Vidali, Debra Spitulnik. 2014. "The Ethnography of Process: Excavating and Re-Generating Civic...

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published online 23 October 2013EthnographyDebra Spitulnik Vidali

engagement and political subjectivityThe ethnography of process: Excavating and re-generating civic

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Article

The ethnographyof process: Excavatingand re-generating civicengagement and politicalsubjectivity

Debra Spitulnik VidaliEmory University, USA

Abstract

This article problematizes the ethnography of process with respect to civic engagement

and political subjectivity. Process is approached in a two-pronged sense: as a target of

ethnographic/phenomenological discovery and as a place-based issue particular to the

US. Regarding the first sense, I examine the dialogic emergence of political subjectivity

in specific communication contexts. Concurrently, I raise epistemological questions

about the power of words to name states and processes of civic-being. Regarding the

second sense, I argue that the experience, expression, and investigation of political

subjectivity in the US is informed and hampered by a political/discursive culture that

emphasizes discrete ‘engagement measures’ and ‘decisive stances’ over processes.

Interweaving these two prongs together, I argue for greater experimentation with

re-presentational forms that excavate and regenerate processes of civic engagement

and political subjectivity. Data stem from ethnographic and theatrical work with young

adults in Atlanta and national survey instruments designed to measure ‘engagement’.

Keywords

ethnography, civic engagement, subjectivity, phenomenology, publics, discourse,

voting, US

Corresponding author:

Debra Spitulnik Vidali, Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.

Email: [email protected]


As every experienced field-worker knows, the most difficult task in social anthropo-

logical fieldwork is to determine the meaning of a few key words, upon an under-

standing of which the success of the whole investigation depends. (Evans-Pritchard,

1962: 80)

Ich furchte mich so vor der Menschen Wort.

Sie sprechen alles so deutlich aus . . .

Ich will immer warnen und wehren: Bleibt fern.

Die Dinge singen hor ich so gern.

I shudder with fear for the word of man.

Everything he proclaims is so precise . . .

I want always to warn and resist: Stay away.

To hear things sing is what pleases me most.

(Rainer Maria Rilke (1898), translated by Cliff Crego)

There is something both magnetic and disruptive about keywords. Keywords attractwith the allure of fixity and crystallization, promising to be fast-track windows into aculture, a mind-set, or a state of being. They disrupt with the illusion that culture, ora mind-set, is static, etchable into a small set of words, ones that are key.While manycultural anthropologists have moved past the narrow idea that keywords unlock keyconcepts, as well as the kind of positivist enterprise exemplified by Evans-Pritchardabove, there still seems to be a fascination with and even dependency on the power ofkeywords. For example, while ethnosemantics has long diminished as a frontal pro-ject, its echoes reverberate throughout the social sciences in various forms of whatSilverstein has called naıve Whorfianism (1998: 422).

The allure of keywords creates a tension within the work that we do as socialscientists, both in our unearthing of lifeworlds and in our professional maneuvering(Bourdieu, 1988; Brightman, 1995; Spitulnik, 2002). The objection to keywords –and all words, for that matter, if one is to follow Rilke – is not just an objection toreductionism, but to the violence that they do to human experience or to ‘reality’.For either the science or art of ethnography, and for the ethnography of our tribe(the tribe of culture-analyzers/documenters), the objection at the professional levelmight also include an objection to the unspoken acceptance – or lack of sustaineddiscussion – regarding the degree to which keywords are operators of both sym-bolic and economic capital in our own line of business. With every concept from‘culture’ to ‘modernity’, from ‘development’ to ‘democracy’, being raked over thecoals and turned into a moving target, or a field of relations, we still end up rallyingaround such terms, cashing in on their value as fetishized, objectified, essentializedthings with value, if only as such under erasure.

In this essay I am concerned with how key words such as ‘engagement’, ‘apathy’,‘activism’, ‘democracy’, and ‘citizenship’ both saturate and shape understandings ofpolitical agency. These understandings span across numerous arenas of life and dis-course, frompublic policy to social theory, frompersonal assessment to interpersonalrelationships. But rather than unpacking each of these keywords and tracing their

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circulation through various arenas, or hoping that they are fast-tracks to anthropo-logical discovery, I wish tomove in amoreRilkean direction: worried about the fixityof words and curious about the potential ineffability of human experience.

Here, I offer an intervention into the minefield of buzz words by exploring twointerconnected questions: What does it mean to do an ethnography of civic engage-ment? What does it mean to do an ethnography of political subjectivity? Thematerial that I discuss stems from national survey instruments designed to measure‘engagement’ and from my own ethnographic and theatrical work on the relationbetween media use and political engagement among young adults (ages 18–25)from all walks of life in Atlanta.1

The first question – how to conduct an ethnography of civic engagement – hasbeen demonstrated, or tangentially broached, at a case study level through ethno-graphies or other kinds of qualitative explorations (for examples see Graeber, 2009;Couldry et al., 2009; Putnam, 2000; Eliasoph, 1998). It has not been raised, to the bestof my knowledge, in a general sense. For example, it has not been framed in terms ofquestions about methods and evidentiality. In the following I address this gap, byhighlighting the need to ask fundamental questions about where one looks, ethno-graphically, for evidence of civic engagement or disengagement, and howone attendsto the tension between analytical categories, culturally-specific concepts, and internalexperiences of engagement or connection. This analytical attention itself might beseen as a delicate choreography (cf. Janesick, 2000), like engagement itself, thatresponds to and creates pulls and pushes across different force fields (Snapshot 1).

Snapshot 1. Engagement choreography

Jin sees Tina walking by.2

Jin: Tina!

