Martian Chronicles

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A review of Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination, Robert Markley, Duke University Press, 2005.

Dying PlanetThe relations between science and fiction have nowhere been any closer than on the planet Mars. The genre of science fiction literally began with imagining life on Mars; and some of its most popular entries nowadays are stories of how humans could settle on the red planet and make it more like the Earth. Planetary science originally took Mars as its object and tried to project onto Mars what scientists knew about the climate and geology on Earth. Now this interest for Martian affairs is coming back to Earth, as scientists are applying knowledge derived from studying Mars to the study of the Earth’s planetary dynamics. Mars’ image as a dying planet has been invoked to support competing, even antithetical views, of the fate of our world and its inhabitants: a glorious future of interplanetary expansion and space conquest, or a bleak fate of environmental devastation and human extinction. Science has not completely closed the issue on whether life has ever existed on Mars; but visions of extraterrestrial civilizations and space invaders have been superseded by narratives centered on mankind and its cosmic manifest destiny. This intimate relationship between science and fiction under the sign of Mars is now more than one century old, but shows no sign of abating. What is it in Mars that inflames people’s imagination from one generation to the next? Why has Mars attracted more interest than our closest satellite, the Moon, or than more distant planets in the solar system such as Venus or Saturn? Are there commonalities between the way our ancestors envisioned channels built by Martian civilizations and more recent visions of making Mars suitable for human sojourn? Will the detailed inventory of the Martian terrain brought back by satellite images and camera-equipped rovers put an end to our interest for the red planet, or will it rekindle a new space age with the colonization of Mars as its overarching goal? And how can our visions of planetary expansion avoid the pitfalls of colonial metaphors and Earth-based anthropocentrism?

Is there life on Mars?

Dying Planet explores the ways in which Mars has served as a screen on which we have projected our hopes for the future and our fears of ecological devastation on Earth. It presents a cross-disciplinary investigation of changing perceptions of Mars as both a scientific object and a cultural artifact. The persistence of the red planet in our cultural imagination explains its enduring presence on the scientific agenda; and the scientific controversies surrounding Mars have often fueled the imagination of artists and philosophers. Scientists still frequently resort to terrestrial analogies to describe Mars; and the study of Mars has encouraged scientists to think about the planetwide conditions necessary to sustain life, making Earth more of a Mars-like planet. For planetary scientists and science-fiction writers, Mars often acts as a bellwether, a harbinger of the ecological fate of the Earth. The image of Mars as a dying planet has an enduring quality: it indicates that the Earth may go the way of Mars and transform itself into a barren land due to resource exhaustion and environmental stress. To the question: Why Mars?, the author lists the reasons that has made the fourth planet in the solar system such an enduring presence in the scientific imagination. Since the invention of the telescope in the seventeenth century, Mars can be observed with a fair degree of accuracy. Dark patches on the surface, the polar caps that wax and wane, waves of darkening that spread across the planet from the poles toward the equator during its spring and summer months: all these observed phenomena have nourished rampant speculation based on analogies to Earth’s seasonal and hydrological cycles. In 1878, Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) announced that he had observed canali (channels or canals) criss-crossing its surface. At the end of the nineteenth century, American astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) forcefully defended the idea that these canals were built for irrigation by an intelligent civilization. For more than a half century, the canal controversy fueled speculations about an alien race which could enter in contact with mankind. More generally, the discovery of life on Mars or elsewhere in the universe would profoundly alter humankind’s perception of its place in the cosmos: the question: Is there life on Mars? is as important as Copernic’s questioning the place of Earth at the center of the universe.

Our fascination with Mars stems from what Robert Markley calls the interplanetary sublime. According to Immanuel Kant, the sublime is the infinite object that reveals the sublimity of reason. The “starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” fill us with a profound sense of wonder and awe. The spectacle of Mars in science and in literature is indeed sublime and awe-inspiring. Mars has the largest volcano in the solar system. Its main valley stretches for three thousand miles, dwarfing terrestrial analogues and making the Grand Canyon seem “a mere crack on the sidewalk.” Its surface preserves landforms three to four billion years old that provide a window into a geological past that has long since disappeared from Earth. Orbital photographs show evidence of geologically recent lava flows, patterns of water erosion, and meteoric impacts that suggest a complex history of planetary evolution and climate change. The evidence of a once warmer and wetter Mars raises the question of planetary evolution and climate change. The study of Mars involves a multiplicity of sciences including geology, chemistry, hydrology, meteorology, and microbiology, as well as the still virtual disciplines of exobiology and terraforming. The exploration of Mars is a “fundamental science driver”: it pushes the frontiers of science further and provokes the imagination of scientists and writers alike. What we see in Mars also reflects “the moral law within me”: gazing at a distant planet makes our insignificance in the universe palpable. Whether humankind is alone in the universe or one of many intelligent species has profound philosophical and even theological implications. The loss of Mars’s atmosphere and the disappearance of water on its surface also bring lessons close to home: if the geological similarities between Mars and Earth have the same causes, then the history of Mars provides a window into Earh’s possible future. Doing comparative planetology, and understanding the dynamics of planetary climate change, therefore becomes the new rationale for going to Mars.

The planetary imagination

To twenty-first century observers, seeing canals on Mars is a bit like discerning a rabbit on the Moon: a figure of the imagination, a matter of folklore and cultural mythology. It is hard to realize that less than a century ago the issue of Mars canals was a matter of science, not fiction, filling the pages of scientific journals and the popular press. The idea of a plurality of inhabitable worlds has long been debated in speculative philosophy, starting with Greek philosopher Anaximander (610-546 B.C.). Based on observation and calculus, Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) placed the sun at the center of the solar system, relegating the Earth to merely another orbiting planet. The Copernician theory provided the impetus for Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) to describe precisely the orbits of the planets, although the German astronomer was “almost driven to madness” by the complexity of Mars’s orbit. With the development of the telescope in the seventeenth century, Mars began to be perceived as the most likely candidate in the solar system for harboring an extraterrestrial civilization. Giovanni Cassini (1625-1712) and Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) published detailed images of the Martian surface that drew on terrestrial analogies: polar caps, “seas” and “oases” became familiar features of the Martian terrain. In the eighteenth century, the plurality of world hypothesis had been put on a sound scientific footing and was debated by scientists and philosophers alike. Mars’s surface was described with increasing precision, and almost all astronomers who had modern instruments at their disposal made observations of the planet. The mapping of Mars focused primarily on global cycles of temperature, hydrology, and presumed biological activity. But it was Giovanni Schiaparelli’s observation of a network of lines on the surface of Mars in 1877 that sparked the most intense controversy. Schiaparelli himself was agnostic about what his canali signified: where they “channels” connecting what was described as oceans, continents, and islands, or “canals” built by an alien civilization?

Robert Markley devotes almost three chapters of Dying Planet to the canal controversy. Forcefully defended by Percival Lowell, it had all the ingredients of a great scientific controversy. It could be boiled down to a simple thesis (canals meant intelligent Martians) and integrated into a grand narrative of planetary evolution (canals were built to counter the desertification of a dying world.) Lowell’s theory operated within the bounds of accepted scientific practice (it used all scientific observations available at the time) and mobilized the rhetoric of scientific objectivity to challenge the values, assumptions, and methods of his opponents (whose refusal to envisage life outside of Earth was denounced as religiously motivated.) Part of the fascination with Mars stemmed from the implicit and explicit lessons which scientists and their readers drew from Lowell’s vision of an advanced civilization struggling to stave off ecological disaster. Lowell’s grand narrative of a dying planet found echoes in the emerging literature of science-fiction writers who mixed the literary genres of utopian novels, adventure narratives, and philosophical speculation. Although H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds is by far the best known of the turn-of-the century science-fiction novels, it was by no means an isolated production. Wells’s novel offers a classic dystopian inversion of European imperialism: his blood-drinking Martians pose a horrific challenge to bourgeois complacency, even as they give shape to late Victorian culture’s masochistic fascination with its own demise. Kurd Lasswitz (1848-1910) describes a more peaceful encounter between humans and a more advanced Martian civilization in his 1897 novel Auf zwei Planeten, published in English in 1971 with a foreword by Wernher von Braun. The book has the Martian race running out of water, eating synthetic foods, traveling by rolling roads, and utilizing space stations. Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928), a Russian physician, philosopher, and Bolshevik revolutionary, describes his Red Star (1908) as a collectivist utopia in the full throes of resource exhaustion and planetary decline. The vanguard socialism of the Martians is carved into the landscape of their planet, with the canals as both cause and effect of Martian collectivism.

How to prove a negative?

Until the 1930s, the canal thesis had enough currency within the scientific community to reinforce a widespread agnosticism about the possibility of intelligent life on Mars. Even as the canal builders retreated into science fiction, the idea of “primitive” life on Mars persisted. Lowell’s paradigm of a dying planet influenced scientific speculation about the composition of the Martian atmosphere, the character of its surface, and the nature of its putative life-forms. After World War II, advances in radiometry and the study of the infrared spectrum gave astronomers new tools with which to study Mars. As the intelligent life hypothesis became more and more improbable, scientists still deduced from the alleged existence of ice, water, and an atmosphere the possibility of vegetative life in the form of lichens and algae. It is hard to prove a negative: the inability to detect signs of life does not signify that life does not—or did not—exist on Mars. Even after the Mariner missions in the mid-1960s brought back photographs showing Mars’s barren surface as inhospitable to life, scientists speculated that oxygen might still be captured in the polar caps, and that bacterial forms of life may have existed in the past and might still be present. Evidence suggested that Mars three billion years ago was comparatively warm and wet. Did life exist in the very distant past on this more hospitable Mars? How had the planet died? Could micro-organisms survive in extreme conditions, as is the case in volcanic or deep sea environments on Earth? A whole discipline, exobiology, grounded on the premise that life may exist beyond Earth, concentrated on the search for signs of life and the study of habitable environments. The ambiguous results of the life-detection experiments conducted during the Viking missions which landed on Mars in 1976 led scientists to lobby for more sophisticated microbiology testings on future NASA landers. The search for life remains a crucial selling point for plans to explore Mars by sending automated rovers and, ultimately, boots on the ground.

In 1948, inspired by the novel of his compatriot Kurd Lasswitz, the rocket physicist and space scientist Wernher von Braun wrote the technical specification for a human expedition to Mars, The Mars Project. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the American astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan was the most vocal advocate of space exploration and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligent life. Again, he was inspired by the science-fiction novels he read as a teenager: a map representing Edgar Rice Burroughs’s vision of Mars hung on the hallway wall outside his office for more than twenty years. Just as the canals occupied the attention of a generation of scientists, Burroughs’s novels about John Carter and his adventures on the planet he calls Barsoom dominated the interplanetary fiction of the first half of the century. Literature inspired by Mars includes the good, the bad, and the ugly: for a Ray Bradbury and his Martian Chronicles (1950) or a Isaac Asimov’s The Martian Way (1952), how many pulp fictions or comic-book adventures featuring green aliens laying eggs and four-armed tetrapods shooting laser beans? As Robert Markley states in his introduction, “anyone who has read a lot science fiction realizes that much of it is pretty bad.” But the appeal of the genre lies elsewhere: “science fiction does not represent historical experience, but generates simulations of what that experience may become.” Ray Bradbury once said that “Burroughs has probably changed more destinies than any other writer in American history.” The same could be said about himself. Generations of adults (mostly males) had their formative years influenced by the likes of Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Considering that space exploration lacks the support of vested interests outside of the aerospace industry, science-fiction novels created a constituency for sending missions to the red planet and beyond.

The Mars Society

Inspired by the Lowellian paradigm of a dying planet bearing the mark of ancient civilizations, classic science fiction was obsessed with the idea of intelligent life on Mars. More recent science fiction plays with the idea of bringing life and civilization (back) to Mars: by sending manned missions, establishing a permanent presence, and terraforming the planet. As an emblem of humankind’s interplanetary future, Mars is described both as a dead world that resists human effort to explore, colonize, and transform it and the site of humankind’s next giant leap in its multisecular evolution. These fictions are haunted by the dark underside of colonization and extractive capitalism, and often demystify the masculinist narrative of the conquest of space with a vision of failed social order and technoscientific hubris. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy, Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996), the settlement and terraforming of Mars is chronicled through the personal and detailed viewpoints of a wide variety of characters spanning almost two centuries. Ultimately more utopian than dystopian, the story focuses on egalitarian, sociological, and scientific advances made on Mars, while Earth suffers from overpopulation and ecological disaster. These plans to colonize Mars are no longer science fiction: established in 1998 by aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin and backed by multibillionaire Elon Musk, the Mars Society, a nongovernmental organization, has set itself the goal to send humans to Mars and establish a permanent colony in the very near future. In an industry where NASA remains the most expensive game in town, the “new space” industry that operates on a “faster, better, cheaper” basis promotes alternative, low-cost ways of getting humans to Mars and sustain them while they stay on the planet. Robert Markley, who published Dying Planet in 2005, has reservations about the whole endeavor. In his opinion, the Mars Society’s vision of a new American frontier, or a new manifest destiny, “is founded on dubious or simplified readings of American history that repress both the human and ecological consequences of conquest and colonization.” As he concludes, “the ultimate challenge posed by planetary transformation is ultimately as much ethical as it is scientific.”

The Land of Kush

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A review of Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan, Christopher Tounsel, Duke University Press, 2021.

Chosen PeoplesOn July 9, 2011, South Sudan celebrated its independence as the world’s newest nation. One name considered for christening the country was the Kush Republic, after the Kingdom of Kush that ruled over part of Egypt until the 7th century BC. According to historians of antiquity, Kush was an African superpower and its influence extended to what is now called the Middle East. Placing the new nation under the sign of this prestigious ancestor was seen as particularly auspicious. But for many people the name Kush has been connected with the biblical character Cush, son of Ham and grandson of Noah in the Hebrew Bible, whose descendants include his son Nemrod and various biblical figures, including a wife of Moses referred to as “a Cushite woman.” A prophecy about Cush in Isaiah 18 speaks of “a people tall and smooth-skinned, a people feared far and wide, an aggressive nation of strange speech, whose land is divided by rivers” that will come to present gifts to God on Mount Zion after carrying them in papyrus boats over the water. For many South Sudanese at independence, Isaiah’s ancient prophecy directly applied to them, to the point the newly appointed President Salva Kiir chose Israel as one of his first destinations abroad. Churchgoers also read echoes of their fight for sovereignty and independence in various passages of the Bible. Christian southerners envisioned themselves as a chosen people destined for liberation, while Arabs and Muslim rulers in Khartoum were likened to oppressors in the biblical tradition of Babylon, Egypt, and the Philistines. John Garang, leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M), was identified as a new Moses leading his people to the promised land. The fact that he left the reins of power to his second-in-command Salva Kiir before independence, just like Moses did with Joshua upon entering the land of Canaan, was interpreted as further accomplishment of the prophecy. Certainly God had a divine plan for the South Sudanese. For some Christian fundamentalists, the accomplishment of Isaiah’s prophecy was a sign of the imminent Second Coming of Jesus Christ that Isaiah identified as the Messiah, the king in the line of David who would establish an eternal reign upon the earth.

Isaiah’s prophecy

This moment of bliss and religious fervor did not last long. Conflict soon erupted between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir (of Dinka ethnicity, Sudan’s largest ethnic group) and former Vice President Riek Machar (of Nuer ethnicity, the South’s second largest ethnic group.) The South Sudanese Civil War that ensued killed more than 400,000 people and led about 2.5 million to flee to neighboring countries, especially Uganda, Sudan, and Kenya. Various ceasefire agreements were negotiated under the auspices of the African Union, the United Nations, and IGAD, a regional organization of eight East African nations. The last truce signed in February 2020 led to a power sharing agreement and a national unity government that was supposed to hold the first democratic elections since independence in 2023. Again, some predicators and religious commentators interpreted these internal divisions and ethnic strife using biblical metaphors. As with earlier periods, the war produced a dynamic crucible of religious thought. Supporters of civil peace called on South Sudanese not to divide themselves like the tribes of Israel or recalled Paul’s injunctions in the Epistle to the Galatians to become one in Jesus by forgetting divisive identities. “Let us take the Bible instead of the gun,” exhorted a senior official at the Ministry of Religious Affairs. “Shedding blood is the work of the devil, and anybody who is killing people is doing the work of the devil,” declared another cleric. The civil war was interpreted as an opposition between right and wrong; only this time the forces of evil were internal to South Sudan, not projected upon the northern oppressor. The most vindictive denounced their enemies by comparing them to the Pharisees or even to Herod. God was used in one breath to argue for cultural unity (“all are one in Christ”) and in another for cultural diversity (tribes are “gifts of God”). These conflicting arguments are proof that in all situations, the biblical referent remains major in the South Sudanese national imagination. Meanwhile, the “land of milk and honey” remains one of the poorest countries on earth, with all the characteristics of a failed state.

