Structuring Public Representational Practice: Violence through Personhood and Personality in American Presidential Oratory and Campaigning ( Jennifer Jackson) 49

NORTH AMERICAN DIALOGUEJournal of the Society for the

Anthropology of North America

Volume 16, Number 2

Fall 2013

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■ EditorSusan Falls, Savannah College of Art and Design

■ Associate EditorShannon Canney

■ Editorial BoardJohn Clarke, The Open UniversityJeff Maskovsky, CUNY-Queens CollegeAugust Carbonella, Memorial UniversityJessica Cattelino, University of California, Los Angeles

Aims and Scope:North American Dialogue (NAD) is the journal of the Society for the Anthropology of North America.NAD provides a forum for North Americanist scholars, activists, and practitioners to share works-in-progress, to disclose findings, raise issues, describe fieldwork, and offer political and theoreticalanalysis as it is happening. Readers learn what their North Americanist colleagues are working ontoday.

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NORTH AMERICAN DIALOGUEJOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICA

Volume 16, No. 2

Fall 2013

ISSN 1556-4819

Editor

Susan Falls, Savannah College of Art and Design

Associate Editor

Shannon CanneyEditorial Board

John Clarke, The Open University

Jeff Maskovsky, CUNY-Queens College

August Carbonella, Memorial University

Jessica Cattelino, University of California, Los Angeles

ARTICLESStructuring Public Representational Practice: Violence through Personhood and Personality inAmerican Presidential Oratory and Campaigning ( Jennifer Jackson) 49

Opportunity and Danger: Why Studies of the Right Are Crucial for U.S. Anthropologyand Beyond (Kaja Tretjak) 60

In the Shadow of Service: Veteran Masculinity and Civil–Military Disjuncture in the UnitedStates (Steven Gardiner) 69

REVIEWS AND REFLECTIONSEthnographies of Uncertain Futures/Notes from the Field: An Interview with Gretchen Purser(Syracuse U) (Lindsay A. Bell) 79

Information for Contributors: Initial submission of manuscripts should be made by email to editor at the addresses below.Authorship and affiliation should appear on a separate page. If selected for publication, final revised forms must be indigital form and sent as email attachment conforming to AAA Style guide. Images must be black and white, scanned at300dpi, authors are responsible for all permissions.

Book reviews, reflections and reports from the field: Books, films and all other inquiries should be sent to editor listed below.

All correspondence should be addressed to:

Susan FallsDepartment of Anthropology/Liberal ArtsSavannah College of Art and [email protected]

Research ArticleStructuring Public Representational Practice: Violence through Personhood and Personality inAmerican Presidential Oratory and Campaigning

By Jennifer Jackson

Introduction

“I shall begin by approving of one who can observe what is fitting,” declares Cicero. “This, indeed,is the form of wisdom that the orator must especially employ — to adapt himself to occasions andpersons.” (Remer 1999:39). In the United States, what has been declared “fitting,” however, haschanged across time. And, too, it has often been at odds with what could be “observed” as theaddressee in the American polity. This awareness of the Ciceronian “human element in communica-tion” historically has been regimented, often driven by revile and rejection, exactly who can be observed(Remer 1999:40). The lack of citizenship for slaves and their progeny brought to or born in the UnitedStates, for example, or the ways in which cultural and institutional literacy have been regulated to theAfrican American even after citizenship, has made any black addressee unobservable, the language ofpolitics fitting to another.

Attention to the human element in communication and its technologies, too, has shaped the stan-dards and evolution of an interactional ethos for how political issues should and can be delivered tovoters and how the speaker might present himself through public oration, rhetoric, and other tech-niques of campaigning. Changing ideologies and aesthetics about the presentation of information andself through political oratory and campaigning has informed the intersubjective relationship betweenleader and led, bringing about the place of the “public candidate.” Also within this evolution come thepossibilities for the character and characterization of other voices and their political voices affecting theclimate of political discussion. Working from the changing aspects of citizenship and the struggles ofpolitical visibility and participation for black Americans, this article considers the structural transfor-mation of political oratory and rhetoric and, as a result, the political campaign, specifically the UnitedStates presidential campaign. It documents the sociohistorical process that brings public speakers to thefore, semiotically whittling away any insulation from the public gaze the speaker or presidentialcandidate may enjoy. The changing role of the performance of self in the context of presidentialcampaign history illustrates that the change in oratorical styles and campaign processes throughout theend of the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first, alongside burgeoning technologies of dissemi-nation, has enabled an ease and flow of rhetorical tactics that hinder black entry into political leader-ship, a leadership that has always reflected the ideals of white civilization as “we, the people.” Suchstructural shifts come to the fore continually to discipline and frame any place of subaltern leadershipas a threat to this nation and its civilization.1

Indeed, much about the ways of “sounding presidential” has changed since America’s early days.But, the availability for structural differentiation of individuals and communities through oratory and

1Though structural shifts in governance since the early Republic have opened space in the polity for new forms of publicity, the veryemergence of that subaltern of black publics across time has galvanized a backlash of oppression, notably entry into the otherwiseunmarked white public sphere long ago imagined by the early Republic and written into the legal documents of its founding, namely TheConstitution of the United States. This history of structural differentiation is far too vast to discuss here alongside that of the politicalcampaign but is taken up in Jackson (forthcoming).

North American Dialogue 16.2, pp. 49–59, ISSN 1556-4819. © 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/nad.12004

49

campaigning today finds its roots in the early Republic’s ideological arguments about what politicalspeech ought to do, and, therefore, the moral order of the nation it would index through its speakers.America’s colonial period and early Republic followed the two deliberative models of the Classicalrhetorical tradition: conversation and oratory. Their meanings then were contrary to their meaningsnow. Conversation, according to the Classic tradition, involved equal participation between speakersand cooperative dialogue based on reason. This deliberative style did not concern anything specificsuch as an action item on the Senate floor, nor did it weigh more heavily toward party or association.Rather, it was a time to contemplate and debate larger philosophical issues about society and the polity,man and civilization, and the place of the Republic enabling their progress. In contrast, the structureand style of oratory was motivated by impassioned, often agonistic monologue in an unequal partici-pant context between orator and auditor. Appealing through modes of self-aggrandizement, verbalagon, ethos, pathos, and/or logos, the orator sought to inflame the emotions of his auditors. Thevisceral performance of urgency served as a call to action, and the weight of the authority of the speakerrested on the persuasive force of his argument and the auditors’ response to this call to action.2 Thedistinction between these two models is significant to the form and content U.S. politicians woulddeploy, notably from the start of Jacksonian populism to what we witness today.

As a result of the Civil War and with the growing populous movement, the decorum in bothdeliberative conversation and oratorical models shifted to respond to structural changes in the polity.But the change came also in response to cries for democracy through more “direct” — both semanticand interactional — forms of deliberation between leaders and led. These structural transformations inspeech that indexed democratic process were primarily driven by metapragmatic arguments for “plainspeech.” Plain speech, whether in school, at the pulpit, or in the Senate, best represented the truthbecause it was delivered in a straightforward, direct, unadorned style. In fact, the ideologies informingthe substantive and stylistic turns of political speech aligned with those regarding Classical educationand intellectualism as well as the language of the church, in general. With the win of Andrew Jacksonin 1828 to the presidency, the importance of this new direct style of sounding out political powerdeepened and found its foothold. The Republic moved away from political legislation through con-versation by virtuous leaders in the privacy of the public Senate, toward a more populous, liberaldemocracy. This new system articulated itself through the register of political oratory, in general, andeventually through the context of oratory and rhetoric in the presidential campaign. The populouscontext of “direct speech” became the impetus of a structural transformation in political process, whichconstituted by its very performance of the written word, the ratified polity addressee.

As the liberal democratic style took hold initially during the Antebellum period, many among theleadership balked at the growing requisite that politicians be good orators. Senators argued againstdirect election to guard their contemplative environment and slight remove from the people. The style,even as it came from the written document, seemed pandering to the electorate, an invitation todemagoguery, and a kind of smooth talking not becoming of the noble actor (Troy 1991:72). Thecolonial polity, Troy argues, “prized executive humility as an antidote to tyranny, and trusted thevirtuous leaders of society to channel people’s passions and avoid the ‘mobocracy’ ” (Troy 1991:5).Most candidates responded with a continued silence they believed pointed to their reason and dignity.The protection of the candidates’ virtue came not only by way of the Party’s representation, but alsothrough oratorical surrogates that performed a representation of the candidate’s party loyalty. Thisethos remained dominant into the mid-nineteenth century.

2See Remer (1999).

50 North American Dialogue

Nearing the Civil War, a range of black orators demonstrated sophisticated grasp of the verbalperformance semiotic of speech and text to address new political concerns (Gustafson 2000:267). But atthis time, blacks were only ever given provisional and tentative acceptance accorded to emerging formsof text-based, and therefore, reasoned out, democratic speech (Gustafson 2000:242, 265). And, this wasprimarily in the North. Most who did gain a public voice came from the movement of black Abolitionorators, 300 men and women of which Frederick Douglass was one. Given the liminal structuraltransformation underway for public political oratory and rhetoric at the time, black Abolition oratorssaw an opening to influence the ways in which oratorical performance might move the public oncertain social issues.

More than what he said, it was Douglass’ speech style that caught the attention of a broaderAmerican public sphere. He departed from the trend of voicing one’s performance based from thewritten text. Though beginning from the written manuscript, Douglass would set it aside to deliver anextraordinary extempore performance inspired by the styles of the trans-Atlantic African traditions. Heused this performance semiotic to negotiate political agency for himself as an African American(Gustafson 2000:267), emerging as “black America’s premier spokesperson, welcomed at the WhiteHouse, his speeches widely reprinted in the northern press; his own life, he believed, exemplifying howAmerica might move beyond racism to a society founded on universal human rights” (Foner 1987:866).Through the circulation of the extempore performance Douglass and other Abolition orators across thecountry made a contribution to public oratorical style that would shift the aesthetic of populous speechfor many politicians to come. In so doing, they would also contribute over time to the change of thepolitical campaign.

Certainly, Abolition speakers were a transformative opportunity of publicity for the establishment ofa communicative style as an interpretive structure from which to frame a black public. But, theevaluative purview from which Douglass and other African-American speakers were judged sawthe extempore performance as merely titillating, fascinating, and thrillingly “savage.” The trope of thesavage, long worn in its use to describe black society and any practice associated with it, wouldstigmatize black speaking styles as speaking from the gut, and therefore, impulsive and unreasonable.The aesthetic of the savage’s speech met with the ideologies privileging the contemplation impliedthrough performance of the written word. This semiotically barred the style’s acceptance to the publicsphere even as slaves were freed and blacks were, through the Thirteenth (1865) and FourteenthAmendments (1868), invited into the fold of the polity. When extempore performance did begin to gaininfluence in political campaigns later at the turn of the century, the very populism that made theseforms of direct speech structurally possible between the candidate and “the people” would also becomethe antidemocratic revisionist voice to marginalize any public participation by the black, extemporepolitical voice and its vote. Populism was the resistance movement that transformed U.S. governmentand its processes, from its electoral laws to its campaigns; yet, it also inadvertently reinforced the veryexclusivity of the political public sphere it had fought against.

If the aesthetics of Antebellum populism and the exposure of extemporaneous speech styles topolitics invited voters toward a more impassioned process, the presidential campaigns of 1860–1876solidified just how proximate the interactional roles of “the people” and “the candidate” could be.This came with the rise of nationalism and the strengthening of the presidency as the focus onpartisanship faded (Troy 1991:81). It came with the crisis of the Democratic Party, borne from thetremendous growth of the electorate’s right to vote, which had been extended to former slaves. And,it came from the continuing transformations in transportation and media technology and the press(Troy 1991:81). With these structural changes to governance and the role of civil society, liberaldemocracy spread and with that grew the place of the press. Jacksonian Democrats’ direct interaction

Structuring Public Representational Practice 51

framed the future, postwar structure of the campaign and the presidency from which to see,hear, applaud, and even attack the candidate himself. After the war, linguistic transformations tooratorical form that had already inchoate forms during Jackson increased as populous ideologies oftransparency and direct deliberation in the election process pressed the country’s leadership into fullview.

Near the turn of the century, Theodore Roosevelt rose to mentor this transformation. His voicebecame the representative of the prominent, active, talkative, and masculine candidate brought to theelectorate. His famous adage suggesting preemptive strike over diplomacy, “speak softly and carry abig stick,” was directed at the world stage, not to the stage at home. In fact, at home he insisted onvehement and robust oratory, while running mate, William McKinley, held fast to the Republicanvirtue of passivity, discretion, sometimes aloofness. Roosevelt felt his public debate should be unin-hibited in its presentation of who he was. He gave the country a consistent, charismatic campaign. By1912, alongside William Jennings Bryant, the bombastic Roosevelt had recast the campaign, thenominee now shouldering a larger responsibility (Troy 1991:108–109). He now had to speak for himselfand to speak with a persuasive verve that had been tagged long ago as attracting the mobocracy. Thevirtuous campaign of issues and the art of the better (reasoned) argument had given way to thepedestrian campaign of personality, a modern and public interest that had come along to trumpthe traditional guide of “character” (Troy 1991:107, 125). Mere presence and pleasantries no longeralone counted, energy and effort took front stage. With this, personality-based rhetoric came to deter-mine how the political public sphere would reshape in the populous man’s image. To hear this shift inpresidential oratory, consider this moment in American policy when the beginning of the twentiethcentury was marked by structural changes in both nomination and campaign processes that wouldencourage this campaign of personality.

With the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, Senators became directly elected by votersrather than by legislators. This meant candidates could not just be known and assessed by their fellowlawmakers and party members but also needed to be known (or made known) to those who would electthem — the voters. With this, presidential candidates resisted less to being the voice of their owncampaigns. And, with more immediate proximity between leader and led, soon gone would be the daysof the public/private distinction in a new country where the “people [have now] grown accustomed tosignification” (Norton 1986:102). So much exposure and access to the presidential candidate vested himwith the requirement to deliver a performance of public personae, iconic of the nation’s ideal. Toaccomplish this, for example, William Howard Taft delivered a 400-speech tour in 1908. As self-effacingas he attempted to be in his speeches (working from that long-held reliance on humility as a winningcharacteristic), his patron, Teddy Roosevelt, urged in his client to be bold, colorful, to attack but avoiddelicate issues” (Troy 1991:122).

The issue of privacy and the aesthetic of the silent, virtuous leader became secondary with this newstyle of campaign. The new way availed to the public a surveillance of the candidate that exposed aspotential targets aspects about his person. In 1912, against Woodrow Wilson’s wishes to maintain hisprivacy, he conceded that America wanted to see their candidate and that personality mattered in thecampaign: “...I know my fellow countrymen want to see what I look like, at least; not for the sake of mybeauty, but for the sake of forming their own opinion about what sort of chap I seem to be” (Troy1991:129). Classically informed conversation once presupposed in its speaker a virtuous leader befittingto that national social imaginary; there was no need to describe his physical appearance to anyelectorate. Now his oratory must be crafted so as to create the person, the body, and the overall imagethat serves as a sign of national embodiment. With the rise of the campaign of personality, the man, thepresident, and the image of the presidency could no longer be dissociated (Norton 1986:91). Of course,


nor could any voice of leadership representing the society excluded in the polity escape the public gazethat would never dissociate his personality with the subaltern status of his people.

