Tag: globalization

Indian Software Engineers and the Power of Algorithms  

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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.

Chinese Women Students in Australia

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A review of Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West, Fran Martin, Duke University Press, 2022.

Dreams of FlightReading Dreams of Flight made me reexamine my preconceptions about Australia, China, and university studies abroad. When I was a graduate student in France back in the early 1990s, I didn’t identify Australia as a land of opportunity for academic studies. In the disciplines that I have studied, Australia is (or was) a scientific backwater, an outlier when compared to North America or Western Europe. I don’t trust university rankings that much, but last time I checked Australian universities ranked quite low in terms of research output, number of Nobel Prizes, well-identified schools of thought, or emerging paradigms. I was under the impression that an academic career in an Australian institution was a second- or third-best choice for aspiring scholars who failed to land the position of their dreams in North America or in Europe. Spending more than a decade in East Asia made me revise that opinion. I have met many Asian scholars for whom Australia was definitely on the academic map. For a prospective graduate student in South Korea, in Taiwan, or in South-East Asia, pursuing a degree in Australia, applying for a faculty position, or doing research as a post-doctoral student in an Australian university are serious options to consider. Australia’s attractiveness is not only linked to geographical proximity. Language, lifestyle, natural environment, diasporic presence, and academic freedom in well-funded research universities also weigh in the decision for an academic destination. Besides, the international students who form the focus of Dreams of Flight—a cohort of about fifty young Chinese women that the author follows across the full cycle of international study between 2012 and 2020—did not wish to pursue an academic career in science or in the humanities. Their ambition was to acquire a degree in a practical field such as accounting, finance, or communication and media studies, to broaden their horizon by getting an experience of living and studying abroad, and to follow a career marked by international mobility and promotion opportunities. Australian universities could build on these expectations to attract a growing number of students from China: in December 2019, just before Covid, there were over 212,000 Chinese students studying in Australia. Students from China represented the largest proportion of international students, while Australia was the third foreign destination for Chinese students after the United States and the United Kingdom.

Study in France, Study in Australia

Reading that higher education in Australia is also a commercial venture wasn’t really a surprise for me. In my previous posting as cultural counsellor at the French Embassy in Hanoi, I was involved in managing a Study in France programme and in attracting Vietnamese students to French educational institutions. Australian universities were clearly our direct competitors. La Trobe University had an admission office and a partnership program within Hanoi University, while RMIT was the first completely foreign-owned university granted permission to operate in Vietnam, delivering Australian degrees for a hefty tuition fee. But even with this experience in mind, I personally don’t like to think of academic studies abroad as a field ruled by competition and marketization. For France, attracting foreign students is a matter of public policy, not market development: it is a way to promote our model and our values, to uphold the position of French as an international language, to train potential recruits for French multinational firms or research labs, and to build long-lasting influence through a network of alumni who will keep a close connection to France. This assumes, of course, that foreign students will adhere to the values conveyed through education and living abroad, that they will practice French in the classroom (where courses are increasingly taught in English) and in everyday life, and that they will keep a positive attitude toward France after their study period (remember that Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot both worked and studied in France.) Unlike many universities in Australia, in the US or in the UK, French universities and Grandes Écoles offer high-quality training without imposing unaffordable tuition and fees. In fact, the French government offers many foreign students a benefits programme that reduces tuition fees to almost nothing. Although this is not the case for every institution of higher education, these fee structures are still lower than other universities in Europe, let alone Australia or North America. This is not always the best selling point among prospective students and their families: especially in Asia, quality comes at a price, and what is low-priced tends to be perceived as low-quality. But in countries like Vietnam, the affordability of studies in France, coupled with the known quality of French curricula, was clearly a strong argument to attract students to France and to persuade them to study French in our cultural institutes located in Vietnam’s four main cities.

Australia has a different approach to attracting foreign students. Australia has been recognized as having “the most organized and aggressive international recruitment and marketing strategy” for its universities abroad, and yet the central government has little involvement in higher education promotion. Universities, and in some respects provinces, are in charge of attracting foreign students to Australia and building an image of academic excellence and cosmopolitanism. They compete among themselves and against foreign education institutions for private income from international students, with the students themselves conceptualized essentially as consumers. To attract new students and maximize revenue, they maintain a network of commercial education agents abroad, organize student fairs and promotion events, open offices on the campus of partner universities, and sign agreements with local institutions. They use marketing strategies to target the public and divide the market into various segments: the cohort of young students studied by the author, who belong to the “post-90” (jiuling hou) generation, were more likely than the previous generation to be female, to study business and management as opposed to sciences or engineering, to start studying at the bachelor’s level, and to apply for permanent resident permit after their studies. The selling points for studying in Australia increasingly focus on urban lifestyle, natural scenery, food and beverage, and opportunities for tourism. International student offices at Australian universities emphasize the quality of students’ live & learn experience. They offer a range of support, advice and information about housing, daily life, and job opportunities. The objective is to create value and maximize consumer experience, not to promote a particular model of democracy and use education as a policy instrument. If exposure to daily life in Australia makes student acquire a taste for freedom and democratic ideals, so much the better. But studying in Australia is responding to economic rationality, not to the logic of a sovereign state. The education sector is Australia’s third export market after agriculture and mining. It generates indirect revenues by contributing to nation branding, tourism, and export promotion. If anything, dependence on Chinese student income was construed as a problem, especially at the end of the period studied by Fran Martin. Excessive market concentration affects product quality and exposes producers to increased political risk.

Preconceived ideas

As Fran Martin writes in her preface, “the young Chinese women whose stories are told in this book represent the human face of this marketization of education.” I was surprised by the description of their social background as middle class: they were the (often only) daughters of middle-rank party cadres, local officials, small business entrepreneurs, or corporate executives, who could afford to pay tuition fees and living expenses abroad. By comparison, in Vietnam, studying abroad remains the preserve of the elite or the upper middle class, and parents are making huge sacrifices to send their children abroad. Even in France, where secondary education is mostly state-led and university tuition fees are very low, sending one’s child to study abroad is a tough financial decision, and most French students content themselves with a one-year mobility in a different European country under the Erasmus student exchange program. Getting a degree in the United States, in Australia, or even in post-Brexit United Kingdom is out of the financial reach of most French families. The huge number of Chinese students abroad (over 700 000 in 2019) made me realize how rich China has become, and how devoted Chinese parents are to the education of their children. A related surprise was to read that for these young urban Chinese women, Melbourne and other Australian cities felt provincial and underdeveloped. Words like Mocun (“Melvillage”) and TuAo (“native Oz”) disparage the cultural and economic backwardness of Australia as a whole, while complaints about the nation’s backward infrastructure and early shop closing times were frequent among Chinese students. For some students, the village-like living conditions in Melbourne felt safe and friendly, while other complained against the unfriendliness of the locals, the unavailability of jobs in non-Chinese-run businesses, the ethnic concentration of Chinese students and migrants in clustered urban areas and housing, and racism and violence in public places. The dream of immersing oneself in the local culture and to get to know local people often ended in disillusion and fear. Indeed, many respondents in the study found that they had left China only to arrive in a subworld populated by Chinese friends, Chinese landlords, Chinese classmates, Chinese flatmates, Chinese bosses, Chinese media, and Chinese businesses. Everyday verbal interactions were held mostly in Mandarin, and the city was experienced as a sociospatial network of connected clusters.

