also interviews and observations, and the study of institutions such as the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Literature. This approach was more about the politics of literary production, and the book that resulted, English Heart, Hindi Heartland (2012) was a little more Bourdieu than Boyarin; nevertheless, my ethnography of literature also analyzed texts to understand specific moments when India’s radical multilingualism appeared in literary texts, when for instance English was mediating Hindi and Urdu worlds. My study toggled between cultural anthropology and literary studies, resulting in a kind of cultural history of the present, where the relationship of English to the Indian languages revealed a complex of shifting linguistic hierarchies connected to caste and class, colonialism and globalization, and the ever present and shifting politics of authenticity. In the late 2000s, I moved from studying places of literary production to Delhi’s new and increasingly lengthy, multiline above and underground metro rail system. Opened in phases since 2002, the Delhi Metro is a high-speed, state-of-the-art system comprised of 10 lines and nearly 300 stations, covering almost 400 kilometers of Delhi’s National Capital Region. Three million ride it each day. My concentrated approach to

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literary figures, texts, and sites became radically diffuse as I traveled for many hours each day by Metro to all parts of the city and beyond. With this project I was stretching my idea of the city along with the Metro lines that were, phase by phase of construction, redefining urban boundaries. I was studying the materiality of the Metro system as well as the changing urban landscape. I was “reading the city” but largely through people’s experiences of the Metro, my observations while riding the trains, and interviews with urban planners, architects, Metro officials, politicians, and others who were making the system. I started to think of the people I met on the Metro as a public. I spent thousands of hours on the trains, but also at stations, which were not only part of the larger transport landscape, but also public places in their own right. It was at one of those stations (Kashmere Gate) where the Sahitya Akademi opened a small shop (Fig.  11.1) selling its own publications, representing a range of Indian authors in multiple languages. I remember visiting it and thinking: Here

Fig. 11.1  A Sahitya Akademi bookshop at the Kashmere Gate metro station in Delhi

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is a physical intersection of transport and social mobilities through the placement and movement of texts. But there wasn’t much more I felt I could do at that point. The Metro was about different kinds of circulation—language, goods, ideas, experiences—but it was not that I was going to study what people were buying in the bookshop and then follow them around. And this is another important aspect of Boyarin’s volume: It raised questions about method, even if it did not always have answers for how to study texts ethnographically. What this intersection of the Metro and the Sahitya Akademi did point to, however, was the ways in which the Metro was a space of middle-class social reproduction in a national frame, two places to exchange different forms of cultural capital. The aspirational aspect of Metro riding was similar to the aspirational qualities of reading (especially in English) that I had documented in my first ethnographic study. This point crystallized when one of my Metro interlocutors, Rupali, said to me one day: “Everybody is busy with their own things, but people are reading more, especially girls are reading books, newspapers, and ones from that day only, not old papers” (Sadana 2022, 96). I had also noticed forms of reading on the Metro—books, newspapers, phones—but what struck me about Rupali’s comment was the emphasis on the fact that the newspapers she saw girls reading were from “that day only” and not previous days. Her comment goes beyond questions of basic literacy, and instead points to a certain kind of awareness and desire to follow current events. These Metro riders are not just grabbing whatever they can read— old newspapers lying around—but are reading the latest news. Rupali speaks of a certain cultivation that is happening, and her comment suggests that it is the environment of the Metro that is leading to the habit of reading the current newspaper each day. The idea of being current is also directly linked to how women come to see themselves in the public space of the Metro. As a middle-class engine of social mobility, the Metro “instructs” as it provides high-speed transport. It is full of “spectators” but is also a social stage to perform on. For women in particular, who have fewer public spaces and forms of transport where they can relax enough to absorb themselves in reading material, the Metro as a new public space is especially significant. Rupali also told me about her neighbor who had made a deal with the newspaper delivery boy to get her paper before she leaves for the Metro each morning. So, delivery times come to be calibrated with Metro timings. The morning commute is not only about transport mobility but also a social scene of reading, walking, waiting, of passing time and time well

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spent. In a similar vein, Johannes Fabian’s chapter in The Ethnography of Reading discusses reading as “time spent” and encourages us to consider the text around us in our social milieu (Fabian 1993). Of course, many Metro riders are gazing down at their phones, but it is harder to tell what and if they are reading. Most often when I glance over to see what fellow Metro riders are looking at on their phones, it is their own text conversations or videos. I am sure some are reading novels and newspapers on their phones as well, and perhaps this could be studied. But Rupali’s point was that the Metro has a capacity to create what I can only call “reading beings.” From my own observations, I will add that these reading beings are not static readers. The ethnographic context of their reading instills a kind of “going along” that one embodies and performs on public transport. The Metro is a space where  transport and social mobilities intersect, and in that process a new kind of Metro mobility is created. The Metro as a site of reading and as a place that instills a practice of reading has only increased as the system has grown. This growth over the system’s three main construction phases has paralleled the growing use of social media in India, whereby the Metro and digital platforms such as Instagram have become linked and are negotiated through online and offline public spaces (Sharma 2022). An example of this linkage is the group, “Books on the Delhi Metro,” which is an online reading community that operates across WhatsApp, Facebook, and especially Instagram. The group has 14,700 followers on Instagram and operates under the tagline: “We leave FREE books on Delhi Metro. If, someday, you find a book, TAKE it, READ, and RETURN for someone else to enjoy. #booksonthedelhimetro” The group is not dedicated to books about the Delhi Metro, but more literally books that are exchanged in the actual space of the Metro (Fig. 11.2). It is the act of sharing books and promoting the idea that books should be for “everyone” (in this case those who already have access to Metro mobility and social media) and not a luxury that motivated the group’s founder, Shruti Sharma, who now gives talks on the subject at colleges around India (Sharma 2019). Books on the Delhi Metro features books in English or Hindi, mostly fiction across genres and non-fiction of all sorts, everything from The Cinema of Satyajit Ray to Wolf Hall. These books are traded in the sense of being left behind for Metro riders to discover, borrow, read, and then return to another Metro location. However, the experience is mediated through Instagram, where users/Metro riders post when they have picked

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Fig. 11.2  A “scroll-call” of books to be found, read, and returned on the BooksontheDelhiMetro Instagram page (2020)

up or dropped a book. This is just one of many digital platforms that Metro users employ as they negotiate the city. Looking for books on the Metro becomes a new way to practice navigation of the system and way-­ finding more generally. Sharma explained in a newspaper article why she started this group in particular: Imagining a space where people could share their bookshelves to give others—whether strangers or friends—a chance to read gave me goosebumps. I began to prepare the logistics, designed a logo for the initiative, printed

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stickers, took the books I had meant to give away, and started leaving them inside the Metro compartments. (Sharma 2020)

Soon it was an operation involving forty volunteers or “book fairies” who were leaving books on the Metro with stickers identifying them as being part of the Books on the Delhi Metro initiative. Sharma explains: I had my doubts about our motto—Take It, Read It, Pass It—but they were put to rest when people started sharing the books we had left behind. By March 2020, we had placed nearly 2,000 books on the Metro. Close to 500 had been picked up and shared by commuters. We received messages on our Instagram when readers picked up the books or passed them on to family or friends. Things were going well, and I had planned to make the initiative even bigger.

What is significant about Books on the Delhi Metro is the interaction between the online and real time / space/ place of the Metro, and the ways in which Instagram becomes a “participatory sensing system” (Boy and Uitermark 2016). The posts on Instagram amplify and make possible the exchanges on the Metro. “Book pickers” as they are called find books on the Metro by following clues on social media, so they use one navigation system (Instagram) to enter another (the Delhi Metro system). Their desire to find the books and the resulting stories of having found the books become part of the larger reading discourse. This circulation can be seen in Kushboo’s story, highlighted on Instagram by Books on the Delhi Metro: Khushboo, just like you, had missed our books quite many times. But when she got to know that one can request the book fairies to match their timings, she tried to give it one more attempt. One day, after talking to all the fairies, she decided to leave early to chase one of our books. She requested her mother to allow her to leave home early. She got the permission and her sweet mother also fed her dahi-cheeni to wish her luck. But, as luck would have it, her metro was crawling at snail’s speed that day (blue line travelers, we get your pain!). She was still one station away when she saw that book was already dropped. She prayed to all the existing gods to make the book invisible to all commuters. And they heard her prayers. She reached the spot just in time to hold the book in her hands and cried with joy. She says that we made her day, but in reality, she made our day because she gave a hand-

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written note to our book fairy which was the most beautiful gesture we’ve ever got.

Kushboo is identified as a book lover which bolsters her status and distinguishes her from the non-book lovers of the world. She will go to lengths to get books on the Metro and even summon the gods to do so. But it is the fact that her “sweet mother” allows her to leave the house early that enables her to enjoy greater mobility, a gendered activity from the start (in terms of one woman relaxing restrictions on another women’s mobility in the city and in terms of the mother’s labor going into the food that will nourish her daughter for the big day). Books on the Delhi Metro merges the association of reading culture (a middle-class, high-status marker) with the place of the Delhi Metro (a high-tech global infrastructure and “cool” way to get around the city). One platform leads to the other, and they mutually reinforce an aspirational culture of reading and Metro riding. Boy and Uitermark specifically write of how Instagram is used to mark public places for particular groups, when they say, “identifying which places in a city are cosmopolitan and which are parochial is important for an understanding of patterns of encounter and enclavement in the city” (2016). Books on the Delhi Metro can be seen as a group that is creating a reading public of twenty-something Metro riders, a subculture of book finders, and perhaps readers. In Boyarin’s words, the group would be an example of “dissolving the stereotype of the isolated individual reader” (Boyarin 1993, 3); and yet the idea of Metro riders looking for left books does not quite make for the textured sociality that some forms of reading could take. This is not a book club but rather a space to find books. The Metro becomes a kind of moving library, without being a bookmobile, though the idea of access and affordability are central to the group’s founding. A clue will drop in an instant on Instagram: a simple image of the cover of the book with the tag line such as: “Just dropped at Guru Dronocharya metro station.” The Metro as the space for book-finding rather than reading per se is also something that distinguishes the activities of the group. The Metro is cast as a social space of people interested in sharing books. It is idealist in that it is non-consumerist and instead is based on the notion of a shared community forged online and in the trains. Founder Sharma also conducts author interviews interspersed with book cover images on the Instagram

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feed, which spreads a different kind of information about the books and their authors. There is Urdu poetry, Hindi stories, English treatises. On Instagram, it is the book covers that Books on the Delhi Metro features that are prominent rather than actual text from the books. Perhaps they become emblems more than literature in the process. The Instagram story becomes one of how people find the books, a kind of scavenger hunt, but one that requires a return of the gift (Mauss 2002)—though not quite a full return. Assuming we have read the book, the content lingers in us. What is reciprocal, a central point of Mauss’s definition of the gift is the fact that the book has been read before returning it—it returns as a used object because it has been experienced by someone new. This passing around of books enlivens the space of the Metro and contrasts its many mobilities—of transit, middle-class pursuits, and the stories contained in books. The “hunt” is a building of relationships around the printed word, and the gift symbolizes the merging of transport and social mobilities. To return to Boyarin then: There is a merging between the materiality of books and the more abstract ideas of social formation, subcultures, and public space. The city contains texts and is a text. Once, in a workshop at Sarai/Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, we researchers were asked to consider the idea of “text as material.” Practically speaking this meant walking around the city and finding text in all its forms. For my part, I wandered around the Civil Lines area of North Delhi, photographing street signs, shop exteriors, graffiti, but also neighborhood postings and even litter, from candy wrappers to chips bags—all together capturing the visual details of the multi-scripted city. We reconvened after several hours of collecting and shared our images of diverse forms of text. Other workshop participants picked up leaflets, scraps of paper, religious inscriptions and more. Some people made collages, others poetry, which begged the question, text as material for what? Ours were visual representations for the most part (we discussed sound, but no one used audio equipment to capture text). What I took from the workshop was that (1) Cities are made of text and (2) Text can be part of visible and invisible infrastructure. We are reading all the time, even when we do not identify ourselves as “reading.” We are often viewing text as visual culture. This mental slippage is even more apparent in multilingual and multiscript societies whose public arenas are saturated with different systems of signs, as is the case in Delhi, where Urdu, Devanagari, and Roman scripts dance around each other and sometimes align with one another (Fig. 11.3).

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Fig. 11.3  A typical billboard in Delhi featuring (from top to bottom), Urdu, Hindi, and English in Arabic, Devanagri, and Roman scripts

The digital by comparison flattens things out, as screens tend to do. The materiality of text is diminished on our phones, and maybe that is why “book pickers” delight in finding actual books left for them on Metro seats. The digital adds to this mix even while it privileges those who have smart phones. On social media there is so much back and forth, finding and looking, liking and commenting that in the case of Books on the Delhi Metro the “social” becomes the Instagram platform and perhaps the books the conduits, a kind of kula ring of book passing to gain status by giving one something to post (boast) about. But is all “reading” reading? What of the immersive aspect of an actual book, the world in your hands,

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the slow seeping into the brain, where time stops and reflection begins? Perhaps it is to these cognitive questions of patience and imagination that we must turn to next.

References BooksontheDelhiMetro. 2020. Book Picker—Kushboo Sharma. Instagram. April 30. https://www.instagram.com/p/B_m4i4DAH5G/. Boy, John D., and Justus Uitermark. 2016. How to Study the City on Instagram. PLOS ONE 11 (6): e0158161. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone. 0158161. Boyarin, Jonathan. 1993. Introduction. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 1–9. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fabian, Johannes. 1993. Keep Listening: Ethnography and Reading. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 80–97. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mauss, Marcel. 2002. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W.D. Halls. London: Routledge. Sadana, Rashmi. 2012. English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2022. The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sharma, Shruti. 2019. The Curious Case of Books on the Delhi Metro. Tedx Talk. YouTube. May 13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyuN2s2wyd0. ———. 2020. From Books on the Metro to Books in the Courier, This Book-­ Sharing Service Has Reinvented Itself. Scroll.in. October 16. https://scroll.in/ ar ticle/975850/from-­b ooks-­o n-­t he-­m etro-­t o-­b ooks-­i n-­t he-­c ourier-­ this-­book-­sharing-­service-­has-­reinvented-­itself. Sharma, Sonali. 2022. #delhimetro on Instagram: Digital Media and Mobility Practices before and during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Asiascape: Digital Asia 9(1–2): July 7.

CHAPTER 12

Miracles of the Street Matthew Rosen

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. —Marx, Capital, Volume 1: Critique of Political Economy

It was late afternoon when I walked through Fan Noli Square, past the Albanian Parliament, to the shaded entrance of the two-story building

This chapter first appeared in Tirana Modern: Biblio-Ethnography on the Margins of Europe. It is reproduced here with permission of Vanderbilt University Press.

M. Rosen (*) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rosen (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0_12

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that has housed the Albanian Academy of Sciences since 1972.1 Constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century, the building was originally used for family and official receptions hosted by the feudal Toptani family, who “dominated the Albanian capital for 150 years” (Pettifer 2013). The historic structure served as the Royal Palace during the reign of King Zogu I (1928–1939) and as the Presidium of the People’s Assembly during the formative years of Albanian communism (1946–1962). Deemed a cultural monument of the highest category in 2016, the building currently holds the distinction of being the last standing structure to have housed an institution of the Albanian state in 1920, when Tirana was proclaimed the capital (Murati 2016). I had gone there that afternoon to attend a public lecture organized by the recently formed Urban Anthropology Laboratory of Tirana’s Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Art Studies (IAKSA).2 Arriving just ahead of the scheduled start time, I took a seat near the front, on the right side of the central lecture hall. I noted the date, 12 June 2018, in one of the small notebooks I kept in my shirt pocket all that summer. Glancing over my left shoulder, I counted about two dozen others who had come out to hear anthropologist Ger Duijzings discuss his 2016 book, Engaged Urbanism: Cities Methodologies, which he coedited with Ben Campkin.3 Duijzings opened with some biographical information. He turned to urban studies in 2009, he said, as “a break from the grim focus” of his earlier work on genocide and war crimes during the Bosnian War. But though his vision of urban anthropology was optimistic, that was not to say he took it lightly. On the contrary, the goal of urban anthropology in 1  Fan Noli (1882–1965), for whom the square is named, is remembered today, among other things, for his 1933 translation of part one of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. The translation is notable both for its continued popularity with contemporary Albanian readers and for its stylistic use of shqiperimi, the action according to the word, shqip, which means “Albanian.” The term shqiperimi is an older, heavier, and literally more Albanian-ized term for perkthim, or translation. It was first associated with, and perhaps coined by, Noli, whose translation of Don Quixote included local toponyms and other features to make the novel more relatable to Albanian readers. 2  IAKSA, along with the Institutes of Archaeology, History, and Linguistics and Literature, belongs to the Academy of Albanological Studies. For an account of the prehistory of IAKSA, see Armanda Hysa’s (2013) “Albanian Ethnography at the Margins of History, 1947–1991.” 3  A prolific scholar, Duijzings was probably best known to the assembled audience for his (2002) essay, “Religion and the Politics of ‘Albanianism’: Naim Frashëri’s Bektashi Writings,” which appeared in the influential collection Albanian Identities: Myth and History, edited by Stephanie Schwanderner-Sievers and Bernd J. Fisher.

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his opinion was to contribute to creating “better and fairer cities for people to live in.” The question of just how to do this—with an emphasis on developing different methods for different cities—provided the main topic of his hour-long presentation. I filled ten pages of my little notebook with verbatim snippets of the speech. “Embracing the city as a whole.” “Diverse, specific, unique, changeable.” “Abundant presence of particular phenomena that ask for special explanation.” “Getting at change.” “Memories, erasures, evictions.” “The street as a place of encounter.” “Overwriting hegemonic knowledge.” I circled that last phrase, which I thought summarized the main point of the talk: If anthropology, already a marginal discipline, was to contribute to urban studies—a field dominated by architects, geographers, sociologists, and urban planners who only recently began to encourage “thinking through elsewhere” (Robinson 2016)—it would not be by importing grand theories of urbanization, but by developing what Duijzings called “site-specific methods of observation and intervention.” Responding directly to the local codes and vernacular realities encountered in the street, such methods allowed each city—Bucharest no less than London, Tirana as much as New York—to become a laboratory for creating and exchanging its own forms of urban knowledge. I stepped out of the Academy of Sciences as if into a city transformed. Joining in the xhiro, or evening walk along the now considerably cooler pedestrian street that ran from the new Toptani Shopping Center to the (since demolished) National Theatre, the abstractions of the lecture hall became tangible everywhere I looked.4 I saw old men walking in shirtsleeves, their hands clasped behind their backs; young women in bright summer clothes pushing children in strollers; thin uniformed waiters moving chairs and arranging tables for the coming café crowd; groups of students with their backpacks, looking heavy on their shoulders; couples walking together, laughing, smart phones at the ready. Looking ahead I saw the endless traffic rumbling along Martyrs of the Nation Boulevard, where the yellow cabbies parked, doors open, chatting and smoking. Through the lens of engaged urbanism these unremarkable 4  The Albanian National Theatre was built by the Italians in 1938. It emerged as a site of contention in 2018, when the government announced plans to demolish and replace it with a building designed by the Copenhagen- and New  York-based firm Bjarke Ingels Group (Gjevor 2019).