Amplifying this structural shift toward the modern rhetorical campaign of personality and thepublics it cohered were the increasing innovations in journalistic technologies and the invention ofstable sound recordings (Bauman and Feaster 2005; Troy 1991:3). By 1916, the press achieved fourtimes per capita consumption compared to the 1890s. Ideologies linking ways of speaking as ways ofbeing persisted as personhood was conveyed through the recorded and replayed voice. Speakingwith a particular accent, prosody, intonation, and grammar could index who he was as a person, hiseducation, the place from which he came, and where he was situated in the big American family.Recorded sound mattered greatly. Even as early as the 1920s, the candidate’s utterances weredeemed the deciding factor in the race. This was such that new textbooks instructing popularspeechmakers flew from bookstore shelves with just three essentials for successfully performingthe speech. Just as with advertising copy, these essentials were brevity, simple words, and sincerity.In fact, with the brevity recording technology required, candidates soon would become fashionedas ad copy, making way for the sound bite and quick turns of phrase accompanying that (Troy1991).

By 1924, radio served as an essential medium for conveying recorded performances by candidates.Troy’s measurement of this shift is instructive. New ways of speaking alongside this shift “from aformal interaction among intimates to an artificial intimacy with a nationwide audience, was part of abroader transformation in the presidential campaign” (Troy 1991:158). Radio, television, and growingmedia markets like advertising came to change the sensibilities about how voters made decisions basedon the performance of the person. The presidential campaign of the twentieth century represented abeginning to the massive learning curve by the polity and its representatives to speak a commonregister of sound bites and rhetorical techniques distorted and recontextualized by mass media capital.3

Reason left as aesthetic experience took over, “the quality felt rather than understood” (Troy 1991:167).Though only one-fifth of Americans had televisions in 1952, 80 percent would own them by 1960. ByKennedy/Nixon (1960), the stage of the image-conscious campaign would be fixed and expected assuch.

Just as personality became the normalized focus of the campaign, the decade between 1955 and 1965marked the active imaginings of a black American vocal public, especially in the South. Racial segre-gation in the United States had both necessitated and given birth to a remarkable black southern publicsphere (Baker 1994:19). This was a public manifesting through the regeneration and reinvigoration ofa representational language, familiar in the songs of Christian praise and songs of solidarity in the CivilRights Movement. And, it was embodied in the irrefutably persuasive oratory of its own form ofvisibility and personality, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Captivation by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s oratory,particularly by the print media, not only framed a national orientation to the movement. It broughtabout a much-needed national form of black publicity. The public he brought to the fore was theimpoverished, the jailed, and the excluded by Jim Crow. In July of 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. urgedthat “the movement must address itself to restructuring the whole of American society.... The problemsthat we are dealing with ... are not going to be solved until there is a radical redistribution of economicand political empire” (Baker 1994:30). These problems were a matter of structural concern, heimpressed. Bringing consciousness to action, the oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr. “captures the

3Every campaign after 1952 would feature television ads. Madison Avenue executive, Rooser Reeves, would convince Dwight Eisenhowerthat short ads played during popular television programs would reach more voters than any other form of advertising.


peculiar agency of civil rights and the movement’s effort to recapture and recode all existing Americanarrangements of publicness” (Baker 1994:12). King’s voice and language made fully visible and audiblea black political public in America.

With his oratory came the institutional infrastructures his words would transform: the church as aspace of political assembly, knocked from “structural alignment with southern Jim Crow” (Baker1994:24); national monuments of freedom recontextualized by the performance of his orations, and thesurprising sites of political resistance and freedom — diners, buses, the public streets, and especiallyjail, the white American site of incarceration that paradoxically gave black people the freedom toassemble.4 “Jail, not bail” defined a new southern black public consciousness that shifted the “con-trolled space of criminality and incarceration” and transformed it into a “public arena for black justiceand freedom” (Baker 1994:14). King gave new meaning to these spaces through his words, words thatby their very performance drastically transformed business-as-usual in the political public sphere.

King’s success at commanding an audience and mobilizing them as a public came as a threat to thestatus quo. The shear draw of his oratory and the spatiotemporal contexts of his performance, the blackchurch, the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and spaces such as jail, threatened “white America’stheology of terror with the intellectual and imaginative resources of the black public sphere” (Baker1994:20, 25). White supremacy responded by silencing Dr. King through assassination. With the deathof King and other leaders, the consequences threatening access or legibility in any common represen-tational language of political collectivity left the black speaker without a representational language orvoice that could sound out in a mass-distributable register, much less cohere a national political public.

The physical violence of history sees its symbolic equivalent as the words and spaces bound to thechronotope of the Civil Rights Movement and its leader, continue to be co-opted and commoditized tosell the message of “freedom” in the United States, even by those intent to restore freedom to anAmerica that must be taken back from the very embodiment of King’s restructuring message, a blackman. This was made evident recently, when cable radio news pundit, Glenn Beck, along with otheranti-Obama politicians successfully secured the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th anniversaryof Dr. King’s oration, “I Have a Dream,” to make the battle cry for restoring America’s honor (fromwhat?). Beck claimed the United States had “wandered in darkness” too long.5 Sarah Palin told thecrowd that calls to transform the country were not enough: “We must restore America and restore herhonor.” Palin likened the rally participants to the civil rights activists from 1963, and said the samespirit that helped them overcome to oppression, discrimination and violence would help this group aswell. Regarding the audience as patriots who knew “never to retreat,” she exclaimed, “Look aroundyou. You’re not alone. You are Americans! You have the same steel spine and moral courage ofWashington and Lincoln and Martin Luther King. It is in you. It will sustain you as it sustained them,”all of which was greeted by the crowd’s standing ovations and chants of “U!–S!–A!”6 To add insult toinjury, Alveda King, daughter of King was invited and attended the rally, focusing specifically onreligious virtue. And, Reverend Al Sharpton held a counter rally at a nearby high school to honor the

4Though the direction of the article does not afford great detail on these spaces of resistance, jail and the church as a space of resistance,in particular, deserve equal footing as structures enabling black publics during the Civil Rights Movement, and have endured as spacesof group identity formation, struggle, and liberation even today (Baker 1994:15). Houston Baker's compelling argument concerning theblack public sphere during Martin Luther King, Jr.'s leadership places the church at the center of the Civil Rights Movement's organizationand, incarceration, usually considered a limitation for freedom, was instead seen, paradoxically, as a space of freedom (Baker 1994).5Fox Cable News, August 28, 2012. Beck: US has “wandered in darkness” too long, Palin praises “patriots”; Sharpton honors Kinghttp://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/08/28/beck-wandered-darkness-long-palin-praises-patriots-sharpton-honors-king/6Rucker, Philip (August 28, 2010). “Sarah Palin takes ‘Restoring Honor’ Stage.” The Washington Post. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/08/sarah-palin-restoring-honor.html


Civil Rights leader; yet, the cable news coverage of this never forgot to mention that people werebussed in and that they received a free lunch. Recontextualizing the spatiotemporal contexts of theblack leader’s historical moment in 1963 at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial reinforced that the words,bodies, and spaces of a black public are property, available for reconfiguration and display in ways thatdisable the legitimacy of their participation in the making of America.

The Civil Rights Movement did do the productive social work of creating and nurturing a repre-sentational language of regeneration and eventually the register of Black Power. The oratory, song, andthe sites of assembly and resistance were not simply technologies of protest but served as instrumentsof recognition that “provided a new conceit of modernism” for the community, a register and contextthrough which to cohere multiple publics, locally and nationally (Baker 1994). In the context of a pressgrowing accustomed to covering political leadership according to campaigns of personality, this newmodernism came with the challenges of the mass-mediated public display of the speaker and thepublic’s evaluative gaze through the lens of its idealized history. Black leadership framed within thisconceit of performance was as vulnerable to scrutiny, essentialism, and stereotype as any other, if notmore. But, the revile of black political participation could be read clearly in mass media, frequentlymisrepresented or reframed by the press as threats by those who need to reigned in. Amplifying thisrecontextualization of those who chose to speak out (and to do so without a script), mass-mediatedrevisions of the black voice not only reflected the speaker but refracted out to a generalization of allblacks as impulsive, irrational, and therefore, violent. Key in this semiotic struggle linking embodiedperformance to mental capacity and moral character, Black Power leader Malcolm X faced this differ-entiation by the press on a regular basis. In his own words, “the press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make a criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s thecriminal.”7

Walter Lippman, longtime journalist, notes that even with his conscious and painstaking attempts tospeak with reason and to win over his audiences by educating them, Malcolm X’s oratorical perfor-mances, and therefore the man, were represented by major press media as aggressive and motivatingnationwide violence (1993). His political concepts reflected nonviolence and, at most, self-defense, yethis reason was recontextualized by the New York Times as an “embittered racist” who has “struck backin anger,” calling upon “Negroes to form rifle clubs, ostensibly to defend lives and property in time ofemergency. ‘It is legal and lawful to own a shotgun or rifle,’ he says, adding with a straight face, ‘Webelieve in obeying the law.’ His is a call to break the law; to take the law into one group’s hands; to erecta private militia. His is a call to arms against duly constituted police forces.”8 Casting the refractive netto frame a collective public iconic of the man, the New York Times generalizes the work of Malcolm X tothe “nasty phenomenon” of minority groups fighting for civil rights: In the May 29, 1964 Times, C.L.Sulzberger, in his Foreign Affairs column, wrote, “A nasty phenomenon” of this century has for the firsttime extended its shadow, if faintly, across the North American continent. This is the phenomenon ofviolence expressed or threatened by extreme activists in dissatisfied minority groups” (Sulzberger1963).9 Iconic of the man, and indexical of his people, such representations would demonstrate “thecontinued potency of that long held stereotype of the savage extemporaneous speaker as a role to be

7See Lippman, Walter. n.d. “How the New York Times distorted Malcolm X's views on self-defense.” http://www.walterlippmann.com/mx-nyt.html8See Sulzberger (1964), “To Arms with Malcolm X,” New York Times, March 14, 1964 and Sulzberger, C. L., “American Extremist Shadows,”The New York Times, May 29, 1963.9See Lippman, Walter. n.d. “How the New York Times distorted Malcolm X's views on self-defense”; http://www.walterlippmann.com/mx-nyt.html


both occupied and critiqued while white reactions continued to manifest through the persistence ofhostile stereotypes focused on modes of speech” (Gustafson 2000:269). Whether his performance ofreason indexed him as the clean, articulate, uppity negro, or the mass media rendered of his words asviolent, Malcolm X and his dissatisfied group continued as something outside of society, foreign to thestatus quo, and therefore something to be feared as a threat to the good of the nation’s civil society.

Today, these tropes of the foreign threat come in the lexicon of fighting the enemy and the calls toaction by political leaders, and critics of President Obama both reflect and shape that lexicon: In a 2009radio interview, Michelle Bachmann talks with Glenn Beck about the cap and trade bill that was underdebate in the House at that time. Referring to her own government in Washington, DC as a foreigncountry, she states,

I’m a foreign correspondent on enemy lines and I try to let everyone back here in Minnesota know exactly the nefariousactivities that are taking place in Washington.... I would say there are probably 30 keepers of the flame over here.... The mainthing we can do right now is be foreign correspondents reporting to you from enemy lines.... I want people in Minnesota armedand dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us “having arevolution every now and then is a good thing,” and the people — we the people — are going to have to fight backhard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedomforever in the United States.” (author’s italics)10

In general, the 2008 campaign itself was built around “racially charged depiction of Barack Obamaas a ‘dangerous’ brown-skinned man with a radical ideology, and his supporters as besotted tools of theEnemy” (Neiwert 2009:139). Whether Obama is being called Osama or someone throws out withanticipation the prolepsis suggestion that he might be dangerous, the fear alone of what this black manmight do or who might be behind the facade of “clean and articulate” is part of what is at stake. Thatthe structure in place for bringing him to office involves close scrutiny to the individual himself and thefact that scrutiny comes with a partial awareness that refracts its stereotypes onto whole groups ofpeople leaves Obama in the direct path of this poetics of violence. For example, it took the on-aircorrection of a fellow Fox anchorwoman to alert her fellow announcer, Fox News Washington, DCanchorman Will Thomas, that he had misspoken when he stated, “President Obama is, in fact, dead.”11

In Sacramento, CA, a Fox affiliate reported as breaking news in the lower-thirds, “Obama bin LadenDead”12 This form of parapraxis continued at many media sites, from CNN.com’s “Latest” alert thatthere was “no indication Obama tried to surrender”13 to hosts of local affiliates from major networkslike NBC.14 Unfortunately, these mistakes and witty turns of phrase can often serve as calls to actualviolence, evidenced when renowned conservative journalist, Liz Trotta of Fox Cable News, easilyuttered without trouble, “And now we have as what some are reading as a suggestion that somebodyknock off Obama ... uh, Osama, well both if we really could (laughter between Trotta and anchorman)to which the anchorman simply laughed and responded, “Talk about how you really feel.”15 Or,audience members go unchecked by their political leaders and freely sell bonehead flags featuring thepresident as the pirate with a bullet through his head; or, they yell from these rallies, “He’s an-, Killhim!” Echoing Sarah Palin’s earlier declaration at a 2008 Tea Party event that “It’s not a time to retreat.

10http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cspg/smartpolitics/2009/03/michele_bachmann_on_dc_im_a_fo_1.php11Fox News, Washington, DC affiliate WTTG 5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgcY-W74B_412http://www.metro.co.uk/news/862122-obama-bin-laden-dead-fox-news-typo-causes-twitter-storm13http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/02/obama-to-make-statment-tonight-subject-unknown/comment-page-71/14For a compelling (but perhaps temporarily posted) collection of instances news reporters and talk show hosts confuse Obama for Osama,see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XteA_DmU5k015http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjYpkvcmog0


It’s a time to reload,” Bachmann and others’ metaphors of violence or direct statements like Trotta’sfantasy assassination of the president attach easily to those associated with the ways black people havebeen described and organized since slavery. Significantly, these tropes of the impulsive, irrational,violent, and foreign have gone down in history as handily prepackaged idioms that could be borrowedin future castigations of black political performance, especially those seeking political office like thepresident, and as leaders like King and Malcolm X do to establish strong black publics within nationalpolitics.

Through the advancements in sound recording and the eventual mass-mediated news culture,public access to scrutinize candidates has become commonplace and naturalized as a part of thedemocratic political process. When it comes to the political campaign of personality, the devil is nolonger in the details. Everyone speaks a common language of sound bites, fluent in the language andmores of television media, and the place of the performance of person over the argument of issuesresounds. With this transformation from a focus on issue-based campaigning to one of the performanceof personality, mass media has taken advantage of both the loss of insulation and innocence candidateswould have to endure and the American publics’ seduction over the images and sound bites producedthrough that exposure (Troy 1991:241). In fact, since the 1950s, television has stood as the “most potentweapon in the modern demagogue’s arsenal of artifice” (Troy 1991:259). As Marshall McLuhen so aptlysummarized in 1968, the medium had become the message.

