Multi Mod Al

In Search of Lost
Futures
Anthropological Explorations in
Multimodality, Deep
Interdisciplinarity, and
Autoethnography
Edited by
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston ·
Mark Auslander
In Search of Lost Futures
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston ·
Mark Auslander
Editors
In Search of Lost
Futures
Anthropological Explorations in Multimodality,
Deep Interdisciplinarity, and Autoethnography
Editors
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston Mark Auslander
School of the Arts, Media, Department of Anthropology
Performance & Design Brandeis University
York University Waltham, MA, USA
Toronto, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-030-63002-7 ISBN 978-3-030-63003-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4
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Foreword
When the contributors to this volume completed their chapters, they

could hardly have imagined the future in which the book would be
published. While they were thinking about future imaginaries in their
various contexts, the possibility of a global pandemic of the extent of
COVID-19 was still only a theoretical possibility, possible yet impossible
at the same time.
Images of possible future global disasters abound, and in some sense
always have done. From apocalyptical biblical visions to dystopian disaster
films, the idea of radical disruption to everyday life is actually quite
familiar. For so many people to actually live through such a disruption,
at least on the scale of the current COVID-19 pandemic, though, is a less
common experience. While some research disciplines may build on world-
visions and everyday expectations of continuity and “normality,” social
anthropology is one discipline where radical inversions and dramatic diver-
sity are relatively familiar concepts. We are well aware that narratives are
not the same as experience, and that continuity and change are unreliably
narrated. Borofsky (1987), for example, revealed how the imagination of
the past could be deeply misleading, narratives of past continuities having
been radically transformed between generations, just as Hobsbawm and
Ranger famously de-bunked nationalist ideas of timeless tradition (1983).
Anthropology and history have long formed a critical dialogue, but an
equivalent examination of the changing nature of future imaginaries has
only slowly taken hold in the discipline, despite long-standing concerns
v
vi FOREWORD
with oracles, religious salvation, reincarnation, policy, and other forms of

forward-looking temporal trajectories.
As the editors detail in the introductory chapter, a more substantial
anthropology of the future has been emergent for some time, notably
since the ASA conference and subsequent monograph published by
Sandra Wallman in 1992, but it gained new momentum with the estab-
lishment of a Future Anthropologies Network in EASA in 2014. This
network erupted with an enthusiasm not only for turning ethnographic
attention to the future, but for doing so with a politicized and activist
approach to rethinking what anthropology is for and how it can be done.
The editors in this volume caution against overestimating the powers
of anthropology to change the conditions that shape people’s lives, but
remain open for the potential for anthropology to open up new realms
for intervention, and to reshape the way that imaginative futures are
perceived, analyzed, and valued, whether or not these reach the intended
outcomes envisaged by researchers or research participants.
Where this volume takes a major step forward is in embracing the
world of performance, not only in acknowledging the notion that
sociality is performative, but also by engaging head-on with the world
of dramaturgy, theater, and visual media. The editors’ ambition of
generating a “dramaturgy of futures” is a moment of mind-opening
theoretical and practical expansion, bringing ideas for method, pedagogy,
and communication alongside new forms of sociality. Experimentation is
at the heart of this exercise, open to cross-disciplinary and collaborative
research through partnerships with trained artists. These challenge the
expectations of both ethnography and performance through a meeting
of different practices and conceptual approaches: interdisciplinarity that
generates a new object while changing established disciplines, as the
introduction makes clear. The editors’ sensory sensibility offers a deeply
reflective space in which risky ideas can be safely touched, tasted, and
explored, by the authors and their research participants too. The future
is not imagined solely through perceptual senses, but through action.
Future possibilities can be acted out, embodied in ways that allow partici-
pants to consider how possible futures might feel. What would it feel like
for a woman to cut wood with an axe or butcher a goat like a man? Jodie
Asselin (this volume) shows how mastering “masculine” skills enables
women to rethink who they are and how they are perceived by themselves
as well as by others, and doing so through a training course that holds
at bay the potential consequences of challenging gender stereotypes until
FOREWORD vii
the women feel confident with their new skills and roles. For many of the
participants Asselin describes, their motivation for reinvention calls on
imagined or possible futures where such skills might be needed.
Magnat’s chapter also shows how attention to sensory experience can
shed new light on familiar stories. Magnat’s chapter discusses how non-
discursive sensory experience allowed Indigenous People in the “new
world” to be rendered as colonized subjects, their use of voice and song
proving distinctly unsettling to the expectations embedded in the colonial
mentalities of Western settlers. Raised voices were experienced by colo-
nizers as threatening and dangerous, but also as evidence of the need for
control. Magnat demonstrates how notable philosophers and commenta-
tors used Western classifications of music to order Indigenous vocality into
a hierarchy of evolution. Understanding Indigenous song as performative
action is one way that political discourses can be decolonized, shifting
attention from the manner of performance to the desired (future) condi-
tions that songs might evoke and the reassertion of Indigenous modes of
being.
The book’s double focus on futures and imaginaries distinguishes two
dimensions that are innately attached but whose scholarship has been
remarkably distinct. The notion of imagination has lived its own life
throughout Western thought, particularly in philosophy and aesthetics,
with extended disputes over how to interpret Plato’s association of imag-
ination and representation, on whether art is technique or inspiration,
and in many discussions about the relationship between perception and
thought (see Cocking 1991). Warnock (1976) traces the idea of imag-
ination as a form of consciousness from Hume and Kant to Coleridge
and Wordsworth, highlighting the connection between image and imag-
ination in affording a means for thought. She casts doubt on Hume’s
separation of memory and imagination, for example, highlighting the
centrality of language. Yet much of this line of debate retains the connec-
tion between visual image and imagination, one that is rejected in anthro-
pology, where the aural and haptic imagination is very much included, as
amply demonstrated in this volume.
This trajectory can be seen as a foundation for anthropological elab-
orations of imagination, and notably Sneath et al’s (2009) commitment
to focusing on the technologies of imagination and the production of
imaginative effects. Distancing themselves from a notion of social imagi-
naries that appears to reproduce the limitations of the idea of culture, they
nevertheless focus on collective processes of imagination, rather than the
viii FOREWORD
internal or “mentalist” approach common to the psychological sciences.

They see imagination as an outcome of social practices, rather than a
precursor, yet in doing so they concretize imagination as a means to other
ends, pursuing imaginaries through technologies and marginalizing the
possible aimlessness of fantasy and moving imaginaries back into a realm
of discourse and practice.
Of course, some kinds of imaginative exercise serve exactly this
purpose. While I opened the preface by suggesting that the contribu-
tors here could not have imagined that their work would be overtaken
by a global pandemic, there are people whose main purpose in life is
to imagine exactly that. Those who plan crisis responses, for example,
must use different imaginative repertoires to conceptualize and preempt
possible worlds. While they may be presented as using scientific modeling,
these processes themselves rely heavily on the generative imagination of
the modeler, in anticipating possible crucial factors and in evaluating the
significance of others. This kind of exercise can be incorporated in the
more common contemporary concept of the imagination, one that can
be understood as indicating an ability to conjure the impossible as well
as the possible, to bring the absent to presence, bring life to the dead
or death to the living. Contemporary (Western) concepts of the imagina-
tion encompass both rational projection and magical thinking, reflecting
an elasticity of human possibilities common to Western understanding
of human consciousness. This concept of imagination is, like any other
concept, temporally and geographically specific. And it raises interesting
interdisciplinary questions. Given the anthropological concern with the
past and a belated interest in futures, we might ask whether the imagina-
tion of the future is qualitatively or physiologically different from evoca-
tion of the past? Is it the same exercise of imaginative speculation to recall
times past as it is to envisage times future? The editors’ nod to Proust’s
famous work encourages us to consider such possibilities and to interro-
gate the complex layers of connection between mental process, collective
narratives, social practices, and temporalities.
One of the challenges for future studies lies in the long-standing
historical tendency to equate futures with modernities, either utopian or
dystopian. For that reason, it is refreshing to see the mix of chapters in this
volume that reframe future imaginaries in modernist countries with those
that address Indigenous sovereignty or that decolonize future-making.
Berglund and Kohtala’s chapter on “Materialist Activist Communities” in
that archetypally modernist state of Finland reviews the often precarious
FOREWORD ix
alternative activist groups to be found on the fringes of many European

cities. These groups offer convivial spaces to remake material substances
and hack the systems that hold cities in their particular capitalist frame-
works. Maker groups have realized that the future and present of cities
can be remade through material reinvention, from small-scale tinkering to
more radical actions that inspire participants by embodying imaginative
possibility. It is also ultimately refreshing to hear Berglund and Kohtala
admit that “we sympathize with MACs but we do not always understand
them” (p. 232). Perhaps they do not entirely make sense, or not the kind
of sense that can be understood or explained (away). It is precisely in
the uncertainty of future visions that creativity and imagination find room
to play, offering activists the space to try out ideas that may or may not
become feasible, seductive, or convincing.
It is also refreshing to see the range of scales addressed in the volume,
from bodily experience to urban infrastructure, from single exhibition
curation (such as Falls’ installation and resultant film or Auslander et al’s
restorative exhibition project) to collective and ongoing development
processes (a Cuban house renovation for Boudreault-Fournier) or design
methodologies (in Pink, Osz, Fors, and Lanzeni’s chapter), and between
state agencies (municipalities in Pawlak’s chapter) and activist collectives,
close families (Kazubowski-Houston’s absent father and Nayyar’s dying
relatives) and whole populations (Magnat), and with the anthropologists
situated on all sides as independent researchers or embedded activists,
as producers of exhibitions, films, and theater, and as community facil-
itators. This variety reminds us that future imaginaries do not fall easily
into simple or normative taxonomies, just as imagination itself is impos-
sible to pin down (Liao and Gendler 2019). There can be no refuge
for anthropology in imagining optimism versus pessimism or aspiration
versus bare life. Instead, we see a multiplicity of futures, some norma-
tive, others exploratory, some conventional, others experimental, some
enduring, others collapsing, some anticipatory, others fearful, and some
intentional while others are accidental.
Where anthropologists have paid significant attention to notions of the
future has been in discussions of temporality, and notably those inspired
by Jane Guyer’s assertions about the future horizons of evangelical Chris-
tianity and neoliberal governance (2007). The subsequent discussions
about future horizons are apposite to current global concerns. In a time
of doubt about the future, the horizons of that doubt are significant.
Many of us have observed that declarations of climate emergency have led
x FOREWORD
to relatively little action, and only a very gradual shift in local, national,
or international policies or strategies in contrast to the rapid and radical
interventions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps the rela-
tively distant (although rapidly approaching) horizons of climate change
relate to a future whose shape continues to change, with new threats and
fears tumbling one after another into our collective consciousness, to be
rejected, denied, distanced, or acted on. The immediate consequences
of the global pandemic, on the other hand, radically usurp the imme-
diate future, raising doubt about the endurance of everyday life, of “nor-
mal” expectations of travel, of the acceptability of aspirations to fly long
distances for leisure or to travel across continents to have a conversation
(or “attend a conference”) while leaving the medium and more distant
future potentially to resume. For many, death suddenly appears imminent,
and health fragile, everyday life easily overturned and work re-evaluated.
The pandemic response has also hastened the adoption, for many, of
future-oriented or hitherto fantastical technologies, moving our sociality
online and bringing dramatic consequences in relation to the infrastruc-
tures required to support these online lives. Investment in data centers
suddenly seems more secure, expansion more likely, energy demands more
urgent, and the pattern and shape of energy distribution suddenly shifting.
Yet despite the temporary reprieve in greenhouse gas emissions, all the
time, in the background, expectations about a “return” or “bounce back”
suggest the continuation of the structural forces that encourage capitalist
growth and climate catastrophe. Now, many people are discussing the
idea of “bouncing forward” rather than back, but it remains to be seen
whether the demonstration of global change we are living through at the
time of writing is one that allays fears about the changes needed to combat
climate change, or one that merely makes them even more palpable and
frightening.
Whatever the world will be like once this book reaches print or reaches
the library, the volume offers a welcome set of examples and ideas about
how future orientations are not only imagined but embodied. They
demonstrate the flexibility of future imaginaries, and the degree to which
futures can and do change, often radically, whether as cities are rebuilt
and redefined (Ringel’s chapter), as activists conjure the possibility of
remaking society, or as performers enact the restoration of the disap-
peared who they know must already be dead (Batchelor’s chapter). They
show us the fine line between knowing and not-knowing, the mech-
anism of re-imagining oneself, and the power of theater in reopening
FOREWORD xi
possibilities that have been closed elsewhere, and the vital role of humor
in both enabling transgressive imaginative thought and articulating it.
This is a volume packed with ideas that will inspire and invigorate new
ethnographic enterprises.
Simone Abram
Durham University
Durham, UK
References
Borofsky, R. 1987. Making History: Pukapukan and Anthropological Construc-
tions of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cocking, J. M. 1991. Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas. London:
Routledge.
Guyer, J. I. 2007. Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic,
evangelical, and punctuated time. American Ethnologist 34 (3): 409–421.
Hobsbawm, E., and T. Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Liao, S., and T. Gendler. 2019. Imagination. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philos-
ophy (Winter 2019 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/
entries/imagination. Accessed 29 April 2020.
Sneath, D., M. Holbraad, and M. A. Pedersen. 2009. Technologies of the
Imagination. Ethnos 74 (1): 5–30.
Warnock, M. 1976. Imagination. London: Faber and Faber.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Simone Abram for her invaluable insights and
editorial support.
xiii
Contents
1 Introduction: In Search of Lost Futures 1

Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston and Mark Auslander
Part I Multimodality
2 Possibilities and Impossibilities in Acción 25

Brian Batchelor
3 Put Your Body into It: Exploring Imagination

Through Enskillment in Outdoor Women’s Camps 51
Jodie Asselin
4 Staging Care: Dying, Death, and Possible Futures 75

Rajat Nayyar
5 Impossible Ethnography: Tracking Colonial

Encounters, Listening to Raised Voices, and Hearing
Indigenous Sovereignty in the “New World” 97
Virginie Magnat
xv
xvi CONTENTS
Part II Deep Interdisciplinarity
6 Future-Making in Times of Urban Sustainability:

Maintenance and Endurance as Progressive
Alternatives in the Postindustrial Era 129
Felix Ringel
7 Knowing and Imagining with Sustainable Makers 151

Eeva Berglund and Cindy Kohtala
8 Anticipating Crisis as Affective Future-Making

in Iceland 173
Marek Pawlak
9 Simulating and Trusting in Automated Futures:

Anthropology and the Wizard of Oz 195
Sarah Pink, Katalin Osz, Vaike Fors, and Debora Lanzeni
Part III Autoethnography
10 Intimating the Possible Collapse of the Future:

Digging into Cuban Palimpsests Through Innovative
Methodologies 227
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier
11 Absence, Magic, and Impossible Futures 255

Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston
12 Projections and Possibilities: An Installation About

HuMilk Now 279
Susan Falls
CONTENTS xvii
13 Exhibition Development as Restorative

Future-Making: Community Co-Curation
in the Struggle Against Sexual Violence 303
Mark Auslander, Denice Blair, Alexandra Bourque,
Chong-Anna Canfora, Jordyn Fishman, Teresa Goforth,
Kelly Hansen, Trinea Gonczar, Ellen Schattschneider,
Amanda Smith, Amanda Thomashow,
Brianne Randall-Gay, and Mary Worrall
Index 327
Notes on Contributors
Jodie Asselin, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the

University of Lethbridge, Canada. She has a background in human geog-
raphy and cultural anthropology, with a Ph.D. from the University of
Alberta where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the depart-
ment of family medicine. Dr. Asselin’s area of interest is in environmental
anthropology with a focus on rural/urban relations, place, policy, land use
planning, and historical ecology.
Mark Auslander, Ph.D. is Research Scholar in the Department of
Anthropology, Brandeis University. A sociocultural and historical anthro-
pologist, he works at the intersection of ritual practice, aesthetics, envi-
ronmental transformation, kinship, and political consciousness in Africa
and the African Diaspora. His book The Accidental Slaveowner: Revis-
iting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family (University of
Georgia Press, 2011) re-reads American racial politics under slavery and
post-slavery through structuralist approaches to mythology and kinship.
His curatorial work engages with art, race, environmental crisis, gender,
and memory politics. He has directed museums of science and culture
at Central Washington University and Michigan State University, and
currently serves as director of special projects at the Natural History
Museum.
Brian Batchelor is a settler scholar and a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre &
Performance Studies at York University in the area now named Toronto.
xix
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
His SSHRC supported research explores the city of San Cristóbal de las
Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, as an interpretive space shaped by the local-global
tensions involved in tourism. His work has been published in Canadian
Theatre Review and Theatre Research in Canada, as well as in the edited
volume Dancing with the Zapatistas. He dreams of better, more just
worlds, but he is unsure of how we might make it there.
Eeva Berglund is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Design, Aalto
School of Arts, Design and Architecture. Her work deals mostly with
environmental activism, social movements, and the politics of nature. She
also teaches research methods. Since 2016, she has been exploring and
developing these with #Colleex collaboratory for experimental ethnog-
raphy, which is organized as a network of the European Association of
Social Anthropologists. She has a doctorate in social anthropology and
an M.Sc. in planning, both from the UK. Since 2010, she has lived in
Helsinki where she also participates in and tries to better understand
urban activism.
Dr. Denice Blair is the Director of Education at the Michigan State
University Museum. Her interests include learning in informal environ-
ments and primary source-based teaching and learning. Blair’s recent
research work has focused on issues of access in museums.
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier is an Associate Professor at the
University of Victoria. She teaches visual culture, visual anthropology,
and the anthropology of sound. She conducts research on electronic
music, media infrastructure, and digital data consumption and circulation
in Cuba since the year 2000. She wrote the book Aerial Imagination
in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops (2019), co-edited the volumes
Urban Encounters: Art and the Public (2017) and Audible Infrastructures
(forthcoming), and is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Anthropologica.
Alexandrine directed the film Golden Scars (2010), in part funded by the
National Film Board of Canada, and co-directed the films Guardians of
the Night (2018), Fabrik Funk (2015), and The Eagle (2015).
Alexandra Bourque is a sister survivor and owner of the “Brightly
Twisted,” business and studio in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood. She
is the creator of the installation “Turned into Butterflies (Ten Feet Tall)”
in the exhibition, “Finding Our Voice.”
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxi
Chong-Anna Canfora is Executive Director at Michigan Community

Action and Board President at the Firecracker Foundation, an organiza-
tion that advocates for survivors of childhood sexual violence.
Susan Falls is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on agency,
semiotics, and political economy. Interested in exploring how meaning-
making works within the production, circulation, and use of material
culture, Falls has worked with communities of dissent forming around
diamonds, public art, ikat silk, breast milk, and robots. She is the
author of White Gold: Stories of Breast Milk Sharing (2017) and Over-
shot: The Political Aesthetic of Woven Textiles (with Jessica Smith [forth-
coming]). Currently working on an ethnography of plant life, Falls teaches
Anthropology at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Jordyn Fishman is a Brooklyn based artist working with painting and
interactive installation. Her work is concerned with the interconnected
themes of gendered control, labor, and violence.
Vaike Fors is Associate Professor in Pedagogy at the School of Informa-
tion Technology at Halmstad University, and her area of expertise lies
in studying how people learn with emerging technologies through visual
and sensory ethnography. She has an extensive experience of working
in projects that straddle academia and industry and tailoring interdisci-
plinary collaborative research methods. New books include Theoretical
Scholarship and Applied Practice (Berghahn Books, 2017) and Imag-
ining Personal Data. Experiences of Self-tracking (Bloomsbury Academic
Publishers, 2020).
Teresa Goforth is Director of Exhibitions at the Michigan State Univer-
sity Museum. She holds an M.A. in American History from Michigan
State University and is working toward her Ph.D. in American History.
She has worked in the museum field since 1993 and has taught museum
studies at Michigan State University and Central Michigan University for
over a decade.
Trinea Gonczar is a sister survivor and Director of Advancement at
WC-SAFE, Wayne County Sexual Assault Forensic Examiners in Detroit,
Michigan.
Kelly Hansen is a graphic designer and exhibit designer for Michigan
State University Outreach and Engagement. She holds an M.A. in Arts
and Cultural Management and a B.A. in Advertising.
xxii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of

Theatre with graduate appointments in Theatre and Performance Studies
and Social Anthropology at York University, Canada. Her book, Staging
Strife (2010), was awarded the International Congress of Qualitative
Inquiry Outstanding Qualitative Book Award and the Canadian Associa-
tion for Theatre Research Ann Saddlemyer Book Prize (2011). Her article
“quiet theatre: The Radical Politics of Silence” was awarded the Cana-
dian Association for Theatre Research (CATR) 2019 Richard Plant Prize
for the best English-language article on a Canadian theater or perfor-
mance topic. She is a co-founding member of the Centre for Imaginative
Ethnography (CIE), which received the American Anthropological Asso-
ciation General Anthropology Division’s 2019 New Directions Award in
Public Anthropology.
Cindy Kohtala is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Design,
Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. She studies
materialist activists exploring new peer-to-peer ways to design and
produce locally and more sustainably. Her research focuses on fab labs
and makerspaces, grassroots communities who explore digital fabrication
technologies and processes in shared community technology workshops,
and how they address sustainability issues in their ideologies and practices.
She also lectures and writes about design-for-sustainability, open design,
co-design, distributed economies and design activism, and she has been
involved in several urban activism initiatives in Helsinki.
Debora Lanzeni is Research Fellow in the Emerging Technologies
Research Lab at Monash University, Australia. She has been working at
the intersection of STS and anthropology and participated in many inter-
national and interdisciplinary research projects. Her research focuses on
understanding how emerging technology and its processes of creation,
imagination, and production are being made in the Smart City and
AI context. Her work has been published in a range of interdisci-
plinary journals such as Media and Society, including with Bloomsbury in
Future Anthropologies and Digital Materialities (of which she is also co-
editor). Currently, she is co-convenor of the EASA Future Anthropologies
Network.
Virginie Magnat, Ph.D. is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Creative
and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia and works at the
intersection of performances studies, cultural anthropology, experimental
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxiii
ethnography, and Indigenous research methodologies. Her new mono-

graph, The Performative Power of Vocality (Routledge, 2020), employs
an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to explore vocality as a
vital source of embodied knowledge, creativity, and well-being, grounded
in process, practice, and place, as well as a form of social and political
agency. Research for this book was funded by two grants from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Rajat Nayyar is an anthropologist and a filmmaker with an M.A. in
Audiovisual Ethnography from Tallinn University. As a Vanier Canada
Graduate Scholar, he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Theatre and Perfor-
mance Studies at York University. His research focus is on vocality,
everyday acts of resistance, collaborative fiction filmmaking, and futures
anthropology. Rajat is currently developing Emergent Futures CoLab,
a transdisciplinary laboratory that aims to map collaborative future-
making methodologies. He is also co-editing the Performance Ethnog-
raphy section of Centre for Imaginative Ethnography and founder of
Espírito Kashi, a project that facilitates performative spaces for rural
Indian communities to critically re-imagine folklore, envision new social-
ities, decolonize archives, and film futures. His recent film ‘Kashi Labh’
was screened at RAI film festival and numerous other anthropological film
festivals and conferences.
Katalin Osz is a User Researcher with a Design Anthropology focus
in the User Experience Center at Volvo Cars and an affiliated Design
Researcher in the School of Information Technology at Halmstad Univer-
sity, Sweden. She has a mixed background in cultural anthropology and
design. She holds a M.Sc. in Culture and Society from the London School
of Economics and Political Science and a Ph.D. in Built Environment
from Loughborough University.
Marek Pawlak, Ph.D. is an anthropologist working as Assistant
Professor in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology,
Jagiellonian University in Cracow. In his research, he focuses on crisis,
migration, futures, and emotions. He has been conducting an ethno-
graphic fieldwork on affects and temporalities of crisis in Iceland and
social class, national identity and cultural intimacy among Polish migrants
in Norway. He is an author of the book Zawstydzona tożsamość. Emocje,
xxiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
ideologie i władza w życiu polskich migrantów w Norwegii [Embar-

rassing Identity. Emotions, Ideologies and Power among Polish Migrants in
Norway] (Jagiellonian University Press, 2018).
Sarah Pink (Ph.D., FASSA) is Professor and the Founding Director of
the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, in the Faculties of Computer
Science, and Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University,
Australia. Sarah is a design anthropologist and methodological innovator
who develops futures ethnography methods and ethnographic video in
interdisciplinary collaboration with partners inside and outside academia.
Her current focus is on engaging a design anthropology of emerging tech-
nologies to bring new human and societal perspectives to bear in research
and debate concerning emerging technologies, including automation and
digital data in everyday life.
Brianne Randall-Gay is an advocate for survivors of sexual violence.
Felix Ringel is an Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at Durham
University. His work on time, the future, and urban regeneration has been
published in leading anthropological journals such as The Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute, Critique of Anthropology, and Anthro-
pological Theory. He is the author of Back to the Postindustrial Future:
An Ethnography of Germany’s Fastest-Shrinking City and the co-editor of
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology’s special issue on “Time-Tricking:
Reconsidering Temporal Agency in Troubled Times.”
Ellen Schattschneider is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. She is
specialized in psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and practice approaches
to culture. She studies ritual performance, gender and embodiment, spirit
mediumship, sacred landscapes, visuality and the power of images, popular
religious experience, and comparative historical experiences of trauma
and mass violence. Her book, Immoral Wishes: Labor and Transcen-
dence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain (Duke University Press, 2003),
explores healing, self-fashioning, and embodied psychodynamic processes
on a sacred landscape associated with a Shinto shrine founded by a rural
Japanese woman in the 1920s.
Amanda Smith is an independent Victims’ Advocate.
Amanda Thomashow is a sister survivor and Executive Director of the
organization Sister Strong.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxv
Mary Worrall is Curator of Textiles and Social Justice at the Michigan

State University Museum. Her research interests include quilts and
quilt makers, dress, and craftivism. Worrall works with developing and
managing exhibition, research, collections, and educational programs.
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Students construct a public memorial to the 43

disappeared Ayotzinapa normalistas while a small boy
looks on in San Cristóbal’s Plaza de la Paz (Photo
by Brian Batchelor) 27
Fig. 2.2 Students construct the memorial by placing pine needles
and flower petals in a circle shape on the plaza floor
(Photo by Brian Batchelor) 32
Fig. 2.3 Two students place identification photos of four of the 43
missing normalistas on the aciculas (Photo by Brian
Batchelor) 33
Fig. 2.4 Images depicting two of the normalistas (one
a photo and the other a silhouette) lay interspersed
with the students’ messages to them. The messages
read (from right to left) “We are with you” and “more
than one year without answers” (Photo by Brian
Batchelor) 37
Fig. 2.5 A student sits in silence on the acción’s periphery (Photo
by Brian Batchelor) 42
Fig. 2.6 The culmination of acción with flowers and petals
intermingling with photos of the missing, messages
from the students, demands for justice, and pebbles
anchoring them to the plaza’s floor (Photo by Brian
Batchelor) 45
xxvii
xxviii LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 7.1 Open-Source Circular Economy Days Helsinki 2016

at Kääntöpöytä, Photo by Cindy Kohtala. “OSCE Days”
is a global grassroots initiative that links local organizers’
events to promote open-source design, closing material
loops, and alternative economies 154
Fig. 10.1 Trench dug in the living room toward the front façade
of the house (Photo by Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier) 236
Fig. 10.2 Plumbers working long shifts until night
to avoid the summer heat (Photo by Alexandrine
Boudreault-Fournier) 237
Fig. 10.3 Remaining foundation made of bricks probably
from a previous house built under the current house
(Photo by Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier) 239
Fig. 10.4 Sample of artifacts found in the ground while digging.
Bottles made of ceramics (Photo by Alexandrine
Boudreault-Fournier) 239
Fig. 10.5 Second floor of the RCA building before its demolition
(Photo by Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier) 246
Fig. 10.6 Close up on some of the artifacts found on the floor
of the RCA building before its demolition (Photo
by Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier) 246
Fig. 11.1 Photograph of author’s father holding his model airplane
(Source unknown) 261
Fig. 11.2 First communion photograph of author’s father (Source
unknown) 263
Fig. 11.3 Front view of author’s gold cross (Photo by Magdalena
Kazubowski-Houston) 264
Fig. 11.4 Back view of author’s gold cross (Photo by Magdalena
Kazubowski-Houston) 265
Fig. 12.1 Image of Speculative Ad for Liquid Gold Humilk
Tetra-Pak Carton, rendered by Zteven Zang bang (2017) 285
Fig. 12.2 Exhibition 291
Fig. 12.3 Golden Coronet (after Milk Drop Coronet, Harold
Edgerton, 1936). 2017. Vellum. Edgerton’s stop-motion
photography allowed us to see into previously unseen
worlds. As Walter Benjamin suggested, new technologies
have both repressive and critical potentials 292
LIST OF FIGURES xxix
Fig. 12.4 Windows are lit by projections from the outside. At first,
the images were not visible from the inside, but as the sun
sets and darkness emerges, the strength of the images
increased. The effect is not unlike that of stained glass
only here images strengthen as the sun sets rather
than the other way around. Motion media artist Wes
Nelson engineered all still and video projections 294
Fig. 12.5 Here, projections of drawings by Lebbeus Woods seen
in the background darken as night falls then fade
as the sun rises, underscoring the powerful but ephemeral
nature of sharing communities 295
Fig. 12.6 Final Sets of Images in Projections and Possibilities 296
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: In Search of Lost Futures
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston and Mark Auslander
From February 2018 through January 2019, the Rubin Museum in New
York featured an immersive installation, R.T./S.R./V.S., by German artist
Matti Braun as part of a larger exhibit titled A Lost Future. This multi-
media assemblage of contemporary works explored how histories and
speculative futures are shaped by globalization, technology, and economic
development. Braun’s installation, inspired by the lotus pond from an
unproduced film—The Alien, by Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray—is a
room transformed into a lake. Visitors “search for a future” by traversing
haphazard paths composed of tree stumps sticking out of the water.
Because the floor beneath the reflective surface of the water is black,
walking from stump to stump feels vertiginous and mysterious; visitors
see their own reflections floating above unknown depths and possibilities.
Pathways meander until they eventually lead into the art worlds of other
M. Kazubowski-Houston (B)
School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design, York University, Toronto,
ON, Canada
e-mail: mkazubow@yorku.ca
M. Auslander
Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA
e-mail: markauslander@icloud.com
© The Author(s) 2021 1

M. Kazubowski-Houston and M. Auslander (eds.),
In Search of Lost Futures,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4_1
2 M. KAZUBOWSKI-HOUSTON AND M. AUSLANDER
galleries. The installation, a meditation on lost futures, has the potential

to evoke myriad moods, emotions, and powerful imaginings about what
has been lost, what remains, what is hidden beneath surfaces, what is still
to come, and what path needs to be taken.
These moods and emotions were especially intensified at the time of
writing, in March 2020, when most of the world came to an unprece-
dented halt because of the COVID-19 pandemic. With newly imposed
measures of social distancing, lockdowns, and rising deaths worldwide,
the future evoked a plethora of new meanings. It seems we may yet need
to traverse many more haphazard paths before we find—if ever—that
which has been lost.
Taking the immersive installation as a cue, In Search of Lost Futures
asks: How can we study people’s forays into the future ethnographically?
Anthropologists can expound on the contested terrains of the past, exca-
vating struggles that have been erased or ignored or bringing to light
marginalized voices that should be foregrounded. We are keen to decolo-
nize historical narratives of all genres—from films and novels to museum
exhibitions and performances—and to propose new strategies for recon-
figuring how we frame the past, with particular emphasis on uncovering
the creative agency of the underrepresented. But hopeful explorations of
the future seem to be in short supply.
Young people often find it difficult to articulate optimistic trajectories
for near or distant futures. They can easily describe dystopic scenarios
born of climate change, rising sea levels, genetic technologies run amok,
artificial intelligence, or even the zombie apocalypse. In contrast, they
often dismiss positive visions of the future as naive. The dominant assump-
tion has often seemed to be that individuals or local communities will
have relatively little creative agency when it comes to redirecting or
ameliorating global forces. The future is often imaged as an unstoppable
tsunami, flattening everything in its path. Yet, clearly, the vast majority
of human beings are still actively planning on there being a future.
Babies are still being conceived and birthed, crops planted, mortgages
signed, couples married, education pursued, investments made, and cities
planned.
Not all of these plans are supported within the dominant protocols
of neoliberal capitalism. Around the globe, we have reports of nonnor-
mative futures being cultivated and anticipated by those who choose
to reduce their carbon footprint, live off the grid, forge new kinds of
community online and in face-to-face proximity, build powerful social
1 INTRODUCTION: IN SEARCH OF LOST FUTURES 3
movements, spearhead artistic initiatives, and develop revolutionary tech-

nologies. Against the odds, alternative futures are being conceived and
even birthed, albeit often far from the media spotlight. Futures are firmly
grounded in the different ways we anticipate them, fear them, hope for
them, or pilfer from them for our own profit. Today, in the age of
COVID-19, our understandings and imaginings of the future are being
tossed in even more vertiginous directions. Politicians, scientists, and the
media are telling us that the future of this world lies in our own hands that
by taking appropriate measures of social distancing and staying at home
we can divert the tide of the pandemic. The future is suddenly presented
as ours to change, despite the fear, panic, and hopelessness that many of
us might feel in these uncertain and surreal times.
The future has been lost to the discipline of anthropology, and we are
urgently in need of analytic frameworks, approaches, and field methods
to tease out these emergent yearnings for divergent futures. Appropri-
ately, then, our volume title inverts that of Marcel Proust’s multivolume
masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. Our contemporary predicament often
seems to be a continuing quest in search of once-grand futures that may
seem forever beyond our reach. Like a visitor navigating through the
R.T./S.R./V.S. installation, this volume maps out the first steps toward
a rigorous and responsible anthropology of the future. The idea emerged
out of a panel presentation for the Future Anthropologies Network
(FAN) titled “Possible/Plausible/Probable/Preferable: Concepts and
Techniques for Realizing Futures” convened by Magdalena Kazubowski-
Houston and Simone Abram at the 2016 European Association of Social
Anthropologists’ annual meeting in Milan, Italy. The volume is a sequel
to FAN’s first volume, Anthropologies and Futures, published in 2017
by Bloomsbury and edited by Salazar et al. It also came out of work
conducted by members of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography—
an international cybercollective committed to advancing transdisciplinary
research that bridges anthropology, ethnography, the creative arts, and
digital media and concerns itself with questions of social justice and trans-
formation. Here, we ask: How can we capture the contours of worlds yet
to be when the people with whom we work find it difficult to articulate
their visions of the future? How do we characterize a habitus that is not
yet fully realized, that is only in the process of becoming? How do we
map a matrix of anticipated outcomes, proximate and distant, even (and
especially) when there are no blueprints on how to get us from here to
there?
Anthropological Forays into the Future

Anthropology has traditionally neglected the future as a subject of inquiry,
even though the future has always been part and parcel of the anthropo-
logical imagination. A concern for the future was evident in the salvage
anthropologists’ colonial project to document “cultures” and “traditions”
for posterity (Pels 2015: 779) and in Margaret Mead’s recognition, back
in the 1970s, of the importance of studying future possibilities and poten-
tials (Mead 1971, 2005). There were also some early attempts, largely
bypassed by the mainstream, to envisage the role that anthropology might
play in studying life beyond Earth (Maruyama and Harkins 1975). And
in the 1980s, an anticipatory anthropology briefly emerged, but because
it focused on microlevel processes, it had very little impact (Riner 1987;
Salazar et al. 2017: 6–7; Textor 1978).
Anthropology’s neglect of the future can be attributed to the disci-
pline’s preoccupation with the past, evident in its early focus on the
classification of “cultures,” “customs,” and “traditions” according to
Western conceptions of technological progress, which, to this date, rever-
berate in the discourses of development (Escobar 1991; Pels 2015: 787).
American anthropology in particular has been vested in history since
Franz Boas critiqued social evolutionism and adopted historical partic-
ularism in the early twentieth century. For Boas, “the whole problem of
cultural history appears to us as a historical problem. In order to under-
stand history, it is necessary to know not only how things are, but how
they come to be” (Boas 1920: 314). Although anthropologists today have
problematized “culture” and “tradition” as sets of practices, processes,
and actions that are co-emergent with history, power, and politics, the
discipline’s focus on the past is deeply entrenched and has been cemented
by its ongoing project of self-reflexivity, of exposing and critiquing its own
colonial and imperialist legacy (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Pels 2015:
779).
When anthropologists do shift their focus away from the past toward
the future, they tend to be preoccupied with demarcating—according to
Western notions of time as linear—ontological differences in approaches
to time. They ask, for instance, how the past has influenced the present
and, by default, the future. Analyses of memory, nostalgia, the past, and
history and how they inform societal transformation have been the focus,
while the future continues to lurk in the margins (Bryant and Knight
2019: 7–8). These works frequently engage with the future as problem-
atic and uncertain, displaced, or as a site of nostalgia and yearning (Guyer
2007; Hell and Schönle 2010; Piot 2010; Rosenberg and Harding 2005;
Wallman 1992). Even in recent studies on prediction (Puri 2015), divina-
tion (Stein Frankle and Stein 2005), and dreaming (Stewart 2012), the
future has been tackled predominantly through the lens of historicity
(Bryant and Knight 2019: 10). Charles Stewart (2012: 2), for example,
explores the future as part of historical consciousness—namely, as “basic
assumptions a society makes about the shape of time and the relationship
of events in the past, present, and future.” Anthropology’s neglect of the
future can also be attributed to the fact that the future is often problem-
atically associated with modernity and progress. In addition, some of the
approaches that emerged in 1990s and early 2000s failed to gain traction
because, rather than building their own theoretical basis, they primarily
supported existing theoretical turns (Salazar et al. 2017: 8–9).
Only recently has the future grabbed the attention of anthropologists.
It surfaced assertively in recent debates on the cosmos, extraterrestrial
travel, and alien life forms and arguments that make room for hope,
anticipation, and speculation (Battaglia 2005; Doyle 2005; Valentine
2016, 2017). This interest in futurism and science fiction (Rosenberg and
Harding 2005), however, has rarely translated into an exploration of how
futures are imagined, anticipated, and lived in everyday contexts (Bryant
and Knight 2019: 12). The future also figures prominently in works
that grapple with urban planning (Abram and Weszkalnys 2013), world
mappings (Messeri 2016), scientific modeling of climate change (Hastrup
and Skrydstrup 2013; Kirksey 2015; Schneider-Mayerson 2015), envi-
ronmental politics (Mathews and Barnes 2016), biotechnology and the
life sciences (Helmreich 2009), economentality (Mitchell 2014), design
anthropology (Gunn et al. 2013; Akama et al. 2018), and the uncanny
(Lepselter 2005, 2016). Similarly, studies on the impact of globalization
on life opportunities have begun to seriously consider humans as future
makers (Appadurai 2013; Bear 2014; Miyazaki 2004; Nielsen 2014;
Pandian 2012; Wallman 1992). Anand Pandian (2012: 508), drawing on
his work with South Indian popular filmmakers, stresses the importance
of paying attention to the ways “the time yet to come” emerges and is
experienced in the present moment. He conceives of time as “the genera-
tive weave of what we feel and do, trespassing any clear line that might be
drawn between subjects and objects of anthropological research” (ibid.:
549).
Anthropologists have also documented how people anticipate the

future through the affective prism of hope (e.g., Miyazaki 2004; Robbins
2013). Hirokazu Miyazaki (2004: 157), for example, asserts that people’s
actions in the present are inherently shaped by their imaginaries of
the future, a kind of a process of reimagining “the present from the
perspective of the end.” His main focus is hope, not as a subject of anthro-
pological investigation but as a “method for self-knowledge” that has
the potential to temporally reorient present actions toward the future.
“The method of hope,” Miyazaki argues, “is predicated on the inheri-
tance of a past hope and its performative replication in the present” (ibid.:
139). Consequently, the method relies on repeating hopeful moments as
imaginaries of future fulfillments.
While these approaches have drawn attention to the future, it is Arjun
Appadurai’s (2013) consideration of time that has had the most influ-
ence on our project and this volume. For Appadurai, the project of future
making is ultimately entangled in the ethics of probability versus the
ethics of possibility (ibid.: 295, 299). He links the ethics of probability
to what Michel Foucault identified as the “modern regimes of diagnosis,
counting, and accounting” that support capitalist interests (ibid.: 295).
The ethics of probability is “the domination of techniques and mentalities
oriented to manipulating or withstanding risk, understood as the statis-
tical representation of any and all of life’s uncertainties” (ibid.: 4). For
example, risk is a central concern in the field of economics, which seeks
to intervene in the future through its calculations of projected risk (ibid.:
4–5).
In contrast, Appadurai defines the ethics of possibility as an ethics
that works through democratic politics to build a “navigational capacity
through which the poor can redefine the terms of trade between recog-
nition and redistribution, and through their confrontations and negotia-
tions with state and market powers demonstrate and perform their ability
to construct collective hope” (ibid.: 126). For him, the politics of possi-
bility—which is ultimately a politics of hope—is a response to the imposed
politics of “catastrophe, exception, and emergency” (ibid.: 126, 198); it
is a kind of “vernacular cosmopolitanism” that works from the ground
up (ibid.: 198). That form of cosmopolitanism seeks to build relations
beyond the local in order to resist the dominant practices of exclusion
(ibid.: 189). The role of anthropology of the future, Appadurai stresses,
is ultimately to enhance the politics of possibility over the politics of
probability by building people’s capacities to aspire. In Appadurai’s view,
the wealthy possess a stronger capacity to aspire than the poor because
they have more resources, opportunities, and social and economic priv-
ileges. Unlike the poor, they can extract benefits from the future and
exchange their knowledge with others of their class (ibid.: 188). The
capacity to aspire “draw[s] on the habit of imagining possibilities, rather
than giving in to the probabilities of externally imposed change” (ibid.:
213). Individuals can improve their well-being by strengthening their
collective capacity to aspire (ibid.). Appadurai argues that anthropologists
need to redirect our attention away from humans as “bearers of the force
of history, custom, and habit” to “make the future as a cultural fact an
equally important part of [our] mission” (ibid.: 267). To craft a robust
anthropology of the future, we need to take into consideration the inter-
play between “imagination, anticipation, and aspiration” because, rather
than a neutral space, the future is “shot through with affect and with
sensation” (ibid.: 287). People’s everyday archives—as “critical sites for
negotiating paths to dignity, recognition”—“provid[e] a map for negoti-
ating and shaping new futures” (ibid.: 288). He sees hope as an integral
part of imagining futures, as it is ultimately hope that drives such imag-
inings (ibid.: 293). The ethics of possibility, he argues, constitutes “those
ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that increase the horizons of hope,
that expand the field of the imagination, that produce greater equity in
what I have called the capacity to aspire, and that widen the field of
informed, creative, and critical citizenship” (ibid.: 295).
Building on Appadurai’s insights, we have also been inspired by the
volume Anthropologies and Futures. Much like Appadurai, Salazar and
colleagues posit that an anthropology of the future should be “an engaged
anthropology that actively responds to the moral obligation for us to
implicate ourselves in futures” and that seeks to develop “a renewed, open
and future-focused approach to understanding the present, anticipating
the unknown, and intervening in the world” (Salazar et al. 2017: 3). The
editors call for reorienting anthropology away from its focus on the past
and its traditional approach of long-term fieldwork, both of which, they
argue, have largely curtailed the discipline’s engagement with futures. In
their view, anthropology can make a significant contribution to the study
of futures because of its critical theoretical positioning and “its capacity to
engage with a world and people at a depth and moral perspective” (ibid.:
4).
In particular, they call for an interventionist anthropology, one that

will craft novel epistemological, theoretical, and methodological tech-
niques of inquiry and intervention by reaching out beyond its disciplinary
confines to take into account the particularities of the field and the
experiences of people on the ground (ibid.: 5). They hope that the
developed techniques—drawing on the creative arts, digital technologies,
and participatory and improvisational strategies—will enable anthropolo-
gists “to account for the contested politics of uncertain, emerging, and
as yet unknown worlds” (ibid.: 5). Their interest in inventing novel
techniques for researching futures is ultimately directed toward problema-
tizing anthropology’s epistemological groundings, ethnographic practice,
and theoretical insights (ibid.: 10–11).
The Three Approaches

In Search of Lost Futures is a specific experiment in three approaches to
the study of futures: (1) multimodality, (2) deep interdisciplinarity, and
(3) autoethnography. These approaches or techniques have emerged as
increasingly vital ways of conducting ethnography; however, their poten-
tial in the anthropological study of the future still needs to be investigated.
Although each part of this book is devoted to one of the three approaches,
we recognize that these approaches are not mutually exclusive; on the
contrary, many of the contributors employ all three. We associated each
of their contributions with one of the three parts based on their level
of engagement with a given approach; to construct a clear road map
through the volume; and to highlight the interconnectedness of the three
approaches.
Part I, “Multimodality,” examines approaches that employ different
types of media to prioritize collaborative, affective, embodied, and critical
modes of engagement to reach beyond the academy. Brian Batchelor’s
Chapter 2 examines a collaborative street performance in San Cristóbal de
las Casas, Chiapas, and Mexico, as a form of public memorial that strives
to realize an impossible future. He investigates how a public, performative
memorial can constitute a form of embodied ethnography of impossi-
bility that enacts politics at the level of the imagination. Jodie Asselin,
in Chapter 3 examines how an ethnographer’s embodied participation
in a community-training program, such as rural enskillment training in
northern and western Canada, can facilitate novel, ethnographic ways of
imagining the future through touch and smell. Chapter 4 by Rajat Nayyar
considers an audiovisual research approach as a form of creative and

improvisatory ethnography. By positioning participants sensorially within
a given environment, it is possible to stage their imaginings of what may
or may not be possible. Finally, Virginie Magnat, in Chapter 5, proposes
an imaginary ethnography of heightened vocality as an entry point to
understanding how futures are imagined and acted upon in everyday
life, beyond the spoken and written word, in ways that subvert colonial
regimes of power and knowledge construction.
Part II, “Deep Interdisciplinarity,” brings together contributors
who draw on different disciplinary fields to craft novel sensibilities
for conducting ethnographic research. They not only draw on pre-
existing approaches but also devise unique, context-specific techniques of
engaging with futures. Felix Ringel’s Chapter 6, based on his fieldwork
in Germany’s poorest city, Bremerhaven, makes a case for cultivating a
research sensibility that would allow the participants’ imaginaries of the
future to question and challenge the researcher’s own perspectives and
analytical tool kits. In Chapter 7, Eeva Berglund and Cindy Kohlata draw
on scholarship in anthropology and design (specifically material-semiotic,
new materialist, or more-than-human thought) to craft a novel ethno-
graphic sensibility that harnesses collective imagination, creativity, and
improvisation to study the future. In Chapter 8, Marek Pawlak draws
on interdisciplinary affect theory and his fieldwork in Iceland to consider
anticipation as an affective and future-oriented theoretical, epistemo-
logical, and methodological sensibility. Sarah Pink and collaborators in
Chapter 9 discuss an interdisciplinary, collaborative research project that
draws on design research employed in the automotive industry, research
that relies on deception and experimental testing and prototyping. They
demonstrate that anthropology can benefit from similar approaches and
techniques, even if they are seemingly incompatible with the discipline’s
own ethical and methodological commitments.
In Part III, “Autoethnography,” we explore autoethnography as a
highly reflexive ethnographic process and style of representation that
draws on the ethnographer’s own life story and experiences in the field
and critically interrogates the conditions that underly a project’s construc-
tion of knowledge (Kazubowski-Houston 2010, 2017). Alexandrine
Boudreault-Fournier’s Chapter 10 provides insights generated through
her autoethnographic study of excavations taking place below her fami-
ly’s colonial house in Cuba, and through a collaborative and reflexive
audiovisual ethnography conducted in a crumbling house in Havana. She
demonstrates that researchers’ critical engagement with their own posi-

tionality should constitute a basis for anthropological conceptualizations
of time and forays into the future. Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston’s
Chapter 11 uses critical ethnographic memoir writing to draw attention to
the ways that the emplaced, embodied, imaginative, and agentic capacity
of the author’s own lived experience of absence and grief can serve as a
springboard for reimagining and acting upon the future. In Chapter 12,
Susan Falls draws on autoethnographic insights generated through the
author’s own participation in the human milk-sharing network and inter-
rogates the speculative potential of reflexive multimodal approaches to
ethnography, especially their ability to engage audiences beyond the
academy. Finally, in Chapter 13, Mark Auslander and collaborators discuss
a museum exhibit based on the collaborators’ personal experience of
sexual violence, presenting it as a process of restorative future making
in which the impossible is rendered possible.
Imagining and Intervening in the Future

Although the contributors to this volume have different approaches and
perspectives, we share the view that, in these uncertain times, anthro-
pologists must urgently concern themselves with the future. This means
attending to how people engage with future worlds in their everyday
lives and how anthropology might intervene in the future. Appadu-
rai’s understanding of the future as the capacity to aspire lies at the
heart of several chapters in this collection. While not always addressed
directly, it is certainly evoked, albeit in different ways, by each contributor.
However, we extend the notion of the capacity to aspire beyond the poli-
tics of possibility. We believe that imagination—on which the capacity to
aspire relies—cannot be conceptualized solely in positive terms. Typically,
anthropologists have been less concerned with imagination as a concep-
tual category and have instead attended to diverse imaginative effects,
outcomes, or technologies (Appadurai 1996; Crapanzano 2004; McLean
2007; Rapport and Overing 2000; Robbins 2010; Sneath et al. 2009).
But much of this theorizing has associated imagination with possibility,
freedom, hope, artistic expression, and transformation or transgression.
Appadurai (1996: 53), for example, suggests that in the era of glob-
alization, “the imagination has now acquired a singular new power in
social life” and constitutes “a space of contestation in which individ-
uals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the
modern” (ibid.: 4). For him, collective imagination can become “a staging
ground for action, and not only for escape” (ibid: 7). Vincent Crapanzano
(2004: 19) argues that the imagination ultimately allows us “to project
our ‘fables’ in a direction that does not have to reckon with the ‘evident
universe.’” And for Jean and John Comaroff (1999: 8) is a “civil society
[that] serves as a tool of the social imagination.” Others have defined
imagination as a ground upon which people can reinvent their temporal-
ities and identities apart from the constraints of their everyday realities
(Rapport and Overing 2000; Robbins 2010: 305–6).
There are those, however, who recognize that imagination—part and
parcel of experience and perception—is difficult to pin down (McLean
2007: 6), as it constitutes a “thinking feeling [involving] the mutual
development of thought and sensation, as they arrive together, pre-what
they will have become, just beginning to unfold from the unfelt and
unthinkable outside: of process, transformation in itself” (Massumi 2002:
134). Some approaches, drawing on Kant’s understanding of imagination
as pervasive and processual, consider imagination as an outcome rather
than a condition and focus on the “technologies of the imagination” that
generate, without determining, such outcomes (Sneath et al. 2009: 19).
These approaches stress that the diverse technologies of the imagination
frequently afford random and unpredictable imaginings and that ethnog-
raphy’s focus on the peculiarities of the everyday is imperative to studying
and analyzing the workings of these technologies (Sneath et al. 2009: 22,
25).
Building on these latter perspectives, we inquire into the diverse imag-
inative effects, outcomes, and technologies of imagination. We engage
with imaginations, imaginaries, and imaginings in their plural forms as
a multiplicity of emergent, dynamic, shifting, intersubjective, embodied,
and affective experiences, modes of being and expression, processes, and
actions. We argue, however, that imagination cannot be reduced to a
positive force, intentionality, or strategic action because it plays out some-
where between intent and outcome, freedom and constraint, hegemony
and resistance, private and public, and real and fantastical. This is evident
in Kazubowski-Houston’s chapter in this volume, for example, which
demonstrates how imagination as an agentic action can operate unpre-
dictably through absence, magical thought, and the lived experience of
grief. Consequently, the capacity to aspire cannot be seen as tied solely to
the politics of possibility—it can also express itself in different registers,
moods, and sensibilities.
For young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, for example, the
capacity to aspire dwells in hopelessness, dejection, panic, and fear. She
asserts, “Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them
hope. But I don’t want your hope, I don’t want you to be hopeful. I
want you to panic, I want you to feel the fear I feel every day” (The
Atlantic, September 20, 2019). Thunberg’s words resonate even stronger
today in the world of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global panic.
Our capacities to aspire, our desire to live to see a “normal” future again,
seem to be vested in our very ability to harness fear and panic for the
good of all. Brian Batchelor’s chapter in this volume, for example, by
describing a public street-performance memorial that calls for the return
of the disappeared normalistas in Mexico, demonstrates how the capacity
to aspire can be tied to the politics of impossibility.
Expressions of the capacity to aspire can also possess many unpre-
dictable and messy consequences, contingent on specific historical and
political particularities playing themselves out in and through individual
and social lives. Felix Ringel’s contribution, for example, brings to light
how people’s capacities to aspire can be vested in seemingly conservative
efforts aimed at sustaining the status quo. This volume, consequently, is
concerned not only with the different registers, moods, and sensibilities
through which people express their capacity to aspire but also with the
capricious consequences of their actions.
The goal of an interventionist anthropology of the future is not neces-
sarily to build people’s capacities to aspire—as all people, even the most
underprivileged, possess their own dreams, aspirations, and goals. In
fact, the chapters in this collection demonstrate that our interlocutors’
imaginings of the future can be incompatible with, and even radically
challenge, our own notions of intervention. Marek Pawlak’s chapter,
for example, which is based on his study of Icelanders’ anticipations of
the future in the post-2008 economic crisis era, reveals how people’s
imaginaries of the future can clash with our own in ways that cannot
be easily anticipated. We acknowledge that these notions, in much of
the current anthropological theorizing, largely equate intervention if
not exclusively with strategic action then at least with “a standpoint of
self-aware commitment” (Horton and Kraftl 2009: 17). While in some
cases we, indeed, might be able to assist our interlocutors in mobilizing
resources to bring their aspirations to fruition, more often than not, we
cannot easily overcome the systemic inequalities that impact people’s lives.
Overstating the power of anthropology—or any academic discipline—to
directly affect lives will only serve the mandate of neoliberal academia,
which masks its entrepreneurial intent with narratives about social justice
and transformation (Kazubowski-Houston 2018: 418).
The chapters in this volume show how intervention can unfold in the
field in ways that are not always intended, foreseen, or accounted for.
Ethnographic research may have major transformative potential, but its
effects might not be easily accessible, apparent, or understood. In Search
of Lost Futures stresses the importance of paying attention to how futures
are made and unmade beyond a goal-oriented action. It foregrounds
intervention that does not adhere to an explicit understanding of poli-
tics and change (Horton and Kraftl 2009: 14) but instead takes many
different forms; for example, they can emerge from the depths of quiet,
affective, and embodied practice (Kazubowski-Houston 2018). In fact,
the contributors to this volume demonstrate that intimate, embodied
imaginings can be central catalysts—not merely effects—of geopolitical
processes. Imaginings may constitute an important intimacy politics (Pain
and Staeheli 2014) that builds bonds of reciprocity, undoing customary
divisions between the global and the local, the private and the public, and
the real and the fictional.
These politics may, at times, provide the only possible means through
which people can work toward a dignified life. Rajat Nayyar’s audiovi-
sual ethnography of death and dying conducted in a salvation home in
Kashi, India, for instance, lays bare how such intimacy politics can stage
themselves as practices of care that strengthen kinship ties and familial
bonds, albeit in ways that cannot be easily ascertained. Magnat’s imag-
inary ethnography of heightened vocality also reveals that intervention
can work as an affective force of chanting and singing, constituting an
important, if not always apparent, form of subverting power.
The challenge lies in figuring out how to go about crafting sustainable
and politically feasible futures from the multiplicity of diverse and not
always compatible imaginings. Here, we follow Salazar and colleagues’
(2017: 17) call for “creating generative forms of not knowing with
others, which might involve imagining, planning, designing, enacting,
intervening, or anticipating the future on an everyday basis.” This call
for “not knowing with others” strongly reverberates in Berglund and
Kohlata’s ethnographic research, which involved collaborating with mate-
rialist activist communities in northern Europe and fully opening oneself
up to their collective initiatives of imagining the future on the ground.
However, we are also mindful that looking to our interlocutors for
inspiration to “imagine/do/think/be otherwise dances a fine line of re-

exoticizing them” (de Sá 2019). We agree with Celina de Sá (2019) that
in the project of imagining and intervening in futures, we should always
“be grounded in the assumption that our interlocutors are unremarkable”
and may not have readily available insights into how the future might be
crafted.
Thus, In Search of Lost Futures proposes an anthropology of the future
that would constitute a kind of “dramaturgy of [affective, sensory, and
embodied] voices from the field” (Madison 2018: xxxi), a dramaturgy
that forges connections between multiple and disparate imaginings of the
future. As early as the 1990s, Faye Ginsburg (1995: 65) argued that to
account for the complexities of social life, anthropology must adopt a
parallax effect, or “different angles of vision,” which could be achieved
by juxtaposing different modes of visual representation, such as ethno-
graphic film and Indigenous media. Our proposed dramaturgy of voices
strives to achieve this parallax effect not simply by juxtaposing different
angles of vision. It also juxtaposes different multisensory, haptic, and
multimodal networks of “seeing” through which the capacity to aspire
is imagined. In their contribution, Pink and collaborators argue that, in
order for anthropology to engage with the future, it needs to seriously
engage with people’s future-making activities and strategies, even if this
means a profound rethinking of our epistemological and methodological
tool kits.
We are committed to tracking the myriad imaginings of futures as they
emerge on the ground in different temporal and affective orientations. As
all the chapters in this volume demonstrate, these imaginings may span—
in various combinations and iterations—the possible and the impossible,
the probable and the improbable, the certain and the uncertain, and
the hopeful and the hopeless. Such a dramaturgy of futures is certainly
in need of developing novel epistemological, theoretical, and method-
ological approaches. Yet, despite the inspiring work that has burgeoned
in recent years, we still have theoretical and methodological questions
about how to study and intervene in the imaginative aspects of futures
that are not easily accessible to us ethnographically. In Search of Lost
Futures addresses this knowledge gap by exploring autoethnography,
multimodality, and deep interdisciplinarity as three potential approaches
to the anthropological study of futures.
The deeply interdisciplinary dramaturgy of the future that this book
proposes tracks diverse capacities to aspire as they sprout close to the
ground, in the stories people tell us, in how they tell these stories
(through actions, gestures, movements, speech, and so on), and in how
they live and enact these stories in their everyday lives. It is a traversing
anthropology. Like Matti Braun’s immersive installation, it is vertiginous.
It leads us through unknown depths and possibilities. It pays attention
to what futures may sound like, smell like, and feel like. It accounts for
those experiences that go beyond words because it is through those expe-
riences that futures frequently stage themselves within the galleries of our
imaginations.
Our work hearkens back to one of the foundational texts of modern
anthropology, Marcel Mauss’s The Gift ([1954] 2011). In this work,
Mauss famously argues that in precapitalist or archaic societies, gift rela-
tionships manifested themselves as total social facts and structured a
vast range of social practices, states of being, aesthetics, and spiritual
conceptions. The gift carried with it a double obligation: to acknowl-
edge the gift and to reciprocate at some future point in time through
a counter-presentation that would be roughly equivalent to, but not
precisely identical to, the original gift. Even the seemingly disenchanted
modern contract, Mauss maintained, contains within it the buried spirit
of the gift, implicating networks of persons in bonds of reciprocity that
are inherently future-oriented. Many of the essays in this volume could be
read as explorations of struggles in contemporary communities to reclaim
that buried, future-oriented spirit of the gift, to reenter into the ethos
of seemingly lost but life-giving economies. In diverse locales around the
world, even under seemingly inescapable neoliberal structures, individ-
uals and emergent collectivities are actively imagining and reconstituting
dramas of future-oriented reciprocity, insisting that there is more to life
than the frozen, sterile tallies of the balance sheet.
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PART I
Multimodality
In recent years, multimodality—approaches and practices that employ

diverse media forms to work collaboratively with communities (Collins
et al. 2017; Edwards 1997; Pink 2011; Postill 2011; Stewart 2013)—has
gained cachet in the field of anthropology. Techniques such as perfor-
mance, film, photography, digital media, and social media have been
employed both as ethnographic modalities to challenge the conventional
ways of disseminating research, practicing reflexivity, and engaging in
community collaboration. The popularity of this approach is evident
in the recent proliferation of transdisciplinary research and education
centers, ventures, and networks, including
• the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography;
• the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, which focuses
on the intersection of ethnography and aesthetics;
• the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at Manchester
University, which heads projects that bridge ethnography and
multimedia;
• the two new European Association for Social Anthropologists
networks: FAN, which is committed to developing new approaches
and techniques to the study of futures, and #colleex–Collaboratory
for Ethnographic Experimentation, which is devoted to
experimenting with field methods and techniques
(Kazubowski-Houston and Magnat 2018: 384);
20 PART I: MULTIMODALITY
• and Ethnographic Terminalia, a collective of international artists and

ethnographers that exhibits works situated at the intersections of
ethnography and contemporary art practice.
The contributors to this volume draw inspiration from these types
of cross-disciplinary pollinations and have personally participated in
some of these initiatives. In particular, they draw on and extend work
carried out by the members of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnog-
raphy (CIE) and the European Association for Social Anthropologists’
(EASA) Future Anthropologies Network (FAN). The cofounders and
cocurators of the CIE have engaged with multimodality through prac-
tices of imaginative ethnography (Elliott and Culhane 2017)—approaches
to research that are attuned to people’s “imaginative lifeworlds” (Irving
2011: 22) and employ transdisciplinary affective, embodied, and critical
research methods (Kazubowski-Houston 2017). Like members of FAN,
the contributors to this volume explore creative approaches to an inter-
ventionist anthropology working in collaboration with interlocutors on
the ground (Salazar et al 2017). In particular, they examine how street
performance, affective and embodied enskillment training, audiovisual
ethnography, and an ethnography of vocality might set up the conditions
of ethnographic knowledge in ways that render it especially useful to the
anthropological study of the possible and the impossible.
Although anthropologists have explored creative modalities primarily
at the representational level, as a way of disseminating fieldwork data
through embodied and sensory ways to diverse audiences, experimenta-
tions at the level of ethnographic process and analysis continue to be rare.
The chapters in this section address this research gap by engaging with
multimodality at the level of ethnographic process, analysis, and repre-
sentation. They pay particular attention to how creative modalities might
transform the research field, the interlocutor-ethnographer relationship,
and audience engagement. They also consider how, in working across
disciplines and fields, anthropologists might capture and convey other
possibilities and forms of agency that reside in imaginaries, senses, and
emotions. They are united in exploring how a multimodal anthropology
of the future might help us do away with disciplinary turf claiming, which
has prevented anthropologists from truly engaging with the concerns of
our interlocutors and seriously embracing theoretical and methodological
experimentations.
PART I: MULTIMODALITY 21
In his chapter, “Possibilities and Impossibilities in Acción,” Brian

Batchelor analyzes a collaborative public acción—which he calls a “perfor-
mance of impossibility”—at the Plaza de la Paz in the colonial city of San
Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. His methodological approach
employs different modalities of research—including long-term partici-
pant observation, performance, and memorial—to intervene in futures.
In this approach, performance is used as both a form of ethnographic
process (where the ethnographer addresses his research questions by
cofacilitating a staging of a performance in collaboration with his inter-
locutors) and a form of ethnographic representation. The acción involved
local students enacting a public memorial to the forty-three Ayotzinapa
students, normalistas, who were disappeared in the state of Guerrero,
Mexico, in 2014. Through the memorial, they demanded the victims’ safe
return. Batchelor carefully traces how the performance and the discussion
with participants that preceded it generated myriad imaginative specula-
tions about the fate of the normalistas. His interdisciplinary approach,
which marries street performance to ethnography, reveals how people’s
capacities to aspire can simultaneously constitute a politics of possibility
and impossibility. Given that the disappeared were likely dead, the acción
was calling for the impossible. However, their demand also generated
multiple imaginaries of what could be possible, such as the govern-
ment undertaking an investigation to locate and identify the normalistas ’
remains and bring justice to their families. The acción was, indeed, a form
of performative address directed at a government that many in Mexico
believed was complicit in (and covering up) the atrocities.
Batchelor’s focus on performance shows how—under certain circum-
stances of hopelessness—people can keep the imaginaries of the impos-
sible alive to craft political possibilities out of them. It offers an example
of how an anthropology of the future may constitute a technology of the
imagination (Sneath et al. 2009) by tracking a vertiginous path through
the possible, impossible, and unforeseen worlds. His performance of
possibility in San Cristóbal de las Casas offers insights into how we might
craft a dramaturgy of voices, movements, and gestures in the field that
functions as both public memorial and radical social action.
In her chapter titled “Put Your Body into It: Exploring Imagina-
tion through Enskillment in Outdoor Women’s Camps,” Jody Asselin
discusses a rural enskillment program, Becoming Outdoor Women
(BOW), in northern and western Canada that teaches participants
hunting, fishing, trapping, and wilderness survival skills. Her approach
is an example of multimodality, as it incorporates long-term fieldwork;
embodied, sensory, hands-on enskillment training in various camp activ-

ities; and semi-structured interviews. She argues that her participants’
affective imaginings of the future—inflected with fear, anxiety, and
uncertainty about food availability and safety and environmental insta-
bility—possess agentic capacities that spur action. She analyzes the camp
as a liminal space where women can imagine alternative possibilities
through embodied enskillment. Their capacity to aspire crystallizes along-
side their nervous anticipation of impending transformations in their
environmental, political, and social landscape, revealing that people can
imagine futures by using tactile experience to contemplate other places
and times. At the center of her discussion is the labor of the women’s
bodies, which she sees as a conduit for narratives of the possible and the
probable. For the women, it allowed them to feel futures “with hands,
through pressure on skin, and the smell of smoke or blood [and] through
the frustration, anger, or joy that comes with learning.”
Enskillment training allows people to engage in activities they other-
wise would not and to contemplate what might be possible and desirable.
Asselin’s research shows that people’s capacity to aspire resides not only
in their imaginings of what might be possible but also in “what might
have been possible had things been a little different.” The women’s
engagements with the future were contingent on imagining what could
have been possible had they learned the skills of self-sustenance as young
children. Although their imaginings were fueled by visions of a postapoc-
alyptic future, they were also rooted in a nostalgic quest for a tranquil
and bountiful past. Asselin’s intervention takes the form of a critique, a
critique of the ways that women’s bodies are excluded from certain kinds
of embodied learning traditionally associated with masculinity.
Based on his audiovisual and sensory ethnography conducted at
Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan—a salvation home in Kashi, India—Nayyar’s
chapter, “Staging Care: Dying, Death, and Possible Futures” examines
how Hindu pilgrims and their families, when caring for a dying relative,
engage in slow and subtle forms of activism to create the possibility of
achieving Moksha, a union of the individual’s soul with a universal one.
In the process, death is transformed from an “end of being” into a prac-
tice of care, and important agentic capacities are constituted as past family
conflicts come to an end and kinship ties strengthen.
Nayyar focuses on the role that the camera plays in this process. The
camera affords Shiv the opportunity—through embodied audiovisual and
sensory participation in the everyday life of the holy city—to improvise
and rehearse the myriad acts and practices of care, including tending
PART I: MULTIMODALITY 23
to dying relatives, preparing for their death, interacting with others,

and contemplating one’s own future possibility of achieving Moksha.
For Nayyar, although the specific rituals and rules of Kashi Labh Mukti
Bhawan are fertile ground for improvising practices of care, it was the
camera that positioned the interlocutor sensorially within the surrounding
environment and egged on daydreaming, imagining, and performing
care and the possibility of Moksha. Ultimately, for Nayyar, audiovisual
approaches that spark improvisation and creativity have the potential to
contribute to an interventionist anthropology of the future in ways that
problematize the notion of intervention itself. However, in his account,
these approaches are not merely methodology; they are an improvisational
ethnographic sensibility that employs the visual as a deeply multisensory
and intersubjective space.
Finally, Virginie Magnat’s contribution, “Impossible Ethnography:
Tracking Colonial Encounters, Listening to Raised Voices, and Hearing
Indigenous Sovereignty in the ‘New World,’” rethinks—from a perfor-
mance studies perspective—an ethnography of the possible by extending
it beyond the written and spoken word. Her chapter sketches out an
imaginary, dialogical ethnographic approach to research by tacking back
and forth between historical accounts and theoretical texts, thereby chal-
lenging the traditional positionality of the ethnographer that derives
its authority from being present in the field. She traces the genealogy
of the devaluation of song in Western epistemologies by focusing on
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s and Jacques Derrida’s contrasting views on
speech, song, and music. In the process, she makes an argument for
the importance of nonverbal forms of vocalization in the construction
of ethnographic knowledge about futures. For Magnat, such forms of
vocality, which cannot be easily rendered knowable by Western modes
of understanding, can provide important insights into how futures are
imagined and acted upon in everyday life.
Magnat argues that, under certain circumstances, song and other forms
of heightened vocality can play an important role in the struggles for
self-determination. Indigenous Peoples, she posits, have historically used
singing, chanting, and invocation to resist colonial ruling powers and
their racist ideologies of European superiority. She argues that, for the
European settlers, it was the unrestrained affective power of Indige-
nous vocality that was deeply unsettling, as it brought into high relief
the limits of Western discursivity. Magnat draws on the work of Stó:lō
scholar Dylan Robinson, who sees song acts as performative utterances
that can assert Indigenous Title, build relations, and affirm Indigenous
history. To demonstrate the importance of raised voices in the assertion
of Indigenous sovereignty, Magnat analyzes sound as it has been utilized
by Canada’s ongoing Indigenous Rights movement—Idle No More. By
considering song and music as important strategies for a performative
politics, Magnat is helping to rethink ethnographic intervention as an
affective, “intangible efficacy” that has the potential to mobilize collec-
tive agency. As utopian performatives (Dolan 2005), the song actions of
Idle No More reveal that we could reimagine our futures collectively by
mobilizing mutual knowledge and respect.
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Though Pasts, Presents, and Futures. In Anthropologies and Futures:
Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds, eds. J. F. Salazar, S. Pink, A.
Irving, and J. Sjöberg, 209–224. London: Bloomsbury.
Kazubowski-Houston, M., and V. Magnat. 2018. Introduction: Transdisciplinary
Travels of Ethnography. In M. Kazubowski-Houston, and V. Magnat (eds.)
Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, Special Issue 18 (6): 379–391.
Pink, S. 2011. Multimodality, Multisensoriality and Ethnographic Knowing:
Social Semiotics and the Phenomenology of Perception. Qualitative Research
11 (3): 261–276.
Postill, J. 2011. Localizing the Internet: An Anthropological Account. New York:
Berghahn Books.
Salazar, J. F., S. Pink, A. Irving, J. Sjoberg. 2017. Anthropologies and Futures:
Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds. London & New York: Blooms-
bury.
Sneath, D., M. Holbraad, and M. A. Pederson. 2009. Technologies of the
Imagination: An Introduction. Ethnos 74 (1): 5–30.
Stewart, M. 2013. Mysteries Reside in the Humblest, Everyday Things. Social
Anthropology 21 (3): 305–321.
CHAPTER 2
Possibilities and Impossibilities in Acción
Brian Batchelor
Seventeen college students enter the Plaza de la Paz, the main public
plaza belonging to the colonial city of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas,
Mexico. The plaza is located in San Cristóbal’s tourist-oriented central
core—adjacent to a number of private businesses and to the city’s cathe-
dral and municipal palace (a site of local, state and national government).
The plaza is crowded but spacious. People congregate in different areas
and crisscross the square going about their lives. Street vendors stroll
past people hoping for a sale. The college students, carrying bundles of
supplies, gather in the northeast corner of the plaza. There they place
two large, blown-up black and white photos. The photos are portraits—
like the kind you would find on a piece of identification. It is a cool, sunny
February late-afternoon, with slight gusts of wind whistling through the
plaza. The students use small rocks borrowed from a nearby construction
site to anchor the photos to the plaza’s stone floor. As one student strums
a slow, rhythmic melody on an acoustic, nylon-stringed, and slightly out
of tune guitar, the others proceed to create a temporary urban interven-
tion and public memorial dedicated to the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa
students. Near the photos they place a sign. It demands: ¡Vivos se los
B. Batchelor (B)
York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4_2
26 B. BATCHELOR
llevaron, vivos los queremos!—They were taken alive, we want them back
alive!
The students building the memorial and intervention in San Cristóbal’s
Plaza de la Paz were from a local college that focuses on ecologically and
socially sustainable land and community governance. They were members
of a class that focused on the praxis of politics, gender and embodiment;
my friend, who was also my landlord for the first eight months of my
fieldwork, was the course instructor. The public acción in the square—
performed by the students, facilitated by the instructor and photographed
by me—is a collaborative performance ethnography in which we used
the acción as a means to generate ethnographic imaginings about polit-
ical possibilities and impossibilities related to the 43 Ayotzinapa students,
called normalistas, disappeared in the state of Guerrero, Mexico in 2014.
At the center of the performance is the demand that the normalistas be
returned alive. But surely this is an impossible ask! The normalistas are,
in all likelihood, dead. So why make this demand? Interestingly, despite
their full acknowledgment that the normalistas were most likely dead,
the students still felt it important to demand their alive return. This is
because, for the students, demanding the impossible became a way of
creating political possibilities out of what they felt was an impossible situ-
ation. As a public memorial dedicated to students who are simultaneously
missing and (in all probability) dead at the same time as an interven-
tion demanding their safe return and demanding justice, the acción is an
embodied and performative exploration of what it means to imagine the
possible while demanding the impossible. What follows then is an analysis
of what I call performances of impossibility—performances that mobilize
and evoke a politics of the impossible in order to recall or imagine the
possible in new and different ways.
This Performance Ethnography