Tina: Hey Jin. Hey Paul. What are you guys doing?

Jin: Hey, how’s it going? We’re trying to get some volunteers to go out and campaign

for Obama this weekend. (Approaching Tina with her clipboard.)

Tina: Oh, cool. (Tries to keep her pace and walk past them, but Jin comes closer and

blocks her path.)

Jin: Yeah, are you interested? Are you free this weekend?

Tina: Um, not really. (Trying to stay in motion and move past Jin.) I have a test to

study for. I haven’t really been keeping up with the election or anything either. I’m not

even registered to vote.

Paul: You aren’t?

Re-Generation: A Verbatim Documentary Play about

Media and Civic (Dis)Engagement, by Debra Vidali

In the choreography of this essay, I approach process in a two-pronged sense: as atarget of ethnographic/phenomenological discovery and as a place-based issue par-ticular to the US. Regarding the first sense, I examine the dialogic emergence ofpolitical subjectivity in specific communication contexts. Concurrently, I raise

Vidali 3


epistemological questions about the power of words to name states andprocesses of civic-being. Regarding the second sense, I argue that the experience,expression, and investigation of political subjectivity processes in the US is bothinformed and hampered by a political/discursive culture that potentially obviatesthe expression and investigation of process, through its over-emphasis on decisivestances and discrete engagement measures, among other things. Taking these twoprongs together, I argue for greater experimentation with re-presentational formsthat excavate and regenerate processes of civic engagement and politicalsubjectivity.

Alongside a discussion of national reports designed to measure something called‘engagement’, I weave a series of snapshots (from my theatrical work, interviewresearch, and wider ethnographic work) through the article, using them to illustrateanalytical points, engagement stances, and re-presentational strategies. Many can beread as analytical contributions at a double level – about both epistemology ingeneral and the anthropological study of engagement in particular.

Subjectivity, evidentiality and the ethnography of process

Like the first question posed above – what does it mean to do an ethnographyof civic engagement? – the second question – about ethnographies of politicalsubjectivity – has received little explicit discussion in relation to issues of evi-dentiality, despite the widespread mobilization of the subjectivity conceptthroughout cultural anthropology and cultural studies research for almost

Scene from Re-Generation with Tina, Paul, and Jin (l to r) played by Natalia Via, Ruben Diaz, and

Emma Calabrese. Tina ‘‘I’m not even registered to vote.’’ Paul ‘‘You aren’t?’’ Photo by Bianca Copello.

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two decades. Ortner seems to speak to this lacuna indirectly, by highlightingthe need for a ‘robust anthropology of subjectivity’ (2006: 127) in her far-reaching discussion of the concept. Through the exegesis of two Geertz articles,she explains how the interpretive method uncovers subjectivities as ‘complexstructures of thought, feeling, and reflection, that make social beings alwaysmore than the occupants of particular positions and the holders of particularidentities’ (2006: 115). At the same time, however, Ortner seems unconcernedwith the possibility that the interpretive method asks readers to take a leap offaith that actual modes of consciousness, states of mind, or experiential reali-ties of real people have been uncovered and connected through the method.There is no direct discussion about how one builds an inductive argumentabout subjectivity from a range of interpretable cultural artifacts or processes(for example from kinship terms, calendrical systems, gambling games, and soon). Evidentiality in this sense is not overtly on the radar of such kinds ofinterpretive anthropology (Spitulnik, 2010).3 What is missing, in part, is dis-tinguishing ‘individual subjectivity’ as a phenomenological problem – that is,approaching the experiencing subject in terms of felt processes of experiencinga relation to a self, others, and the world – which is separate but related to‘culturally-specific concepts of subjectivity’, understood as the subject positions,stances, attitudes, values, and ideal behaviors that are created or promoted bycultures, institutions, and other ideological systems.

What does it look like to do an ethnography of processes of political subjectiv-ity? How can such an ethnography of process balance the re-presentation ofongoing and emergent experience with the use of keywords (both emic andetic) – such as ‘apathetic’, ‘engaged’, ‘cynical’ – that name internal states? Whilethere is an extensive set of terms for political positionalities or states, the languageof/for process seems rather anemic.4

Such questions join a long-standing concern with – and even theoretical pri-vileging of – process – across numerous fields and approaches, such as phenom-enology, linguistic anthropology, symbolic anthropology, practice theory,performance studies, symbolic interactionism, the ethnography of communica-tion, post-Marxist critical theory, and psychotherapy. Significantly, for many ofthese approaches, a theory of the social maps directly into a method of dataanalysis. Put into shorthand, the recipe for studying process might then be statedas: Reality is socially constructed, so the goal is to look for the real-time emer-gence of social values and categories, and the processes that contribute to theirstabilization and normalization (neutralization).5 Or, stances and statuses areachievements-in-process rather than methodological primitives, so the goal is totrack the emergence of such interactional alignments and co-constructions inpractice/discourse/interaction as it unfolds over time, within specific communica-tion contexts.6 Many phenomenological approaches within anthropology andsociology take time, temporality, and process over time as central organizingresearch problems (see Katz and Csordas, 2003). For the most part, this phe-nomenological concern is motivated by a theoretical position that the

Vidali 5


experiencing subject is a process in time and that temporality is a subjectivelyexperienced phenomenon.