This arsenal extends to new media through which massive amounts of words, pictures, and soundscomment on other words, pictures, and sounds in a real-time 24/7 reel. Significantly, its reel spins bythe centrifugal and centripetal force of the same projectors as that of mainstream celebrity televisionand motion picture such that even the register and aesthetic of journalistic media are at first shaped bythat socializing register, both brought to bear on the representational language of America’s politicalpublics. As the campaign of celebrity features presidential candidates or First families on comedyshows, talk shows, movie cameos, and even the Oscar’s, 24/7 news coverage streams tropes of howperformances of personhood ought to be read: sound bites across the bottom-thirds, the anchor desk,the teleprompter, all to discursively orient the political and moral ideologies and aesthetics of itslisteners. Structural shifts in public rhetoric and oratory alongside the changes to the American cam-paign aesthetic may have evolved from the notion of populous representation and enabled by advance-ment in sound recording to the global mass-mediated campaign of personality and now celebrity thatwe see today. But it also held steady with a common effect throughout: The campaigns of personalityand celebrity have made vulnerable the biography and the embodiment of that biography of allindividuals who seek the presidency. As ideologies conflating ways of speaking with ways of beingreflect and shape mass media and their audiences-as-polity, the campaign of personality as a structureof performance of self through the meta-performance of celebrity personae has the dialogic power toextend its effects onto broader political publics.

Conclusion

Since the country’s founding, the politics of public representation through oratory and campaignrhetoric point to language’s mediating role in the production of America’s publics. As we find with theoratory and rhetoric criticizing the place and performance of Barack Obama as President of the UnitedStates, the structural logic of the presidential campaign through American history bears down on themediating relationship between fluent access to mainstream political participation and undisguised,vocalized anxiety and rage over the principal office of the country being held by a black man, and thefear that will strengthen black political publics. The uptake of a violent rhetoric against this threat to a


“we, the people” has all been made available by a structural history of the United States that includesthe very transformation to politics of representation in the presidential political campaign.

Voting in and inaugurating a black, educated, articulate man as the Commander-in-Chief of theUnited States provoked an otherwise localized and covert rhetoric to rise to the national fore of populardiscourse. As indexical of this agitation and the anxiety this produces, speakers cast aspersions on thePresident and his First Family. U.S. politicians and media of the conservative ilk activate and call intoaction particular publics when they engage certain semiotic devices in anticipation of and in responseto a perceived imperiling of this civilization and manhood. In this case, President Obama can be foundrecruited to at least two subject positions from which his personhood may be subjected to symbolicmodes of violence: being the President of the United States, a role thought quintessentially represen-tative and protective of “the Nation,” and being a black male citizen, a role historically characterized asa threat to that Nation. The chronotope of black Americans as persona non grata, the deficient nonhu-man, noncitizen is ushered in. As campaign styles shifted away from issues and toward personality,that persona of the essentialized, “undifferentiated and uncomplicated but huge and threatening mass”(Zentella 1997) of the black race in America has persisted. For the black candidate represented throughthe campaign of personality and now celebrity, person is quickly made into personae, a subjectivitymaximally available to a coercive recalibration of a race that is still recognized as less than human, alien,and un-American (Neiwert 2009:115). To increase the stakes, circulating discourse available 24/7 setsthe “truth” in action and avails public affines of the phrasings and frames through which to think aboutand act upon these fears, both through preemptive strike and through retaliation. They galvanizeaudiences through demagoguery, fueling panic over the subjugation by the otherwise slave gone“uppity” whose place now is at the head of the table.

Chocked full of idioms and images to embody that message — from indexical slippages torecontextualizing space to mockery and carnivalesque calibrations of masculinity and moral-ity — mass-mediated political rhetoric and its uptake and reproduction by voting publics work todenigrate the president. These sound bites arrive from the structural logic of American slavery andthose techniques of disciplining bodies and their knowledge even after slavery. They dismantle thepresident’s role as a citizen, suggest his education is unusual, and respond with anxiety at his verypositions as a black leader and as the president (Jackson, forthcoming). These deployments issue a callto action, to save America and “restore” its honor. Unconscious fears and fantasies regarding mascu-line, market-driven civilization and usually white, Christian supremacy, then, play out in politicalrhetoric that serves as the elixir of anxieties toward political power. Of course, rhetorical violence iscommon in American campaigns; however, for Obama, the rhetorical mudslinging often comesbecause black America vis-à-vis this man, pollutes the social imaginary of what “America” is “supposedto be.” And in President Obama’s case, acts of racial stereotyping are recontextualized against thenostalgic background of that imaginary as embodied in the President of the United States himself. Thesemiotic equation of differentiation is set in social motion through the more perfect union of campaignstructure and rhetoric: Celebrity brings about structural transformation in campaigning and a vulner-able visibility to the candidate; while, contemporary signs of violence attached to black citizenship,leadership and politically oriented publics brand and market black personhood, both singular andcollective, as a threat to everything for which “America” stands.

References

Baker, Houston. 1994. “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere.” Public Culture, 7(1):3–33.Bauman, Richard, and Patrick Feaster. 2005. “ ‘Fellow Townsmen and My Noble Constituents!’: Representations of Oratory

on Early Commercial Recordings.” Oral Tradition, 20(1):35–57.


Foner, Eric. 1987. “Rights and the Constitution in Black Life during the Civil War and Reconstruction.” The Journal ofAmerican History, 74(3):863–883.

Fox Cable News. 2012. “Beck: US Has ‘Wandered in Darkness’ Too Long, Palin Praises ‘Patriots’; Sharpton honors King.”(August 28, 2012). http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/08/28/beck-wandered-darkness-long-palin-praises-patriots-sharpton-honors-king/, accessed September 4, 2013.

Gustafson, Sandra M. 2000. Eloquence Is Power: Oratory & Performance in Early America. Chapel Hill: Published for theOmohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of NorthCarolina Press.

Jackson, Jennifer. 2014 Forthcoming. Structural Differentiation and the Poetics of Violence Shaping Barack Obama’s Presi-dency: A Study in Personhood, Literacy, and the Improvisation of African-American Publics.

Lippman, Walter. 1993. “How the New York Times distorted Malcolm X’s Views on Self-Defense.” http://www.walterlippmann.com/mx-nyt.html.

Metro. 2011. Obama bin Laden dead’: Fox News Typo Causes Twitter Storm (May 2, 2011). http://www.metro.co.uk/news/862122-obama-bin-laden-dead-fox-news-typo-causes-twitter-storm, accessed September 4, 2013.

Neiwert, David A. 2009. The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right. Sausalito: PoliPoint Press.Norton, Anne. 1986. Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Ostermeier, Michele. 2009. “Michele Bachmann on D.C.: “I’m a foreign correspondent on enemy lines.” (March 22, 2009).

Smartpolitics. http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cspg/smartpolitics/2009/03/michele_bachmann_on_dc_im_a_fo_1.php,accessed September 4, 2013.

Remer, Gary. 1999. “Political Oratory and Conversation: Cicero versus Deliberative Democracy.” Political Theory, 27(1):39–64.

Rucker, Philip. 2010. “Sarah Palin Takes ‘Restoring Honor’ Stage. The Washington Post. (August 28, 2010). http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/08/sarah-palin-restoring-honor.html, accessed September 4, 2013.

Sulzberger, C. L. “American Extremist Shadows.” The New York Times. (May 29, 1963).Sulzberger, C. L. “To Arms with Malcolm X.” New York Times. (March 14, 1964).This Just In. CNN.com. May 2, 2011. “U.S. troops Kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan”. http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/

05/02/obama-to-make-statment-tonight-subject-unknown/comment-page-71, accessed September 4, 2013.Troy, Gil. 1991. See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate. New York: Free Press.YouTube. May 2, 2011. “Will Thomas - Fox 5 - Washington D.C. - “President Obama Is, in Fact, Dead.” Excerpt from, Fox

News, Washington, DC affiliate WTTG 5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgcY-W74B_4, accessed September 4,2013.

Youtube. n.d.. Fox News Jokes about Killing Obama. Fox Cable News. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjYpkvcmog0,accessed September 4, 2013.

Zentella, Ana Celia. 1997. Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.

Jennifer [email protected]


Research ArticleOpportunity and Danger: Why Studies of the Right Are Crucial for U.S. Anthropology and Beyond

By Kaja Tretjak

The resurgence of social movement activity worldwide in recent years has seen an attendant rise ofanthropological and related scholarship on present-day insurgency. Scholars have engaged a broadrange of efforts, from the Zapatista struggle for autonomous communities in Mexico, to Latin America’s“pink tide” and indigenous movements across the continent, to massive global justice and antiwarmobilizations, to the Arab Spring and the waves of demonstrations enveloping Turkey and Brazil at thetime of this writing. Building on the field’s long-standing traditions of public, activist, and militantanthropology, for instance, today’s “protest anthropologists” rightly engage the Occupy movementuprisings that swept the globe in 2011, unsettling many of the discipline’s knowledge-producingpractices along the way (Maskovsky 2013). But the field too often neglects social movements at oddswith scholars’ own political commitments. Perhaps due in part to their own antipathy toward conser-vatism and hostility toward the consolidation of various parts of the right in recent decades, “research-ers overwhelmingly choose to study ‘attractive’ movements with which they sympathize” (Edelman2001:302). Yet anthropology offers a robust foundation for the study of conservative movements, alegacy that illustrates the centrality of these complex formations in establishing the scope and limits ofthe present political economic order (cf. Edelman 2001; Ginsburg 1989; Harding 2000). It is upon thesecontributions that a growing scholarship currently draws in renewing anthropological focus on move-ments with which many researchers may not identify, but are nevertheless key to shaping contempo-rary political economic and cultural landscapes — a research agenda particularly significant in themidst of growing concerns regarding the discipline’s ability to speak to pressing issues of the day.

From studies of the transnational ex-gay movement (Erzen 2006) and the social engagement ofevangelical Christians (Elisha 2011) to anti-immigrant Minuteman Corps activity (Molina 2011), eth-nographic attention to conservative movements is on the rise. In both 2007 and 2008, students at theCUNY Graduate Center’s Department of Anthropology organized a conference series on studying theright. The effort was followed by a day-long workshop on the tea party in 2012, culminating in SandraMorgen’s keynote address on “taxpayer identity politics” mobilized by conservative efforts since the1980s. Many contributors to these events recently gathered at the 2013 Society for the Anthropology ofNorth America (SANA) Conference session “The Future of the Right,” sharing timely research on thegenealogy of “entitlement” in opposing redistributive public policies (Morgen 2013a); the tea party’sconceptualization of history (Bauer 2013) and the significance of the movement’s local formations andpolitical victories (Westermeyer 2013); conservative mobilization of anti-socialist imagery (Henry2013); ecological catastrophe in evangelical discourse (Bjork-James 2013); and the functions of utopianimaginaries in libertarian organizing (Tretjak 2013a).

Through an overview of this burgeoning scholarship, this essay highlights the significance ofanthropological attention to the right. Such contributions hold the potential to uniquely illuminatecrucial developments within U.S. cultural and political landscapes, revealing both opportunities anddangers presented by conservative movements. Careful analysis of the dynamic and multifacetednature of such movements illustrates the myriad, and at times competing, intellectual traditions andmotivations they frequently entail. Cracks and fissures in dominant movement trends may lead toprofound implications as participants take up movement discourses on their own terms and toward


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ends quite different than those advanced by movement elites. Such a research agenda can also helpunderstand the processes through which conservative populist movements garner support by success-fully mobilizing legitimate grievances and concerns, particularly in times of economic decline — atrend of profound significance historically both within and well beyond the U.S. context. In turn,scholarship focused on conservative formations can explore potential alliances across ideologicalboundaries around specific issues; discern the factors shaping the development and evolution ofparticipants’ political identities over time; as well as highlight the voids in and shortcomings ofcompeting mobilization efforts. Of course, in numerous instances studies of conservative movementsalso reveal their profound negative consequences, particularly for marginalized and vulnerable groups.Such studies can simultaneously offer tools for thorough yet vigorous critique and intervention — acounter to the plethora of well-intentioned but overly generalized, ill-informed, and unpersuasivecriticisms pouring forth particularly from left-oriented spaces within and outside the academy alike.Specifically, this essay takes up three interrelated contributions of the emergent field of studies focusedon conservative movements: helping to understand these movements’ complexity and heterogeneity;highlighting the importance of taking seriously the grievances of many participants in such mobiliza-tion; and facilitating nuanced critique.

“The Koch Brothers Fallacy”: Understanding Movement Complexity and Heterogeneity

In 2011, former Vice President Dick Cheney presented former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeldwith the Defender of the Constitution Award at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC),the largest national conservative gathering held annually in Washington, DC. At the event, I stoodpressed against a wall of the packed auditorium, surrounded by hundreds of predominantly college-aged attendees shouting “War criminals!” and “Terrorists!” amidst thunderous booing and hissing.While some retaliated with chants of “USA! USA!” the raucous crowd would not be subdued. Eventorganizers removed several particularly vocal hecklers. A group of Cheney and Rumsfeld detractorsrose and walked out en masse. An older gentleman standing nearby muttered, partly to me and partlyto himself, “Wow. Cheney and Rumsfeld aren’t even safe at CPAC anymore. What is going on here?”Indeed, the event’s vibe felt much more akin to an antiwar demonstration than the country’s premierconservative congregation. But the voices of dissent were not, as one might readily assume, those ofleftist protesters infiltrating the event. They were self-identified libertarians, part of the phenomenonthat in the late 2000s erupted in what journalist and historian of libertarianism Brian Doherty describesas “the largest popular movement motivated by distinctly libertarian ideas about war, money, and therole of government we’ve seen in the postwar period” (Doherty 2009).

While libertarian figures and institutions have aimed to mobilize a popular movement for decades,it was only recently that former Texas Representative Ron Paul gained “rockstar status” among youngpeople who routinely pack stadiums by the thousands for his speeches. Simultaneously, youth liber-tarian organizations have grown dramatically: Students for Liberty’s (SFL) global campus network hasexpanded to 863 student groups since its inception in 2008, while Young Americans for Liberty, alsoestablished in 2008, is today the fastest-growing national organization in the United States and boastsa network of over 125,000 activists. The Auburn, Alabama-based Ludwig von Mises Institute drawshundreds of students from around the globe each summer for Mises University, the intensive, week-long seminar billed as the world’s leading instructional program in the laissez-faire Austrian school ofeconomics, which began in 1986 with a handful of attendees. Further, the liberty movement, as it istermed by participants, increasingly transcends borders. For instance, SFL has formed considerableAfrican, European, and Latin American counterparts. African SFL unites students across nine countries

Opportunity and Danger 61

from Egypt to South Africa, while affiliates of European SFL span campuses in 26 countries — in 2012,the latter held five regional conferences across the continent.

From 2010 to 2013, I conducted 32 months of ethnographic fieldwork with the liberty movement.Funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the CUNY Graduate Center, my research centered inAustin, Texas — a university city in Ron Paul’s home state informally known as the libertarian capitalof the United States due to its thriving, heterogeneous libertarian community tightly networked withother libertarian hubs both regionally and nationally. Research further encompassed attendance ofnational and international events, conferences, and numerous intensive, week-long seminars for liber-tarian students; over 200 unstructured and semistructured interviews as well as 10 life history inter-views; and countless hours of informal day-to-day interactions with movement participants.

By 2011, the CPAC “libertarian takeover” was undeniable. The conference overflowed withlibertarian-themed panels, the attendees of which stood packed alongside ballroom walls, sat onauditorium floors, and gathered in doorways, straining to hear the presentations. Throughout thethree-day affair, the predictable CPAC crowd of pudgy middle-aged men and pearl-clad women inbusiness attire intermingled with a colorful cast of characters less likely to be associated with thecountry’s largest annual conservative convergence. Sporting dreadlocks, sleeve tattoos, face piercings,and pink hairdos, representatives of groups from the Ladies of Liberty Alliance to various chapters ofStudents for Sensible Drug Policy joined other young people in, for the second year in a row, bringingRon Paul victory in the CPAC presidential straw poll, once seen as a key indicator of which presidentialhopefuls were favored by movement conservatives.

