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A Q&A with Social Psychologist Jack Glaser on Racial Bias and Policing

Published June 9, 2021

Jack Glaser, Professor in the Goldman School of Public Policy, is a social psychologist whose primary research interest is in stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. He studies these intergroup biases at multiple levels of analysis. For example, he investigates the unconscious operation of stereotypes and prejudice using computerized reaction time methods, and he is investigating the implications of such subtle forms of bias in law enforcement. In particular, he is interested in racial profiling, especially as it relates to the psychology of stereotyping, and the self-fulfilling effects of stereotype-based discrimination.

Additionally, Professor Glaser has conducted research on a very extreme manifestation of intergroup bias — hate crime — and he has carried out analyses of historical data as well as racist rhetoric on the internet to challenge assumptions about economic predictors of intergroup violence. Professor Glaser is working with the Center for Policing Equity as one of the principal investigators on a National Science Foundation- and Google-funded project to build a National Justice Database of police stops and use of force incidents. He is the author of Suspect Race: Causes & Consequences of Racial Profiling.

Professor Glaser has been involved with past Matrix Research Teams on community trust and policing. We reached out to Professor Glaser in July 2020 for his insights on bias in policing in the wake of the protests for racial justice and police reform.

How do you describe your research, particularly as it relates to policing?

My research is centered on applying the psychological science around stereotyping and prejudice to understand racial disparities in policing, in stops and searches, and also in use of force.

I do that a number of different ways. The work I’m most associated with is research on how implicit bias gives rise to discriminatory judgments and behaviors. Some of the work I’ve done there is to measure, for example, the extent to which people hold an association between Blacks and weapons, and the extent to which that causes them to make a shooting response to an armed Black man faster than unarmed White man, or to make a no-shoot response to an unarmed White man relative to an unarmed Black man. What I’ve been doing more recently, though, is working with police departments and with various government agencies to try to figure out what’s going on in the field, and how to reduce the racial disparities that we see time and again, across many different datasets.

Where does racial bias come from?

There’s a century’s worth of psychological science on prejudice and discrimination and stereotyping. But some of the fundamental understandings we have from careful experimental research include the fact that people are hard-wired to categorize others and themselves into racial and ethnic and other kinds of groups. We just do that very spontaneously, we start doing it at a very young age, and it’s not something we can really turn off.

We make those categorizations, and then we have a tendency to prefer the groups we belong to. It’s natural in-group favoritism that people tend to have. On top of that, people who belong to negatively stigmatized groups are less likely to like the group they belong to than the ones who are from the superordinate, high-status, high-power groups. And we also have the specific content of the stereotypes that we have about members of various groups. So we very quickly start to formulate hypotheses about how people from one group or another are going to behave. That might be along gender lines, or racial or ethnic lines, or age lines, or political affiliation lines. We make sense of our complex world by putting people into these categories, and then having predictable traits about those categories.

One of the very prominent stereotypes that’s highly pervasive in American culture is that Black people are associated with crime and weapons and violence. Police officers are not immune to that, so as a consequence, they tend to regard people of color with greater suspicion, because the stereotypes cause them to interpret ambiguous behaviors in a manner that’s consistent with their prior conceptions. In the last 30 or so years, there’s been an avalanche of research on implicit bias and how these biases operate outside of our conscious awareness, and then can be activated automatically, and influence our perceptions and our judgments and behaviors, in spite of our best intentions to behave in a fair and unbiased manner.

How is it possible to bypass or manage this kind of bias?

Training is the usual response. Unfortunately, we don’t know of any training that reduces these biases or consistently reduces the impact that they have on behavior. There is a whole cottage industry of implicit bias trainers across many industries, but especially in policing, and they’re private companies that offer training for a fee. To the extent that they’ve been studied at all, there’s no indication that they actually change performance in the field.

There is a non-trivial number of officers who are explicitly biased and deliberately and overtly engaging in racial profiling or racial oppression, but for the vast majority of officers who are at least trying to operate in an unbiased manner, they are unable to suppress and control the influence of these implicit biases. And so it’s not really realistic to expect that a day’s worth of training, or even multiple days of training, is going to change their biases, or give them the skills that enable them to short-circuit the influence of those biases. You really need chronic motivation, a specific strategy, and then the cognitive resources or the opportunity to impose that strategy to prevent those biases from influencing your judgments. The likelihood that police officers on a day-to-day basis are going to be able to mobilize all three of those dimensions to override their biases is very low.

My view is that the effort should be focused on supervisory staff — sergeants and above — who are determining the decision-making environment the officers are stepping into. They’re the ones who are setting the incentives. If they’re trying to get officers to make a lot of arrests, or find a lot of drugs or weapons, then those officers are going to go out and make a lot of indiscriminate stops and searches of people, most of which (the data show us) are going to be unfruitful.

One of the things we find in the data across many different jurisdictions is that, among the people that officers stopped and searched when looking for guns and drugs, the Whites that they search are more likely to actually be in possession of illegal contraband than the Blacks and Latinos that they search. That’s probably because they are imposing a higher threshold of suspiciousness in order to decide to search a White person in the first place. To the extent that those kinds of discretionary stops are occurring and are being imposed disproportionately on people of color, that is going to be a catalyst for the influence of the implicit or explicit biases on the treatment of minority community members. The best way to have a significant effect on reducing that disparate impact is to reduce those kinds of behaviors that give rise to discriminatory effects.

What kinds of structures can be put into place to help reduce racial bias in policing?

The psychological research on controlling the influence of bias is pretty clear. The first element you need to have in place to be able to make an unbiased judgment is having the cognitive resources, which means not being rushed or stressed or drunk or tired. Then you can make a deliberative judgment and focus on specific indicators of, in this case, suspicion or whatever it is that you’re looking for. And so that needs to be in place in the first place for the implicit bias not to influence you.

But even if you have that, it’s difficult for a normal person to look at another person, take the information that is available to them — which is never going to be complete, and will always have some ambiguity — and differentiate between the subtle, implicit things that are causing them to regard that person in a certain way with the actual objective indicators of that. We can’t subjectively separate those things out very well. You need a specific strategy to help you try to separate those things out. That involves approaches like trying to think of that individual as another person, or relating to them by taking their perspective. Lots of different strategies have been tried, and some of them work. But none of them works for very long.

One approach would be to use some kind of checklist to say, does this person have these three characteristics that have been empirically demonstrated to be related to this sort of suspicious behavior? In the absence of that, they don’t meet the criteria for being searched. The strategic approach would be to formalize the process. But that’s very difficult to do in the real world when you’re encountering things in a fluid situation. So my view is that the incentives matter more. And generally, what you’re asking people to do is going to determine the extent to which what what they’re doing is discriminatory.

Have you seen any departments implement these shifts in incentives?

I can’t say that I’ve seen it done that rewards are changed to promote accuracy, per se. But what we have seen across multiple jurisdictions is that some police departments are backing away from the incentive to make a lot of drug arrests. In New York City, the city lost a major class action lawsuit over “stop and frisk,” so there’s been a radical reduction in the number of pedestrian stops they are doing in New York. There was also a shift in political winds at the same time, but they’ve gone from almost 700,000 stops a year to under 20,000 stops a year. It’s almost unrecognizable. What we see there is that those racial disparities in the outcomes of the searches have become almost equalized in New York, while the crime rate was flat or declining. Oakland, California also reduced the number of discretionary stops (mostly vehicle stops) that their officers were making. They also saw a reduction in racial disparities for those stops, and there was no impact on crime.

It’s not entirely clear to me as an outsider how those incentives changed, but I have an opaque sense that it was the removal of an encouragement to make a lot of stops in New York, and even a prohibition, like, we’re not doing those stops anymore unless you have a high degree of suspicion. In instances where we have seen that, you see not only overall reduction in stops, but also reduction in the disparities. And one thing that’s important to bear in mind is that, even if you didn’t see a reduction in the disparities, because the harm of being stopped without good purpose is overwhelmingly borne by communities of color, reducing that activity overall is going to differentially benefit those communities. It’s not going to equalize things, but it is going to have a benefit for those groups.

What are the research questions you’re asking now?

I have a couple of research projects currently in progress with my very impressive colleagues, one of which is with Perfecta Oxholm, a doctoral student at the Goldman School, who is doing her dissertation work with the Oakland Police Department. She’s going to be doing a multi-methodological study where she is interviewing police officers and community members to get a sense in a qualitative way of their perceptions of each other — and their perceptions of their perceptions of each other. And then we’ll be doing survey-based research that’s more structured based on those interviews, and ultimately doing an intervention, a randomized, controlled trial where some police officers engage in particular community contact activities to see how that affects attitudes on both sides.

Communities have a right to have good relations with other people, including agents of government, and to feel enfranchised and to not feel threatened by agents of government. But it’s also in the interest of the state for communities to trust law enforcement, because they’re going to be more likely to report crimes and to cooperate with investigations. It’s generally a win-win all around. Historically, it’s been clear that having an oppressive relationship between law enforcement and minority communities is not helpful.

I’m also conducting research with colleagues at UC Davis and RAND where we have developed a computerized simulation that we’re going to be rolling out with police officers, in which we have experimentally manipulated the race of the person they view on the computer monitor, and they evaluate the suspiciousness of the behaviors he’s engaged in. We have 72 different scenarios, where individuals are doing things ranging from not at all suspicious, like just sitting on a stoop, to highly suspicious behaviors, like dropping a gun behind a bush. In between are the really interesting ones, where they’re dropping some ambiguous object, or they’re picking something up from under a suspicious place. The idea is that we want to see the extent to which there are racial differences in who they regard as suspicious. The question is, would you stop and search this person? The main purpose is to establish a standardized metric for the variation in racial sensitivity that officers have to the race of the suspect, and to look at how that relates to their actual field performance, and the racial distribution of the people that they’re actually stopping in the field. We’ll be measuring lots of other things as well.

We created little animations of three still photographs that depict a process where somebody is moving through space and doing something, but it’s highly standardized. We have Black and White actors playing these parts doing exactly the same thing. We will of course mix up the order in which people see them. So it won’t be like, here’s the Black guy doing it, here’s the White guy doing it. But you know, just be respond to this individual. We may give some of our research participants only the Black actors and or only the White actors to do what we would call a between-subjects comparison. We’re going to do it a lot of different ways to see what we can pick up.

How might police departments be able to use that kind of standard metric?

If we find a correlation between racial bias in that measure, and the racial distribution of who they’re stopping and searching — or the outcomes of the searches they’re doing — that would give the department quite a bit of insight. Without the metric we’re developing, they could look at those racial disparities in who has been stopped and searched and throw their hands up and say, well, that might just be them responding to what’s happening on the street. But if we can show that there’s a relationship between the sort of preconceptions and the actual performance, that would be enlightening. It could also lead to training opportunities, where they use that information to say, you should be looking at the object, but the officers who do this tend to be influenced by the race of the person dropping the object or picking it up.

What are common misconceptions that people have about policing and racial bias?

One thing people don’t realize is that the overwhelming majority of police civilian encounters do not have any public safety-enhancing effect, especially the discretionary encounter. Obviously, calls for service when officers are responding to a call — whether there’s been a witnessed crime, or there is some kind of crisis — those have great public safety-enhancing value. But these discretionary stops, or low-level equipment failure vehicle stops, do not promote public safety. And only a very small minority of them result in any kind of recovery of weapons, and a slightly larger but still small fraction result in recovery of illegal contraband like drugs.

A lot of these discretionary activities that police are engaged in are not only not promoting public safety, but they are disproportionately borne by communities of color. And that has the effect of violating the Constitution — violating those people’s right to equal protection and due process — but it also destabilizes the communities and causes a lack of trust and a lack of cooperation.

In the case of something like the murder of George Floyd, it’s hard to use the usual explanations of automatic bias and the like to explain a nine-minute strangulation. But the more typical cases, where there’s a shooting and maybe even a foot pursuit, those are disproportionately Black victims when they’re unarmed. That’s quite clear in the research, although there’s another body of research that shows that if you look at all of the cases of fatal officer-involved shootings, there doesn’t appear to be a racial disparity. The problem with that analysis is that it’s really the unarmed victims that are the ones who shouldn’t be getting killed by the police, and that’s where the disparities reside. The much larger number of cases are armed victims, and they tend to be White men.

The fact that it took the George Floyd killing to bring this to the public consciousness, to the boiling point where change can actually happen, something about the way our society is structured in the way people from a hegemonic group are unlikely to relate to the challenges of minority groups. What we don’t want to lose sight of is that the fatal killings and use of force on unarmed Black men is just the tip of the iceberg of the daily indignities that Black people suffer at the hands of police when they’re being overzealous. That’s the big mass of the iceberg under the water that most of us don’t see, but that minority communities feel the weight of very, very heavily.

Podcast

Matrix Podcast: Interview with Rebecca Herman

Published April 12, 2021

In this podcast, Michael Watts interviews Rebecca Herman, Assistant Professor of History, UC Berkeley. Professor Herman’s research and writing examine modern Latin American history in a global context. Her first book, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, reconstructs the history of U.S. military basing in Latin America during World War II – through high diplomacy and on-the-ground examinations of race, labor, sex and law – to reveal the origins and impact of inter-American “security cooperation” on domestic and international politics in the region. She has also authored past and forthcoming articles and book chapters on the global politics of anti-racism, the Cuban literacy campaign, the Brazilian labor justice system, and U.S.-Latin American relations. She is currently working on a new book project on Antarctica, Latin America, and the World.

Prior to entering academia, she spent several years in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Brazil working as a freelance translator, researcher, and documentarian. Before joining the faculty at Berkeley, she was Assistant Professor of International Studies and Latin American Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley and her B.A. in Literature and History from Duke.

Produced by the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix, the Matrix Podcast features interviews with scholars from across the UC Berkeley campus. The Matrix Podcast is hosted by Professor Michael Watts, Emeritus “Class of 1963” Professor of Geography and Development Studies at UC Berkeley.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.

Podcast Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California Berkeley. Your host is Professor Michael Watts.

Michael Watts: Hello, everyone. And my name is Michael Watts, and I’m welcoming you back to Social Science Matrix Podcasts. These are an opportunity for us to showcase some of our faculty’s– Berkeley faculty research. And I’m delighted today to have with us Professor Rebecca Herman of the Department of History, and we’ll be talking about her work and her forthcoming book.

Rebecca is a relatively new arrival on the Berkeley campus. She came here in 2015, but her professional history precedes that. While she read literature and history at Duke, she actually came here for her master’s and PhD, which she completed in 2014, and then moved up to the University of Washington International Studies prior to coming here to Berkeley.

Rebecca is, I suppose you might say– although, we could talk about this, Rebecca– a type of global historian, and especially locating Latin America, which is a regional area of focus, on a much larger global and transnational stage. And that, indeed, is the subject of her forthcoming book, The Americas at War, which will be published by Oxford University Press, which we’ll be talking about later in the podcast. Rebecca, thank you so much for generating a little time during these COVID times to be with me today, and I’m so looking forward to our conversation.

Rebecca Herman: Yeah, it’s a pleasure to have a conversation with somebody at all. [CHUCKLES] Very good to be here.

Watts: Well, welcome. Rebecca, I’m going to begin, if I may, with some sort of personal or intellectual formation questions in part. I know that you were trained in history. But I also know that in parts of your life, you lived in the Southern Cone in Argentina and Chile and Brazil and a whole variety of places, working as a translator among other things.

And so I wonder if you could– we could start by talking a little bit about two sorts of things. One is how you came and why you came to think and want to study Latin America in this global, more transnational way and how it is that you approach or, indeed, whether you see yourself as a global historian and came to focus in particular on this key moment, which is so central to your book, namely the Second World War. So fill us in if you would a little bit about your own trajectory, your own journey coming to these sorts of issues.

Herman: Sure. Wow, OK, let’s see. Where to begin? You know, I guess I had an experience in college that I think a lot of people have, where– well, hopefully less now. Maybe that K through 12 education has improved and diversified since I was in grade school.

But I just remember this feeling of getting to college and becoming very quickly aware of how little I knew about the world and feeling almost angry that I had been taught the same stale historical narratives over and over again throughout my K through 12 education about the United States, about Western Europe a little bit. But for the most part, it had been pretty redundant and shallow.

And suddenly, I was in a class in the literature department at Duke taking an entire semester on South Asian Women’s Fiction. And I’d never learned about the partition of India before in any meaningful way, and I was just blown away by this. And so I ended up building a major that was split between literature and history departments that was organized around the parts of the world that I was upset to have never learned about before.

And so it was mostly focused on literature classes and history classes that focused on South Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And Latin America was the real central focus. I think having grown up in California for the second half of my childhood, Latin America always felt like a place that was sort of close to home, but also unfamiliar.

And when I started taking coursework in Latin America and started learning in particular about the history of US foreign policy in Latin America that added another level to my frustration with my poor education because I was appalled by a lot of the things that I was learning about and thought I’d had access to a pretty good education. So if I didn’t know about things, probably most 18, 19-year-olds didn’t either.

And from there, I just went on a journey into Latin American history, leaving US foreign policy behind, leaving the United States behind. I did research in Chile as an undergraduate and the summer before my senior year. And while I was in Santiago for the summer, I took just a weekend trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and just kind of fell in love with the city and decided to move there after I graduated from college and developed some really solid friendships, even in the three days that I was there and just was really fortunate about where I landed.

So I’ve always had this interest in the connections between narrative storytelling and history. That was the link between literature and history. And when I got to Argentina, I had a grant to work with a human rights archive called Memoria Abierta, which means open memory in Spanish. That was dedicated to documenting the history of the Dirty War, the violent period in Argentine history during the Cold War.

And my role as an apprentice type, learning the ropes, trying to learn from these really excellent documentarians was to assist in a project that they were putting together to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the coup. So this is drawing on all of this really amazing multimedia material that they had from their oral history archive, and so I got to talk to the historians who were collecting the oral histories to build that archive.

An architect who managed this really cool spatial history project of trying to reconstruct what the clandestine detention centers that had been destroyed looked like when they existed based on the testimonies of survivors who had gone through them, the documentary archive where they were just trying to assemble and preserve documents from various human rights organizations that grew up around the Dirty War– and that was just a really incredible experience.

Watts: Was this– sorry. Can I ask, was this– at that point, was the American imperialism as your interest front and central? Or was it that you were in Chile or in Argentina, and these things had obviously a deeply national focus. Or was that thread always there, or this was something that you really brought to graduate school or developed in graduate school when you came to Berkeley afterwards?

Herman: So that thread was there that sparked my interest. In college, I took a class that I actually teach a version of now. It was my favorite class in college. It was called Communist Kingpins and Counterinsurgencies. And it was about US-Latin-American relations. And so that’s what brought me to Latin America, but then I became interested in Latin America in its own right.

And I really dove down into the National histories of the places I was interested in and living in, and it wasn’t at all clear to me at that point that I would circle back around and end up working on international relations. I did have a moment when I was working at Memoria Abierta, where I remember I was translating something, which was my way of contributing to their work. And the news broke about the CIA black sites.

And I just felt like, God, what am I doing working for a human rights organization in Argentina when, the United States is committing these human rights cities around the world? Shouldn’t I be back in the United States trying to hold my own government accountable? So I struggled with figuring out what my place was, and also trying to think about the relationship between historical study and contemporary politics.

And I didn’t really know where I was going to land. It wasn’t clear to me at that point that I would end up getting a PhD in history, or even entering academia. So that was always– the US foreign policy was always an interest of mine that was in the back of my head. But at this point in my life, and when I applied to graduate programs in history, I wasn’t proposing any projects that had to do with the US Latin-American relations.

I think because my experience with Latin America has been about international movement and contact and transnational relationships, that seemed– that always felt like a comfortable lens for me. A lot of– most of the scholarship on modern Latin America does tend to be very much centered around the nation. And so there is more and more scholarship now.

I mean, obviously the colonial period is a very global scholarship, and even the 19th century. But for a number of reasons, the 20th century scholarship on Latin-America has tended to focus on national narratives. And so I think a lot of exciting work is being done now that is putting those national narratives in more of a global framing and shedding new light on some of the subjects that have been really important in Latin American historiography.

Watts: And that provides a nice segue into the first piece of your substantive research I wanted to talk about, which is an article that appeared last year in the American Historical Review entitled, “Global Policies of Anti-racism, A View from the Canal Zone.” And this is a fantastic piece, looking at a particular moment of politics in the Canal Zone in the 1940s when, as you’ll explain in just a second, some additions and renovations to the canal was underway.

And I think this may be close to your first sentence in that article, but I want to use that as a jumping off point. You say, from its creation, the Canal Zone labor policy was built on the scaffolding of intertwined racial and national hierarchies. So I’d like you to talk to that.

But maybe for those of our listeners who are not terribly familiar with the history of the Panama Canal, maybe just begin initially with a potted history, if you would, of how the canal and Panama itself emerged itself out of a type of American imperial reach before we get into the fascinating story that you tell about the 1940s and race in relationship to it.

Herman: Sure, yeah. So Panama became a Republic in part through US intervention based on US designs for a canal through the Isthmus of Panama. So before the turn of the century, Panama had been a part of Colombia. And there was a long history of separatism and separatist movements on the Isthmus. But that part of the Isthmus had been a part of Colombia since the time of independence from Spain.

The Isthmus had been a point of interest for creating this idea of a transoceanic canal that would connect the Pacific and Caribbean oceans from the 19th century onwards. And the United States was very much interested in this. France was actually the first country to attempt to build a canal through Panama. The US canal was built in the ruins of the French construction project. The French company went bankrupt and ended up managing to sell basically the infrastructure that it had made to the United States.

At this point, of course, the French had been building in Colombia. And when the United States approached Colombia for the permissions that it sought to continue this construction and build a US canal, the Colombian Senate rejected the terms that the United States wanted. And so Theodore Roosevelt ends up supporting a separatist movement on the Isthmus to declare Panamanian independence, support it with US warships.

And then the Panamanian Republic comes into being but, in some ways, has no bargaining power in relation to the United States, because the US is guaranteeing independence in exchange for these canal rights. And so from the beginning, the terms by which the United States establishes the Panama Canal and the terms of governance over the canal, the kinds of economic compensation for the canal have been a bit of a contentious point in Panamanian history.

Watts: Of course. Now, obviously that was a massive mega engineering project, which involved mobilization, I presume, back in the early 20th century, prior to the First World War, of large numbers of people, et cetera. What scale of mobilization of labor, and where did the labor come from to build in this first construction phase, so to say?

Herman: Yeah, so this was a really dynamic period in terms of labor migration. I mean, ever since the mid-19th century, when the United States– when US interests built a railroad that crossed the Isthmus, also for the purposes of getting from one side of the country to the other, the labor force that worked on these infrastructure projects often came from other parts of the Caribbean, and particularly the British Caribbean and the French Caribbean.

So typically, Black West Indian workers were moving about this region in search of opportunities and taking advantage of these large infrastructural projects. They also worked on the French project and then would be employed in large numbers on the US project.

But this meant that when it came to the labor system in the Canal Zone, you saw this– what I was describing in that sentence that you read from my piece, which is labor structure that’s very much segregated, so different payrolls, different facilities, different housing, different recreation centers, different commissaries for Black West Indians, who were in the majority. There were workers from other places as well–

Watts: Got it.

Herman: –and white US workers, who tended to be in positions of technicians, supervisors, and that sort of thing.

Watts: Now, when we jump forward then to the period that you focused on, which is when, I gather, there was additional engineering work launched in the 1940s, beginning in 1940, during the Second World War, those labor relationships were as it were already in place. And you talk about the gold and silver wage scales. I wonder if you could just talk us through that and how this became a vehicle for the sorts of questions of race and hierarchy that you talk about.

Herman: Yeah, that’s right. So the segregated labor system has remains in place over the course of these first 40 years of Panamanian history, and the kind of politics of race within the Canal Zone become really consequential for the politics of race within Panama. So those are two different considerations that intersect in the Canal Zone.

But the gold and silver role were– so originally, the different workforces were paid in different currencies. And so that’s where those names originated. But over time, they were paid in the same currency. They were just paid very different wages.

The justification was that Caribbean workers needed to be paid wages that would be attractive by Caribbean standards. Whereas US technicians would need to be paid according to US wage scales. They also justified it by suggesting that these were different skill sets.

But oftentimes, you had a position like painter or chauffeur, where if you were gold or silver, the only real difference was the color of your skin. It wasn’t the skill set that you brought to the job. And so that was always a pretty problematic way of justifying the segregation and the disparate working conditions and pay.

Watts: Now, we’re also– was there also a type of segregation, not only in terms of pay scales, but in terms of, is it we’re almost a spatial layout within the Canal Zone over which obviously the US had direct jurisdiction? Because you refer to, at some point in your article, that this was, in fact, a Jim Crow system, pure and simple.

Herman: Yes, exactly. It was very much like Jim Crow, except there’s this added component of nationality in the mix. And this is where it becomes particularly problematic with Panamanian workers because Jim Crow, as we know, is this very binary system of white versus Black. There’s this idea that that’s the way that race is thought of in the United States.

But in Latin America, there’s a much more nuanced way of thinking about racial hierarchy. And it’s still hierarchical, but it’s not binary. And so when you tried to apply this way of thinking of gold means white and silver means black, then Panamanians who are mixed race or who thought of themselves as white really resented being placed on the silver roll because they didn’t self-identify as Black and, in fact, thought they were superior to Black people.

And so this becomes really politically complicated when you introduce, one, different ways of thinking about race and prejudice, and also the issue of nationality because the United States tried to just say, OK, it’s not about race. It’s about nationality. Well, African Americans, who are US citizens, threw a wrench in that framing because the United States didn’t want African Americans– or the Canal Zone government didn’t want African Americans, for instance, using gold facilities, gold commissaries, gold clubhouses. So [INAUDIBLE] complicated.

Watts: Absolutely. How did the Panamanian elites use those racial hierarchies for their own interests? I’ll get to, in a sense, the West Indian workforce and what their intentions were and et cetera, et cetera. But what, in this story, in light of what I take to be already existing, long-existing resentments on the part of the Panamanian state about the very jurisdiction and powers that the US had historically had there– what was their latching on to the race question all about?

Herman: Well, this was one of the things that I found most surprising when I came across this story in the archives and started to read more about it. Because the beginning of– in the beginning of the war, the anti-imperialist project of the Panamanian state is– one element of it is based on Panamanian racism towards West Indians.

Part of the frustration with the United States is this perception that the United States has saddled Panama with this burden by bringing in this Black inferior labor force from the British West Indies that then has become a burden on the nation. Or another narrative was that the resentment over the privileging of Black West Indians for jobs in the Canal Zone that Panamanians would like to fill, for instance, were keeping Panamanians off of the gold roll.

But what all of these different threads of resentment had in common was that the Panamanian state, in appealing to the United States to not behave so condescendingly towards Panama, appealed to the United States to treat Panamanians as white, essentially. They begged the United States not to bring in more Black workers for work on the Third Locks Project, which was the project the defense construction– during the war, they wanted to build a larger set of locks that larger warships could fit through in the canal.

And so there was all kinds of political pressure put on Roosevelt’s administration to not import Black workers and to look to Spain instead, which would help to whiten Panama’s population. So you can get a sense for the kind of racism that shaped the thinking of the Panamanian elite around labor and race. By the end of the war, the Panamanian government is denouncing the United States’ racist labor policies in the Canal Zone entirely.

Rather than quibbling with where they fall on the hierarchy, they’re denouncing the hierarchy altogether. And they embrace this very same language of anti-racism that Black Panamanians have been using to try and make demands on the State. So that was just this really interesting transformation that happened in a really relatively short period of time, and that’s what drove me to want to learn more and to write this piece, to try and get at what happened there.

Watts: And was that– by the end of the war, was that a type of nationalist self-assertion on the part of, not only Panama, but many Latin American states in relationship to wanting to be acknowledged in some way as global actors, powers, et cetera, et cetera?

Herman: Yeah, I mean, what’s interesting is in the history of US Latin American relations, so much of US interventionism in the early 20th century was premised on this idea of the United States as superior in all sorts of ways, like Anglo over Hispanic, Protestant over Catholic, white over racially mixed. There were all of these implicit ideas about why people in the United States were, quote unquote, “fit for self-government” and why people in Latin America were not.

And like I said, they were really heavily imbued with these ideas about race. And over the course of the early 20th century, I mean, Latin American jurists and diplomats from across the region, which is a really diverse regions, were trying to push back against that and really push liberal ideas about sovereign equality before the law, and the idea that all of the American republics should be treated equally and really push the United States to of relinquish this idea that the US was the hemispheric policeman that was going to offer tutelage and paternalism to bring Latin Americans up to their level.

So there was a certain pushback against racism and international politics already present. It’s just that it tended to be– it wasn’t posed in anti-racist terms. It was more about pushing back against where Latin American countries seem to fall on this racial hierarchy that was objectionable.

And so the shift is that I’m identifying in this piece, at least as it played out in the canal, is that during World War II, you see those same anti-imperialist projects framed in explicitly anti-racist terms, rather than just trying to assert themselves as on par without dismissing this broader racial hierarchy, if that makes sense.

Watts: Absolutely. Got it. Now, what about the Black populations themselves, West Indian population, who, I take it, in some cases had been in Panama for some time, where presumably Panamanian citizens did– did they then– was their strategy– the race question became, I take it, an organizing principle. And was this orchestrated through trade unions? And how and in what ways did this produce improvements in– or the abolition of or the reform of this bifurcated gold silver wage structure that you were referring to?

Herman: Yeah, so this part of the story is really complicated in regards to just the question of citizenship, for instance. So yes, there were a lot of– by this time, there were more and more Panamanian-born West Indians, so children of West Indian migrants who were born in Panama and would have had citizenship by virtue of Panamanian law, except, in 1941, Panama issues a new constitution that’s the peak of anti-Black xenophobia in terms of Panamanian law that strips Black West Indians of their citizenship, if they’ve acquired it, and forbids the immigration of non Spanish-speaking Black people.