Building on this work, I wish to draw attention to the dialogic and emer-gent nature of political subjectivity.7 Crucially, such processes of dialogicalitymanifest in bodily movement, as well as in talk and other semiotic practices.Further, they exemplify what Husserl has defined as ‘phenomenological modi-fication’, that is, ‘acts by which social actors take on differing attitudes, and ormore less reflective or engaged stances, when relating to objects of experienceor life more generally’ (Desjarlais and Throop, 2011: 88). For the study ofpolitical subjectivity, the analysis of such dialogicality is particularly pro-nounced since certain keywords themselves are semiotic operators in the dis-cursive fields of research, analysis, and professional cultures. As such, theydisrupt the possibility of having neat divisions between etic and emic cate-gories. Furthermore, and perhaps even more significantly, these keywords –and the semantic networks and communicative practices which anchor theirmeanings – shape the phenomenological horizons of experience for those whoare commenting, sharing, talking, and being-in-the-world as political selves.This, then, is precisely where the subjectivities that Ornter writes of – cultur-ally-specific concepts of subjectivity and possible subject positions – intersectand inform subjectivities as experienced, i.e. modes of consciousness andsensation, as well as states and processes of mind.

Snapshot 2. ‘Get comfortable with there being gray areas’

Fifteen minutes into the interview, I ask Nathan: ‘What do you think is the burning

issue [for you]? . . . Something that needs to happen, or that you want to see happen in

your lifetime?’

Nathan dives in. He explains how he thinks people need to question authority and not

be so ‘concerned with having a black or white answer to everything’. ‘[W]e have to

really get comfortable with there being gray areas’, he says. ‘I think it gives you a

chance to make the most informed decisions’. His reflections develop through a seem-

ingly incongruent range of examples: the rote memorization of 2 + 2 ¼ 4 and other

basic facts in grade school, being pressured by his parents to improve his dinner table

manners when he was a teenager, and the possibility of ethical disagreements when

there are cultural differences.

He goes on for more than five minutes. His talk is cluttered, redundant, elliptical. It is

also forceful, passionate, clear. He has gone inside, to pull this out. He builds up to a

conclusion: ‘And it’s not something that can be fixed in one generation. You have to

change the way you go about teaching people and that requires a lot of work. But it is

something that I think would help a lot’.

‘Thank you, that’s amazing’, I say.

‘It took me a while, but yeah, I can definitely stick to those for sure’.

Research interview. May 2011

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Scales of ethnographic knowledge

A wider field of relations, communicative practices, and circulating discoursesaround political stance and political identity – many of which are buttressedand disseminated by powerful institutions – inform the dialogic emergence ofpolitical subjectivity in individual instances of talk, interaction, and behavior.From a phenomenological perspective, they create and reinforce possibilitiesfor what does and can show up within the horizons of the meaningful and thesay-able. From a poststructural or critical theory perspective, they are a locusand mechanism of sociopolitical reproduction. One major component of thiswider field of relations in the US involves a political/discursive culture whichplaces strong emphasis on what might be called ‘decisive stances’ and ‘forcedchoices’. Such rigidity – reinforced and framed by apparatuses of polling, stan-dardized testing, and media pundits, to name just a few – potentially obviates theexperience and expression of process, uncertainty, and in-between-ness. It alsoworks in concert with certain models of normative democratic citizenship.Nathan nails this, in a very meandering way, in Snapshot 2. For him, there isa connection between the mechanics of primary school education and not beingcomfortable with gray areas as an adult.

The implication of this analytical approach for public sphere theory is thatdifferent scales of ethnographic knowledge are required for unpacking and explain-ing culturally and historically-specific modes of civic-being, being-in-a-public andbeing-a-public (also see Vidali, 2010). The following sections tackle one dimensionof the complex political/discursive culture around civic engagement in the US,through readings of some prominent public reports and surveys related to measuresof engagement. These are considered in tandem with a series of ethnographicsnapshots.

Forced choice? Measuring the measures of engagement

The balancing act between the re-presentation of ongoing and emergent experiencewith keywords that name internal states is all the more pressing in the study of civicengagement because the received popular language (and way of using language) forsuch phenomena tends to be in terms of stances or statuses, not processes. Thesestances are typically cast and measured as discrete positions, activities, or states.Often these are binaries, ‘as if there is a black and white answer to everything’, inNathan’s words (Snapshot 2). Examples include:

Approve / Disapprove

Favor / Oppose

Voted / Did not vote

Democrat / Republican

Donated / Did not donate

Involved as community volunteer / Not involved as community volunteer

Vidali 7


The challenge is both to avoid recapitulating these kinds of forced choices in theethnographic analysis of political subjectivity and to attend to where people arepotentially impacted by such logics in their own political lifeworlds, and as theytalk about their thoughts, positions, and experiences within context-specific com-munication frames, including research interviews.

This section offers a window into how the logics of forced choice, reductivekeywordism, and engagement measures operate in public polling. While this isnot the place to do an extensive review of the literature or an ethnography oforganizational cultures themselves, the discussion highlights how ‘engagement’ asa keyword becomes tangled up both in measurement efforts that claim precisionand in unstated assumptions about normative citizenship. It also provides aglimpse into how discourses of ‘engagement’ circulate at the level of public opinionand public policy organizations. Space limitations prevent a fuller examination ofthe precise relations of causality and circulation across such institutions/technolo-gies of ‘the public’, and into the fields of human experience and ethnographicanalysis, but the discussion points the way for how such an analysis might proceed.

Significantly, polling instruments designed to measure political opinions andlevels of engagement are not only framed in terms of binary choices, like manysuch instruments, they also contain interviewer instructions with additionalprobes to use if respondents do not respond using the discrete categories pre-sented to them by the survey frame. In this way, interviewees are guidedas much as possible to fit into the pre-determined categories. For example, inthe Pew 2011 Generations Survey, the first question asks: ‘Do you approve ordisapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling his job as president?’.Telephone interviewers are to code responses as: ‘Approve’, ‘Disapprove’, ‘DK’(don’t know). Interviewer instructions state that if a respondent answers‘it depends’, then a follow-up probe should be asked that repeats the same ques-tion with the word ‘overall’ inserted at the beginning (Pew, 2011: 105). Instructionsstate further that if the answer is still ‘it depends’, then the response should becoded as ‘DK’.