The conventional view that collapses libertarians with conservatives is dangerously flawed — the“conservative movement” itself is a complex formation composed of disparate and often opposedcommitments and philosophies. For example, in her 14-month ethnographic study of evangelicalChristian communities in Colorado Springs, Bjork-James (2013) explores why dominant evangelicaldiscourse marginalizes concern for the environment. Despite mass biocide of a significant number ofspecies globally and environmental catastrophes on virtually every scale, it is abortion — not extantand impending ecological disaster — that constitutes the ethical crisis of our day for most evangelicals.Yet these issues are not only championed by segments of the “Christian left,” but also by some, andespecially younger, evangelical leaders who urge environmental awareness and action grounded inparticular theological understandings and moral convictions. Through exploring how specific concep-tions of time structure evangelical ethical life, Bjork-James analyzes the means by which competingethical understandings of the future shape ideas about and responses to ecological collapse.

Such differentiation forms the cornerstone for understanding crucial contemporary developments.There certainly remains a substantial contingent of liberty movement participants of a distinctlyconservative bent — a long-standing political coalition between libertarians and conservatives domi-nated a significant portion of the twentieth century. While expressing reactions from dissatisfaction tooutrage with the Republican Party status quo, such “conservatarians,” in movement parlance, strive forParty reforms on foreign and monetary policy, among others; they simultaneously find common causewith mainstream Republicans on issues from abortion and same-sex marriage to privatization andderegulation. Some aim to benefit by allying with the movement, as exemplified by the public “con-version” to libertarianism by Fox commentator Glenn Beck. But the liberty movement’s recent revital-ization has embroiled the long-standing conservative/libertarian political coalition in strife, despitevehement insistence of traditional conservatives to the contrary, at least in public. While the particularsof how this coalition will be reconfigured in the realm of electoral politics remain to be seen, thesedynamics are already furthering the consolidation of an “anti-establishment” conservative wing withinthe Republican Party (Tretjak 2013b). Yet libertarianism’s resurgence has also ushered forth the emer-


gence of new liminal spaces between “right” and “left” political formations as traditionally understood,spaces through which increasing numbers of young people develop their political identities andchallenge existing political economic arrangements. A framework that uniformly dismisses such devel-opments as part of a tainted “right-wing” is unable to account for the fluid constituent parts within theonce-robust conservative coalition, nor grasp the potential reshaping of the political and cultural milieuin the United States and beyond by various parts of the liberty movement.

In particular, critics of libertarianism ought to be wary of “the Koch brothers fallacy”: the tendency,widespread particularly among various parts of the left, to view any and all liberty movement dynam-ics as sinister plots devised by the conservative billionaire brothers and imposed upon duped, orbought, participants from above. To be sure, conservative behemoths such as the Koch and Scaifefamily foundations have played key roles in the movement, and continue to do so today. Whilehistorical circumstances converged to fan the fires of the libertarian resurgence and Ron Paul’s presi-dential runs mobilized the movement in unprecedented ways, these developments could not haveoccurred on such a scale without the groundwork laid by long-standing libertarian institutions overnumerous decades — often funded by mammoth conservative foundations. Yet large parts of themovement’s youth who have taken up this knowledge are presently reimagining and recreatinglibertarianism on their own terms. Dismissive and ill-informed treatments of the liberty movement’scomplex dynamics overlook both the emancipatory potential of ideas and projects stemming from partsof the movement as well as opportunities for alliances around a range of issues.

The liberty movement is anything but monolithic, marked by a vast infrastructure of organizationsthat span a wide range of ideological commitments as well as rigorous — and frequently compet-ing — intellectual traditions. In turn, perhaps most overlooked by outside observers, is the potential ofgrassroots efforts stemming from various libertarian spaces: alliances with left-identified efforts inantiwar and police accountability organizing; models of localized, “off-the-grid” alternative economies;promotion of emerging technologies such as 3D printing, secure communication methods, and thedecentralized, open-source digital currency Bitcoin; as well as community projects around organicgardening, alternative education for children, and health education programs geared at marginalizedcommunities (Tretjak 2013b). Further, parts of the movement and fellow travelers are extremely criticalof both existing economic hierarchies and their apologists, committed to reviving libertarian traditionscentered on the experiences of vulnerable groups. Movement participants collaborating under thebroad rubric of the libertarian left systematically fuse market analysis with ardent critique of structuralpoverty and other forms of subordination — urging the integration of antiracism, feminism, mutualaid, and labor solidarity with libertarian thought. A significant target of numerous libertarians in thistradition is “vulgar libertarianism,” the tendency to treat existing business practices as though they aretaking place in the context of a genuinely free market, while routinely highlighting how the currentsystem is far from a free market in other contexts: “When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that thepresent system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich.But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth ofexisting corporations on the basis of ‘free market principles’ ” (Carson 2007).

Many of those in the rapidly expanding libertarian anarchist tradition1 who consciously reject theterm “capitalism” and opt instead for the moniker “market anarchist” thus draw a sharp distinction

1For clarity and consistency I retain the movement's own term “libertarian anarchism” in referring to support for the complete eliminationof state institutions. The term “libertarian” here reflects a particular usage popularized in the United States and referring to a traditionheavily influenced by mainstream classical liberal political thought. It should not be confused with the meaning of “libertarian” in manyother contexts, where the term is associated with social anarchist approaches that generally challenge private ownership of the means


between the market form and the economic features of actually existing capitalism. Themselves rifewith debate, anticapitalist market anarchist approaches fundamentally reject the notion that the marketform “must entail a social order of bosses, landlords, centralized corporations, class exploitation,cut-throat business dealings, immiserated workers, structural poverty, or large-scale economic inequal-ity” (Chartier and Johnson 2011:3). In turn, countless swiftly proliferating online spaces are ablaze withlively exchanges between activists and thinkers identifying or in close conversation with various partsof the liberty movement. For example, a growing arena of inquiry focuses on alternative property rightssystems, aiming to resuscitate and build upon a range of nineteenth-century anarchist thought. Therevival of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s philosophy of mutualism, for instance, has stirred intense debateboth among social anarchists and their Austrian economics-informed libertarian counterparts — emer-gent collaborations and exchanges are spearheading developments and realignments on both fronts.Granting developments such as these, due consideration is central to any understanding of the con-temporary political and cultural milieu.

Taking Participant Grievances Seriously

The implications of various conservative movements notwithstanding, scholarship on these forma-tions illustrates that many participants are drawn to them as a result of legitimately held grievances.The rise in what Morgen (2012) describes as contemporary “taxpayer identity politics” exemplified inthe rise of the tea party can thus be understood in part as an expression of legitimate outrage at taxpolicy that disproportionately advances the interests of an elite at the expense of everyday fami-lies — albeit an outrage harnessed by well-organized political efforts and directed toward endsunlikely to in fact help working and low-income people. Analyzing the growing income and wealthinequality in the United States over the past 30 years, Abramovitz and Morgen (2006) trace thesignificant decrease in downward redistribution of tax policy matters and federal taxes. Reductions incorporate tax rates, for example, have led to severe decreases in the overall tax revenue, while tax ratereductions for individuals have disproportionately impacted higher tax brackets. In turn, federal socialspending on programs for low-income groups has decreased dramatically. Further, Morgen (2013b)highlights “hidden” welfare — public subsidies within the tax code available to those taxpayers whocan take advantage of them, in contrast to the direct outlays of social spending. Thus, tax expendi-tures — tax credits, exemptions, and deductions — disproportionately lower the tax liabilities ofwealthy households and corporations, reducing available revenues for other programs.

In other words, the problems of economic insecurity and government’s failure to meet the needs ofeveryday people are excruciatingly real. But how, by whom, and to what ends such grievances areharnessed, as well as the nature of resulting mobilization, in part depends on how adept variousmovements are at capturing people’s attention and interest. The “Koch brothers fallacy” applies here aswell — rather than dismissing participants in conservative movements as dupes, ignoramuses, orbought souls, it behooves scholars and organizers alike to take many of their concerns seriously.

At times, identification with a particular movement stems directly from a lack of organized alter-natives. Thus, for instance, a significant part of an entire generation — gravely disenchanted withpolitics as usual as a tool in transforming a world embroiled in economic crisis and militarized systemsof governance — today looks to the libertarian tradition as a compass for envisioning alternative modes

of production. Movement participants also often use “libertarian anarchism” interchangeably with “anarcho-capitalism.” This, too, is aparticular usage stemming from the U.S. context, and many social anarchists reject the libertarian claim to the anarchist tradition in lightof the strong libertarian commitment to a private property rights framework.


of social organization. Movement participants share, in classic libertarian fashion, a deep-seated sus-picion regarding the capability of state action to meet the challenges presented by any number ofcontemporary dilemmas, seeing state-based solutions as much more likely to exacerbate than resolveproblems — not an unreasonable conclusion in light of numerous historical and contemporary politicaldevelopments. The single set of issues that presently unites the vast majority of liberty movementparticipants across ideological divides is a critique of state-sponsored violence: vehement opposition toU.S. imperialism and military action abroad coupled with outrage at civil liberties encroachments,systemic police abuse, and intensifying surveillance at home related to the war on terror and war ondrugs. Profound esteem for former Representative Paul’s lifelong commitment to noninterventionistforeign policy and outspoken critique of both parties on these fronts is thus nearly universal amongparticipants, many of whom do not recall a time when the United States was not at war. Regardless oftheir, or Paul’s, other views, movement participants repeatedly tell me, his truly uncompromisingantiwar advocacy is far more compelling than what they have seen from nearly any other politician.They are, they say, accustomed to panderers, careerists, and opportunists — in their life experience, theentire political system holds very little credibility. Movement participants in fact come from a broadrange of political backgrounds; a substantial number joined the movement after supporting BarackObama in 2008, feeling intensely betrayed by that administration’s subsequent policies on war and civilliberties. Further, the movement increasingly attracts veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, withgroups such as Veterans for Ron Paul playing an important role. Yet increasing numbers of Republicanpoliticians attain office with the aid of electoral politics-oriented libertarian efforts, successfully tappinginto the legitimate grievances of movement participants.

Facilitating Nuanced Critique

To be sure, the impact of powerful conservative and related institutions can be profound. Studies ofthe right can thus offer a counter to oversimplified, sweeping critique of the “Koch brothers fallacy”variety. Perhaps one of the most well-known and frequently criticized libertarian tendencies is theimpact of Beltway market-oriented think tanks. This is the case particularly with respect to the appli-cation of libertarian principles in the policy arena without regard to context — disproportionately, forinstance, to the rollback of social services and safety nets in the name of shrinking government power.In this respect, libertarian bearing on everyday lives is powerful indeed, although not with regard todisrupting state power or dislodging the state-sponsored elite privilege that concerns numerous move-ment participants. Yet as a result of lack of familiarity with the robust philosophical and economicunderpinnings of the movement’s various parts — or of refusing to take these seriously — critics ofsuch tendencies too often mount ineffective, easily shelved critiques, leading to a wealth of missedopportunities. In-depth, rigorous studies of such movements offer sophisticated analysis and tools formeaningful critique and engagement. Underlying the liberty movement, for example, is an intellectu-alism grounded in a vast network of publications, conferences, online lectures, and trainings. Inaddition to academic contributions to economics and philosophy, the literature produced through thiscomplex consists of thousands of articles and books where readers can find an array of libertarian takes,and usually fierce debate, on virtually any issue. Understanding the underpinnings and assumptions ofdistinct libertarian traditions, which serious scholarship on the subject can help provide, is central tomounting effective critique and developing alternatives.

In this vein, Morgen (2013a) provides an astute analysis of the role of various conservative organi-zations in the shift of political vocabularies about redistributive public policies. Drawing on ethno-graphic fieldwork, national poll data, and information about recent well-funded campaigns to “fix the


debt” and curb social spending, she traces the genealogy of the discourse of “entitlement/s” andhighlights changes in the meanings of, and popular support for, social provisioning and protection. Forexample, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, this terminology was commonly used in reference to a widearray of property rights, including the professional licenses of physicians and lawyers, labor unioncontracts and pensions, executives’ contracts and stock options, subsidies to farmers and businessmen,and individual social security pensions. “Entitlements” were seen as “sources of security,” regarded as“essential and fully deserved.” Furthermore, “war on poverty” legislation and related judicial decisionsrecognized the “statutory entitlement” of the poor to public assistance. Yet beginning in the 1980s, anumber of efforts contributed to popularizing a usage of the concept tied to a “pathological self-absorption” of U.S. culture, presaging a nation “going broke” and facing a moral crisis triggered by anerosion of personal responsibility. This usage is today commonplace in political discourse and main-stream media analysis alike. Morgen identifies key actors underlying this shift: conservative institu-tions such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute spearheaded key projectsto this effect. The latter, for example, was at the forefront of the shift in organizing the 1984 conference“Entitlement Issues in the Domestic Budget.” Likewise, individual authors — many affiliated withthese and other conservative organizations — have helped popularize the language of “the entitlementepidemic” and “the entitlement tsunami.”

Similarly, in his study of eight local tea party chapters in central North Carolina grounded in 15months of ethnographic fieldwork, William Westermeyer (2013) notes that because the tea partymovement relies in part upon resources stemming from well-financed conservative sources, scholarscommonly overlook the thousands of community activists reproducing the movement in small chap-ters nationwide. His research demonstrates the significance of local, face-to-face tea party organiza-tions in social mobilization, exploring the challenges involved in representing a movement composedof both elite and grassroots elements linked through diffuse, temporary networks. Local chapters donot simply amplify prepackaged political discourses; these are adapted to and contextualized withinlocal-historical particularities. The tea party movement, Westermeyer shows, entails linkagesbetween local and trans-local actors and processes in which symbols, frameworks, and discoursescirculate and are invested with meaning through the everyday practices of participants on theground — fostering the development of local political dramas that nonetheless hold broader signifi-cance for U.S. politics.

A.J. Bauer’s work on the tea party (2013) further illustrates how ethnographically grounded studiesof conservative movements can advance understandings of these formations and facilitate nuancedcritique and exchange. Drawing on data collected through interviews with tea party participants andattendance of events across the country, he posits that the tea party movement is making not only apolitical claim, but also a historical argument. Focusing on two 2010 keynote addresses to tea partycrowds by Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart, Bauer highlights the movement’s insistence that thefuture of the United States lies in the country’s re-founding based on its original constitutional prin-ciples: “Tea Partiers revere history because their political claim depends on it — the movement’sproducer nationalist appeal seeks to circumvent the Obama administration’s claim to represent ‘thepeople,’ staging a countersubversive claim on behalf of the sovereignty of a particular people, whoselegitimacy is derived from the past, as opposed to the present.” But supporting such a claim “requiressome fancy footwork, a two-step of worship and disavowal. Beck’s dichotomy, that Americans caneither focus on the nation’s ‘scars’ or on building its future, implies a two-pronged historicalapproach — ‘good’ history, that is to say the inspirational stories often memorialized in monuments, iseternal, occurring in the past but also transcendent, occupying the present and determining the futureas, to use Beck’s term, ‘American scripture’; meanwhile ‘bad’ history, including ‘mistakes’ such as


slavery and discrimination, is rendered static, calcified into discrete ‘scars’ that require no moretreatment and, thus, can be forgiven and forgotten.”

