Para-Sites: A Casebook against Cynical Reason 0226504379, 0226504387

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ACADEMICS

AND

INTELLECTUAL

ALEXEI ELFIMOV

THE

PRODUCTION

DISCOURSE IN

OF

OF AN

MODERNITY

RUSSIA

The notion of intelligentsia when applied to, or as it is typically used in, Russian society often evokes the cultural figure of an organic intellectual, a curious kind of personality that is, in essence, supposed to combine all the qualities that the age of modernity, so to speak, simultaneously culturally inspired and socially repressed in human beings. An organic intellectual is ultimately one who is supposed to hold a broad universal knowledge in the face of increasing division of labor and the fragmentation of every possible branch of human knowing; the one who is supposed to be somewhat above material grounds and adhere to the idealistic spirit of humanism in the face of expanding capitalism and growing mercantilization; the one who is supposed to salute a free-floating lifestyle of flaneur as an assertion of individuality and freedom in the face of the epidemic alienation of the latter and expanding bureaucratization and corporatization of all forms of human experience; the one who is supposed to be charismatic, engagé, and actively immersed in the realm of the public in the

face of the dissolution of the public sphere and the mass retreat into “private quarters”; and the one who is supposed to be critical of one’s own society in the face of the continuous political affirmation of national values. Although probably every culture has produced an extraordinary individual or a few who to some extent combined such qualities, the concept of organic intelligentsia as a collective entity and a pniversal discursive tool of a kind, especially in the Russian case, emerged most likely as a cultural imaginary that must have been born precisely in response to the deepening of the repressive aspects of modernity. And, as it frequently happens, once ideas have entered the discourse, they find a life of their own and do well happily ever after. The fact is, even the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia—that which is often presumed authentically organic—had never been quite what it was imagined to be (for one thing, it had proved unable to overcome its reactionary attitude toward modernity, which had forever remained in its worldview not as an inspiration but a scare). But, as cultural imaginaries tend to persist, the Soviet intelligentsia continued to be traditionally judged on the same premises,

oe)

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although it was a totally different group of people, not to mention that it was hardly even a “group” in a strict sense. It was an abstract social assemblage of professionalized individuals who were performing different roles in the state structure and cultural life, and who, having different social ideals and opportunities, were standing in different relationships to the state, bureaucracy, and

one another. One thing common to them all was perhaps only their pursuance of that cultural imaginary of organic intelligentsia. Due to historical circumstances and the complexities of the Soviet regime, some groups of intellectuals, such as writers and artists, were more successful at pushing the cultural imaginary of “intelligentsia” to work to their service. Others, notably academics, found themselves in a somewhat different space,

perhaps a more bureaucratized one, which substantially influenced their public image—that is to say, in a way excluded them from the cultural image of “intelligentsia” that had permeated public minds. Thus, while in the West academic stands almost as a synonym for intellectual today, it is hardly the case in Russia. In a new Russian society of the nineties, on its hard road to democratization, the academics strive to be heard as an intellectual voice, but the stereotypes still persist and the allocation of cultural shares in the imaginary corporation of “intelligentsia” continues to be ruled in many ways by its own laws. In the interviews that I present in the following chapter, five professors in the humanities and social sciences, affiliated with prominent Moscow

institutions,

reflect on various issues that academics as intellectuals have had to face in the nineties. From their different positions within the system of Russian academic scholarship, they speak about the divide between ‘“‘creative” and “‘scholarly” intelligentsia in Soviet society, about the divide between “Slavophiles” and “Westernizers,” about the political standing of an academic, and other issues that draw together a controversial picture of the predicament of the academic as intellectual in contemporary Russia. I. Excursion into the History of the Russian Intelligentsia

This chapter reflects on the place of academics, and particularly scholars in the humanities, in contemporary Russian intellectual culture. Unlike discourse in the West, in which the terms academic and intellectual normally appear firmly associated, in Russian cultural discourse the association is not so firm and points, perhaps, to one of the major predicaments of Russian academics, which is by and large going to be the subject of the following discussion. Academics in Russia are not generally thought to be genuine intellectual producers, as opposed to, for example, writers, poets, theater directors, and others who belong to the so-called creative professions. In fact, academics are not always at all thought to be intellectuals as such. Their involvement in the production of

THE PRODUCTION OF INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSE IN RUSSIA

what, for the lack of a better phrase, could be called an intellectual discourse of modernity —which always only takes the form of reappreciation of the past in Russia—remains often unnoticed or neglected. This predicament—which is deeply rooted in decades, or perhaps centuries, of Russian history —is by no means a new development. Rather it represents an old development that has come to dwarf the attempts at establishing a normal, critically oriented discourse in the humanities in the 1990s. Although the past decade in Russia has surely witnessed an unprecedented amount of social change, it has also kept much of the cultural conservatism of the former years in what the Soviet ideolanguage used to describe as dukhovnaia sfera (“social mentality,” for our purposes; but literally, “spiritual sphere,” an interesting term that could easily extend its meaning to cover the whole of “culture,” for example).' As a result,

mainstream intellectual discourse still reminds one of the first years of perestroika, being more aggressive than critical, predominantly centered on, if not obsessed with, the past, and persistently dismissive of the subject of modernity. At the same time, there might be observed an increasing desire on the part of academics to surmount their traditional intellectual alienation and assume a more important role in the process of broad cultural production, which has been long dominated by writers, artists, and other creative elites that were, as such, thought to be intelligentsia. The encounter of academics with an array of cultural and political issues in the 1990s constitutes the subject of this chapter. In the second part of the essay, I am going to make use of interviews and conversations with several Russian scholars, prominent in their fields, that I conducted in Moscow over the course of fall 1995 and summer 1996. However,

before proceeding to the interviews, I find it proper to take a short excursus into the history of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia because academics, however particular or specific their status might be, are still part of an intellectual community. Their predicaments, likewise, are part of more general predicaments to which intelligentsia in the Soviet Union and Russia has been exposed over the course of the century. Besides, in Russian culture, which is

enigmatically rooted in the past in its every aspect, a little history sometimes explains much about what is going on today. i

The Problem of Modernity Dear to me is sleep and better to be stone So long as shame and sorrow is our portion. Not to see, not to feel is my great fortune; Hence, do not wake me; hush, leave me alone. “Sleep,” Michelangelo

The first and the last problem—at which, one way or another, every other cultural issue in Russia stops and which is essential for understanding how