What is striking in this case (and this is just one of many) is that such instru-mentalities of polling yield a survey result coded as ‘don’t know’ that is actually agrab bag for a range of stances and states, some of which are dissimilar, and evenopposed.8 In this study, ‘DK’ might mean that the respondent was uncertain (per-haps actually said ‘I don’t know’). Or, it might mean the polar opposite, namelythat the respondent had a great deal of certainty, but offered a response that wasmany-layered. In addition, ‘DK’ might mean that the person refused to answer theinterviewer’s question, or that they said that they did not care. These nuancesmatter, particularly when one-tenth of the interviewees end up being coded asDK.9 While the critique of the pigeonholing of public opinion into discrete cate-gories is nothing new (Bourdieu, 1979), this example illustrates how the reliance onkeywords and discrete measures objectifies states and statuses; it pushes out pro-cess. And it does not hold space, to use Nathan’s analogy, for all the shades of grayin people’s thinking.

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Numerical measures of something called ‘civic engagement’ have been the sub-ject of tremendous interest in recent years. The quantitative measure of civicengagement has typically been approached as a composite measure of the presenceor absence of different activities, competencies, or states. For example, for a majorstudy on civic knowledge, voting behavior, and civic engagement, EducationalTesting Service (ETS) created a ‘Civic Engagement Index’ (CEI) based on answersto questions that appeared in the US Census Bureau Current Population Survey(Coley and Sum, 2012: 21). The study focuses on five voting and volunteeringactivities, assigning a value of 1 if the activity occurred and a value of 0 if it didnot occur. Individuals with a CEI index score of 5 are considered the ‘mostengaged’ and those with 0 are considered the ‘least engaged’. The five measuresof civic engagement are:

. voted in most recent presidential election

. voted in most recent midterm election

. volunteered with a nonprofit or government agency within the past year

. volunteered with a civic/political organization within the past year

. volunteered with an education- or health-related agency within the past year

At abasic level of data significance, ‘engagement’ is like anon/off switch. It is eitherthere or not there; a 1 or a 0. Since five different engagementmeasures are combined inthe ETS study, the overall concept of engagement is more nuanced than ‘on’ or ‘off’ –it is a gradient across a scale of 5 to 0 – but it is still based onmeasures of the presenceor absence of behaviors. The study begs the fundamental question of whether thepresence of a behavior should be considered ‘engagement’.

Most synonyms for the word ‘engaged’ – ‘attached’, ‘committed’, ‘involved’,‘engrossed’, ‘connected’, ‘enthusiastic’ – refer to degrees of affective intensity, cog-nitive intensity, and/or intersubjective proximity.10 In common usage, the word‘engaged’ is not just about the existence of an action or a behavior but aboutsome level of subjective or intersubjective experience that is connected with anaction or behavior. In the ETS study, however, the affective or cognitive intensityof so-called ‘engagement’ behaviors is not directly measured; it is presumed. Theunspoken assumption is that +1 ratings are about high and positive degrees ofconnection, while 0 ratings are about low and/or negative degrees of connection.

Such pro-social meanings of civic engagement are made explicit in both aca-demic and popular definitions of the concept. For example, Korten explains: ‘Civicengagement is about the right of the people to define the public good, determine thepolicies by which they will seek the good, and reform or replace institutions that donot serve that good’ (1998: 30). Similarly, university centers devoted to civicengagement are replete with such formulations on their websites and other pub-lished material, such as this excerpt from Illinois State University:

Civic engagement means working to make a difference in the public life of

our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values, and

Vidali 9


motivation needed to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a

community through both political and non-political processes.11

The ETS study does not, however, attend to whether respondents felt they werecontributing to a public good, whether they were emotionally or intellectuallycommitted when voting or volunteering, or whether they were bored, frustratedand even disconnected through such activities. The sole binary for coding so-called‘engagement’ (presence/absence of behavior) potentially aggregates data thatwould fall into separate and even contrasting categories if other binaries connectedto the engagement concept – such as positive/negative affect; high intensity/lowintensity interest; empowering/disempowering feeling – were used in associationwith the measure of the occurrence of behaviors.

Places for complexity

Snapshot 3. ‘I’m happy about not voting’

Bill: So um I, I didn’t end up voting. I’m happy about that.

Debra: You’re happy about that. Really?

Bill: Well ImeanCaliforniawent toObamaby about 3million votes. It was like 6million

to like 3.8 . . . So I mean I looked at the map and stuff, and Georgia went solidly to

McCain. And I mean, you kind of want to vote when you think your vote makes a

difference. And I think the things that I wanted to vote for, like either local stuff – I had

no relevance either in California or Georgia, considering I was moving [to DC]. And it

just didn’t apply to me. So I mean like, I mean it’s a lame cop out.

Research interview. 17 December 2008

In the case of Bill above (Snapshot 3), non-voting, which would be categorized bythe ETS study as non-engagement, is explicitly self-labeled with positive affect: ‘I’mhappy’. Put simply, for Bill an ETS civic engagement measure of ‘zero’ producedhappiness. Looking closely at his words, however, the reality is more complex. Thelack of voting was actually a product of an active civic engagement process (notzero), whereby Bill assessed the value of his vote in light of the electoral col-lege, state populations, and his shifting residencies (home in California, schoolin Georgia, and imminent residence in Washington, DC). While Bill states expli-citly that he felt good about thinking through the potential value of his vote, thatis, ‘happy’ about making an active choice, he also expresses some concern aboutlack of power as well as an auto-critique that activates tropes of normativecitizenship.