And so this is a real high point in the history of racism in Panamanian politics, particularly with a particular ire for West Indian Black people, quote unquote, “colonial Blacks,” who were people who descended from African slaves who had been brought to Spanish America, had a little bit of a different experience.

But so not surprisingly, there was a lot of solidarity transnationally among West Indian migrants because of this mobility, because of connections across space. With the growing numbers of Panamanian-born West Indian-descended Panamanians, there’s– a new strategy begins to emerge. Certain leaders from that community start to push for the idea that Panamanian-born West Indians should really assert themselves as Panamanian citizens in order to try to push for inclusion and make changes, make demands on the state because they can’t effectively make demands on the Canal Zone government.

And the Jamaican authorities, for instance, hadn’t been particularly helpful. And so in terms of trying to figure out the menu of options of how to push back against racist policies in Panama, it seemed George Westerman, who was the leader in this community, really advocated embracing Panamanian national identity and trying to change it from within.

Watts: But did the workers, the West Indian workers themselves use organized trade union mechanisms for that? And to the extent that they did, they presumably had some type of left political orientation. And how was that left orientation both perceived by the Panamanian elites and presumably at the time by US interests? Would have also raised, a pun, unfortunately a red flag for American interests. So how did that part of the story enter into, as it were, these two forces at play, the Panamanian elites on the one side and American interests and American norms on the other?

Herman: Yeah, OK. So actually, the most active labor union organizing in the Canal Zone were the white workers on the gold roll. And this was really important because their union was very powerful and was very invested in policing the segregation that was going on, preventing Panamanians from getting access to the gold positions that they coveted, and maintaining segregation in the facilities in the Canal Zone.

Black workers on the silver roll had had– there was a really interesting history of labor organizing that predated 1940 that was from the earlier decades, but they’d also experienced pretty intense repression. And so by the time my story picks up, there’s actually– there are certainly some community organizations, fraternal organizations, mutual aid societies, but not a labor organizing in the way that you’re talking about.

We do see that in the immediate post-war period. And maybe that’s what you’re thinking about, from where the CIO ends up organizing the first kind of multiracial, cross-class silver alliance in the immediate years following the war. Some of the Black leaders from the West Indian community become increasingly concerned when they think that the CIO’s politics are going too far left.

They’re afraid it’s going to delegitimize their claims if the United States government can just say, you’re a bunch of communists and dismiss them by claiming communist infiltration or something like that. And so you actually see a subgroup of Black workers break away in an anti-communist move from the CIO, and that ends up creating fissures in the efforts to organize silver workers in the manner that gold workers had been organized.

Watts: Last question, then we’ll segue into your book. What sort of moral of the story did you conclude from this apropos, particularly, again, coming back to that opening phrase of yours, the scaffolding of intertwined race and national hierarchy? What did this seem to you, this story, incredibly rich, that you’ve just given us a gloss on really– what were the jump-out conclusions or surprises for you in laying that out?

Herman: Well, I think one of the stories that you see throughout history that comes up over and over that I find– I guess if you can take a moral– say what’s the moral of the story, the instances where you see, OK, there are these rhetorics that exist at the conceptual level that are really altruistic and profound, like anti-racism, and they gain really important currency during particular moments– so during the Second World War, the fight against Nazism made anti-racism much more powerful of a concept than it had been previously and the United States trying to lead the Allied cause is put in a position in which a lot of what US foreign policy consists of is revealed to be very hypocritical.

And this happens with the US domestic politics as well, I mean, the domestic story of civil rights and human rights within the United States from African Americans trying to call the United States out on not living up to the rhetoric that it’s proclaiming on the world stage is a really interesting one. But I really like stories that reveal how– not just that hypocrisy exists, because that’s obvious, but how hypocrisy is an opportunity for people who are disadvantaged by that hypocrisy.

And so this is a really interesting situation to me where you see the Panamanian government start to call the United States out on being racist. But then people suffering from racism within Panama then having the opportunity to call the Panamanian government out on being racist.

Watts: Exactly.

Herman: And–

Watts: Exactly.

Herman:–I think that a lot of times with global history– and this might bring us back to this question of, am I a global historian? I think global history is really fascinating, but it’s really hard to do at the global scale. And so the way that I tend to work and the way I tend to think is drilling down really deeply into a particular local context and to think about what that can tell us about global history.

And what this particular story tells me about race relations and power and politics is that there’s not one racial hierarchy that shapes power around the entire world that one anti-racist project could then attack. Because in this case, for instance, diplomats who are attacking anti-racism in the international sphere are architects of racism at home. So I think the sort of intertwining of the racialized ideas that shape power in international politics and those that shape domestic politics is something that’s really worthy of study in other contexts where race is thought about in yet other ways.

Watts: Absolutely. Let me transition into your book. Although, before I do that, one of the wonderful things that I so much enjoyed about your article was it reminded me very much of what you may indeed be familiar with, particularly by Robert Vitaris on his work on the– I work on the energy sector, oil and gas companies– wonderful work on exactly the gold silver wage scale system that he called apartheid within the oil compounds in Durham in Saudi Arabia.

So it seems to me that there’s obviously– I mean, apropos your point about global history, there are some wonderful opportunities to think transnationally about how these Jim Crow apparatuses were attached both to the state and to the corporate world right exactly about this time that you were describing.

Herman: Yeah, yeah, that’s great. I think I attended it. He wasn’t there, but there was a labor and empire conference that I attended that had– I mean, you just saw so many manifestations of very similar stories, and it’s a really rich scholarship.

Watts: Absolutely. So let me jump there if I can then to your Americas At War book. And of course, Panama surfaces centrally in that. But now you’ve located it in a rather different register, and here it’s– in a sense, the Second World War is central to it.

But here you begin to focus on, I suppose, what we would call the American base world, and many of our listeners will be aware of that, obviously. It became a central part of politics, particularly, of course, in the war on terror when words like “Guantanamo” or “Bagram” in Afghanistan became central to Black sites and so on that you were referring to. So we’re all aware of that apparatus.

But probably fewer people are necessarily aware of it or to think about it in the moment that you describe, in the Second World War. So can you just begin first of all by outlining why the Second World seemed to be an important crucible for the expansion of a particular set of bases in Latin America in particular and just the scale of it, just to give our listeners a sense of what we’re talking about across the Americas at that particular moment?

Herman: Sure. Yeah, so the reason that the United States was interested in establishing defense sites across Latin America during this period– and this is before the United States entered the war, so years before Pearl Harbor the US is already beginning to figure out how to build defensive airfields across Latin America.

And the main reason it has to do with advances in technology, aviation and weapons technology at this point, because it used to be that defense strategists in the US thought of in the Naval age the oceans on either Coast of the United States were this natural buffer that provided the United States with a certain degree of security. And the Canal Zone, of course, was a very– the canal itself was a really important strategic asset.

But over the course of the 1930s, as you know, planes can fly further. The distance between spaces really shrinks. And by ’38, Roosevelt concludes and his war department concludes that the United States has got to prevent any sort of an attack in the Western hemisphere in general, not just within the United States.

So the particular concerns that drove the base building that I focus on in the book had to do with the idea that Northeastern Brazil is only 1,600 miles from West Africa. And if the Germans crossed the South Atlantic successfully, they might unite with an imagined fifth column of Nazi sympathizers already living in Latin America, where Germany had been gaining greater cultural and economic influence over the 1930s. And then it would just be a hop, skip, and a jump to the Panama Canal or to invade the United States. So this was sort of a scenario driving a lot of defense planning in the early days.

By the time the Allies have some victories in Africa, the United States– this is well into the war. The defense sites that they end up building end up being much more useful for transporting goods across the Atlantic to the Allies, so it doesn’t end up being particularly important defensively. And in fact, obviously the attack on Pearl Harbor came from the other direction.

Watts: Exactly. Exactly.

Herman: But this is– I mean, this real transformation in technology and alongside the United States rise as a global power is what drives this idea that the United States national defense isn’t a national undertaking anymore. First, it’s a hemispheric undertaking. And then by the end of the World– the World War II, it’s a global undertaking. And that’s why you see the proliferation of US military bases around the world in the rest of the 20th century.

Watts: But just give us a sense of the scale. I mean, how many bases were actually constructed first of all in the Americas as part of that mission that you’ve just described that emerges in the ’30s, late ’30s.

Herman: Yeah, so I’ve had to do this tally as I’ve been going because it’s not a subject that’s particularly well-studied in the existing literature. And there’s also no comprehensive list, because it was such a program of improvisation. I mean, there are multiple different projects for building these sites. I’ve counted just shy of 200 different sites in Latin America during this period. Those ranged dramatically in size and scope.

So you had US military bases in Brazil that look like what listeners are probably picturing when we talk about bases, teeming with US soldiers, not quite on the scale of the little Americas but pretty significant in size. But also, that would include radio installations that were built by the United States on Latin American soil and would be run by US technicians, for instance.

And then the distribution of these sites was not even across the region. So 134 of them were located within Panama itself. Others, for instance– there were a number of airfields built in Mexico. But the Mexican government was very cautious about allowing the United States to do too much with them.

And so in the end, it was mostly plainclothes army technicians that staffed the airfields. They were used for transit purposes but didn’t turn into full-fledged bases with large contingents of US troops. So it’s a pretty diverse landscape in terms of what these ended up looking like.

Watts: Now, to the degree that these installations were sort of Greenfield sites, it involved construction of new airfields with the technicians, et cetera, et cetera, how were they prosecuted? Was this clandestine? Who did the construction? Who did the building?

Herman: Yeah, so this is what really piqued my curiosity when I first got into this project, which was, it was obviously a real political problem for the United States trying to figure out how to build these defensive airfields because this was a moment where the US had just really done a total about-face in its foreign policy towards Latin America. This was supposed to be a period where the US had renounced interventionism in the region, was trying to garner goodwill.

This became all the more important with the outbreak of war because they really– there was a strong sense that unity in the Americas would be required for the United States to defend itself or to keep the hemisphere safe, at first stay out of the war, and then later lead the Americas unified into the war.

And so there was a real sense that building US military bases right after the United States had agreed to pull the military out of Latin America was going to be a delicate endeavor. And so the first project outside of Panama that the US initiates is the War Department contracts Pan American Airways, the commercial airline to build the facilities that the War Department wants with funds from the government but under the guise of commercial expansion.

So Pan Am was the one US airline operating in Latin America, had airfields throughout the region. So it wouldn’t have been terribly odd to approach Latin American governments and say, we want to expand our facilities in these locations. We want to build new airfields. Pan Am was charged with the task of obtaining whatever necessary permits were required.

So in theory, it was clandestine. But what I ended up finding when I was in the archives was at the same time the US War Department had been approaching Latin American governments seeking permission to use their airfields for defensive purposes, so it wasn’t particularly hard to put two and two together and recognize that this airline with incredibly close ties to the US government is trying to expand its infrastructural capacity at the same time that the US government is seeking the rights to use that infrastructure.

Most Latin American leaders seem to have concluded what was going on but were happy to go along with it because they wouldn’t embarrass themselves by permitting US defense construction at such a nationalist moment.

Watts: We’re happy to go along with it. But presumably, because it was such a sensitive issue also in some ways had to negotiate perhaps with the United States the conditions under which that would happen and presumably that to the degree, the more larger, more complicated types of installations involved a substantial American presence, people, for example, of various sorts, then presumably this became a rather tricky, delicate issue to navigate, whether in Brazil, in Cuba, in Panama.

Herman: Yes, that’s right. It was incredibly delicate. And the thing about the ADP that was interesting– that’s the Airport Development Program, was the name of the program that the War Department created with Pan Am– was that the only thing that they were getting permission to do was to build the airfields.

And so Getulio Vargas in Brazil could think, oh, you want to expand Brazil’s aviation infrastructure? That’s great, have at it. But I’m not giving you permission to station anyone there. I’m not giving you permission to use it in any military capacity.

And in fact, part of the granting permission, Vargas, for instance, asserted that Brazil would become the owner of those facilities when they were completed. And so Latin American governments were really in a position of leverage to assert ownership over the facilities that were being constructed, in part because they knew why the US wanted them so badly.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor is when the United States starts really wanting to station personnel at these sites. And there’s a moment where some of the defense planners realize, wow, we’ve just sort of paved the way for the Germans because we’ve created all these great airfields for them to land on. And we don’t have anyone there to defend them.

Watts: Exactly.

Herman: So once, I mean– on the one hand, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, they’re rushing to get US soldiers on the ground. And that is going to be the most problematic part of the whole affair. On the other hand, the attack on Pearl Harbor is really important in raising popular support for the American republics to become involved in the war to at least declare their allegiance to the Allied cause.

And so in some ways, it actually makes it easier for Latin American governments to consent to stationing the troops there. The thing is, and this is what the bulk of my book is about, is that this is really unprecedented, this construction of US overseas bases on sovereign soil. There’s no blueprint for how to govern them.

Who has jurisdiction over the US soldiers that show up? Well, the US thinks that they do. But Brazil, Cuba, Panama– they’re not going to cede jurisdiction over these people. That would be a total sacrifice of territorial sovereignty. The question of labor law is really contentious.

When Pan Am shows up and doesn’t observe newly won labor legislation in Brazil, Brazilian workers take Pan Am to court. And so all of these kind of local conflicts at the bases that my book deals with in various chapters focusing on different aspects of them end up illuminating other spaces where international and domestic politics collide. So that’s something that they share in common with the HR article.

Watts: Absolutely. You focus in particular on Brazil, Cuba, and Panama in your book.

Herman: Yeah.

Watts: And as you’ve just said, in particular on certain arenas in which these questions of sovereignty play themselves out with a particular drama, you mentioned race, you mentioned labor, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your fantastic chapter on questions of gender and sex? You have a lovely chapter entitled “Sex and Moral Hygiene.”

How did this become a set of issues in the context of bases, American presence, American stationed, et cetera? How did this become both an issue– I mean, we all know about the cases, contemporary cases of the disgraceful behavior by Americans stationed in Okinawa or South Korea. But what was– this is now a long time before all of that happened. And how did those issues as they emerge– how were they navigated and dealt with quite differently in a Cuba versus a Panama, let’s say?

Herman: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so one of the interesting things to me is that these really charged conflicts that start erupting at base sites from the beginning– sometimes, they’re really explicitly about legal questions of authority that take on this broader symbolism, so the question of labor rights, for instance. But sometimes, there were cultural. And those were often some of the most powerful.

And so from the beginning, particularly once US personnel arrive, but even when it was just Pan Am personnel, construction personnel, you see conflicts arise over gender relations. And this comes up in two different ways that, from the United States’ perspective, both have to do with the fight against venereal disease.

So the culturally sensitive thing in a place like Brazil, for instance– in northern Brazil, I focus on the base in Belém, which is in the mouth of the Amazon River. And the elite in Belém were fairly conservative Catholics, and so the kinds of socializing and courtship practices that the US soldiers, who were arriving there, were expecting or trying to engage in with women from high society were incredibly offensive.

The US military authorities, who were concerned about venereal disease, high rates of venereal disease among US soldiers, were very eager for US personnel to socialize with women from elite families because they were perceived as less likely to transmit disease. And so on the one hand, you have US authorities trying to create opportunities for US soldiers to socialize with women from that social sector and, in theory, drive them away from red light districts.

But this is creating– this creates a lot of tension with local communities because it’s culturally offensive to them, and they worry about this idea of moral degradation in their communities that’s going to be the result of US basing.

The second way that this comes up is US authorities say, OK, prostitution is inevitable. And so while the War Department’s official policy is to suppress prostitution at any cost, what local authorities settle on is, it’s inevitable that our men are going to frequent prostitutes. So we need to figure out how to make it as safe as possible. And so at each of the defense sites in different countries, local authorities end up finding– improvising ways locally to regulate the sex industry, which is, of course, a question of legal authority besides being a cultural issue.

And so the way that this happens in each place depends on the local circumstance, the geography of the sex industry, the laws surrounding prostitution. But in all instances, this becomes another area in which you see the United States asserting extraterritorial rule in a way that is– frustrates those Latin Americans who are focused on questions of national sovereignty because it’s offensive to local sovereignty to violate national– to violate local law and assert authority over this particular aspect of local life, but also triggers a bit of a freak out about moral degeneration and moral hygiene of local communities.

So it was just really interesting to me that there’s all of these different spaces where this International Alliance ends up creating quite a bit of trouble on the ground, and Latin American leaders are forced to navigate the pressures that come from these local conflicts and their international relationships with the United States.

Watts: It seems almost as if that period is so crucial because all of these things that you talk about– that in some sense, we can see in the Cold War under a different sets of circumstances, or even in the contemporary base world, for example, they seem to be all present in a way. The struggles over sovereignty and how this gets negotiated, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, seem to be almost already set in place in the history that you tell in that interwar period between the late ’30s and ’45.

Herman: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s just a tale as old as time. International cooperation and national sovereignty are inherently incompatible. And the way that incompatibility is resolved really reflects the power asymmetries in the Americas, for instance. It would look different in Europe, of course. It looks different in Japan.

And so again, we have this kind of global story that I’m drilling down into one particular context to try and illuminate a little bit. But yeah, it really does resonate. What’s distinct about Latin America relative to other parts of the globe is that you actually don’t see a ton of US bases in Latin America in the postwar period during the Cold War. And that’s for a number of reasons.

But I do think that of the various– of the various things that come out of this wartime experiment in security cooperation, because that’s really– this is the beginning of security cooperation as a feature of inter-American relations, the beginning of military training, military aid, development assistance.

All of these things that will wed certain Latin American regimes to the United States as they pursue their mutual security interests during the Cold War are much more effective from the perspective of US defense strategists and, in some ways, less problematic than basing. And they render basing unnecessary. Because if you have such tight relationships with Latin American governments that you can rely on access to airfields should you need them, then you don’t have to create the problems that come with governing them yourself.

Watts: Absolutely. Absolutely. Rebecca, we’re almost at an end, unfortunately. But I did want to ask you one last question, and that has to do with your new project. And I wonder if you could just say a few words. Because in a sense, it’s an interesting extension of all of these things. I wonder if you could just provide a little final few remarks on your new interest.

Herman: Yeah, so it’s funny because I wondered if this is my second project would seem so tangential. A lot of historians do like the same thing for a different period, or there’s a reshuffling. And at first, I thought this project seemed so out of left field. But actually, the continuities are really striking the more I get into it.

My new project is on Antarctica and the global politics of environmental governance in Antarctica. And what drew me to the project was coming across this particular aspect of it, which is in the late 1970s, the Argentine military dictatorship. Argentina historically has had territorial claims to Antarctic land.

And in the late ’70s, the Argentine military junta airlifted an eight-months pregnant woman to Antarctica so she would give birth to the first Native Antarctican. And he would be Argentine. And it was this grand gesture to reaffirm Argentina’s claims to territorial sovereignty. And I just thought, whoa, this is so interesting.

And there was an effort to create a civilian colony. A few years later, Pinochet and Chile who– Chile also had these historic claims to Antarctic territory that overlapped with Argentina’s claims– created a civilian colony of his own. So I started to dig into that history, and I had made assumptions about maybe this was about trying to rally popular support at home during a time when these governments’ human rights records were under scrutiny.

But actually, it turned out, at least what I’m finding so far, is that it was sort of a defensive posturing in response to a number of new visions for Antarctic governance that were being pushed from elsewhere, the rising environmental movement, particularly Greenpeace. The Non-Aligned Movement was pushing for Antarctica to become part of the common heritage of mankind.

Greenpeace wanted to create a World Park in the Antarctic, and there was a lot of speculation at this point about the potential discovery of oil. And how would that be taxed if there’s no clear consensus around who rules in Antarctica? So anyway, it just sort of blossomed into this larger project of thinking about how competing ideas and competing ways of thinking about the relationship between government and nature percolated during this period and how these Latin American governments responded to them.

Watts: Fantastic. Well, with any luck, Rebecca, we can get you back on the podcast series when your project is done and when you have a wonderful new book on the Antarctic sovereignty and nature. It’s been a terrific pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for generating some time. And of course, we look forward to the appearance of your book, The Americas At War, later in the year. Thank you so much.

Herman: All right Thank you, Michael it’s been a pleasure.

Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening to learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.

Podcast

Matrix Podcast: Interview with Brittany Birberick

Published March 30, 2021

In this episode, Professor Michael Watts interviews Brittany Birberick, an anthropology PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley — and a former Matrix Dissertation Fellow. Birberick’s dissertation project focuses on urban transformation in Johannesburg, South Africa. More broadly, she writes and thinks about economies, migration, temporality, and aesthetics within an urban context. Her dissertation, “Paved with Gold: Urban Transformation in Johannesburg,” situates the city of Johannesburg historically, considering the extractive economy of gold that initiated its development to understand the city’s contemporary tensions: a dilapidated post-apartheid city aiming to be a world-class global city. Her research takes place in Jeppestown, a neighborhood in Johannesburg, and focuses on the inhabitants and built environment of a single street. Today, Jeppestown is portrayed as either on its way to becoming a site of redevelopment by the Johannesburg Development Agency, artists, and private developers, or, if left unattended, a crime ridden area and hotbed of xenophobic violence. The dissertation posits that rather than transformation and development projects leading to an inherently new city or inherently new object, Jeppestown, like many urban areas around the world, is caught in a back and forth between being a successful or failed urban space—a “good” or “bad” city.

Birberick received the Association for Africanist Anthropology’s 2019 Bennetta Jules-Rosette Graduate Essay Award for her essay, “Dreaming Numbers,” which is an analysis of fafi, a street-based lottery game played by residents in Jeppestown. The piece investigates the ways in which dreams, gambling, and interpreting patterns become meaningful strategies for choosing the next winning number and reducing uncertainty in the city.

Related Materials

“Dreaming Numbers“
“Playing Fafi in Johannesburg,” American Ethnologist, 2018

Podcast Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley. Your host is Professor Michael Watts.

Michael Watts: Hello, and welcome to Matrix Podcast. We’re delighted today to have an anthropologist with us who is going to be talking about her research in South Africa. I’m delighted to have Brittany Birberick here. Brittany is a PhD student, completing her PhD in the Department of Anthropology here on campus, working with Mariane Ferme, Lawrence Cohen, and Sharad Chari.

She is a scholar of Africa and she went to South Africa to pursue her field work, looking at particularly focusing on the post-apartheid city. But today, we’re going to be talking about one particular piece of her research that I found to be absolutely fascinating. And we’re going to be talking about gambling and illegal street gambling in and around Johannesburg. So Brittany, welcome to Matrix, and thank you so much for coming and talking to us.

Brittany Birberick: Thank you so much for having me.

Watts: So let me start with a sort of personal question. How did you come to be interested in South Africa as a research site for your anthropological interests? How did that come about?

Birberick: I first went to South Africa as an undergrad when I was studying at the University of Chicago, and I did a study abroad program with Jean and John Comaroff in South Africa.

Watts: Major scholars of that part of the world?

Birberick: Yeah, the big wigs. And we were in Cape Town for a few months, and then in Johannesburg for just a few weeks and then spent some time in Kruger. And at that time, I was an undergrad also doing an anthropology degree, and I was working on peer-run mental health recovery centers–

Watts: I see, very different topic.

Birberick: –very different, in Chicago. But something about South Africa just sort of clicked for me. And when I decided to apply to grad school talking with Jean, I formulated this project that was about the contemporary South African art market. And I thought I was going to be thinking about high-end art and its relation to rebuilding the city and this project that’s very much situated in de-industrializing part of the city.

Watts: Why don’t you fill us in a little bit on the nature of the community itself before we get into the details of your gambling interests?

Birberick: Yeah. So Jeppestown is– in South Africa, they would call it a suburb. It’s a neighborhood just–

Watts: Of Johannesburg.

Birberick: Of Johannesburg, yeah. Just east of the inner city. It has a pretty interesting history. It was the first city or it was the first part of Johannesburg to be founded after the discovery of gold. And originally, it was meant to be a residential area.

Watts: Housing workers, you mean Black workers, migrant workers mostly?

Birberick: Migrant workers, both from Europe and from other parts of Africa. So before apartheid was institutionalized, segregation was a little blurry in the early days of Johannesburg. And so Jeppestown was actually meant to be– and even under apartheid was always designated as a white area.

In the ’30s, you get the development of the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, and those become the residential areas for middle class white South Africans or folks moving to Johannesburg for the mining industry or for other industries. And Jeppestown, because it had been– because infrastructure had been built there, the railways and what became the highway, it very quickly morphed into the industrial part of the city.

Watts: So this happened in the ’30s and ’40s that it became less of a mining hostel town and more of a light manufacturing industrial town of some sort?

Birberick: Yeah, exactly.

Watts: And is that still the case now today?

Birberick: Well, and now you have a really interesting situation. So as apartheid was nearing its end, a lot of these factory workers– or factory owners abandoned the warehouses they had. So you had a huge influx of Black South Africans coming into the city for the first time. You have a phenomena of informally inhabited buildings in Johannesburg, all over South Africa really.

So you had influx of people coming in. And a lot of these factory spaces were taken over or hijacked, they call it. And so different people started living in these buildings as residential areas. So people were still paying rent, but there wasn’t too the formal legal owner who had abandoned the space. And so right now, there’s been a huge move by the city government to redevelop the area as a new kind of residential area again, part of this large Johannesburg 2040 Spatial Redevelopment plan.

Watts: This is to make Johannesburg another world class city, et cetera, et cetera.

Birberick: Yeah. And so Jeppestown is really pointed to as a place that’s going to alleviate the pressure of housing in the inner city by cleaning up or clearing out these buildings. At the same time, though, you still have factories that remain.

Watts: But is it in that sense, would you say a type of decaying sort of post-industrial city populated by working poor, or is it still some energy in it economically?

Birberick: There’s still definitely some energy. And there are factories that are still running. I think what’s unique about it is that these factories run a little bit more like artisanal workshops than they do the way we imagine sort of mass production factories.

They’re all making very specific custom-made things, be it like light fixtures, or metal washers, or the plastic sort of satchels that go in between magazine covers to hold perfume samples. It’s a wide-ranging kind of industrial sector of what it is that’s produced. At the same time, you have a lot of new migrants, African migrants to the area who are opening shops or restaurants.

Watts: Non-South African?

Birberick: Yeah.

Watts: I see.

Birberick: And the area also has a huge men’s work hostel that has about 10,000 men living there, somewhere between unemployed and sort of barely employed.

Watts: Understood. So you went there to study precisely these issues, something about its history, and its changing character in relationship to post-apartheid South Africa. But we’re here today to talk about something that sort of was not exactly an offshoot, but something that perhaps you didn’t expect to spend time studying. And that is illegal gambling, particularly associated with working poor Black families, in particular, which goes by the name of “fafi.”

So first of all, let me just ask you, how did you even get interested or stumble across this gambling enterprise and realized that it was something that was a central way of understanding what was going on in the city?

Birberick: Yeah. So the interesting thing about fafi or, you know, other names, “umshayina,” is that it all takes place outside on street corners.

Watts: But it’s illegal?

Birberick: But it’s illegal, yeah. But it’s very publicly performed. And so I noticed different people sort of coming together as I would be walking from where I was staying into Jeppestown to go and spend time in the factories and shops that I was doing my other ethnographic work at. And I have a wonderful friend, collaborator, Angel Khumalo, who’s a photographer and she’s also from the area and grew up in one of the informal buildings in Jeppestown.

And so we would stop and talk to the older women who were selling corn or sitting on these street corners. And they would be taking– this one woman, in particular, would be writing all of these receipts for people who were coming in. And they’d be saying these– I would hear fragments of dreams or fragments of bets they were placing. And there was no money exchanged, and she would just write down this– or there would be money exchanged, and then she would just write down a number and a few ticks on a piece of paper and hand it to them. And it was just like, what is this woman selling?

Watts: What is going on? What is going on?

Birberick: I mean, like a lot of cities, people congregate on street corners all the time, putting themselves into organizations that you’re like, well, I don’t know what that is and I’m just going to walk on by.

Watts: But these were at multiple locations, public locations in the city, and they were known as places where if you wanted to engage in this gambling, that was where you would go?

Birberick: Yeah. And twice a day, always the same location, a morning pull and an afternoon pull.

Watts: All right. Let’s talk a little bit then about what the pull refers to, and just sort of walk us through the process of if I’m standing on that street corner, how– in fact, what would happen and how would I essentially place a bet?

Birberick: Of course. So maybe I should back up a little more than that. So fafi is a pretty pure lottery game. There are 36 numbers. You only play 34 numbers at a time because you usually do not bet on the two previous winning numbers. Each of these numbers are associated with a kind of image.

Watts: Give us some examples.

Birberick: So eggs, white woman is number 9, birds flying, police is number I think 16. So each of them are attached to a kind of image.

Watts: A type of figure, or could it be a person, could it be– are they all live or are they– is it a vast array of different things that each number would have for?

Birberick: They’re not all alive. So they vary from mundane things like eggs or birds flying or many people to sometimes more sinister things like the police, police and dog are the same number. Drunk man.

Watts: I see.

Birberick: Dead woman.

Watts: I see.

Birberick: So it varies. And if you’re doing a– if you’re looking just at those figures, you can start to tell yourselves a bunch of stories about–

Watts: So 36 numbers. OK. So what then happens if I’m interested in gambling and selecting a number? How do I do it? What do I do?

Birberick: So if you are a casual gambler, you would go to someone, like this woman that I mentioned, and you would place a bet Say you had a good feeling about the number 9. So you would place a bet on number 9.

Watts: And how much would it cost me to place that bet?

Birberick: You can place– you can put as much money as you want?

Watts: I see. But a typical bet would be what? $0.10? $0.20?

Birberick: So, like a proper bet I think if you felt really good about it, you would put like 10 rand, which is about a little less than $1.

Watts: OK. OK.

Birberick: And that’s if you feel really good.

Watts: But there’s no limit on what you could pay, assuming you had the resources. I see.