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things work in Russian society—is the problem of modernity. I will try to outline the contours of the issue here, because the fundamental gravity of this problem requires that one should begin with it right from the start, rather than making it a matter of conclusion. Modernity is a topic that is generally unpopular among Russian intellectuals and tends to be persistently dismissed in intellectual discussions. The system of discursive rules and cultural practices, which embrace Russian society, whether we choose to see it as Foucauldian discursive formation or Kuhnian paradigm, is deeply embedded in the past, and it shows itself in a variety of cultural details, apart from the mainstream discourse with its traditional topics and subjects, which dictate that the correct understanding of the past is the most essential requirement for being in the present, or for arriving at a better future. If, for instance, one should just watch the public in a bookstore for a while, one will unmistakably notice that the history section will be permanently crowded, while the section where they sell contemporary criticism will see a rare customer and a salesperson will just stand there yawning, if there at all. The lack of interest in modernity, curiously enough, is characteristically reflected in language. Sovremennost’,

a Russian term for modernity, is not as

loaded a word as its English correlate (or, say, French modernité, for that mat-

ter). Although in rare contexts it may be forced to represent a partial, or even the full array of meanings, covered by the term modernity; in regular use or as a stand-alone word, sovremennost’ conveys little meaning to the ear of a Rus-

sian intellectual and points out to a most banal, routine, and uninteresting moment in the life of humankind. Both by origin and its actual meaning, the word stands closer to the English adjective contemporary. In fact, the words sovremennost’ and contemporary use exactly the same morphological structure, employing an adequate set of morphemes: con + [temp] [so] + [vrem]

(together, with + time) Thus while in English or some other European languages, there is a certain line of distinction, drawn between the notions contemporary and modern, it is not so in Russian, where we find only one term, called into service for all occasions; its counterpart that would stand strictly analogous to modernity, as it appears in Western discourse, is missing. The use Russian language makes of the root modern is restricted (with the exception of the recently borrowed term postmodern,

which means nothing in the realities of Russia but comes

into increasingly frequent use among writers, artists, and some avant-gardeminded scholars) by and large to two words: Modérn (Russian architectural style of the beginning of the twentieth century); and modernizatsiia (“modernization,” “improvement”’). Neither of the words in Russian has a straight temporal connotation; both rather imply a sort of technological advance (one of

THE PRODUCTION OF INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSE IN RUSSIA

the peculiarities of the style Modérn is indeed its employment of convoluted architectural forms on the basis of elaborated engineering design). It is interesting why the word modern, in its temporal function, was not borrowed from French and incorporated into Russian in the nineteenth or the beginning of the twentieth century, given the persistent Francophile spirits among the Russian intelligentsia (tremendous numbers of French words were brought into Russian during the period). It is even surprising to a degree, considering the fact that Baudelaire—a great French poet who was among the first to praise the experience of modernity —was one of the most adored figures in the artistic and literary circles of the Russian Silver Age. His poems and writings were widely read and translated and apparently constituted a ““must-know” subject within the intellectual discourse of the day. A curious detail, though, which should not escape the attention of a sensitive literary scholar is that the interest in Baudelaire’s works, which the Silver Age manifested so openly, was not comprehensive and the choice of the poet’s writings as such fell apart into two major categories: one contained poems that can be loosely described as eschatological in character; the other represented an array of works that dealt with art and symbols. Both were dictated by the retreat of Silver Age intelligentsia from reality to the realm of “pure art,” in which an excessive value was always attached to symbolism and the idea of the return to the past, to the “stones of

antiquity” as a source of eternal values.’ As a result, an essential part of Baudelaire’s heritage was dismissed by the Russian intelligentsia, which is also clear from the fact that, in the Silver Age hierarchy, Baudelaire was placed in the same row along with German romanticist Novalis, English symbolist Swinburne, and other French poets of symbolic orientation. Experience of modernity was alien to Russian culture and did not translate well into it. The experience of modernity has never become part of Russian cultural spirit—Russia lives in another temporal dimension. This was rarely well understood by so-called ‘“‘sovietologists” in the West, especially in the United States. The fact is not surprising per se: people in America do not remember any other experience, except that of modernity, because, strictly speaking, every time in American history was modernity. As long ago as in the midnineteenth century, Walt Whitman could saythings like “The Modern Man I sing,” or “I know that the best time and the best place are mine.” If one should search through the vast body of Russian literature, one will fail to find a similar praise to time. Russian literary thought of all times has been equally sick with the present, haunted by the past, and longing for a better future. This paradigm in thinking has become deeply entwined in the fabric of Russian culture over the centuries. As a consequence, the past and the future have polarized into a major meaningful dualistic opposition, while the meaningfulness of the present has been substantially reduced. In Russian society, therefore, the loaded categories are the past and the future, while the present, sovremennost’, possesses

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a minimal value—it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the present is socially perceived by and large as just an annoying transitional moment on the way from the past to the future. The paradox is, of course, that Russia has been stuck in this “transitional” moment for several centuries by now. As a matter of fact, the idea of Russian history being caught in some sort of time loop reappears fairly frequently in the thoughts of the most insightful Russian thinkers. In the nineteenth century Russian state politician and brilliant philosopher Piotr Chaadaev criticized Russian culture for its ultimate ignorance of the present. In the beginning of the twentieth century prominent philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev seconded his thoughts and wrote in one of his memoirs, “Among us the intelligentsia could not live in the present; it lived in the future and sometimes in the past.’* This

was a common perception of time among the liberal intelligentsia who, much like the Silver Age writers and artists, in their thoughts and deeds (which were,

again, mostly writings) sought to live for the future, desperately trying to separate and free it from the haunting past, while remaining disdainful of the present moment. Baudelaire’s famous warning, “You have no right to despise the present,” scattered throughout his writings here and there, was again and again dismissed by the same Russian intelligentsia that was so fond of the poet. It rarely occurred to a mind of the intelligentsia that something was to be changed in the present in order for the future to be rid of the past. So strong and pervasive was this belief that the political system was corrupt to the bones and nothing could be changed in the present, that the only valid course of action, seen by the intelligentsia, was to not collaborate with the bureaucracy, withdraw, and

hope that one day clever people would come to power, or maybe, better still, Christ would come down to Earth and things would finally change. Berdiaev perhaps meant this intelligentsia’s blindness, saying that he felt they all had hardly lived in the present. In fact, among the intellectuals who survived the revolution in emigration or elsewhere, this feeling eventually grew into the complex of guilt and words of repentance that “‘we failed to notice the present, and let the Bolsheviks ruin Russia” became a commonplace in memoirs written after 1917. This pattern of treating the present remained essentially the same throughout the Soviet period of Russian history. What once had been the intelligentsia’s dream was made by the Bolsheviks an ideology. Now life entered a new cultural epoch, the present of which was horrifying to people. So the ideology crossed the present out of history. From now on, people were supposed to forget about the present and work hard to death in order to achieve the future that would liberate them from the evil past (that is, that of tsarism and imperialism). People worked hard, but the future never came; and sixty years later they still remained in the same horrifying present they had started with. Suspicions were rising and the new intelligentsia began to guess that “something must have