Emerges Through Acción
The acción originated out of the college course’s focus on and discussions
around performance, memory and politics. The instructor had invited
me to co-teach a part of their course, a process that the students, the
instructor and I termed “transnational dialogue” whereby I would present
topics of interests to the students and they would ask questions and make
comments.1 I developed a lesson on the use of performance and spec-
tacle as a tool for political protest. To provide a localized example of
2 POSSIBILITIES AND IMPOSSIBILITIES IN ACCIÓN 27
Fig. 2.1 Students construct a public memorial to the 43 disappeared Ayotzi-

napa normalistas while a small boy looks on in San Cristóbal’s Plaza de la Paz
(Photo by Brian Batchelor)
such work, I used the instructor’s prior series of anti-femicide public

accións. These earlier performance interventions attempted to raise public
awareness toward the conditions that lead to high rates of femicide in
San Cristóbal and elsewhere in Chiapas (Chávez and Difarnecio 2014:
36–37). They staged public acts of memory and mourning by naming
the victims; using photos, artistic representations, candles, flowers and
banners to make present the absence of the murdered women being
memorialized (40). During that class, there emerged a collective interest
in creating a similar imaginative, affective and visually striking public
performance. The instructor was willing to develop one with the students
if the school agreed, and the instructor proposed an acción centered on
the Ayotzinapa students—a means to mark a year and a half since the
disappearances.2
For the students and instructor, the intention behind the acción was
experiential and educational: to create a public acción that puts into prac-
tice ideas of embodiment, memory and performance that the instructor
had been discussing with the students prior to and during my work
with them. I was interested in employing performance ethnography as
a research method to explore how political performances within San
Cristóbal’s public spaces can generate ethnographic possibilities as part
28 B. BATCHELOR
of my fieldwork. Performance ethnography sees performance—a term

that encompasses performance as both process and product (Levin and
Schweitzer 2017: 35)—as a means to communicate research, and as a
mode of ethnographic exploration (Kazubowski-Houston 2017b: 121;
2018: 416–17; Kazubowski-Houston and Magnat 2018: 366–67). This
project used performance as a creative ethnographic research method-
ology. Noting that performance both attends to and communicates
the embodied, sensuous, affective and tactile experiences that make
up everyday lives, Kazubowski-Houston (2017a, b, 2018), argues that
performance becomes an increasingly useful tool for generating ethno-
graphic information. Performance, as a process, orients and directs its
collaborators’ attention and mental acuity toward a specific issue or
topic of mutually constructed interest, thereby developing a “performa-
tive expression grounded in the face-to-face encounter” (Irving 2018:
393). Importantly, performance ethnography, as an imaginative process,
does not reveal ethnographic knowledge that is already present but rather
generates new knowledge out of collaboration (Culhane 2017; Madison
2018: 463). In this manner, providing a performance “occasion” (Fabian
1990), whether an event (Culhane 2011; Fabian 1990; Kazubowski-
Houston 2010), an installation (Castañeda 2006), an ethnographic film
(Irving 2018), or a story (Kazubowski-Houston 2012, 2017b, 2018),
opens up possible expressions that are both guided by the specific
imperatives of that performance and grounded in the engagements of
collaboration.
My interest in possible and impossible worlds and imaginative processes
comes from my dissertation research: a performance studies inflected
ethnography that investigates the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas as what
Edward Bruner (2005) calls a tourist borderzone, an imaginative and inter-
pretive space where local and traveler are animated by their encounters
with each other and shaped by the tensions between the local, national
and global caused by tourism. To research the particularities of tourist
borderzones, during my year-long fieldwork process, I collaborated with
a small number of research participants who work to varying degrees in
the tourism sector.3 I also worked with the aforementioned students.
Drawing from collaborative, open-ended, embodied, imaginative and
experimental research methods (Elliott and Culhane 2017) in addition
to more traditionally grounded ethnographic practices, I map out the
embodied and affective ways that my collaborators related to tourism on
an everyday, micro-political level. The acción, while not directly related to
tourism (but still performed in a tourist-oriented location), is an example

of this imaginative and performance-based work: the result of an overlap
in my interest in performance as research and the students’ and instruc-
tor’s interest in performance as public intervention and pedagogical tool.
My collaborations with the students extended beyond the acción, but I
focus specifically on the acción here.
I arrived in San Cristóbal shortly after the one-year anniversary of
the Iguala disappearances. By the time of the acción, I had been
working (alongside the instructor) with the students once a month for six
months.4 Because of our limited time together, more traditional partic-
ipant observations and interviews would not work with the students’
schedule. Our classes therefore became spaces of co-teaching and co-
learning, our work together coming from complementary “states of
expert not knowing ” (Pink and Salazar 2017: 16; c.f. Pink et al. 2017a),
and the performance acción became one avenue through which we could
collaboratively “form such expertise” (16) around the topics of imagi-
nation, politics and performance. I asked the students if they would be
willing to consider the acción as an extension of our collaborative class-
room work together. That is, if the acción could serve as what Fabian
(1990: 7) calls a “cultural performance,” that catalyzes collaborative
ethnographic research around a specific topic. Putting on a performance,
or in this case building an acción, creates the conditions to generate
specific ethnographic knowledge that arises from and addresses that
specific performance event (Fabian 1990; Kazubowski-Houston 2010).
Our topic would be the disappeared and missing normalistas. Because
the acción was predicated on the impossible demand that the normalistas
be returned alive, it compelled speculation on what possible and impos-
sible scenarios the students might imagine regarding the normalistas’
reappearance, alive or dead. Accordingly, the acción became a means to
collaboratively explore the possibilities—and as I would learn impossibili-
ties—sparked by the demand to return the missing Ayotzinapa normalistas
alive.
Importantly, the acción was proposed by the students and was driven
by their interest in creating a public performance. Without the students’
desire to enact a public intervention, this performance ethnography would
not exist. The acción therefore became a small-scale version of what Pink
et al. (2017b: 176) call “stakeholder ethnography,” a collaborative research
process that acknowledges the various stakeholders involved in transdis-
ciplinary research projects, as well as their different intentions, stakes,
30 B. BATCHELOR
power relations and goals. The instructor was happy that her previous
work served as a roadmap for this co-production, and that the students
would have the possibility of experiencing such a performance. In doing
the acción, the students could create an evocative public performance,
one that also generated ethnographic considerations of political possibil-
ities and impossibilities. The acción was thus a shared and collaborative
performance with multiple, overlapping intentions: research, education
and activism. In demanding the alive return of the dead normalistas, the
students manifested political possibilities out of what they imaginatively
considered to be an impossible scenario.
Ayotzinapa 43
On September 26, 2014, 43 students of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural
Teachers’ College in Ayotzinapa, Mexico were disappeared. The students
were traveling to Mexico City to participate in annual political rallies to
commemorate the victims of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre in which the
Mexican army killed an unknown number of university students. The
Ayotzinapa students had made this trek before; the college was known
for its activist networks and history of political protest (Pederson 2016:
79–80). A group of roughly one-hundred students—known as normal-
istas based on the category of education that they were enrolled in—had
commandeered two buses. As the buses made their way through the
town of Iguala in the state of Guerrero, local police stopped and/or
attacked the buses (Mason 2017: 109). According to survivor testimonies
and information pieced together by journalists, the initial clashes with
the police killed six students from the school (as well as a couple of
bystanders) and injured several more. The students fractured into smaller
groups and some fled the area and took shelter around the town (Semple
2016; Goldman 2015). Some of the students were arrested by the police,
beaten (possibly tortured), and brought to the local police station. After
this point, the students were never seen or heard from again: the police
turned them over to members of Guerreros Unidos cartel, and they were
summarily disappeared (Semple 2016; Jimenez 2016: 151).5
The acts of violence in Iguala and disappearance of the 43 students
sparked protest and outrage throughout Mexico. The national govern-
ment, perhaps embarrassed by the scale of violence, tried to quickly
solve and absolve itself of the matter. A rushed investigation into the
atrocity by Mexico’s Attorney General concluded that members of the
Guerreros Unidos cartel executed the students and then incinerated

their bodies at a garbage dump, afterward disposing of the remains in
a nearby river (Goldman 2014; Semple and Malkin 2016). Mexico’s
Attorney General referred to this account of the disappearances as the
“historical truth”: it was a localized drug-related crime in which the
students had been murdered, incinerated and then disposed of by a cartel
(Goldman 2015). An independent international investigation into the
disappearances, however, found that the government’s account of how
the normalistas’ bodies were disposed of came from witnesses whose
confessions were forced through torture (Semple and Malkin 2016; GIEI
2016). A second panel of international experts, asked to investigate the
crime further, deemed the government’s “historical truth” as scientifically
impossible: the fire that reduced the students’ bodies to ash needed to be
larger and burn longer than the official account reports (Goldman 2015;
Pederson 2016: 80). This led the government to begrudgingly reopen its
investigation. To date, the remains of only two of the students have been
identified; the rest of the students remain missing.
Collaborative Ethnography in Acción

To construct the memorial in the plaza, the students use flowers, flower
petals and pine needles (acículas ). They grab handfuls of red rose petals
from a bag while others grab handfuls of green pine needles from a burlap
sack. They spread the petals and the needles on the plaza floor forming
two concentric circles, about fifteen feet wide. The group then outline the
pine needles’ outer border with long and thin yellow flower petals creating
a tricolored circle—red, green and yellow—that outlines the memorial.
On the east end of the circle they place a sign stating “17 mesas sin
justicar” (17 months without justice), and surround it with red petals.
They place another sign with simply “43” written in large numerals on
the opposite end. In the circle’s center, the students scatter red, pink and
yellow petals. They place a single lit candle and a large white tulip with
a thick green stem. The two blown-up photos in the center each feature
one of the normalistas. To finish the memorial, they take smaller, indi-
vidual printouts featuring the faces of the remaining 41 normalistas and
place them in the circle, around the two blown-up photos and also on
the flower petals and pine needles. The students continue to use rocks to
anchor the photos in place. At some point, the guitar has swapped hands
but the new guitarist continues to strum.
32 B. BATCHELOR
Fig. 2.2 Students construct the memorial by placing pine needles and flower
petals in a circle shape on the plaza floor (Photo by Brian Batchelor)
As an ethnographic collaboration, the acción consisted of two distinct

phases. First, it involved a facilitated discussion with four of the seventeen
students in the class that prompted them to address various possibil-
ities and impossibilities regarding what happened and will happen to
the normalistas. This stage grew out of the conversations and discus-
sions I was already having with the students. Secondly, the students
undertook the performance of the acción itself which generated its
own series of imaginative speculations. In conversation with information
provided through our discussions, the acción, as practice, co-produced
ethnographic knowledge around possible and impossible worlds. These
two methodologies—discussion and performance—operate as collabora-
tive tools to create the conditions in which speculative, possible and
impossible scenarios can be investigated.
Much of the logistics and planning occurred the same week as the
acción itself, and it would use many of the same performance elements
as the acciónes against femicide such as pictures of the missing/dead,
flowers, acículas and public mourning. That said, as the acción unfolded,
the students themselves improvised certain moments and details (the
guitar playing and rocks to hold down photos are two examples). The
acción’s overall score, which the instructor developed and finalized in
consultation with the students, consisted of building a circle, placing signs
and photos within the memorial space, writing messages to the missing
students, memorializing (taking time to actively remember or not forget
the disappeared), saying goodbye to the memorial, and then departing.
I purposefully decided to not participate in the acción proper as I did
not feel that it was my place to participate in a memorial for disappear-
ances that I, at the time, knew little about. I also did not want (perhaps
egotistically) my white-skinned, ginger-haired body to detract (visual)
attention away from the acción itself. Instead, we decided that I would
assist in the acción by transporting supplies and by serving as a photog-
rapher, documenting the acción for both the school’s records and for the
students.
Fig. 2.3 Two students place identification photos of four of the 43 missing
normalistas on the aciculas (Photo by Brian Batchelor)
34 B. BATCHELOR
Demanding the Impossible:

We Want Them Back Alive
Prior to the acción, I had an extended conversation with four of the
seventeen students in the class, focusing on what they thought about
the incident and what they thought might happen in terms of the
government’s official investigation. The students had different levels of
familiarity with Ayotzinapa: José had followed the updates and news
regarding Ayotzinapa; Marisol and Uriel knew about the disappearances
but had only tangentially followed the unfolding investigations; and Rosy,
one of the more politically engaged students had attended protests related
to the disappearances. This conversation took the form of an unstructured
interview where I would ask a question and the students would respond
but would also prompt and respond to each other.6
I started the discussion by asking the students about the phrase Vivos
se los llevaron, vivos los queremos. The demand to return the normal-
istas alive featured prominently in the various protests surrounding the
disappearances of the 43 normalistas across Mexico. It would also feature
prominently in the students’ acción. The phrase itself was not unique to
the Ayotzinapa protests but emerged from circuits of protest against the
forced disappearances of people by state governments in Latin America,
specifically protests from the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and
from El Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo in Guatemala (Brett 2008; Taylor 2002:
155). In making and performing this demand, were the students just reit-
erating a trope or utterance typical of performance protest in their acción?
Interestingly, the students did not believe that the normalistas were still
alive. In fact, many of their comments to me indicated a pragmatic, even
cynical, outlook regarding the disappearances. Why even do the acción
then, I wondered? Why demand something that is impossible? Despite
their full acknowledgment that the normalistas were mostly likely dead,
the students still felt it important to demand their alive return. Rather
than mimicking other forms of protest, the demand became an imagi-
native prompt through which the students would articulate a politics of
impossibility.
During our discussions, the students outlined their skepticism that
the government would be able—or even willing—to resolve the disap-
pearances or bring justice to those responsible. Marisol suggested that
perhaps Mexico is too busy with its own problems, its more “immediate
concerns,” to direct more attention toward the atrocity, and force the
government into an honest investigation. Uriel told me that, while he

did not understand all the shifting and missing details of the disappear-
ances, “the ways that the government has behaved in their investigation
make me think that they are perhaps involved in the disappearances.” He
then corrected himself and clarified that he feels the cartels are respon-
sible for the murders while the government is responsible for the ongoing
cover-ups. Rosy agreed with Uriel, noting that, because the government
and cartels are entwined, the government will “never admit their own
responsibility,” and will always “hide the truth.” José concurred with the
connection between cartel and government, adding that, “I think that
they knew what was happening and didn’t do anything or maybe even
agreed with the students’ disappearance.” Rosy picked up this thought,
noting that the normalistas had a history of being politically disruptive
and subversive. This is one reason, she argued, why the government does
not “care about the disappearances, or about finding those responsible.”
Perhaps the demand to return the normalistas alive then becomes a
demand that the government “care,” as Rosy stated, or shift its atti-
tudes about the missing normalistas. As Rosy articulated to me later in
our conversation, the accion was, for her, about communicating to the
government and to the public that “we will not forget” and “we will not
stop the fight to hold the perpetrators accountable.” Marisol, likewise,
was skeptical that the truth will ever be found: “It seems very complex
with many different pieces and because there are so many parts to this
story I don’t know. I don’t see that it will ever be whole.” In this way,
the students’ demand was directed at a government that seemed more
interested in covering up its own complicity in or connections to the
atrocity, than in any attempt to bring justice to those responsible for the
kidnapping and murders.
However, given the students’ skepticism that the government even
wanted to uncover the truth of what happened to the 43 disappeared
normalistas, I also read their demand that the normalistas be returned
alive as a means of keeping alive the possibility that the normalistas’ bodies
are returned at all. The small amount of hope the students communi-
cated to me was that the international group of experts (GIEI) assigned
to investigate the incident would find some or all of the remains. “All we
can hope for is that the students are found,” Rosy said. When she said
“students” here, she referred not to their live bodies but to their remains.
José reiterated this assessment: “You see, the officials want the bodies,
the whole situation, to go away and to never have existed. That is why
36 B. BATCHELOR
the normalistas remain missing, disappeared.” That is, demanding that

the normalistas be returned alive, or returned at all, counters the govern-
ment’s claim that the bodies have already been found and incinerated
(a claim, remember, that the GIEI has outlined as impossible). As José,
Uriel, Rosy and Marisol pointed out to me, if the bodies are still missing,
then they need to be found and the government has to acknowledge their
existence. For the students, then, the impossible demand that the normal-
istas return alive becomes a means of thinking about the possibility of the
normalistas returning at all. However, for these four students in Chiapas,
the idea that the normalistas be returned alive by a corrupt and uncaring
government, responsible for the disappearances in the first place, remains
a distinct impossibility. Moreover, for them it seems unlikely that the full
truth surrounding the incident will ever be revealed. Yet, the impossible
scenario in which the normalistas are returned alive nevertheless enabled
the students to generate scenarios of possibility: that the government
suddenly start taking the investigation more seriously and normalistas’
remains be identified.
Messages to the Missing

Upon completing the pine and flower circles and placing a series of signs
within, the students gather together and distribute pens and pieces of note
paper among each other. On the paper, each student writes a personal
message, a way of articulating the whole situation. The instructor provides
them with a series of prompts: “Something that you want to say to the
normalistas”; “Write something that you want people [in San Cristóbal]
to know.” Some compose their notes immediately while others pause
before scribbling words down, using the ground, a book or a leg as a
writing surface. Many write more than one message. Once the messages
have been composed, the students stand around the pine and flower petal
circle, looking inward. Then, in a sort of procession, the students place
their messages in the memorial, often adjacent to or near the photos
of the disappeared. They again use small rocks to keep the messages
from blowing away. Once the last message has been placed, the students
assemble around the circle; some sit and some kneel. Some sit alone
while others cluster. The guitarist continues to play a soft melody but
the students sit in solemn silence, staring at and taking in the memorial
that they have constructed.
Fig. 2.4 Images depicting two of the normalistas (one a photo and the other
a silhouette) lay interspersed with the students’ messages to them. The messages
read (from right to left) “We are with you” and “more than one year without
answers” (Photo by Brian Batchelor)
The messages that the students write and place as part of the acción
are examples of their own imaginative processes and reflect the possibil-
ities and impossibilities the acción implicated: to consider what it means
to demand the alive return of the students, to demand justice, and
to refuse to accept the government’s “historical truth.” The messages
therefore become a version of a “performative address” that confronts
“messy, shifting and incidental imaginings as they emerge in the present”
(Kazubowski-Houston and Magnat 2018: 370). These messages further
operate as what Sneath et al. (2009) term technologies of the imagination:
the emergent and indeterminate ways under which we conceptualize and
grapple with possible and unforeseen worlds (19). If the students articu-
lated a particular politics of impossibility about the normalistas’ return in
their conversation with me, then, their performance of the acción shifted
how they imagined the possible and impossible. Specifically, the messages
that they write showcase how imaginings of possibility emerge from and
38 B. BATCHELOR
are filtered through the acción’s function as both public memorial and
political intervention.
Acción as Public Memorial

A few of the comments are mournful calls to remember the missing
students as a group; these reflect José, Marisol, Uriel and Rosy’s under-
standings that the normalistas are dead, and indicate processes of memo-
rialization. Paired with the students’ silent performance afterward, they
frame the acción as a public memorial for the 43, and ask the public to
mourn alongside the students.
Every shed tear. … Every tear will be paid for (A cross is drawn in the top
right corner)
The 43 missing students will always be remembered
Public memorials commemorate lives lost and in doing so attend to the

social issues that lead to those the loss of those lives. For Jack Santino
(2004: 364), public memorials are personalized acts of remembrance or
commemoration that are made and filtered through the public sphere,
thereby conjoining the dead with the social conditions that caused their
deaths. As public sites that bring attention to instances of untimely death,
public memorializations can incite or instantiate social change (Santino
2004: 366). Diana Taylor (2002: 161) states that such acts compel
participation, identification and interpretation, processes that bridge the
personal memories of those doing the commemoration with a larger
public collective memory. When made public, personal acts of memory
and mourning do not just call out social and political injustice but also
create the possible conditions for address or redress. For the acción then,
the public acts of memorialization written in the messages and placed in
the memorial are also acts of protest as they illuminate the social and
political conditions that have disappeared, and continue to disappear, the
43 normalistas.
Many of the students also direct messages at specific normalista and
attach these messages to the printed photos that their comments are
intended for. These messages are acts of memorialization—refusals to
forget that particular disappeared individual and the larger group. The
act of writing is a performance of memory here and so too is the act
of taking the message, and placing it next to the photo of a murdered

student.
I am with you. I will not forget you
Always in my heart
You still live Ángel! (to José Ángel Navarrete González)
We will never forget you!
We are with you
I’m with you José Ángel. I will not forget you! (to José Ángel Campos
Cantor)
That these messages articulate a being with or co-presence between

students performing the acción and the missing normalistas further
outlines the ways in which the acción is a public memorial. In this case,
the acción, with its photos of the dead surrounded by pine and flowers,
takes on the characteristics of the familial altars (ofrendas ) and deco-
rated graves created in Chiapas during the Día de los muertos (Day of
the Dead) festivities. The celebrations during Día de los muertos serve
as public and private performances of remembrance—the souls of the
dead are believed to return and intermingle with their living friends and
families; to welcome the dead back, the families build ornate ofrendas
in their homes (Cano and Mysk 2004). In Chiapas, they do so by
using pine, flower petals (most commonly orange marigolds), incense,
candles, food and drink. Although the acción did not include food and
drinks, the remaining elements nevertheless reference the ofrendas that
Chiapanecan families build during their Día de los Muertos celebrations.
Certainly, the students and public would have recognized the overlap-
ping aesthetics. The students’ subsequent silence could also be interpreted
as mourning; the crowd, joining in and watching the scene unfold, also
become mourners. As a performance, the acción functions as a staged
public ofrenda in which the dead normalistas are invited to return and
comingle with the students. It therefore stages the impossible: the return
of the dead normalistas, but in which mourners acknowledge that the
normalistas are dead. That is, this is a return that maintains a gap between
the impossible alive return of the normalistas and the conditions in which
40 B. BATCHELOR
they can possibly return. By asking the impossible—that the missing

normalistas be present with the students—these public acts of memori-
alization demand social introspection and critique. We, as co-mourners,
are compelled to ask why the 43 are dead. Why are they missing? Why
are they not (physically) here?
Acción as Political Intervention

Many of the students saw the acción as primarily a form of political
protest: a public call against the impunity of a Mexican government that
is very likely obscuring its own culpability in the disappearances, at the
same time as it hinders international investigations into the incident. In
this manner, the acción can be read as a “radical street performance,”
a politically engaged form of public theater that bridges “imagined and
real actions” (what could be and what is) in order to contest reality
and evoke changed attitudes and behaviors (Cohen Cruz 1998: 1). The
acción utilized the interrogative nature of public memorial to direct atten-
tion toward the 43 and the government’s problematic investigation into
the disappearances. As described above, many of the students I talked
to (including the four I interviewed) did not think that Mexico’s current
corrupt judicial and political system was willing to properly investigate the
incident. They nevertheless saw the acción as politically generative: a tool
to address, showcase and disrupt these corrupt systems. For the students,
the acción became a means to communicate both anger and indignity.
More than a year and no answers
It breaks my soul to know and live in this unjust world
Why is life so cruel? It is already more than a year since they disappeared.
We do not forget
Ayotzinapa lives, the fight continues …
Furthering the idea of struggle against the impossible possibility of

altering unjust systems, still other messages draw connections between the
people involved in the acción (both students and public) and the missing
normalistas. These messages act as direct appeals to each other as well as
to the public who engaged with the acción. Overlapping with some of
the messages listed above, these messages indicate a desire for change by
appealing to a public’s willingness to remember and actively engage with
the problematic politics that led to a reluctant government investigation,
as well as the overall political context in which the normalistas can be
murdered by local authorities and illegal cartels with little to no trace or
evidence.
they = us
As a mother, I feel what you are feeling right now
Think about the others
Look around you and you will see that 43 students are missing
The public becomes participants in the acción as witnesses to this

yearning: the performative activity of refusing to forget, to buy the
“historical truth” or to accept injustice. The performance sutures the
imaginings of those doing the acción (in this case the students) with
the public, building a critical reflexivity or social awareness (Chávez and
Difarnecio 2014: 37). By demanding justice and appealing to the public,
the acción serves as a performance protest that attempts to intervene
in and produce alternative future politics. As a performance that illu-
minates “the possibilities that grate against injustice,” the acción can
be considered as a form of D. Soyini Madison’s (2010: 159) concept
of performances of possibility: performances that mobilize audience and
performer for political and social change toward a more just and equitable
world (Madison 1998: 276–78). However, remembering the impossible
demand that the normalistas be returned alive, and reading the acción
as a public memorial that stages the return of the dead students, I see
the acción specifically as a performance of impossibility, performances that
address and imagine the impossible and, in doing so, create spaces of
possibility.
“Look Around You and You Will

See”: Performances of Impossibility
The students sit in silence around the memorial they have created, and
even the guitarist stops playing to sit contemplatively. They are not still:
42 B. BATCHELOR
they shift in their seats—sometimes propping themselves up, sometimes

standing to stretch—yet their focus remains directed at the memorial.
Their look is sullen, but also determined. Some of them wipe away tears.
A few of them shiver—perhaps because of the cool wind or perhaps as an
embodied response to the acción. My friend, the instructor, comforts one
of the students who has started to shake and cry. By this time a crowd
has formed around them. Most members of the public keep a respectful
distance, wanting to observe but not interrupt the scene. A few people fill
in gaps of the circle, looking at the photos and reading the messages left
to the 43. They come and go. I flitter around the outside of the students
and the crowd and take photographs. The wind occasionally whips up
long hair at the same as it flutters the petals and paper leaflets weighed
down by rocks. The students sit like this, in silence, for fifteen, maybe
twenty minutes. Then they slowly get up. After some quick deliberations,
checking in with each other, they exit the memorial’s periphery, gather
their supplies and leave the plaza, leaving the material elements of the
memorial behind.
Fig. 2.5 A student sits in silence on the acción’s periphery (Photo by Brian
Batchelor)
The students’ performance of silence during the acción drew atten-

tion toward the words and messages that they wrote, as well as to
the faces of the disappeared normalistas. Balkenhol (2016) notes that
rather than marking the “absence of speech,” silence can operate as a
particular language that “mobilises compassion in particular” (284). The
silence performed by the students could be seen as a form of what
Kazubowski-Houston (2018: 416) calls “quiet theater,” which refines our
attunement to a performance’s minute and detailed specificities: “Speech,
facial expressions, gestures, movements, breath.” Kazubowski-Houston
reads the silence that fills such forms of performance as facilitating “a
form of radical politics through affect, projective improvisation and empa-
thy” (2018: 411). In the messages to the missing normalistas, thoughts
of co-presence are often communicated alongside thoughts of memory
and the refusal to forget. “I am with you” and the “I will not forget
you” are taken together. The acción here opens a space for memory
and imagination to comingle. Robbins (2010), summarizing Ricoeur’s
philosophy of the imagination (1994), notes that the imagination can be
both reproductive—imagining things that already exist in new permu-
tations and combinations—as well as productive—imagining things that
do not yet exist (12). Death, he states, is intimately connected to the
imagination because it “hinges” these two processes together: in tasking
us to remember a person who no longer exists, processes of remem-
brance demand that we instead “recall them in innovative ways” (312).
During the acción, the silence brings about a particular attunement to the
messages and to the silent performers: to the compassionate and imagina-
tive evocation of those who are missing and no longer here. The acción,
as a performance of remembrance, recalls and re-imagines the missing in
innovative ways.
Importantly, the students never had a live image of the normalistas to
hold on to or to recall. All they had were the fragments of information
and images of the normalistas left in the wake of their disappearance.
What they did have, however, were shared commonalities and experi-
ences. When describing one of the motivating factors behind doing the
acción, Uriel noted that many of the students identified, in some way,
with the normalistas.
Uriel: Like the normalistas, we are students. And we gather … we come

from many places and we gather for our school. [ … ] We have our
44 B. BATCHELOR
communities that we come from, and we come together as a commu-

nity to learn together. We then go back to our communities bringing our
knowledge with us. They came from their communities to Ayotzinapa to
learn and then were to go back to their communities.
Uriel here outlines the similarities in how students from each school
gather in a central location (San Cristóbal and Ayotzinapa, respectively)
for educational purposes with the intention of taking what they have
learned back to their communities. Moreover, in our discussions, Rosy,
Marisol, José and Uriel also noted that they felt a shared background
to the normalistas because they both identified as campesinos from poor,
agriculture-based, indigenous communities (González-Flores 2018: 493).
Moreover, Rosy also noted that she thought that the government did
not care about what happened to the students because they were poor
and indigenous. “If they do not care about them, why should they care
about us?” she asked. The comment “they = us,” written on a piece of
paper and placed as part of the acción takes on a literal meaning, and
the acción becomes a more personal project of expressing and sharing
these connections. The students’ fabulation of co-presence points toward
the imaginative recalling of absent bodies—bodies that no longer exist
but are made present in different forms, whether in photos, silence,
or the perceived connections and real commonalities between students
and normalistas. In both imagining and demanding the impossible, the
students make possible the return of the disappeared, or at least make
them present.
I wonder, too, if the phrases, “I am with you,” and “we are with you,”
as well as the “quiet theater” (Kazubowski-Houston 2018) of the acción,
are also attempts to reconcile with the violence and atrocity of the Iguala
massacre, as well as the uncertainty and speculation around what happens
now in the ongoing investigations and the lack of reconciliation or reso-
lution. In the aftermath of the Ayotzinapa disappearances, searches for
the normalistas turned up not their bodies but other bodies that had
been disappeared and placed in clandestine graves in Guerrero’s coun-
tryside (Guillén et al. 2018; Jimenez 2016: 121; Pederson 2016: 80).
The hills surrounding Iguala alone have revealed 175 bodies spread across
fifty-four grave sites (Guillén et al. 2018). These graves mark a larger,
systemic problem of forced disappearances amidst Mexico’s ongoing war
against drugs. There has been an estimated 22,000 to 25,000 disappeared
persons in Mexico, between 2006, when Mexico initiated its drug war,
Fig. 2.6 The culmination of acción with flowers and petals intermingling with
photos of the missing, messages from the students, demands for justice, and
pebbles anchoring them to the plaza’s floor (Photo by Brian Batchelor)
and 2014, when the Ayotzinapa students disappeared (González-Flores

2018: 14; Guillén et al. 2018). In a Mexico where people disappear and
are buried in clandestine graves, where the government does not care or,
worse, is involved in the disappearances, and where bodies only reappear
when found by searchers searching for other bodies, perhaps the students
can only imagine justice as an impossibility. Alternatively, if the acción’s
performative remembrance of the normalistas recalls them in innovative
ways, then perhaps its staging of impossibility also recalls justice and hope
in new forms as well, and the students’ performance of impossibility was
a means of imagining justice and hope as possible.
Interventions and Difference Making

Sarah Green (2014: 5) articulates that interventions are marked by the
differences and differentiations they bring about, and that particularities
matter when considering the effects and implications of said intervention.
She notes that such differences are difficult to fully gauge as they ripple
through dynamic and diverse social relations, making such interventions
46 B. BATCHELOR
decidedly uncertain (12). This is true in the case of this acción as it would
be impossible to account for differences and differentiations within public
attitudes. However, the acción was not just directed at changing public
perception, but it also operated on a more personal scale. In performing
acts of remembrance, in refusing to forget, in marking the silence and
in tuning attention toward the absences, the students established connec-
tions between themselves and the missing normalistas. They also, perhaps,
formulated the conditions for possibility from a scenario that they clearly
felt was impossible.
Upon commencing fieldwork in 2015, I would not have imagined
that I would be writing about students’ responses to Ayotzinapa; indeed,
prior to as well as after the acción, much of my work with the students
centered around issues related to tourism and theater. Nevertheless, this
collaboration necessarily worked its way into my research. Ethnography,
Fabian (2007: 101) notes, is an intervention into “practices of memory”
because it causes us to remember, collect and forget differently. Working
with the students on this acción has led me to remember differently.
When we conversed, Rosy, Uriel, José and Marisol asked me if Ayotzi-
napa had made news headlines in my home—Canada. If Canadians had
heard about Ayotzinapa at all? I said some Canadians had while others
hadn’t yet and I asked if there was anything that they would want to
say to Canadians about the Ayotzinapa 43. What would they want us to
know? Marisol, after taking a moment to formulate an answer, said, “It
is important to know what has happened within this country. I want you
to tell people there [in Canada] about this. The more people who know
what is happening, the less that the government can ignore it.” “We want
people to know about the disappeared,” José told me. “We want people to
know that we are missing forty-three students, and even more than that.”
This chapter is a response to their request. This chapter—the communica-
tive result of a performance ethnographic project—recalls the disappeared
normalistas in a different form. They are still missing. We want them back.
Notes
1. My adoption as a classroom collaborator came at the students’ request and
was a decision that they made in consultation with the class instructor.
2. While the original intention was to perform the acción on the year and a
half anniversary, the students were unable to meet that month because of
Easter and Holy Week vacations. The date of the acción was pushed ahead
by one month.
3. I worked with several people, but my primary collaborators are two
performers from a local dance and theatre spectacular directed at tourist
audiences; an Italian expat and owner of a popular restaurant; a waitress
and journalism student at the same restaurant; and a domicile worker who
cares for a number of expat homes. I met them through friends and each
one took an interest in my project and shared their stories with me.
4. Because its students had livelihoods, families and obligations outside San
Cristóbal, the college would run courses for one week of every month over
the course of a year; after four years the students would receive a degree.
For the week that their classes where scheduled, students would stay on
campus and take classes in three-hour blocks from early morning to late
evening over the seven days.
5. Much of the information about the events surrounding the Iguala massacre
and forced disappearances has emerged from journalistic investigations
built on testimony from survivors and witnesses (see Goldman 2014,
2015; Hernández 2018; Pederson 2016; Semple 2016). Additionally, a
report by the Group of Independent Experts (Grupo Interdisciplinario de
Expertos y Expertas Independientes, GIEI), an investigative body established
in agreement between the survivor’s families, the Mexican government,
and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, aggregates much
of this information, and adds forensic and legal evidence surrounding the
disappearances (GIEI 2016).
6. The students’ responses are verbatim, and I have translated them with help
from the course instructor. However, in the following section I paraphrase
and summarize much of our discussion for the sake of brevity because I
want to focus more on the students’ work in the acción. Participants are
identified using pseudonyms.
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CHAPTER 3
Put Your Body into It: Exploring Imagination

Through Enskillment in Outdoor Women’s
Camps
Jodie Asselin
Becoming Outdoor Women (BOW) is a North American program that

trains women through experiential learning in skills such as hunting,
trapping, fishing, and wilderness survival. In camps lasting three to five
days, women live and eat together, take enskillment courses, and engage
in social activities. The camps disrupt the participants’ daily routines,
creating a liminal space where they are able to imagine other possibilities
for themselves. BOW’s primary aim is to increase women’s participation
in outdoor activities by improving their confidence with hands-on expe-
rience. Its design is based on research suggesting that women’s minority
participation in hunting and fishing could be surmounted through hands-
on experience (Thomas and Peterson 1990).
J. Asselin (B)
Department of Anthropology, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, AB,
Canada
e-mail: Jodie.asselin@uleth.ca

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4_3
52 J. ASSELIN
This chapter explores the connection between imagination and the

embodied experiences of BOW participants. Like McLean (2007), I
understand imagination to be an active component of experience and
perception, and like Walter (1988), I understand imagination as a sense
in itself. I am particularly interested in the link between the sensual and
active component of experience, and the possibilities and contingencies
that lie just on the edge of what those senses cultivate, the place that
Crapanzano (2004) describes as existing beyond the horizon or in the
hinterland. To this end, rather than focus on program outcomes, an area
already examined (Hargrove 2010; Welch 2004; Lueck 1995), I address
the process of embodied enskillment and how participants make sense of
the imagined possibilities it creates.
I was drawn to the topic of imagined pasts and futures by the move-
ments and voices of participants as they engaged in acts of learning while
contemplating both lost childhood opportunities and uncertain futures.
Across three programs in different Canadian provinces and territories,
women shared their worries over environmental uncertainty and food
safety and contemplated their own capacities and trajectories as they shot
guns, skinned animals, lit fires, and tied knots. Ideas do not simply float
about, they acquire substance through discourse and performance(Wolf
1999), and as such, I took these ponderings seriously.
For some of the women, the process of enskillment within BOW alters
“what lies beyond the horizon, with the possibilities it offers us, with the
licit and illicit desires it triggers, the plays of power it suggests, the dread
it can cause—the uncertainty, the sense of contingency, of change—the
exaltation, the thrill of the unknown it can provoke” (Crapanzano 2004:
14). Through the performance of BOW activities, what ideas are feasible
and desirable for participants can shift. Embodied experience becomes
the catalyst to explore and express the possibilities and limitations held
within the individual and group. In this way, participants reformulate
the practical participation-inspired goals of BOW’s original creator. While
Thomas’ goals in initiating BOW were to increase women’s participa-
tion in hunting, her own autobiography of becoming a hunter (Thomas
1997) speaks to the deeper transformations that are part of outdoor
learning. Given the centrality of embodied experience for participants
and the original organizer, physical engagement is the conduit through
which researchers can best gain access to the imagined possibilities shared
between participants.
3 PUT YOUR BODY INTO IT: EXPLORING IMAGINATION … 53
In this chapter, I argue we need to explore how people imagine beyond

the visual, specifically the role of tactile experience in contemplating other
places and times. In the BOW camps, the women’s physical bodies facili-
tated their imaginative practice and were the conduit through which their
narratives emerged. Walking is well established as a research method (Gray
1999; Moretti 2008), and I propose that the shooting, paddling, skin-
ning, and other activities of BOW participants link them to the same
learning and research possibilities.
This focus on the “sensory beyond vision” appropriately fits with an
environmentally-driven enskillment program. Climate change and social
unrest are the consequences of unsustainable and unequal human devel-
opment in the era of the Anthropocene. Ingold (2002) draws our atten-
tion to the entanglements between the human and non-human world and
our experience and enskillment within it as very much embodied. Culhane
(2016) likewise presses anthropologists to remember that humans are
embodied multisensory beings and to stretch our ethnographic curiosity
toward the non-visual. In this context, exploring ways of knowing and
of shaping ecological subjectivities is central to better understanding the
contingent futures people face and the decisions they make as a conse-
quence. BOW is an everyday example of how people work to shape their
world when faced with the possible and probable future worlds they
imagine and central to this process is the labor of their bodies. To explore
the connection between the camp participants’ embodied experiences and
their imagined elsewheres, I first address the context and method of
research in BOW camps, discuss the imagined futures of women as well
as their pasts, and then finish with a contemplation of what it means now.
Exploring BOW: Context and Method

Becoming Outdoor Women was initiated in 1991 in Wisconsin and
has since expanded to over forty American states and seven Canadian
provinces and territories. Programs typically last three to five days in
which participants live and eat together while completing selected courses.
In 2016, I attended BOW camps in three Canadian provinces and territo-
ries, fully participating in the program and interviewing participants and
organizers. I took hands-on courses in wilderness survival, gun safety, trap
shooting, handgun and rifle target practice, archery, game care, and trap-
ping, as well as shared meals and accommodation with the other enrolled
women. Each course contained four to ten participants, and could last a
54 J. ASSELIN
few hours or an entire day. Participants were from a range of rural and
urban areas, some were local while others had come as far as 300 km from
the closest large city. Ages ranged from early twenties to late seventies
and education levels varied from high school to graduate school. Employ-
ment type was likewise far-ranging, with University professor (other than
myself), administrative workers, healthcare providers, correctional officers,
waitresses, students, geologists, farmers, stay at home parents, unem-
ployed, etc. Participants were predominantly white (also reflected in US
programs [Lueck 1995; Welch 2004]), and were often though not exclu-
sively married. While two participants stated they had partners of the same
sex, I cannot comment on gender diversity in terms of identity or rela-
tionships except to say that the dominant relationship in conversation was
often taken to be cisgendered male/female. The majority of participants
had previous outdoor experience, often having grown up in hunting and
fishing families. Program costs in Canada range from $200–300 (C$)
for lodging, food, and programming. The program is often held over
a weekend, allowing participants to take fewer days off work. While the
cost and time needed would make the program inaccessible for some,
many commented on its affordability. The atmosphere of camps was fun
and relaxed, with meals provided for participants and ample social time.
While learning, this mix of women often openly discussed their capac-
ities, childhoods, and anxieties, contributing to a sense-making narrative
based on shared experience (Asselin 2019). Interviews were often an
extension of these conversations, as I asked participants to expand upon
views or stories shared during the program. Thirty-seven semi-structured
interviews took place in the week following each program, with the excep-
tion of participants who asked to be interviewed during or immediately
post-program. My questions focused on the women’s expectations, moti-
vations, prior outdoor experiences, views of family and friends, and on
their BOW experience.
Anthropological fieldwork rests on a foundation of participant obser-
vation, a process which minimally requires physical and social proximity
to the daily lives of people, but more often aims for a deeper immer-
sion that enables the researcher to directly experience for herself the lives
of participants (Emerson et al. 1995). However, the method of partici-
pant observation often privileges the visual with “participation” lending
the prestige of having been there. As practices and ways of knowing are
also shaped by the affective and the sensorial they should be central to
the method of participant observation, and as Culhane argues, key to a
method of imagination (2016: 11). Privileging imagination offers us an

opportunity to explore a “source of new provocations, challenges and
possibilities” (McLean 2007: 8) made apparent through material and
embodied engagement with the world. In this instance, a participant
insisting on hands-on experience was a demand to fully participate in the
world in ways previously denied to them. It was a political act that opened
a window not only onto new skills but new possible worlds.
As an example, in one program I spent an afternoon learning how to
butcher an animal with four other women and two instructors, a husband
and wife who were avid hunters. The session began by driving to a local
farm and watching while the instructors chose a goat, shot it in the head,
and slit its throat. Participants then held its warm body over a tall plastic
bucket as its blood drained, congealing into a thick mass. We hauled the
goat’s body into the back of the truck and returned to the camp where
we spent the next hours gutting, skinning, and butchering the animal
under the watchful eye of our instructors. Participants were task focused
as they were cutting away at the sinew, bone, and flesh of the carcass—
they were here to learn a skill. They discussed the angle and pressure of
the knife, the feel of the process, each taking turns as others watched.
Throughout, participants talked of what brought them to this moment,
how they felt about hunting or eating meat, their general feelings about
the process (one participant was uncomfortable with the death), and when
they might do this again. The talk was sense-making: What am I capable
of? What brought me here? Why has this capacity not otherwise been
cultivated? Despite hearing the descriptions from other participants, each
time a woman began their turn they had get the feel for the job to be
done.
Many women in the camps, including those who participated in this
activity, were also actively contemplating their relationship to food. Wild
or small-farm animals stood starkly in contrast to grocery store meat that
was understood as environmentally unsustainable and potentially unavail-
able in times of social upheaval. Rather than representing any specific
symbolic relationship, say between people and nature, gutting and skin-
ning a goat was about exploring possibilities on the individual and social
level and each participant drew their own conclusions on what it meant to
them. Those moments were central to this study; the process of actually
doing, touching, smelling, and later eating, was central to understanding
the imagined futures and remembered childhoods that the activity evoked
in participants and in myself.
56 J. ASSELIN
Imagining Uncertain Futures: Chemicals,

Disaster, and the Zombie Apocalypse
As participants arrived at the beginning of my first BOW camp they were
assigned a shared cabin, given a BOW shirt, and a name tag. After finding
my cabin I introduced myself as a researcher to the half-dozen women
likewise organizing their belongings. Hearing that I was interested in
participant motivations, a woman in her thirties called Julie here, told
me and our cabin mates that she and her husband wanted to own a small
farm. She had been learning from her neighbor who raised geese, had
taken a masters gardener course, and had completed a hunter’s safety
course. When she joked about taking BOW to prepare for the coming
zombie apocalypse the other participants laughed along with her. Later
that day, I ate dinner in the dining hall while sitting with a woman in her
late fifties who worked in the city but planned to retire in two years. She
and her husband had set aside a little money and planned to move north
and “live off the land.” Through BOW she was building the necessary
skills as she felt it was time to become self-sufficient in such an insecure
world. Later I met two women, both in their mid-thirties and mothers of
small children. Each referenced a coming zombie apocalypse when they
heard I was researching participant motivations.
These tongue-in-cheek references were common in all three programs
and were often accompanied by longer conversations about uncertain
futures and plans that were already (or could be) in place to mitigate
potential troubles. While playful, these zombie references entwined both
concerns over material end-of-days possibilities and a symbolic critique of
contemporary society as unsustainable on both a political and environ-
mental level. General anxieties presented by participants included fears
of potential food shortages, untrustworthy food quality, disruptors in
material infrastructure, and the consequences of environmental events
like storms and drought. When present, these anxieties often focused on
future social or environmental disruptions—what would happen if the
road to town was closed (in one community this had occurred in the
past)? Could they find food if grocery stores were closed? How might
they respond if there were an accident while in the bush? Would they
have to depend on someone else in times of uncertainty? And how had
they had become so disassociated from the mechanisms of their own
survival? While often playfully discussed, the persistence of these narratives
suggested that many were contemplating the possibility of a disrupted
future. For example, when I asked a participant during that first camp
why she had become involved in BOW she stated the following:
A12: A lot of it has to do with my concern over what we’re being

exposed to, you know the, the farming conditions out there for
meat and stuff like that. The factory produced kind of stuff. I
don’t want to feed that to my family so I have been looking
more and more into it. I have to say and this is gotten a little
bit silly probably too, but there’s this little element in there of
what would happen if we did lose power and how would we
survive and you know it doesn’t hurt to have some knowledge.
So there is a little bit of that. It’s not my major part but I would
like to learn a bit more. So this year I learned to crochet “cause
you know apparently that’s what you do when, you know” …
I’m going to be teaching my kids to fish this year. Well they’ve
done, did it a little bit last year but we’re going to be doing
more fishing trips this year because I think they need to grow
up with it at an earlier age than I did.
Asselin: Early exposure is important?
A12: I think so. I have some basic knowledge because of being

allowed to watch, not participate necessarily but we watched my
(laughter) grandfather. I think that’s important but also yeah,
like the idea of knowing that your, your food is coming from a
non-factory, non-medicated source makes me a little bit happier
so yeah.
Regarding climate change more generally, the discourse of fear, risk, and
disruption within the wider public has been noted elsewhere (Hulme
2008). While participants did not often directly reference climate change,
they did often speak of unreliable weather and the potential impacts
of storms and drought. In his discussion of the language surrounding
tipping points and climate change, anthropologist, Mark Nuttall, argues
that a discourse of fear and risk prompts discussion marked by nervous
anticipation of a future shaped by dramatic changes in environmental,
political, and social structures (Nuttall 2012: 97). This matters because,
as people anticipate potential futures, it informs their lives and choices
58 J. ASSELIN
in the moment: “The future thus also becomes a locus of everyday life in
terms of how people think of what lies beyond those secure horizons—we
think about the future and imagine ourselves into it” (101). In this way,
concerns over what might be, inform the actions participants take today.
However, this relationship is not unidirectional (in anticipation of X I do
Y) as the embodied act itself is part of what opens the capacity to imagine
the future in the first place.
While I do not want to overstate participant anxieties (fun and
enjoyment was a primary motivator), it was a significant and ongoing
component of informal discussion and interviews. In all camps, a quick
mention, joke, or explicit reference to future uncertainty was consistently
present. Throughout this, the capacity of the physical body was both a
conduit for these ponderings and a means of mitigating unpleasant possi-
bilities that may rest on the other side of the horizon. In touching the
wood and steal of a weapon, having muscles internalize the weight of a
tool, participants had both a growing sense that they could handle any
daunting task that may come, but likewise were drawn further into a
contemplation of what exactly that might be. A BOW past participant
and current instructor discussed with me her concern over food recalls,
the subsequent impetus to become self-sufficient, and the impact this had
on her wider outlook:
A13: It would be in my best interest to know all that available infor-

mation if I’m thinking at any point in time there could be
an issue with grocery stores or with a complete blackout or
sunspot taking out all the power and electricity and all that kind
of stuff. So it’s not necessarily war right, it could be any global
event that could really put a lot of people at survival risk. (Also
discussed in Asselin 2019)
For this participant, both contemplation of what might occur and the
capacity to mitigate possible futures rested in the body.
Appadurai’s (1996) mediascapes and ideoscapes are useful tools to
further explore the connection between public narratives and personal
anxieties. Mediascapes refer to the flow and dissemination of informa-
tion and images, such as that made available through the Internet and
television. Appadurai argues that this collection of information provides
narratives and imagery for people to consume and, as result of its sheer
scope, can blur the lines between fictional and realistic landscapes. He
turns to ideoscapes as another form within which the varied flows of glob-
alization materialize. With ideoscapes, he references the larger political
ideologies made available through these same systems (Appadurai 1996:
304). However, sometimes mediascapes abrade people’s sense of connec-
tion to the communities around them and reinforce individualism and
uncertainty. This is the focus of works that examine the impact of genres
such as disaster movies (Schneider-Mayerson 2013; Bendle 2005) and fits
well with the pop-culture abundance of zombie imagery.
While none of the BOW participants I met would consider them-
selves “peakists” or even “survivalists” as framed by Mitchell (2002),
what was present was a focus on insecure futures, sometimes expressed
through apocalypse-like narratives, media stories of food contamination,
and references to disaster films. In BOW, much of this contemplation
occurred while women were physically engaged in learning new skills,
such as trying to create a spark with flint and steel while discussing our
reliance on electric heating. While more playing with potential futures
than fully committing to mitigating action, many BOW participants were,
as Schneider-Mayerson (2013) suggest when examining the US peak oil
movement, concerned about the future in a way that further confirmed
a focus on individualism, sudden disaster over slow violence, and the
reshaping of social inequalities through social or environmental upheaval.
In other words, through training now they would be in a position to
reshape their social potential post-disaster.
For instance, during my second program one participant mentioned
often contemplating her capacity to survive in the woods if necessary.
When asked to expand on this she stated:
B8: I mean down the road we don’t know what our future holds or
for our kids and it’s good to carry those skills on. We don’t know
our food source. Up here it could, you know we had the one day
where the highway closed and the groceries were empty in two
days. It’s like well, we really should know how to get some of
our own food and keep ourselves warm. Those skills should not
all be lost.
This conversation was as much about recovering or reshaping the poten-

tial of the self as it was skill acquisition. Being a competent skilled person
60 J. ASSELIN
not only prepared participants for an uncertain future, but shaped them
in the present. In this same way, gaining technical skill was as much about
capacity as it was reinventing of the individual-environment relationship
to something more connected than modern society typically supports.
In another example, two friends answered interview questions while
sitting outside their cabin between courses. Reflecting on the program
overall, the first spoke of how BOW provided a getaway from regular life,
including getting out of the city. They continued:
C23A: There is a lot more about survival these days too, like
managing to survive on your own.
C23B: On your own, yeah it could be yeah. If our world is going to
hell in a hand basket, we’d better get our survival skills out.
C23A: Yeah, I think it’s been a lot like this zombie apocalypse type
thing. And the terrible stuff that’s happening in the media.
These narratives would not have had the same depth without the accom-
panied shared experience of enskillment. The term survival skills is flat
when merely spoken, but alive with possibility when enacted.
Hylland Eriksen (2003), in his collected works on globalization,
wrote that “although there are doubtless aspects of social organisa-
tion and symbolic universes in virtually every society that conform
with these notions of globalization—statehood and citizenship, mone-
tary economies, modern mass media and so on—their actual realisation
is always local and embedded in locally constituted life-worlds and power
relations” (4). With BOW, it is in examining how circulating images and
narratives of environmental uncertainty weave their way into discourse
and become part of the sense-making and decision-making apparatus of
people that we can explore these locally constituted life-words. Imagined
futures instigate action in the now—and taking time from busy lives to
learn specific skills and connecting with like-minded women who share
the same concerns and embodied enskillment is central to this process.
Remembering Childhood:
Enskillment and Narrating the Past
On my second day at the first BOW camp I attended, I ate lunch across
from a school teacher who had just finished a morning gun course. When
asked about her reasons for taking the program she said she was inter-
ested in learning “all that stuff that you can’t know unless you grew
up doing it.” If imagination can stretch forward in time to help artic-
ulate present-day choices in BOW camps, this was also true for the past.
This sense of imagination rested again on the physical body and on what
could have been possible had hands-on learning been available at an
early age. This lack of opportunity, most often correlated to participant’s
gender, nurtured ponderings of how participants came to be where they
were in this specific moment and time. The material world includes both
habit (as accumulated past) and potential of the future McLean (2007:
8). Methodologically, one way to navigate this nexus is to prioritize
participant and researcher experience.
Following Andrew Irving (2017), I understand life histories to
“involve a complex temporality in which the past is reshaped from the
vantage point of the future” (27), this includes recasting critical events
in which causality, consequences, and outcomes are understood retro-
spectively. While I was not collecting life histories, I was drawn to the
life stories that emerged out of women’s embodied engagement in the
moment of learning. Participant stories were often about being“helped”
out of hands-on experience, often by male hands who presented skills
without providing space for actual practice. In other cases, stories were
about being explicitly denied experience based on gender or presumed
disinterest. In BOW, the act of learning presented participants with
the apparent contradiction of being familiar with a task yet lacking in
experience. Participants in each camp discussed their lack of hands-on
experience, and I observed a connection between these shared histories
of childhood/youth exclusion and anxiety over lack of enskillment in face
of the unimaginable.
Participants told stories of watching their fathers, brothers, or grand-
fathers engaged in outdoor work, but of having no space to practice the
same tasks. In many ways, their stories mirror the ethnographic critique
of prioritizing the visual over the embodied. Sometimes this exclusion
was made explicit—a family member who stated they did not want a little
girl to gut animals or handle guns—while at other times, it was based on
the child’s assumed disinterest. These stories, often exchanged as partici-
pants were fully involved in BOW programming, started with statements
such as “my brother is really good at this, but I never learned how,” and
then extended into wider conversations among participants who shared
some version of this general experience. In this way, the past was a direct
62 J. ASSELIN
component of how participants understood the embodied act they were

currently engaged in. When asked to expand on this idea one participant
added:
My grandfather was a hunter and a fisherman so he would take me fishing

and out, when I was really young but I, I have a little bit, like my grandfa-
ther was a really old school, I don’t think he thought girls really should do
this kind of stuff so he would basically bait my hook, throw it out and kind
of let me hold onto it but if there was anything on it, he would actually
reel it in, so really, I did nothing. I was there with him and I saw him.
(Bow participant A12)
And in another example:
I was pretty young the last time I went (hunting with my family). It was
more for the outdoor experience. I really, like I got to do moose calling
and that sort of thing but in terms of the actual shooting and dressing
of the moose, that was usually done by my dad and whoever else he was
with. (Bow participant B4)
Repeated stories of being present, yet never fully engaged—“I was there,
I saw”—has led me to argue that while as children women were legit-
imate peripheral participants, they were held back from the anticipated
step of full participation (Asselin 2019). Eventually, their own inexperi-
ence and age limited them from even peripheral participation and these
experiences largely stopped, on occasion recurring while as wives they
accompanied husbands on hunting or fishing trips, once again playing
the role of the unskilled side-kick. One participant from my last camp
spoke of the communal nature of BOW as countering this trend:
C23: The appeal is being able to learn how to do these things inde-
pendently and the appeal is also being able to meet other
women who are doing it so that you can start to grow a bit of
a community so that you can, you know you’re, if you’re going
out, you can go out with other women and acquire those skills
in a real way as opposed to going out with males where you
wind up doing the whole, where you end up basically being
helped, quote “helped” (chuckle) and it’s just, and taken care
of the entire time which doesn’t really help with your own
learning.
The emphasis on practicality and tricks during training is an example of

the everyday know-how that women otherwise had not been exposed to.
In an afternoon course on game care that focused on field dressing an
animal (gutting an animal before transport), our instructor was a local
woman and avid hunter. The class included not only instruction on the
basic practices—where to make incisions, when gutting is necessary—but
also the small tricks that only come from experience: how best to deal
with the weight of moving large animals or how to sew a button on the
shoulder of a jacket to ensure any object hanging from the shoulder (like
a gun or purse) won’t easily fall. BOW instructors imparted knowledge
that was specific and related to everyday life. In a later interview, our
female instructors emphasized the importance of hands-on experience and
provided parallels with her own childhood. As a girl, she would often
accompany her family on hunting trips but never learned herself. Instead,
she became interested in hunting as an adult when she found a female
mentor who enjoyed hunting.
A14: … that’s kind of what tipped me back into it and I’m like yeah
I got, I, I need to pursue this again and got my PAL and I got
my CORE and I got all my tags and everything like that and
that’s kind of how I got more involved but I think mentoring is
huge for women. You need a mentor and it’s very empowering
to find a female mentor instead of going with the husband,
the boyfriend, the uncle, the dad, you know that’s all fine and
dandy but to, to see that there’s women out there hunting is,
is amazing.
This story was told by an individual who herself acts as a mentor to

women, and in that mentorship demands participants confront their inse-
curities through practical hands-on learning, allowing them to manifest
possibility through enskillment.
Narratives of past experience evoke not only the hinterland of what
might be possible, but of what might have been possible had things been
a little different. In other words, very often childhood stories rested on a
reflection of what could have been possible if they had been provided the
opportunity to learn as children. As adults, outdoor skills were equated
with capability and certainty, and the inability to internalize them resulted
in a perceived disjuncture between what participants should be capable
64 J. ASSELIN
of and what they were actually comfortable doing. This sense of inability
was often exacerbated by imagined futures which were themselves marked
by anxiety, particularly in terms of imagined threats to food insecurity,
questionable food safety, and environmental instability.
Regarding how anthropologists might approach the joint ventures of
experience and knowledge, Mark Harris (2007) argues that as all knowl-
edge is situated in particular places and moments, it is always changing
and emergent (4). Enskillment (embodied knowledge) links people to the
contingent futures that come into focus as new possibilities emerge—but
these are likewise placed in the context of the trajectories that led them to
this moment of learning. In other words, BOW provides concrete knowl-
edge through hands-on-learning such as starting a fire with flint and steel.
In lighting the fire and grasping the intricacies of fuel, the pressure needed
to create a spark, the breath of air needed to feed the flame, participants
were propelled forward in time as they contemplated when this skill may
be necessary, and backward in time as they pondered the path that led
them to this moment. Through this, many BOW participants are doing
what Irving (2017) would label as trying to impose a structure on the
indeterminacy and contingency of the future. This contingency, in part
made apparent through narratives of climate change and environmental
uncertainty as described in the first section, is also formulated through
a sense of incompetence that emerges from participants’ own childhood
experiences and a sense that they should know but do not. In all of this,
the body is the central feature of sense-making. These imagined pasts and
futures must be felt with hands, through pressure on skin, and the smell
of smoke or blood, and they must be sensed through the frustration,
anger, or joy that comes with learning. These lived experiences are the
lens through which participant interviews are most clearly understood,
and the lens through which researchers might best understand the impact
of programs like BOW on everyday choices.
Experiencing the Now: Desirability and Feasibility

Research on motivations for enrolling in education programs often
focuses on the circumstances that led to the choice to participate. Mate-
rial and structural constraints like affordability, time, and knowledge, are
often balanced to differing degrees with individual agency. For example,
in their examination of lifestyle choice, Blunsdon and colleagues (2010)
highlight the influence of habits, routines, and individual choice shaped
by normative constraints. In the latter, social expectations are internal-

ized to influence how people evaluate the desirability and assess the
feasibility of action. The authors argue researchers must understand the
values that motivate people, the beliefs that frame the way people inter-
pret their world, and the social and institutional structures that both limit
choice and provide opportunities to act on these values and beliefs. Thus,
changes in the importance of social institutions, the rise of consumer
culture, or social media can influence both what is desirable and feasible.
This is likewise apparent in BOW, for example, one participant stated:
B9: Cause a lot of times the girls didn’t get taught these skills you
know, when they were growing up by their fathers or whatever
because it was the guys that was doing it. So it came from there,
and now there’s programs that are teaching people who didn’t
get taught this and I think like social media has a huge part to do
with it because you see on social media all these women fishers,
hunters and you know, they become like celebrities right because
they’re women and they’re like experts and at all these outdoor
activities. So I think that, people realize like now you know it
should be anyone can do anything. It doesn’t matter what you
are you know.
While the work of researchers such as Blunsdon and colleagues is espe-

cially strong in demonstrating the importance of wider context in decision
making, the role of embodiment is often absent from discussions as to
why people do what they do.
BOW offers an opportunity for participants to engage in physical acts
that would not otherwise occur and through this cultivate new under-
standings of what is possible and desirable. Because of this, the separation
between BOW camps and regular routines, as well as the mixing of
women from different backgrounds and ages, I understand BOW as a
liminal space. As a liminal space, BOW camps cultivate imagination in
more overt ways than may otherwise occur. This is partly through enskill-
ment as previously discussed, but also through the collaborative nature
of the program and the subsequent exchange of stories and cultivation of
new narratives between participants.
The first stage of Turner’s tripartite structure, separation from regular
daily routines, allows participants to step outside of structures such as
66 J. ASSELIN
kinship and gender that limit not only their activities but what is possible
and desirable. This separation leads to the liminal space of BOW camps
and to the apprentice position. This recreates the potential to be legiti-
mate peripheral participants (to watch, try, and ask questions) and then
to take a step toward being competent actors. In exploring Turner’s
conception of liminality, Thomassen writes that “Turner realized that
“liminality” served not only to identify the importance of in-between
periods, but also to understand the human reactions to liminal experi-
ences: the way in which personality was shaped by liminality, the sudden
foregrounding of agency, and the sometimes dramatic tying together of
thought and experience” (Thomassen 2009: 14). Alternatively, Crapan-
zano (2004) criticizes this version of liminality for missing deeper possi-
bilities, particularly the different epistemologies facilitated through what
he terms the betwixt and between. The ecological subjectivities cultivated
through BOW do follow a western-model (i.e., alternative epistemologies
such as non-binary human-environment relations are absent), however,
the imaginary facilitated through BOW does allow people to escape from
what Crapanzano refers to as the incessant pull of reality through postu-
lating a beyond. In understanding BOW as liminal space I mean that the
program rests outside many of the constraints Blunsdon et al. (2010)
describe, and through this facilitates a contemplation of the possible and
impossible, the in-between of what is and what could be, and through
a focus on agency allows participants to imagine beyond the incessant
pull of reality. The nature of the last stage, reintegration, is determined in
part by participant experience. Those that came for a relaxing break may
find the event largely fades without consequence, while others may find
their social relations have changed. One participant commented that her
husband is energized by the concept of his wife as a hunter and provider—
shifting her position with her spouse and children. Others are driven to
learn and practice more. In each camp, women exchanged contact infor-
mation with potential hunting or fishing partners. Participants made plans
with each other to meet and go fishing, join women’s hunting groups, or
meet at the local shooting range.
Even for those who showed no interest in enacting the skills they
learned outside of BOW, the acts themselves were now more possible.
One participant in the second program stated:
B14: One of the biggest things is camaraderie among women. It’s

very empowering. You see a lot of tears from women during
this weekend and believing in themselves and being shown a

skill that they never, ever thought that they could learn and just
that sense of pride. Once you go to one, you’re hooked, you
know like, a friend of mine posted a couple of pictures on her
personal Facebook page and there’s like five girls that are like
“where did you learn this, like I want to go to this” and you
know here’s me shooting a .22, here’s me on a quad, here’s me
learning to build a campfire in my outdoor survival skills and
here’s me backing up a boat into the lake.
This feeling was in part facilitated through the shared physical experience
of BOW programming.
As a social space, BOW facilitates new potentialities for participants
through their ongoing engagement with imagined futures. Appadurai, in
his interest to recover the future “as cultural capacity” (2004: 32) focuses
on marginal groups, specifically the poor and their capacity to reimagine
the future as central to solutions to contemporary inequality. BOW partic-
ipants, by virtue of their ability to take the time, money, and have the
social support necessary to participate are a privileged population, yet,
“the navigational capacity that is nurtured by the possibility of real world
conjectures and refutations” (Appadurai 2004: 189) by BOW participants
does allow for new possibilities to be formulated.
Agency was a preoccupation of those participants who insisted on
hands-on learning. When asked to tell me a story about the program, the
majority focused on detailing what the labor itself felt like. One described
climbing a tree to access the tree stand that was found within its branches
farther up. She described feeling nauseous and exhilarated at the same
time, the sense of distance between her and the ground, the feel of move-
ment, the harness, moving beyond fear, and ultimately wanting to do it
again. Another described the feeling of skinning a beaver: what it felt and
smelled like, her narrative arc shifting from unease to accomplishment.
Very often these same stories included some level of contemplation of
when these skills may be used in the future. They were narratives of overt
self-questioning that interwove newly gained hands-on experience with
the logical extension of what a person might be capable of.
Methods wise, research or commentary that fails to consider physical
experience also misses an opportunity to explore the interconnections
between possible futures, skill, and self. Beyond a transfer of knowledge,
skills are a way of knowing the world and a person’s place within it. It is in
68 J. ASSELIN
the primacy of perception that the body, “creature of habitual cultural and
social processes” (Casey 1997), is completely immersed in the moment
and place of enskillment. This immersion both repeats (as detractors have
argued1 ) and creates both practice and self. In other words, in learning
how to hunt or fish women did participate in cultural reproduction (man
the hunter), but new contingent futures also began to take form as what
was possible altered through their own capacity. Male family members
typically held a monopoly on skill and knowledge, but when women were
given an opportunity to fully engage their experiences were more than
reproductions of a male experience. For example, in one program I met a
returning BOW participant who had also taken a mentored hunt the fall
before. During our interview she recounted the process of learning:
C20: The more I stepped into it, the more open I was, the more
the response to it was really physical. It was a physical response.
It was like, it was like putting my head into something and
then my body following and everything got connected up and
I was, I was almost enlivened by the whole experience. It set me
alight inside in a way that I had no idea that it was going to do
that. And I’ve gone to learn these skills, I wanted to become
a proficient woman, in the wilderness, having children, being
able to be in the wilderness and be able to survive, have the
skills.
When I asked her if the skills learned during the program were as expected
she responded:
They were much more because it, it’s almost like they grew into me. It’s
like, it’s like reaching out for them and then bringing them into you and
then placing them in yourself. Like they grew into me so now they’re part
of me.
It was through discussion while immersed within these direct acts of

engagement that women refined their viewpoints and reflected on their
own anxieties. Such embodied engagement as that above is where we can
see human senses as arenas of agency (Culhane 2016) and touch as a
political act (Puig de La Bellacasa 2009). Overlooking the lived experi-
ences of enskillment and practice would have rendered many participant
accounts dry. Crapanzano (2004) argues that imagination is a dimension
of experience that resists articulation, indeed that it can disappear with

articulation (18), yet in physical engagement brief moments of connec-
tion with the possible are lengthened and felt more deeply. As a researcher
“putting your head into something and having your body follow” mate-
rially connects contingency to the now, and moves understanding from
something thought to something felt. Ethnographers as novice, are often
in a position to not only engage in and ask questions about tasks, but
likewise engage with the contingent futures made possible through those
acts. In doing so they may share these subjective potentials with those
around them and collectively take part in future making.
Conclusion: Method of Imagination

I am interested in how sensory methodologies highlight the imagina-
tive process that drew women forward and back in time. In some ways,
women not only explored the past through missed childhood opportu-
nities but also pre-modern living. As they contemplated survival without
modern trappings, they also pondered a dystopic future where survival
skills may one day be of use. Enskillment as a measure of individual
competency, anchors this theoretical time travel in today’s world. A world
where participants feel the desire and social obligation to be compe-
tent providers while also being limited in the very experiences they are
exposed to. For some, BOW offers the potential to regain control in
a male-dominated space and to redefine what being a provider means.
Anthropologist and feminist scholar Joyce (2006) points out that the
Western tradition privileges the mind rather than the body as the site
of identity. In this work, I wanted to privilege the role of physical action
in forming and contemplating imagined potential, together with a recog-
nition that it is the gendered nature of the physical body that reduced the
possibilities for embodied learning in the first place.
The physical body was the conduit through which narratives of the
hinterland emerged. Political Scientist and place scholar E. V. Walter
(1988) argues that imagination shapes and informs how we encounter
and interact with our surroundings. It is part of the human sensory expe-
rience that allows people to perceive place as containing meaning beyond
what is immediately apparent (Asselin 2013). Extending this, imagination
is a tool that allows for history, memory, and potentiality, to become a
key feature of experience in the now. My own engagement in BOW was
central to understanding women’s stories as I found that not only could
70 J. ASSELIN
I understand them on an academic level, but could relate intimately with

their concerns, frustrations, and hopes. The sense of intimacy was more
than shared understanding, but of experience. Sensory anthropology
asks researchers to step away from the privilege of sight and embrace
humans as multi-sensory beings. In discussing the method of imagination,
Culhane’s (2016) simple reminder that humans are embodied multi-
sensory beings should be a methodological grounding for those interested
in the possibilities and probabilities that lie beyond the horizon. Beyond
this, BOW serves as another reminder—that embodied engagement is a
privilege not afforded all people and the sometimes simple acts of doing
highlight the role of those on the margin in navigating and imposing a
structure on the (un)imaginable.
The imaginings woven throughout participant discussion and experi-
ences do invite a word of caution however. These are traceable manifesta-
tions of social and environmental concern and represent particular forms
of ecological subjectivities. On the surface, human-environment relations
appear to be reshaped against the backdrop of a modern post-industrial
society and a crisis of alienation. Within this, there also exists the poten-
tial to reshape gendered norms and take steps toward alternative futures.
If participants feel it is a likely scenario that the future will be less abun-
dant or perhaps even hostile (especially in terms of food procurement,
energy supply, and access to social support), then an imagined future is
directly influencing contemporary decision making, political choice, and
even environmental values. These actions are also part of a wider imag-
ining. For example, participant environmental and food anxiety often
manifested in back-to-land imaginings which on occasion rested on some-
thing akin to a frontier ethic. Wanting to live off-the-grid, to kill one’s
own food, to trap, or fish, all made possible by the imaginary potential
of vast ruralness, individualism, and expansion laced with the nostalgia
of a frontier past and fuelled by an illusory post-apocalypse future. This
potential rests on ideas of an idyllic past and could easily become complicit
in recreating or continuing colonial inequalities. Conceptually emptying
inhabited place in order to create a settler space. Lastly, as Schneider-
Mayerson (2013) points out, the tendency to privilege sudden disaster
over slow decline often has the side effect of recreating rather than
addressing inequalities. Likewise, those engaged in prepping can easily
cultivate individualism as they prepare to exist on their own terms, under-
mining hopes of addressing contemporary alienation between people,
and between people and the non-human environment. Moving forward,
recognizing the depth of human environmental impact as ushering in a

new epoch, the Anthropocene, we should all pay attention to the formula-
tion of ecological subjectivities on the margins and the role of contingent
futures in shaping the how’s and why’s of people’s daily choices.
Note
1. Fitzgerald, a feminist political ecologist is an active BOW critic and argues
the program primarily reproduces hunting norms through a male-generated
and financially motivated recruitment campaign (Fitzgerald 2005). This is
discussed further in Asselin (2019).
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CHAPTER 4
Staging Care: Dying, Death, and Possible

Futures
Rajat Nayyar
Every three years during the Kumbha festival, about 120 million Hindu
pilgrims (Safi 2019) travel to wash themselves in sacred river Ganga. They
pray that the holy water will liberate them from the cycle of life, death,
and rebirth through achieving Moksha. According to anthropologist T.
N. Madan, the Hindu concept of Moksha is “death … being treated as an
opportunity for the individual soul to realize union with ‘that’ [universal
soul] from which it has … separated” (Madan 1988: 137). For Hindus,
death should come at home or at one of the sacred Hindu pilgrimage
cities. Kashi, India’s holy city situated on the banks of river Ganga in the
state of Uttar Pradesh, is especially favored, for it is said that the souls of
all who die there immediately attain Moksha (Kumar 1984).
During our research collaboration in 2018, Shiv understood Moksha as
the process of “fulfilling his mother’s final wish to release her last breath in
Kashi” and staging new futures for his family. We first met at Kashi Labh
Mukti Bhawan, a salvation home in Kashi that offers a devotional space
R. Nayyar (B)
Theatre & Performance Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada
e-mail: rajatn@yorku.ca