Another preconceived idea I had about China was that increased openness through foreign travel and studies abroad might change Chinese society for the better and steer its citizens toward more liberal attitudes on the political and social fronts. This is a delusion I share with many people in the West: the notion that exposing young Chinese people to our ideas and values will make them think and behave more like us and will turn China as a whole into a responsible stakeholder on the global scene. In France, international education is recognized as a significant tool of soft power, a mechanism of attraction and persuasion. Through student exchange programs and cultural institutions such as Alliance française and Campus France, countries convey particular cultural, social, educational and political images of themselves abroad. These not only enhances their global visibility and influence but also their ultimate goal to reach and win the hearts and minds of people worldwide. It seems hard to deny the fact that internationalized higher education, with its cross-cultural and multi-national exchange activities, lays the ground for an intensified cross-border dialogue, contributes to a greater understanding between countries as well as enhances international cooperation. Education as a global phenomenon attracts people, and generates interest in the languages and cultures of other places. But Australia doesn’t seem to make such assumptions. For Australians, education is a lucrative business, not a policy tool, and promotion efforts focus on short rather than long term objectives. If anything, the increased number of Chinese students in Australian universities, and their dependence on partnership agreements with China, are perceived as a threat to academic freedom and domestic sovereignty. After Fran Martin completed her study, it was announced that Australia’s federal government was to shut down Chinese learning centers, known as Confucius Institutes, after the latter has been suspected of functioning as a plank of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda. In 2021, Human Rights Watch published a report entitled How China’s Long Reach of Repression Undermines Academic Freedom at Australia’s Universities, giving voice to students and academics who felt forced to self-censor their views about the human rights abuses of the communist regime in China. Cases of nationalist outbursts and peer harassment have been reported among Chinese students abroad, making true the Chinese regime’s assertion that “leaving the country is more effective than a hundred patriotic education classes.”

Competing models of identity

This is not to say that international education had no effect on the Chinese students who responded to Fran Martin’s questions or discussed together on their WeChat group. The author identifies two competing models of identity among the young Chinese women from the post-90 generation: neoliberal-style enterprising selfhood, and neotraditionalist familial feminity. The first one values mobility, individual freedom, cosmopolitanism, professional orientation, gender equality, and consumerism. The second one prefers stability, family orientation, filial piety, collective discipline, job security, and traditional gender roles. Studying abroad accompanied a shift from the second to the first model. Contacted a few years after the study, women in the focus group were more likely to be unmarried, independent, focused on their professional career, following a flexible life course, and geographically mobile. They valued professional ambition, cultural reflexivity, and leisure consumption. All were not able to translate international studies into higher-status jobs in the private sector, in China or in Australia, and a significant number experienced downward social mobility. Some remained in Australia, navigating the state immigration regime and accumulating points in pursuit of permanent resident status while doing odd jobs in precarious conditions. Other graduates returned to China and faced gender-based discrimination in their job searches, competing with a large number of haigui returnees and having less guanxi than those who had stayed behind. Most of them delayed marriage and childbearing, with the risk of falling behind the gendered life script of marrying before their late twenties and becoming shengnü, or “leftover women.” The other model of gender neotraditionalism also retained its influence, in alliance with family structures and the modern apparatus of the socialist state. Pressures to marry and have children on a fixed schedule were difficult to escape, and heteronormativity weighed on some women who had developed same-sex leanings while in Australia. In political terms, Chinese students abroad tended to manifest expressions of “long-distance nationalism” and “patriotism from afar.” Faced with “insults to China”, the ethics of national representation demands that one make counterclaims to defend the national honor against hostile outsiders: “A son never complains that his mother is ugly; a dog never complains that its household is poor.” But nationalist feelings were also complicated by time spent abroad: the author observes a growing tendency to distinguish patriotism (aiguo) from attachment to the party or government, as well as a growing appreciation of the heterogeneity of Chinese identity. As she observes, “national feelings on the move are characterized by multiplicity, mutability, and ambivalence.”

Interestingly, the only institutions who really care about the subjectivities of Chinese students in Australia and who want to win their “hearts and minds” are proselytizing churches and religious sects. Among evangelical churches in the West (and in South Korea), China is seen as a new frontier for Christianity, a continent ripe for mass conversion and heavenly salvation. Some churches selectively target foreign students in evangelizing strategies: their personal alienation, disorientation, and insecurity resulting from their immersion into an unfamiliar environment make them easy targets for street preachers and door-to-door missionaries. The church to which there are drawn acts as a “service hub” for foreign students, providing spiritual comfort and material orientation as well as free language classes, outdoor excursion opportunities, and a quick way to meet new friends. In France, where secularism is part of the national identity, proselytizing has a bad image in the general public. It is perceived as undue influence and foreign meddling: evangelicals are routinely characterized as “Anglo-saxon,” and Seventh-Day Adventists or Latter-Day Saints are categorized as “cults.” By contrast, I was surprised to read that Chinese students had a rather positive image of proselytizing churches; despite being warned against “heterodox cults” (xie jiao) in their home country, they were curious about what they perceived as part of the cultural foundation of Western societies, and were favorably impressed by the selflessness and genuine sympathy of Christian missionaries. Some Chinese women used Bible-study classes and Pentecostal church sermons as a type of introspective self-cultivation and self-improvement, not necessarily leading to long-term religious engagement. For others, the church became the center of their social activities and spiritual life. For many Chinese students drawn to religious activities, churches were one of the few places where conversation and friendship with locals could occur. The LDS (Mormon) Church is not allowed to proselytize in China, but it trains its missionaries in Mandarin and tasks them with targeting Chinese citizens abroad in order to expand the faith into Chinese communities. For other churches as well, returnee converts may appear as an efficient means of spreading the faith in China while complying to the strict limitation imposed by the communist authorities on their activities. For the author, “churches’ provision of social services to international students raises some questions when considered in relation to ‘education export’ in Australia”: she sees it as “neoliberal privatization” and “outsourcing” of welfare services that ought to be provided by the secular state. She notes that the LDS Church and Pentecostal megachurches promote “deeply conservative positions on gender identity, (hetero)sexuality, and marriage.” But she also acknowledges the limitation of academic approaches when it comes to religious affects and expressions of faith: “the affective experience of immersion in religious scenes—even in the scholarly guise of ethnographic observation—tends to elude the clinical grasp of academic analysis.”

Market research

I wish I had with me a similar book about Vietnamese students abroad when I was posted at the French Embassy in Hanoi, covering the education sector. In our efforts to attract Vietnamese students to France, we were more or less walking in the dark. We had no market research reports, no focus group results, no customer satisfaction surveys, no communication strategy. When we organized a Study in France fair in a big hotel in Hanoi and in Ho Chi Minh City, we were overwhelmed by the number of young Vietnamese who showed up to gather information. We did invest resources to create and sustain a network of Vietnamese alumni: they were our best salespersons, and often took an active role in attracting their junior peers to the same institutions and programs from which they had graduated. A private philanthropist, who was particularly fond of elite institutions such as Ecole Polytechnique, played a tremendous role in attracting the best and the brightest Vietnamese students to France through a scholarship program. The “bourses de l’ambassade” (scholarships at the graduate level) were also very sought after, and a process was designed to guarantee the total independence of student selection. For many students, the French language was a barrier, as most courses in France were taught in French, but it was also an incentive to enroll in French language classes in Vietnam and develop a deeper engagement with French society. In our efforts to attract Vietnamese students to France, we stood halfway between economic rationality and the logic of a sovereign state. Higher education was not identified as a business sector that could generate revenue and contribute to economic growth, but as a tool of national influence and soft power. We were in competition with other foreign destinations or domestic programs, but we tended to present the Study in France experience as unique and special, not as a competitive option amongst many. Of course, a book like Dreams of Flight is not a market research report or an exhaustive survey of Chinese students in Australia. The insights it generates are, in my view, more relevant for public policy than for private sector development. In this way, it confirms my preconception that studies abroad should not be left to market forces and wealth considerations.