THE PRODUCTION OF INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSE IN RUSSIA

been wrong with the past (this time, the Bolshevik one), that is why we are still here and cannot arrive at a future.” In other words, the cycle repeated itself. The perception of time by new Soviet intellectuals fell into the same trap as the one that the Silver Age intelligentsia failed to avoid. The problems of the present were thought to be related to the inability to work out the right attitude toward the past. A new future was again secretly longed for. But nobody was going to change anything in the present because long decades of exiles, expatriations, and gulags brought back to life the old belief that the political system was totally corrupt and would not allow any change in life, or even just tolerate a hint of it, for that matter. The intelligentsia became absorbed in moral and spiritual self-searching; reappraisal of the past became one of the ultimate goals of personal development, and symbolic means of expression assumed again utmost importance. Thus, in the sixties, Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky, then avant-garde minded, opened his collection of poems, symbolically entitled I Am Goya, with his new translation of Michelangelo’s sonnet ‘“‘Sleep.”* The pattern of the Silver Age, with minor deviations, was reproduced in the Soviet society almost precisely. Intellectuals and Bureaucracies

It should be said that one major difference between the old pattern of the intelligentsia’s behavior and the new one lay in the course of action that the intellectuals resorted to. If the old intelligentsia refused to cooperate with the government and chose to either oppose the state or just withdraw from participation in any political activities whatsoever, the new intellectuals, trying to keep an informal image of themselves as some sort of “dissidents,” often went into cooperation with the communist state, or one way or another did what the party wanted them to. Voznesensky, for example, in addition to his “‘dissident”’ poetry,> wrote a series of procommunist, patriotically oriented poems in which he praised Lenin and for which he was eventually awarded the Lenin Komsomol Prize, the second most important state award, after the State Lenin Prize,

in the Soviet hierarchy of honorary distinction. Although the image of a “‘dissident”’ and the fact of being a recipient of,a major communist award did not go over well, this was one of the paradoxes of the new condition in which

intellectuals found themselves under the Soviet regime. One important change related to the intelligentsia’s life had taken place since the Silver Age. In the new society of workers and peasants, the intelligentsia was debased, declassed, and deprived of all social privileges. If the nineteenthcentury intellectuals constituted a class of a kind, a social group that possessed certain rights and certain wealth (after all, most of those people came from aristocratic noble families), under the new regime the intelligentsia was purposefully made the poorest group of individuals and was deliberately opposed

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to “workers” and “peasants” in the language of the Soviet constitution.° Unlike the intellectuals, who did not learn much from history, the new rulers of

the Soviet state learned well that the intelligentsia’s brain, on the one hand, could pose a threat to the state but, on the other, was needed by it. So they came up with a simple solution—they turned the intelligentsia into a servant with no actual rights, having lowered it, by the power of the constitution, to a classless status of a “layer” that was supposed to accentuate the marginal grounds, upon which the existence of the intellectuals in a new society was built. The famous novel by Russian writers of the 1920s and 1930s Ilya II’f and Evgenii Petrov Twelve Chairs [Dvenadtzat’ stuliev], one of the most popular literary works ever in Russia, drew a sarcastic picture of the proletarian society that made the existence of an intelligent individual an absolute utopia. In this society the intellectuals, in a fine phrase from the novel, were made “proletarians of the mental labor.’’” The idea of making the intelligentsia the party’s servant was, in fact, rooted in Lenin’s revolutionary theory. One of the most frequently repeated thoughts in Lenin’s works was that the point was not to exterminate the intellectuals, but to make them work for the cause of the working class. Shortly after Lenin, as

it is known, suspicious rulers of the communist state worked out a more effi-

cient strategy: to make the intellectuals work for the party and then exterminate them. During the 1920s, before the beginning of the notorious Stalinist mass terror, this policy was already pursued, sometimes to a very strange end. Even such personalities as Aleksandr Blok, a famous Russian poet who was married to a daughter of the acclaimed chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev and who was openly against the tsarist regime, and for that reason welcomed the revolution; or, for

example, Maxim Gorky, a writer who came from the proletarian walks of life and who was highly regarded by Lenin for his literary work—even these people, who in fact were extremely important in molding a new nation’s cultural consciousness, were confined by the communists to the atmosphere of

highest ingratitude, constant poverty and hardships, and were allowed to die under unclear circumstances. Recent inquiries into the matter do not exclude the possibility that both Blok and Gorky were deliberately poisoned by the doctors who were assigned to “treat” their tuberculosis. Although there is still no conclusive evidence to prove this point, it is a proven fact that both writers were categorically denied permission to go to Europe for treatment. An interesting issue is the involvement of Lunacharsky, the head of the State Committee for Education, in this matter.* The traditional Soviet version of the story, as

retold in many literature and history textbooks, pictured a half-heroic, halfpathetic episode, according to which Blok, for instance, did not want to inform the government of his illness, being too modest and aware that the whole country was “ill,” not just himself, and that the government had more important matters to attend to. When Blok’s relatives and friends figured his health was getting worse, they interceded with the authorities for the poet, asking to let