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4_4
76 R. NAYYAR
to families seeking Moksha for their terminally ill and dying relatives. The
priest staff at the salvation home introduced me to Shiv as a filmmaker
“whose research never seems to end at Mukti Bhawan.” I subsequently
informed Shiv about my anthropological graduate research on Moksha
and family-centered end-of-life care. I also told him that I was hoping to
study how the camera might facilitate this research. Shiv found comfort in
knowing that I also hail from Delhi, and he asked me to assist his family
during their stay at the salvation home by locating key temples and river
banks (ghats ) in the city.
Kashi, up until then, had been a city of Shiv’s religious imagination,
and now it promised the possibility of his mother’s Moksha by providing
a sacred space to perform grief, anticipation, and care. Attending to his
mother’s call for Moksha, Shiv had to shut down his busy tailor shop in
Delhi, and with his son, he drove slowly toward Kashi for twelve hours,
ensuring that the ride was comfortable for his mother, who lay on the
back seat of the car. This was followed by a ten-day stay at the salvation
home in Kashi, where he waited and engaged in “everyday projects,”
while anticipating the possibility of his mother’s last breath in Moksha.
According to Shiv, “caring” for (his mother’s) Moksha and being able to
attend to its (final) call is a lifelong spiritual project for a Hindu. Shiv’s
performances of the possible in Kashi, speak about a politics-of-care that
is embodied and emerges from spiritual beliefs within Hindu ontologies
and cosmologies.
This chapter examines collaborative audiovisual ethnography as it acti-
vated the imagination to engage with temporalities that emerge from
Shiv’s understanding of care. Primarily used to co-create a memorial
for the family in the form of a film, the camera emerged as an impor-
tant affective technology for researching and intervening in possible
futures. As Shiv put it, “the camera helped in imagining new possibili-
ties of navigation … in this holy city.” Taking seriously Shiv’s anticipatory
politics-of-care, our research methodology reconceptualizes ethnography
by approaching the imagination (Culhane 2017: 13), as a mobilizing
force for envisioning the possible, improvising new futures and shifting
our lenses of reflexivity. During this research at Kashi Labh Mukti
Bhawan, anticipation emerged through performances of care, as an
affective state situated somewhere between the possible and the future
(Moksha) that has already been. In her performance ethnography with
a Romani woman in Poland, Kazubowski-Houston contends that “rad-
ical change can also sit in the strangest of places, such as silence or
4 STAGING CARE: DYING, DEATH, AND POSSIBLE FUTURES 77
inaction” (2018a: 419). In relation, I argue that my collaborative audio-

visual ethnography, as an embodied and intersubjective research practice
(MacDougall 2015) facilitated a “slow and subtle activism” (Kazubowski-
Houston 2018b, forthcoming) that is grounded in care and staged as
performances of the possible.
Background
Shiv returned to the family’s room at the salvation home after a morning
bath. He touched his sleeping mother’s feet and then lit up incense.
Sounds of priest staff chanting crackled through old metal speakers
attached inside each room of the salvation home. Usually, Shiv would
join the priest staff in devotional singing ceremonies every day, but this
morning he must visit the Kal Bhairav temple in the city. Priest staff
had advised him to fetch the sacred water from the temple well for
his terminally ill mother. Upon arriving, Shiv informed the Kal Bhairav
temple care-takers about his pilgrimage with his mother from Delhi and
made a request for sacred water. The temple care-takers assured him that
the water, when given to his mother, will ease and accelerate the dying
process.
Through the records maintained by the salvation home and my own
research over the last four years, I found that 80% of dying pilgrims release
the last vital breath within a day of arriving at Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan.
It was a general understanding that the waiting period for families at the
salvation home is directly associated with the past karmas of the dying
pilgrim and their close family members. Shiv’s family stayed for ten days.
The priest staff and the manager at Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan made Shiv
believe that there is something still outstanding that has not yet become
“real” as a possibility in Moksha. As days go by, anticipating the last breath
of their dying relatives, families become more susceptible to accepting
advice from the priest staff, manager, and local people of Kashi. On the
basis of this understanding, every day during his ten-day stay, Shiv had a
project to visit a temple, or ghats and river Ganga, or to meet a classical
Indian musician who could help his mother release her last breath.
When the priest staff introduced me to Shiv upon his arrival, we
instantly connected as we both spoke Punjabi and hailed from Delhi. The
priest staff also told me that “Shiv’s family will require more assistance
as he is not aware of the rules and daily rituals at the salvation home …
78 R. NAYYAR
and even the after-death rituals.” The priest staff is never directly respon-
sible for the care of the dying pilgrim; “the family is expected to perform
all the care.” The priest staff’s primary responsibility is, rather, to create
the desired devotional atmosphere in which the dying person and their
immediate family may remain focused on the possibility of Moksha. Priest
staff participate in caring for the dying pilgrim only to the extent that
they read religious scriptures to them, offer advice, or even remind the
families that the dying pilgrim must be regularly bathed.
It was quite odd that during my research at the salvation home, most
families arrived from the rural areas of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya
Pradesh, and not a single family, until now, had made such a journey
from an urban center like Delhi. Unlike Shiv, most families had also
regularly visited Kashi—they had either heard about Kashi Labh Mukti
Bhawan or had already stayed there before with another dying relative.
Shiv reminded me, in a way, of my own position in the city and at the
salvation home as a newly arrived researcher years ago. After conducting
six months of preliminary fieldwork at Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan in 2014,
I had accepted an offer from Tallinn University to develop this project as
part of my research toward a Master’s degree in Anthropology (Audiovi-
sual Ethnography module). However, the salvation home was shut down
for renovation between October 2015 and November 2017, precisely
when I had hoped to graduate from the Tallinn program. During this
period, I had the opportunity to film the reconstruction process at Kashi
Labh Mukti Bhawan. As I stood there filming the brick walls in an empty
room, one of the priest staff members walked in with a tray in one hand
and a bell in the other. This practice continued to be a daily ritual for
him despite the fact that the rooms were empty during the renovation
period. In that moment, I realized that, up until then, my audiovisual
ethnography had exclusively involved studying the salvation home from
the perspective of the priest staff. Having learned that any good ethnog-
raphy required longer periods of fieldwork and relational accountability
(Wilson 2008), I had hesitated to spend time with families in their indi-
vidual rooms because they would leave within a day or two of arriving.
Therefore, the greatest challenge that emerged in this research project was
the lack of access to the families’ interior life-worlds and the difficulty of
forging relationships with them in such a short timeframe. Moreover, the
dying pilgrims themselves were generally very weak and in pain, which
made it difficult to converse with them. This lack of access, in addition
to my close association with the priest staff, had resulted in an audiovi-

sual ethnography that mirrored the unequal power dynamics between the
families and the priest staff. While filming the empty rooms, I realized
that my research methodology, like the salvation home itself, needed a
radical reconceptualization.
When the reconstruction ended on January 10, 2018, Shiv’s family was
the first to arrive ten days later. I was in the courtyard with three priest
staff members when Shiv arrived in his car. I helped Shiv carry his mother,
Smt. Satya Rani Dhawan, to the room, while the priest staff guided his
son Kanhaiyya through registration and the rules of the salvation home.
Later that day, Shiv recounted his arduous journey from Delhi. He told
us it was like driving toward the city of his religious imagination, which
was nurtured within him through the religious stories he had heard from
his mother since childhood. This was the same city where his mother’s
Moksha would become possible. I told Shiv about my own association
with the city through the many religious stories and songs that my grand-
mother had sung to me about Parvati, Shiva, and many other Gods who
continue to live in Kashi along the banks of river Ganga. My grandmother
(and parents) would also prefer to die by the banks of river Ganga, and
such topics are casually discussed in my family. It is impossible for me to
imagine my family members’ absence in my life, and their wish to die in
a certain manner always remains present in me as my not-yet.
On the evening of his day of arrival at the salvation home, Shiv invited
me inside his family’s room and announced to his mother, “Look, there’s
even a film that is being made about you. We are so blessed to be in
Kashi!” The sacred city had offered Shiv “a filmmaker who would not
only co-create a life-long memory” as he performs his ultimate duty but
also assist the family during their stay in Kashi. Having settled into his
room, he asked Kanhaiyya to stay with his grandmother while she slept
and invited me to go for a cup of chai in the city. During our walk, Shiv
asked me what this “ethnographic” film will be about, and I told him that
it is open to possibilities. The film cannot be about an “end” since we are
not sure what the end will be. Furthermore, the manager of the salvation
home usually requests that families leave if the event of biological death
does not occur within two weeks, and I did not want to add to Shiv’s
anticipation through the pursuit of a cinematic goal.
During the ten days of my research with Shiv, I realized that Moksha is
an embodied knowledge of care that is transmitted through generations
80 R. NAYYAR
in the form of religious stories and is grounded in the everyday adjust-

ments of making it a possibility (as future), rather than a philosophical
argument (Jackson 2014). During our walks with the camera through
the labyrinthine network of narrow streets, we began to improvise small,
daily projects. These projects represented Shiv’s distinctive politics-of-
care, for they heightened the possibility of his mother’s Moksha. In
attending to such unintended imaginaries (Kazubowski-Houston 2017:
115), the camera attuned us to the affective and embodied dimensions of
Shiv’s politics-of-care. This approach to audiovisual ethnography further
allowed Shiv to take an active role in setting the direction of the film and
impacting his family’s future. Based on our critical intervention within the
everyday performances of the possible, I reconsider the anticipatory and
the creative potential of our research, and how it facilitates collaboration
and the reflexive creation of ethnographic knowledge.
Politics of Care
During this research project, I had the opportunity to interview a number
of family members who had arrived at Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan with a
dying relative. In many cases, the dying pilgrim had predicted their own
death and had asked their family to immediately prepare to leave for Kashi.
In other cases, the family had collectively decided to bring their terminally
ill relative to Kashi, after realizing that medical care was no longer useful.
In all cases, they had invited their distant relatives, friends, and neighbors
to gather for a religious ritual that preceded the pilgrimage to Kashi. This
departure ritual is the first step that families undertake toward co-creating
the dying process. As one of my interlocutors put it, departing for Kashi
as a family involves “freeing themselves for Moksha” in the last days of
their dying relative’s life.
Like most family members at the salvation home, Shiv never spoke
of Moksha as something to be achieved in another world, but rather as
something that is to be constantly practiced throughout one’s life. Shiv
recalled how a few years after his birth, male family members had chanted
mantras and females had sung folk songs for his initiation ritual; this ritual
represented Shiv’s first step toward Moksha. In this way, a Hindu life is
laid out around sixteen rites of passage (Samskaras ) that lead one toward
Moksha. According to one of my interlocutors, one needs to constantly
pursue this lifelong spiritual project in order to be able to receive, and
attend to, the call for Moksha when it announces itself.
This does not mean that one is always focused on the “event” of
death—rather one “cares” for Moksha as a lifelong spiritual project that
is grounded in everyday individual decisions, relationships with others,
familial commitments, and career choices. At the same time, this includes
caring for one’s own Moksha as well as that of one’s close family members.
As a result, death is not approached as the end of being, but as “care.”
For my interlocutors, Moksha announces itself, in their dying relatives’
final days, as a call of care. Shiv’s performances of the possible in Kashi,
for instance, speak of a politics-of-care that is embodied and grounded
in anticipation. For families, Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan, and the city
itself, is a place that allows them to stage performances of care that
make Moksha possible. The salvation home, with its unique rules, rituals,
and social aesthetics, provides a sensory environment that urges family
members ahead to collaboratively engage in such performances, while
contemplating their own being as a being-toward-Moksha.
Aesthetics of Dying in Kashi

The population of Kashi as of the 2011 census was just over 1.2 million.
Additionally, around one million pilgrims and tourists visit Kashi every
year. It continues to be one of the most crowded cities in India because
it is quite small; Kashi occupies about a three-mile stretch of the bank of
river Ganga, which has been transformed, over time, from clay and mud
into hundreds of stone steps, temples, and mosques. Upon entering the
holy city of Kashi, one is struck by the crowds of pilgrims following city
guides and rapacious pandas (Brahmin ritualists), who are known to capi-
talize on pilgrims as they attempt to reach one of the many temples in the
city (Saraswathi 1975). Small groups of men are seen carrying the dead
body of their relative, on a wooden bier, while proceeding toward the
Mahashamshaan (India’s largest cremation site, located at Manikarnika
Ghat ) and continuously chanting Ram Nam Sat Hai (the name of Lord
Ram is truth). They hustle through narrow lanes where, for generations,
small shops have sold milk-based items, local sweets, snacks, bhang (a
cannabis-infused drink), spices, perfumes, religious books, ritual materials,
jewelry, utensils, silk sarees, and everyday groceries. These lanes are also
infested with monkeys and dangerous bulls that live off of tea leaf leftovers
that are strewn in the streets.
82 R. NAYYAR
Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan is very close to Godowlia, the heart of

the city, where uncanny streams of traffic are a usual sight. Here, auto-
rickshaws, cycle rickshaws, electric rickshaws, and taxis are made to stop,
and pilgrims (as well as travelers) from around the world who arrive in
the city must continue the rest of their journey toward the old city on
foot. There is also a loudspeaker installed on a pole at the center of
the junction that broadcasts live commentary, loud security announce-
ments, directions, and warnings by a group of policemen who sit at a
table placed on an elevated platform. These sounds are audible within the
walls of Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan. They are also often overshadowed by
the loud chanting and music that is simultaneously broadcasted through
the speakers in each room from the central temple area of the building,
where the priest staff regularly perform their ritual duties.
Why do people even bring their dying relatives here in the final stages
of their lives, when they could have chosen to die in an arguably more
peaceful environment at home? This was the immediate question that
came to mind when I first visited the salvation home. For some reason,
noise, air, water, or any other pollution has never been an issue for any
of my interlocutors at Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan. Shiv sees Kashi with
so much love, charm, and adoration. Seeing is an appropriate metaphor
because, as Diana Eck (1983: 20) points out, in the Hindu tradition,
the eyes have been entrusted with the apprehension of the holy; when
Hindus go to the temple they say they are going for darshana (seeing) of
the divine image. Pilgrimage too is performed for darshana of the sacred
sights. Eck presents her Kashi from two opposing perspectives; a Western,
phenomenal view and a Hindu view; in the latter, Kashi is “not only the
city that meets the eye; it is also that engages the religious imagination …
through the eyes of collective imagination and religious vision” (1983:
22–23). It is the Kashi of the religious imagination that must be taken
seriously, for it is this Kashi upon which pilgrims, including those coming
to die, act.
When Shiv arrived in his car at Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan, one of
the priest staff members opened the large iron gate that is kept chained
so that only people—and not the many cows that wander freely in the
narrow streets of Kashi—can slip through. The gate is fully opened only
when a family arrives with their dying relative or when the family carries
out the body to the cremation site in a procession. When greeted by the
families, the priest staff member usually asks them about their hometown,
in order to confirm that the reputation of Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan
is spreading through word-of-mouth. Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan, run

by Dalmia Charitable Trust, offers a free room to families, with the
opportunity to hear Hari Kirtan (religious singing) and the recitation of
Bhagwad Gita and Ramcharitramanas (religious scriptures) twenty-four
hours a day. According to the priest staff, the salvation home also offers
bhojan (a cooking facility) and bhajan (religious songs), which allow for
the creation of a devotional atmosphere for families who seek Moksha for
their terminally ill and dying relatives.
Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan is comprised of two floors built around
a central open courtyard. The entrance leads to a temple hall—a dark
chamber where priest staff and family members gather twice a day to
sing religious and spiritual songs while playing harmonium and hand
cymbals. Meanwhile, the tape recorder system in this hall broadcasts the
Hare Ram, Hare Krishna chant throughout the day in every room of
the salvation home. After passing through the door of this temple hall,
one reaches the inner courtyard with the two floors built around it and
four rooms on each floor. Shiv’s family settled in the room on the ground
floor that faces the temple hall. Shiv gently placed his mother down on a
wooden cot, which now had a comfortable mattress that he had brought
for her. The other (larger) wooden cot had been prepared for him and his
son, Kanhaiyya. During my research at the salvation home, many families
would set up a cooking area with a burner stove and a sack of rice and
lentils, but Shiv’s family arranged for their meals to be delivered from
local restaurants in the city. Chaubey ji arrived with a tray in one hand
and a bell in the other. On the tray was a small cup of water from river
Ganga which had been infused with some dried leaves of the holy Tulsi
plant. Chaubey ji then bent a little to pour a spoonful of the water into
the mother’s mouth and uttered the words “Ram Ram.” He then rang
the bell, and the sound reverberated in the room for a few moments.
As the sonic presence of the priest staff faded away, the sounds of the
broadcasted chants from the tape recorder took over.
Later, during the evening aarti (adoration of gods) ritual at the salva-
tion home, the three priest staff members slowly walked in single file
toward Shiv’s room. They carried the tray and continued to recite the
Hare Rama, Hare Krishna mantra while ringing chimes and bells. They
entered the room, waved the diya (flame on the tray) over and around
Shiv’s mother, and one of them applied teeka (a red mark) to her fore-
head. Finally, Chaubey ji blew the divine conch before they left the room.
The three priest staff members continued, in single file, and performed
84 R. NAYYAR
the same ritual twice a day in all the eight rooms (whether occupied or
not) before returning to the temple hall. Shiv and I also walked out from
the room into the inner courtyard. We silently looked at the three priest
staff members finishing up their aarti in the temple hall. Shiv, then, made
an interesting comment about a piece of cloth that had been hung to
dry under the sun in the inner courtyard. He said, “As families leave,
these bed sheets are washed, dried and put back on the cots for the dying
pilgrims that arrive next. [Similarly,] this body is a temporary clothing for
our spirit … and we will keep changing our clothing (be reborn) unless
our spirit finds a way to reunite with Paramatman (the universal spirit).”
He smiled and then told me that he had learned about this clothing
metaphor from a Hindi film. I figured that Shiv wanted to project his
thoughts, as we tried to make a film that for him was also an exercise in
history-making. But everyday items, such as a drying cloth, a log of wood,
a boat or a river bank, which were present at the salvation home, as well
as in the city, emerged during our audiovisual ethnography as important
sensory sources for daydreaming, imagining, and performing the nature
of that possibility in Moksha.
The following morning, Chaubey ji came to Shiv’s room carrying the
Ramcharitramanas and spent half an hour reading and explaining its
passages to the family. Chaubey ji sat cross-legged on the wooden cot,
while Shiv and Kanhaiyya sat next to their mother and listened intently.
As a sign of respect, Shiv touched Chaubey ji’s feet once he had finished
reading. Shiv wanted to get a copy of the scripture for himself, so the
priest staff member suggested that he take a walk in Vishwanath Gali (the
street that leads to the most important Vishwanath temple), as there are
many shops there that sell the book. Once we had purchased the book, I
invited Shiv to visit the cremation site at Manikarnika Ghat, which is only
a short walk from Vishwanath Gali. We found a comfortable spot next to
a chai shop and watched the drama that regularly unfolds at the crema-
tion site: burning pyres, families negotiating and performing rituals, bulls
relaxing, a dead cow awaiting its cremation, goats playing between the
burning pyres, boats passing by with tourists trying to take photographs
and the loud sound of drums and bells from the temple.
“Is this a twenty-four-hour spectacle?” Shiv asked me. Before I could
answer, a sadhu (religious ascetic) who was standing beside us replied,
“Yes; it is for this reason that Kashi always remains in Satya Yuga (the
beginning of time and the first of the four ‘Eras of Truth’ in Hinduism).”
For the people of the city and pilgrims who arrive here, Kashi stands
outside space and time, yet they believe that all space is contained within
it. Often Banarasis (locals of Kashi) and pilgrims who visit the city talk
as though the laws of karmic retribution are suspended in Kashi (Parry
1994: 11–30). When Shiv enquired further, Mauni Baba (the sadhu) told
us that Yamaraj, the lord of death in Hindu mythology, is not allowed
within the city limits because Lord Shiva lives here and guards it; as such,
dying in this holy city means one can escape the cycle of rebirth and
death. Jonathan Parry, an anthropologist who studied the death ritualists
in Kashi, suggests that it is the city’s association with death that provides it
with immunity to the degenerative flow of durational time and renews its
capacity to encompass the rest of creation (Parry 1994: 11). In his book,
Death in Banaras (1994), Parry delves deeper into a recurrent theme
in Hindu religious thought, namely the homology which is believed to
exist between the body and the cosmos (Eliade 1959: 172). Body and
cosmos are governed by the same laws and are comprised of the same five
elements. Parry notes a further equivalence between cremation, which
destroys the microcosm of the physical body and the general conflagra-
tion which destroys the macrocosm at the end of time (pralaya) (Parry
1994: 30). In some of the Puranic texts, an individual death is classified
as nitya (“daily” or “constant”) pralaya (Biardeau 1971: 76). In Hindu
mythology, Pralaya, that involves fire and water, is not only an end of
the universe; it is also a beginning, a necessary prelude to a new world
cycle and hence a renewal of time. With this argument, Parry concludes
that the most celebrated cremation ground in India is also the scene of
cosmogony, where one constantly is at the beginning of time itself, as this
process is kept in perpetual motion by the constant stream of cremations
which are staged there (Parry 1994: 31).
During the evenings at the salvation home, Shiv (and I) participated in
a daily tradition held by the priest staff and family members. Described as
a “Nirgun Kirtan,” this tradition usually represented an evening of fast-
paced, mood-altering chanting of the thirteenth-century mystic poetry of
Kabir. These evening ceremonies would become quite intense and loud
over time, as members from different families were sometimes more expe-
rienced in singing these folk songs, and at all times they encouraged
each other to participate. During Shiv’s stay, there were no other fami-
lies staying at the salvation home, so the priest staff urged Shiv to sing
along with them and even play the hand cymbals. Soon, their voices trav-
eled to his mother through the speakers that were installed in each room.
It was evident that these were times of intense joy for Shiv. He would
86 R. NAYYAR
completely immerse himself in the ceremony—eyes closed, head rotating,

and hands automatically playing the instruments—as he patiently waited
for Chaubey ji to sing a verse, so he could repeat it as a chorus, while
appreciating the spiritual knowledge in it. Below is my own translation of
one of the songs that Shiv sang with the priest staff.
One day at the river bank, I was walking leisurely

I saw with my eyes, a beautiful body burning in fire O Ram!
I saw with my eyes, a beautiful body burning in fire O Ram! (Chorus)
Carrying a bamboo cot, four men reached the ghat
Carrying a bamboo cot, four men reached the ghat (Chorus)
I saw with my eyes, his son put the fire on him O Ram!
I saw with my eyes, his son put the fire on him O Ram! (Chorus)
One day at the river bank, I was walking leisurely (Chorus)
Friends and relatives whoever were there, said the same words in a chorus
Friends and relatives whoever were there, said the same words in a chorus
(Chorus)
I saw with my eyes, “the name of Ram is the truth” they repeated O Ram!
I saw with my eyes, “the name of Ram is the truth” they repeated O Ram!
(Chorus)
So far, I have demonstrated how the salvation home and Kashi, the
city, itself provide the sensory environment, spiritual knowledge, and
ritual tools for family members to perform their anticipation for their
dying relative’s Moksha. The salvation home also allows sociability among
different families and priest staff. The daily activities at the salvation home
heighten the embodied and sensory experience of anticipation and perfor-
mance of care. Participation in the daily activities at Kashi Labh Mukti
Bhawan provides resoluteness to the family’s anticipation in performing
the possible and in staging new futures for themselves. Many of these
performances included walks around the holy city, in which I would
accompany Shiv with the camera. Walking, as Liisa Malkki (2007: 178)
says about ethnography, is “a way of being in the world.” Walking with
the camera, for us, became a shared performative practice (Moretti 2017:
97) in the city of our religious imagination. This involved co-performing
new ways to navigate the city and improvising our daily projects. In the
upcoming section, I shall portray the everyday projects that Shiv and I
performed, with the help of the camera in order to make his mother’s
Moksha possible.
Performances of the Possible

On the second day of his stay at Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan, Shiv decided
to take the holy bath in Ganga river. So, we walked through the Kashi
Vishwanath temple area toward Thateri Bazaar and onward to Panch-
ganga Ghat. Shiv looked at the mighty river Ganga and noticed that
thousands like us have come to wash themselves in the holy river. Shiv
politely approached a man by the river and asked him what he was doing.
He learned that the man was soaking dry clay (collected from Ganga) with
water in order to use it as a soap. This sustainable practice, according to
the man, has been followed for generations in Kashi and helps in cleansing
the body before the holy bath in river Ganga. Shiv was very impressed to
have met Mishra ji, a local of the holy city. He then asked Mishra ji if he
knew the mythological history of Ganga’s arrival in Kashi. Goddess river
Ganga, who lived in the devalok (abode of the Gods), was asked by the
Gods to manifest on earth and flow through Kashi. However, goddess
Ganga did not wish to go to earth because she believed that the greed of
humans would destroy her. Shiv listened attentively as Mishra ji reminded
us both of the damage being done to the river by the growing indus-
trial sewage, tourism, and the hydro-electric demands of the country. Shiv
decided not to bathe with the soap that he had brought with him for his
holy bath and instead used some of the dry clay that he received from
Mishra ji, the man at the bank of river Ganga.
While walking back to Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan, Shiv was immensely
happy for having taken a holy dip in the river Ganga, for having met
Mishra ji and for carrying Ganga water and the clay back to his mother.
His next comment was directly addressed to the camera: “This will be
a great memory to have in the film.” It became clear to Shiv that the
daily projects he was undertaking in Kashi in anticipation of his mother’s
Moksha were providing an opportunity for him to learn and improve his
understanding about an everyday life, made up of small sustainable activi-
ties, that leads to the possibility of Moksha. As we walked with the camera,
Shiv remarked, “My mother has brought me to Kashi for a reason … life
in Delhi has kept me away from all of this.” When I was leaving Kashi
Labh Mukti Bhawan that evening, Shiv confirmed with me again whether
I will be joining him for a walk the following day. In this way, our daily
walks with the camera were not only an activity set out to complete daily
projects in the city, but also a performative exercise in imagination—a way
of thinking of the past and the future or engaging in collective projects
88 R. NAYYAR
(Moretti 2017: 99). We began using the camera to establish a new aware-
ness of our understanding of Moksha, as an embodied politics-of-care. The
camera also allowed us to navigate the holy city while reflecting upon our
own relationship to it, with others and with our surroundings.
In an early morning phone call the following day, Shiv greeted me with
Har Har Mahadev, as Kashi locals greet each other. The priest staff had
advised him to visit the temple that is dedicated to Lord Mahamrityunjay,
the conqueror of death and an avatar of Lord Shiva. Many pilgrims go
there to fetch ashes from the temple’s hawan kund (holy fire), after the
temple priests inscribe it with the Mahamrityunjay mantra. Shiv informed
the temple priest about his mother’s situation and even requested to film
this encounter so it may be documented as a family memory. As I filmed,
the temple priest offered the ashes on a leaf and asked Shiv to chant the
Mahamrityunjay mantra with him. While walking back to Kashi Labh
Mukti Bhawan, Shiv told me that he had noticed that the temple priest
had provided us with special attention; Shiv attributed this to the presence
of the camera. I thanked Shiv for asking the temple priest for permission
to use the camera, and he told me that he wished to document these
moments, in which he is learning and improving his understanding of
how one might lead a spiritual life that leads to Moksha.
Filmmaking, in this way, emerged as a performative and collaborative
activity that helped Shiv to actively engage with the environment and
with the many questions, family histories, and meanings that emerged
and were associated with anticipation and care for his mother’s—as well as
his own—Moksha. Audiovisual ethnography, as a catalyst for trajectories
of creative and imaginative possibility (Irving 2018: 394), provided me
with an open-ended research practice to follow Shiv’s ideas and memo-
ries, taking seriously our embodied, audiovisual, and sensory participation
in the everyday life of the holy city (Moretti 2017; Pink 2008). Jean
Rouch would see this as a result of Shiv’s “ciné-provocation,” which
the former also regards as a catalyst of his ethno-fiction filmmaking; for
Rouch believed that the provocation of the camera brings in elements
of improvisation and reveals “hidden truths” (Sjöberg 2018: 411). In
relation, I contend that the camera in my project created the conditions
for such kinds of performative expression that constituted what I call an
activism grounded in care. The activism grounded in care did not rely
on an explicit understanding of politics and change (Horton and Kraftl
2009: 14; Kazubowski-Houston, forthcoming), but emerged as the antic-

ipatory, creative, and spiritual potential of Shiv’s embodied understanding
of care.
As we continued walking toward the banks of river Ganga, we came
across an old friend of mine, Dr. Vijay Choubey. I introduced Shiv to
Vijay ji, who is a North Indian classical violinist from Kashi. Shiv greeted
him and also told him that he had come three days ago from Delhi
to fulfill his mother’s Moksha. Vijay ji informed us that, within Indian
classical music, there are particular ragas (melodic frameworks for impro-
visation) that can be very useful in such situations, as they can help one
deal with inner conflicts and memories. He explained: “While listening
to raga Shivranjani the mind that is stressed with sadness, releases the
pressure with tears dripping like raindrops. It allows the listener to pour
out these suppressed feelings and emotions.” Suspecting that there may
be unresolved issues that are impeding the release of his mother’s last
breath, Shiv invited Vijay ji to visit them at Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan
and requested that he play a raga that can help.
Shiv was impressed to learn that Kashi is one of India’s centers of
classical Indian music. After confirming that we had managed to audio-
visually document our discussions with Dr. Vijay Choubey, he expressed
his interest in continuing to meet more of Kashi’s extraordinary people.
In anticipation of his mother’s Moksha, Shiv began to imagine new ways
of performing care with the help of local people from the city. One day,
for instance, the priest staff had no suggestions to offer; so, Shiv himself
suggested that we plant a tree at Assi Ghat as he felt that there are not
enough trees in Kashi. In this way, new possibilities started to emerge
during our walks in the city; and by improvising and performing these
possibilities, Shiv was actively taking a role in the direction of the film.
On the fourth day of his stay at Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan, and as
we sat in the outside area of the salvation home soaking in the sun’s
warmth, Shiv told me about his mother. She was ninety-two years old
and had not only been a mother to Shiv but also to her grandchildren,
Kanhaiyya and Noor, since Shiv’s wife had died when the children were
young. Shiv told me that although he later remarried, both of his children
continued to look toward their grandmother for love and care. Moments
later, Kanhaiyya arrived with his sister Noor and her father-in-law Khan,
whose family hails from Kashi. Everyone praised Shiv for bringing his
mother to the holy city. We all stepped outside the room, as the mother
was sleeping, and Shiv introduced me to his relatives as a friend. This
90 R. NAYYAR
led Khan to speak about friendship. He stated that true friends are those
who stand by you in times of grief and suffering. Notably, Shiv has a large
family, based all over India and around the world; however, none of his
relatives—not even his sisters—were able to join him in this pilgrimage
to Kashi. Khan was pointing toward a future where their friendship could
truly become a possibility. The name of Shiv’s daughter was changed to
Noor when she got married to a Muslim man. Shiv had not approved of
the marriage. Noor had settled down in Kashi with her new family and
had had no contact at all with Shiv. Six years later, Shiv’s dying mother has
brought together a father and a daughter in a situation where they have
to face each other, as a family. This was also the first time that Shiv was
meeting his daughter’s father-in-law, who now frequently visited the room
to inquire about their well-being. When Shiv introduced Khan to me, he
remarked that “they probably would never have met each other otherwise,
and only God knows how his mother had made this a possibility.”
Shiv was aware that a future where he would have to face his daugh-
ter’s new religious identity awaited him, when he had embarked with his
mother on the journey to Kashi. However, he had not expected to stay in
Kashi for more than a day or two. At times, when he found it difficult to
contain his emotions, he would discreetly invite me to go out for a walk
in the city. Once, Shiv stated: “Maybe I should take my mother back to
Delhi. Perhaps she needs to be admitted to the hospital … If she is not
ready to die, we must take her back home.” He told me that he was also
worried about his tailor shop in Delhi, as many of his clients had been
calling to inquire about their garments. On our way back, Shiv thanked
me for assisting them like a family member would. My response to him
was quite direct: “I am not the only one here with you, as you have your
daughter and her father-in-law as well. That is a blessing.”
The following day, when I arrived at Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan, I
found Shiv and Khan in the midst of a conversation. They asked me to
join them. “Have you been here since the partition?” Shiv asked Khan.
It came as news to Shiv that about one-third of Kashi’s population is
Muslim, and that they have inhabited the city for generations. The two
men discussed Islam, Hinduism, their similarities and differences. Shiv
insisted on the fact that Moksha is neither heaven nor hell, but rather
the union of the individual soul with the universal soul. Meanwhile,
Khan questioned Hindu practices like the worship of idols. Shiv’s mother
appeared to be sleeping throughout, but I wondered if she could hear
this discussion. Shiv believed that she was listening to everything that was
happening. During our walk in the city that evening, he said to me: “I
have realized that one cannot judge something, if one has never experi-
enced it.” He later contemplated the fact that his mother had essentially
created the ideal atmosphere for her family to come together and become
one again. Having transferred some videos from our walks in the city to
my mobile phone, I now showed them to Shiv. He noted how he had put
forth his questions to the locals of the city and spoken about improving
his understanding of a life that leads to Moksha. Shiv then told me that
Kashi is the only city where such possibilities could manifest for the sake
of his mother’s Moksha. I asked him if he was still planning to return to
Delhi, and he told me that “no matter what it takes and how long it takes,
we will stay till my mother releases her last breath.”
Our interactions with local people and the holy city on camera had
urged Shiv to imagine and carry out small, sustainable, and spiritual
projects that may lead to Moksha; and there was no space for animosity
in our performances of the possible. Kazubowski-Houston argues that
her “quiet theatre” (2018a: 419), as a method in performance ethnog-
raphy, is about being attentive to the unpredictable, hidden, obscure,
and humble ways in which activism might play out in the field. In her
research practice, Kazubowski-Houston (2018b, forthcoming) focuses on
how performance employed as ethnography can facilitate an activism that
works slowly and subtly, creating embodied and affective imaginaries with
inadvertent transformative capacities. Similarly, in our project, audiovisual
ethnography allowed Shiv to reimagine his everyday projects, staged as
performances of care for his mother’s Moksha and, by proxy, his own life.
He achieved this by engaging in a process of self-cultivation (Tinius 2016:
28), resolving past family conflict, and making new possible worlds for his
family. In this context, the camera created the conditions for improvising
and imagining our daily projects, which constituted an activism grounded
in the embodied and the spiritual understanding of Moksha. Crapanzano
(2004) argues that the process of imagination allows us to explore what
lies beyond the “horizon” in the “hinterland,” and it facilitates our “prac-
tical domination over the real” (19). In referring to imagining in my
project, I draw on Appadurai (1996), and I argue that the camera did
not allow us to detach from reality but led us to a complex engagement
with it. Our audiovisual ethnography facilitated a performative space that
allowed us to try out different possibilities for a future in Moksha.
It was the ninth day after the arrival of Shiv’s family in Kashi. Shiv
had called me to ask for Dr. Vijay Choubey’s mobile phone number. I
92 R. NAYYAR
was already with the family in their room when Vijay ji arrived that after-
noon. He took out his surpeti (an instrument used to provide a drone in
Indian classical music) and his violin. Sitting cross-legged on the wooden
cot, Vijay ji looked at the mother for a few moments then started to play
a tune that was both deeply melancholic and meditative. All the family
members, including Shiv, his son, his daughter, and his daughter’s father-
in-law, sat around the mother’s bed. Together, they were all trying to
deal with the deep emotions and memories that were emerging through
the music. For the first time in nine days, Shiv’s mother opened her eyes
and looked into Shiv’s, tears welling up in both. With eyes closed, Vijay
ji continued to play his violin. When the music ended, Shiv’s mother
plunged back into deep sleep without having uttered a single word. Shiv’s
performances of the possible in Kashi, staged as activism grounded in care,
had urged him to resolve past family conflicts; and in doing so, he had
created a possible future, where his family’s reunion and reconciliation
became the most vital performance of the possible, which in turn was
necessary for the sake of his mother’s Moksha.
The next morning, on the tenth day after their arrival, I received a call
from Shiv, requesting my help in purchasing the raw materials required
for cremation; his mother had just released her last breath. I ran at once
from home, navigating narrow streets, with their throngs of people and
animals, and reached the main road where I could catch a rickshaw to
reach Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan. The junction that was usually the most
crowded in the city was now shockingly quiet. All the roads were suddenly
empty, and policemen were urging people to stay on the side of the
road. I waited impatiently with the other people and overheard that the
Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi, was scheduled to arrive in Kashi.
Ten minutes later, about one hundred cars, with red beacons and police
sirens, passed through the junction in single file. Once the last of the cars
had passed, the city returned to its previous bustling sonic and sensorial
state, and I was finally able to take a cycle rickshaw to Kashi Labh Mukti
Bhawan.
Both Shiv and I were unsure about the materials required for the
cremation ritual, so we asked our rickshaw driver to help us buy a bier, or
wooden frame, on which the corpse may be carried to the cremation site,
as well as orange satin fabric, white cotton fabric, flower garlands, rose
syrup, and sandalwood sticks. Noor and her father-in-law had arrived, and
the whole family awaited our return at Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan. We
returned late in the evening and there was a power cut in the city. Upon
instruction from the priest staff, Shiv and his son, Kanhaiyya, quickly
washed the mother’s body, wrapped it with the white cotton fabric, and
placed it on the bier. Although we needed a fourth man to help (as
is customary in Hindu death rituals), Shiv was hesitant to request that
Noor’s father-in-law, a Muslim, join us in carrying the bier to Manikarnika
ghat and asked me to discuss this with Shukla ji, the manager of the
salvation home. The manager advised that this is a moment of cele-
bration, and the religion of the four people carrying the bier does not
matter. Noor’s father-in-law agreed after much contemplation but said
that he needed fifteen minutes to perform his daily prayer in the mosque
before proceeding to break social boundaries in order to be one with
Shiv’s family in the mother’s final rites. The priest staff opened the large
iron gate and the four of us—Shiv, Khan, Kanhaiyya, and myself—walked
slowly while carrying the bier on our shoulders through the same chaotic
streets toward Manikarnika ghat (the cremation site).
As is the Hindu tradition after the death of a parent, Shiv got his
head shaved and only kept a long tuft. He was unsure of the structure
of the death ritual at Manikarnika ghat; therefore, the cremation special-
ists advised him to perform it like a local of Kashi. Shiv dressed in a
fresh white dhoti (a single piece of cloth placed around the waist) and
wrapped another around his neck, allowing it to drape down his back.
Wooden logs were arranged in a large pyre on the edge of river Ganga,
near the remains of some earlier cremations. The mother’s body was then
placed on top. Shiv joined us with a burning ember smoldering away in
a bundle of grass. Carefully guarded and sold for a high price by the
“Dome” community, this special fire is said to have been burning contin-
uously since time began. Based on the instructions of a funeral priest,
Shiv passed the ember in a circular motion over his dead mother’s head,
an action that ignited the grass. Then, he shoved the burning bundle into
the pile of wood and stepped back to observe his mother’s cremation.
Khan joined us and gave Shiv a pat on the back for having successfully
fulfilled his mother’s final wish. Shiv held Khan’s hands and thanked him
for all his support throughout. “I have come to understand a lesson about
true friends,” he said. For Shiv, this was a moment when he was separating
with his mother on the one hand, and reuniting with new family members
on the other. Shiv thanked his daughter Noor and her father-in-law Khan
for all the support and invited them to his home in Delhi. We collected
the ashes and mixed them with river Ganga. When we returned to Kashi
Labh Mukti Bhawan, Shukla ji asked Shiv to fill up the feedback register.
94 R. NAYYAR
Almost always, Shukla ji recites to the family member what needs to be

written:
I, Shiv, stayed at Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan, along with my son and
dying mother. On the 10th day, my mother took her last breath and was
cremated at Manikarnika Ghat. Her last wish to die in Kashi and be forever
one with God was fulfilled. I am paying INR 100 (USD 1.45) as the cost
of electricity.
Film Screening
Shiv continues to keep in touch with me; he calls me regularly and recalls
vivid memories of his pilgrimage to Kashi with his mother. In July 2018,
after graduating with a Master’s in Anthropology from Tallinn University,
I went to meet Shiv’s family in Delhi, and I screened “Kashi Labh,” the
ethnographic film that I had created from our research, at their home.
The film reminded Shiv about each of our daily activities in Kashi, when
he had performed the possible and through which he had found openings
into a new future for his family. Kanhaiyya informed me with immense
joy that his sister Noor and her family had come to visit them in Delhi to
participate in the after-death ceremony for their grandmother.
Shiv was eager to get a copy of the film from me, so he could share
it with his distant family members. After some time, he asked me why
I had excluded his interactions with Khan from the film, so I explained
how I had felt that this was a private family matter that would be difficult
to contextualize clearly given the scarcity of audiovisual material about it.
After all, the video footage I had gathered was not based on a planned
shooting schedule: it was limited to whatever my embodied camera could
capture while Shiv and I improvised the daily activities that involved our
walks in the city. Furthermore, given the time limitations of my graduate
program, I had to finalize the film and the written thesis with the material
I had gathered by January 2018.
Shiv then asked if I could share with him all the videos that we had
recorded in Kashi, including his interactions with Khan. So, I provided
him with a disk containing all the video footage and promised that if given
the chance, I would share our story through a medium that would allow
me to highlight his family’s reconciliation, alongside our daily activities
and walks with the camera in Kashi. This chapter represents my endeavor
to highlight some of the deep family transformations that transpired but
could not be included in the film. The reconciliation between Shiv’s

family members was ultimately one of his most significant performances
of the possible staged as activism grounded in care.
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CHAPTER 5
Impossible Ethnography: Tracking Colonial

Encounters, Listening to Raised Voices,
and Hearing Indigenous Sovereignty
in the “New World”
Virginie Magnat
If conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the past is admittedly impossible,

I contend in this chapter that imaginatively reconfiguring notions of space
and time to include past and future eras within the operations of field-
work might very well constitute indispensable ethnographic research for
an anthropology of the contemporary. My imaginary ethnography begins
with a discussion of musicologist Gary Tomlinson’s investigation of the
impact of Indigenous vocality on the experience of European explorers
engaged in the “discovery” of what they considered to be the “New
World.” I then place historical accounts, namely testimonies by Euro-
pean colonizers about their perception of Indigenous voices, in dialogue
V. Magnat (B)
University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, BC, Canada
e-mail: virginie.magnat@ubc.ca

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4_5
98 V. MAGNAT
with theoretical texts by European philosophers whose work has signifi-

cantly informed Western ways of thinking about language, speech, song,
and music. This dialogical approach necessarily alters the positionality of
the ethnographer, who can no longer derive authority from having spent
time “in the field” developing relationships with research participants.
Moreover, investigating past vocality provides an opportunity to radi-
cally reimagine ethnography and fieldwork beyond their discursive and
spatio-temporal boundaries, which can be traced to the colonial legacy of
anthropology.
Indeed, early ethnography was conceived as a method designed to
make the cultural practices of the Other legible to the West by translating
orality and embodiment into scholarly writing, whose truth value was
legitimized through publication. Of course, since its Malinowskian begin-
nings, the discipline of anthropology has undergone profound epistemo-
logical and methodological changes, provoking intense internal tensions
that reached their apex during the 1980s. However, whereas the post-
modern turn marked by the publication of Writing Culture (Clifford and
Marcus 1986) placed the ethno of ethnography and its fraught relation-
ship to culture and race under scrutiny, the emphasis on graphy remained
central to postmodern anthropology, albeit in a more self-reflexive and
performative fashion. Anthony Qwame Harrison hence argues that the
uniqueness of ethnography as research and as a representational practice
resides in its capacity to contextualize the social dynamics of fieldwork
by reconstructing experience “through the process of writing first field
notes (Emerson et al., 1995) and later ethnographic monographs” (2014:
226, 243). The colonial legacy of the ethnographic project resurfaces
when Harrison acknowledges an arresting paradox: “Ethnography’s foun-
dations are in writing culture, yet historically ethnographers are deeply
implicated in the project of literatizing non-literate societies,” which
compels him to ask two crucial questions that remain open-ended: “What
non-literal forms of ethnographic representation might a contemporary,
critical, and historically informed ethnographic project take? How can we
move beyond writing culture?” (2014: 245). These questions are particu-
larly relevant to reimagining early European encounters with Indigenous
forms of oral culture in North America. As colonizers struggled to “lit-
eratize” Indigenous voices through written testimonies, they seemed to
have become acutely aware that discursivity failed to circumscribe vocal-
ization’s oral, sonic, and vibratory qualities, its sensorial and affective
5 IMPOSSIBLE ETHNOGRAPHY: TRACKING COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS … 99
properties, and its vital relational dimension. In light of Dwight Conquer-

good’s critique of textocentrism in the academy and his call to take sound,
voice, and vocality seriously, imaginary ethnography invites readers to hear
and listen to vocality through non-discursive modes of sensory percep-
tion and experiential cognition that counter and unsettle Western cultural
imperialism.
In The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voices in the Era of
European Contact, Tomlinson enlists Derrida’s critique of Rousseau’s
impossible ethnography on the origin of song, speech, and language
to deconstruct the ways in which Europeans imagined and projected
their own fantasies of encounter that “coalesced especially under the
impetus of raised voices” (3). Building on Tomlinson’s notion of the
supraperformative force of Indigenous songwork, my intervention in
his argument consists in probing his proposed revision of Derrida’s
perspective by offering a critical reading of the French philosopher’s
analysis of Rousseau’s writing. I will examine Rousseau’s fascination
for, and Derrida’s disavowal of, the irrepressible affective power of
phonic/sonic materiality and relate the latter to the sensory experience of
the New World by European colonizers, who perceived Indigenous raised
voices as unimaginable vocality dangerously breaching the boundaries
of discursivity delineating the Western knowledge systems that crucially
empowered the colonial enterprise.1
Historicizing testimonies provided by early visitors, Tomlinson
suggests that they recognized raised or heightened voice “as distinct
from speech in its intonation, patterned rhythmicization, and tautolog-
ical excess,” hence perceiving it as “non-speech, even anti-speech, in its
escape from a semantic order within which its powers might have been
defined and tamed” (3). From such a perspective, the space opened by
heightened voice is not only broader than that of speech but also some-
what independent from it, leading Tomlinson to argue that Derrida’s
analysis of the metaphysics of speech and writing must be revised so as
to include “vocalization all told in which speech plays an important but
by no means encompassing role” (3). Tomlinson highlights a widespread
inattention to the powers of heightened voice, especially when it comes
to song, in recent scholarly literature on the “early New World,” which
tends to overlook what he considers to be an important perspective on
Indigenous American societies, the aim of his project being “to under-
stand certain of these societies by listening for the voices they raised at
the moment of contact” (3). Pointing to the ubiquity of singing as a
100 V. MAGNAT
fundamental mode of human cultural expression, he remarks that, as an

analytical category, singing has become invisible to our gaze as evidenced
by the conspicuous absence of both “song” and “singing” in the indexes
of most of the books to which we refer in our scholarly writing (6)—a
test that I carried out systematically as part of the preliminary research I
conducted for my monograph The Performative Power of Vocality (Rout-
ledge 2020). Tomlinson associates the inattention to song in “early New
World” scholarship with “a resistance to listening” in spite of the abun-
dance of information about singing, dancing, music-making, ceremonial
chants, calls, and cries recorded in early European accounts and remarks
that “these testimonies from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries regu-
larly attain a level of detail and vividness that beckons with the prospect
of hearing, if dimly, the 500-year-old song of Indigenous Americans” (4).
Significantly for this discussion, Tomlinson distinguishes his approach
from the ethnographic work of ethnomusicologists and anthropologists,
whom he notes are themselves very cautious about reading historical
depth into their conclusions, and concurs with them that researchers must
generally avoid “‘upstreaming,’ whereby traditional societies today are
seen to reflect ancient societies” (5). Since no performable music writing
survives from ancient Indigenous American societies, he probes historical
accounts for insights into the ways in which song was used, including
“expectations for its efficacies [and] the sense of world embodied in it,”
which he relates to what he calls songwork, whether it be part of the inter-
actions that occurred between Indigenous groups or of their coming into
contact with European newcomers, hence encompassing “the achieve-
ments of song in specific situations both Indigenous and colonial” (5).
Situating his work in the space between “the beckoning phantasm of a
reconstructed performance and the encyclopedic rehearsing of contem-
porary testimony,” he calls for a focused engagement through intent
listening that might enable us to “still hear in certain songs from these
societies [ … ] the nuanced cultural work they were designed to accom-
plish,” which he relates to “a supraperformative force, linked to societal
and expressive particulars and yet audible even in the absence of specific
recuperable sounds” (5). Having acknowledged that Indigenous song-
work was mediated by the presence of European conquerors and that
all the sources to which he refers “are read today through the dimming,
altering scrim of colonial histories and modern historiographies,” he spec-
ifies that the kinds of singing he describes in his book are nevertheless
“acts of world- and self-making. Through them Indigenous powers were
unfolded that continued to make the world in non- (or anti-) European
ways even in the bleakest moments of conquest and early colonization”
(6–7). He further suggests that such world-constituting power persists
today because “song and by extension music continue to be one of our
fundamental expressive capacities” (7).
In an effort to mitigate the Eurocentric dangers that lurk behind
the phrase “New World,” Tomlinson emphasizes ontological differences
between Indigenous and Western worldviews, admitting in a footnote
that his proposed revision of Derridean analysis raises the question of
its relevance to the study of vocality in Indigenous American societies
(10). To justify this methodological strategy, he suggests that Derrida’s
reading of Rousseau’s writing “points up ideological pressures that have
led us to subordinate song to speech” and remarks that, historically,
the period stretching from the Renaissance to the Cartesian moment
that ushered in a modern subjectivity where “the metaphysical emphasis
shifted from a divine presence in logos to an individual, reflective self-
presence there,” coincides with the European exploration and subjugation
of non-European territories and its inhabitants (11). European ideolog-
ical discourse on language and writing was instrumental to this modern
metaphysics, which was complicit with and often helped to rationalize
imperialism, as reflected in the eagerness of European conquerors to prove
that the nonalphabetic languages employed by the non-European soci-
eties they encountered were inferior to phonetic writing based on the
alphabet, equated with historical progress and societal evolution. In Essai
sur l’origine des langues [Essay on the Origins of Languages] published
posthumously in 1781, Rousseau hence envisions three stages of an evolu-
tionary process, beginning with pictographs or hieroglyphs, proceeding
toward ideographs, and culminating in the alphabet: “the depiction of
objects suits savage people; signs of words and propositions, barbarian
people; and the alphabet, civilized people” (Rousseau cited in Tomlinson
2007: 12). In his response to this ethnocentric perspective, Tomlinson
enlists Derrida’s critique, in De La Grammatologie, of Rousseau’s defense
of phonologism and its logocentric metaphysics. Tomlinson relies on this
critique to recuperate for the voice the notion of supplément discussed
at length by Derrida in his analysis of Rousseau’s Essai, turning it into
a key term whose double meaning becomes particularly potent. Inter-
estingly, the various definitions of this ambiguous term include the idea
of adding something (possibly less important) to something else that is
already considered to be complete; making something complete by means
102 V. MAGNAT
of a necessary addition; and replacing something that is inadequate with

something more appropriate (Larousse Dictionary http://www.larousse.
fr/dictionnaires/francais). The concept of supplémentarité employed by
Derrida encompasses all these possibilities and is central to his reading of
Rousseau in De La Grammatologie, which he concludes with the sugges-
tion that Rousseau was unable to fathom the type of writing (écriture)
that occurs prior to and within speech (parole) because his thinking was
circumscribed, hence limited, by the metaphysics of presence.
Before further considering Tomlinson’s revision of the Derridean
critique for the purpose of his discussion of Indigenous vocality in the
“New World,” I propose to revisit Rousseau’s foray into impossible
ethnography through his imaginative investigation of the relationship
between language, music, and song. This implausible undertaking seems
driven by his determination to privilege vocality by situating height-
ened voice as the source of language and contrasting singing with the
lack of musicality of articulated speech, which he associates with writing.
He contends that heightened voice has been tamed through alphabetic
writing and musical notation, a domestication which he considers to
threaten melody and song. While he speculates quite freely about the
first language (Derrida suggests that such fantastical theorizing is closer to
dreaming), envisioning its origins in the form of sung speech that featured
a wide range of sounds, rhythms, and onomatopoeia inspired by nature
and imitating human passions, Rousseau admits that there are no traces
left that might provide tangible clues about how this first language might
have sounded. Yet, as underlined by Derrida, Rousseau goes on to contra-
dict this hypothesis when suggesting that primordial means of expression
among the first humans were gestural rather than vocal because they must
have not been evolved enough to experience the passions he associates
with song. To compensate for his lack of ethnographic evidence about
such a primordial human condition, he provides in a footnote the example
of Indigenous people in the “New World” that Europeans claim to have
discovered: “Les sauvages de l’Amérique ne parlent presque jamais que hors
de chez eux; chacun garde le silence dans sa cabane, il parle par signes à
sa famille, et ces signes sont peu fréquents, parce qu’un sauvage est moins
inquiet, moins impatient qu’un Européen, qu’il n’a pas les mêmes besoins,
et qu’il prend soin d’y pourvoir lui-même [The savages of America almost
never speak except when away from home; each one keeps silent in his
hut, he uses signs to speak to his family, and these signs are infrequent,
because a savage is less anxious, less impatient than a European, he does
not have the same needs, and he takes care of them himself]” (155).
Influenced by prevailing colonial fantasies, Rousseau imagines primitive
modes of communication corresponding to a way of life that is so basic
that there is no expressive need for song or speech. This grotesque carica-
ture of Indigenous cultures is further sketched out as the essay progresses,
and Rousseau states in another footnote: “Il est inconcevable à quel point
l’homme est naturellement paresseux. [ … ] Rien ne maintient les sauvages
dans l’amour de leur état que cette délicieuse indolence. Les passionsqui
rendent les hommes inquiets, prévoyants, actifs, ne naissent que dans la
société. [It is hard to conceive the extent to which man is naturally lazy.
Nothing more than this delicious indolence sustains the fondness that
savages have for their own condition. Passions, that make men anxious,
give them foresight, and keep them busy, can only be born from social
life]” (163). When claiming here that passions are generated by people’s
active participation in social life, which he links to a more evolved usage
of language than that of the sign-making savage, Rousseau appears to
have abandoned his earlier notion of a primordial language whose musi-
cality was linked to passionate, if inarticulate, expressivity. He attributes
the absence of any developed social bonds between people considered to
be primitive to the priority they must have placed on survival in a hostile
environment: “les Esquimaux, le plus sauvage de tous les peuples, se rassem-
blent l’hiver dans leur cavernes, et l’été ne se connaissent plus [the Eskimos,
the most savage of all peoples, gather in their caves during winter, and no
longer know each other when summer comes]” (166). Arguing that the
development of language and writing stems from a need to communi-
cate with others in the spirit of fraternity and compassion cultivated by
virtuous civilized people, that is to say, Europeans, Rousseau nevertheless
identifies a significant pitfall in this form of linguistic evolution:
Tout ceci mène à la confirmation de ce principe, que, par un progrès naturel,

toutes ces langues lettrées doivent changer de caractère et perdre de la force
en gagnant de la clarté; que, plus on s’attache à perfectionner la grammaire
et la logique, plus on accélère ce progrès, et que, pour rendre bientôt une
langue froide et monotone, il ne faut qu’établir des académies chez le peuple
qui parle [This ultimately confirms the principle according to which, by
means of natural progress, all literate languages must change in character
and lose vigor while gaining clarity; striving to perfect grammar and logic
hence accelerates this progress, and a language eventually becomes cold
and monotonous when academies are established among the people who
speak it]. (152)
104 V. MAGNAT
Rousseau further contends that the evolution of language and music is

intimately connected, which implies that music, too, as it becomes more
sophisticated, runs the risk of losing the vitality so crucial to its affective
efficacy. He specifies that the powerful influence that music has on the
soul of the listener cannot be reduced to the physical sensations produced
by sounds, just as it is not merely the colors in a painting that make an
impression on the viewer. Comparing the melody composed by a musician
to the outlines of a figure drawn by a painter, he argues that chords and
sounds are to music-making what colors are to painting, and, perhaps in
the hope of further legitimizing singing within the context of eighteenth-
century artistic sensibilities, he insists that drawing and melody elevate
painting and music to the noble rank of imitative arts, whose moral effects
on the soul he repeatedly extols (179; 182).
Derrida’s critique, motivated by his fierce defense of the anti-
metaphysical dimension of writing and his quasi-compulsive suspicion
of voice and presence, is systematic, detailed, and unforgiving (see De
La Grammatologie 1967). In a move crucial to the development of his
theorization of supplémentarité, Derrida raises a pivotal question about
Rousseau’s ambivalence toward writing. This question is based on the
observation that while Rousseau indicts writing as the destruction of pres-
ence and the disease of speech, he paradoxically rehabilitates writing to
the extent that the latter promises to re-appropriate presence stolen from
speech, compelling Derrida to ask: “Mais par quoi, sinon déjà par une
écriture plus vieille qu’elle et déjà installée dans la place? [But stolen by
what, if not by a form of writing older than speech and already occu-
pying that space?]” (204). Derrida later points to the double meaning of
supplément, explaining that on the one hand, it can signify a plenitude
that enriches another plenitude and can point to the most fulsome pres-
ence, a cumulating accumulation of presence, as in artistic representation
that creatively supplements nature, but that on the other hand, it can also
mean substituting, filling a gap, making up for a lack, namely the loss
of presence, always anterior to the supplement, its unworthy subaltern.
Derrida notes that in Rousseau’s discourse on writing, the supplément can
play either function alternatively but always remains exterior, outside, and
other to that which it substitutes, in contrast with the notion of complé-
ment, which completes something by becoming integral to its completion
(208).
Departing from such binary thinking, Derrida upholds the radicality of
supplémentarité precisely because it offers a game-changing opportunity
within the dominant economy of logocentrism: for example, instead of

considering, as does Rousseau, that singing is corrupted by the imposition
of harmony onto melody and that harmony, as a supplement substituted
for melody, saps song from its life and energy, Derrida contends that
a more productive way of understanding supplémentarité entails recog-
nizing that harmony is always already part of melody, as Rousseau himself
is forced to do, albeit reluctantly, in the text titled “Examen de deux
principes avancés par M. Rameau [Examining Two Principles Posited by
M. Rameau],” when he states “tout son est accompagné de trois autres sons
harmoniques [ … ] qui forment avec lui un accord parfait [ … ]. En
ce sens, l’harmonie est naturelle et inséparable de la mélodie et du chant
tel qu’il puisse être, puisque tout son porte en lui un accord parfait [each
single sound is accompanied by three other harmonic sounds that form
with it a perfect chord. Thus, harmony is natural and inseparable from
melody and song whatever the type, since each sound carries within itself
a perfect chord]” (276). Harmony can therefore be said to enrich melody
rather than degrade it, and this positive counter-perspective leads Derrida
to posit: “L’harmonie est le supplément originaire de la mélodie [Harmony
is the originary supplement of melody]” (306). Derrida also playfully
revises Rousseau’s statement: “L’articulation est le devenir-écriture du
langage [Articulation is the becoming-writing of language]” into a more
fluid conception of supplementarité when making the koan-like statement:
“Le devenir-écriture du langage est le devenir-langage du langage [The
becoming-writing of language is the becoming-language of language],”
which implies that articulation operates at (or as) the origin of language
(326). He infers that speech, song, and music could never have existed
prior to articulation, thereby dismissing Rousseau’s untenable claim that
the origin of language in speech and song precedes articulation (345).
Accordingly, supplémentarité must be envisioned beyond binary
conceptions that pit writing and representation against speech and pres-
ence. Derrida stresses that Rousseau’s writings mark a particularly impor-
tant moment in the history of the metaphysics of presence, hinging upon
auto-affection produced through the voice: “Telle est du moins l’expéri-
ence ou conscience de la voix : du s’entendre parler. Elle se vit et se dit
comme exclusion de l’écriture, à savoir de l’appel à un signifiant ‘exterieur,’
‘sensible,’ ‘spatial’ interrompant la présence à soi [Such is at least the expe-
rience or consciousness of the voice, of the hearing-oneself-speak.
It is lived and expressed as the exclusion of writing, that is to say, of
the call for an ‘exterior,’ ‘perceptible,’ ‘spatial’ signifier interrupting one’s
106 V. MAGNAT
presence to oneself]” (146). Derrida strikingly encapsulates this Cartesian

conundrum when observing: “La privation de la présence est la condition
de l’expérience, c’est-à-dire de la présence [Being deprived of presence is
the condition for experiencing, that is to say, for presence]” (237). He
further states that such a conception of presence, making auto-affection,
produced by voice as consciousness or self-presence, the necessary condi-
tion for experiencing oneself as the autonomous subject produced by
the Cartesian cogito, informs all types of “investissements du système de
l’oralité et du système audio-phonique en général, si riche et si divers qu’en
soit le champs [investments in the system of orality and the audio-phonic
system in general, no matter how rich and diverse their scope]”—as if the
French philosopher strove to universalize deconstruction by either assim-
ilating or discounting forms of orality operating outside and beyond the
metaphysics of presence that empowers Western logocentrism, such as the
heightened voices of Indigenous societies discussed by Tomlinson.
Yet why would the concept of auto-affection hinging upon a sound-
less voice rooted in the mute Cogito and designed to produce an illusory
effect of consciousness understood as presence, be relevant, pertinent, or
even remotely applicable to the epistemologies of non-Western societies
that value orality as a legitimate way of knowing? Doesn’t the exclusion,
disavowal, marginalization, or subalternization of these epistemologies
necessarily reproduce and exacerbate the philosophical contradictions and
inconsistencies of Western logocentrism that Derrida seeks to open up to
scrutiny? Significantly, his suspicion of voice includes the notion of voicing
resistance, implicitly considered to be unreflexively naive and woefully
misguided: “Et la voix se donne toujours comme la meilleure expression
de la liberté. [ … ] Les êtres les plus enchaînés et les plus démunis ne
disposent-ils pas encore de cette spontanéité intérieure qu’est la voix? [And
voice always presents itself as the utmost expression of freedom. For are
the most shackled and destitute beings not supposed to still possess this
inner spontaneity which is the voice? ]” (239) as if denying, in principle,
the possibility that raised voices might at times constitute a powerful
source of resistance—for example, to the imposition of Western ways
of knowing through colonialism. Ultimately, Derrida appears to be so
deeply entrenched in his battle against the metaphysics of presence that
he is unable to fathom the positive, affirmative, and productive poten-
tial of heightened voice as a decolonizing and politically efficacious act
of self-determination requiring an engagement with the meaningfully
phonic materiality and sonorous performative qualities of vocality. From

the vantage point of deconstruction, this is and must remain impossible.
It is worth noting that the term colonialism does not appear in the
Derridean critique of Rousseau’s writing, even when the passages about
“savages” that I foregrounded are featured in the sections submitted to
the laser beam of deconstruction. The term ethnocentrism does appear
briefly on the page where Derrida asks whether Rousseau’s critique of
Rameau’s universalizing theory of harmony as the natural principle under-
lying all music may be considered as a critique of European ethnocentrism
given the overall absence of harmony in non-European as well as ancient
musical traditions in general, a question that Derrida turns back onto
Rousseau: “On se demandera si Rousseau, conformément à un schéma que
nous connaissons bien à présent, ne critique pas l’ethnocentrisme par un
contre-ethnocentrisme symétrique et un ethnocentrisme occidental profond
: notamment en revendiquent l’harmonie comme le mal et la science
propres à l’Europe [One will be inclined to wonder whether Rousseau,
in accordance with a pattern that we now know quite well, is not criti-
cizing ethnocentrism through a symmetrical counter-ethnocentrism and a
deeply occidental form of ethnocentrism at that, especially when he claims
harmony as a form of evil and a science pertaining specifically to Europe]”
(301). Derrida adds a footnote in which he quotes at length the passage
that begins with “Quand on pense que, de tous les peuples de la terre, qui
ont tous une musique et un chant, les Européens sont les seuls qui aient une
harmonie, des accords, et qui trouvent ce mélange agréable … etc. [When
realizing that, of all the peoples on earth, who all have music and song,
Europeans are the only ones who have harmony, chords, and who find
this combination agreeable … etc.]” (301). I would object that Rousseau
amply demonstrates his allegiance to song and melody over and against
harmony in his writings on music, and although in the Essai he certainly
does not propose a self-reflexive analysis of his complicity with the Euro-
pean ethnocentrism he denounces, neither does Derrida in his analysis of
Rousseau’s discourse, whose cultural capital critically (also a term with a
double meaning) empowers him to develop his theory of supplémentarité,
which is closely tied to the notorious neologism différance, namely the
branding of deconstruction.
Should Rousseau’s eighteenth-century ethnocentric biases simply be
considered de rigueur, and has the trope of the so-called noble savage
become such a conspicuous cliché that it is now endowed with the
type of invisibility pertaining to the terms song and singing, as noted
108 V. MAGNAT
by Tomlinson? Should the critique of Western logocentrism be exoner-

ated from the type of self-reflexivity mandated by feminist, postcolonial,
and Indigenous scholars, requiring a thorough accounting of Enlighten-
ment philosophy’s complicity with the epistemic violence of European
cultural imperialism? Within such a contested intellectual context, it is
perhaps all the more tempting to appropriate and revise the notion of
supplémentarité, as prompted by Tomlinson, especially if doing so can
become a way of repositioning heightened voice as positively supple-
menting speech, language, and writing, by making them richer and more
complete. Derrida conceives of the supplément as connecting that which
Rousseau divides into positive and negative categories: accent and artic-
ulation, passion and reason, spontaneity and structure, presence and
absence, life and death (349). In the closing pages of De La Gramma-
tologie, Derrida concludes that Rousseau provides, in spite of himself,
important insights into the potentialities of supplémentarité, even if he
systematically disavows them in his discourse. For example, Derrida infers
from Rousseau’s assertion “on écrit les voix et non les sons [one writes
voices rather than sounds]” (443) that what enables us to distinguish
voices from sounds is precisely what enables us to write, that is to
say, consonants and articulation. Derrida argues that if it is articulation,
which Rousseau accuses of replacing accent, that is actually the origin of
languages, then voices replace only themselves. This perspective on artic-
ulation posits that the alteration of language through writing, associated
by Rousseau with degeneration, is actually responsible for its generation
and operates through the principle of supplémentarité, which is neither
positive nor negative. Derrida therefore asserts that the supplément is no
more a signifier that it is a signified, it is no more a representative than
it is a presence, and it is no more writing than it is speech, since none of
the terms comprised in this binary series can dominate the economy of
différance or supplémentarité that he articulates through his critique of
Rousseau’s writing (444). He concludes by foregrounding a perplexing
impossibility:
Nous désignons l’impossibilité de formuler le mouvement de la supplémen-

tarité dans le logos classique, dans la logique de l’identité, dans l’ontologie,
dans l’opposition de la présence et de l’absence, du positif et du negatif [
… ] Bien sûr, la désignation de cette impossibilité [ … doit ] puiser ses
ressources dans la logique qu’elle déconstruit. Et par là-même y trouver ses
prises. [We point out the impossibility of formulating the movement of
supplémentarité from within classical logos, within the logic of identity,

within ontology, within the opposition between presence and absence,
positive and negative. Of course, pointing out this impossibility requires
making use of resources that belong to the logic that it deconstructs. And
finding therein ways of supporting itself. (442–43, emphases in original)
Tomlinson chooses to invest in the generative power of supplémentarité

to support his argument that singing as well as all heightened uses of
voice constitute as much of a threat to logocentric metaphysics as writing
does, pointing out that “this threat is discernible in Rousseau’s Essai but
obscured, ultimately, by Derrida’s emphasis on writing” (12). Tomlinson
thus contends that singing, while linked to speech because of its connec-
tion to the voice, is also different from speech by virtue of its “potency as
embodied, nonsemantic phonos ” that resists the “semiological mechanics”
of speech, so that both writing and song may be understood to under-
mine the preeminence of speech in Western logocentrism through their
alterity (13).
Yet is it possible to employ Derridean deconstruction to fully rescue
the non-discursive dimension of voice by asserting its supplémentarité
in ways that make vocality as ‘threatening’ as writing from a Western
logocentric perspective? What are the implications and consequences of
a Derridean reading of Rousseau that obscures the alterity of height-
ened voice, as suggested by Tomlinson, through its privileging of writing?
What are we to make of the persistence with which the Derridean critique
describes song and singing as integral aspects of the metaphysics of
presence defended by Rousseau and opposed by Derrida? Might the
supplémentarité of vocality be more productively mobilized by mining
Rousseau’s passion for song through the strategic recuperation of some
of his insights, especially those on the basis of which Derrida articulates
his theory of the supplément ?
While Rousseau praises in vocal music the precision required for the
artful imitation (a form of articulation?) of the inflections of the voice
that convey the movement of human passions, he importantly questions
the legitimacy of modern musical notation, which he compares with the
phonetic alphabet, because he feels that notation drains vocal music of
life, energy, and power through the separation of song and speech in
an effort to capture the former in writing. Associating the privileging of
harmony over melody with what he perceives to be Rameau’s cerebral
view of music and his quasi-scientific approach to composition, Rousseau
110 V. MAGNAT
calls for a reassessment of this dominant perspective which he considers to

promote a reductive conception of musicality that leaves very little room
for song. Moreover, in spite of his highly problematic evolutionary view
of language relying on the distinction he posits between savages, barbar-
ians, and his civilized European contemporaries, Rousseau’s critique of
musical notation seems motivated by a call for the inclusion of other types
of music, especially when he remarks that the ancient Greeks “ont dans
leur chants des inflexions que nous nommons fausses parce qu’elles n’entrent
pas dans notre système et que nous ne pouvons les noter [have in their songs
inflexions that we deem out of tune because they do not fit within our
system and we cannot notate them]” and further comments: “C’est ce
qu’on a remarqué sur les chants des sauvages d’Amérique, et c’est ce qu’on
aurait dû remarquer aussi sur divers intervalles de la musique des Grecs, si
l’on eût étudié cette musique avec moins de prévention pour la nôtre [This is
what we have observed about the songs of savages in America, and this is
what we should also have observed about Greek music, had we studied it
with less bias for our own” (193). The alleged and much-vaunted univer-
sality of European technologies of writing such as the phonetic alphabet
and music notation is similarly questioned by Tomlinson, who states:
In Europe’s encounter with non-European others, music notations reflect

an absence within alphabetism, an outgrowth of the egregious insufficiency
of phonetic writing to encompass the otherness of song/poetry [ … ].
Music notation in its familiar form works in tandem with the logocentrism
that has determined our orderings of speech, song, and writing. It records
and represents from within these European orders, in the process excluding
other music notations that do not. (18)
To some extent, then, Tomlinson concurs with Rousseau’s defense of

melody, singing, and voice, in contrast with Derrida’s suspicion of
vocality, conflating song with speech in his critique of phonocentric logo-
centrism (see Cavarero 2005). Moreover, Tomlinson asserts throughout
his book the overwhelming presence or sonorous materiality of vocality
experienced by European conquerors as a persistent threat to colonial
ideologies of cultural dominance, which Indigenous raised voices sonically
resist, challenge, and undermine:
In encounters of difference as dramatic as those between Europeans and