In particular, Bauer challenges historian Jill Lepore’s understanding of tea party historicity. ContraLepore, who sees the tea party movement as both “antihistorical” and “historical fundamentalist,”Bauer argues that the two concepts are in fact two sides of the same historical claim. He thus posits thatthe movement is marked by what he terms “historical ahistoricism” — the deployment of favorablecomponents of the past to disarm and disavow unfavorable ones. “It is a bait-and-switch whereby truehistorical antecedents are obscured and romanticized ones extolled, whereby pseudo-historical argu-ments are made toward ahistorical ends, resulting in an un-due appearance of historical exceptional-ity.” But “historical ahistoricism” also gestures toward a particular understanding of historical timeembraced by the movement. Lepore’s critique centers on the movement’s ostensible sense of historicalsimultaneity, particularly as regards the nation’s founding period. Yet in Bauer’s account, the move-ment’s treatment of history is more complex. While tea partiers do generally see themselves as engagedin the same meta-historical struggle of the nation’s founding fathers, they also acknowledge andembrace the exceptionality of the present moment. Further, Bauer points out that Lepore’s focus on themovement’s connectivity to the eighteenth century causes her to overlook its indebtedness to thehistorical logic of the Cold War: “The movement is not disavowing the linear logic of chronology, butrather adheres to a hybrid conception of historical time which implicitly values conservative certaintyover the uncertainty of progress.”

Bauer’s engagement with Lepore’s work demonstrates well a twofold contribution of ethnographi-cally informed studies of the right: these approaches can both facilitate nuanced, informed exchangeas well as contribute to ever-deepening understandings of conservative formations. He is sympa-thetic to her desire, as a historian, to correct the tea party’s oversimplified version of U.S. history byinfusing it with relevant context. But his analysis further builds upon her observations, ultimatelyrevealing a critique of modernity implicit in the tea party conception of history — a conception thatin fact incorporates both rectilinear and circular logics and “might be seen as a critique of modernhistoriography, which reduces historical meaning to causality (and, per Beck, attends to the businessof scars).”

In sum, participants in conservative and related movements are remaking both political identitiesand our contemporary landscape in myriad ways that have yet to be sufficiently understood. Exploringhow emerging identities and spaces are presently being constructed and refashioned — and to whatends — is the broader task taken up by growing numbers of anthropologists studying these move-ments. While not without distinct methodological and theoretical problems (Ginsburg 1993), thisresearch agenda brings with it crucial insights into how the practices of actors involved in such effortsarticulate with, shape, and reconfigure our world — why they matter. Anthropology is in a uniqueposition to intervene in current debates on these fronts.

References

Abramovitz, Mimi, and Sandra Morgen. 2006. Taxes Are a Woman’s Issue: Reframing the Debate. New York: The FeministPress, City University of New York.

Bauer, A.J. 2013. “The Future Is in the Re-Founding”: The Tea Party’s Vernacular Theory of Historical Time. Paper presentedat the Society for the Anthropology of North America Conference, Durham, March 15.

Bjork-James, Sophie. 2013. The Meaning of “Life” in the Age of Biocide: The Temporality of Evangelical Ethics and Politics.Paper presented at the Society for the Anthropology of North America Conference, Durham, March 15.

Carson, Kevin. 2007. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. Charleston, SC: BookSurge.Chartier, Gary, and Charles W. Johnson, eds. 2011. Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism against Bosses, Inequality,

Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. London: Minor Compositions.


Doherty, Brian. 2009. A Tale of Two Libertarianisms. Reason.com. December 18. http://reason.com/archives/2009/12/18/a-tale-of-two-libertarianisms, accessed July 1, 2013.

Edelman, Marc. 2001. Social Movements: Changing Paradigms and Forms of Politics. Annual Review of Anthropology,30:285–317.

Elisha, Omri. 2011. Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

Erzen, Tanya. 2006. Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

Ginsburg, Faye. 1989. Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community. Berkeley: University of California Press.Ginsburg, Faye. 1993. The Case of Mistaken Identity: Problems in Representing Women on the Right. In When They Read

What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography. Brettell, Caroline B., ed. Pp. 163–176. New York: Bergin and Garvey.Harding, Susan Friend. 2000. The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University

Press.Henry, Joseph R. 2013. Socialism as the Apocalypse: Dystopian Fantasies and the Politics of Austerity. Paper presented at

the Society for the Anthropology of North America Conference, Durham, March 15.Maskovsky, Jeff. 2013. Protest Anthropology in a Moment of Global Unrest. American Anthropologist, 115(1):126–129.Molina, Devin T. 2011. The Minuteman Corps of California: Civilian Border Patrols and the Production of Power and

Difference at the Mexico-U.S. Border. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, American University.Morgen, Sandra. 2012. Taxpayer Identity Politics in the Era of the Tea Party. Keynote address at Reclaiming “America”: The

Tea Party in Ethnographic, Historical and Comparative Perspective, New York, October 26.Morgen, Sandra. 2013a. From Safety Nets to “Entitlements:” Right-Wing Political Vocabularies and Visions of American

Decline. Paper presented at the Society for the Anthropology of North America Conference, Durham, March 15.Morgen, Sandra. 2013b. The Economic War on Women. Presentation at the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics,

University of Oregon, Eugene, January 22.Tretjak, Kaja. 2013a. Libertarianism and the Future: Doom, Utopias, and the Crisis of State Legitimacy. Paper presented at

the Society for the Anthropology of North America Conference, Durham, March 15.Tretjak, Kaja. 2013b. Chasing Freedom: The Resurgence of Libertarianism in the U.S. PhD dissertation, Department of

Anthropology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York.Westermeyer, William H. 2013. Under the Radar: Tea Party Activism and Influence in Local Political Conflicts. Paper

presented at the Society for the Anthropology of North America Conference, Durham, March 15.

Kaja TretjakSUNY Buffalo Law [email protected]


Research ArticleIn the Shadow of Service: Veteran Masculinity and Civil–Military Disjuncture in the United States

By Steven Gardiner

Since the end of U.S. war in Vietnam and the end of the draft, there have been two signal develop-ments — the continuing militarization of U.S. society and the simultaneous alienation of civilian expe-rience from military life-worlds — that would seem, if not utterly contradictory, situational irony. Thisarticle is an attempt to map this double movement, ongoing militarization and civil-military alienation,working from the point of view of a population caught in the middle: American veterans, particularlywhat I call mobilized veterans. By mobilized veterans I mean those active in veterans’ organizations,whether traditional “patriotic” groups such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFWs) and the AmericanLegion, or “oppositional” groups such as Veterans for Peace (VFP) and Iraq Veterans Against the War.For such men and women, veteran status becomes a key component of identity and the role ofintermediary between the two worlds — military and civilian — is an important touchstone of thatidentity.

The ethnographic context of this article is my three years of fieldwork (2004–2007) with veterans’organizations in the Midwestern United States, particularly the American Legion, though I also drawon observations and interviews with members of the Marine Corps League, VFW, and VFP, as well asmy own military experience (United States Army, 1982–1986).

The heterogeneity of the veteran population in the United States makes generalizations from mysmall, geographically limited sample problematic. Thus, I read my cases symptomatically, to suggestissues of general interest, worthy of consideration and further investigation. As Clifford Geertz put it,“Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods ...); they study in villages”(Geertz1973:22). Here I claim, in analogous fashion, that this is not a study of the American Legion as it existsin a small Midwest town, but of the ways in which changes in civil–military relations have affectedsome veterans, and how some mobilized veterans continue to interpret and respond to these changes.

They Should Send Us

While it is an urban legend that there was a deluge of volunteers for military service following 9/11(Bumiller 2001: B1; McLemore 2001; Pelton 2006), the attacks did kindle powerful “down range”fantasies among my veteran informants. Marine veteran Larry Thompson is a case in point. Now in hislate-40s, Larry served in Beirut at the time of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing. He is part of a cohortof veterans who came of age between the end of American involvement in Vietnam and the end of theCold War, during a period when U.S. overt wars were relatively limited. He is also part of an emerginggeneration of leaders in the traditional veterans’ organizations.

Larry’s involvement with the traditional organizations began in the mid-1990s, roughly 20 years afterleaving the military as with many other mobilized veterans. In the context of the American Legion andVFW, this involvement means raising funds for the families of soldiers in extremis, serving weeklybreakfasts for veterans, organizing special events like annual Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day parades,flag ceremonies, and funeral details. Ultimately, a veteran active in one of these groups is expected to“move up through the chairs,” that is, the elected leadership positions, starting with post adjutant — asecretary/treasurer-type position — and then on to assistant commander and post commander.


69

Regarding the standards of service, 9/11 raised the stakes for Larry and other mobilized veterans. Inthe midst of (unfounded) rumors of age waivers for vets, Larry took the potentially humiliating step ofcontacting a local Marine Corps recruiter. He had been forced out of his career as a long-haul truckdriver by a chronic knee injury — and was still recovering from surgery the first time we talked — buthe volunteered his 40-something body for active duty. Not surprisingly, the Marine Corps declined hisapplication. To Larry, however, it was important that he had acted on his willingness. While fewveterans actually took the step of attempting to volunteer for active duty, many expressed the desire togo “down range” after 9/11. And some few took things further and sought positions with privatemilitary contractors (PMCs) like Blackwater (now Xe) and Triple Canopy (Pelton 2006:179).

There are certain realities for older veterans. Their aging bodies fail, their kids are in college, theyhave mortgages to pay and spouses or ex-spouses to consider. For Larry and the vast majority ofveterans who did not serve in the narrow band of elite military “Special Forces” occupations which aremost attractive to the PMCs, the private route was not an option. His attempt to enlist should not beread as an empty gesture; the heated rhetoric of the immediate post-9/11 period suggested to many anurgency that could, or at least should, sweep away anything as anemic as bureaucratic age restrictions.

Moreover, for mobilized veterans like Larry, soldierly dispositions are a self-conscious component ofidentity. He embodies a veteran masculinity that is in large part derivative of a military masculinity,one that constantly invests itself by performing the distinction between military and civilian spheres.And while many authors (Boose 1993; Enloe 2000; Jeffords 1989) have argued that the defining char-acteristic of military masculinity is a negation of the feminine, this negation is always complicated bythe institutional inculcation of feminized traits — typically projected onto racial, ethnic, gendered, orsexual scapegoats of the moment — as constant threats in military discourses. The hard masculine bodyof the military qua military is always under assault from the feminine softness of the civilian sphere,and yet military masculinity proves flexible enough that it can be appropriated quite effectively bywomen able to perform its exacting dramaturgy (Belkin 2012:3).

For veterans, the nuances of gender performance can be extremely complex. They are expected toinhabit a civilian masculinity that emphasizes autonomy and assertive privilege, but only withinconformity. They are to retain a capacity to perform military hardness and suppress the extreme aspectsof military masculinity: obedience, sadism, and masochism. Simultaneously civilian and military,veteran gender performances can cause veterans enormous stress.

One way this stress betrays itself is in expressions of doubt about the military masculinity of youngermen. While most mobilized veterans are strongly supportive of “the troops” in the field, more than oneof my informants questioned the capacity the “xBox Generation” to do what “needs doing” in the Waron Terror, echoing the fears of generations of veterans past, going back at least to the turn of thetwentieth century (Mosse 1996:78). Such endemic intergenerational doubt is less about any honestevaluation of the capacities of the young, than about veterans performing their distinction fromcivilians. As Larry put it, speaking to me veteran to veteran, if the need was as great as the Bushadministration claimed and they really wanted to get the job done, then “they should send us.”

Militarization and the Civil–Military Divide

Neither military nor veteran masculinity are stable constructs. Gendered positions linked to theinstitutional military are also linked to changes in the international posture of the United States, thoughthere is an inevitable lag between changes in such postures and changes in military masculinity, whichin turn flow generationally between the veteran populations. The current situation, in which thepopulation of both soldiers and veterans is declining (National Center for Veterans Analysis and


Statistics 2010; Pew Research Center 2011), and yet the militarization of U.S. society continuesunabated, warrants closer examination if we are to understand the current nuances of military-cum-veteran masculinity and the way it is embedded in the larger social order and its increasingmilitarization.

Here I will follow Cathy Lutz in defining militarization as a thing much broader than “weaponswielded and bodies buried” (Lutz 2002:724). Most succinctly, militarization is the process by whichsocieties produce their capacity for collective violence (Geyer 1989). It turns out, however, that suchcapacities entail far more than the training of soldiers or the making of weapons. Whole realms ofknowledge — from materials science and nuclear physics on the one hand to just war theory andmemory studies on the other, with a vast range of administrative and logistical disciplines in between.Likewise, journalism (Hedges 2002), social welfare (Kelly 1997), popular culture (Boose 1993), highereducation (Bennett 1996), and gender (Bickford 2011; Enloe 2000; Goldstein 2001; Mosse 1996) areimbricated in militarization. Indeed, there are few areas of American life remaining untouched bymilitarization in this broader sense of an orientation of our capacities to produce the ways and meansof collective violence. Even so, the ubiquity of this process remains largely “invisible to people bothinside and outside the military” (Lutz 2002:724).

One measure of the militarization of society is military spending. Another is the absolute and relativenumber of veterans. The budget for the Department of Defense in 2010, including separate funding forthe wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was about $700 billion, or 4.8 percent of GDP (The Economist2011) — an enormous number to be certain, but does it equate to militarization? Unlike in countriessuch as Egypt, where the military dictates terms and conditions to civilian governments, or Pakistanwhere the army is a dominant player in the national economy (Siddiqa 2007), the effects of militariza-tion in the United States are often hidden. They are hidden particularly since the absolute and relativenumbers of both soldiers and veterans are declining — meaning ever fewer Americans maintain closerelationships with either.

This focus on the political economy of war provides a baseline understanding of the enormouspercentage of U.S. productive capacity that is oriented to war — and no one even disputes that U.S.military expenditures are, in absolute terms, greater than the next 17 largest combined (The Economist2011). Moreover, as Lutz (2001) and economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes (2008) have argued,when the real costs of the American war economy are calculated to include expenses for spy agencies,homeland security, nuclear weapons development, veterans expenses, and loss of investment in civil-ian industries, the amount is many times that of the baseline budget for the Pentagon.

There are costs of militarization that do not lend themselves to pie charts and bar graphs, but are atleast equally important to understanding its implications. Perhaps the most important is the distortioneffect that militarization has on the social production of persons, tilting this process toward thedevelopment of human capacities and dispositions useful in military service, war fighting, war pro-duction, and support for survivors of war. In the next section I will examine some ways in which thiswar-centric focus touches our collective social being through the lens provided by mobilized veterans.

Military vs. Militarized Habitus

It is anthropological convention that persons proper are not born but made, produced, raised, andgrown. And that this social production is never generic but involves highly specific category-crossingidentities and related roles — gender, class, race, sexuality, religious affiliation, nationality — withrelational links to specific individuals, embedding and circumscribing a social horizon of rights andobligations that extend outward from parents, children, and siblings, to grandparents, aunts, uncles,

In the Shadow of Service 71

cousins, in-laws, friends, neighbors, and so on, growing ever more diffuse in the process (Rubin 1975;Sahlins 1972; Turner 1979). Furthermore, each made person is made in such a way that the system ofcategories and obligations, roles, rites, and rights — the whole basic apparatus of society — is alsoreproduced, as what Bourdieu calls a habitus (Bourdieu 1977).

So when I speak of a militarization of U.S. society at the level of the social production of the person,I am speaking effectively of a militarized habitus — not just in obvious places such as barracks, bases,Boot Camps, and on the front lines — nor even the playing fields, locker rooms, police academies, videogames, and war movies that so relentlessly reference these — but in the most basic categories of socialorganization, bodily discipline, and moral discernment.