THE PRODUCTION OF INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSE IN RUSSIA

him go to Europe for medical treatment, but some bad guys in the bureaucracy allegedly never passed their request to the government, which thus was left again unaware of the illness of the first poet of the nation. It was, as the myth goes, only when the news of Blok’s serious condition reached Lunacharsky that the matter was immediately attended to. Lunacharsky supposedly rushed to the highest government officials and obtained the permission for Blok to leave in a matter of hours, but it was too late since the poet happened to die the same night. This mythical story was placed in Soviet school and university textbooks not as an excuse but rather as an object lesson that was supposed to show just how many bourgeois saboteurs there were in the young Soviet society, how difficult it was to fight them, and how high the price to pay was sometimes. At the same time, it demonstrated the heroism of communist leaders, such as Lunacharsky, who at the drop of a hat were ready to help Soviet people with all their needs and troubles. Of course, things did not seem quite as heroic in reality, as they were pictured afterward. Archival research has revealed that Lunacharsky knew about Blok’s illness all along and that other government officials were kept informed about the state of his health as well. Writers and artists constantly reminded Lunacharsky of the need to send Blok abroad, and, in fact, it was only when

the state of the poet’s health became apparently hopeless that the measures (or the appearance of measures) were taken. This is just a single example of what became a typical practice under the socialist regime. No intellectual was considered worth a penny, and anyone, regardless of one’s importance in the eyes of the public or even one’s services to the party, could be tossed away at any moment. Therefore, the trap was not just that the intelligentsia was given an unambiguous choice—either to serve the party or go to the gulag—it was rather that even serving the party, it could not be sure that it was doing the right thing and that its position was secure. A secure position was not envisaged for the intelligentsia in socialist society simply because, by definition, the intelligentsia was bourgeois in its interests and aspirations. It was allowed to stay and live in this society, so to speak, “on

parole” and “until further notice.” at That is why the Soviet intelligentsia, which was allowed some freedom of expression at the time of Khrushchev’s “thaw” in the sixties, still could not counterpose itself to the state bureaucracy in the way the nineteenth-century intelligentsia had done. Soviet intelligentsia was unconditionally employed by the bureaucracy, and it had to work for it one way or another, otherwise it would have been “‘released”’ to the KGB’s hands. Even during Khrushchev’s short rule, when the official reevaluation of Stalin’s personality cult and mass terror started and, for the time being, the risk of being thrown in the gulag was substantially reduced, intellectuals could not allow themselves more than several

bold words, wrapped in a veil of historical metaphors or symbolically disguised

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in some other manner. They did not think about assuming an actual oppositional stance and openly standing up to the humiliating bureaucratic system. Unlike nineteenth-century intellectuals, they had nothing to stand on, and they were afraid. However, much like the old aristocrats, the idea of struggle with and, more importantly, for the present was alien to their consciousness, as some impossible and fatalistically unaccomplishable task. Intellectuals occupied nothing more than isolated cells in the structure, firmly held by the communist bureaucracy. Besides, as a rigid rule, all those places in which the concentration

of intellectuals exceeded a safe level (universities, humanitarian institutions,

publishing houses, and so on) were prudently injected with an enforced dose of communist nomenklatura, which maintained close surveillance and set not

just the rules for intellectual discourse, but the standards of intellectual behavior as such. Anyone who displayed a deviant tendency became subject to punishment, and the criteria for “deviant”? could be indeed cunningly loose, because they were never written out in black and white, being deliberately placed at local nomenklatura’s exclusive disposal and thus made, in essence, a subject

to oracular interpretation. This condition explains why intellectuals would not want to take any risk related to their jobs or their behavior at work, for being punished at work or losing a job was not the end of the road down but just the beginning of it, and one could never be sure where exactly it would lead. There is a remarkable episode in Tarkovsky’s film The Mirror (Zerkalo), which subtly illustrates the point. A woman who works as a journalist in a newspaper publishing house is awakened early in the morning and informed that, due to a typesetting misprint, a line in her article about some government official has acquired an obscure double meaning and that the issue is about to come out. The woman gets up and, having grabbed some random clothes, rushes to the printing house. What follows is just a long silent scene of her running, which conveys all the profound psychological contents of the moment. Tarkovsky’s camera captures the full measure of this constant fear of a regular Soviet intellectual, showing that the woman is not just scared to lose her job, but is rather experiencing a feeling of the beginning of the end of the world. The universe is about to start falling, in her eyes—and this experience, Tarkovsky seems to say, is what constitutes the never-ending pathological horror one can never escape from. An intelligent person was meant to walk a tightrope in this society—one step aside and you begin a long agonizing descent through the seven circles of hell.?

Categorizing the Intellectuals Pressed by social and economic instability on the one hand, and by constant ideological terror on the other, intellectuals certainly went to work for the community bureaucracy, and they, in the fullest sense, became a part of it. They

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must have surely felt that (but they were never able to admit it) so strong was the persuasion that the union of the intelligentsia with the bureaucracy implied bad conscience on the part of the former. Some people could live with that, some could not, and some chose to dismiss the whole point of the contradiction. This seemingly simple delimitation came to mark three distinctive categories of intellectuals, which were steadily reproduced through the 1980s, having gone into the process of mutation with the bankruptcy of the communist regime. To the first category (where “the first’ means essentially “the largest’) belonged all those who, one way or another, dismissed the moral implications of the connection with the bureaucracy and, having thus cleared the badconscience predicament once and for all, in good conscience assumed the right way of life, prescribed by the communist state. This category surely contained all those who reached, and were allowed in, various positions that involved

power, even the slightest amount of it, or some kind of management or control over people and cultural production—that is to say, departmental chairs, deans, section heads in any kind of organization, journal and newspaper editors, film and art producers, TV and radio newscasters and program hosts, secretaries of the central and local artistic unions, and others of the sort all came to belong in

this group. Side by side with them was an even larger part of the same group, which consisted of the intellectuals who had not reached such prominent positions but were aspiring to them. And, finally, the rest of the group was primarily academics. All these people, as a rule, cared very little whether their image corresponded to what was defined by others by that rather demanding term intelligentsia (as a matter of fact, most of them were sure they actually were the intelligentsia, although they were rarely perceived as such by the public, and never so by other intellectuals)—this question did not trouble them at all in any form. In other words, this group represented that group of intellectuals who had achieved some success within the framework of the communist social system and felt comfortable with it. The majority of people forming this group were either members of the Communist Party or on the way to joining it— because party membership was a prerequisite for virtually any of the positions mentioned above. Ye The second category embraced a smaller group of intellectuals, most of whom were well educated, in fact often bettér than those belonging in the first category, but not as successful at moving up the social scale as the representatives of the latter. The reason why they were experiencing social difficulties was in many cases the same. They did cherish some intellectual ideals and adhered to the principle (totally utopian in the communal society) that their success, well-being, rewards, and movement up the social stairs should result

from their work and their actual intellectual achievement, not from their place in the communist hierarchy. The tricky way of achieving success by means of