For some people, interpreting historical events along religious lines is not only irrational and delusional, but also dangerous and divisive. Looking at history from God’s perspective can lead to a fatalistic view of life and human action. Having “God on our side” has served as justification to some of the worst atrocities in human history, and the Westphalian system of nation-states that is enshrined in the United Nations Charter was originally created to bring an end to the religious wars that plagued Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. According to modern views, Christian interpretation of biblical prophecies should remain in the pulpit, and clerics should refrain from interfering in political issues of the day: “The more politically involved the church has become, the less spiritually involved the church is.” In the case of Sudan, religion was mobilized both in the North and in the South to bolster national identities and strengthen racial differences. Leaders in Khartoum have attempted to fashion the country as an Islamic state, making Islam the state religion and sharia the source of the law since 1983. Meanwhile, Southern Sudanese have used the Bible to provide a lexicon for resistance, a vehicle for defining friends and enemies, and a script for political and often seditious actions in their quest for self-determination and sovereignty. But Christopher Tounsel does not see religion as the source of the civil war that led to the independence of South Sudan. After all, rebels in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) were first inspired by Marxism and backed by the socialist regime of Mengistu in Ethiopia. John Garang believed in national unity and a secular state that would guarantee the rights of all ethnic groups and religions in a “New Sudan” conceived as a democratic and pluralistic state. Theology was only one of the discourses that informed the ideological construction of the South Sudanese nation-state. Race and, after 2005, ethnicity, were also important components of southern identities, working to include individuals in collective bodies and to distinguish them from others. In this perspective, the author cautions “against a limited view of South Sudanese religious nationalism as one based exclusively in anti-Islamization.”

A crucible of race

In Chosen Peoples, Christopher Tounsel presents “theology as a crucible of race, a space where racial differences and behaviors were defined.” Rather than approaching race and religion—the two elements most often used to distinguish North and South Sudan—as separate entities, he analyzes religion as a space where race was expressed, defined, and animated with power. Tounsel is particularly interested in how Christianity shaped the identity of the region’s black inhabitants (as opposed to Sudan’s Arab-Muslim population) and brings forth the notion of God’s chosen people (or peoples) using the Bible as a “political technology” in their fight against the oppressor. The first Catholic missionaries – Jesuits – settled in South Sudan in the middle of the 19th century following the creation by Pope Gregory XVI of the Vicariate Apostolic of Central Africa in 1846. As for the Protestants, they arrived in 1866 by through the British and Foreign Bible Society. However, this initial period of mission work was interrupted for nearly thirty years due to the Mahdist Wars that bloodied Sudan in the last decades of the century. When the British regained control of the region under the Condominium Agreement signed with Egypt in 1899, they facilitated the reestablishment of missions there in order to transform South Sudan into a buffer zone that could stem the expansion of Arabic and Islam up the Nile. The missionary work carried out there in the first half of the 20th century, mainly by Roman Catholics, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the United Presbyterian Mission (also known as the American Mission), in addition to its classic dimensions (translating the Bible, identifying socio-linguistic groups, schooling a new local elite), included a strong martial dimension by playing both on the symbolism of the crusade and the struggle against Muslim slavery. Through a case study of the Nugent School, created by the CMS in Juba in 1920, Tounsel shows that ethnic identities were also reinforced through the teaching of local vernacular languages and the definition of self-contained tribal units based upon indigenous customs, traditional usage, and competitive antinomies (a Nuer-English dictionary included the descriptive phrase “my cattle were stolen by Dinka.”) Ethnic conflict between indigenous identities, seen as natural and inevitable, could only be overcome by a common Christianity, while Islam and Arab culture was portrayed as alien and hostile.

After Egypt’s 1946 effort to assert its sovereignty over Sudan, Britain reversed course and conceded Sudan’s right to self-determination and, ultimately, independence, which was proclaimed on January 1st, 1956. The almost complete exclusion of southerners from the “Sudanization” policies in the 1950s fueled a growing sense of southern grievance and political identity. The 1954 creation of the first all-Sudanese cabinet under al-Azhari’s National Union Party, while the southern Liberal Party was in opposition, accelerated southern political thinking toward self-determination and federalism. It was in this context that a mutiny of the Equatorial Corps occurred in 1955 at Torit in the southern Equatoria province. The Equatorial Corps, composed entirely of Christian soldiers – around 900 –, had been created by Lord Reginald Wingate as part of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium on Sudan at the end of the 1910s: a bold decision in a context where military service had until then been reserved for Muslims. It was intentionally divided along ethnic lines: most of the corps was recruited from the Lotuho and other small eastern ethnic groups on the Sudanese slave frontier that were perceived to have “natural” military qualities. The mutiny, motivated by a project to transfer some units to the North and have them replaced by northern soldiers, was sparked by an incident involving an Arab soldier who allegedly insulted a black soldier by calling him a slave (abid). This term, then commonly used by Muslim Sudanese to denigrate black populations, testified to the very slow disappearance of slavery in the region. Sudanese slavery had even experienced a surge in the 1860s and 1870s with the progress of navigation on the Nile and had still been largely tolerated by British supervision until the beginning of the 20th century, after the end of the Mahdist wars. Mostly contained in Equatoria, where most of the mutineers were based and originated, the mutiny was quickly put down but it then led to the First Sudanese Civil War, taking its sources from the same crucible: Christian identity, racial confrontation, ethnic divisions, refusal of slavery and Muslim domination.

The First and Second Sudanese Civil Wars

The First Sudanese Civil War (1955-1972) considerably strengthened the biblical reference in the South Sudanese national emancipation movement. It was widely regarded as a religious confrontation between a Muslim government in Khartoum and its armies, and Christian liberation fighters in the South. Religious thought provided an important spiritual lexicon for the racial dynamics of the war, becoming a space for southerners to articulate the extent of racial division and hostility. The decision of the Sudanese government to Arabize school programs and gradually ban foreign missions, definitively expelled in 1964, not only amplified Christian proselytizing by local pastors but also provided new troops for the South Sudanese resistance. At the beginning of the 1960s, southern opposition was structured militarily and acquired propaganda organs such as the Voice of Southern Sudan published from London with the support of missionary societies. In 1967 the Youth Organ Monthly Bulletin of the Sudan African National Union (SANU) published a rewriting of Jeremiah’s Book of Lamentations where Israel was replaced by South Sudan and Babylon by Khartoum. This type of parallel was used more and more frequently, giving the conflict the appearance of a war of religion. While Arabs were demonized as inhuman evil agents of Satan, southerners framed themselves as God’s beloved people analogous to the Israelites. The war witnessed the creation of a theology that maintained that providence was leading southerners to victory. When the first civil war ended in 1972, biblical reference was clearly rooted while racial and religious identities were closely interwoven. For Sudanese refugees, returning home was presented as the end of exile in Babylon. Southern intellectuals, rather than approaching race and religion as mutually exclusive, used theology as a crucible through which racial identity was defined.

The peace agreement signed in Addis Ababa in 1972 provided for autonomy for South Sudan and religious freedom for non-Muslim populations. Despite their desire for independence, SANU leaders accepted to compromise, but multiple violations of the agreement, as well as the decision of the Sudanese government to impose Islamic law, contributed to relaunching the conflict in 1983 with the creation of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and Army (SPLM/A). The fall of Ethiopia’s Mengistu regime in 1991 was the second formative event, depriving the southern opposition from operational support and ideological justification. Though the SPLM never officially affiliated with any religion and maintained a policy of religious toleration, it increasingly turned to Christianity to mobilize and garner support at home and abroad. The SPLA was transformed into a largely Christian force that explicitly used Christian themes and language as propaganda. Apart from the Bible, few other sources were available with which to interpret their position. Episodes from biblical Israel’s history, like David’s clash with Goliath or Moses leading his people to the Promised Land, became popular narratives to fit the modern situation. It is in this context that Isaiah’s prophecy concerning Cush was referenced as foretelling ultimate victory. John Garang, a secularist at the beginning of the war, saw utility in including Cush in domestic politics. He also tried to mobilize support abroad, appealing to Pan-Africanism, Evangelical solidarity, and humanitarian repulsion against modern slavery. American human rights activists pressured the US government to get involved in the situation, framing the conflict as a war between Arabs and Africans, Christianity and Islam, masters and slaves. Their advocacy and humanitarian engagement influenced the manner in which the conflict was represented in mainstream Western media. Beginning in the 1990s, Sudan entered the American evangelical mind as a site of Christian persecution and possible redemption. President Bush appointed Senator John Danforth—an ordained Episcopal minister—as his special envoy on the Sudan. Without Washington’s support, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in 2005 and the ensuing independence of South Sudan in 2011 would never have taken place.

A failed state

Christopher Tounsel takes a neutral perspective on the role of religion in framing South Sudan’s struggle for independence. He does not see religion as a “veil” for material interests or as an “opium” that would intoxicate people into a war frenzy. He has consideration and respect for the religious narrative that interprets South Sudanese nationalism as a spiritual chronicle inspired by the Bible and corresponding to God’s plan. Of course, he does not himself offer a religious interpretation of historical events. The views he presents are those of local religious actors: mission students, clergy, politicians, former refugees, and others from a wide range of Christian denominations and ethnicities. He strictly endorses the role of the professional historian, crafting a rigorous history of religious nationalism—analyzing many printed sources and archives that are exploited from the first time; collecting oral testimonies by clerical and non-clerical figures in Juba; offering his own interpretation after discussing other viewpoints present in the academic literature. Only in the acknowledgement section does he make reference to his own religious affiliation by giving thanks to “my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” But if we consider the devastating toll that successive civil wars had on the local population, one may see the role religion has played in a more negative light. Were it not for a biblical narrative of suffering and redemption, a South Sudanese state would never have seen the day. There are serious concerns about the viability of such a landlocked, ethnically polarized country that political scientists subsume under the category of failed state. Religious faith may have been useful in forging a common identity against an oppressor perceived as Arab and Muslim, but could not prevent the newly independent state to plunge into prolonged ethnic warfare. And American Evangelicals who viewed South Sudan as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy and the sign of Christ’s second coming were not simply delusional: they added oil to the fire in an explosive crucible of race, religion, and ethnicity.

Critical Fashion Studies

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A review of Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property, Minh-Ha T. Pham, Duke University Press, 2022.

Minh-Ha PhamThe fashion world has always espoused the latest trends in society and kept up with the times. It should therefore come as no surprise that fashion producers and commentators now speak of “ethical fashion,” “sustainable fashion,” or “fashion for good.” But what do these terms exactly mean? Who has the power to declare fashion worthy of these labels? What lies behind the glamour and glitter of fashion shows and catwalk fame? Unsurprisingly, there is also a radical wing of fashion critique (or critical fashion studies) that scrutinizes those corporate objectives and tries to hold the fashion industry accountable. Minh-Ha T. Pham is one of those critics that read fashion in relation to race, class hierarchies, labor, indigenous knowledge, creativity, and intellectual property rights (IPR). In Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, she examines the way social media users monitor the fashion market for the appearance of knockoff fashion, design theft, and plagiarism. Through what she calls “crowdsourced IP regulation,” she envisages the online activities of bloggers and Instagram users as a form of free labor mobilized in the service of fashion capital accumulation. Network vigilantes who are policing the border between authentic and fake fashion are engaged in racial work: copycat producers and consumers are always portrayed as Asians and reviled as morally defective, while creativity is defined as a property of whiteness, which gives Western fashion designers the privilege to engage in racial extractivism and legitimate cultural theft.

The sociology of fashion

 Although this book is grounded in media studies, it also uses standard tools and concepts of sociological analysis. Its sociological value is limited by the fact that the author didn’t engage in fieldwork or participant observation: she only observed fashion blogging netizens from a distance and through the media impact of their activities. Nor did she collect quantitative data about fashion imitation and IPR policing activities. Her terrain is digital, and she gathered most of her observations online. But her critical perspective on the fashion industry places her in a long tradition of the sociology of fashion, from George Simmel and Thorsten Veblen to Pierre Bourdieu and Nancy Green. According to Simmel, fashion derives from a tension between, on the one hand, the tendency of each of us to imitate somebody else, and on the other hand, the tendency of each of us to distinguish oneself from others. Veblen coined the word “conspicuous consumption” to characterize the acquiring of luxury commodities by the “leisure class” as a public display of economic power. Bourdieu conceptualized fashion innovation as a field of values, norms, and power hierarchies structured around the opposition between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, mainstream élégance and avant-garde. Nancy Green gave a historical description of the working conditions of immigrants in the women’s garment industry in New York’s Seventh Avenue and the Parisian Sentier, showing how labor organization builds on gender and ethnic differences. Minh-Ha Pham’s perspective is thoroughly global: her examples and case studies originate from the heart of the fashion industry in Paris or New York as well as from the periphery of indigenous communities in Mexico or from ordinary social media users in Thailand. Call it multi-sited ethnography without direct engagement, or doing fieldwork from a distance.

Imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, but that is not how most fashion brands see it. For years, the luxury industry has been battling counterfeiters, investing heavily in technology, the internet, and AI to authenticate products. Brands have lobbied governments to seize and destroy fake goods, prosecute buyers and dealers, and managing online traffic to counterfeit platforms. However, legal action does not seem to be enough. For a start, in the fashion industry, intellectual property is not enforced as it is within the film industry and music industry. To take inspiration from others’ designs contributes to the fashion industry’s ability to establish clothing trends. Fashion copycat disputes rarely involve original designs: fashion is, after all, a copy culture, in which innovation feeds on imitation. With few legal basis to protect original works of authorship, fashion leaders turn to the public to defend them against imitators. In the early twentieth century, powerful fashion companies used the trade and popular press to create a popular sense of fashion legality. Today, social media users and environments do this work. For Minh-Ha Pham, crowdsourced IP regulation is extralegal work: rather than pay legal experts, fashion brands depend on social media users to stamp on knockoffs and copycats. The fashion industry reproduces downstream a practice that it uses at every step of its value chain: mobilizing unpaid or grossly underpaid labor, from the garment factory workers to the unpaid fashion interns and the models that are compensated in kind with the luxury goods they have to wear.

Crowdsourced IP regulation

In crowdsourced IP regulation, social media users are naming, shaming, and demanding boycotts against fashion copycats while defending and promoting alleged copycat victims. They are playing this digital vigilante role in good faith and with good intentions: most of them sincerely believe that they contribute to a more ethical fashion world in which creativity gets rewarded and copying is sanctiond. But according to Minh-Ha Pham, the denunciation of the copycat culture follows racial and colonial patterns. The copynorms that inform them are freighted with cultural assumptions and biases, whereby copiers are always construed as Asians and innovators as Western. Authentic and fake fashion, creativity and copying are racialized categories, not neutral facts. The Asian fashion copycat is ethical fashion’s quintessential racial other. It derives from deeply rooted ideas about, on one hand, Asians’ technical superiority and, on the other hand, their cultural and ethical inferiority. According to standard stereotype, Asians are incapable of creativity, they are condemned to rote learning and mechanical repetition. The premise of the Asian copycat is routinely accepted without question or qualification: fashion knockoffs are immediately perceived as made in Asia, as the products of cheap ethics and shoddy manufacturing. Google searches automatically associate copycat culture with China or South Korea. These countries are accused of having achieved development by imitation rather than innovation. Accusations of “bottom-up copying” bristle with moral indignation about the theft of creative property, hard work, and sales that should have benefited their rightful owners. Words like “copying,” “knockoff,” “piracy,” and “counterfeit” are laden with value judgements and potentially legal implications. Meanwhile, “top-down copying” receives much less attention, and “lateral copying” is mostly a concern within the industry that feeds on imitation and trend-making. Popular euphemisms for top-down copying include “creative inspiration,” “homage,” and “cultural appreciation.”