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kinds of human activity now seemed to be imbued with some deeper significance. But what was I to make of such fleeting perceptions? How was I to connect these quotidian scenes to the questions I had come to explore? What, in short, did any of this have to do with the ethnography of reading in contexts of pronounced social change? An answer hit me while I was waiting for the traffic light to turn green. Looking across a street built by the Italians in the 1930s, whose present name recalled Tirana’s not-so-distant occupation and liberation, I saw Mihal, one of the sidewalk booksellers I met the previous summer through my association with the Tirana publisher and book collector Arlind Novi.5 Along with dozens of others throughout the city, Mihal’s makeshift stand was a fixture in Tirana. As specific and salient as the stray dogs of Bucharest that Duijzings traced in “Dictators, Dogs, and Survival in a Post-Totalitarian City” (2011), the abundant presence of books for sale on Tirana’s streets cried out for explanation. That their arrival coincided with the fall of the old regime is apparent from the Prologue of a finely observed book on post-communist Albania: It was July 1993 … Tirana was chaotic and hot. A single traffic light hung in the center of the city, and it did not work. Private cars, illegal three years earlier, raced through the streets, dodging horse carts and blasting kitschy musical horns. Most were third-hand clunkers from Germany; they say Albania is where a Mercedes goes to die. Books by Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha littered the streets. (Abrahams 2015, 2)

Twenty-five years later, Tirana in summer was still hot and chaotic. But much else had changed. There were working traffic lights on every corner. The proliferation of cars—not to mention trucks, busses, and heavy construction equipment—prevented anyone from driving very fast in most parts of the city. And while the horse carts and musical horns were no longer conspicuous parts of the cityscape, the cars, including but not limited to Mercedes, were mostly up to date. But the books—maybe even some of the same ones, judging by their sun-faded covers!—were still circulating. Amid the diverse, specific, and unique change that had taken place in Tirana, books were still abundantly present on the streets. But why? And what did their presence say about everyday life in this former socialist city? 5

 I use a pseudonym here to protect Mihal’s identity.

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What kinds of memories, erasures, and evictions might be revealed by “reading around” these old books? With these questions still forming in my head, I crossed with the light to say hello to Mihal. Wanting to preserve a visual fieldnote of the idea that occurred to me moments earlier, I snapped a few photos of the books displayed face up on the low wall running along the western edge of Tirana’s Parku Rinia or Youth Park (Fig. 12.1). Among the old books, scattered with pine needles, were Enver Hoxha’s Eurocommunism is Anti-­ Communism, Ismail Kadare’s Theft of Royal Sleep, Volumes II and III of a French edition of Marx’s Capital, Musa Kraja’s The Teacher in the Party Era, Diana Çuli’s The Circle of Memory, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, Thor Heyerdahl’s Aku-Aku, Salverio Strati’s We, Lazzaroni, Robert Escarpit’s Literatron, and Friedrich Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry. These works of fiction and nonfiction by Albanian, French, German, Italian, and Norwegian authors are indicative of the range of books available at Mihal’s stall. Except for the

Fig. 12.1  A visual fieldnote—Mihal’s bookstall

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French edition of Marx, the books I just listed were all printed in the original Albanian or in Albanian translation. All but two were originally published or circulated freely in Albania during the communist era. The two exceptions were Theft of Royal Sleep, a collection of Kadare’s post-­ communist stories published by Onufri in 1999, and Schiller’s foundational essay on poetic theory, which I recognized by the cover, with its yellow letters on a green background, from the catalogue of Pika pa sipërfaqe (trans. Armand Dedej, 2015).6 Although one needs to be careful citing Marx in a post-communist context, I used that memorable first line from “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret” ([1867] 1976, 163–77) as an epigraph to this chapter because it also describes the books on Tirana’s streets—apparently trivial things, which upon closer examination reveal condensed histories, for example, of a harsh dictatorship, a subsequent mass migration, and the everyday social relations of those who have managed to secure a precarious living from the re-circulation of the moveable possessions that those who have departed (the country or this world altogether) have left behind.

Books as Commodities Going by the standard definition of a commodity—any item with a use value that also has an exchange value—books present a case that is especially “good to think.”7 Yet, as Trish Travis pointed out in 1999, “thinking about the book as a commodity, as a good that is good for thinking, does not come naturally” (Travis 1999). This is due, she said, not only to the book’s deep cultural associations with sacred and literary texts but also to dominant ideas of reading, which “figure the book as an object ... with meaning that inheres in its contents, rather than in its points of intersection with the culture around it” (Travis 1999). But for us, now, to see books as commodities, it should be enough to recall that Amazon, the most valuable brand in the world from 2018 to 2020 (Brand Finance 2023), started life, about thirty years ago, as an online bookseller. And despite all the considerable differences between 6  Pika pa sipërfaqe (lit. Point without Surface) is a small press established in Tirana by Ataol Kaso and Arlind Novi in 2009. Readers who are interested in my full account of the work of the publishing house can see Rosen (2022). 7  Ever since Lévi-Strauss (1963) first made the claim for totemic animals, a veritable laundry list of anthropological topics have been deemed “good to think.” Readers who are interested in a partial list can see Rosen (2015, 1061).

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Amazon and the book trade in Tirana, the initial success of Jeff Bezos’s business venture depended on some of the same factors that brought the books to the streets of the Albanian capital in the 1990s. Namely, “the low price that could be offered for books, and the tremendous selection of titles that were available in print” (Grant 2004, 12). For an analysis of books as commodities, I found it helpful to reach back to Igor Kopytoff’s 1986 essay, “The Cultural Biography of Things.” There Kopytoff established that commodities are produced through cultural processes by noting that the same thing may be treated as a commodity at one time and not at another, and the same thing may, at the same time, be seen as a commodity by one person and as something else by another. Such shifts and differences reveal a moral economy that stands behind the objective economy of visible transactions. (Kopytoff 1986, 64)

Each of these statements also applies to second-hand books in Tirana. But before getting into what stands behind their visible appearance, I need to underline the original point I wanted to make—how I came to the topic in the first place. I began with the question of how to do ethnographic fieldwork in the context of a large city. Starting from the recognition that urban sites are “diverse, specific, unique, and changeable” (Campkin and Duijzings 2016, 2), I used urban wandering (Benjamin 1979) as a device to generate a mental list of phenomena that (a) could be found in abundant presence, (b) were visible from the street, and (c) seemed to ask for special explanation. The list of images that streamed through my thoughts as I walked along the pedestrian street toward Mihal included memories of seeing coffeeshops named for other European capitals—London, Paris, Oslo, Vienna; construction equipment rumbling down neighborhood lanes; electric box street art; “censored” graffiti—for example, at a perpetual construction site on Joan of Arc Boulevard, where someone crossed out the first two-­ thirds of an imperative that once said, “Rebelim, Reflektim, Rikrijim— Rebel, Reflect, Re-create” (Fig. 12.2); missing or severely damaged storm drain and utility hole covers; whimsically decorated “accordion” busses that were made to look like giant versions of the musical instrument that inspired their name; and many different kinds of unexpected conjunctions—for example, a petrol station next to a bookstore, or an optometrist that is also a physical therapist.

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Fig. 12.2  Abundant, visible, and asking for explanation

It was after running through this mental catalogue of my experience in Tirana that I arrived at Mihal’s display of sun-faded books. Looking at the city from an anthropological perspective, all these features of Tirana’s urban fabric can be seen to be related in meaningful ways. But given my specific interest in biblio-ethnography, I decided to turn my focus to the circuit of books, and to ask: What needs do the book markets meet? And what do they reveal about the structures of power that organize everyday life in Tirana?

Indexical Values: Markets, Migrations, Miracles Just as one can locate topics in a book by checking the alphabetical list of subjects printed on its back pages, the books on Tirana’s streets point to key events in Albanian social history. In 1992, for instance, when the country first emerged from half a century of harsh dictatorship, it faced an acute paper and book crisis that made it difficult for schools to function. Writing about Tirana at that time, the anthropologist Clarissa de Waal noted that international aid organizations sent large shipments of schoolbooks that were not much use for practical purposes. “These books,” she

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observed, “like many charitable donations, generally ended up for sale on the streets” (De Waal 2014, 54). During the period of my own fieldwork, I noted plenty of books that came to the street through channels of international development (e.g., Adventures in English, the VOA Special English Word Book, and multiple volumes of Essential English for Foreign Students). What I saw most, however, were books printed domestically (Fig. 12.3). Of these, there remained many titles penned by Enver Hoxha, who died in 1985, leaving behind what the writer and translator Bashkim Shehu has called “incursions into every field of knowledge” (Shehu 2001, 185). Hoxha’s memoirs and polemics such as Years of Childhood, When the Party Was Born, Eurocommunism Is Anti-Communism, and The Khrushchevites exist today—along with the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Kadare, Agolli, and other mediators of Albanian Socialist Realism—as durable traces that, in Valentina Napolitano’s words, “give force to and are animated by ... lingering histories. They have a life course, they may haunt but also empower, they may be receding or emerging. Certainly, they refer beyond themselves” (Napolitano 2015, 48).

Fig. 12.3  Indicators—International trade and the domestic product

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But how do so many books actually “end up” on the street? The sellers I asked said they regularly bought books from the relatives of the deceased and from those about to go abroad. This was a kind of common knowledge among locals. If you knew where to find a used bookseller (a good possibility since the sellers claimed prominent spaces in the city) you could easily arrange to sell whatever books you didn’t want or couldn’t keep. It was in this way that the old books on Tirana’s streets pointed to the contemporary phase of Albanian migration (King et al. 2005). During the first major wave, in the fifteenth century, Albanians fled in large numbers to the nearby coasts of Italy and Greece. By the early twentieth century, Albanians had established permanent diaspora communities in large cities in Greece, Romania, Egypt, Turkey, Bulgaria, the United States, Argentina, Canada, and Australia. These patterns of migration came to an abrupt halt during the communist regime, when moving abroad was outlawed. Due in part to an accumulation of “migration potential” during the communist era, rates of Albanian migration have increased dramatically since 1990. According to a 2015 report published by the Migration Policy Institute, “the collapse of the socialist system, the immediate opening of the country, and the radical and chaotic transformation of the economy produced massive migration flows as people sought a better future, either abroad or elsewhere in Albania” (Kosta and Kosta 2015). An estimated one-third of the resident population in 1990 left the country in the first wave of post-­ communist migration. More recently, according to the 2020 report, “Albanian Diaspora in Figures,” the total number of individuals who left Albania in 2019 was “360,699 inhabitants, or about 12.4 percent of the total population of 2011” (INSTAT 2020, 26). Where some local people sold their relatives’ old books for a small sum, others simply disposed of them in the trash. In either case, the books wound up in the same place— for sale on the street. If the movement from the bookshelf to the street is a sign of out-­ migration, the trip from the dumpster to the bookstall is diagnostic of a different kind of structural inequality. To salvage the books that were thrown out, collectors and sellers depended on—and exploited—an informal network of the country’s poorest and most marginalized communities: men, women, and children, mostly but not exclusively members of the local Roma and Egyptian communities, who survived by sorting through the city’s garbage, looking not just for books but also for bottles and cans, shoes and clothes, bags and electronics, tools, utensils, and much more. Anything at all with re-sale value could be sold at the “market of old

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things,” which despite recurring evictions since 2015, has continued to materialize on Saturday mornings in Tirana’s periphery, albeit increasingly farther out and subject to arbitrary police harassment (Fig. 12.4). The next stop for the better-quality books—bought in bulk and sifted; or spotted by discerning eyes and claimed individually—would be at a stand like the one Mihal operated on the border of the park. Once you started to look for these bookstalls, they were everywhere: along the curved balustrade of a bridge over the Lana stream (Fig.  12.5), in the shadow of the dilapidated Pyramid of Tirana (once Enver Hoxha Museum, now slated for demolition), in front of the House of Leaves (once a site of secret surveillance, now a tourist-attracting museum), against the construction hoardings that border Skanderbeg Square (Tirana’s first historical nucleus, now a site of perpetual reinvention), and on countless narrow lanes and other dusty tributaries feeding into streets with names like Qemal Stafa, Don Bosko, and Siri Kodra. The books on the street also raised questions about the sellers. Where had they come from? How did they choose this work? And how did they manage to make a living from it? I still don’t have the answers to all these

Fig. 12.4  Index of things—Saturday morning market

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Fig. 12.5  Index of places—Biblio-urban landscape

questions. Compared to the relatively easy access I had been granted to the inner spaces of book publishing, the sidewalk booksellers were more reticent to let me in. There were at least two reasons for this. The differences in positionality I discussed in the methodological remarks included in the introduction played an important part. But the greater part, I think, had to do with a habitus shaped by the arbitrary threat of harassment, fines, and eviction that the booksellers had to contend with daily. Considering the justified fear and suspicion that permeated their lives, I could understand why a bookseller like Mihal would be cautious about telling too much to a note-taking foreigner. Being perhaps oversensitive to the feeling that my presence or my questions might create discomfort, I backed off. So while I was able to learn that Mihal had been persecuted during communism, I can’t say—because I don’t know—the details of his persecution or what that experience was like for him. From where I sit

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now, at my desk, I see this as a missed opportunity. There was much I might have learned had I been less timid. Indeed, of all the book-related indices of Albania’s transition to capitalism, the life stories of contemporary booksellers were surely among the most poignant. This was true not just of the booksellers whose persecution during communism brought them into the postsocialist era with a structural disadvantage. It was also true for others, such as Hektor Metani, pictured below in 2017 (Fig. 12.6), who were respected during communism, with good jobs that they lost in the transformation. The first time I asked Hektor if I could take his photograph, he said no. That was in 2015. When I saw him again two years later, instead of asking for a photo, I bought an old Albanian-English dictionary with a dark green cover. I paid 500 Lekë (less than five USD). Edited by Ilo Stefanllari and Frida Idirizi, the dictionary was published in 1988 by 8 Nëntori, one of the two state-controlled publishers supervised by the Party and its related Institute of Studies on Marxism-Leninism. Other than a small tear on the spine (which Hektor repaired with a strip of brown electrical tape)

Fig. 12.6  Index of persons—Hektor Metani, bookseller

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the book was in good condition when I bought it and has held up well to frequent consultation. The next time I passed by Hektor’s bookstall, I bought a copy of the late professor Alfred Uçi’s 2010 book, The Philosophy of Don Quixotism, for 600 Lekë. It’s a beautiful book, published by the Albanian Academy of Sciences, manufactured in the printing house Gurten. The graphic design by Enkelejda Misha repurposed Picasso’s iconic 1955 sketch of the literary hero and his sidekick, Sancho Panza, for the cover and frontispiece.8 At 622 pages, it’s a heavy book. I paid up front, but since I had a long walk ahead of me and no bag to carry it in, I asked Hektor if I could come back later to collect it. “Sure,” he said, “no problem.” When I came back the next morning, Hektor invited me for a coffee. We went to the Eurolive betting shop that had taken over the old café next to Hektor’s spot on the sidewalk. Although the betting places were then as ubiquitous as Tirana’s outdoor bookstalls, this was the first (and last) time I entered one.9 It was still early in the morning, but the sun was already hot in the sky. “Raki? Beer? Whiskey? Cigarette?” Hektor was very generous with me. “No, thank you,” I said. “Just the coffee, please.”

We sat together for about thirty minutes. I found out he was from Ksamil, in the south. “Before,” he said, “I was a member of the Communist Party.”10 He was a teacher of language and literature. “Not just a teacher,” he said, “but also a poet.” Some of his poetry was published in the newspaper Drita, in 1988. When he lost his job in the country’s restructuring, he first tried his luck finding work in Greece. When that didn’t work out, he migrated to Tirana, where he’d been ever since. 8  The sketch was first printed in a 1955 issue of the French weekly journal, Les Lettres Francaises, in celebration of the 350th anniversary of the first part of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (PabloPicasso.org 2021). 9  “In this capital city of ours,” Alfred Rakipi wrote in a 2017 editorial published in Tirana Times, “gambling is present in every neighborhood, public space, and most of the ground floors of buildings on main and secondary streets” (Rakipi 2017). Rakipi concluded with a wish for the future: “Let’s hope that the owners of the gambling shops in the city are willing to vacate the city itself. And if not, let’s hope they are compelled to do so by law.” Apparently, someone in the central government was listening. On January 1, 2019, Albania banned all gambling. Seemingly overnight, more than 4000 betting shops shut down for good. 10  Interview conducted in Tirana, July 25, 2017.

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As he told me his story, a friend of his at the next table was drinking raki (a grape liquor) and teasing him, calling out “Komunist.” Hektor didn’t respond to the interpellation of the old Party ideology that followed him into the postsocialist space of the betting shop, outside of which he spent his days sitting on a square of cardboard in the sun, drinking bottled water to stay hydrated and selling old books for a few hundred Lekë apiece. Our conversation had run its course. But we stayed to watch the end of a football match. It wasn’t close: 4–0. I was leaving the country the next day. I still wanted to get his photograph. It was now or never, I thought (mistakenly). So I asked again. This time he agreed. I say “mistakenly” because I saw Hektor again the following summer. I was cutting through the small lane around the corner from his old stand, running late for a 9:30 appointment at Friends Book House. Hektor recognized me. “Amerikan!” he called to me. We greeted warmly. He invited me to drink coffee. But I had to postpone. From then on, Hektor and I would meet often, and he always insisted on buying me a coffee. After several failed attempts to return the gesture, I thought I might be able to even things out by buying a nice book, so I picked one I thought would go for a relatively high price. It was a compact hardcover edition of Engels’s (1884) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, published by 8 Nëntori in 1970.11 It was one of 10,000 copies printed that year in the printing house Mihal Duri.12 My plan backfired. Hektor refused my money but insisted I keep the book. It’s weird, but of all the difficulties I’ve encountered in the field, trying to figure out how to meet my obligation to reciprocate the gifts Hektor gave me was one of the most vexing. I tried everything, even being assertive, which doesn’t come naturally for me, but I never managed to pay him back. In an earlier draft of this chapter, I wrote, “Maybe next time.” But when I returned to Tirana in summer 2021, Hektor was gone. I stepped into the corner pharmacy (which housed a barbershop when I photographed him in 2017) to see if I could get any information on his whereabouts. “Bukanist, Hektor Metani?” I said with a rising intonation. The 11  Following the Russian convention for measuring book size, the format was designated as 70 × 100 × 32, which refers to the size of the paper sheet for printing in centimeters and fractions of sheet (70–width, 100–height, and 32–fraction). 12  Mihal Duri is remembered as a “hero of the people.” In 1941, he printed the tracts of the Communist Group of Korça that were distributed in Tirana. In 1942, he was killed in the resistance against the Italian Fascist forces (Dervish 2016, 102).