Birberick: Yeah. There’s no limit. There’s no minimum. So you place your bet. This woman or person marks your bet on a sheet that’s given to them by the fafi man, the person who runs the gambling, which we’ll get to. They take that sheet, once that’s all calculated, they take your money and they put it in a little leather pouch that they’ve also been given by the fafi man. And this pouch has a number on it that correlates to them as a player. That person, or you maybe, go to the bank or the sort of designated meeting spaces that are outside.

Watts: So designated places are called banks? And then what happens? So they’ve gone there– I’ve gone there, I’ve placed my bet.

Birberick: So you’ve placed your bet. You’ve gone there. The pouch has been taken there. The pouch is then given to a runner, so someone who’s also a better but who’s kind of organizing the bank.

Watts: And what’s his or her role– the runner’s role? Their role is to organize the bank?

Birberick: They organize the bet. So everyone has their own little pouch with their number on it. Those pouches then get put into larger bags. And it’s not until the runners there with all of the bags collected that the fafi man, who is usually or always a Chinese immigrant or a Chinese South African pulls around in a large truck.

Watts: A large vehicle. I see.

Birberick: Yeah, always a truck.

Watts: Like an armored vehicle you mean or just–

Birberick: So I’ve heard and read different things. I think they used to be– they used to have bulletproof windows because of fear of robberies. But the trucks that I saw didn’t look quite as–

Watts: Fearsome as that might imply.

Birberick: –as securitized.

Watts: And it’s always– and the vehicle always has a or more than one person.

Birberick: Two.

Watts: Two Chinese South Africans in the vehicle.

Birberick: Yeah. Always.

Watts: And they pull up to the bank.

Birberick: They pull up to the bank.

Watts: And then what happens?

Birberick: The runner comes with the bag of bets, hands it directly to the fafi man. The fafi man then hands that runner a slip of paper with a number written on it, the winning number, the winning pull for that moment. And then the runner comes, stands in front of the view of all of the gamblers who’ve assembled and does a hand gesture. And that gesture also correlates to the image or number of the winning.

Watts: So when that gesture is made and it correlates to an image, let’s say, king, which is number 1, and I’d bet on number one, then I have won?

Birberick: Yeah. And then you go whoa.

Watts: And I’m very excited. And then I had put 10 rand, and what do I in return receive as my winnings?

Birberick: You would receive– for 10 rand, you would get 280 rand back.

Watts: And is any of that taken by the runner, is there a commission or the person who I placed the bet with?

Birberick: Yeah, that’s a good question. So if you have or if you’re playing in your own bag that you have yourself, you get 280 rand back. If you’ve played in someone else’s bag, which you have for this hypothetical example, you only get 140 rand back. So they take 50% just by putting in their bag. And so then everyone sort of stands around and waits or sort of congratulates one another.

The men in the car, the fafi men take out all of the money that’s been bet right there in that moment and take out all of the slips with the playing numbers on it and what everyone has bet and they allocate the winning bets right there. So if you’ve won, you get back–

Watts: I get my cash in hand?

Birberick: Yeah. You get back a nice, little pouch of money. It’s very exciting. The winners always get their bags back first. The losers always get empty bags back that usually they haven’t even bothered to zip back up. So it’s a little demoralizing to get a losing bag.

Watts: And then when that is complete, then the vehicle drives off and leaves?

Birberick: Yep, exactly.

Watts: And how many of that– at that bank, on that street corner, how many of these pulls, as you described it, will happen every day? Just one?

Birberick: Two.

Watts: Two every day?

Birberick: Yeah, one in the morning and one usually around lunchtime.

Watts: So let’s just put that in context a little bit. This is popular. Lots of people engage with this mostly, working class, Black South African poor, or the people who you might say are, if not middle class–

Birberick: Mostly working class, poor, Black South Africans. I mean, at the bank that I was at and where I did all my research, which was in Jeppestown, very close to the men’s hostel, a lot of the men from the hostel were runners or would come and bet in this. A lot of women from the informal buildings would come and bet.

But every once in a while, someone would drive in clearly from a suburb or from a wealthy part, maybe of a township in a very fancy car and a very fancy suit, and they just felt really good about one number and they would bet hundreds of rands.

Watts: And they would make a larger bet.

Birberick: Yeah.

Watts: Make a larger bet.

Birberick: Yeah. And the other thing to remember, too, is that people are there who have bags and who are betting, but most of the people who are coming with– are playing within their own bags are also betting like 10 other bags. So people really make a kind of– they pull together a livelihood from this, or it becomes sort of like their work in some cases.

Watts: That would be my question. Do people both lose in relative terms, local relative terms, significant amounts of money and gain significant amounts of money? And are there people, certain people, who would see this gambling as a mode of livelihood for them that sustains them or their family, or is this mostly something that’s happening, as it were in relatively small quanta of money that don’t necessarily end up people in debt or losing significant quantities of money?

Birberick: I think that’s a hard question because I think that the reality is people are not betting a ton of money and people are not necessarily losing or winning a ton of money. But it’s also true that playing fafi, in some cases, very much subsidizes people’s livelihoods.

Watts: I see. I see.

Birberick: And for men living in the hostel, they’re paying very, very little rent, if any. For people living in informal buildings, they’re also paying no rent, if any. So this really becomes sort of how grand one’s meal is going to be. For folks who are playing with children, it subsidizes certain grants from the government. It might pay for a new pair of shoes for kids.

So I think the– and I think this is the tough thing about fafi and a lot of these kind of informal gambling games is if you do the math around gambling games and the return, fafi has a really low return. Nobody is getting– so nobody is getting rich off of fafi.

Watts: Except presumably, perhaps the Chinese.

Birberick: Except perhaps the fafi men, yeah.

Watts: Fafi men themselves.

Birberick: Yeah, exactly. So in a kind of casino analogy, the house is definitely–

Watts: Is definitely winning.

Birberick: –winning in this scenario. And yet winning and playing fafi is very important to a lot of people who participate in it.

Watts: Understood. Let me just ask a question about the Chinese angle here. This is exclusively the fafi men themselves. Well, are there fafi women?

Birberick: There are fafi women, yeah.

Watts: But they are exclusively, to your knowledge, across South Africa, because this is not just a Jeppestown gambling syndicate. It is exclusively Chinese-controlled?

Birberick: Yes.

Watts: And why don’t you say a little bit then for our listeners who maybe are not aware that there’s a significant Chinese population in the country, what’s the history here, and what do we know about how the game began to both show up in South Africa? Did it build upon Indigenous traditions of gambling or something of that sort, or was it an import with the Chinese populations?

Birberick: Yeah. So originally around the turn of the century, Chinese men were brought over to work in the gold mines in South Africa. South Africa, even then already, had a very sort of– had a lot of anxiety about race and ethnicity. And so there was a huge push after these laborers tenure was up to send people back to China. Nevertheless, there seems to be a small population from that initial migration that stayed.

You then have another wave of economic migrants who are coming to South Africa around the 1930s. So I think my initial hunch was that fafi really became a sort of significant institution in South Africa. And I mean, it’s across South Africa, but it is in areas where Chinese migrants have settled.

Watts: Have settled I see.

Birberick: Cape Town doesn’t necessarily have a fafi ring. But then upon doing more research, I put it back to as early as 1909 that there are news reports or anxieties about this fafi gambling game that was run by the Chinese that’s going to potentially corrupt white South African miners.

Watts: So it’s at least a century old, and at one point, its clients, as it were, the gamblers, were likely to be– as likely to be white as Black?

Birberick: Yeah, I think it was a more heterogeneous mix of gamblers in its early days.

Watts: Since this, obviously, operated during the apartheid period and this was run by Chinese, how did the Chinese– how were they situated into these forms of racial classification which, of course, were central to grand apartheid? Were they seen as– what was their racial categorization? How were they classified?

Birberick: The Chinese situation in South Africa is interesting. I think the apartheid government didn’t quite know what to do. They were ranked very low on the racial hierarchy under apartheid. But then there was always a lot of anxiety because Japanese people were ranked honorary white under apartheid. And so there– and this, I think, is a larger story of apartheid South Africa, the kind of anxiety about being able to tell, being able to tell like who is who.

The Chinese population in South Africa was put in townships, lived in areas slotted as Asian or more specifically Chinese. And in some ways, in some working conditions, they were thought of as being even below certain Black South African ethnic groups. But again, that gets– you have all of these exceptions and things get quite weird. The fantasy apartheid tried to weave didn’t always play out in real life.

And so in the kind of later days of apartheid, the way that the game would work is these Chinese fafi men, who themselves were not necessarily– they were the ones taking the bets or driving the truck, but they weren’t necessarily the one making the money, like they were working for somebody else.

Would drive across townships, usually Black townships, to run the game. They would also drive through wealthy white suburbs and fafi, not so much the bank I was at, but more broadly is thought of as being a kind of female or it’s gendered female as a kind of gambling because a lot of women who were domestic workers. And I think this is where the morning and lunchtime pull schedule come from.

They would take their breaks or their tea breaks in the morning, go out to the corner of the white suburb–

Watts: And place a bet.

Birberick: –and place a bet.

Watts: But, for example, the bank that you were part of where you yourself gambled, was that pretty much equally in terms of gender now? Was that equally populated by–

Birberick: Yeah.

Watts: I see. I see.

Birberick: It was pretty equal, which it seems to be somewhat unique for a fafi game.

Watts: And what’s the perception, if you could generalize, among the members of the bank and the fafi men? Are they seen as being intimidating? Are they seen as being untrustworthy? Are they being seen as one might view a banker? Are they seen in more cultural or racialized terms? What’s their understanding?

Birberick: Yeah, that’s interesting. There isn’t a lot of mistrust because so much of it is public, so there’s never a sense that they’re being outright cheated. But the ways in which one comes up with the number that you bet. So you asked what are the kind of– is this [INAUDIBLE].

Watts: Well, maybe let’s pursue that, because that’s such a fascinating part, and we’ll maybe get back to the perception of the Chinese. But let’s just– walk us through then how someone might then come to choose a number, 8, let’s say. And how that likely comes about and the degree of confidence that they would have in that number.

Birberick: Yeah. So it is, on the one hand, fafi is uniquely Chinese South African. It’s very much part of that history. But on the other hand, the techniques or strategies for coming up with the number is very much tied to Zulu dream interpretation or Zulu divinatory practices. So I think in an earlier moment, one might go to a sangoma, a traditional healer, and ask for certain kinds of herbs to help them dream better, to help them dream winning numbers better. Or they would go to that same sangoma with a dream that they’ve had and ask them to help interpret.

Watts: Seek an interpretation.

Birberick: Yeah. Today, there are fewer formal consultations like that happening. And you would usually discuss with your fellow fafi gamblers, or say you’re going to someone to place a bet with in their bag. They become the kind of de facto or informal dream interpreter.

Watts: So maybe just give us an example, if you could, or maybe from your bank where you participated of a dream, and the type of discussion or the type of ways in which that dream would be interpreted, by a friend or by a fellow gambler, that would allow one to alight upon a number.

Birberick: Yeah. So the fafi gamblers were very curious about me once I started hanging out, and once I started gambling especially. And they would always say to me that, oh, you’ve got good numbers or you’re close, but you’re not– you’re not quite there.

Watts: Because you weren’t winning, you mean, typically or–

Birberick: I would win every once in a while, but I wasn’t winning like enough.

Watts: I see.

Birberick: And so they decided that they needed to hear my dreams, and that they would interpret them better than I was doing.

Watts: To allow you to get the good numbers?

Birberick: Yeah. So one particular– one particular day I went to the fafi bank, I was filling out my sheet. And one of the older women was like, OK, what was your dream? Tell us your dream. And on that particular day, or the night before– I have very bad eyesight. I’ve always had bad eyesight. And I had a dream about my eye turning into this mechanical machine. And this very elaborate– this very elaborate dream that was very hard to speak in my mixture of English and Zulu and explain correctly. And so the women were like, uh, eye numbers. It’s all about eye numbers.

Watts: And is there more than one eye number or is there a number that refers to eye?

Birberick: There is a number that refers to eyes, but along with this sort of– along with each number having a specific image to it, each number has a kind of relationship to the body as well. There’s one specifically for the eye, but there’s also a set of numbers that are the head, or the upper cheeks, or there’s a whole slew of them.

Watts: But would they be classified as that upper cheek number as a type of potentially an eye number in relationship to your dream?

Birberick: Yeah. The numbers get– this is the thing– this is the thing about fafi is that the numbers get ambiguous, or these are just tools to interpret. So when they become slippery– when you pick a number that’s not quite there, but it’s close, it doesn’t ever dissuade from the divinatory practice. It almost adds to it. Like, even the failure is a kind of positive reaffirming the practices. And that people are like, ooh, you were close, but you just missed something or you didn’t interpret the dream right, or you must have forgotten something from the dream.

But anyways, on this particular day, the eye number won, and the women were very, very excited about this. And for the next three days, numbers around the eye or the partner number, all of these numbers also have relationships to one another, or the partner number of the eye number would win. And that really this sort of this three-day period where eye numbers and my dream just kept being repeated over and over again to everyone, and people were winning and making money, that really solidified.

Watts: But would people then select numbers your friends on the basis of your dream, but you yourself chose the specific number for yourself? It wouldn’t be as if your friend– your friends, after having identified eye numbers, said, well, Brittany, number 4.

Birberick: Yeah, no, they would. Yeah.

Watts: So they would give you strong suggestions.

Birberick: Yeah. That’s the thing about fafi that perhaps is different than a lot of other gambling games in that people are very communal. I mean, not everybody, but if you are– you tell your friends your numbers, people will take out their– this is perhaps a little bit illicit, even within this illicit game. But say you’re taking bets for a lot of people, you might look at your list of bets, see where everyone is, move them around, compare to your friend’s bag in case, just to strategize or increase your odds.

Watts: Your odds of winning.

Birberick: So there is a kind of it’s collaborative and the real– and I think– and this gets back to the relationship between gamblers and the fafi men. No one is hurt by someone else winning. Really the only one or the only person you’re trying to beat is the fafi man, is the bank. And along with the sort of beliefs about dreams and divination, there are different charts that show the kind of relationships between numbers.

Along with all that, there is a sense that the fafi man is kind of on the other side of this doing the exact same thing. That the fafi men by taking down these betting sheets is also tracking dreams, is also interpreting, is also trying in some way to commune with or pick the next winning number that no one is going to bet. And so there’s a kind of almost a competition of, I don’t know, divinatory strategies or cosmology.

Watts: Strategies or interpreted acts. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Birberick: Yeah. In which that’s where the kind of antagonism comes in is like, who is going– who’s going to be able to get ahead? Is the fafi man going to get ahead and pick the number that no one else is betting on, or is it the sort of community of gamblers that’s going to get ahead of the fafi man?

And there are all of these phrases about being caught by the fafi man or you catching the fafi man or anxiety about being seen by the fafi man. If you’ve been winning a lot, then like something about him seeing you is going to enable him to catch up in some capacity with whatever divinatory strategy you’re using.

Watts: And so how did you perform in the sense of your own engagement or involvement in the gambling? Was it that first serious dream interpretation that in some sense allowed you to break through a series of, if you like, poor numbers?

Birberick: Yeah. I mean, I did– this feels like a brag now, but I did quite well at my gambling. But the other gamblers I would gamble with were always really frustrated with me because I never gambled enough.

Watts: You put a low bet on the number that came up.

Birberick: So I would win, I’d get excited, and they’d be like, arrgh, how much did you bet this time? 1 rand? And I’d be, like, 2 And they were really unimpressed. And I think a little– yeah, I mean, unimpressed, but also annoyed that they were like, we’re teaching you to do this and you’re not even– you’re not even making the most of it.

Watts: Of course. Of course. So let me ask a couple of final questions. How then did you come to see this game in relationship to the broad topic that you went there to study, namely post-apartheid South Africa? And so you’ve made the point that perhaps seeing it solely or exclusively in terms of money made or money lost, it may not be that significant even in these marginal communities. So what’s the alternative, if you like, interpretation, or what did you see that game opening up for you as a type of lens on post-apartheid Jeppestown?

Birberick: Yeah. When I started gambling fafi, I thought it was going to be a sort of escape from the rest of my field work. I was like, OK, I’m going to take a break from the factories. I’m going to take a break from the hostel, from these predominantly male spaces. I’m going to go gamble with the ladies for a little bit, then I’ll go back to work.

But as I continued to play, particularly the language around the future and getting ahead of the future and these strategies in which people were reading their dreams, but they were reading their daily lives as well. And I’d run into these folks I was gambling with on the streets and they would grab me and point to something and be like, many people, this number.

They were reading the world through this kind set of patterns, and it occurred to me that these kinds of speculative strategies are not really that different than a lot of the speculative strategies that are used by these larger developers or these government officials who are–

Watts: Or Wall Street.

Birberick: Or Wall Street. Exactly. Or the gamblers that shape our everyday lives that are looking at the city and really not understanding exactly what’s going on. And using these, at times, I don’t want to say illogical, but these kind of incomplete schemas in order to try to figure out what’s the next best place to invest in, or what’s the next building to redevelop, or what’s going to happen here?

And so fafi for me ended up being a way that allowed me to consider the temporalities of these projects and their future orientation and the sort of I think post-apartheid and that moment of transition or revolution or transformation. All of these kind of coming up on a horizon that never quite took off for South Africa the way it was perhaps expected to in an earlier moment.

Fafi became a way for me to think about how our folks on the ground trying to orient them to a future. And what it’s– and the way I’m thinking about it now is that fafi is– I think it’s less about predicting exactly what’s going to happen, but more that sense of getting ahead of the future. Being able to see what’s on the horizon rather than being surprised every time.

Watts: And if you did indeed pull a good number, and if indeed you did then have the appropriate and sophisticated understanding of that dream interpretation, that would be an indication that indeed you are ahead of the curve. In some sense–

Birberick: You’re on it, you’re reading it correctly.

Watts: And an insecure, uncertain future that in some sense you had some type of knowledge, if not prophetic knowledge, at least a knowledge and some understanding of what this future might hold for you.

Birberick: Yes, exactly. And there’s a lot of respect for people who are able to win or get ahead of the fafi man.

Watts: Brittany, absolutely fascinating. We could talk more about this. I’m delighted that you didn’t blow most of your research funding on the gambling and that you at least seemingly made a few good– pulled a few good numbers at a certain point. Absolutely fascinating. And I just wanted to thank you for coming along and talking to us and wishing you well in completion of your dissertation work here at Berkeley. Thank you so much.

Birberick: Thank you.

Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.

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Podcast

Matrix Podcast: Interview with Clancy Wilmott

Published February 13, 2021

In this episode, Professor Michael Watts interviews Clancy Wilmott, Assistant Professor in Critical Cartography, Geovisualisation, and Design in the Berkeley Centre for New Media and the Department of Geography. Professor Wilmott comes to UC Berkeley from the Department of Geography at the University of Manchester, where she received her PhD in Human Geography with a multi-site study on the interaction between mobile phone maps, cartographic discourse, and postcolonial landscapes. At UC Berkeley, Professor Wilmott is teaching graduate-level combined theory/studio courses on locative media, cross listed courses in digital geographies, as well as core curriculum on geographic information systems in the Geography department.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.

Related Materials

Watch the video on YouTube
Purchase Professor Wilmott’s Book: Mobile Mapping: Space, Cartography, and the Digital (MediaMatters)
Follow Clancy Wilmott on Twitter

Podcast Transcript

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Your host is Professor Michael Watts.

Michael Watts: Hello and welcome to Social Science Matrix Podcast. My name is Michael Watts and I’m the host for today’s discussion and interview. These podcasts are really an opportunity to showcase some of the social science research that’s being conducted on the Berkeley campus by faculty, by postdoctoral fellows, by doctoral students. And we particularly tend to focus on the sorts of critical social science that’s being conducted on the Berkeley campus in and around the most compelling and important social, economic, political challenges of the moment.

Today, I’m delighted to have with us Dr. Clancy Wilmott, who is a professor in the geography department on campus. That’s not quite true because Clancy was hired immediately prior to COVID. She at that point, had a position at Manchester University and essentially has been trapped in the United Kingdom where she is talking to us right now.

So she is, we hope, now able to come relatively soon. Clancy is a geographer by training. She actually received her undergraduate education at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, with a specialization in communications, but also international and cultural studies.

She then moved to the UK and completed her doctoral work in geography at Manchester University, where she then held a position teaching largely on questions of cartography, geographical information systems, the new raft of geospatial technologies that we perhaps now have come to take for granted.

She is currently teaching on campus and will be teaching in both geography and the new media studies group on the Berkeley campus. She also has a new book just out, which we’ll be talking about in just a second entitled Mobile Mapping, Space, Cartography, and the Digital. And she’s written extensively on geovisualization, critical cartography, forms of locative technology, phone maps, cartographic discourse and so on, with a particular focus on urbanism and cities. Clancy, we’re delighted to have you online with us today. And thank you so much for generating a little time to be with us today.

Clancy Wilmott: Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m delighted to be here. Really looking forward to it.

Watts: So let’s begin with a question that’s not particularly about your research per se, but since we’re in the electoral season here in the United States, the elections occurred just over a week ago. And of course, we’ve been swamped with maps, forms of spatial representation over the last 10 days. Not peculiar to American elections. It’s elections in general.

But given that you’ve spent most of your professional life thinking about spatial representation, thinking about maps, mapping, who gets to map, and particularly the new media, I wondered, firstly, just as a way of getting us going, what’s your reflection as someone who’s thought a lot about those technologies and how they get deployed as part of the electoral process?

Wilmott: That’s a good question. I think by sheer coincidence, the night before the election, the Monday evening, my time, so Monday morning US time, I was teaching a large undergraduate class about gerrymandering and the problem of– the MAUP problem, which is the Modifiable Area Unit Problem, which is basically this big issue where when you start with a piece of data. So every single person casts a vote. And then you generalize that data or aggregate it up into a shape, you lose the fine grain of what’s hidden underneath.

And I think what’s been particularly interesting for me in watching this election is actually looking at the way in which maps aren’t just about communicating geographic information anymore, but they’re actually part of a, I suppose, a media storytelling narrative. And each different newspapers have their own mapping projects.

So the San Francisco Chronicle, for instance, has a whole raft of different interactive maps and the New York times, too. But what I found was really interesting, there were two maps that started circulating around social media. And the first was this argument that basically geography doesn’t vote, people do. And it rearranged these large areas of relatively unpopulated space and actually realigned the blue and the red states to actually more accurately reflect the population rather than the geography itself.

And I think when you look at a country like the US, and it’s the same with Australia, and to a degree the UK as well, because rural areas that take up more space but tend to have less population, they tend to be over-represented cartographically on those maps. And so it looks like a hell of a lot more people are voting one way than they necessarily are because of this problem with the map.

And I think for me, that was a really good example of actually how geography itself kind of tells fibs. It lies in some ways, and cartography particularly. But also the way in which these new tools, we have these new digital cartographic tools, like even something as simple as a GIF or a “jif,” G-I-F, can actually demonstrate some of these big cartographic problems that we teach our students about all the time to this general audience.

And I think the second map that I really enjoyed was one that didn’t paint the states, red and blue, but instead created these gradations of purple to actually try and show a much more nuanced story that didn’t lump everyone in Arizona together voting the same way or everyone in California. But actually gave a much more detailed story about how location and how population actually is a lot more complicated than these, I suppose, made up shapes that are states that are kind of imagined.

And I think for me, this kind of– it was really joyful to see a more nuanced cartographic discourse. Maps being used not as tools just to try and represent a so-called truth but to actually try and make arguments about their own limitations in terms of how we represent elections. I really, really enjoyed watching those kinds of conversations unfold through maps.

And I think it was because mapping has perhaps moved a little bit away from this traditional field of GIS and into something that’s much more media based. It’s data visualization. It’s different kinds of cartographic argumentation.

So I thought it was interesting that basically, I’m teaching my students about this problem, that you cannot see individuals. That basically the shape of a state erases all the complexity of the lives inside in it. And at the same time, there are all these incredible maps that are trying to make these arguments counter to that. So I thought that was great. Really great.

Watts: It was interesting that you mentioned those two newspapers and the degree to which now quite sophisticated forms of visualization are now commonplace. I mean, particularly in a newspaper, for example, like the New York Times, which has undergone some type of revolution in the last few years where you would, in the past, have rarely seen a map. Now, particularly because all of these things are available online, of course, you have all sorts of interactive forms of mapping that are really extraordinarily rich and can fulfill a very different set of purposes really.

Well, that’s a nice segue into where I wanted to begin our conversation, Clancy, and that is to just start with the very idea of what a map is, what mapping entails, and who are the mappers. These are issues that you begin your book with actually.

And I start because I think often within the social sciences, people make use of maps a lot and yet they’re not perhaps thought of critically. And you yourself and many people in our discipline identify as critical cartographers. So let’s start with how you think about the map and whether it is a type of– and in what way is it a miniature version of the world? Is it a detached and elevated view of the world or a part of the world from above?

Is it, in some sense, truthful? Is it objective and neutral? After all, a good map can get me from A to B. It’s a simplification, of course, but there are a series, presumably, of rigorous rules that allow one to transform or the map to correspond to the territory or the landscape. Is this the way that we should think about maps or does that need to be unsettled in some way?

Wilmott: I think it needs to be unsettled. Maps are really complicated. And I think for me, the first point of unsettling. And it’s not a distinction that a significant number of critical cartographers draw but it’s one that I found helpful in trying to hone my own thinking out of just a critique into something that’s a little bit more optimistic, is to separate out two concepts which is mapping on one hand and cartography on the other.

And I think the reason it’s important to separate out these two concepts is that, for me, cartography, it’s a scientific endeavor. And it’s born out of a particular set or ways of thinking that place questions of truth and objectivity, also questions of universalism at its heart. And I think this is how we traditionally understand maps. And when we talk critically about cartography and mapping, we’re usually talking about this kind of, I suppose, way of knowing space through lines drawn on paper, through numbers, through coordinate systems, et cetera.

Mapping, on the other hand, and this is why I start in the book with the question of what is a map, who are the mappers, what is mapping. For me, mapping is much more– it’s much more intuitive. It’s much more performative. It’s about drawing relations between things in the world and then representing them in certain ways.

And so maps don’t necessarily have to be visual in this sense. We can think about– and I think for me, the distinction between, say, a map and any other piece of art is that it’s specifically spatial relations. We’re specifically talking about spatial temporality where things are arranged compared to other things.

And I think for me, mapping is something that we all do all the time. And when we imagine how we’re going to get home after work or we imagine what home looks like, we’re always undergoing this kind of representative mapping of the world, of bringing it together in a way that is understandable to us. And I think everyone’s maps are vastly different. And I think if you’ve ever tried to navigate with someone who moves through the world differently to you and had a fight about it, then you understand that mapping is this heterogeneous process.

And I always have a top down, very cartographic map in my head. I grew up in a family of orienteers. And orienteering is a sport where you run with maps going from A to B. And so my entire life has been thinking about the world in this very cartographic way. But when I travel with other people and they talk about landmarks. Oh, you’ve got to go all the way to the Burger King and then turn right. I’m like, I don’t know where the Burger King is. What’s the name of that street. And so you get these different heterogeneous ways.

What I think cartography does, it serves a different kind of purpose, which it tries to bring into some, I suppose, communal understanding how those representations should be. And then pins them upon principles of accuracy, so making sure that the distances that we imagine between things are consistent. So there’s a consistency question. And that these principles can be applied universally to all places in the world.

And I think that doesn’t necessarily have a lot to do with our experience of mapping in the world. I think sometimes places will feel further or closer than they are now. And I think the recent pandemic is a very good example of how places feel further away than ever, even though they’ve not geographically changed in terms of distance. So for me, I think that’s the key distinction here, is mapping is this way of drawing spatial relations, and imagining them, and communicating them. Cartography is a much more formal practice.

Watts: Can we just spend a moment on that formal practice? You use a very important term in your book called cartographic reason, which you in part take from my old teacher, actually, Gunnar Olsen.

Wilmott: Really?

Watts: Yes.

He was my teacher in Oxford and Franco Farinelli. So could you just unpack that for us a moment? so on this more universalist cartography, a science, a set of rules that turn on points, and distance, and projection, why is that important for both your book and for us to understand?

Wilmott: So I think within thinking about critical cartography and mapping, there has been a kind of move away from understanding the map as a discrete object that exists on its own in the world. When you read a map, people draw on maps, the map changes depending on the landscape. So maps are always kind of in becoming, they’re always changing. And we’re seeing it increasingly in the last 70 years or so, cartographic tradition changes as well. The way we represent things. I mean, increasingly every map looks like a Google map now. So we’re getting these changes in cartographic tradition.

What cartographic reason offers as an idea and the way that I’ve taken it from a Farinelli’s work and Olsen’s work and tried to– well, applied it to this particular way of thinking about cartography is to understand cartography not as a doing necessarily or as an object, but as a way of thinking and a way of thinking through acting or through creating as well.

So Olsen makes this constant discussion around what he calls a chiasm of thought and action, which for me, basing a lot of my work as well on particularly the early writings of Michel Foucault, this idea of the speech act. So I think for me, what cartographic reason, it’s a way not just of representing the world and thinking about it, but it also inscribes its own truths into the world.

And I think Farinelli describes the way in which following the enlightenment, the map or cartography is not just a descriptive. So people like Baron Von Haussmann would look at a map and then use that to draw out the boulevards of Paris. So it’s this basic way that the object itself becomes bigger than what it’s representing.

And so for me, cartographic reason, it’s about understanding that there is this principle of universalism within the Cartesian structure of coordinates so that all things can be described via coordinates. And there are lots of examples where that gets very, very messy.

It’s also about the way in which the world can be inscribed and territorialized according to a set of principles that was built in a very specific place and time as well. And these principles are transported, this way of thinking is transported by people like Lieutenant James Cook to Australia who use these principles to then try and describe this other kind of landscape with varying degrees of success.

And it’s also about this idea that you can capture the world in lines, in numbers, in representation. And then you can use those representations means to then make decisions about that world. To make decisions on how you should change it. To make decisions about where you might put mine. So it’s this way of thinking that is both speaking and doing at the same time.