From Hot Line to Help Line

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A review of Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor, and Life Become Global, A. Aneesh, Duke University Press, 2015.

Neutral AccentAt the turn of the twenty-first century, China became identified as the world’s factory and India as the world’s call center. Like China, India attracted the attention of journalists and pundits who heralded a new age of globalization and documented the rise of the world’s two emerging giants. Foremost among them, Thomas Friedman wrote several New York Times columns about call centers in Bangalore and devoted nearly half a book, The World is Flat, to reviewing personal conversations he had with Indian entrepreneurs working in the IT sector. He argued that outsourcing service jobs to Bangalore was, in the end, good for America—what goes around comes around in the form of American machine exports, service contracts, software licenses, and more US jobs. He further expanded his optimistic view to conjecture that two countries at both ends of a call center will never fight a war against each other. An intellectual tradition going back to Montesquieu posits that “sweet commerce” tends to civilize people, making them less likely to resort to violent or irrational behavior. According to this view, economic relations between states act as a powerful deterrent to military conflict. As during the Cold War, telecom lines can be used as a tool of conflict prevention: with the difference that the “hot line,” which used to connect the Kremlin to the White House, has been replaced by the “help line” which connects everyone in America to a call center in the developing world. The benefits of openness therefore extend to peace as well as prosperity. In a flat world, nations that open themselves up to the world prosper, while those that close their borders and turn inward fall behind.

Doing fieldwork in a call center

Anthropologists were also attracted to Asian factories and call center to conduct their fieldwork and write ethnographies of these peculiar workplaces. Spending time toiling along with fellow workers and writing about their participant observation would earn them a PhD and the launch of a career in an anthropology department in the United States. Doing fieldwork in a call center in Gurgaon near New Delhi came relatively easy to A. Aneesh. As a native Indian, he didn’t have much trouble adapting to the cultural context and fitting in his new work environment or gaining acceptance from his colleagues and informers. His access to the field came in the easiest way possible: he applied for a position in a call center, and after several rounds of recruitment sessions and interviews he landed a job as a telemarketing operator in a medium-sized company fictitiously designated as GoCom. He had already completed his PhD at that time and was an assistant professor at Stanford who took a one-year break to do fieldwork and publish research. He even benefited from the support of two research assistants while in New Delhi. There was no special treatment for him at the office floor, however. He started as a trainee alongside newly-hired college graduates, attending lectures and hands-on sessions to get the proper voice accent and marketing skills, then moved to the call center’s main facility to work as a telemarketer doing the night shift. He engaged in casual conversations with his peers, ate with them in the cafeteria where lunch was served after midnight, conducted formal interviews with some of them, and collected written documents such as training manuals and instruction memos.

What makes Aneesh’s Neutral Accent different from Friedman’s The World is Flat? How does an ethnographic account of daily work in an Indian call center compare with a columnist’s reportage on the frontiers of globalization? What conclusions can we infer from both texts about the forces and drivers that shape our global present? Is there added value in a scholarly work based on extended field research as compared with a journalistic essay based on select interviews and short field visits? And what is at stake in talking of call centres as evidence of a globalised world? As must be already clear, the methods used by the two authors to gather information couldn’t be more different. Aneesh’s informants were ordinary people designated by their first name—“Vikas, Tarun, Narayan, Mukul, and others”—who shared their attitudes toward their job, their experience and hardships, their dreams and aspirations. The employees with whom the author spent his working nights were recent college graduates, well-educated and ambitious, reflecting the aspirations and life values of the Indian middle-class. By contrast, Friedman associated with world-famous CEOs and founders of multi-million-dollar companies. They shared with him their worldview of a world brought together by the powerful forces of digitalization and convergence, and emphasized that globalization must have “two-way traffic.” To be true, Friedman also tells of his visits to a recruiting seminar where young Indians go to compete for the highly sought-after jobs, and to an “accent-neutralization” class where Indians learn how to make their accents sound more American. To distantiate himself from the arm-chair theorist of globalization, he emphasizes his contacts with “real” people from all walks of life. But he never pretends that his reportages amount to academic fieldwork or participant observation.

The view from below

The information collected through these methods of investigation is bound to be different. One can expect office workers to behave cautiously when addressed by a star reporter coming from the US, along with his camera crew, and introduced to the staff by top management for his reportage. The chit-chat, the informal tone, the casual conversations, and the mix of Hindi and English are bound to disappear from the scene, replaced by deference, neutral pronunciation, and silence. The views channeled by senior executives convey a different perspective from the ones expressed on the ground floor. As they confided themselves to Aneesh, employees at GoCom expressed a complete lack or pride about their job and loyalty for their company. They were in for the money, and suspected GoCom of cheating employees out of their incentive-based income. Their suspicion was not completely unfounded, and the author notices several cases of deception, if not outright cheating, regarding the computation of monthly salaries. Operators were also encouraged to mislead and cheat the customer through inflated promises or by papering over the small print in the contract. Turnover was high, and working in a call center was often viewed as a temporary position after college and before moving to other occupations. While Friedman is interested in abstract dichotomies, such as oppositions between tradition and modernity, global and local, rich and poor, Aneesh focuses on much more mundane and concrete issues: the compensation package, the commute from home, or working the night shift.

Indeed, night work is a factor that goes almost unnoticed in Friedman’s reportage, while it is a major issue in Neutral Accent. “Why is there a total absence, in thought and in practice, of any collective struggle against the graveyard shift worldwide?” asks the author, who explains this invisibility by corporate greed, union weakness, and the divergence between economic, social, and physiological well-being. He documents the deleterious effects of nocturnal labor on workers’ health, especially on women who suffer from irregular menstruation and breast cancer risk. He notices the large number of smokers around him, as well as people who complain about an array of anxieties without directing their complaints on night work per se. The frustration and discomfort of working at night is displaced to other issues: the impossibility to marry and start a family—although night work is also used by some to delay marriage or run away from family life—and the complaint about commute cabs not running on time. Indeed, what Thomas Friedman and other reporters see as a valuable perk of the job, the ability for young employees to travel safely to and from work thanks to the chauffeured car-pool services provided by the call centers, ends up as a source of frustration and anguish due to the delay and waiting time occasioned by the transport. Nocturnal labor affects men and women differently; Indian women in particular feel the brunt of social stigma as “night workers,” leading some of them to conceal their careers while looking for marriage partners, or alternatively, limiting their choice of partner to men in the same business. While the lifting of restrictions on women’s right to work at night was justified by gender neutrality, the idea of being neutral to differences carries with it disturbing elements that feminist critique has already pointed out.