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pharmacist’s face dropped. “Ka vdekur,” she said. He has died. Three to four months back. “Covid?” I said. “No, cancer.” I stood a while in the place his books used to be. Tears formed in my eyes but didn’t flow. I walked a little way down Rr. Qemal Stafa. Bought a 2018 edition of Sami Frashëri’s (1899) manifesto, paying 400 lekë from another veteran of the street. In place of the debts I was unable to repay, I include here in my English translation a few lines from Metani’s poem, “Part of the Whole, Named Livadhja.”13 The road, ah the road, you can break your neck on it walking, entering Livadhja. The smell of oregano, the song of the bird community, the melody of the waves, which only rivers know how to make, with a musical instrument still unnamed. The sound of footsteps, yesterday’s wind and thunder, with pleasure, with relaxation, with emotion. From this point of view, they took revenge for the fatigue of the road, the heat, the empty space.

The range of possible responses this fragment might elicit—about the mountainous landscape of the Ionian coast near the Greek-Albanian border, for example, or about the stylistic conventions of Albanian Socialist Realism, or indeed about the memories and experiences Hektor Metani brought with him to Tirana—these all point to the inexhaustible indexicality of written communication. Here I am reminded of José Ortega y Gasset, who noted, in “The Difficulty of Reading,” that “Every utterance is exuberant—it conveys more than it plans. … The result of this [unpremeditated gift the exuberance of speech provides us] is that every text appears to us a mere fragment of a whole X which it is necessary to reconstruct” (1959, 2). Thus in addition to questions about the lives of booksellers, about Albanian migration since the 1990s, and about other aspects of inequality and the informal economy in Tirana, the books I have been talking about in this chapter also of course raise questions for the ethnography of reading. And though I wouldn’t go so far as Ortega, who said reading itself was a utopian task, I can’t say I learned very much about the reading experience of the anonymous, transitory people who stopped one day and not another to browse and occasionally to buy a book on the street. What I 13  Livadhja is a village in southern Albania. The population in 2011 was 1165. Readers who are interested the full text of the poem in the original Albanian can see Metani (2005).

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did learn—from regular reader-collectors like Arlind, Eligers, Orges, and Shpëtim—was that here, in Tirana, the street was a place to go in search of mrekullitë, or miracles, as Arlind called the old and rare books that were hard to find, out of print, and certainly not carried by any of the stores. These readers taught me what they learned from their own experience— that it was possible, after all, to find miracles on the street.

References Abrahams, Fred. 2015. Modern Albania: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe. New York: New York University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1979. One Way Street and Other Writings. Translated by Edmond Jephcott. London: New Left Books. Brand Finance. 2023. Amazon Reclaims Title as USA’s Most Valuable Brand, Despite Losing Brand Value. March 29, 2023. https://brandfinance.com/ p r e s s -­r e l e a s e s / a m a z o n -­r e c l a i m s -­t i t l e -­a s -­u s a s -­m o s t -­v a l u a b l e -­ brand-­despite-­losing-­brand-­value. Campkin, Ben, and Ger Duijzings, eds. 2016. Engaged Urbanism: Cities & Methodologies. London: I.B. Tauris. De Waal, Clarissa. 2014. Albania: Portrait of a Country in Transition. London: I.B. Tauris. Dervish, Kastriot. 2016. Lëvizja Komuniste Në Vitet 1924-1944 Dhe Formimi i PKSH-Së. Tiranë: Shtëpia Botuese 55. Duijzings, Ger. 2002. Religion and the Politics of ‘Albanianism’: Naim Frashëri’s Bektashi Writings. In Albanian Identities: Myth and History, ed. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd Jürgen Fischer, 60–69. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Frashëri, Sami. 1899. Shqipëria ç’ka Qënë, ç’është e ç’do Të Bëhet. Bucharest: Shoqëria Dituria. ———. 2011. Dictators, Dogs, and Survival in a Post-Totalitarian City. In Urban Constellations, ed. Matthew Gandy, 145–148. Berlin: Jovis. Gjevor, Elis. 2019. How One Theatre Tells the Unfolding Story of Albania’s Political Crisis. TRT World. April 17, 2019. https://www.trtworld.com/maga z i n e / h o w -­o n e -­t h e a t r e -­t e l l s -­t h e -­u n f o l d i n g -­s t o r y -­o f -­ albania-­s-­political-­crisis-­25939. Grant, Tina, ed. 2004. Amazon.Com, Inc. In International Directory of Company Histories, 56: 12–15. Detroit: St. James Press. Hysa, Armanda. 2013. Albanian Ethnography at the Margins of History, 1947–1991: Documenting the Nation in Historical Materialist Terms. In The Anthropological Field on the Margins of Europe, 1945–1991, ed. Aleksandar Boskovic and Chris Hann, 129–151. Münster: LIT Verlag.

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INSTAT. 2020. Diaspora e Shqipërisë Në Shifra. Tiranë. King, Russell, Nicola Mai, and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, eds. 2005. The New Albanian Migration. Lancaster: Sussex Academic Press. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kosta, Barjaba, and Joniada Kosta. 2015. Embracing Emigration: The Migration-­ Development Nexus in Albania. Migrationpolicy.Org. September 9, 2015. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/ar ticle/embracing-­e migration-­ migration-­development-­nexus-­albania. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press. Marx, Karl. (1867) 1976. Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Classics. Metani, Hektor. 2005. Pjesë e Së Tërës, Me Emrin Livadhja. Forumi Horizont, June 8, 2005. http://www.forumihorizont.com. Murati, V. 2016. Godina Historike e Akademisë Së Shkencave, Shpallet Monument i Kategorisë Së Parë. Gazeta Mapo, March 24, 2016. https://gazetamapo.al/ godina-­h istorike-­e -­a kademise-­s e-­s hkencave-­s hpallet-­m onument-­i -­ kategorise-­se-­pare/. Napolitano, Valentina. 2015. Anthropology and Traces. Anthropological Theory 15 (1): 47–67. Ortega y Gasset, José. 1959. The Difficulty of Reading. Translated by Clarence E. Parmenter. Diogenes 7 (28): 1–17. PabloPicasso.org. 2021. Don Quixote, 1955 by Pablo Picasso. https://www.pablopicasso.org/don-­quixote.jsp. Pettifer, James. 2013. Ihsan Bey Toptani, Journalist and Political Activist. Dielli | The Sun, June 27, 2013. https://gazetadielli.com/ihsan-­bey-­toptani-­journalist-­ and-­political-­activist/. Rakipi, Albert. 2017. Against Gambling. Tirana Times, September 13, 2017. https://www.aiis-­albania.org/?q=node/147. Robinson, Jennifer. 2016. Thinking Cities through Elsewhere: Comparative Tactics for a More Global Urban Studies. Progress in Human Geography 40 (1): 3–29. Rosen, Matthew. 2015. Ethnographies of Reading: Beyond Literacy and Books. Anthropological Quarterly 88 (4): 1059–1084. Shehu, Bashkim. 2001. The Dictator’s Library. In Autodafe: The International Parliament of Writers, ed. International Parliament of Writers, translated by Peter Constantine, 185–91. Aubervilliers: Seven Stories Press. ———. 2022. Tirana Modern: Biblio-Ethnography on the Margins of Europe. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Travis, Trish. 1999. Ideas and Commodities: The Image of the Book. http://web. mit.edu/comm-­forum/legacy/papers/travis.html.

CHAPTER 13

The Ongoing Work of New York City Graffiti Writers During the Covid-19 Epoch Amina Tawasil

Ethnographer. How do you feel about the year passing? Graffiti Writer. [Pauses to consider] I was very consistent with bombing. I got a lotta ups this year. That is definitely, definitely one thing. Graffiti has been a visual staple of New York City since the 1970s, as documented by numerous researchers like Henry Chalfant (1984; Chalfant 2012–2015) and Martha Cooper (1994, 2022). Today, from the gigantic roller brushed names DISTORT and GANE off the Brooklyn Queens Expressway to the letters BC and SEN4 on dump truck containers on Grand Street, graffiti writing cannot be missed. Thousands of names have been written on the city walls and other surfaces. As they are being erased,

A. Tawasil (*) Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rosen (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0_13

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hundreds more are being written. I have been collecting oral histories1 of graffiti writers from New York and New Jersey since December 2021. In this chapter, I share what I have learned about how they educate themselves and each other about graffiti, how they make sense of the urban space, as well as what they do with systems of power. I draw on their individual histories to show what graffiti names on a wall can tell us about the social and political life of graffiti reading and writing. To do this, I revisit a classic anthropological inquiry: how does a person read what is unwritten from what is written? Rephrased in the graffiti context, how do graffiti writers do the work of interpretation when reading a graffiti name in New York City? To answer this, I tell the story of BIME, pronounced [bahym], from the South Bronx to show how the graffiti name indexes the social happenings beyond the space and the moment.2 In April 2020, the New York City graffiti cleanup program was suspended and a moratorium was placed on the New York Police Department’s response to graffiti reports, in order to channel policing efforts toward the Covid-19 crisis. Along with empty streets and closed non-essential businesses, the city became an open canvas for graffiti writers. Bime is one of many middle-aged graffiti writers who came out of the woodworks to write on, or “bomb” the walls of New York City during the Covid stay-at-home mandate, or informally called the lockdown. Writers often go bombing deep in the night with crewmembers and friends. There is safety in numbers, especially when avoiding law enforcement or possible altercations with other writers. Together they deliberate on reading the unwritten aspects of graffiti writing, taking into consideration several factors when reading a potential place to write. One is the kind of space. Different codes of conduct apply to different spaces. For instance, the codes of conduct for writing graffiti on freight trains are slightly different from writing on other surfaces of New York City. Places of worship like churches, synagogues, and mosques, preschools, cemeteries, family-owned homes, and hospitals are generally off limits. So as not to waste paint, writers avoid doing graffiti on property with walls that are 1  A crucial part of my ethnographic practice includes generating narrative inquiries and oral histories. 2  Some of the graffiti names are assumed names. I use actual graffiti names for those who have given me permission to use them. The names I read from urban spaces are actual graffiti names. I write the names in capital letters for first use to reflect how they are graffiti written on surfaces.

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consistently and immediately washed and painted clean. They also avoid “hot spots,” the vicinity of walls that are known to have the presence of law enforcement. Another consideration is who is written on the wall, when and how the names were written. Upon his return to graffiti writing, however, Bime has had no choice but to go bombing by himself, because those he used to write with in the 1980s have all stopped writing. He is, therefore, faced with the task of re-­ reading “the game,” the ethics of writing graffiti, after having been absent for decades. Bime does the work of interpretation by himself, appearing from a distance to be both a silent or solitary reader and writer. But, the work of graffiti is hardly that. Like writers who bomb in groups, Bime holds himself accountable to the unwritten codes of conduct between graffiti writers. What may appear to be solitary acts of reading and writing graffiti names on surfaces like walls, trains, highway overpasses, and billboards are very much grounded in the unwritten codes of conduct between writers; that is, what they can and cannot do, both to mark themselves as graffiti writers and to avoid conflict with each other. Of the many codes the graffiti writers I know adhered to, I focus here on the one most directly related to the question of how graffiti writers interpret reading a wall. In my analysis, I revisit the critique of the solitary reader in a way that also challenges the idea of the “solitary scribbler,” who in Elizabeth Long’s phrase, has presented “a hegemonic vision of writing” (1993, 180). Graffiti writing in Bime’s story involves “performance as a concerted activity” (Gundaker 1998, 132), where “one or more persons assume responsibility for presentation” (Hymes 1981, 79, as cited in Gundaker 1998, 132). Whether Bime writes by himself or not, he must read the wall first, before deciding to write. He is expected to be responsible for the graffiti written before his. In my story telling, I assume that graffiti writing in New York City and surrounding areas is a community of practice where participants engage each other in a “generative process of producing their own future” (Lave and Wenger 1991, 58). I assume Mikhail Bakhtin’s view of a text as “a unique monad that in itself reflect all texts (within the bounds) of a given sphere” (Bakhtin 1986, 105). But, I also open up the limits of a bounded reading and writing event. This analytical move, what Richard Bauman refers to as interdiscursive, provides a pathway to consider “more extended temporal relations … social formations larger than the immediate interaction order” (Bauman 2005, 145–6). It then becomes

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possible to provide an account for how the social happenings beyond the moment of reading graffiti influence a writer’s interpretation.

The First in 30 Years It was the last week of March 2021, 11:30 pm. It was a tolerable slight humidity-in-the-air-50-degrees kind of evening. Bime put six spray cans of paint in a small reusable grocery bag. The cans fit perfectly enough so they wouldn’t make a clanking sound when he walked. We, New York City dwellers, were a year into the lockdown at this time, and the Covid-19 vaccine was not yet available for 40- to 50-year-old adults. The second variant of the virus was ravaging the city with high hospitalization and death rates. Bime barely escaped the virus as he was infected at the end of January and luckily recovered after two weeks unlike the thousands who died the year before. This evening would be his first time bombing after 30 years. Bime, a Puerto Rican Bronx native, is pushing 50, and had been working in construction for about 18 years by the time Covid-19 wreaked havoc. Growing up in the South Bronx, he witnessed the arson epidemic, and a decade later, the crack epidemic. He speaks of how he learned more from playing in the decrepit buildings and junkyards than he did in classrooms, where he felt he did not belong because he found it difficult to focus. He suspected that his difficulty in focusing might have been from being exposed to lead paint from the buildings he used to live in. He was placed in Special Education and failed to pass his grade level twice. Bime was in and out of different schools, juvenile centers, and courtrooms for all sorts of misdemeanors. He describes his younger self as someone who was not a listener, reader, writer, or test taker. Math and Science were his favorite classes because these contributed to one of the many things he enjoyed doing the most—making things with his hands. He excelled in his remedial program after having chosen Construction Training for this reason. The other joy in his life was writing graffiti, which he began doing with his friends when he was 13 years old. After becoming a father at 17, Bime turned to selling drugs to provide for his family. He made the unfortunate decision one morning right before his State Regent’s exam to make a quick sale, much to his dismay, to an undercover police officer. Bime never graduated from high school, but in prison he made sure to complete his GED and make use of his artistic skills to paint murals in the common areas of the prison facility. Bime was in his

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early twenties when he was finally released from prison, but with one rejection after another, he found it extremely difficult to find a job because of his record. To make matters worse, he experienced a close call one evening as the police apprehended him for writing graffiti in the South Bronx. Fortunately, the property owner decided not to press charges, which would have extended his previous sentence to at least another five years. His luck only began to change after his re-entry program working for a small construction company where he also learned how to preserve and restore furniture. He feared jeopardizing his freedom and never touched a spray can for 30 years. This was until the Covid-19 lockdown, until this evening of March 2021. He has not stopped writing graffiti since. Bime explained his hiatus from graffiti to me in a pithy phrase. “Life took over,” he said. What took over, in other words, was his need to work, pay the bills, support his family. But something happened to them during the lockdown. He and a good number of writers I have been spending time with were suspicious of Covid-19, as well as the lockdown. He reminded me, “The government or those people up top did this. They wanted all the small businesses to close and old people to die so that these companies can take over our neighborhoods.” For Bime, his interest in doing graffiti was re-ignited when the video of George Floyd’s murder went viral the first week of June 2020. He was not at all a stranger to the circumstance around the case. It infuriated him. But the protests that began hours after somehow also made him feel heard. His suspicion against “the government” working to suppress poor people of color was finally being told at an unimaginable scale, because the video had gone viral all over the world. It was around then that he began writing his graffiti name on orange packaging labels and pasting them on surfaces called “sticker spots.” After a month or so, he began designing his own stickers and had online sticker companies print them for him in bulk. One evening in the fall of 2020, Bime went behind the scenes during a Black Lives Matter protest in front of City Hall, and placed about 100 stickers in the area, including one on the forehead of the Wall Street bull. He couldn’t at the time imagine himself writing graffiti or bombing, but from here on his interest in graffiti developed. He began to take notice of the colorful legal graffiti murals, those authorized by property owners, in Brooklyn and the Bronx. He opened an Instagram account where he began to see video posts of graffiti writers. These ultimately inspired him to pick up a spray can and return to writing graffiti (Fig. 13.1).