Ironically, the very ubiquity of the militarized habitus — a much larger, encompassing entity ascompared to the military habitus — can make it difficult to recognize, even more so because the formerdoubles as the civilian habitus which is the ideological foil for the military. To visualize this relationshipbetween military and militarized modes of social being, at once invisible, encompassed, and opposed,I will turn to my ethnography of mobilized veterans in whom I have identified three interlockingmechanisms — the banalization of military experience, the hierarchy of valor, and the ideology ofsacrifice — through which the mutual articulation of militarized society and military habitus arerevealed in the performance of veteran masculinity.

First, it is commonplace for veterans to downplay their service, also to minimize and underestimatethe extent to which the military habitus has touched their lives. “My time in the Navy didn’t have muchof an effect on me,” said one 40-something informant who spent months at a time at sea, maintaininganti-aircraft systems. “It’s not like I was in ground combat. I never fired a shot.” I heard similar storiesfrom dozens of veterans, nor was such understatement limited to those who never saw combat. Thepattern I found was not significantly different than the one noted by Lomsky-Feder in her work withIsraeli veterans of the Yom Kippur War. One tank corps veteran told her, “The war didn’t bring aboutany special transition for me.” Another reports, “I was slightly wounded once, and some friends diedand other friends were captured, and it wasn’t even traumatic, because it was all done in the name ofIsraeli heroism” (Lomsky-Feder 2004:91).

At one level there is no reason to doubt the self-reporting of these veterans. Service in different timesand places, under widely differing conditions, refracted through the experience and capacities ofunique individuals, should logically have widely varying after-effects. Yet the systemic denial of muchof any impact of military training or even combat service on subsequent life, what has been called the“banalization of war experience” (Lomsky-Feder 2004:95), is another matter. It reflects both a hierarchyof valor, which I will discuss below, and a deeply inculcated code of silence, explicitly modeled bymobilized veterans on the military policy of Operational Security, or OpSec — “loose lips sinkships” — within which privileged information is divulged only on a “need-to-know” basis (Gardinerand Garner 2010).

The combination of these two factors, hierarchy of valor and OpSec, lead to a double-consciousnesson the part of many veterans: in denying the impacts of service, they also deny the ways in whichmilitary habits and values have shaped their bodies and minds. In normalizing military experience,veterans at once reveal and conceal the continuity between civilian and military life. This continuity isgrounded in militarization of the former, and to an extent the subsequent civilianizing of the latter, aconvergence of institutionally valued modes of being in which militarized society embraces militarymasculinity as a norm.

This leaves in effect less room for soldiers and veterans to perform their difference. In denying theimpacts of service, veterans communicate they are “just like” the rest of us, masking the stigma ofviolence in the quotidian, and at once rendering invisible the process through which military service


becomes “just like” any other job (Moskos 1977) — a process predicated on the prior militarization ofthe society.

Even as veterans communicate they are “just like” the rest of us, there are situations in whichmobilized veterans are expected to perform in ways that clearly contradict this claim, for example, inthe ritual space described by organizational activities, and the intra-veteran social space that accom-panies it. The difficulties of negotiating gender performance in such settings are exacerbated by theactual and potential extension of that space to military women. While women remain underrepresentedin traditional veterans organizations, particularly in the leadership cadre, this may well change asfemale veterans are the only demographic that is currently increasing (National Center for VeteransAnalysis and Statistics 2010), and when more women vets reach the 20-year distance from service, thatseems to prompt involvement in such organizations. It is quite likely that some of the same strugglesfor recognition accompanying women’s expanding roles on active duty will be replicated within theveterans’ groups. As this happens, veteran masculinity will become more complicated still; femaleveterans can lay claim to the authority that comes with veteran masculinity, which in the end dependsnot on biology, but on performance and recognition of soldierly disposition (Belkin 2012:3).

Second, the hierarchy of valor that buttresses the normalization of military experience limits thenumber of “real veterans” present in any veteran milieu to a relative handful of military operationalspecialties (MOSes), times and places of service, and levels of sacrifice (Lomsky-Feder 2004:101). Theeffect of this limit is not only to de-valorize ordinary veterans but to foster deep and abiding survivorguilt, which further obfuscates the continuity between a militarized society, responsible for producinga quota of men (and increasingly women) who can be trained by the institutional military as “ordinarysoldiers,” and a military institution often imagined by soldiers, civilians, and veterans of all politicalpersuasions to be standing in polar opposition to that society.

Here it is useful, I think, to trace out some of the impacts of hierarchies of valor on the subject-position and identity of one of my key informants, Army veteran Mark Baxter. Soft-spoken andself-effacing in his civilian persona, Mark served in the Cold War military of the 1980s, and tends likeso many others to downplay his service. When I interviewed him he was serving as local AmericanLegion post adjutant — an exemplar of what I call mobilized veterans — working his way “up throughthe chairs” as part of the local leadership.

“When I think back on it,” he told me, “I joined for all the wrong reasons, like most people at that age.I was thinking about myself at the time and I’m a little ashamed of that now. I joined for reasons thatmy mom wouldn’t have approved of. That’s one of the reasons I joined the Legion, to give somethingback. I feel like my account is overdrawn.”

What is clear is his awareness of what I have called the hierarchy of valor, his knowledge of whichwas extremely nuanced. He clearly looked up to his friend Larry (previously mentioned), a marineveteran who lost many comrades-in-arms in the Beirut barracks bombing, as well as to Ryan, a MarineCorps veteran who was wounded five times during four tours of duty in Vietnam. “Those guys, theywent through some shit,” Mark told me, “but they never looked down on me because I wasn’t a combatsoldier.”

The tension between the hierarchy of valor and what might conversely be called the “fraternity ofservice” — reflected in the “they never looked down on me” comment — is a commonplace of veterandiscourse, found not only among mobilized veterans, but in the wider community. This tension isinternalized: more valorized veterans would not look down on someone like Mark both because he hadalready banalized his own experiences, and because they are preoccupied with the upward gaze — atleast in face-to-face interactions. The virtual world, of course, is less polite, and the tension more overtlymanifest. One example is the often vitriolic exchanges of comments on sites like Military.com, where


“all who served are honorable” is the necessary counterpart to “if you haven’t held your buddy’s gutsin your bare hands keep your mouth shut.”

Both are part of the hierarchy of valor, the former extending comparisons to the civilian world, thelatter constricting it to the military. The one embeds the other in much the same way that the militaryhabitus is embedded within the militarized one. And ultimately, for living veterans, there is alwayssomeone more valorous against whom to compare. Mark, Larry, and Ryan all looked up to theoctogenarian vet who parachuted behind enemy lines on D-Day as part of the nearly suicidal effort tosecure a beachhead. And finally, it is only the “honored dead” — those buried at Arlington, or whosenames have been chiseled into the black marble of the Vietnam Memorial — who are the real veterans.Everyone else, by comparison, lives with an enduring sense of guilt and inauthenticity that is particu-larly acute for those who served since the end of the draft and were never deployed directly “in harm’sway.”

Third, the lynchpin of the military-militarized system is the ideology of sacrifice that both generatesthe hierarchy of valor within the military and provides the logic of the link between military andcivilian life-worlds. This link is the essential ground on which militarization infiltrates the larger societythat encompasses the institutional military. Again, this is best illustrated through a closer look atsoldier-veteran narrative of one of my informants, in this case Marine Corps veteran Larry Thompson.

As previously mentioned, Larry served in Beirut at the time of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing.Two hundred and twenty marines and twenty-one other American service members were killed in theattack. Friends with many of the dead, Larry confided that he was motivated in his veteran serviceorganization work by “the ghosts, who are always looking at me.” The language associated withveterans haunted by lost comrades is by now too familiar, relegated to stock characters from film andtelevision, tending inexorably to cliché. Yet such clichés do not denote insincerity, rather the opposite,just as conventionalized expressions of sympathy — “I’m so sorry for your loss” — protect both theperson grieving and the person offering sympathy from delving too deeply, intruding on privatematters or stepping on emotional land mines.

Veteran clichés are formulas that offer an escape from the silence that pervades war experience orany experience lacking in a rich and familiar descriptive vocabulary. Talk of “ghosts” or “beinghaunted” is an individualized refraction of ceremonial rhetoric about “those who have gone before,”who “gave their all,” and “who made the ultimate sacrifice” that embeds an expectation about theunquestionable value of sacrifice. The volunteer work many veterans do with patriotic organizations isservice which pays on a debt that is intrinsically impossible to discharge, as conceived, because it isgrounded in being alive when others are dead. Yet many veterans respond at times with visceraldisgust for public rhetoric of sacrifice, at least when uttered by civilians. “What does he know aboutsacrifice?” is the equally clichéd complaint.

In spite of the best efforts of governments in power and self-proclaimed patriots, the ideology ofself-sacrifice for the sake of the nation is conspicuously complicated by several realities. In the firstplace, it is transparent that such sacrifices are unevenly distributed by class, by race, and by region;some categories of person end up “giving their all” more often than others. Secondly, the idea ofsacrifice combined with the militarization of society has enabled the normalization of sacrifice, pro-vided that only victims of the appropriate category end up dead.

Who, then, are these who are properly subject to sacrifice? Gorgio Agamben famously uses the figureof Homo sacer — he who is cast out, banned, and can be killed but never sacrificed — as the foundationof legal sovereignty (Agamben 1998). The answer, of course, is soldiers — and the very idea of warfareas it has developed in the modern period is bound up with a separation of soldiers and civilians,combatants and noncombatants. The separation, ideological rather than existential, ritually marks


soldiers as suitable for sacrifice while doing little to protect civilians who fail to live in the mostpowerful and fortunate nation-states from the horrors of warfare.

The soldier, particularly the one who volunteers to serve, is carried along in a discourse of sacrificethat began to shape his or her experience long before enlistment and will continue to shape it afterward.This is true, even for the likes of Mark Baxter, or Larry, or myself for that matter — the original decisionto volunteer for military service was construed in pragmatic or economic terms, as a way to make abetter life, pay for college, learn a trade. In the American context, tension between an individualismfounded in Calvinist notions of personhood multiplied by the logic of capitalism and nationalexceptionalism cum nationalist chauvinism has always pulled people in opposite directions withrespect to attitudes toward sacrifice (Strenski 2002), and ambivalence is to be expected. So, while it ispossible for a veteran to “refuse the debt” incurred to the sacred dead — avoiding further service — inmuch the same way most civilians avoid joining the military in the first place, those who do self-selectsuch service reveal the discourses and mechanisms that serve to flow a sufficient number of young menand women into the military, and then a sufficient number of veterans into doing unpaid veterans’service work.

The three factors discussed above — the normalization of military service, the hierarchy of valor,and the ideology of sacrifice — mediate between the military proper, with its constant but not insatiableneed for soldiers, and the larger militarized society which encompasses it. It is a system that functionsnot primarily for the benefit of the military as institution, much less for the benefit of rank-and-filesoldiers or veterans, but for the benefit of a militarized society that maintains vast capacities forviolence in excess of any conceivable need for self-defense. Thus, it is naïve to imagine that the militarytail wags the civilian dog. The continuity between civilian and military worlds, however, can seemcounterintuitive.

It seems more obvious to pose an opposition between civilian and military, combatant and noncom-batant, and the vocal opposition of some civilians and mobilized veterans to the military and towar-fighting tends to obscure the way in which the encompassing society produces not just the goodsand services needed by the military, but the specific types of persons it needs as well as the attitudes ofthe population. The person-making forces of normalization, hierarchies of valor, and sacrifice arefurther integrated in personal identities, especially gender, which forms discursively coherent pack-ages. It is to a discussion of the way in which military and veteran masculinity integrates and respondsto the militarization of society that I turn next.

Veteran Masculinity, Bragging Rights, and Pissing Contests

I have laid out the factors connecting what I see as a militarized society to the military as institu-tion — normalization, hierarchies of valor, and sacrifice — largely as if they floated free from salientidentities, when of course they do not. The three factors noted here above are elements of person-making that, as is typical, cluster together around identities, which conversely can be thought of asclusters of such person-making elements about which socially relevant stories are told. Gender inparticular constellates identities along a continuum of compliance, some of which embrace the threefactors, some of which are constructed in opposition, and some of which are considered complemen-tary. The three factors indicated are central to the possibility of the social construction of soldiers, acritical mass of whom will constellate all three — in varying intensities — when performing a soldierlymasculinity. Soldiers are also expected to constellate additional capacities, especially toughness, obe-dience, courage, and mission-focus, as they perform their gendered identities in a military context. Ifocus on the three factors previously indicated because they form the invisible bridge between


pre-military genders, soldierly masculinity, and veteran masculinities. Many of the other factorsconstellated in soldierly masculinity become problematic in civilian contexts, but the normalization ofmilitary service (“It’s just a job”), the hierarchy of valor (“real heroes are dead”), and the ideology ofsacrifice (“the irredeemable debt”) constellate an invisible residue in every nook and cranny of amilitarized society.

The ostensible performance of veteran masculinity is not constantly visible in the lives of mobilizedveterans exactly because in many it is lost in the background noise of an already militarized society — itis normal. Yet veteran-specific stages do elicit modes of behavior in excess of that found in civiliansociety — where the excess is an excess of meaning that would be unavailable to most civilians.

A case in point: Flag Day ceremony at the American Legion post. The Legion is well-known for its“defense of the flag” position and is perhaps associated in the public mind with flag-related activities,including flag raisings, funeral and memorial related rituals, carrying the colors in parades and on FlagDay, what is known as flag “retirement.” Contrary to urban legend, there is no law against disposingof a flag, old and weather-beaten or otherwise, by simply throwing it away. The Legion encouragespeople to bring their worn-out flags “that have done honorable duty” to their local post for ceremonialburning on Flag Day each June; meanwhile, opposition to “flag burning” is perhaps the single piece ofpoliticking with which the Legion is most associated. And here are the excesses of meaning. A flagburning, conducted with elaborated respect, even reverence, by uniformed veterans acting ritually, isnot at all the same thing as a flag burned by antiwar protesters. The meaning of the latter is parasitic onthe former, and therefore calls into question the symbolic efficacy of the Legion ceremony in much thesame way that consuming consecrated communion wafers with butter and jam might call into questionthe efficacy of the miracle of transubstantiation.

This is the context of the flag-burning actions I will further describe: an annual emotionally chargedAmerican Legion event attended only by Legion members and their families. The emotions evoked arecomplex. The ritual flag burning is conducted with forms and high seriousness usually reserved forfunerals, complete with patriotic eulogy in language that echoes that found in veteran burials, refer-encing “old soldiers” who “gave their all” — meaning the weathered flags themselves, who had “donetheir duty to the utmost” and had earned their “honorable retirement.” On the other hand, Legionmembers are not naïve or confused; they clearly differentiate the flags as colored pieces of cloth fromthe symbolic associations thereof. The ceremony may echo a funeral, but there is no actual mourning,no grieving next-of-kin to consider, and so in the moments between ritual seriousness attendees are freeto engage in aspects of veteran masculinity evoked by the charged setting.

The following episode involves each of the three veterans previously introduced, Army veteranMark Baxter and Marine vets Larry Thompson and Ryan Stone. Mark, as mentioned, was serving aspost adjutant — a position that involves a good deal of paperwork. Both Larry and Ryan served aspast commanders of the local American Legion post. In my previous encounters with Mark, hisdemeanor had been quiet and self-effacing, emphasizing his humility and respect for service in theLegion. In particular, he volunteered for burial detail, which is a symbolically rich, but physicallychallenging duty often involving standing to attention for long periods in brutal weather conditions.Larry had described Mark to me as “a really nice guy, but I think he could be pretty intense too, ifit wasn’t for me and Ryan.” Here “intense” is a loaded word referring to a high capacity for ritu-alized one-upmanship.