Being neutral to differences

Neutrality, or indifference to difference, also characterizes the most-often noticed trait of Indian call centers: the neutralization of accent and the mimetic adoption of certain characteristics such as the Americanization of the first-names of employees who assume a different identity at work. Aneesh points out that neutral accent is not American English: during job interviews, he was asked to “stop rolling your R’s as Americans do,” and invited to speak “global English,” which is “neither American nor British.” As he notes, “such an accent does not allude to a preexisting reality; it produces it.” Accent neutralization is now an industry with its teaching methods, textbooks, and instructors. Call center employees learn to stress certain syllables in words, raise or lower their tone along the sentence, use colloquial terms with which they may not be familiar, and acquire standard pronunciation of difficult words such as “derogatory” or “disparaging,” which they ironically note in the Hindi script. Some employees are repeatedly told that they are “too polite” and that they should not use “sir” or “madam” in every sentence. For Aneesh, “neutralization allows, only to a degree, the unhinging of speech from its cultural moorings and links it with purposes of global business.” Mimesis, the second feature of transmutation, reconnects the individual to a cultural identity by selecting traits that help establish global communication, such as cheerfulness and empathy. Employees are told to keep a smiling face and use a friendly voice while talking with their overseas clients. But despite their best efforts, some cultural traits are beyond the comprehension of call center agents: “The moment they start talking about baseball, you have absolutely no idea what’s going on there” (the same could be said regarding Indian conversations about cricket.)

Aneesh uses neutralization and mimesis as a key to comprehending globalization itself. They only work one way: as the author notes, “there is no pressure, at least currently, on American or British cultures for communicative adaptation, as they are not required to simulate Indian cultural traits.” But Western consumers are also affected by processes at work in the outsourcing and offshoring of service activities. Individual identities and behaviors are increasingly monitored at the systemic level in numerous databases covering one’s credit score, buying habits, medical history, criminal record, and demographics such as age, gender, region, and education. Indeed, most outbound global calls at GoCom were not initiated by call center agents but by a software program that used algorithms to target specific profiles—demographic, economic, and cultural—in America and Great Britain. Artificial intelligence and predictive algorithms, only nascent at the time of the author’s fieldwork in 2004-2005, now drive the call center industry and standardize the process all agents use, leaving little room for human agency. Data profiles of customers can be bought and sold at a distance, forming “system identities” governed by algorithms and embedded in software platforms that structure possible forms of interaction. Identities are no longer fixed; they keep changing with each new data point, escaping our control and our right of ownership over them.

Global conversations

We cannot judge The World is Flat and Neutral Accent by the same criteria. The standard to evaluate a journalistic reportage is accuracy of fact, balanced analysis, human interest, and impact over readers. Using this yardstick, Friedman’s book was a great success and, like Fukuyama’s End of History, came to define the times and orient global conversations. The flattened world became a standard expression animated with a life of its own, and generated scores of essays explaining why the world was not really flat after all. Many Indians credited Friedman for writing positively about India and often echoed his views, claiming that the outsourcing business was doing wonders for the economy. Others critiqued the approach, saying the flat world was just another word for underpaying Indian workers and denying them the right to migrate and find work in the US. By contrast, Aneesh’s book was not geared to the general public and, apart from an enthusiastic endorsement by Saskia Sassen on the back cover and a few book reviews in scholarly journals, its publication did not elicit much debate in the academic world. In his own way, Aneesh paints a nuanced picture of globalization. Where most people see call centers as generating cultural integration and economic convergence, he insists on disjunctures, fault lines, and differentiation. The “help line” is not just a tool to connect and erase differences; it may also create frictions and dissonances of its own. A world economy neutral to day and night differences; a labor law that disregards gender disparity; work practices that erase cultural diversity; digital identities that exist beyond our control: neutralization is a force that affects call center agents and their distant customers much beyond the adoption of global English and neutral accent as a means of communication.

Trinidad’s Carbon Footprint

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Energy without Conscience. Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity, David McDermott Hughes, Duke University Press, 2017.

Energy without conscienceAs a small state composed of two islands off the coast of Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago is heavily exposed to the risk of climate change. It is vulnerable to the rise in sea levels, increased flooding, extreme weather events, hillside erosion and the loss of coastal habitats, all of which are manifestations of the continued progression of climate change. Rising sea levels and temperatures will also impact its economy, vegetation and fauna, health, and living conditions, to the point of making current livelihoods wiped out. But there is another side to the story of climate change in this small island state. Trinidad and Tobago ranks fourth globally in per capita emissions of carbon dioxide. Each of the 1.2 million inhabitants of the two islands emitted, on average, 31.3 tons of CO2 in 2017, six times the world average. Unbeknownst to the public, who tends to associate this island paradise with beach resorts, rum-based concoctions, and calypso music, Trinidad and Tobago is an oil state, a hydrocarbon economy. In the early 1990s, its hydrocarbon sector moved from an oil-dominant to a mostly natural gas-based sector, and from land-based sites to offshore production. It is now the largest oil and natural gas producer in the Caribbean, the world’s sixth-largest LNG exporter, and the largest LNG exporter to the United States, accounting for nearly 71% of US LNG imports in 2014. If we include the carbon emissions of the oil, gas, and petrol products it sells overseas, Trinidad’s carbon footprint is disproportionately large. When it comes to climate change, Trinidad and Tobago is all at once victim and perpetrator, innocent and guilty, passive object and active subject. How do its inhabitants and its political leaders react to this situation?

Victim and accomplice

The answer is, in short, denial. To the dismal of David M. Hughes, who spent a year around 2010 conducting interviews with petroleum geologists, oil and gas executives, and environmentalists, the majority of his informants simply didn’t seem to care about carbon emissions and their impact on climate. When they did care, as in the wake of hurricanes, droughts and fires that affected the country at that time, it was to posit the island state as a victim of climate change, claiming compensation and redress from richer countries. Victimhood constitutes a “slot” in the sense that anthropologists give to the term when they refer to the “savage slot” or the “tribal slot.” To quote from Hughes, “the victim slot artificially clarifies an inherently murky moral situation. It whitewashes – as innocent – societies, firms and industrial sectors otherwise clearly complicit with carbon emissions and climate change.” History predisposed Trinidadians to that role: as victims of colonialism, of the slave trade, and of the plantation economy, Trinidad’s inhabitants naturally associate themselves with other island populations that have been victimized by the history of imperialism and the modern contempt for small states. Diplomats used this chord to initiate an alliance of like-minded states in climate negotiations, eventually giving birth to the concept of SIDS or Small Island Developing States. The irony is that Trinidad and Tobago is neither a “developing state”—according to the World Bank, it falls into the “high income” category—nor an innocent victim of climate change when it comes to per capita emissions.