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Fig. 13.1  This is an example of a wall with a sticker, various types of throw-ups that have been written over tags, tags that have survived throw-ups, and elevated throw-ups that force the audience to ask the question, how? (Photo courtesy of the author)

Bime had been eyeing a small container facing the East River in Transmitter Park, where Kent Street dead ends in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He decided that this night would be the night “to hit it,” to paint on the container with a filled-in throw-up, or large bubble letters, on the side facing the East River. Transmitter Park is a public park that gained its name because it used to house public radio WNYC’s transmitter twin antennas from 1935 to 1990. The then Polish residents fought collectively against the toxic industrial pollution from the oil refineries, the nearby sewage plant, and increased industrial activity. Chemicals had contaminated the soil and groundwater. Eventually with the corporate-funded environmental cleanup, the real estate prices soared. Old buildings were replaced by commercial developments, Polish stores and diners replaced by cafes, bars,

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vegan restaurants, juice stores, and gyms. Polish residents no longer make up the majority. Today, the old transmitter house, which sits in the middle of the park, is a backdrop to new locals doing yoga class in the summer, locals that can afford to purchase million-dollar real estate or the $3000 a month 1-bedroom rent in the area. Bime made it to the park by midnight. He took a calculated risk and made his way from the other side of the container where he could not be seen. The only way anyone would know he was spray-painting would be from the sound of the spray can or seeing him from the port. There were a few tags, or elaborate signatures, on the container. To begin writing, Bime must read the surface, to make sure he does not “diss,” or disrespect another writer, holding himself accountable to the codes of conduct between himself and other graffiti writers. He took a photo of the container. Bime was excited to write. It took him weeks of practice on blank sheets of paper, making sure his bubble letters were proportionate, and the shadows were just the right size to give his throw-up the desired effect. He was aware that taking that design from paper and spray-painting it to a ridged surface of a container was not as easy feat. He managed his nerves, battling against self-doubt. From the histories of other graffiti writers, young or old, novice or veteran, this seemed to be a common experience right before approaching a surface. The cost of wasting cans by producing a disappointing throw-up was on Bime’s mind. In the 1980s, to tag on walls, he and his friends would sometimes use shoe dye when they would run out of the Krylon, Rustoleum, or Touch Tone spray cans they would “rack,” or steal, from the AAA Auto Parts on Jerome Avenue in the South Bronx. These spray cans used to come with one cap and released more paint faster and with more pressure. Without proper can control, the paint could drip down on the surface. The presence of that drip and producing straight lines are one of many ways graffiti writers evaluate other writers. Bime knew how to use those cans, but in 2021, spray cans were different. With the help of graffiti writers, paint companies in Europe have developed low-pressure spray cans with removable caps. This gives the writer more flexibility. Another middle-aged writer who returned to graffiti writing during this time, TURN, explained, “There is a difference between this and something you do in the old days, high pressure paint. When I first came back and started painting with low pressure paint, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.” Like Turn, Bime needed to recalibrate his skills for can control. Furthermore, these improvements to spray cans came at a financial cost.

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Spray cans used to cost three to four dollars in the 1980s. Today they cost between eight and nine dollars per can. These spray cans were unaffordable for many during the lockdown when thousands were unemployed. Bime tried to get a feel for the steel surface and the pressure of the spray can. He first sketched out the letters using black spray paint, starting from left to right. He had to switch aerosol caps in this tight space in order to match the pressure from the can and its distance from the surface. He then filled the letters with silver using a fat cap, then outlined them with red. The intermittent breeze did not help. He realized he did not have the can control with the new low-pressure cans, but he spray-painted anyway. Bime’s space was tight, under his feet was the cemented edge of the dead-­ end street, beyond that were the large boulders that touched the water of the East River. Unlike a painter in a studio who can take steps back to evaluate the canvas, Bime could not. There was simply no space to do so. The chances of a “Karen” or a “hero,” a person who would try to physically stop him, lurking in the vicinity were high. He was under pressure. Unlike experienced writers, he took about an hour and a half that evening to complete his throw-up. He walked away from the container and onto the pier to see what his work looked like from a distance. He noticed the size of the letters were not proportionate. He decided to go back and re-do the last three letters. This took another hour and a half. By the time he finished, it was 3 a.m. He took a photo of his throw-up and headed back toward his truck. Right at that moment, a police car was approaching the park and drove right past him. He felt good. But he was laughing at the fact that it took him three hours to do a throw-up that might once have taken him just ten minutes to accomplish. He embraced the fact that he needed practice. If other writers wanted to bomb this container, they would have to wait until it is completely painted over by the property owner before they can write, unless they opt to do a piece, short for masterpiece, over Bime. Masterpieces, which contain highly stylized and colorful lettering, are extremely difficult to do under surveillance. Other writers can certainly write over Bime, but that would be a breach of the code, and comes with the great possibility of conflict with him. Like Bime’s brief attention for the tags on the container, this regard for Bime’s anticipated interpretation is part of holding oneself accountable for the unwritten codes of conduct between graffiti writers. Bime was no longer interested in doing graffiti in the area, so he left it alone. Other writers have taken their turn on the

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container after it was cleaned since a newly buffed surface is an invitation to start anew.

Tags, Throw-Ups, Pieces For this to make sense, I need to explain a bit more about these codes. The foundational code is don’t write over anyone’s name, or in graffiti terms, “don’t go over anyone.” The best way to avoid conflict is to write on an empty space, or “spot,” on a wall. For many in New York City and elsewhere, a blank surface, what they refer to as “a newly buffed wall,” or a surface with very few tags on it, is an invitation to write (Halsey & Young 2006, 289). It goes hand in hand with the larger graffiti community’s encouragement for writers to write. If, as often than not, an empty space does not exist on a wall, the codes of conduct between writers serve to provide some accountability. The most important code for writers when reading a wall is encapsulated in the axiom, “Throw-ups over tags, pieces over throw-ups and tags.” MODUS, a prolific writer, pointed out that the nuances of these rules are actually quite complex. Case in point, there are fairly new forms of writing that have made their way into the complexities of these rules; “Straights” or straight lettering, “rollers” or writing by way of a roller brush lettering, and “extinguishers” or writing using a fire extinguisher. An analysis of this phenomenon is for another project. At a basic level, however, it makes clear that writers must first learn to read the different forms of graffiti. Moving through the different types there is an increase in the skillset and amount of time it takes to complete each one. The most basic form is the tag, a writer’s elaborate signature or hand style that eventually becomes a writer’s trademark or stamp. Throw-ups are large bubble letters. There are two kinds of throw-ups, one with outlined letters that are filled in with color and one with just empty outlined letters. A piece is also referred to as a burner. It is short for masterpiece, graffiti writing that is highly stylized with elaborate forms of lettering and color blends. It can also have a character in place of one of its letters. Wildstyle is one kind of piece, sometimes seen as letters moving or dancing on a wall (See Figs. 13.2 and 13.3). Pieces take hours to do, therefore, more often than not, pieces are painted on permission walls. That is, the writer has permission from the property owner to maintain the wall with pieces. It is also possible for writers to accomplish complete pieces without permission. Rare, but very possible.

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Fig. 13.2  This is an example of a highly stylized masterpiece being done by SOZE on a legal wall. (Photo courtesy of the author)

“Throw-ups over tags, pieces over throw-ups and tags” means that writers can write either empty or filled-in throw-ups over tags, and writers can write pieces over throw-ups and tags. With few and very important exceptions, a writer can write over all types of graffiti writing with a piece according to this code. Going over someone is always considered a diss. But as long as the diss is in accordance with this code, writers who have been written over do not have grounds to interpret the diss as an invitation for conflict. They are expected to move on to other surfaces or locations. In all instances, the writer going over another writer must do so in a way that does not reveal what was written before. Doing so is an invitation for conflict. For this reason, a top-to-bottom throw-up with wide and tall filled-in letters that take up the entire wall space, leaving no room for any other kind of writing, is an acceptable diss over all forms of graffiti except a piece. Depending on where it is located, this kind of writing is what they call, impact graffiti, because of its enormous size.

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Fig. 13.3  ZEXOR, a Bushwick native, was a well-known writer who died in 2019 at the age of 29 from heart failure. The reverence for Zexor’s name in a throw-up is depicted here, lodged between two masterpieces. His throw-up has been untouched since his death. This photo was taken in Newark, NJ, which indexes he was well-respected beyond Brooklyn. (Photo courtesy of the author)

Since the container had only tags written on it, Bime could do a throw­ p according to the code. But first he needed proof. With the invention of u camera phones that provide photo time stamps, writers are better able to avoid conflict and document what existed on the wall before they decide to write. This was the reason why Bime took a photo of the container before starting his throw-up. Legal repercussion aside, potential conflict between writers is part of writing graffiti. There’s simply not enough surface space to accommodate graffiti writers, among other reasons. Like many writers, Bime’s motivation for his return to graffiti is difficult to pin down. It is perpetually shifting. “I don’t know why, but it makes me feel good,” he said. DISTORT, one of the more renowned writers who hails from New Jersey, explains how graffiti for him is a necessity, an antidote, an “homage to others’ suffering as not to dismiss it” (Distort 2022).

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BOM5 writes names of friends who have died to remind other writers about the legacies of those who have passed. Some writers, like KMIST, write graffiti for the friendships he develops with other writers, and at times, as an act of political resistance. Like KMist, EMOH speaks of how graffiti writers need to make themselves more visible in areas where gentrification is taking place. Furthermore, there is no guidebook for what to do exactly when confronted with potential conflict, for the between the lines, the exceptions to these, and the many more unwritten codes between writers. Bime, like most writers of past and present generations, learn about these in bits and pieces through forms of apprenticeship, by bombing as a group, observing others, listening to stories of heroic deeds or missteps, watching documentaries and films like Style Wars or Getting Up, and by experiencing the consequences of breaking a code. For this reason, coupled with the varied and temporal motivations for writing graffiti, interpretations from reading a wall are bound to be misaligned. Thus, Bime’s work of interpreting a wall is locked in to the social and political life of graffiti with other writers.

Reading the Graffiti Name, Accountability, and Disrespect I have learned to pay particular attention to graffiti names, in part because of the relentless presence of specific names in New  York City, but also because I have become friends with many of the writers who were once to me just letters on walls. Through this knowing, I have also come to learn a bit about how the act of breaching these codes is interpreted as disrespect, much to do with the labor and resources that go into a graffiti name that then becomes a representation of the graffiti person. SIENIDE, a Bronx writer from the 1980s, explains, “The piece or the writing is a one-off. So, if someone comes to diss it, you’re talking about disrespecting the time and effort someone puts into the work. There’s money involved. Paint costs money, if not money, writers pay with the risk they take to write.” Writing a name, as a moment that often involves intense effort, money, and other incalculable resources like time away from family or work, cannot be repeated. That one-off moment demands respect by way of codes that “are tied to the streets,” he explains. In the following, I explain how these codes are connected to the conditions of

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the particular, how writers read the creation of a name, the esthetics of the name, and the labor involved in writing and maintaining a name. The codes being “tied to the streets” is a common understanding among writers. That is, the interpretation from reading a surface and the decision about when and what to write are tied to the sociopolitical and economic contexts and histories of the neighborhoods in which graffiti writing is taking place. “Streets” index many things outside the scope of this chapter. But one that is relevant here is the importance of learning and observing social boundaries, in that time spent with someone must be earned, and of knowing that there are consequences to actions that are deemed to disregard or belittle one’s hard labor. As with “throw-ups over tags, pieces over tags and throw-ups,” the complexities of all these codes have a rich history. New York City graffiti was born from harsh conditions in historically neglected areas of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan’s Washington Heights, Harlem, and Alphabet City neighborhoods in the 1970s. Like Bime, many Bronx writers tell their stories of schools making them feel like failures, of living in buildings without heat, of running out of staple foods at the end of the month, of playing in junkyards, jumping out of windows onto stacked mattresses, of making clubhouses out of disposed appliances and auto parts, and of witnessing buildings burning down. Those who were raised in such spaces of abandonment while the rest of New York City progressed were supposed to accept their position in society as those have been discarded. Graffiti writing changed that for them. POETIK, a middle-aged writer explains, “You can say you’re gonna be an artist, a writer, an actor, you can try as hard as you can, [but] there’s no guarantee you’re gonna be famous. Graffiti is the only thing that you can do, that, if you put in the work, and you have the balls, and go out there and hit, you will get famous. … Your fame is the direct result of your balls.” Undoubtedly, in this context, graffiti is about sending a message to those watching from a distance. But, there are complex nuances to the concept of fame that Poetik speaks of in the context of abandonment and neglect. It has much to do with enunciating oneself as being a significant part of the workings of the world, “to be recognized, not necessarily famous,” in the words of KOLEKT, a graffiti writer who writes in roller brush. Though not unique to the writers I’ve spent time with in New York City, graffiti writing for them is an urban spatial practice to express their right to the city (Austin 2010, 44). They do so through the work they do behind their graffiti names.

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Herbert Kohl, who did pioneering work on the role of tags on walls in the late 1960s, writes, “wall graffiti, once a furtive expression of the lives of the poor, young, and disenfranchised, becomes a public monument, one which presents a challenge and a warning to the makers of stone, glass, and steel monuments” (Kohl and Hinton 1969, 38). Writers today continue to appropriate the visible urban space that was meant to exclude them, as if to send a collective message, “I am here. We are everywhere, bringing the unwanted to you.” NEPS, for instance, is spray-painted underneath a Newark freeway ramp, and not too far in the distance roller brushed on top of an abandoned building. MTNW is all over Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, but also on Westside Avenue in Jersey City since 2018. LOSTO, MENAS, and DOME are on a tractor-trailer that moves about in Newark’s Ironbound. Niceo dominates the tunnels and buildings of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Modus’s trademark is on a gray board near the courthouse in the Bronx, and most especially in areas that are soon to be gentrified. The names MANIK, WASE, SPRAY, and CNONE can be found on one of the white Long Island City billboards on the 495 among other places. RIBS, KEST, and DETOR are on stickers from the Bronx to Staten Island. In Brooklyn’s Evergreen Tunnels, ZERS and JINS are spray-painted in light blue, pink, and white, and CHEAK is in lime green and red. “Fuck Ur Condos—HOMESICK” is tagged on a mailbox in Williamsburg. MINUS is in the Lower East Side, but also written on a gate leading up to the Fresh Pond train tracks in Queens. DEK2dx is on a rusty door on Atlantic Avenue, but is also spray-­ painted in white with black outlines on the Williamsburg Bridge subway tunnel. ACEM is in silver top to bottom on Division Street in Chinatown, also top to bottom in the Bronx. JA, of course, is all over New York City. ACER 444, who is from the west coast and tends to do impact graffiti, made it on the news in the spring of 2022 when he bombed New York’s New Museum. Graffiti writing has come to stand for bringing the excluded where they supposedly do not belong.

Writers Read How a Name Was Created When reading a wall, writers know that the graffiti name is constituted by meaningful interactions. This is why newcomers are advised to learn the names they read on a wall, to learn about the history of the writer, and the history of the name. Many writers like Bime do not write their “government name” in graffiti. They write another name, the creation of which

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sometimes involved taking a sign they read from their neighborhood, from items in the corner store, after-school television, a feeling, a technique from riding BMX bicycles, skateboards, and so on. It also involved the participation of friends. Coming up with a name came in phases, creating several versions of a name, like MEK short for mechanic, or CYKO short for cycle. It’s also common for writers to have had two to three names before they settled for one. Bime used to write “Tyco” when he was 13 years old. He eventually gave the name to his best friend when he settled for “Bime.” SKEME, one of the more senior writers from Harlem and featured in the film Style Wars, called himself Cheerios when he first started writing as a teenager. His graffiti friends sat him down and convinced him to change his name. It had too many letters, since graffiti names average between two to five letters. It also did not reflect how people knew him in the streets. His friends asked him how he thought of himself. Together they agreed that he was good at scheming the authorities, a subtle and meaningful compliment among them. Since then, he has been writing “Skeme.” Inspired by Star Wars, he began calling himself Skeme Three Yard King and produced iconic elaborate pieces on the subway trains and all around the city in the 1980s. Through repetition in use, experimenting with lettering design, and bombing, graffiti writers constitute and reconstitute their names. The graffiti name, whether inspired by a process, experience, or material object, eventually becomes a self-investment in figured worlds, where graffiti writers are “socially positioned, form subjectivities, and develop identities that both motivate and constrain their actions and ultimately their life trajectories” (Holland 2009, 269). But the social workings of names are not unique to graffiti. On naming practices, there are communities that do not name newborn babies immediately after birth, giving room for the unfolding social life to inform the naming ritual. The Inupiat, a group of Alaskan natives, have for hundreds of years, lived off of whale hunting. When an Inupiat child is born, the child is fit into a name, not given a name. If a family determines that the child’s temperament reminds them of a deceased family member, the child will be given that name (Bodenhorn 2000). For the Acoma Puebloans in New Mexico, a newborn is not given a Puebloan name until the mother has healed from childbirth and is able to climb the now over 150-year-old sandstone staircase of 300 steps up the plateau. The name given to the child is a phrase reflecting what takes place in the natural environment during that climb. In other contexts, names can signal which socioeconomic class a person might belong to. The wealthy

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members of Tsimshian indigenous peoples in the Northwest Coast occupy name-titles that stand for political and social power (Roth 2008). Names are important signs of social-identity negotiations. In as much as names can indicate that someone belongs to a group of people, names can also signify being an outsider. Children in many classrooms in the United States make a decision at a young age on what to call themselves so that they do not have to constantly explain to a potentially hostile audience what they are and where they come from. Turning a name from one language into an English equivalent is an example, from Esteban to Steven, or from Yusuf to Joe. Children do so to be able to move through the invisible barriers of discrimination without even knowing the word discrimination. Children are aware that words, especially in the act of naming something, have the power to exclude and include. Naming and being named requires self-organization, on which Dorothy Holland writes, “One becomes able to organize oneself in the name of an identity. Identities develop on personal terrain over time” (2009, 272). In this context, writers use the graffiti name to express themselves but also to enact themselves in what writers do—bomb and tag throughout the urban landscape. Stating the name constitutes what is being named (Austin 1975, 9), or, what they name is what they do and who they are. The name in graffiti letters must be present in the city or move throughout the city. It relays this message. “This ‘chorus’ of character-letters represents action better than a protagonist” (deAk 1983, 90). That is, the graffiti name stands for the person who created the name and the performance of writing graffiti. In reference to the opening vignette about Bime, there is no separation between his personhood and his labor of bombing. By way of their graffiti name and its lettering style, a writer is able to move from the periphery with subtle force, creating a sociopolitical stylistic space between convention and non-convention, while also performing their belongingness with other writers.