It is an open question about whether Bill’s closing ‘it’s a lame cop out’ (slang for‘poor excuse’) undercuts the sense of agency that he reports. It is also an openquestion whether this self-appraisal is dialogically responsive in relation to his antici-pations of what I might think, expect, or say, based on his perceptions of who I am as

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an adult, a professor, and the interviewer. The likelihoods are high, but these areopen questions. The answer to the first question depends on who is doing the inter-preting. The answer to the second is potentially unknowable, especially now that theinteractional moment has passed. The relation can only be suggested.

Regardless, invoking ‘lame cop out’, particularly as part of a closing frame,signals a lingering sense that one should vote regardless of situation. It is dialogi-cally responsive to ideals of dutiful citizenship: voting is an adult responsibility; theimportance of voting is incontrovertible; actions (of voting) are better than non-actions. And this would align with ETS’s democratic citizenship model of voting asan individual responsibility and a social good. The normative evaluation is inten-sified further since ‘lame cop out’ is itself a ready-made expression within popularlycirculating discourse in the US. It is commonly used to assess and critique personalresponsibility and integrity, in contradistinction to ideals of principled behavior,political and otherwise.

Many young voters in my research expressed motivations for voting that weremore personal and peer-directed, rather than civically-minded or about high prin-ciples. For them, voting was less about contributing to the good of a robust andshared democracy than it was about engaging in the performance of adult citizen-ship and something that one could talk about later with peers (Snapshot 4). Thisagain challenges a simple reading of showing up to vote as an indicator of positivecivic engagement.

Snapshot 4. Facebook confessions

The only reason I voted was to get that sweet ‘I’m a Georgia voter’ sticker. #kidding

#notreally #butkindof

Facebook post. Helena. 6 November 2012

On Election Day in 2012, a continuous stream of status updates and Instagramphotos about voting flowed on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Manywere not about themeaning of voting in terms of political positions and outcomes, orin terms of exercising one’s rights and responsibilities within a democracy. Ratherthey were about self-display and documentation, akin to ‘here I am now’ or ‘here’sproof that I voted’. Snapshot 4 is striking as a direct confession or boast aboutsuperficial voting. It also contains layers of humor, irony, and ambivalence with astring of hashtags that metapragmatically build on each other to shift the message.

At least two different decodings of Helena’s post are possible, depending onwhich utterance segments are interpreted as being modified by the qualifiers#notreally and #butkindof. Is it the claim of kidding? Or is it the identificationof the reason? With the first, a possible decoding would be: ‘The only reason Ivoted was to get the sticker. I am kidding. I am not really kidding. But I am kind ofkidding.’ With the second, it might be: ‘The only reason I voted was to get thesticker. I am kidding. That was not really the reason that I voted. But it was kind ofthe reason I voted.’ With either of these decodings, internal ambivalence comes

Vidali 11


through in a projection of stances that create a back and forth dialogue, as selfcomments on self, for others.

Again, as with Bill, the moment has passed for further inquiry about authorialintent and a fuller exploration of Helena’s subjective experience in this moment ofcommunication. The possibility is open as to whether Helena actually intended asecond layer of ambiguity with the shiftable qualifiers. Perhaps she became awareof the rhetorical ambiguity and then owned it during the process of posting themessage. Regardless, what results is a kind of poetic condensation of message in theform of 107 characters. A status update about engagement processes that breakslanguage to show process. In a fascinating way, a Rilkean breakthrough – withhashtag shorthand, cliches, irony, and shifting modifiers – speaks to the ineffability(or complexity) of experience.

Snapshot 5 illustrates how the expression of a similar ambivalence is co-con-structed within the flow of talk among friends. Bryan searches for a way to say thathe simultaneously cares and does not care. Evan starts to elaborate on Bryan’s ideaand Shea completes the thought with a crisp assessment of real world impact: ‘Itdoesn’t matter’. Evan continues with specific examples of how he does care andhow he does act, but he returns to the theme of feeling ineffective. Unlike Helena’sFacebook post, in this case the expression of internal ambivalence is not witty orhumorous. Instead there is a nervous laughter that suggests self-consciousnessabout failing to meet expectations of ideal citizenship.12

Snapshot 5. ‘Internal ambivalence’

Bryan: I wouldn’t say I’m apathetic, no, I definitely care, I think I just- I kind of feel

like I have this internal ambivalence, or I just . . .maybe

Evan: It’s like I don’t-

Shea: It doesn’t matter-

Bryan: Complacent, yeah.

Evan: Yeah, I mean of course I’ll go out and vote and express how I feel. Or tell

people if they ask me. But in my daily life, I don’t really care. (laughs)

Debra: You don’t care about -?

Evan: To ex- I mean just like expressing or doing something proactive, because I just

feel like there’s only so much you can do, and why even bother?

Conversation group. 25 April 2007

Through the five snapshots – Jin’s approach and Tina’s dodge, Nathan’s meander-ing reflection, Bill’s ‘lame cop out’, Helena’s public #kidding #notreally #but-kindof, and the collaborative arrival at expressions of internal ambivalence inconversation between three friends – we gain a window into the dialogic and emer-gent nature of political subjectivity. Attending to these movements and moments,and finding ways to re-present them, gets closer to an ethnography of process.Reducing these processes to a static measure or an off/off switch potentiallychanges the story to one of counting behaviors, not people.