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joining the party was not favored among this category of people, and often they saw party membership as an obstacle that was blocking their professional road. Some of them did join the party when, upon completion of a certain amount of intellectual work, they came to face membership as a last requirement they had to meet in order to advance their professional status. Others chose not to compromise their moral principles and remained where they were forever, considering involvement in ideological structures as a mark of bad conscience and thus following the old pattern of Russian intelligentsia. These intellectuals could be found occupying many positions in society except those reserved for the first category—for example, they could be talented writers whose works were rarely accepted for publication, journalists of a lower rank, all kinds of assistant and associate professors in academia (the rank of full professor almost

unconditionally required being a member of the party), a variety of people in creative arts, and so on. Common to all these individuals was that they believed that the genuine intelligentsia should not be involved with the bureaucracy and should oppose and criticize it, exposing its oppressive nature. In other words, people in this category were those who, in their beliefs and worldview, maintained a certain standard of what genuine intelligentsia should be like, and that standard definitely had a “dissident” ring to it. Furthermore, they were not always sure they conformed to that standard, which was thought to be rather high, and, for that reason, usually did not like to use the word intelligentsia when referring to themselves (they certainly never applied it to intellectuals in power, those composing the first category, for whom they had the greatest disdain as ignorant people who pretentiously posed as cultural elites or people who betrayed their moral principles). Instead, they had a common habit of referring to themselves as “proletarians of mental labor,” in a phrase borrowed from Twelve Chairs.'° To the third and the smallest category belonged, as it is perhaps easy to guess, those who not only “believed” that intellectuals should oppose the state and act to expose the oppressive nature of bureaucracy, but those who did oppose the state and did act the way they felt they should. These were dissidents without quotation marks, and they could mainly be found abroad or in gulags, although a certain number of them always remained scattered here and there in the social maze of socialist society. So the first group represented an actual intellectual elite, where by elite I mean not “intellectually sophisticated” but rather “socially safe.” These people occupied the highest positions that intellectuals could possibly achieve within the given social system, and they were loyal to the system rather than to their intellectual background in exchange for some power that they were allowed to exercise over the rest of the intellectuals. This was, therefore, the

group of intellectuals that most successfully merged with the bureaucracy— or, one may simply say, they were the bureaucracy.

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The second group essentially represented those who tried to maintain their intellectual identities, their being part of cultural intelligentsia (which unequivocally required them to stay away from the bureaucracy), and at the same _ time tried to find their way in the system by honest means (which unequivocally required them to work for the bureaucracy one way or another). This was the group by and large producing the intellectual discourse of the day. The third group represented intellectuals who gave up attempts to find their way in the system, being in radical disagreement with the existing social order, and either were engaged in some underground activity or, if miraculously employed, tried to assume an attitude of defiance toward the bureaucracy, thus taking advantage of their positions. As mentioned earlier, these people often were either abroad or, if at home, under KGB’s surveillance. They played a very important part in consolidating the self-identity of the Soviet intelligentsia, serving both as “saints” of informal intellectual culture and certainly as an ideal of a kind for every intellectual unhappy with the oppressive totalitarian system. The distinction drawn between the groups of intellectuals is an important thing for a researcher to keep in mind because the layer of intellectuals in the cake of Soviet society was never homogeneous. When one speaks of Soviet intelligentsia, it always makes sense to specify which group is being talked about; otherwise, an account may result in a good deal of confusion. Here, as we are going to pay special attention to the academics, we will mainly touch upon the first two groups of intellectuals, the more problematic of which appears certainly the one we have placed in the second category, as a group responsible for the basic production of intellectual discourse in the humanities and as a group with the most complex relationship with the bureaucratic structure. Indeed, the relationships of the first (“elites”) and the third (“‘dissidents’) groups with the bureaucracy were very much fixed and relatively unproblematic, whereas for the intellectuals of the second category that rela-

tionship always constituted an awkward (or perhaps one should say, the basic) predicament, which in many aspects shaped their worldview and social position. This was a curious group of people, which in fact ideally conformed to the type of intellectuals frequently mentioned by Adorno and perhaps represented by himself to an equal degree (that is, the type, caught in a double bind between seductive powers of bureaucracy and the vanity of intelligentsia); for, within the realm of intellectual discourse, these people essentially liked to pose as intellectuals from the third (“dissident”) category, but in their deeds often performed what the intellectuals from the first (“bureaucratized”) group did, even without noticing it. So in a sense this was a group most successfully coopted by the state, because the first group actually already was the state and exercised certain power over the second, whereas the latter, being forced to

stay in marginal positions and permanently kept at bay, was at the same time

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allowed to pursue some “dissident-looking” discourse and, thus, experience some

excitement of individual

freedom—of

course, in exchange for some

good work done for the state. Hence the notorious paradox of the totalitarian state needing the dissidents. It is not just that the state needed the dissidents to satisfy its paranoia, as a psychoanalytic interpretation would tell us; it is rather that the state found it a cheap and efficient coin with which to pay. The state somehow figured that the intelligentsia’s work could be best paid off not with money or with career honors or distinctions, but with the mythical experience of freedom. It was not expensive at all to let intellectuals pronounce a few dissident words and make them feel proud, if that was what they wanted. On the contrary, this price could not suit the state better, for by satisfying dissident desires of intellectuals, the state simultaneously gathered evidence against them, so that at any time, should the need arise, the state would have a reason to nail them; and it was also good because it made intellectuals feel somewhat guilty and insecure, which meant that the state did not have to exert extra pressure on intellectuals in a direct way, for now their own feeling of guilt and insecurity would force them to do what the state expected them to. This ideological device proved very efficient because, for example, a writer having said a dissident word in one novel, would now feel obliged, solely by power of his or her guilty conscience, to write three other novels, this time ideologically correct and expressly loyal, in order to atone for the misdeed. The state in many instances found the price acceptable, because both on the social and individual scale expression of loyalty substantially exceeded that of disloyalty. In this light it becomes less surprising that such people as Voznesensky, who was publicly denounced by Khrushchev as a “bourgeois formalist, slandering the Party,” should be made recipients of outstanding party awards several years later, under Brezhnev (whose coming to power, absurdly enough, marked the end of the “thaw” of the sixties and the beginning of much stricter censorship over cultural production). The same could be said about another formerly popular, now unpopular, Soviet/Russian poet, Yevtushenko, who had a fairly radical, almost dissident,

public image but at the same time was one of the most publishable and welltraveled writers, which again represented a virtually implausible combination of things that, according to common opinion, could not go together. Common opinion certainly was not misleading people, but it never went far enough to reveal the actual roots of what appeared as implausible. Thus many people were apt to reason that the poet was just so popular that his public prestige made the government show some formal regard for him and take his authority seriously. This was nothing but another absurdity in Soviet intellectual thinking, which, having gone through decades of most disrespectful social oppression, still was able to accept that an intellectual voice could possess such authority that would carry some weight with the ruling power. It was hardly a