Americans [heightened utterance] showed a special capacity to threaten.
[ … ] The special qualities of song and its corollary forms of utterance

were experienced, in a cognitive step that growing evidence suggests is
hardwired like the capacity of language itself, as a gaining access to special
realms not open to speech alone. [ … ] The real threat was not singing
per se but what everyone involved knew to be conjured in its difference
from speech. At the heart of ritual, the altered behavior of voice and
body constituted the unmistakable sign of a frightening, unassuageable
otherness. (176)
While it may simply seem impossible to credit Rousseau for any of his
insights in light of his extremely offensive misrepresentation of Indige-
nous peoples, I nevertheless wish to highlight the value of his contri-
bution to theorizing vocality, following John Scott’s observation that
Rousseau’s musical theory is often overlooked: indeed, while his Essai
sur l’origine des langues has received extensive scholarly scrutiny, most
notably in Derrida’s De La Grammatologie, Scott states that “interpreta-
tions of Rousseau’s linguistic treatise have not tended to stress the musical
content of the work, which is indicated in its full title Essay on the Origin
of Languages, In which melody and musical imitation are treated [Essai sur
l’origine des langues où il est parlé de la mélodie et de l’imitation musicale]
nor have they interpreted the writing in light of his other musical writ-
ings” (1998: 297–98). Scott foregrounds Rousseau’s reference to ancient
Greek culture in his defense of melody and song, “contrasting the expres-
sive power of the melodic language and music of ancient Greece to the
inexpressive modern music dominated by harmony,” and objecting to
Rameau’s contention that Greek musical expressivity suffered from an
inadequate harmonic science, to which Rousseau responds that the Greeks
based their music on different principles deriving largely “from the almost
inconceivably melodic language upon which it was based” (304).
In his passionate advocacy of melody and singing, Rousseau boldly
asserts the evocative dimension of vocal music whose source he argues
is to be found in the natural world: “la nature [ … ] inspire des chants,
et non des accords; elle dicte de la mélodie, et non de l’harmonie [nature
inspires songs rather than chords; it compels the creation of melodies
rather than harmonies]” (Essai, 191). When comparing the art of painting
with that of making music, Rousseau highlights the latter’s use of sound
to paint the continuous movements and transformations of the natural
world, thereby affecting the listener in a more intimate and more powerful
way than visual arts: “Il agitera la mer, animera les flammes d’un incendie,
112 V. MAGNAT
fera couler les ruisseaux, tomber la pluie, et grossir les torrens; [ … Il]
calmera la tempête, rendra l’air tranquille et serein. [ … ] Il ne représen-
tera pas directement ces choses, mais il excitera dans l’âme les mêmes
sentiments qu’en les voyant [It will stir the ocean, kindle the flames of
a fire, make rivers flow, rain fall, and torrents swell; it will calm the storm,
imbue the air with stillness and serenity. It will not represent these things
directly, but will excite within the soul the same feelings as when we see
them]” (191). Having envisioned both speech and song as necessarily
partaking in the musicality of the first language, Rousseau goes on to
indict modern music for separating them and subordinating singing to
instrumental music, a development that he relates to the devaluation of
orality in literate languages: “Nos langues valent mieux écrites que parlées,
et l’on nous lit avec plus de plaisir qu’on ne nous écoute [Our languages
are more valued when written than spoken, and more pleasurable when
read than heard]” (175). This view leads Derrida to suspect Rousseau
of devaluing writing in his complicity with a phonocentric economy of
knowledge governed by Western metaphysics, even though Rousseau
clearly considers the evolution of language and writing as undeniable signs
of progress and modernity. It is therefore less a concern about writing
than a genuine interest in vocal music that induces Rousseau to yearn for
a type of orality whose function he feels is no longer valued in his literate
society whose linguistic prestige relies entirely on the written word.
Since both Rousseau and Derrida largely owe their status as excep-
tionally influential philosophers to the publication and dissemination of
their work in French as well as in translation, they obviously have bene-
fited immeasurably from the dominance of print culture, first in Europe,
then throughout the world, a phenomenon which, ironically, can be said
to considerably discredit their respective perspectives, namely Rousseau’s
veneration of, and Derrida’s attack on, phonos. However, in the spirit of
recuperation and revision that might be associated with the most radical
form of supplémentarité, I want to suggest that Rousseau’s theory of
vocality and his insights into song may be used to undermine Derri-
da’s usage of Rousseau’s writing to consolidate his critique of phonos-
centered logocentrism, through which, as cogently argued by Adriana
Cavarero, Derrida reduces vocality to speech—hence overlooking the
anti-metaphysical potential of song. This seemingly paradoxical Rousseau-
inspired deconstruction of Derrida’s theoretical perspective is, in fact,
supported by Tomlinson himself when he states:
Song powerfully lays bare the illusion by which phonetic writing could
support a universal metaphysics of presence in spoken speech. It is bound
to speech/logos usually by a semantics and always by a dimension of phonos.
But its phonos exceeds speech and remains always farther alienated than it
from alphabetic writing. [ … ] Because of this distance, singing, chanting,
and intonation in general mark experiences of Europeans in America that
are not reduced and domesticated, but rather exposed and exacerbated,
by the exegetical technology the Europeans brought. Song is the open
question that undoes the metaphysical pretensions of phonetic writing. [
… ] We cannot hope to hear [Indigenous song] again except in the echo
of a surplus that overwhelms the forces in the West mobilized to control
song all told. There we sense a realm allied to but beyond speech that
eludes the effort of phonetic writing to represent utterance. (48–49)
Foregrounding song as other than, different from, in surplus or excess of

speech, Tomlinson revises Derrida’s critique to make room for the alterity
of vocality, which cannot be captured, circumscribed, or made familiar by
Western forms of writing, whether musical or alphabetical.
In his reading of Rousseau’s Essai, Derrida suggests that the phonetic
dimension of alphabetic writing, identified by Rousseau as the third and
highest stage of linguistic, cultural, and social development, simulta-
neously dissimulates and protects the presence of the voice, endowing
representation with all the more power in the metaphysical economy
of knowledge that Derrida aims to deconstruct and expose. Yet when
Derrida refers to voice (la voix) in his analysis, he employs this term as if
it were interchangeable with speech (la parole) and does not include the
singing voice, which is the main focus for Rousseau: whereas his three-
stage evolutionary view of writing, which is highly speculative, serves as
a point of entry into his discussion of music, for Derrida, it becomes a
point of departure for thinking about writing.
Derrida hence articulates an arresting paradox: it is the muteness of
phonetic alphabetic writing that endows it with its much-vaunted univer-
sality, for alphabetism produces a representation of phonos that preserves
the spoken origins of writing in the very absence of speech, a way
of silently reinscribing the logocentric power of phonos into writing.
However, one may argue that if alphabetic writing is a mute repre-
sentation of voice/speech, the latter necessarily excludes what Roland
Barthes calls the signifiance of the heightened voice, whose non-semantic
sonorous presence exceeds voice reduced to speech in service of linguistic
signification. For while signifiance is carefully distinguished from the
114 V. MAGNAT
semiotic operations of language in Barthes’s evocation of the grain of the

voice (see “Le grain de la voix” first published in 1972), this does not
imply that the heightened voice is meaningless. Accordingly, Tomlinson
states:
It is hard to imagine any singing vocables, all the way to nursery rhymes,
that would contribute no significance to their context. In the first place,
the distance they mark from the lexical words around them is itself a form
of meaning [ … ]. In addition, the affecting phonos of singing, its surplus
over speech, works to define a space of meaning whether or not this space
is filled with determinate semantic content. Vocables, which seem always
destined to be chanted or sung, seek out a liminal position between non-
linguistic cry and semi-semantic word. (85)
Consequently, the voice that interests both Rousseau and Barthes

occupies a liminal space where non-semantic vocality cannot be easily
dismissed as non-sensical, that is to say, non-threatening to Western meta-
physics, whose dominance relies on the alleged universality of alphabetism
hinging upon a reductive understanding of voice as speech.
Taking a closer look at Rousseau’s discussion of vocal music can
therefore lead to a re-interpretation of the following statement made by
Derrida about phonetic alphabetic writing, which is pivotal to his critique
of Rousseau’s perspective:
[ … L’écriture de la voix est] plus rationnelle, plus exacte, plus précise, plus
claire, [et] dans la mesure où elle s’efface mieux qu’une autre devant la
présence possible de la voix, elle la représente mieux et lui permet de s’ab-
senter aux moindres dommages. Servante fidèle de la voix, on la préfère aux
écritures en usage dans d’autres sociétés, mais comme on préfère un esclave à
un barbare, et en la redoutant simultanément comme une machine de mort.
Car sa rationalité l’éloigne de la passion et du chant, c’est-à-dire de l’origine
vivante du langage. [This way of writing down the voice is more rational,
more exact, more precise, clearer, and, insofar as it is better suited than
others to giving way before the possible presence of the voice, this writing
better represents the voice and enables it to absent itself without incurring
much damage. As a faithful servant of the voice, this writing is favored over
those used in other societies, yet it is like favoring a slave over a barbarian,
while simultaneously dreading it as if a death machine. For its rationality
detaches this writing from passion and song, that is to say, from the living
origin of language.] (426)
As we have seen, Rousseau is far from considering writing as a death

machine, even if he does have plenty to say about savages and barbarians,
whose assumed lack of culture and sociability he relates to a pre-literate
condition characteristic of the early stages of mankind’s evolutionary
development. He would likely object to the idea that either alphabetic or
musical writing can be the faithful servant of the voice, precisely because
he deplores his literate society’s privileging of writing, which, as a music
theorist and practitioner, he does experience as a detachment from song,
wishfully imagining singing as the living origin of language even though
he admits that this is nothing more than his own speculation based on his
passion for vocal music. Rousseau thus states:
“[L’écriture] substitue l’exactitude à l’expression [Writing substitutes exac-

titude for expression],” from which Derrida infers:
L’expression est l’expression de l’affect, de la passion qui est à l’origine
du langage, d’une parole qui fut d’abord substituée à un chant, marqué
par le ton et la force. Le ton et la force signifie la voix présente : ils sont
antérieurs au concept, ils sont singuliers [ … ]. Quand le sujet n’est plus là,
la force, l’intonation, l’accent se perdent dans le concept. [ … ] L’écriture
est donc toujours atonale. La place du sujet y est prise par un autre, elle
est dérobée. [Expression, here, is the expression of affect, of passion, from
which language originates, along with speech, which was first substituted
to song, marked by tonality and vigor. Tonality and vigor signify the voice
by conveying its presence: they are anterior to the conceptual, they are
singular. When the subject is no longer there, vigor, intonation, accent lose
themselves in the conceptual. Writing is thus always atonal. The subject’s
position within writing is taken by another, it is stolen.] (443)
The sentence quoted here by Derrida appears in a passage where Rousseau

is discussing the affective qualities of orality: “L’écriture, qui semble devoir
fixer la langue, est précisément ce qui l’altère; elle n’en change pas les
mots, mais le génie; elle substitue l’exactitude à l’expression. L’on rend
ses sentiments quand on parle, et ses idées quand on écrit. [ … ] On
écrit les voix et non pas les sons; or, dans une langue accentuée, ce sont
les sons, les accents, les inflexions de toute espèce, qui font la plus grande
énergie du langage [Writing, which seems designed to preserve language,
is precisely that which alterates it; it does not change its words, but
its genius; it substitutes exactitude to expression. One expresses one’s
sentiments when speaking, and one’s ideas when writing. One writes
voices rather than sounds; yet, in articulated language, sounds, accents,
116 V. MAGNAT
and all types of inflections endow language with its greatest energy]”
(146). When replaced within the larger context of the Essai as well as
Rousseau’s other writings about music, this passage can be seen as a delib-
erately rhetorical maneuver designed to bolster Rousseau’s critique of
the eighteenth-century materialist reduction of musicality to the physical
dimension of vibrations, promoted by Rameau in his focus on harmony
as the basis for all music-making, which, as noted by Rousseau as well as
by Tomlinson, excludes a wide range of world music practices that often
precede European instrumental music by thousands of years.
Tomlinson hence compellingly argues that “a history of European
colonialism could be written as the story of negotiations of the space
between speaking and singing” and foregrounds the eighteenth century
as a turning point, with the establishment of “a category of modern, elite
European artistic attainment predicated on newly reimagined powers of
instrument-playing; call it Music,” which constituted Europe’s response
to “the singing of the rest of the world” (196). The ideology underlying
this new cultural construction “exalted the non-songish, sovereign powers
represented especially by the European orchestra and celebrated the Euro-
pean cultural preeminence that was seen to have uncovered them,” in an
effort to universalize and naturalize what is now known as Western clas-
sical music “by rending invisible (in this case, inaudible) those outside
it”—an ideology in which high culture was specifically designed to distin-
guish “an elite European instrumentalism from the songs and chants of
the rest of the world. In this it distanced European musical refinements
from the colonial terrors that were especially pressing in others’ raised
voices” (196–97). A thorough critical investigation of the political dimen-
sion of this history of music should therefore prevail over Eurocentric
philosophical arguments about language, speech, and writing, no matter
how sophisticated these arguments may be, and Tomlinson’s research
takes on this challenge by focusing on Indigenous vocality as a particularly
efficacious material practice of resistance to colonial power:
Ultimately, when ceremonies of song and dance thought to have been

eradicated by the force of evangelization were found to be celebrated still
in all their native force, the most basic doubts about evangelization arose
among the missionaries. [ … ] Spanish disenchantment in the New World
was a product of lingering indigenous enchantment. It grew from a song
that could not be silenced. (178)
Tomlinson refers to the colonial dynamic of difference articulated by

Homi Bhabha and contends that “raised voices broach, in all societies and
in ways recognizable across gaping cultural divides, an order of meaning
distinct from that of normal speech,” so that singing, chanting, and
invocation become meaningful in ways that exceed linguistic modes of
expression, which “helps to explain why song traditions the world over
exploit [ … ] non-lexical words (or vocables),” turning language itself into
“surplus vocalization” whose alterity destabilizes the meaning-making
conventions of speech (193).
The raised voices of Indigenous peoples during the era of the Euro-
pean conquest of the “New World” thus mark the beginning of a form of
cultural, spiritual, and political resistance to Western imperialism that has
a very long history, and I would contend that the question of whether
or not the Western subject’s position is taken/stolen, or supplemented
in the sense of displaced/replaced, within the logocentric economy of
writing, remains opaquely theoretical and, as such, appears far less conse-
quential than the issue of the restoration of the right to self-determination
for Indigenous peoples, a right effectively stolen from them by Western
colonial power through the systematic dispossession of, and displace-
ment from, their ancestral traditional territories, with the aim to eradicate
their languages, cultural practices, and identity. I would further infer
from Tomlinson’s investigation of the supraperformative force animating
Indigenous songwork that these raised voices must have been experienced
by European colonizers as an encounter with the limits of discursivity—
a deeply unsettling experience that continues to resonate in Rousseau’s
fascination for, and Derrida’s disavowal of, the irrepressible affective
power and phonic/sonic materiality of this unimaginable vocality.
I began this discussion by proposing a reconfiguration of ethnographic
research that would be inclusive of past and future eras and that might
turn out to be the indispensable supplement of an anthropology of the
contemporary. In conclusion, I would like to provide a contemporary
example of Indigenous sovereignty expressed by means of raised voices.
In his discussion of the sensory and affective politics of sound mate-
rialized by Idle No More gatherings, Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson
remarks that the latter affirm “Indigenous peoples’ connection and sense
of belonging through Indigenous public assembly” (214). Robinson fore-
grounds the efficacy of “song acts” that operate similarly to J. L. Austin’s
speech acts or performative utterances, in that these songs “do what they
sing” (2017: 212). He specifies that for Pacific Northwest First Nations
118 V. MAGNAT
“songs can act as the equivalent to legal expressions of land title, enact
forms of diplomacy between nations, and convey knowledge about the
land; they are living documents of our history, affirm our own and other
nations’ sovereignty, and provide healing” (212). He stresses that, as with
Austin’s performative utterances, there are “various levels of felicitous-
ness dependent upon a large number of variables, including whether the
singer is recognized as having the appropriate status to sing the song”
(232). He further asserts that the functionality of Indigenous song is
linked to “its more-than-aesthetic impact upon the lands that Indige-
nous peoples are caretakers of, and its capacity to have an effect upon our
relations, both kin and other-than-human” (212). He infers that in Idle
No More gatherings, song, music, and dance did not simply constitute
“the media by which political messages were conveyed, but performa-
tive forms of politics in and of themselves” (218). He thus considers
the “song-actions” of Idle No More as “Indigenous forms of ‘doing
sovereignty’” that not only challenged settler Canadians to reconsider
normative negative assumptions about protest, but, more importantly,
“also reaffirmed the vital possibility of public assembly among Indige-
nous participants, which in turn has sustained our energies in agitating
for further change” (218). In contrast to quantitative analyses of activism
that equate efficacy with measurable change, Robinson focuses on intan-
gible efficacy, such as the amplification of “a sense of hopefulness and
‘fullness’” experienced by participants, a collective form of exuberance
which he describes as “fluid movement and overlapping of intensities”
(219; 234). Beyond its function as a political protest, this transforma-
tive affective experience was a celebration of “the vibrancy of Indigenous
sovereignty,” and as a participant he testifies that its performative efficacy
relied on the affective power of “the timbral and rhythmic cultural speci-
ficity of our drums and voices” (221). The sensory and affective politics
of the Idle No More movement thus operated via gathering “in malls, in
intersections, on train tracks, in schools, in ever-expanding round dance
circles, filling spaces with our voices, and dancing through these spaces
together” (223). Robinson therefore considers that the intangible efficacy
of repeated acts of Indigenous sovereignty lies in the collective production
of “atmospheres of accumulative fullness [ … ] and the sense of capacity it
affirms” (225). I would suggest that this collective sense of agency experi-
enced as hope/fullness constitutes a political form of presencing through
the raised voices of a community embodying the vibrancy of Indigenous
sovereignty. The song-actions of Idle No More may thus be envisioned as
anti/de/non-colonial forms of utopian performatives (Dolan 2005) that

have the potential to restore trust, solidarity, and social justice, echoing
the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and empowering
participants and witnesses to imagine possible futures together based on
reciprocal understanding and respect.
Note
1. All translations of Derrida’s and Rousseau’s writing are mine.
References
Barthes, R. 1982 [1972]. Le grain de la voix. In L’obvie et l’obtus: Essais critiques
III , 236–45. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Cavarero, A. 2005. For More Than One Voice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal
Expression. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Clifford, J. and G.E. Marcus (eds.). 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press.
Derrida, J. 1974 [1967]. De La Grammatologie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
Dolan, J. 2005. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. University
of Michigan Press.
Harrison, Anthony Kwame. 2014. Ethnography. In Oxford Handbook of Qual-
itative Research, ed. Patricia Leavy, 223–53. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Larousse Dictionary. Paris: Éditions Larousse http://www.larousse.fr/dictionna
ires/francais.
Magnat, V. 2020. The Performative Power of Vocality. London and New York:
Routledge.
Robinson, D. 2017. Enchantment’s Irreconcilable Connection: Listening to
Anger, Being Idle No More. In Performance Studies in Canada, 211–35.
Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Rousseau, J.-J. 1820a. Essai sur l’origine des langues [Essay on the Origins of
Languages]. In Écrits sur la musique. Œuvres complètes de J-J. Rousseau, vol.
XVII, 125–201. Paris: Librairies Perronneau and Guillaume.
Rousseau, J.-J. 1820b. Examen de deux principes avancés par M. Rameau.
[Examining two Principles Posited by M. Rameau]. In Écrits sur la musique.
Œuvres complètes de J-J. Rousseau, vol. XVII, 272–96. Paris: Librairies
Perronneau and Guillaume.
120 V. MAGNAT
Scott, J.T. 1998. The Harmony between Rousseau’s Musical Theory and His
Philosophy. Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (2): 287–308.
Tomlinson, G. 2007. The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voices in the Era
of European Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
PART II
Deep Interdisciplinarity
All of the contributors to this volume are engaged in the approach

and technique of deep interdisciplinarity. The essays gathered here in
particular advance current thinking about interdisciplinarity beyond the
idea of cross-disciplinary borrowings. Reaching out beyond anthro-
pology to other disciplinary fields—such as the creative arts, digital
technologies, sonic studies, and participatory and improvisational tech-
niques—may, indeed, render productive insights. However, we must
also remain cautious of idealizing deep interdisciplinarity as being best
suited to studying the imaginative aspects of futures, as all ethnographic
engagements mobilize imagination and can potentially provide equally
important, albeit different, insights.
There are also risks inherent in adopting arts-based approaches without
a thorough understanding of their disciplinary moorings and without
having undertaken the necessary training. Although many anthropologists
have addressed such perils by forming partnerships with artists and collab-
orators from other fields (see Boudreault-Fournier, this volume) or by
learning the trade, so to speak (see Nayyar and Asselin, this volume), such
perils nevertheless persist. Anthropologists themselves have been troubled
by the transdisciplinary travels of ethnography over the past decade. (For a
detailed discussion of this topic, see “Transdisciplinary Travels of Ethnog-
raphy,” a special issue of Cultural Studies–Critical Methodologies, edited
by Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston and Virginie Magnat and published
in 2018.)
122 PART II: DEEP INTERDISCIPLINARITY
In anthropology, ethnography is frequently considered a methodology

and not a method (a kind of sensibility or a craft) with its own historicity
that cannot be easily learned and transposed from one disciplinary context
to another (Kazubowski-Houston and Magnat 2018). This sensibility is
seen as largely “improvisational, creative, and situated—a sensibility that
cultivates a particular understanding, a way of being, sensing, feeling, and
responding, to the world” (ibid.: 384). Ethnography is fancied to be a
craft that requires specific skills that should be honed through long-term
practice and improvised and implemented in ways relevant to the specific
context in which a research project is being carried out (Carter 2018).
Coming from this perspective, we call for an anthropology of the future
that—rather than merely utilizing methodological approaches developed
in other disciplines and fields—crafts its own novel sensibilities for
conducting research, guided by a commitment to deep interdisciplinarity
(Penny 2009). The concept of deep interdisciplinarity draws on Roland
Barthes’ (1972: 72) assertion that “in order to do interdisciplinary work,
it is not enough to take a ‘subject’ (a theme) and to arrange two or
three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists of creating a new
object, which belongs to no one.” This kind of interdisciplinarity makes
boundary objects (Bowker and Leigh Star 1999) that “create an uncanny
tie across disciplines, retaining a central amount of internal coherence
while denaturalizing methodologies and analyses endemic to different
disciplinary locations … A boundary object does things with disciplines,
satisfying certain of their requirements, without, however, belonging
properly to any one of them” (Loveless 2019: 32). Ultimately, deep inter-
disciplinarity aims to tell new stories within the academy that break down
disciplinary silos by committing to an uncanny research practice that “is
never certain; it is always propositional and responsibly in the encounter.
And it is never comfortable” (ibid.: 51).
Thus, research sensibilities committed to deep interdisciplinarity
open us up to vulnerability and invite us to unknow what we know
about ethnographic process, representation, reflexivity, ethnographer-
participant relations, audience, and intervention within and beyond
the academy. In this context, interdisciplinarity is not merely about
adopting different intertextual strategies such as performance, instal-
lation, videography, or sound effects; rather, it aims to produce its
own “offspring” that is “often unthinkable, illegible within the current
institutional frameworks of academia. It creates a chimera” (ibid.: 56).
Such an approach stirs us up at the level of sensation and allows
PART II: DEEP INTERDISCIPLINARITY 123
us to ask questions in ways that value diverse knowledges, including

“opinion/advice, feeling/emotion, knowledge/skill, sensory/descriptive,
background/ethnographic, behaviour action, story/once-upon-a-time,
and so forth” (Madison 2018: 52). It arouses the kind of curiosity “that
gets one into (methodological/ontological/epistemological/disciplinary)
trouble” (Loveless 2019: 23). And its “theorypractice” gnaws at the
corporate, competitive, and dehumanizing structures of the contempo-
rary academy and its dominant modes of research output, inviting us to
“care differently” (ibid.: 106, 107). The contributors to this section of the
volume, as well as other sections, are ultimately committed to developing
these deeply interdisciplinary sensibilities as traverse diverse imaginings of
the future.
In the first step along the path, Felix Ringel’s contribution, “Future
Making in Times of Urban Sustainability: Maintenance and Endurance
as Progressive Alternatives in the Post-Industrial Era,” focuses on his
fieldwork in Germany’s poorest city, Bremerhaven, where he has studied
sustainable economies since the industrial crisis of the mid-1970s. His
methodological approach involved participant observation and semi-
structured interviews conducted over a period of fourteen months. He
illuminates how his interlocutors’ interventions into futures challenged
not only his understanding of what future making may entail but also
his own analytical and theoretical tool kits. He demonstrates that seem-
ingly conservative efforts aimed at sustaining, maintaining, and enduring
the status quo in fact constitute “radically progressive alternatives for
future making in the postindustrial era.” He argues that, as ethnogra-
phers, we need to cultivate a sensibility that accounts for our interlocutors’
unique imaginaries of the future. He also cautions that future making
cannot be conceptualized solely as a strategic action that takes place in the
“high-fly futurist arenas of professional planners, creative entrepreneurs,
pathbreaking inventors, and digital or technological pioneers”; it can also
unfold in mundane social practices, even those seemingly directed at
maintaining the status quo. For him, when we define change as a prac-
tice of altering the present state of affairs, we succumb to the problematic
framework of progress, which sees the present as necessarily deficient and
in need of improvement.
As anthropologists, Ringel argues, we need to be careful that future-
making strategies do not always “cater to notions of radical change or
new alternatives.” Ultimately, Ringel proposes that if we want to build
futures collaboratively with our informants, we need to be attentive to
myriad future-making practices that may not align with our own. By
analyzing why numerous city-restoration plans have failed to materialize
despite their high probability when other plans have unexpectedly came
to fruition, he reveals how people’s capacities to aspire can transgress
the possible-probable and impossible-improbable divides and calls for a
metaphysics of futures that accounts for “volatility and problematize the
analysts’ expectations.”
In their chapter, titled “Knowing and Imagining with Sustainable
Makers,” Eeva Berglund and Cindy Kohtala draw on their research with
materialist activist communities (MACs) in northern Europe to show that
people can intervene in futures not only through grandiose sustainability
initiatives but also through mundane practices of collective imagination
working at the level of the improbable. Their approach is based on
both long-term fieldwork and on shorter forays into Helsinki’s field sites;
however, it seeks to challenge—by adopting more open-ended and impro-
visational forms of ethnographic engagement—the predictable trajectory
of ethnographic research, which progresses from research design to data
gathering and, finally, to data analysis. MACs are alternative social groups
that focus on environmental sustainability through speculating, designing,
and making small-scale technology (e.g., media art, urban agriculture,
chemistry, genetics, and pharmacology). Berglund and Kohlata argue that
MACs operate through a repertoire they call the “dirt way.” Rather than
focusing on setting goals and devising solutions, they offer countercul-
tural, liminal spaces of creativity to reimagine alternative futures beyond
neoliberal speculations. The “dirt way” signifies the messy groundwork
that MACs undertake and the messy methods they use to partially desta-
bilize the taken-for-granted presumptions of capitalism while at the same
time operating within its framework.
Berglund and Kohlata’s research combines deep interdisciplinarity with
participation in various MACs initiatives, and it draws on scholarship
in anthropology and design, specifically material-semiotic, new materi-
alist, or more-than-human thought. Their engagement in MACs’ projects
cultivated a novel research sensibility that draws on their own ethno-
graphic commitments to multiplicity, situatedness, and partiality and their
interlocutors’ sense-making practices, which emphasize the strengths of
collective imagining. In fact, Berglund and Kohlata propose an anthro-
pology of the future that places collective imagining and the dirt way
at the center of inquiry. Their method is not about a goal-oriented
action but proceeds slowly and responsively according to the wishes and
desires of people on the ground. For them, ethnography’s role is to culti-

vate collective imagination so that “absent things become present and
present things become absent while the possible and the impossible keep
swapping places.”
Marek Pawlak’s chapter, “Anticipating Crisis as Affective Future
Making in Iceland,” based on his fieldwork, explores affect-centered
ethnography’s potential to study the relationship between the emer-
gent and the possible. His ethnographic process included interviews,
informal conversations, and long-term critical, reflexive, and open-ended
participant observation. Focusing on the linkages between Iceland’s past
economic crisis and current sociopolitical circumstances that reorient
toward the future, he shows that anticipation can reside not only in
possibility but also in other moods and emotions, such as anxiety, fear,
uncertainty, surprise, hope, or ambivalence. Intervention—not necessarily
a strategic action—can spring up as affective, anticipatory economies
encompassing diverse bodies, imaginaries, and practices. By studying how
Icelanders gaze toward the future, he reveals the epistemological value
of anticipation, which can reveal the interconnectedness between past
occurrences, present events, and speculations about the future locally and
globally.
During his fieldwork, Pawlak learned that Icelanders anticipate a future
economic crisis on the basis of their past experience with the collapse
of financial markets in 2008 and their emergent associative feelings
and emotions. He calls for an anticipatory ethnographic sensibility that
constantly tacks back and forth “between the past, present and future
in order to parse out existing social, cultural, economic and political
entanglements.” His anticipatory ethnography—inspired by recent theo-
rizing on futures, interdisciplinary affect theory, and embodiment—can
be seen as a boundary object that creates uncanny ties between disci-
plines; anticipation figures as an affective and future-oriented theoretical,
epistemological, and methodological sensibility. This research sensibility,
he argues, can open up a space for vulnerability where we question our
own taken-for-granted assumptions. Although he initially arrived in the
field in 2016 with a feeling of regret that he had “missed” the economic
crisis, he found that the crisis lived on in people’s imagination through
the practices of anticipation. Pawlak’s anticipatory anthropology of the
future is truly a multisensorial dramaturgy of voices from the field.
In their contribution, “Simulating and Trusting in Automated Futures:
Anthropology and the Wizard of Oz,” Sarah Pink, Katalin Osz, Vaike
Fors, and Deborah Lanzeni describe an interdisciplinary, collaborative

research project in the field of design anthropology that was conducted
with so-called Wizard of Oz (WOz) experimental testing and prototyping,
which is used in user experience and design research in the automo-
tive industry. Their ethnographic approach, which foregrounds embodied
participation in the WOZ testing as a form of intervention in futures,
challenges traditional anthropological methods while at the same time
embracing the discipline’s principles of collaboration. Their approach to
the anthropology of futures is a model for deep interdisciplinarity, as it
truly breaks down disciplinary silos by drawing on experiments devel-
oped outside of anthropology that rely on psychological and sociological
theories and methods. However, by inquiring into the ways that design
anthropology might develop its own techniques of research and analysis,
their approach taints anthropological “purity.” WOz experimental testing
is incompatible with anthropological research ethics because it relies on
deception. Participants believe they are being driven by a self-autonomous
car, but the car is, in fact, controlled by a driver—the “wizard”—in
the back seat. The participants learn the truth only after the fact, so
the experiments involve a breach of trust. This is problematic from an
anthropological point of view, as trust is central to ethnographic inquiry.
Pink and colleagues argue, however, that anthropologists must
compromise to allow the discipline to better engage with people’s
future-making activities and to provide a fertile ground for interrogating
anthropological principles. By partnering with other projects engaged
in exploring how “people might live in possible future scenarios,” Pink
and colleagues are discovering what we might learn if we introduce
the possible into our interlocutors’ lives and then craft, in collaboration
with them, an interdisciplinary approach to the future. Ultimately, for
the authors, to commit fully to interdisciplinary research that challenges
anthropology’s long-held preconceptions, anthropologists must critically
engage with—rather than criticize—the terms of research undertaken in
other disciplines.
References
Barthes, R. 1972. Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux.
Bowker, G., and S. Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classifications and Its
Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press.
Carter, T. F. 2018. Disciplinary (Per)mutations of Ethnography. In M.
Kazubowski-Houston, and V. Magnat (eds.) Cultural Studies-Critical Method-
ologies, Special Issue 18 (6): 392–399.
Kazubowski-Houston, M., and V. Magnat. 2018. Introduction: Transdisciplinary
Travels of Ethnography. In M. Kazubowski-Houston and V. Magnat (ed.)
Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, Special Issue 18 (6): 379–391.
Loveless, N. 2019. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for
Research-Creation. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Madison, D. S. 2018. Performed Ethnography and Communication: Improvisation
and Embodied Experience. New York: Routledge.
Penny, S. 2009. Rigorous Interdisciplinary Pedagogy: Five Years of ACE. Conver-
gence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 15
(1): 31–54.
CHAPTER 6
Future-Making in Times of Urban

Sustainability: Maintenance and Endurance
as Progressive Alternatives in the Postindustrial
Era
Felix Ringel
As anthropologists, we often cannot but share our informants’ fears,

hopes, worries, and expectations. During fieldwork, therefore, we do not
just cultivate a sense of their “historicity” (Hirsch and Stewart 2005), i.e.,
the ways in which our informants relate to the past. We also cultivate a
sense of, or “sensibility” for (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007), the ways in
which they imagine the future. However, expectations of the future are
volatile, and anthropologists are most aware of their volatility on their
return to the field, when the contrasts to previous expectations come to
the fore. On a return visit to my current fieldsite, the North German
harbor city of Bremerhaven, in February 2017, most expectations from
my previous visit nearly a year earlier remained unfulfilled. In the context
F. Ringel (B)
Durham University, Durham, UK
e-mail: felix.ringel@durham.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4_6
130 F. RINGEL
of the enduring failure of these expectations, how is the future made and
imagined in this postindustrial city?
One example of failed expectations concerns the renovation of the
center of Bremerhaven-Wulsdorf, the city’s southern district where I was
usually staying during fieldwork. The city council had opted for its reno-
vation in 2014 and, if I remember correctly, this renovation was originally
envisioned to be completed by 2016. I had seen the glossy images in
the local newspaper depicting the transformation of the district’s central
crossing into a roundabout and the development of the adjacent area into
a central square with new-built houses, infrastructures, and shopping facil-
ities. In 2015, I had noticed that some of the shops and restaurants next
to the crossing had already been emptied and readied for demolition. One
of those was my favorite Chinese takeaway, which had to close in prepa-
ration for the new development. But by 2017, these houses still stood
empty, slowly dilapidating. There was no sign of the start of building
work yet. My friend and landlady Carla’s comments throughout that year
varied from “They’ll never start!” to “They promised to finally get it done
at the end of this year.” By “they” she meant the city administration in
charge of the district center’s revitalization. At some point, we both did
not know what to expect anymore. Despite the initial signs of progress,
the hoped-for change just never seemed to occur.
Even worse, the whole city had experienced a blow to its prospects
during the same period—and I was shocked when I first heard about it
on my return. The initially much welcomed Malaysian investors, who had
bought one of Bremerhaven’s biggest remaining shipyards, had suddenly
left the city not even a year after their locally celebrated purchase. To the
dismay of many of my informants, the company claimed that it had shifted
the production of several river cruisers (within a year, no less) to shipyards
in East Germany “for economic reasons.” Many Bremerhaveners were
amazed that the investors did so despite large investments in the renova-
tion of the old shipyard’s headquarters and despite opening a brand-new
design laboratory in it. Even these clear signs of long-term investment did
not prevent the company’s short-term retreat.
However, during that same visit, I also encountered some unex-
pectedly good news: some of the city’s most dilapidated scrap houses
(Schrotthäuser) in its poorest district, the Goetheviertel, were unexpect-
edly renovated despite the fact that many of the district’s inhabitants had
repeatedly underlined that this was impossible. Since the physical state of
the houses had led to their closure by German building law, being deemed
6 FUTURE-MAKING IN TIMES OF URBAN SUSTAINABILITY … 131
legally unfit to house people, many Bremerhaveners had presumed that

a renovation was either technically impossible or economically unvi-
able. But one daring private investor, well-versed in such renovation
projects, had taken on the challenge and revived three of these Schrot-
thäuser against all expectations. Similarly, the long-dreaded closure of
the local science center Phänomenta in the southern fishery harbor was
also suddenly averted and my friends running the center reported that it
would, apparently, be given a new building soon and, thus, avoid closure.
I even attended a workshop with city officials during that visit, in which
we developed architectural ideas for the future building and conceptual
visions for the center’s new thematic orientation.1
Against the backdrop of these unexpected setbacks and developments,
I fell prey to such surprises on most of my return trips to Bremerhaven.
Previously uncertain plans had actually been realized against my own
expectations, and many plans whose fulfillments were previously certain
and immanent still had not materialized against all probability. In the
meantime, my informants had already forgotten, changed, or adjusted
many of their previous expectations but still maintained their aspirations
for a better future. The contrasts to my last visits showed how volatile
expectations are not just in a context of drastic change, but generally.
Still, despite this volatility, the informants I am concerned with in this
paper, activists and professionals in charge of making the city sustain-
able, continued to maintain the proto-sustainable economic, ecologic, and
social forms they had introduced several years earlier—against all odds. I
claim that these practices of maintenance and continuity depict a radically
progressive form of future-making, typical for the postindustrial era. They
aspire to a form of change often neglected in the social sciences.
However, any analysis of future-making practices depends on the clari-
fication of the analysts’ expectations. These expectations are crucial when
assessing the potential “progress” (not) made in a particular ethnographic
context, even more so in a context where aspirations favor sustainability.
As I indicated with the help of the introductory vignettes, the volatile
nature of expectations, i.e., the volatility of the “knowledges”—the many
ways of knowing the world (Thrift 2008)—that relate to the future,
makes it hard to turn them into stable objects of analysis and construct a
specific “futurity.” These expectations have their own conflictive and ever-
changing historical, political, and social contexts. As I show below with
regard to the maintenance of urban sustainability in Bremerhaven in local
businesses and institutions, this should not prevent anthropologists from
132 F. RINGEL
including these manifold and different relations to the future, including

seemingly conservative ones, in their analyses. This, in turn, depends on
further metaphysical, political, and methodological commitments.
When assessing the efficacy and promise of future-making practices,
there is one specific problem that both our informants and we face in
equal measures: metaphysically, the future does not exist (yet). Conse-
quently, no one has a privileged perspective on, or knowledge about, the
future. Metaphysically speaking, anyone’s guess is as good as any other. I
would concur that some options seem more or less likely, or as the editors
of this volume have it, they are more or less probable, and some are
straightforwardly possible or impossible—or at least seem so at first sight.
Nonetheless, as the ethnographic material from my fieldsite suggests, one
can never be too sure. We therefore need a metaphysics, and a method-
ology, that can account for this volatility and problematize the analysts’
expectations.
As a presentist (Ringel 2016a, 2018a), I presume that only the present
exists while the actual future remains inaccessible by any methodology I
can muster. As Barbara Adam has it: “every reality that transcends the
present must itself be exhibited in it” (1990: 38). This means that we
can study the future only through the ways in which it is imagined in any
given present. We have to attend to any form of knowing that is imag-
ined to relate to, or to represent, the future regardless of whether these
expectations, predictions, forecasts, fears, or worries ever actually become
true and are actualized in a future present. It is not only representations
of actual futures that make up the future’s existence in the present. The
kind of knowledge I have considered during my long-term fieldwork in
Bremerhaven since 2014 is simply characterized by its quality of being “of
the future.” Furthermore, that also means that the future (in the present)
is also not just made in high-fly futurist arenas of professional planners,
creative entrepreneurs, path-breaking inventors, and digital or technolog-
ical pioneers. The future is part of most if not all social practices, and
an anthropology of the future should be as detailed and encompassing
(comp. Bryant and Knight 2019).
This presentist take on the future allows us to take all kinds of futures
into consideration, embedded in their respective presents. If only the
present exists, then any future can only be measured or assessed against
the concrete and contested expectations involved in its imagination. And
anthropologists, because of their presentist methodology, can help scruti-
nize such expectations, their own and others (e.g., Abram and Weszkalnys
2013; Appadurai 2013; Bear 2017; Boyer 2001, 2006; Ringel 2018b).
We have our own “temporal agency” (Ringel and Moroşanu 2016) and
we can even study the future together with our informants (comp. Ssorin-
Chaikov 2013; Ringel 2013), because neither the anthropologist nor her
informants have privileged access to the future. Their expectations take
place on eye-level.
One methodological tool I used for scrutinizing my informants’ expec-
tations was to contrast them (and my own expectations) during my many
return visits to the city. During the overall fourteen months of fieldwork,
I was not trying to uncover an underlying futurity, but to take relations
to the future for what they are for both anthropologists and their infor-
mants: objects of their own agency, continuously changing and constantly
negotiated in their own specific sociopolitical context. A single fieldwork
period might not have allowed for this long-term observation of changes
in expectations. These expectations, in turn, are not dissimilar to other
ethnographic objects. My fieldwork in Bremerhaven therefore looked
similar to fieldwork I have done elsewhere. I had simply focused on issues
of the future and sustainability, both in the many semi-structured and
recurrent interviews with local experts and residents, and during partici-
pant observation in specific professional, activist, or private social groups.
Rather than asking my informants about their past, I would continuously
inquire about their ideas of, and relationships to, the future—in the full
awareness that these ideas and relationships are bound to change in time.
To access such modes of knowing the (future) world, no other methods
were necessary. However, when collecting this kind of empirical data,
including the aspirations to the future that seem conservative at first sight,
analysts should determine its metaphysical qualities as well as its specific
temporary context. Similar to representations of the past, these represen-
tations of the future should not be judged based on their potential truth
value. Rather, they are significant for what they tell us about the present.
As I argue in this chapter, a presentist approach, therefore, allows us
to throw light onto future practices that do not look innovative, exper-
imental, or radical at first sight. In their own context of postindustrial
crisis, with its own dominant “problematization” (Rabinow 2003: 56) of
the future, practices of maintenance and repair, forms of endurance, and
continued strives for sustainability might look conservative because they
do not aspire to something new. However, they already adhere to a frame-
work that works beyond the notion of growth and its conceptualization of
change and the future, particularly once, as any anthropological method
134 F. RINGEL
should, we contextualize these expectations of sustainability properly.

Having studied them over the course of five years, I can attest to their
radically progressive character in their own context of decline. In this
chapter, I focus on these often unnoticed relations to the future and their
work on possible, probable, and impossible urban futures.
With these conceptual confessions in mind, my remaining argument
about urban sustainability and the future practices it engenders in Bremer-
haven falls into three parts. First, I introduce my fieldsite and its
specific context of socioeconomic stagnation and decline. I introduce the
topic of urban sustainability and explore some recent discussions in the
anthropology of the future. I then discuss two ethnographic examples
concerning the maintenance of local forms of economic and ecological
sustainability. They show how my informants in Bremerhaven had to
learn that sustainability, once introduced as the guiding trope, itself has
to be sustained beyond its initial promise for change. Both examples of
ecological sustainability also elicit another logical implication of sustain-
ability, namely that it already adds considerations of the future’s future to
practices of future-making. In conclusion, I argue that aspects of imag-
ining the future in the conceptual realm of sustainability are already part
and parcel of our work as anthropologists: we can facilitate and foster
broader temporal and spatial contextualizations of the wished-for changes
(supported by ethnographic comparison) and contribute mundane and
specific details of how these different (or similar?) futures could look like
(via empirical, if somewhat imaginary, specificity).
The Time of Urban Sustainability

Bremerhaven is a prototypical postindustrial city. With its huge harbor
infrastructure and as the US army’s post-World War II port of embarka-
tion in Germany, it was thriving economically in the first half of the Cold
War period. However, in the wake of the postindustrial era in the 1970s,
most of the city’s shipyards as well as the German national fishing fleet
closed down. After reunification in 1990, the US troops left, too. Almost
five decades ago, Germany’s main North Sea harbor had stumbled into a
period of economic decline, high unemployment, increasing poverty, and
extensive outmigration. Although the downward spiral has been halted in
the last decade, in 2014, Bremerhaven was still named Germany’s poorest
city, and it continues to struggle to secure a better future.
However, in response to this ongoing structural crisis, the city was

fortunate enough to develop and implement a strategy of urban regener-
ation with the help of extensive national funding. In 2004, it was given a
substantial lump-sum payment from the federal level and it opted for two
of the most common strategies of urban regeneration in the postindustrial
era: reindustrialization and economic restructuring. Whereas reindustrial-
ization is still based on the idea of growth and copies previous modes
of urban development, the second strategy of restructuring attempts is
used to find and establish an alternative economic foundation for the
city. It promises to make the city economically sustainable and mitigate
the effects of any further crisis by creating a robust and resilient local
economy, for instance, through economic diversification. Its advocates
aspire to stabilize the local economy by shifting the terms on which
it operates toward a different economic logic. This logic would give
economic practices and planning not the vision of growth, but of stability.
The city should aspire to conserve and strengthen its industries rather
than to expand them. The aim of the actors involved in this process was
to make the city’s economy viable and enduring for all futures yet to
come.
I came to the city in 2014 when at least some aspects of these two
economic sustainability strategies had already been implemented for more
than five years; the change, arguably, had already happened. What I
studied, in contrast, was the aftermath of this change: not the creation,
but the equally difficult maintenance of the social, economic, and ecolog-
ical urban forms that had materialized under the trope of sustainability.
One could argue that this process of transformation was still going on, but
during my fieldwork, public austerity measures, among other factors, had
shifted the attention of many activists, entrepreneurs, and public officials
to preserve and maintain the changes that had already been introduced
rather than to seek new ones.
I therefore explored how the maintenance work of urban sustain-
ability—the work aimed at maintaining the new present—was itself
maintained. In a context of potential further decline, I claim, this main-
tenance work of local businesses and institutions expresses a form of
progressive future-making currently neglected in anthropology and other
social sciences because it does not cater to notions of radical change or
new alternatives (comp. Ringel 2014). These latter two notions seem to
capture the expectations of an anthropology of the future best—as part of
our (justified) critique of the present, we study the future in the hope for
136 F. RINGEL
changes that could help overcome current shortcomings and crises. But
how could an ethnographic context like Bremerhaven change the remit
of an anthropology of the future?
The anthropology of the future was hailed in the discipline not least
since Munn’s (1992) important essay on “The Cultural Anthropology of
Time.” However, it has only gathered momentum over the last decade
or so. Whereas initially, particular topics that relate to the future, such
as hope (e.g., Miyazaki 2004, 2006) or planning (e.g., Abram and
Weszkalnys 2013; Weszkalnys 2010), attracted academic interest, lately
many scholars have dealt with the topic head-on (e.g., Appadurai 2013;
Bear 2017; Bryant and Knight 2019; Guyer 2007; Pels 2015; Ringel
2016b, 2018a; Salazar et al. 2017; Yarrow 2017). Still, some tropes have
only been dealt with in passing such as expectations (e.g., Ferguson 1999;
Strathern 2005) or endurance (e.g., Povinelli 2011). Other scholars have
expanded the modes in which we can think about the future beyond the
present toward science fiction and outer space imaginaries (e.g., Battaglia
2005; Valentine 2012).
Most of these analyses of the future conceptualize and approach the
future as something potentially different from the present. The disci-
pline’s first comprehensive volume on The Anthropology of Sustainability
(Brightman and Lewis 2017), for example, also follows this tradition
while critically engaging with the hopes that others invest in the trope of
sustainability. The editors Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis argue that
there is a “need to focus our approach to the future in terms of sustain-
ability—on how to ensure a future liveable earth” (ibid.: 3). However,
such an approach to the future, they underline, should not be “in terms
of maintaining what went before (as resilience thinking implies) but as
a process that prepares us for an unpredictable future.” Their critique
of the fashionable trope of resilience is spot-on: to only mitigate worse
futures does not allow us to prevent them. The seemingly impossible task
of stopping global warming can only be tackled with an aspiration for the
unpredictable. While I very much agree with their vehement argumen-
tation for immanent (and often hardly imaginable) change, I still think
that sustainability also helps to envision a future that is not dependent
on further change, but on the maintenance of the present in the future.
In Bremerhaven, this situation is already emerging on a local level. Both
economic and demographic declines have been halted, but my informants
do not conceptualize this as radical change in comparison with previous
expectations of decline. For some of them, only growth would register
as change and a possible way out of decline. Others, in turn, aspire to

sustainability with a different temporal register in mind.
For conceptualizing such a different understanding of sustainable
futures, I take inspiration from another recent development in studies
of the future in anthropology. Following work in human geography
by scholars such as Graham and Thrift (2007; for the topic of urban
sustainability comp. also Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013), anthropol-
ogists, too, have belatedly taken on the topics of maintenance and repair
(e.g., Graeber 2012; Jackson 2015; comp. also Jansen 2013 on grid-
ding). Particularly, the recently very productive study of infrastructure
(e.g., Appel 2015; Larkin 2013; Mains 2012; von Schnitzler 2013)
has combined these issues with reference to the future, scrutinizing its
promises (Anand et al. 2018) and other relations to the future (e.g.,
Howe et al. 2016; Ringel 2018c).
The trope of sustainability can be linked to these efforts to stabilize,
maintain, and endure the changes affecting contemporary communities
worldwide. To do so, however, we would have to explicate our expecta-
tions for what this link would contribute to the study of future-making.
This entails a reconceptualization of the notion of crisis, in this case the
structural crisis of postindustrialism. Bryant and Knight (2019) have most
recently attempted to rescue the notion of teleology (or as they describe it
following Schatzki: “teleoaffective”) to also give some force and agency to
people’s attempts of having an effect on (and in) the future. Sustainability,
too, affords a telos. They reminded us, furthermore, that we should not
lose sight of the more mundane practices of future-making, rather than to
expect the future to emerge elsewhere and elsewhen in privileged sites of
future-making. Such practices easily include practices of maintenance and
endurance, if that is the “telos” of people’s efforts and expectations. But
what if these “teloi” and expectations change too often and dramatically
like in Bremerhaven?
In such a context of structural change, defined by times of acceler-
ated decline as well as the enduring absence of progress, the idea of
sustainability can foster more radical takes on the future, which go against
the odds by reproducing the present in the future rather than changing
it. For that, however, we have to see the crisis that affects Bremer-
haven as something that incites relations to, and problematizations of,
the future rather than preventing them. As Bryant and Knight (2019:
43) ask poignantly: “What of those instances … when the parameters of
life have changed so distinctly that the future is no longer imaginable?
138 F. RINGEL
When anything or nothing could happen?” In response, I would argue

that even in what they describe as the “vernacular timespace of a ‘Time of
Crisis’” (ibid.)—i.e., “when anticipation is not possible—when the future
cannot be imagined, planned for, forestalled, or resolved” (ibid.)—people
still invest in the future, for instance, by maintaining what they see in
front of them. This is one way of imagining the future, but also of having
an effect on it and exercising one’s temporal agency.
The following two ethnographic examples of the impact of expec-
tations of urban sustainability depict a specific take on the future. In
Bremerhaven, urban sustainability continues to be the most promising
idea for tackling decline. However, local problems with its supposed lack
of success offer some conceptual incitement, too. I address the kinds
of hopes for the future that seem to allow unpredictable, unorthodox
responses to crises by fostering, somewhat counter-intuitively, the main-
tenance of social forms against anticipated change. Researching the
production of more of the same would in this particular context also
mean to look at “emerging and uncertain worlds” (Salazar et al. 2017).
However, what would sustainability actually look like once it is achieved?
Sustaining Economic Sustainability

The practices of sustainability I am concerned with seem rather mundane:
the people doing work at local museums, in the Climate City Office, or at
social clubs attending migrants, refugees, and the urban poor. To my own
surprise, my informants are former natural scientists, retired teachers, or
retrained career changers, who I met in various local organizations and
activist groups during intermittent fieldwork starting in 2014. Although
entangled with and dependent on local politics and resources, their work
does not seem to entail radical political claims on the surface: they are not
calling for a political revolution, set up barricades, or conspire for a coup
d’état. However, in some sense, they aspire to a radically different future:
the sustainment of recently introduced industries and the continuation
of the Climate City project. Their future survival, my informants gather,
needs contemporary regulation, management, and investment in order
not to change with regard to the present. Indeed, their work is simply
geared to produce, establish, or maintain what there already is. This work
entails a form of care for the present that imagines, and thereby produces,
the future as much as a future practice that aspires to a future different
from the present. In a context where the reproduction of the future is
under threat, envisioning more of the same is a radically different achieve-

ment and prospect in its own terms. My informants’ common aims and
strategies are best captured by the term sustainability, despite the different
forms of sustainability they aspire to (economic, ecological, and social).
Although some of the problems the actors deal with affect them and their
city existentially, they are often tackled in fairly unagitated and nonchalant
ways. How can our analytics account for such attempts at stabilizing the
present?
There are, certainly, a few problems with the concept of “sustain-
ability.” While the term is often nothing more than an empty signifier,
it continues to incite new practices, hopes, and ideas of the future. At
least in Bremerhaven, it dominates local urban regeneration strategies and
meanwhile creates new forms of personhood and sociality, for instance,
in the domain of ecological sustainability. Apart from the stereotypical
green activists, I encountered Youth Climate Councilors, various energy
consultants and green transformation specialists, several environmental
advisers, climate scouts, climate detectives, climate friends, and climate
godparents—to only name a few. As agents of a better future, their agen-
tive force is revolutionary, even though their projects are small scale and
practical, often tiresome and disappointingly long term (comp. Hackney
et al. 2016; Kazubowski-Houston 2017). They seem to follow a different
idea of politics and change. For example, the managers of the city’s most
prestigious hotel have introduced a variety of sustainability projects in
their hotel, which involve both the guests and the staff: they offer green
room service, charging points for electric cars, and a variety of local prod-
ucts; they try to minimize their food wastes, follow a social sustainability
strategy for the whole team, and installed two bee colonies on their roof.
While still looking for new projects to implement, their main focus is on
sustaining the many little efforts they had already started. They also do
not see their role as radical in political terms, which traditionally would
involve some lobbying and party politics or forceful propagation. As one
of the hotel manager underlined: “We are in it for ourselves and for the
long run. We see that our efforts do really work, every day, but this success
demands endurance.” Despite disappointing my own “needs for the polit-
ical” (Dzenovska and De Genova 2018), they still collectively sustain the
change they have introduced in the form of their own future-making
activities.
The radical nature of their ongoing practices also stems from the future
of the future they envision. For instance, sustainability seems to suggest
140 F. RINGEL
that once the urban infrastructure and all circulations of goods, finances,
and resources will have been “made sustainable,” my informants predict,
the city’s existence will be secured and any further decline prevented. As
my friend Carla remarked on the sudden closure of the Malaysian-owned
shipyards: “I thought now was the moment, when the city’s development
would finally pick-up again!” As others, she thought that the strategies
of economic sustainability would take Bremerhaven out of these cycles of
growth and decline. Many believed that with the new diversified economy,
the city will remain continuously economically viable and thereby attrac-
tive and worth living in. If such future was realized, their logic goes, it
would sidestep any further crises yet to come.
However, if we take this logic further, actually existing sustainability
would also sidestep notions of change: once the state of sustainability is
reached, historical development would necessarily stop. The new indus-
tries would continuously flourish and they would not need to grow
anymore. The city would be a Climate City with zero carbon emissions
and endless energy resources. To some extent, the end of all crises will
coincide with the End of History as we know it. As preceding ideologies,
sustainability entails a promise of stability in the future, which is triggered
by wishes for stability in the present. My informants’ experiences with
the aftermath of their city’s turn to sustainability, however, underlines the
opposite: the city’s desired economic sustainability has proven not to be
sustainable in and of itself; as any other social reality, it, too, needs to be
continuously maintained. Sustainability’s problem with its own sustain-
ability is that it, too, needs to be sustained. As any realized future changes,
it needs continuous human scrutiny, investment, and care.
The same goes for the city’s efforts of reindustrialization. For a
long time, Germany promoted itself as the forerunner of the global
green revolution, and since the transition to a post-carbon economy
once seemed inevitable, Bremerhaven’s economic sustainability strategies
jumped on the safest bet by seeking to adopt renewable energy in the
form of offshore wind farm industry. For more than a decade, Bremer-
haven aspired to establish itself as the national center of this nascent
industry. With the help of the substantial federal payment, it linked plans
for a straightforward reindustrialization to the security promised by the
undeniable necessity for renewable energy. The hope was that with the
implementation of this economic strategy, and because of its ecological
twist, the wind farm industry will continuously thrive and thereby secure
economic growth and stability.
At first, the strategy seemed to be successful. Several thousand jobs

were created in multiple new factories, for which a whole new infras-
tructure was constructed on the city’s large areas of brownfields in the
southern harbor. Many inhabitants saw the beginning of a new era mate-
rialized in the gigantic tripods, rotor blades, and engine cases stored
onshore before being transported to one of the newly emerging North
Sea offshore wind farms in the German Bay. The city’s Economic Devel-
opment Agency BIS (Bremerhavener Gesellschaft für Investitionsförderung
und Stadtentwicklung ) was proud of the success of its strategies. It had
managed to attract new investors and provided them with industrial real
estate and access to public funding. Its offices still showcase maps of
Bremerhaven’s industrial areas and shiny brochures about the potential
the city has for future investors.
Against all hopes and realistic expectations, however, change in
national discourse and policy dramatically affected the German offshore
industry. Investment for infrastructures needed to support the transition
to renewable energy, the nation’s Energiewende, slowed down as concerns
about the costs for energy consumers suddenly took center stage over the
need to tackle climate change. Since the federal government had put a
halt to the German energy transition, Bremerhaven’s re-industrialization
stopped. Most wind farm companies fired people and introduced long
periods of reduced working hours for those employed. The company
building the enormous tripods, for example, whose opening was cele-
brated by a visit of Germany’s president only a few years ago, went
bankrupt and closed down. During my fieldwork, the Economic Devel-
opment Agency and its investors were generally insecure about the future
of the whole industry. They could not have foreseen that the inevitability
of the energy transition itself suddenly would become questioned.
In response, the Agency more forcefully pursued economic diversi-
fication, the second strategy, targeting the city’s potentials for creative
industries and the so-called green economy. Although the promise of
sustainability had failed them in the case of reindustrialization, they were
still continuing their work, not by radically throwing their previous visions
and instruments overboard, but by adjusting them carefully. This takes
some perseverance: the green economy project in the southern harbor
was announced more than five years ago and continuously reported on in
the local newspaper. But as of summer 2019, the project has not mate-
rialized yet. As we can see, the economic diversification strategy also had
its difficulties.
142 F. RINGEL
Economic diversification, too, promised to prevent any crisis in the

future. If the offshore industry fails, for instance, another branch would
still thrive and guarantee the city’s well-being and ultimately its survival.
The diverse economic pillars, however, were nonetheless to be sustain-
able on their own terms. Tourism was seen as such a sector, so the city
used part of the federal funding to become a prime tourist destination. It
capitalized on its location at the North Sea, but, given the usually dire
weather, a set of new museums was to secure this branch’s successful
future. By the time of my fieldwork, these museums were all up and
running, but with varying success.
Since 2004, a whole new city center had emerged on the postindus-
trial wastelands of the oldest parts of the harbor. Already in the 1970s, the
National Maritime Museum (Deutsches Schifffahrtsmuseum) had opened
in this area. By 2009, the same area housed two further museums, the
German Emigration Centre (Auswandererhaus ) and the Climate Centre
(Klimahaus ) situated next to a Dubai-esque hotel and convention center,
and a shopping mall with the maritime—though in a North German
context somewhat misleading—name of Mediterraneo. The whole marina
was refurbished, and more and more high-end apartment houses are
being built alongside it. More than five years after the opening of the
Climate Museum in 2009, one would think that the new infrastructure
should run successfully—if it was not for yet another crisis.
Tourism appeared to be more fragile than expected; tourists are, in
fact, not as renewable a resource as predicted. Their choice of destination
and ability to travel depend on all kinds of factors, as the city’s tourist
managers explained to me, including the weather, individual economic
well-being, and a tourist destination’s reputation. A bad summer in one
year can boost the visitor numbers of local museums and other indoor
attractions. However, a good summer can as well diminish them. For
reasons still unclear to these tourism professionals, visitor numbers of
Bremerhaven’s museums had overall declined over the last years. The
three major museums felt the decline most strongly. By 2014, all of them
were concerned about their futures. For example, at least 200,000 visi-
tors per year are needed to make the two new privately owned museums
profitable. The advertisement costs for assuring this are considerable. On
top of that, according to my interlocutors, the “novelty-effect” of a newly
opened museum quickly wears off. Apparently, at least every eight years,
a museum should introduce a variety of new attractions to maintain its
attractiveness. Whereas in its first year, a record 700,000 people came to
visit the Climate Centre, by 2014 the numbers had fallen dramatically.
Even temporary new attractions, such as a too lurid show on dinosaurs in
2013, could not prevent this decline.
The two other large museums face similar problems. They, too, have
already introduced several strategies to secure their survival. The Emigra-
tion Centre added an extension building for immigration, tried out new
event-based formats to attract more visitors, and intensified its coop-
eration with local activist groups on the issue of the so-called refugee
crisis. The National Maritime Museum, too, tried out new formats and
further collaborated with local actors, among which, as in the cases of the
other museums, particularly schools were much sought-after since new
generations of pupils promised ever new generations of visitors. They also
planned and are currently completing a huge extension. The necessity for
such strategies shows that tourism has actually not produced the constant,
sustained cycle of income. In contrast, the recent struggles shook Bremer-
haven’s inhabitants yet again in their hopes for a secure future. Against
initial claims and expectations, the city needs to continuously invest in
remaining a touristic hotspot and an economically sustainable city more
generally. The new touristic infrastructure has to be maintained, not just
created. Given these actually sobering developments, has my informants’
agency failed or, rather, has it been failed by the notion of sustainability?
Thus far, the sustainability strategy remains unquestioned.
Sustaining Ecological Sustainability

A last example shall help to answer this question. This time it concerns
the Climate City Office (Klimastadtbüro). In 2009, the local government
had agreed to transform Bremerhaven into a Climate City (Klimastadt ),
which entailed serious and binding commitments to the reduction of CO2
in both official institutions and the city as a whole. Newly opened in 2014
in the city’s central shopping alley, the office was to ensure the implication
of strategies toward this aim by developing projects and plans together
with a diverse set of local actors.
Till, the head of the office and a former marine biologist, had a clear
idea of what he was doing. For him, it was not just about the quick fixes
and radical solutions, he said. His undertaking was a long-term process,
whose single steps had to go into the right direction. He believed that
change did not happen from one day to the next. With this logic, Till
created new forms of social practice, for instance, the first worldwide
144 F. RINGEL
Youth Climate Council (Jugendklimarat ). However, he resisted attempts

by national TV stations to report about it. He said the Council has to
work first and be able to sustain itself in the future. The way he approaches
his task is not just by changing the present, but he also holds the present
responsible for its endurance in the future. In a context of decline, this
is not to be mistaken for stagnation; rather, it is a progressive interven-
tion beyond ideas of growth and decline, aspiring to a future that can
itself endure in the future. However, what would actually determine the
moment, when this Council, or the city, will have become sustainable? As
with the city’s overall aspiration to become sustainable, I wonder whether
citizens’ imaginations were ever specific enough to determine when the
introduced changes had become sustainable.
Interestingly, Till was also quite hesitant to determine this future in
more detail. He used rather abstract biological terms to conceptualize
his work. When he spoke about the future of the Climate City project,
he deployed terms like “dynamic equilibria” (Fließgleichgewichte), organic
development (natürliche Entwicklung ), and systemic factors (systeminher-
ente Faktoren). The social forms he produced will have to stand the test of
time within the given social ecosystem and its specific resources, but these
biology-inspired conceptual tools do not seem to clarify how sustainability
should or will look like. The only thing that counts for Till in the moment
is that these forms can endure, not that they are radically new. It will
be no surprise that in the meantime the Climate City Office, despite its
important work, was threatened with closure and demise. Till had always
suspected that, but after local elections in 2015, and with a new polit-
ical coalition in power, the office had only barely escaped closure. In the
end, it remained open, but was moved out of the city center into a much
less-frequented area. Against all hardship and discouragement, the people
working in the office continue with their work and still try to uphold the
Climate City project.
Conclusion:
Sustainability/Maintenance/Endurance
as Future-Making
As we can see, the endurance of local forms of sustainability depends
on constantly renewed efforts for, and investments in, their futures.
Sustainability’s temporal logic is crucial for Bremerhaven’s continued
urban regeneration efforts. In times of massive and drastic change, prac-

tices that try to maintain the state of the present in the future can be
understood as radically progressive, indeed, political acts. Given the most
common progressive take on agency, as criticized in Saba Mahmood’s
works (2005), we would usually account for such practices as expres-
sions of a conservative, fearful attitude to change because they aspire to
the status quo. As the ethnographic examples from above underline, in
Bremerhaven this is not the case: Although they want to conserve certain
aspects of the status quo, they do so against the backdrop of expectations
of decline. However, they are right in metaphysic terms: if they would not
invest in these forms, they would seize to exist and sustainability would
have failed their future-making.
Thinking through the future-making involved in practices of mainte-
nance therefore also advances conceptualizations of change and expecta-
tions. In the instance of defining change as being different with regard
to the present, anthropologists cling to a framework of progress. In
popular and academic discourse, change is often conceptualized as being
for the better; to make a difference is all about changing the state of
the present, which is perceived to be lacking and bad. Despite my belief
that the present is often extremely lacking, deficient, and troublesome,
such thinking conceptualizes change on the presumption that the present
is enduring by itself and constantly in need of change. Particularly in a
context of actual, probable, and realistic decline, however, the endurance
of the present is itself the outcome of continuous practice. To reproduce
the present then constitutes a betterment of sorts.
The metaphysical question about change, namely whether something is
per se durative or has to be made durative, however, can only be answered
in relation to the ways in which we attempt to do an anthropology of
the future. My main analytical strategy in this paper was presentist: to
take my informants’ claims about the future fully into consideration and
to see their attempts at maintaining social forms as progressive in rela-
tion to their own expectations. Carla sustained her hope in the city’s
future; the hotel managers persevered with their sustainability strategies;
and Till managed his Climate City Office against all odds. To them, the
temporal logic they employed did not seem conservative, but progressive.
Their maintenance work counterintuitively proved revolutionary—but
only if I take their often-volatile expectation of further decline seriously.
This shows why, through the analytical lens of the future, it is often
146 F. RINGEL
more important to explain endurance (as change) rather than change as

progress toward progressive alternatives.
For many communities suffering from postindustrial and other crises,
sustainability is seen as a remedy against current economic, social, and
ecological problems since it promises change toward a different future
as well as the future maintenance of that future. In Bremerhaven, the
hopes connected to this strategy were severely shaken by recent nega-
tive developments through which sustainability itself turned out not to
be sustainable. Rather, it needed constant reinvestment and the use of a
variety of resources. Despite sustainability’s own shortcomings, it allowed
thought and practice in the present that capitalized on maintenance and
endurance rather than change. It thereby enabled new relationships to
the future, which we should include in our analyses. As the inhabitants
of Bremerhaven found out, beyond the dreams and fantasies of a better
future, sustainability deserves—and depends on—constant practice and
investment in people’s daily professional and personal lives. Once we take
our informants’ expectations of the future more seriously, and study them
in their detail and complexity, we will be able to account for the radical
political character of attempts at maintaining sustainability, not just in
Bremerhaven.
We should therefore be careful when prescribing our own ideas of
what constitutes a better future. We should hesitate to only see progress
in difference and search for cure-all remedies in the emergence of alto-
gether different and new futures. If we want to explore the future worlds
of our informants with them, we should be aware of their, as much as
our own, expectations, which are at the core of their manifold future-
making practices. Anthropology’s presentist methodology allows for that,
but it should be accompanied with its according metaphysics, too. My
theoretical, metaphysical, and political hesitation, however, should not
silence anthropologists’ ideas for, and imaginations of, the future. In fact,
since knowledge about the future is volatile and constantly readjusted,
it invites our collaborations and interventions. Our informants’ future-
making practices are not just to be represented in all their complexity,
but they invite collaborative imaginations of change that can be all at
once—possible, impossible, probable—depending on the expectations
we approach them with. As I proposed in this paper, with a presen-
tist methodology, we can sidestep our own metaphysics of progress
and approach our informants’ practices of future-making in their own
ever-changing contexts of expectations.
Note
1. Needless to say, by the time of writing this chapter in the spring of 2019,
nothing had transpired yet, but at least—and that is in some sense even
more surprising—the Phänomenta was still open to the public despite these
dire forecasts.
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CHAPTER 7
Knowing and Imagining with Sustainable

Makers
Eeva Berglund and Cindy Kohtala
In the space of just a few years, safeguarding the future and even
sustaining human civilization has become a widespread concern. Incum-
bent political and commercial regimes, as well as media outlets, now
actively participate in the study of future worlds, while planetary chal-
lenges such as climate change grab attentions (Fry 2012; Appadurai
2013; Granjou et al. 2017). Although this generates anguished calls for
urgent and drastic intervention, overwhelmingly, hegemonic institutions
and individuals within them still indulge hopes that the future will be
much like today only with different gadgets. Wild flights of fancy are, of
course, out there in an increasingly cluttered landscape of literary, artistic,
popular, technological, and all kinds of futures.
This profusion extends also to academic work on sustainable futures,
both in anthropology (e.g., Mathews and Barnes 2016) and in design
(e.g., Ehn et al. 2014), our respective academic comfort zones. We find
more and more events and publications that are presented as radical and
E. Berglund (B) · C. Kohtala

Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Espoo, Finland
e-mail: eeva.berglund@aalto.fi

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4_7
152 E. BERGLUND AND C. KOHTALA
more scholars who are adopting an activist posture. Yet in most Euro-
American contexts, such activism, like the vocabularies associated with
it, too easily aligns with neoliberal values. One example is the “Maker
movement” that espouses the shrinking and distributing of digital manu-
facturing technologies (such as 3D printers and CNC milling machines),
not only as a route to replacing or adjusting environmentally damaging
consumerism, but also as “democratizing.” The hype and over-optimism
around the movement serve to promote US engineering (Turner 2018),
while often imperializing free culture and community technology move-
ments elsewhere (Braybrooke and Jordan 2017) and actively obfuscating
global supply chains and the working conditions wherein their playthings,
like electronic components and equipment, are made (Kohtala 2017).
Critiques notwithstanding (e.g., Morozov 2014), the literature around
self-organizing sustainability initiatives, including makers, has a roman-
ticizing as well as noticeably declamatory tone, but it is often thin on
understandings of real-world future-making. We prefer to approach such
activity by trying to understand concrete social practices, something that
ethnographic research, as we will argue, is well equipped to do. We train
our lens on a style of activism and activist imaginings involving more or
less autonomous and low-budget groupings in wealthy parts of the world
who seek to rethink everything. In their activist spaces and in everyday
life, they behave as if the techno-utopian solutionism of the mainstream
were impossible, and they are actively curious about the unknowables
produced by what passes for normal.
We refer to these spaces of future-making as MACs, Materialist Activist
Communities, because they concern themselves with material flows,
embrace a critical ethos, and participate in a politically engaged form of
maker culture. They are explicitly alternative groups developing collective
practices of speculating, designing, and making, with a marked environ-
mental orientation. The futures animating their activities are radically
different from, but have grown out of, the mundane presents of the early
twenty-first century. Those we have encountered, and whose activities
inform this paper, feature explorations into small-scale technology devel-
opment and new media art, but also urban agriculture, DIY and synthetic
biology, chemistry, genetics, and pharmacology that do appear improb-
able if not impossible: bio-hacking and bio-art that open up the spaces
and forms of institutionalized natural science.
In Helsinki, as elsewhere in Europe, from Barcelona and Paris to
smaller cities in the Netherlands, the activist spaces we have visited are
7 KNOWING AND IMAGINING WITH SUSTAINABLE MAKERS 153
often temporary and usually precarious. They are likely to have visible
signs of artistic and technical skill in quirky objects left over from previous
projects, evidence of know-how in building, architecture, and design.
They contain small and large, simple and complex tools for exploring:
soldering stations for electronics and sewing machines, fridges, and sinks.
Sofas and coffee tables invite conviviality. These spaces house future hori-
zons that are radically different from what passes for normal in Finland
(and similar places) today, while offering immediate pleasures where
bodies, minds, and stuff mingle, clearly offering intellectual and emotional
rewards.
As is typical of a smaller European city, several individuals are active
in many Helsinki groups, while others participate only in specific events.
Sometimes projects use the facilities of the city’s makerspaces, hacklab,
and fab lab. Others are associated with highly visible community venues
(such as an urban greenhouse), while some groups use spaces offered by
others to produce discrete events (Fig. 7.1). Kääntöpöytä (“Turntable”),
for instance, is a low-key center of urban gardening and sustainable life-
ways that has been operating on central but not-yet-developed land in
Helsinki since 2009 run by Dodo, an environmentalist association (see
Berglund 2016). It hosts workshops, on DIY solar PV panels, “pee-
ponics,” making soap from used cooking oil, furniture making with
reclaimed wood, and the like, and has periodically organized popular
brunches featuring the garden’s plentiful offerings in a vegetarian and
vegan spread. Pixelache1 is a long-running arts collective whose yearly
festivals’ themes straddle art, technology, environmentalism, and activism.
Often these are staged in contentious venues: a DIY-biology summit
arranged in an old barn on an idyllic island threatened by urban devel-
opment, a bio-art exhibition in a former mental hospital that temporarily
hosts grassroots cooperatives.
What we are calling MACs are then physical and conceptual spaces
where practices of knowing as well as of making forge ways of imag-
ining beyond neoliberal frames. MACs could be framed as intense cases
of a shift, identified by David Schlosberg and Romand Coles (2016) in
how critical politics is developing in industrialized and wealthy places.
Not quite post-material, the new environmentalism identified by Schlos-
berg and Coles nevertheless builds repertoires of embodied and applied
modes of political action that offer “new modes of organization, forms of
resistance, and prefigurative models of democratic living, all immersed
in re-formed relations with each other and the natural world” (2016:
Fig. 7.1 Open-Source Circular Economy Days Helsinki 2016 at Kääntöpöytä,