On the day in question Mark lived up to Larry’s prediction. He showed up to the ceremony in fullLegion uniform — khakis, dress-shirt, carefully tucked tie, and cap — when technically only the cap isrequired to be considered “in uniform” for Legion events. He also wore mirrored aviator shades, andentered with a pronounced military swagger that could be read as intimidating.


Larry and Ryan interpreted this as a challenge requiring a response. They promptly asked where washis oldest daughter, a member of the Legion Auxiliary (a companion organization for the femalerelatives of Legion members). She was running late, and their body language and exaggerated intona-tions suggested he was failing in his duty to produce her appearance.

“She’d better show soon,” he responded defensively.

When Mark’s daughter did show, some minutes later, it was without her uniform cap. Thus, byLegion or Auxiliary standards she was “out of uniform” — a major point of reference for veterans.While soldierly uniform covers the entire body, the cap is the item mostly likely to be misplaced, sinceregulations require it be removed inside. Hence, virtually every soldier ends up having “out ofuniform” nightmares, since to be outside without a uniform cap is technically an offense againststanding orders and punishable by administrative penalty. And while few soldiers are actually pun-ished for this minor infraction, every soldier will have experienced, or at least witnessed, the focusedhumiliation of a “dressing down” — an often profanity-laced “correction” administered by any non-commissioned officer who happens to pass by.

Mark reacted in a mode reminiscent of this, dressing down his daughter preemptively, before Larryand Ryan could “flick him shit” for failing to control her. “Where’s your cover [i.e., cap]? And there isonly one right answer,” he demanded.

“I forgot it,” she answered, shrugging, looking at him like he’d lost his mind.

“That’s the wrong answer,” he said. “You’re out of uniform.”

At that point Larry and Ryan stifled chuckles. Mark’s wife, also a veteran, interrupted the exchangeby pointing out that the ceremony was about to start. Mark muttered “This isn’t over,” but took hisplace for the ceremony.

This performance constellated Mark as willing to participate in the competitive “shit flick-ing” — exchanges of insults that call into question the honor of rivals, and embodied posturingreferencing the possibility that such contests could escalate to physical violence. Among veterans, thiselement of subtextual violence is relatively subdued, as compared to active duty soldiers. Through suchcontests, as well as more formalized competitions for “bragging rights” — for example, an irresolvablecompetition between marching units led respectively by Larry and Ryan during the annual MemorialDay Parade — veterans constantly seek to negotiate their place in the hierarchy of valor, even whileacknowledging that such postservice rivalries are relatively drained of meaning. Thus, Larry could tellme both that his rivalry with Ryan was “about pride, about bragging rights for the year” meanwhilefully acknowledging that he could not aspire to equal Ryan’s record as a combat marine.

The full meaning of these overlapping contexts emerges usually only for other veterans, referencinga shared military habitus, but integrated into a militarized society in which military service is normalizedas the profession of a self-selected minority. In which hierarchies of valor are founded on the exclusionof all civilians at the outset, yet nuanced enough to contain innumerable distinctions among soldiers andveterans of varied experience. Imbued with an ideology of sacrifice acknowledging an irredeemable debtto the dead — one that only veterans can even attempt, however ineffectually, to discharge.

Conclusion

In this paper I noted that even as both absolute and relative numbers of soldiers and veterans aredeclining, United States society is becoming not less but more militarized as quantified in military


spending. I have not attempted to discuss the “why” of either of these phenomena, but have taken afine-grained look at some of the lived epiphenomena that emerge at the nexus of the two trend lines,in the embodied experience of a particular population, which I call mobilized veterans. I have not askedwhy the number of veterans is declining, but what is it like to be a veteran in a context in which thelarger society continues to prioritize war-making while civilian connections to the military life-worldare fewer.

Such questions are important for their own sake, as veteran life-worlds are fascinating and revealingof contemporary cultural forms and forms of sociality in the United States. Moreover, veteran experi-ence offers a glimpse into the afterlife of military masculinity, a gendered form that doubles as a modeof embodied authority. In a militarized society, military masculinity is a privileged subject positionfrom which to make claims on and for the nation that are extensible to the political party, the corpo-ration, the athletic team, the civic organization, and so on. This makes the questions of paramountconcern.

The current work — along with recent works by authors such as Aaron Belkin (2012) and AndrewBickford (2008) — just begins to examine how military masculinity functions in a militarized UnitedStates and consequences. I have commented on the invisibility of militarization, exacerbated both bydecreased social contact with veterans and soldiers and the banalization of military service, but muchmore needs to be done. I intend this article as a provocation, to myself and others, to trace out themyriad impacts of militarization on human lives, including the families of veterans, female veterans,and those touched by American military power, directly or indirectly, at home and abroad.

References

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Press.Gardiner, Steven, and Angie Reed Garner. 2010. “Relationships of War: Mothers, Soldiers, Knowledge.” In Women, War, and

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Pp. 65–102. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.Goldstein, Joshua. 2001. War and Gender. New York: Cambridge University Press.Hedges, Chris. 2002. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Perseus.Jeffords, Susan. 1989. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Kelly, Patrick. 1997. Creating a National Home: Building the Veterans’ Welfare State, 1860-1900. Cambridge: Harvard University

Press.Lomsky-Feder, Edna. 2004. “Life Stories, War, and Veterans: On the Social Distribution of Memories.” Ethos, 32(1):82–109.Lutz, Catherine. 2001. Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century. Boston: Beacon Press.Lutz, Catherine. 2002. “Making War at Home in the United States.” American Anthropologist, 104(3):723–735.


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Mosse, George. 1996. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press.National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics. 2010. Veteran Population Projections: FY2000 to FY 2036. Washington,

DC: United States Department of Veterans Affairs. www.va.gov/vetdata, accessed July 11, 2012.Pelton, Robert. 2006. Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror. New York: Three Rivers Press.Pew Research Center. 2011. The Military-Civilian Gap: War and Sacrifice in the Post-9/11 Era. Washington: Pew Research

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Steven GardinerZayed [email protected]

Reviews and ReflectionsEthnographies of Uncertain Futures/Notes from the Field: An Interview with Gretchen Purser(Syracuse U)

By Lindsay A. Bell

This past March, the Society for the Anthropology of North America chose the theme of “UncertainFutures” for its biannual conference. The aim of the conference was to explore the uncertain futuresenvisioned by our informants, interlocutors, and research subjects and the uncertain futures auguredby the processes we study. The conference intended to provide a space in which new visions of NorthAmericanist anthropology might emerge. The idea was to bring together those of us working in Mexico,Canada, and the United States to see whether the concepts that have been used to interrogate NorthAmerican life in the recent past are adequate in the face of new realities. Among those terms, some ofthe most hotly debated are neoliberalism, precarity, and postfordism.1

As anthropologists, we specialize in the particular. We can find the exception to every rule. Bycontrasting field sites or by comparing historical epochs, we can drain the analytical purchase of termsfaster than a sink drains dishwater. In this interview with sociologist and ethnographer GretchenPurser, I want to stay with some of these terms as they happen (or not) on the ground in the arena of

1Recent full volumes dedicated to these debates include Cultural Anthropology 2013 Vol. 28(1), Social Anthropology 2013 Vol. 21(1), andearlier still and importantly is Critique of Anthropology 2008 Vol. 28(2).


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low-wage work. Work and labor are crucial parts of the means of making futures in North America.This interview shares what is happening on the ground in the burgeoning formal day labor industry asa means to fuel conversation about possible political projects, cultural movements, social imaginaries,and economic developments that emerge in uncertain times.

Gretchen Purser is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship andPublic Affairs at Syracuse University. She specializes in day labor in the United States, both informaland formal. I recently sat down to talk with her as we are both currently summer fellows at the Schoolfor Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We share an interest in the anthropology ofwork and poverty in North America. Although our contexts are radically different — I work in asub-arctic mining town in Canada and she in large U.S. cities — I was struck by the similarities in howwork, poverty, and race intersect in the contemporary moment. She made me rethink my impulses tojoin the ranks of the post-precarity, post-neoliberal intellectual circuit and sit with the part of therealities and commonalities for making a living and making a life in the contemporary moment

While at the SAR, Gretchen is working on her book Labor on Demand: Dispatching the Urban Poor. Herethnographic study takes an in-depth look at the day labor industry and the reproduction of urbanpoverty in the United States. The issues she raises seemed so timely that to wait for the academicpublishing cycle to come around seemed a shame. I interviewed Gretchen about her work for tworeasons. First, to connect NAD readers to recent and relevant work in sociology. Second, to start aconversation on how to ethnographically address livelihood questions, given the precarious nature ofcontemporary work in North America.

***

Lindsay: At the moment, the word precarity is increasingly being used in anthropology and adjacent disciplines to describework and workplaces. I think your research is an exceptional illustration of that. Can you tell us about your work?Gretchen: I spent a little over three years doing intensive ethnographic fieldwork in the formal day labor agencies inBaltimore, Maryland, and Oakland, California. Colloquially referred to as “labor pools” or “body shops,” these agen-cies — which are ubiquitous in poor, urban communities throughout the U.S. — constitute the bottom segment of the muchbroader temporary staffing industry. What characterizes day labor companies is that they hire and fire people on a dailybasis, so the employment contract literally lasts no longer than a single day. Also, you have to be physically present insidethe offices, inside the actual agency, in ordered to be considered for the “opportunity” of employment. So, those who makeuse of these agencies are engaged, on a daily basis, in a very uncertain and congregate search for employment.

I argue that the day labor industry represents — it’s really an exemplar — of two of the most fundamental transforma-tions in the contemporary labor market. The first is the flexibilization of employment and the spread of precarity. Thesecond is the increase in the ambiguity of employment via the growth of labor market intermediaries, or brokers. Bothtransformations are exemplified by my case and I try to give equal analytical attention to each. So yes, one would be reallyhard-pressed to find more precarious conditions of employment, at least in the formal sector, but I also focus a lot on whatit means to be embroiled in a triangular employment relationship.Lindsay: Can you take us through a typical day?Gretchen: Yes, but really, there is no typical day and that is, in part, the real challenge of both doing the fieldwork andwriting it up. As a participant observer, I fully immersed myself in these labor pools. I would wake up by 4 am or 4:30 amto get down to the agency by 5am or 5:30 am. I’d walk into the agency and sign up on a numbered sign-up sheet, indicatingthat I’m ready and willing to work. Then I’d wait around in the hopes of getting work, or “getting on a ticket.” Given thenumbered sign-up sheet, workers are led to believe that work is distributed on a first-come-first-serve basis. So there’s acertain level of competition in the morning to be towards the top of the list. But ultimately, they realize that work isdistributed according to the dispatcher’s whim or discretion, codified in what is known as the “the best match for dispatch”policy. So, if you cop an attitude, or if you’re a no-show, or if you do something that the dispatchers don’t want you to do,you’re not going to get a job. In that respect, it’s a high discipline work regime.

I would spend an indefinite number of hours waiting around the labor hall, drinking bad coffee and half-watchingmorning talk shows on the always blaring TV. The mornings were typically quite sociable, with conversation usuallyfocused on the incompetency of the dispatchers, their failure to drum up enough business, and the nepotistic favoritismthat dictated the distribution of jobs. Many workers would spend time trying to “get in” with the dispatchers by doing themfavors — going out to buy them donuts, volunteering to clean up the grimy office. On some occasions, I’d get dispatched


for a job, predominantly in construction, manufacturing, warehousing, or service. The only thing consistent about thesejobs is that they were dangerous, dirty, and degraded. On other occasions, the wait would be for nought and I’d leave theagency empty-handed. It all depends on how many orders come in and how those job orders are distributed amongst thesurplus of would-be workers.So, ultimately, it’s important to recognize that to work as a day laborer means that you haveno idea from day-to-day if you’re going to get a job and if you did get a job, you have no idea where you’re going to go, whatyou’re going to do, how you’re going to get there, with whom you’re going to be working, for whom you’re going to beworking, and whether there’s going to be food or water available at the job site.Lindsay: And how do workers get from the day labor hall to the job site?Gretchen: It depends. Some agencies have vans in which they transport people for a mandatory fee of between $7 and $10roundtrip. Other agencies push this to the informal economy and dispatch one worker with a car — a “driver” — who istold to collect $7 from each worker he/she transports. This is really no different from a jitney cab operation, or what inBaltimore is referred to as “hacking.” It creates a lot of tension between workers, because it leads the intra-worker disputes,wherein passengers come to think that the driver is trying to get over on them. The transportation issue is really critical. Insome respect, the agencies literally are transportation agencies — offering themselves as a solution to what urbansociologists have called the “spatial mismatch” by transporting underemployed urban job seekers to available jobs in thegreater metropolitan region.Lindsay: Listening to you, it has occurred to me that the classical notion of anthropological informants or participants is noteasily assumed in your case. With every day being so different, how often would you see the same participants?Gretchen: There’s very little stability or predictability, but I did work alongside the same workers on many occasions andI did develop enduring ties to the “regulars.” One of the things I argue in this book is that given these conditions ofemployment that I just stated are in fact becoming generalizable — the precarity and intermediation of employment — weneed to move away from traditional workplace ethnography, which focuses on the labor process of a particular worksetting. Instead, I argue that we need to focus on the processing of labor. That’s really what these agencies are doing, theyare processing immediately dispatchable and disposable workers for employers’ “just-in-time” labor needs. It’s ajust-in-time labor regime and a “work today, pay today” operation. So, I trace the processing of labor across worksites. Interms of writing, that creates some real challenges, because there is neither a consistent worksite, nor consistentemployment relations, nor consistent occupation. It is very difficult to write about the actual work of a day laborer. The onlyconsistent thing is the indefinite and uncertain waiting, the clamoring for work in the morning. That is a consistent story.That is something that I’ve written a lot about, but the work itself, since it’s always changing, is difficult to both representand analyze.Lindsay: How do the agencies reach out to and recruit workers? What makes these populations available in the firstinstance and then how do these agencies reach out to them?Gretchen: Although day labor agencies are ubiquitous in poor urban neighborhoods, they can nevertheless fly under theradar. So, they’re all around, but they operate to some degree invisibly. One of the agencies I studied in Baltimore, forexample, operates out of a back alley. It’s unmarked streetside facade reveals nothing of the upwards of 100 to 150 workerswho congregate there each morning in hopes of a day’s work.

In addition to extensive participant observation, I conducted dozens of interviews, including interviews with themanagers or dispatchers of these companies. They talked about the process of recruitment as a process of “drumming upbodies.” For starters, they have tight institutional ties, as well as spatial proximity, to a whole assortment of povertymanagement institutions like homeless shelters, prisoner re-entry programs, and drug and alcohol rehabilitation pro-grams. So they recruit would-be workers from these sorts of institutions and purport to have a real social mission of“putting people to work,” thereby contributing to individual moral uplift, on the one hand, and social order and discipline,on the other hand, by offering what “an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work” to those who would otherwise be miredin the informal and/or illegal activities of the street economy.In addition, many managers talked about just looking at amap of public housing and Section 8 housing voucher use and flyering those communities. So they explicitly targetcommunities where there’s a high level of unemployment and a dire need for cash. All in all, these agencies operate asemployers of last resort for employees of last resort; there’s no background check, no references, no drug test, no workexperience, no skills, and no transportation required.Lindsay: What are some of the other key characteristics of this population?Gretchen: In both field sites, the workforce is predominantly, but by no means exclusively, comprised of African-American, precariously housed, formerly incarcerated men. Indeed, over half of the workers in my two field sites areformerly incarcerated. That includes people who are desperately trying to “go legit” and who are relegated to day labor astheir only opportunity to access the world of work, given the well-documented barriers they face in the broader labormarket. It also includes those who see little value to a life of servility and “slave wages” and yet who make use of day laboragencies because they need evidence of gainful employment in order to meet the conditions of, and successfully navigate,their parole. I have argued elsewhere that the day labor industry is an opportune case through which to examine the labormarket effects of the growing penal state.