Another strategy of denial is to act in bad faith, to take the term popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre. By silence and omission, Trinidad diplomats and policy leaders were able to pair with the vulnerable victims of climate change. When they took the floor in international fora, it was to claim moral superiority and victim status. “We are the conscience of the world when it comes to climate issues,” declared the environment minister on behalf of small island states. Prime Minister Patrick Manning obfuscated critiques when confronted with the high figures of per capita emissions. “The atmosphere does not respond to per capita emissions,” he repeated whenever relevant. “It only responds to absolute emissions.” In absolute terms, “we emit very little,” officials claimed, quoting the figure of 0.1 percent of global carbon emissions per year. They invoked the principle of historical responsibility to shift the blame away from developing nations: rich countries are mostly to blame for past emissions, and they should pay for their accumulated contributions to global warming. Historical responsibility, like per capita emissions, are a bone of contention in climate change negotiations. They raise legitimate questions, but they also conceal as much as they illuminate. According to Hughes, the category of victimhood redeems its sufferers in an almost Christian fashion: “It allows good people to do bad things in the biosphere.” For him, it is more relevant to consider the category of “high emitting individuals” who are present in all countries and who, taken together, number about one billion people and are responsible for the bulk of carbon emissions.

Taking sides

In conducting his research in Trinidad, David M. Hughes was in a peculiar position. Anthropologists are often supposed to take sides: for the tribe they observe against the dominant society that encroaches on their livelihoods, for the colonized against the colonizers, for the local resistance against the global empire. They want to protect the livelihoods of the natives against the onslaught of cultural modernity and social change. Hughes takes the reverse position: for him, the oil and gas industry should go extinct. Exploiting hydrocarbons is both immoral and irresponsible. The core business of any oil company damages the whole world. Oil firms should be consigned to an ash heap, worthy of condescension and worse. When burned in large volumes, hydrocarbons wreak havoc and endanger the planet. In a petrostate, the objectives of sustainability and resilience are turned on their head: the status quo is not an available option. To mitigate climate change, Trinidad and all the petrostates will need to replace the paradigm of hydrocarbons with sustainable forms of energy and economic activity. The idea of peak oil and the depletion of oil reserves makes this energy transition necessary, but we should not simply wait for oil and gas to run out before taking action on the climate. Proven reserves greatly exceed what the atmosphere can safely absorb before 2050. The role of ethnography should be, in this case, to study the enemy and document how they think, act, and feel in order to combat them. Hughes divides the Trinidad population into three groups: the engineers and executives who directly depend on the oil and gas industry; the middle- and upper-class urbanites who depend on the oil infrastructure without giving it a thought; and the poorer part of the population, including the inhabitants of Tobago, who have a minimal footprint in terms of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emission.

And so Hughes became an activist or engaged ethnographer. His political agenda was to challenge people’s complicity with climate change and to raise public concerns about carbon emissions and fossil fuel. He used his contacts in the oil and gas industry to corner people into conversations they did not wish to hold, exposing their omissions and contradictions. Along with other environmental activists, he participated in a round of public consultations on the country’s first policy regarding climate change. He raised the issue of per capita emissions repeatedly and suggested that the policy document include targets for cutting them. He suggested Trinidad identify less with Tuvalu or the Maldives and more with Bahrain, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. To become a carbon-neutral destination, Trinidad would have to radically change its business model, exiting from the oil and gas industry and developing renewable energies such as solar and wind power. But the energy transition was seen more as a threat than as an opportunity by Trinidad’s industrialists who saw the substitution of oil and gas with wind and solar energy as a form of “aboveground risk” on a par with sabotage or nationalization. The anthropologist-turned-activist did find some environmentally-minded people and joined their fight against a proposed aluminum smelter that would have constituted a threat to the environment and human health. The activists defeated the smelter itself, but they acquiesced to the adjoining power plant, the complex’s only emitter of carbon dioxide. Even the most free-thinking Trinis failed to criticize the principle of burning oil and gas itself.

Oil culture

Trinidad’s society is suffused with oil, and yet hydrocarbons are relatively absent from art and culture. Around 1850, Michel-Jean Cazabon, the first great Trinidadian painter and internationally known artist, made sketches of Pitch Lake with heavy asphalt bubbling on the surface. Trinidad is also the place where the world’s first continually productive oil well was drilled in 1866. In both world wars, Trinidad’s oil propelled British and Allied forces. After independence in 1962, the country developed its gas sector, becoming a major exporter of downstream products such as methanol and plastics. Belying the resource curse that has plagued other countries, oil has given Trinidad and Tobago economic stability and political sovereignty. The island’s two Nobel laureates, V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, do not address the oil industry in their writings—there is a dearth of petro-novels or oil fictions globally—but their characterization of Trinidad as a small and forlorn country did play a role in the cultivation of victimhood that characterizes modern attitudes to climate change. No official in Port of Spain is accepting partial responsibility for climate change. Provocatively, Hughes posits that Trinidad could assume its part of greatness and leadership if it acknowledged its status as one of the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases. But he knows this is not going to happen. The country, like the rest of the planet, is stuck with oil and doesn’t want to claim responsibility for the wrongs it produces. The victim paradigm reigns supreme: environmental change is presented as something we all suffer passively, rather than actively influence.

Things weren’t meant to be that way. There were times when energy pricked the conscience of individuals. Hughes describes the successive energy transitions that characterized Trinidad’s history, highlighting the moral choices and the roads not taken. In the 1740s, the Jesuit Joseph Gumilla proposed developing a tropical colony built on abundant sunlight and fertile soil. Josef Chacon, the last governor for Spain before the English took power in 1797, encouraged settlers from neighboring French Caribbean islands, to come and grow sugar cane. Calculating the inputs necessary for agricultural productivity, he factored in slave labor and plantation managers but entirely omitted sunlight or other forms of energy. Plantation slaves were the first fuel, the first transatlantic flow of energy, whose exploitation meant the obliteration of conscience. In the early 1860s, Conrad Stollmeyer, a German immigrant, also proposed an utopian colony, a “paradise without labor” where humans were replaced by machines to be powered by sun, wind, and other tropical forces. But his utopian dreams soon faded and instead the German engineer developed a technology to transform heavy asphalt into kerosene, finding a new way to fuel the economy in addition to somatic power and natural energy. As this short history shows, people have already suggested the abandonment of former sources of energy and the adoption of new ones. What if Trinidad had developed into a natural colony based on abundant sunlight and water, or if mechanized agriculture had substituted to indentured labor and the need to bring in slaves? There were solutions that predated the problems, and we could return to them if only as a form of counterfactual speculation.

Energy without conscience

The title of Hughes’ book echoes Rabelais’ famous quotation: “science without conscience is but ruination of the soul.” According to environment science, energy without conscience leads to the ruin of the planet. But what could energy with conscience be? Hughes suggests that we should apply to energy consumption the same moral lenses that we once applied to slave labor: “oil might become the new slavery.” Burning oil constitutes a form of environmental injustice and human structural violence. It is not fair to say that we are all complicit in this endeavor: some people consume energy less than others, and the blame should be accrued first to persons and corporations responsible for the largest emissions.  But energy with conscience should not be just about putting blame and calling for climate justice. If climate change is to become a moral issue, it has to be framed into imaginaries and narratives as powerful as the ones that maintain the status quo. In his conclusion, Hughes notes that slavery gave a bad name to physical labor or somatic power: “it may be particularly difficult in Trinidad, the United States, and other postemancipation societies to propose muscle as a performer of work.” In public consultations, his proposal to establish bicycle lanes in Port of Spain was met with skepticism. And yet it is a mixture of brains and brawn, of ideas and effort, that may take the islands of this world out of their complicity with oil and climate change.

Watching Crap Videos on YouTube

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global, edited by Joshua Neves and Bhaskar Sarkar, Duke University Press, 2017.