Several case studies in the book concentrate on this top-down copying and contrast the lack of sanction associated with it to the moral indignation and media campaigns raised by bottom-up imitation. In the exceptional cases where “top-down copying” is publicly acknowledged, the copying is often excused as an isolated lapse in judgement rather than a reflection of a broader cultural or racial pattern. In particular, indigenous knowledge and ethnic designs are considered as part of the public domain, constituting a “free bin” that Western designers can mine for their creations. For Minh-Ha Pham, cultural appropriation and cultural inspiration are two faces of the same coin. They rely on what she calls “copy rights,” the power to copy without being branded a copycat. Copy rights include the right to use and enjoyment and the right to exclude others. They provide some with the right to copy, to benefit from copying, and to exclude others from the same privileges. They constitute a “racial license to copy” that is part of the privilege of being white. Examples of such racial extractivim are numerous. Isabel Marant’s copycat version of the Mixe blouse, a traditional design from the Tlahuitoltpec people in Oaxaca, Mexico, led to a legal battle that classified the indigenous design as belonging to the public domain. The Maasai people of northern Tanzania and southern Kenya have experienced a similar pattern of legally sanctioned exclusion and extraction, being used in many media campaigns without receiving any share of the proceeds. The racial license to copy also protected the designers who launched “Navajo-inspired” collections, giving rise to a Navajo chic trend that didn’t benefit the Navajo people in any regard. In fashion’s parlance, “traditional clothing”, “folk costumes,” and “ethnic garb” are racially coded terms that de-skill non-Western designs as cultural and natural rather than artistic and intellectual.

Ppl knocking each other off lol

Whereas most websites dedicated to exposing fashion copycats “punch down” on cheap imitators and align with the interests of the luxury business, Diet Prada, an Instagram account with a massive followership, doesn’t hesitate to “punch up” or “punch laterally.” It plays the role of a whistleblower or an online watchdog exposing the structural problems that pervade the global fashion industry, particularly racism, misogyny, sexual predation, and labor exploitation. Diet Prada dares to name, shame, and, in some cases, flame industry giants. Its posts typically involve side-by-side comparison photos of two or more lookalike fashion garments or accessories. It also imitates the headlines of fashion magazines or uses internet memes to expose wrongdoings and express outrage. According to Minh-Ha Pham, Diet Prada is “a fashion insider that uses insider branding strategies and forms to articulate an outsider cultural political discourse about the inequalities sustaining the global industry of which it’s now a significant part.” Its refusal to consent to hegemonic ways also finds expression in absurd posts that poke fun at fashion, fashion policing copycat, and fashion copycatting itself by juxtaposing high fashion objects with mundane things, like a ham sausage adjacent to a Bottega Veneta shoe or a dog’s snout and a Saint Laurent dress. Its derisive one-line description, “Ppl knocking each other off lol,” has remained unaltered since its first post. Its status as an industry watchdog is now so established that fashion companies have instituted channels to communicate with it, eschewing the conventional language of corporate communication to publish off-the-cuff comments and candid reactions.

Apart from naming and shaming, another response to counterfeits is moving upscale. This makes perfect economic sense: according to market signaling theory, when counterfeits enter the market, authentic brands have incentives to upgrade their quality and innovate. A higher price signals a higher quality, while pervasive counterfeiting with low production cost could drive authentic products with lower prices out of the market (as in the “market for lemons” theorized by George Akerlof.) Chanel, Gucci, and Prada don’t really need to crack down on counterfeits: they control their own distribution outlets and have developed among their customer base a sensitivity to detail that allows them to distinguish between the authentic and the fake. Fashion is linked to elitism and fueled by the increasing wealth gap in society. This is why the notions of “democratic fashion,” or “affordable luxury,” are contradictions in terms. They were promoted at the turn of the century by television shows and feature films that made the rarefied world of high fashion relatable. With Sex and the City or The Devil Wears Prada, people who might never shop for luxury fashion were encouraged to become conversant in its language. Fashion imposed its brands and values upon a society that learned to distinguish between authentic taste and fake products, between high and low market positioning. This period also saw the rapid expansion of European “fast fashion” brands into US markets. After the 2008 financial crisis, terms like “cheap chic,” “recession chic,” and “credit crunch chic” were widely used to describe budget versions of designer fashions sold at stores like Zara, Target, and H&M. Cheap chic was as much a political fashion statement then as sustainable fashion is today. It promised to make fashion (the clothes and the industry) accessible to more consumers. More recently, fast fashion came to be associated with China and rejected as unethical: it became synonymous with cheap labor, shoddy quality, and environmental degradation.

Fast fashion

Minh-Ha Pham’s book encourages readers to take a broader view of the value chain in the fashion industry. It should include all actors who create value, including the “free labor” mobilized downstream to expose counterfeits and reinforce IPR protection. Could critical fashion studies be included in this broader industry environment? Does Minh-Ha Pham participate in the regulation of a sector she so vehemently criticizes? Like fashion bloggers, academic critics believe in the importance of fashion as a social phenomenon. They treat their activity as work and dedicate an important part of their time to monitoring the industry’s latest developments. By holding fashion accountable, they demonstrate that the fashion world cannot stand outside broader societal concerns pertaining to racial justice, gender equality, labor rights, and sustainable development. The fashion world is very sensitive about these issues, not because it is particularly virtuous (it was late to follow the #MeToo bandwagon), but because its business has always been to keep abreast of latest cultural trends and to align with the changing times. Corporations in the luxury business are very careful about the language they use and what is told about them. Any blemish in their corporate image translates into massive revenue loss and need for reputation repair. The Asia Pacific region has become one of the brightest spots in the global fashion economy: as the economic status of Asian women is growing globally, racial stereotyping of Asian groups is no longer acceptable, as any blunder can lead to devastating boycott campaigns. Reading Minh-Ha Pham’s book might help corporate executives in the sector become more aware of concerns about race, gender, and global justice.

Anthropology Post-1986

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A review of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, Paul Rabinow and George E. Marcus with James D. Faubion and Tobias Rees, Duke University Press, 2008.

Marcus 2I am interested in the history of anthropology. But there is a great disconnect in the way this history gets told. It stops at the point when it really should start. Anthropology is rich with disciplinary ancestors and founding fathers. Bronisław Malinowski and Franz Boas laid solid foundations for the discipline, teaching their contemporaries that no society, including their own, was the end point of human social evolution. The discipline has a few founding queens as well: Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, who both studied under Boas, contributed to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity that allowed for the turn toward greater tolerance and inclusion in postwar America. History books go in great detail in discussing their contribution to the field and how a few great debates shaped the discipline. They highlight a Golden Age of anthropology in which the discipline was relevant, not only for other academic specialties, but for addressing the pressing concerns of the day. As of today, an anthropology major will give prospective students a valuable perspective on matters like diversity and multiculturalism, race and gender, globalization and political conflict, religions and secular beliefs, and much more. But history books all stop when the party gets started. They never mention the controversies and paradigm shifts that form the bedrock of contemporary research. The references they quote are absolutely of no use in writing current anthropology. Bibliographies of recently published articles rarely, if ever, mention publications antedating the 1990s. It seems as if the discipline reinvented itself at some point and discarded its former self.

Writing Culture

This point can be dated with some precision: it corresponds to the publication in 1986 of the collection of essays Writing Culture. There was a before and an after Writing Culture. This is not to say that this edited volume was a scientific breakthrough: it consists of ill-written essays that, read retrospectively, obfuscate debates and are most noticeable for what they missed—gender and feminism, race and ethnicity, and what will be known as the politics of identity are conspicuously absent from the texts. But the book published by the University of California Press achieved mythic status. As Tobias Rees recalls, studying anthropology in Germany in the mid-1990s, “We read the history of anthropology up to Writing Culture and… and there is nothing afterwards.” It is still mandatory reading in graduate courses taught at American anthropology departments. Writing Culture operated a linguistic turn by reducing ethnography to the status of a text, separated from the reality it was supposed to study and even from a scientific project of truth-making. It opened what was at times the rather dry prose of ethnographic writing to literary freedom. It led to a proliferation of personal confessions, literary essays, and subjective renderings of fieldwork that confirmed the status of the anthropologist as author but made very little contribution to the knowledge of societies they were supposed to study. Both Paul Rabinow and George Marcus were protagonists in this movement. Marcus coedited the volume (with Jame Clifford) and began a lifelong reflection on ethnographic writing and pedagogy. Rabinow entered an essay in Writing Culture in which he grappled with philosophical issues of modernity and postmodernity. Their testimony was collected by Tobias Rees, a young assistant professor, in a series of intellectual exchanges that form the basis of this volume, published in 2008.

In retrospect, Writing Culture appears more as a logical end point than as a new departure. It seemed to bring the history of anthropology to an end, putting the whole undertaking, its methods, its concepts, even its object, radically into question. While the early academic descendants of Boas and Malinowski had a clear sense of purpose, by the 1980s the discipline had become more fragmented. Anthropologists were haunted with a sense of embarrassment about the discipline’s colonial legacy and keen to refute it (even more so today.) They had realized that true “participant observation” was hard to achieve, since the mere presence of the researcher in a society tends to change what is being studied. They had also become uncertain about where the boundaries of their discipline should lie. A new and intense sensitivity to matters of power and conflict took hold of American anthropologists. Tobias Rees lists these political factors in his introduction: “the worldwide struggles against colonialism, the rise of the civil rights movements, the coming of affirmative action, the anti-war movement, the Chicago riots, new-nation building, minority movements, etc.” It has often been said that in the 1970s and early 1980s, anthropology in the United States turned left, standing on the side of the exploited and marginalized people, while the other social sciences turned right, espousing paradigms of scientific rigor and quantification. Anthropologists also increasingly turned their lens to Western society. But studying Western cultures left them entering territory dominated by economists, geographers, political scientists, and sociologists. So should they compete with these disciplines? Collaborate? As anthropology groped for answers, the discipline spawned numerous subfields: economic anthropology, feminist anthropology, medical anthropology, legal anthropology, science and technology studies, and so on.

Clifford Geertz’s influence

Writing Culture was written in the shadow of Clifford Geertz. Geertz’s formulation of an interpretative program for anthropology marked an important turning point in the history of the discipline. Conceptually, he proposed to understand culture as text. To be more precise, Geertz defined culture as a semiotic web of meaning that is open for interpretation and rereadings. “The challenge of fieldwork was, as he famously remarked, to look over the shoulder of an informant and to read the script that guides the native’s life.” As a result of this philological turn, ethnographies were increasingly understood as texts and thus as literary documents. Clifford Geertz was Paul Rabinow’s PhD advisor at the university of Chicago and sent him to do his doctoral fieldwork in Séfrou, a Moroccan town that Geertz had selected as the camp base to conduct an extensive survey of life conditions in Third World nations. The tone of some remarks made by Paul Rabinow in his conversation with Tobias Rees confirms there was bad blood between the two. Geertz famously criticized the tendency towards “I-witnessing” that manifested itself in Rabinow’s recollection from the field, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. But he was careful to specify that he was speaking of him and his like-minded colleagues only as they function inside their pages, not as “real persons.” In return, Rabinow made ad hominem attacks on his former professor in an essay, “Chicken or Glass,” in which he claimed Geertz was unable to read even a simple situation and could not tell whether a certain ritual was performed in relation to “chicken” or “glass,” as the only word he understood from an informant’s answer could have meant both. Part of their opposition was political: Geertz kept his political opinions to himself but he did not make a stand against the war in Vietnam, while Rabinow mentions that partly out of protest he started learning Vietnamese, “though the only course in English available then was a U.S. Army course.” In these conversations, Rabinow does not dwell on his grudge against Geertz, expressing regret that he and Marshall Sahlins did not engage the issues raised by Writing Culture in a constructive fashion: “by their despising the present, they essentially foreclosed their own futures. This was a loss to the discipline.”

Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary reads like a graduate seminar discussion—which it is, in a way: Tobias Rees brought Paul Rabinow and George Marcus in a conversation across generations about some of the directions anthropology took after 1986. Places, namely university affiliations, play an important role in the way the history of the discipline gets taught and research traditions are transmitted from one generation to the next. The foundation of anthropology in the United States has been construed as an opposition between Columbia, where Franz Boas and his students operated, and Harvard, where grand theory building took precedence over the careful gathering of data from the field. In the postwar period, Rabinow and Marcus describe a similar tension through the opposition between Chicago and Harvard. Marcus arrived at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations to witness its crumbling: “Talcott Parsons was still there, giving abstract lectures reminiscent of some heyday, but mostly to foreign students (…) such as Niklas Luhmann.” According to Rabinow, Geertz’s focus on culture goes back to Harvard, where he was trained by Talcott Parsons before joining the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations at the University of Chicago in 1962. Chicago had a broader view of anthropology, nurtured by interdisciplinary exchanges and the influence of the Chicago school of sociology. Meanwhile, anthropology at Columbia University turned more radical, with a generation of scientists such as Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, and Morton Fried falling under the influence of Marxism. Rabinow recalls that an entire cohort of students from the University of Chicago were chased out of New York: “They despised Geertz and Lévi-Strauss and they just saw it as some kind of, I don’t know what, right-wing thinking of some sort or other.” The history of anthropology at the time of Writing Culture and after was a story of an expansion of the discipline beyond these hallowed grounds. George Marcus moved to Rice University, where he chaired the anthropology department for twenty-five years before passing the baton to Michael Fischer. Paul Rabinowitz arrived at the University of California at Berkeley in 1978 and scored a big hit early on by writing the first book and anthology devoted to the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

The globalization of anthropology

Anthropology was a modest family affair back in the early days of Franz Boas and his students. By contrast, anthropology expanded rapidly in American higher education’s post-World War II boom. Nowadays nearly all American research universities, and many liberal arts colleges, harbor an anthropology department. Nor is teaching anthropology limited to the United States: European research institutions in the United Kingdom, in France and in Germany pursued distinct disciplinary traditions, while anthropology spread out worldwide and enriched itself along the way. This makes charting contemporary anthropology and delineating the new directions the discipline is taking a difficult enterprise. The profile of anthropology students and researchers also diversified: there are more women and more “halfies,” people whose national or cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education, or parentage. Rabinow noticed other changes at Berkeley: “We’re seeing an entry into anthropology graduate schools of many people who have been through NGOs and have, in a bigger way, run through the crisis of the Peace Corps that we saw earlier.” People still choose anthropology as a major for existential reasons both personal and political. As Rabinow recalls, “I became an anthropologist in many ways because I felt, and continue to feel, profoundly alienated from the United States.” Despite all the talk on diversity, the idea of a right-wing or conservative anthropologist runs counter, if not to logics, then to the sociological reality of a discipline that has always taken the side of the excluded, the marginal, the downtrodden. Cultural relativism is embedded in the DNA of the discipline. If anthropologists are less ready to claim the moral and political high ground, they are still committed to an agenda of radical change and social justice. As Marcus notes, “anthropology encourages these sorts of strong feelings about public issues and the world.”

Despite anthropologists’ emphasis on an epistemological break before and after Writing Culture, there has been more continuity that they are ready to acknowledge. The 1980s generation wanted to get rid of the key concepts of the discipline—culture, fieldwork, participant observation, the native point of view—and invent new modes of sharing results away from the journal article or ethnographic monograph. But publishing in peer-reviewed journals, and submitting a book to a university press, remain the gold standard for hiring and promotion. Geertz’s dilemma—“How to get an I-witnessing author into a they-picturing story”—continues to challenge writers who face new obligations of ethical best practices and accountability. The premise that fieldwork is the discipline’s distinguishing bedrock remains as powerful today as it was before Writing Culture. Ethnography is not an endangered genre: young researchers continue to go to far-away places and immerse themselves for an extended period in the daily activities of local communities in order to get a better grasp of what makes them tick. Learning the local language is still a requisite, and having some knowledge of French is always a plus: if judged by the number of references to Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour, American anthropologists remain in the thrall of French Theory. The concept of culture has been discarded, but a renewed focus on identity and on the self has kept intact the preoccupation with symbolic expression, collective modes of being, and construction of the subject. There has been productive exchanges with adjacent disciplines: feminism, media studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies, to name a few. But anthropology has not disappeared with the blurring of disciplinary boundaries and the disappearance of its traditional object. It has found a new lease of life “after ethnos” (to take the title of a 2018 book by Tobias Rees, which I reviewed here.)