Writers Read the Esthetics of a Name The work of graffiti in New York City forces the public to recognize names that collectively signify a refusal to be discounted, names that are written in ways that fall between familiar and unfamiliar. But it’s also written in ways that would in the past warrant admonishment from educational institutions like schools—“That is not how you write a Q!” To analyze the complex work of graffiti lettering, I rework Bauman’s interdiscursivity in

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performance in the context of what is learned about penmanship in schools. Graffiti lettering is a performance form “constructed and recognized as part of a succession of intertextually linked reiterations” (Bauman 2005, 149). Graffiti writers take on the Latin-script alphabet, which is associated with schooling and their experiences of exclusion, as the basis of their lettering, in order to recreate them. Writers design letters in ways that schools and other such hegemonic institutions reject. Graffiti letters have different shapes and sizes, some letters are written backward or upside down, and cartoon characters or objects sometimes replace the letters. Sometimes the manner in which the letters are brought together to form a word, like Abstrk instead of abstract, would be considered a misspelling according to convention. By re-inventing the legibility of the alphabet in his throw-up, Bime inserts himself in a space between the convention of the Latin-script alphabet and the convention learned in schools that failed him. Thus, Bime not only creates this space, he recreates it by developing his lettering style and by bombing the city with them. Historically, this is at the heart of graffiti writing. In 1983, Edit deAk, the then contributing editor of Artforum, published an article length commentary-interpretation on key components of Rammellzee’s 1979 Iconic Treatise of Gothic Futurism. At 19 years of age, Rammellzee, a world renowned graffiti writer in the late 1970s and performance artist from Queens, conceptualized graffiti writing as a symbolic warfare against the standardization of the Roman alphabet. Rammellzee explains the making of the dictionary, “They put the dictionary together, they gave a word formation, meaning and structure, but they don’t understand the letter” (1983, 88; citing Rammellzee). He adds, “Society is in love with the letter, it uses it every day. … Society just did not know what to do with the letter” (89; citing Rammellzee). The letter as a symbol was standardized into the alphabet and was made useful only through that convention. To this, deAk writes, “The very shell form, body of the thing is used to recall itself or to annihilate itself … this overwhelms the original symbolic intelligence, the structured truth of the letter” (1983, 89). She refers to this convention as “post-literate illiteracy” as it normalized convention, a complete disregard for what the letter as a symbol can become otherwise. Rammellzee and graffiti writers like him changed this through graffiti forms of writing, where the letter “liberated from writing, evolves into a character, an image” (89). He explains, “we had the letters fight for us” (91; citing Rammellzee).

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That space Bime creates is legible and relatable to many writers and followers of graffiti, but also excludes those who do not relate. Grey Gundaker describes this phenomenon regarding subway graffiti from the 1970s and 1980s, “they involve double voicing and double sight in that they purposefully address outsiders and insiders differently” (1998, 186). Citing Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, she writes, “the illegibility reinforces their sense of having a secret society that is inaccessible to outsiders. A writer will therefore make a piece deliberately hard to read” (1998, 186). It is meant to exclude readers of conventional writing, and simultaneously include those who relate to the sociopolitical circumstances graffiti emerged out of. Rivera, a well-known graffiti photographer who experienced similar forms of exclusion from schools in west Harlem, explains how graffiti writing, especially the masterpiece, speaks to him, “I don’t know, for some reason, the way letters are written, the colors, the design, the shapes, all that are relatable to me. It speaks to my experience growing up in my part of New York City.” Thus, because graffiti writing is often illegible to the untrained eye, it also forces the public to acknowledge their own vulnerability. Thus, the question, “What does that say?” can often be heard from observers when reading a wall. In turn, graffiti writers in New York City and surrounding areas place expectations on each other to reconstitute this space. It is a community of practice with hierarchies that are constituted by the relational movement of practitioners from the periphery to the center (Lave and Wenger 1991). Some writers maintain their position in the graffiti community with just tagging on surfaces. Many opt to write other forms of graffiti such as throw-ups, pieces, roller brushes, and stickers, which makes reading and interpreting names on a wall tricky business. Rammellzee attempts to categorize these levels into phases; bomberism, wild stylism. He refers to these as “isms” because he conceives of graffiti writing as a practice (deAk 1983, 91). The use of the category “toy” does its job to motivate writers to develop their style and to get more “ups” or to write more graffiti so they become visible throughout the city. The way they gauge each other’s labor matters. A writer performs his belongingness. On this performance as presentation of self, Erving Goffman writes, “When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them … that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it” (1959, 17). Those who do not take the time and effort to develop their style is labeled a toy. In acknowledging the phases of graffiti writing, Isk, a writer from Queens,

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adds, “I don’t go over toys. We all start off as toys.” The objective is to move beyond that phase. Cooper and Chalfant make a similar observation from the 1970s and 1980s in that there is pressure for writers to develop their writing style in order to strengthen their social standing in the community and to make their writing difficult to copy (Gundaker 1998, 186). With the advent of Instagram and TikTok where writers are able to showcase their work today, esthetic competition has become more intense. Being called a toy is also about social interactions, when a writer neglects to gain a favorable reputation among other writers, especially those they emulate. Therefore, writers talk about getting better at what they do, whatever form they attempt to master by taking cues from older writers. “Graffiti is all about lettering,” explained Isk. They work hard to improve the esthetics of their lettering, a phenomenon that was sparked by graffiti’s history on subway trains. Graffiti writing on Philadelphia and New York City walls actually predates its first presence on subway lines in 1969 with the names JULIO 204 and TAKI 183. But because the subway trains were visibly accessible, they became the primary medium for writers to make their presence known all over the city (Austin 2001, 42; Gundaker 1998, 186). Over the next 20 years, droves of graffiti writers began to develop their own styles, which became the foundation for the lettering of legal graffiti murals today. This development in style coincided with the increase in tougher laws against subway graffiti. New York City officials responded in a way that resulted in the outflow of subway graffiti writers to writing on other surfaces like vehicles, tunnels, abandoned buildings, highways, overpasses, building walls, billboards, water tanks, and freight trains. As a result, subway writers began to encroach upon wall writers, and the graffiti scene became even more competitive in terms of style, and the already existing codes of conduct between writers became even more complex.

Writers Read the Labor to Put Up a Name Part of what is revered among writers is the hard labor of writing graffiti, of leaving a trace of themselves on a wall. “His letters are not that great, but he has ups!” explained Qez, a writer from Brooklyn. Leaving their trace by way of writing their graffiti name is a powerful moment. Graffiti writing not only forces the public to acknowledge their inability to read graffiti, it also forces the public to take notice of the labor of writing a graffiti name. “How did they get up there?”, “How did they do that?”, “Who is this person?” are questions often asked by the public. Teresa

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Caldeira, who does work on Sao Paulo Brazil’s style of tagging, pixações, writes “they affirm rights to the city while fracturing the public” (2012, 385). There are always new configurations in the way graffiti writers move through the city, a topic for another paper. But, as I’ve detailed in Bime’s story, one long enduring spatial practice is bombing in the very late evening when it is easier for writers to evade law enforcement, surveillance cameras, and the public. In this context, graffiti writers are what Michel de Certeau calls walkers in the city. Graffiti writing is visible, “but its effect is to make the operation that made it possible invisible” (de Certeau 1984, 161). In this space of and in the moment of writing on a surface while being unseen, what is produced in writing gains recognition. To put this in graffiti terms, Poetik explained to me that bombing was “about getting recognition for having balls. Then, if you’re good, and actually pull off a production that’s nice under pressure in the dark, then you get even more [recognition].” Poetik, who is in his late fifties, began bombing with SUMI, another Bronxite writer who turned 61  in 2022, during the Covid lockdown. They bombed almost every evening on their bicycles until they could no longer during the winter nights. “Me and him went out every night, hammering and hammering both tags and throw-ups,” he said. He described the first time he went bombing after some 30 years, “I felt like my old self again.” Setting aside this excitement, bombing takes enormous time and resources that are already limited for many coming out of the pandemic in New York City. Perhaps most importantly, graffiti writing is fraught with danger, it entails taking risks to personal safety. In his early years of graffiti, Poetik was shot in the arm and the leg in Westchester. During the lockdown, the police chased him and Sumi one evening in the west Bronx. They credit having gone out with bicycles instead of a car for their escape. Many of the writers I’ve met liken graffiti to a sport, because they say graffiti requires practice that is time consuming. Bime certainly treats graffiti as a sport, aware that doing a tag should only take ten seconds at most, and a throw-up at eye-level, between three to ten minutes depending on the location. Getting ups requires long hours of repetition, to write with “clean lines” in a short amount of time. 2ESAE, a writer from the Bronx who was living in Puerto Rico during the lockdown, credited bombing for helping him develop the muscle memory, in particular, the arms, hands, and fingers that were stable enough to paint impeccably straight lines. It also takes time to figure out how to get to certain areas of built-in structures in the city. A writer often has to visit a location several times to

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surveil the area for when foot traffic is low. For SOULS, another Bronx writer, bombing enables writers to develop a heightened sense of space and the people in it, more attuned to whispers or footsteps from a distance over and above the sounds of cars or sirens. He and his friends explain how they have developed the ability to feel the rhythm of the streets, the acuity for when and what area is hot. Graffiti writing always risks erasure by force of nature, including what other writers do. Therefore, the diss that often comes in the form of a tag over a piece or a throw-up is translated into a purposeful disregard for the emotional, physical, and social labor in writing a graffiti name, a signifier rich in meaning and memory. It is deeply offensive. The codes of conduct between writers, who are often unbeknownst to each other, serve to preserve this reverence for each other’s labor.

Writers Read How a Name Is Cared For If all graffiti writers always adhered to the voluntary codes of conduct I have outlined, the writers would only have to contend with law enforcement. Of course, there are many instances where writers will break the code. If there happens to be an empty space on a wall and a writer still decides to write over a name, for instance, this will be interpreted as a diss, inviting conflict. The most common form of diss is the tag on a throw-up or a piece. The second most common form of diss is a throw-up over a piece, or over another throw-up, especially when parts of the writing being written over is still showing. “You gotta understand that if you are playing in the streets sometimes the streets will wanna play with you,” Dek2dx explains. In other words, writers who decide to break the code are just as common as those who avoid doing so. The conversations about how to respond to a diss revolves around the notion of upkeep. Just as writers expect property owners to maintain their gates and walls, writers expect other writers to do the same with their graffiti. “If you don’t take care of it, the streets will take over,” Dek2dx explained. Writers who get written over can either “fix it” or concede to the diss. If the diss was not in accordance to the code, writers can opt to “fix it” to maintain their credibility or concede to the unacceptable diss and risk being called a toy. Here, I return to the concept that these codes are tied to the language of the streets. Meaning, how a writer responds to a diss is about street credibility. “Someone is always watching what you do,

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how you respond, especially on social media,” explains EKO, a middle-­ aged writer from Brooklyn. “Fix it” refers to a writer reclaiming “the spot,” or the area on the wall, by re-writing a throw-up or re-touching paint over the diss tag. Menas, a writer from south New Jersey, explained that being written over is all considered a disrespect, and the only way to properly address it is to restore one’s writing to its original form so that others know that the writer takes care of their work. Bime did just this in another location. He once did a filled-in throw-up near the Evergreen Tunnel in Queens. Two weeks later, another writer, QUE, did a filled-in throw-up over Bime’s. Bime returned to the same spot and rewrote his filled-in throw-up over Que. Bime’s throw-up has since been there for one year. Neps, another writer from New Jersey, made clear that, “Graffiti is a semi-contact sport. You have to work hard in maintaining your spots.” Meaning, taking care of a spot can lead to fist fights and other forms of physical violence as sometimes seen on Instagram posts. Sienide alludes to this by describing how breaking the rules could lead to getting “a knock on their door.” Many writers do not care much for these codes, especially when conflict between writers already existed beyond the wall. In the fall of 2021, CASHN, a writer from the 1980s, organized his annual graffiti event in the South Brooklyn. The property owners on this block had given him almost ten years of permission to paint on the gates and walls of their businesses. He brought together over 50 writers to paint masterpieces for the weekend event. A handful were from one of the most prolific graffiti crews that originated from the Bronx in the 1990s, TNT, but whose members now come from all over the United States and Europe. The crew is known for its large productions of masterpieces. Crewmembers at the event placed yellow tape around the side walk to prevent visitors from coming too close to the wall while they were painting. A writer who writes CLD crossed this yellow tape and exchanged words with the head of TNT, FYNYT. Cld became upset and threatened to diss Fynyt’s piece. Fynyt, who at the time was experiencing leg pain, ignored him and worked past sunset to complete his piece alongside his crewmembers. When he returned the following day, he saw that CLD had tagged over a portion of his piece, an act considered to be a breach of code. Fynyt became upset. I learned that the conflict between them existed long before this event. To help dampen the conflict, Cashn and TNT crewmembers reached out to Sak and his crewmembers. Fynyt asked his crew members to fix the

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portion that had been tagged over to ensure that CLD would not return to diss the entire production. When reading a wall, some writers concern themselves only with angles that will get them the most visibility, regardless of these codes. In the summer of 2022, a property owner had given a group of writers permission to do pieces on a wall in Brooklyn; a wall full of tags and throw-ups. In order to prepare the wall, NSPEK and SKI, both crewmembers from Brooklyn and Queens, and other writers buffed the wall to spray paint their pieces. According to the code, pieces over tags and throw-ups, what the writers did was acceptable. EYS, one of the writers who had a throw-up on that wall, became upset. Soon after the pieces were completed, he began to diss Nspek and Ski throw-ups and pieces in other parts of Brooklyn. Though Eys is well aware of these codes, he chose to ignore them. In response, Nspek and Ski continue to fix their throw-ups and pieces. They retaliate by dissing Eys as Eys continues to diss them. The conflict continues.

Learning About Exceptions Bime was aware of the basics of what not to do, but he was not well versed in the exceptions to the code that might have been normalized during his 30 years of absence. Because of exceptions to these codes, seasoned writers advise newcomers to study the history of graffiti in their location and to study and follow the names they see on the walls. While there is not space here to unpack all the finer shades of the code, there are two important exceptions I want to mention here briefly. The first is that a writer cannot write over a dead writer. This is because the deceased are unable to take care of their spot. The second is about graffiti legends. WYDE, a writer from the Bronx, made this mistake of interpretation. Wyde stopped doing graffiti in the late 2000s and returned to graffiti during the lockdown. He had been bombing with tags and throw-ups during the lockdown and came across a tag, which he thought he could write over based on the rules he knew in the late 2000s. He painted a throw-up over the tag by TIBS. Tibs returned to it and rewrote his tag over Wyde’s throw-up. They went back and forth for a period of time doing the same thing to each other. They eventually found each other through other writers. It was then that Wyde learned that Tibs was a legend, he had earned his place in the graffiti community by being all-city for decades with relative anonymity. They decided to meet in person. Tibs came to the meet up with his crew, while Wyde came with other writers. The two of them took

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a drive around the city so Wyde could show Tibs his tags and throw-ups. Impressed by his effort, Tibs and his crew recruited Wyde to join them. Bime made a similar mistake of interpretation as Wyde. He came across a wall in Bushwick with many names in black and white, some with new paint, some faded. Based on the codes he learned in the 1990s, faded paint meant the writer was not maintaining the spot. Bime decided to do a fill in throw-up in pink with a maroon outline over one of the faded names, CONTRA. Contra happens to be a very well-known writer because she has been all over New  York City since the 1980s. The following week Bime returned to the wall only to find Contra had re-written her throw-up over Bime in pink fill in and light blue outline. The message was clear— she was reclaiming her spot and that she takes care of her spots. Bime conceded by not writing over Contra, but he also responded by doing throw-ups around Contra’s throw-up with colors that corresponded to hers, pink and blue. Bime’s message could be interpreted in many ways, he hoped the least of which was conflict. By not going over Contra’s letters and using corresponding colors, he wanted to let Contra know that he acknowledged his mistake and was trying to make the wall more esthetically pleasing than it had been. Both throw-ups have been there for almost one year. Bime’s lesson on the exception was that a writer must not write over “a legend,” even if it is a tag or a faded throw-up. The most important marker of a legend is their decades-long labor of writing themselves all over the city. Interestingly, writers can now speak of “decades” because graffiti has been around for a little over 50 years in the northeast United States. For many, being designated as a legend also entails being anonymous. Anonymity coincides with greater notoriety. Many writers know Contra in person. But, she has maintained relative anonymity from the public by not having a social media account and by not commodifying her graffiti name. After one year since his return to graffiti, Bime has begun using “eggshells,” stickers that are very difficult to remove because they crack and tear when they are being peeled off the surface. With a ladder purchased from Amazon, he now climbs walls, and sometimes makes it up to rooftops. One evening, Bime climbed a 10-foot fence to enter a junkyard full of abandoned food trucks in Long Island City. As soon as he reached the top, the fence bent forward and fell over with him hanging on. He hung on until it reached the ground but could have easily broken a bone. He continues to laugh at these mishaps. But since his first time writing in

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March 2021, he can now complete an elaborate throw-up in under five minutes. There are other themes have left out. These include the role of gender, how graffiti writers learn from the more experienced among them, and how writing has become a stream of revenue for many by way of social media. Today graffiti writers can sell merchandise with their artwork while posting videos of themselves bombing. Graffiti podcasts and YouTube channels are now also readily available online. There is much still to be said about the ambiguous parts of the codes of conduct related to how writers assess expertise, the phenomenon of doing legal graffiti, and the materiality of making graffiti. But, in this chapter, I’ve provided a story of a graffiti writer who out of his circumstance appears to be a solitary reader, but is not when aspects of his urban spatial practice is examined closely. He is responsible for taking care of the work of others. When graffiti writers in New York City decide on a possible location to write on, they first do the work of reading and interpreting the context around a graffiti name in order to hold themselves accountable for the unwritten codes of conduct between them; codes that are grounded in reverence for each other’s labor.

References Austin, J.L. 1975. How to do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Austin, Joe. 2001. Taking the Train: How Graffıti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2010. More to see than a Canvas in a White Cube. City 14 (1–2): 33–47. Bodenhorn, Barbara. 2000. ‘He Used to Be My Relative’: Exploring the Bases of Relatedness among the Inupiat of Northern Alaska. In Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, ed. Janet Carsten, 128–148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bauman, Richard. 2005. Commentary: Indirect Indexicality, Identity, Performance: Dialogic Observations. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1): 145–150. Caldeira, Teresa P.R. 2012. Imprinting and Moving Around: New Visibilities and Configurations of Public Space in São Paulo. Public Culture 24 (2): 385–419. Chalfant, Henry, and Martha Cooper. 1984. Subway Art. London: Thames and Hudson. Chalfant, Henry. 2012–2015. Henry Chalfant’s Graffiti Archive Volume 1–5. Edited by Max Hergenrother. New York: Apple Books.

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Cooper, Martha. 1994. R.I.P.: New  York Spraycan Memorials. London: Thames & Hudson. ———. 2022. Spray Nation: 1980s NYC Graffiti Photos. Edited by Roger Gastman. New York: Prestel. deAk, Edit. 1983. Train as Book. Artforum International 21 (9): 88–93. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Distort. 2022. Painting w/ Distort: A Liquid State. Populist Magazine. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuinYdO1zsY. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New  York: Doubleday. Gundaker, Grey. 1998. Signs of Diaspora/Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America. New York: Oxford University Press. Halsey, Mark, and Alison Young. 2006. Our Desires are Ungovernable: Writing Graffiti in Urban Space. Theoretical Criminology 10 (3): 275–306. Holland, Dorothy. 2009. Symbolic Worlds in Time/Spaces of Practice. In Symbolic Transformation: The Mind in Movement Through Culture and Society, ed. Brady Wagoner, 269–283. New York: Routledge. Hymes, Dell H. 1981. “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kohl, Herbert, and James Hinton. 1969. Names, Graffiti, and Culture. Urban Review 3 (April): 24–38. Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Long, Elizabeth. 1993. Textual Interpretation as Collective Action. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 180–211. Berkeley: University of California Press. Roth, Christopher. 2008. Goods, Names, and Selves: Rethinking the Tsimshian Potlatch. American Ethnologist 29 (1): 123–150.