Photo by Cindy Kohtala. “OSCE Days” is a global grassroots initiative that links
local organizers’ events to promote open-source design, closing material loops,
and alternative economies
161). Thus, MACs explicitly present themselves as counter to indus-

trial mass production and to industrial modernity’s hierarchical structures,
promoting possibilities to open up participation in the design and creation
of futures to non-experts in the spirit of doing it yourself, DIY. They
operate as self-consciously self-organizing collectives working to ensure
access to production technologies (for making tangible things as well as
alternative media projects and software), seeking to build technological
skills and literacy, but also focusing on how to produce and provide food,
shelter, energy, and mobility while building generalized knowledge about
a sustainable way to live. They may practice DIY smelting and casting
using cast-off CDs or beverage tins as raw material, repairing electronics,
canning, or fermenting food to avoid waste, which all politicize material
issues. The projects they undertake are messy and highly imaginative, their
reasons for doing them often vague. Throughout their spaces, we find
situated and partial confusion in which thinking bodies extend to all kinds
of stuff in transformation. Playful and militantly anti-productivist, their
activities draw in all the senses in an education of possibilities, sustaining

them as loose collectives that nurture significant insights about unsus-
tainability. These features impel us as researchers to keep going back to
them, even as we recognize that they have precursors in a long tradition
of prefigurative and repoliticizing initiatives to counter the damages of
capitalist ways (Gibson-Graham 2008).
Our account is based on MACs in Helsinki, as well as on field-
work carried out by Cindy with digital makers across northern Europe
(Kohtala 2016). Diffuse, ebbing, and flowing as funding and sponsor-
ship allow, rarely persisting for more than a few months in a single
location, the experimental practices we have witnessed in Helsinki over
two decades have nonetheless left a discernible trace on artistic, polit-
ical, and socio-environmental life in the city. Libraries, for instance, have
frequently supported MACs’ activities both in one-off and in permanent
services like workshop facilities, as have local galleries and private founda-
tions. Individuals we know have shifted from precariousness to somewhat
steadier lives as entrepreneurs, academics, and denizens of the third spaces
proliferating around emerging creative and knowledge industries, and
from time to time, we hear of ventures around the country that have
a kinship with MACs we have known (orienting to a “circular economy,”
for example). Several are quasi-academic, funded, or partially hosted by
formal educational institutions or not-for-profit arts associations while
remaining open-access and experimental.
We render as a story of studying future worlds some of our expe-
riences of participating (though very inexpertly a lot of the time) in
activists’ joyful research amidst equipment and people, animating and
animated by objects only just taking form. Here are nebulous yet exciting
concepts-things that stimulate new knowledge, just out of range, “epis-
temic objects” that are in the process—perhaps—of becoming sedimented
into knowledge but “have no reference in the everyday sense of the word”
(Rheinberger 2008). These things could be apparent as dirt, as tools
or something utterly unexpected, or as habits and routines that are in-
formation. Elusive and unnamed, they nevertheless actively shape how
we—activists, others—relate to the material world.
MACs render more-than-human and other-than-capitalist futures
tangible and realistic, practicing futures that are difficult if not impos-
sible for inhabitants of industrial and post-industrial worlds to imagine.
Our own efforts are informed by a growing literature in anthropology
and design that draws on material-semiotic, new materialist, or more-

than-human framings (Bennett 2004; Connolly 2013), but it is above
all fed by our repeated but not systematic engagements with MACs,
which we have both carried out as observant participants (Kohtala 2017,
2018; Berglund 2016, 2017). We have thought about these encoun-
ters as modes of ethnography, where partially and sporadically we have
been learning their “vernacular doings and understandings” (Lanzeni and
Ardevol 2017: 117). If our curiosity grew from what we knew about
Helsinki-based groupings, MACs’ cosmopolitan and digitally networked
yet place-based character makes it easy for us to jump into conversation
with them elsewhere too, learning from and with them. Ethnography at
its best is always self-consciously dialogic as well as embodied, but, we
argue, a “re-functioned” ethnography, as Douglas Holmes and George
Marcus (2010) might have it, has even more to offer. This we understand
as a forward-looking intellectual effort where our ethnographic sensibili-
ties together with the sense-making efforts of our “subjects” generates a
messy but not toothless way of working out what is important and why—
both for researchers and for activists—and a device for making evident the
improbability of what Leonardo Castillo has called sustainability-as-usual.
We are not concerned with setting an agenda for what future-oriented
ethnography should be (or whose) (Pink and Salazar 2017); rather, we
want to build on the inspiration we find in critical ethnographic work in
both design research and anthropology.
Though popular, it is not easy to encourage challenges to traditional
notions of ethnography, those broadly based on the magic of “being
there.” In trying to account for what we both have learned along-
side and with activists, we have encountered very varied responses, from
sparks of recognition to strong skepticism that our findings—whether of
valued ways of learning or imaginative and inventive ways of sharing—are
valid. Yet we have both started from quite conventional understandings
of ethnographic methods, ones which endorse that need for intimacy
and which ideally unfold as committed, long-term, and necessarily open-
ended engagements. This is more or less as forerunners in both design
(Bjerknes et al. 1987) and anthropology (Strathern 1991) have taught
us. The doctoral student’s privilege of 13 months of anthropological
fieldwork with busy professional people taught Eeva of the benefits of
long-term immersion as well as the downsides of fieldwork by appoint-
ment, now standard but novel in the early 1990s. Cindy’s experience in
engaged fieldwork in a fab lab for her doctoral dissertation was likewise
foundational, and periods of fieldwork, observation, and engagement are

core to her subsequent postdoctoral enquiries: visiting activists’ events,
staying on in European fab labs, and puzzling things out with makers as
a kind of “researcher-in-residence.”
Here, we draw on a combination of Cindy’s long-term research with
makers and Eeva’s more unplanned but productive forays into Helsinki’s
activist spaces since 2010. Yet it was what we shared in our experi-
ences that inspired us to think and write together. In our ethnographic
work with activists, we have both been struck by people’s capacity to
learn to value diverse knowledges and transform themselves—and us.
These engagements have felt messy, as we will explain, but not without
value. Quite the opposite—for ethnography sparks potentially any kind
of curiosity, just as it encourages care in description and analysis. This
comes from attending to detail and trying to experience life from another
“inside,” both in design and in the social sciences. As with others
wanting to renew ethnography (e.g., Criado and Estalella 2018), we have
nurtured our own curiosity by learning with activists how to live with and
against the troubles and discomforts of contemporary knowledge prac-
tices. Alongside them, rather than ignoring, cleaning up, or devaluing
mess, dirt, and confusion, we have exploited ethnography to challenge
the cleaned up sequence of research gap > research design > methods >
data > analysis, which persists in design, anthropology, and beyond.
Furthermore, stereotypes of the temporal orientations of the two
fields—future-oriented design working on what could/should be, presen-
tist anthropology dealing with what is/was—are unhelpful and they
hinder mutual learning. Besides, insightful ethnography in both design
and anthropology has long grown out of embracing multiplicity, situ-
atedness, and partiality and should not need referencing.2 We want to
supplement these long-standing insights with insisting on the power of
collective imaginings as productive of knowledge, within MACs but also
within our fields of research.
Our use of the phrase collective imaginings is anchored in the work
of philosophers Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, specifically their
scholarship on the seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict de (Baruch)
Spinoza. According to them, Spinoza had a materialist philosophy of
knowledge, in which the very idea of the future was bound up with
the imagination. When materialist activists pursue their critique, they are
above all engaged in a “refiguration of the capacities of imagination” that
resembles the Collective Imaginings that Gatens and Lloyd identify in
their 1999 book of that name, as “ways that open up new questions and
make possible new relations between philosophical thought and polit-
ical reality” (1999: 11). This resonates powerfully with the way MACs
reinsert material life in all its filth into politics together with reason and
imagination.
The challenge we pose ourselves of capturing this work of imagining
is considerable, but the task is helped by picturing a scene of mess, impu-
rity, and ignorance, not just within MACs but everywhere. Aligning with
critical design research and STS (Woodhouse and Patton 2004) on the
one hand, and anthropology’s tendency to focus on the “dark side” of
neoliberal normality (Ortner 2016) on the other, we contextualize our
own and MACs’ work against the literal mess and dangers bequeathed by
incumbent, Euro-American styles of global reasoning and acting (Fortun
2012; Granjou et al. 2017). In the next section, we introduce some illus-
trative examples of the messy but productive work that goes on in these
spaces, noting work by other scholars that points to similar situations of
imagining, knowing, and intervening in un/sustainable futures. We then
return to the importance of collective imagining as a methodological prin-
ciple, not only in relation to MACs, but as a way of conceptualizing and
practicing better ethnography.
Technoscience in Spaces of Dirty Knowing

Researching ethnographically with activists is a dialogue, and it means
collaborating at an epistemic level (Criado and Estalella 2018), learning
from as well as with our interlocutors. As illustration, Cindy was walking
in the garden of Barcelona’s Valldaura Self-Sufficiency Lab, an experi-
mental space hosted by (while running partially independently of) an
architecture school, with its director Jonathan Minchin. Around them
were forest, permaculture gardens, aquaponics systems, outbuildings,
construction experiments and WikiHouse structures, and a villa with a
fab lab, DIY-biology lab, and large rooms for hosting events, cooking,
eating, and sleeping. They talked about the place, but also about a recent
global makers’ meeting, more of a showy conference than the usual
counterculture assembly. The conference speakers had breezily prosely-
tized asteroid mining and gene editing alongside humanitarian work in
refugee camps. Jonathan asked Cindy about other workshops and activist
communities elsewhere, and the talk shifted to how various communi-
ties discuss and enact what technology should be. Brambles caught on
their clothing; chickens fussed in the background. They talked about

“appropriate technology.” He said:
There is another term, of technology choice … which is revealing when

you’re engaging with a student or discussion group or whoever. When
we discover that we have a technology choice, we discover the reasons
to choose. It’s at that point that we can say: there are these two 3D
printers. One of them, you have to buy the cartridges and the other one
you don’t. So we’ve got a technology choice. What’s one? One is a free
system, hackable, and the other one is not. When we’re looking at material
choice, one wood has formaldehyde in it and the other one doesn’t. How
would they make it? Let’s track it back. A technology choice. Do we mine
the moon for minerals? That we have to plug into our industrial model,
or do we change the industrial model, so we don’t need to mine at all?
The discussion, as discussions in MACs usually do, came back to

taking systems and societies apart in order to mend or rebuild them. The
discussions are informed by the many social worlds that surround MACs
and feed their enquiries and mischievous disobedience: synthetic biolo-
gists making life, engineers making materials that self-program, scientists
making machines that self-replicate, and hackers unmaking commercial
products and remaking them. We, ethnographer and activist alike, read
the same manifestos and argue about their meanings. Jonathan continued:
When I was involved with the permaculture design certificate—one of the

first courses that we did up here—it was very interesting to see the inter-
action between some of the people who signed up for that course and
others in the fab lab, the programmers or engineers, and there was a real
worldview collision. It worked itself out, but there were casualties along
the way. But one of the founding principles and tenets of the permanent
agriculture, permaculture, ideal is that you do nothing. Actually that’s a
choice. (…) How interesting is that: there is a choice to do nothing. And
observe, rather than act.
Then you’ve got the programmers. And Larry Wall, I think, who was
the creator of Perl language. His mantra was laziness. Be lazy. Don’t do
anything. That was his mantra as a programmer. So at this point you’ve
got a similarity between automization and doing nothing. It’s, how do you
say, it’s only a tenuous link, but at the same time we sort of start to engage
in conversation between these worldviews. Programmers are not evil. And
permaculture guys are not just hippies.
“Naïve hippies,” Cindy offered. “Yeah,” he paused, then continued. “It’s

very interesting this, even just the idea of technology. You think it’s always
something advanced but it’s often not.” Cindy agreed, “Yeah, I think we
learn a lot more when we consider what the real meaning of technology
actually is. Like the technology of the [ancient] water system that you just
showed me.” “Yeah. Or the woods. All of this is here because we’re here.
All these trees.”
We sympathize with MACs, but we do not always understand them.
We are struck, however, by how they combine the political work of iden-
tifying and making choices (as in the vignette above) with a principled
embrace of matter and materiality. They explicitly reject cognitive capital-
ism’s standard disavowal of matter, the no longer pleasure-bringing stuff
that the mainstream would prefer to discard and forget as “externalities”
or, at best, deal with through waste management or recycling schemes
that leave damaging structures intact. Activists bring the problem mate-
rial—non-recyclable materials, “invasive” plants (Chinese knotweed), or
unwanted animals (urban geese)—into the here and now. Doing this is to
link things up rather than to keep them neatly separate, to pay attention
to how matter flows (not smoothly) through everyday life, mingling with
information and people. Making such connections is key to sustainability
and foregrounded by many, many thinkers. Noortje Marres (2012), for
example, makes the point by discussing the work of the artist Esther
Polak, Spiral Drawing Sunrise, in a square in Amsterdam. In that 2009
artwork, Polak drew on the energy of the sun to power a robot car that
then made traces in the sand. This is an analogous process to those under-
taken by activists seeking to make important but hard-to-discern effects
and relations apparent, to give distant things (the turning sun) “a tangible
presence in the here and now” (Marres 2012: 88). Here it is Marres who
spells out the link with technical definitions of sustainability dating from
the 1970s, and the way the solar-powered art aligned with experimental
social research. Similar spelling out is increasingly going on across many
discussions, as artists, activists, academics, and others account for their
doings. Through ethnography, we also find that alongside it, inside these
spaces, is situated and partial confusion that, we argue, allows activists to
imagine and practice—know—less unsustainable lives with a preference
for humility and debris over hubris in technological practice (Jasanoff
2016). Their activities generate situations that are indeterminate, messy,
and crazy. We argue that this is principled.
We have elsewhere proposed the “dirt way” as a concept to capture

the situated confusion that emerges here (Berglund and Kohtala 2020)
in contrast with sustainable futures discourses based on expertise devel-
oped in conventional Euro-American contexts. The “dirt way” is closer
to what Sebastian Abrahamsson and Filippo Bertoni (2014) have dubbed
the “dirty” side of the “green.” Like them, we reject the idea that high-
lighting mess is merely a romantic reaction to profit-led and technocratic
forms of expertise, since the route to knowledge and knowing necessarily
goes through embodying, experiencing, experimenting with, and being
entangled in the world. Beyond this, and inspired by MACs, our notion
of the “dirt way” centers on non-formulaic ways to reach not “solutions”
so much as to keep working and acting, using existing resources. It hence
renders impossible grandiose future sustainability visions such as asteroid
mining or giant space mirrors, as well as abstract techno-utopian imagi-
naries that culminate in machines that make machines that make machines
(Gershenfeld et al. 2017; Kline 2015; Turner 2018), and where we are
all “connected” by undersea cables, underground tunnels, drone ports,
or the blockchain. MACs largely reject, even ridicule, such imaginaries,
preferring to focus on how we are organico-technically connected in webs
of life.
MACs are part of what geographer Noel Longhurst (2015) calls “alter-
native milieu.” These are countercultural spaces that protect and nurture
socio-cognitive directions that elsewhere would be experienced as impo-
lite or ridiculous and so would not flourish. An alternative milieu offers
security for people to pursue things unthinkable in other places. MACs
and other alternative milieus contrast sharply with venues proliferating
across corporate, political, and civic institutions that are not just over-
optimistic and improbable by any scientific standards, but even refuse
to imagine futures that differ significantly—apart from the gadgets as
noted—from today. Given the uncertainties associated with planetary
transformations underway, the “dirt way” works as a shorthand for
elements of knowledge production that are hard to articulate yet probably
particularly important in today’s unsustainable and unimaginative context.
It also echoes the Future Anthropologies Network’s endorsement of
“epistemological filth” (Future Anthropologies Network 2014). Above
all, confusion is an empirical reality within activist gatherings—people do
things without being clear about what they are doing or why.
Activist meetings can then operate like ritual, being a switch point
between individual and collective experience. Something similar has been
noted by anthropologists of social movements attentive to how collec-

tive protest can (temporarily) interrupt the perpetual disorder and crisis
of capitalist normality (e.g., Krøijer 2015, chapter 5). Also relevant for
appreciating the allure of MACs is perhaps Victor Turner’s work on rituals
of liminality, where things that exist but that are structurally invisible
like a “not-boy-not-man” (1967: 95) are acknowledged and, in some
cases, worked up into some “primitive hypothesis, where there is a certain
freedom to juggle with the factors of existence” (1967: 106). MACs also
allow for alternative ways to reckon time, to inhabit something other than
the linear, innovation-focused logic of cognitive capitalism, green-tinged
though it may appear, which they perceive not as solution but as problem.
We have argued that as these activist projects define and reach toward
sustainability, they reverse social norms by reveling in “dirt” of all kinds,
in an ad hoc, dialogic, and embodied way that parallels “a critical STS
insight about how knowledge is ‘purified’ in order to give it power, but
… also points to human bodies, substances and experiences that will not
be contained” (Berglund and Kohtala 2020: 103).
MACS are as dependent on capitalism as they attempt to counter it,
but this is hardly a finding: Anyone who seeks less impactful pathways
must still rely on high-energy and globalized socio-technical infrastruc-
tures of computers, Internet, electricity, screens, components, vehicles,
fuel, building materials, and exhausting daily routines. Nevertheless,
activist camps and festivals do see participants sleeping in tents and on
drafty floors, feeding themselves and having to deal with their own bodily
wastes, extension cords snaking through rooms and trees to provide elec-
tricity to laptops, projectors, and other devices. Such contradictions are
taken in stride and do not cause paralysis; in fact, they are debated openly
as activists spell out the trade-offs and discuss alternatives. Embeddedness
in a highly industrialized, globalized world is both fodder for narratives of
resistance and for the imagination. The discomforts of this nurture humor
and irony: Could the “community powerbank,” a Pixelache project in
which participants learned to remove lithium batteries from discarded
laptops, test and turn them into portable USB power banks, also help
beat melancholy? After all, lithium has been known to be a treatment
for depression; workshop participants jokingly speculated about extracting
the lithium and repurposing the unusable batteries as anti-depressants.
The complications of such embeddedness are never clearer than in the
realm of synthetic biology, bio-hacking, and bio-art, which have featured
highly in the Helsinki communities’ recent festivals. In one Pixelache
event on taxidermy, led by internationally known biohacker Dusjagr,

Cindy arrived to scenes of prone dead animals and birds with their organs
removed, the air thick with a disturbing chemical odor. A woman was
delicately painting the beak on a bird whose wings were spread out on
a piece of cardboard. Several rats lay stretched out, unfinished; one was
pinned open with pearl-top pins, its cavity covered with red velvet. Cindy
commented that it looked rather royal. A mounted reindeer stood to
the side near the sofas, perhaps a treasure found in one of the city’s
many flea markets? Dusjagr (his hacker name) had placed two LED lights
in the eye sockets of a poorly stuffed mouse and kept repeating how
“bad” it was. It reminded Cindy of the humorous photos of amateur
taxidermy that spread on social media. “Why taxidermy?” she asked. He
was simply interested, he replied, preferring it to bio-art that is clean
and behind glass, the kind made for people afraid to spend a night out
“in nature.” Using the word haptic several times, he said he wanted the
participants to have an active, haptic experience. Andrew, the coordinator
from Pixelache, was also present, and both commented several times on
how difficult the previous day’s workshop had been, with participants
skinning and removing organs. Though they joked about how disturbing
it had become, bad enough that they had had to send someone out to get
a bottle of brandy, Dusjagr felt they had had “really good discussions.”
Cindy remembered dissecting a frog in biology class in school; the
memory of it was stimulated by the smell in the room. She mentioned that
as pupils they also did a rat, which was much more difficult. In response,
Dusjagr made reference to the Anthropocene, the “fur thing,” and added
that “we have no problems with frogs.” Cindy reflected that it might be
the same with birds and feathers; fur is much more disturbing.
Such projects are undertaken with considerable technical skill and, we
argue, collective imaginings that rely on familiarity with wide-ranging
intellectual currents. In our analysis, MACs not only recognize power and
complication in science, but they insist that it is also dirty and violent.
Though their conceptions of science render it as something that isn’t
separate and isn’t neat, even corporate-led techno-science is interesting to
them. To illustrate, we draw on one particular open assembly where the
science and philosophy of genome editing (CRISPR in particular; Broad
Institute 2019; Cong et al. 2013) were being discussed. The conversa-
tion turned to medical self-experimentation and DIY fecal transplants.
While medical science has not yet been able to fully explain the effects of
fecal microbiota transplantation, it has been used to treat irritable bowel
syndrome and Crohn’s disease, for instance. This involves a person being
instilled with another healthy person’s fecal matter (Brandt 2013). A
biologist leading the discussion highlighted further mysteries of science
regarding the “brain-gut axis”: People’s guts did indeed evidence a
change in microbiome reflecting that of the donor after a stool transplant.
Further, in cases where the donor had depressive tendencies, the trans-
plant recipient subsequently showed a tendency to likewise experience
depression. The talk here was about care in inter-species relations, about
the impossibility of separating the human and non-human and about
the “epistemological filth” hidden in purified conceptions of Western
medical knowledge. When we share microbiomes with our life mates,
other humans, pets, where do “we” end, and the other begin?
Present were also some (bio)artists who drift in and out of MAC
spaces we know. Bartaku proposed launching a start-up. The enterprise
would acquire (in some way) the stools of renowned technology person-
ality Elon Musk and produce Musk “poop pills” that could be sold to
aspiring entrepreneurs worldwide who idealize Musk and currently domi-
nant imaginaries of innovation. That the proposal caused mirth is not to
mask its intention: It was proffered up or in fact not articulated so much
as worked out in the situation, as an imagining of a particular, alternative,
future. Like all imaginings, it was about making present something absent,
however vaguely. In this case, it activated a sense of a whole alternative
world or way of being that is incompatible with the early twenty-
first-century ontology of “ownership” and marketization. The proposal
altered notions of what bodily entities are sacred, and alongside practical
experiments, it helped make networks of relations between the human
and more-than-human apparent and visible, open for plural futures and
moments of choice. We see this as activists consciously imagining science
differently. In part (and probably not accidentally given the intellectual
and occupational experiences of many in community and participatory
projects), activists were effectively using techniques of elicitation familiar
from art and therapy-based practice that are also recognized in speculative
design (e.g., Halse 2013) and even anthropology (e.g., Kazubowski-
Houston 2017), techniques similarly designed to encourage wanderings
where the actual and the imagined intersect.
We have shown that activism’s critique of incumbent (conventional
modern) notions emerge in processes that are intellectual and physical,
but also necessarily collective. This is congruent with recent invocations of
Spinoza’s philosophy of knowledge, or collective imagining, for instance,
the influential work of Jane Bennett, whose Spinoza owes much to Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari. For Bennett, since “matter has an inclination
to make connections,” it also serves to cultivate “an enhanced sense of
the extent to which all things are spun together in a dense web” (Bennett
2004: 354, see also 2010).
This emphasis on collective and embodied intellect may be gaining
popularity, but it contrasts with most academic work, now characterized
by impactful publications and narrowly conceived notions of account-
ability. Even in the realm of sustainability, science has been reduced
to an exercise in “solving problems” and the contributions of activist
groups and ordinary people, though presented as progressive alternatives,
are quickly rendered unimaginative. Making sustainable futures becomes
limited to novelties like carbon-light mobility, “smart” housing, flexible
workplaces, and leaner everyday provisioning, almost always anchored in
technological innovations and geared toward the efficient streamlining of
a system. An example that coincided with some of the vignettes provided
here is from 2017, the centenary of Finnish independence, celebrated by
the national innovation foundation SITRA, in its Ratkaisu100 (“solution
100”) contest. It was won by an AI research team and an app to promote
the creation of a “positive CV”3 .
Whether upbeat like this, or in anticipations of dire environmental
futures (Granjou et al. 2017), future talk in Helsinki remains overwhelm-
ingly stuck in fixing and then fixing the unintended consequences of
the fixing, much as Ulrich Beck argued decades ago in his “risk soci-
ety” thesis (1992). MACs meanwhile are moving away from fixing to
the “elaboration of social relationships” (Corsín Jiménez 2013: 386) and
“prototyping” possibilities. They appear to be rather serious and consis-
tent—as consistent as is possible given prevailing conditions—in living
as well as making different worlds. Though vulnerable to all kinds of
criticisms (being all but forced to enjoy the unsustainable comforts of
ordinary life in Helsinki), they do tend to prefer reused clothes and
household items, low-carbon modes of travel, vegan or vegetarian, or
dumpster-dived, diet, and these do not appear simply as marginal lifestyle
choices or hesitant role experiments. Being performed all the time,
these are practical and realistic ways to prefigure the less unsustainable.
Through them too, it is possible to imagine what a post-capitalist future
could be—not a frugal, ascetic, stereotypically new age or hippie “lifestyle
choice” that assaults our admittedly middle-class sensibilities, but more as
(or also as) a prototyping of a lifeworld without money, with precarity,
with repertoires of technological, scientific, and artistic practices to hand,

with care for material matters, with some risk-taking, and with humor.
These efforts and ambitions also help us as scholar-activists to rethink
what knowledge production might be. We turn then finally, to the power
of ethnography, not to seek magic or romance in it, but as a suitably
flexible and messy way to work out with interlocutors like MACs what is
important and why.
Collective Imaginings
We have argued that MACs create a different everyday experience from
a buy/consume/throwaway normality and that their knowledge practices
build on the mixed repertoire that we have called the “dirt way.” Among
other things, this “dirt way” helps achieve foresight about how realistically
to live with the environment “out there,” which, as MACs’ explorations
indicate, turns out to be continuous or even identical with what is biolog-
ically generative and materially wasting “in here.” Like designers always
primed to make improvements, they make, through the imagination, what
is missing from today, or wrong or somehow should be different. One
of the key features of the imagination is its indeterminacy (Sneath et al.
2009), and indeed, this is consistently if vaguely involved, as design and
anthropological research are aware, in anticipating and making futures.
Something similar happens, we find, in ethnographic research, whether as
taught as part of a classical anthropological doctorate in the 1990s (Eeva)
or as an appropriate method of generating data as a doctoral student in
a design department twenty years later (Cindy). Perhaps ethnography
also has something of the “dirt way” of learning, not least the inele-
gant combination of participating and observing. At least from the most
speculative design enquiring into possible futures (Ehn et al. 2014; Halse
2013), to the most conventional anthropology, the view from the ground
up—the natives’ point of view—is expressly sought because it changes
the what and how of knowledge conditioned only by professional or
disciplinary problems. This exploits the insight that comes from juxta-
posing meanings and problems. Such juxtaposition in turn can promote
and provoke better ethnographic practices wherever these are adopted and
adapted. Furthermore, a refunctioned ethnography (Holmes and Marcus
2010) that is explicit about learning with ethnographic “subjects” can
show it, and how the existing and the impossible are already being grasped
and partially materialized through collective imaginings, as Gatens and

Lloyd elaborate.
Doing ethnography with MACs is to learn (about) their messy but
principled ways of being curious. Like qualitative methods generally,
ethnography has always built upon the commonalities of human bodies,
inter-subjectivity, and situatedness. These qualities may court accusations
of romanticism, but increasingly scholarship and activism have shown
that ignoring the messiness and contingency of all knowledge produc-
tion is utopian in a foolhardy way (e.g., Jasanoff 2016). Furthermore, as
Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s (2016) recognizably anthropological work on
the overheating planet shows, the ultra-automated information processing
possible with contemporary technology cannot satisfy society’s needs for
knowledge alone—the mess we are in requires ethnographic research just
as it needs an understanding of the systemic features of globalization.
MACs share this starting point, imagining unprecedented futures
through abstract information and place-based materials. Picking up on
Gatens and Lloyd’s account of Spinoza’s notion of imagination, our
ethnography has pushed us to emphasize how MACs expand on the
mind’s capacity to think what is not there, through the body in complex,
even confusing, perceptions (Gatens and Lloyd 1999: 19). Certainly,
the guessing and laughing and attending to one’s own or shared phys-
ical sensations—of disgust, for instance—are central to what is intriguing
about MACs and what brings activists (and us) back over and over even
when there is little discernible to be gained.
Gatens and Lloyd draw on Spinoza to show how knowing is not best
understood as something that is conducted by an autonomous individual,
nor by a pre-given collective identity. Knowing is done by a body-mind
but only as a composite individual, “a union of parts acting as a center
of communicating and communicated motion” (an idea that hints at why
so much scholarship using materialist and assemblage-derived language
harks back to Spinoza). Further, an individual mind is a good thing, but
the source of its “enhanced perceptual capacity is the body’s dependence
on the mediating force of all the other finite bodies which impinge on it”
(1999: 13).
Parenthetically speaking, it is not a novel thing to seek anti-dualist
vocabularies to conceive reason as embodied, collective, and imagined.
Rather, what is remarkable is how resilient these dualist and individualist
philosophies have been and continue to be, that disavow and vehe-
mently oppose such ideas! As scholars of social movements, we know
that examples abound of different philosophies, of taking responsibility

as individuals in consciously care-taking relationships with other people
and things (Callén and Criado 2015) and of trying out, prefiguring, and
prototyping alternatives to unsustainable ways (Gibson-Graham 2008).
An illustrative encounter with activists supports the argument: Cindy
was at Dodo’s Kääntöpöytä, the urban greenhouse. She was talking to
someone involved in setting up their guerrilla gardening sites nearby. He
had set up a Facebook group to share ideas and start experimenting with
low-tech urban agriculture. She asked him why he had started it up. He
replied, “Because it’s kind of like the only way I can, there’s so many
things to do, things I would like to do, and I can’t do it by myself, so it’s
better to get some people involved.” Even with the immense amount
of information available online, he had not found much information
on worm composting or combining vermicomposting with hydroponics.
“It’s really experimental. It has to be tested.”
This neatly captures the social, collective, dimension of imagining,
where collective interaction strengthens the epistemological powers of
the individual mind (Gatens and Lloyd 1999: 39). His comments and
his wider projects at the greenhouse also aligned with the dirt way, where
activists rehearse the links that connect the lucky to the unlucky, the mate-
rial to the abstract, and so foster an acute awareness of sharing their world
with human and non-human others and of affecting and being affected
by many different time frames.
In hanging out and trying to figure out MACs in ethnographic
ways, we too have been collaborating, learning, and making less impos-
sible futures with imagination, collaborating with activists through a
re-functioned ethnography (Holmes and Marcus 2010). As we have
suggested, imagining is a generative and necessary human capacity that
is not (necessarily) romantic or superior, nor does it need serve any ulti-
mate or external function; it just is (Sneath et al. 2009). However, in
the ethnographic work we have done, we may have engaged in collective
imaginings, but through it, we have also instrumentalized activists for our
scholarly purposes (academic papers, etc.). Herein lie potential seeds for
further connections and imaginings (we hope). In this sense, we would
like to believe that perhaps the ethnographic objectification that inevitably
happens in academic writing is not necessarily inimical to responsible
kinds of collective imaginings, even if we allow for likely misunderstand-
ings and misrecognitions. For not in only anthropology but in design
and other fields, ethnography must nurture imagination, traveling from
memories to futures, in body-minds in constant change. Even in studying

future worlds, ethnographers objectify the present, as well as look back-
ward in time to what has been observed and narrated. But ethnography by
definition also leans forward in time to what is intuited, almost grasped,
hinted at, and talked about. Ideally, it can do so over weeks, months, and
years, processing things so evanescent that words and sometimes even
images fail to capture their essence.
Through our efforts to know with the sustainable makers whose
efforts fascinate us, our own confidence in a conception of reason that
is embodied, collective, and imagined has grown. We have learned with
MACs and their “dirt way” of knowing that the important thing in
studying future worlds is not what we do or think, but what we are—
shared substance. This emerges out of MACs’ experience as swamped and
dependent on slime, stuff, and unfinished projects. Through their collec-
tive imaginings, absent things become present and present things become
absent, while the possible and the impossible keep swapping places.
Acknowledgements We would like to thank all the people we have worked

with, in Helsinki and in several European fab labs, whose work has inspired us.
Notes
1. https://pixelache.ac/.
2. That said, classic references remain, e.g., Haraway (1988), Strathern
(1991), Suchman (2011), and Simonsen and Robertson (2013).
3. https://www.sitra.fi/en/news/artificial-intelligence-shows-finland-can-pos
itive-cv-reveals-hidden-talents-young-people-winners-sitras-100-million-
euro-ratkaisu-100-challenge-competition/.
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CHAPTER 8
Anticipating Crisis as Affective Future-Making

in Iceland
Marek Pawlak
One July afternoon in 2016, I went to Harpa. It is a modern concert

hall and conference center—covered with colorful glass panels—located
in Reykjavík’s downtown, near the harbor. Harpa, an old Icelandic word,
refers to the first day of summer in the Nordic calendar, which marks
the beginning of a better future—a time, when nature awakes, and the
landscape is about to be painted with bright and lively colors. Yet, for
many Icelanders, Harpa is also a reminder of the recent crisis, which has
affected many lives and became a kind of rupture in Icelandic temporality.
Its construction started in 2007, but was suddenly halted with the begin-
ning of the economic meltdown in 2008 and the subsequent uncertain
This article is part of the project “Polish Migrants in Iceland. Mobile and
Immobile Strategies of Response to the Aftermath of Economic Crisis” (No.
2014/15/D/HS6/04860) funded by the National Science Centre in Poland.
M. Pawlak (B)
Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University,
Cracow, Poland
e-mail: marek.pawlak@uj.edu.pl

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4_8
174 M. PAWLAK
future rapidly encroaching onto Icelandic society. Although, amidst the

turbulences, the government has ultimately decided to finish the project,
its completion took several years and was finalized in 2011. Today, as one
of the main landmarks of Reykjavík, Harpa is busy with tourists, whose
number has significantly increased in recent years.
There I met Bjarni, an Icelander, who after living for several years in
Thailand, returned to the island in 2007, just before the economic crash.
I have to admit that it was a rather unexpected meeting. At that time,
I was doing ethnographic fieldwork on emotions, affect, and the impact
of economic crisis on Polish migrants in Iceland. Initially, I was inter-
ested in their affective recollections, crisis-driven experiences, and social
practices as well as their coping strategies in the post-crisis situation. In
the process, I decided to expand my research and also explore the crisis-
induced lived experiences of Icelanders and other migrants living and
working in Iceland. Hence, that July afternoon in Harpa, I had a sched-
uled ethnographic interview with Marie from Philippines, who has been
in Reykjavík since 2004. When I arrived there, Marie was having a coffee
with Bjarni and Hana—a migrant from Germany—and invited me to join
them. Instead of the planned interview, the four of us ended up discussing
various complexities of the pre- and post-crisis situation in Iceland as well
as the current political and economic circumstances. At some point, an
interesting twist happened, when Bjarni asked me completely out of the
blue: “Marek, do you know what a national bird of Iceland is?” Baffled,
I replied: “No, I don’t know, a puffin maybe? Every souvenir shop in
Laugavegur sells plush puffins for tourists, so it must be a puffin, right?”
“No,” he said smiling, “the national bird of Iceland is the crane” and
pointed to dozens of construction cranes spread across the city’s skyline.
“And when I see cranes,” he added, “I know that something will happen
soon.”
It was one of my first encounters with anticipation of the possible
future in Iceland and the uncertain, yet appeared to be possible, future
in Iceland. Before meeting Bjarni, Marie, and Hana, anticipation did not
appear to me as an important field of ethnographic explorations. I did not
see it (sense it) as a significant future-oriented affective state, which sheds
a light on the relationship between crisis and temporalities. In fact, at the
outset of my fieldwork, I was rather shadowed by a discomforting feeling
of lateness, of being in the wrong time and searching for something that
is already bygone. After all, the crisis, which I wanted to explore, was
something that had happened a decade prior to my research, and what
8 ANTICIPATING CRISIS AS AFFECTIVE FUTURE-MAKING IN ICELAND 175
I thought might be only recalled as a past memory. At the time of my

arrival, Iceland’s “vernacular timespace”—a collective temporalizations of
lived time—was rather experienced as a “time of prosperity” and not a
“time of crisis” (Bryant and Knight 2019: 34). In the course of my field-
work, I even caught myself regretting that I could not experience and
observe it “there” and “then.” I envied those with whom I discursively
traveled back in time to “those days” where everything was happening
“now.” I imagined myself in those situations and contexts as being a
“proper” anthropologist exploring the “exact” time of the collapse and
having the opportunity to live through all of it. As if I was uncon-
sciously following the misconduct of classical anthropological encounters,
known for their “salvage” and “redemptive” modes of doing ethnography
(Marcus 1986). It was the past and not the future that initially haunted
me in the present.
Such biased, instrumental, and highly unempathetic thoughts toward
the times when people have been suffering the loss of their belong-
ings and savings are now inconceivable and, more importantly, shameful
for me. However, at that time, they also launched my critical reflex-
ivity, invoked the complexity of positioning and my field awareness
(Kazubowski-Houston 2018), which in turn have opened for me new
possibilities and ways of observing and understanding how people sense,
imagine, and act upon something that has not only happened in the past,
but that is also about to happen in the future. In other words, throughout
my fieldwork, the more I traveled back with my informants to the bygone
times of the crisis, the more I had to sojourn into the future. Whenever
I was meeting somebody to discuss kreppa (crisis), or whether I was just
relaxing with Icelandic friends in a geothermal pool, I kept hearing stories
not only about the past crisis experiences, but also about the upcoming
future and another crisis that would happen soon. Listening to my infor-
mants, I have begun to see and sense the ways and contexts in which
ordinary elements of the urban landscape launch the local imagination and
affect the future-oriented gaze. Numerous construction cranes in Reyk-
javík truly were “new birds” seasonally migrating to Iceland, or—as some
of the Icelanders often ironically said—an “Icelandic forest,” which finally
grew on the otherwise treeless island. It became obvious to me that while
emerging in the present, the construction cranes bring back the memories
of the recent past and engender the affective mixture of humor, anxiety,
and uncertainty among many Icelanders.
176 M. PAWLAK
I have spent nine months in Iceland, conducting ethnographic field-

work in the capital region of Reykjavík, including the communes of
Hafnarfjörður, Kópavogur, and Seltjarnarnes. I have also traveled to other
cities and towns, such as Keflavík, Borgarnes, and Hveragerði, and visited
villages in Westfjords and Eastfjords. My informants are of various social
class backgrounds and have different lived experiences of the economic
collapse. In the course of my fieldwork, I have encountered Icelanders
working in the construction sector, IT and tourism services, such as
hotels, restaurants, and travel agencies. I have also met teachers, journal-
ists, local city officials, politicians, activists, and pensioners. Importantly
though, throughout my fieldwork, I have closely collaborated with my
key informants with whom I met frequently to discuss various emerging
findings. Apart from ethnographic interviews, discussions, and chats, I
have also attended different events (protests, meetings, and parties) and
accompanied my informants in their daily routines and weekend trips
outside Reykjavík. Therefore, my main fieldwork method was participant
observation with its critical reflexivity, positionality, and open-endedness.
I responded to the developments arising in the field, while being keenly
aware that emerging insights were, to a large extent, a product of joining
streams of representations emerging from the discourses and practices of
the communities with whom I had worked. I, then, conceptualize the
role of the anthropologist as one who follows interlocutors across diverse
social spaces and diverse social groups. Ethnographic approach allowed
me to raise questions, reconfigure conceptual tools and problematizations
in the course of investigative process. Although the in-depth engage-
ment with everyday life situations was my central approach, the field also
included numerous scales, variables, and forces (Marcus 1995). In other
words, researching crisis, its temporalities and anticipation, also meant
parsing the interdependencies between macro- and micro-levels of social,
economic, and political matters
After the meeting with Bjarni in Harpa, anticipation began to be
a pervasive mode of thinking about ethnographic present, thereby
becoming a significant focus of my research. It gradually unfolded itself
as an “affective state” (Adams et al. 2009), which brings together the
aspects of “knowing” and “not knowing,” and produces contingent forms
of thinking, sensing, and acting upon the possible future (Pink and
Salazar 2017: 16). Anticipatory moods and ways of being in the Icelandic
present concerned affective gazing upon the future, which spans from
anxieties, fears, uncertainties to surprises, hopes, or simply indifferences.
However, these affective components of anticipation are not the simple

case of unambiguous distinction between rationalizations and emotions,
the mind and the body. Rather, they function as “affective economies”
(Ahmed 2004), “in which affect does not originate in individual bodies
but is provoked in individuals through larger circulations and strategies,
thereby accruing its value and potency as a moral economy through its
distributions” (Adams et al. 2009: 249). In other words, anticipation
involves both, thoughts, practices and senses, and is a result of the rela-
tionship between the past experiences and future imaginings. Yet, how can
we ethnographically explore anticipation? How to apprehend ways of that
people anticipate, feel, and sense futures in the present moment? What
does it mean to locate ethnographic perspective in-between the emergent
and possible futures?
In this chapter, I address these questions by focusing on the ways in
which people speculate about the possible future in Iceland through the
recognition and interpretation of the repetitive and past-informed, social,
and cultural practices emerging in the present. Therefore, I am interested
in ways of doing ethnography that is engaged with the ways that the past,
present, and future coexist and produce affective anticipation. In what
follows, I first discuss the crisis that happened in Iceland in 2008 and
contextualize its links to the current situation permeated with anticipatory
atmosphere. Next, I problematize anticipation as an affective state and
show its embeddedness in Icelandic society. In the last section, I argue
that in order to make sense of how people speculate and imagine the
future, ethnography should be located in-between the emergent and the
possible and parse the temporal dynamics between the past, present, and
future.
The Past: Unfolding the Crisis

The economic crisis that hit Iceland in 2008 revealed the existing entan-
glements between global forces, local worlds, and emplaced practices
(Durrenberger and Pálsson 2015). The crisis had made it clear that
Iceland was no longer an isolated island somewhere in the North Atlantic
(cf. Hastrup 1998). On contrary, at the time of the crash, Iceland was
already well connected and embedded in the global regimes of economic
and political interdependencies. This was a result of neoliberal reconfig-
urations of Icelandic political economy and the affective production of
new subjectivities (cf. Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009), which led not only
178 M. PAWLAK
to significant social and cultural changes in Iceland, but also prepared a

fertile ground for the crisis-to-come.
The privatization of the fishing industry in the 1980s, the pillar of
Icelandic economy, was only the beginning of radical changes in Iceland
(Pálsson 1993, 1996). It coincided with a larger ideological approach
aimed at managing the human and the natural in a rather totalizing idea
of “efficiency” (Pálsson 1996). Neoliberalism was introduced as a political
and economic project leading to modernization and an active participa-
tion in a societal better future (Pálsson 1996). As soon as fishing zones
“evolved” from commons to commodities, the new bankers arrived with
a brand-new financial agenda and banking practices (Mixa 2009, 2015).
It was a time of risk-taking, which was believed to be of the highest value
and a proper practice for the future to come. The “new” bankers, most
of whom were inexperienced young men, gradually started to replace
the “old” ones (Mixa 2015: 40–43). These generational and ideolog-
ical struggles dominated the small Icelandic banking system, which ended
up in radical transformation of not only economic policies and financial
rigidity, but also banking practices and relations in the workplace (Mixa
2009). To be sure, neoliberalism brought a rapid growth of Icelandic
financial system; however, it was rather a temporary and short-sighted
effect, the flaws of which were about to be experienced in the future (for
details, see Bergmann 2014; Alibar and Zoega 2011).
According to Kristin Loftsdóttir (2012, 2015, 2016), the changes of
Icelandic political economy—privatization and financial deregulation—
were fuelled by Icelandic nationalism and state’s post-colonial resent-
ment. Nationalism began to dominate political discourse, and many
officials boasted about the unimaginable possibilities of progress and new
Icelandic “golden age” (Jóhannesson 2015). Iceland’s economic growth
was thus explained as being a result of “Icelandic character” and “joint
heritage of individualism, strong leaders, solidarity, daring, trust, honour,
and poetic skills” (Jóhannesson 2015: 20). As then-President Ólafur
Ragnar Grímsson said during one of his speech, Icelanders “should strive
to excel” and, just as the ancestors, bring the “entrepreneurial spirit to
explore the world” (Jóhannesson 2015: 18). At the time of Icelandic
economic boom, the “glorious” Viking past re-emerged (was invoked)
in the present and was projected onto the future. These imaginaries have
sought to construct Icelanders as the courageous pioneers once again, but
this time discovering and conquering the new neoliberal world.
Nationalistic discourse also unraveled a strong context of existing

dependencies and post-colonial entanglements (Loftsdóttir 2016). As
a former Danish-ruled state, Iceland strove to be recognized as an
important global actor, a modern state that belongs—and always has
belonged—to the Western world (Loftsdóttir 2012, 2015, 2016). It was
a post-colonial struggle, which aimed to reconfigure the prior power rela-
tions, reshape the global imaginaries, and break with the “old anxiety of
Icelanders that foreigners have a misconception of them and don’t see
their uniqueness or specialness” (Loftsdóttir 2015: 11; see also Hastrup
2003a). This new Icelandic era has exposed a “reinvention of Icelandic
nationalism that articulates older ideas in concert with those of indi-
vidualism and neoliberal ideology” (Loftsdóttir 2015: 12) and had a
significant impact on Iceland’s social and cultural fabric (Loftsdóttir 2010:
11).
Iceland’s economic growth began to be known as the Manic Millen-
nium (Mixa 2009, 2015). It was a time of útrásarvíkingur (Business
Viking), a new type of Icelandic financier, almost predestined to conquer
the world. Not the real, physical world, but the imagined one—a world of
global finances. In Icelandic, the term útrás means an “outward expan-
sion” and during the economic boom was used as an idiomatic vehicle
for social and cultural explanation of rapid changes. It justified neoliberal
reforms and reassured that the upcoming future would, once again, bring
back the glare of the Viking pioneering past and “Icelandic antiquity”
(Loftsdóttir 2015: 9–12; cf. Hastrup 2003a). Consequently, the figure
of Business Viking linked the past, present, and future and became a
meaningful reference explaining Icelandic financial success.
Business Vikings were idolized in Icelandic media, which depicted
them as new celebrities, who often intermingle with international super-
stars (Loftsdóttir 2015: 10) and covered their major purchases (“con-
quests”) around the world: hotels, yachts, penthouses in New York,
or football clubs in the UK (Loftsdóttir 2010, 2012, 2015). Many
Icelanders embraced this image and aimed at becoming the new Vikings
and exploring the world of existing opportunities. This involved indulging
oneself in a consumerism on a great scale, including building bigger
houses and purchasing luxurious cars and other goods. The consumerist
imagination and needs were fulfilled with the help of flexible and lavish
bank loans, which not only opened new possibilities, but also made class
distinction become an important context of Icelanders’ everyday life.
180 M. PAWLAK
Through my fieldwork, I have encounter different stories about the

Manic Millennium, which revealed an affective mixture of celebration,
pride, but also—when seen from the present perspective—a sort of rebuke
and self-criticism. For example, Sigmar, an Icelandic man whom I met in
one of Reykjavík’s local pubs, near Laugavegur, recalled one evening:
Well, we were celebrating our success and the uniqueness of Icelandic

business. People felt very proud that our small society was so successful.
Icelanders were buying foreign properties and companies… for example in
Denmark, and we were like “Ha, ha, now the tables have turned.” And like
even a year before the crisis, there was absolutely nothing to be worried
about… My dad bought me a car, and it was even a year before I was
allowed to get my driving license. At my school, before 2007, every kid
had a car, and everyone lived in a big house.
I met with Sigmar a few times on different occasions, but that evening in
a pub, we were talking about his experiences of the crisis and the recol-
lections about the pre-crisis period. Sigmar was a teenager during the
Manic Millennium and remembers it as a “glorious days” of Iceland’s
global position and as economically successful and modern country. Yet,
while recalling the past over a pint, he also added: “I remember the
consumerism then, which we also see today, you know, everyone is going
crazy now, because they’ll open a new H&M later this month. This is the
same feeling that I remember from before.” This awareness of existing
links (imagined or not) was a rather common among my informants.
Whenever I have discussed with them their past-lived experiences, they
used the present situation in Iceland as template of explaining me how it
was before the collapse.
Another and even more affective recollection of what was happening
during the Manic Millennium came from Hrafn, whom I visited in
Keflavík. Hrafn left Iceland in the 1990s and moved to Canada, but ulti-
mately decided to come back to the island in 2006. This is how he spoke
about his experiences prior to the collapse:
Everybody was so pretentious… you know, talking about their jeeps and
motocross bikes… And back then, I didn’t really get where was the money
coming from? What is Iceland producing? How is this money being made?
I remember so innocently asking people who seemed to know what they’re
talking about, like, how this was done. I was genuinely fascinated how this
was done. And the answers were always very murky and, in the end, it was
a period that nobody understood. So, I didn’t like the period before. I
was raised here, but then left for Canada. I came back in 2006 and I was
expecting to come back to Iceland that I knew… a kind of socialist society
that took care of one another and not compete with one another. And I
came back to managerial America. It was horrible. It was like consumerism
but on steroids.
For Hrafn, the atmosphere of Manic Millennium was a disappointing

experience, and he found it difficult to adjust and follow the “pioneers”
of these new consumerist habits. He told me that he had refused to sign
a big loan with which one of the Icelandic banks was tempting him and
decided to settle on a small one to purchase a new house. This, however,
came as a incomprehension and surprise for a bank employee, as if Hrafn
lived in a different temporality, not knowing the common habits. Inter-
estingly, Hrafn’s recollection of the past largely echoes scholarly accounts
of Icelandic economic boom of 2003–2008 in which “Iceland was like
its farmers” cows freed in the spring after being locked inside the barn
all winter, full of life but not necessarily managing freedom very well.
Icelanders embraced the free market mantra that they believed entailed
harmony and stability (Mixa 2015: 43).
The Manic Millennium was a promise of a better future waiting ahead,
a future, which will bring Iceland not only the economic affluence, but
also a proper global recognition (Loftsdóttir 2015). It was a period in
Iceland, which was “unknown prior to the economic boom and ran
contrary to the common belief that equality was a basic characteristic of
Icelanders” (Loftsdóttir 2015: 10; cf. Durrenberger and Pálsson 1989;
Pálsson and Durrenberger 1996). Yet, the bright future has never come,
and the Manic Millennium gave its way to a period of social anxiety and
uncertainty, which resulted from the global economic meltdown in 2008.
At that time, Iceland hit the headlines, which depicted its economy as
“corrupted,” “failed,” or “ruined” (Pálsson and Durrenberger 2015). To
be sure, the crush was severe, and Icelanders had to deal not only with
the economic and financial predicaments, but also with multiple crises that
subsequently followed the meltdown (Pálsson and Durrenberger 2015).
The government was found guilty of leading the country toward the fall
and had to face the full-throated revolutionary movement of “pots and
pans” gathered in the streets of Reykjavík (Bernburg 2015). The protests
started in the fall of 2008 and lasted until January 2009, when the govern-
ment had been dissolved and the new politicians appointed to manage
182 M. PAWLAK
the ongoing crisis. For a few months, many citizens gathered every day in
front of Icelandic parliament (Alþingi). Armed with pots and pans, they
made noise, demanding changes in politics, economy, and new constitu-
tion. It was a time of “affective solidarities” and massive civic engagement,
which for many Icelanders was a way to muddle through the harsh reality
(Bernburg 2015). Nevertheless, after the collapse, Iceland’s image radi-
cally shifted from representing a perfect example of neoliberal success to
being a “failure-state” that needed to be rebuked for its irresponsible
policies (for details, see Durrenberger and Pálsson 2015).
For many Icelanders, the crash of 2008 came with a surprise. The
economic collapse resulted in serious social and political problems
(Durrenberger and Pálsson 2015). Many Icelanders lost their lifetime
savings, and most of them had to face the harsh reality of the new present.
The crisis has broken the promise of a better future, which dominated
in the public discourse during the Manic Millennium. However, amidst
various turbulences, there was one event that made a significant mark on
Icelandic society as a whole. Hadda, an Icelandic woman with whom I
spoke about October 2008, brought this event to my attention:
I was teaching then. I was at school with my pupils and I got a message
on my phone “turn on the TV.” And we were all watching it and the kids
were kept asking “What does it mean, Hadda, what does it mean?,” and I
was like “Shit, how bad is it.” Do you know this speech made by Haarde,
when he said “God bless Iceland”? It was unprecedented, so for all of us
it was really serious. And it wasn’t like, you know, “I’ve seen it coming.”
I didn’t know that this would happen.
Hadda is refereeing to prime minister of Iceland, Geir Haarde’s broad-

casted speech delivered on October 6, 2008, during which he described
the problems of Icelandic banking system. His statement “God bless
Iceland” for many people meant that the future became bleak. No polit-
ical leader in a history of Icelandic governance had made such direct
reference to God and for many Icelanders “this signified complete loss
and total abandonment, a deep sense of the country being out of touch
with all reality and beyond any reason or governance” (Pálsson and
Durrenberger 2015: xix). Iceland was about to face a difficult time.
In the following months after the collapse, many Icelanders, including
Hadda, lost jobs and left the country looking for income opportunities
somewhere else. To be sure, the crisis was severed; however, its financial
consequences varied depending on one’s social class belonging, consump-

tion habits, and debt. This resulted in different affective responses starting
from the feeling of indifference often expressed in sayings “Crisis? What
crisis? I was poor then and I’m poor now” or “The crisis didn’t concern
me. I wasn’t deep in debt,” through disappointment, anxiety, and fear
about one’s livelihood, and ending with rage and anger directed toward
politicians and prominent Business Vikings.
Interestingly, there were also other narratives, told in a rather brighter
light of re-emerging equalities and solidarities, previously destroyed by
neoliberal reconfiguration of social fabric. Thus, some Icelanders saw
hope in the unfolding crisis and believed it would change a society so
preoccupied with hyper-consumption. This was the case for Hrafn:
I was kind of hoping for it, because I didn’t like the atmosphere of 2007.
It was strange… and actually, during the crisis I lost my job for a while
and I sort of was fixing the appliances like washing machines and driers for
people, because during 2007, if you wanted to fix your drier, two hours of
work and parts, then you would rather buy a new one. It made no sense
to fix anything, you just threw it away to the garbage and buy a new one.
People were just throwing away things. I found it so wasteful. I hated it. I
hated everything about that culture. So, actually, I welcomed the collapse.
I was happy to fix people’s appliances and be paid for it.
Hrafn welcomed the crisis, even though he lost his job as an electrician
in a construction company. He saw it as an opportunity for self-reflection
and changes in Icelandic society. Yet, when I asked him about the present
situation in Iceland, Hrafn said that “there’s sort of a humility, there’s an
acknowledgement that this will not last forever and we’re waiting for the
next downturn. Things are looking up right now, but people do prepare.”
The Manic Millennium and crisis in Iceland became meaningful
points of reference for many Icelanders. Throughout my fieldwork, I
found it difficult to discuss the present circumstances in Iceland without
mentioning the recent past. My informants kept shifting between the
past, present, and future as if there were a direct link, or a sort
of temporal blueprint, for explaining contemporary nuances of social,
cultural, economic, and political entanglements. While recalling the past
experiences, they immediately gaze toward the possible future, thereby
unfolding the emerging contingencies in the present, which produce the
state of anticipation.
184 M. PAWLAK
The Present: Anticipation as an Affective State

For many Icelanders, it seems that the history repeats itself in the present.
The Icelandic economy is booming again, and politicians celebrate the
fast recovery. Reykjavík looks like one big construction site with new
hotels and shopping malls sprouting all over the landscape. The numbers
of migrants and tourists are on the rise, and the economic experts fore-
cast a rather sunny days for Iceland. Once again, the country is becoming
“exceptional” (Loftsdóttir 2018), but this time in ways how it has dealt
with the crisis and how successful it is now, just a few years after the
collapse.
However, at the same time, many Icelanders seem to be experiencing
the uncertain future, which looms large in the booming present. As if
some forms of habits, signs, and vestiges from the past were re-emerging
in the present, forecasting the future. These trigger affective responses
and produce an anticipatory state, while experiencing the present. I heard
a rather detailed analysis of a current situation in Iceland from Eric, with
whom I met for an ethnographic interview in Reykjavík. He is a local
journalist and follows economic and political developments in Iceland’s
capital. At some point during our conversation, we have discussed antici-
pation and different symptoms of crisis emerging in the present landscape.
Eric, drawing on his own experiences, started then to specify what he
believes to be signs of another crisis coming: I told him about my field
observations and the emerging theme of anticipation:
There’s a lot of indication that I’ve been noticing already in 2011. One
of the indexes, I guess you could say, for seeing whether the good times
are coming back or not is how many construction cranes there are in
Reykjavik. And they started moving again. When the crash happened, all
construction stopped. Then in 2011 it began to happen again. But there
are also other indexes I can point out, such as the increase of cocaine
importation. That’s come back, and if that is not a sign of good times then
I don’t know what is. Also, a lot more of Range Rovers in the streets. Of
course, there’s a housing market, which is a separate subject. Another thing
is that during and shortly after the crash the national poll on the happiness
of children and teenagers stated that actually they were happier during the
crash, because they spent more time with their parents, there was more
family time. And now, the new poll shows that they are as unhappy now
as they were in 2007, so shortly before the crash.
For Eric and many other Icelanders, the fast-growing economy triggers
the memories and experiences of the recent past. The material and visual
markers of recurrences mushroom across Iceland and are interpreted
as confirmations of an emerging and possible near-future crisis. The
dynamic of landscape, understood as the entanglements of the natural,
social, cultural, economic, and political, unravels the interdependencies
between the past crisis-driven experiences, present anticipation, and imag-
inings of the possible future. Therefore, seeing and sensing everyday life
occurrences, social and cultural practices, and changes in the Icelandic
landscape reminds of not only “what has happened,” but also “what is
about to happen.”
Apart from “migrating” construction cranes, the ambivalent past is
also emerging in the form of new luxury and high-standard cars, once
again, gradually appearing in the streets of Reykjavík. Some of these cars
have been playfully rebranded by Icelanders after the crisis; thereby, Range
Rover became known as “Game Over,” Land Cruiser as “Grand Loser”
and Hummer as “Bummer” (Bergmann 2014: 142; Boyes 2010: 15).
These were the symbols of Icelandic affluence, which initially fuelled the
imaginings of a forthcoming better future, but today reminders of the
uncertain times. There are also other markers of the potential bleak future,
such as housing shortage and prices (garages being transformed into
“studio flats” or cars parked in front of houses offered to tourists to sleep
in), tourist bubble (or rather a hot potato in Icelandic public discourse),
and political turbulences and scandals (“Panama Papers”). They all impact
the temporalities in Iceland and produce a context of anticipating another
crisis, which takes a form of the recurrent narrative along the lines “It’s
happening again,” “They’re doing it again” or “It’s not the question of
if, but when.”
The past and future meet in the present and produce an affective state
of anticipation. It is a multifaceted, temporal, contextual, and contin-
gent state, “pervade[ing] the ways we think about, feel and address our
contemporary problems” (Adams et al. 2009: 248). Although the crisis
belongs to the past, it still invokes a meaningful reference along the lines
of contingency, “which reminds us both that we cannot know what will
happen and of the tendency for logics to be constructed not only around
what will happen, but also around the narration of what has happened”
(Pink and Salazar 2017: 17). In Iceland, the current situation unravels
such contingent relationship between the past and the future, which is
186 M. PAWLAK
shaped by both individual and collective recollections of the past and the
affective speculations about the future.
Anticipation is about gazing ahead, but with past and present expe-
riences serving as a temporal template for speculating and dealing with
the unknown future. Its affective feature stems from the ways of “actively
orienting oneself temporally” and inhabiting “time out of place as future,”
which trigger various emotional reactions, such as anxiety, fear, but also
excitement and hope (Adams et al. 2009: 247). These, however, are
not merely individual feelings, but also public moods, which originate
from current social relations, cultural knowledge, and economic and polit-
ical ideologies (Ahmed 2004; cf. Adams et al. 2009: 249). They have a
“rippling effect” and “move sideways and backwards,” thereby invoking
“associations between signs, figures, and objects,” which are used as
explanations of experiencing temporal relationship between the past,
present, and future (Ahmed 2004: 120). Emotions, which are produced
through such associations, “do things, and they align individuals with
communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very inten-
sity of their attachments” (Ahmed 2004: 119). As a result, anticipation as
affective state is lived and felt individually, but at the same time, it impacts
socially constructed public moods and various ways of thinking and acting
upon the future, which “sets the conditions of possibility for action in the
present” (Adams et al. 2009: 249).
The ethnographic study of affective anticipation is important to the
understanding of our social, cultural, economic, and political entangle-
ments. Social action is “never simply a reaction to what has already
happened,” but also “a mode of acting upon anticipation,” and since
“we perform a world into being, acting as much upon anticipation as
upon antecedent,” then in order “to explain how the world works,”
one needs to “make new connections between individual imagination
and social ‘facts’” (Hastrup 2005: 8, 11, 16). It is, thus, anticipation,
which might shed a new light on ways of seeing, hearing, and sensing
the world. It introduces a “regime of being in time” in which the
relations between the past, present, and future coexist. As such, antic-
ipation has an epistemological value, because it indicates not only the
existing interdependencies between past happenings, future expectations,
and present dynamics of events (Salazar 2017: 155), but also the multi-
faceted entanglements between the global and the local. In other words,
we anticipate the future, but the anticipation itself emerges as a result
of the contemporary conditions. “The future is crammed into present
action, just as the past is” (Hastrup 2005: 17), and it is through antici-
pation that we imagine and practice possible worlds. In such conceptual
approach, ethnography should be situated in-between the emergent and
the possible—in a field, which informs us about anxieties, hopes, or simply
indifference toward the future anticipated in the present.
The Future: Ethnography in-Between

the Emergent and the Possible
Although anticipation seems to be a rather common condition of the
contemporary, it has not been an important element of ethnographic
investigation. The reason for that lies in particular understanding of the
politics of temporality in anthropology, which has been “capitalized and
colonized in the name of the “present” of particular locations, situations
and actors” (Adams et al. 2009: 247). Throughout the history of anthro-
pology, it was the past and the present that preoccupied epistemological
inquiries (see, e.g., Geertz 1973; Hastrup 2003b; Ong and Collier 2005;
Rabinow et al. 2008), while the future and its anticipation have rather
been neglected. Apart from few exceptions, which aimed to break with
this dominance and have focused on the future-driven temporalities (Gell
1992; Mead 2005; Munn 1992; Wallman 1992; cf. Pink and Salazar
2017), the future only recently has begun to be a field of research in
anthropology (see, e.g., Abram and Weszkalnys 2013; Appadurai 2013;
Collins 2008; Hannerz 2016; Rosenberg and Harding 2005; Salazar
et al. 2017). Yet, ethnography has great potential to go beyond tradi-
tional temporalities and focus on anticipation and “possible futures” that
emerge in the ordinary and “are lived and felt as inevitable in the present,
rendering hope and fear as important political vectors” (Adams et al.
2009: 248; see also, Appadurai 2013). The past, present, and future are
thus “related to one another in multiple ways in people’s understanding
of their experience and in their definitions of projects for the future”
(Narotzky and Bresnier 2014: 13). This relationship includes specula-
tions, which in turn point to “material trajectories of life” that unfold
as anticipated by those speculative processes (Adams et al. 2009: 248). In
Iceland, as well as across the globe, the futures are in the making through
anticipatory ways of being in the present and sensing particular social,
cultural, economic, and political entanglements. Anticipation links the
past experiences with the unknown future and unravels itself in-between
the emergent and the possible.
188 M. PAWLAK
The emergent concerns both tangible and intangible matters, which on

the one hand are context-specific, historically contingent, and socially and
culturally communicated, but on the other, they might also originate in
global complexities and dependencies. Thus, the emergent takes various
forms of different objects, items, landscapes, issues, practices, habits, and
ways of doing, which are somehow known, familiar, and recognizable
to people living and experiencing particular local worlds. The emergent
unravels the interdependencies between global forces and local worlds,
and by doing so, it signifies a rupture in otherwise taken-for-granted ordi-
naries. In other words, the emergent informs the lived experiences of the
ordinary, creates a sort of alertness, and produces a feeling of bewilder-
ment. It is a feeling that something is about to happen; however, it is still
not certain and clear how and when it will happen. The emergent trig-
gers the possible, which dwells in imagination and launches speculative
processes about what will happen.
The possible, in turn, stems from an imaginative mixture of known
and unknown and reveals the existing affective state of anticipation. The
possible involves the ongoing interpretation of the emergent present situ-
ation, lived experiences, and happenings, which shed an epistemological
light on social relations and cultural understandings of economic and
political uncertainties. The possible is used as a past-informed, yet future-
driven, explanation of seeing and sensing the emergent in the ordinary. It
is a speculative tool, which shifts the focus to the future, and is used
to comprehend the lived experiences of the current circumstances. In
case of Iceland, construction cranes, luxury cars, consumerist habits, and
other “reminders” of the Manic Millennium are the embodiments of
the past, which seems to be emerging once again in the present. These
past-informed signs rupture the ordinary and are felt as indication that
something is about to happen. Another crisis is then anticipated along
the lines of something that emerges and launches local imaginaries and
produces temporal associations, which bring together the past, present,
and future. In this way, the possible future unfolds itself in the affective
being in the present.
Ethnography engaged with anticipatory ways of being in the world
attempts to locate this relationship between the emergent and the
possible, which is always relational, contextual, and embedded in partic-
ular cultural settings. This kind of perspective problematizes temporal
dynamic between past happenings, present experiences, and future gazing
and aims to explore anticipation along the lines of politics of affect and
speculative epistemologies (Adams et al. 2009: 248). It unravels the ways

of people’s engaging “with difficult, challenging, sometimes unexpected
current experiences through particular understandings of past and future”
(Kleist and Jansen 2016: 8–9). While attempting to “make sense” of the
present experiences, people often “inscribe them in (sometimes reworked)
accounts of pasts and futures” (Narotzky and Bresnier 2014: 13).
Anticipation reveals the ways of thinking and acting upon futures,
which are imagined as possible in the present. Thereby, ethnography
should pay attention to the emerging discourses, practices, relations, and
“social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels
like something” (Stewart 2007: 2). It means focusing on “the matterings,
the complex emergent worlds, happening in everyday life,” which include
“the rhythms of living that are addictive or shifting” and “the kinds of
agency that might or might not add up to something with some kind
of intensity or duration” (Stewart 2011: 445). Anticipatory moods are
not fixed or static, and their intensity changes depending on the present
social, economic, and political circumstances. A rather interesting example
of how crisis-driven lived experiences, temporalities, and contemporary
matters affect anticipatory moods, I heard from Hallur, an Icelandic man
working in the tourism industry, with whom I met on different occasions
and discussed Icelandic history, economy, and politics:
The collapse of 2008 was so unexpected, nobody saw it coming, not even
the people, who criticized the banks at that time. It seemed then that
the future was on this trajectory that we will all get rich. So because the
collapse was unexpected then, people ever since are anticipating the next
one. But, the future is hard to predict, just because things happened before
doesn’t mean that they will happen again. But, as soon as things started
getting up in 2015 and 2016, everyone automatically started to talk about
the next collapse… When people now see expensive cars in the streets, they
have this image of the near collapse, but that doesn’t mean that there’s a
causality here. Conversely, because now everyone is anticipating the crash,
it rather means that it won’t happen.
The emerging crane, luxury cars, or hyper-consumption habits seem

to affect many Icelanders and forecast the possible crash in the future.
Thus, there is a sense of alertness that crams into the ordinary and
produces imagined dark future. Hallur is obviously right in saying that
there is no direct link between the past and the future. Crisis itself
is a complex phenomenon and cannot be predicted easily. This is also
190 M. PAWLAK
not the role of anthropology to predict what future holds. Rather, an

ethnographic approach to anticipation informs us about other people’s
predictions and speculations, as well as the ways, forms, and interdepen-
dencies in which those originate and manifest themselves. It is thus not
about knowing what will happen, but why and how people think that
something might happen. An ethnography of anticipatory states is located
in-between the emergent and possible and breaks with traditional tempo-
ralities and timelines. It is an ethnography that constantly moves between
the past, present, and future in order to parse the existing social, cultural,
economic, and political entanglements.
∗ ∗ ∗
In Iceland, the state of crisis-driven anticipation unfolds itself in various

contexts of the ordinary and becomes an affective form of future-making,
thereby introducing “a temporal balancing point between the past and the
future” and making “people to rethink their relationship to time” (Knight
and Stewart 2016: 13). It launches particular imaginaries and produces
historicity, in which “versions of the past and future… assume present
form in relation to events, political needs, available cultural forms and
emotional needs” (Hirsch and Stewart 2005: 262; Knight and Stewart
2016: 6–9).
Among many Icelanders, there is a feeling, a kind of premonition, that
another crisis is about to happen. This stems from the recollection of the
recent past experiences, which once again are emerging in the present.
These invoke the speculations about the possible future and launch the
narrative of “it’s happening again.” Thus, anticipating crisis links the past,
present, and future and produces possible worlds, which “ontological
status” is “that they are emergent from a particular way of imagining
through the contingent configurations of the present” (Pink and Salazar
2017: 16).
Anticipation is obviously not a new phenomenon, not least it is
limited to Iceland. Anticipating futures is what has always made us
human and impacted various social, cultural, economic, and political
relations. However, ours seems to be an era, in which anticipation
becomes even more significant aspect of everyday life and shapes ordinary
discourses and practices (Adams et al. 2009). Today, we are continuously
exposed to possible futures, which cram into the present. Whether it is
economic recessions, political turbulences, climate-driven catastrophes, or
just simple and ordinary ways of imagining and planning one’s life course,
anticipation always plays an important role and informs our doings. In
times of multiple crises, which unravel dependencies between government
and business, culture and politics, nature and science, anticipation is an
affective state of dealing with the present concerns. It introduces various
futures “that may or may not arrive,” but which are “always uncertain”
and thus “demanding a response” (Adams et al. 2009: 249). Reacting to
futures is driven by affective mobilizations. It stems from individual anxi-
eties, fear, and hopes, which might be transformed into collective actions
aiming to change the present conditions.
An ethnography of anticipatory states opens new perspectives of
research inquires. Anticipation breaks with traditional temporalities in
anthropology and “reconfigures the ‘lay of the land’ as sites that in
colonial logics were mapped as either primitive (past and out of time)
or modern (present and in time) and turns them both into produc-
tive ground for anticipatory interventions, each forecasting its own
type of darker and/or more hopeful futures” (Adams et al. 2009:
248). Unpacking the interdependencies between the past, present, and
future helps to illuminate existing imaginaries, cultural meanings, and
social practices, including those formations which are still in a state of
becoming. Our attentiveness to these processes of active meaning-making
in motion offers insights into the lived affective and temporal ways of
being in the world.
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CHAPTER 9
Simulating and Trusting in Automated

Futures: Anthropology and the Wizard of Oz
Sarah Pink, Katalin Osz, Vaike Fors, and Debora Lanzeni
Ethnographies of the possible have become a key concept and practice

in recent design anthropological discussions, where existing research has
focused on how possible futures might be co-constituted as interventions
through participatory methods. Such approaches disrupt conventional
anthropology through interventional methods, but follow anthropolog-
ical (and participatory design) principles of collaboration and engagement
with the worlds, feelings, and imaginations of participants in research
S. Pink (B)
Faculties of Computer Science, and Art, Design and Architecture, Monash
University, Melbourne, Australia
e-mail: sarah.pink@monash.edu
K. Osz · V. Fors
School of Information Technology, Halmstad University, Halmstad, Sweden
D. Lanzeni
Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
K. Osz
User Experience Center, Volvo Cars, Gothenburg, Sweden

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4_9
196 S. PINK ET AL.
and design. In this chapter, we build on this emphasis on the possible

through ethnography, but advance the discussion to examine how the
making, experience of, and engagement with possible futures can enable
novel modes of research practice, knowing, and understanding. To do
this, we draw on our interdisciplinary collaborative research with Wizard
of Oz (WOz) experimental testing and prototyping used in User Experi-
ence (UX) and design research in the automotive industry, undertaken
with interaction designers, test leaders, and participants in Sweden in
2017–2018.
Experimental approaches that involve simulating real-life scenarios
and tricking participants are among the most controversial in the social
sciences and humanities. Yet they also provide vital knowledge that partic-
ipates in the production of many of the things and services that are taken
for granted in our everyday lives and that are in progress for our near
and far futures. In this chapter, we discuss how such experiments can
become incorporated in an agenda for an ethical and responsible futures
anthropology approach, which seeks to imagine what might happen in
not-yet experienced and indeterminate futures (Pink and Salazar 2017).
We develop this through the example of the Wizard of Oz (WOz)
experimental testing and our own ethnographic research with WOz
autonomous driving (AD) car tests leaders and participants. WOz testing
was originally conceptualized by the UX field as the “Oz paradigm” by
J.F. Kelley around 1980, “Since 1983, the term ‘Wizard of Oz’ has come
into common usage in the fields of Experimental Psychology, Human
Factors, Ergonomics and Usability Engineering” (Kelley 2018: 119). The
WOz test evaluates technological concepts and interactions and in doing
so simulates a situation that is possible in the present from a technical
point of view. The WOz helps interaction designers test and evaluate
features that have not been fully built and developed yet. Because tech-
nological features are simulated, WOz enables possible futures to be
elaborated around and experienced without having to fully develop the
technology. Participants in the experiment believe that the WOz AD
research car is a fully autonomous self-driving vehicle. However, after the
experiment, it is revealed to them that the car is actually being moni-
tored and controlled by a safety driver—the “wizard” positioned in the
back seat of the car. In this sense, the WOz experiment stands for both
possible and impossible futures at the same time. Possible in the sense that
what the WOz car performs can be imagined as a technological possibility
9 SIMULATING AND TRUSTING IN AUTOMATED FUTURES … 197
and impossible in that WOz cars themselves are not part of our imagined
futures.
Our work involved undertaking research with participants who had
been recruited as participants in WOz experiments, meaning that the
ethnography was undertaken at sites where the experiments were already
being carried out. In November 2016, when researchers from Halm-
stad University started participating in WOz, the tests took place at a
test track outside of Gothenburg. Interviews were undertaken with 10
participants who had already been recruited to the WOz tests, internally
from Volvo Cars but had no direct involvement in the AD car develop-
ment process. In 2018 February, WOz testing moved to public roads and
10 research participants were again recruited internally from Volvo Cars.
In June 2018, researchers from Halmstad University conducted further
WOz studies of 6 participants, who were recruited from families living in
and outside Gothenburg.
Wizard of Oz Testing as a Design