Asian Video Cultures

Reflecting on the uploaded content usually found on YouTube, legal scholar and political activist Lawrence Lessig made the following comment: “The vast majority of remix, like the vast majority of home movies, of consumer photographs, or singing in the shower, or blogs, is just crap. Most of these products are silly or derivative, a waste of even the creator’s time, let alone the consumer’s.” This is a book about crap. But it isn’t a crap book: as Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin have taught us, there is meaning and enjoyment to be found in the transient, the fleeting, the contingent. It is by acknowledging these mundane aspects of everyday life that we can paint a true picture of modernity. Modernity as experienced by Baudelaire or Benjamin was Parisian, pedestrian, and picturesque. Our modernity falls under the sign of the global; and it is now in Asia, not on the streets of Paris, that new forms of contemporaneity are being experienced. Videos posted on YouTube and its regional equivalents—China’s Youku, Japan’s Niko Niko Dōga—as well as images circulating on low-tech video supports such as Video CDs and microSD cards are not only the crap of lived experience and a waste of consumer’s time. They are invested with imaginaries, intimacies, and identities that summon other ways of being in the world. As such, they provide weak signals, background noise, and narrow bandwidth communication to the careful observer attuned to Asia’s many presents and futures. But attending to these realities cannot be done merely from a computer screen. The various contributions in Asian Video Cultures emphasize ethnography as a crucial methodological tool for achieving better comprehension of video cultures at all levels of analysis and advocates anthropological case studies and cross-cultural analysis as foundational to a much-needed critical global media perspective.

Asian modernities

The “Asia” the editors have in mind is different from the landmass imagined by politicians, corporate executives, and ideologues. It is not defined by geography: art videos assembled by a gay Singaporean artist in Germany are as much part of Asia as the Bollywood movies that circulate in northern Nigeria. The book includes fieldworks studies taking place in Palestine and Lebanon, while other Asian geographies, such as Central Asia or Iran, are conspicuously absent. Articles about India dominate the count, and introduce us to fine-grained descriptions of localist movements such as the consumption of music videos by rigorist Meo villagers in the state of Haryana or the accession of Telangana to statehood through a politics of YouTube remixes and online comments. Some countries known for their digital modernity, such as Japan and Korea, only appear tangentially, while we are reminded that Indonesia has (or had) the second-highest number of Facebook users in the world. Just as the nation-state was molded by the printing press and the emergence of national literatures, imagined communities in Asia are currently being formed through the circulation of images and affects on online platforms and offline hardware devices. The YouTube video or its social media equivalent is at once intimate and political. It shapes an imaginary and carries values of immediacy, propinquity, self-expression, and affective engagement. Internet videos herald “the age of the amateur” which blurs the divisions between producer and consumer, media and content, uploading and downloading. They proliferate “in the penumbra of the global”, in the twilight hours between dusk and dawn when all cats are grey and dogs and wolves are confused.

The new media formations that the book chapters describe are often relegated at the margin of scholarly attention, statist projects, and corporate strategies. A common trope among intellectuals is to disparage media practices across the region as the emanation of a culture of copy, duplication and counterfeit, devoid of any intellectual creativity and adversarial to legitimate market value. According to this common view, the West is the originator of value and content, and the East free-rides on this authentic culture of innovation by offering knockoffs and low-cost imitations. The tolerance that Asian states grant to these intellectual property infringements is the sign of a retrograde political culture that is, in the end, adversarial to economic development. Another stereotype, which partly contradicts this first trope, is to view the state in Asia as authoritarian and manipulative. In his critique of Stalin’s Russia, Karl Wittfogel saw the authoritarian nature of communism as an extension of the need of totalitarian rule to control water that had shaped civilizations in most of Asia. This “oriental despotism” now takes the form of media censorship, Internet control, and political repression in densely populated cities and states that cannot tolerate political dissent. For the editors, these views, which still inform much of what passes as area studies in Euro-American university departments, are inspired by Cold War geopolitics and market neoliberalism: their objective is to make Asia fit for capitalism and democracy. They prevent us to register the profound social changes that are taking place at the level of the infra-political: most media practices described in this volume operate below the radar of the state and the market. They also make connections beyond and outside the borders of the state, giving way to transnational currents that are as constitutive to globalization as the movement of goods, services, and capital.

Bringing media to the village

Beyond the triumphant view of emerging Asia as a continent of skyscrapers and digital connectivity, one should not forget that Asia is also composed of slums, shantytowns, and remote villages. The economies of survival that sustain these margins also shape the technologies, idioms, and practices that characterize Asian video cultures. In “Video documentary and rural public China,” Jenny Chio describes how video is integrated into contemporary rural and ethnic minority livelihoods in China’s southwestern provinces. She shows that one can be modern and rural and ethnic at the same time. Video recordings of local festivals and folk performances of ethnic Miao communities find their ways to the smartphone screens and computer monitors of migrant workers and farming households living in factory towns or staying in isolated villages. They exist alongside, but not necessarily in conflict with, mainstream national media. The videographers who produce these videos are self-taught or, in some instances, beneficiaries of video-production training workshops run by local NGOs. They bring “media to the village,” but also participate in a rural public culture that allows for different forms of media representation and public participation. Slums and villages shouldn’t be identified as the “local” in opposition to the global. In another chapter on “Sensory politics in Northern Nigeria,” Conerly Casey takes the case of Muslim secondary-school girls who develop signs of spirit possession that include “dancing like they do in Indian masala films.” Qur’anic scholars who adhere to a strict interpretation of the Sunna immediately forbade Bollywood movies, while the local video movie industry produced song-and-dance copies of Bollywood productions and young adults circulated a PalmPilot version of the Kamasutra known as the Palmasutra. Stories of spirit possession, forbidden images, and sexual fantasies also played out in national politics when Nigeria’s strongman, General Sani Abaca, dropped dead after a late-night visit with two “Indian prostitutes”. The transnational circulation of images and content affect people at the level of the sensory, the intimate, the emotional, but also the religious and the political.

Another bias in media studies is to focus on large cinema screens and TVs or computer monitors, and to leave aside smaller screen displays and low-tech hardware supports. Products like VCDs, digital audio tapes, MiniDiscs, and SD cards were widely adopted in the region and successfully competed with DVDs and web uploads until smartphones became ubiquitous in the 2010s. The ethnographies collected in Asian Video Cultures attest that the preferred mode of diffusion is often off-line and through movable hardware devices that are passed on through informal networks of distribution and exchange. As Chia-chi Wu shows in her study of trans-Chinese screen practices, Asia is the continent of small-screen realities. In Chinese-language communities in the recent past, a growing lexicon of the “mini”, the “small” and the “micro” has developed in multifarious forms with radically different political and cultural meanings. “Wēi”, meaning “micro” in Mandarin, has been used in ubiquitous names like Wēibó (China’s version of Twitter), Wēixìn (WeChat in Chinese), and wēi xiǎo shuō (micro-fictions or SNS novels) or wēi diàn yǐng (micro-cinema or “micro film”). Other neologisms centering on the concept of small are also popular, such as xiǎo què xìng (small pleasures), wēi zhěng xíng (micro-plastic surgery) or wēi lǚ xíng (micro-travel). Asian minimalism, a film orientation associated with directors You Hsiao-hsien and Jia Zhang-ke, has given rise to the rejuvenation of short-film culture on a regional scale, as evident now in the flourishing of film festivals devoted exclusively to short films or micro-movies. Wēi diàn yǐng has almost completely replaced the Mandarin term for movie shorts, duǎn piàn, which now sounds old-fashioned if not obsolete. As Chinese consumers are enjoined to embrace “wēi” or “micro”, technologies that exploit the small, the mundane, the daily pleasures, and the quotidian begin to shape a specifically Asian or Chinese modernity. All these little things resonate with subtle, multilayered meanings about the production of a self-managing, complacent, and self-comforting subject that is compatible with market neoliberalism and state authoritarianism: of course, making “big” acts of disobedience is not tolerable or even imaginable in China.