An interview with Gretchen Purser (Syracuse U) 81

Lindsay: You mentioned earlier that employees would, in some cases, have to pay for their own transportation. What arethe average wages for this kind of work? How do these fees fit in to their compensation?Gretchen: The vast majority of jobs pay minimum wage. The best job I ever received over the course of three years ofworking as a day laborer was a mere $9 per hour. This is in addition to the transportation fee that you mentioned, but what’smore, there can be a whole assortment of other fees deducted from a day laborer’s paycheck for such things as safetyequipment and cashing one’s paycheck at the end of the day. Also, many workers get an advance on their paycheck in orderto cover the costs of lunch and some are forced by the dispatcher to purchase such things as deodorant, toothbrush, or socksbefore being sent out to work. In addition, a lot of workers have their wages garnished by the state for child support and/orrestitution. So I would frequently see men work an 8- or 10-hour day and come back to receive a paycheck amounting to,literally, $18. Though that example might sound extreme, paychecks consistently amounted to less than the federalminimum wage.Lindsay: How familiar, if at all, are employers with the various job sites? Do the agencies know what the work entails?Gretchen: Oftentimes, they don’t know. They’ve never been to the job site. They’ve never seen the job site. I meansometimes they have, if it’s a regular client, maybe the manager of the agency has been out to check out the work site.But oftentimes, they haven’t. Oftentimes, if it’s like a flagging job, for example, the job site is some random stretch ofroad in the middle of some random county.This is why I was saying earlier that I see the intermediation of employ-ment as analytically significant as is the precarity of employment. The triangulated structure of the employmentrelationship not only enables both employers to evade responsibility for workers, but it renders it so that neitheremployer — neither the legal employer (the day labor agency) nor the actual employer (the client) — fully sees orunderstands the full scope of the worker’s day. The dispatchers have very little understanding of the actual workingconditions on the job sites. The on-site supervisors have very little understanding of the fact that their “rented”workers have typically already put it in a four- or five-hour day — performing, via the act of waiting, what GuyStanding has called “work for labor” — before they step foot on the job site. As a result, when workers complain aboutthe working conditions or when they show up to a job already hungry and tired, their grumblings are simply inter-preted by their employers as evidence of their faltering work ethic and/or lack of desire for an honest day’s work.Lindsay: There’s been extensive work in anthropology of North America about the use of informal day laborers. Whywould employers hire workers through formal day labor agencies as opposed to hiring them informally?Gretchen: That’s a great question and it’s one I’ve thought a lot about, given that I started this project after completinga study on informal day laborers in San Francisco. In both of the cities where I did this fieldwork — Oakland andBaltimore — there is a burgeoning informal day labor market, so employers definitely have a choice to hire workersoff the street or to hire workers from these “labor pools.” This formal and informal divide maps perfectly onto a racialdivide, with predominantly undocumented Latino men seeking work from street corners and predominantly African-American and white workers seeking work through the agencies.

Employers choose to hire through the agencies, because they don’t want to bear the risk or liability of hiring “off thebooks.” Indeed, it is estimated that over 90 percent of U.S. employers now make use of the services of a staffingagency, so this kind of outsourcing is an entirely routine business practice. Of course, employers typically have tospend more to hire through an agency than they would if they hired workers off the street, since the agency chargesa significant mark-up. But in doing so, they don’t have to worry about workers’ compensation or liability, since thatis all handled by the legal employer, the day labor agency.

What I find significant is the fact that the immigrant day laborers I studied had no desire to work for the labor pools.They were familiar with these companies, but felt relatively confident in their ability to obtain employment off thestreet and to secure at least $10/hour in payment. The African-American men with whom I worked at the agencies,by contrast, all wished that they could cut out the “broker” and work in the informal day labor sector, which, thoughjust as precarious, held out the possibility, though not necessarily the promise, of greater autonomy and higher wages.Yet, they were painfully aware of the racialized preferences of employers and recognized that they would have a hardtime being hired from off the street. So I discovered that workers have an incredibly conflicted relationship with theseagencies, seeing them as both deeply exploitative businesses and as the very entities which shield them from thebroader discrimination they face in the labor market. I draw upon June Nash’s concept of “contradictory conscious-ness” to explain their joint consciousness of exploitation and consciousness of dependency.Lindsay: To what extent is what you have observed in the day labor industry “new”? I am wondering how thisconnects to the longer history of temporary staffing and why this issue seems more pressing now?Gretchen: The temporary staffing industry has been in the news every single day for several months because tem-porary jobs have constituted virtually all of employment growth since the so-called end of the recession. Moreover,temporary staffing companies have been projected to see even more explosive growth with the implementation of“Obamacare,” as companies seek ways to evade the employer mandate by limiting the size of the workforce throughthe strategic use of temps.Day labor is certainly not new. Nor is precarious employment, which, as anthropologistswell know, is the dominant form of employment in the world. Labor brokers, too, are common throughout the world.


What we have seen is that since the 1970s, temporary staffing has exploded, bringing back conditions of employmentthat were dominant during and prior to the Great Depression. Throughout the 1970s, representatives of the newfangled temporary staffing industry lobbied for state laws that would classify these companies as the legal employer.This enabled the agencies to evade the regulations that had been put in place in the 1930s to eradicate the widelycondemned business practices of vampire-like “employment agencies” and spurred the explosive growth of temporarystaffing in the U.S. In this respect, the growth of temporary staffing and its firmly entrenched status in the labormarket is a radical departure from the postwar labor market. It is deeply connected to this story about legal reclas-sification and deeply connected to the saga of deunionization.The growth of day labor staffing has radically trans-formed the way in which hiring and employment take place across a broad swath of sectors in our economy. Whileit might seem like day labor is a marginal business, in fact, it’s not. Day labor agencies are utilized by every majoremployer you can think of, both in the private and even in the public sector. In fact, one of the day labor companiesI studied is the single largest employer in the construction sector in the U.S. Day laborers are working in practicallyevery worksite you can think of, yet the conditions of their employment remain entirely obscured.

Over the last two to three decades, the temporary staffing industry has really transformed itself from being anindustry predominantly focused on clerical work to one more predominantly focused on industrial employment.Along with this shift, came of course a shift in the racial and gendered makeup of the temporary staffing workforce.Erin Hatton wrote an excellent book called The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America whichdetails how the temporary staffing industry used the gendered strategy of the “Kelly Girl” to obtain legitimacy andevade the scorn of labor unions. The legitimation and growth of temporary staffing was premised upon the myth ofthe female housewife working for “pin money.” Once staffing became an acceptable employment practice, it wasdeemed to be a matter of “sound business sense.” Hatton calls this the popularization of the “liability model ofemployment.” In the last several decades, we’ve seen the tremendous growth of day labor staffing companies.

I started studying the formal day labor industry because they have a business interest in the expansion of labormarket contingency, both on the side of supply and demand. They have an interest in making sure that workers aredependent on their “service,” in other words that they are desperate and willing to put up with low-wage andhyper-precarious employment. They also actively work to convince employers to outsource their staffing by “renting”just-in-time workers. It is incredibly important to recognize that they are actively working to create the conditions thatnecessitate their existence.Lindsay: What I think is really stunning here is trying to imagine ways of organizing laborers under these circum-stances. I know there are probably lots of people thinking about this, but it seems so difficult with the added inter-mediary piece and also with the way these contracts are written.Gretchen: Absolutely. The employment contract literally states: “at the end of the work day, you will be deemed to havequit.” This is a fascinating choice of words. The words “hire” and “fire” are never used because there’s no clear moment atwhich you become employed or unemployed. This exemplifies what Bourdieu referred to as “flexploitation,” for daylaborers are flexibly exploited, made to straddle indispensability and superfluity vis-à-vis the needs of capital. The keything here is that structurally they are unemployed but they are working. And they might actually be working everyday,but they will never show up in the unemployment statistics that they have worked in the previous week. Every single night,they go to bed as unemployed individuals. How do you organize given those circumstances?

I’ll just add, in the U.S. we have seen a lot of really robust activism about informal day labor. I myself have beenvery involved in worker centers that aim to regulate the informal day labor market by both providing some sort ofaccountability and obliterating the kind of anonymity that takes place on the street corners. By contrast, I know of veryfew organizing efforts going on with the formal day laborer market or with poor African-American workers moregenerally. There have been efforts to regulate the day labor industry, so for example, some states — Illinois, Massa-chusetts, New Mexico — have passed laws that ban some of the most exploitative practices, such as charging fees formandatory safety equipment. But there’s been very little organizing.Lindsay: And especially, trying to encourage worker affiliation with one another in that competitive of an environ-ment must be a real hurdle.Gretchen: Yes, I absolutely agree, but then I’m also somewhat optimistic on this point because, at least compared toother sectors of temporary staffing and other kinds of highly precarious employment, day laborers see each other andwork alongside each other. The wait for work is a collective, if competitive, endeavor. This congregate “work forlabor” generates all kinds of opportunities from an organizing perspective. Also, day laborers often work in groups orin work crews. That, too, is very different from the isolation experienced by so many other kinds of workers.Lindsay: You told this one story during your talk here at the SAR which I thought was really kind of touching. Youwere out on a job flagging on a highway with another worker. It seemed like you might get left on the side of thehighway in the dead heat of the summer and your coworker took it upon himself to not let you get abandoned. Hereally saw you guys as out there together, so was that common on the worksites that once you were on the ticket, youwere on it together?


Gretchen: Yes, absolutely. It is, no doubt, very difficult for these workers to resist. But they nevertheless do makecollective demands, particularly of the clients, or on-site supervisors. At the end of the work day, it is common for daylaborers to band together and collectively demand additional hours on their ticket, as a way of recouping some of the(unpaid) hours they spent waiting around in the labor pool that morning. So, let’s say you spent four hours waitingand then worked an eight-hour day. Before leaving the job site, you might collectively ask the supervisor, who youmay or may not ever see again, to give you 10 hours of pay. When this strategy works, workers feel like their day’sbeen made and like they’re getting over on the agency. But actually, this act of collective resistance works in theinterest of the agency, since the agency makes money on each hour workers are employed.Lindsay: Last year at the University of Toronto we had Guy Standing, the author of The Precariat, come to give a talk.The anthropologists in the audience were really caught up on the question of occupational identity. They weren’t sureit unequivocally mattered across cultural contexts. I’m wondering to what extent does the matter of occupationalidentity weigh on your participants. Does it matter that they can’t afford one or has day laboring become an occu-pational identity on its own right?Gretchen: No, none would claim day laborer as an occupational identity. I mean, one of the most common things youhear them say, even those who have been there for 12 or 15 years, is that they need to go out and find themselves “areal job.” So, there’s a clear recognition on their part that day labor does not constitute a real job. Even though, likeI said, they’re working. They’re very careful to position themselves on that side of the working/nonworking divide,but they don’t claim day laborer as an occupational identity.Lindsay: So, when you gave your public talk here at the SAR, there were a few questions from the audience that weresort of the order of: “Yes, but isn’t this better than nothing?” Not to criticize that as a question, but the very fact thatthat can be a sensible question speaks to the normalization of this kind of employment. So, what do you say to that“it’s better than nothing” question? What, in other words, is wrong with that question?Gretchen: Well, there are many things that are wrong with that question. The critical thing to understand about thetemporary staffing business is that it reshapes the way in which the labor market functions. The very existence oftemporary staffing companies, and of day labor agencies in particular, makes it possible for employers to transformthe way they hire and to outsource the most degraded and dangerous jobs to the most destitute and dispossessedlabor force. These companies are transforming the nature of work, the conditions of employment, and the way thelabor market works. I would also just say that what I’ve noticed over the years of doing this research is that a lotof employment practices that were distinct to day labor are now emerging in other kinds of employment sectors.There’s a way in which certain employment practices begin at the very bottom of the labor market and then circulateout more generally. For example, having to pay a fee to access your paycheck at the end of the day; we’ve seenthat that is now a common practice at McDonald’s and other restaurants and retailers. There are lawsuits thatare being waged against this, but the practice became normalized in the day labor industry.

Also, how can you structure your life if you don’t even know from day-to-day whether or not you’re going to getwork? How do you do anything if you have no idea if you’re going to have a job the next day? As the workers so oftenexpress: what if we have kids? what if we have a court date? There is no ability to plan for the future, let alone planfor the next day, if work schedules and earnings are so extraordinarily precarious. If you earn $30 for a day’s work,you’re pretty much guaranteed that that money will be gone before you even wake up the next morning, so you’reright back in the exact same situation of desperation. The other thing that’s significant to consider is that because daylaborers have to be physically present in the agency to be considered for the opportunity of work, they are incapableof simultaneously spending that time looking for work in other capacities. So yes, there is petty hustling going on inthe office while workers wait, but they are unable to go out searching for employment. For all of these reasons, theworkers really feel trapped.Lindsay: Your work has so many valuable insights into the transformation of work more generally. What are some ofyour key concerns moving forward?Gretchen: Chiefly, I am concerned with how the spread of day labor staffing is normalizing people to highly despoticand degraded conditions of employment. I think peoples’ expectations about work have really radically shifted down-ward. You see that everywhere, for example, with college kids scrambling to work for free under the guise of an“internship.” Day labor agencies are a key piece in the broad project of neoliberal paternalist poverty governance.These agencies espouse the message that poverty is an individual problem to be tackled through individual respon-sibility and one’s willingness and readiness to work at any point and under any conditions. Of course, my workclearly demonstrates that work is a core cause, and not the solution, to the problem of poverty. Moreover, it highlightsthe fact that work in the inner city has not, in fact, disappeared. It has instead been transformed, with day laboragencies now controlling access to the labor market and the urban poor trapped in a liminal space between workingand job-searching, employment and unemployment.

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Conclusion

Post-Fordist work places new demands on how and where we conduct our research. While at timesit seems as though terms like neoliberalism and precarity may obscure more than they reveal, thegrowth of formalized day labor seems to suggest that there is something to be gained in paying closeattention to these terms as processes that shape the lives for more and more North Americans. The risein temporary work across sectors and classes is one we will be forced to attend to in the years to come.What terms we choose to do this with should not overshadow the chronicling of these everyday effortsto get by and the ways in which institutions and larger social forms shape, channel, or block thepossibilities for more certain futures.

*Lindsay Bell is an adjunct professor at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University ofToronto.

*Gretchen Purser is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship andPublic Affairs at Syracuse University. For the 2013 academic year, Dr. Purser is a visiting scholar at theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the School for Advanced Research for their support through theChristopher Smeall Fellowship (Lindsay Bell) and the Ethel-Jane Westfeldt Bunting Fellowship(Gretchen Purser).

Lindsay A. BellUniversity of [email protected]


Structuring Public Representational Practice: Violence through Personhood and Personality in American Presidential Oratory and Campaigning ( Jennifer Jackson) 49

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