The numbers do not add up when non-voter but civically concerned Bill receivesa 0 within ETS’s measures of civic engagement, and not sure he really cares butvoting anyway Evan receives a 1. Perhaps these coding glitches cancel each otherout? But then what to do about witty performance voter Helena who receives a 1?Most quantitative studies necessarily involve some form of reductionism and it isnot my intent to create a straw man in that regard. In the ETS study the engage-ment concept is not only imbued with misleading precision as a single binarymeasure across five behaviors but it contains unspoken assumptions about idealdemocratic citizenship and what positive civic engagement looks like. Voting andvolunteering for organizations are considered social goods; they are presumed goodfor the society and they are presumed to feel good to the individual. Many of thepreceding snapshots challenge this.

Significantly, the ETS study is limited to measures of voting and volunteering,and nothing more. One might imagine other potentially relevant measures of‘engagement’ such as doing community service in other ways than volunteeringfor organizations, making donations, attending public rallies, organizing aroundcommunity/political issues, or participating in active forms of political communi-cation, such as writing to political leaders, talking about politics with friends,tweeting or blogging about current events, regularly reading news and blogs, andcreating or displaying various forms of political signage such as T-shirts, bumperstickers, graffiti, or tattoos.

While other public studies do use such activities in their measures of ‘engage-ment’, they deploy externally-imposed categories and topics and not necessarilyengagement categories or topics that might be most salient or relevant for thepopulation under study. Some even deploy more person-centered labels and phras-ings – rather than metrics of on/off, or numbers on a scale of 0 to 5 – to classifydata and characterize a range of political orientations. For example, Torney-Purta(2009), running a statistical cluster analysis on results from 12 attitudinal scales,finds five distinct clusters among young people’s orientations towards politics andsocial responsibilities. She labels these: ‘conventionally political’, ‘social justice’,‘indifferent’, ‘disaffected’, and ‘alienated’. In later work, these labels are joined by afirst-person statement (termed a ‘motto’) that exemplifies attitudes characteristic ofthe young people in the cluster. ‘Indifferent’, for example is: ‘I have better ways tospend my time than thinking about being active in politics’ (referenced in Coleyand Sum, 2012: 28). Similarly, Kawashima-Ginsberg et al. (2011), working from aPew-funded civic engagement research center, report six different clusters of‘Young Americans’: ‘Political Specialists’, ‘Broadly Engaged’, ‘CivicallyAlienated’, ‘Under-Mobilized’, ‘Talkers’, and ‘Donors’. Their cluster analysis isbased on 11 ‘indicators of civic engagement’ (2011: 10), many of which are thesame as or close to the measures in the ETS study discussed above.

Such studies provide richer insights into the complexities of civic engagementbehaviors and attitudes and how they might co-occur/cluster. They are alsothought-provoking as attempts to move beyond narrow assessments of dutifulcitizenship and discrete stances to more complex measures across axes of

Vidali 13


action/inaction; affect; attitude; and types of civic actions/causes. This potentiallyredresses the issue noted above, regarding the contradictions introduced whendiverse affective and attitudinal stances are ignored in favor of a simple binarycoding of engagement (for example, voting or not). In the Kawashima-Ginsberget al. (2011) classification, voters and non-voters might be clustered together. Forexample, voter Evan and non-voter Bill might be grouped together as ‘broadlyengaged’, while voter Helena and non-voter Tina might both be ‘civicallyalienated’.

The process through which labels for clusters are selected, however, is not madetransparent. They still seem to be created around prosocial and conventionalunderstandings of engagement. Significantly, the labels create an illusion of aperson-centered analysis. They use terms for types of people, feelings, and states.And they use ‘I’ statements about beliefs and feelings. Questions about potentialcircularity and rhetorical effect are also pertinent here since the clusters are labeledwith key phrases and terms that are distinctive and catchy, ones which resonatewith already existing categories. They are also potentially designed for ready cir-culation across policy and media venues once reports are published. They do notemerge directly from the data as one might expect native categories to emerge in anethnographic analysis.

Examining precisely where and how people like Bill, Helena, Evan, Bryan, andShea develop their models of – and discourses about – democratic citizenship isbeyond the scope of this essay. In fact, that might be a near-impossible projectgiven the multi-sited and multi-directional nature of such development in an indi-vidual life over time. Same too, for making a specific causal link between thenarrow, binaristic and conventional understanding of engagement that is registeredin techniques of public polling, on the one hand, and what seems to have beeninternalized – or what operates dialogically – as an ideal model of citizenship, asindexed for example by laughter, self-critique, or avoidance, on the other. The linksare more indirect and diffused.

What I wish to suggest, however, is that such popular models of measuring andtalking about ‘engagement’ reflect a broader cultural model of American citizen-ship that is normative and socially powerful. It is one which values decisiveness,stable binary stances, dutiful and informed voting, and actions that ‘make a dif-ference’. The model contains little space for expressing political subjectivity interms of processes, whether they be ones of internal debate, discovery, confusion,uncertainty, irony, or something else. In addition, the perceived positive value offixity and tangibility – for example, knowing where one stands, or taking a standand acting in a straightforward way without irony or hesitation in the project ofvoting – looms large on the phenomenological horizons of experience for thosewho are commenting, sharing, talking, and being-in-the-world as political selves. Ifsubjective experiences do not fully align with the ideal version of engaged citizen-ship, or if they do not fit into a language of definitive stances and familiar labels,then there may be laughter, irony, auto-critique, tension, avoidance, or some otheraction that mitigates the centripetal pull of this perceived normativity.



How might some of the data in the snapshots presented here be used to nameinternal states and describe comportments or ways of being engaged and disen-gaged? I close this section with a proposal:

. Enthusiastically blocking path with clipboard

. Rambling social philosopher (‘It took me a while, but yeah, I can definitely stickto those for sure’)

. Happy about his lame cop out, because it was rationally arrived at

. #Witty self on display #kidding #notreally #butkindof

. I do care, but why even bother?