Platform and content

Two terms dominate the formulation of corporate strategies and government policies in the digital sector throughout Asia: “platform” and “content”. The shared goal is to create home-grown platforms that would compete with the dominant players, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple, and to generate content targeted at global audiences. But video cultures show us that platforms can be improvised, such as in the exchange of microSD cards among traders and consumers, and that content is often user-generated with a very local audience in mind. Niko Niko Dōga, abbreviated Nico-dō, is a Japanese video-sharing service owned by Kadokawa Corporation as part of a media mix strategy that fuses platform and content. The media mix originally refers to the practice of turning books or manga into moving images or products and vice versa. It ties video together with print, games, plastic figures, comics, and novels in a tightly knit ecosystem. Unlike other video sharing site, comments generated by users on Niko Niko Dōga are overlaid directly onto the video, synced to specific playback times. This feature allows comments to respond directly to events occurring in the video, in sync with the viewer—creating a sense of a shared watching experience. Nico-dō delivers not only videos but also manga, novels, and magazines, via the same interface as its videos, and conjunction with its unique comments function.In Japan, the emphasis on platforms was a rather late addition in corporate strategic discourse. Previous priorities in the 1990s focused on contents and intellectual property, as policy makers entertained the hope that Japanese cultural goods would make up for the decline of Japanese industrial power. But once it was adopted in the 2000s, platforms became ubiquitous. Former telecom services such as NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode were reconceptualized as platforms, and business seminars with MIT professors were organized on the logic of multi-sided markets—as platforms are modeled among economists. The enthusiasm for platform reflected the craze about media theory that had developed among Japanese executives at the time of Marshall McLuhan’s book Understanding Media in the 1960s. Indeed, as Marc Steinberg notes in his contribution, “what we used to call media we now call platforms.”

There is a dark side of Asian video cultures that the authors of this volume do not really explore, and to which they refer only tangentially. In Asia as elsewhere, the Internet is a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, right-wing ideologies, racist provocations, and nationalist mobilizations that abuse free speech and undermine democracy. Evidence points to an Asian genealogy of some of these extremist forums. Japan’s infamous 2Channel (2ch.net), known as nichan, served as the model for the English-language 4chan, on which the hacker collective Anonymous and the far-right conspiracy movement QAnon first developed. First launched in 1999 as a bulletin-board where full anonymity was guaranteed, 2chan became known as a hub for the Net-Right or netto uyoku that bears some responsibility for the rightward swing of Japanese politics in the past two decades. Likewise, nationalism and anti-foreigner sentiment in China would never have developed to the extend it now has without the availability of Internet forums and text messaging services that allowed disgruntled youths to vent the anger they couldn’t direct at the authoritarian regime. The dark side of the net is also reflected in the proliferation of pornographic pictures and sex videos that affects individuals and communities in Asia as in other continents. Without going so far as saying that “mobile phones are responsible for rapes,” as the Karnakata legislature did to ban smartphones in schools and colleges across the state, the proliferation of smutty videos and pictures on modern social networks has certainly taken a toll on populations and especially on the most vulnerable: women, the young, those least able to navigate discriminately the new currents of online streams. With great freedom comes great responsibility.

The new Internet archive

The authors of Asian Video Cultures prefer to insist on the positive, creative and empowering aspects of new media. They offer vignettes of individual emancipation, community involvement, emergent solidarities, and artistic production that all point toward the same direction. Patricia Zimmermann describes a new-media portal in Indonesia that has been described as the “YouTube for Southeast Asia activists”. It focuses not on the national but on micro-territories and micro-practices such as the production of short documentaries for social media that address issues of environmental degradation, social mobilization, and migrant rights, thereby circumventing the mainstream media’s stranglehold on information. Tzu-hui Celina Hung documents how immigrant brides in multicultural Taiwan are able to better negotiate the terms of incorporation into their new household by exchanging information and sharing their stories on social networks. Rahul Mukerjee and Abhigyan Singh explain how young men from the Meo ethnic group in rural Mewat in northwestern India are able to escape the strictures of their rigorist community by appropriating the symbols of individual emancipation, the motorbike and the mobile phone. Feng-Mei Heberer analyzes the art videos of Singaporean artist Ming Wang who performs drag cross-dressing by impersonating the role of female protagonists in German classical movies, thereby giving a face to under-represented ethnic and sexual minorities in Germany. S.V. Srinivas studies the mobilization that led to the formation of Telangana State within India through online activities such as uploading videos and posting comments in the local language on YouTube. Like literacy in 19th century Europe, the diffusion of video cultures in contemporary Asia is conducive to the formation of new subjects and collectives. Unlike literacy, however, it largely escapes the sphere of the state and is not framed by national policies. Video documentaries and short movies are produced outside of the state media system and circulate beyond the realm of the market. Another key difference is that we are able to document 19th century history through the print archive formed by the collection of books, newspapers, pamphlets, and printed material kept in libraries and archival depots. How will future historians and researchers document our video cultures, and how will they deal with the crap that is uploaded daily on YouTube?

Thinking Deep about Hello Kitty

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific, by Christine R. Yano, Duke University Press, 2013

Jhello-kittyapanese pop culture is not just a consumer fad or a passing attraction. It has become a research topic worthy of academic lectures and scholarly publications. This interest for new things Japanese was demand-driven and linked to transformations in North American and European universities in the past twenty years. Students enrolling in Japanese language classes or Japanese studies departments grew up alongside anime figures and manga characters coming from Japan. Their early exposure to Japanese popular culture and commercial products led them to request teachings that would reflect their childhood experience and teenage interest. Anthropologists and cultural studies scholars were better equipped to address this new demand than the literature scholars and historians or political scientists that have traditionally dominated area studies departments. Rather than working on texts and archives, they use ethnographic fieldwork as the preferred means of data collection. They are interested in the production and circulation of cultural objects as bearers of meaning and values. They do not draw a sharp distinction between high and low culture, between marketized commodities and authentic creations. For these new scholars, observers of the contemporary should not reject the mundane, the commercial and the transient. Rather, they should pay attention to everyday objects and popular productions as “goods to think with.” By doing so, they are able to notice emerging trends and societal changes that have broader implications for the understanding of contemporary societies.

Can Christine Yano prove she’s a real anthropologist?