CHAPTER 14

Afterword: The Ethnographer of Reading, Pushing Seventy Jonathan Boyarin

The chapters in this volume demonstrate that, among other benefits, reading can help make you less lonely. In this case, reading the manuscript of this edited volume makes me feel like I have a dozen new friends. Consider this closing text a letter to them, and to you. I’ll begin with a brief reiteration of how the phrase, “the ethnography of reading,” became part of my own vocabulary. It was like this: having returned to New York’s Lower East Side from a year of doctoral fieldwork with elderly secular Yiddish speakers in Paris, I sought a milieu where I could begin to gain literacy in rabbinic texts. I was decidedly not thinking that an ethnography of Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ) was to be my “second project.” Yet upon joining a group of young adult male beginners, I quickly realized that the creative work of shared interpretation was too significant a phenomenon to leave undocumented. I also eventually realized that this scene of social reading could not be entirely anomalous, that Jews couldn’t be the only people in the world who read together, and

J. Boyarin (*) Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rosen (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0_14

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that textuality and orality were interwoven in ways that belied the older evolutionist view of orality as primary and textuality as a second-order, less authentic phenomenon. Evidently, I was right, and my simultaneous involvement in the Modern Language Association and in the world of cultural anthropology helped me to find colleagues who were exploring similar realizations in their own work. But had there not been an MTJ in my Lower East Side neighborhood; had I not had an older brother who achieved rabbinic expertise despite starting only as a young adult; had I not been sufficiently frustrated with the limitations of existing anthropological theory that I sought critical stimulation among the scholars of literature; had my parents not insisted, often against my wishes, that I continue as a child to attend after-­ school Hebrew school and acquire a basis for further non-Latin script literacy; had my spouse and I not been troubled by the lack of generational continuity that the rich legacy of secular Yiddishism afforded (whatever her views about the putative virtues of the undeniably sexist yeshiva milieu), I doubt that I at least would have ever been compelled to hit upon the ethnography of reading. As I wrote in the introduction to the original volume, I saw it as situated in between the examination of “writing culture” and explorations in “the ethnography of speaking.” From the evidence of this new set of chapters, it did indeed help not only to overcome some of the handicaps of disciplinary boundaries but to create a space where, under the broad category of “reading,” a broad-scope anthropology of social semiotics could be articulated at a time when so much energy within the discipline is devoted to putatively more material questions of justice and survival. To be sure, inasmuch as the survival of the species depends in turn on its members’ abilities to read the signs—the signs in all their forms—and to react in ways that promote that survival, semiotics is not obsolete as a luxury of postmodernism but still a vitally necessary resource. Much of this new collection both fills in some of the acknowledged gaps in the original volume concerning everyday reading practices and documents readers’ engagement with technologies of sign distribution that were if at all barely on the horizon in the early 1990s. Looking at Chin Ee Loh’s contribution makes me wonder in turn about ethnography per se as a form of reading, and in particular, about “interactive mobile ethnography apps.” My first thought was: “Gee, there’s an app for that?” But why shouldn’t there be? One thing that struck me about this was the degree of agency the use of this app affords those we (still, in the years

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when I was being trained) once called informants. How many of those early and mid-twentieth-century “informants” got to choose their own pseudonyms, as these girls did? Like so much else that follows in the volume, Chin Ee Loh’s work indeed “forces consideration of what counts as reading.” The new volume also offers a far different geographical scope than the earlier one, even while all the contributions focus on the present and very recent past. I couldn’t agree more fully with Halvorson and Hovland’s emphasis on the relevance of “the material turn” for the ethnography of reading, nor with their point, drawing on Courtney Handman’s Papua New Guinea work, that “[t]he ‘soft’ infrastructure of language and the ‘hard’ infrastructure of roads both enable (and disable) channels between places.” That statement is consistent with the view I have held for decades that language is that part of the material world with which we make sense of the rest of it. If I would modify that view now, it would be only either to expand what is meant by “language” or to clarify that there are other parts of the material world that we use in sense-making as well. But beyond the effort to overcome lingering notions of language as somehow ideal and not material, the analogy between roads and language facilitates an invigorating view of reading itself as, in their words, “a moment of circulation,” and thus in no sense whatsoever unidirectional. Andrew Brandel’s piece underscores that the determination of “what counts as reading”—the expansion of the category in ways that enhance, rather than dissolve, its critical specificity—is not something to be determined in advance but rather discovered. It also makes an important bridge to another still-emerging area of semiotics, that is, translation studies, by considering translation as a form of reading. This leads to an intriguing discussion of writers who refuse or are reluctant to have their work distorted or flattened through translation, a phenomenon that suggests there might be fruitful work to be done in something we could call “the ethnography of non-reading,” or perhaps a negative dialectics of reading. Moreover, Brandel points to the “‘process by which early self-defined commentaries defined the texts they were commenting upon’” (citing Pruett), a process that shows reading as a form of writing. Anyone who has studied the Babylonian Talmud with the indispensable commentary of Rashi knows exactly what this means! But what’s thrilling here is the generous effort to make the category of reading as capacious as possible. One of the classic pleasures of ethnography is of course the chance to learn about other human worlds, and I certainly knew nothing about the

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dujing movement in China before reading Yukun Zeng’s contribution.1 The effort to articulate a “labor theory of reading” is certainly welcome as another way to undermine the assumption that reading is primarily an ideal or superstructural phenomenon. Yet I am certain that the effort to quantify the effort of reading, whether in terms of hours spent or pages mastered (and even in marking the physical suffering involved), is both older and more general than recognized here. During my first stint at MTJ in the early 1980s, one of my teachers reminded me of the adage that “God doesn’t count the folios but rather the hours.” And yet, a recent effort within the traditionalist Jewish world boasts precisely of the number of folios mastered each week by the students it supports.2 What is perhaps most innovative here, however, is the suggestion that the focus on quantity of effort in the dujing schools may be inspired precisely by the industrial time disciplines that E.P.  Thompson (1967) first and most clearly identified. It is somewhat humbling and also comforting to learn something about the para-academic study world of South Korea. Rigorous and deeply committed study of critical texts outside of the established academic institutions has doubtless been a feature not only of late capitalist but of earlier forms of class society as well. Shinjung Nam takes this para-academic world as, among other things, an occasion to promote “the ethnographic study of philosophy,” yet another area where an academic discipline might, perhaps kicking and screaming or at least somewhat reluctantly, find itself invigorated by a picture of its own Sitz-im-social-Leben. This contribution also nicely underscores the continuing play of orality in reading, especially in the subtle analysis of “diacritics” as a mark of oral difference. More ominously perhaps, this contribution can be read as a reminder that more of us should be preparing to be para-academics as humanities training becomes devalued in a thoroughly operationalized educational enterprise. From East Asia (sorry, it is hard for me entirely to escape my “area studies” training) we move to radical Brazil, for Antonio J. Bacelar da Silva’s examination of how Black Brazilian activists and intellectuals read the national narrative against the grain. Juxtaposing the new Zumbi manifesto 1  Nor, for that matter, did I know about the further career of Ursula LeGuin’s “Loud Cows” which serves to open The Ethnography of Reading. When I first approached Ms. LeGuin about the piece—after she had read it at a benefit for the National Organization for Women—she insisted that she would only agree to publish it as the original written script, a condition I was more than happy to meet; yet now I learn it was later published in print. 2  shasyiden.com.

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to the earlier one of Andrade, Silva emphasizes the active making of “a deliberate intertextual resemblance” as yet another form of what Brandel identifies: writing as a form of reading, or better, the simultaneity and interchangeability of the two, much like the interplay of orality and textuality more broadly. I confess I never expected to read an ethnography of twenty-first-­ century Trotskyists. I suppose I’d like to know more about just how it is that “Marxist praxis,” in Ahmed Kanna’s words, “including specific forms of reading … models and materializes a vision of non-alienation.” What negotiations are involved where an “‘accepting’ organizational culture” nevertheless ends up promoting “reading of the movement’s literature in a ‘correct’ way?” And I’d like to understand better the distinction between the work that reading does to promote “the formation of social identity” and how “absorbed reading” (a term Kanna borrows from Adam Reed) works “as a form of self-cultivation.” Nevertheless, I find altogether convincing Kanna’s suggestion that these activist interlocutors have, through their shared study as much as their shared activism, “helped create a sense of home” for themselves and each other. The milieu described by Christiansen and Dalsgård seems aimed at self-­ care and self-preservation rather than transformation of the society, and accordingly the focus is on the presentation of self in the context of shared reading. Shared reading groups, as one member explains, may expose members to more vulnerability than standard book clubs, since their elicited reactions are much more immediate. In at least one striking respect, and whether or not the authors of this chapter had this in mind, the participants in the shared reading group were like anthropologists: “they needed to accept that they would never fully know what the others were thinking, what the author’s intentions were, or why the character acted as they did.” The authors are also surely right to note that in shared reading groups, “the oscillation between making sense and just succumbing to an intense (ritualized) experience … bears many resemblances to ritual practices as described by anthropologists treating both literary and non-­literary practices.” What we are left with is a poignant study of a social setting where the interiority of others remains largely opaque, where its contents remain, as the very next contribution suggests, “icebergs of inner recollection.” Cicilie Fagerlid also brings us a scene of shared reading, albeit this one literally two-dimensional: part of the growing literature of Covid ethnography, Zoom ethnography, and the intersection of the two. Problematic as

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a sharp distinction between the private and the public may be, it arguably gained a new lease on life when so many of us began to spend so much time “meeting” virtually from the relative comfort or confinement of our own homes (those of us who are, to coin a phrase, “homed”). Fagerlid hones in precisely on the relation between literary interpretation in a group setting and the process of remaking the individual self, when she writes: “For Emma, the ‘inner’ resources between yet unarticulated body memories and emergent narrative reconstructions of the self gain a further dimension through ‘outer’ resonances when the other participants acknowledge her interpretation.” The scare quotes are telling here; on the one hand, we see that there is a certain participant and then there are others; and yet, we acknowledge, more or less, that the distinction between them is not entirely, not unproblematically, not in any stable way actually that between inside and outside. I loved reading about the Delhi metro as a scene of reading, in the chapter by Rashmi Sadana that I could by now relate back to the earlier metaphor between languages and roads and the idea of reading as circulation. If the reading of books retains a certain aura of freedom from schedule and the rhythm of industrial capitalism, this ethnography shows how they are fully integrated. The vignette at the end about a youngster who hurried to the scene of a book drop before anyone else could get the book captures this in a nutshell. Whereas references to the classic literature of social anthropology are infrequent in the volume as a whole, the suggestion that books circulated through Books on the Delhi Metro serve as kula goods, gathering as it were mana as they are consumed and exchanged, is especially appealing. And this chapter reminds us that there are still worlds where a book remains a precious thing. And then to Tirana with editor Matthew Rosen! Used books hawked on the streets of that city seem somehow paradigmatic “old things,” bearing perhaps a residual power from the days when they were new and much sought after. As Rosen reminds us, his own broader strategy for the ethnography of reading does not tighten its focus toward the text, so much as make it serve as both a point of entry and a metaphor for the dynamics of this very distinctive post-socialist society. Most specifically—and like many of the best scholarly insights, it seems obvious once it’s pointed out but you never would have noticed on your own—the old books often remain behind as their owners leave the country, a powerful if not always painful separation of agents and their appurtenances.

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Finally, for me at least, back home to the familiar streets of New York City. Here, although the explicit focus is primarily on a scene of writing— the work of contemporary graffiti artists—there is an underlying concern for the strategic reading of earlier work by other artists for its potential impingement on the availability of space. Here, the notion of “inscription” that somehow floated as a metaphor through the literary-theoretical discussions of the 1980s and 1990s is quite concretized, in careful documentation of the skills, strategies, and dangers that graffiti artists continue to face. But in order to do so, they must be able to tell the difference between a “tag,” a “throw-up,” and a “piece,” all these the signs and work of other artists, and they must be able to read the cityscape to know when and where it is safe for them to do their work. Their own reading is quite different from that of outsiders, who often attempt to read graffiti only to end up acknowledging their helplessness: “What does that say?” What indeed? Thanks for reading. Do write back again, please. I still love reading, especially with others.

Reference Thompson, E.P. 1967. Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism. Past & Present 38: 56–97.

Index1

A “Absorbed reading,” 129, 130, 255 Abu Jamal, Mumia, 142 Academia, employment in, 189, 254 Acoma Puebloans (New Mexico), 239 Adams, Nick, 162 Adivasi artists and storytellers, 56–58 Adolescent girls in Singapore, reading practices academic proficiency of, 22, 34 access to books in home, 22–23 agency of, 21 breadth of reading, 30–34 as critical/serious readers, 27–30 fandom reading practices, 24–27 online reading communities, 29–31 parents’ roles, 22 reading as mode of social mobility, 35 reading as self-making, 20–24

reading for leisure and learning, 35 reading toolkit, 31, 35 researcher’s positionality, 20 research methods and data analysis, 19–20 smartphone use, 18, 19, 32, 36 Adolescent girls in Singapore, research participants Ambien Toast, 21, 23, 29, 31–33 Aoi, 22, 28–30, 32 Beomgyu, 26, 33, 34 Ganyu, 21–23, 26, 27, 29 Iris, 32, 34 Katheryn Elizabeth Harris, 21, 28, 30, 32, 34 Mat, 30 Phxtxm, 26 Smiley Bear, 22, 23, 34 YY, 26 Adolescent literacy, 35 Adventures in English, 215

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rosen (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0

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INDEX

Affect, Embodiment, and Place in Critical Theory (Lenters and McDermott), 48 Afro-Brazilian people and culture, see Brazil Agolli, Dritëro, 215 Aku-Aku (Heyerdahl), 211 Albania book markets and Albanian social history, 214, 216, 219 communist era, 212, 216 historic buildings, 207, 208 out-migration, 216 post-communist era, 212 reading practices in, 11 structural inequality in, 216–217 Albanian Academy of Sciences, 208, 209, 220 “Albanian Diaspora in Figures” (INSTAT), 216 Albanian-English Dictionary (ed. Stefanllari and Idirizi), 219 Albanian National Theatre, 209n4 Albanian Socialist Realism, 222 Ali, Ahmed, 196 Alienation, see Capitalism Amazon (Inc.), 212, 213 American Anthropological Association (AAA), 5, 6, 13, 14 Analects, 73–76 Analects 100 (dujing course), 73 The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, 76 Andrade, Oswald de, 9, 110, 115, 116, 120–122, 255 Anonymity of graffiti writers, 247, 248 in reading groups, 171, 178, 183–185, 192 Anthropological Locations (Gupta and Ferguson), 2

Anthropology contributions to urban studies, 209 critique of authority of, 58–59 decolonization of, 8 and graffiti, 226 of labor, 72 and literary studies, 54 of social semiotics, 252 and the study of reading, 2, 94, 113–114, 130, 177 and theories of value, 85 Anthropophagic reading, 110, 115, 122 Anti-Austerity Alliance, Ireland, 142 Anti-racism, definition, 110 “Arbeidsnever” (Dale), 177, 185–192 Archive of Our Own (AO3), 24, 29, 33 Arendt, Hannah, 95, 97 Aristotle, 64 Arlind Novi (Albanian publisher), 210 Artscroll publishing house, 55 Asad, Talal, 138 Asian comics, 26 A Suitable Boy (Seth), 196 Audio books, 179 Augustine, 64 Authenticity, politics of, 196 Autoethnography, 178 A Wolf Called Romeo, 30 B The Baby-Sitters Club, 25 Baker, James, 8, 46 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 227 Barber, Karin, 6 Barret, François, 90 Bary, Leslie, 110, 115 Bauman, Richard, 227, 240, 241 Bauman, Zygmunt, 189

 INDEX 

Bednar, Lucy, 179 Benjamin, Walter, 99 Bergson, Henri, 93 Berlin, 65 Better Than the Movies, 32 Bezos, Jeff, 213 Bharat Bhawan, 56 Bhopal, India, 56 Bible/biblical texts, 64, 130 Biblio-ethnography, 13, 214 Billington, Josie, 183 Bime (graffiti artist, NYC) introduction to, 226 lettering style of, 240, 241 life story of, 227 mistakes made, 247–248 names of, 238–240 resumes writing, 231–232 Black Brazilians, see Brazil; Reading and social transformation Black Lives Matter, 127, 229 Black Panther Party, 142 “Bodyminds,” 48 Bolivia, 54 Bombing (graffiti), 226–229, 239, 240, 244, 247–249 Book clubs Book-of-the-Month Club, 20 in Denmark, 152 ethnographic study of reading, 150 online groups-Booktok, 29, 30 See also Reading for sharing (Oslo, Norway); Reading groups; Shared reading (Denmark) Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Long), 150 Book markets (Albania), 214–220, 222, 223, 256 “Books on the Delhi Metro,” 11, 199–205, 256

261

#booksonthedelhimetro, 199 #bookstagram, 19 #booktok, 19, 29, 30 Bourdieu, Pierre, 196 Boy, John, 202 Boyarin, Daniel, 7, 63–64 Boyarin, Jonathan academic affiliation of, 2 ethnographic study of reading, 3, 195, 198, 251 reading as “living textuality,” 109 study of reading in Jewish yeshiva, NYC, 3, 45, 64, 130, 252 Brandel, Andrew, 5, 253, 255 Brazil Afro-Brazilian anti-racism activism, 109–122 anti-Blackness as national problem, 118, 121 Black consciousness-raising, 111 Black culture, reclaiming of, 113–121 dominant national narratives, 113 myth of racial mixing, 117, 119–122 “Semana de Arte Negra” (Black Art Week), 113, 115 Semana de 22 (Modern Art Week of 1922), 115 See also Instituto Cultural Zumbi; “Manifesto Antropofágico” (Anthropophagic Manifesto, Andrade) Brooklyn, 11 Bucharest, 209, 210 Buddhist classics, 73 Buddhist monastic traditions, 80 Buffon, 81 Bundesen, Birgit, 182 Bureaucratic documents, see State documents, reading of Butler, Judith, 95