Watts: And I take it that a key part of that thinking and doing and the way in which that cartographic reason gets deployed is absolutely central to state building and to Empire. All imperial projects ended up mapping. And land surveys, in exactly the same way, that the establishment of what we take– presumably, which we call the modern nation state was about making things legible. Where the borders are. And where people were located. And how many people were there that you could tax them, et cetera. So presumably, cartographic reason was a central part of that modern project of state building.

Wilmott: It wasn’t just a central part. You cannot disentangle mapping from this modern state building that particularly happens in the 19th century. And so the cases I look at in my book are both Sydney and Hong Kong, which are these very modern colonial British imperial states.

But what happens in both of these places and many other places as well is that the mapping, in a way, precedes territorialization. So before these spaces are claimed, before they are territorialized, mapping occurs. And then I think it’s not necessarily coincidental then, so in 1997, following the handover of Hong Kong, so Hong Kong Island and the new territories in Kowloon back to the Chinese government that the Chinese government then embarks on a project of remapping as well, of going back and remapping that land.

And so part of this necessary centralisation of mapping to the state formation– and it’s important as well. And this is why I use the term cartographic reason rather than just cartography. If we understand cartographic reason or cartography as a way of thinking and doing, then it’s not just the act of mapping itself either. It’s a whole host of associated actions as well, like surveying, like census data, like a lot of geological mining.

It’s all of these practices together that seek to basically describe the world in such a way, in this consistent way of knowing, this universal way of knowing so that they can almost speak to each other as well. And so in Australia, before they could even land, they had to measure the depth of the water in the first instance.

And one of the first things that happened after Hong Kong was settled, the island, is they drove a copper bolt into the pier of the naval dockyard. And they used that as a center point for agreeing, well, this is what sea level looks like. And so it’s about forming these agreements and about trying to bring everything into line together.

And it doesn’t end with colonization either. It’s a continual project of constantly refining all of these forms of spatial representation into a continuous system across the world. And I think as well– so it’s not just– cartographic reason is imperial way of thinking as well.

Watts: That’s terrific. I mean, you make the point that these forms of spatial knowledge, spatial visualization are in the business of calculating or in the business of classifying. But you also, again, early on in your book say that those same cartographic practices are in the business of, I’m quoting you now, “controlling bodies in space.”

Can you talk a little bit about that more? I guess, it’s partly about what these maps are used for, that spatial knowledge is used for as part of a whole raft of apparatuses you’ve just described. But what, for you, is important about that. Controlling bodies in and over space in thinking about maps and mapping?

Wilmott: I think for me, it’s central to the fact that landscapes, they’re lived, right? And so the idea of the colonial project is one that is about order. And maps play a huge role in that. And I think the continual re-imagination of cartographic projects throughout the histories of both Hong Kong and Sydney see a constant battle not just with landscapes but also with people.

And so early on in documents in Hong Kong, they start laying out land parcels that people can build on. But there’s constant miscommunications and people go and build houses on the wrong land parcel. And a big question then is raised, OK, well, who do we get them to move their house, what happens.

And similarly, as Chinese immigrants keep coming into Hong Kong, they start building in ways that are not pre-advised by the colonial government. And this creates all kinds of problems for them in terms of controlling this population through cartography.

Because I think maps, particularly colonial maps, they focus on buildings. They focus on habitation, on dwellings, as well as resources. So it’s not just– and I think this is particularly the case when we look at somebody like Sydney and Hong Kong, is that these are cities emerging. They’re cities that are prestaged in these maps. And you see the dwellings in early maps of where people are living. You can see the plans of where people can live as well so you see the plan of the city beginning to be etched out before it’s been built in pencil on those plans. And so for me, I think that’s one element.

And I there’s a second element that is joined in just the historical application of maps but the more contemporary application of maps. And I think this is where my understanding of cartographic reason, I suppose, departs a little bit from Gunnar Olsen’s.

In that, for me, cartographic reason isn’t just an alignment project around Cartesianism. It’s not just about the coordinate system. But it actually takes up a whole host of ideas that you find around universalism in Leibnitz’s work as well. Also, this kind of material universalism. So it’s not just about creating a grid that goes outwards forever. But actually our ability to calculate doesn’t just get bigger and bigger, it gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller. And it becomes inside ourselves as well.

And so in a way that we can begin to see the building where people can build in early maps, we’re beginning to see further determination about where we might go in space through our everyday use of maps. And it’s not even so much saying that we necessarily have to obey but this increasing datafication of our bodies– and I think for me, this is still part of this same universalist project where we’re basically able to now translate our journey into a certain number of footsteps which we can then use to measure against how far we’ve gone.

And in the same way, the algorithmic way in which a Google map decides which way you should go is entirely determining– ooh, sorry, controlling a body in space. It’s entirely about trying to funnel people into certain ways. It’s just in a much more subtle way.

Watts: Let me just ask you one last question of a more general sort on maps, and mapping, and cartography before we get into your book. And that is that insofar as cartography was a hugely important tool and part of a set of apparatuses for state building. In other words, maps were part of seeing like a state, as James puts it.

But this was a very contentious process. Some people don’t want to be seen or some people resisted the idea of being mapped. There’s a whole history of surveyors being shot and killed and so on. And where I’m going with this question is, in our discipline, there’s also a tradition which you’ve written about and others referred to as counter mapping.

And I’m just wondering if you could talk a little bit about, in a sense, both the contentious and the type of counter movement sometimes in which maps are used– other types of maps, perhaps predicated on different systems of calculation, let’s say, are then used to resist the power of state-backed maps, let’s say, something of that sort. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

Wilmott: So I think the way I would summarize this is there’s two big questions in this discussion of counter mapping. And I personally think they’re a little bit irresolvable. And I know certain geographers like Agnieszka Lozinski have tried to articulate what the actual issue is here. And I think it’s a difference between critique of purpose versus critique of the representational tools being used to describe.

And I think there’s no answer to this because I think it is such a deeply situated question where there’s some really incredible projects across the board where people– so for instance, Eddie Mabo in Australia, who was responsible for taking the question of Native Title, the right to own land or the right to ancestral lands for Aboriginal people to the high court submitted a map to the high court, which is one of the most, I suppose, powerful maps in Australian history.

And it was written on a piece of note paper which still has the blue lines and the round puncture holes in the top. And it was basically written. It is in pencil. And he submitted this map of land that he claimed was his ancestral land to the High Court of Australia. And the case won. So it wasn’t for nothing either.

And so you have this question of, you can count a map, you can redraw boundaries. A lot of the times, people will go out and information that they’ve been told about themselves that they don’t feel is true, they will find new ways of drawing new boundaries of providing new data around– there’s a lot of citizen sensing where people provide new environmental data around air pollution, or radiation, or water quality.

There’s a lot of counter mapping as well, where Indigenous groups will go out and remap their territory in order to be able to make claims about their right to own that against states that seek to dispossess them or are unsure of those claims. So you’ve got this whole thing where you’re using these tools, which again, I would agree are deeply flawed because they are based in colonial ways of thinking, ways of thinking that are very much about universalism, rationalism, around resource control, around capitalism as well. They use these tools to basically try and make these claims backwards– or back towards power. So you get this counter mapping power.

At the same time, there’s also a critique that a lot of people who do counter mapping also appreciate, which is the tools themselves are really problematic. We still use Google Maps for a lot of counter mapping. And Google, as a corporation, owns a huge amount of our spatial information, in the same way that the Landsat satellites that a lot of people use for making maps are still owned by the US government.

So you’ve still got these problematic tools and the limits. And if you’ve ever used a GIS or a Geographic Information System, the ways in which we can represent the world are really, really limited. They’re still based around points. We still have a meridian that’s based that runs through London or through the observatory in London at the Royal Naval Academy.

So we’ve still got these systems that are very deeply problematic. And I think for me, my research is always about trying to manage both at the same time. We need better tools. But at the same time, not everyone has the luxury of waiting for these tools to be made either. And I think for me, this is where critical cartography, critical GIS, critical mapping, all of this debate is at this point at the moment of just waiting because I’m not sure to what degree the need for purpose versus the need for the best tools that are the most emancipatory is ever going to be resolved in the near future. So that’s kind of where I see that as being at.

Watts: That’s terrific. And that’s a lovely segue then really into your book, Mobile Mapping. So the media question one needs to begin with is how does digital mapping make a difference? What’s different about it? And in fact, if I can quote you, you begin your book, I think it may be the first line, I can’t recall. It’s that you say, “what does mapping mean in the age of mobile digital media? Who are the mappers? What is the map?”

So let’s just start then with the fact that all of us have become, by virtue of owning a cell phone, a photographer and a mapper. So let’s start there. What for you is distinctive about this shift away from, as it were, the traditional mapping devices that we’ve talked a little bit about on paper, et cetera, to the digital? What do we need– how do we need to think about digital maps differently? Or indeed, are they that different?

Wilmott: I think, again, it’s a two-edged answer. Which is on one hand, they’re not that different at all. The same systems of thinking are still very much in place. The same geometries, a lot of the same coordinate systems are still in place. A lot of really old rules. And I think what’s particularly interesting is that when you look at something like Google Maps, they get their new maps from going over old maps. So they’ve still very much inherited these deeply problematic ways of thinking about the world that are really limited.

And when you take these limitations and you place them into spaces like Sydney and Hong Kong, which are contested spaces, when the land or the ownership of the land is contested, the histories are contested, those are ceased to be just problematic and they become weaponized politically.

So on one hand, you’ve still got this continuation of thinking. And I think a continuation of belief in the map as a kind of truth rather than a storyteller as well. At the same time, what the digital brings to my mind technologically is an extension of those principles of thinking and basically extends those ways of thinking into realms that we hadn’t necessarily understood as being cartographic beforehand.

And I think, by way of example, so for instance– actually, there’s two points I want to make here. Firstly, by extending it, basically, it’s allowed for an interoperability between cartographic systems and systems of big enumerative data as well.

So before this movement where you would use or you would geolocate data or information, whether that’s economic data, whether that’s money, or whatever, and if you’re going to put that into space, that would have to be done manually or quite slowly and arduously. Now there’s this very easy interchange between cartographic or geographic data and all other kinds of data. It’s very easy to make data geospatial one way or another. it’s pretty easy.

On the other hand, we’re also seeing the application of the spatial principles of representation around geometry, around numeration, calculation, quantification, extending well out of our phones as well, and into so many different new technologies as well.

So from things like the wearables, like Apple Watches which will buzz depending on which way you want to go to the new iPad, for instance, has a LiDAR function that enables you to map the world using sensors so that you can place it. Video games use the same kinds of architecture or architecture programs as architects. And so you’re seeing this folding in of all of these different spatial technologies together that we use at once for fun, but also for more serious concerns.

And so for me, thinking about what the digital map is, it’s not just a map on a computer screen. And it’s increasingly not just a map on your phone screen either. You use any app. So if you’re using Instagram, then you’ll be geotagging those photographs. If you’re using Snapchat, you’ll be geotagging. So everything is being spatialized that you do on any device. And the ways in which that’s being spatialized are becoming more complicated as well.

So your phones have accelerometers in them, which are little crystals that change according to– they measure change. And so if you’re moving faster or slower, the accelerometer can measure this spatial relationship of change. Similarly, autonomous vehicles are not just using GPS devices but they’re folding the data they get from GPSs into other kinds of data they get from sensors as well.

So we’re actually seeing this extension of the universal cartographic principle into pretty much anything that’s spatial. And as geographers, we pretty much everything spatial. So robots are mapping bodies and using those maps of bodies to then do surgery. And so you’re seeing this extension of these cartographic principles which were originally just about spatial order, about imperial imaginations, about control over space and bodies into control over so much in our lives. Everything can be mapped and everything can be datafied. And so therefore, everything is now subject to these really old school ways of thinking cartographically.

Watts: What is the significance given that sort of spatial extension that you’ve described? Of the fact that presumably, digital maps entail a type of real time experience in which the old map did not? Is that of any significance for you or not?

Wilmott: Yes, it is to some degree. Partly because again, navigation is pretty old. And I think a lot of the ways in which we have navigated historically– so the fact that we can now see ourselves on the screen. So I mean, Bruno Latour writes about La Pérouse, traveling up the East Coast of Australia using Lieutenant Cook’s maps.

So maps have always had this kind of mobility. We’ve always referred to previous maps to try and determine where we are and to navigate through the world, generally speaking. I mean, there’s lots of different navigational traditions as well from Polynesian wayfaring, et cetera.

But the appearance of the GPS, which is something– it’s a little bit separate. We often think of it as being part of the map. But it’s actually a layer on the map which is based not so much in cartographic tradition but in a particular scientific tradition of positioning that was developed after the development of the radio by [INAUDIBLE] Marconi.

And so what you’re actually seeing is this kind of speeding up of us being able to enumerate ourselves in our position in the world and then the speeding up of us being able to put that on the map. And so I’m writing a piece at the moment about the history of positioning Australia because Australia is a really interesting continent because it moves very quickly North so they have to constantly update the positions.

But there’s a whole cooperation in the Pacific around trying to position the various points of the Pacific against each other. And there was a cooperation between Japan and Australia, and this is in the early 19th– early 20th century, apologies, 20th century trying to do this kind of work. But of course, the radio is bound up in histories of empire. [CHUCKLES] So it’s all bound up together.

And I think for me, again, it’s just a classic example of the way in which the digital map now can see all of these different disparate technologies that were previously part of different realms, so radio on one hand. Cameras on the other hand, maps are now all able to be brought together onto single devices and cycle very, very quickly between those applications.

So you can take a photo, figure out where you are, attach a tag to it, and then represent that on a map all within the space of a few seconds. It doesn’t happen instantaneously. It just happens much, much, much more quickly than it’s happened in the past.

Watts: In your book, you refer to mobile mapping as thinking, being, and doing all at once. Is that exactly what you’ve just described or what you meant that turn of phrase to imply?

Wilmott: Yes, basically. Yes. And I think what’s important as well– and I think I started out with the project expecting us to be much more imprisoned by the phones, the maps that we use. And I think probably mea culpa, a little bit too much reading of Foucault led me to that hypothesis.

But when I got there, actually mobile mapping, it’s not always just about the phone. I think for me the question was what happens when we decenter the technology and understand ourselves as being in constant thinking, being, doing all at once. And what happens when we bring the phone– well, we don’t bring ourselves, our social lives into the phone. But rather we bring the phone into our social lives. And we choose to focus instead on our practices, our thinking, being, doing, rather than focusing on what the phone itself can do. So for me, mobile mapping is about– it’s more than just technology. It’s our way of engaging, of mapping while moving in the world.

Watts: Can I just run with that a little bit and raise the question of in your book the type of, if you like, research design part of your book. And that is you chose two cities, Hong Kong, Sydney. And the, as it were, the empirical spine of your book are a series of walks that you took with individuals. Can you talk a little bit about that and why you chose that means as opposed to driving in a car with a GPS or some other set of interfaces with forms of spatial– geospatial technology?

Wilmott: Partly I was interested– so I had done previous research about the way in which geolocative technologies had– so I was looking particularly at Foursquare which was a check in app around 2010. Kind of reshapes your urban imaginations and memories.

And so I’ve done a lot of research on the fact that the phone plays a big role in giving us language and playing a part in how we remember where we’ve been, and what we’ve done, and also blurs our experiences between what we’ve actually done and what we’ve read about on the internet as well.

So I had already done that kind of research. And I was thinking a little bit more about the fact that I had done this research in Sydney and I hadn’t really given Sydney a chance to speak back, in a sense, to counter map my narrative. And what I was interested in doing was actually asking the question, well, to what degree is this just my experience and what degree does context make a big difference in the way in which we engage mapping and maps. And to what degree does the history or the spatiotemporality of where we map of that mobility make a difference.

And so what I decided– I could have done interviews but I was actually much more interested in trying to garner a sense of impromptu whatever. I think for me, it was the opposite of what I think a lot of research designs are. It wasn’t about specifying an object that I wanted to research. But instead to see to what degree does that object actually permeate or infiltrate into our everyday experiences.

And so what I did was– I was doing archival research at the same time, reading about the city, and going into the archives, and looking at a lot of archival documents that don’t really make it to see the light of day because they’re really messy sketches that surveys had made very early on.

But what I wanted to do with people was say, OK, so can I just hang out with you for a few hours. Can you just take me somewhere. Can we just do something in the city. And I’m interested in how you engage in practice of mobile mapping.

Like, how do you know where you are. How do you know where to go. How do you decide which way to go. How do you know what you like and you don’t like. How do you actually map this space in and of itself. And then to what degree does the phone actually determine what we think of as Sydney. To what degree do these phone maps actually determine that. Or to what degree is it much more complicated than that. And I chose Sydney because I had already done the research there.

And I chose Hong Kong for a similar reason where I was actually considering a third case study in Los Angeles but decided it was actually a much more complicated space than I think I could have done those three cities in a single project. But Sydney and Hong Kong have a lot of comparabilities in a way, partly because they’re both on the edges of the British empire. So these spaces that were very specifically designed to be outposts as well. They’re edge cities.

And they were both, I suppose, colonized from the edge in as well. So they start at the shoreline and they colonize inwards as well. And of course, they’re both doing most of their big city building projects at a very similar time. As anyone who knows their urban history, the 19th century grid plan becomes this big thing. And in Sydney and Hong Kong, it fails miserably because there’s a lot of hills and they’re both really terrible examples of the grid plan.

So that’s why I chose. It was basically just to go, well, OK, well I’m going to give the landscape of Sydney a chance to intervene in this. And I think I just wanted to try and find a way of saying, actually, is it possible to study technology and maps as well without focusing on the maps as well. I think there have been a lot of discussion in previous writing about the power that the map has. And I suppose what I was interested in, well, what power does the map not have. What is the limitation of that power.

Watts: And what surprised you in your findings across these two cities with respect to that question?

People are surprisingly inconsistent. People are terrible [CHUCKLES] at doing what they’re told. And I had expected some kind of resistance. But one of the interviews, Cassie, she had– and I mean, she’s the same generation as me, knows how to use technology very well, writes for digital media companies, and she decided that she was going to walk from her workplace to the main station, Central Station in Sydney.

And she had gone to Google maps, written out the instructions on a little sticky note. And then we followed the instructions for the note. But halfway through, she veered off from the instructions and went down the wrong street. And I knew that she had gone down the wrong street because I suppose being a geographer, I’m usually very, very aware of where we are.

And I asked her three times what the name of the street was. She just thought it was the same street. So we eventually got to Central Station. I said to her, I’m like, you know you didn’t follow the instructions, right? You went down a completely different street. And she’s like, no, I have not. No. And she’s like, that’s why you kept asking me what the name of Crown Street was when she kept saying it was Elizabeth Street. I’m like, yes.

And this happened so often. The amount of time I spent holding my tongue while people got very, very lost and missed. And the way then as well, not only did they just find themselves to be very disobedient bodies, like they’re very, very disobedient. The landscapes themselves are also disobedient. They don’t obey what cartographic reason or this kind of way of thinking wants them to do. And this is just, I mean– [CHUCKLES]

Watts: For example. Give us an example of that.

Wilmott: So people had stories over and over again. So for instance, people would talk about the shape of the hills and the way in which the hills fill this kind of shape. But the street itself– so in Sydney and Hong Kong, there are a lot of very straight streets that go very sharply down hills. And I mean they’re very dangerous roads. But they were trying to enact this grid plan and this is what they decided to do.

And people would describe ways that moving that were counter to the cartographic plan. They’re like, no, we can’t go that way because yes, the street is too steep, or it’s raining and the street is really slippery, or it’s really dangerous. Also, people talked often about the way in which–

So storms make a big difference as well. So Ben, for instance, wanted to go to a Green Park so he could sit and talk. And he looked at the Google Map and he saw this little green patch. And he’s like, oh, let’s go to that park. And we got there and he’s so disappointed. He’s like, I thought it would be more like park and less like sporting fields. But it’s the middle of summer in Sydney and everything is brown. Nothing is green.

And I think when you see this kind of green patch on the map, you have this expectation that the landscape will look like this very ordered British park from whence this kind of mapping comes. And when you get to Australia, it is full of really dangerous bugs that want to bite you. And it’s plants that sting you. And the dirt is really hard. And the grass is really rough. And the sun is really hot. And the trees are straggly gum trees. And it’s all just very disappointing all the time. And the cartographic reason sets up this promise and the landscape’s like, [CLICKS] no.

And the final example I think this is my favorite example, is when I was walking with Cliff in Sydney. There had been a storm the night before. And we were walking along the shores of Botany Bay. And we could actually see where Cook landed when he first came there. And where they shot at the Aboriginal people. And we could see La Pérouse, where La Pérouse landed on the other side of the Bay.

So we’re walking across this pretty historic site. And there had been a storm the night before. And it was quite windy. And there were these big mansions, very American-style houses built right, right close up against the Bay. And there was this little digger that was basically running around trying to scoop up all of the sand that had been blown over the dune and onto the pathway in the front yard of these houses. And trying to scoop it back up and put it back on the beach.

But as it did it– and I don’t have very good footage of this because I had a little camera. And I wish I had but it was so windy, it was difficult. As the digger got the sand, it would then go back towards the beach but the wind would blow all the sand backwards even further into the people’s houses because the bay is really windy.

And so I think there’s always this kind of tension between these ordered spaces that the path is a path and not the beach. And when you look at the path on the map, it looks like the path and it’s not the beach. And someone’s property is also not the beach and not the path. And this kind of separation or this expectation of separation of landscape compared to what really happens in the world, which is messy, and mucky, and sandy, and brown, and disappointing. So I think for me, it was this constant hills, and koalas, and bugs, and heat just kept interfering with the cartographic imagination all the time.

Watts: Terrific. Thank you. Let me ask you one last question. We’re almost out of time here. But I do want to explore this one because this is some of your newer work. You’ve also been writing recently about what you and others call platform urbanism and its significance with respect to cities and city life of what you see as a shift from, I’m quoting you now, sort of traditional cartographic structures of the sort that we were talking about before, peer to peer exchange.

And particularly, you take a look at a couple of start up companies that are using blockchain mapping as potentially something that might provide in relationship to that centralization of data and information that you were invoking earlier with respect to big companies like Google, et cetera. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about those forms of technical innovation and the type of mapping that that potentially might entail as you see it.

Wilmott: [LAUGHS] For a couple of minutes. So I think for me, what is interesting is part of the critique and we talked a little bit about this when we discussed this sort of question of counter mapping is that cartographic data is really, really closely funneled into very few platforms.

So you’ve only got a certain number of different organizations, sometimes corporations, sometimes governments, sometimes collectives, I suppose, you could call OpenStreetMap. But there’s this limitation of who gets to control this cartographic data.

And I think at the heart of this question of our tools of representation aren’t good enough. They’re not democratic enough. They’re still based in these really imperial ways of thinking about the world and I would say rationalist in the extreme.

There’s this question of, well, what tools can we use. And I thought the blockchain mapping example is particularly interesting. So there’s been an emerging area of research about the possibility of using blockchain systems for managing country or Indigenous knowledge management. So there’s this possibility.

And I think the attraction of a blockchain system is that. It’s open so everyone can see what’s in it. No one can change anything inside it without everyone agreeing to it. And everyone still retains control over their part of it as well. So you’re not giving your data to Google who goes and does whatever. You have this agreement in place. There’s this contract exchange.

And a range of companies– and so I’ve been sort of following this debate around blockchain as a possible way of decentralizing ownership over knowledge around geography, et cetera, or country management. And these two companies have sort of come along and basically made an argument for a much more decentralized mode of mapping where rather than relying on the GPS satellites that are owned by various consortia, whether it’s the European Union or the US government, instead we can actually engage with each other to be able to verify our location using triangulation on the ground.

And so this relates, again, back to what I was saying about sensing, this rise of the sensing technology of these cartographic technologies that are still the same ways of thinking but are much more embedded in everyday practices. They’re much more continuous. They’re happening faster and all the time.

And so for me, I find these systems to be kind of interesting. I am concerned, however, the emphasis on blockchain as a mode of exchange, and that’s usually monetary or financial exchange, this idea of constant incentive in capitalism. But I think at the same time, it speaks to this tradition that has always been going on the sidelines around people trying to gain control over mapping infrastructure as well.

And so whether that’s some of the protests where people are destroying GPS satellites in California to people creating new– so there’s a system called like open positioning system, which an artist has made whereby you can actually use that to measure vibrations. And from that, you can find power plants and actually position yourself based upon the vibrations from industry.

Like ham radio is an interesting example of people trying to control radio waves. So there’s all of these examples of people not just using these infrastructures as ways of speaking back and just not using those tools but actually trying to get control of those infrastructures as something that is much more emancipatory and democratic.

And I think it’s an interesting example. I don’t think it’s a perfect example. I have big concerns over the economic emphasis of it. But when you think about the majority of countries in the world that don’t have access to GPS systems but have to rely on and pay for access to systems that are in largely the global North, if we think about the ways in which we might be able to democratize infrastructure, I think, for me, that’s something that’s kind of interesting.

And I think part of the critique or the part of the problem with something like platform urbanism is that we continue to see a centralization of the data infrastructure. Even though the data itself might be more democratic and more open, the people who are controlling it– I mean, Google Garage has now opened up a shop down in Manchester where they teach business owners how to use their Google Services.

And I think it’s, again, this continually centralization. And I think for me, as someone who’s much more interested in the digital as a way of thinking, as cartography as a way of thinking rather than– as of speaking, being, and doing, of acting, of all of this stuff together, I think, for me, blockchain, these two companies FOAM in New York and Hyperion in China/the UK provide an interesting example of maybe where we can go a little bit wrong as well.

Where innovation, it’s supposed to be about decentralization and democratization but ends up just being about capital. But also where there’s no reason why we couldn’t make our own blockchain system if we wanted to that was democratic, and free, and didn’t require economic incentives. So I always have hope.

Watts: That’s a wonderful note on which to end our discussion. Thank you so much. Let me reiterate for those of you who are listening that if you’re interested in these issues, Clancy’s book is out. It’s entitled Mobile Mapping, Space, Cartography, and the Digital. And also on our website, we’ll list some of her publications if you want to pursue any of those. And with any luck, Clancy, I may get to see you or we may get to see you on the Berkeley campus sometime very soon.

Wilmott: Oh, I hope so. I keep having dreams about chasing Kiwibots and trying to find one and pick it apart because I’m like this is– so I think that. And then kite mapping on the Memorial Green. So I’m really looking forward to finally being able to come over and meet everyone in person.

Watts: As indeed we are. Thank you so much for your time. A wonderful discussion. And I hope to see you– we hope to see you very, very soon. Thanks.

Wilmott: Thank you very much.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

Podcast

Matrix Podcast: Interview with Mariane Ferme

Published January 30, 2021

In this episode, Michael Watts talks with Mariane C. Ferme, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley and the author of Out of War: Violence, Trauma, and the Political Imagination in Sierra Leone and The Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and the Everyday in Sierra Leone.

Ferme is a sociocultural anthropologist whose current research focuses on the political imagination, violence and conflict, and access to justice in West Africa, particularly Sierra Leone. Her research encompasses gendered approaches to everyday practices and materiality in agrarian West African societies, and work on the political imagination in times of violence, particularly in relation to the 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone. Her most recent fieldwork in Sierra Leone—carried out in 2015-16—was an interdisciplinary research project on changing agrarian institutions and access to land in the country. Ferme’s latest book, Out of War: Violence, Trauma, and the Political Imagination in Sierra Leone, draws on her three decades of ethnographic engagements to examine the physical and psychological aftereffects of the harms of Sierra Leone’s civil war.

Related Materials

Podcast Transcript

Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley. Your host is Professor Michael Watts.

Michael Watts: Hello, and welcome to Matrix Podcast. This is Michael Watts, and my guest today is Professor Mariane Ferme, a very distinguished sociocultural anthropologist, a scholar of Africa. And so we’re excited to talk to her today about her new book and about her work more generally. Mariane was educated at Wellesley and the University of Milan, University of Chicago, has held various visiting appointments at Cambridge, Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, Leuven, and so on.

And for over three decades has been working in West Africa, Sierra Leone in particular, exploring a variety of hugely important issues around conflict and the trauma of conflict, humanitarianism and its legacies, various sorts of jurisprudence associated with victimhood and criminality in times of war.

She’s published two books. Her first book, The Underneath of Things– Violence, History, and Everyday in Sierra Leone, and more recently, her new book, Out of War– Violence, Trauma, and the Political Imagination in Sierra Leone. Mariane, welcome.

Mariane Ferme: Thank you.

Michael Watts: So let me start with a sort of general question. You’ve spent a large part of your professional life living, working in Sierra Leone. And perhaps most listeners might associate Sierra Leone with the long, decade long civil war in that country, in the 1990s in particular.

And that, as you point out in your books and in your work, was often seen as an exemplar of a certain type of post-cold war, sometimes referred to as new forms of war or new barbarism.

A famous article written referred to the coming anarchy. You’ve been quite critical of this. I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about how now with some distance, you reflect upon Sierra Leone as part of that larger landscape of conflict in post-cold war Africa.

Mariane Ferme: So the civil war in Sierra Leone lasted between 1991 and 2002. So it falls squarely within the period following the end, the official end, shall we say, to the cold war, with the fall of the Berlin wall, in which the large blocks of alliances that had been in place before started fragmenting.

And in particular, the availability of many cheap, small light weapons on the world weapon market in Africa, in particular mostly being sold by former East Bloc countries to raise capital, all of a sudden flooded the markets.

And that decade saw a really many different parts of the continent becoming embroiled in what’s been called low-intensity conflicts, mostly because they mostly used conventional weapons but were still often quite long-lasting and quite bloody.

That was a decade of the Rwandan genocide, and it was also the decade of the falling apart of the former Yugoslavia. So it wasn’t just Africa that was affected by these conflicts.