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question of some public authority, which mattered little to the political elite, for, according to anumber of recent publications, Yevtushenko simply did some kind of minor spying job for the party, watching and denouncing his fellow intellectuals, in exchange for the informal permission to look “dissident” and intellectually bold. Some authors even assert that Yevtushenko was actually involved with the KGB; but at this point it does not really matter whether his activities had to do directly with the KGB or did not go further than some party officials, because both party officials and the KGB were nothing but different hands of a single state machine, and it was all the same in the end. What is remarkable here is, again, the pattern of relationship between intellectuals (those we have marked under the second category, as the basic cultural producers) and the state. The degree of co-optation that pattern has revealed is indeed impressive. What comes to mind is again Adorno’s statement: “Administration is not simply imposed upon the supposedly productive human being from without; it multiplies within this person himself” (emphasis added). It is now time to turn to the academic community after this detour into the history of intelligentsia, which had to be taken into account, for everything that has been said above about the intelligentsia holds pertinent to the academics. Among the intellectuals, academics always held one of the most secure positions in the social maze of society. Journalists and writers might have to live by constantly switching places and jobs whereas an academic, upon taking his or her job at a university, could really relax in a sense (all it took was to accept the tule of the game, and in the end it was not that much—Jjust behave and write and teach, according to an unsophisticated standard set by the party officials, and you are set and secured for the rest of your career). That is why professors in the Soviet Union rarely changed their places of work (institutions, departments )—which, for example, has been typical for scholars in the United States, where academic mobility is rather high. Getting an assistant professorship at a university in most cases would mean literally that you were secured to spend your entire career at that institution to the day of retirement. As a result, academics became one of the most bureaucratized groups among the intelligentsia. Naturally, they would rarely do anything against the regime. And so, because of all that, because of their being relatively aloof from many common anxieties of the intelligentsia—because of their silence and nonparticipation, noninvolvement in provocative intellectual discussions, but also because of the idea, deeply ingrained in Russian culture, that intellectuals should be writers, poets, or artists academics, in public perception, somehow slipped out of the notion intelligentsia (at least, genuine intelligentsia) and were rather thought as some sort of technical workers of science. Academics never felt uncomfortable with that public image—indeed, one may wonder if they even noticed it—until the perestroika ended academic security and privileges. Now academics have been put on equal terms with all other intellectuals, and they are definitely losing in

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the eyes of the public because journalists, TV newscasters, and other popular figures have been able to develop a more salient public image in recent years, leaving academics behind the realm of publicity. The media, accordingly, have lost active interest in academics, especially those in the humanities, who are

now often thought of as Marxist retrogrades or as figures incapable of any good intellectual discussion. Newspapers and public magazines, for instance, now rarely turn to academics for interviews. And it is strange, but academics still remain conservative in that they still wait for something from the state and think that the state should come to their salvation, while it becomes increas-

ingly apparent that the state does not seem to appreciate their “help” anymore, since with the demise of communist ideology, silent guardians of the ideological values have apparently become unneeded. What the state now needs is proclaimers of new “capitalist” values, and old academics are not good for it, as they are not used to such things as proclamations in principle, being largely accustomed to a quiet style of intellectual activity. The state wants those who do proclamations—and these people are certainly being enrolled from other walks of the population: from the uncompromising (not academics), desirably rich (again, not academics), and those with constant public exposure (surely

not academics). That is to say, those who qualify to be favored by the state are often journalists, all kinds of media people, businesspeople—but by no means academics. Academics feel increasingly alienated in this situation, and they want to find a way to join the group of the privileged ones, but at the moment it looks like they are likely to remain in the shadow. II. Conversations with Russian Scholars In what follows, I present my conversations with Russian scholars in the hu-

manities reflecting on a variety of academic and cultural issues. A few words in the way of introduction. Professor S. N. is a senior scholar who teaches philosophy and culture at one of the major Moscow universities; he wished to remain anonymous in the interviews because he thought the topic was too sensitive and what he had to say could damage his relationships with his colleagues since, in his own phrase, “a critical word in Russia is just never taken right, but always as an offense of some sort.’ Olga Vainshtein is a bright professor, currently teaching in the graduate program in the humanities at the Russian State University for the Humanities and a leading research scholar at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, a very interesting institution that has gathered a group of respected scholars, most of whom came from the interdisciplinary tradition of Moscow-Tartu School of Culture and Semiotics, formerly associated with Yuri Lotman. Alexei Nikishenkov is a professor in anthropology, affiliated with the faculty of history of Moscow State Uni-

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versity, and a senior scholar who has been one of the most respected and popular figures among the students ever. Sergei Sokolovsky is a professor of anthropology at the Russian Academy of Sciences and one of the few scholars in the discipline who has been trying to shift research to the interdisciplinary frontiers, writing on the subjects of modernity, reflexivity, and reproduction of knowledge. Aleksandr Saltykov, a recent graduate of the faculty of history of Moscow State University, was a bright and promising student who was eventually offered a position of assistant professor but chose to decline the offer and quit the academy. He went to work for a small private Russian-American firm. I found it interesting to include him in the pool of the interviewed because his career path and his statements in the interview quite adequately reflect both the attitude of the younger generation toward the academic sphere and the state of the academy in its many aspects. Finally, I should note that all of the interviews were held separately, and it was only later in the act of composition that I mixed them in the interests of the reader. ELFIMov: We were talking about the predicament of academics as intellectuals in this country... S.N.: Yes, as I said, the predicament consists by and large in a sad fact that academics here are not given any attention as “intellectuals,” which is especially clear these days. It is rather obvious that the government and the media ultimately ignore academics every time humanitarian issues pop up and a representative of the intelligentsia is needed to make sense of them in front of the public. You know, they would call upon writers, poets, even movie actors—I mean, all those people who enjoyed popularity fifteen years ago and who have a very superficial understanding of the social reality we are currently going through. Look, in the last issue of Argumenty i Fakty they interview Andrei Bitov''! on the subject of power, intelligentsia, and the state. Oh, this is just so typical! I mean, as much as I respect the literary work Bitov had done in the past, he really has nothing to say on the subject today. Nothing new, just like the rest of writers. You read that stuff only to get annoyed—they all think in the old categories and do not want to move on. Stalin, personality cult, intelligentsia’s duty to people, a prophetic word that will save Russia—we have heard all of this so many times! Writers are not experts in such complicated social issues. Not anymore. Actually, I wonder if they have ever been. They never cared to study the reality they pretended to describe. What was important to them was a fictionalized image of that reality, and they must have invested so much effort in constructing that fictionalized image that, I am afraid, it will remain stuck in their heads forever. You know, at the time when