The future of the discipline

Almost twenty years after these conversations that took place at Rice University in 2004, it seems to me that the evolution of the discipline has not validated the claims made by the two aging professors. People don’t turn to anthropology to know more about “the contemporary”: there are other disciplines that may be better equipped for understanding science and technology developments, emergent forms of life, or social precariousness. If anthropology can contribute to contemporary debates, it is mostly by cultivating its distinctive concepts, methods, ad research traditions. Anthropology has turned to the study of the “here and now,” rather than the “far away’”and “timeless,” but it has kept its attachment to localized communities and out-of-joint temporalities. Marcus and Rabinow made the remark that “anthropologists are increasingly studying timely phenomena with tools developed to study people out of time.” But anthropologists and the people they study have always been in and of their times. For most researchers, taking time out to do extended fieldwork remains the distinctive mark of the profession, its rite of passage and its rejuvenating spring. Marcus’ idea of multi-sited ethnography has not really taken hold, except when the research topic is itself on the move or dispersed in several locations. And Rabinow’s vision of so-called third spaces like studios, labinars, archives, and installations, many of them enabled by new technologies, hasn’t really replaced the traditional university environment. If anything, anthropologists are now more numerous in non-academic employment. Faced with the dearth of stable tenure-track positions, freshly-minted anthropologists have found job opportunities with corporations wanting better information about how to design and sell their products, and, controversially, an American military seeking to learn more about the “human terrain” where it fights. The US government and Microsoft are now reportedly the two biggest employers of anthropologists. Reports of anthropology’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Love Can Be Racist

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A review of Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy, Leslie Bow, Duke University Press, 2022.

Racist LoveRacist Love starts from the position that love can be racist. This is an idea that many people may find difficult to admit. Of course, most people will acknowledge that racism can be at work in the sexual fantasies of old white men attracted to young Asian women. In the same vein, the way Asian American communities are praised as a “model minority” can also be called racist. But can the sincere love of a white person to his or her Asian partner be called racist? What about the unconditional love of a mother to her child in the case of interracial adoption? And even if racist love exists, is the fact that some white people, male or female, prefer Asian sexual partners different from the attraction other people feel for blondes or redheads? Where do you draw the line between a preference for physical attributes in a partner and racism? If transracial love is systematically tainted by racism, what about the love or attraction one may feel towards people of one’s own ethnic group? Can people of color be suspected of racist inclinations because they are attracted to persons outside their ethnic group, or is racist love the preserve of white people? How to deal with the case of non-Asian persons (say, Gwen Stefani) who are so attracted by everything Asian that they themselves identify as Asian? There are no easy answers to these questions and, especially in the French context, it is hard to engage a conversation on these issues. Speaking of racism usually elicits the topical response “I am not a racist!”, while using the expression “structural racism” tends to deprive people of their agency. Racism, like religious beliefs or political affiliations, are topics that are best kept out of conversations at the dinner table. 

Asian fetishism

The value of Leslie Bow’s book is is not to raise the issue of racist love in the abstract, but through the exploration of cultural artifacts, children’s books, collectibles, and artworks. These material objects act as substitutes for Asian people, displaying some of the traits Americans associate with Asian cultures. These ethnic signs can take the form of artifacts (fans, chopsticks, rice bowls, dress style, and textile patterns) or body parts (slanted eyes and other facial features, black hair, petite silhouette) that are detachable from the whole body to convey attributes of gender, youth, and ethnicity. Together, they express a racial imaginary infused with desire, longing, and intimate connection. They show that “race can be a source of pleasure” and not just rejection or apprehension. Racism can be made cute and charming, as in the Hello Kitty series or the geisha car in Pixar’s animated movie Cars 2. These inanimate objects “spark joy”, to use the terms of Marie Kondo, the Japanese lifestyle guru. They also reinforce racial stereotyping as a process of abstraction in which a quality ascribed to one member of a group then applies to all. One such Asian stereotype is the notion of inscrutability: Hello Kitty’s lack of mouth and facial expression offers a blank slate for the feelings of the viewer. Another prejudice is the association of Asian women with submissiveness and passivity. This stereotype affects Asian American women in their career, causing many to plateau, but also in their affective life. Asian female bodies are fetishized, oversexualized, and objectified in the fantasies of white males. Asian women deal with a very specific type of racialized sexism that makes them especially vulnerable. For Leslie Bow, attraction is the very form of anti-Asian bias, and translates into a specific desiring structure characterized by equivocation. Racist love can easily turn into racist hate: they are the two sides of the same coin.

Portraying differences among peoples using animal surrogates has always been a standard approach in children’s literature. It has also always been controversial: from the “fairy tale wars” of the 1920s to the Great Society programs in the 1960s and to more recent initiatives to expunge public libraries from allegedly controversial or inappropriate material, adults have always invested children’s literature with a great deal of phantasies and anxieties. Once thought as a tool for celebrating human variation and diversity, the practice of enlisting animal as racial proxies for child audiences is now seen by some as fraught with stereotypes and latent racism. As a critic notes, “we expect a white child to find it easy to identify with an animal but not with a Black character. Is the child further removed from a person of another race than another species?” More specifically, why are Asian characters always depicted as panda bears, ninja turtles, or karate chicken? Can biodiversity act as a metaphor for racial diversity? Do narratives about overcoming species bias encourage ethnic tolerance among children? For Leslie Bow, children’s literature mostly reflects adult concerns. Taking D.W. Winnicott’s definition of the teddy bear as an exemplary transitional object for the child, she asks: “by the same token, how do picture books represent transitional phenomena for adults, a site where racial fears and desires also find expression if not also release?” Illustrated books depicting animal characters and how they can get along across species are “racial transitional objects” for adults. Much like stories can help the child work through unconscious pressures, race-as-species characters reveal unconscious adult pressures to promote both color blindness and diversity. Whereas young children may relate more to human characters than anthropomorphized animals, adults prefer to envision democratic inclusion without the messy divisiveness of American racial history.

Transracial adoption

Nowhere is this urge to reassure parents more apparent than in the vast literature that has developed over the past twenty years around transracial adoption. Leslie Bow lists dozens of illustrated books addressing the experience of transnational adoption as transpecies parenthood, from the Ugly Duckling story to mama polar bear and the grizzly cub. Such books aim to reassure the reader of the adoptee’s integration into a loving family despite biological differences. But according to many adult adoptees, such books do not mirror the experiences of transracial adoptees. They present transspecies adoption as the happy resolution of a mother-quest narrative, whereas the reality of intercountry adoption more often reflects a parental quest for a child. They assume a complex chain of inferential reasoning, from visual difference to species, from species to race, from race to different human features, and then require the child to discount the importance of these differences that may not have been perceived in the first place. Adoptive animal parents are very often single and female, leaving the adult companion largely absent. Books emphasize maternal love and caring as the solution to all personal or societal concerns regarding family resemblance or discrimination. They reinforce adoptive parents’ refusal to acknowledge racial difference and racial tensions within the family. The authors of these books are almost exclusively adoptive parents, although a young generation of adopted persons is starting to produce graphic novels reflecting their experience of intercountry adoption for adolescents and young adults. One such book reviewed by Leslie Bow was written by an American-Born Chinese who takes the character of the monkey-king in the classic novel Journey to the West to express his feeling of inadequacy and physical difference.

Moving from anthropomorphic characters to racist kitsch, Leslie Bow explores an archive of mundane household goods personifying East Asian iconography: Asianized chopstick holders and rice bowls, kitchen timers and coin banks, luxury handbags personifying “crazy rich Asians,” and a Mandarin citrus squeezer made by Italian designer Alessi. Given the legacy of white supremacy in the United States, these objects may well be seen as a form of hate speech. They parallel the infamous history of Black mammy cookie jars and Black lawn jockeys that now trade on eBay as collectibles, often bought by African Americans who “collect racism” as pedagogic tools to remind viewers of a repressed history that still produces deep affective responses. In the American context, stereotyping is now recognized as a microaggression that negatively affects the mental health and well-being of people of color. Hence the prohibition of the Indian American mascots of sports teams, ethnic Halloween costumes, brand commodities playing with racist clichés, and various instances of cultural appropriation. Household goods with Asian faces elicit different responses: they are both offensive and inoffensive, an ambivalence that the author experienced herself through her reaction to some items: “I thought it was adorable.” The racist love of cute things characterizes America’s reception of the Japanese aesthetic of kawaii or cute style. For Leslie Bow, cuteness is the aestheticization of powerlessness. The racial cute veils pleasure in domination; it allows for the enjoyment of unequal relations of power, and invokes asymmetries of power underlying racialization. Addressed to children and young women, the kawaii aesthetic marks an association with dependence and innocence. It conflates Orient and accessory, Asian as thing or commodity. It takes delight in the diminutive, the passive, the inscrutable. For the author, “the pleasure surrounding cute commodities, their enactment of complimentary racial stereotyping, masks a fetishistic anxiety surrounding East Asia writ large.” 

Fetishistic anxiety

Fear and anxiety also characterize what the author defines as techno-Orientalism, the projection of an Asianized future fueled by perceptions of economic ascendency in Asia. She analyzes three examples of the embodiment of a posthumanist future centered on Asia: the field of social robotics dominated by Japanese companies and researchers; humanoid robots who disproportionately tend to be modeled as Asian and female; and fictions involving AI characters such as Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. According to Leslie Bow, “techno-Orientalism is tech feeling as anti-Asian bias.” It reproduces the fetishistic structure of feeling that she has identified as racist love: anxiety transformed into pleasure. Attitudes towards artificial intelligence and social robots are often depicted as different in East Asia, compared to western countries where growing dependency on automatons generates negative feelings. In particular, Japan has more robots than any other country with robots contributing to many areas of society, including manufacturing, healthcare, and entertainment. Humanoid robots commercialized by Japanese companies are built as companion machines that establish bonds of sympathy and trust with their owners. But superior research and manufacturing skills in East Asia do not explain why robotic technology is so often embodied as Asian and female. Asian female clones, robotic geishas, mecha women, and digital assistants are coming out of research labs and now populate the reception desks of department stores, the animated stands of gaming conventions, and the imaginaries of Hollywood movies. For Leslie Bow, these robotic dolls reproduce familiar tropes about Asian women: “innocent and passive yet willing to please; sexually desirable but curiously lacking sexual desire; marvelously enhanced yet emotionally fragile.” They reinforce the association between Asian women and modern slavery, sexual exploitation, and human trafficking. The attitude they encourage among their public is highly problematic: boys and adults are encouraged to touch the face, to poke the body, and to aggress verbally in order to elicit reaction. It is as if #MeToo and the obligation of consent never happened. “Our visions of the future are thus tethered to existing social categories and histories even at the moment we imagine transcending them.”

In her last chapter, Leslie Bow turns to contemporary visual art and media engaging fetishism. Asian fetishism is “the quintessential form of racist love”: race fetishism involves sexual objectification and the same processes of reduction and exaggeration bound to the stereotype. Asian women are reduced to hair, eyes, or skin; they are seen as a type in which one individual represents them all. For the author, “the Asian fetish represents a form of harm that reflects a presumably degrading fantasy of reduced personhood, an injurious affront to individuality.” Fetishism is pleasure that masks anxiety: this is the same structure of feeling that has been identified as racist love. Fetishism is not necessarily a bad thing: a case can be made for fetishism as a site of split identifications and queer desires. It can be turned into a productive site of artistic expression. Several such artworks are curated in the book: Laurie Simmons’s photographic series The Love Doll consisting of images of a life-size doll from Japan exposed in various locations and situations; Elisha Lim’s cake sculpture of high-heel boots; Hong Chun Zhang’s collective self-portrait Three Graces depicting Asian women as wholly hair; Japanese artist Mari Katayama creating self-portraits using her own disabled body as a living sculpture; and video artist Laurel Nakadate provocatively engaging lonely white men to convince them to be involved in her videos. In the same way she reacted to racist cute objects with a mix of attraction and repulsion (“I both hate it and love it”), Leslie Bow questions her fascination with fetishistic art, and her scholarly involvement in the field of Asian American studies more generally. Asian American as a category of political visibility is also a type, she remarks, and “my critical and pedagogical practice may inadvertently enforce taboos surrounding race.” What is the point of critique that offers us pleasurable images simultanenous with the message that it’s wrong to enjoy them? How to answer a student who, after a class discussion on race fetishism, requested: “Remind me again why that’s wrong?”

The Uncanny Valley

What’s wrong with racist love is that it can easily turn into racist hate. Hate and love are merely flip sides of the same coin of stereotyping. Roboticians talk about the “uncanny valley” phenomenon, the point at which our reaction to artificial human likeness veers from familiarity into repulsion. As the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers’ emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic, until it reaches a point beyond which the response quickly becomes strong revulsion. The tipping point on the continuum between racist love and racist hate is easily crossed. Witness the evolution of relations between the United States and Japan, or with China, over the course of the past century. America and Japan fought as bitter enemies during World War II; yet during the Cold War and beyond, Japan arguably became America’s closest and most reliable ally in the Asia-Pacific region. Sino-American relations show that the “responsible stakeholder” in the global economy can turn in less than a decade into a “strategic competitor” or an existential threat. Within the United States, the “model minority” will regularly transform into a target for envy and aggression. The slur can be indistinguishable from the compliment. This is why fetishistic love, racial scopophilia, and perverse spectatorship are suspect pleasures: they trigger profoundly ambivalent desires split between repulsion and attraction. Racist love is not located in vague and ineffable beliefs or in great conscious or unconscious prejudices—the sky of ideas—but it has a material, corporeal and organic reality. Throughout her book, Leslie Bow approaches it in the series of objects that surround people most closely: children’s picture books, home décor and kitchen tchotchkes, dolls and machines. She cannot hide her own attraction to this Asian paraphernalia; likewise, she suspects that her own investment in Asian American studies may itself be fetishistic. The structure of the fetish (“a story masquerading as an object”) is similar to the structure of feeling that characterizes racist love: anxiety transformed into pleasure, positive attraction as anti-Asian bias. It pursues a satisfaction that is impossible. As Leslie Bow reminds us, “desire is not democratic”: sexual attraction cannot be legislated in the same context as rights violations. Likewise, you cannot judge Hello Kitty figures and children’s books based solely on the criteria of adult critics and scholars: it would be missing the way they “spark joy” and elicit simple pleasures.

War Photos and Peace Signs from Vietnam

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A review of Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam, Thy Phu, Duke University Press, 2022.

Warring VisionsIn April 2015, the Institut Français in Hanoi held a photography exhibition, Reporters de Guerre (War Reporters), marking the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Curated by Patrick Chauvel, an award-winning photographer who had covered the war for France, the exhibition showcased the work of four North Vietnamese photographers (Đoàn Công Tính, Chu Chi Thành, Tràn Mai Nam, and Hùa Kiêm) whose documenting of the Vietnam War was often overshadowed by photographers from the Western press working from the South. The poster for the cultural event at L’Espace used an iconic image: a black-and-white picture of North Vietnamese soldiers climbing a rope against the spectacular backdrop of a waterfall, taken in 1970 along the Ho Chi Minh trail. Đoàn Công Tính, the photographer, had caught a moment of timeless beauty and strength, an image of mankind overcoming physical hindrances and material obstacles in the pursuit of a higher goal. However, a scandal erupted when Danish photographer Jørn Stjerneklar pointed out on his blog that this iconic image was doctored. He compared two versions, the recent print that appeared in the exhibition and the “original,” which was published in Tính’s 2001 book Khoảnh Khắc (Moments). Tính apologized profusely for “mistakenly” sending the photoshopped image, claiming that the original negative had been damaged and that he accidentally included a copy of the image with a photoshopped background in a CD to the exhibition’s organisers. But in a follow-up article on his blog, Stjerneklar pointed out that even the “original” had been retouched, as evidenced by the repeating pattern of the waterfall, and was likely a montage of another photograph which is displayed at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Stjerneklar’s story was picked up worldwide and ignited a lively debate around the presumed objectivity of photojournalism and the role of photography in propaganda.