Sierra Leone is a small country, roughly the size of Illinois, just to give you a comparison. And so in many ways, kind of a small-scale theater in which to look at these larger forces in play.

One of the things that clearly happened from very early on, and it was quite obvious in the aftermath especially, was that this conflict needs to be understood in a regional setting.

So another publication that I worked on was the editing of a special issue of a Francophone Africanist Journal, which looked precisely at the regionalization of conflict in the ways in which Liberia, Sierra Leone at various points in time and certain locations, even Guinea, which by and large stayed out of the conflict, but other regional actors and all the way into Cote d’Ivoire where there was an exacerbation of north-south tensions and the breaking out of conflicts that eventually involved even Liberian and Sierra Leonean mercenaries who came out of those local conflicts took off.

So the regional aspect is important to understand some of the inflammatory, some of the precipitating events. The fact that the leader– one of the key warlords involved in the Liberian civil war next door, which started in ’89, so a couple of years before the actual conflict in Sierra Leone broke out, his connections with Libyan counter insurgency movement and Gaddafi at the time.

Burkina Faso at one point intervened with its own fighters. And eventually, the civil war kind of moved over the border into Sierra Leone, where very soon afterwards there was a military coup and it had been at that point under single party rule for some 25 years.

So there was a lot of pent up discontent, which with the addition of some good training and a lot of weapons, sort of brought about the expansion of this conflict.

Now, from the beginning, in my own work, I mean, I was in a region– I had been working in Sierra Leone for the better part of the previous decade. So to me, what was very remarkable when I returned to the country during the civil war was how local pre-existing conflicts got folded into this larger conflict.

So when I went back during the civil war to the chiefdom, rural chiefdom where I’d spent a good number of years living previously–

Watts: And which part of the country was that, Mariane?

Ferme: This was the southeast. So it wasn’t very far from the Liberian border. And already in 1990, when I was there working on a documentary film, on an ethnographic film, we started seeing a lot of relatives who had been living in Liberia, where the economy had been in better shape than in Sierra Leone, coming back to the country and talking about conflict and insecurity right over the border.

The border between Liberia and Sierra Leone, a good chunk of it separates Mende speaking people. So there’s people who speak the same language and belong to the same ethnicity, and then part of it is Kissi speakers.

And I was in a Mende speaking region where there had been a lot of informal cross-border mobility, even in the pre-war decades, particularly depending on the economic situation in each country.

So the fact that the Liberian economy was supported by the American dollar to a certain extent made trade in that direction advantageous. Sometimes things turned around, et cetera.

So already we’d seen informally streams of people. But when you went back into the area during the civil war, it was amazing how even after there had been a rebel incursions in the chiefdom where I was mostly based, how selective destruction was. You could visit a particular village and see every other house burnt out and shot up, and then others perfectly intact.

And if you map that on the massive political conflict that there had been around the 1986 elections, which were the first elections after Siaka Stevens, who had controlled the country since independence, gave up voluntarily his office there for the first national major presidential elections, that created a lot of conflict in this region, in this particular chiefdom.

I’ve written about the reasons for this, but the destruction was mapped perfectly on those pre-war tensions between the two opposing sides in those elections.

Watts: Can I ask you– you mentioned this destruction, this mapping that you’ve just described. At the time, of course, the conflict was cast in very pronounced terms and hence this term of the new types of wars or a new barbarism, which emphasized the child combatants, which emphasized the horrific violence.

Now, with some distance from those events, was that a type of– not a fiction, of course, not, but was that a type of exaggeration in some way, in your view, now in keeping with the ways in which the continent had been historically viewed or what?

Watts: There was a lot of, if you like, very inflammatory language around that, to say nothing of Hollywood films and so on, Blood Diamonds and what have you. How do you now reflect upon that aspect of the violence that you just referred to?

Ferme: The horrific violence– so I assume you refer to the mutilation campaigns–

Watts: Precisely, precisely.

Ferme:–that captured the imagination–

Watts: Precisely.

Ferme:–of the media and of the international communities. And as one colleague pointed out, at the time, it was only in an era in which we had been lulled into the perception that you could carry out precision warfare from a distance without casualties on your side.

For instance, exemplified by the Iraq war, with all this precision distance drone mediated or whatever hits that actually cause tremendous destruction and maiming on the ground, but not necessarily where it could be represented visually by outside media.

It’s only in that context that you can talk about a face-to-face combat and what mutilations and other kind of bloody forms of killing are happening as particularly horrendous, even among other things.

Because in terms of total casualties, there really is no comparison between the fatalities and casualties in some of those wars versus these kind of African wars, as they’re called, these new kinds of African conflicts.

So in a sense, it’s a continuation of earlier forms of warfare. But it is true that there were these quite explicit mutilation campaigns that were targeting aspects of the complaints of the Revolutionary United Front, who were the main so-called rebel force combating in this conflict. It was targeting their opposition from 1996, which was the first multi-party election held in the middle of the civil war.

The beginning of these mutilation campaigns can actually be linked to some of the canvassing slogans that were being spread by international donors and partners who were pressuring the country to actually transition out of the military coup that had happened in ’92 towards a multi-party election that might assuage the rebels and convince them to come to the negotiating tables.

So the most common slogan was one hand, one vote, which was also a reference to the widespread corruption that had characterized earlier elections in which the same people would register to vote under multiple identities in different locales and vote more than once, or so went the rumor.

The first mutilation campaign was actually an explicit response to that. And they started by cutting hands, to say, go back to the government and tell them that until all foreign actors are out of here– in particular, they were against the presence of the South African mercenary firm Executive Outcomes and of Nigerian-led regional peacekeeping forces of the Economic Community of West Africa and–

Watts: Yes, ECOWAS.

Ferme: –Monitoring Group, or ECOMOG. Until these people are out of the country, we will not accede to elections, which they had wanted, but not under those circumstances.

So after that, it kind of became a blueprint. And some fighters even said to scholars who interviewed them later in the conflict, this garnered international attention.

So whenever we feel that we needed to get people to come to the table and pay attention to our complaints, we knew that this was the only way to make people respond. So it became kind of a blueprint for later actions. But it wasn’t this kind of irrational explosion.

Watts: That’s right. That’s what I was suggesting. It was pictured in that way in the popular press, of course, back in the 1990s as this sort of irrational types of violence.

Ferme: And of course, I don’t want to make too much of that kind of rationalization because if that’s really the logic of the violence you’re perpetrating, you don’t chop arms off babies and children and so on who are too young to vote and too–

Watts: Of course.

Ferme: You’re clearly wanting to leave lasting marks on people’s bodies of this conflict, while still leaving them alive to tell the story in a sense.

Watts: Of course, of course. Let me just follow up on that before we get to–

Ferme: To the child soldiers.

Watts: –to your book. But also, I mean, you were there during this period in the 1990s. And I take it both working there and having friends there of long-standing and the post-war period does exact both an emotional toll on people like yourself and to say nothing of presumably all manner of ethical conundra that emerge.

Talking to people about trauma, yet alone, as you were saying, traveling admittedly in a landscape that was unevenly affected by the war, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about just your personal experiences with respect to those sorts of issues working in war-torn, deeply conflicted, and in this case, quite violent types of environments.

Ferme: Yeah. So you ask about the ethical questions. I mean, I think as someone who had already been engaged in research in the country before this conflict broke out, I felt that I had– I mean, I wanted to know what was going on and how this conflict was affecting the communities in which I had established relationships.

So there was never a question of mine not going back at all. And also, I could tell from reports I was hearing back from Sierra Leoneans I knew in different parts of the country how episodic and sometimes contained these episode was. And I felt that I did have enough on the ground knowledge to be able to navigate that situation.

Having said that, I did find myself during a return trip in 1993, a situation in which rebels who had heard that there was a white person in a fairly remote area in which most other, I mean, NGOs, missionaries even had been evacuated.

We faced a situation in which– I mean, I had to be hidden by villagers who fortunately– bush radio is very, very efficient. And we would hear about rebel incursions before they happened when they were three villages over and then move ahead of them, basically.

And they often announced their arrival because of the politics of fear and how that works. So it wasn’t that hard often to know that they were on their way.

So in one case where clearly word had gotten out that there was a white person and someone actually came looking for me and I had to hide on a farm with some people, I felt that I might put other people in danger.

So I decided not to come back until– or not to come back to that area until the conflict had moved to other parts of the country, or just stay in the capital city, which turned out wasn’t such a safe place because the worst single attack during the civil war happened in Freetown, the capital city, in January 1999.

So I think it’s important to give voice to what’s happening, even if this contradicts the narratives that sometimes humanitarian actors want to spread in order to maintain sympathy.

In situations of danger, I’m always guided by a phrase in one of Hannah Arendt’s essays in which she said the real casualty, the first casualty in war is truth, not opinion. That, in fact, the first thing people are going to try to do is undermine a kind of version of truth and transform it into opinion.

So when there were exaggerate– that meant that when there were reports of exaggerated violence that did not correspond to my knowledge of the facts, I would actually say this.

And when I would say this in the overestimation of casualties, particularly of amputees in the civil war, when I would say this, I would often be pilloried by people in academic audiences or activists who said, you’re just trying to diminish the gravity of the war. And I mean, I don’t think that’s the case.

Watts: Of course. Just returning briefly to child combatants, which was another dimension that received a lot of press in addition to the amputations, for example. And I know you’ve worked a lot on that.

I wonder if you could just say a few words about, again, something that wasn’t unique to Sierra Leone. Of course, it was as much the case in Angola and Mozambique in roughly earlier periods.

Ferme: And Uganda, the recruitment.

Watts: Of course.

Ferme: I mean, it’s important, again, to understand the context. And it’s only since the widespread availability of very light weapons that children could carry and handle did it become fairly easy to conceive of, of recruiting young combatants. All militaries have liked to recruit people young when they could shape them according to particular ideologies and disciplines.

But in Sierra Leone, like in other conflicts around the war of that decade, there was a sustained recruitment of young children, and it incited a whole range of debates about questions of agency consent intentionality.

Because often, these children were drugged and reduced to conditions where it was very hard for them to object to the atrocities that they were then forced to perpetrate. But in some cases, they weren’t.

And it’s interesting that in the debates that were unleashed in the international jurisprudence that ramped up to address war crimes in the decade, the people who actually wanted to find a middle ground between saying these are just unwilling innocent victims and saying, as we say in many states in this country now, that for certain kinds of crimes, we should treat even teenagers as adults–

Watts: As adults.

Ferme: –were African international actors like Graca Machel, First Lady of South Africa, Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United nations, who said, well, maybe after the age of 15 without sort of pinning down particular numbers and ages, we should treat on an individual case basis.

The agency and degree of responsibility of combatants who may have been recruited under conditions of duress, but then went on to prove in situations in which they could have pulled back or in which they could have– that they were actually active perpetrators of these kinds of atrocities.

But the way it was done was obviously designed to isolate these young people and make it impossible for them to go back to the communities that might offer them alternatives by forcing them to commit atrocities against family members in public in front of the rest of the community, by tattooing the RUF, the Revolutionary United Front initials on their bodies so that if they were captured, they’d be tortured and killed by the other factions or the army in the war and so on.

Watts: Absolutely, absolutely. Let me jump forward a little bit because I want to spend some time on your Out of War book. I mean, this is obviously– what we’ve been describing are the dynamics of the conflict itself, which dragged on for over a decade, which involved, among other things, large-scale peacekeeping forces present in the country. It involved a massive, as you point out, a humanitarian support and intervention.

In your book, you begin to look at the legacies of the post-war period, psychological among others. I wonder if you could talk– and particularly the types of traumas and how they endure over time.

And two of the major themes that you address in that book and your new book is, on the one hand, trauma and how it’s experienced and reproduced, and on the other hand, the different senses of time that carry those traumatic and other types of effects.

I wonder if you could just sort of walk us through those relationships a little bit and how you think it was important to understanding what type of mark that long war left in the country.

Ferme: Times of war are also times of great creativity. And I mean, disruption can be, as all crises, can also generate something, right? So one of the things that I was surprised not having lived through a conflict before then was the booming war economy.

So an economy that had been stagnant, devastated, slowed down by structural adjustments and program impoverishment during the decade leading up to the war, all of a sudden things were moving, roads were being improved because armies need to have decent roads to carry themselves.

Watts: And people can make money from that, presumably.

Ferme: And yes, absolutely. There was fuel everywhere. That was the constant mantra of fuel scarcity sort of hitting randomly, and so on. So there was that thing. And in some areas, people were actually better fed during the civil war and its immediate aftermath.

Then, for instance, in 2008, when I went back after the world financial crisis and I’d seen people so gaunt and really hungry from the sharp increase in the cost of transportation, a bad harvest, and so on. So the unevenness and the different ways in which war can change livelihoods in a particular place.

After the first post-conflict decade went by, shall we say, I felt that pretty much all the immediate traumas, the people who would wander around constantly talking about their wounding, their experiences, and so on, was pretty much addressed more or less.

But what struck me is the belatedness, which is a concept that I use quite a bit, and in fact, it’s the title of one of my book chapters, with which certain kinds of trauma can hit.

And in particular, I was struck by the loss of intergenerational transmission of farming knowledge, which was a kind of livelihood that I was especially interested in as a result of the fact that a whole generation of young children basically had grown up in refugee camps or in the peri-urban areas where they could have access to wartime food rations and kind of humanitarian aid, and the fatalities that this caused as late as this past decade, the teens since well after the end of the war.

So one of the cases that I look at is at a time of increasing environmental problems and especially long dry seasons, which I’ve been witnessing more and more in Sierra Leone in recent years, there were more and more bush fires which were lit to clear fields that were going out of control and causing serious injuries and fatalities even.

So there was one in the village where I was working that had happened just a few days before my return, in which a young man from the community had been killed because he’d come back to help his mother lay her rice farm for the year.

Having basically grown up in urban areas and in camps and had really made a fairly silly mistake in the lighting of this field of dry cut brush and ended up being surrounded by flames and not being able to get out of it. So that accidents of men who fell off palm trees because they just hadn’t acquired the skills.

Watts: Had lost their expertise.

Ferme: So the kind of belatedness of the way in which certain kinds of physical and even psychological traumas can hit was an aspect that I wanted to write about. And that often after the major humanitarian intervention and the major wartime scholarly intervention is often not visible, not seen as much–

Watts: Not visible, right?

Ferme: By the same token, to speak about temporality in a different vein, it was quite striking how events that happened during the first half of the civil war when there was relatively little international media attention and humanitarian intervention versus the second half of the war when basically the international community decided that it was going to–

Especially after the intervention of governments like the UK’s former colonial power, in which Tony Blair’s government decided they were going to really try and put an end to this conflict that was kept on reigniting after various peace attempts in 1996, ’99 and every time conflict started again.

So 1999-2000, when the British and the international community decided to step in there and deploy what at that time was the largest peacekeeping operation ever deployed anywhere on the grounds that if it doesn’t work in a small country like Sierra Leone, it won’t work anywhere. So we better make it work here.

At that point, when there was all this international scrutiny and media attention, a lot of events that had happened during the first half of the war that actually were critical to understanding what was unfolding then had already been forgotten.

So the intermittent ways in which events are remembered, forgotten, sometimes even discussed at the national level and in the local national media quite extensively, and then they completely disappear from the collective consciousness.

And one of the ways I track these events that had I not been there, I probably wouldn’t have known about during the early part of the conflict is through neologisms, is to names that were given to places and circulated in the popular discourse where a particular rebel attack had happened, where there had been casualties.

Or times of really intensely experienced hunger in particular places, and all the words, the proverbs and popular expressions that it generated to describe that time, how that kind of marked certain moments and places in the conflict.

And the fact that these neologisms had completely disappeared by the end of the war also meant that some of the memories associated with them had sort of become more emergent.

But every time I would bring these out– because had I not had my notes to say, but don’t you remember when everyone was talking about this particular expression? And they’d all say, oh, my gosh, you’re right. And I haven’t heard it in so long. I’d forgotten,

Watts: Right, right, right. One of the other things that you talk about in your book at the level of aftermath is that during the war itself, institutions of what are sometimes called customary rule or chieftainship, which are, of course, endemic across the continent, were themselves disrupted because people fled, because of displacements. And many of the chieftainship positions at the end of the war were not even occupied.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that consequence and what happened in the wake of the war in terms of the type of role that these hugely important institutions of local governance, if you like, have historically played in Sierra Leone and elsewhere.

Ferme: So yeah, one of my special interests over the years has been the institution of the chieftaincy or chiefship in Sierra Leone, and particularly the paramount chieftaincy.

The country is divided in about 148 chiefdoms that are grouped into districts and each chiefdom has a paramount chief and speaker, and then their subchiefs below them.

But the paramount chief is basically the main interlocutor of the national government, the main link between the national government and local politics. It’s not a democratic institution. This is basically royalty, right? Once you’re elected, it’s a very hybrid institution in interesting ways,

Watts: But competitive, though. But competitive?

Ferme: It’s competitively contested, and it starts with an election. Although, the candidates can only come from enumerated ruling houses that were institutionalized. A list was drawn up by the British colonial administration before– towards the end, actually, of British rule and left in place in independence in 1961.

And it’s this classic, hybrid, colonial thing in which post-colonial Sierra Leoneans run to these colonial documents to establish their own legitimacy in challenging, in running for the next chiefship.

So it is contested and there is an election, but only among limited individuals, a very small group of individuals. And then once you’re in place, it’s a lifelong institution, unless you really get basically replaced by the state having committed some sort of crime.

So it was a feeling of many institution, governments, and scholars, including myself at the end of the war, that the country should take advantage of the fact that over 40% of these positions were vacant for a number of reasons.

In some cases, chiefs were targeted by rebels, again, within the rubric of settling scores at a time in which there was local discontent against them. In other cases, they simply left the country or left their chiefdoms and never came back. And in other cases, it was just natural mortality during a 10-year period can take them away.

So there was a feeling that this was a good moment to replace them with more democratic and accountable institutions, like the district councils that had been in place until the 1970s, but had been very ineffectual in part because the paramount chiefs were so powerful that nothing the district councils needed to do could be done without the cooperation, and therefore the involvement of paramount chiefs.

Watts: But was the idea to abolish the notion of that paramountcy or was the idea to retool it or repurpose it in some way that would, quote, “make it more democratic?”

Ferme: So, I mean, many Sierra Leoneans were on both sides of that debate. But the British government, which had a lot of capital, of social and capital by the end of the civil war because it had really made the decisive intervention that put an end to the conflict and it had committed resources to this felt that under the rubric of chiefdom governance reform program, that it was best to actually reform and strengthen the institution, make it more accountable, give proper salaries to paramount chiefs to diminish the incentive for corrupt practices, which they had been engaged in and which made them very unpopular to raise revenue.

That really the best solution was to reform the institution. And that was because they felt that this was a possible way of finding a culturally acceptable alternative to the overcentralization of power and of economic means in the hands of the central government, which, in their view, was one of the key factors in having such a corrupt government as the Sierra Leonean government had been leading into the civil war.

So it was basically decentralization in a culturally acceptable way in their view. And they didn’t really, I think, think through very carefully the question of the lack of accountability of paramount chiefs.

So they did some things like helping– along with the international community and NGOs, and so on, helping the renaissance of district councils in which paramount chiefs were also represented. But they never actually addressed the structural limitations of district councils in their earlier iterations. So they turned out to be fairly weak.

And I guess the jury is still out now. The last time I was in Sierra Leone, they were still kind of hamstrung by the fact that they didn’t have robust budgets from the central government. So they still relied on paramount chiefs to raise taxes and revenues so they could implement any programs they wanted to implement.

Watts: But I take it these reforms were also happening simultaneously with the liberalization of the economy in the 2000. So did that class of individuals– those reforms and that existing class of chiefs, did they become, as your newer work on agricultural change in the country seems to be pointing toward, they became the sort of local brokers or they became the intermediaries for new forms of investment or new types of liberalization strategies that were being pursued in that period?

Ferme: Yes, so the idea was in these neoliberal reforms, there were all kinds of new agencies. And so there was this narrative of trying to streamline and facilitate foreign investment by bypassing central government agencies.

There was a robust presence still until my most recent trip in Sierra Leone, which was ending in 2016, still a robust legacy of legislation that human rights, lawyers, and members of NGOs that wanted to be vigilant about the exploitation of resources and post-conflict situations.

They had actually set up some fairly robust guidelines for carrying out environmental impact assessments and reports and all this. But the implementation of all of these regulations was very weak, and it was very hit or miss.

So I worked with a couple of NGOs, legal empowerment and legal rights NGOs who actually made it their business to monitor all the pipelines of contracts that were making their way.

Eventually, these things do have to be overseen by government agencies, ministry of agriculture, and so on before they can be finalized. They would monitor these contracts and these reports, environmental impact reports, and so on.

And in some cases, actually sued or got involved in a pre-lawsuit phase, shall we say, with some of these actors to ensure that local people weren’t being exploited, that the government wasn’t losing revenue over them, and so on. So it was largely in the hands of the NGO sector to have some kind of supervision and inform the government of these things.

The other thing that was happening from the ground up where I was, was there were all kinds of ways in which local authorities and farmers, farming communities could engage in foot-dragging practices that made it very difficult to actually implement contracts that were being agreed to in the abstract.

So these contracts existed on paper and gave certain foreign investors rights to exploit certain tracts of land. But you’d see nothing happening on the ground–

Watts: On the ground.

Ferme: –for years in some cases.

Watts: Exactly.

Ferme: So it was very much a situation in flux.

Watts: Let me ask you one last question, Mariane, and that comes up in also in your book. And that is that in many of these post-war sorts of situations or even post-genocidal situations, the question of what constitutes justice, redistributive or transitional justice, as it’s sometimes called.

The sorts of things that we saw in Rwanda post-genocide, trying to put divided communities back together, or Ditto in Colombia and the civil war, even truth commissions, as we saw in South Africa.

Wonder if you could just talk a little bit about the Sierra Leonean experience in that regard, trying to come to terms again with this legacy question of the terrible civil war.

Ferme: Yeah, I do believe that these conversations, which often happen in the abstract and based on universal principles, should always also be tailored to the individual circumstances of particular conflicts.

We have seen that, for instance, in this conflict, it had its own modalities of violence, it had its own modality– the other signal crime that was added to the international humanitarian jurisprudence based on war crimes committed in Sierra Leone and Yugoslavia and Rwanda to some extent.

But was the crime of forced marriage and sexual enslavement, which had been identified and prosecuted in Yugoslavia and Rwanda as well. But the first successful convictions happened in the special court for Sierra Leone. So there was a question of gender crimes and how you make amends for those as well.

In the Sierra Leonean case, the international community had an outcry because there was a sentiment in the country that in order to get peace, people were willing to consider amnesty.

And in fact, in the very first post-conflict arrangement, the Revolutionary United Front was granted ministries and cabinet positions, including paradoxically the control of the ministry of mines and precious resources.

So a war that was fueled by diamonds, after this conflict fueled by diamonds, you’re putting the Ministry for exploiting diamonds in the hands of the rebel leadership, basically.

And there was an outcry about this. But there was a very strong sense in Sierra Leone that until peace was achieved and the cessation of hostilities, they weren’t ready to consider anything. And basically, accountability was a later sort of secondary concern.

So I think that was something that needed to be paid attention to, and it was to some extent. There were amnesty provisions included in the first two peace accords.

But after Lomé failed in 1999, international actors actually insisted to put a timeline on amnesty. And if those accord failed, then all bets were off, which is essentially what happened, because after hostilities started again in 2000, then this mechanism could start up in which a special court for a crime was established, and so on. Otherwise, there would have been even greater amnesty and immunities for crimes.

Having said that, there was a sense in Sierra Leone, as in other places, that reparations had not really been commensurate with the harms suffered to the extent that there were any.

That it was very difficult to convey the notion that because the UN process wants to establish a blueprint for rule of law behavior, which includes the humanitarian treatment of the accused and of prisoners in decent prisons and so on.

I mean, the people in the street were commenting on the fact that these people in their air conditioned jails with three meals a day were actually better off than some of their victims and those kinds of perceptions.

But I think Sierra Leone was an important step in the advancement of international jurisprudence. And one thing that is remarkable is the extent to which legacy involvement of the special court has remained over time in the country.

Even though with the trial, the last trial of Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia, basically the whole court and its archives had moved its proceedings to the Hague,

Watts: The Hague.

Ferme: They left in place a small group of personnel and a budget for legacy projects, including the continued support of victims and witnesses. And I was actually– there and did some research on– and even during the Ebola crisis outbreak in 2014, ’16 when I was there, the first people–

This legacy office of the court reached out to all the surviving witnesses and victims that they had dealt with during the trials at the special court to make sure they had information about health to meet– in one case in which one contracted Ebola and eventually died, they made sure they got them to a treatment unit. They sent out their personnel.

So that was something that I was quite struck by and that is quite different from earlier involvements of the international community and these international crime tribunals.

Watts: Thank you, Mariane, for a fascinating discussion. This podcast will be posted on our website, matrix.berkeley.edu. There are other podcasts there too. So please check them out whenever you have a moment. Thank you.

Ferme: My pleasure.

Podcast

Matrix Podcast: Interview with Leigh Raiford

Published September 30, 2020

In this episode, Michael Watts interviews Leigh Raiford, Associate Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley and author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, finalist for the 2011 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize. In her book, Raiford argues that over the past one hundred years, activists in the black freedom struggle have used photographic imagery both to gain political recognition and to develop a different visual vocabulary about black lives. Offering readings of the use of photography in the anti-lynching movement, the civil rights movement, and the black power movement, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare focuses on key transformations in technology, society, and politics to understand the evolution of photography’s deployment in capturing white oppression, black resistance, and African American life.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.

Related Materials

Watch the interview on video.
PowerPoint with images discussed in the podcast.
Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle

Podcast Transcript

Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California Berkeley. Your host is Professor Michael Watts.

Michael Watts: Hello and welcome to Matrix Podcast. This is our opportunity to showcase some of the Social Science Research that’s being conducted on the Berkeley campus. And today, I’m delighted to have with us Professor Leigh Raiford. Leigh is a professor in the African-American Studies department. She’s been on campus since about 2004, has affiliate positions in the program in American Studies and Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

And she teaches, writes researches about questions of race, gender, social movement, political activism, and particularly with respect to visual culture or the image world, and especially photography, which we’ll be talking about, I hope today. Leigh completed her, I think, as I recall, her high school education in Manhattan and went off– am I right? And went off to Wes–

Leigh Raiford: Oh, we’re going right back. OK.

Watts: Yeah, way back. Then to Wesleyan and then to complete her PhD at Yale. Although, I also recall, Leigh, that in the ’90s, you spent some time at Berkeley.

Raiford: I did.

Watts: In the midst of your Yale graduate work.

Raiford: I did. I was an exchange– what do they call it? An exchange scholar. And I spent a semester in the Department of Ethnic Studies right before the African-American Studies department started. We’re still in Dwinelle and/or I guess in Newly and Barrows. And I took classes with Norma Alarcon, and Waldo Martin, and Angela Davis.

Watts: Fantastic, fantastic. And I also recall that you got into trouble with your involvement in the anti-prison movement, hip-hop, spoken word, that sort of thing-

Raiford: Where’d you hear that?

Watts: –when you were here.

Raiford: I did.

Watts: Anyway, it’s fantastic to have you, Leigh. I should probably say that Leigh’s, work, her first book, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare— it’s entitled– Photography in the African-American Freedom Struggle. We’ll be talking about today, a fantastic piece of work, looking at the relationship between the photographic archive and Black liberation movements, but also Leigh has written about a number of Black artists and has curated, served as a curator in various ways around African-American art. So it’s a real treat, Leigh, to see you even if it’s virtually and to have you along with us.

Raiford: Thank you so much, Michael.

Watts: So I want to start not explicitly on your work, but something that I think will lead into it. And that is that, of course, I don’t need to tell you of all people that Black Lives Matter has released this enormous political energy not only in this country, but globally. And that’s shown up in various fora in exposing institutional racism in universities, schools, corporations, but also in a world that you’re quite familiar with, namely, the museum world.

And in the last year, we’ve seen heads roll, let’s put it that way, a senior curators at Guggenheim, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art. And in fact, you were interviewed and quoted in the New York Times around this issue. I wonder if we could start there for a moment. And how do you see and what’s the significance of this intersection of, if you like, Black Lives Matter movements and the museum world?

Raiford: Sure, yeah. I mean, it’s such a powerful conjuncture thinking about how in June the protests around the murder of George Floyd and the kind of resurgence of the movement for Black Lives, as I think now, what we’re understanding, is the largest social movement of our current moment. Also– and I’m still trying to find exactly the right verb that we can understand also the movement around public art, around All Monuments Must Fall, around decolonizing museums that are all converging in this moment.

It’s not that sort of one leads to another per se, but that there is a kind of I think– really, what this moment tells us is that all of the kind of structures– structures and legacies, the afterlives of slavery and colonialism manifesting in both the coercive force of the police and the state and the consent building forms of art, museum, culture, and our public spaces are really up for– they’re on the chopping block, right? And so I think this is the ways in which we kind of– for a long time, I think people have really understood the art world and activist worlds as distinct, as fundamentally distinct.

And this kind of– I can’t tell you how many panels I get invited to be on arts and activism as if they are these two magical things that we don’t know how to put together. They’re fundamentally intertwined. And I think at least what Black Lives Matter in this past summer gave language to the museum world to articulate or to expose the racism, the structures of colonialism that have long been embedded in the museum that people have been fighting against for a long time, but that there was a language and an energy that enabled people to broader world to really hear it and really understand what was happening.

I mean, obviously, the museum– I like to say that the museum is the last bastion of deeply entrenched liberal white supremacy. That it’s kind of veneer of we’re just here to create conversations and hiding behind art to a certain extent, really masks the histories of theft, of appropriation, of exclusion that have buoyed the museum world for so long since the 1700s. So I think this is a really– it is really exciting. And it makes a lot of sense to me that the fight to defund the police is also a fight to decolonize museums.