Anthropology Research Site
WOz is an experimental testing approach, used in human factors and
human-computer interaction research approaches, where participants try
out a prototype computer system they believe to be autonomous. In these
fields, studies of vehicle-driver interaction most commonly cover areas
such as interfaces for driver assistance, information, and entertainment
(Dahlbäck et al. 1993; Lathrop et al. 2005), desire for shared control,
or transition moments, such as how drivers take over control of the car
(Wang et al. 2017).
Such tests have most commonly been undertaken in closed test envi-
ronments; however, in 2017, a WOz test undertaken by researchers at
Virginia Tech in the USA, which sought to study people’s reactions to
the vehicle, was widely reported when members of the public began to
witness an apparently driverless car on the roads. In this reported case, the
driver of the car was disguised, hidden inside the driver’s seat of the car
(The Guardian 2017). WOz experiments are conducted for the following
reasons: to cut out the technical limitations of an automated system (e.g.,
new software and algorithms do not need to be developed fully), to gather
information in advance about how people might interact with a design
concept, to test usability and the extent to which a technology is intuitive
198 S. PINK ET AL.
and easy to use, and to encounter problems while completing tasks under
realistic scenarios.
In this chapter, we investigate and reflect on how design anthro-
pology can engender an approach that undertakes anthropology with
WOz testing through the development of ethnographic techniques of
research and analysis around the experiment. The value of developing
such an approach is, we argue, that it enables a design anthropological
agenda that seeks to imagine how people would live in possible future
scenarios and engages with both other stakeholders and participants in
order to achieve this. We emphasize however that it is not our objec-
tive to report on the full findings of our research with WOz testers and
participants, but rather to engage with this example in order to advance
our wider interest in the status of the experiment as a mode of researching
the possible anthropologically and ethically.
We do this through the example of testing for trust. Trust is for us a
key anticipatory concept that, defined anthropologically, forms part of
the theoretical basis of our wider research and inquiry. In this sense,
tests that involve locally or discipline-specific concepts of trust offer us
the opportunity to investigate particular modes of anticipation, which are
discussed further below. However, it is also particularly pertinent in our
research context because the question of trust in new and emerging digital
technologies has become a core theme in industry contexts in recent
years. Trust is moreover a key topic for human-computer interaction
(HCI) research (e.g., Harper 2014), and in the case of WOz AD testing,
trust in moments of control handover from human to automated driving
modes is the theme of one of the hypotheses that are tested against, as
explained below. However, a design anthropological theory of trust (Pink
et al. 2018b), which underpins our work, conceptualizes trust differently,
beyond the interactional context. Indeed, as we will argue in this chapter,
trust is both emergent from the improvisatory and imaginative capacity
of humans which enable us to cope with the inevitable uncertainty about
what will happen next, and generated in moments whereby people feel
comfortable, familiar, and confident enough to open themselves up to the
possibilities of what might happen next and can therefore also be seen as
a sensory and embodied feeling.
While, as is evident from this introduction to the question of trust,
there are different disciplinary approaches and perspectives at play in the
ways that the WOz experiments can be conceptualized, they also provide
an ideal scenario for an interdisciplinary encounter of two approaches that
seek to understand AD futures. This is because WOz tests provide rare

sites for the playing out of anthropologies of the possible, and the collab-
orative stance of the anthropological research encounter brings to WOz
tests a new layer of experiential investigation that connects, as discussed
below through shared interests in questions of human sensory perception
and feeling.
However, to be able to participate in such a collaborative mode of
interdisciplinary futures research, anthropologists need to be able to
cede to the interdisciplinary endeavor by: acknowledging that aspects
of the ethnographic site and encounter might be fixed by the parame-
ters of other disciplines; shifting the terms and moment of collaboration
and self-revelation; respecting rather than critiquing conceptual and
methodological difference; and accepting that the practical outcomes of
something that are not conceptually and methodologically aligned with
everything that anthropology believes in can subsequently have positive
and useful practical effects in design processes. There have been some
overlaps between anthropology and human-computer interaction design
(Dourish 2006) and user experience design; however, such design fields
have more typically drawn on psychological theories of behavior and
sociological models of interaction. Anthropological theory and method-
ology can contest these approaches for failing to engage with humans
and their sensory and affective relations as part of wider and ongoingly
emergent environments—that is as beyond their interactions with other
people and machines (Pink et al. 2017a). Yet, as we suggest here, by
bringing together, experimental testing and design anthropology much
can be gained. In doing, however, we need to be prepared for anthro-
pological research losing something of the disciplinary “purity” which
has hampered anthropological engagement in applied research in the past
(Roberts 2005) and that both hinders its expansion and capacity to inter-
vene in other disciplines and in the world and nurtures its theoretical
advancement. The experiment is a good example of this.
Experiments, Ethics, and Anthropology

The experiment has been used in some areas of anthropology, for
example, the anthropologist Kate Fox has been known for carrying out a
number of rule-breaking experiments in order to understand Englishness,
including constantly bumping into people to gauge their responses, and
200 S. PINK ET AL.
queue jumping (Fox 2004). Yet experiments and testing have not gener-
ally become part of conventional anthropological practice. However, there
have recently been calls toward a new experimental anthropology, which
urges anthropologists toward “experimental collaboration” (Estellea and
Sanchez Criado 2018) along the lines of the conventions of reflexive
and collaborative anthropology, as influenced by the work of James
Clifford and George Marcus (1986). Such an approach seeks to both co-
produce the very sites and terms of engagement of ethnographic research
through modes of collaboration that might exceed those of past anthro-
pological practice. Following this paradigm, any experiment would be a
co-produced affair and would result in ways of knowing that were the
outcome of open, transparent, and collaborative endeavors. Our own call
to experimentation differs from this since it is located in an interdisci-
plinary context. This is a space where collaboration might not be only on
the terms of the anthropologist and participant, but also requires both
ceding to and seeping into other disciplinary frameworks. It thus requires
us to open up the principles of anthropology for scrutiny and to frame
collaboration as the ability to relinquish some of these principles in order
to be able to participate in forms of productive trickery.
Therefore, we are specifically interested in interdisciplinary collabo-
ration with experiments that are governed by the parameters of other
disciplines and what anthropologists can learn from such scenarios. Such
a methodology requires an openness to other disciplines, and a prepared-
ness to be complicit in their methodologies while at the same time
remaining committed to playing out our own. It also has implications
for how we cope with our own theoretical assumptions and commitments
being at variance with those of other disciplines. For instance, in our work,
the conceptual underpinning of the experiment raises difficulties in its
assumption that the variables that are put together in experiments are exis-
tentially separate things from each other or that the relationships between
things can be measured. This is confronting for anthropological under-
standings of the relationality of things and their propensity to leak into
each other (e.g., Ingold 2008; Pink et al. 2016). Similarly, challenging
are the uneasy questions about the ethics and responsibilities entailed
in experimental trickery, since these, like the idea of researching futures
itself, instead of always taking refuge in the past tense (Pink 2017; Akama
et al. 2018), gnaw at the foundations of anthropological practice and its
emphasis on seeking to make the processes of its knowledge-making trans-
parent and based in collaborative encounters with participants (e.g., Pink
2015, 2021). Such ethics are rooted in the reflexive project of anthro-
pology manifested in anthropological writing since the 1908s (Clifford
and Marcus 1986) as well as in anthropological filmmaking (see Pink
2013) whereby the relationship between anthropologist and participant
is seen as the site where ethnographic knowing is constituted. There is,
however, an ethics to trickery, and we argue there can also be a sense in
which participants can still be complicit in the goals of the research while
being tricked. With this in mind, we next discuss a prominent example of
deception in experimental research and situate our interests in relation to
this.
Experiments that involve forms of deception of participants have long
since been part of psychologically oriented research agendas and have
raised a range of issues that have been subject to debate in academia and
in public scholarship. One of the most well-known controversial exper-
iments in this history of psychology was Stanley Milgram’s “Obedience
to Authority” project (1961–1963), which has been brought into new
public visibility through work of the researcher and filmmaker Kathryn
Millard’s in her film Shock Room (2015) http://shockroomfilm.com/.
The controversies that unfolded around this experiment help us to unpack
the wider context in which anthropological principles often seem to
be pitched against the interests of experimental research in psychology.
Participants in Milgram’s experiment were required to inflict pain on
others by administering what they thought were electric shocks in order
to punish them for making errors and were told that they were assisting in
an experiment. Milgram’s work was driven by a motivation to understand
how people could have participated in the Nazi holocaust, which was
informed by his interest in Hannah Arendt’s theory that Adolf Eichmann
had been able to participate in the holocaust because he was “a man who
was focused narrowly on the bureaucratic challenges that he faced without
concern for the broader implications of his actions” (Haslam et al. 2015:
59) as developed in her work on The Banality of Evil (Arendt 1963).
Retrospective and more recent discussion of the circumstances of the
experiments reflect on both the accuracy of the findings represented from
the project (Millard 2015) and the extent to which the research subjects
became complicit in the experiments (Haslam et al. 2015), which together
address controversies about the accuracy and ethics of this experiment.
One of the questions Haslam et al. focus on regards how while the
subjects in the experiments were distressed directly after their participa-
tion, when asked later they were generally happy to have been about
202 S. PINK ET AL.
to help with the research through their participation. They outline how
while for Milgram the fact that his participants had consented and been
happy about their participation afterward resolved any ethical issues
related to the project, there is another ethical perspective. Their own anal-
ysis disagreed with Milgram’s in suggesting that “people are able to inflict
harm on others not because they are unaware that they are doing wrong
[as argued by Milgram], but rather because—as engaged followers—they
know full well what they are doing and believe it to be right” (2015: 79).
They find this concerning since it implies that “‘science’ itself has the
potential to be invoked as a ‘warrant for abuse’” and argue that there-
fore, ethics committees should not only be concerned “that participants
are content, to also reflect on what they are encouraged to be content
about” (2015: 79–80).
Haslam et al.’s discussion raises complex questions for experimental
psychology. However, it also raises interesting questions for the relation-
ship between anthropology and experimental research for a number of
reasons. First, it highlights how in experiments the participant and the
researcher are co-complicit in the idea that they will be doing research,
but that they cannot form the agenda of the research together. Anthro-
pologists have argued strongly against scientific models that deny us
the possibility to develop shared and processual ethics agendas with
research participants, through predictive regulatory models (Amit 2000;
Pels 2000; Strathern 2003; Pink 2017), while in contrast experiments
require the researcher to take responsibility for the ethics on behalf of the
participants. The experimental model also differs from the temporality of
ethics that is required to undertake future-focused design anthropological
research. Design anthropology, when applied in an interventional mode,
means that researchers need to consider not only the ethics of researching
and representing things that have already happened, but to also focus
on the ethical implications of investigating possible future scenarios and
imaginations and emergent circumstance, which cannot be known before
the research event (Pink 2017). In contrast, the ethics of the experi-
ment as Haslam et al. (2015) define it should be determined before
the event, because in their interpretation the process through which the
participants became complicit with Milgram’s intentions in the period of
time after the experiment was where the ethical issues manifested, thus
constituting an ethics of prevention. This offers an interesting insight for
design anthropology and a future-focused ethics (Pink 2017) since the
implication is that what is needed is not a closed down predictive ethics
framework as Haslam et al. suggest in their proposal for closer ethical

approval scrutiny. But rather, it calls for an open ethics that is ongoing
and extends into possible interventions in an as yet unknown future where
participants might experience feelings that have not yet been determined.
Therefore, while there is an obvious anthropological critique of exper-
imental methods, rooted in the discipline’s commitment to reflexivity,
collaboration, and respect for research participants, there is more to it
than that. There are also a number of lessons and a path forward into
interdisciplinary collaboration which we outline below.
Design anthropology is perhaps the area of anthropological practice
that lies closest to experimental methods due to its proximity to design
and the interventional stance of methods that disrupt or seek to make
changes (Akama et al. 2018). Indeed, as Akama et al. (2018) discuss,
mild or playful forms of trickery have been used in design futures work-
shops that seek to invoke creative modes of uncertainty or disruption. In
such contexts, they have investigated questions concerning how people
improvise in moments of uncertainty in order to be able to proceed to
the next activity. Design anthropology is one of the areas where the ques-
tion of inventing imaginary scenarios for participants to experience and
engage with has been developed, for instance, through the making of
ethnographies of the possible (Halse 2013). In such scenarios, however,
possible futures are co-designed in projects that hold similar approaches to
anthropology and that are rooted in participatory design principles. Such
projects enable researchers and participants to together imagine (Carlin
et al. 2015) or make (Halse 2013) future scenarios and to be able to
ethnographically understand people’s experiences of them. Indeed, design
anthropology has thrived at this meeting point between anthropology and
co-design and participatory design (Gunn et al. 2013; Smith et al. 2016;
Akama et al. 2018), in part due to shared theoretical and ethical princi-
ples between the disciplines which have made it easier for methodological
meeting points to be created.
Ethnographies of the possible have become a key concept and prac-
tice in recent design anthropological discussions, where existing research
has focused on how possible futures might be co-constituted as interven-
tions through participatory methods (Halse 2013; Smith and Otto 2016).
Such approaches disrupt conventional anthropology through interven-
tional methods, but follow anthropological (and participatory design)
principles of collaboration and engagement with the worlds, feelings,
and imaginations of participants in research and design. Here, we build
204 S. PINK ET AL.
on this emphasis on the possible through ethnography, but advance the

discussion to examine how the making, experience of, and engagement
with im/possible futures can enable novel modes of research practice,
knowing, and understanding. As we discuss further below, the WOz
experiment makes/simulates a future technology and experience of it,
to constitute an im/possible automated present and imagined future.
Once the simulation is revealed, these experiential and temporal reali-
ties become disrupted, enabling new forms of reflection and discussion
between researcher and participant. Here, the ethics become part of a
collaborative anthropological research process in that the researcher and
participant together make sense of the participant’s experience; indeed,
it could be said that it is here where the ongoingness of ethics lies.
By productively contesting conventional anthropological temporalities
and ethnographic modes, the test reveals new layers of the complexity
of how (im)possible worlds might be constituted as interventional and
experiential layers of design anthropological practice and where collabo-
ration might be situated in those processes (see Salazar et al. 2017 for
other examples where the conventional temporalities of anthropology are
contested).
Anthropology, Testing, and Trust

There has been a long-term interest in future-oriented concepts related
to trust and the uncertainties that it overcomes in anthropology, ranging
for instance from Mary Douglas’ (1986) interrogation of witchcraft and
oracles to Saminian-Darash and Rabinow’s (2015) more recent concerns
with how uncertainty figures in society. However, trust has not frequently
been treated as a central empirical or theoretical theme in anthro-
pology. Instead in anthropology, considerations of trust have tended to
be embedded in the study of other future-oriented concepts, such as risk
which tends to have dominated discussions about how societies and indi-
viduals engage with uncertainty about what might happen next. More
broadly, in the social sciences, Pedersen and Liisberg report that “[a]
prevalent approach to trust … is to perform quantitative survey studies
of generalized trust in different entities” (Pedersen and Liisberg 2015:
2). The anthropologist Alberto Corsin has critiqued sociological treat-
ments of trust which engage trust as a cognitive category to perform
cognitive evaluations of how much one person would trust another
(2011: 178). He summarizes that there are: “accounts of trust as a
form of moral commitment, a character disposition, or a dynamic of

‘encapsulated interests,’ where trust emerges as a mutual co-implication
of interests on all transacting parties and where ‘Trust’ emerges as an
epiphenomenon of social knowledge: what people’s relationships look
like after the fact of cognitive re-appraisals” (2011: 178). To develop
an alternative perspective on what trust does, Corsin engages the anthro-
pological technique of comparison between how trust is constituted in
narratives of contemporary capitalism and in an indigenous culture. He
argues that in contemporary business audits “Trust works by creating its
own preconditions of existence, which must in turn be certified as trust-
worthy.” The “Audit cultures” he argues “are the classic example: the
audit makes the culture trustworthy, which in turn holds trust as a value
capable of audit” (2011: 193). He contrasts this with Rane Willerselv’s
research with Yukaghir hunters in Siberia, whereby the Yukaghir system—
“an economy of trust and an economy of mistrust; … about showing
and about deceiving, about making relationships visible and invisible,
all at once” (2011: 193). Corsin’s analysis alerts us to the point that
trust is not always the same thing and leads him to call for a rethinking
of trust, since it throws into relief capitalist notions of trust by both
rendering visible their mechanisms and showing that trust can also be
constituted in other ways. While the critique of capitalism in Corsin’s
approach is relevant, an anthropology of trust, we argue, needs to be
pushed further: Our agenda is different since, motivated by the urge to
make change through an interventional stance, our ambition is to identify
how theoretically opposed but practically and demonstrably interdepen-
dent interpretations and mobilizations of trust can become conjoined in
the production of new understandings. Therefore, our research implies
a new question regarding how we might confront circumstances where
different variations of trust co-exist in the same society. This is a core
question underpinning both the empirical and methodological compo-
nents of our commitment to developing an interdisciplinary research
agenda whereby we do anthropology with (rather than about ) design
(Anusas and Harkness 2016) and also do research with rather than about
participants (Ingold 2008).
This question is moreover not unique to our investigation of trust.
Rather, it is the same genre of question that underpins related inves-
tigations of the relationship between the everyday human creativity,
improvisatory modes of action, and sensory embodied ways of knowing
in the world. These can be seen to be co-emergent with the apparently
206 S. PINK ET AL.
converse structures of contemporary societies in the global north that

frame the temporalities of governance, production, and change through,
audit-based regulatory frameworks (such as health and safety, ethics and
compliance systems) and neo-liberal innovation paradigms that celebrate
technological advancement. As recent work shows, there is an ongoing
tension and interdependency between change that happens in an ongoing
and processual mode and dominant assumptions about technologically
driven change whereby finished products impact on society (Pink 2017;
Pink et al. 2017a, 2017b). Therefore, our interest in bringing together
different approaches to trust in anthropology and interaction design is
not concerned with critically evaluating the work of another discipline.
Rather, it seeks to understand how, by bringing design anthropology into
communication with the paradigm that interaction design represents, we
can create methodologies that both acknowledge and seek to intervene at
the point of the tensions between different approaches to understanding
societal processes and the ongoing configurations of the everyday.
In interaction design, the aim is to design transactions that encourage
the user to trust the technology. For example, Sasse and Kirlappos, in an
essay about “Design for Trusted and Trustworthy Services” in the field
of Technology Mediated Interaction (TMI), suggest that “The need for
trust arises when we cannot be sure about the risk and uncertainty asso-
ciated with transactions,” from their perspective: “participants need to
reach a transaction-enabling level of trust over a medium which makes
the trust signals they rely on meaningful and easy to manipulate” (Sasse
and Kirlappos 2014). The need to create ways of mitigating uncertainty
appears to be at the core of their model. The conceptualization of trust as
interactional and transactional in interaction design is part of a paradigm
of technological innovation whereby when people trust the interfaces,
then the benefits promised by technologies can be accrued. Against this
approach, there has been a backlash, particularly from Science and Tech-
nology Studies (STS), where for instance scholars Russell and Vinsel call
for attention to move away from innovation itself toward “after inno-
vation” (2016) to understand what people do with things. However,
in their enthusiasm to contest dominant societal and political innova-
tion paradigms, such approaches miss the point that we also need to
understand how the innovation paradigm is embedded in the design and
making of things. It is here that design anthropological engagement can
usefully step into also engage within innovation processes rather than with
only after innovation. The interdisciplinary methodology we discuss here
is precisely that a mode of design anthropological engagement in inno-

vation that seeks to shift and co-produce new understandings of how
people engage with things, within that very domain of practice. Indeed,
with reference to the question of trust in AD, the interaction design
WOz experiments are fundamental steps in the preparation of vehicle
and interface designs that people will be able to effectively use in real-
world circumstances. That is, they are essential elements of the process
through which AD features arrive on the market, and without them, the
processes that occur “after innovation” would not be the same. Our aim
then is not to critique these approaches, but to bring together with them
the insight that trust means something else anthropologically. Our crit-
ical vision of trust focuses on why people are prepared to “trust” in the
moment through a design anthropological understanding of the circum-
stances through which trust is configured. It means that trust is configured
both during innovation and is also closely associated with the improvisatory
actions through which people engage with technologies “after innovation.”
A design anthropological understanding of trust as outlined elsewhere
(Pink et al. 2018b: 3) proposes that trust in immediate situations is emer-
gent from circumstances when “we feel sufficiently confident to be able to
act,” there following Fredricksen’s suggestion that “Confidence based on
familiarity is the foundation of getting involved in a situation” and differ-
entiates trust from risk (Fredricksen 2016: 59). Thus, we trust when we
feel confident that our improvisatory actions (that design anthropology
particularly focuses on) or “leaps of faith” into unknown or uncertain
circumstances are simultaneously embedded in familiar routines, situa-
tions, or feelings. As noted, “[t]his might not be a cognitive decision but
rather a sensory experience of feeling or disposition towards something”
(Pink et al. 2018b). As Pink, Lanzeni, and Horst stress, “even when such
security and familiarity is felt, it does not mean that the immediate or far
futures are secured. Rather trust is a feeling that is part of a mode of living
in a world of uncertainties that ‘feels right,’ a sense of control in a space of
uncertainty” (2018b: 3). Thus, opening up a context in which to under-
stand how trust as articulated in WOz testing might be extended beyond
an interactional paradigm and instead as a feeling that is generated when
certain circumstances configure.
208 S. PINK ET AL.
WOz Experimenting and Design

Anthropology in Practice
As noted above, WOz methodology is a UX and usability testing approach
used on prototypes to test out early aspects of a not-yet implemented
design, simulate an experience, and envision what future interactions
might look and feel like. During simulated driving in the context of AD
cars, test participants are first informed about the test, and they are then
given a series of experiment or practice tasks to perform. Tests take place
either on test tracks or more recently on public roads. Generally, the
safety driver who controls the car is either hidden at the back seat or in
a remotely controlled station (Mok et al. 2015). The driving experience
often starts with the test participant being the driver. Then the control is
handed over to the safety driver and that is when the driver becomes a
passenger and the AD experience begins. Scenarios, experiments, or prac-
tice tasks are developed in advance around a set of hypotheses with the
goal to verify behaviors and responses to, for example, driving modes and
control handovers. Most frequently tested concepts focus on trust and
awareness in relation to how the car communicates to the driver and how
the driver understands how the car maneuvers.
Katalin had the chance to be part of a WOz test drive and listened into
the conversation between the test leader and the participant from the back
seat. Participants were guided through a set questionnaire over the test
drive that is structured to identify usability problems for particular design
solutions of prototypes related to the control handover. Participants were
asked about their experience of directly interacting with the human-
machine interface (HMI), how easy it was to understand signals from
the car in relation to giving control over and taking control back from
the car. Moreover, questions were related to how participants became
aware of the AD mode, whether they recognize colors of signals, what
those might indicate, how useful they are, and what they look for when
searching for information. Overall, participants were asked to evaluate the
extent to which two distinct design solutions related to color and touch
were easy to use and understand.
Ethnography of the WOz testing revealed that the setup of the test
environment is rigorous and carefully controlled when focused usability
concepts are tested, because these concepts leave little room to unex-
pected and improvisatory insights in relation to the AD experience. Due
to the focus on participants’ direct interaction with the HMI and struc-
tured usability interview guide, testers often did not have the time to let
unexpected insights into the test environment. However, we also found
that designers who participate in WOz testing are aware that the expe-
rience of driving goes beyond these direct interactions. For example,
Christoffer, a designer who plays the role of WOz safety driver, explained
how the feeling of the car was fundamental:
It’s important how the car behaves, it’s your ass feeling everything. A race
driver can sense just from his ass if it the gear misses a millisecond or so
because it feels wrong. Or if the car brakes, the first thing is that your ass
is feeling ok it brakes or if it does some wiggling … and that is I think the
most important part that you feel confident and when you turn on that
autopilot it feels like you’re going on a rail. And even if the HMI is telling
you need to have one hand on the steering wheel, you need to do this, you
need to do that, so on and so forth … it doesn’t matter because people
feel … it feels like it’s really good and it feels confident. It’s like people
and the impression that they give. It tells something. You get different
trust levels and it’s the same thing with the car.
An ethnographic design anthropological approach meant that we could

explicitly explore such questions in the research process, by going beyond
the test scenario to seek to understand how they were articulated by
test (and our research) participants in the experience of WOz testing.
We scheduled interviews with participants before and after the test drive
in ways complementary to the WOz experimental testing, because they
brought to the fore a more contextual, layered, and relational under-
standing of trust. Participants could reflect on the overall AD experience
in relation to their own everyday experience of driving and commuting.
They were able to reflect on what trust felt like, how it might emerge
in relation to present commuting routines, one’s idiosyncratic way of
driving, within various infrastructural contexts (highways, city traffic;
country road), or as an outcome of mutual learning between car and
driver. We now briefly present some examples of how the participants
were able to talk to us about their experience of participating in the
possible futures that their rides in the WOz cars represented and in doing
so analyze how these articulations of ways of feeling trust, and its limita-
tions can become ways to bring together the improvisatory stance of use
in an uncertain world with the framed process of testing in an innova-
tion process. We emphasize that this is not intended to be a discussion
210 S. PINK ET AL.
of ethnographic findings or a description of our fieldwork, but rather

an example of some of the ways that an embodied and sensory engage-
ment with what possible AD futures might feel like enabled participants
to experience and express feelings that broadened our understanding of
what testing can mean.
All participants were employees at Volvo Cars. While this does in some
ways suggest that our ethnography was with people who worked in a
particular organization and that the participants were of course connected
to the automotive industry, we also stress that Volvo Cars is a large orga-
nization and that the participants were drawn from different departments,
and therefore, we would not see this as an organizational ethnography.
While some participated in earlier WOz testing, others were new to the
test environment. Among participants, a series of modes of talking about
the experience of and their trust in WOz emerged; here, we focus on two:
confidence and knowing. The idea of trust as a confidence in “knowing
what happens next,” and the familiarity that this entails was emphasized
by some participants, in terms of a human feel, or as one participant put
it “humanish … like something soft, not like a machine.” Anders (53)
is an engineer at Volvo Cars who commutes to work every day from the
outskirts of Gothenburg. When we talked about trust, he recalled a taxi
ride experience between Shanghai airport and his hotel from a work trip,
linking the feeling of trust to a more intuitive way of knowing, and having
confidence in the expertise and knowing of the driver:
I guess it’s the same as a taxi driver really. Just the feeling that one in
charge knows what he or she is doing. If you have a driver and it’s the
first time he is driving, you’d sense that. It’s bumpy and not smooth. And
I guess it’s the same for AD. Once it feels like it’s able to take decisions
and handle situations in a good way that’s trust for me.
Some participants also talked about their own unique way of driving.
They stressed that trust in AD during the test environment could not be
established due to the discrepancy between how one drives and how the
car planned and solved situations. Thus, showing how their own ways of
knowing and feelings that would be familiar to them were disrupted by
the feel of the WOz experience. Meaning that it was difficult to generate
the confidence and familiarity needed to trust, due to this “feel.” Astrid
(32) works at the procurement department and takes a short ten-minute
drive to work every day. She explained that for her, trust in AD is recog-
nizing similarities between the car and her own idiosyncratic ways of
driving:
I would like the car to drive a bit more like me. If the car would read my
way of driving and acted the same as I do … now the car was indicating
and I didn’t know which way we were going. We were in the middle lane
and it was indicating and there were cars on both sides and I was thinking,
where is the car going? I just had to accept it. I would like to see some
sort of indication that now I’m planning to go that way. I would like to
see the long term and short-term plans. Like now I’m indicating and I’m
going into this lane. And the indication was like it indicated right before it
turned out. At one moment, there was a car coming out at a faster speed.
I would have chosen to wait for that car to pass because there weren’t any
other cars behind. And then, I would have changed because we had plenty
of time. But this car (the WOz car) chose to indicate and change lanes in
front of the speeding car that had to change the lane. That didn’t make
me trust in it. When I see something like that I think it wasn’t really a
good behavior.
Therefore, the embodied knowing of the participants was sometimes

difficult to reconcile with their expectations of the WOz car, since its
actions did not correspond with those that felt right as next steps. Thus,
creating a gap between the improvisatory actions through which partic-
ipants would deal with everyday driving situations in order to make
themselves feel comfortable and the way that the technology-driven solu-
tion played out. Björn (55), a vehicle engineer, described trust in relation
to other drivers on the road: “there was a big truck just behind me not
keeping the distance and I got stressed because I wanted to increase the
speed and get away from that. That annoys me a lot. I would change the
lane. But my car went 60 km/h and the truck was really close. You can’t
control the other cars around you.” For another participant, Jonas (47),
who works at the market research department and experienced AD for the
first time, the lack of access to the sensory ways of knowing that informed
the actions of the car (which would in a fully AD vehicle be responses to
sensory technologies), stressed the need for the car to be more trans-
parent in it is decision making. He felt that a continuous feedback system
between the AD car and the driver would lead to transparency and trust
and described this through a more human analogy, telling us that:
212 S. PINK ET AL.
Actually 15 years ago I taught my now wife how to drive. In traffic I

wanted her to say yeah I’ve seen that one and this one. Now of course I
have to let go of that. But that kind of beginner driver holding the steering
wheel and then you get used to the driving seat and go longer distance
and that gives you more stability so to say. Somehow getting feedback on
why the car is making decisions … that would be nice to gain confidence.
When in contrast, a participant felt comfortable with the safety driver’s

way of driving, they were able to feel confident enough to trust. Fredrik
(27), a first-time participant and young employee from the finance depart-
ment, was very optimistic about the AD experience. He emphasized that
trust was “instinctive” and came from “situation that are difficult to judge
when driving” such as roadworks or highway crossings: “I saw that the
car was very rational and very planning in the way it was driving. It always
kept distance and so on… So after that I trusted it.”
As such, these discussions with participants enabled us to gain a sense
of how they had encountered a possible future, which could not yet be
realized technologically. Significantly in relation to our interest in trust, it
meant that we could develop understandings of what it felt like to be in an
as yet not existing AD vehicle and what might be needed for a feeling of
trust to emerge in such an environment. In turn, it has helped us to refine
a design anthropological approach to trust, but showing us how trust is
constituted in possible future scenarios, where the person and car are not
simply two interacting elements, but are part of wider configurations of
things, processes, and environment. A design anthropological approach
to trust, we argue, is complementary to the WOz experimental testing
because it opened up room for participants to connect the AD experience
to their own everyday commuting and ways of driving and specifically to
the modes of feeling and action through which they generate senses of
familiarity and confidence in driving situations. In the WOz experimental
setting, a design anthropology approach grounded the tested technical
functionality and in-car experience in the context of everyday life because
participants were able to connect to and make sense of the AD experi-
ence in relation to their own way of driving and commuting (Osz et al.
2018). This was complimentary to validating the usability of AD concepts
because the design anthropology approach accommodated and captured
the emergent and improvised qualities of the test environment.
Indeed, from the perspective of our interdisciplinary endeavor, a design
anthropological approach has brought a more layered, speculative, and
classificatory understanding of how trust might emerge and what might

people expect the AD experience to be like within different contexts. As
a future anthropologies project, our work with experimental testing has
provided us with new and otherwise impossible contexts through which
to investigate how trust might emerge in relation to new and not-yet
existing configurations of people, technologies, and other elements of the
environment, and as such to gain deeper empirical understandings of trust
as ongoingly emerging, and comprehended through a processual theory
of trust. We do not report further on these theoretical findings here, but
rather mention them precisely because it is through our engagements
with the (im)possible that these insights have become possible, and we
suggest that it would likewise be possible to investigate other anticipatory
concepts through such forms of experimental-ethnographic collaboration.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have discussed the question of how the possible
might be introduced into research participants’ lives, within an interdis-
ciplinary design anthropological approach to futures. We have reflected
on the status of the experiment in anthropology and the ways in which
our engagements with it require us to cede some of our anthropological
requirements in order to be able to appreciate the types of insights we can
only produce when worlds that can only usually be imagined or fantasized
about are made experientially possible. In order for this to happen, some-
times forms of creative trickery are necessary so that people can get a
sensory and emotional sense of something that is still not fully techno-
logically or legally possible. In some cases, the engagements they have
with such technological possibilities might actually be necessary for the
approval processes that are needed in order to make the technologies
legally possible in the future. This is indeed the case for some testing
processes.
In weaving anthropology into this process of technological design and
testing, which is part of an innovation narrative, we are able to begin to
see how the processes through which innovation come about are likewise
imbued with the sensory, emotional feelings, and improvisational actions
that form part of the ways people use technologies. For example, even
when testing processes are controlled and seek to collect objective data
that is important for regulatory and safety features, there was simultane-
ously an acknowledgment of trust as a feeling, among both test leaders
214 S. PINK ET AL.
and test participants. By participating in such research process as anthro-

pologists, we are able to create, with our co-researchers, new insights into
what testing processes can tell us and to draw new theoretical insights
about how the constituent parts of processes of technological innovation
(design, testing, regulatory compliance, etc.) are not separable or very
different from the everyday worlds of users and the improvisatory modes
through which they trust in the contingent situations of everyday life.
Indeed, it is rather the ideological and moral, theoretical, disciplinary,
and ethical paradigms that are used to study, explain, and progress these
fields of analysis and activity in the world that portray them in ways that
make them different.
Finally, therefore, to be able to engage across disciplines, impact on or
intervene in technology design processes, and as such participate, a futures
anthropology needs to act and think in ways that go beyond the critical
stance taken traditionally by anthropology and that is also still exercised in
many academic disciplines. This does not mean that we should not be crit-
ical, and in fact, it means we should be more critical, but that rather than
addressing the critique toward how other disciplines think “wrongly,” the
“trick” of anthropology lies elsewhere. For example, while anthropology
can easily reveal that interactional and transactional views of trust are mis-
thought (according to our theoretical convictions), the real challenge is
elsewhere, and it lies in being able to participate meaningfully in the inno-
vation narratives that such modes of trust are integral to. It means being
able to engage with (even if not completely on) the terms of research
undertaken in other disciplines, to blend and contribute to it, while always
retaining a sense of what else anthropology can do. The point of doing
this is not to become complicit in societal narratives that we are critical of,
but rather to be able to participate in them in such a way that can bring
about change by connecting them to the wider experiential and societal
worlds that they are part of. The trickery of experimental testing offers us
a route into the worlds of the technological possible and of innovation.
And it is by participating in this world that we have an opportunity to
create a new interventionist futures anthropology designed to be to the
benefit of all the stakeholders we engage with.
Acknowledgements This article has been produced through anthropological

teamwork. Most of the fieldwork was undertaken by Katalin Osz. Sarah Pink,
Katalin Osz, and Vaike Fors developed the ethnographic methodology, analysis,
and theory. Sarah Pink and Debora Lanzeni developed the theoretical discus-
sion of the relationship between technology innovation and improvisation. We
are very grateful to our colleagues at Volvo Cars for both enabling access to
the WOz tests and collaborating with us and to the people who participated in
our research. The research discussed in this chapter was undertaken as part of
the Human Experiences and Expectations of Autonomous Driving project finan-
cially supported by the Swedish strategic vehicle research and innovation program
(FFI) and undertaken as a collaboration between Halmstad University and Volvo
Cars.
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PART III
Autoethnography
Autoethnography can be understood as an ethnographic research process

and product that foregrounds the biographical, social, and intellec-
tual situatedness of the ethnographer (Chang 2008; Ellis et al. 2011;
Kazubowski-Houston 2010; McClaurin 2001; Reed-Danahay 1997;
Waterston 2019). Although autoethnographic approaches have been used
in anthropological research since at least the 1990s, insufficient atten-
tion has been paid to how autoethnography can be employed in the
ethnographic study of the future. The contributors to this part draw on
their own lived experience while conducting fieldwork and data analysis,
in their writing, and in other forms of ethnographic output. They want
to know if this experience can constitute a springboard for interrogating
larger social and political issues by “confront[ing] the truths and traces
that are both possible and impossible” (Jackson and Mazzei 2008, 314).
In this sense, the autoethnographies presented here are akin to what
Alisse Waterston calls “intimate ethnography”—a research practice that
“depict[s] the multiple connections between life lived and experienced
and the processes of a larger, contingent history that enable speculation
on the conditions and possibilities of human life in this world” (Watter-
ston 2019: 9). It is the personal experiences of ethnographers themselves,
their family members, and professional collaborators that ground their
critical inquiry into how the relationship between history and biography
shapes our imaginings and interventions in futures. However, rather than
treating the ethnographer’s personal experience as a window into unmedi-
ated ethnographic “truth,” the chapters assembled here engage with a
220 PART III: AUTOETHNOGRAPHY
“performative ‘I’” that seeks to expose the gaps and breaches in what is
known and unknown (Jackson and Mazzei 2008: 314).
Rather than being discouraged by these gaps and breaches, this
approach to autoethnography embraces them “to present complicated
voices and create new ways of understanding for those who read and
listen to these performative accounts” (Jackson and Mazzei 2008: 314).
Methodologically, the contributors deploy personal experience to examine
how futures are felt and sensed, and how their felt knowledge constitutes
a basis from which to unearth hope and creativity in the uncertain folds
of what yet might be. The chapters that follow are also committed to
“strong readings” of reflexivity (Wasserfall 1993) that seek to destabilize
power differentials between ethnographers and research participants by
“weakening the interpretive authority of the former and empowering the
voices of the latter and thereby, minimiz[ing] the potential for exploitative
research” (Groves and Chang 1999: 238).
Like other chapters in this volume, the autoethnographies included
here are committed to multimodal and deeply interdisciplinary
approaches. At the level of ethnographic process, the contributors exper-
iment with approaches that blend audiovisual ethnography, museum
exhibition, installation, storytelling, performance, fiction, and creative
writing. They employ a combination of autoethnography, critical essay,
creative writing, confessional writing, and other modes of creative repre-
sentation in ways that develop novel ethnographic styles and genres not
limited solely to the traditional approaches of cultural critique. The chap-
ters rely heavily on the use of metaphor, personal reflection, testimonial
writing, memoir, fiction, theory, and image in ways that “stage the social
as creative force” (Orr 2006: 27). Such experimental, sensory, and imag-
istic forms of ethnographic representation seek to unearth the ways in
which the future emerges from the fabric of the everyday as fragmented
stories, feelings, sensations, and imaginaries, subverting linear notions of
time and ravaging our familiar patterns of perception. The authors also
seek to challenge—by incorporating themselves into their own work—
“accepted views about silent authorship, where the researcher’s voice is
not included in the presentation of the findings” (Holt 2003: 2). Finally,
by positioning the self at the center of the ethnographic inquiry, the
contributors challenge essentialized and universalizing master narratives
and analyses and, instead, seek to convey the peculiarities and partic-
ularities of specific imaginaries of the future in a specific times and
place.
PART III: AUTOETHNOGRAPHY 221
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, in her chapter “Intimating the

Possible Collapse of the Future: Digging into Cuban Palimpsests
Through Innovative Methodologies,” inquiries into the ways that we can
ethnographically investigate time beyond the confines of linearity. Her
autoethnography builds its analysis from sessions of observation, personal
reflection, and audiovisual experimentations that unfolded over a period
of eight years. It also develops a multimodal methodology that draws
from archaeology, ethnography, and arts-based approaches and focuses on
two projects: an autoethnographic study of artifact excavation below her
family’s colonial house in Santiago de Cuba and a collaborative, audio-
visual ethnography conducted in an abandoned, collapsing building in
Havana. The chapter demonstrates that house construction and reno-
vation—by engaging with “dirt, piles of garbage, soil, plumbing, and
construction sites”—can be an important act of world making. Stories
shared during renovation touched on pirates, slavery, and colonialism
and opened doors to expressing the injustice of the past and to imag-
ining more inclusive futures. She argues that, like a palimpsest—“layers of
inscription and erasure superimposed over each other”—shared stories can
layer themselves over the imprints of the past, generating new expecta-
tions and hopes for the future. Her notion of the palimpsest, which serves
as both an analytical tool and a methodological approach to studying the
interrelationship of the past, the present, and the future, can be seen as a
boundary object that blurs anthropology’s engagement with time.
Boudreault-Fournier’s second project, conducted in collaboration with
an Afro-Cuban electronic musician living in Havana, examines audiovi-
sual media as a way of studying past imaginaries and possible futures. For
Boudreault-Fournier, the process of recording the sounds of collapse on
site and mixing them with electronic beats and other sound effects consti-
tuted a way to “better sense the present and open up to future desires and
possible collapses.” In the spirit of critical autoethnography, she seeks to
reconceptualize the role of the anthropologist in the ethnographic study
of futures as that of a cloth maker who weaves stories into various affective
and sensory textures.
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston’s chapter, “Absence, Magic, and
Impossible Futures,” explores the role of absence in imaginings of
futures. Rather than treating absence as purely immaterial, her autoethno-
graphic account examines the generative capacity of absence by reflecting
on her grief following the death of her absent father. Her account
employs a multimodal ethnographic approach that weaves threads of
the author’s diaries, field notes, poetic prose, and photography with
theoretical analysis. Although the body, affect, emotions, and sensations
remain underexplored as forms of intervention in the anthropology of the
future, Kazubowski-Houston suggests that the embodied ephemerality
of absence may constitute an important intimacy politics. Such politics,
she argues, can generate a powerful world-making capacity that oper-
ates in between the past and the future, life and death, and reality and
magic. Inspired by American author Joan Didion’s notion of magical
thinking—an irrational thought process that can accompany grief—she
conceptualizes the agency of absence in her life as a magical performance
of otherwise possibilities that challenge common imaginaries of what is
possible.
Kazubowski-Houston proposes affective forms of knowing—such as
those that accompany our experience of absence—as a sensory episte-
mology and a methodology of the otherwise. Her account stresses the
importance of paying attention to how futures are made and remade,
not only through planned intervention but also through the quiet work-
ings of grief, longing, and hope. Her magical performance of absence,
which imagined an impossible past and an impossible future, did not
merely constitute an act of denial: it was a powerful strategy for facing the
inevitability of death. Drawing on approaches from performance studies,
imaginative ethnography, and psychoanalytic theory and from scholar-
ship on the affective dimensions of photography, her account stands as
an exercise in deep interdisciplinarity that questions what it means to do
ethnography, embrace activism, and imagine futures. She proposes the
notion of intervention as a process that bumps against memories, confab-
ulations, objects, and archives of feelings and follows unpredictable paths
through one’s interior and exterior lifeworlds.
In her chapter titled “Projections and Possibilities: An Installation
about HuMilk Now,” Susan Falls discusses a multimodal ethnographic art
installation titled Projections and Possibilities that she designed to engage
audiences beyond the academy in imagining and intervening in futures.
Deeply interdisciplinary, the project explores the interventionist and spec-
ulative potential of multimodal autoethnography that uses, as a starting
point of discussion, the author’s own involvement in the human milk-
sharing network to examine the experiences of other network participants.
Drawing on her own personal reflections and interviews conducted with
multiple stakeholders, Falls explores how multimodal ethnographic spaces
can anchor critique and dissent, facilitating a multisensorial community
engagement that is “augmented by the co-experience of feeling our way

into probable future(s).” The result is her own kind of traversing anthro-
pology. In contrast to the linearity of the traditional ethnographic text,
this method invites participants to meander in between images, sounds,
and tastes. Her work not only contributes to our understanding of the
possibility of breast milk farming and community-based practices that
challenge biocommodification, but it also provides insights into how
anthropological approaches to speculation can be crafted and honed. Falls
stresses that truly interdisciplinary research needs to develop meaningful
collaborations with experts in other fields. She also takes a significant step
toward rethinking how anthropological insights might be shared beyond
the academy in ways that render theoretical analysis and methodological
considerations accessible to the general public.
In “Exhibition Development as Restorative Future Making: Commu-
nity Co-curation in the Struggle against Sexual Violence,” Mark
Auslander and colleagues propose an anthropology of the future to render
the impossible possible. They discuss a partnership between the Michigan
State University Museum and the victims of a university sports physi-
cian who sexually abused at least five hundred girls and women. The
project adopted a multimodal approach to ethnography that involved
cocurating an exhibit, Finding Our Voice: Sister Survivors Speak, which
relates the survivors’ stories and reflects on the inaction of the univer-
sity and law enforcement officials. The exhibit engaged audiences with
physical objects placed in installation spaces, works of visual art, music,
poetry, and storytelling. The chapter examines how curating objects in a
museum can both lead to bodily healing and facilitate the process of imag-
ining future possibilities. The project considers the museum-community
partnership as a way to catalyze “restorative future making” by creating
meaningful bonds between people and the passage of time. Restorative
future making, they suggest, imitates the power of ritual by “circulating
or projecting meaning-bearing objects in arresting ways across normally
distinct domains of experience.”
Drawing on the anthropology of ritual’s notion of physical objects as
structural operators that “mediate between persons and between different
realms of existence,” Auslander and colleagues argue that the ribbons
that parents of survivors wrapped around trees on campus—and that were
subsequently featured in the museum exhibit—can be seen as a gesture
performed toward the future. They also argue that the abuser’s gifts
to the survivors, later donated to the museum, constituted transitional
memorabilia: through them, survivors sought to repair their traumatic

past and undertake a healing journey of future making. In the exhibit,
this journey was symbolically represented by a dress adorned with silken
butterfly cutouts and a shadow of a crouching girl, projected out of the
base of the dress. A collectively curated exhibition, they conclude, can
facilitate a process of “moving individual isolation and anguish toward
imagined future spaces of shared acknowledgment and recognition.” In
that sense, this essay is an exemplar of an “intimate ethnography” that
places the survivors’ voices at the center of inquiry to highlight the
interconnectedness between history, the present, and that which may be
(im)possible.
References
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Ellis, C., T. E. Adams, and A. Bochner. 2011. Autoethnography: An Overview.
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Groves, J. M., and K. A. Chang. 1999. Romancing Resistance and Resisting
Romance: Ethnography and the Construction of Power in the Filipina
Domestic Worker Community in Hong Kong. Journal of Contemporary
Ethnography 29 (3): 236–265.
Holt, N. 2003. Representation, Legitimation, and Autoethnography: An
Autoethnographic Writing Story. International Journal of Qualitative Methods
2(1), Winter: 1–22.
Jackson, A. Y., and L. A. Mazzei. (2008). Experience and ‘I’ in Autoethnography:
A Deconstruction. International Review of Qualitative Research 1 (3): 299–
318.
raphy with Polish Roma Women. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens
University Press.
McClaurin, I., ed. 2001. Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis,
and Poetics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Orr, J. 2006. Panic Diaries: A genealogy of Panic Disorder. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Reed-Danahay, D. 1997. Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social.
Oxford: Berg.
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Ethnologist 46 (1): 7–19.
CHAPTER 10
Intimating the Possible Collapse of the Future:

Digging into Cuban Palimpsests Through
Innovative Methodologies
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier
Resulting from a struggling economy and decades of storm damage

and neglect, many buildings in Cuba are falling apart. The scale of the
problem is huge. On average, three buildings collapse every day in Havana
(Hamberg 2011). In Cuba, construction materials and tools are difficult
to obtain, and consequently, Cubans often rely on the black market to
find screws, piping, cement, sand, or other basic resources. In this context
of crumbling and collapsing buildings, and through the process of digging
deep into the layers of meaning left through time, I explore past worlds
and possible futures. Construction and renovation projects relate to prac-
tices and processes of “worldmaking.” In this article, they also allow us to
look back to the past in order to better sense and imagine new presents,
which, in turn, leak into possible futures. Dirt, piles of garbage, soil,
plumbing, and construction sites can bring us to reflect on stories and
A. Boudreault-Fournier (B)
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
e-mail: alexbf@uvic.ca

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4_10
228 A. BOUDREAULT-FOURNIER
landscapes long disappeared at the same time as they might transport us

into potential futures. Yet, possible futures may also collapse, highlighting
the presence of shattered and unfulfilled dreams.
The concept of palimpsests allows for an archaeological perspective of
various temporal dimensions in paying attention to the layers of super-
imposed inscriptions and erasures, and the traces of multiple overlaps
that emerge while digging the underground. Inspired by the work of
José Quiroga (2015) in Cuba, I develop a metaphorical understanding of
palimpsests, which emphasizes how the present blends into the past. Two
present sites transport us from imagined past stories to possible futures.
Firstly, this article delves into the process of excavating the plumbing
system of a colonial house under renovation in Santiago de Cuba that
my husband and I purchased in 2015. Our house offers a panorama of
layers of historical and social traces that emerged via the efforts of two
plumbers who came to work on our house. More specifically, stories of
earthquakes, pirates, and slave owners surfaced as the plumbers excavated
their way down into underground layers in a charged historical context of
slavery and colonialism. Their discovery of artifacts, potteries, and bones
not only revealed their personal and local conceptions of the past, but also
shared imaginaries of how it “used to be before” in a current national
context that silences narratives about racism and legacies of slavery.
Secondly, an audio-visual collaboration that took place in an aban-
doned building (today demolished) in downtown Havana reveals how
it is possible to articulate hopes and desires of a possible future and
imagine a better world. The building used to be an RCA Victor music
store and recording studio in the 1950s. After the Cuban Revolution,
it was re-allocated as housing for poor families. However, it was declared
insalubrious by municipal housing authorities at the end of the 1990s and
was evacuated. Soon after, squatters occupied it, as the housing shortage
in Cuba is so severe that families, especially those arriving in the capital
from the provinces, will live in almost any conditions. In 2010, the occu-
pying families were relocated elsewhere and the building was cordoned
off. Next, in 2014, the building was demolished and the site barricaded.
But, just before its destruction, I organized in the abandoned building
an anthropological-artistic collaboration with DJ Jigüe, a well-known and
talented Afro-Cuban electronic musician living in Havana who is making
his way in the music world. In the middle of garbage and rubble, a musical
performance influenced by a Cuban version of afro-futurism took place.
In looking retrospectively at this experiment, I consider methodological
10 INTIMATING THE POSSIBLE COLLAPSE OF THE FUTURE … 229
approaches that can orient anthropologists to delve into an exploratory

ethnographic project that may use audio-visual media to explore local past
imaginaries and possible futures.
This chapter is based on sessions of observation, audio-visual exper-
imentations, and autoethnography that unfolded over a period of eight
years. I worked in Havana between 2011 and 2014 and in Santiago
de Cuba from 2015 until 2018. Situating fieldwork temporally is key,
as Cuba is in the midst of a sociopolitical transition. Most notably,
on December 17, 2014, then US President Barack Obama and the
Cuban head of state Raúl Castro announced that they would progres-
sively normalize political, economic, and diplomatic relationships between
the two countries, providing hope for change to all Cuban citizens.
Unfortunately, this initiative did not deliver the hoped-for results, mainly
because of the status quo orientation adopted by the subsequent US Pres-
ident Donald Trump. Raúl Castro resigned in April 2018. For the first
time since 1959, the newly appointed President of Cuba—Miguel Díaz-
Canel—was not a member of the Castro family. At the end of 2018,
the Cuban National Assembly approved a revised version of the Cuban
constitution, which although it retained the one-party socialist system
as the guiding force of the country also recognized the importance of
foreign investment. All evidence shows that Cuba is going through uncer-
tain times and this situation has a concrete impact on how ethnographic
experiences and reflections emerge in the field.
The two sites—the colonial house and the abandoned RCA building—
are located in the two most populated cities of the country, respectively
in provincial Santiago de Cuba and the Cuban capital of Havana. Two
million people live in the province of Havana, compared to one million
in the province of Santiago de Cuba.1 Havana is by far the main bureau-
cratic and administrative center of the country. Santiago de Cuba, located
on the opposite end of the island in the east (often referred to as
“el Oriente”) is the cultural and historical center of the eastern region
of the island. In comparison with Havana, which is home to varied
foreign capital and a booming tourist industry, Santiago de Cuba remains
economically stagnant.
Cubans across the island say that Santiago province is known to be
“darker-skinned.” Waves of agricultural laborers migrating from Haiti
and Jamaica to this region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to
find work on the area’s expanding sugar and coffee plantations explain
this demographic characteristic. Artistic currents from neighboring islands
of the Caribbean significantly influenced the province’s cultural land-

scape in ways that distinguish it from the capital, especially with respect
to music (Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo 1999–2000: 23). Oriente is
also the region where palenques —villages populated by escaped slaves
during the colonial era and until 1886 when slavery ended—were most
common on the island (La Rosa Corzo 1991). Santiago is commonly
believed to have the highest level of mestizaje (racial mixture) in Cuba,
and africanidad (Africanity) is said to be an especially strong component
of popular culture.
Housing Crisis in Cuba

According to the most recent statistics reported by Cuba’s National
Housing Institute, almost forty percent of the country’s residences are
in very poor or merely adequate condition (Díaz-Briquets 2014). The
scale of the problem is huge. Cubans constantly live with anxiety associ-
ated with overcrowding and gradual decay, not to mention the potential
collapse of their homes. Furthermore, although municipal authorities are
supposed to provide construction materials at subsidized prices to citizens
affected by building deterioration, collapses, or natural disasters such as
floods, winds, or hurricanes, there are endemic shortages of everything
from cement to rebar to plumbing and electrical necessities. Materials
are difficult, if not impossible, to find, often appearing only on the black
market and sold at high cost. Considering that the average monthly
salary for employees of the Cuban government—such as civil servants,
teachers and university professors, health sector professionals, garbage
collectors, and public transportation workers—ranges approximately from
USD $15 to $30 USD per month, construction and renovation projects
can last decades, as Cubans build their homes little by little with almost
no resources. There are no bank mortgages available in Cuba. Financing
for properties is considered as a loan, which means that dwellings cannot
be used as collateral (Hamberg 2011: 85). As shown in the following,
sections, despite the severe anxiety and distress associated with housing,
construction and renovation also give birth to vibrant stories of hope and
achievement.
There is broad literature on housing in Cuba from a historical,
economic, and statistical perspective (Fernández 1976; Roca 1979;
Hamberg 1986, 2011; Eckstein 2004). We learn from this literature
that the right to housing has been a priority for the regime since the
beginning of the Revolution in 1959. For instance, the Urban Reform

Law implemented in 1960 expropriated urban landowners and redis-
tributed dwellings (as a result, 50% of urban tenants became homeowners
according to Eckstein [in 2004]), and established very low price leases for
those still renting. However, new housing projects were costly and, at the
beginning of the post-1959 revolutionary era, there was an urgent need
to allocate resources to sectors such as health, education, and infrastruc-
ture projects such as dams and highways (Díaz-Briquets 2009; Hamberg
2011). Demand for housing increased with new generations, but govern-
mental allocations for housing become more difficult to fund. In the
1990s, the availability of cement, among other materials, was severely in
shortage, as were all imports of construction necessities (Díaz-Briquets
2009). Although this literature provides insightful background on the
current housing situation in Cuba (especially Luzón 1988; Eckstein
2004), no in-depth research has been conducted on how Cubans are
responding to their difficult housing situation and the very real impacts
it has on everyday lives in non-touristic ambits. This article is an attempt
to instigate a conversation about how poor housing conditions, construc-
tion work, and crumbling buildings—which are serious concerns for many
Cubans—can generate deeper understandings of the reality faced by citi-
zens in the fabric of their daily lives. More specifically, I consider issues
of duration, or how the entanglement of memories, materials, and local
stories from the past can lead to new ways of exploring possible futures.
Palimpsests and the Blurring

of Temporal Dimensions
Archaeology offers insightful theoretical explorations of the notion of
time and proposes ways to delve into how materials cross temporal and
spatial dimensions. Indeed, both archaeologists and paleoanthropolo-
gists dedicate themselves to investigate empirically how the properties of
archaeological data, and the context in which they are excavated, can
reveal events from the past. Here, the concept “event” is understood
as “material assemblages of people and objects that persist for shorter
or greater duration” (Lucas 2008: 62). It therefore refers to imagi-
naries of the past that are constituted by material traces left behind and
assembled together through time. I am interested in stimulating a conver-
sation about how, through innovative ethnographic methodologies, I can
investigate alternative ways of expressing a notion of time that is not
necessarily linear and forward. In other words, I wish to create a space

in which multiple understandings of how the future might be imagined
as fulfilled or collapsing can emerge and be discussed. The idea of “time
perspectivism” and more importantly here, the concept of palimpsest as
developed by the archaeologist Geoff Bailey (1981, 1983, 1987, 2007)
are especially useful and I base the following conversation on Bailey’s
work.
“Time perspectivism” shares similarities with the concept of cultural
relativism, common in social and cultural anthropology. This broadly
refers to the impact of the researcher’s positionality and background on
the process of conducting research. Similarly, “time perspectivism” is a
form of “subjective temporal awareness” (Bailey 2007), which can be
defined as “the belief that different timescales bring into focus different
sorts of processes, requiring different concepts and different sorts of
explanatory variables” (Bailey 1987: 7). “Time perspectivism” high-
lights the idea of the relativity of time, but also the positionality of the
researcher’s perspective in order to understand a phenomenon. Therefore,
to delve into the past, one has to recognize the following methodological
considerations as they have an impact on the knowledge that is produced:
The timescale of observation one is investigating and the temporal dimen-
sion in which one stands (Bailey 2007). To an extent, each individual has
a different conception of time, and as Bailey (2007: 202) points out, this
can cause challenges when conducting empirical research, and more so
for archaeologists and paleoanthropologists whose work is driven by a
quest for datation. Again, according to Bailey (2007: 202), the concept
of a “palimpsest” is associated with material universes that can help us
respond to temporal relativism. It provides a methodological basis from
which one can think about various compositional deposits within a flex-
ible conception of time as it considers the various forms of engagement
with the past, such as memories, storytelling, fiction, and dreams.
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “palimpsest” as a written docu-
ment that has been erased to be inscribed again. According to the
same source, it can also refer to “something having usually diverse
layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface.” Materials eliminated
by other superimposed layers, which are also subsequently eliminated
through time, is a key idea associated with the concept of palimpsest.
In other words, the concept of palimpsest considers the overlapping of
multiple variables through time despite the subsequent erasing of earlier
traces (Lucas 2005: 37). The superimpositions of meanings create new
temporal perceptions that may disrupt conventional ways of conceiving

our concepts of the sequence of time as artifacts found underground may
not be read as a linear and defined account of the past—some might have
disappeared while others are intermingled with one another. This does
create a sense of the present and by extension, of the future, that is not
based on solid grounds. In other words, imaginings of the future may
collapse, which implies that dreams and hopes may not be fulfilled. Bailey
(2007: 203) explains that from an archaeological perspective, palimpsests
are often perceived as a handicap. However, there is a way to learn from
palimpsests as they offer opportunities to “focus on a different scale of
behaviour” and to think about the structure of the material world (Bailey
1981: 110).
In Cuban Palimpsests, José Quiroga (2015) “digs” various sites, events,
and phenomenons, through photography, arts, and music (among others)
that give shape to collective Cuban memories. Quiroga uses the term
“palimpsests” in a metaphorical and methodological way to refer to the
blending of “ruins” overwriting each other into one continuous present.
He argues that the approach he develops in Cuban Palimpsests consists of
writing “the text of the present in a way that allows the older text to come
to the fore” (Quiroga 2005: ix). Temporal dimensions are then blended
in a non-chronological and linear order, each element complementing
another to reveal not the present as a reproduction of the original but
as a continuous assemblage of elements that carry on through time (to
paraphrase Ingold 2013). The past is then perceived as extending into
the present. The concept of duration of materials, memories, and other
events blurs the boundaries between past, present, and possible futures,
but also the reverse—the present and future extending into the past.
Similarly, the assemblages of materials found in two Cuban sites
discussed below—the excavation of a colonial house in Santiago de Cuba
and a collapsing building in Havana—provide the opportunity to delve
into a past that is still progressing today, and the present that leaks into
the past. Both sites reveal layered materials left behind and can serve as
a source of inspiration to both remember a shared historical past (associ-
ated with the experience of slavery) and times to come that allows citizens
to creatively engage with possible futures (paraphrasing Oman-Reagan
2018).
The Story of a Plumbing System

In 2015, my husband Noedy and I decided to buy a house in his home-
town Santiago de Cuba. We were convinced that it was the right moment
to purchase a property on the island because of recent regulations that
allowed Cubans to buy and sell their house for the first time since the
beginning of the Revolution.2
We found a colonial-style house built in 1902 located in the historical
center of Santiago de Cuba in the price range that corresponded to our
limited budget. The owners, a three-generational family, were moving to
Havana in search of better opportunities. We decided to move forward
with the legal purchase of the property and my husband signed the papers
at the lawyer’s office.3 I remember how excited we were to enter our
new home and to plan to live there. However, our “dream came true”
exhilaration lasted only a few weeks. Our house began to reveal, bit by
bit, an alarming level of decay, caused by years of lack of maintenance.
In Cuba, the sale of properties usually takes place between the owner,
the buyer, and the lawyer’s office. No other intermediaries such as a prop-
erty agent are officially involved. Although there are people who dedicate
themselves to finding homes in exchange for a certain percentage of the
sale, being a real estate agent is not a legal profession in Cuba. No inspec-
tion of the building by a knowledgeable specialist is required at the time
of signing the home sale documents. Acquaintances with knowledge of
construction work gave us feedback, but in retrospect, I realize that we
were totally ignorant about the state of the house we had purchased.
A series of unfortunate events slowly revealed the reality of owning
an old home in Cuba. Some of the disastrous early events included the
collapse of the kitchen’s walls and part of its roof, the discovery that our
water cistern was made with asbestos cement, and leaking ceilings pretty
much everywhere. But the event that really broke our spirit—and actu-
ally made us weep in despair—is when one of the ceramic tiles of the
bathroom floor collapsed under my husband’s weight. With the help of
a flashlight, we discovered, to our great disgust, that the bathroom floor
was actually suspended on top of a 2-foot tall empty crawlspace, and to
make matters worse, the house did not have a plumbing system. We were
told that natural filtration through the soil was a common way of dealing
with wastewater during the colonial period. Thus, we began a long chain
of meetings with architects, construction workers, and civil servants of the
municipality, to decide what could be done to save the house. We finally
decided that we had no choice but to destroy sixty percent of it (which

ended up becoming one-hundred percent a few years later, but that is
another story) and to reconstruct from the ground up, an adventure in
which we are still entrenched after five years of stress and hard work, not
to mention money. Needless to say that if one day we make it to the end,
our house will not be “colonial” anymore.
In addition to the poor condition of our house, the sanitation,
drainage, and water system infrastructures of the city of Santiago de Cuba
are probably among the most archaic in the country (in Cueto and De
Leon 2010). Residents do not have access to running water on a contin-
uous basis. Instead, running water is distributed by the piping system of
the city whenever it is available. As a consequence, people are forced to
store large amounts of water in cisterns (on rooftops and buried under-
ground), or in tanks, and/or plastic containers because they do not know
when city systems will be running. Due to the poor state of city infras-
tructure, water needs for the population are not met (Cueto and De Leon
2010). The disastrous situation of the water distribution system repre-
sents only the tip of the iceberg. This is background context to better
understand the stories emerging from the belowground excavation of the
plumbing system of our house, which was completed over the course of
five weeks.
Digging into the Underground

Plumbers and other construction workers have only basic materials and
tools to do their job. Often without shoes, using old shovels and no
other instruments, plumbers dig through the soil to remove the dirt and
make their way below the ground level, excavating trenches of 2 meters
deep and 30 cm wide, big enough to insert the PVC pipes and connec-
tions. Constructing our plumbing system made me think of building an
underground highway from the back of the house to the street. Plumbers
made sure there was a natural slope from the front of the house to facili-
tate, thanks to gravity, the expulsion of used water and sewage (Fig. 10.1).
Construction work is physically demanding and often includes long hours
in poor conditions whether working under the tropical sun or waiting
until night to avoid the heat (Fig. 10.2). However, most construction
workers are self-employed and thus generally earn a better living than
state employees, and can make an acceptable wage according to Cuban
standards.4
Fig. 10.1 Trench dug in the living room toward the front façade of the house
(Photo by Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier)
Fig. 10.2 Plumbers working long shifts until night to avoid the summer heat
(Photo by Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier)
We dug a water cistern of approximately 12,000 liters, as well as twelve

holes of three meters deep each—or until we met “firm soil”—to build
columns that would become the backbone of our new house.5 However,
it was during the digging of the trenches to install the plumbing that
I heard most of the stories emerging from belowground. My husband,
my son, and I decided to remain in the house during the digging of the
plumbing system and as a result, we spent a lot of time with the plumbers,
Ariel and Juan, sharing conversations and stories with them along the
way. Both Ariel and Juan are fathers of young children and they live in a
popular neighborhood called Martí. Ariel used to have dreadlocks but had
them cut when he spent time in jail. He was accused of peligrosidad social
(social dangerousness) an all-embracing offense that includes hanging out
with foreigners or in parks where tourists spend time. The plumbers and
my husband, all Afro-Cubans, got excited at telling each other stories
related to the underground, and as they dug deeper, their minds seemed
to awaken a shared historical past.
As the workers dug the trenches, they found evidences of older
constructions lying below our house what Bailey (2007) would probably
identify as a “cumulative” palimpsest. This did not only happen during
the excavation of the plumbing system but also when we dug holes to
find “firm soil.” As they dug down, the construction workers found
other foundations (Fig. 10.3), and also various porcelain artifacts, such
as bottles made of ceramic (Fig. 10.4) and bones (unidentified). They
also found a chamber made of wood buried at the back of our house,
swamped in dirty and putrid black water. We had no choice but to fill
some of the holes with dry soil without pushing our excavation further.
The plumbers and other construction workers on our site, as well as
my husband, began to speculate on how we could explain the presence
of other layers of ancient livable spaces under our house. Neighbors also
reported to us that they found similar artifacts while digging in their back-
yard. And everybody seems to have an anecdote to tell about one of these
ceramic bottles, which seemed to have been a beer container—an inscrip-
tion at the bottom of the ones we found indicates that they were brought
from Scotland (Fig. 10.4). The presence of traces of earlier past life below
our house opened the door to stories about past events that some might
remember from what they learned at school, but most stories seem to
have been transmitted through informal conversations among friends and
family.
Fig. 10.3 Remaining foundation made of bricks probably from a previous

house built under the current house (Photo by Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier)
Fig. 10.4 Sample of artifacts found in the ground while digging. Bottles made
of ceramics (Photo by Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier)
Stories from Belowground

The city of Santiago de Cuba is built on the north side of the Bartlett-
Cayman fault zone, which divides the North American and the Caribbean
tectonic plates. This means that Santiago de Cuba is located within an
active seismic region and that the earth frequently moves. Santiagueros
are used to this, but that does not mean they are not nervous about it.
The poor condition of buildings and houses means that when the earth
shakes, even if not at high magnitude, walls, bricks, and parts of balconies
can easily fall, causing injuries and sometimes more serious fatalities. In
January 2016, a series of earthquakes shook Santiago de Cuba and the
population slept in parks and open areas because of fears that their houses
would collapse on them at night time.
During an encounter I had with the historian Olga Portuondo Zúñiga
at her home in Santiago de Cuba, she explained how it was common
after violent earthquakes—and Santiago has known a few—to construct
new dwellings on top of the rubble. For instance, it is reported that an
earthquake of a magnitude of 7.2 on the Richter scale took place in 1852
leaving the city covered in a cloud of dust and with “not one liveable
house” (Portuondo Zúñiga 2014: 250). A new city center was recon-
structed above the rubble. Other violent earthquakes were reported after
the one of 1852, and something similar must have happened with our
house. As plumbers made their way into the palimpsest of artifacts prob-
ably left behind after each of the house’s collapses, new stories and dreams
of encountering valuables unfolded with passion.
In addition to earthquakes, the plumbers also thought that pirates
could have voluntarily buried their treasure in Cuban soil. “What if we
find a treasure buried below?” asked Juan, one of the plumbers. “Why
do you think I keep an eye on what you do?” responded my husband,
bursting with laugher. The thought of finding hidden treasures buried
below the ground became a common theme among the workers. Like the
thought of winning the lottery that for some evokes the hope of fulfilling
irrational dreams, a buried treasure was stimulating the faith of being able
to “move forward” in life (ir pa’lente). Cubans know about pirate raids
in the Caribbean and in Cuba before and during the Spanish colonial
era. The cinematographic Hollywood success Pirates of the Caribbean also
helps feed this imaginary of bandits and hidden treasures. However, few
people in Santiago de Cuba know that pirates, more specifically English
privateers, raided the city on various occasions: Christopher Cleeve in
1602, Christopher Myngs in 1662, and the famous Henry Morgan who
probably took part in Myngs’ fleet and other attacks at the beginning
of the 1660s, in Santiago de Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean and
Central America. Without knowing all the historical details, the plumbers
imagined the implausible possibility that pirates may have buried a trea-
sure under the ground during one of their raids in Santiago de Cuba.
They hoped that their work, digging into the ground, might provide
an opportunity to find old valuables, which for them meant gold and
jewels. Finding such a treasure would transform their lives; it would bring
economic stability for them and their families. In digging into the stories
of the valuable objects pirates might have left behind, possibly below
ground, they resolve the difficulty of living the present in imagining a
future that is more hopeful. The stories created excitement among the
workers (and my husband) who lively discussed other reports—probably
fictitious—of treasures and precious objects supposedly found under-
ground. Unfortunately, no treasure was discovered below our house. The
hopeful future imagined by plumbers collapsed as their job ended. Yet,
they did not seem to lose faith while other stories fed their imaginaries.
Slavery was also a theme that came out in the stories told by the
workers, who were all Afro-Cubans. It was assumed that because of the
size of the plot of our land and its location in the city center, the house
must have been owned by a rich and/or professional family. During the
demolition (and its collapse) of some sections of our house, we found a
brass sign with the following inscription: “Dr. Raúl Obregón, Pediatri-
cian.” Most probably, a doctor owned our house at one point in time,
and patients received treatments in one of its rooms. One of the stories
told by the plumbers was how it was a common thing to bury the corpse
of deceased patients who passed away during a treatment at the back of
the doctor’s house (exactly where we were digging at the time of the
search for “firm soil”). Dead horses and animals that people kept in their
backyard would know a similar fate. According to the workers, this would
explain the presence of bones we found in the ground toward the back of
the house.
Considering the social status of the people who used to live in our
colonial house, the plumbers thought the owners probably had slaves
working for them. According to Juan, it was common for a family to
bury their wealth below the ground in a type of chamber—like the one
we found—and, also according to Juan, to bury one of their slaves alive
with it. Although this idea seemed strange to everybody present at the
time, it conveyed the level of cruelty and exploitation associated with

the shared memory of slavery. In equating a slave’s life with objects
that could be buried in the ground in order to be protected “forever,”
Juan insinuated that slavery was part of a cruel enterprise. Juan belongs
to the Rastafarianism ideology and religion, which is not common in
Cuba. This Afro-centric belief system might have influenced the rela-
tively unusual opinions he adopted in relation to slavery and race. That’s
because race and racism are not usually discussed publicly in Cuba. In
fact, I rarely heard people articulating a discourse based on black empow-
erment in Santiago de Cuba. In conversing about what people used to
bury in the ground (including alive slaves and dead animals), the plumbers
connected their present with a past covered in blood. They told each
other stories about a colonial history that indirectly speaks to contem-
porary racism, a history that is not taught at school and/or discussed
openly in the media and in public spaces. Afro-Cubans know about the
history of slavery in Cuba and in the Americas. However, many believe
that racism does not exist anymore even if they are Afro-Cubans. The
underground freed stories of slavery and provided a rare opportunity to
intimate contemporary racism.
Racial concerns, including the history of slavery, tend to be silenced
in Cuba, but that does not mean that racism does not exist today (de
la Fuente 1998, 2001; see also Moore 2003, 2006; Zurbano 2013,
among others). The silence on race originates in large part from a politics
of inclusion that was implemented by the Cuban revolutionary govern-
ment. In reality, race did not so much figure in the agenda of Fidel
Castro and the rebels who took power in 1959. Yet, their commitment to
social justice highly affected the black population, as they were overrepre-
sented in the lowest economic strata of Cuban society. For instance, the
implementation of social policies not primarily directed at racial inequal-
ities, such as housing programs, literacy campaigns, and free health care,
considerably improved the condition of many Afro-Cubans. In a speech
delivered in March 1959, Castro called on Cubans to eliminate racial
discrimination. This speech, according to Alejandro de la Fuente, “cre-
ated unprecedented opportunities to challenge traditional patterns of race
relations in Cuba” (2001: 264). The same year, institutionalized racial
discrimination was officially eliminated. Afro-Cubans were given imme-
diate access to formerly restricted spaces such as beaches and parks. In
1962, Fidel Castro declared in the “Second Declaration of Havana” that
the Revolution had officially “suppressed” racial discrimination on the

island (de la Fuente 1998: 61).
It is clear that racism in the private sphere could hardly have been
eliminated by the new regime in such a short period of time. But, in the
public sphere, there was a sense that racism was a remnant of the past
and that it would soon fade away completely. The revolutionary regime’s
circulated idea was that racism would disappear when class distinctions
ceased to exist (Pérez Sarduy and Stubbs 2000). When institutionalized
class privileges were eliminated, racism and discrimination became “things
of the past.” Discussing racial matters in public became taboo, as the
government had (supposedly) officially eliminated racism. To talk about
the continuation of racial discrimination became off-limits. A politics of
silence was imposed, and race became a non-issue (de la Fuente 1998,
2001). In other words, mentioning race in public discourse was a threat
to national revolutionary unity.
Despite the official silence on race in the social and political spheres,
many Afro-Cubans express their racial identities in various ways. Indeed,
there is a need for contemporary Afro-Cubans to articulate a black
perspective (Pérez Sarduy and Stubbs 2000) and this can be expressed
through religion, arts (for instance, theater; see the interview with Elvira
Cervera in Pérez Sarduy and Stubbs 2000), and music (among others).
Since the 1990s, there has been a rise in the number of Cubans (both
whites and non-whites) joining Afro-Cuban religions such as Santería. But
it is music that remains the most political and radical choice of expression
for young blacks. Rap and reggae music has become a means of asserting
the Afro-Cuban voice and presence. Stories associated with slavery, such
as the ones told by Juan and the other workers while they were digging
belowground, also evoke past collective experiences; they can become a
platform to express injustices of the past at the same time as they empower
the storyteller to imagine a more inclusive future. Like a palimpsest, these
stories add to layers of the past and create new expectancies and hopes
for the days to come. Yet, nothing indicates that this imagined future is
constructed on solid grounds. The plumbers who worked on our house
know this too well as they and their family are subject to racism in their
everyday lives. As suggested above, race in Cuba is complex—as is the
issue of class—in part, because of the political landscape of the country
and also because of historical conjunctures. Juan was aware of the multiple
faces racism can take in Cuban contemporary society. In many ways, he
knew that the stories from the past, shared by Afro-Cubans, may leak into
uncertain futures.
The Beat of Collapse: Experimental