it was hard to say a straight word of truth, fiction did matter to us, but now it’s all gone; people are tired of fiction, and all they seek to hear is a straight word

of truth—which is something the writers never knew how to say. Yet, even

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ALEXEI ELFIMOV such serious papers as Argumenty i Fakty'? still prefer a writer to an academic when the need arises for an opinion on these issues in which only an academic can be an expert today. Evrimov: Yes, I agree that newspapers seem to neglect an academic opinion and suit themselves quite well with a less sophisticated, indeed often shallow, opinion of popular figures from the so-called “creative”’ intelligentsia. But then, I guess, they have in mind a certain kind of reader, in making this preference; because an opinion of a scholar could be such that ordinary people would make little sense of it. But newspapers apart, what about other publications? Is there not a variety of scholarly periodicals in which academics can professionally discuss what they have to or want to? S.N.: Well, yes... But let me focus first on that phrase creative intelligentsia you just used. Because that’s the very core of the problem. In Soviet society, as you should know, there was this stupid ideological demarcation, which eventually grew into a cultural demarcation, between creative intelligentsia [tvorcheskaia intelligentsia], which was informally perceived as the intelligentsia, and scholarly intelligentsia [nauchnaia intelligentsia], which was thought as some kind of second-rate one. Well, not even second-rate . . . It is just that that group could be called “intelligentsia” only in a technical, should I say, sociological sense of the word, without all the aura that would

always be in place, if one had to speak of creative intelligentsia. So, creative intelligentsia implied all these spiritually rich, genius, inspired people, whereas representatives of scholarly intelligentsia were somehow thought as, what is the word?—-well, some sort of engineers who constructed the edifice of knowledge, those uninspired manual workers who did the technical job of classifying knowledge. Something like that. This demarcation is still the case today, as old traditions die hard, and it appears to me as one of the reasons

why scholarly intelligentsia is so underrated in the eyes of the public. And in the eyes of the government, for that matter. It is truly ridiculous how the govyernment has been treating academics lately. We naturally want some respect, but I don’t think the government is going to remember us in this millennium. What can we do?... SALTYKOV: You ask me why I quit the academy? Basically, for two reasons. First, I am married now and have to take care of my family, which would be a rather utopian project with that $30 per month that my assistant professorship provided me with (it is, if you need this comparison, three times less than my wife gets paid as a secretary and probably about fifteen times less than what a poorly qualified bus driver gets these days). Second, I think I had the same reason as many other intellectually curious and talented scholars who have recently left the university walls. Not that I am that talented— it’s not what I meant to say—but it is a telling tendency, indeed quite obvious, if you are not completely blind, that every creative person should sooner or later

THE PRODUCTION OF INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSE IN RUSSIA quit the academy, because our academy is an outstandingly boring and terribly bureaucratized place. It is a gathering of the most uncreative and unexciting people who engage in thoughtless compilations and have an inflated opinion of themselves—well, like all small bureaucrats do. They are very inert, afraid of any change, and usually try to avoid far-reaching proposals at all costs. Besides, they always expect something from the government and also want to gain some glory by silently sticking to their little spots. It is a dream of every bureaucrat, isn’t it? . . . It is, of course, a shame that academic salaries have gone so miserable lately —just no excuse!—but, on the other hand,

I can understand why the state does not want to pay academics more. Why pay them at all? These people are totally useless. What they do is of no benefit to anybody. Well, as a result, creative people have to leave both because they are bored in that environment and because that environment tends to reject them as aliens. I can name literally three or four, no more, broadly educated, intelligent, and creative professors among the entire staff of the faculties in the humanities departments at Moscow State University. The rest are just sitting there and enjoying the opportunity to exercise power over students, because that is the only place on earth where they could show any power and influence. And outside the classroom, who cares about them?...

S. N.: Anyhow, let’s turn back to the issue of publications and intellectual opinions. We certainly have a variety of scholarly journals (although, I think, we should have had at least twice the number of them in the humanities)

and, yes, academics can freely express their intellectual opinions in those. Well, maybe not as “freely” as one would wish, for there is still a substantial residue of annoying socialist censorship. It is no longer “socialist,” but it is still censorship. You know, it is again that old-habits-die-hard thing. I guess, some people in the press business will never understand properly the concept of freedom of speech. So, yes, we have got journals, but the thing is, they are not popular among the general public. They are simply not known outside the academic community. Stop any person in the streets, who is not an academic, and ask him whether he reads Voprosy Filosofii [Questions of Philosophy ]— he’lljust do those scared eyes, because he has-never heard of such thing. Or maybe, better still, he has, because fifteen years ago they probably made him learn some Marxist propaganda from that journal in high school. So, at best, the public is unaware of these publications —at worst, it is instinctively afraid of them. What I want to say is, scholarly journals can not become a forum for a broad intellectual debate. Not these days. Whatever opinion a scholar expresses in such a journal, it will never be heard by anybody but his fellow scholars. This is why I was telling you about the importance of academics having a voice on the pages of newspapers. Newspapers now seem to be the

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only source of the printed word that are shared among broader intellectual audiences. It is no longer those thick literary magazines, like Novy Mir [New World], Nash Sovremennik [Our Contemporary], and the like. Those are not

read anymore and have hopelessly dropped in circulation (I think Novy Mir has dropped from a million to ten thousand copies, it not less). ELFimov: But not long ago these magazines were an informal forum for important intellectual debates? S.N. Yes, they were. As I mentioned, their status was maintained mainly through the regime of general intellectual oppression. A word of truth could be only pronounced, thoroughly disguised in fiction, and that’s where writers drew their authority from. Writers supposedly could write—and many of them, I suspect, just pretended they did—between the lines. So the public was constantly looking for something “between the lines” —you know, because there was a natural hunger for truth. But, in fact, there were just a few daring authors. I believe that, by and large, the intellectual authority of these literary journals rested rather on the magic of what was unsaid, than on the boldness of what was actually said. After perestroika, it all became too clear. For when one was allowed to openly say what one wanted, it became obvious, astonishingly obvious, that writers simply had nothing to say. Once, they were good at fooling people, playing the game of half-uttered words and pretending they were after the truth, while most of them really were after dachas in Peredelkino. But it was all unveiled in a matter of a few years. That said, one can