Even so, choosing Hello Kitty as a research topic may have raised some eyebrows in Asian studies departments. Sanrio’s merchandising icon is the archetype of what scholars usually brush off as irrelevant for their studies. The commercially-driven, superficial and childish phenomenon of this kitten figure adorning various consumer products surely cannot be taken as the topic of a serious academic study. It can at best provide a case study for a business class on brand marketing, or an illustration in an introductory course on Japanese culture’s global reach. But certainly no book can be published on such a mundane topic. Or can it? Christine Yano is aware she took risks in choosing Hello Kitty’s reception in the US—what she calls “pink globalization”—as the focus of her study. As a nasty comment gleaned over Twitter puts it, “some years ago anthropologist Christine Yano proved #hellokitty wasn’t a real cat, which made many readers doubt she was a real anthropologist.” Such remarks may have been inspired by the jealousy of colleagues who saw Yano reach popular success, not really in terms of book sales, but through invitations to give lectures, attend fan conventions, and curate exhibitions—all activities that usually lie beyond the ambit of most anthropology professors. Critics may also point to some flaws in the methodology—this is a research-lite, easy-fieldwork book that is overly reliant on Internet sources—, lack of fact-checking—Yano takes at face value the anti-Hello Kitty rant found on a satirical parody website based around a fake fundamentalist Baptist church—and writing style that mixes professional jargon and journalistic catchwords.

How can the author prove she is a real anthropologist while at the same time remaining true to her chosen topic? Her first impulse is to take Hello Kitty very seriously. Her book won acceptance in a prestigious university press series by showing all the trappings of serious scholarship—the footnotes, the bibliography, the references to theory and drafting of new concepts. At the beginning of every chapter, Christine Yano raises theoretical issues by way of rhetorical questions, and then purports to answer them based on accumulated data and complex reasoning. She pays tribute to past scholarship and quotes from all anthropologists who have studied Japanese popular culture—Anne Allison, Laura Miller, Thomas LaMarre, Brian McVeigh, Jennifer Robertson, Marc Steinberg—as well as from many cultural critics and feminist scholars. She discusses key concepts in detail, presenting the genealogy of popular notions such as pink, cute, cool, and kitsch, as well as exotic words such as kawaii, asobi, fanshii guzzu, kogyaru, shôjo, and kyarakutâ. She offers her own theoretical constructs: “pink globalization”, “Japanese Cute-Cool”, “the wink”. She knows that in doing so, she loses some readers along the way—some Internet comments lambast her book as “a boatload of jargon”, and particularly resent her savant references to Adorno and to Marx. But this is the price to pay to gain admission in the exclusive circle of cultural critics and anthropology scholars.

A multi-sited ethnography

More specifically, Christine Yano, who is identified on the book’s back cover as Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, anchors her research in the discipline of cultural anthropology. Her book is what scholars describe as a “multi-sited ethnography”: she didn’t do fieldwork in a single community or location, but collected data and observations in various places, mostly in Hawai’i and in San Francisco, but also in other cities where her professional assignments took her. As she describes it, “Hello Kitty became a research hobby: whenever I traveled to another city, I searched Sanrio stores and fans… Every year when I taught the course on Japanese popular culture, I surveyed students about their knowledge of Hello Kitty.” She also scanned the Internet for testimonies and contacts on her research topic. She conducted structured interviews (thirty-one in total) with various informants: Sanrio managers in Japan and in the US, shop salespersons, Kitty adult fans, goods collectors, and artists. She includes long excerpts of these interviews in her book. Again, this is standard practice in anthropology, where the notes and recordings of the ethnographer are often reproduced in extenso. But this may rebuff some readers, for various reasons that the author herself acknowledges in the following: “some readers may feel that the fan interviews I quote here represent an overload of sentiment, a barrage of capitalist frenzy, a besotted attachment to a commodity. Without apology, I agree, and suggest that these readers skip over the interviews themselves and head to the conclusions I draw from them at the end of the chapter.”

This curious self-denial points to another discursive strategy by which the author affirms her credentials as a serious scholar. At many junctures, she tries to distance herself from corporate lore, marketing ploys, and naive adherence to what Hello Kitty represents in order to offer her own critical interpretation. She responds to critics by incorporating their viewpoint and giving them a voice within her own analysis. For instance, she concludes her chapter on Sanrio’s corporate strategy with the following: “a company ethos of happiness tinged with pink sounds like a hugely naive, manipulative enterprise, and that, in fact, may be exactly what it is.” She devotes a whole chapter on “Kitty Backlash”, reflecting the views of Hello Kitty’s detractors which she mainly found on the Internet. This leads her to her enormous blunder when she takes at face value the discourse of a parody Baptist church that reads the word “Hell” in “Hello Kitty”. Although Sanrio’s cat is primarily a child’s character, Yano focuses exclusively on adult consumers of Kitty products—and even on adult products, such as the infamous Hello Kitty massage wand. She also devotes much place to cultural productions and artistic expressions that play with Hello Kitty in creative and imaginative ways. Art, like anthropology, has a complex and troublesome relationship with commerce and capitalism. In her way, her whole book structure reproduces her ambivalence with Hello Kitty as a scholarly pursuit—from finding Kitty at home in Japan, to following her through global marketing strategies across the Pacific, describing her ubiquity, giving voice to Kitty detractors, and then showing that subversion and, ultimately, art, essentially “get it.”

We find this mix of adherence and critical distance in the juxtaposition of fan testimonies and anti-Kitty hate speech, in the contrast between interviews and commentary, and even in the author’s own writing style, which mixes scholarly jargon and popular expressions. Christine Yano claims for herself the right to write at times like the editor of a girlie magazine, while in the next paragraph using difficult words and complex reasoning like a tenured professor. Like her character, she can be both cute and cool at the same time, and she writes with tongue-in-cheek humor. Her sentences often mix the serious and the playful, the elaborate and the obvious, the obtuse theorizing and the plain reasoning. Even her main theoretical concepts (cute, cool, kitsch, pink, kawaii, etc.) are borrowed from plain language and everyday expressions. This makes Pink Globalization an easier and more pleasant read than most anthropology books published in the same publisher’s series. This also makes it risky business: her theoretical apparatus and critical commentary may lose plain readers along the way, while scholars of a more classical bent may be put off by her choice of topic in the first place. But again, there is a market for critical analysis of Asian pop culture, as evidenced in the many publications that now address the topic, and cultural anthropologists are better placed to claim this market segment for their discipline.

The philosophy of “the wink”

Beyond Hello Kitty, is there anything that non-Kitty fans can take from this book? I mentioned the creative use of simple notions such as cute and cool, the way they relate to ordinary people’s lives, and the value added that theory brings. More than pink globalization, the key concept Christine Yano wants to offer as her personal contribution to social theory is the “wink”. This is, of course, a Kitty gesture: Hello Kitty, in some of her modern renderings, winks at her viewers, thereby complicating the blank stare and expressionless face she is so much remembered for. The wink defines the very fetishism of Hello Kitty. It is a symbol of friendship, playfulness, and intimacy. It creates the possibility of two-way interactions, of double meaning, and second degree. The wink resolves logical inconsistencies—between cute and cool, child and adult, kitsch and art, pink and black. It allows for subversive uses of Hello Kitty. The wink also includes the viewers into the circle of those who “get it” and assume what Kitty stands for. More importantly, “wink as play” holds the power to silence or incorporate Kitty’s critics. In turn, adult consumers wink back at her and use Kitty in minimalist acts of subversion, performing feminity or sexiness. For Christine Yano, the wink is also a theoretical gesture. It is her personal answer to those in faculty committees and scholarly associations who raise eyebrows at her research topic and question her credentials as an anthropologist.