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INDEX

C Caldeira, Teresa, 243–244 California, 46 Canadian Anthropological Society, 5 Candomblé, 119 Cannibal metaphor (Andrade’s “Manifesto”), 110–111, 115, 116 Canonical/classical literature, see Reading of sacred/classical literature Capital (Marx), 97, 211 Capitalism alienation of life under, 129, 132, 134–136, 166, 189 “common sense” of, 136 destruction via socialist revolution, 144 late capitalism, culture of, 133, 138, 174, 191 myths of meritocracy and hard work, 133 reading practices in, 11 “there is no alternative,” 133, 138 See also Reading and social class Carr, E. H., 90 Catholic catechism, 54–55 Cavanaugh, Jillian, 47–48 Cavell, Stanley, 10, 66 Cellphones, see Phones Chalfant, Henry, 225, 242, 243 Chartier, Roger, 71, 80 Chatterji, Roma, 56–58 Children, reading to, 179 China as authoritarian/imperialist state, 83, 126 commentarial tradition, 63–64 Confucian revival, 83 imperial education, 79 persecution of writers in, 61–62 reading practices in, 6–8 See also Dujing

Cho, Sŏng-Ho, 91 Chomsky, Noam, 141 Christian readers evangelical groups, USA, 130 in Papua New Guinea, 47 women reading story of Mary and Martha, 43, 49–50 Christiansen, Charlotte Ettrup, 10, 178, 255 The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, 199 The Circle of Memory (Çuli), 211 Citizenship and translation, 60 City as text, 203 Colombia, 165 Colonialism and language (India), 196 Colonized spaces, reading in, 46 Colors of the Mountain, 30 Coming Up Short (Silva), 135 Commentary, ethnography of, 63–66, 253 Commodity books as, 212–214 definition of, 212 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 144 Communist Party USA, 131, 145 Community for Alternative Studies (CAS), 92, 93, 97–106 Confucian classic literature, 70, 72, 73, 80 Confucian traditions, 80, 97 Context of girls’ reading in Singapore, 23, 28, 36 of graffiti, 12, 237, 249 of reading in Delhi, 195 of social change, 210 sociocultural and economic, 21–24, 36, 44, 110

 INDEX 

texts in context, theorizations of, 2–6, 10, 45–46 of translation and commentary, 53–61, 63–66 unstructured, 14 See also Reading and social class Contingent proximity of language, 62–63 Convergence culture, 26 Cooper, Martha, 225, 242, 243 Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 29, 33 Corsica, translation practices in, 60 Court documents, reading of, 55 Covid-19 pandemic ethnography of, 255 expansion of webtoon market during, 24 fieldwork conducted during, 12 graffiti resurgence during, 226, 228, 244 impact on New York City, 226, 228 impact on reading groups, 172, 178, 185 media coverage of, 192 Critical race theory, Brazil, 116 Çuli, Diana, 211 Cultural anthropology, 196, 252 “The Cultural Biography of Things” (Kopytoff), 213 Cultural capital, 176, 198 D Dale, Jan Kristoffer, 177, 185 Dalsgård, Anne Line, 8, 10, 178, 255 Danda (of Zumbi, Brazil), 112, 121 Danish Reader Society, 151–153, 152n3, 162, 163 Dante, 64 Daoist classics, 70, 73 Davis, Angela, 141, 145 Davis, Jane, 151

263

Davis, Mike, 138 Dazai, Osamu, 28 The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, see The Transitional Program (Trotsky) De Certeau, Michel, 113, 116, 244 de Waal, Clarissa, 214, 215 Deleuze, Gilles, 97 Delhi, India, 195–205 Delhi Metro book sharing on, 199–203 creation of “reading beings,” 199 as high-tech global space, 198, 202, 203 as “moving library,” 11 as site of reading, 198, 199 and social mobility, 198, 199, 202, 203 See also “Books on the Delhi Metro” Democratic Party, USA, 127 Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), 9, 127, 143, 144 Denmark, 8 Descartes, René, 97 Devanagari scripts, 203 Diacritical politics, 99–106, 254 Diaries, reading of, 36 The Diary of Anne Frank, 30 Dickens, Charles, 25 “Dictators, Dogs, and Survival in a Post-Totalitarian City” (Duizings), 210 “The Difficulty of Reading” (Ortega y Gasset), 222 Digges, Diana, 165 Digital fanfiction, see Fanfiction Djørup, Adda, 162 The Doctrine of the Mean, 82 Drita (Albanian newspaper), 220 Duijzings, Ger, 208–210, 213

264 

INDEX

Dujing discipline of, 71, 76–80 emergence of, 70, 76, 77 ideology of, 72–74 Mr. A, 77 as physical labor, 7–8, 72–76, 253–254 practice of, 72–76 as precarious, 72, 85–86 pronunciation, 74 repetition as reading practice, 71, 76–80, 85 resemblance to factory work, 79, 85 as social movement, 72 time and daily schedule, 71, 77, 78, 85 as value regime, 72, 80–82, 85 Xiaodou, 82–85 See also Keku (“to overcome hardship”); Wang Caigui (Professor) Dungeons and Dragons, 33 E Eastwood, Clint, 45 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx), 134 Edison, Thomas, 82 Edit deAk (editor, Artform), 241 Egyptian populations in Albania, 216 Engaged Urbanism: Cities Methodologies (Duizings), 208 Engels, Friedrich, 90, 144, 215, 221 English Heart, Hindi Heartland (Sadana), 196 English language literature in India, 196, 203 Singapore girls’ proficiency in, 22 Enver Hoxha Museum, 217

Escarpit, Robert, 211 Essential English for Foreign Students, 215 Ethnography ethics of reciprocity, 3 of literature, 196 of non-reading, 253 of speaking, 54, 58, 252 See also Ethnography of reading Ethnography of reading “absorbed or enraptured reading,” 130, 145 among Marxist/socialist activists, 130–131 author-centered theory, 130 in and beyond religious contexts, 93 as cultural critique, 8 in Delhi Metro, 195–205 immersion in lives of characters, 65 immersion in lives of readers, 36 key themes in current study, 6–9 ordinary/everyday reading, 12, 13, 55 reader-centered, 4 reader-response theory, 129, 130 research insights, Singapore study, 36 as “studying sideways,” 4 See also Boyarin, Jonathan; Reading; Reading and racial justice; Reading and social class; Reading and social transformation; Reading as relational; Reading as self-­ making; Solitary reader, stereotype of The Ethnography of Reading (ed. Boyarin) “field of interaction,” 46

 INDEX 

first read by Rosen, 12–13 ground-breaking study of reading, 4, 44 materiality/sociality of reading, 43–51, 54 reading as “time spent,” 199 reading as relational, 4 “Voices Around the Text,” 3 The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty (ed. Rosen) Boyarin’s reflections on, 251–257 call for contributions, 6 major themes of, 6–11 overview of chapters, 1–5 scope and omissions, 13–14 Ethnopoetics, 58 Eurocommunism is Anti-Communism (Hoxha), 211, 215 Eveline (Joyce), 172–177, 181 F Fabian, Johannes, 3, 105, 199 Facebook, 199 Fagerlid, Cicilie, 10, 11, 255, 256 Fandom reading practices, 24–27, 35 Fanfiction, 19, 20, 24, 29, 30, 181 Fan Noli (Albanian scholar), 208n1 Fan Noli Square (Albania), 207 Fassin, Didier, 182 Father, I Don’t Want This Marriage, 26 Federici, Sylvia, 136, 138 Feminism and reading, 70 Feminist reading groups, 184 “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret” (Marx), 212 Fetish of difference, 3 Fischer, Luis Augusto, 115 Fisher, Mark, 129, 133, 134, 138

265

Fistful O’Dollars (film), 45 Flaubert, Gustave, 211 Floyd, George, 229 Fontanelle, 81 Foucault, Michel, 8, 93–95, 97–106 Fourth International, 129 Franchi, Jean-Joseph, 60 Fraser, Nancy, 136 Frashëri, Sami, 222 Freire, Paulo, 111, 118 French philosophy, 97 Freud, Sigmund, 182 Friends Book House (Tirana), 221 Frye, Northrop, 181 G Gaillemin, Bérénice, 54 Gaiman, Neil, 23 Gal, Susan, 73, 82 Gallagher, Shaun, 175, 176 The Garden of Forking Paths, 76 Gender and reading, 36, 69, 70, 184, 202, 249 Genshin Impact, 21 Germany, 61–62 “Getting Up” (graffiti), 236 Gift, 203 definition of, 203 in ethnographic research, 221 Giordano, Cristiana, 60, 61 Girls’ reading, Delhi Metro, 198 See also Adolescent girls in Singapore, reading practices Global urban studies, 11 Goffman, Erving, 242 Gond art, 56–58 Good Omens (Gaiman), 23 Gornick, Vivian, 131, 132 Gorz, André, 143, 144

266 

INDEX

Graffiti acquiring the skills/knowledge, 231 birthplace in neglected urban areas, 239 “bombing,” 226–229, 236, 239–240, 244–245, 249 “censored” graffiti in Tirana, 213 codes of conduct (ethics of), 12, 226, 227, 231–233 codes of conduct, exceptions to, 247–249 community aspects of, 227, 247 conflict, 245–247 dangers of, 244 dissing of others’ work, 236, 246 hierarchies within, 242–249 illegibility of, 242 impact graffiti, 234 interpreting a wall/graffiti name, 236 as labor, 243–245 legends of, 247–248 letters and lettering, 240–243 masterpieces/“pieces,” 232–236, 242, 246–247, 257 names, 236–243 in New York City area, 225–249 opposition to state/societal power, 228 permission for, 246 policing of, 226, 229 reasons for, 236 resurgence during Covid, 226, 228, 244 as right to the city, 237 as secret society, 242 as sport, 244, 246 tags, 233–236, 243–247, 257 techniques, 239 throw-ups, 232–237, 242–249, 257 “toys,” 242–243 as unseen/secretive, 244 as war against alphabet, 241

See also Graffiti sites; Graffiti writers/names Graffiti sites Alphabet City, 237 Atlantic Avenue, 238 the Bronx, 226, 229, 237, 238 Brooklyn, 225, 229, 230, 237, 238, 243, 246, 247 Chinatown, 238 freight trains, 226 and gentrification, 238 Grand Street, 225 Harlem, 237 Jersey City, 238 Long Island City, 238, 248 Manhattan, 237, 238 Newark freeway, 238 New Jersey, 226, 235 New York City, 225, 226, 237, 243 off limit sites, 226 Queens, 238 Sao Paulo, Brazil, 244 Staten Island, 238 Transmitter Park, 230 Williamsburg, 238 Graffiti writers/names Acem, 238 ACER 444, 238 BC, 225 Bime, 226–233, 238–241, 247–249 Cashn, 246 Cheak, 238 CNONE, 238 Contra, 248 Cyko, 239 Dek2dx, 238 Detor, 238 Distort, 225, 235 Dome, 238 Echo, 246 EmOh, 233, 236 Eyor, 247

 INDEX 

Focus, 246 FUCK UR CONDOS– Homesick, 238 Fynyt, 246 Gane, 225 Hopz, 245 Isk, 242, 243 JA, 238 Jins, 238 Kest, 238 KMist, 236 Kolekt, 237 Losto, 238 Manik, 238 Mek, 239 Menas, 238 Minus, 238 Modus, 238 MTNW, 238 Nays, 236, 246 NEPS, 238 Niceo, 238 Nspek, 245, 247 Poetik, 231, 237, 244 Pumpt, 244 Qez, 243 Que, 246 Ribs, 238 Sak, 246, 247 Sen4, 225 Ske, 247 Skeme, 239 Snipz, 246 Spray, 238 Sumi, 236, 244 SV, 248 Tibs, 247, 248 TNT, 246 Wase, 238 Wyde, 247, 248 Zers, 238 Zexor, 235

267

Gramsci, Antonio, 136 Gregory, Patricia Lehan, 184 Grs (rabbinic literature), 7 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 159, 160, 163, 164 Gundaker, Grey, 227, 242, 243 H Hakyemez, Serra, 55 Halvorson, Britt, 4, 9, 10, 253 Handman, Courtney, 47, 253 Haredi authority, 55 Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, 34 Harry Potter franchise/series, 24, 34 Hartman, Saidiya, 114, 118 Harvey, David, 138 Hashtags #booksonthedelhimetro, 199 #bookstagram, 19 #booktok, 19 Hegel, Friedrich, 93 Heidegger, Martin, 105 Hemingway, Ernest, 162 Henry Williamson Society, 64 Heroes of Olympus (Riordan), 32 Heyerdahl, Thor, 211 Hindi, 195, 196, 203 Hinduism, 97 History of Labor (Barret), 90 History of the Russian Revolution (Trotsky), 144 Holland, Dorothy, 239, 240 House of Leaves (Tirana), 217 Hovland, Ingie, 4, 9, 10, 253 Howe, Nicholas, 3, 180 Hoxha, Enver (Albanian dictator), 210, 211, 215 Hull, Matthew, 55 Husserl, Edmund, 176 Hwang, Karam, 31

268 

INDEX

I I Ching, 77 Iconic Treatise of Gothic Futurism (Rammellzee), 241 Ideologies of reading, 71, 72 Indexicality of written communication, 222 India diverse forms of text in, 203 language politics of, 195, 196 reading practices in, 11 as research site, 3 storytelling of Pardhan-­ Gonds, 56–58 study of novels from, 195 texts as visual culture in, 203 See also “Books on the Delhi Metro”; Delhi Metro; National Academy of Literature, India Instagram, 34, 199, 201–204, 229 Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Art Studies (IAKSA) (Tirana, Albania), 208 Institute of Studies on Marxism-­ Leninism (Albanian Communist Party), 219 Instituto Cultural Zumbi, 9, 110–113, 117–121, 254 “Intensive” and “extensive” reading, 71, 80 Intensive immersion, 22 Interdiscursive analysis (Bauman), 227, 240 International Socialist Organization, 127 Interpretation, 182 Interviews of adolescent readers, Singapore, 19, 31 in Delhi, 196, 197, 202 of reading group members, Norway, 174–178

of shared reading group members, Denmark, 158 of socialist group members, USA, 127–128, 134 Inupiat (Alaska), 239 Ireland, activism in, 142 Irvine, Judith, 73, 82 Iser, Wolfgang, 179 Islamic madrasa tradition, 80 Israel, ancient reading practices in, 2 Italy, translation practices in, 60 J Jackson, Michael, 94 Jacobin, 127, 131 Jacobsen, Rolf, 191 Jaffe, Alexandra, 60 Jameson, Fredric, 133 Jamile (of Zumbi, Brazil), 113–118 Jewish Orthodox publishing, 54 Jewish reading/textual traditions, 45 Jim, Rex Lee, 59, 60 Joyce, James, 172, 175, 181 K Kadare, Ismail, 211, 212, 215 Kanna, Ahmed, 7, 255 Kant, Immanuel, 94 Kashaya Pomo Indian reservation, 2, 46 K-drama, 37 Keeper of the Lost Cities, 28 Keku (“to overcome hardship”), 72, 82, 85, 86 Ke Xiaogang, 79, 80 The Khrushchevites (Hoxha), 215 King Zogu I (of Albania), 208 Kinokuniya bookstore, 29, 30 Knock (Romains), 60 Kohl, Herbert, 238

 INDEX 

Kopytoff, Igor, 213 Korean Neo-Confucianism, 97 Korean Wave (Hallyu), 24 Kraja, Musa, 211 Kula goods, 256 Kurdish prisoners’ notes, 55 L Labor, reading as, see Reading as labor Language and Materiality (Cavanaugh and Shankar), 47 Language-and-materiality approach, 43–51, 253 Language, theories of, 60, 85, 253–254 Laozi, 66 Le Guin, Ursula, 2, 14, 69, 70, 254n1 Le Monde Diplomatique (Korean translation), 97 Left Voice, 131 Lenin, Vladimir, 144, 215 Lenters, Kim, 48 Les Mots et Les Choses - The Order of Things (Foucault), 93–95, 100 Liao Yiwu, 61–62 Liberalism, critique of, 134 Libraries in Norway (public), 11, 174, 178 roadside libraries, India, 3, 12 in Singapore, 22 Linguistic anthropology, 47, 58 Liqian (dujing school), 72, 73, 77, 83 Liquid Modernity (Bauman), 189 Literacy early acquisition of, 34 new theories of, 47, 48 rates in South Korea, 96n3 Literary anthropology, 6, 10, 130 Literatron (Escarpit), 211 Literature defined by Nussbaum, 182

269

discussed in public reading groups, 171–193 ethnography of, 196 literary study of, 196 Literature and Agency in English Fiction Reading (Reed), 6 “Living textuality,” 3, 109 Loh, Chin Ee, 7, 252, 253 London, Jack, 81, 82 London, UK, 209, 213 Long, Elizabeth on reading groups, 163, 184 “social infrastructure” of reading, 17, 18, 149, 163, 180 stereotype of the solitary reader, 45, 51, 149, 180, 227 transformative aspect of group reading, 150, 166 Longden, Eleanor, 151, 176, 179 “Loud Cows” (Le Guin), 69–71, 85, 254n1 Luhrmann, T.M., 130 M Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 211 Magdoff, Harry, 138 Mai (Shree), 196 Malkki, Liisa, 2 Manga, 26 Manhwa, 24–26, 36, 37 “Manifesto Antropofágico” (Anthropophagic Manifesto, Andrade) anti-racist reading and rewriting of, 111 critique of cultural dependency, 110 cultural cannibalism metaphor, 110–111 inter-textual reading/writing practices, 111 See also Instituto Cultural Zumbi