Watts: Absolutely. And that presumably extends way beyond the purported power of the curators, whether they’re white, Black, whatever they may be, to, as you’re obviously invoking, questions of the historical legacies of colonial theft of artworks that can and should be returned, et cetera, and what types of art presumably ends up in the collections, the types of purchases that are made. So it’s a deep and structural and multifaceted set of questions that get thrown up.

Raiford: And I would add to that. I mean, I would add to the types of stories that art tells through the work of the curators, the type of work that gets collected, as you mentioned. But also the makeup of the boards, board of directors, and the kinds of institutional funding and power and the financial profile of these institutions as a kind of handmaiden of capitalism, I think is also–

I mean, thinking about what happened at The Whitney Biennial a couple of years ago in which a number of artists started to pull out of the Biennial in protest of Warren Kanders and Safariland, and how the money that he made building tear gas canisters being circulated, being utilized by police states from Ferguson to Palestine is underscoring the Whitney Museum. It’s bankrolling the Whitney Museum. So these kinds of institutional entanglements, I think, there’s– the art world can be is really sexy, and pretty, and glamorous, but it also really hides really a lot of nastiness.

Watts: Absolutely. Well, as someone who studies the oil and gas industry, you take a look at the relationship between the Tate in London and big oil and one could multiply that, those types of connections. That’s terrific. Let me segue from that into the world of photographs in particular. And before we get into your work and your analysis of photographs, can I just ask a personal question about how did you end up gravitating toward photographs? Did your father give you a Kodak camera when you were young, or what’s the trajectory by which these loomed so centrally in your work and in your life?

Raiford: I mean, I think fundamentally, I– well, a couple of things. I think one, I’m just a kid who watched a lot of TV. Growing up, I grew up– I was born in 1972 and spent a lot of time watching television in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, all of my life, basically. And so I’ve always thought a lot about images about visual culture broadly in popular cultural forms.

And one of the questions that actually drove my first book was being born when I was recognizing that I was born at the end of the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, but I also understood that all of my life choices or opportunities had been made possible by those movements. And so I was really trying to think about how did I come to– how did I actually come to understand or know the histories of those movements. And I realized it was through images.

It was through McDonald’s commercials of Martin Luther King giving the “I Have a Dream” speech for Black History Month. And so really, for me, photography opened up a way to just to think about how– I mean, just sort of go back to Stuart Hall and think about how we are produced, how I am produced through culture.

But I think also growing up in New York City, I spent a lot of time in museums. I used to go to run away to the museum a lot. And so I really– as much as I have a pretty trenchant critique of museums as institutions, I also have a deep love for museums as public spaces, as the place where we get to access art, beauty, and think differently. And so I actually did want to be an art historian. And I took AP Art History in high school.

I wanted to be in the museum world. But certainly, I would say like 20, 30 years ago, there really weren’t as many opportunities for young Black women to really find their way into the museum world. So if you weren’t just going to focus strictly on art, art outside of politics, art outside of a very specialized history, art historical framing. So I think a lot of also what I bring to– what brought me to photography and what I bring to photography is a kind of deep love of close looking, and being in the museum, and being kind of quiet with images that I didn’t get to explore otherwise.

Watts: Well, that’s a wonderful segue into what I thought we would do next, which is that before we get again into your book, I’d love to give you the opportunity to talk a little bit about how you approach photographs and that close looking and that close reading that you just invoked. And I thought the way to do that, particularly for our audience, might be to bring up a couple of images and about a photographer who I think we both love, Dawoud Bey, and just have you talk a little bit, and to give a bit of a flavor about how you approach a reading and interpretation of these images.

OK, so Dawoud Bey, I thought we would focus on Dawoud Bey because perhaps some of our listeners may have seen his show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before it was closed because of COVID. And I know he’s someone who you’ve written about extensively. And I thought I’d show a couple of images that you could talk about from his most recent work. He’s, I guess, it’s fair to say– correct me if I’m wrong– his work on Harlem and his Birmingham Project were deeply concerned with portraits among other things, but this work is quite different. And let me just show them a couple of these images from Night Becoming Tenderly, Black.

Raiford: Night Coming Tenderly, Black, yes.

Watts: So I’m just going to show a couple of images and talk to them in whatever way you wish.

Raiford: Sure, well, I mean– so one of my training is sort of as a historian, as a cultural historian so I feel the need to set a little context for Dawoud’s work, right? So Dawoud really began making photographs in the 1970s. His first show at the Studio Museum in Harlem was called Harlem USA. And it was a series of street portraits, black and white street portraits that he made of Harlem residents. And like you said, portraiture has really been the kind of dominant mode, dominant genre of his work.

And it’s a really– for him, it’s really about a kind of collaboration about really spending time, and time, long or short, but really, kind of paying attention and listening to his sitters. And certainly, for African-Americans who have largely historically been excluded from the genre of portraiture, Bey’s work, with their kind of real technical crispness and a very loving eye, really just made a space for Black portraiture. And I mean, one of the things that you can’t– in some of his images, the images are so crisp that you can see the reflection of Bey as a photographer in the sitter’s eyes, right?

Watts: Right.

Raiford: And also a lot of attention to children, et cetera. And so over the course of his career, he’s made a number of different portraits, street portraits, school portraits. And then in the last few years, his work has kind of shifted in a couple of ways. He returned to Harlem in the early 2010s and worked on a series to visualize what was happening in terms of gentrification in Harlem. And so, how do you photograph a place? How do you photograph a kind of economic process, right? And how do you make sense of a place in which Black and brown people are, who culturally made this space, are being pushed out?

And so those photographs called Harlem Redux start moving away from portraiture and more into a kind of landscape, street landscapes. And that starts to create a language, I think, a visual language for Bey to move to what we’re looking at now, Night Coming Tenderly, Black. This series in which Bey visits sites on potentially that were part of the Underground Railroad and tries to visualize the experience of the enslaved escaping what they might see, how they might kind of render– experience the darkness.

And I should also add that this series coming between Harlem Redux or around the time of Harlem Redux, also before Night Coming Tenderly, Black, is based Birmingham series, which you also mentioned, which returns to Birmingham, Alabama to photograph the kind of afterlives of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, right? So that series for Bey’s also deeply thinking about history how we access history and how history holds meaning and affects us in the present.

And so these works, the Night Coming Tenderly, Black, which takes its– the series takes its name from a Langston Hughes poem. “Night coming tenderly Black like me,” is not trying to engage a historical verisimilitude, right? It’s not saying like I’m– he’s not documenting these sites of the Underground Railroad. But again, to get at a kind of affective experience of escape, and also to really pushing the kind of, for me, what was fascinating and the boundaries of the– I think what I try and call– I call it the teleology of representational progress, right?

That the idea that what– the ideal form of representation is to be seen and to be fully legible to be kind of in the light as it were. And these works are dark. What’s amazing about looking at this on the screen is that it’s actually very legible. But when you see them in person, they’re very, very dark. And you kind of have to shift your body to be able to actually figure out what you’re looking at.

And there’s something also really– I think it’s a really powerful lesson in also the ways that we think about how knowledge is produced through visibility, what we actually– that we have to see in order to know. And I think these works really encourage us to think about what knowledge is produced from darkness and from not seeing, which is also a really powerful metaphor for how we think about Blackness as both a color and as a racial formation.

Watts: Right. I mean on a technical level, the dark tones that you refer to give these images a type of almost a haunted and a type of dreamlike– and actually also, again, you’re right. In the museum, they’re darker still, and they’re quite intimidating too, and in their own way, rather terrifying. So in that technical register, they’re also doing, I would guess, a lot of work in relationship to the reference to the Underground Railroad in Cleveland where he was working, et cetera, et cetera.

Raiford: Yeah, I mean I think for me, what was interesting writing about this, and I write about this image, which is Untitled #17 (Forest). And I think intimidating is one word. I think it was the level of uncertainty and what it means. And part of what I have always loved about photography or what I imagined I loved about photography was a kind of certainty. And even going back to– I always loved the Flemish paintings, the Flemish masters, the still lives of food, and cheese, and chalices.

And I realized actually what I loved about them is their photographic quality, like the way those images catch the light, and they reflect and refract it, and the kind of precision of the rendering, right? And I think what– so writing about this in May and June at the beginning of the protests, we’d been sheltered in place for so long, for months, and then the protests erupt.

And it forced me to think about what it means to trying to travel, trying to find a way towards what you hope will be something better, but not actually knowing what that path is, if it’s safe. Will we be caught and be turned back? But also trying to have a certain amount of faith in the need to move forward. And that is– Fred Moten sort of says, the slave doesn’t know that they’re as free so much as when they’re running, right? And so trying to take this image as a kind of invitation to, I guess in a sense, just to keep moving.

Watts: Exactly, exactly. Well, let me segue again from your observation about Bey’s efforts in his revisited Harlem work where you say he was trying to– how do you photograph a process, an economic process, and use that as an entree into your own book where you are there, in a sense, exploring the question of how do you understand through photographs, the history of Black liberation. An incomplete project moreover, you point out.

So I’m wondering, how did you approach that? In your book, which has a spectacular title, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, how did you approach this bringing together an archive, a historical archive, about Black liberation, Black struggle, Black playing, Black suffering? How did you bring that together, that archive, with the actual history in a way that in a sense isn’t cliched?

Because we’ll see in a second some photographs that we would all immediately recognize from the Civil Rights Movement or from the period of the Black Panthers or the anti-lynching movement, all of which, those three things are central in your book. So my first question would be, how did you think about the challenge of how to photograph Black struggles, and maybe, what the archive for such a project would be?

Raiford: Right, no. Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, I will say, one of the values or the benefits of being an interdisciplinary scholar is that sometimes I feel like I get to inhabit other fields. And so I really approached– and as a graduate student, I approached this project as an historian and trying to think both synchronically and diachronically, right?

And so thinking about why, on a really basic level, not taking for granted that social movement organizers would use photography. And sort of beginning with photography as a social movement choice rather than as a given kind of opened up a lot of– opened up a lot. And so to think then, especially in the anti-lynching era, why these absolutely charged really difficult images would be taken up by Ida B. Wells or W.E.B. Du Bois, and again, not take it for granted.

And so by approaching that, it became thinking about photography as a set of choices, and a set of opportunities, and also a set of challenges, and a visual terrain that has to be navigated. And then thinking also about the photograph– and of course, the photograph itself presents this kind of unique challenge because on one hand, we do look back, and they become documents of history, and they help construct this kind of, as you said, foregone conclusion that’s already twice told tale, right?

But thinking about really every photograph as a choice, every photograph as a kind of construction. Not that– icons are made. Iconic images are made. They’re not born, right? So what is it then that sort of attaches? What kinds of politics, what kinds of feelings, what kinds of histories can then connect to a particular photograph that then gives it a kind of power and movement?

So I spent a lot of time– well, there were a few things I had to work out. First of all, I had to work out the relationship of photography to history, which is complicated, right? And I think one of the questions you had asked me to think about was how social scientists use photographs. And so the first place, I was thinking, well, how do historians use photographs?

And largely, what I think is that historians to use photographs as illustrations to underscore a point that’s already made rather than thinking about how a photograph helps construct that point in the first place. It helps make that argument. And that becomes, I think, very clear the work of photography in making meaning rather than conveying meaning or making ideology becomes very clear when we’re thinking about race and we’re thinking about Blackness, Black people in particular.

So in my research, I did definitely start with the most iconic images, but then took those as a single history, as a single path that was chosen when every photograph suggests another path, right? It suggests another opportunity, another narrative possibly. So I spent time not just obviously with the most well-known photographs, but I spent time looking at contact sheets, looking in our archives to see what were the images– what on that contact sheet got chosen to be the poster or to be the circulated image, and what is just left of the archive, thinking about other people’s personal photo collections, trying to do–

I did a lot of interviews with social movement photographers with SNCC and Panther, Black Panther Party photographers, which was fascinating because when I was doing these interviews, no one had really asked them about their practice of photography. So they really would often talk about the movement’s goals and et cetera, but I was really interested in well, what kind of cameras did you use? And where did you develop? And what did it mean to– did you ever want to throw your camera down and get into the mix, right?

Actually, I’m going to– this photograph behind me is an image from a photographer named Matt Herron who just passed away a few months ago, a resident of San Rafael. But Matt was an independent photographer who worked with SNCC and trained a number of SNCC photographers, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee photographers, built the darkroom, and helped build the darkroom darkrooms in Atlanta and New Orleans.

So in our conversations, he talked about the different roles that photographers played in social movements, sort of as photojournalists, as movement photographers, as social documentarians. And that also was really important to recognize not just the photograph then as a series of choices, but the photographer themselves not as a kind of innocent eye witnessing history, but also kind of engage, sort of mediating their relationship to the world through the camera.

Watts: Can I just extend that a little bit by saying if the movements actually had their own, if you like, photographic departments, what about earlier characters? You mentioned Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Reverend King. As activists, what were their views of the photograph, of the photographic archive?

Raiford: I mean, so what’s exciting is that we now understand, know that Frederick Douglass was the most photographed man of the– person of the 19th century. He wrote extensively about photography. One of the– so the first time actually that I wrote about Dawoud Bey was at the invitation of Sarah Lewis who edited the Aperture Special Edition, Vision and Justice, which sort of takes Frederick Douglass’s notion that photography is necessary to a functioning democracy at its core.

So Frederick Douglass had a very deep, intimate relationship to photography, really believed in its power, really understood that representation is not just about our– is, at once, a political and a cultural concept. So photography was central for him. And the same for Ida B. Wells in that as a journalist– well, as a journalist, her pamphlets, her anti-lynching pamphlets, really drew on every form of data, of evidence that she could marshal, right? So charts, graphs, newspaper articles, interviews, and images, and photographs. Du Bois as well, the 1900 Paris Exposition, the display that he put together.

So the beautiful book that has come out recently on his data visualization charts on Negro life are absolutely stunning. Part of that, another part of that exhibition was a series of photographs that he commissioned from Black Georgia photographer named Thomas Askew of what he called Negro types. But they were also these kinds of– they were really portraits of African-Americans in Georgia at the turn of the century. So as a journalist, a social scientist, an abolitionist, all key figures in the long Black freedom struggle all understood the power of photography, both personally and professionally.

Watts: But in a way, if I hear you correctly, a part of that turns on almost a type of enlightenment view of the photograph. It’s a source of authority. It actually documents. This is a truth. Whereas you’ve already in our conversation on a number of times shown that you have to be very careful with that idea. And in your book, I think you have a lovely quote from John Berger who says something like a photograph is an interruption without a context or something of that sort.

Raiford: Right, right, right.

Watts: I love a quote by Diane Arbus. She says “a photograph is a secret about a secret.”

Raiford: It’s a secret about a secret.

Watts: But apropos, what your discussion of Reverend King and Du Bois, they were making use of a certain standing that the photograph had in this type of this is how it was is.

Raiford: Right. And I think that’s absolutely right that the sense of seeing is knowing. We need to be visible. We need to assert ourselves. The photograph is a kind of unmediated certain kind of evidence that it provides. But that said, I think they were also all aware that in a sense, Blackness was an interruption, right? Blackness– race is a way of seeing that actually– and Fanon describes this so powerfully in “The Fact of Blackness” chapter of Black Skin, White Masks in which he really describes the– it’s just like that his presence as a Black man, he can’t be– his meaning is already made before he kind of enters the space.

And so any idea that– anything that– there’s no presentness in the way that we understand him. So even Ida B. Wells used a photograph in part because– but she still had to provide context for it. Du Bois also, he used these photographs not just sort of to– I think what was really fascinating about it is that he called them Negro types and some of the photographs actually adhere to a kind of phenotypic profile frontal view set of images or genre, which is very scientific.

And we see this in the J.T. Zealy Agassiz daguerreotypes of Renty and Delia, et cetera, as a kind of like the visualization of racial science. But even as he used the frontal and side portrait, they’re also framed in a kind of oval frame. The sitters are highly very well dressed and very well quaffed, so necessarily having to disrupt the genres in which photographic meaning is made.

So I think there’s– so yes, there’s a kind of appeal to an enlightenment knowledge around or investment in truth and visuality while also recognizing its limitations. But I think also, the other thing I will say is that my work now has been I guess more interested turning– or not– it’s turning towards thinking about of quieter images that people make and thinking about also the longer practice of photography.

So how many photographs did studio portraits, did Ida B. Wells or Frederick Douglass sit for that they rejected because they were not the ones they liked? And we think about the pictures we take of ourselves and what we choose to show and what we don’t. And I think there’s something also about the camera as a way of knowing oneself, right? And that practice of imaging is a kind of mediation between oneself and the world that is, in some ways, a recognition that– is a very clear recognition that we may be striving towards a truth, but we also are– we actively have to craft it.

Watts: Let me bring up, if I can, Leigh, a couple of images that our audience will assuredly recognize. And I want to ask you a couple of questions about them, if I can. OK. So here are some that will be– I think most of these were published in Life. And they were, as you point out in your book, explicitly used by the movement in various types of ways. These are instantly recognizable. They’re iconic. They’re enormously powerful.

But you have a sentence in your book that I want to read to you. And I wonder if you could just walk us through it. You say, exactly, these are enormously powerful. They were explicitly deployed for political purposes, et cetera. But you say, images of pain and suffering can– be careful of them, you say, as I understand it, because they are part of the necessary performance of appealing to liberal humanism. I wondered if you could just unpack that for us and to flag what is it in spite of the fact that these images do do that authority documenting work and enormously powerful, what were you what were you trying to convey there?

Raiford: Yeah. And this is where I start. I start the book with these images because they are exactly the kinds of photographs that were entered into congressional record, that were published around the world, and that built a kind of moral authority for the Civil Rights movement And they are also an invitation to the sense of rescue, of Black folks needing to be rescued and saved from this violence, this kind of they’ve done nothing wrong, the performance of an innocent victim that deserves the protection of the state and its citizens.

And I think that has become a really– well, I shouldn’t say become because these images fit into a long line of the ways that African-American Civil Rights or abolition have been visualized, right? If we go back to, “am I not a slave and a brother,” the kneeling slave figure, or the photograph of Gordon, the whip scarred man, all we see is his back with the wounds of slavery literally etched on his back.

And so this appeal to a kind of white empathy and the need that we are a kind of– we are all human, this standard of humanity. And I think– and part of why I used– the book is called Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, it’s a Martin Luther King quote where he describes the importance of these images as imprisoning centuries of white terrorism against Black Southerners or African-Americans broadly in the camera’s luminous glare and it’s vigilant eye.

But it also means that these images become the kind of framework in which people can– Black folks are meant to protest or argue for rights, for the rights of citizenship, and partly, sort of going back to where this project came from, I think about being a young person participating in activist struggles in the ’90s. And so much of– we were taught, well, you want to link arms, sing “We Shall Overcome,” and this is going to be a nonviolent–

And it’s like, no, there are other modes of protest. And actually, so will you go– I think you have the next image. If you go to the next image, this is the one that actually, to me, really encapsulates the movement. It encapsulates the sense of Black Power and Black efficacy and also joy in the struggle and the kind of mitigating of the power of the police power. And it’s iconic, but it’s not the image that showed up on the cover of the New York Times.

Watts: Exactly.

Raiford: Not the image. And so I think that increasingly what’s been powerful about the Black Lives Matter, the images coming out of Black Lives Matter protests, is that we get more images like this one. Because I think fundamentally, what Black Lives Matter is not necessarily an appeal to say that Black people are human too, right? Which in many ways is what the previous image argued for, right? But it opens up the space where we actually have to question what the human is and how a human has been defined, or is overrepresented the category of the human is overrepresented by the white male figure.

Watts: Correct, yeah. I wonder if I could show you one last image, which is in a very different type of register. But in your book, I think figures in a very important way for you. And I wonder if you could give us a little reading of this particular image. This is Timothy O’Sullivan’s.

Raiford: I love this book– this image. It’s actually not in my book.

Watts: OK.

Raiford: I had been thinking about it in the conversation that I did with Hrag Vartanian in Hyperallergic around Juneteenth. And this is that– so this is the Timothy O’Sullivan who has photographed the Civil War and this fleeing African-Americans pause at Chalford. And I love this image because we think about photography as– well, I should say, we think of– oftentimes, we think of social movements as we look back on them as already written. We know who was on the right side of history.

But I think also what’s powerful about photographs as a record of coming out of a particular single moment is that they’re actually always asking questions of the future, right? We don’t know what’s next. We don’t know what comes. We know what’s behind, but we don’t know what’s coming next. We don’t know– there is no certainty.

As African-Americans were participating in what Du Bois called the “General Strike” where leaving, removing themselves from plantations, taking advantage of the decree that the enslaved would now become if they left their plantation, their enslavers, and found their way to Union armies. They were contraband. And so there could be something better.

But I love how– I appreciate– I shouldn’t say I love because it’s an awful image. But it is the tension between movement and stuckness of trying to make this very cumbersome wagon filled with people and personal items make it through this river stuck the blur in the image as well. That people reminds us just what photography actually– that photography, when we think of photography, it’s freezing a moment, and yet, we are constantly in movement, and we are not always captured by the image.

And I think– but what’s also cut out of this image in the way that this particular version of this image is cropped are also the Union soldiers standing on the sideline watching and doing nothing. So all of the ways in which we can think about what’s happening in the image, what’s happening, what we can’t see, what it captures, what it doesn’t, how it travels, like how it makes its way through history, how Walter Benjamin wrote how it flashes before us at different moments of crisis and danger and what it can tell us anew about our moment, these are all the things I love about photographs.

Watts: Absolutely. That’s fantastic. We are getting close to the end of our time, Leigh, but I feel sort of compelled to ask one last question, if you don’t mind. And that is, of course, we’re talking an extraordinary moment in history. We’re in a run up to an election. The importance of which is impossible to exaggerate. We’ve had a release, as you’ve said, of this fantastic political energy around Black Lives and other things, thrown into that, a pandemic, which has exposed the massive fractures in American capitalism and on and on.

From your vantage point with that attentiveness to visual culture, but deeply rooted in politics and political economy, what’s your reflection on this current moment, if you like? And what, again, from your vantage point, you would want to highlight? It could be about images and photography, et cetera, but you’ve talked a little bit about that with regard to the types of images that BLM and Black Lives Matter has been making and deploying, of course. But what’s your reflection on– it’s an enormous question. I realize it’s quite ridiculous.

Raiford: Well, it’s only– it’s hard because we are so still in it. We are so in the thick of it, right? And I think maybe that’s also what I hold on to, is reflect on that we are in the thick of this movement. Well, OK, I guess we’re– a couple of things I would say. One, going back to the Dawoud Bey. I think about that there is no turning back. There’s no going back to the plantation. There’s no going back to the before, right? The only way through is through.

So in the moments of difficulty where it’s just like, this is so– especially when the fires were raging, and it was just surrounded on three sides by smoke, right? There’s no going back to the practices, the structures, the ignorance, the willful and comforting ignorance and magical thinking that I think has– I don’t know– kept us going for longer than we needed to be going. And so I think– and in some ways, photography reminds me of that too, because we may make an image now, but it’s significance, it’s going to mean something– continue to mean different things as we progress and as we move forward.

And then I think the other thing that I also hold on to, reflect on in this moment, are all the ways that current movements are. And this is always the truth about movements, right? They don’t just spring up. They emerge from their part of a longer conversation. And they emerge from earlier formations. And so thinking about that our language about abolition, for example, is 20 years old at least, thinking about the work of critical resistance, and Angela Davis and Are Prisons Obsolete?

But more than that it is almost a 100 years old, going back to Du Bois in Black Reconstruction and the need for what he called an abolition democracy that we cannot have a true democracy without abolishing all of the vestiges and institutions of slavery. And then, of course, just further back than that from the beginning of slavery in the Western, in the Americas. So part of also what I hold on to is that the work is always– people are always doing work to visualize something more.

And that there can be– our colleague Eric Stanley said this in a meeting the other day, that sort of abundance that we can imagine that’s attached in a world of a vision of abolition and of possibility. And that’s also, I think, what I would like to hold on to. And so I guess, in the sense that we don’t have to hold on to the things that don’t serve us anymore. We don’t have to be doctrinaire or precious about them.

Watts: That’s terrific. And two wonderful things to hold on to as we pass through the next few weeks in the run up to November. Thank you so much. We could go on for hours. It’s been absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for generating some time and walking us through your views on photography and Black liberation. It’s been an absolute treat. Thank you so much.

Raiford: Thank you so much, Michael, really appreciate it. Appreciate you.

Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.

Podcast

Matrix Podcast: Interview with Desiree Fields

Published March 30, 2020

In this episode, Michael Watts talks with Desiree Fields, Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Fields’ research explores the financial technologies, market devices, and historical and geographic contingencies that make it possible to treat housing as a financial asset, and how this process is contested at the urban scale. At the heart of her work is an interest in how economic and transformations unevenly restructure urban space and social relations, with a particular concern for how urban struggles for justice coalesce around these changes. Within this broadly defined area, she examines two transformations as they relate to housing, a crucial vector of urban inequality and terrain of grassroots political contestation. First, the shift to a finance-oriented political economy; second, the growing global reach and power of digital platforms.

Related Materials

- Platform methods: studying platform urbanism outside the black box, D Fields, D Bissell, R Macrorie, Urban Geography, 1-7
- Automated landlord: Digital technologies and post-crisis financial accumulation, D Fields, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 0308518X19846514
- Constructing a new asset class: Property-led financial accumulation after the crisis, D Fields, Economic Geography 94 (2), 118-140

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Podcast Transcript

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[MUSIC PLAYING]

Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California Berkeley. Your host is Professor Michael Watts.

Michael Watts: Hello. This is Matrix Podcast. Our interview today is with Professor Desiree Fields, assistant professor of geography on the Berkeley campus and also a core faculty member in the global metropolitan studies program.

Desiree is a relatively recent arrival here. She happens to be a Bay Area native. So she’s coming home in that regard. But prior to arriving here, she taught for a number of years at the University of Sheffield in the UK.

Her focus in research terms is primarily on the housing sector and particularly changes in the housing sector that have occurred since the financial crisis of 2008. And she’s especially concerned, and that’s what she’ll be talking about today, with the sorts of changes, technological changes related to, among other things, social media, cloud computing, mobile computing, tech boom 2.0 as it sometimes popularly referred to, how that has been transforming the structure and character of the housing market and actors in the housing market. So Desiree, welcome and thank you so much for coming along and talking to us today.

Desiree Fields: Hi, Michael. Thanks for inviting me.

Michael Watts: Good. So let me begin with a sort of general question. Your training and your formation and most of your professional experience has been as a geographer. So let me start with this question. How do you as a geographer think about housing and why for you it’s so central to understanding, for example, contemporary American capitalism?

Desiree Fields: Sure. Yeah. So housing is a really interesting thing to look at as a geographer because it’s both fundamental to the urban landscape and how we make and remake cities, but particularly in places like America and other highly advanced economies, it’s also really central to economic growth and reproduction.

And so that’s really how I think about housing both as something that is actually increasingly important in our economy and increasingly sort of structured by financial interests and the way that those financial interests are affecting urban housing markets.

So I think about how do financial actors seek to use housing as a means of making profits from cities and from housing markets and how are those efforts by financial actors to extract wealth from housing fundamentally changing our cities.

Michael Watts: So is it fair to say that in a way there’s been– there’s been a lot of talk, of course, about the dominance of finance or finance capital in contemporary America or the transatlantic economies. Do you see much of your work then in housing as a type of example of this financialization at work? And these actors that we’ll talk about in just a second, investment banks or whatever they may be. Is this for you not exclusively but a type of financialization story?

Desiree Fields: Yeah, certainly. I mean, my work is about financialization, but I think one thing that distinguishes my work perhaps from– look, I mean, there’s a lot of work on financialization and housing financialization now in geography, urban studies, and lots of other fields.

My particular focus on financialization of housing has always really sought to look not only at that process of treating housing as a financial asset or attempting to treat housing as a financial asset but to also look at how does that change the lived experience of housing and home, how does that create inequalities that then become the site of urban struggles.

So yes, I’m interested in the economic parts of this process but just as much on the politics and power relations and lived experience of this process.

Michael Watts: Let me ask you, why did you gravitate toward housing as a graduate student really? I guess your PhD was awarded after the 2008 financial crisis. Was it triggered by that and changes that you saw when you were in New York, let’s say? Or were there other motives that drew you to housing as being something that was so central to understanding, for example, contemporary inequality?

Desiree Fields: Sure. I mean, so I came into graduate school and into environmental psychology with a background in psychology and social work. And I had been working in San Francisco as a counselor in residential settings and working with a primarily homeless population.

And my motivation for going to graduate school was my frustration with the system that I was working in and how I perceived it as almost necessitating that the people I was working with be in crisis in order to be housed.

And so I started to see that the system was reproducing a cycle of crisis in people’s lives that, of course, was not helpful for their mental health. So I wanted to pursue a PhD in environmental psychology to better understand that process and to intervene in it.

And then of course, in the middle of my graduate training, 2008 happened, and I was working closely with my PhD supervisor on a research project about experiences of foreclosure in families in different cities across the country.

And so I think that’s where the kernel of my interest in financialization of housing really lies. And then I just think– I think getting your PhD at such a pivotal time in our history, it just–

Michael Watts: Right. Exactly

Desiree Fields: Yeah. It was inescapable to focus on housing.

Michael Watts: Well, let me just take up on this issue of your Bay Area origins and working in the Bay Area. I mean, obviously, there’s probably no more central and contentious an issue right now in the greater Bay Area than housing costs, than the homeless question, than gentrification and so on.

And sometimes those things are seen to be in a way if not peculiar to San Francisco, they’re in part, of course, driven by a lot of wealth in Silicon Valley and so on. But is your view that these sorts of issues are peculiar to the likes of San Francisco, or New York, or Los Angeles? Or do we see these showing up in very different types of urban contexts in the Midwest, in Florida, or other parts in the transatlantic economies?