Approaches to Ethnography
In Spanish, derrumbar means to crumble away, to tumble down. In
playing with the “sound of the moment,” Inay Rodríguez Agramonte,
alias DJ Jigüe, and myself created and remodeled what we called “the beat
of collapse” by using artifacts found in an abandoned building—today
demolished—located on Neptuno Street in the city center of Havana.
We called our sonic collage “Derrumbeat,” which was made of sounds
exclusively recorded on site, mixed and blended with electronic beats
and sound effects. More specifically, the sound of falling rocks, pieces
of wood, cements, and ceramics recorded on site provided the source of
our beats. Sound composition, distortion, and manipulation in the studios
gave birth to a sonic and aesthetic experience. This sanctuary of garbage
and human traces gave us a breeze of inspiration. Indeed, the process
of creating the Derrumbeat project contrasts with digging a plumbing
system. Yet, I argue that in both cases new negotiations of the past that
lead toward imaginings of possible and desirable futures—but always in
danger of collapse—are articulated.
The Derrumbeat project aimed at reflecting on the potential of
research-creation—or arts-based research—a methodology associated
with artistic disciplines such as visual and media arts, theater, dance, and
music, as well as with architecture and design, and which in the current
case involved the close relationship between an artist (DJ Jigüe) and an
anthropologist (myself) in the production of a common project.
Research-creation encourages anthropologists to engage with the
spaces in which they conduct fieldwork through creation—in addition to,
or instead of, the more common participant observation approach associ-
ated with the discipline. Research-creation requires an immersive strategy,
one in which we place ourselves within the study and which provides the
opportunity to expand beyond either just a simple cataloging or a purely
theoretical examination. Arts-based research and collaboration between
artists and anthropologists conducting research together, as is the case
in the current project, can open novel ways of imagining the fieldwork
enterprise. The process of editing sounds and images into original compo-
sitions and clips for instance can be approached as part of the practice of
ethnography and can reveal layers of meanings that are not necessarily
attainable through more traditional ethnographic methods (Drever 2002;
also Boudreault-Fournier 2012, 2016a, b; Boudreault-Fournier and Wees

2017).
I argue that sonic and audio-visual production offers ways to engage
with a space, and by extension, to learn from it through sensorial experi-
ences. The collaborative approach we adopted in the abandoned RCA
Victor building can potentially open up the layers of time and help
expose stories articulated in a sonic aesthetic that may also speak to
possible futures. This approach provides an empowering way to expose
relationships with various temporal dimensions.
The RCA old building attracted my attention while I conducted field-
work in Havana for the MusDig research project about digital music
consumption and circulation (Boudreault-Fournier 2017).6 DJ Jigüe, an
Afro-Cuban electronic music producer, worked as a research assistant
on the MusDig project. I had known DJ Jigüe for more than fifteen
years when we took the freedom to experiment with our own collabora-
tive efforts that aimed at bridging arts and anthropology. Because of DJ
Jigüe’s natural proclivity for electronic music composition, we decided to
further explore the potential of sound as communicating a sense of place
in collapse.
A huge sign proclaiming “RCA Victor” was fixed to the front of
the three-story abandoned building at the time. I could not help but
wonder what happened to this historical building. I talked to DJ Jigüe
about adventuring inside the building. We asked the permission to clothes
vendors squatting at the entrance of the building to let us pass. As soon
as we went in and climbed the second floor, both DJ Jigüe and myself
felt inspired by the crumbling site (Figs. 10.5 and 10.6).
The building was in an advanced state of decay and there were a
lot of piles of garbage everywhere mixed with parts of fallen ceilings.
During our first visit, we recorded the sounds of the place as well as
objects and parts of the building peeling and crumbling onto the floor.
We also organized four recording sessions inside the building with musi-
cians we invited, a saxophonist, a flutist, a bassist, and a percussionist.
These multiple recordings gave DJ Jigüe the sonic material to compose
an original sound track, involving sound effects that we superimposed
on video images of the site.7 Sound compositions, albeit more abstract
than video clips, are well suited to highlight “people’s sensory experiences
and mental worlds in […] expressive and relational ways” (Eylul 2014:
127). The process of producing the sound clip as well as the compo-
sition itself became material to further explore various layers embedded
Fig. 10.5 Second floor of the RCA building before its demolition (Photo by
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier)
Fig. 10.6 Close up on some of the artifacts found on the floor of the RCA
building before its demolition (Photo by Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier)
in the aesthetic, the texture, and the messages that remain in this sonic
counterpoint. In other words, the process through which we produced
the sound composition became my ethnographic fieldwork. Anthropolo-
gists should consider sonic ways of sharing experiences and interpretations
via sound when they emerge from ethnographies conducted in sound
(following the invitation made by Feld 1996). In exploring the poten-
tial of arts-based research, and more specifically sound recording and
editing in combination with video, anthropologists may stimulate new
ways of sensing, experiencing, and learning that cannot be compared to
the written form and that can sometimes be difficult to express with words
only (Boudreault-Fournier 2019).
In digging into the artistic influences of DJ Jigüe, I discovered how
many layers of one’s history can generate particular aesthetics to sonic
expressions. Early in his career, when DJ Jigüe was still living in Santiago
de Cuba, he was inspired by old-school hip-hop culture and philos-
ophy. Today, he defines his art as expressing a “tropical afro-futuristic”
aesthetic and ideology, tracing his most recent influences to afro-futurism,
a movement that was first named by Mark Dery (1994) but which has its
origins in the 1970s. At the time, African-American musicians like George
Clinton, Lee Perry, Sun Ra, and Herbie Hancock—all musicians DJ Jigüe
admires—were inspired by science fiction, electronic instruments, and
experiences of racial marginalization to forge an aesthetic of afro-futurism.
One of the peculiarities of afro-futurism is the reification of a trau-
matic past that is consistent with the idea that the experience of black
diasporic communities is essentially one of alienation, where blacks had
already experienced a sort of science fiction story when they were forcibly
deported to the Americas. The alienation of black diasporas in the New
World has propelled an ideology of the future that allows the recovery of
an alternative past to change the future. Here, the slave trade is rein-
terpreted in terms of kidnapping by extraterrestrials and the Americas
are perceived as another planet. Afro-futurism is in communion with a
long history in black popular culture that proposes the reinvention of
black history in an identity mythology that deconstructs the paradigms
associated with the West.
Afro-futurism represents the gap between the past and the future. This
movement resists, from a conceptual point of view, divorce of the future
from the past. It is by re-visiting the palimpsests of the past that the future
can remain an inclusive imaginary space where new visions can take shape
(Dery 1994). The future becomes a creative space that allows actors to
deconstruct barriers and historical models that have placed them in a

marginalized position. The future proposed by afro-futurism is shaped
by an ideology of inclusion and participation, and this also applies to the
discipline of anthropology. As explained by David Colón-Cabrera (2018;
n.d), who defines himself as a queer man of color, “Afrofuturism provides
inspiration for some of us in anthropology to see ourselves in the future,
in a way that many intellectual movements neglect.” In identifying himself
with a “tropical afro-futuristic” aesthetic, a term he invented, DJ Jigüe
appropriates the ideological foundation of the “afro-futurist” movement,
but he makes it his own in relation with the Cuban context in which he
lives.
The composition of a sonic track based on recordings in collapsing
building, and as part of a collaborative ethnographic-artistic effort,
engages with a possible methodology that takes the palimpsests of the past
as a source of inspiration to better sense the present and open up to future
desires and possible collapses. In listening to DJ Jigüe’s composition, one
travels in a broken rhythm world that is full of futurist effects, jump cuts,
and electronic sounds. It is a sonic palimpsest that speaks to a future DJ
Jigüe is in full possession as he fabricates the sounds of advanced tech-
nologies, robots and spaceships—the sounds of tomorrow. The repeated
sounds of collapsing objects remind the listener of how Cubans antic-
ipate a better future in uncertain times. The Derrumbeat composition
is a sonic expression of the afro-futurist project. Therefore, much more
than a building in devastation, the sonic experience highlights the poetic
traces of human passage, the rejuvenation of decay, and layers of mean-
ings occupying this site. In the present case, a tropical afro-futurist sonic
and electronic aesthetic, as DJ Jigüe came to label it, led the way toward
creative engagements that blended the weight of the past with a hopeful
future. Experimental methodologies like sound recording and composi-
tions, as well as collaborative approaches, contribute to the bridging of
various temporalities, in addition to adding layers of exploration, delving
into palimpsests of possible futures.
Conclusion: Possible Collapses

Similar to José Quiroga in Cuban Palimpsets (2015) who delves into
multiple memories, events, and art forms to bring forth an assemblage of
the present, I combine various traces found in belowground and in ruins,
to explore how anthropologists can think about investigating possible
futures. The precariousness Cubans face in the context of poor housing

and the possible collapse of their homes echoes how they imagine and act
to build possible futures that are always in risk of collapse. In this general
atmosphere of possible collapse, Cubans find a way to express their hopes
through stories that emerge from the palimpsests of everyday life. The
two cases described in this article show different angles of possible futures,
and how they can be addressed from an anthropological perspective and
in combining various conceptions of time. The excavation of a plumbing
system in a colonial house suggests that stories can emerge from what is
silenced and buried way below. In digging below ground, one meets the
assemblage of materials that give shape to a palimpsest, incomplete and
blurred, but also entangled with stories of collective pasts and of various
temporal dimensions. The role of the anthropologist while accompanying
the exploration of these palimpsests is to weave the stories that emerge
into the various textures, as well as relating them with what is unfolding
above the ground at the time when people stand and look down the
trench.
During the RCA collaborative sound experiment, I also engaged with
the decay and collapse associated with the precarious housing situation in
Cuba. However, this experiment went a step further than highlighting
the presence of stories buried in the underground. It suggested that
arts-based methodologies can potentially push the boundaries of what
anthropologists usually consider as traditional methodologies (e.g., obser-
vation, participant observation, interviews). It proposed other forms
of telling stories that are not necessarily verbal and written but that
still provide ways to dig into the various layers of a palimpsest and
consequently into the past and possible futures in the making. More
specifically, sound design and composition can generate abstract and
sensorial materials that are not commonly “analyzed” from an anthropo-
logical perspective. Yet, I argue that they provide alternative ways to sense
and delve into emotions, memories, and collective stories of the past that
can complement more traditional methodological strategies. As argued by
Johannes Fabian (1983), the discipline of anthropology must be carried
out on the basis of coevalness, the idea of sharing the same time and space
with the collaborators and participants involved in our research projects.
In addition, Fabian (1983) encourages us to rethink ethnography not as
a research method based on observation, but using communication skills
that involve speaking and listening. In the two case studies I outline in
this article, this means listening to the stories that emerge from below-
ground and also to other forms of communication. Collaborative work
based on the production of sounds and images are examples of alterna-
tive methods that can convey layers of stories and memories entangled
into the palimpsest of life. From a metaphorical or a more tangible and
archaeological perspective, the concept of palimpsest as well as the various
ways one can engage with it—storytelling, sound, and image production
for instance—offers the possibility of entering into the buried past as it
persists into the present and the future.
Notes
1. Oficina Nacional de Estadística e información, República de Cuba, censo
2012. http://www.one.cu/resumenadelantadocenso2012.htm, retrieve
November 5, 2015.
2. From the Revolution in 1959 until recently in 2011, Cubans could only
purchase housing in a government-controlled subsidized market or through
a permuta, a process of trading one home for another. But, following a
change in national property laws in 2011, Cubans can now legally own
and sell their homes.
3. As a non-Cuban citizen, I am not entitled to co-own the house even
though I am married to a Cuban citizen.
4. Over recent years, in an attempt to trim bloated ranks of state workers, the
economically strapped Cuban state has been slowly expanding legal cate-
gories of self-employment on the island. While most state workers attempt
to augment their meager salaries by engaging in strategies such as bartering
with neighbors, re-selling items garnered from their workplaces, or offering
small services such as baking cakes (those lucky enough to own a func-
tioning oven) or giving pedicures, full-time self-employment is still not
common in socialist Cuba. Construction and renovations workers repre-
sent something of an exception, since most are self-employed; their services
available to those families who have managed to gather enough money to
afford assistance with renovation or structural projects.
5. At a certain depth, the soil is enough solid to provide a base on which the
structure of a house is built.
6. The MusDig research program led by Professor Georgina Born was funded
by a European Research Council Advanced Grant, based at the University
of Oxford, UK. More information about this large-scale research program
can be found on the MusDig web page (www.musdig.music.ox.ac.uk).
7. Images of the site and the original track are available at https://vimeo.
com/315319530.
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February 4, 2019.
CHAPTER 11
Absence, Magic, and Impossible Futures
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston
Absence
Absence is a strange thing. A magical thing. It has green eyes and glossy,
pointy shoes. It sleeps in the day and prowls at night, like a cat. It creaks
in a door’s hinges and lurks in mirrors. It spitefully scorns the bird in the
puddle where he friskily preens himself. It clings to you like sap and, just
when you think you’ve finally scraped it off, it hops on your back to hitch
a ride into the future.
This paper, situated at the intersection of anthropology and perfor-
mance studies, explores the role of absence in the imaginings of impos-
sible futures. Rather than treating absence as purely immaterial, I explore
the generative capacity of absence by reflecting on my own grief following
the death of my absent father. I recount how grief constituted a magical
performance of absence that found a past that never was and sought out
a future that would never be. While current anthropological scholarship
has marginalized the role of the body in the experience of absence, the
embodied, affective, and imaginative dimensions of absence are central to
M. Kazubowski-Houston (B)
York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: mkazubow@yorku.ca

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4_11
256 M. KAZUBOWSKI-HOUSTON
my analysis. I treat the ephemerality of absence as a lived and felt materi-

ality that has the power to choreograph our lives, challenge our ways of
knowing and call into question what we hold as real and unreal, memory
and confabulation, truth and magic. In doing so, I hold performing
absence to be a significant worldmaking practice that reimagines and
intervenes in futures.
As a brief ethnographic memoir, this chapter draws attention to my
own lived experience as having an emplaced, embodied, imaginative,
and agentic capacity (Culhane 2017: 49; Katzman 2015; Kazubowski-
Houston 2018a, b; Pink 2015). It is based on the field notes, diary
entries and poetic prose I wrote over a period of sixteen months after
learning of my father’s death, which together document the activities,
thoughts, sensations, and feelings I experienced during that period. My
analysis draws on approaches in anthropology and performance studies
that address the omission of absence in posthumanist and new materi-
alist thought, which primarily is concerned with the agency of things that
are present (Bennett 2004; Coole 2013; Coole and Frost 2010; Latour
2005). Posthumanism and new materialism have challenged modernity’s
dichotomous distinction between human/nonhuman, nature/culture,
and animate/inanimate by holding that objects and things (“actants”)
have their own lives, forces, purposes, goals, and randomness that exist
alongside, apart from and in opposition to their human counterparts
(Schweitzer and Zerdy 2014: 1–17). The agency of absence, however,
has been largely overlooked in this body of literature, an omission some
attribute to the difficulty of engaging with absence beyond a discursive
level that relies on human agency. And it is this human agency—
anthropocentric and social constructivist—that posthumanists and new
materialists seek to challenge (Bille et al. 2010: 25). Yet, we know that
absence can assert its presence as powerfully as material things do. Just
as one can trip over the root of a tree on a running path, one can “trip”
over absence; the sudden absence of people on a busy city street can have a
powerful object-like presence (ibid.: 26–7). Absences do not reside merely
at the discursive level: they perform labor that challenges, instigates
action, and wields concrete material effects. Immateriality and materiality
are interrelated and, thus, absence can only be revealed through presence
(ibid.: 28).
While the question of absence is not extensively discussed in anthro-
pology, an edited volume by Mikkel Bille and colleagues (2010) is quite
insightful. The contributors to the volume focus on the presence of things
11 ABSENCE, MAGIC, AND IMPOSSIBLE FUTURES 257
that have been absent, arguing that what is absent is always important
to people’s lives on a sensual, emotional, and intellectual level, which
is evident in the multiplicity of societal discourses, rituals of remem-
brance and performances that re-enact the past and/or reimagine the
future (ibid.: 3–4). They carefully trace the power that absence can have
on people’s daily lives and its ability to ground us in what is present.
Drawing on the work of existentialist and structuralist philosophers, they
write of “the paradox [of] … the presence of absence” (ibid.: 4). Particu-
larly influential have been the ideas of Søren Kierkegaard ([1843] 1988),
who saw absence as a sign of longing that is part and parcel of social rela-
tions; Arthur Schopenhauer ([1818] 1966: 196), for whom absence and
the resulting longing are inextricably linked to suffering; Jean-Paul Sartre
([1943] 2005: 34), who drew attention to how absent things can make
that which is present disappear; and Jacques Derrida (1973: 129–60),
who saw presence as in relation to absence.
Bille and colleagues (2010: 17) caution us not to conflate absence
with the immaterial or hold it in opposition to presence and empir-
ical matter, since absence and presence defy rigid classifications. They
stress that we need to attend to “the complex intersections, repudiations,
and tensions between what is considered present and absent in people’s
everyday lives” (ibid.: 18). Salt, for example, embodies the simple togeth-
erness of plurality in which absence and presence co-exist and permeate
each other “through colour, taste, shape, weight, texture” (Meskell 2010:
208). Tim Flohr Sørensen (2010: 211–12) argues that empty spaces
left on a gravestone have the potential to serve as a means of creating
an immediate bond between the dead and the living. In anticipating a
reunion of those separated by death, they render both the deceased and
the bereaved absent, once again complicating any rigid division between
presence and absence, materiality and immateriality, past and present.
Finally, Bille and colleagues (2010: 212) stress that absence and loss
cannot be solely seen in terms of mourning and nostalgia because they can
also constitute important future-focused practices through which people
reimagine themselves and their communities. Looking back to the past is
as much about imagining a future as about living in the present.
I am also inspired by perspectives on absence that draw attention to
the invisible dimensions of theater and performance. Andrew Sofer (2013:
3), for example, borrows the notion of “dark matter,” which in astronomy
signifies the nonluminous mass whose gravitational pull holds the galaxies
together, to describe “the invisible dimension of theater that escapes visual
detection, even though its effects are felt anywhere in performance.”

Theater, Sofer (ibid.: 3) continues, deals with present and “corporeal stuff
(bodies, fluids, gases, objects), [but] it also incorporates the incorporeal:
offstage spaces and action, absent characters, the narrated past, halluci-
nations, blindness, obscenity, godhead, and so on.” This “dark matter”
plays an active role in theatrical representation while holding power over
our imaginations (ibid.).
Sofer (ibid.) ultimately proposes what he calls “spectral reading” (5)—
“a phenomenology of the unseen” (6)—that attends to what unseen
matter does, rather than what it means, namely, how it affects audience
members viscerally and sensuously. He argues that invisible matter haunts
and holds together a theatrical event in the same way that the dark matter
of the universe holds together its galaxies; theater is just as much an
“invisibility machine” as it is a “memory machine” (ibid.: 7). The work-
ings of invisible matter are writ large in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for
Godot, where Godot, an offstage character for whose arrival Vladimir and
Estragon wait the entire play, never arrives, but his expected arrival drives
the action of the play (ibid.: 24).
Drawing on the aforementioned approaches, this chapter traces the
agency of absence I encountered following the death of my estranged
father. Exploring absence as an affective materiality that mischievously
plays with you when least expected, I pay close attention to its visceral
and sensuous affects. I find the performance lens to be particularly useful
in thinking about my experience of absence, as it can draw attention
to how absence can throw one into a liminal space between the past
and the future, life and death, and reality and magic. Inspired by Marlis
Schweitzer’s (2014: 38) notion of the “choreographic thing,” which
considers the agency of theatrical things in terms of movement and
vitality, I draw attention to how absence can choreograph presence.
Father
I met my father only twice, each time for about an hour. I was twenty
years old and he was fifty-six, and he was living in a town that was a two-
hour train ride from my home at the time. My mother and father had
been married for eight years before I was born. Although a promising
chemist, he fell into alcoholism and my mother left him when I was six
months old. Under state socialism in Poland, alcoholism was prevalent,
especially among men, as the government used alcohol as a panacea for
social and economic ills by making it widely available and relatively afford-
able (Bielinska-Kwapisz and Mielecka-Kubien 2011). This was all I knew
about my father. I had no contact with his family either. My mother rarely
spoke about him and I rarely asked. She had a serious heart condition, a
complication of a childhood illness that remained undiagnosed until her
late forties. I did not bother asking her about the past, as I had a future
to worry about.
Somehow, I got used to my father’s absence. In fact, his absence had
become so ordinary that I could hardly imagine life otherwise. But that
absence was also filled with the future, as I always knew I would meet my
father one day. I was convinced that he was waiting for me somewhere,
although I had no evidence to back up my conviction. I lived with the
anticipation that one day he would unexpectedly appear in my life, just
like that, and never leave again. Many a night, I would lie in bed listening
to the hinges creaking on my bedroom door, wondering if it was him
trying to come in. Once, when brushing my teeth, I looked in the mirror
and saw a strange shadow flash in the distance. I immediately thought it
was him passing by. For many of my childhood years, I kept searching for
the shadow in that mirror. I even took a photograph of the mirror, hoping
that the camera could catch an image that my naked eye could not. I
am not sure if ever saw that shadow in the mirror again, but I think I
convinced myself that I did. In fact, I remember spotting a similar shadow
in the puddle by my school’s gate where I watched a bird preening itself.
This time, the shadow appeared as a face on the water’s surface, teasingly
looking up at the bird. I even wondered if the face was teasing the bird or
me. But once I approached the puddle, the shadow disappeared. Again, I
was certain it was my father.
The first time I went to visit my father was a few months after my
maternal grandmother had passed away. Somehow, when I thought of
her, I also thought of him. Perhaps I hoped that bringing him back into
my life would bring my grandmother back too, as if the absent were
connected by a magical rope. When I met him, I was astounded he was
not wearing glossy, pointy shoes. He wore them in that old photograph
of him standing in my grandmother’s garden, the only one of him I had.
He did have green eyes, like my mother had told me. That was my first
encounter with the deceitfulness of absence.
Our reunion did not go as I had hoped, and after my second visit, we
never met or spoke to each other again. He resumed being absent, like
he had always been, until one day in January of 2016, nearly twenty-five
years later. I came to my office to prepare for a graduate seminar I was

teaching. I checked my email and found a message from my father’s niece,
who I did not know existed, that my father had died a year earlier. She
had been unable to locate me until now. I closed my laptop and went to
class. I needed to open my computer to retrieve my seminar notes but
somehow could not. My father was in there. He was in the laptop, but he
was also dead. I could not face him in class, dead or alive. So, I improvised
the seminar instead. After the class, I ran into a colleague who asked me
if I was okay. I blurted out that my father had died, but that it was not a
big deal because I did not really know him. It was not a big deal at all.
The next day, the cousin who had informed me about my father’s
passing sent me a few photographs of my father as a little boy: sitting on a
sled next to his siblings and parents, proudly displaying his model airplane
with his friends, and dressed for his first communion with a prayer book in
his hand. It was odd looking at these photographs, like looking at archival
photographs of strangers. The next few weeks I was preoccupied with
work and had almost completely forgotten about my father. However,
late one night, I looked out of my study window as the brightness of
the moonlit snow caught my attention. For a few minutes, I stood there
mindlessly watching the snow evenly covering the ground. And then, it
occurred to me: my father was dead. Not dead in the same way he was
dead before. He was really dead. I would never see him again. But how
could he just die like that? Why had I not visited him one more time?
How could so many years go by? It couldn’t be too late (Fig. 11.1).
At that point, I felt an intense force welling up within my body and
pulling me backward. To prevent myself from falling, I sat down at my
desk. Then, mechanically, I opened my computer and went to the folder
containing the photographs of my father. I looked at the photograph of
him holding his model airplane, which had an approximate wingspan of
three meters. A shadow on the left wing of his plane, cast by the plane of
his friend standing nearby, caught my attention. It was a peculiar shadow,
cracked in half. As the wing of his friend’s plane cast a shadow onto
my father’s airplane and the window curtain behind them, the wing of
my father’s airplane interrupted the shadow. There was something in
that interruption that kept me captivated. Somewhere in that shadow,
I spotted the future: my son, his childhood and his passion for model
airplanes—a future interrupted by the past.
I then examined the photograph of my father on the day of his first
communion. I was perplexed by his prayer book: it was child-sized, fully
Fig. 11.1 Photograph of author’s father holding his model airplane (Source
unknown)
contained by his left hand, leather-bound and padded, and embossed with
what appeared to be a gold cross. A rosary dangled from the same hand.
The prayer book reminded me of something I had seen before, but it was
impossible to tell from a black and white photograph. It looked like an
old prayer book I had seen as a child, in a drawer of my grandmother’s
dresser, and also like a prayer book belonging to my mother. Did my
grandmother pass her prayer book on to my mother? Or was it possible
that my father had given his prayer book to my mother? I then continued
poring over every photograph I had of him. I studied every detail of his
face. This little boy was my father. But he really was not. A little boy only
a few years old could not be anyone’s father. So, who was my father? I
wanted to touch that photograph of the little boy, to feel his presence,
but it was nothing I could hold in my hand; it was merely an image on
my computer screen. A screen image cannot feel like a father, as it lacks
that wear and tear of life. I realized I could not recall what he looked like
when I met him. How could I not remember my father when I was nearly
twenty years old when we met? The more I tried to recall my visits with
him, the less I remembered. Panic set in: I needed to find him. I needed
to see him one more time (Fig. 11.2).
I spent the next ten months looking for my father. I looked in an old
jewelry box. There was a little golden cross in there. I remembered my
mother telling me that it was my father’s gift to me for my first commu-
nion, and that my name and date of birth were engraved on the back of
it. I always kept it in that box, safely wrapped in tissue paper. I had never
worn it. I never felt I could. It was as if the cross did not belong to me;
I was merely its custodian. And I never really read the engraving on the
cross, only glanced at it once or twice. I always thought that the letters
were too small to read. Now, though, I took it out of the box and care-
fully unwrapped the tissue paper, which was white and unevenly torn. I
remembered making that tear, careless in my rush to put the cross away
in a safe place. It still looked the same: gold, nondescript, rounded on the
front and flat on the back. I turned the cross over and read the engraving.
The letters were not too small. My initials were engraved on the hori-
zontal board of the cross, while, to my surprise, the date of my tenth
birthday—rather than my date of birth—was engraved on the vertical
board. So, this cross was not a gift for my first communion, as that had
taken place when I was eight years old. I placed the cross upon my night
table. It did not feel right to put it back in the jewelry box. Once upon
a time my father held this cross in his hands. This may be the closest I
would ever get to my father. The next day I called my mother in Poland
to ask her about the cross, but she could not remember. She did not recall
it being a gift from my father, or that I even had the cross. My mother
had dementia, but her long-term memory was still intact. I was certain
she once told me that the cross was from my father. Why didn’t she recall
what I remembered? (Figs. 11.3 and 11.4)
Fig. 11.2 First communion photograph of author’s father (Source unknown)
So, I tried calling my father into my dreams. But the only dreams I had
of him were ones in which he was not. In one dream, my mother and
father were cooking a meal together. But, curiously, my father was not
physically present in the dream; I could not see him or ask him anything.
I only knew he was in it. But I could see his sweater, the same red sweater
he wore when I visited him. I could see it from a distance, from behind
a window. The sweater seemed suspended as if hanging on a clothesline,
and I wondered why there would be a clothesline in the kitchen. I tried
to get closer to the sweater, but the window was blocking my way. And
any attempts at opening it failed. In another dream, I saw a man’s figure
walking down a sandy path in Birds Hill Park, a favorite park of mine
when I lived in Winnipeg after my arrival to Canada. I could not really
Fig. 11.3 Front view of author’s gold cross (Photo by Magdalena Kazubowski-
Houston)
see who it was from a distance, but I sensed it was my father. It was a
cold fall day, and colorful leaves covered the path. I ran after my father,
but the leaves were slippery, and I kept struggling not to fall. The faster
I ran, though, the less certain I became that it was in fact him.
Some time later, I decided to contact a psychic. I did not believe in
psychics, clairvoyance, or the afterlife. Had someone suggested to me
a few months prior that I should communicate with my father via a
psychic, I would have dismissed it as an utterly irrational proposal. At
that moment, though, it seemed perfectly logical. In fact, it seemed like
the only viable option left. I found a psychic in my area and planned to
contact them shortly, but I never did in the end. Not because I came
to question the validity of this decision, but because I concluded that a
psychic would not be able to contact my father. A psychic, after all, needs
to know what to search for, but I could not remember what my father
looked like, what his mannerisms were, or what his voice sounded like. So
what would be the point? And even if they conjured a spirit, how could I
ever confirm who that was?
Fig. 11.4 Back view of author’s gold cross (Photo by Magdalena Kazubowski-
Houston)
A significant part of my search took place on my computer and online.

On my electronic calendar, I retraced every single day from January 27,
2016, when I learned of my father’s death, back to the day he died: May
5, 2015. There were no entries in my calendar for that day. Every other
day of the month had at least one entry, but not that day. What did this
mean? The death certificate my cousin had sent me stated that he had
died at 7:30 a.m. It would have been 1:30 a.m. in Toronto. I would have
been asleep. What did it mean that I was asleep when my father died?
What was I doing, thinking, and feeling that day? I needed to sneak a
glimpse into that day. I wished there was a special calendar function that
would allow me to select a day from my past and replay it like a film,
an archive not only of what I did but also of what I thought and felt.
Because what if I felt my father that day? Where does one find a feeling
once felt?
I also searched for my father on Google Maps. I found an image of his
tenement block from 2012 using the street view mode. He was still alive
back then. I zoomed toward the window of his living room. The curtains
were drawn, but I spotted what I thought was a water bottle on the
window sill. Upon closer look, it turned out to be an old outdoor ther-
mometer. A water bottle would have meant getting closer to my father.
Water has that sense of being close to things, where there is water there
is life. I tried to zoom further in on the window. My father would have
been there, behind that curtain. I even caught myself feeling ashamed of
trying to peek in and then of the absurdity of this thought. But what if he
was there now, looking at me? I also spotted an elderly man on the street
carrying a grocery bag. I wanted to peek into that bag as well. I had an
urge to peek into a grocery bag of an elderly Polish man who lived on my
father’s street. What if finding my father was really about seeing into that
elderly man’s bag? I knew that Google Earth was considering human-scale
mapping of the everyday world, including indoor spaces. That would be
hardly ethical. What if, instead—I thought to myself—we mapped only
the shadows of places, things, and people? Twentieth-century French
theater director Antoine Artaud (1958: 12) argues that theater has its
double, namely, shadows that reach out to where “life has never seized to
grope its way.” What if we mapped those shadows of where life had never
seized to grope its way: shadows of living rooms, elderly men, and grocery
bags. Plato’s cave or an illusion of what could have been but never was.
Grief
Death and bereavement have a tremendous impact on people’s lives
because they force us to live with absence. However, rather than
evoking a consciousness of absence, the dead continue to be emotionally
present for the living (Maddrell 2013: 505). Grief works by main-
taining emotional bonds with the dead through cemeteries, memorials,
shrines, photographs, commemorative objects, and affective rituals and
performances (Maddrell 2013: 508). Since Sigmund Freud’s work on
mourning, however, psychoanalytic theory has traditionally held that the
labor of grief is a process by which an individual seeks to dissociate from
the representation of the lost object (Freud [1917] 1957: 245). For
Freud, any attempt at maintaining the bonds with the lost object1 was
a symptom of pathology, or what he referred to as “melancholia” (ibid.:
249; see also Freud [1923] 1961: 19). Consequently, for many years,
psychoanalysts viewed an individual’s attempts at maintaining a contin-
uous bond with a deceased loved one as an example of complicated grief.
In Freudian psychoanalysis, “healthy mourning requires the giving up of
all active internal fantasies about the deceased love object” (Baker 2001:
59). Even those who saw mourning as a process of reworking the image
of the deceased into a new one corresponding to the changed reality still
emphasized the importance of detaching from the deceased (Horowitz
1990).
More recent psychoanalytic approaches, however, conceive of the
grieving process as a continuation of the bonds with the deceased.
Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein ([1940] 1975) initially propa-
gated this different approach in her objects relations theory, wherein
she conceived of the mourning process as a “reparation” through which
the individual restores their relationship to the object they have lost.
In opposition to Freud, she stressed that during mourning the indi-
vidual strives to maintain bonds with the deceased by seeking to preserve,
rather than discard, something from the past. Others have similarly
argued that people maintain their bonds with the deceased through
dreams, fantasies, memories, and inner dialogues; keeping the deceased’s
belongings; adopting some of their personal traits; or maintaining their
legacies (Baker 2001, 63; Bowlby 1980; Shuchter 1986; Zisook and
Shuchter 1986). Photographs and other material objects are important
in the grieving process because people grieve with and through objects.
Margaret Gibson (2004: 285) argues that the bereaved frequently use
the deceased’s objects while grieving because such objects “function as
metaphorical metonymic traces of corporeal absence.” For her, objects of
grief facilitate an emotional transition for the bereaved from a time when
the deceased was living to a time when they are absent (ibid.: 285–86).
Transitional objects of any kind are important to the bereaved, she writes,
because, “[n]o longer present in their physical being, the deceased socially
and corporeally transform to the status of non-being, and through burial,
nonvisibility and non-contact” (ibid.: 291).
With death comes the absolute annihilation of the body and its contin-
uing absence that are profoundly shocking to the bereaved who, in the
early stages of grief, fantasize about the return of that body (ibid.). This is
frequently an internalized and private process of grief (ibid.: 297). People
maintain their bonds with the deceased in different ways because “the
quality of the internalized reality after loss should reflect the nature of the
bereaved’s attachment to the deceased prior to the death” (Baker 2001:
66). These approaches conceptualize mourning as “a process of transfor-
mation” that impacts our images of ourselves and of the object we mourn
(ibid.: 68). Such a process allows the mourner both to maintain ties to
the internal image of the loved one and to pursue new relationships and
practices (ibid.).
In my case, however, grief was complicated by the fact that I could
not maintain emotional bonds with my father because I did not hold an
internal image of him. He was neither physically nor emotionally present
to me before he died; I could not even remember what he looked like.
I was not sure why I could not remember. Was it because I spent all my
childhood looking at the one photograph I had of my father? Did the
imprint this photograph made on my memory override the memory of
my two visits with him? Literary theorist Roland Barthes (1981: 91), after
all, argues that “[n]ot only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory
[… ] but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.”
Similarly, Paula Carabell (2002: 181) argues that for philosopher Henri
Bergson, photography “forces the individual to fix on a moment he,
himself, did not generate, thus reducing the flow and development of
his inner life.” Or maybe each attempt at recalling my visits with my
father made them stubbornly cling to the past, like a Proustian memory
that can never be awakened through conscious efforts, but only with that
taste of a madeleine cake morsel dipped in blossom tea? Marcel Proust’s
narrator, after fruitlessly trying to relive a powerful memory response to
this sensory treat, states, “How could I seize it and apprehend it? I drink
a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a
third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the
potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not
in the cup but in myself” (Proust 1982: 48). For me, there is no morsel
to awaken the memory response.
Before I learned of my father’s passing, his absence had likely lain
dormant, somewhere deep in the subliminal realms of my affective inte-
riority (Irving 2011; Massumi 2002; Stewart 2007). I must have shut
it in there more than two decades ago, following our failed reunion. It
may have been that grief, like a midwife, delivered the absence into the
more conscious and reflective realms of my inner life. Perhaps this is what
happened when, looking out my window that bright winter’s night, it
suddenly occurred to me that my father was dead, but not dead like he
had been before, but really dead. Philosopher Françoise Dastur (1996:
46) argues that in mourning through “the very fact that we have lost him
or her the dead person is more totally present to us than he or she ever
was in life.” In grief, my father’s absence became suddenly present to me:
a present absence.
But what was always absent could not remain present. It needed to be
filled somehow so I could grieve properly. Naturally, I first looked at the
photographs of my father, as photographs have that lure of authenticity.
They are supposed to be a testament to that which once was present. An
archive of truth. Barthes (1981: 80) in Camera Lucida famously writes
that “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a
real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch
me, who am here. … A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the
photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal
medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.” But I
could not share a skin with my father in those photographs. He was not
their referent. The little boy undeniably was once there, standing before
the camera lens; however, he was not my father. I could not recognize his
face, nor myself, in him. And a little boy cannot be a father. Following his
mother’s passing, Barthes wanted to find a photograph that would corre-
spond to his memory of her. Eventually, he found one—a Winter Garden
photograph taken prior to his birth—that deeply affected him (Barthes
1981: 67–70).
For Barthes (1981: 26–27), the photograph is at its most powerful
when images wake our imaginations through punctum—an indescrib-
able emotional or affective “prick” or “wound”—launching us on an
adventure. He contrasted punctum with what he called “studium,” the
intellectual interest a photograph stirs within a viewer, which is shaped
by one’s culture, upbringing, and education. Punctum, on the other
hand, occurs without the viewer expecting it. It allows one’s subcon-
scious self to speak; it is what one adds to the photograph, but also what
is already present. It is a certain feature that rises out of the photograph
and “pricks” the viewer on an emotional or affective level, making them
pause and reflect. This Winter Garden photograph held an image of his
mother of which he had no memory; it consoled him because he saw
there the kindness of his mother that he had always known and because
it made him realize that he and his mother had lives they did not share
(Barthes 1981: 67–70). Just as his mother had lived before he was born,
he must continue living after her death (Phelan 2002: 983).
Unlike Barthes, I found no punctum of consolation in the photographs
of my father, because I had no memory of him. But though the
photographs could not console, it is not to say that they did not prick.
Barthes himself notes that a photograph always affects the viewer on
an individual level, depending on their connection to the photographed
image. Anything in a photograph—a small detail, a specific arrangement

of disjointed elements, or another aspect of an image (likely unintended
by the photographer)—could potentially bring about punctum. He never
published the Winter Garden photograph and argued that it would not
be meaningful to anyone else: the punctum of it was his alone, as it corre-
sponded to “the truth of the face I had loved” (Barthes 1981: 67). For
him, “[t]he Winter Garden photograph was indeed essential, it achieved
… utopically, the impossible science of the unique being ” (Barthes 1981:
71).
The prick of my father’s photographs also held a sense of the singular,
of the essential, of something unique. But it pricked in me a feeling
of restlessness. A feeling of what was lost, what was missing, and what
needed to be found. This is clearly demonstrated in the following field
note I wrote after viewing the photographs of my father:
I can’t just keep looking at these photographs … I need to find something

else. There must be something else. I know he wrote me letters. I swear
I read them. What did he say in them? I think he invited me once to
visit him, but why didn’t I go? What did I write him back? Did I write
him back? Perhaps they are still somewhere? But where? I’ve looked for
them before in Elbl˛ag though [my home town]. Maybe I could still find
my letters to him? Did I ever send them? Did my mother send them? Or
perhaps I have written somewhere about my letters to him? To someone?
Maybe in my diary? Where could they be? I may have also drawn him a
few times. But where are those drawings?
As such, the prick of the photographs touched me with the aura of lack
found in portrait photography. Walter Benjamin (1968: 4) associates the
aura with an artwork’s “authenticity” and “authority,” arguing that the
technology of photography and film extract the work of art out of its orig-
inal context by massively reproducing it and making it available to a wide
audience. The mechanical reproduction of art deprives the artwork of its
“aura,” or its authenticity derived from “its presence in time and space”
(ibid.: 3). Later, he also associated the aura with the spectral effect of
“authority” and “authenticity” in portrait photography. Benjamin (ibid.:
7) writes, “The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead,
offers a last refuse for the cult value of the picture. For the last time
the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression
of a human face.” Benjamin’s aura identifies that which has been lost in
Jacques Derrida’s sense of the supplement, an addition or substitution for
what is natural (1976: 157). The role of the supplement is to ultimately

illuminate the absence within the presence, but it never eliminates that
absence: “it does not simply add itself to the positivity of a presence, it
produces no relief, its place is assigned in a structure by the mark of an
emptiness” (ibid.). The prick of the photographs of my father was not
the feeling of what was found but the feeling of what was lost. It was a
stubborn nudge to keep looking, to fill the mark of emptiness, against all
odds.
Magical Performance
Yet there was really nowhere else to look. The few photographs of my
father were the only things I had of him. I did not have any of his posses-
sions or keepsakes. I never found those letters from him, my letters to
him or my drawings of him. There was nothing else.
In Poland, cemeteries are important commemorative spaces, where the
link between the dead and the living is maintained and where the dead
are remembered. Visiting the graves of my deceased family members has
always been important to me. This time, however, it was denied to me.
I had, of course, not known about his funeral. Even when I eventu-
ally learned where his ashes were buried, I missed the opportunity of
visiting the columbarium twice: once I could not find it, and the second
time, I missed the early train and by the time I arrived, it was too dark
to visit the cemetery. Yet grief, as a deeply embodied condition, needs
to be laid down somewhere, like a tablecloth. It needs to be material-
ized as that affective image of mourning. My grief, as it had nowhere
else to go, laid itself down in magic. Here, I am inspired by American
author Joan Didion’s (2004) concept of “magical thinking,” which she
used—influenced by anthropological theorizing on magic as a belief in
the cosmic interconnectedness of things—to describe the thought process
by which she sought to come to terms with the death of her husband. She
recounts the year spent, following her husband’s death, looking for signs
in her everyday life—omens in the form of, for example, undeleted emails
and spelling mistakes—indicating that he would eventually return. Didion
describes her magical thinking as a powerful way of denying reality, of
keeping him alive, despite all logic, and of filling the space of absence.
What I understand by “magic” is a form of this magical thinking, one
that unites thought, sensation, feeling, and action. That magic is about
the power of denial. It is an argument with the universe. It is about our
desire to stop time, to go back, to return the dead—a performance of

the Artaudian reality of the double, the uncanny, the realm of ontological
otherness. Here is what I wrote when I learned of his death:
He couldn’t just leave like this. It’s impossible. He wasn’t that old and,
besides, a person can’t just die without a warning. I’m sure my cousin
doesn’t know. She probably isn’t even my cousin. Didn’t she say she
couldn’t find me? She wasn’t sure it was me? She said she hadn’t seen
him for many years before he died, so how can she know for sure he
died? I have to find out for myself. I need to call tomorrow and confirm.
Someone must know his number. My cousin said there was no number to
call him, but someone must. I can also go and visit him. I’ll knock on his
door. But where does he live? How can I get his address? Does my cousin
know? Should I ask? Who should I ask? If he were really dead, I would
have received a letter from him that he was dying. He’d never die without
telling me. If I could only have a chance to speak with him. Or even find
that letter he wrote.
Magical thinking draws on the theatrical power of ghosting. In the

most apparent sense, theatrical ghosting can be understood as a process by
which an actor embodies and gives life to something that does not exist: a
character, a setting, or the past (Blau 1982: 282–83). However, ghosting
is not merely a practice of making the spectral visible through theatrical
illusion; it is also about theater’s longstanding refusal—dating back to
its history as a ritual practice—to concede that “invisible, immaterial,
or abstract forces are illusions, that the spirits of the dead are imagi-
nary, or that the division between spirits and matter is absolute” (Rayner
2006: xi). Theater, at least to some extent, has always been about repre-
senting not what already exists in the world, but rather, what does not
by “unmak[ing] the ontological presumptions of is ” (ibid.: xv). Artaud
took this unmaking to the extreme by calling for the breakdown of the
division between theater and life, and for bringing theater’s double to life
itself. Any theatrical event—although necessarily a repetition, a “memory
machine” (Carson 2003), “restored behavior,” or “twice-behaved behav-
ior” (Schechner 2006: 29)—also produces a new reality through the
process of its very actualization. Performance theorist Alice Rayner (2006:
xvii) argues that “[t]he greatest mystery of theatrical ghosting is not that
the ghosts are disembodied spirits from some ineffable realm, heaven
or hell, and hence imaginary. The mystery, rather, is that they are fully
embodied and material but unrecognized without a certain mode of

attention.”
The magic of grief made this mode of attention possible by a sleight of
mind that relied on the suspension of disbelief to maintain the theatrical
illusion, although, at times, it seemed that I truly believed the illusion was
real. Activated by the sorrow of grief, it was further ignited by viewing the
photographs of my father. While I could not find my father in them, they
emanated a sense of lack that sent me on a magical search, punctum’s
imaginative adventure, for a past that never was. In that past, my father
sent me a first communion gift, cooked a dinner with my mother, waited
for me in his living room, and reached out to me on the day of his death.
But that past was also infused with a pall of doubt, uncertainty, an inability
to confirm. It was a past of denial, longing, and hope.
While Barthes initiated an interest in the affective dimensions of
photography, we now recognize that images possess a multisensory
agentic nature (Bal 2003; Mitchell 2005). This nature is constituted
in and through “[t]he stories told with and around photographs, the
image held in the hand, features delineated through the touch of the
finger, an object passed around, a digital image printed and put in a
frame and carefully placed, dusted, and cared for” (Edwards 2012: 224).
Photographs have a “sensory embrace” (Pinney 2001: 158, 160–61),
because, in our comprehension of images, the complex interrelationship
of the image and the body is constituted of mutually permeable senses,
feelings, and imaginaries (Edwards 2012: 229). Ann Cvetkovich (2014)
argues that photographs are “archives of feelings” (274), “document[s]
of the ephemeral” (281), operating somewhere in the space between
the image, its referent, the viewer, and the outside world. Such archives
hang onto the nonmimetic relationship between the photograph and the
referent; they detach the photograph from the past that was by working
as a “psychic glue that allows unexpected correspondences between words
and things, stories and pictures, to emerge and stick” (Eng 2014: 343).
That archive of feeling, that ephemeral knowledge, can sometimes be
made visible only through performance (Taylor 2003: 205), as in the
magical conjuring of grief. Like a stone thrown across the water’s surface,
the magic of my grief glanced across the photographs, skipping once,
twice, thrice, leaving in its wake ripples of the golden cross, dreams, digital
calendars, and maps—an archive of feelings. An archive of my incoherent
imaginings, snippets of memories, confabulations, longings, embodied
associations, interior dialogues, and bits and pieces of stories related to
me by others. And this is where I found the missing object of mourning,

the missing referent. It was that feeling of my father’s absence prior to his
death. I found it loitering somewhere in that interrupted shadow of the
past, cast on the airplane wing; in that rushed feeling of the unevenly torn
tissue around the golden cross; in the red sweater curiously suspended on
a kitchen clothesline; in the squares and grids of my electronic calendar;
in the grocery bag of an elderly man spotted on Google Maps. Just as it
did several decades ago in those glossy and pointy shoes, in the creaking
of my bedroom door, in my mirror and in that puddle by my school’s
gate where I watched a bird preening itself.
When I learned of my father’s passing, I lost that feeling of absent
absence, as his absence suddenly became present to me. Cvetkovich
(2014) argues that the archive of feelings situates memories not solely
in people but also in what remains after them. That feeling of my father’s
absence prior to his death was the only remnant of him that I had. And
grief, for me, was about wanting to go back to that familiar not feeling of
his absence. It was about wanting the absence itself to be absent again.
That feeling of an absent absence, however, was a memory performed
not only in relation to the past but also in relation to the future. Barthes
(1981: 90) saw the photograph as a melancholy object linking it to time;
it is “without future, (this is its pathos, its melancholy)”. This is the case,
Gibson (2004: 286) explains, because “looking at photographic images
of ourselves and of others, we recognize the mortality of what was and
will never be again.” But the magic of my grief conjured an object with a
future. An impossible future, one in which I could see my father again. I
even began preparing for that trip.
Absence is a strange thing; it has a magical worldmaking capacity. In
my case, absence found the past that never was and a future that could
never be. As such, it was a magical performance of “otherwise possibili-
ties,” “infinite alternatives to what is. And what is about being, about
existence, about ontology” (Crawley 2016: 2). Working in cahoots with
the magic of grief, absence in my life became a sensory epistemology and a
methodology of the otherwise. And although that otherwise was both an
impossible past and an impossible future, the performance did not merely
constitute an act of denial but, rather, was a starting point for coming to
terms with loss, grief, and the inevitability of death.
Notes
1. For Freud, the lost object could be either an animate or an inanimate
object.
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CHAPTER 12
Projections and Possibilities: An Installation

About HuMilk Now
Susan Falls
Anthropologists have developed a keen interest in examining how people

imagine and shape the future. The emerging commodification of the
human body and bodily fluids is an especially active area of research
in this regard. My own work on communities that form around the
selling and sharing of breast milk considers the imagination as a social
activity that coalesces in the space between images, imagined relations
between people, and imaginaries, understood as sets of ideologies, values,
and possible futures (Appadurai 1990). In order to activate this kind of
community engagement with arguments presented in my book White
Gold: Stories of Breast Milk Sharing (Falls 2017), I planned Projections
and Possibilities, an installation developed with a team of artists, curators,
and motion media designers.
White Gold is an ethnography of what I call a “counternetwork,”
powered by a politics of pragmatics based on existing frameworks of capi-
talism, gifting, parenting, and science (Falls 2017: 20). The book explores
S. Falls (B)
Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia
e-mail: sfalls@scad.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4_12
280 S. FALLS
the motivations, mechanics, and implications of sharing human breast

milk as a form of dissent against encroaching biocapitalisms; the work
argues for heterarchical community making as a strategy for (re)claiming
a role in shaping emerging futures. It is relatively straightforward in
contextualizing data gleaned from participant-observation within both
historical and theoretical matrices, but departs from convention in at
least one important way. I built the chapters around sets of images; these
visuals served as the starting point for exploring how “speculative fabu-
lations” (see Salazar 2017) implied but not elaborated in conventional
ethnographic description can be otherwise activated. Though it is not
uncommon to include visual meditations in publications within the fields
of art, performance, or other humanities, building chapters around sets
of images in anthropology is unusual (though not unknown).
Drawing on relational aesthetics sketched by artists of the Situationist
International, refined in the work of Nicolas Bourriaud (2002), practiced
by artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, and then deployed by future-oriented
practitioners featured in edited collections such as Anthropologies and
Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds (Salazar et al.
2017), I planned an event based on these images that would present a
version of a future to which a non-professional audience could respond.
The goal was to inspire a productive community response to the probable
rolling out of farmed HuMilk. This multimedia experience communicated
the predictive edges of ethnographic analysis, asking viewers to look at the
world anew. In this article, I describe the installation and then present
some remarks about why and how ethnographers can offer embodied
art installations to share our work.
White Gold
It would be nearly impossible to explain Projections and Possibilities
without highlighting the main points in the book. White Gold was the
result of ethnographic fieldwork with members of a breast milk sharing
network in the southern United States. The book explores how milk—
conceived by sharers as “white gold” or “liquid gold” as a scare, valuable,
or even magical substance—is circulated as a mode of enacting parent-
hood, cultural values, and care, all via a dynamic, digitally enabled
network. It is a fascinating example of need-based community making
between erstwhile strangers who live within the context of commodity
capitalism.
12 PROJECTIONS AND POSSIBILITIES … 281
I examined milk sharing using several anthropological lenses, starting

with kinship but then turning to exchange, agency, and infrastructure.
This made sense to me as a way to examine the thickening of a commu-
nity around a bodily fluid that is rapidly undergoing commodification.
The book can thus be understood as an examination of parenting, subjec-
tivity, and community making under the regime of globalized neoliberal
capitalism as well as a foretelling of near-certain future conditions.
My analysis centers on an ethnographic sensibility that started with my
own family participating in the sharing network (an unintended conse-
quence of a desire to give my child breast milk when I could not produce
it myself). Presenting the story of my involvement in milk sharing estab-
lished my presence within the community, but ultimately, arguments
presented in White Gold were informed by data gleaned from interviews
with members of the network well beyond my own circle.
Over the course of a year and a half, I conducted over forty formal
interviews (mostly with donors and donees), in addition to informal
interviews with lactation consultants, doctors, nurses, bloggers, web site
administrators, bank personnel, insurance agents, scholars, and other
parents. Since many informants knew me or knew of me through the local
network, I was in an excellent position to pose a loose set of questions
that allowed them to reflect upon their own experiences, motivations,
and broader life histories. I allowed people a great deal of latitude to
discuss why and how they were involved with milk sharing, and listened
for opportunities to dive more deeply into expectations, hopes, and
disappointments. Rather than asking explicitly about matters of political
orientation, religious beliefs, marital status, and so forth, I allowed for
personal details to emerge more obliquely. I used the standard anthro-
pological practice of protecting people’s identities and took extra steps of
combining or splitting identities to protect informants who may be talking
about one another within a close-knit community.
After completing the interviews, I coded my notes. I paid particular
attention to issues of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, educational status,
and military involvement as well as love, ideas about the body, attach-
ment, fear, modernity, community, instinct, science, and so forth that
emerged as salient aspects of parents’ narrations. This pool of narratives
helped me to draw conclusions about communal responses to social and
political forces in the context of capitalism that are taking place within the
world of digital, communication, and transportation infrastructures. In
many ways, this is a study of dissent: Parents involved in sharing are doing
282 S. FALLS
so against explicit recommendations of authoritative institutions such as

the AAUP who assert that giving shared milk to children is too risky.
Lactivists, on the other hand, including sharers, admit that risks exist, but
argue that they can be managed, citing that (to date) no children have
been sickened by shared milk.
While conducting interviews and reading about baby formula, surro-
gacy, milk producing yeast cells, and art projects involving human milk,
I learned about the work of the (now late) architect Lebbeus Woods.1
I was intrigued by his work on post-crisis, alternative-reality landscapes
which included the presence of what he called “free space.” Free spaces
are unprogrammed areas of an architectural plan where people engage in
innovative practices in response to their new, post-crisis living conditions.
I was particularly inspired by his books War and Architecture (1993) and
Radical Reconstruction (1993, 1997) which explain his designs through
hand-rendered illustrations, poems, and expository essays.
I was fascinated by Woods’ drawings, but at first did not understand
his ideas. As I tacked back and forth between two styles of explanation
(writing and drawing), I began to work out how Woods’ practice could
help me to explore and communicate my own ethnographic project. As
someone who openly courts approaches that are “epistemologically filthy,
improvisational, and undisciplined” (Salazar et al. 2017: 2) to deal with
a present and future marked by increasingly bifurcated potentialities, I
trusted the feeling “in my gut” that Woods’ architecture should seed
an ethnographic analysis of sharing. But I also knew this move would
be tricky: Milk sharing is enabled by emerging digital technologies, so
the group does not constitute a community, social movement, or activist
group of the kind typically studied by anthropologists.
This shifting, ephemeral group of participants occupy communications
and transportation infrastructures to circulate fresh and frozen milk as
a mode of dissent against authoritative institutions, rationalized scien-
tific epistemologies, and the emerging profit-driven of commercial milk
industry in ways that are reminiscent of new social movements. But I
was struggling to find a frame for the more general argument that breast
milk sharing offers a model for decentralized dissent operating outside
the logic of neoliberal subjectivity. I prioritized showing the relevance of
a heterarchical sharing practice outside of the small world of milk sharing,
and I hoped that reading milk sharing as dissent through Woods would
help. Free space, with its future temporality, unforeclosed potentials,
and encouragement of human creativities, turned out to have enormous

anthropogenic power.
When I talked with my students about Woods’ free space, they mostly
liked the idea but worried about the possibility of “bad actors” taking
over. It is a fair concern; there is always the chance that unplanned, unreg-
ulated spaces can be inhabited by people whose goals do not align with
one’s own. When we pry open spaces for new, yet-to-be-imagined futures,
we necessarily add risk, a feature of life anathema to contemporary neolib-
eral motherhood and governmentality in general (see Wolf 2013). Partly
in response to concerns about the essential unmanageability of the future,
I braided a second theoretical strand into my work that involved the flip
side of risk: trust. The analytic power of these terms (free space, risk, and
trust) is contingent upon recognizing how an imagined future structures
the present; using them requires testing the now against the roughly hewn
borders of desired versus undesired possibilities.
Here, parents are receiving a bodily fluid that on the one hand
contains nutrients and antibodies that infants need, but milk can also
carry unwanted and perhaps even dangerous substances such as pharma-
ceutical traces, caffeine, alcohol, bacteria, and viruses (just to name a few).
Parents often acquire milk from someone they do not know, or do not
know well, so interactions within the sharing network require strangers to
trust one another. Many of the desires, fears, and excitements informants
expressed were echoed in Alphonso Lingis’ masterwork Trust (2004).
Lingis described trust as a foundation of human connection when he
writes that:
“Every day we deal with people who occupy posts in an established social
system where behaviors are socially defined and sanctioned … But to trust
you is to go beyond what I know and to hold on to the real individual that
is you … When we leave our home and community to dwell awhile in some
remote place, it happens every day that we trust a stranger, someone with
whom we have no kinship bonds, no common loyalty to a community or
creed, no contractual obligations … We attach to someone whose words or
whose movements we do not understand, whose reasons or motives we do
not see. Our trust short-circuits this space … and makes contact with the
real individual agent there—with you.” (Lingis 2004: ix, italics in original)
Combining trust with free space created a framework for seeing milk
sharing—which admittedly involves only a small percentage of parents
284 S. FALLS
who are giving their children other mothers’ milk (see Wilson 2018)—
as a model for dissent and decentralized community making against the
rise of the neoliberal state with all of its biocapital entailments. Of course,
here, I am interested in the rise of commercial extraction of human milk.
But, human breast milk is already a commodity. Individual mothers
can sell small quantities of milk in peer-to-peer purchases. It is also sold
by milk banks regulated by the Human Milk Banking Association of
America (HMBABA), but HMBABA banks follow strict allocation proto-
cols (primarily serving severely premature infants in NICU units). These
banks charge a fee that only covers the costs of recruitment, processing,
and distribution. The fee is typically paid by the state and/or insurance
companies. There are, however, commercial companies that sell highly
processed breast milk products for profit. For investors, the human milk
market is a new area for lucrative venture capitalism (Pollack 2015; Lopez
2013). As a consequence, some mothers siphon milk away from their
infants to sell to these companies (a perfectly understandable strategy,
given the lack of sufficient maternity leave and other supports provided
by employers or by the state for new mothers).
Scientists and venture capitalists are searching for “off-label” medical
and commercially viable markets for humilk. I expect to see human milk
showing up in non-refrigerated tetra-pak boxes at my local grocery store
in the years to come. To help readers visualize and feel this potentiality,
I asked the graphic artist Zsteven Zang Bang to develop a series of
marketing mock-ups of the kind we may see.2 As a speculative fiction,
I asked that materials for Chubby Baby and Organic White Gold to feature
soft pastels and contain breast milk imagery that would appeal to a range
of consumers. These ads were aimed at naturalizing the circulation of milk
while critiquing emerging bioindustries. The humor and visual familiarity
made them easy to read, so that even the casual viewer could imagine
the possibility of filling their cart with body-farmed milk.3 In interviews,
people were simultaneously fascinated, surprised, and, at times, disgusted
by the idea (Fig. 12.1).
Against the rise of humilk is a reaction by milk sharers, many of whom
explicitly describe their actions as a critique of the state, the medical estab-
lishment, and the profit motive of the “baby-industrial complex.” This
network, operating with no central authority, relies upon an infrastructure
of circulation that is extremely effective. Many parents reported that once
they hooked into the network, they never once went without the milk
Fig. 12.1 Image of Speculative Ad for Liquid Gold Humilk Tetra-Pak Carton,
rendered by Zteven Zang bang (2017)
they needed. I realized that milk sharing was happening in a Woodsian

free space!
Woods fights in his drawing practice to elucidate a new theory of archi-
tecture, to describe creative energy, and to work beyond the constraints
of tradition. When I saw his Lost and Found (2008)—a drawing created
286 S. FALLS
in 1973 but published on his blog as an accompaniment to his Trea-

tise on Architecture (not published)—I saw that I could use an oblique,
poetic layer of elucidation in anthropology. This architecture was a cata-
lyst to my own understanding, just as the methodologies of the creative
arts have influenced many kinds of anthropological research and writing.
But, most ethnographies remain distinctly logocentric, continuing
a history of Cartesian thought that privileges the cognitive over the
sensuous. They lay out an argument in an orderly fashion, tacking back
and forth between ethnographic data and theory building. When authors
insert images into an ethnographic text, it is often for the purpose of
illustration. And as clichéd as it is, a picture really is worth a thousand
words, so using photographs, drawings, maps, advertisements, sketches,
and other visuals to depict a place, person, or object is extremely useful
for readers who may not be familiar with a subject. But reference is
not the only way that images can function. It certainly was not what
Woods’ Lost and Found (2008) was doing.4 That drawing was an inaugu-
ration—a work that called something entirely new into being—although
it did this by working in concert with, and in juxtaposition with, as well
as against other modes of exploration (both visual and written). This
mode of constituting, or conjuring, rather than referring to the world
is fundamental to artistic practices, and it can be integrated into the
anthropological project.
Luckily, the search for more imaginative approaches to ethnographic
process and presentation that grapple with “the chaotic, multisensory,
performative, and material dimension of social life in the Anthropocene”
(Salazar et al. 2017: 2) is expanding. Boundary-breaking anthropologists
have exploited the visual and the sensual to create powerful theoretical
and ethnographic interventions. As testament to the expanding interest
in sensory ethnographic practices, Elliott and Culhane’s edited collec-
tion, A Different Kind of Ethnography (2016), presents cross-disciplinary
approaches to knowing, showing, and making the world.
Experiments with alternative genres for both research and represen-
tation have been fruitful. For example, in her Naptime at the O.K
Corral (2018), Sally Campbell Galman combines form with content
in using comics to present ethnographic methods for studying chil-
dren. More playful partnerships between ethnography and film (Favero
2015) or theater (Kontos and Naglie 2006; Kazubowski-Houston 2016)
have constructively blurred the boundaries between representational and
participatory practices. And in The Life of Art and Death (2017),
Andrew Irving triangulates imagery with long-term ethnographic study

and anthropological theory to explore the sharpened sense of living with
mortality. Galman and Irving, along with members of the Centre for
Imaginative Ethnography (CIE), the Future Anthropologies Network
(FAN), and the curatorial collective Ethnographic Terminalia (ET), are
augmenting the toolkit for research, writing, publication, and perfor-
mance so that anthropologists can not only find new ways of knowing
and showing, but also of being and being with the many publics with
whom we are engaged.5
So, to explore breast milk sharing in this vein, I took a two-pronged
strategy. One prong was to lay out a step-by-step analysis of ethnographic
data within a longer history. I begin the text with a history of sharing.
Subsequent chapters highlight how (and to whom) milk moves, what does
sharing do (in a kind of Austinian sense [Austin 1962]), and, finally, what
this can teach us about dissent.
To take advantage of the rhetorical power of what Reyes-Foster (2018)
identifies in her review of the book as a clear, but perhaps predictable
chapter organization, I opened the preface with an entry story. This narra-
tive situates White Gold within a lineage of well-known works such as
Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) or Geertz’s Notes on
a Balinese Cockfight (1972) as well as within what has come to be known
as auto-ethnographic texts, exemplified in books like Randall Contreras’
Stick Up Kids (2012) or Kathleen Stewart’s poetic, and highly subjec-
tive Ordinary Affects (Stewart 2008). I placed this work alongside these
others not only to imply theoretical and methodological affinities, but also
to suggest that the topic of breast milk sharing is a serious cultural activity
deserving of sustained investigation. As a poetic counterpoint to this
straightforward chapter organization, Apollonian in its linear, disciplined
argumentation, I inserted sets of images to operate like the dithyramb
sung by the chorus in a Greek tragedy.6 These sets of images—called
EthnoGraphics—do not stand alone as a parallel interbook, nor are they
to be taken as illustrations of materials presented in neighboring chapters.
EthnoGraphics created a semantic ambience that prepared the reader for
the material to come, but more significantly, challenged the reader to
explore ideas beyond what was made explicit.
288 S. FALLS
Purposeful Interruption
Images in White Gold were curated from many domains: art history,
Hollywood film, Facebook, architecture, advertising, my own notebooks,
and so forth. The sets are accompanied by expository text to help the
reader with interpretation, but as the book progresses, images stand alone
with no scaffolding so that readers create their own associations. The
EthnoGraphics pages are not numbered. They are the book’s reveries,
a visual experience sequenced outside of the contiguous chapters but
existing in between them, coloring the readings in the same way that a
powerful dream can linger and shade the morning. The images are bridges
between the chapters, and between what is said and not said. They are like
the “dark” flicker between the frames of a film that, paradoxically, let us
see the moving image. To signal a different hermeneutic plane, the font
there is different from the rest of the book. These dreams are provoca-
tions for what milk sharing/selling has been, is, and what it can or will
become.
Some images are descriptive, others challenge or contradict the text.
There are long literary, artistic, and cinematic traditions of using visuals
in a way that I would call “purposeful interruption.” Scott McCloud’s
Understanding Comics (1994), Michael Taussig’s Corn Wolf (2015),
John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), Todd Haynes film Poison
(1991), and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1930) each show how
image and collage can be used in counterpoint with text to cast competing
or hidden contours of a narrative into relief. While this EthnoGraphics
approach in an anthropological context may have been unfamiliar to some
readers, it aligned with my understanding of Roland Barthes’ (1973)
notion of the lisable, the readerly text, that I put into play against the
scriptable, the writerly text. The point is to invite the reader to speculate
outside of what I was able to capture with the language or ruminations
acceptable in an academic book.
As I worked on the manuscript, I began thinking about the ways in
which the aesthetic has been relegated to the margins of what is consid-
ered to be most worthy of anthropological investigations. And while there
is a movement to turn our collective attention to the senses and there is
a great deal of excellent visual anthropology focusing on vernacular visual
and sensual culture (see Stoller 1997; Howes 2005; Pink 2009; Cox et al.
2016), there remains much less research on white box gallery art, contem-
porary architecture, or mainstream cinema even though it is seen and
experienced by millions of people every day (see exceptions by members

of the CIE, ET, and in Buckley 2016; Bunzl 2015; Halle 1994; Hoffman
2017; MacDonald 2017; Seiber 2010; Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010
among others). Part of this has to do with the way that many anthropol-
ogists have been trained to think of aesthetic activity as superstructural,
that is to say as epiphenomenal to an underlying economic configura-
tion (in this case, neoliberal capitalism). It is no coincidence that many
introductory anthropological textbooks leave art and design for the very
last chapter, the one many instructors do not have time to cover. But a
study of the creative arts for researching, imagining, and intervening in
the (im)possible future is absolutely foundational and intersects in yet to
be adequately theorized ways with our study of the human condition and
within political and the economic dynamics.
Some philosophers have worked on explicating the interaction of the
aesthetic with the political. For example, in Political Aesthetics (2010),
Crispin Sartwell argues that while some but “not all art is political, all
politics is aesthetic; at their heart political ideologies, systems, and consti-
tutions are aesthetic systems, multimedia artistic environments … It’s
not that political ideology or movement gets tricked out in a manipu-
lative set of symbols or design tropes; it’s that an ideology is an aesthetic
system, and this is what moves people, attracts their loyalty or repug-
nance, moves them to action or apathy” (2010: 1). Sartwell suggests
that to study politics is to study it within the context of a “multisen-
sory surround or context” (2010: 2). Sartwell’s project (demonstrated
through case studies of Nazi aesthetics, but also vernacular expressions of
punk and black nationalisms) is important because it recuperates aesthetics
into the realm where power is negotiated, but remains, in its essence, an
expanded study of the political by way of the aesthetic. In generating
EthnoGraphics, I was attempting to explore relationships between the
political and the aesthetic by showing how the aesthetic works as an index
and as a framework for imagining cultural and political futures.
As I put my own research in dialog with visual materials, some
suggested by informants who referred to artworks (and other aesthetic
objects) as they struggled to verbally describe their own experiences,
I developed the third, and I think most important, level of the text.
Inserting visual vignettes between the chapters created a triangle between
the reader, the images, and the text. White Gold, the book, exists in that
trilateral space, where readers ply Dionysian poetics with and against the
Apollonian text. This space was converted into an installation.
290 S. FALLS
Projections and Possibilities