270 

INDEX

Mann, Thomas, 211 Martin Eden (London), 81 Martyrs of the Nation Boulevard, Tirana, 209 Marx, Karl, 90, 97, 143, 144, 210–212, 215 Marxism historical materialism, 144 literature of, 9, 129, 132, 134, 135, 143, 144 revolutionary parliamentarianism, 142 and South Korean radicalism, 91, 92, 98 theory, concerns, and praxis, 98, 126, 129, 255 See also Marx, Karl; Trotsky, Leon Marxist activism, see Socialist groups, USA Mary and Martha story (Luke 10: 38-42), 43, 49–50 Masterpieces/“pieces” (graffiti), 232–236, 242, 246–247, 257 Materiality of reading, see Language-­ and-­materiality approach “Material turn,” 44, 47–50, 253 Mauss, Marcel, 203 McDermott, Mairi, 48 McDowell, John, 58 Memorization of Analects (dujing), 79 catholic catechism, 54–55 grs (rabbinic literature), 7 See also Dujing Merkel, Angela, 61 Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem, 3, 45, 251, 254 Metani, Hektor (poet and street bookseller, Tirana), 219, 221, 222, 222n13 Middle-class reading access to books/technologies, 35

on Delhi Metro, 198, 202, 203 family support for, 31–34 and identity formation, 20, 21 as leisure activity, 45 literature as bourgeois privilege, 81 by Protestant Christian women, 43, 49–50 See also Adolescent girls in Singapore, reading practices; Reading and social class Migrants, writing and translation, 60–62 Migration Policy Institute, 216 Mihal (street bookseller, Tirana), 210, 210n5, 211, 213, 214, 217, 218 Mihal Duri (Albanian printing house), 221 Miller, Madeline, 29 Minjung, 92 Misha, Enkelejda, 220 Misogyny in literary world, 69 Mitzvot, 45 Miyazaki, Ichisada, 79, 80 Mobile ethnography, 7, 18–20, 22, 30, 35–36, 252 Modern Language Association, 252 Moody, Kim, 127 Munro, Alice, 154 Murphy, Paul, 142 N Nam, Shinjung, 7, 14, 254 Naming practices of Indigenous Peoples, 240 social exclusion/inclusion, 241 Narrative personhood, 176 National Academy of Literature, India, 196 Navajo poetry, 59 Nazi persecution of writers, 61

 INDEX 

Nebeneinanderstehen, 62 New Jersey, 226 New materialism, 47, 48 New media and reading habits, 36 Newspapers, 55, 198–200 New Politics, 131 New School for Social Research (NYU), 1, 2 New York City effect of Covid pandemic on, 244 graffiti in, 225, 226, 237, 242, 257 Jewish reading practices in, 45, 63, 251 and urban knowledge, 209 No Longer Human (Dazai), 28–30 Non-fiction, reading of, 30–31 Norway, 11, 43, 49, 171 See also Reading for sharing (Oslo, Norway) “Now I Lay Me” (Hemingway), 162 Nussbaum, Martha, 182 O Occupy movement, 143 Occupy the Economy (Wolff), 141 “Off the Page” (Le Guin), 69 Omniscient Reader, 27 One of Us Is Lying (McManus), 28, 29 Ong, Walter, 179, 181 Online books, 34 Online reading groups, 171 On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (Schiller), 211 Orality/oral communication, 179, 252, 254, 255 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Engels), 221 Ortega y Gasset, José, 222 Oslo, Norway, 11, 178, 213

271

P Padocyo, Bolivia, 54 Pakistan government documents, 55 Papua New Guinea, 47, 253 Para-academic projects (South Korea) concept of “lack,” 103, 104 critical reading of Foucault, 93–95, 97–106 “diacritical politics,” 95, 99–106, 254 Dr. H., 93–95, 99–106 Dr. Yi, 97, 98 as ethical practice, 105 “microphysics of power relations,” 105 Mr. Kim, 89–92 neoliberal turn, 96–98 philosophy as critical social practice, 89–92, 94, 99–106, 254 public reading groups, 89–93, 96–99 vita activa, 96–99 See also Community for Alternative Studies (CAS) Para-academic scholars, 98–99, 254 Pardhan-Gonds, 56–58 Paris, France, 174, 178, 213 Parkin, Frank, 128 Parku Rinia (Youth Park, Tirana), 211 Participant observation, 3, 12, 128, 152, 173, 174, 177–178 Participatory art forms, 174 “Part of the Whole, Named Livadhja” (Metani), 222 Peplow, David, 184 Persona, 176 Philosophy, 94, 95, 97–99 Philosophy Academy, 96, 97 Philosophy Essay (ch’o ̆lhak essei), 90–91 The Philosophy of Don Quixotism (Uçi), 220

272 

INDEX

Phones adolescent reading on, 18, 19, 24–27, 32, 36 diminished materiality of text on, 204 Indian Metro riders’ reading on, 199 used by graffiti artists, 235 Picasso, Pablo, 220 Pieces, see Masterpieces/“pieces” (graffiti) Pika pa sipërfaqe (Point without Surface), 13 Places as texts, 11 Plato, 73 Poetic language, 181 Postcolonial language politics, 195 Posthumanism, 48 Postmodernism (Jameson), 133 Precarity, 99, 105, 139 Prisoners, reading by, 55 Protestant women reading, 9, 43, 49–50 Public libraries, see Libraries Puett, Michael, 65–66 Pune newspaper, 13 Pyramid of Tirana, 217 Q Quechua homophones, 54 Quranic recitation, 8, 46 R Rabbi Schlomo Yitzchaki, see Rashi (Rabbi Schlomo Yitzchaki) Rabbinic literature and reading practices, 2, 7, 64 Radin, Paul, 94 Radway, Janice, 20 Rahmenhandlung, 62, 63

Rammellzee (graffiti writer and theorist), 241 Rappaport, Joanne, 165 Rashi (Rabbi Schlomo Yitzchaki), 63, 253 The Reader (organisation, Liverpool, UK), 151, 183 Reading and cultural change, 18 as embodied experience, 175 ideology of, 82, 83 new technologies for, 7, 19, 35–36 (see also Phones) for pleasure, 34 for self-empowerment (Oprah), 184 as social/public act, 180 sociological questions about, 5 twenty-first century practices of, 3–4 what counts as, 10, 53–56, 64, 66, 253 See also Ethnography of reading; Reading aloud; Reading and gender; Reading and racial justice; Reading and social class; Reading and social transformation; Reading as labor; Reading as ordinary/ routine; Reading as relational; Reading as self-making; Reading for sharing (Oslo, Norway); Shared reading (Denmark); Solitary reader, stereotype of Reading aloud to children, 153 of Foucault in Korean, 93, 95, 100–106 “Loud Cows” (Le Guin), 70, 85 See also Dujing; Reading for sharing (Oslo, Norway); Shared reading (Denmark)

 INDEX 

Reading and gender, 36, 69, 184, 202, 249 Reading and materiality, see Language-­ and-­materiality approach Reading and racial justice anthropophagic reading in Brazil, 7, 110, 114–122 reading as reparation, 113–114 Reading and social class analysis of class in “Arbeidsnever,” 185–192 caste and class in Indian reading, 196 class and gender dimensions, 36 literature as bourgeois privilege, 81 material circumstances of readers, 9 reading by working class, 81 See also Middle-class reading Reading and social transformation feminist activism, 184 in groups of American socialists, 9 as major theme of ethnography of reading, 6, 7 See also Brazil; Instituto Cultural Zumbi; Socialist groups, USA Reading as individual/solitary activity, see Solitary reader, stereotype of Reading as labor, 7–8, 254 See also Dujing Reading as ordinary/routine by adolescent girls in Singapore, 18–19 Rosen’s interest in, 12, 13 “Reading as Poaching” (de Certeau), 113 Reading as relational insights of Boyarin, 130, 251 insights of Long, 150 major theme, 3, 4, 9 new platforms and technologies, 35–37 reading in groups, 13, 14, 149–168

273

social aspect of webtoons and manhwa, 26 See also Book clubs; “Books on the Delhi Metro”; Graffiti; Reading aloud; Reading for sharing (Oslo, Norway); Shared reading (Denmark) Reading as self-making cultural and economic contexts of, 21–24 emancipation and personal empowerment, 184 ethical communist self, 129, 131–132 fashioning reading selves, 35 major theme, 6, 7 by reading classic Chinese texts, 82 socially-embedded personhood, 176 teenage readers in Singapore, 21, 26–31 via “absorbed reading,” 129, 130 via graffiti, 241 See also “Narrative personhood”; Persona “Reading beings,” 199 Reading context, see Context Reading for sharing (Oslo, Norway) affirmation from others, 176, 190 anonymity in, 171, 183–184, 192 blurred spaces of, 184–185 and civic engagement, 175, 184 description/format of, 173–175, 186 discussion of “Arbeidsnever,” 185–192 discussion of Eveline, 172–177 emotional aspects, 175, 177 fashioning of an authentic public self, 171, 174, 177, 186, 192, 193 fragility of communication, 192 as interactive and participatory, 181

274 

INDEX

Reading for sharing (Oslo, Norway) (cont.) inward and outward meaning-­ making, 171, 176 playful nature of, 182–183 public nature of, 183–184 research methods used to study, 174 “reverse-switching of awareness,” 176, 177, 185, 186 role of facilitator, 182 shared interpretation of texts, 180 social riddle solving, 180–182 sociopsychological and sociopolitical analysis, 186 sound of reading, 179 transformative effects of (personally/socially), 193 Reading groups, 174, 177–185 See also Book clubs “Reading nearby,” 13 Reading of sacred/classical literature Bible, 64, 130 Buddhist classics, 70 Confucian classics, 70, 73, 80 Daoist classics, 70, 73 rabbinic commentaries, 64 religious texts, juridical study of, 55 Talmud, 63 Tao Te Ching, 73 as theme of Boyarin’s 1993 text, 12 See also Christian readers; Jewish reading/textual traditions Reading Societies (Denmark), 152 Reciprocity, ethics of, 3, 4 The Records of a Great Historian (Sima Qian), 103 Reed, Adam, 6, 55n1, 64, 65, 129, 130, 145, 255 Religious texts, see Reading of sacred/ classical literature Reparations, reading for, 113–114 Repertoires of reading, 35

Research methods autoethnography, 178 interviews, 176–178 mobile ethnography, 7, 22, 30, 35–36 participant observation, 3, 128, 152, 173, 174, 177–178 reading diaries, 36 urban wandering, 213 WhatsApp texts/images, 36 See also Interviews Resonance, 165–168 “Reverse-switching of awareness,” 176, 177 Riddles, 180–182, 185 Riordan, Rick, 32 Ritual, 163–165, 178, 255 Rivera (graffiti photographer), 242 Roads and language, 48, 253, 256 Robinson, Jennifer, 11 The Romance of American Communism (Gornick), 131 Roman scripts, 203, 204 Roma populations in Albania, 216 Rosa, Hartmut, 165–167 Rosen, Matthew, 55, 110, 256 Rosenblatt, Louise, 159 Ross, Catherine Sheldrick, 180, 184 Rote methods of reading, 71, 77, 78 See also Memorization Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 97 Russian Revolution, 132 S Sadana, Rashmi, 256 Sahitya Akademi (India), 196–198 See also National Academy of Literature, India Sakai, Naoki, 102 Salvador, Brazil, 110, 114 Sancho Panza, 220

 INDEX 

Sanders, Bernie, 127, 144 Sao Paulo, Brazil, 244 Sarai/Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 203 Sarris, Greg, 46, 51 Sawant, Kshama, 127, 142 Schieffelin, Edward, 164 Schiller, Friedrich, 211, 212 Seale, Bobby, 141 Seize the Time (Seale), 141 Self/self-making, see Reading as self-making Seligman, Adam, 164, 165 Semiotics, 252, 253 Sennett, Richard, 183, 189, 190 Seoul National University, 91 Seth, Vikram, 196 Seven Endless Forests, 33 Seymour, Richard, 128 Shakespeare, William, 73, 134 Shankar, Shalini, 47–48 Shared reading (Denmark) atmosphere created, 158–160 definition of, 151 distance and doubt, 161–163 as group practice, 10 mental health benefits of, 150, 181, 183, 190, 255 method developed in UK, 151, 183, 184 oscillation, 150, 163, 255 participants’ experiences of, 152–154, 160 resonance in, 165–168 as ritual, 163–165, 255 standard process of, 163 of Virginia Woolf story, 10, 152, 154–158 vulnerability during, 162, 255 See also Reading for sharing (Oslo, Norway) Sharma, Shruti, 199–202

275

Shehu, Bashkim, 215 Shree, Geetanjali, 196 Silva, Antonio Bacelar da, 7–9, 254, 255 Silva, César, 112, 113 Silverstein, Michael, 58 Sima Qian, 103 Singapore, 3, 7, 18–27, 31, 36 Skanderbeg Square (Tirana), 217 Skjerdingstad, Kjell Ivar, 151, 179 Slam poetry, 174, 178 Smartphones, see Phones “Social infrastructure” of reading and changing technology, 24, 37 as focus of ethnographies of reading, 50 identified by Long, 17, 45, 149, 163, 180 in South Korean para-academic studies, 93 See also Context; Reading and social class “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” (Engels), 144 Socialist Alternative, 9, 127–142 Socialist groups, USA collective reading and discussion, 133–145 concept of revolutionary parliamentarianism, 142 cultivation of the self, 128–132, 145, 255 ethnography of reading in, 130–131 minimum wage increase demanded by, 141, 142 renewed interest in socialism, 127 research methodology to study, 126–129 “transitional demands” (Trotsky’s concept), 140–142 See also Reading and social class Socialist periodicals, 9, 131

276 

INDEX

Social mobility, 81, 191, 198 Social movements Afro-Brazilian movement, 9 Arab Spring, 143 Black Lives Matter, 229 dujing as, 72 ethnic rights movements, Colombia, 165 informed by socialism, 126 Marxist activism, USA, 132 Occupy, 143 Sunrise (climate) movement, 127 women’s movement (Denmark), 152 workers’ movements, 132, 152 Social reading, see Book clubs; Reading as relational; Reading for sharing (Oslo, Norway); Reading groups; Shared reading (Denmark) “Solid Objects” (Woolf), 152, 154–159, 161 Solitary reader, stereotype of and graffiti, 227 identified by Long, 17, 45, 51, 149, 180, 227 as norm in Denmark, 153 and reading on Delhi Metro, 202 Solomon, Jon, 102 The Song of Achilles (Miller), 29, 32, 33 South Korea economy of, 96 minjung, 92 philosophy as social practice, 89–92 pop culture wave, 24 radical politics in, 89–92 reading practices in, 8 restructuring of higher education, 96 roles of public intellectuals, 91, 93, 95, 99–106 underground reading circles, 91

See also Community for Alternative Studies (CAS); Para-academic projects (South Korea) Spade, Dean, 133, 138 Spectre, 131 Stalin, Joseph, 210, 215 Stalinist Communist Parties, 139 StarKid, 21 The Star Seekers, 26 State and Revolution (Lenin), 144 State documents, reading of, 55, 55n1 Stock, Brian, 2, 6, 11 Stolow, Jeremy, 55 Strati, Salverio, 211 Street signs, reading of, 55 Structuralism, 99, 100 “Studying sideways,” 4, 12 “Style Wars” (graffiti), 236, 239 Sunrise (climate) movement, 127 Surveillance of writers (Stasi), 61 Swaminathan, J., 56 Sweden, book reading in, 36 Sweezy, Paul, 138 T Tags (graffiti), 233–236, 243–247, 257 Taiwan, 70, 71 Talmud, reading of, 63, 253 Tangerås, Thor Magnus, 151, 179 Tao Te Ching, 73 Tawada, Yoko, 62 Tawasil, Amina, 12 The Teacher in the Party Era (Kraja), 211 Technologies of reading, 35–36 Tempest (socialist periodical), 131 Text, diverse forms of (Delhi, India), 203 Texts as visual culture (Delhi, India), 203

 INDEX 

“Textual Interpretation as Collective Action” (Long), 149 Thatcher, Margaret, 129 Theft of Royal Sleep (Kadare), 211, 212 “There is no alternative” (to capitalism), 133, 138 Thompson, E.P., 254 Throw-ups (graffiti), 232–237, 242–249, 257 Tidore, Indonesia, 46 Tiktok, 26 See also #booktok “Tiny publics,” reading groups as, 184 Tirana, Albania books for sale in streets, 11, 210, 212–214, 220, 222, 256 booksellers, ethnographic questions about, 217 “market of old things,” 217 scenes of urban life, 209, 210, 218 “Together and Apart” (Woolf), 167–168 To Hell With You, 33 Tonio Kröger (Mann), 211 Toptani family (Albania), 208 Toptani Shopping Center, Tirana, 209 The Transitional Program (Trotsky), 9, 129, 137–144 Translation across genres, 57–58 ethnography of, 56–63 in ethnopsychiatric clinic, 60 limits of, 60 as metaphor for ethnography, 58 theorization of, 57, 253 Transmitter Park, Brooklyn, 11, 230 Travis, Trish, 212 Trotsky, Leon, 9, 129, 135–145 Trotskyist Socialist Alternative, 127 Tsimshian (Northwest Coast), 240 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 138, 139 Tumblr blogs, 33

277

Turkey, speeches of president, 55 Twilight in Delhi (Ali), 196 U Uçi, Alfred, 220 Uitermark, Justus, 201, 202 United States of America (USA) communist/socialist politics, 127 reading practices of Protestant women, 43, 49 See also Graffiti Urban anthropology, 208 Urban Anthropology Laboratory (Tirana, Albania), 208 Urban studies, 208, 209 Urban wandering as ethnographic method, 213 Urdu, 196, 203, 204 US Socialist Workers Party, 129 V Vannes, Maria, 171, 172, 178, 185 Vienna, Austria, 213 VOA Special English Word Book, 215 “Voices Around the Text” (Boyarin), 3, 45 Vulnerable people, and shared reading, 183 W Wang Caigui (Professor), 73, 76–78, 84 Warner, Michael, 104 Wattpad, 24, 34, 37 “Ways of knowing,” critical/school-­ valued, 28 Web novels, 26, 37 Webster, Anthony, 59, 60 Webtoons, 19, 24–27, 33–35, 37

278 

INDEX

We, Lazzaroni (Strati), 211 Western theories of language, 60 What Is History? (Carr), 90 What is To Be Done? (Lenin), 144 WhatsApp, 36, 199 When the Party Was Born (Hoxha), 215 Why Read the Classics? (Calvino), 81 Wicked, 37 Winfrey, Oprah, 184 Wolff, Richard, 141 Wolf Hall, 199 Women as readers, see Gender and reading Women’s Reading Society (Denmark), 152 Woolf, Virginia, 152, 157, 167 See also Shared reading (Denmark) Words, nature of, 66 Workers/working class, 139, 140, 142, 188–189

X Xiashang Academy, 77, 84, 86 Y Years of Childhood (Hoxha), 215 Yi, Chŏng-Wu, 97 Yiddishism, 252 YouTube, 37, 249 Yuk, Sang-Sŏn, 104 Z Zahavi, Dan, 175 Zeng, Yukun, 7, 8, 253–254 Zerilli, Linda, 95 Zhuangzi, 73 Zinn, Howard, 141 Zoom, ethnography of, 255 Zumbi, see Instituto Cultural Zumbi