Desiree Fields: I mean, certainly there are particular variations that we associate with San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and these kind of major cities. But in the North Atlantic, we live in late capitalism. And in that system, housing is a crucial part of the economy.

And in that sense, housing financialization, homelessness, gentrification, rising rents, these are problems that we see across the United States in rural contexts, in small cities, in major cities. We see the presence of institutional investors in suburban housing markets, urban housing markets, and in between.

So it’s a variegated problem as geographers would say. So this is a problem that has geographical variation, sociospatial difference, but nonetheless, it’s a pretty generalized process I would say.

Michael Watts: Good. Let me start by moving into your research by focusing specifically on the financial crisis of 2008. Why, in your view, is this such a foundational moment in understanding the changes that you’ve documented, which we’ll get to in just a second, within the broader real estates sector?

Desiree Fields: Sure. So leading up to 2008, of course, there were decades of financial innovation as we might call it. So a proliferation of different kinds of lending products that really transformed the notion of the 30 year fixed rate amortizing mortgage.

We began to see different mortgage rates, different mortgage products, interest only mortgages, et cetera, et cetera. So we saw this kind of real–

Michael Watts: Proliferation of instruments as it were.

Desiree Fields: Of different instruments and different ways of then treating those debts as the raw material of financial products. So mortgage backed securities and all of those other– all those other things.

So the dissolution of all of that in the 2008 crisis, all of that was a turning point in itself. All of those decades of innovation, I think, really changed how people think about housing, so just at a personal level, this idea of being able to take out a loan against your house in order to go on a vacation or pay for your kid’s education or whatever.

So the mortgage as a means of supporting personal consumption, that was a difference. The idea of the mortgage as the ingredient in a financial asset that was a difference. And then so when all of that fell apart in 2008, it became as crisis often is in capitalism an opportunity for different kinds of actors to capitalize on all of this dispossession and loss.

Michael Watts: And these were as it were traditional financial actors, meaning investment banks? Who were the cast of characters who when that massive foreclosure happened in Stockton here in California or in Florida? What were the actors that were piling in to this sector that was literally, as you said, being ravaged?

Desiree Fields: Sure. So what we began to see in the aftermath of 2008 was really the increased involvement in the housing market of actors like private equity funds, who were well known in terms of taking over large businesses like retail businesses and all kinds of other business settings.

So private equity players are known for taking over what they would call distressed assets or distressed businesses and attempting to turn them around. So we began to see the entrance of these private equity players coming into the housing market. So these very large scale investors with a lot of capital.

And this was pretty new. I mean, there’s a history in apartment buildings, particularly in New York and some other major cities, there’s a history of this kind of institutional investing in multifamily housing, not so much by private equity firms but–

Michael Watts: But these were acquisitions of single family rentals that were, quote, “distressed assets”, end quote. So this was in a sense a consolidation and a massive acquisition of these sorts of properties. Is that correct?

Desiree Fields: Right. Yeah. I mean, essentially, the foreclosure crisis created an opportunity ostensibly for all kinds of investors to buy up housing that had been devalued. But what we saw was that the ones who really had access to large pools of capital were private equity investors largely, who were able to come in and buy properties from banks often one by one, so on the courthouse steps as it were every month when foreclosed properties were being auctioned off.

And really, assemble portfolios consisting of thousands and tens of thousands of single family homes that they then rented out. So there was this shift happening from home ownership to just real huge increase in rental demand as people, both homeowners and tenants, lost homes in the foreclosure crisis.

Michael Watts: And these properties that were so acquired, were they distributed nationally or would a private equity firm, for example, be specializing in southern Florida and southern California, were they national in that sense in these large scale holdings that they possessed?

Desiree Fields: So the geography has shifted a bit over time but there’s definitely a distinctive sunbelt geography to this phenomenon. And so we see parts of California, largely southern California a bit, northern California markets like Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tampa, heavy presence in Atlanta.

So there’s this real west, southwest, and southeast metro areas that really saw private equity kind of descend on these places. And it kind of started in the west and then moved east.

Michael Watts: But it’s not exclusively private equity firms that are the sole actors in this consolidation of single family rentals. Or are they the major player would you say?

Desiree Fields: There’s been a bit of a shift. So particularly in a place like Oakland, you saw a lot of smaller localish private equity firms but there’s been over– that was kind of in the immediate right after, during, and right after the crisis. And then you saw larger firms like Blackstone or Colony Capital coming in.

And so what we’ve seen over the past almost a decade now is this kind of the entrance of smaller players, some private equity backed, some just kind of savvy local investors. And you’ve seen this kind of consolidation happening.

So the smaller players come, the larger players then descend. You see sometimes they buy up the inventory of the smaller actors. You then see some of the larger actors themselves start to consolidate and merge with one another.

And then you have these private equity players like Blackstone, their single family rental company is called Invitation Homes. Invitation Homes is now a real estate investment trust. So there’s also a shift in the corporate structure of these companies.

Michael Watts: Now, is this a peculiarly American phenomenon? Or do we see this in Canada? Do we see this in the UK or versions of it?

Desiree Fields: We see it all over the place. I mean, particularly if you look at other countries that were really hit hard by the crisis in terms of the impact of the 2008 crisis on their housing markets. Ireland, Spain, these places you have seen the entrance of many of the same players, particularly Blackstone, acquiring distressed housing, sometimes distressed public housing, and renting it out.

You’ve also seen in those countries the rollout of legislation by the state that really supports this strategy by allowing real estate investment trusts. You also have seen a heavy financialisation of rental housing in Canada, which was not hit as hard by the crisis but nonetheless is subject to this trend.

Less so in the UK because their rental market is still very, very fragmented.

Michael Watts: Quite. Quite. Quite. Quite. Now, let’s take Blackstone. So you have now thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of properties, across a national space. How are they managed? This seems to be a central part of your story and the role of technologies of various sorts in facilitating that. So walk us through that story.

Desiree Fields: Sure. I mean, so this is so interesting to me because I grew up in a single family home in Concord. And a lot of us grew up in single family homes. So what is tricky to think about doing is managing a portfolio of 100,000 of these properties, which unlike apartment buildings, are all sitting in different places.

So all of Blackstone’s properties are not on the same block or even in the same neighborhood in any one city that they’re operating in. So you have a scattered set of assets that were built at different times, non standardly constructed, and that is a real challenge in terms of operations and management.

And so I think while the foreclosure crisis and the price dislocation that that created presented an opportunity for these actors, it was not sufficient for them. I think what we really see is the intersection of that price dislocation with this crazy boom in technology that we’ve seen essentially happening over the same time scale.

And that is what has enabled investors like Blackstone to manage such a huge portfolio of properties.

Michael Watts: Let’s start there because you in your work, you flag a number of innovations or a number of forces that you think are central for anyone to understand and what you’ve just described. And maybe before we get into the technologies, let me just ask you about those things that you think are so important.

One is you refer to logistics. So why is logistics– perhaps just walk us through what you mean by that term. And why an understanding of something called logistics is an integral part of the story that you’ve just outlined?

Desiree Fields: Sure. So we often think of logistics in terms of ways of trying to move things efficiently from one place to another. So if we think about cargo ships and the ways in which products that are produced in China are moved on shipping containers on ships and shipping containers and then how all of those goods get to different points throughout the United States.

So logistics is this kind of scientific or technical approach to the movement of stuff.

Michael Watts: So this could be a type of classical global supply chain when we talk about the iPhone and its various components being outsourced and moved around, something of that sort.

Desiree Fields: Right. And so I try to take this idea of logistics and use it to think about how do we move capital basically and how do we organize rental homes in such a way that rent checks can be moved from tenants’ bank accounts into global financial markets via financial products.

And so I’m thinking about this notion of the supply chain in terms of the supply chain of financial products. So rent checks as the thing that needs to be kind of moved and distributed through an extended supply chain of different kinds of actors.

Michael Watts: Got it. Got it. Now, a second force that you identify or a set of innovations you refer to here some work of our colleague actually, Neil Fligstein on campus here at Berkeley, the vertical integration of the firm. Now why is that an important part of your story too to understand the real estate innovations?

Desiree Fields: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting if you look at a lot of work about the economy over the past 50 or 60 years, there’s a lot of talk about vertical disintegration and the shift from these huge producers and large factories controlling everything within the factory to the creation of these kinds of flexible lien, et cetera.

Michael Watts: Decentralized networks of production.

Desiree Fields: Forms of production. But I drew on Neil’s work because he was looking at the production of subprime loans and found that the production of subprime loans in the lead up to the crisis was engineered– some of the most important actors in that space were heavily vertically integrated.

And so these firms were responsible for everything from knocking on doors and originating loans in neighborhoods all the way up to securitization and selling those products on financial markets. And what I observed with actors like Blackstone is exactly the same kinds of behavior.

So keeping all of those activities internal to the company all the way from acquisition of homes to the rehabilitation of those homes, the operation and management of those properties, and the securitization of the rent into a financial asset.

Michael Watts: Absolutely. Since you’re talking about the firms themselves, let me ask you a related question, namely, how does one study these things? I mean, typically studying large corporations is a difficult issue.

They don’t disclose very much. Their records may not even be in the public domain. What was your approach to trying to understand that vertical integration that you just described from the knocking on the door up to the instruments that were securitized?

Desiree Fields: Sure. So I do a lot of what we call it in the UK desk research, which consists largely of following a lot of media and journalistic accounts of this process. I think one of the things that was really interesting about this phenomenon, this kind of creation of the rent backed security is that it is and was a totally new financial asset class.

And because of that, there was a lot of interest in the process from investors, by credit rating agencies, by people in capital markets. There was a lot of speculation about whether this business model could exist, whether investors like Blackstone were trying to quickly buy and flip properties or whether they were in it for the long haul.

And because of that, there was a lot of material to work with. So I did a lot of this kind of desk research. I do conference ethnography, where I go to investment forums and do participant observation at conferences and use that as a way of networking with actors in this space and interviewing them.

Michael Watts: So we’ve got the logistics. We’ve got the vertical integration. Let’s turn to the technologies themselves. Why don’t you just walk us through then when you’ve got this organizational supply chain challenge in a sense of multiple properties dispersed over space, different housing stock qualities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, how does technology, what you call platform capitalism– I’ll come back to that term, I’d like you to explain that. But what are the sorts of technologies that are in play at this point?

Desiree Fields: Sure. So we can think about it starting from the point of acquisition. So if you’re trying to scale up a portfolio that you need to have 1,000 properties in a given city, for example, or a metro area, how do you acquire those properties before all the other investors who are interested in the same set of properties get in there and prices go up?

And so what we began to see was the development of acquisition algorithms or acquisition engines that basically take all kinds of public and proprietary and private data about housing stock and neighborhoods, employment growth, and transportation, the age of the housing stock, the quality of the neighborhood, proximity to schools, all of these kinds of data points, throw them into an algorithm and use that to identify geographies that have concentrations of properties that meet those criteria.

Michael Watts: I see.

Desiree Fields: So we saw companies using these kinds of algorithms to essentially delineate geographical areas where they could acquire properties and to designate what a maximum bid for a particular property in that space might be.

And so they were able to, even though they were largely buying properties one by one and not in bulk, they were able to use that to very efficiently scan what was available and then drill down into, OK, what are the properties that meet our investment criteria and how much are we going to pay.

And so that kind of is like an industrial strategy–

Michael Watts: Acquisition strategy almost.

Desiree Fields: Right. So then once you have– once you’ve acquired the properties, it’s a question of, OK, well, how do we manage all of this stuff? Certainly, the landlord is not going to be going around to properties one by one and engaging with tenants.

So we see things, all of these companies have tenant portals where you can pay your rent via this portal rather than writing out a rent check and sending it into the management office, where you can submit a maintenance request if something is wrong with your home.

And as I learned in attending these conferences and investment forums, the Holy Grail of this is it sounds so simple now but it’s just having tenants upload a picture of whatever is happening. So that they can kind of diagnose the problem rather than having a workman or a contractor come out twice, once to diagnose and again to fix the problem.

So you have that kind of management at a distance enabled by portals for payment and maintenance. And then there’s this question of turnover. So we see actors deciding, OK, well, I need to add 20 properties in this metro area, or actually, we’re not going to be active in Las Vegas anymore, so we want to drop all of these properties in this market.

And when you have tenants in properties and you need to add or cull your portfolio, then it becomes a real problem of, well, so are you going to get the tenants out, put the property on the market vacant? Wait for someone else to buy it, then the person who buys it or the company who buys it has to get in there, do rehab, and get a lease signed.

So meanwhile, you’re just leaving rent on the table. And so what we have seen is the emergence of platforms that are designed to basically enable the buying and selling of single family rental properties without getting the tenants out. So you have a platform like Roofstock, which is designed specifically for this purpose.

Michael Watts: So let me ask then about the renters themselves and the ways in which these types of technologies and particularly of big data of various sorts– you yourself talk about an interesting legal case from last year in which Facebook was implicated in exactly providing this sort of private data about actual or potential renters. Where does that enter into the tech story that you’ve just walked us through?

Desiree Fields: Sure. So I mean, what is especially important to consider and just understand when you’re looking at the ways in which technology is reconfiguring housing markets is that, of course, our housing markets are already fundamentally unequal and heavily segregated by processes of discrimination, both individual and structural.

And so any kind of technology that’s operating in the housing market is, I would say, likely to perpetuate these same processes. And so this case that HUD brought against Facebook is really interesting because they allege that Facebook violated the Fair Housing Act via the ways in which housing ads and mortgage ads on Facebook Marketplace were made available to different Facebook users.

And so they contend that this happened in two ways. The first way we might think of is like uploading existing biases into the system. So Facebook Marketplace, the platform that advertisers were interacting with to put these ads on Facebook Marketplace essentially allowed people taking out ads to pick and choose which kinds of Facebook users they wanted to see the ad.

And there was even a tool where they could draw a red line around areas that they did or did not want people located in those areas to see the ads, which just the idea of a tool that allows them to draw red lines around specific areas obviously harks back to–

Michael Watts: Redlining and in real estate more generally.

Desiree Fields: Exactly. And the reason that Facebook was able to make different categories of users available for advertisers to pick and choose who will and won’t see the ads is because of our activities on Facebook essentially creating all of this data that Facebook can use to classify us.

So based on my activities on Facebook, they probably know, for example, that I’m an academic, that I’m interested in housing, that I’m a parent, that I live in the Bay Area. And so all of those things might kind of get condensed to put me into some kind of box that says, OK, here’s a middle class white woman living in the Bay Area who’s interested in stuff for her kid.

And so Facebook uses that data to present categories to advertisers.

Michael Watts: So this is also classifying people and families in a sense. You refer to this. Again, one of our colleagues, Professor Marion Fourcade has talked a great deal about this. You cite her use of this notion of an information dragnet, which is in the business of exactly that type of classification.

Desiree Fields: Exactly. And so Facebook Marketplace more or less allowed advertisers to upload their existing biases by picking and choosing who will and will not see these ads. But the lawsuit that HUD brought goes further to say that the platform itself generated its own kind of discrimination that was a violation of the Fair Housing Act because regardless of whether advertisers wanted to, say, cast a wide net and have lots of different kinds of groups see the ads, the platform would choose which categories of people did and not see the ads on the basis of who they deemed most likely to interact with that ad.

So who’s most likely to click on the ad? And so this is a really interesting case where it’s like, OK, yes, platforms allow us to transmit our biases online. But platforms themselves by virtue of those kinds of dynamics of classification and the analysis of data that says, predicting who will and will not interact with certain kinds of content, that platforms themselves generate their own kind of discriminatory behavior.

Michael Watts: That’s fascinating. I mean, this points to, I guess, a larger question about the degree to which these technological innovations within this sector are now demanding new sorts of regulatory interventions of various sorts or to what degree are these innovations pushing into frontier areas that effectively are not regulated.

Or we could anticipate exactly these types of HUD Facebook issues becoming central to transparency and disclosure within this sector.

Desiree Fields: I mean, even as HUD is bringing this suit against Facebook around violations of the Fair Housing Act, HUD is also increasingly reluctant to pursue other modes of algorithmic discrimination in housing.

And so it’s not really clear how HUD as a regulatory agency charged with upholding and strengthening fair housing, it’s not really clear whether and how HUD is an actor is going to intervene effectively in this space.

But we see other kinds of pushes for regulation around these kinds of technological interventions happening. So one case that a lot of people might have heard about is the use of facial recognition systems to access housing.

So there’s a pretty well known case now in New York of a property management company that wanted to use a facial recognition system for tenants to– this would be the primary way that tenants would be able to get into and out of the apartment complex.

They had properties in Central Brooklyn and in the Bronx, a primarily Black resident population. And the tenants said, we do not consent to this kind of surveillance. We already feel heavily surveilled by virtue of the cameras and the electronic key fobs that you’re requiring us to use.

And we feel that this is a kind of punitive carceral intervention that is really designed to criminalize us as tenants. And you see companies advertising this kind of biometric access system as a way for property owners to more or less catch up tenants who might be violating the terms of their lease.

And so this is especially poignant in the context of gentrification and the ways in which landlords might be able to use this kind of technology to evict tenants and raise rents. So those tenants in New York fought back. The city is now really pushing to restrict the use of facial recognition systems at all.

And you see this wave of legislation by cities around the country outlawing the use of facial recognition on the basis that it is not only inaccurate but discriminatory and just difficult to govern.

Michael Watts: I mean, obviously, these types of push backs in and around what is effectively forms of surveillance is one area that’s going to be clearly an important policy arena going forward. I’m wondering whether these types of platforms that you’re describing, precisely because you’ve written a lot and have been involved in various types of social justice work around evictions, around rental properties, et cetera, et cetera, are these platforms also being used by advocacy organizations?

Or are there in a sense technological counterweights to exactly this type of process that you’ve been describing, which is in a way is if I understand you correctly is sort of facilitating the deeper structural forms of segregation, exclusion, eviction that have always inhabited the housing sector?

Desiree Fields: Yeah. I mean, I think what we know about technology is that it’s a tool. And the technology exists in a social context and a political context. And all of the kinds of interventions that we’ve just been discussing are really uses of technology within a market context, within a capitalist context, and being used more or less to further capital accumulation.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be used that way. And so we see, of course, really sophisticated and exciting uses of technology by activists and advocates that are trying to push back on that process in various ways.

So of course, there’s the Anti Eviction Mapping project, which is well known for its work mapping evictors, evictions, and also developing counter narratives to push back on this process that we see really just turning the Bay Area inside out.

We see groups like justfix.nyc, which has developed this tool called Who Owns What that allows you to– it basically draws together just lots of different public data sources into a user friendly interface.

So you can put in an address and look at who owns the property, what are all the other buildings that they own. Because this process of financialization means that your landlord could own lots of different properties not just in your neighborhood but all over a city.

And that, in terms of activism, I think demands a different kind of organizing that might be more portfolio based than strictly neighborhood based. So this kind of tool justfix.nyc offers helps to facilitate that kind of portfolio based organizing.

I’ve been doing some field work in Berlin on this question. And we see some interesting more social enterprise focused strategies that basically use legal technology, machine learning, and so forth to basically scan rental contracts, check them against regulations, and find out if tenants are being overcharged, and help them kind of recoup those costs.

And then we see platforms like Doma, which basically is trying to use smart contracts and crowdfunding to facilitate investment in rental properties and then to pay some of the dividends back to tenants.

So it’s basically trying to redistribute equity that develops in property over time, rather than letting that all go to property owners.

Michael Watts: So in a sense, all of these are pointing to the need to innovate political and advocacy strategies that are congruent with the types of technological innovations that are transforming the sector itself.

It’s going to demand in that sense a different style of doing politics in some sense given the nature of the beast that’s now so dominant in the housing sector.

Desiree Fields: I think this is true. However, I think it is also true that we need to push for blanket policies that protect and support all renters because even though these technological processes are transforming housing markets and even though they might be affecting greater and greater parts of the housing market, they aren’t going to affect everyone.

And if we are targeting only those kinds of interventions, we might protect and support some people. When we know the housing market itself is operating in fundamentally unequal ways that benefit landlords and property owners and disadvantage renters, we need to be careful, I think, in terms of how we focus our organizing.

And so pushing for things like just cause eviction across the board, pushing for things like rent controls that are– good rent controls across the board is just as important.

Michael Watts: Thank you, Desiree, for a fascinating conversation. These issues are obviously central not only to Bay Area and politics that we’ve been involved with currently. But obviously, they have national and in fact, global implications. And we’ll be certainly circling back to many of these issues in our future podcasts. We’ll be posting this and other podcasts on our website. That’s matrix.berkeley.edu. And thank you very much for listening.

Podcast

Matrix Podcast: Interview with Dacher Keltner

Published October 30, 2019

In this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Michael Watts talks with Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology, Director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory, and Faculty Director of the Greater Good Science Center.

Dacher’s research focuses the biological and evolutionary origins of emotion, in particular prosocial states such as compassion, awe, love, and beauty, and power, social class, and inequality. He is the co-author of Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness, and The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence. Dacher has published over 200 scientific articles, written for many media outlets, and consulted for the Center for Constitutional Rights (to help end solitary confinement), Google, Facebook, the Sierra Club, and for Pixar’s Inside Out.

Related Materials

Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion, co-authored with Jonathan Haidt, Cognition & Emotion, 18 August 2010.
Higher social class predicts unethical behavior, co-authored with Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, and Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, PNAS March 13, 2012

Listen above or on Apple Podcasts.

Podcast Transcript

Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley. Your host is Professor Michael Watts.

Michael Watts: Hello and welcome to Matrix Podcast. We’re delighted today to have Professor Dacher Keltner from the Department of Psychology with us. Dacher is well known on and off campus for his work on emotions and social interaction, on power and social perception.

And I’m sure at least some of our listeners will be familiar a couple of his bestselling books– Born to be Good, The Science of a Meaningful Life, and The Compassionate Instinct. But also, more recently, The Power of Paradox, How We Gain and Lose Influence has been enormously influential, picked up by Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and so on. And he’s a major figure in the study and analysis of the relationship between the emotional and social psychological worlds and contemporary problems of today.

Dacher was born in Mexico, Jalisco. And his parents brought him to Laurel Canyon for a while. And then he was raised in the Sierra Nevada before going on to college in our wonderful UC system, Santa Barbara, before going in turn to Stanford, where he was awarded his PhD in social psychology. Dacher has been here since the mid-1990s. And we’re delighted to have him here today. Dacher, welcome to you.

Dacher Keltner: It’s great to be with you, Michael. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.

Watts: Good. Obviously, your work stretches over a number of domains. We can’t cover them all today, but I wanted to focus in particular on two or three subjects of your very recent research. And I want to begin, if I may, with your work on the relationship between emotions and nature, immersion and engagement with the natural world.

Keltner: Yeah.

Watts: This is, of course, a long-standing question, whether we go back to the romantic poets, or John Muir, or Walden Pond, and so on, community gardens. All of this is speaking to these sorts of issues. Let me start then with a sort of general question. What attracted to you, as a psychologist, a social psychologist, about the relationship between the emotional world and the experience of nature?

Keltner: Ah, what a terrific question. So part of it is my parents. I was raised by a mom who taught romanticism and Wordsworth and Shelley and Blake and Virginia Woolf later. And, obviously, as you’ve already alluded to, those poets and writers really prioritized nature as a source of deep wisdom, deep insight, moral insight, spiritual experience.

Watts: Absolutely.

Keltner: And then I was raised by a dad who was a painter who had me looking at paintings since I was a young kid and a backpacker. And he got me going out backpacking. And there, like a lot of people who are lucky enough to be near mountain ranges, I experienced what Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was influenced by romanticism, the idea that there’s nothing that nature cannot repair.

Watts: Right.

Keltner: And then there’s a kind of a political or social-political motivation here. I came into contact with Stacy Bare, who was a veteran. He came back from Iraq. He wanted to blow his brains out, like a lot of veterans.

Watts: Of course.

Keltner: You know, all kinds of troubles. And he went rock climbing, and it saved his life. And then he partnered with me, or I partnered with him, through the Sierra Club, thanks to John Muir, to get underserved teenagers and veterans outdoors.

Watts: So this sort of recuperative aspect of a connection in some way, whether it’s profound or indeed just in the everyday, can you talk a little bit about how you began to frame that as a research project?

Keltner: Yeah.

Watts: And I want to especially explore this notion of awe that you explore in detail as one particular set of emotional responses to the natural world.

Keltner: Wow, what a terrific question. So there’s amazing science in Japan and South Korea, in particular, where they have healing forests, where they literally use health care money to get people through these experiences in the forest. And what they’re finding published in Japanese and Korean is being outdoors calms your cardiovascular system. It helps your immune system. It helps your brain function. It helps your well-being.

My lab really got interested in nature vis-a-vis awe, right? And a lot of awe experiences worldwide are found in nature– mountains, flowers, spring, shadows, light, clouds, skies. And we had this initial finding, Michael, that really got a lot of attention– thanks to Jenny Stellar here at Berkeley– which is, the more I feel awe on a daily basis, the lower my inflammation. And the inflammation system is part of your immune system that attacks pathogens. But if it’s chronically activated, you’re vulnerable to diabetes, autoimmune disease.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: Awe quiets that down. And that blew my mind, right? And so putting these things together, we arrived at this idea that– from Romanticism and Wordsworth and Indigenous knowledge and others– that nature gives us awe. And when you read Muir, the flesh-and-bone tabernacle disappears, and you read Emerson.

Watts: Exactly. Exactly.

Keltner: It’s all awe.

Watts: Exactly. Exactly.

Keltner: So we started to look to nature as a pathway to awe and all of its benefits.

Watts: But from what you said, this seems to be exceptionally deep in the sense that you started with South Korea and Japan studies, that this is, in fact, something that is very profound– if you want to use the language of hardwiring– that it has cross-cultural valency. Is that your sense too, that this is not something that’s peculiar to us here in California?

Keltner: [LAUGHS] Right. And thank you for saying that because the first response is like, oh, this is just a California thing.

Watts: California thing.

Keltner: But this is universal. And we’ve got a lot of data on that. And I really like your word, Michael, deep, Indigenous knowledge. And there are now really sophisticated surveys of 10,000 years of wisdom. Humans are part of nature, and nature gives them all and gives them a sense of– I’m part of a big system.

And so we are, I think– and if you read Emerson, when he has this great spiritual experience in the gallery of comparative anatomy in Paris that really leads to his transcendentalism– and he freaks out. He’s like all of these species– and he’s seeing them in this museum– I’m part of them. And it’s almost a Darwinian insight, like we’re all one thing.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: I think it’s one of the deepest sources of our mind that there is. And a lot of people have written about this, but now science gets to take a crack.

Watts: So as a scientist, how then did you structure? I’d love you to talk through for our listeners the way in which you designed a project with very different constituencies. And of course, this recuperative capacity that you’re talking about is particularly relevant. We’re on a campus here for stress students, for example, to say nothing of veterans you were working with. So could you talk a little bit about how you framed or and the data, really, that you’ve been able to generate?

Keltner: Yeah. Thank you so much for asking the methodological question because awe really presented a lot of challenges scientifically. And in fact, there are people who feel like, how dare you even study it as a scientist. It’s ineffable, and it’s mysterious. I’m like, come on. So we had some early failures. Having students look at fractals in the lab didn’t do anything. And then we started to get the idea. And it was really Paul Piff, who’s a professor at UC Irvine, who took people outdoors and had them look at trees. And trees are incredible for one or two minutes. And they became more kind and civil and so forth. And that just spurred in me the idea that we can study all in nature.

And so what we did, in partnership with Stacy Barron, the Sierra Club, is– and it was hard work. It took us years. What we did is we literally got high school students, and we went to Oakland and Richmond where they don’t go camping. And they have not seen a full sky of stars. And we got veterans. And veteran suicide rates and depression rates are 2 to 3 times that of the average control person in the United States. And what we did, it was amazing. And Craig Anderson was really the point person. We tracked their emotions. We measured how well they’re doing before a rafting trip.

Watts: And the rafting trip was the vehicle, as it were, for a particular immersion into a very dramatic natural landscape.

Keltner: Yeah. And if you and I went on that rafting trip, we would go through rapids named things like the Meat Grinder. These are serious rapids.

Watts: Got it.

Keltner: So here’s what’s great. So we measure how they’re doing before. They go on this rafting trip that’s coordinated by the Sierra Club. GoPro gave us cameras. And so we mount them on the rafts.

Watts: Fantastic.

Keltner: We videotaped them. And if I showed you the videos so we can post them, people are going, whoa! Whoa! They’re screaming and howling and exalting. So that tells us this was the real thing.

Watts: Got it. So now, how did you convert that experience then into data that you could then analyze? Stick with the veterans for a moment.

Keltner: So we do a couple of things. First, we gather measures. At the start of the study, we gather saliva. And from saliva we can assess stress-related cortisol. Then during the rafting trip, we measure emotional expression. After the rafting trip and one week later, we measure how well they’re doing. And I think the key results are, number one, the Emerge, it’s full of awe. By the way, we also have them write about their experiences.

Watts: They keep a diary of some sort or a log.

Keltner: Yeah. In the tradition of Thoreau, write about nature. One of our veterans wrote, he — just looking up at the sky, which he hadn’t really thought about in a long time, gave him a sense of how small his trauma is in the big sweep of history and how much power he has in life.

Watts: Extraordinary.

Keltner: Yeah, I was just blown away.

Watts: Extraordinary.

Keltner: So those are our sources of data. And then the key findings are that everybody is less stressed a week later– teens and veterans. Veterans, 32% drop in PTSD.

Watts: Wow.

Keltner: And if you compare that to anything, it’s hard to move PTSD around. And the third thing that was cool, we have a lot of awe during the experience. And then their physiology, when we measure cortisol at the beginning of the trip and at the end, starts to resemble each other on the rafting trip. It’s almost like they’re become this collective entity, where they find strength. So nature’s powerful.

Watts: Now, another part of that study was exploring awe through, I think, what you call the “everyday set of experiences,” which are very different from the drama of the Meat Grinder, et cetera. So can you talk a little bit about both how you structured that and again, what emerged out of those sorts of experiences?