Photography and propaganda

That photography was, and still is, part of propaganda in Vietnam was never a secret. Along with my colleagues, I experienced it firsthand during my term as consular counsellor at the French Embassy in Vietnam. When the Institut Français organized photo exhibitions at its flagship cultural center L’Espace in Hanoi, every picture had to be vetted by controlling organs of the government. The answer often came at the last minute, and many photographs were rejected on the basis of obscure criteria. Still, young Vietnamese photographers were enthusiastic about events organized by the French culture center. With the help of French photographer Nicolas Cornet and other professionals, young photography apprentices honed their skills in creative workshops and attended seminars on portfolio building. Some talented photographers held their first solo exhibition at L’Espace before embarking on an international career. In April 2023 (after I had left Vietnam), the Institut Français in Hanoi and its director, Thierry Vergon, initiated the first International Photography Biennale in Hanoi, a major cultural event placed under the aegis of Hanoi’s People’s Committee in partnership with a network of Vietnamese and international partners. More than twenty exhibitions organized on several locations allowed the general public and professionals to discover the wealth of contemporary photography and the treasures of heritage photography in Vietnam. A series of outreach activities were scheduled throughout the Biennale, including workshops to connect stakeholders, roundtables and debates, training sessions, film screenings, and portfolio reviews. The initiative was used by Hanoi City, part of UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network, to bolster its image as a regional hub for culture and innovation. Still under the strictures of a socialist government, a new Vietnamese narrative on photography is slowly emerging. It is based on creativity, not control, and its aim is to put Vietnam’s capital on the map for cultural professionals and creative workers. Alternative visions of Vietnam are seeping through the web of censorship and are flourishing in the rare spaces of unrestricted freedom offered by social networks or independent cultural venues.

Thy Phu’s book Warring Visions shows that creativity was also present in the photographs taken during the Vietnam War (known in Vietnamese as the Resistance War against America.) Vietnamese photographers working for the Hanoi-based Vietnam News Agency (VNA) were no less talented than their Western counterparts operating from the South. War pictures published by the Western press (or by Japan’s) were as much involved in political propaganda as the “socialist ways of seeing Vietnam” that filled the pages of Vietnam Pictorial, an illustrated magazine run by the communist state. War was fought on the front of images, both in Vietnam and within America. Propaganda pictures were also waged by the South Vietnam government, with less international success. For Americans, the Vietnam War still haunts the national psyche with the ignominy of defeat. The war was a watershed in visual history, and the many pictures taken by Western reporters and photographers laid the foundation for battlefield reporting and contemporary photography studies. But as Thy Phu notes, “in addition to overlooking unspectacular forms of representation, the Western press, then as now, neglects Vietnamese perspectives, emphasizing instead the American experience of this war.” The role of Vietnamese photographers, including the many stringers and fixers working for full-time foreign correspondents, is systematically downplayed, although some of them took the most iconic photos that were to shape the imaginaries of the war (such as Napalm Girl, the picture of a naked girl running away from an aerial napalm attack.) But placing the spotlight on photographs taken by Vietnamese war photographers is only half of the story. According to Thy Phu, we need to enlarge the category of war photography, a genre that usually consists of images illustrating the immediacy of combat and the spectacle of violence, pain, and wounded bodies. Pictures depicting wedding ceremonies, family reunions, and quotidian rituals are also part of the Vietnamese experience during the war. Drawing from family photo books from the Vietnamese diaspora, discarded collections found in vintage stores in Ho Chi Minh City, or her own family records, Thy Phu reconstitutes a lost archive of what war in Vietnam might have been like for ordinary citizens.

Socialist ways of seeing Vietnam

The canon of war photography, as well as its most basic principles, were established during the Vietnam War. Pulitzer-winning images exposed the brutality and injustice of war, its toll on the body and on the mind of soldiers, its devastating consequences for civilians and their living environment. According to the profession, war images should by no means be staged or manipulated. They should expose reality as it is, captured on the spur of the moment by a neutral observer. It will come as no surprise to learn that North Vietnamese photographers obeyed to different rules and aesthetic principles. The images that were taken by these propaganda workers are full of positivism and youthful energy. Unlike the photos taken from the South showing the terrible effects of war, the images taken by photographers from the North show young soldiers smiling in front of the camera or caught in the middle of disciplined action, images of incredible romanticism in the middle of war. The goal was, of course, to highlight their heroism in order to stimulate other soldiers and citizens seeing the images. Ideology informed the subject matter of these photographs and guided practitioners into what to look at and how to represent it. Harsh material conditions also shaped the way photographs were taken and circulated. The photographers were foot soldiers in uniform who had been selected from among Hanoi’s university elite and given a crash course training in journalism and photo reporting before being sent to the frontline. Communist allies abroad provided cameras and lenses that were made in East Germany and the USSR. Equipment and film were in such short supply that they were not issued to individual photographers but were stored at the headquarters of organizations such as the Young Pioneers, the Army’s photographic department, and the VNA. In such conditions of scarcity, photographers were forced to shoot sparingly, to compose and stage their images prior to shooting, and to improvise solutions to compensate for the lack of equipment. In the absence of flash bulbs, the flare of rockets fired against a dark sky provided the light necessary for nighttime pictures. Piecing together several shots created an improvised panoramic view without need of a wide-angle lens. War photos were displayed in makeshift jungle exhibitions or village fairs, along with propaganda posters, to uplift the masses and disseminate a “socialist way of seeing” things. Photographs were also distributed to foreigners beyond the Communist bloc, especially to members of antiwar organizations, some of whom received copies of Vietnam Pictorial, an internationally circulated illustrated magazine.

Reviewing past issues of this magazine, three central subjects stand out: the heroic struggle of soldiers, the toil of factory workers and farmers, and the sacrifices of revolutionary Vietnamese women. Beautiful portraits of women harvesting lotus flowers, of young girls playing in poppy fields, or children riding on the back of water buffaloes also adorned the color covers of Vietnam Pictorial, with vibrant colors denoting artificially painted photographs and reminding readers of the bright socialist future for which war was fought. For Thy Phu, the revolutionary Vietnamese woman was more than just an image: it was a symbol, embodying contested visions of women’s role in anticolonial resistance and national reunification. The battle for this symbol was fought on two fronts. On the leadership side, the figure of Nguyễn Thị Bình, the Viet Cong’s chief negotiator at the Paris Peace Conference in 1973, opposed the fierceful Madame Nhu, the de facto First Lady of South Vietnam from 1955 to 1963. Both used feminity for political aims, wearing different styles of áo dài, Vietnam’s traditional dress, as a gendered display of nationalism. In contrast to Madame Bình’s demure attire which singled her out as the sole woman at the negotiating table, Madame Nhu favored a more risqué style of áo dài and did not hesitate to pose in masculinist postures, such as in the famous closeup picture where she is seen firing a .38 pistol. Both camps also sought to glorify women’s contribution to nationalist struggle by enrolling them in mass movements. In the South, Madame Nhu founded the Women’s Solidarity Movement of Vietnam (WSM) in order to give women military training and enroll them in paramilitary groups assisting the armed forces. Women in uniform included Hồ Thị Quế (the “Tiger Lady”), member of the Black Tigers Ranger Battalion, pictured in full battledress looking fiercely at the camera. In the North, young women were recruited en masse in the Youth Shock Brigades, also known as TNXP, and sent to the frontline in order to assist male soldiers or build the Ho Chi Minh trail. The image of “girls with guns” or “long-haired soldiers” stood in stark contrast with the more traditional pictures emphasizing motherhood and family that were used to appeal to the solidarity of women’s antiwar organizations in the United States. But pictures offer fertile ground for projection, misrecognition, and reinvention: the Vietnamese revolutionary woman was reclaimed as a radical chic symbol for American feminist struggles in which she had no part. The Vietnamese Communist Party won the day in the fight over images and symbols associated with womanhood. But as French historian François Guillemot reminds us, Vietnamese women, who represent half of society, suffered more than their half as a result of military conflict and civil war.

Lost archives

The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), now known as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, ultimately claimed victory in the war of images and symbols. As a result, war images from the South were censored, erased, and eliminated from the record. They survive as embodied performances of reenactment and remembrance in the dispersed archives of the Vietnamese diaspora. To illustrate the war as seen from the perspective of South Vietnam, Thy Phu takes the example of Nguyễn Ngọc Hạnh who was one of the most respected Vietnamese photographers of his time. He served in the French Army until 1950, then transferred to the Armée Nationale Vietnamienne, which in 1956 became the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). He attended the French Army photography school during the mid-1950s, was designated the official ARVN combat photographer in 1961, and ultimately attained the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, he was sent to a “re-education camp” with his fellow officers, but survived until he was released through the intervention of Amnesty International in 1983. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1989, where he passed away in 2017. Published in 1969 in collaboration with civilian photographer Nguyễn Mạnh Đan, his book Vietnam in Flames ranks in the top echelon of great Vietnam photobooks, right alongside Philip Jones Griffiths, David Douglas Duncan, and the best of the Japanese photographers. Hạnh made no secret that his photos were staged: he even explained in painstaking detail how he used drops of olive oil to place “tears” on one of his most notable photograph, Sorrow, the portrait of a lovely young woman weeping over the dog tags of her missing companion. As Thy Phu notes, manipulation has been a defining characteristic of war photography from the nineteenth century to the present. Indeed, some of the mots famous war photographs, such as Robert Capra’s The Falling Soldier, are said to be restaged or reenacted. Hạnh nevertheless insisted that his images are authentic documents that register the intensity of the emotions the war engendered. Photographs, like tears, are a social ritual. Whether they are authentic or inauthentic, induced or spontaneous, matters less than the fact that they are to be seen and recognized. As they circulate among the Vietnamese diaspora while they remain censored in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, pictures from Vietnam in Flames contribute to a sense of community through collective suffering, sacrifice, and remembrance.

The two waves of Vietnamese refugees, those who fled in 1975 after the fall of Saigon and the “boat people” who left the country from the late 1970s into the early 1990s, left behind all their personal belongings, including family pictures and photo albums. Those who stayed behind pruned their photo collections of all images reminiscent of the old regime: men in ARVN uniform, pictures betraying friendly connections with Americans, or scenes denoting bourgeois proclivities such as foreign travels and private vacations. Remarkably, however, thousands of those photos have resurfaced in the marketplace in the form of orphan images and albums separated from their original owners and stories. These are images that have been “unhomed”: scattered, lost, or left behind. Together they provide a counter-narrative of the war, a testimony of Southern Vietnamese experiences that have been erased from the record and banished from official history. How to deal with those missing archives, lost memories, and orphaned pictures? What can be learned of family pictures in the absence of a story, when the memories that bring photographs to life are missing from official records and even personal collections? In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, only a scholar is capable of speaking with ghosts. Similarly, only artists can speak to the ghostly presence of these anonymous faces. Thy Phu, who herself assembled a community archive of family photographs and the stories about them, presents the artistic démarche of Dinh Q. Lê, a diaspora Vietnamese artist now based in Ho Chi Minh City and whose work was recognized by major exhibitions in Singapore, Tokyo, New York, and Paris. Since 1998, Lê has been working on a trilogy of installations that feature family photographs, objects that fascinate him because he lost all of his own photographs in the course of his family’s forced migration. Images are stitched together to form fragile-looking, rectangular installations like mosquito nets, or they are cut into enlarged strips that are weaved to form a new picture, superposing the initial faces on the strips and an emerging bigger picture. In his 2022 exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum, one of the weaved picture represented Madame Nhu waving a pistol, an image still taboo in Vietnam but that the artist was able to reinterpret through his own eyes. In another installation, onlookers from the Vietnamese diaspora were invited to pick up images covering the gallery floor and to consult an online database that draws on crowdsourcing to identify lost images of their own family, merging the acts of collecting, remembering, and archiving.

War photography in the age of generative AI

What does Thy Phu’s book tell us about photography censorship and creativity in contemporary Vietnam? How can we interpret war photography in the light of warring visions, ragged memories, and contested identities? The first lesson I learned from Warring Visions is that the distinction between propaganda pictures and war reporting is artificial: in the end, what matters is not political intent, but what we make of it. War pictures will always be used for political purposes. But those that remain in public memory transcend the immediacy of a cause and express universal values, sometimes at odds with the intention of their sponsors. The second lesson is that we need to expand our notion of war photography. Vernacular pictures representing quotidian rites of family life also tell stories about wartime conditions, and these stories must be collected and made known. As a third lesson, we should think hard about authenticity and manipulation of images in the age of generative AI and deep fakes. The indignation that followed Jørn Stjerneklar’s blog article exposing the manipulation of Đoàn Công Tính’s poster in 2015 was in a way misplaced: war pictures can be staged, reframed, doctored, reenacted, and, yes, photoshopped. As historians of war photography tell us, this has always been the case, and we should anticipate more of the same in our technologically savvy future. In my perception, Vietnamese nowadays have a more relaxed attitude to Photoshop than people in Europe or in North America. When I took ID pictures in Hanoi, the result came heavily retouched, with bright eyes and rosy cheeks. To tell the truth, I like the picture more than the original, and I still use it on my identity documents or CV profile. This tradition of retouching pictures goes back a long way, as evidenced by the family portraits and painted photographs from colonial Indochina. It is also linked to the highest levels of Vietnamese statesmanship: as is well known, prior to establishing the DRV in 1945, Hồ Chí Minh led a peripatetic life and worked a number of odd jobs. According to the records of the French police, around 1915-17 he worked as a photo retoucher in Paris by day and meeting leading Communist agitators by night. It is said that this humble experience with visual restoration led him to grasp photography’s political potential. It also taught him to be wary of photography’s role for state surveillance and identity control: only one portrait remains from this period, recognizable by the chipped upper part of his left ear that allowed the French police to check the identity of the Vietnamese revolutionary leader who changed his name and civil status several times over the course of his career.

Parliamentary Abdications: 1933 and 1940

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A review of Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications, Ivan Ermakoff, Duke University Press, 2008.

Ruling Oneself OutHow can a majority of parliamentarians vote to renounce democracy? Why would a group accept its own debasement and, in doing so, abdicate its capacity for self-preservation? What induces them not only to surrender power, but also to legitimize this surrender by a vote? Which conjuncture allowed democratically elected officials to rule themselves out and allow authoritarian leaders to take full control? This sad reversal of fortune happened on two occasions in the twentieth century. On 23 March 1933, less than one month after the burning of the Reichstag, German parliamentarians gathered at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin passed a bill enabling Hitler to concentrate all powers in his own hands by a majority of 444 to 94, meeting the two-third majority required for any constitutional change. On the afternoon of 10 July 1940, at the Grand Casino in Vichy, a great majority of French deputies and senators—569 parliamentarians, about 85 percent of those who took part in the vote—endorsed a bill that vested Marshal Pétain with full powers, including authorization to draft a new constitution. In these two cases, abdication was sanctioned by an explicit decision—a vote. Both cases gave authoritarian leaders all powers to sideline parliament, suspend the republican constitution, and rule by decree. Both 23 March 1933 and 10 July 1940 are dates which live on in infamy in Germany and in France. As soon as the events occurred, they were to haunt the elected officials who took part in the decision. To borrow Ivan Ermakoff’s words, these were “decisions that people make in a mist of darkness, the darkness of their own motivations, the darkness of those who confront and challenge them, and the darkness of what the future has in store.” Can we shed light on this darkness?

History and context

History is the discipline of context, and it explains an event by putting it into a broader frame. But how much context does a historian need, and how far back is one to investigate to put an historical event into a proper frame? In Ruling Oneself Out, Ermakoff chose to explain the handing over of state powers to Hitler and to Pétain by staying as close to the event as possible. He takes as chronological points of departure the German presidential election of 1932 and the French declaration of war in September 1939, giving a short summary of Germany’s descent into political chaos and France’s ignominious defeat. He concentrates on the moment of decision within the two national parliaments by making a blow-by-blow narrative of those two fateful days, trying to enter the minds of rank-and-file parliamentarians and to account for their every motions and expressions. This is different from the historian’s point of view which usually goes farther back in time and tries to put an event into a causal chain of explaining variables and historical determinants. For instance, in a historical essay written on the spur of the moment, Marc Bloch explained France’s “Strange Defeat” (L’Étrange Défaite) by listing all the personal failings and strategic mistakes made by political and military leaders during the interwar period. German historians have interpreted the rise of Nazism as a “belated post-scriptum” (ein spätes Postskriptum) to the cultural conflict (Kulturkampf) between German Catholics and the central state inaugurated by Bismark’s antichurch policies in 1871, or as the expression of a Sonderweg some see going as far back as Luther’s Reformation. Ermakoff’s goal is not to provide a historical account of the two events but to build a theoretical model, a “theory of collective abdications” that may apply, beyond the two cases of parliamentary suicide, to a broad class of collective situations and outcomes.