As I completed the manuscript, the cinema studies scholar Leslie Stern
was visiting Savannah. She came to deliver a lecture on materiality and
affect in film, and because I had used her work on Buster Keaton’s Go
West! (1925) in White Gold to explain how relationships are activated by
material culture, I was keen to meet her. I was drawn to her analyses of
film (and smoking!) but her cryptofiction and autobiographical writings
had inspired me to use a more speculative, less literal approach to curating
images (see Stern 1999, 2016). I admire her as a creative scholar and so
when she said to me, “Well, you must do an installation!” as if it were the
most obvious thing in the whole world, I immediately agreed. Of course,
I had absolutely no idea what this might entail or how I might go about
doing it, but I did start keeping a notebook of ideas.
Just as the publication date neared, an acquaintance from The White-
field Gallery asked me if I would like to hold a book reading there.
I quickly said, “Yes!” since I wanted to have an opening to celebrate
the contributions of all the people I had worked with. I also wanted to
introduce milk sharing to the larger community and to show how the
anthropology of something as esoteric as breast milk sharing could help
us think our way into a world beyond Trump. The gallery space seemed
to have come to me. But when I went to look at it, I realized that while
the space was good for a book reading, it would be even more perfect for
an installation (Fig. 12.2).
Like milk sharing, this project required collaboration. Luckily, I was
invited to participate in a Little Blue House Artist Residency at the Isle
of Hope in the summer of 2017. Taking seriously Sarah Pink’s (2010)
call for a multisensory anthropology in which learning and knowing are
understood as situated, bodily practices, I began drawing up plans, greatly
benefitting from feedback given by three seasoned artists who were there.
Shortly thereafter, a journalist interviewed me about the project for
our local arts and culture paper, Connect Savannah (Lebos 2017). This
interview helped me organize my thoughts and illustrated the process of
planning installation work. I should have known this since I once worked
as an assistant to an installation artist, but doing it myself was a very
different experience. I mention feedback from artists and an interview
process here to point out that collaborating with those outside of the
field of anthropology was imperative for developing the exhibit. Trans-
lating a 2D book into a 3D multisensory panorama that could be taken in
Fig. 12.2 Exhibition
at a glance was completely new to me, but each time I tried to explain my
vision for the installation, it helped to solidify what I was trying to achieve.
Projections and Possibilities would focus on the fact that while breast milk
sharers are doing an erstwhile critique of big pharma, big medicine, and
big insurance (industries involved in the profitable commercialization of
infancy), breast milk is increasingly recognized as a valuable resource in
investment portfolios, biomedicine, and even in popular culture (in films
like George Miller’s Mad Max Fury Road [2015]). We are doing HuMilk
Now.
Once I had a workable site plan, I began researching similar projects,
plotting images, looking for suitable materials and technologies, and
assembling a team. I teach at an art school so I was able to convene
a team of curators, photographers, large format printers, motion media
artists, fiber artists, cinema studies scholars, and art historians.
While it was a rendering of the future now, the installation was planned
to last for only three hours, a reflection of the fleeting, ephemeral appear-
ance of a heterarchical community which lacks a central authority, but
makes up for transience in flexibility, responsiveness, creativity, and effi-
ciency. White cube galleries are the standard typology for art shows: This
292 S. FALLS
exhibition took advantage of a space designed for other activities (the

gallery is in a Victorian house otherwise used for missionary activities) as
the parents featured my book inhabit spaces (from digital infrastructure
like Facebook to land structures like Fed Ex) to share breast milk. Some
friends wondered aloud about the fact that I was staging an installation at
a property affiliated with a very conservative religious group; in my view,
it was a perfect site-specific instantiation to show how sharing occupies
infrastructures and spaces designed for other ends.
The installation of digital and celluloid images, video, still projections,
and breast milk shooters was meant for parents and non-parents alike.
The images surround and show rather than telling the story of White
Gold. Here, participants are inside the book, having a somatic experience
of the triangle created between readers, text, and imagery.
The gallery consists of three open salons with wide doors at both
the front and the back. I mapped images in the gallery to mirror the
chronology of the book—viewers could enter at the preface, then move
through the gallery as if moving through the chapters—and then see a
final image as a conclusion. People could also enter at “the conclusion”
and circulate along other pathways, experiencing the timeline in other
orders (Fig. 12.3).
Fig. 12.3 Golden Coronet (after Milk Drop Coronet, Harold Edgerton,
1936). 2017. Vellum. Edgerton’s stop-motion photography allowed us to see
into previously unseen worlds. As Walter Benjamin suggested, new technologies
have both repressive and critical potentials
I altered (at times lightly, at other times, dramatically) art historical

images using hand inks, charcoals, and contemporary imaging technolo-
gies and then printed everything in large format onto vellum. I used
vellum not only because it is a fragile and beautiful printing surface, but
because its whitish translucence recalls the qualities of milk. Works repre-
senting the theoretical scaffolding of the book were projected outside
of the house onto the exterior surface of the windows; this was done
not only to create an interior space that felt like being inside of an
illustrated jewel box, but also to give viewers the experience of being
inside the book, of reading—and feeling—its arguments all at once. The
re-presentations of known works on vellum and tinted projections of
paperworks on opaque windows highlight legitimate histories as well as
the “illegitimate” circulation of milk and other human resources so that
the installation as a whole suggests a set of futures to be shaped by this
very community. I pushed the speculations that viewers could “feel out”
and discuss during the installation that I was unable to make explicit in
White Gold. The audience circulated within a history of biocapitalisms
that end in a yet-to-be-determined register (Figs. 12.4 and 12.5).
The images and projections promoted lively conversation, but I also
addressed other senses such as taste. There is a rich literature on the
meanings and functions of food, demonstrating that like language food
does things (Mintz and Du Bois 2002; Klein and Watson 2016; Austin
1962). In the art world, exhibition protocols call for people to talk to
one another and view the artwork, and serving alcohol—usually wine—
creates a celebratory atmosphere while lubricating social interactions. To
help encourage this kind of mood, in addition to wine, I served a cock-
tail, Liquid Gold, containing coconut milk, nutmeg, Frangelico, and rum.
Liquid Gold is the color of breast milk but has a far more adult flavor. The
rum invokes the society of pirates and the heterarchical democracy they
are reputed to have entertained (see Cordingly 1996; Graeber 2007). It
was served in tiny golden shooters to hint at a valuable, potent liquid.
This concoction with its serving accouterments was designed by Sheila
Edwards; she was tasked with creating a drink that would align with
exhibition practices and ask the audience to consider (breast) milk as an
object of value, as a beverage/foodstuff, and as an elixir. We hoped that
by naming it after the book, imbibers would examine their ideas about
breast milk, value, and the ways in which partaking in common food and
drink creates social relationships, including kinship.
294 S. FALLS
Fig. 12.4 Windows are lit by projections from the outside. At first, the images
were not visible from the inside, but as the sun sets and darkness emerges, the
strength of the images increased. The effect is not unlike that of stained glass
only here images strengthen as the sun sets rather than the other way around.
Motion media artist Wes Nelson engineered all still and video projections
Finally, participants were invited, implicitly by the installation and

then explicitly by me when I gave a brief talk, to reflect upon the sale
of humilk in stores, humilk as a pan-human elixir, milk farming, and
the placement of humilk on the global commodities market. The book
was aimed at anthropologists, but the installation was an opportunity for
everyone to reflect upon sharing in a commodity context, the exhilaration
of dissent, and the human body as a site for resource extraction.7 In a
larger sense, the juxtaposition of works not only deepened visitors’ appre-
ciation for the practice of milk sharing, but in the quintessential human
acts of trust and community making. As a provocation, the last image asks
viewers to look over the shoulder of The Sentinel (Clarke 1983) into a yet
to be seen future (Fig. 12.6).8
Fig. 12.5 Here, projections of drawings by Lebbeus Woods seen in the back-
ground darken as night falls then fade as the sun rises, underscoring the powerful
but ephemeral nature of sharing communities
Doing Anthropology
The installation was designed for the audience to Do Anthropology. I
wanted to invite interviewees and other community members to expe-
rience an analysis of breast milk sharing, to offer an object lesson in
anthropogenic communication, and, as a pedagogic goal, to walk viewers
296 S. FALLS
Fig. 12.6 Final Sets of Images in Projections and Possibilities
through the idea of forming heterarchical communities. Site-specificity

and material-specificity were critical to supporting arguments presented in
the book, namely, that communities inhabiting “free spaces” to accom-
plish common goals can work as an incredibly effective mode of organi-
zation. In this sense, the ethnography and the installation completed one
another.
As Marion and Offen have pointed out, anthropologists struggle to
translate life and culture into thick ethnographic inscriptions and the
result can fall short; consider, for example, the challenges of adequately
communicating to readers the rich visual, aural, and even olfactory envi-
ronments of circuses and dance competitions (Marion and Offen 2009:
13). In these cases, an extra-textual rendering—be it film, music, or
performance—can complement the text. Likewise, installation anthro-
pology of the kind I describe here can evoke understandings beyond the
word, by creating a multimodal surround into which a community can be
immersed. Ideas stated in the solitary exercise of reading are augmented
by the co-experience of feeling our way into probable future(s) and, while
having certain limitations, achieve several objectives.
First, an installation expands the parameters of reasonable interpreta-
tion vis-à-vis an ethnographic monograph. Doing fieldwork is emergent
and symbiotic, and like experiencing an installation, it unfolds as we learn
with others. But, ethnography usually presents a rather rigid map for
the reader, where pathways through the materials as well as the conclu-
sions are forgone. The reader is expected to move through the text in a
predetermined way, and to do so alone. Ethnographies are typically peer
reviewed by knowledgeable experts, published by specialized academic
presses, and marketed to and consumed by students and professional audi-
ences; this makes sense given the way that contemporary work responds
to academic literature on field style and argumentation, but is often inac-
cessible to non-anthropologists. Attendees at Projections and Possibilities
told me that while they enjoyed reading the preface to White Gold, they
“needed a dictionary” and a “theory class to wade into the argument.”
Several people said that they had stopped reading because it became too
difficult, but after having seen the show, they felt more prepared and were
excited to read the entire book.
Unless shared aloud (as readers once did), books are experienced indi-
vidually. Art is often described in disciplines like art history as if the
work is being seen by a neutral, individual, and largely disembodied eye,
even though this is not always, or even ever, the case. And so, while it
is possible to plan an installation to be experienced individually (similar
to the way that White Gold is read), Projections and Possibilities was a
gathering. Inspired by artists working in a tradition where situations or
performances act as catalysts for mingling and discussion, the installa-
tion was developed with an eye toward two dimensions: time and space.
Against the linear process of reading, the installation allowed people to
meander, to experience it in any order, and to move in and between any
and all of the still and moving images, sounds, and tastes. The idea here
was for attendees to feel it all at once while talking together.
Even though planning and staging the installation was time-
consuming, the event took place in a single evening. The compressed time
frame meant that everyone who was coming would be there at the same
time. The evening hours created a party time framework where people
would expect to mix and mingle (in ways that they might not in a daytime
gallery setting, where people are accustomed to talking quietly, if at all).
The majority of attendees came during the “meat” of the event. Some
298 S. FALLS
people stayed after the event ended, continuing the conversation. On the
other hand, the time frame meant that some people (especially mothers
with infants) may have been unable to attend. A second limitation was
that interpreting the installation required a degree of aesthetic literacy
(that admittedly was not always present).
This installation forced me to consider how to better foster conversa-
tions about anthropological speculation, the possibility of milk farming,
and the heterarchical communities of dissent that contest biocommod-
ification. To successfully work in the arts, I had to collaborate with
experts in other disciplines. Together, we mobilized the digital tech-
nology, delivery infrastructures, and social media that parents use to share
milk to show people how alternative, heterarchical resistances in free space
can work. This experience showed me that multimodal presentations are
well suited to inviting audiences accustomed to looking at art to peer into
the rather esoteric world of an anthropology of the future, and thus is a
practice anthropologists should continue to develop.
Acknowledgements I thank the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Savannah

College of Art and Design for time, support, and materials provided to draft
White Gold. I am indebted to Liz Sargent, Jessica Smith, Carson Sanders, Lisa
Young, Wes Nelson, Sheila Edwards, Tracy Cox Stanton, Gene Boyd, Zsteven
Zang Bang, Houhan Wang, Robin Whaples, Taylor Thorne, Erin MacMahon,
Matt Van Rhys, John Colette, James Gladman, and Capri Rosenberg for their
participation in planning, documenting, and installing Projections and Possibil-
ities. I would also like to acknowledge anonymous reviewers and the editors
whose insightful comments greatly improved the chapter.
Notes
1. See Yardley, William. 2012. Lebbeus Woods, Architect, Dies at 72. New
York Times, November 3, A24. Woods’ statement in an interview about his
work sums it up nicely: “I’m not interested in living in a fantasy world,”
Mr. Woods told me. “All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural
spaces. But what interests me is what the world would be like if we were
free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we
lived by a different set of rules” (Ouroussoff, Nocolai. 2008. An Architect
Unshackled by Limits of the Real World. New York Times, August 24,
Art & Design. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/arts/design/25w
ood.html).
2. Marketing materials for Chubby Baby and other products were initially
created for an exploratory intervention in a grocery store.
3. I experimented with visual argumentation in my book Clarity Cut and
Culture (Falls 2014). The hand-rendered drawings of diamonds, diamond
products, and even people were meant to recapitulate the singular character
of each individual diamond as well to support the semiotic mechanisms that
produced unique interpretations of every particular stone. This strategy was
developed as a practical response to the theoretical Peircean distinction
between type and token (see Peirce, Charles Sanders 1931–1958. Collected
Writings, 8 vols., ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). We developed this kind of
intervention for an edited collection, Back to the 30’s: Recurring Crises of
Capitalism, Liberalism, and Democracy (Rayner, Falls, Souvlis, and Nelms
2020).
4. Lebbeus Woods was a consummate thinker and draftsman. Present in his
early drawings are ideational threads—conflict and transformation—that
characterize his subsequent work which deals with developing an archi-
tecture of interplay between the organic and the geometric, the fantastical
and the mathematical, but also, less conventionally, in their subordination
to both the premeditation and spontaneity of drawing. Architects make
designs. Their designs have to embody—or at least allude to—the para-
doxical nature of the human condition and of our personal experiences. I
was especially attracted to Woods’ work because he is designing, and in
designing, actually making worlds yet to be. See Untitled (Lost and Found
5). 1973. Ink on Paper. 10” × 16”.
5. See websites for The Centre for Imaginative Ethnography (http://imagin
ativeethnography.org/), The Future Anthropologies Network (https://
futureanthropologies.net/futures-seminar-and-lab-barcelona-2015/) and
Ethnographic Terminalia (http://ethnographicterminalia.org/).
6. A dithyramb works like an ode to Dionysus, meant to offer background,
insight, and commentary to the main narrative but in a style that is
evocative, disorderly, poetic, and adventurous.
7. The work treats humilk in the context of bare life. See Agamben,
Giorgio. Heller-Roazen. 1998. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Homo
Sacer. Stanford: Stanford University Press,.
8. The astronaut in Clarke’s short story was illustrated by Lebbeus Woods.
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CHAPTER 13
Exhibition Development as Restorative

Future-Making: Community Co-Curation
in the Struggle Against Sexual Violence
Mark Auslander, Denice Blair, Alexandra Bourque,

Chong-Anna Canfora, Jordyn Fishman, Teresa Goforth,
Kelly Hansen, Trinea Gonczar, Ellen Schattschneider,
Amanda Smith, Amanda Thomashow, Brianne Randall-Gay,
and Mary Worrall
This experimental and collaborative chapter explores an improbable part-

nership aimed at making possible the seemingly impossible. From July
2018 through April 2019, a group of us worked to develop a museum
M. Auslander (B) · D. Blair · C.-A. Canfora · T. Goforth · K. Hansen ·

M. Worrall
Michigan State University Museum, East Lansing, MI, USA
e-mail: markauslander@icloud.com
A. Bourque
Brightly Twisted, Detroit, MI, USA
J. Fishman · A. Smith · A. Thomashow · B. Randall-Gay
Sister Survivor, New York, NY, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4_13
304 M. AUSLANDER ET AL.
exhibition reflecting on the well-publicized crisis of mass sexual violence

centered on the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing,
Michigan. Across decades, Larry Nassar, a university physician, sexually
assaulted hundreds of girls and young women. In hindsight, it is widely
understood that this long series of predatory crimes was enabled by
vast institutional failures, by the university administration, USA Gymnas-
tics, the US Olympics Committee, law enforcement agencies, and many
others. In the shadow of this history, we attempted to develop a collab-
orative exhibition, against the odds, at the Michigan State University
Museum, located in the center of the very campus where so many of
these crimes had been committed.
The exhibition, which opened on April 16, 2019, is entitled, “Finding
our Voice: Sister Survivors Speak.” Throughout the exhibition develop-
ment process, we considered how creative acts of “bricolage” involving
physical objects, collaboratively curated by museum staff and commu-
nity members, might gradually ameliorate experiences of violation and
help catalyze renewed senses of bodily integrity. Co-creating the exhi-
bition, we hoped, might engender for survivors a resurgent, deeply
felt sense of future possibilities. Under certain circumstances, museum-
community partnerships can help catalyze processes of what might be
termed “restorative future-making,” reforging meaningful bonds between
persons and the flow of time. These processes, we suggest, work by
emulating the potentials of ritual, by circulating or projecting meaning-
bearing objects in arresting ways across normally distinct domains of
experience. In so doing, they help remodel core experiences of place,
personhood, belonging, and temporal sequence.
The authors of this chapter come to this partnership from different
perspectives and backgrounds. Three sister survivors, Amanda T., Amanda
S., and Trinea, served as community co-curators for the exhibition. Sister
survivors Alexandra and Jordyn are artists whose work is represented
in the exhibit. Sister survivor Brianne has been a public advocate for
law enforcement reform. Mark, Chong-Anna, Mary, Denice, Kelly, and
T. Gonczar
WC-SAFE, Detroit, MI, USA
E. Schattschneider
Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA
13 EXHIBITION DEVELOPMENT AS RESTORATIVE FUTURE-MAKING … 305
Teresa work at the MSU Museum. Ellen, based at another university, is a

museum anthropologist closely allied to the project.
In this chapter, we present a chain of voices that reflects the collabo-
rative process through which the exhibition has developed, alternating
between personal and academic registers. Although we come from
different backgrounds, we share a deepening appreciation of the future-
making potential of museum exhibitions and museum objects, which in
rather uncanny ways can oscillate between a painful, recovered past and an
opaque future in the process of becoming. Although most of us are not
trained as anthropologists, our shared practice has been akin to projects
of “imaginative ethnography” showcased by the Centre for Imaginative
Ethnography collective. Through manipulating highly charged physical
objects in installation spaces, and sharing works of visual art, music,
poetry, and storytelling, we have dramatized and, in a performative sense,
made real a journey from darkness to light, while continuing to pay
homage to the shadows of suffering that continue to infuse the lives of
those subjected to sexual violence.
The Growing Crisis: On not Being Believed

Mark and Mary: Since published revelations in the Indianapolis Star in
2016, the Michigan State University campus and the nation have been
dismayed and riveted by continuing revelations of the vast sexual abuse
perpetrated by sports doctor Larry Nassar, many against young women
gymnasts, some as young as eight years old when the abuse began. The
youngest known victim was age six. We now know that credible allega-
tions of sexual abuse against Nassar were reported to university, athletic,
and legal authorities beginning in the early 1990s. These reports were
repeatedly ignored or dismissed, and abuse continued against hundreds
of girls and women.
Approximately 156 survivors delivered victim impact statements during
the six-day sentencing phase of the trial in January 2018. As of this
writing, about 505 survivors have been identified in “first wave” and
“second wave” litigation; many of these have not publicly self-disclosed
and are referenced as Jane Does in legal records.
Every survivor’s story is different. For all the differences, nearly all
emphasize the agony of not being believed for so long, and how impor-
tant it has been, slowly and gradually to be believed and to develop
solidarity with other survivors. The vision of a collectively curated exhibi-

tion emerges out of this challenging process, for moving from individual
isolation and anguish toward imagined future spaces of shared acknowl-
edgment and recognition.
Brianne: I was just seventeen years old when Larry Nassar sexually
abused me. I instantly knew what had happened was wrong. Without
hesitation, I reported the abuse to police later that day and even had a
rape kit done. This process was terrifying and traumatizing in itself but
was something I knew I had to do. Sadly, as with many victims of sexual
abuse, I was not believed. Larry used his power, prestige, and connections
to discredit me. When I found out that the police were dropping my case,
I was devastated. For over a decade, I went through life feeling like I had
failed. Not only had I failed myself, but I failed others who I knew would
inevitably be subjected to his abuse. I felt completely helpless and thought
I would never be able to stop him or receive justice.
The truth is most victims of sexual abuse never get the opportunity
that I had. Even though what happened to me was horrific, I feel lucky.
I spent years feeling angry, confused, and hopeless, but I was given the
chance to change all that.
In 2018, after fourteen years, I finally had the chance to confront my
abuser and say what I had wanted to all those years ago. And this time
someone was listening and believed me. I can’t begin to express the solace
I felt in finally being believed.
I had a voice and I was not alone. I was part of an army, the strongest
and most fierce army I have ever seen. Together, we were determined to
not let this kind of evil thrive again.
Through this experience, I felt empowered. I knew that I could not
let what happened to me to define me. I had to turn my suffering into
something constructive. This was not a simple task. Part of me wanted
to hide away and pretend like this was all a bad dream, but I knew that
there was no hiding from this. This would be with me the rest of my
life and I had two choices. I could continue to be angry and resentful or
I could take the pain I was feeling and use it for good. I could tell my
story in hopes to bring awareness to this issue and give other survivors
the strength to tell their own stories.
This was not an easy road, but it was one that I knew I had to take. So
I accepted an apology from the police who had mishandled my case and
I worked with them to bring awareness and education to the community
surrounding this issue. I did speaking events, training sessions, and spent
countless hours working to create educational materials for the commu-

nity on sexual assault prevention. This meant giving up my privacy and
being subjected to criticism. These sacrifices were not small, but they were
worth it. Not only was it the right thing to do, but this process also
changed and healed me in ways that I could not have imagined.
While I’m still untangling the impact of this experience on my life,
one thing is clear: I will always believe and support survivors. The past
few years have been horrific and amazing at the same. In my moments
of weakness, I would look at my child’s sweet, innocent face and remind
myself this was all worth it.
My story represents the experience of many victims, all too many of
which will sadly never have a venue in which to share their story and will
likely suffer alone. Hopefully, knowing that others have shared common
experiences and survived will bring them some measure of comfort.
Mark: As we developed the exhibition at the MSU Museum, we were
mindful of the imperative to honor Brianne’s story and comparable narra-
tives by her fellow sister survivors. We were aware that for so long the
survivors’ rights to tell their own stories had been violated. Our hope was
that through the exhibition development process participating survivors
would be empowered to control the process of story-telling and help
create a space that was welcoming and meaningful to all survivors and
all their current and potential allies. Beyond that, we hoped that the
exhibition might stand as a model for subsequent restorative community-
oriented work in museums, grounded in compassion, respectful listening,
and shared discovery. This exhibition development process has been an
experimental arena of exchange, in the fullest sense of the term, through
which speakers and listeners are increasingly bound together in ever-
expanding webs of community and trust in one another. Our exchanges of
language, ideas, images, and physical objects, while proximately oriented
toward reconstructing and representing a recent, traumatic past, have
been a staging ground for re-imagining the healing contours of individual
and collective futures.
Teal Ribbons on the MSU Campus

Mary: The MSU Museum’s direct involvement in this project emerged
in response to an unusual landscape-based activity. In February 2018,
soon after the presentation of the 156 victim impact statements in court
proceedings, large teal-colored bows made of tulle fabric were wrapped
around more than 200 trees across MSU’s extensive campus arboretum.
In some cases, ribbons were tied to a bridge near the administration
building. On each of the bows, an attached ribbon named one of the
survivors or, in some cases, the anonymous designation for individuals
who had chosen not to be public. For these, the ribbons listed the case
numbers by which survivors were identified in court records, such as
Victim D or Victim 288.
The ribbons, we learned, had been placed in a kind of insurgent art
action by the parents of the survivors. They worked with friends of their
daughters and a small group of student supporters. From late winter
through spring and early summer of 2018, parents, family friends, and
survivors quietly visited the trees, to pray, meditate, and reflect.
The ribbons were powerful statements, as material representations they
kept survivors in the minds of all who passed them while crossing the
universities’ bridges and sidewalks. As a curator, I was both moved by
the ribbons and wanted to learn more about their creation. I wanted
to collect a sample ribbon, but knew that removing a ribbon would be
wholly disrespectful and inappropriate. The ribbons were in line with
previous curatorial work related to what is sometimes termed “craftivism,”
the use of craft and popular arts in social activism and protest. I knew
these were important artifacts to document and also saw their potential
as educational tools, engaging future generations in thinking creatively
about protest and self-fashioning.
Ellen: The bows and ribbons, tied to campus trees, struck me as a
special kind of gift being offered by parents to their children. Trauma,
especially that associated with sexual violence, in many respects under-
cuts language and cannot always be addressed directly by conventional
language. Anthropologists of ritual speak of certain physical objects as
“structural operators,” which mediate between persons and between
different realms of existence. This appears to have been the functions of
the trees, bows, and ribbons. As each mother tied with care and attention
a bow around each chosen tree, honoring the name of the young survivor
written on the attached ribbon, she was in effect putting a part of herself
into the tree. In turn, when survivors visited the tree in quiet reflection,
they placed an aspect of themselves into that same natural being. Thus,
the trees became symbolic conduits of meaningful exchange between the
generations, allowing for gifts of love and compassion at a time when the
basic fabric of human decency had been so horribly frayed. In a sense,
the ribbons took on an agency of their own, demanding attention at a
time when university administrators and others in power were inclined to

ignore the collective crimes of complicity that had been committed on
campus.
Mary: In mid-summer 2018, Gypsy Moths infested many trees across
campus, and the netting of the ribbons proved a particular inviting site
as female moths laid eggs and as caterpillars established their larvae. Since
female moths tend to stay on the tree where they have emerged from
metamorphosis, Dr. Frank Telewski, curator of the W.J. Beal Arboretum,
explained that with the next cycle of moth reproduction, the leaves of
hundreds of trees would be consumed, and many trees might die. The
Museum reached out to the parents to consult. One mother of a survivor
explained that the parents are deeply committed to the health of the trees,
which they all loved, and had been careful to affix the ribbons without
the use of nails or tacks. After consultation among themselves, the parents
agreed that the ribbons needed to come down expeditiously, but that they
themselves, with the student allies who had originally tied the ribbons,
needed to be the only people to do the act of untying.
Mark: On a beautiful summer evening, we all met in front of the
Museum. There, we gathered first in a great circle holding hands around
a large oak, one of the first to have a ribbon tied around it during a
February blizzard. We shared a moment of silence, and a mother spoke
to us of how the tightly tied ribbons are a monument to the strength and
heroism of the survivors. She then untied the first ribbon, which was care-
fully placed in a bag by the Museum team. We moved first through the
oval, counterclockwise around the Museum, as the mother and allies who
had helped the parents tie the ribbons on the first day untied the ribbons.
As they worked, we noted the name of each young woman honored. We
then moved to the trees on the great lawn in front of the administration
building. A parent explained that here she had tried to group together
those she knew to be dancers; it seemed to us that the lawn was a kind
of expansive dance stage, honoring, amidst all the sorrow, the dancers’
exuberant joy in movement. One parent spoke to us of how the tightly
tied ribbons are a monument to the strength and heroism of the survivors.
She recalls that some bows were more difficult to untie than others. Some
of the mothers attribute this variation to the variable interior psycholog-
ical states of the survivors, many of whom remain deeply wounded by
the horrors they were subjected to, and by the university administration’s
long refusal to acknowledge the truth of their claims. The ribbons could
be thought of as gestures toward a hoped-for future, tied to trees that are

not only witnesses to the past but which will long outlive us.
Writing to a Tree
Mark: Many sister survivors and family members developed personal
connections to the trees that had been dedicated to them. Amanda Smith,
a former gymnast, decided to write a letter to her tree, a white oak near
the administration building:
To my tree,
You have been here watching everyone and everything for years. You
have become part of this university’s soul, rooted into the earth. I am
merely a human; you will be here long after I am gone to watch forever-
more. I stand here a mess of a person, like a tree who has just been
through an incredible storm, parts of me have been broken and may never
be repaired. Looking at you standing tall makes me realize that I too can
weather this storm and flourish. There is still room to grow, and give to
others around me. You are the eyes of the universe seeing it all, shading
everyone but never knowing what lies in their shadows. You stand tall with
no judgment.
I hope that this particular storm is almost over and that you will be
here when my kids walk these streets, you can provide them with the
inner strength and guidance you’ve given me.
I never knew how rooted one had to be in order to weather the storms.
Once this storm waged a war within my life, I thought I had all the rooting
I needed with my family, but I was wrong. I felt like a sapling in a tornado,
getting ripped from its home and life failing to survive. It wasn’t until I
sat under you that I realized, you were the last piece of rooting that I
needed. I hope that your roots are powerful and that you will be here for
eons. It is my hope for you that each year someone will sit underneath
you and have moments just like this. That you will be there for them in
moments where they feel like they are not strong enough to carry on. You
will shade them from their demons and they can lean on you for strength
and courage just like I am doing today. I won’t lie and say every day from
here on out will be better, but I can say honestly that without having you
my days would certainly not be as grounded.
Forever yours,
Amanda
Mark: Amanda read part of this letter aloud at the planting of the
“Survivor Tree,” an American Beech located adjacent to the Museum,
on the day of the exhibition’s public opening. Soon afterward, Amanda
decided to honor her tree in another public fashion, by commissioning a
colorful, intricate tattoo on her left bicep. The tattoo depicted a tree in
bloom, its mid-section shaped as the double helix of DNA, honoring her
ancestry and her descendants, with roots reaching out below. She chose
for the background a color palatte drawn from her favorite of the 505
abstract tiles (discussed below) displayed at the exhibit’s entrance.
Taken together, Amanda’s letter and tattoo may be understood as
active practices of restorative future-making. Her tree, which will in her
mind stand for “eons,” locates her in spans of time beyond the present,
linking her to fellow survivors who may come long after her. The tree
tattoo on her arm in effect grafts her bodily being into a grand drama
spanning past and future, bound to trees whose lifespans can long outlast
human lifetimes.
Conserving the Teal Bows

Mary: The Museum does not have a conservator on staff and needed to
work with the mothers on a course of action to clean and preserve the
ribbons. We thus brought in Jane Hammond, a leading textile conser-
vation specialist from ICA Consultants in Cleveland, Ohio, to do a
workshop for the mothers on preserving the ribbons. Armed with detailed
instructions, the mothers took the ribbons home to conserve them. In
the end, the process of cleaning ended up being a joint project between
museum staff and mothers. During the cold winter months, we were able
to work together in an enclosed loading dock in our collection building
to complete the mechanical cleaning of the ribbons. This process gave an
opportunity for several staff members to assist with the project and to get
to know one of the mothers.
As the ribbons were cleaned, it was continually noted how each ribbon
had weathered being exposed to the elements in its own ways. A compar-
ison was made between the unique wear pattern of each ribbon and the
individuality of each girl. They were forever connected, yet each is an
individual. As a curator of textiles, I have come to appreciate deeply that
textiles often convey profoundly important meanings for our community
partners, especially women. These particular bows and ribbons, created
during a period of such pain, and actively scorned by persons of power,
are deeply precious to the parents who placed them around the trees. It
seems deeply fitting that they took responsibility to care for them and
restored them to the point that they could all be displayed in public.
Developing the Exhibit: Regaining Trust

Teresa: In September 2018, the Museum formed a Survivors and Allies
Advisory Council, consisting of six sister survivors, three parents of
survivors, and a detective who had played a leading role in bringing Nassar
to justice. We agreed that the council would set the basic themes of the
exhibition, review and approve the “script” and signage, and help guide
key design choices during the exhibition development process.
When I reflect on this process, the word that consistently plays in my
mind is trust. Michigan State University broke trust with these young
women and with their families over and over again. And here we were
part of a unit of that same university asking them to trust that we had
their best interests at heart and wanted and would be able to tell their
story, to elevate their voices over all of the noise of this scandal. That is a
very big ask and, early on, was a tenuous bond that could easily be broken
through unintentional missteps.
From my perspective as an exhibit developer and project manager, I
know that I was more timid in my approach to this project than I might
be in others, afraid of saying the wrong thing, of being misunderstood, of
making an accidentally offensive suggestion. It turns out that our trust-
building wasn’t one-sided; we too had to learn to trust that our mistakes
would be seen as just that and that we would be forgiven and our inten-
tions be given greater value than our mistakes. And that our partners in
this process would be patient and would explain to us more than once and
in more than one way why a particular conceptual element was so impor-
tant to them to have in the final exhibition. For example, we kept pushing
back on the idea of a timeline saying it was too big, too complicated,
visitors don’t read timelines. But they insisted that the exhibition must
have a timeline and it must be delineated by the organizations involved,
MSU, USOC, and USAG. The details, in some cases, month by month,
were vital; they told us to convey these basic messages about institutional
accountability and complicity. Once the Museum team “got” this key
point, we got to work proposing detailed timeline designs to the group.
Time and again, interactions like our conversations about the timeline
helped us all understand that we were bringing different expertise to the
table that would make a better exhibition. The survivors and allies council
were the experts on sexual assault and particularly this profound case of
assault. We were the museum experts, and we understand the exhibition
medium and had the tools to take the pieces that were so important to
the group and to the story and turn them into interpretive exhibition
components that could be accessed and understood by a broad spectrum
of museum visitors.
From the start, we agreed there were two messages for two different
audiences. First, for sexual assault survivors, whether survivors of the
Nasser scandal or not, the message is “you are not alone.” For visitors
who are not survivors, “words can hurt and heal.” No matter which
message resonates, together we created messages that can live outside the
exhibition gallery as visitors go back out into the world.
Mary: As a curator, part of the process of co-curation was learning
when to sit back and listen. In many ways, the process of exhibit develop-
ment was so different than a more traditional process rooted in curatorial
research and whose storyline was curator driven. Listening and working
together as a team was essential to this process. As we were working with
survivors whose voices had been silenced for so long, we need to utilize
our collective backgrounds as a museum staff to create an impactful and
engaging exhibit that brought forward the themes, objects, and concepts
that the committee stressed were essential.
The exhibit, the team decided, would chronicle the survivors and fami-
lies’ struggle toward healing, from being immersed deeply in a closed
circle of symptoms toward gradually learning how to reclaim their own
sense of self and stand outside of their symptoms, understanding these
as afterimages in effect, of traumatic experiences. The show, the survivors
insisted, would unflinchingly confront failures at the institutional level to
take reports of abuse seriously and to protect all victims. It would also
be a gift oriented toward proximate and distant futures, exploring their
collective struggle as sisters to educate the world about sexual violence
and to promote prevention and healing initiatives around the world.
Design Decisions: The Art of Listening

Kelly: During initial discussions regarding how to display the bows and
ribbons within the gallery, the survivors and allies council made it very
clear that it was an all or nothing prospect. Either all of the bows be
displayed, or none. As the bows each symbolically represent a sister
survivor, the council wanted to be sure that no “girl” be left behind or

forgotten.
As a designer, it was important for me to listen with an open heart
and understand the intentions behind specific requests so that I could do
my best to honor the survivors’ wishes within the design. It would have
been much easier to display a handful of bows, but once the team and
I understood the symbolism and emotional weight the bows carried we
focused our energy on finding a creative solution that would showcase all
of the bows in a reverential and respectful way.
The survivors initially proposed that at the start of the exhibition visi-
tors should come face to face with a wall of photographs, representing all
of the 505 known survivors. This wall would not list names but would
show the women at the age they were when the abuse began, and visually
convey the enormity of the crimes perpetrated across the decades.
However, it soon became apparent that not all survivors could be
represented photographically. It has often proved emotionally painful for
the survivors and/or parents to search through photographs to find an
appropriate image. Photographs can only be displayed of individuals by
those who have signed releases and the survivors were hesitant to sign
university-generated release forms.
The Museum team then proposed a compromise. For each survivor
whose photo we were unable to display, a placeholder would be created.
The wall would be hung with 505 uniformly-sized tiles; as many as
possible would be images of the survivors, and the rest would be abstract
hand-painted transparent acrylic tiles. A limited color palette was estab-
lished (including teal, which is the international color of the sexual
violence prevention movement) so that the painted tiles would be visually
cohesive, while being strikingly unique in the way that color was applied.
Alcohol-based ink blends beautifully and dries quickly which made it ideal
for this usage. It is also impossible to mess up, and every test tile was
gorgeous, which was important considering how many we would need to
make. The photos of the survivors would be printed in black and white
on PVC of matching size and thickness to the acrylic tiles.
Another key aspect of the wall design was that it be able to accom-
modate late photo additions. We anticipated that during the life of the
exhibit, we may continue to receive photos from survivors who wanted
to be included. When new photos come in, we remove a painted tile and
replace it with the photo.
The Advisory Council liked the idea so much that they wanted to
create the tiles themselves, along with their families and allies, so that
their shared energy and investment in the form of these tiny artworks
would be the first thing encountered by visitors upon entering the exhi-
bition gallery. We then scheduled two workshops, one at a neighboring
community church and one in the Museum, to create the 505 needed
abstract images.
An invitation to attend the tile-making workshops was sent out to the
broader survivor group, beyond the handful who were participating in the
exhibit planning process, in hopes of being as inclusive as possible. The
workshops also allowed survivors and their families who wished to remain
anonymous to be a part of the exhibit in a gentler, quieter way. Helping
to facilitate the tile painting was the first time I met survivors outside
of the Advisory Council. It helped me better understand their different
perspectives and paths to healing and allowed me to feel helpful to those
ends, even if it was only by moving their finished tiles to the drying table.
I was extremely moved by a family (mom, dad, and daughter) who had
initially been reluctant to stay in the space, but who worked together at
one table, creating tile after tile, side by side. All of us were swept up in
the drama of, tile by tile, offering a gift to a shared, more positive future
for ourselves and our loved ones.
Objects of Pain, Control, and Ambivalence

Mary and Teresa: The core group of survivors and allies decided to
include in the show a rather startling set of objects, the many “gifts”
presented by Larry Nassar to his young female patients, including
Olympic mascots, key chains, trinkets from the national competitions, and
photographs of victorious Olympians. One especially disturbing object is
a small jacket presented to a young gymnast when she was eight years
old; she wore this jacket proudly, and she recalls during a yearlong period
when she was repeatedly abused. When we were young, the survivors
recall, we deeply valued these objects, which carried with them our dream
of national and international success in gymnastics. “This memorabilia was
our worldly treasure,” said one young woman. In hindsight, they under-
stand these gifts as instruments of control, through which this predator
deepened his influence over them. Says one sister survivor, “We cherished
these gifts as kids. It was so hard to give them up. We loved them. But
now, it would be therapeutic to give them up, to the museum, for this
purpose.” We might, one suggested, exhibit these objects and then we

could all get together after the exhibit closes, to burn them in a grand
bonfire.
Many survivors, who came from proud MSU families, have pondered
what to do with their green and white school pride clothing, and their
class rings. They are not willing to wear these items, but nor are they
eager to throw them away. They hit upon a compromise: They lent these
garments and rings to the Museum, to be displayed in a glass closet. The
objects are presented as though the closet has been cleaned, and the prob-
lematic MSU objects are viewed being packed into storage tubs. (At one
point, we considered placing a key on the closet with a sign, explaining
that “the key to unlock this closet” would be for the university to regain
their trust, after which they might once again wear the green and white.)
Ellen: In pondering these potent objects and the ambivalent reactions
they catalyze, I find myself thinking of the work of the psychoanalysts
Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott. Klein (1975) argues that psycholog-
ical maturation and healing are achieved through a complex choreography
of attachment and detachment, allowing in time, under optimal condi-
tions, for healthy integration of the mature person’s psyche. Winnicott
(1971) emphasizes the vital importance of physical objects or their
symbolic equivalents in these processes. A young child achieves a neces-
sary degree of separation from its mother or primary caregiver through
what Winnicott terms “transitional objects,” such as a beloved blanket or
doll, which carry extended traces of parental warmth and protection while
operating under the control of the increasingly autonomous child.
Transitional phenomena, Winnicott insists, continue to operate
throughout the life cycle, in domains ranging from art to religion. We
continue to develop, amidst the challenges and suffering of everyday life,
through complex negotiations with physical objects, which may bind us
to beneficent or malicious others, and which may, in time, allow to us
gain release from the beings and forces that have haunted us. Such seems
to be the case with the “grooming objects” that will be consigned into
a case, or even the green and white university garments that survivors
will lend to the show. The decision to place these physical things inside a
plexiglass case and to write a commentary about them is a powerful way,
perhaps of breaking their spell and regaining power over them and all
they stood for. Framing and fixing these traces of a horrific past, paradox-
ically, enable active practices of future-making. The grooming objects in
this regard were rather different than the ribbons, which had been offered
by parents to call public attention to the crisis; in contrast, these objects

of pain were specifically given by the sister survivors, to cut a cord with
past and take individual and collective steps forward.
Mary: Another object of pain is one that remained invisible to its prin-
cipal subject for a two-year period. Amanda Thomashow reported on her
abuse to university authorities in 2014. In 2015, she was given a Title IX
report which asserted, in essence, that she was ignorant of the medical
procedures to which she had been subjected. Her legal team later learned
that this was a redacted report: The actual report’s conclusion, secretly
circulated to university administrators, acknowledged that the medical
procedures had been irregular and potentially opened the university to
legal exposure.
Amanda notes that she was doubly victimized, first by the perpe-
trator and then by the university administration, which refused for so
long to acknowledge the wrongs done to her. During the time gap
between her initial complaint and the time Nassar was removed from prac-
ticing at MSU, many girls and young women were abused. In hindsight,
many survivors and university community members are convinced; more
rigorous university enforcement and oversight would have protected these
individuals from violation.
Butterflies Are Good to Think:

Alexandra Bourque’s Sculpture
Mary: The healing power of collective voices is powerfully conveyed by
Alexandra (“Alex”) Bourque’s 2018 sculpture, “Transformed into Butter-
flies (Ten Feet Tall).” Three hundred brightly colored silk cutouts in the
shapes of butterflies are suspended on nearly invisible threads forming a
multicolored dress on a female dress form.
Alexandra composed the following Artist Statement:
We admire the beauty of the butterfly but we rarely admit the changes it
has gone through to achieve that beauty- Maya Angelou
We are a small but mighty group of humans, who have fought through
the pain and the darkness, and have emerged brighter than ever, and with
more love to share. But I want to acknowledge the strength and sheer
force of will it took to come out of our cocoon, to achieve this beauty. I
am so honored to stand alongside these amazing loving humans. This art
installation is for them, the 300 + army of woman who helped break me
out of my cocoon. There are over 300 butterfly’s on this dress each one
drawn and cut out by hand, representing the team of women who helped
create justice. As each of us move through the healing process as each of
us learn how to heal remember the butterfly’s, allow them to guided you
to stand 10 feet tall.
Thank you—Alexandra Bourque
Mary: Advisory committee members loved Alexandra’s work: As they

noted, butterflies symbolize rebirth and transformation and thus are
powerful signifiers of a hopeful future. Yet many felt that the work’s
beautiful and triumphant qualities risked overshadowing or obscuring the
continued pain inflicted by the crisis on survivors and family members.
It was essential not to suggest that the survivors of sexual assault are
completely healed and all the trauma is in the past.
One parent proposed a life-size three-dimensional sculpture of a little
girl crouching in terror in a corner, perhaps cutting herself. This seemed
far too literal and potentially re-traumatizing to the Museum staff and
our clinical advisers. After many weeks of discussion, a compromise was
hit upon, Kelly designed a subtle shadow in the shape of a crouching girl,
to be projected from the base of Alexandra’s butterfly dress. Visitors to
the exhibit could easily walk by the shadow and accidentally obscure it
with their own shadows. This struck many of us as entirely appropriate:
We all need to learn how to see with new eyes, to be profoundly attentive
and sensitive to the many survivors among us, whom we may all too easily
overlook.
Over time, we have come to think of the space between the butterfly
dress and the shadow as among the most important in the exhibition.
Here, we glimpse to vital, seemingly opposed poles in the lives of the
sister survivors, between beauty and pain, between public triumph and
enduring private suffering, between a re-emerging past and future yet to
be. That intermediate space or duality conveys a fundamental truth, one
which could only emerge through many sessions of attentive listening and
compromise. This duality honors the sister survivors’ insistence that their
journey is not a unidirectional one toward complete healing but rather is
itself a kind of compromise formation, simultaneously suspended between
rebirth and a perpetual return to the shadowlands of long-term trauma.
Ellen: The butterfly dress, in which three hundred silken butterfly
cutouts adorn a dressmakers’ form, which has visible “wounds” in its
upper torso, is a striking example of using negative space as a foundation
for re-imagining a future. These gaps are both dramatized and healed
by the symbolic presence of butterflies, which represent the hundreds
of sister survivors who have supported her during her healing journey.
Negative space is also highlighted in the shadow of the crouching girl,
projected out of the base of Alexandra’s dress. In the liminal voice
between the dress and shadow, past and future coexist hein complex ways
beyond our capacity to articulate in conventional language. When visi-
tors notice the shadow, they tell us their breath is often taken away, and
they begin in their own minds to go traveling in time, imagining new
directions for themselves and those whom they hold dear.
A particularly subtle instance of future creation through negative space
is seen in sister survivor Elena Cram’s deeply engaging three-part tapestry,
“Emergence,” installed adjacent to Alexandra’s butterfly dress. In creating
the work, Elena spent time contemplating the empty spaces within her
loom; initially, she had anticipated weaving a tree undergoing successive
stages of growth, but after some time, she felt called upon to weave a
more abstract sequence, mapping her changing interior emotional land-
scape over time. Elena explains that the first panel evokes a phase of stasis
or equilibrium; in the wake of trauma, one manages, in a partial state of
numbness, to endure each day, even if one is cut off from the full range of
life’s experiences. The middle panel seems to signal a process of transfor-
mation, familiar in therapy, as long-submerged arcs of pain, here evoked
by shard-like red-brown wedges, begin to manifest themselves. The first
and third panels of this work are executed in both warp and weft ikat
techniques, in which threads are dyed (or painted) to resist certain colors,
prior to being woven, thereby creating a “painterly” and flowing manip-
ulation of color throughout. The middle panel, in contrast, combines
both ikat-style dying and a tapestry technique (killim) used to demarcate
three sharply angular shapes that dominate the horizontal plane. As Elena
explained, these rather disruptive sharp triangular forms in the middle
panel signify the intrusion of traumatic memory.
Significantly, these painful memories do not entirely dominate the
middle panel but rather are constrained, opening a space for the third
and final panel. In this third section, the earlier hinted-at colors begin to
coalesce, in an assemblage reminiscent of a sunrise, as we are bathed in
the warm promise of a new day, even as many of the darker tones remain
in the lower half of the image. By “seeing” and giving that experience a
shape and form, acts of physical repair move toward enduring forms of
psychic and social restoration.
“How We Roar, Part 2”: Jordyn Fishman’s Painting

Mark: A comparable trajectory, in which the act of representing one’s own
traumatic pain becomes the foundation for refashioning temporal experi-
ence, is traced in Jordyn Fishman’s magnificent twenty-one-foot triptych,
“Together We Roar, Pt. 2.” Set on an epic gymnastics floor, the painting’s
three panels depict survivors’ transitions across time. In the foreground,
we see a sidewalk, full of cracks and bumps, evoking survivors’ journeys
through struggle and healing. We glimpse a medical examining table and
uneven parallel bars; we see a proud standing gymnast with a strange
presence embedded in her lower calf, evoking the demons with which
survivors must still contend; we grasp the collective exultation of the full
team of performers, as they find solace in one another’s resilience and
strength. As in the space between Alexandra’s dress and the shadow, the
painting opens up a liminal arena of unconstrained possibility, in which
past pain and future transformation uncannily coexist.
Jordyn’s Artist Statement is a prose-poem addressed initially to the
perpetrator and then to other interlocutors, perhaps her fellow sister
survivors, and perhaps to life itself:
Somebody was the something and somebody was the nothing

You wanted us to be the nothing but we are the something
So you are the nothing
Then there is justice
It feels like a lot when I feel like nothing
Nothing feels like something sometimes
Sometimes people aren’t ok
Ok isn’t what to be all the time
Time is what they say you should take to feel like something again
Again time didn’t work
Work got in the way
Way to go life
Life keeps going
Going to be ok
Ok
Jordyn: My decision to choose three panels was intentional, since the

narrative I am telling has both linear and cyclical dimensions. The cyclical
time complicates any straightforward, linear narrative. The triptych rein-
forces the stages in time and the gaps in our experience of time. The fiery
red placed in the right of the third panel hints that this may not be “the
end” but rather more of a cycle. The first and third panels mirror one
another in some respects. This is because the experiences undergone by
the army of survivors are complex cannot be reduced to single moments
or images. Thus, the first girl and the sixth girl are both saluting: the first
saluting the judges and the last girl saluting herself in the mirror. Hence,
we have come full circle, in a way that has returned us to our starting
point, yet everything now is different. We have struggled, grown, and
undergone more struggle.
The order of the triptych is the order in which we compete: vault, bars,
beam, floor.
This cycle is repeated at the end. Again, we see vault, bars, beam, floor,
but the “V” with which the painting begins, on the far left, is disassem-
bled on the far right, to suggest that we are now in a different place than
we once were, even as we re-commence the same cycle.
Engaging with Younger Audiences

Denice: A large percentage of our visitors includes families with children,
PreK-12 school groups, and youth organizations. In keeping with the
survivors’ emphasis on building a safe and productive future, we knew
that careful work with younger audiences would be essential. Although
the exhibit is centered on a sensitive and challenging topic, we believed
that children of all ages, with guidance, could benefit from having devel-
opmentally appropriate experiences with the content. We wanted to
support families/caregivers and K-12 teachers in working with younger
audiences.
To address this goal, we developed a variety of resources, including the
“C.A.R.E. = Consent And Respect Everyday” display area in the museum
lobby that serves as a youth-friendly introduction to the main exhibit.
It is a colorful and visually engaging way to introduce basic concepts
of consent or reinforce what children already know. The consent area
highlights bodily autonomy, what to do if something happens, and how
to take care of each other (self-care for survivors and how to be ally).
The area also contains a table featuring a game designed in-house called
“Ask!” This game presents a series of knowledge and role-play questions
about consent, getting people thinking and talking. Caregivers may visit
the consent display only or before going into the full exhibit. In choosing
not to hide this information but rather to present it in a way that scaffolds
adults’ conversations with children, we are trading silencing for voicing

(Savenije and Goldberg 2019).
While we were not sure exactly how people would react to the exhibit
and the consent area, we anticipated that most people would welcome
opportunities to discuss issues surrounding sexual assault in a supportive,
safe space. For the most part, this has proved to be true. We have,
however, encountered a spectrum of experiences and reactions, ranging
from great enthusiasm to great caution. One of the things that struck me
the most when working with one K-12 administrator and educator group
that toured the exhibit soon after the opening was the group’s complex
reaction. While the exhibit team had had a lot of time to grapple with
the content presented in the exhibit, the educator group’s experience was
very immediate. When we discussed the possibility of students visiting
the exhibit, their first concern was for how teachers could possibly first
prepare themselves to share the content with students, and then prepare
students for the experience. This is a very difficult task, and we were, as
Russell et al. (2008) observed, asking teachers to “Prepar[e] students to
work through the same layers of complexity that thoroughly trained and
experienced researchers and practitioners struggle with” (p. 414). The
same can be said of parents and other adults visiting with children. We
realized the importance of helping those who will be helping others by
providing a variety of supports.
One of the most concerning aspects for us has been the paradox of
what we are teaching students in the consent area. The area focuses on
principles of affirmative consent and bodily autonomy. Central to these
principles is protection and reporting of violations of consent. Visitors
are encouraged in the consent area to “tell a safe adult” or to “call a
help line.” One of the appalling failures of individuals and institutions
described in the exhibit is not believing victims when they reported their
abuse, often repeatedly over time and causing re-traumatization. How
then can we, with confidence, encourage children to report abuse and
hope they will be believed?
We have much left to do, but we are learning much through this
experience. Although the exhibit’s focus is on the crisis and the trauma
people have endured as a result, the exhibit also highlights hope, support,
healing, and ways to create change. That is what we plan to continue
sharing.
Celebrating Advocacy and Intersectionality

Amanda T.: Among our group of sister survivors, I could not help but
notice our stories were taken a little more seriously because we came
from positions of racial and class privilege. We reflect on another case
being prosecuted by Angela Povilaitis, at the time she served as the pros-
ecutor on our cases. The late Shawana Hall, a woman of color who was
raped in 2008, did not receive justice. Her accused rapist escaped convic-
tion through a not guilty verdict. When we were being honored at the
ESPYs and receiving the Arthur Ashe award, I found myself wondering if
Shawana would have been as welcome on the same stage.
Chong-Anna: As we developed the exhibit, the Museum partnered
with the Army of Survivors to hold a series of roundtables in which issues
of race, social class, and other forms of difference were placed front and
center. Scholars and advocates from many different backgrounds engage
in dialogue about the many forms of sexual violence, and the constant
struggle for inter-racial solidarity and inclusiveness. It is not easy to bring
everyone to the table of this issue; many of our students of color have
noted that they are tired of being asked, time and time again, to explain
the basic facts of life to their white sisters and brothers, and that they are
skeptical of what they view as overly easy claims of sisterhood.
Concluding Thoughts: Two Sister Survivors

Amanda T.: I’ve been thinking a lot about how the process of partic-
ipating in the creation of this exhibit has impacted my own personal
healing journey. At times, it has exhausted me, frustrated me, and left
me an anxious mess with my stomach in knots. Other times, it has reju-
venated my spirit, made me feel heard, and shown me that not everyone
at my alma mater is as morally bankrupt as the former (and parts of the
current) administration.
Just like the process of healing, which is anything but linear, there have
been good days and bad days and everything in between. But, unlike
healing, this exhibit is tangible and is a journey for anyone who wants to
take it. It helps any victim, any survivor, feel seen and understood because
finally there is a place in this world that gets them. Finally, there is a space
that is safe, a space that knows the pain of abuse and gaslighting but also
the beauty in coming together and rising above the hurt. This exhibit
helps not only my sisters and I shed the years of silent suffering, but it
gives hope to all survivors.
The most beautiful part of being a survivor in this army is that I am
part of a support system of strong, powerful humans who understand my
scarred up soul. I hope that while this exhibit shows the suffering we
should have never experienced, it also extends that feeling of unity to all
survivors and let’s anyone who has been victimized know they are not
alone; they are a part of this army, too.
And this army, it’s not stopping any time soon.
Trinea: As we reflect on the Finding our Voice exhibition process, it
occurs to us that this undertaking can be regarded as a model for future
advocacy and solidarity work with survivors of sexual violence everywhere.
From the beginning, we agreed that sister survivors, who had so long
been denied a voice by the university and other powerful institutions,
would take the lead in crafting the main messages and primary goals of the
exhibit. We all committed to a process of careful and attentive listening,
through which we would learn from one another. The museum profes-
sionals would not impose a pre-existing interpretive framework on the
survivors; rather, they would engage in co-equal dialogue so that together
we could create a deeply moving, and even beautiful, exhibition space that
would unflinchingly tell the story of what we had endured and show the
best of what the survivors are now capable of, including the extraordi-
nary works of language and art we have created. The gallery has become
a space in which sister survivors, individually and together, find ourselves
becoming stronger and empowered, stepping out of the shadows into the
light through a series of choices we have freely made.
In my own work as an advocate for sexual assault survivors in Detroit,
this is the process I try to follow every day, and this is a process I
observe so many of my fellow sister survivors striving for in many different
domains. The goal is not to impose a single pathway or protocol on each
and every survivor. One size does not fit all. As activists and advocates, we
share important information and stand in solidarity with survivors as they
make difficult decisions, as they determine which forensic resources they
will avail themselves to, which medical and healing approaches are right
for them, whether or not they are willing to file charges and go through
with the entire process of giving evidence and testifying, and what steps
they will take to protect themselves and their loved ones.
Again and again, we remind ourselves that our job is never to evan-
gelize for a specific course of action. Rather, we are here to empower
individuals, whose fundamental dignity and choices were cruelly violated,
to make their own decisions and chart their own way forward. The
collaborative exhibition process of Finding our Voice stands as a living

monument for all of us, a living demonstration of how we should act
with one another, going forward. Creating a productive, humane future
needs to rest, every day, on our unshakable faith in the rights of others
to make their own informed decisions, and to reclaim our shared right to
be authors of our own destinies.
References
Klein, Melanie. 1975. Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921–1945.
London: Hogarth Press.
Russell, Beth S., Champika K. Soysa, Marc J. Wagoner, and Lori Dawson. 2008.
Teaching Prevention on Sensitive Topics: Key Elements and Pedagogical
Techniques. Journal of Primary Prevention 29 (5): 413–33.
Savenije, Geerte M., and Tsafrir Goldberg. 2019. Silence in a Climate of Voicing:
Teachers’ Perceptions of Societal and Self-Silencing Regarding Sensitive
Historical Issues. Pedagogy, Culture and Society 27 (1): 39–64.
Winnicott, D.M. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.
Index
A 165, 174, 176, 177, 183–188,

absence, 10, 11, 27, 43, 46, 79, 100, 190, 191, 198, 259
103, 107–110, 113, 137, 221, apocalypse, 2, 56, 59, 60, 70
222, 255–259, 266–268, 271, archaeology, 221, 231
274 architecture, 153, 158, 244, 282, 285,
activism/lactivism, 22, 30, 77, 88, 91, 286, 288, 299
92, 95, 118, 152, 153, 164, 167, Army of Survivors, 323
222, 308 arts-based methodologies, 249
affective economies, 177 audiovisual ethnography, 9, 13, 20,
affective efficacy, 104 78, 79, 84, 91, 220, 221
affective states, 76, 174, 176, 177, autoethnography, 8, 9, 14, 219–222,
185, 186, 188, 191 229
affect(s), 7, 9, 13, 43, 115, 125, 137, autonomous driving cars, 196, 197
139, 174, 175, 177, 188, 189, Ayotzinapa 43, 46
222, 258, 269, 290
agency, ix, 2, 20, 24, 64, 66, 68, 118,
133, 137, 138, 143, 145, 176, B
189, 222, 256, 258, 281, 304, Barcelona, 152, 158
308 being, vii, 2, 3, 11, 15, 22, 23, 27, 35,
alterity, 109, 113 53, 57, 61, 62, 66–70, 76, 79,
alternative milieu, 161 81, 87, 91, 106, 121, 122, 126,
anticipation, 5, 7, 9, 12, 22, 57, 58, 130, 132, 141, 142, 145, 156,
76, 79, 81, 86–89, 125, 138, 161, 164, 166, 168, 175, 176,
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 327
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63003-4
328 INDEX
178, 180–182, 185–188, 191, D

196, 197, 200, 201, 208, 214, daydream, 23, 84
220, 234, 240, 259, 262, 266, death, viii, x, 2, 13, 22, 23, 38, 55,
267, 274, 286, 287, 293, 297, 75, 78–81, 85, 88, 93, 94, 108,
305, 306, 308, 311, 313–316, 114, 115, 222, 255–258, 265,
319, 323, 324 267, 269, 271–274
Benedict de (Baruch), 157 de Cuba, Santiago, 221, 228, 229,
Bremerhaven, 9, 123, 129–134, 233–235, 240–242, 247
136–146 deep interdisciplinarity, 8, 14, 121,
122, 124, 126, 222
design, ix, 9, 51, 124, 126, 130,
151, 153, 154, 156–159, 164,
C
166, 168, 195, 197–199, 203,
Canada, 8, 21, 24, 46, 54, 180, 181, 205–209, 213, 214, 244, 249,
263 289, 299, 312, 314
Chiapas, 8, 21, 25, 27, 36, 39 design anthropology, 5, 126, 198,
cocktail (could go as food or drink), 199, 202, 203, 206, 207, 212,
293 213
collaboration, 19–21, 28, 29, 32, 46, digital media, 3, 19
75, 80, 126, 146, 195, 199, 200, “dirt way” (of knowing), 169
203, 204, 213, 221, 223, 228,
dramaturgy of voices, 14, 21, 125
244, 290
dying, ix, 13, 22, 23, 76–78, 80, 82,
collaborative ethnography, 29, 248
84–86, 90, 94, 272, 319
(collective) imaginings, 124, 157,
158, 163, 164, 167, 168
colonialism, 106, 107, 116, 221, 228
comics, 286 E
community engagement, 223, 279 earthquakes, 228, 240
confusion, 154, 157, 160, 161 ecological, 53, 66, 70, 71, 134, 135,
construction, 9, 23, 25, 116, 158, 139, 140, 146
173–176, 183–185, 188, 221, economic, 1, 6, 7, 125, 130, 131,
227, 230, 231, 234, 235, 238 134–136, 139–142, 146, 173,
context, 5, 41, 53, 65, 108, 122, 131, 174, 176–179, 181–190, 229,
133–135, 138, 142, 152, 161, 230, 241, 242, 259, 289
175, 179, 198, 200, 201, 207, economic crisis, 12, 125, 174, 177
213, 228, 231, 235, 270, 288, embodiment, 26, 27, 65, 98, 125,
294, 299 188
contextualization, 134 emergent, vi, 3, 11, 15, 37, 64, 125,
COVID-19, 2, 3, 12 177, 187–190, 198, 199, 202,
Cuba, 9, 227–231, 234, 240, 242, 207, 212, 297
243, 249, 250 emerging technologies, 8, 198, 213,
cultural performance, 29 282
INDEX 329
emotion(s), 2, 20, 89, 90, 92, 123, film, v, ix, 1, 2, 14, 19, 28, 59, 76,
125, 174, 177, 213, 222, 249, 78–80, 84, 88, 89, 94, 95, 201,
257, 266, 268, 269, 314, 319 270, 286, 288, 290, 291, 296
endurance, x, 133, 136, 137, 139, Finding our Voice, 324, 325
144–146 future anxiety, 22
engaged methodology, 7, 20, 76, 97, future-making, viii, 6, 10, 14, 69,
157, 249, 287 123, 124, 126, 131, 134, 135,
enskillment, 8, 20–22, 51–53, 60, 61, 137, 139, 145, 146, 152, 190,
63, 65, 68 223, 224, 304, 311, 316
ethics, 6, 7, 9, 70, 126, 196, 200–204, futures anthropology, 196, 213, 214
206, 214, 266
ethnocentric, 101, 107
ethnographic memoir, 10, 256 G
Ethnographies of the possible, 195, gender, vi, 26, 54, 61, 66
203 Germany, 9, 123, 130, 134, 140,
ethnography, vi, 3, 8, 10, 11, 19, 141, 174
21, 23, 28, 76, 80, 86, 88, 91, gifts, 15, 223, 262, 273, 308, 313,
98, 102, 121, 125, 156–158, 315
160, 166–169, 175, 177, 187, girls, 61–63, 65, 67, 223, 224, 304,
189–191, 196, 197, 204, 210, 305, 311, 317–319, 321
219, 221, 222, 224, 244, 249, grief, 10, 11, 76, 90, 221, 222, 255,
279, 296 266–268, 271, 273, 274
everyday, v, x, 5, 7, 9–11, 13, 22, gymnastics, 315, 320
28, 53, 58, 63, 76, 80, 81, 84,
86–88, 91, 152, 155, 160, 165,
H
166, 176, 179, 185, 189, 190,
Havana, 9, 221, 227–229, 233, 234,
196, 205, 206, 209, 211, 212,
242, 244, 245
214, 220, 231, 243, 249, 257,
Helsinki, 124, 152, 153, 155–157,
266, 271, 316
162, 165, 169
exchange, 7, 65, 234, 281, 307, 308
heterarchy, 280, 282, 291, 293, 296,
expectations, v–vii, x, 54, 65, 100,
298
124, 129–133, 135–138, 141,
housing, 165, 184, 185, 228, 230,
143, 145, 146, 186, 211, 221,
231, 242, 249, 250
281
human-computer-interaction (HCI),
experiments, ix, 8, 9, 28, 126, 133,
198, 199
155, 158, 160, 164, 165, 168,
hunting and fishing, 51, 54
196–202, 204, 207, 208, 212,
213, 220, 228, 245, 249
I
Iceland, 9, 125, 173–175, 177,
F 179–185, 187, 188, 190
fab labs, 153, 156–159, 169 Idle No More, 24, 117, 118
330 INDEX
imaginary ethnography, 9, 13, 97, 99 knowledge practices, 157, 166

imagination, v, vii–ix, 4, 7, 9–11, 15,
21, 29, 37, 43, 52, 55, 61, 65,
68, 69, 76, 79, 82, 86, 87, 91, L
121, 124, 125, 132, 144, 146, Lingis, Alphonso, 283
157, 162, 166–168, 175, 179, literature, 99, 152, 155, 230, 231,
186, 188, 195, 202, 203, 258, 256, 293, 297
269, 279 logocentrism, 105, 106, 108–110,
imaginative ethnography, 20, 222, 112
305
impossibilities/the impossible, v,
viii, ix, 8, 10, 12, 14, 20, 21, M
26, 28–32, 34, 36, 37, 39–41, magic, 156, 166, 222, 255, 256, 258,
44–46, 66, 79, 97, 99, 102, 107, 259, 268, 271, 273, 274, 280
108, 111, 124, 125, 130, 132, Mahmood, S., 145
134, 136, 146, 152, 161, 164, maintenance, 131, 133–138, 145,
169, 213, 219, 222, 261, 272, 146, 234
274, 280, 303, 314 maker culture, 152
improvisation, 9, 23, 43, 88, 89, 215 Materialist Activist Communities
India, 13, 22, 75, 81, 85, 89, 90 (MACs), viii, ix, 124, 152, 153,
Indigenous vocality, 23, 97, 102, 116 155, 156, 158–163, 165–169
infrastructure, ix, x, 56, 130, 134, memory, vii, 4, 26, 27, 38, 43,
137, 140–143, 162, 231, 235, 46, 69, 87–89, 92, 94, 163,
281, 282, 284, 292, 298 169, 175, 185, 222, 231–233,
installation, ix, 1–3, 15, 28, 122, 220, 242, 248–250, 256, 258, 262,
222, 223, 279, 280, 289–298, 267–269, 272–274, 319
305, 317 metaphysics, 99, 101, 109, 112, 114,
interdisciplinary research, 126, 205, 124, 132, 146
223 metaphysics of presence, 102, 105,
interiority, 268 106, 109, 113
intervention, vi, x, 8, 12, 13, 22, methodology, ix, 8, 9, 23, 28, 32, 69,
24–26, 29, 45, 46, 80, 99, 122, 76, 79, 122, 132, 146, 199, 200,
123, 126, 144, 146, 151, 191, 206, 208, 221, 231, 244, 248,
195, 203, 219, 222, 286, 299 286
interventionist anthropology, 8, 12, methodology of the otherwise, 222,
20, 23 274
intimacy politics, 13, 222 Mexico, 8, 12, 21, 25, 26, 30, 34, 40,
44
Michigan State University, 223, 304,
K 305, 312
Kashi, 13, 22, 23, 75–94 Moksha, 22, 23, 75–81, 86–92
Klimastadt /Climate City-Climate moods, 2, 11, 12, 85, 125, 176, 186,
City Office, 143 189, 293
INDEX 331
MSU Museum, 305, 307 performance intervention, 27

multimodality, 8, 14, 19–21 photography, 19, 42, 84, 222, 233,
museum, 2, 10, 138, 142, 143, 220, 259, 260, 266, 268, 270, 271,
223, 303–305, 307, 311–313, 273, 274, 292, 314
315, 321, 324 pirates, 221, 228, 240, 241, 293
music, vii, 23, 24, 77, 82, 89, 92, Political Aesthetics, 289
98, 100–102, 104, 105, 107, political intervention, 38, 40
109–116, 118, 223, 228, 230, politics-of-care, 76, 80, 81, 88
233, 243–245, 296, 305 possibilities, v, vi, viii, x, 1, 6, 10,
15, 20–22, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32,
35–37, 41, 46, 52, 53, 55, 58,
N 60, 63, 66, 69, 76, 80, 87–91,
Nassar, Larry, 304–306, 315, 317 102, 118, 154, 165, 175, 186,
new materialist, 9, 124, 156, 256 196, 198, 222, 223, 250, 283,
normalistas, 12, 26, 27, 29–41, 43–46 284, 320
possible, v, vi, viii, 9, 13, 20–23, 26,
28, 32, 37, 38, 44, 45, 53, 55,
O
58, 61, 63, 66, 68, 69, 76, 80,
orality, 98, 106, 112, 115
81, 86, 91, 92, 94, 109, 114,
119, 124–126, 132, 134, 137,
P 165, 166, 169, 174, 177, 185,
palimpsests, 221, 228, 232, 233, 238, 187–190, 196, 198, 202, 203,
240, 243, 247–250 209, 212–214, 221, 223, 227,
participant observation, 21, 29, 54, 228, 231, 233, 245, 248, 249,
123, 125, 133, 176, 244, 249 273, 297, 314
past, v, viii, 2, 4, 6, 7, 22, 25, 52, 53, Posthumanism, 256
58, 61, 63, 64, 69, 70, 77, 87, postindustrial city-era-crisis, 130
91, 92, 97, 98, 117, 121, 125, present, ix, 4–7, 23, 26–28, 37, 40,
129, 133, 175, 177–181, 183, 44, 58–62, 79, 84, 106, 123,
185–191, 200, 221, 224, 227, 125, 132, 133, 135–138, 140,
228, 231–233, 238, 243, 244, 144, 145, 152, 154, 163, 164,
247, 249, 255, 257–260, 267, 169, 175–178, 180, 182–191,
272–274, 305, 307, 310, 311, 204, 209, 220, 221, 224, 228,
317, 318, 320 233, 248, 256–258, 266, 268,
performance, vi, vii, 2, 8, 12, 19–21, 269, 280, 283, 286, 297, 298,
23, 26–30, 32, 34, 38, 39, 41, 305, 311, 321
45, 52, 76, 80, 81, 91, 95, 122, presentism, 132, 133, 145, 146, 157
222, 255, 257, 258, 272, 274, problematization, 137
280, 296 psychoanalysis, 266
performance and silence, 43 psychology, viii, 126, 201, 202, 309,
performance ethnography, 26–29, 46, 316
76, 91 public memorial, 8, 21, 25–27, 38–41
332 INDEX
R Spinoza, 157, 164, 167

radical performance, 21, 40, 43, 76 storytelling, 220, 223, 232, 250, 305
reflexivity, 19, 41, 76, 108, 122, 175, sustainability, 124, 131, 133–137,
176, 203, 220 139–141, 143, 144, 146, 152,
relational aesthetics, 280 156, 160, 162, 165
resistance, 11, 100, 106, 116, 117, sustainability-urban, 134, 138
153, 162, 298
S T
Saba, 145 teal, 307, 314
San Cristóbal de las Casas, 8, 21, 25, temporalities, viii, ix, 11, 61, 76,
28 173, 174, 176, 181, 185, 187,
Sartwell, Crispin, 289 189–191, 202, 204, 206, 248,
savage, 101–103, 107, 110, 115 282
Science and Technology Studies theater, 40, 243, 258, 266, 286
(STS), 158, 162, 206 theatrical ghosting, 272
self-organizing, 152, 154 time, v, viii–x, 2–5, 10, 13, 15,
senses, v, vi, ix, 20, 52, 54, 55, 58–61, 22, 26, 29, 33, 40, 42, 53–56,
64, 67, 68, 70, 100, 113, 117, 58, 60–62, 64–67, 69, 78, 81,
118, 124, 129, 147, 155, 156, 84, 85, 90, 92–94, 97, 123,
164, 165, 168, 174, 175, 177, 124, 126, 133, 140, 143, 144,
182, 189, 196, 201, 207, 210, 147, 155, 159, 162, 163, 165,
212, 213, 219, 221, 224, 227, 169, 173–175, 178, 180–182,
233, 243, 245, 248, 249, 266, 184–186, 189–191, 196, 200,
270, 272, 273, 281, 287, 293, 202, 209–211, 220, 221, 223,
296, 297, 304, 305, 307, 308, 227, 229, 231–234, 238, 240,
313 241, 243, 245, 247–250, 258,
sensory ethnography, 22, 286 259, 262, 264, 267, 268,
sexual violence, 10, 304, 305, 308, 270, 271, 273, 274, 284, 291,
313, 314, 323, 324 293, 297, 298, 304, 306, 308,
simulations, 204 315–320, 322–324
slavery, 221, 228, 230, 233, 242, 243 time-time of urban sustainability, 134
social media, 19, 65, 163, 298 trust, 119, 126, 178, 198, 204–214,
social movements, 3, 162, 167, 282 283, 294, 307, 312, 316
song, vii, 23, 24, 80, 83, 85, 86,
98–102, 105, 107, 109–113,
115–118 U
spectral reading, 258 underground, 161, 228, 233, 235,
speculative fabulation, 280 238, 241, 242, 249
speech, 15, 23, 43, 98, 99, 102, 104, unsustainability, 155
105, 108–114, 116, 117, 178, urban development/regeneration,
182, 242 135, 139, 145, 153
INDEX 333
W women, vi, vii, 22, 27, 51–56, 59, 60,

62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 223, 305,
wilderness programs, 21, 51, 53, 68
311, 314, 317
Wizard of Oz (WOz) testing, Woods, Lebbeus, 282, 283, 285, 286,
196–198, 207, 208, 210 298, 299

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In Search of Lost

ISBN 978-3-030-63002-7 ISBN 978-3-030-63003-4 (eBook)

Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com

When the contributors to this volume completed their chapters, they

with oracles, religious salvation, reincarnation, policy, and other forms of

internal or “mentalist” approach common to the psychological sciences.

alternative activist groups to be found on the fringes of many European

1 Introduction: In Search of Lost Futures 1

2 Possibilities and Impossibilities in Acción 25

3 Put Your Body into It: Exploring Imagination

4 Staging Care: Dying, Death, and Possible Futures 75

5 Impossible Ethnography: Tracking Colonial

Part II Deep Interdisciplinarity

6 Future-Making in Times of Urban Sustainability:

7 Knowing and Imagining with Sustainable Makers 151

8 Anticipating Crisis as Affective Future-Making

9 Simulating and Trusting in Automated Futures:

Part III Autoethnography

10 Intimating the Possible Collapse of the Future:

11 Absence, Magic, and Impossible Futures 255

12 Projections and Possibilities: An Installation About

13 Exhibition Development as Restorative

Jodie Asselin, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the

Chong-Anna Canfora is Executive Director at Michigan Community

Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of

ethnography, and Indigenous research methodologies. Her new mono-

ideologie i władza w życiu polskich migrantów w Norwegii [Embar-

Mary Worrall is Curator of Textiles and Social Justice at the Michigan

Fig. 2.1 Students construct a public memorial to the 43

Fig. 7.1 Open-Source Circular Economy Days Helsinki 2016

Introduction: In Search of Lost Futures

Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston and Mark Auslander

© The Author(s) 2021 1

galleries. The installation, a meditation on lost futures, has the potential

movements, spearhead artistic initiatives, and develop revolutionary tech-

Anthropological Forays into the Future

Anthropologists have also documented how people anticipate the

In particular, they call for an interventionist anthropology, one that

The Three Approaches

considers an audiovisual research approach as a form of creative and

demonstrates that researchers’ critical engagement with their own posi-

Imagining and Intervening in the Future

inspiration to “imagine/do/think/be otherwise dances a fine line of re-

In recent years, multimodality—approaches and practices that employ

• and Ethnographic Terminalia, a collective of international artists and

In his chapter, “Possibilities and Impossibilities in Acción,” Brian

embodied, sensory, hands-on enskillment training in various camp activ-

to dying relatives, preparing for their death, interacting with others,

Possibilities and Impossibilities in Acción

© The Author(s) 2021 25

This Performance Ethnography

Fig. 2.1 Students construct a public memorial to the 43 disappeared Ayotzi-

such work, I used the instructor’s prior series of anti-femicide public

of my fieldwork. Performance ethnography sees performance—a term

tourism (but still performed in a tourist-oriented location), is an example

Guerreros Unidos cartel executed the students and then incinerated

Collaborative Ethnography in Acción

As an ethnographic collaboration, the acción consisted of two distinct

Demanding the Impossible:

government into an honest investigation. Uriel told me that, while he

the normalistas remain missing, disappeared.” That is, demanding that

Messages to the Missing

Acción as Public Memorial

The 43 missing students will always be remembered