Keltner: Yeah. one of the challenges in the science of studying an emotion like awe is– and you put it really nicely, Michael. If our listeners start to think about awe, they’ll think about– I remember the time that I was in the Grand Canyon, or I was at this, I was at a temple, or I heard this Nobel Prize winner speak, or I met Bono. And that doesn’t address the question of like, what’s our everyday life of awe like?

So to do that, what we do is we rely on a methodology called the Daily Experience Sampling Approach. And we get people connected to our lab digitally. And every night for two weeks, they write about– did they feel awe that day? We’ve done this in China and Japan and the United States, a lot of different places, and that gives you a sense of, well, what’s the everyday landscape of awe like?

And what we found, first of all, 2.3 experiences of awe per week. And people are having incredibly subtle, powerful experiences of awe in ways we wouldn’t ordinarily think. Walking to school, they see leaves up in the light, and they have an interesting pattern on them, and they feel awe. Or a friend comes by and helps them out in a time of need, or hearing a piece of music.

So there’s a lot of everyday awe, and it has the same benefits as these Big Bang experiences. I get calmer. I see my stresses within perspective. I feel more connected to a community. So both everyday and big stuff, we got to go after.

Watts: That seems to be very important because there’s– that everyday experience because often, that seems to be– how can I put it? Relatively invisible, or not acknowledged, or we pass over it. Very different from that drama of being on the river, for example.

Keltner: Thank you for pointing that out. I think one of the challenges for our culture in thinking about awe is the scholarship has really focused on the spectacular versions– the Mystics, Julian of Norwich. Oh my god, I’m trembling with God.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: Psychedelics. Big experience.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: Experiences, listening to music, like Charles Darwin had. And what that study we just talked about said is– and philosophers and certain contemplative teachers, like in particular, the Buddhists feel like it’s everywhere. Just open your eyes, and you’re going to see a lot of moral beauty and character in people, and incredible nature. And that’s what we’re finding, is there’s awe that’s all out there to go after that– we need to really cultivate in our culture.

Watts: These findings, obviously, have huge implications for personal well-being. And I just want to close this part of our discussion by asking you about how you see this work gaining traction in some, almost programmatic sense. I know you’ve worked a lot in schools. You’ve worked with veterans. So how do you see the insights from your research? Is that we’re moving into arenas where people can actually both be aware of. One can get state or maybe private funding to, in some sense, instantiate some of this work.

Keltner: Thank you. I really see this awe spreading, and it already is in a couple of ways. One is, we have to open our eyes to what we’re already doing. So 300 million people go to our national parks each year. That’s more than baseball games, football games, all the Disney combined by a mile. It is the central institution in the United States. And they’re getting all benefits. And so we need to honor that.

The second thing, as you know, Michael, I’ve devoted part of my career to teaching the science of happiness and health, and really prioritizing how these happiness practices benefit your nervous system, like inflammation levels, like odors.

And we’ve gone through a mindfulness movement. There’s a gratitude movement, and I think awe is next. And let me give you one finding that really is about how to promote this, with my collaborator, Virginia Sturm, at UC San Francisco. There’s a Healthy Brain Initiative over there, which is looking at people after the age of 75, and that’s about when happiness starts to dip. And so what can we do to strengthen people. And we’re working through the results. Really robust. You go on a regular walk once a week or an awe walk. And I’ve written up a program for an awe walk at mindful.org. Lots of people have used it.

And it’s just go out, wonder at things, do unusual things. And the 75-year-olds who do the awe walk show less anxiety and depression, which starts to arrive when you’re 75 in some people, than the vigorous walk conditions. So I think there’s going to be a lot of nature programming and all programming that starts to happen.

Watts: But presumably that is as relevant for youngsters. Particularly, I know you’ve worked a lot with underserved communities, but that’s as true for marginalized communities in Los Angeles or New York. And particularly, in some sense, again, embedding that in school experience, where, again, the every day that you’re talking about, it’s not something that’s going to necessarily demands a trip to a rafting expedition.

Keltner: Absolutely. And I think that that’s all– to me, part of it is– how do we– the aging population in the United states, there’s a lot of complexity. Part of it is veterans.

Watts: Yeah, of course.

Keltner: And there’s a lot of good work and then underserved kids. Based on this work, just as one existence proof. There was a school teacher in the Bronx, and she’s profiled at the Greater Good Science Center, who took her kids out. These were kids who were having difficulty going to school. Very poor. And they went out on awe walk. And she does it regularly as a practice in her classroom and gets them to paint what they did, and write poetry about.

Watts: Absolutely.

Watts: Very powerful. So I think part of what’s happening, like at the Greater Good Science Center is, our practices are in thousands of schools. How do you breathe? How do you empathize? How do you express? How do you be civil? And I think awe will be part of that. And there’s a lot of work like the English are very good with their walking tradition.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: They have school kids do a lot of Awe Permit Program.

Watts: That’s exactly right.

Keltner: So it’s coming.

Watts: Fantastic. Fantastic. Let’s move, Dacher, to a second area, if I can, of your research, which I found absolutely fascinating. Kindly sent me an article with some colleagues from Stockholm and Washington, Saint Louis from the American Psychologist on vocalization. And again, given your long-standing interest in emotional states and the emotional world, the relationship between the two.

So again, let me just start with a general question. What is it, again, as a psychologist with this history of engagement, with the emotions and with patterns of social interaction that we were just talking about? What is it that drew you to vocalization and particular forms of vocalization that you discuss in this article?

Keltner: It’s so interesting. And I really trace this back to my parents, which is, my mom taught poetry and romanticism, and loved DH Lawrence. Like in our family life together, she would be quoting poems, William Blake sayings. And I could just hear all the depth of meaning and emotional meaning in the voice. And then my dad had me looking at paintings– Dutch masters and Goya and all of his favorites.

And as a kid, I was just transfixed with emotional expression in art. And then just to give– I was sitting at a conference one day talking about an experience of awe. And this guy who now is well-known, but he was an iconoclast at the time, Paul Ekman, got up. Controversial guy. Brilliant scientist. And he had spent seven years figuring out how to study emotion in the face by looking at facial muscle movements.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: And at the time, he hadn’t published anything, or not too much. And he said, we have a new method that can help us measure emotion in the face anywhere in the world. And there are new methods for measuring emotion in the voice. And I literally almost started crying because here was a way to measure the face and then the voice in emotion anywhere. And that is what my parents had taught me to look through at the world for.

And that led to what you’ve pointed to, which is 25 years, 30 years of my career, trying to figure out how do we express emotion in the face and the body, and in the voice.

Watts: Absolutely. Now, one of the things that I found absolutely extraordinary in this piece is that you focus, in particular, on what you call vocal bursts. And so I’d like to, for our listeners, just to have you walk through that, and particularly, as you do in the paper, to illustrate a little bit–

Keltner: I will.

Watts: –the extraordinary menu of these vocal bursts.

Keltner: Yeah. So there are two ways in which we communicate emotion, at least, in the voice, as scientists study them. One is with prosody, the tone that we give to our words.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: And the other is to these short sounds. They last about a quarter of a second. That don’t have words or semantic content in them, but they have tons of emotional meaning. And they’re called vocal bursts. So I’m going to first illustrate. And then I’ll illustrate a few. And I’ll tell you why I got really interested in these. So here’s one that I used to hear from my teenage daughters, who are now, I’m very proud to say, students at UC Berkeley.

Watts: Congratulations.

Keltner: Thank you. We don’t get any advantage. So it’s a big deal for us. And they are 13, 14. And I put on my music or talk about what I believed in. Here was a sound that I would hear. [LIP TRILLING] And immediately, it was like, oh, they’re expressing social disgust or disdain.

Watts: Disdain.

Keltner: Yeah, exactly. So here just to illustrate, can I test you?

Watts: Yes, of course.

Keltner: OK. How would you express interest in somebody who’s speaking?

Watts: Interest in someone who’s– if it were a dramatic lecture, I might say, whoa!

Keltner: Nice. That’s almost awe, right? Like this awe.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: All right, how about somebody comes to you and their mom has dementia, and is really declining, and you’re going to show sympathy?

Watts: [SIGHS]

Yeah. Sort of a sigh. How about you’re really frustrated with the parking ticket you just got in Berkeley? What sound would you make?

Watts: [GROANS]

Keltner: [LAUGHS]

That’s pretty strong. So we have this incredible repertoire of these sounds. So sympathy is on. Anger is [GROWLS] It’s like awes. Whoa. Now, here’s what’s really interesting about them. Number one, if you look at what the acoustics of these sounds are, the particular patterns of acoustic sound waves that they use, they actually predate language.

And they are old in the evolution of how we communicate. And a lot of mammals have a repertoire of about five different emotions that they signal through these kind of vocal bursts. And so what we did, in short, is we in Berkeley, we gave people little scenarios like, imagine that you stubbed your toe. What sound would you make?

[GROANS]

Or someone’s really crying and suffering. What sound would you make?

Oh.

So we take those sounds, and we then go to different parts of the world, 11 different cultures, including a remote tribe or community in Eastern Bhutan. We play the sounds, and then we have them match the sound to different situations. And what we find is humans can identify 18 to 20 sound emotions via these little short sounds.

Watts: Extraordinary. It’s extraordinary. Again, can I come back to the research design part of this? I also found this absolutely fascinating. You also began to use, essentially, video clips and other sorts of material as a way of assessing this fantastic range of emotional states. One thing that I found particularly interesting is that, for example, one of these utterances, these vocal bursts I gave you, I said, whoa.

For example, I can obviously use that for a variety of emotional– that whoa sound can be whoa. Whoa! So I’d love you to talk a little bit about how, in some sense, that– again, coming back to the data that you were able to document this extraordinary range of emotional responses through these.

Keltner: Thank you. Yeah. I mean, Michael, this is some of the work that I’m most excited by, and it’s of Alan Cowen, who is a brilliant, young mind, studied Applied Math at Yale and came to Berkeley. The study that I’ve just described to you is typical in this tradition. One sound, you know, you make it. And then you give it to other people. They judge what its meaning is. And that really doesn’t capture what you just pointed out, which is the extraordinary complexity of this space. You went, whoa. You did two different whoas. Whoa! versus whoa. And one is more inspiring, and another is a little bit more astonished or dumbfounded.

Watts: Exactly. Or just surprised. Exactly.

Keltner: So what Alan did– and I would really encourage our listeners to go to his maps just to explore– is he gathered, as you said, in one study of the voice, and this builds on studies of experience and face and music. He did exactly what you suggested, which is go out and get a broad array of sounds that you would hear in the real world. In this particular study, I think there were 2,100 of people making all kinds of different sounds.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: And then you present those to other people. You give them a richer way to rate them. And then with new mathematical techniques that he really had to prove statistically and data visualization techniques, he creates these maps of the meaning of sound.

Watts: Now, is this what you refer to in your article as the semantic space?

Keltner: Exactly.

Watts: I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that and what populates it, because I found that incredibly interesting.

Keltner: Thank you. I actually think what he– and it’s largely Alan. I think he’s discovered a new way to represent meaning that– so a semantic space is the idea that any realm of experience, how much do I different kinds of art? What music do I like? And what emotions does music communicate? What emotions do I communicate with a voice? How do I think about different kinds of people? Those are meaning spaces, semantic spaces of different domains.

And they have thousands of stimuli within them, not just 10 or 12, like I used to study. So they have three different qualities that you really should think about. One is called the dimensionality, which is, how many distinct units of meaning are there? How many kinds of emotion do I perceive in the voice? The second is the distribution of the stimuli. Are they in these discrete nodes? Or are they blurry and blended? And your example suggests they’re–

Watts: There’s a gradient of some sort.

Keltner: Right, there’s a gradient. You can go from whoa! to whoa. Different sounds, close meanings, but quite graded. And the third is– our audience, I hope, will forgive the clunky language is conceptualization, which is when I hear music, I see art, I taste things, I hear a human voice. Do I immediately categorize it with labels like awe?

Do I construct it through? Oh, that’s a good thing. And then add an interpretation. It’s an issue in the field of emotion.

And what Alan’s found, just to round out this story, is, wow, these spaces are complicated. In terms of dimensionality, there are a lot of emotions we perceive. To your observation, they are graded. They aren’t discrete boundaries between categories. They’re blended. You can express on surprise or on horror as blends. And third, it really looks like the mind first categorizes emotion in terms of what we call discrete labels. Like, oh, that’s really about sadness, and then interpret it. So his work, we’ve just published a paper on music, on prosody, on face. We’re working on art. I think semantic spaces are profound.

Watts: That seems to open up. I mean, to blow up, in a way, certain conventional understandings of how we think about emotion, how we think about forms of vocalization. This seems to open up whole new avenues.

Keltner: Oh, my God. I have to tell you, Michael, one of the great things about working at Berkeley, just being a professor or being in life, is young people open up your eyes to new ways of looking at the world. And Alan came in. And he’s like, the whole field of emotion– and you’ve already pointed this out– was based on this idea of one-to-one matching. Oh, there’s a face. I use one word for it.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: And then the word I use always goes to that phase–

Watts: With this stable meaning.

Keltner: And it’s not like that. Faces can have many meanings. Words can refer to different– but there’s a structure there that he’s really uncovering.

Watts: It’s fantastic. And incidentally, we’ll have the links, Dacher, for our audience on our website. So if people want to pursue and get into the nitty gritty and granularity of what you do, we can.

Let me turn to the third and final issue I’d love to talk about today, which is far too complicated and rich for a discussion like this. We’ll have you back to talk about it further, but it’s so relevant.

And that is, again, your work as a social psychologist on the relationships between emotion, social interaction, and social class. Now, obviously, on a campus like this, for example, we have all manner of social scientists, many of whom are associated with Matrix here, who think about social class in terms of the particular forms of American capitalism that have emerged since the ’80s, or the centrality of race and institutional racism, et cetera.

All sorts of hugely important ways of thinking about how social class in the United States has changed, whether we actually have an oligarchy, an elite. Who are they, et cetera? The centrality of the blue-collar, white working class.

You come at this in your work as a social psychologist. So again, let me pose the question. What is it, given your formation, that in some sense– I can understand why you would come to social class. For our listenership, what is it that how you frame the social class issue that would be complementary to but very different from what a political economist like myself might approach the issue?

Keltner: Yeah, it’s funny. Michael, I just want to start with the personal in a sense. I had this really interesting experience in childhood where– and very few kids would have this experience today, which is my mom got her PhD at UCLA. We were living in– it was 1970. It was actually a period of egalitarianism in the United states, as you know. Income disparity wasn’t great. Lots of public schools.

And my parents, for personal reasons, we went from a very nice upper middle class neighborhood in Laurel Canyon, LA, and we moved to a really poor town. And I was 10 years old. And the neighbors were sublimely nice. It was a bucolic life. We had five acres and a pond. It was wonderful. But I just noticed, like, wow, when you go to a poor place, things just start happening.

Kids get sick. They have issues at school. There wasn’t the warm surround of a nice middle class neighborhood to move them along. And it really struck me. And over my life as a social psychologist, I’d be learning about social psychology. And I kept thinking about class. Thanks to this personal experience. Bill Emhoff’s book was on the ruling elite.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: Blew my mind. Whoa, there are all these institutions that are really about class, like the social register. Pierre Bourdieu changed my life. It’s like, whoa. class imbues art and what I like.

Watts: And taste, and so on.

Keltner: And taste. It just astonished me that taste, a psychological phenomenon, could be shaped by institutions. And as you nicely set it up, that’s the challenge of our work, is to say, how is it that the school you go to and the neighborhood you grow up in, and the parks they have, and the after-school programs, and the money in your parent’s bank account class, prestige of work, how does that get into your nervous system? And that was the central challenge that my field hadn’t addressed that I was impelled by.

Watts: And of course, I mean, just to follow on from that, I mean, it’s also true. You were talking about your own personal experience. But it’s also the case that, in general– I’m English– where a class system is so front and central, even today, certainly. But certainly when I was growing up in the ’50s and ’60.s And yet in some sense, the very way that the category of social class in the United States, in some sense, is something that often doesn’t get talked about.

Keltner: At all.

Watts: Or rather we’re all middle class. All classes get dumped into the enormous bucket of middle-classness. So in some sense, then, approaching this as a psychologist, it seems to me is, again, doubly unusual for that reason, too.

Keltner: It is. And thank you for pointing out because– another interesting experience for me was when I was 16 or 15, my mom did exchange program, and we were in Nottingham, England in 1978. And they sent us to this super-working-class school. And it was just mayhem and wonderful. And all the kids, I remember them telling me– and it just opened my eyes– they could identify a person’s class background– and there were six or seven types– by their tone of voice.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: And it blew my mind.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: You mean, you can tell me where a woman lives based on how she elongates vowels?

Watts: Precisely. Exactly.

Keltner: And they had this whole class theory.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: In the United states, we think everybody class is hidden. We think everyone’s in the middle class and their data on that. And to me, that was a mystery to go after.

Watts: Absolutely. Let me just give perhaps listeners a sense of at least one of the ways that you’re thinking about this issue. I’m just going to read the very provocative title of a fantastic piece published, interestingly, in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and it’s entitled “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior.”

We can develop this, but I wonder if we could just start there, again, to open up how you, again, as a social psychologist, take, in this case, what you’re calling higher social classes and how you begin to think about the relationship between that social class with all of its status, resources, assets, entitlements, and behavior, and forms of social interaction.

Keltner: That paper was one of the most downloaded papers I’ve ever—

Watts: I can imagine. I can imagine. I can imagine.

Keltner: I got a lot of hate mail.

Watts: I bet you did.

Keltner: Yeah.

Watts: I bet you did.

Keltner: Part of the motivation was prior to social class. And by class, we think about it in two ways– wealth, prestige of your work, and education. And then subjective, which is if I’m in a neighborhood and there’s a 10-rung ladder of social class, where do I fall? And you put a little x. And both work equivalently, although they’re different.

We had been working on power, the sense of having influence over others, and there’s a lot of data that showed that power unleashes unethical tendencies– you interrupt people, you take resources, et cetera.

And so we had that as a grounding. And my colleagues, Paul Piff, in particular, in this case, and I, were struck by not only that literature, but really interesting findings and just real-world observations– interesting findings like this one, which really shook us. Who’s more likely to shoplift, an upper middle class high school kid or really poor kid? Upper middle class. They’re more likely to shoplift.

So we started to get the sense. And a lot of people have this intuition that power and class and privilege and feeling better than others frees you from the constraints of social norms. And then like a lot of social scientists, Michael, we’re – you look at the US today of admission, cheating, scandals, and the way executives compensate themselves. And who has sexual affairs at work. It’s more likely to be high-level executives on down the line.

And we were like, wow, there’s something about privilege that that’s bad news.

Watts: I mean, of course, this is central both to MeToo. It’s central to Black Lives Matter. I mean, embedded in these sorts of movements is exactly the ways in which social class and class power operates at a number of different registers.

Keltner: And that’s why. It’s not random that once this work, hit the press, which we should talk about. The MeToo movement reached out to me and. It was like, hey, let’s talk about sexual harassment because this guy grabbing my butt in the Xerox room is a class move.

Watts: Absolutely. So can we just– again, because this is obviously– you got a lot of heat on this, but I’m particularly interested in the science of it. Because how you establish these claims is enormously important. And you have a variety of ways in this paper. The higher social class predicts unethical behavior. I’d love you just to walk out again our listenership through the way in which– the multiple ways in which you empirically attempted to address that.

Keltner: Yeah. And that was so important for the field. So we look at correlational data. If I say I’m an 8 on a 10-rung ladder or I report my family’s wealth and education and prestige of work, and I more likely to endorse unethical tendencies? And that turns out to be true. Like, hey, it’s OK to take resources from the office, to not abide by the certain laws or conventions. We had ways in which we could momentarily get people to think they were in a position of privilege.

And this was developed by Michael Kraus’s. We have people rate themselves on a 10-rung class ladder. But we change the anchor. How are you on a 10-rung ladder compared to a homeless person? And suddenly in your mind, you’re saying, wow, I’m actually doing pretty well. I’ll give myself a seven. By contrast, if you say, what is your ranking compared to Oprah Winfrey, or a billionaire? Oh, my God, I’m down at a four.

Watts: Or a two.

Keltner: Yeah, you move people around. And that’s simple class mindset where I feel like I’m better and higher– one of my favorite studies in that package, and it’s really Paul Pitts’ genius at UC Irvine, is we have people– you’re playing in a game. You get to win 50 bucks. You roll the dice six times, or you press a little button that rolls the dice. And we know that they’ve scored. And the higher the score, the better your chances of winning the 50 bucks. Who cheats? Who lies?

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: It’s people who are of an upper class mindset. Now, just think about it. They don’t need the 50 bucks.

Watts: Of course. Of course.

Keltner: But they’re more really– so that’s a nice experiment. And then the coup de grace or the icing on the cake was our car study.

Watts: This is fascinating. Could you just walk us through that? It’s so interesting.

Keltner: Yeah. And this boy, I have to tell you, when I present this– and I can almost predict, as I present these results, who’s driving a fancy car, who doesn’t.

So here’s what we did. How you behave on the road is really important. A lot of people die in accidents, billions of dollars. This is a serious thing. And people, their blood pressure boils.

So here’s what we did. I’ll talk about one. We did two different studies. It’s been replicated. Pedestrian zones in California, by the rule of law in the California Vehicle Code, it’s a series of white stripes. And if you’re a pedestrian about ready to cross, the car has to stop. Has to stop. Correct. People get killed in the Bay Area when cars don’t pay attention.

So all we did is we positioned a Berkeley undergrad at the edge of the pedestrian zone, and they look like they’re wanting to walk across. And we had another Berkeley undergrad hiding, noting the car that was coming. And we made sure that it was just one car, and not a big mob of cars approaching. And we coded: is it a kind of a poor Blue Book car, old AMC Pacer? Is it a moderate car, a Taurus? Is it a middle class car, a Civic, a fancier car, an Accord, or a really fancy car, BMW or Mercedes?

And if you’re driving a poor car, you stop 100% of the time. You honor the rules of the road. If you’re driving a fancy car, you blaze through the pedestrian zone about 42% of the time. I mean, that’s a massive effect. We replicated that study.

One of my two favorite moments, I was on a radio show about this in Florida. And this police officer calls in. And he says, I don’t ordinarily agree with people from Berkeley, but I have to say, when I stopped drivers of poor cars for violations, they are polite and civil. When I stopped drivers of fancy cars, they lecture me about my job.

Watts: Of course. Exactly.

Keltner: And I was like, there you go. There you have it. The other one is comedic, which is– I think Conan O’Brien told this story. Somebody asked me like, what about Priuses? Priuses actually are the most likely to violate the rules of the road, which is interesting in its own right. And Conan O’Brien told this joke where he’s like, hey, do you hear about this study from Berkeley? Prius drivers drive like mean people. It’s hard to drive well when you’re patting yourself on the back. But it really touched a nerve of just how uncivil privilege and feeling better can make you.

Watts: Now, obviously, and you discuss this in other work, is that let’s just call it that type of class entitlement. It permits you in some sense and perhaps justifies to yourself the ability to do unethical, immoral things. But that entitlement can be expressed– this is the question I want to get to– non-verbally through body posture, through all manner or through an ideology. You talk a lot about this, the ideology of merit. Well, we have a meritocratic system– you work hard, you take the exam, you take the SAT. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the social psychology of those domains above and beyond the behavior, in this case, of simply not stopping at a stop sign or a crosswalk.

Keltner: Yeah. And that first wave of studies, cheating in a gambling game and taking candy in a candy bowl that was meant for kids, and driving, they’re fun theatrical demonstrations. But I think they really have parable-like qualities for people. Yeah, I’ve definitely had that experience with a driver. I feel, in some sense, the deeper question is, as you’re saying, Michael, it’s like what Erving Goffman was interested in, of like, everyday, social reality, what happens?

And the first thing is, entitlement breeds disrespect and incivility. And there are incredible studies of two out of three acts. As we started to publish this stuff, other people started to send us findings from around the world. Here’s a couple of my favorites. Two out of three acts of incivility in the workplace are from the well-to-do, high-paid managers. They’re calling people’s work dog shit. They’re offending people.

There was just a lot of swearing behavior, offensive behavior towards others. Insults at work tend to be perpetuated by people who are entitled. And then we started to document that in our lab. You could take two people, put them into a conversation. One person has more privilege or wealth, and they just show this kind of cool, detached, aloof disengagement. And that really spoke volumes to me. Just like, hey, just talk about your college students. Just talk about the day.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: This is the stuff of life. And the well-to-do, entitled person is not looking, not being warm, moving away, creating this cool atmosphere. I think that’s really profound, in some sense, to worry about. And then, thank you for bringing up the ideology work. One of the major trends in social psychology is like, how do we grapple with inequality? How do we grapple with– I mean, it’s astounding, people making $20 million versus-

Watts: Exactly. Exactly.

Keltner: And social psychology, I think, has a lot to say, which is we justify. We come up with these stories. And we’ve got a lot of neat new goods on this. People of upper-class backgrounds, number one, don’t see inequality. You can present them an image of ordinary people off the streets that shows a lot of inequality– really poor, homeless people. Very well-to-do executives, they don’t see it as being unequal. They just don’t see this issue.

And then in the ideology work, what we found is– you hear this in well-to-do, elite circles. It’s almost Social Darwinism. People start talking about better genes, special brains, which there’s no data that lends any credence to that thinking.

And what we found is, well-to-do people, when you present them with social problems like homelessness, when you present them with stories of success, they really invoke these social Darwinist, essentialist explanations. He’s born to be a leader. She has better genes. She has a brain that’s fit for success, et cetera. Poorer people are good sociologists, which you would love, which is, they think in terms of institutions.

Watts: Exactly. Exactly.

Keltner: Well, my school system doesn’t have a graduation.

Watts: I’m on the back foot from the get-go.

Keltner: Exactly. Exactly.

And again, to your point, sociologists knew this with depth, but to show like, hey, ordinary citizens walking around have these ideologies.

Watts: But presumably, also, what psychology does is to say that this has sort of psychic consequences.

Keltner: Oh my god.

Watts: This is internalized. It’s not just that– I mean, not seeing something, not seeing inequality or legitimating one’s own wealth or unethical behavior by virtue of a meritocratic ideology. All of that gets, in some sense, imbibed. It’s not just behavioral. It’s cognitive. It’s intellectual. It’s emotional. And presumably, this is also a central part of these sorts of studies, and you’re engaged with.

Keltner: And this is where psychology starts to inform sociology. And we were humbled to enter into the class literature where sociology and political science and a little bit of history are just so deep. But in this particular case, it does, which is the class-drenched ideology in a person’s mind suddenly creates institutions. And so you have an admissions committee–

Watts: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

Keltner: –of people of a class background.

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: And then they write the letters to college students about what– or high school students about what they’re looking for. And if you’re poor and you read that language and it talks about special type of kid, it feels foreign.

Watts: Well, this is also, of course, a central on campus, as well as I do, that first-generation working class Hispanic students, with a mindset, a particular set of beliefs who’ve made it here, now have to navigate a complicated campus world of entitlement. I mean, this is something that–

Keltner: It’s profound. You and I have the privilege of teaching at a big public school. And like a lot of the UCs, we have a lot of poor kids, first generation. And this is one of the central issues they’re navigating. And it’s full of conflict. “Wow, I was raised in this wonderful family in the Central Valley in California. My parents didn’t go to high school, but it was warm and loving. And now I got all this class stuff I got to negotiate.”

Watts: Exactly.

Keltner: It’s hard. It is so hard.

Watts: Absolutely. We could go on forever on this. But let me ask you one last question again.

Keltner: Yeah. Thank you, Michael.

Watts: Again, it speaks to your work, your programmatic work. I know you’ve worked a lot on these issues in schools, where we increasingly now have a big divide between public and private schools, for example, but where these issues are almost inevitably hardwired into big, complicated, contradictory institutions at a totally formative moment of young people’s lives. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the types of work that you’ve been doing. I know you get all sorts of invitations to speak in schools.

Keltner: Yeah. I mean, I am deeply worried by what you nicely described, Andrew Hacker’s stuff. There are two societies now.

Watts: Yes, exactly.

Keltner: And like, whoa, there’s this private, elite, wealthy world. Let’s call it a wealthy world. And then there’s the public institutions. And to me, I have a lot of hope, because what we’re learning– one of the central things we’re learning about class is, if you feel stigmatized about your class and you hear somebody dumping on poor people, like a lot of people love to do, whatever it is.

Watts: Yeah, exactly.

Keltner: If you’re of a lower-class background, like the kids I grew up around– which is why I bring them up– you get stressed, your heart races, your skin gets sweaty, you have cortisol, and that interferes with how well you do in school. So if I’m feeling like my lower-class culture is stigmatized and marginalized and disenfranchised, I start to get stressed out. And what we are committed to at the Greater Good Science Center is ways to teach teachers with neuroscience and social sciences a backing like, here’s how you can keep kids calm.

Watts: Right, exactly.

Keltner: Teach them a little breathing. Teach them to practice gratitude. Teach them about the vagus nerve, which I study. And this kind of work through our work and other institutions, it’s in thousands of schools. And showing kids who– third graders who can calm down with these techniques do better in school. And so I think one of the ways to confront the inequality that’s entrenched in classism is to teach students tools to be stronger than that. And I’m really encouraged by where that’s going.

Watts: Dacher, that’s a fantastic way to end our wonderful conversation. There’s so much that we haven’t covered that I want to cover. I’ll make sure that we invite you back.

Keltner: It’d be an honor.

Watts: But meanwhile, we’ll have links to all of your work on our website, and including the Greater Good Science Center, so people that are interested in following up on this certainly can. And let me once again just extend my gratitude to you for coming along for a quite wonderful conversation. Thank you.

Keltner: Well, it was an incredible delight to be here, Michael. Thanks for your amazing questions. Thank you.

Watts: Thank you.

Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.