In the empirical sciences, and especially for the formal lenses of decision theory, context should be reduced to a minimum. The scientist builds a theoretical model and tests it on a constructed dataset, keeping as close as possible to a controlled experiment. Ermakoff’s study is context-rich and steeped in empirical detail. For him, abstracting the event from its historical context is a crucial mistake. The sources he uses for his enquiry are narrative accounts produced by the actors themselves. These testimonies are either contemporary or retrospective, spontaneous or in response to a request, public stances or private accounts. Especially letters and diaries written immediately after the facts are very helpful to debunk ex post rationalizations. They allow to reconstruct actors’ subjective states as they made their decisions. But all testimonies include a form of self-justification and self-deception. The actors rationalized their decision by portraying it as the only viable and acceptable course of action. The tactical reasons the delegates invoke for themselves are self-serving and often betray a willingness to deceive oneself. As Jean-Paul Sartre has shown, the consciousness with which we generally consider our surroundings is different from our reflecting on this consciousness. The historian has to dig deeper if he wants to examine actors in the process of making their decisions. He has to rely on a range of analytical tools—formal, quantitative, and hermeneutic— and apply them to a variety of historical sources. The theory he offers is primarily a theory of the case. Its scope is limited to the confines of the two historical events. No single determination or macrocausal explanation can account for the result of the two parliamentary votes. The outcome was not predetermined; events could have turned differently. The parliamentary votes of abdication were the end result of a process by which parliamentarians based their opinions on the behavior and declarations of their peers. The collective understanding of a situation is dependent on a series of interactions. In confining the analysis to the moment of decision, both theory and history gain in intelligibility and leverage.

Fear of retaliation, misjudgment, ideological contamination

Ermakoff starts by rejecting the three standard explanations for political acquiescence during these two fateful days: fear, blindness, or treason. Delegates who participated in the decision, and historians after them, argued that they made their choice because they were coerced; because they were deceived; or because they were complicit. The coercion thesis portrays abdication as a forced choice. Miscalculation calls into question the assumption that target actors correctly assess the implications and significance of their decision. Collusion lifts the hypothesis that the challenger and the target actors have conflicting interests. Each explanation holds a degree of validity. Threats and intimidation were certainly present in the context of 1933 Germany. Nazi thugs harassed their opponents with seeming impunity. On the day of the vote, several thousand Nazi activists demonstrated outside the Kroll Opera House, where the parliamentarian session took place. In the meeting room they filled the banks reserved for external observers. In France, the country was under the direct threat of an occupying army, and rumors of latent menaces also suffused the political climate. A vote of no confidence would have entailed Pétain’s resignation and a leap into the abyss. But when so much is at stake, actors can always choose to disregard the threats that are deployed against them. As Ermakoff underscores, they can decide to challenge the odds. At the final moment, the decision is theirs. Likewise, the explanation that abdication was based on misjudgement takes actors’ most common retrospective justification at face value. But Hitler’s intentions were clear for all people to see, and in France Pétain’s mouthpiece Pierre Laval had made it clear that a “yes” vote would mean an end to democracy and the republican regime. Besides, the coercion and the misjudgment arguments miss the fact that the two votes were by no means unanimous. Some parliamentarians took a stand and opposed the delegation of full powers to a single man. In Germany, the Social Democratic delegation unanimously voted against the bill. Despite all appearances in retrospect, acquiescence in March 1933 and July 1940 was not a foregone conclusion.

The third scenario, ideological collusion, takes the deterministic argument to its extreme. Nazism’s rise to power is sometimes interpreted as a result of a class alliance between the ruling elite and Hitler’s party in order to thwart communism and secure the interests of the capitalist owners of production. Similarly, the Vichy vote is seen as a conservative revenge against the Front Populaire that had won the elections and implemented labor-friendly policies in 1936. More generally, the period saw the commitment to democratic institutions dwindle, becoming either tenuous or dubious. German Catholic leaders, it is argued, surrendered to Hitler because they were not entirely immune to an antiliberal frame of mind and an organicist conception of the nation. In France, class-based motivations for a political revenge went along with a rejection of the political regime that had made military defeat possible. According to historian Robert Paxton, “there was no resistance simply because no one wanted to resist.” There is a degree of truth in this argument. Parliamentarians who voted “yes” to Hitler and to Pétain failed in their role to uphold the constitution and maintain democratic institutions. They gave the transition to an authoritarian regime the appearance of legality because they abdicated their political capacity. From a legal perspective, they had no right to give a constitutional blank check to Hitler and to Pétain. Lack of personal courage was ultimately the reason for the delegates’ acquiescence. But accusing a majority of parliamentarians of treason or dereliction of duty misses the point. The social scientist’s role is to interpret and to explain, not to judge or to vindicate. A more fine-grained approach to the mechanics of decision is needed.

Decision under stress

Another line of argument points to the irrational forces at play during the decision process. Delegates were under maximum pressure. Wild rumors were circulating. Fear and anguish spread like a disease. On February 28, the day after the burning of the Reichstag, Hitler had issued an emergency decree “for the protection of the people and the state” that abolished basic civil rights conferred by the Constitution. Germany was veering toward total chaos and civil war. Likewise, France after the defeat was totally disorganized. In Vichy, where authorities had gathered after a chaotic escape away from the advancing German troops, everything had to be improvised. The breakdown of parliamentary groups made interactions more random, more hectic, more informal, less structured, and less predictable than in routine times. In such circumstances, social scientists often emphasize the irrationality of crowds, herd behavior, panic movements, and contagion effects. The collective behavior of a disorganized group can influence people to act a certain way or lose their responsibility. Ermakoff agrees that the explanatory key to the outcome is to be found in the collective dimension of the decision. The focus should be on a collective process of decision making. Diffusion effects and the modeling of interactions should take centerstage, for in situations of radical uncertainty people tend to turn toward their peers to shape their own expectations. Yet what gets diffused is less an emotional state than a strategic assessment of the situation. Contagion, the diffusion of an affective state, is a misleading representation of group behavior, for it implies that the process is purely emotional, affective, and mechanical. Even if the process is nonlinear and the result suboptimal, there is no need to resort to the irrationality of crowds and to abandon the hypothesis of rational behavior.

The crucial factor underlying collective abdications were not threats, blindness, or ideological propensities but the dynamics of expectation formation that took shape among delegates in a context of radical uncertainty and as traditional coordination mechanisms had broken down. Witnessing their world crumbling, delegates turned their eyes to their peers. But they did not know where these peers stood. This situation is a classical setting in game theory, decision science, or empirical finance. And indeed, Ermakoff mobilizes many concepts from these disciplines. His theory of collective abdication builds on the three notions of sequential alignment, local knowledge, and tacit coordination, and uses concepts such as reference groups, prominent actors, action thresholds, tipping points, and common knowledge. Traditional historians may shy away at the evocation of these abstract notions, and may even recoil in horror at the sight of a book’s appendix full of equations and graphs. But Ruling Oneself Out is not a book written for theory’s sake, and its narrational structure remains faithful to disciplinary standards in historiography. It refers to many books written by historians on the two events, and particularly to Robert Paxton’s Vichy France. Historians will be on familiar ground, as game theory or decision science are only mobilized to interpret the historical narrative and analyze data. This sociology to the event stands in stark contrast to the cumbersome constructions of social scientists who only use empirical evidence to advance their theoretical claims. Sociology remains a historical science and cannot abstract itself from its temporal condition in order to offer an abstract modeling of social systems. Here, formal tools and abstract theories remain at the service of explaining the facts.

When democracies fail

Ruling Oneself Out offers many valuable lessons for today’s social scientists and committed citizens. The choice to concentrate on two episodes when democracies surrendered on their own free will is significant: it shows in particular that the failure of democracies was not a preordained conclusion. Things could have turned differently. Historical outcomes are not the result of deterministic forces and collective interests: individual decisions matter. And so does politics. In particular, parliamentarians are bestowed with a great burden of responsibility and accountability. Their decisions can make or break a constitutional order. They are the guardians of the democratic temple, and their failure in protecting the sacred treasure that they have in charge can have dramatic consequences. Ermakoff also offers a lesson in applied social science, or historical sociology. He used the best conceptual tools available at his time, without falling into the trap of theory fetishism of math graph envy. His book combines various methods of analysis, both qualitative and quantitative, which are rarely used together. It remains an historical account of two significant events, in which the lay reader will learn a lot. In this perspective, theory and evidence should go hand in hand. Being faithful to “how things actually happened,” to take Leopold von Ranke’s definition of history, does not imply a rejection of formal models or theoretical constructions. The role of parliaments offer a particularly rich material for theoretically inclined social scientists. Parliaments’ archives contain a trove of empirical data, both textual and statistical. They are open to the public, and easily lend themselves to participant observation or ethnographic work. A young French sociologist, Etienne Ollion, has recently published a book on the functioning of the French National Assembly using state-of-the-art narrative techniques and quantitative tools, including statistical techniques derived from artificial intelligence. I hope his book, Les candidats, gets translated into English.

A Flash in Japan

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A review of The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan, Eric Cazdyn, Duke University Press, 2002.

The Flash of CapitalThe “flash of capital” refers to the way the underlying structure of a national economy “flashes” or reverberates through the films it produces, and how cinema critique can highlight the relations between culture and capitalism, film aesthetics and geopolitics, movie commentary and political discourse, at particular moments of their transformation. A flash is not a reflection or an image, and Eric Cazdyn does not subscribe to the reflection theory of classical Marxism that sees cultural productions as a mirror image of the underlying economic infrastructure. Karl Marx posited that the superstructure, which includes the state apparatus, forms of social consciousness, and dominant ideologies, is determined “in the last instance” by the “base” or substructure, which relates to the mode of production that evolves from feudalism to capitalism and then to communism. Transformations of the mode of production lead to changes in the superstructure. Hungarian philosopher and literary critic György Lukács applied this framework to all kinds of cultural productions, claiming that a true work of art must reflect the underlying patterns of economic contradictions in the society. Rather than Marx’s and Lukács’ reflection theory, Cazdyn’s “flash theory” is inspired by post-marxist cultural theorists Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson, and by the work of Japan scholars Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian (the two editors of the collection at Duke University Press in which the book was published). For Cazdyn, how we produce meaning and how we produce wealth are closely interrelated. Cultural productions such as films give access to the unconscious of a society: “What is unrepresentable in everyday discourse is flashed on the level of the aesthetic.” Films not only reflect and explain underlying contradictions but, more importantly, actively participate in the construction of economic and geopolitical transformations.

 Reflection theory and flash theory

 The Flash of Capital concentrates on those critical moments of Japanese modern history during which the forms of both cinematic and capitalist categories mutate. The author identifies three such mutations of Japanese modernity: (1) between being colonized and being a colonizer nation of the pre-World War II moment; between the individual and collective of the postwar moment; and between the national and the transnational of the contemporary situation. Colonialism, Cold War, globalization: these are the three moments that Cazdyn addresses through thematic discussions of cinematic visuality, of film historiography, of literary adaptations, of amateur acting, of pornography, and of aesthetic experiments. Rather than a linear history, he prefers to concentrate on key moments of transformation during which formal inventions on the level of the film aesthetic figure a way out of impossible situations before a grammar becomes available to make sense of them. By paying close attention to the details of cinematic texts, he reads the works of Japanese directors and film critics as so many symptoms of the most pressing social problems of the day. Cazdyn borrows from Fredric Jameson and other literary critics the technique of symptomatic reading, a mode of reading literary and cinematic works which focuses on the text’s underlying presuppositions. A symptomatic reading is concerned with understanding how a text comes to mean what it does as opposed to simply describing what it means or represents. In particular, it tries to determine what a particular text is unable to say or represses because of its ideological conviction, but that transpires at the formal level through flashes, allegories, and aesthetic choices. The films that Cazdyn passes under review occur at historical junctures in which the social and political events are difficult to articulate. There does not seem to be an effective language with which to express the transformations taking place at key moments of Japanese modernity. But, as Cazdyn notes, “some filmmakers take more risks than others. They risk speaking in a language for which there is no established grammar.”

 Japanese cinema has a peculiar affinity with the history of capitalist development. The movie industry is literally coeval with Japanese modernity: in the case of Japan, the history of film and the history of the modern nation share approximately the same span of time, both emerging in the 1890s. In addition, the one-hundred-year anniversary of film in Japan coincided with the fifty-year anniversary of the end of World War II. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that almost every history of Japanese film has used the history of the nation to chart its course. The three moments that The Flash of Capital choses to concentrate on are key turning points in Japanese modern history. They are also periods when Japanese cinema was particularly productive, with successive “Golden Ages” that have marked the history of Japanese cinema for a worldwide audience. The 1930s, the postwar period up to the late 1960s, and the 1990s were times fraught with contradictions. The antinomies and tensions between colonization and empire, between the individual and the collective, and between the national and the transnational made an imprint of the films produced during these periods, both at the level of content and in the formal dimension of aesthetic choices and scenic display. It is interesting to note that these moments have also produced canonic histories of Japanese cinema, both in print and through cinematic retrospectives. Cazdyn conducts a formal analysis of six histories of Japanese films, two of which are themselves films. The first historiographic works in the 1930s and early 1940s set the terms for a theory of cinema that was heavily influenced by Marxism and by nationalism; the 1950s saw the publication of Tanaka Jun’ichirō’s monumental encyclopedia of Japanese movies and Donald Richie and Joseph Anderson’s The Japanese Film; and the 1990s was marked by the one-hundred anniversary of Japanese cinema, with yet another four-volume encyclopedia and a film retrospective by Oshima Nagisa. Among scholars and students in the West, Richie and Anderson’s book has been a constant reference and has gone through a series of republications; it is, however, distinctly anticommunist and heavily marked by the Cold War context.

Colonialism, Cold War, globalization

 Cazdyn begins his discussion of the first period with an Urtext of Japan’s cinematography: the recording in 1899 of a scene from the kabuki drama Momojigari by the actor Ichikawa Danjūrō (the stage name of a lineage of actors that goes back to the seventeenth century down to the present). Attending a screening held at his private residence, Danjūrō was shocked by his own image staring back at him and made it clear that the film should never be screened during his lifetime. But he later agreed that a presentation of the movie reels at an event in Osaka he was unable to attend was more satisfactory than a performance by another kabuki troupe. This episode set the terms—repetition, reproductibility, ubiquity, copy rights, distribution networks, mass production—by which the movie industry later operated. By the 1930s, cinema had become well entrenched in Japan. The early figures of the onnagata (men playing women’s roles) and the benshi (commentator integrated into the story), taken from similar roles in the traditional performing arts (kabuki, noh, bunraku), had given way to the modern talkie movie, a star system based on female actors, and genres divided between jidai-geki (period dramas) and gendai-geki (modern dramas). Film adaptations (eiga-ka) of literary works of fiction (shōsetsu) served to gain legitimacy for cinema as an art form, circumvent censorship, consolidate a literary cannon, and affirm the superiority of the original through fidelity-based adaptations. The writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, who had offered his own theory of adaptation through his successive translations into modern Japanese of the Tale of Genji, criticized the filmization of his novel Shunkinshō by pointing out the erasing of multiple levels of narration and identity that was so central to his work. When Tanizaki’s novel is reduced to mere narrative content, “all that remains are the most reactionary and conservative elements.” For the author, Tanizaki’s aesthetic choices, and the films produced by the first generation of Japanese directors, were inextricably related to the most crucial issues facing the Japanese nation in the 1930s: the rise of militarism and the backsliding of democracy, the colonization of large swathes of Asia, the rejection of Western values in favor of Japanese mores. Remaining silent about these issues, like Tanizaki in his novels or Ozu Yasujirō in his early movies, are charges that can be held against the authors.