Alternative forms of analysis and textuality

For the excavation and re-generation of civic engagement and political subjectivity,both as academic subject matters and as real, felt experiences for individuals, Ibelieve we need to turn to alternative forms of analysis, language use, and textualityfor fundamental breakthroughs. Otherwise we remain with normative citizenshipmeasures and well-worn labels for a spectrum of engagement vs. disengagementstances that are variations on on/off, or intensity of affect and commitment. Recentwork within cultural studies and political communication provides inspiration forhow engagement positions can be mapped within multi-dimensional space and asdispersed (Couldry et al., 2009: 16), ambient (Berlant, 2009), episodic (Vidali,2010), or moments with a circuit (Dahlgren, 2003). This suggests ways to movebeyond binary and scalar categorizations and representations.

In addition, following Keane’s rich discussion of epistemologies within Americananthropology, which argues for ‘sustaining the project of anthropology as an epis-temological critique of received categories’ (2003: 241), we might also begin a decon-struction of the engagement category itself, while simultaneously attending to itscirculation and import within discourses of citizenship and technologies of publicpolicy. I have attempted to sketch out here what such a project might look like.

Taking somewhat of a balance between Evans-Pritchard and Rilke, my argumentthrough the series of snapshots is that the solution is not to find better keywords thatwill definitively unlock the mystery of how people engage and disengage, nor is itabout completely pushing away the project of trying to understand and documentlifeworlds. Rather, it is about embracing an ethnography of process that is to a greatdegree an ethnography of dialogicality. Re-presenting that dialogicality on the pageand in embodied forms on the stage provides fresh ways of seeing into the livedexperience of engagement. This is because ‘engagement’ and ‘disengagement’ andeverything between, around, and nearby are not only periodic, episodic or phased,but contextual, relative and deeply intertwined with dialogical relations to self andothers. Individuals calibrate themselves – their stances, their knowledge, theirthoughts, their physicality – to different situations and different groups of people.

Jin is enthusiastically holding a clipboard and trying to waylay Tina. Tina isdodging Jin. Jin and Paul are professing normative expectations to Tina. Tina: ‘I’m

Vidali 15


not even registered to vote.’ Paul: ‘You aren’t?’ They are frozen, eyes locked.Tension. Another move forward. Another dodge. Then a sigh, an ‘oh’, a shrug,letting it go. Tina exits. Nathan is working hard to express his thoughts during amoment when he has been given the opportunity to reflect on and explain a burn-ing issue. That might not have happened without the sounding board/prompt ofme as a question-asker. ‘It took me a while, but yeah, I can definitely stick to thosefor sure’. For Bill, the burning issue is sitting right with his transient status, doingthe right thing practically speaking. And this is measured against a world whereblue and red others are imagined. For Helena it is about play and performance: aself that narrates the self and performs the self and jokes about the self for aFacebook world. For Shea, Bryan and Evan it is about being within the flow ofenergized conversation among friends, a dialogical collaboration to find languagefor a contradiction, and possible unease with it.

So it is not necessarily a question of finding the best keywords or learninghow to better ask about political subjectivity and civic engagement, butlearning how to see political subjectivity and civic engagement as dialogicalachievements-in-process that are emergent in a host of interactions and utterances.An extreme case of this is illustrated in the final snapshot.

Snapshot 6. ‘I felt like this great country was giving me a voice’

Antonia: When did you register to vote?

Jake: Hmm about a week, two weeks ago.

Antonia: Wait really?

Jake: Yeah well I registered online like three weeks ago and then I just got my thing in

the mail and then I sent in my application for an absentee ballot yesterday.

Antonia: Why did you register?

Jake: So I can fucking vote, what kind of a question is that? Why did I register to vote?

To fucking vote?

Antonia: Can you take me back to that moment?

Jake: Take you back to the moment when I decided to register to vote?

Antonia: Yeah, did anything change for you?

Jake: Yeah I became able to vote. What kind of a question? I don’t understand the

question.

Antonia: Did you feel any different? Did you, like, feel . . .

Jake: No I just submitted an online form.

Antonia: I know but did you feel, like,

Jake: (Sarcastically) Yeah I felt like this great country that I live in was giving me a

voice and then I really appreciated how my voice was influencing my government.

No I didn’t feel any fucking different.

Research interview by research assistant. October 2012

Pushing a well-worn question about ‘did you register to vote’ into a line ofquestions about how it felt to become a registered voter, my research assistant



Antonia Rovira met her match in the form of Jake. Knowing Jake already, andhaving a similar sense of humor, helped Antonia stand her ground as interviewer.While Antonia felt this to be a case of interviewer fail, I disagreed, seeing inJake’s words echoes of everything from high school civics lessons to JohnStewart’s Daily Show. At each step of the way, Jake either does not connect,or refuses to connect, with the interviewer questions that try to elicit somethingmore than a practical statement about the fact that he registered to vote. Antoniais trying to learn something more than just a measure of the on/off switch ofengagement. Antonia’s probes try to get at internal states, feelings, memories.Finally after four tries, each of which was met by a flat or ironic attempt to shutdown the line of questioning, Antonia comes back with her third repetition of theword ‘feel’. Pressured to ‘feel’, Jake finally provides his first extended answer: acliche statement about feelings of patriotism and the meaning of voting – anextended ironic attack on the concept of ideal citizenship. If the story were toend here, we might place Jake in a similar engagement camp as Helena: voting,ironic, not really committed to a civic engagement meaning of voting. In thebroader research, however, Antonia found Jake to be a close follower of newsand politics, the go-to person for news and news analysis among his college room-mates, and very adamant about the importance of being an informed voter. SoSnapshot 6 might be better seen as just that, a snapshot of process. The wholeencounter can be seen as part of a dance of stance, where interviewer and intervieweemove in and out of particular kinds of speaking roles.