 The second Golden Age of Japanese cinema, and a high point of Japanese capitalist development, arose from the rubbles of World War II, found its most vivid expressions in the 1950s and early 1960s, and culminated in the avant-garde productions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Out of this second period emerged not only a studio system modeled on Hollywood, but an impressive number of great auteurs that have become household names in the history of artistic cinema. Ozu’s challenging formal compositions, Kurosawa’s intricate plots, and Imamura’s nonlinear temporalities are immediately recognizable and have influenced generations of movie directors in the West and in Asia. The postwar period, which coincided with the Cold War, was marked by the subjectivity debate or shutaisei ronsō, which influenced popular ideas about nationalism and social change. For the postwar generation of left-leaning intellectuals, a sense of self—of one’s capacity and legitimacy to act as an individual and to intervene against the state and collective opinion—was crucial to keep the nation from ever being hijacked again by totalitarianism. But at the same time, the individual was summoned to put the interests of big corporations, administrative structures, and the Japanese nation as a whole before his or her own personal fulfillment, and to sacrifice the self in favor of economic development. In the context of the movie industry, the attempt to transcend the contradiction between the individual and the collective was resolved by positing a third term: the “genius” filmmaker who breaks out of the rigid structure and trumps the other two terms. The “great man theory” claims that an individual can rise up and produce greatness within—if not transcend—any structure. The same emphasis on the power of the filmmaker characterized film adaptations of literary works in the period. Encouraged by the Art Theater Guild, eiga-ka movies took liberties with the original text either by focusing on a particular section or adding content to the narrative. Shindō Kaneto’s 1973 adaptation of Kokoro, for example, deals only with the third letter of Sōseki’s famous shōsetsu, while in Ichikawa Kon’s Fires on the Plain the soldier-narrator of Ōoka Shōhei’s novel is shot and killed at the end instead of going to a mental hospital.

The withering away of the nation-state

 The era of globalization, the third period in Eric Cazdyn’s survey of movie history, marks a transformation in the operations of the nation-state and in the aesthetics of Japanese cinema. The problem of globalization is the problem of a globalized system in which nations are steadily losing their sovereignty but where state structures and ideological models cling to an outdated form of representation. The political-economic and the cultural-ideological dimensions do not move at the same speed: at the precise moment in which the decision-making power of the nation-state is declining, nationalist ideologies and identities are as strong as ever. Some authors combined a renewed emphasis on the nation with the full embrace of globalization. For Ōshima Nagisa, the enfant terrible of the Japanese New Wave, national cinema is dead, and Japan is being bypassed by the transnational forces of capital. In Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), he represents the Japanese from the viewpoint of the white prisoners of war. In L’Empire des sens (1976), the pornographic nature of the film does not lie in the content (although the actors Matsuda Eiko and Fuji Tatsuya are “really doing it”) but in the form of reception: the Japanese conversation about the film was almost entirely consumed by questions of censorship, while in France, where it was first released, the film was geared towards a general audience—and foreign visitors: Ōshima noted that one out of every four Japanese who traveled to France had seen the movie. For Cazdyn, a film that makes history is “a film that represents a transformation before it has happened, a film that finds a language for something before a language has been assigned, a film that flashes the totality of modern Japanese society in a way that is unavailable to other forms of discourse.” Rather than commenting on blockbuster movies and costly productions, he choses to read political allegories in experimental films such as Tsukamoto Tetsuya’s Tetsuo (1988) or the documentary films of Hara Kazuo such as Yukiyukite shingun (Naked Army, 1987). He even finds inspiration in adult videos, which he sees as a compromise between guerrilla-style documentaries on the left and reality TV on the right. He notes that approximately seventy-five percent of current adult-video films in Japan are documentary-style—that is, their narratives are not couched in fiction, but follow a male character walk the streets looking for sex and engaging women to that end. Similarly, in his documentaries, Hara Kazuo can often be heard asking questions and provoking situations. His films make change happen into the real.

Eric Cazdyn is well-versed in the history of Japanese Marxism and makes it a central tenet of his theorization of Japanese cinema. He refers to the pre-war Marxist debate between the Kōza-ha (the faction that remained loyal to the Japanese Communist Party and the Komintern) and Rōnō-ha (the faction that split from the JCP in 1927 and argued that a bourgeois revolution had been achieved with the Meiji Restoration). Another school of Marxism, the Uno-ha, was the school of the late Tokyo Imperial University economist Uno Kōzō, who was probably the single most influential postwar Japanese economist on the domestic academic scene. Uno drew a distinction between a pure theory of capitalism, a theory of its historical phases, and the study of concrete societies. He concentrated on the first, and dedicated himself to working through the most theoretical problems of Marx’s Capital, such as the labor theory of value, the money circuit represented by the M-C-M’ formula, commodity fetishism, and the recurrence of crises. Moving to the present, Cazdyn pays tribute to Karatani Kōjin, a contemporary philosopher and interpreter of Marx’s thought that has attracted a vast followership. Marxism has had a lasting influence on Japan’s intellectual landscape, and has impacted the work of many filmmakers in the course of the past century. Cazdyn recalls that many intellectuals joined film clubs in the late 1920s and early 1930s because they were some of the only places where members could read Marx’s Capital without falling prey to censorship and repression. But this utopian space was soon discovered, and by 1935 Marxist intellectuals were either behind bars, had retreated to their private space, or had embraced right-wing nationalism. Illustrative of this wave of political commitment is the Proletarian Filmmaker’s League or Prokino. Cold War histories of Japanese cinema have disparaged this left-wing organization by pointing out “the extremely low quality of its products.” Cazdyn rehabilitates the work of its main theorist, Iwasaki Akira, and of film documentarist Kamei Fumio, who treated montage as a “method of philosophical expression.”

New publics for old movies

What is the relevance of these references to Marxist theory and obscure works of documentary or fiction for contemporary students of Japanese cinema in North America and in Europe? Cazdyn highlights the changing demographics of the classes that enroll in his discipline: “Students were primarily attracted to the arts and Eastern religion in the 1960s and 1970s; in the 1980s, they were chasing the overvalued yen; and today, they are consumed by (and consumers of) Japanese popular culture—namely manga and anime.” He also notes that the study of national cinema as an organizing paradigm has lost much of its appeal. The academic focus is now on films that address issues of minorities in Japan—post-colonial narratives, feminist films, LGBT movies, social documentaries—or on transnational productions in which Japanese identity is diluted into a pan-Asian whole. But academics should not project their current global and professional insecurities onto the screen of cinema history. The demise of the nation-state, and the dilution of national cinema into the global, is not a foregone conclusion. Movies produced in Japan today do not seem to appear less Japanese than the ones made one or two generations ago. There is still a strong home bias in the preferences of viewers, who favor locally produced movies over foreign productions. Japanese films that are popular abroad do not necessarily make it big in Japan, and the art movie theaters or international festivals often include films that are completely unknown in their domestic market. The economic and geopolitical context matters for understanding a movie, but not in the sense that Cazdyn implies. The author’s knowledge of the real functioning of an economy is inversely proportional to his investment in Marxist theory. He confesses that his interest does not hinge “on the profits and losses incurred by the film industry in Japan.” But supply and demand, profits and losses, and production and distribution circuits matter for the evolution of cinema over the ages, and a theory that claims to conceptualize the link between films and their socio-economical context must grapple with economic realities, not just outmoded Marxist fictions.

From Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter

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A review of Policing Protest: The Post-Democratic State and the Figure of Black Insurrection, Paul A. Passavant, Duke University Press, 2021.

Policing ProtestLet’s begin with a tale of two cities. The first—let’s call it Gotham—is a city where crime and violent protest run rampant. Hoodlums and thugs control the streets. City Hall is corrupt and incompetent. Police officers are powerless. An anti-Western, anti-rationalist, racialist, segregationist ideology has declared war against individual freedom and freedom of thought. Vigilante groups have taken control of entire neighborhoods and established a reign of permanent violence, looting businesses, attacking representatives of public authority, setting fire to courts of law and to the premises of police departments. The chaos that accompanied the takeover of these Red Guards has caused dizzying increases in crime. Even so, influent voices are calling for the defunding of police and the abolition of prison. Law enforcement officers have to obey strict rules of engagement. They have to wear body cameras to record their interactions with the public or gather video evidence of their eventual mishandling of a situation. There are discussions about streaming these video feeds online, in real time. The second city—dubbed The Big Apple—is a place where a militarized police patrols the streets like an occupation army, clamping down on any form of dissent. Business interests have privatized vast portions of the public space, evacuating any undesirable people including climate change activists, protesters distributing antiwar pamphlets, or trade union picketers who could disrupt the consumer’s experience. With the full support of politicians, police forces have responded to a previous wave of crime with a zero tolerance policy they now apply to all kinds of public protest, in violation of the First Amendment of the American Constitution. This “Broken Windows” doctrine has had no effect on crime, but now justifies disproportionate use of force, excessive length of custody, and “shock and awe” tactics against protesters. People demonstrating for social justice or against racism are treated like criminals and are arrested without any legal basis. Democracy is undermined, and the government increasingly behaves like an authoritarian state.

A Tale of Two Cities

The first city is a fiction. It exists only in the alt-right world of alternative facts and post-truth reporting. The second city is how Paul Passavant describes the evolution of law enforcement and order maintenance in the United States. Policing Protest is a political science book that documents the rise of a “post-democratic state” in America through an analysis of the way police has become more hostile to protesters, thwarting the rights of free speech and free assembly enshrined in the American Constitution. It is based on legal analysis of court decisions, proceedings from civil actions against the NYPD, interviews with activists and with lawyers, reference to press coverage and books recounting the Occupy Wall Street movement, and textual analysis of video footage and testimonies. Although it uses standard tools of the social sciences, the research methodology does not include participant observation or questionnaire survey research, which constitute the Gold Standard in sociology. Passavant builds on a large previous scholarship highlighting a perceived decline in the guarantees offered to rights of free speech and assembly in America. Scholars have documented how policing in the United States became increasingly militarized in the 1980s and 1990s. Some point to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, as causing more repressive practices in law and policing. Others see evidence of a repressive turn as early as the 1970s, instrumented as a backlash against recently conquered civil rights. Still for others, police is inherently hostile to civil rights activists and anti-racist protesters. For the proponents of Afro-pessimism, anti-Blackness is a constituent element of policing in the United States. Passavant rejects both the essentialism of Afro-pessimism and the historicism of descriptions based on rational choice theory. For him, we should analyze the hostility against Black Lives Matter as a political antagonism, not an ontological condition. But police’s excessive response to protesting should not be seen as a rational response based on utilitarian efficiency. Passavant highlights the significance of affective attachment to “kicking ass” that goes beyond instrumental rationality of the neoliberal state. He describes the emergence of a “post-democratic, postlegitimation state shaped by neoliberal authoritarianism and haunted by the figure of black insurrection.”

Police abuse of force against protesters became a political issue in the United States at the end of the 1960s. Images in the media of civil rights marchers in Birmingham or Selma, Alabama, or protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention being attacked by police, or antiwar demonstrators being killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, shocked the national conscience. Formed in 1967 to investigate the causes of civil disorder that had culminated in the urban riots of the summer this year, the Kerner Commission attributed the race riots to lack of economic opportunity for African Americans and Latinos, failed social service programs, police brutality, racism, and the orientation of national media to white perspectives. The 426-page report became an instant bestseller. It set into motion reforms to make police more legally accountable and to steer protest policing into a more tolerant direction. Beginning in some cities in the 1970s, the “negotiated management” model of protest policing emphasized dialogue and collaboration between police departments and groups planning acts of civil disobedience as part of a demonstration. Under the new model, police should expect and tolerate a certain amount of disruption to everyday routines when citizens exercise their First Amendment rights. During protests, police should avoid using force, and refrain from making arrests except when absolutely necessary. Arrestees should be processed with diligence and a certain degree of leniency. This model was in sharp contrast to the previous model of “escalated force” emphasizing brutal show of force and early dispersal, which was perceived as inciting an aggressive response from protesters. But the Kerner Commission report and the new model of protest policing met with fierce opposition. In December 1967, the Miami police chief uttered the now-infamous phrase, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Richard Nixon placed his 1968 presidential campaign under the banner of the “forgotten Americans,” the “non-demonstrators” who are “not guilty of the crime that plagues the land.” Conflating civil rights demonstrations, urban riots, and street crime, he set in motion a “war against crime” that was fought by his successors.

Broken Windows

In 1982, The Atlantic published the essay “Broken Windows” by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson. This controversial theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder. Starting with the NYPD, police departments began to target minor forms of disorder with zero tolerance in the 1990s. According to Passavant, “the transformation of policing in the direction of zero tolerance, quality of life, order maintenance policing, and enjoyment of ‘kicking ass’ was at odds with the principles of tolerance and restraint informing the negotiated management model of protest policing.” A new style of protest policing, dubbed “command and control,” emphasizes inflexible regulatory practices, strategic incapacitation based on risk assessment and surveillance, shock and awe tactics of disproportionate display of force, extralegal intimidation of protesters, and punitive postarrest detentions. This shift from negotiated management to more aggressive and violent protest policing methods can be attributed to three interrelated crises: a crisis of democracy, an urban fiscal crisis, and a crime crisis. To illustrate the first crisis, Passavant takes the example of Supreme Court decisions regarding the use of public space, such as the exercise of free speech in shopping malls and urban centers, as the sign of a deeper crisis in political culture: commercial interests are encouraged at the detriment of democratic expression. To compensate the contraction of fiscal revenue caused by the exodus to suburbia, cities began to reorient their infrastructure away from residents and toward nonresidents who might visit city centers: consumers, tourists, and visitors attracted by sporting events or cultural manifestations. Lastly, the perception of a “crime wave” in the 1960s and 1970s led to the militarization of police and the abandonment of the negotiated management model of protest policing.

By looking at how the NYPD policed the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC), Passadant argues that when cities host mega-events, they are left with a security legacy that persists after the event is over. This legacy takes the form of armored vehicles, military-grade weapons, or security cameras that become embedded within the fabric of the urban environment. In the case of New York, politically motivated intelligence gathering and needlessly punitive arrest processing practices were first institutionalized during the organization of the 2004 RNC. When a city hosts a mega-event classified as a national special security events by the secretary of Homeland Security, it becomes eligible for federal money to enhance security. The Secret Service becomes the lead federal agency for developing and implementing security for the event, coordinating federal agencies and state and local police. Cities want to avoid a breach in security at all costs. The fear a repetition of the events that plagued Seattle’s 1999 hosting of the WTO’s ministerial conference, when massive street protests disrupted the event and caused mayhem in the city. But being perceived as capable of hosting a mega-event is also a powerful marketing tool for a city, as it generates a large economic windfall in the form of increased tourism and commercial activity. Like New Orleans’ hosting of the Super Bowl after Hurricane Katrina, New York submitted bids for several mega-events after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and was successful for its hosting of the 2002 World Economic Forum and the 2004 RNC. The first event was a rehearsal for the preparation of the second, which in turn shaped the way the NYPD reacted to Occupy Wall Street and to Black Lives Matter. Post-event assessments emphasized the perceived psychological effects of major shows of force, the role of intelligence or surveillance like the use of “undercovers” to infiltrate groups of protesters, and the NYPD’s “proactive arrest policy” directed against potential rioters. Hosting mega-events therefore produces a multiplier effect spurring the securitization of policing and urban environments. Much as the “Broken Windows” theory encouraged a horizontal dissemination of policing practices, the vertical dissemination of surveillance and control after a national special security event shapes institutions and methodologies in police departments long after the mega-event is over.

From OWS to BLM

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) left in its wake a paper trail of civil actions against the NYPD and other police departments, who were accused of excessive use of force and arbitrary arrests. It was a legally literate movement, with “legal observers” embedded among participants to document possible violations of civil rights by the police and later defend activists in courts. NYPD was found guilty of trespassing the law on many counts. But court decisions came too late to remedy the NYPD’s preemption of constitutional rights in the streets. They also failed to make the NYPD financially accountable for their policing, as civil damages arising from judicial settlements were absorbed into New York’s citywide budget. The case of a public administration violating its own laws raises a broader question. According to Max Weber, the monopoly of the legitimate use of force defines the rational-legal state and is used in an efficient and orderly manner. But there was nothing rational or orderly in the use of force by the NYPD during OWS protests. The overwhelming numbers of police dedicated to street demonstration and their heavy anti-riot equipment were displayed to intimidate protesters and force them into submission. There were numerous acts of verbal abuse and physical brutality. Rules were applied arbitrarily: in some cases, police would conduct arrests for even the slightest infraction such as putting one foot into the street when only use of the sidewalk was allowed. In other cases, illegal or unruly conducts on the part of demonstrators were tolerated and even encouraged or provoked. For Passavant, the role of excess is indicative of an affective attachment to the repressive nature of neoliberal order maintenance policing. Some police officers enjoyed “kicking ass” and reveled in the disorder they were causing. The arbitrary, aggressive, and overwhelming police behavior was calculated in order to cause fear and anger among the otherwise nonviolent crowd. As an aside, “this also had the effect of diverting the Occupy movement away from its political purpose of protesting economic inequality to a preoccupation with the NYPD.” Polices forces were not alone in reacting affectively to demonstrations and in enjoying the disorder they were causing: videos posted on YouTube of police subjecting protesters to violent treatment have become viral, eliciting in their comment thread a range of reactions going from indifference (“whatever”) to sadistic pleasure (“LOL”).