Within poststructuralist and postmodernist philosophy, the concept of a uni-tary speaking subject has been roundly critiqued and replaced with more fluidand polyvalent models of subjectivity. A philosophical tradition dating back toNietzsche and Heidegger continues to interrogate the degree to which people’svoices and stances can be considered to be authentic and individually possessedversus temporarily inhabited and socially owned. Joining this philosophical trad-ition are long-established lines of inquiry within linguistic anthropology andsociolinguistics regarding the performative and contextual nature of ‘self’ and‘identity’, some of which have more recently drawn inspiration from Bakhtin’s(1981) concepts of heteroglossia, voice, and dialogicality. While numerousresearchers within pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and discourse analysishave built a skepticism over fixed, unitary selves into the heart of their researchagendas, the path is open for sharpening the ways to track the emergence ofmultiple voices and stances around ‘engagement’ within different kinds of discur-sive events and in relation to the more broadly circulating tropes and categoriesof engagement that are boosted by prominent institutions and techniques of ‘thepublic’. In turn, this provides an opening to challenge through ethnography thenormative models that monopolize the current popular language and scholarlymethods for understanding political processes. And the path is even further openfor experiments with re-presentational forms that write in and draw in, as muchas they write out and draw out, these processes, not just as a series of maneuvers,but as felt processes of civic-being.

Vidali 17


Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Frank Cody, Andy Graan, Misty Jaffe, and Thomas Tufte for their very

insightful comments on previous versions of this text. I would also like to thank the FoxCenter for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University for support during my tenure as a FCHISenior Research Fellow; research assistants Sarah Howie and Antonia Rovira; and all who

have worked on Re-Generation projects as actors, co-writers, artistic directors, andinterlocutors.

Notes

1. The first phase of work (2006–8) involved interview and ethnographic research with over

90 young adults (see Vidali, 2010, for a discussion of research methods). In 2009–10, in asecond phase of work, I drew on research transcripts to write and produce a verbatimdocumentary theatrical work that activates the stories and dilemmas around engagementand disengagement that I encountered in the research. The full length play entitled Re-

Generation: A Play about Political Stances, Media Insanity, and Adult Responsibilities wasperformed in Atlanta in 2010. A third phase continues with additional interview andethnographic research, as well as screenings of the Re-Generation DVD, a new version of

the play, and ongoing collaborative projects in civic theater. Videos of performances areon YouTube at www.youtube.com/user/ReGenINITIATIVE/ Other information can befound on the Re-Generation Initiative Facebook page.

2. All names are pseudonyms.3. For a notable exception see Cerwonka and Malkki (2007).4. I am not sure that there is an easy solution to this, for example one which places the

progressive marker –ing at the end of verbs or nouns to make them into process words,much like Heidegger’s (1982 [1959]) linguistic interventions into epistemology withwords such as be-ing, language-ing, and world-ing. Some such words are already in ourvocabulary – connecting, engaging, closing, opening, questioning, rejecting, wavering, con-

tributing, doubting – and others are not, for example, apathetic-ing, cynical-ing, angry-ing,happy-ing, informed-ing, or embracing the gray. Regardless of linguistic innovations, wemight instead entertain a solution that sees ‘state’ and ‘process’ as two heuristic categories

of being, not as mutually exclusive categories but as simply what we have to work with.5. Work within cultural studies, interpretive cultural anthropology, and practice theory

takes this approach. See Ortner (2006) for one example.

6. Scholarship in this vein is far-ranging and not reducible to a single school of thought. SeeAhearn (2012) for a discussion of such approaches within linguistic anthropology, theethnography of communication, and sociolinguistics as they are informed by the pion-eering work of Austin, Bakhtin, Goffman, Gumperz, Hymes, and Silverstein, among

others.7. Despite the growing field of phenomenologically oriented anthropology (Desjarlais and

Throop, 2011), the phenomenology of political subjectivity seems to have received limited

treatment to date. Most such studies focus on the phenomenology of political experiencein contexts of conflict, violence, suffering, and exclusion. There is a significant gap in thephenomenology of political experience in contexts of relative stability.

8. Andy Graan points out (personal communication) that such a leveling of response andexperience is reminiscent of the methodological implications discussed by Rosaldo (1993)in the analysis of cultural ‘patterns’ vs. cultural ‘borderlands’.



9. Between 7 and 12% of respondents fell into the DK category at different times of thesurvey’s administration over a 15-month period.

10. The same is true for the opposite set. ‘Disengaged’ can be synonymous with ‘detached’,

‘indifferent’, ‘disaffected’, ‘disinterested’, ‘disconnected’, or ‘dispirited’, all of which referto degrees of affective intensity, cognitive intensity, and/or intersubjective proximity.

11. http://focus.illinoisstate.edu/modules/what/isu_definition.shtml

12. See Vidali (2010) for further discussion of how nervous laughter figures in young peo-ple’s self-evaluation and presentation regarding not achieving ideal expectations forcitizenship.

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Author Biography

Debra Spitulnik Vidali is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory Universityand Director of the Re-Generation Initiative. Her work focuses on public spheretheory, media ethnography, relations between media and publics, the circulation ofdiscourse and critical epistemology. Previous research has focused on media, lan-guage and communication in contemporary Africa, particularly Zambia.


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