The death of Eric Garner at the hands of the police on July 17, 2014, was one of the events that helped trigger the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. When the NYPD local commander was informed by text message that Garner was “most likely DOA” (dead on arrival), he responded, “Not a big deal.” In Ferguson, Missouri, where black teenager Michael Brown was shot multiple times and killed by a police officer on August 9, 2014, imposing a fine on poor and black citizens for minor violations of the law and then issuing a warrant when they failed to comply was a kind of “primitive accumulation” that provided the city with 25 percent of its fiscal revenue. This is a kind of police “who enjoys impunity, and who are supported by political subjects who enjoy their enjoyment of impunity.” Much as the NYPD sought to repress, intimidate, and defeat Occupy Wall Street, it treated Black Lives Matter as a political enemy to be defeated by any means necessary. The full spectrum of repressive measures were used against the BLM movement: battlefield tactics of urban warfare and counterinsurgency, deployment of military-grade weapons such as LRADs, surveillance by counterterrorism units and undercover police, interception or blurring of communication signals, preventive arrests and grueling detention conditions. According to Passavant, these reactions are haunted by the specter of black insurrection. The protests and riots of the 1960s continue to weigh on the present. At the same time, the responses envisaged at the time—addressing inequalities in education, housing, employment, and degrading conditions of welfare—have now vanished from the political horizon.

Echoes beyond the United States

The conflation of civic protest and violent riots presented in the opening vignette (the “tale of Gotham”) is not new. In the 1960s, conservatives complained that the civil rights movement was spreading “mass lawlessness and violence,” when in fact it was the disorderly response of the authorities that fueled unrest and turmoil. Should we trust empirical evidence or alternative facts? Unfortunately, when they originate in the United States, both facts and fiction are export products. They influence the way other Western states organize their police forces, and how they perceive protests as a result of a “woke” ideology of ethnic polarization. European authorities and commentators took different attitudes regarding the two social movements reviewed in Policing Protest, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. It must be remembered that OWS was met with a great deal of sympathy in Europe, where hostility to market forces and unfettered capitalism runs deep. European cities became the center of occupation movements that paralleled the protests in New York and other American cities. In France, a political manifesto penned by Stéphane Hessel, a respected figure from the left, Time for Outrage! (“Indignez-vous !”), sold more than one million copies in a few months. In Spain, the Indignados Movement led to the creation of the Podemos political party that entered a coalition government with the left-of-center Socialists. Occupation of public places and urban parks, in large part self-disciplined, was monitored by the police without any major incident. The BLM movement was met with more reservation and dismissal. Denunciation of structural racism and police abuse of force strike a sensitive chord in countries like France, where political leaders reject all references to “police violence” (the preferred terms are “response to provocations” or “excessive use of force”) and deny that systemic racism in French institutions can even be an issue. On the one hand, police forces and the governments that mandate them try to avoid unnecessary deaths at all costs. They fear death at the hand of the police can spark violent riots and turmoil, as was indeed the case in France in 2005 and then again in June 2023. On the other hand, the same evolution toward the militarization of law and order and the escalation in the use of force can also be observed in Europe. How can we reconcile the categorical imperative “Thou shalt not kill” with the brutalization of order maintenance methods? There are no definite answers, but the reflection proposed by Paul Passavant in Policing Protest also finds echoes in Europe.

Indian Software Engineers and the Power of Algorithms  

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization, A. Aneesh, Duke University Press, 2006.

Virtual MigrationA. Aneesh first coined the word algocracy, or algocratic governance, in his book Virtual Migration, published by Duke University Press in 2006. He later refined the term in his book Neutral Accent, an ethnographic study of international call centers in India (which I reviewed here), and in subsequent work in which he preferred to use the term algorithmic governance. What is algocracy? Just as bureaucracy designates the power of bureaus, the administrative structures within large public or private organizations, algocracy points toward the power of algorithms, the lines of code underlying automatic expert systems, enterprise software solutions and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. Power and authority are increasingly embedded in algorithms that inform and define the world of automated teller machines, geographical positioning systems, personal digital assistants, digital video, word processing, databases, global capital flows, and the Internet. In Virtual Migration, Aneesh made the distinction between three types of organizational governance: the bureaucratic mode (rule by the office), the panoptic mode (rule by surveillance), and the algocratic mode (rule by code). Each form of governance corresponds to different technologies, organizations, and subjectivities. This classification is loosely connected to Max Weber’s classical distinction between three types of legitimate authority that characterize human societies, especially as they evolve from simple to more complex social organizations built upon shared norms, values, and beliefs. The German sociologist called these three types charismatic authority, traditional authority, and rational-legal authority. Charismatic authority comes from the personal charisma, strength, and aura of an individual leader. The legitimacy of traditional authority comes from traditions and customs. Rational-legal authority is a form of leadership in which command and control are largely tied to legal rationality, due process of law, and bureaucracy. Proposing the new concept of algocracy raises many questions. Is the rule of code perceived as legitimate, or how is the issue of legitimacy displaced by a new form of governance that doesn’t rest on human decision? How does this lack of human agency affect the functioning of democratic institutions? Does it have an effect on social asymmetry, inequity, and inequality? What are the intersections between algocracy and surveillance (the panoptic mode) and organizational design (the bureaucratic mode)?

What is algocracy?

But first, it is important to understand that algocratic governance is a sociological concept, grounded in the standard methodologies of social science. It is not a computer science concept, although software engineers and scientists deal with algorithms on a daily basis. Nor is it a philosophical notion that an intellectual builds out of thin air in his or her cabinet. Sociology has a long tradition of theory-building that goes through the steps of observation, categorization, and association. Participant observation is one type of data collection method typically used in qualitative research and ethnography; it constitutes the golden standard in anthropology and several branches of sociology. Other methods of data gathering include non-participant observation, survey research, structured interviews, and document analysis. Based on the collected dataset, the researcher makes generalizations from particular cases, tests the explanatory power of concepts, and builds theory through inductive reasoning. In contrast to Neutral Accent, Virtual Migration is not based on participant observation but was conducted through a qualitative methodology the author characterizes as critical, comparative, and exploratory. Aneesh conducted more than a hundred interviews with Indian programmers, system analysts, project managers, call center workers, human resource managers, and high-level executives, including CEOs, managing directors, and vice-presidents, both in India and in the United States. He also observed shop floor organization and work processes in twenty small, mid-size, and large software firms in New Delhi, Gurgaon, and Noida. The conceptualization of algocracy came to him through a simple observation. When an Indian dialer in a call center answers the phone or fills in the “fields” on a computer screen, these actions are constrained by the underlying computer system that directs the calls and formats the information to fill in. The operator “cannot type in the wrong part of a form, or put the address in the space of the phone number for the field may be coded to accept only numbers, not text; similarly, an agent cannot choose to dial a profile (unless, of course, they eschew the dialer and dial manually). The embedded code provides existing channels that guide action in precise ways.”

In order to come to this epiphany, Aneesh had to immerse himself in fieldwork and grapple with questions that connect the local and the particular to wider transnational trends. The context provides some understanding of the challenges the researcher was facing. The rise of the Indian IT industry was boosted by the so-called Millennium Bug, also known as Y2K: approaching the passage to the year 2000, there was widespread fear that the “00” date that would start from the last midnight of 1999 could cause computers to malfunction, since they might interpret it as the 00 for 1900. India’s fledging IT companies sensed the opportunity and offered their services.They sent software specialists onsite to fix the computer systems of large US corporations, and operated from a distance through increased bandwidth and Internet cable links. This was also a time when outsourcing and offshoring of service activities became an issue in the United States. The transferring of jobs from the United States to countries with lower labor standards and environmental protection became a dark symbol of globalization. The effect of international trade and global economic integration on workers’ rights, human rights, and the environment was hotly debated. In Seattle during December 1992, four days of massive street protests against the World Trade Organization turned the city into a battle ground. Globalization was attacked from the right and from the left. The nativist right criticized the loss of manufacturing jobs and the tide of immigrants that were flooding American cities, disrupting the social fabric and diluting national identity. The social justice left denounced the erosion of workers’ rights in the US and the prevalence of child labor and over forms of exploitation in the Global South. One type of work, the staffing of call centers responding to American customers from places in India or other locations, came under the focus of the news media. The same forces that had destroyed manufacturing jobs and put blue-collar workers on the dole were also affecting the service sector and threatening white-collar workers. For some observers, like the journalist Thomas Friedman, the world was becoming flat. Something was definitely happening, but social scientists lacked the tools and datasets for interpreting what was going on. New concepts were needed.

Body shopping and virtual migration

In their analysis of globalization, economists have shown that commercial integration and foreign direct investment reinforce each other, thus being complements rather than substitutes. Aneesh started his research project from a similar question: “Initially I began inquiring whether online services were replacing on-site work, making the physical migration of programming labor redundant.” During further investigations, especially interviews, he realized that the situation was a bit more complex. In a typical situation, “a firm in India might send two or three systems analysts to the client’s site in the United States for a short period, so that they might gain a first-hand understanding of the project and discuss system design. These systems analysts then help to develop the projects in India while remaining constantly in touch with their client, who can monitor the progress of the project and provide input. Once the project is over, one or two programmers fly back to the United States to test the system and oversee its installation.” Aneesh then made the distinction between two types of labor: body shopping, or embodied labor migration; and virtual migration, or disembodied labor migration. Both practices are part of the growing transnational system of flexible labor supply that allows Indian firms to enter into global supply chains and achieve optimal result. Virtual migration does not require workers to move in physical space; body shopping implies migration of both bodies and skills. In body shopping, Indian consultancy firms “shop” for skilled bodies: they recruit software professionals in India to contract them out for short-term projects in the United States. At the end of the project, programmers look for other projects, usually from the same contractors. Some of them start looking for a contractor based in the United States and attempt to secure a more lucrative placement. The ultimate goal is to switch their visa status from the H-1B work visa to the Green Card: body shopping allows Indian workers to pursue the American dream.

Contrary to standard perceptions, “the biggest advantage of hiring contract labor is not low short-term costs; it is flexibility, and the resulting reduction of the long-term costs of maintaining a large permanent workforce.” With a widespread demand for programming labor in different organizations, software professionals are well-paid workers. They are both “expensive and cheap” for American corporations to hire. They allow the receiving company to trim its workforce, take these temporary workers into service only in times of need, and economize on long-term benefits—social security, retirement contributions, health insurance, and unemployment insurance—that must be provided to permanent employees. Contractual employment allows American companies to implement just-in-time labor and to decouple work performance from the maintenance of a permanent workforce. In the case of virtual migration, they can also achieve temporal integration and work in real time, round-the-clock, in a seamless way: “Since the United States and India have an average time-zone difference of twelve hours, the client may enjoy, for a number of tasks, virtually round-the-clock office hours; when America closes its offices, India gets ready to start its day.” The temporal sequencing of work across time zones allows corporation to “follow the sun” and gain a competitive advantage by dividing their work groups and assignments between India and the United States. But time integration is not as easy as it sounds: coordination is a complex business, and lots of valuable information get lost during the workload transmission from one team to the other. Temporal dissonance may also occur when an Indian team is obliged to work at night to provide real-time response to American clients, like in the case of call centers. Like Aneesh illustrated in his subsequent book Neutral Accent, people who perform nightly live in two worlds, straddled between time zones, languages, and cultural references. Night work alters circadian rhythms and put workers out of phase with their own society: “there is a reason why night work has another name—the graveyard shift.”

Algocracy is not algonomics

In writing Virtual Migration, Aneesh’s ambition was to disentangle sociology from economics, showing that they can take different and sometimes opposed perspectives on the same phenomenon. An economist would ask whether migration and trade are complementary or substitute, and look at trade data and labor statistics to test hypotheses. He would try to differentiate between short-term losses and long-term gains, showing that job displacements and layoffs caused by transnational economic integration is more than compensated by gains in productivity and increased activity. Aneesh warns against the danger of conflating the economic and the social where the social is often assimilated to the economic. Virtual workers or Indian programmers who engage in the body shopping trade are not only economic agents; their location of choice is not only motivated by economic interest. During interviews, “programmers continually long for the ‘other’ nation: they miss India while in the United States and miss the United States when they are back in India.” It is not only an opposition between material versus more social and emotional longings: “we also find high-level executives who enjoy material luxuries in India such as chauffeur-driven cars, plush houses, and domestic help at home and yet still try to maintain their permanent residency in the United States.” Similarly, discussions on organizational networks tend to be economistic, focussing on possible efficiencies, competitive advantage, coordination, and relative transaction costs for corporations. But for Aneesh, the language of “networks” often obscures relations of power and governance in the emerging regime. As he explains, “algocracies are imbued with social ideas of control as well as formal logic, tracing their roots to the imperatives of capital and code.” Computer programming has emerged as a form of power that structures possible forms of action in a way that is analytically different from bureaucratic and surveillance systems. Enterprise software systems developed by Indian firms are not merely the automation of existing processes. They also “produce the real” by structuring possible forms of behavior and by translating embodied skills into disembodied code.

One of the characteristics of algocratic governance is to reduce the space needed for deliberation, negotiation, and contestation of the rules and processes that frame actions and orient decisions. As Aneesh could observe on shop floors and in call centers, “work is increasingly controlled not by telling workers to perform a task, nor necessarily by punishing workers for their failure, but by shaping an environment in which there are no alternatives to performing the work as desired.” Programming technologies have gained the ability to structure behavior without a need for orienting people toward accepting the rules of the game. Software templates provide existing channels that guide action in precise ways: all choices are already programmed and nonnegotiable. This guidance suggests that algorithmic authority does not need legitimacy in the same sense as was used in the past. Max Weber’s three types of legitimate power supposed human agency on the part of the bearers of authority and for those under their command. But as authority is increasingly embedded in the technology itself, or more specifically in the underlying code, governance operates without human intervention: human agency disappears, and so does the possibility to make authority legitimate. This is not to deny that programming is done by someone and that human agents are still in charge of making decisions. Yet programming also becomes fixed and congealed as a scheme, defining and channeling possible action. Automation, or the non-human operation of a process, is not a problem in itself. It becomes a matter of concern when automated algorithms enter into certain areas where it is important for the space for negotiation to remain open.

AI alignment

Artificial intelligence brings the power of algorithms to a new level. The critics addressed to AI are getting more and more familiar. AI systems are non-transparent, making it almost impossible to identify the rules that led them to recommend a decision. They can be biased and perpetuate discrimination by amplifying the racial or gender biases embedded in the data used for training them. They remain arbitrary from the individual’s perspective, substituting the human subject with changing behavioral patterns and data scores. AI lacks human qualities like creativity and empathy, limiting its ability to understand emotions or produce original ideas. Surveillance powered by AI threatens individual privacy and collective rights, tipping the balance in favor of authoritarian states and oppressive regimes. In a not-so-distant future, artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems could become “misaligned”—in a way that could lead them to make plans that involve disempowering humanity. For some experts, AGI raises an existential risk that could result in human extinction or another irreversible global catastrophe. The development of AI has generated strong warnings from leaders in the sector, some of whom have recommended a “pause” in AI research and commercial development. What I find missing in discussions about AI security and “AGI alignment” is the lack of observable facts. We need empirical observations and field research to document the changes AI-powered algorithms bring to work processes, organizational structures, and individual autonomy. We also need to explain what algorithms actually do in concrete terms by using the perspectives of people from various cultures and backgrounds. Only then will we be able to balance algorithmic governance with countervailing forces and ensure that democratic freedoms can be maintained in the age of the rule by code.