only wonder why newspapers keep going after the writer’s opinions! . . . But no, literary journals will not be able to regain their role of intellectual forum. And I can hardly see scholarly journals taking over their place, despite all editorial attempts that are made now. You know, such journals as Voprosy Filosofii or Voprosy Istorii [Questions of History], for example, have been making repeated attempts at establishing a wide-open intellectual discussion within the last three or four years, but, I guess, they have only scared people off [laughter]. |suppose the same thing is going on with the rest of academic periodicals. Your anthropological journal, Etograficheskoe Obozrenie [Ethnographic Survey], if 1am not mistaken, seems to share the same destiny— I looked at a couple of issues awhile ago... . SOKOLOovsky: Well, our journal, Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie, I must say, is a terribly narrow, guild-bound edition that is really meant for a few and read by a few. They say it is meant to reflect the currents of cultural and ethnic processes in the world, but, in my view, it only reflects the internal life of the guild. The same people are published from issue to issue, and they won’t let anyone in from outside. I wonder how they could expect that broad cultural discussion they have been allegedly aspiring to? There have been several attempts by now to launch some sort of interdisciplinary thread that would provide a space for scholars to discuss contemporary issues and each other’s

THE PRODUCTION OF INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSE IN RUSSIA opinions. But scholars here cannot discuss opinions of each other, they start discussing each other, and so most discussions end the moment they start. Like in a recent issue of the journal there was an article by Viktor Kozlov, one

of our senior anthropologists, and the whole point of it, as I figured reading it, was just to count old personal insults. . . . ELFIMov: I would like to ask you a question about the political standing of an academic. How do academics situate themselves among the intelligentsia? Would you say they tend to be more liberal or more conservative these days? Is it the left tendency that dominates or the right one? S.N.: Of course it is the left. Among the intelligentsia, academics are now positioned on the left side. Many of those whom we call “‘creative”’ intelligentsia have shifted toward the right—they are well paid by the state and also supported by new businessmen. So it is, in my mind, an essentially rightist position. They are no longer in opposition to anybody. That’s why, as I have been trying to tell you here, their intellectual resources are exhausted. They have nothing to say, and if they had, they would not want to anyway. But the paradox is, they are still listened to. At the same time, an academic, who

must, absolutely must stand in charge of the intellectual and cultural sphere at the present moment, is utterly neglected by everybody. SALTYKOV: Throughout all the time I have spent inside the university walls, I have not seen a single academic who would be on the left side of the divide. There are some nice people (no, I am not being sarcastic) who do not care about politics and do not want to be involved in any kind of ideological debate; and there are those—the majority —who stick to the right side. I see nothing particularly surprising here, for this is a natural place for bureaucracy to belong in. As I said, the academic community is a group of people, thoroughly addicted to the bureaucratic style of life and also possessed by the vanity of intelligentsia. This is certainly a heritage of the Soviet social system. There was not a chance this country could have something similar to France in 1968. Academics, especially those in the humanities, had always been the right hand of ideology. And, let’s admit it, a reliable hand. So, it is no surprise that many professors should miss what they had in the good old days. It is funny but it looks like they hate the current,political regime because of what the regime has done to them, and at the same time they try to be supportive of the regime because they hope the state will start caring about them again the way it did before. So our academy is really a silent right. They can pretend to be supporters of the liberal cause, but this is just because they believe that course of action will help them return to their old quiet and easy conservative lifestyle. VAINSHTEIN: The humanities people here certainly have a leaning toward political conservatism, although it is traditionally camouflaged by the we-arebeyond-the-politics posture. This posture is in many ways a product of the

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Soviet political system and has been developed over the long decades of our history. That is to say, many Russian intellectuals still have that reflex of steadfastly resisting any kind of politicized forms of. knowledge. I know that Western scholars have often found this striking, but, well, that’s the reality we live in. I do not think it is going to change soon. It seems unlikely that Russian intellectuals will ever be able to develop that left-wing complex of Western humanities (I mean all those things related to the PC debates, critique of the right government, and the like). Stories about political correctness that sneak into the Russian press, and specifically into the newspaper Segodnia [Today], which most of our intellectuals seem to read these days, are perceived here with much irony. They appear under titles like “I Don’t Want to Be a Noblewoman, but Want to Be a Black Lesbian” (clearly, what is meant

is, to get a job in the U.S., the best strategic device is to belong to several minorities simultaneously). So, as I say, we have a somewhat different view of things here, which is an outcome of our history. NIKISHENKOV: This question is hard to answer—you know what the intelligentsia is all about. A revolutionary yesterday is a conservative today and will probably become a religious fanatic tomorrow. Intellectuals are evolving in very strange ways. Much depends on academic organization. The School of the Humanities at Moscow State University, for example, is mainly conservative. Although there are different scholars within it, it is the conservative at-

titude that dominates and is somehow constantly reproduced. At the Russian Academy of Sciences as well, conservative tendencies are prevailing today. This was not the case some five to eight years ago, when everyone was a liberal during the early perestroika years. But then all that gradually changed, maybe because of the constant drop in salaries, maybe because of psychological tiredness, maybe because of disenchantment in something. Or perhaps for all these reasons. I am not sure which tendency really dominates, left or right. I would rather say neither. I cannot see how the left would dominate, being the object of skepticism these days. At the same time, it would be wrong to say that it is the actual right that dominates. It is not really right, it is rather some kind of unsettled center. Well, what I mean by “unsettled” is that this centrism is not

a self-consciously adopted stance. It is by and large an accidental attitude caused by a state of deep perplexity and frustration. What lies at the core of this, in my opinion, is an illness of language. These days people experience an utter lack in ability to verbalize their moods. They do not know how to speak; they do not know what name their moods have. The fact that many people tend to express an extreme political judgment does not mean they are firmly convinced of what they say. Quite the contrary, in most cases it is just an easier way of expressing their emotional states. People are mostly angry,

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and they are apt to fall into extremes in their words. While their actual political preferences, if there are some, remain very unclear to themselves. This

has been the common case lately. This is, I should say, the state of acculturation, of loss of identification and clear structural orientations. That’s what I think it is. And if you make me speak of my own discipline, anthropology, I would have to add that the entire question of whether the academic community is liberal or conservative is not as relevant here as, for instance, it might be in

the West. Western anthropology, ever since it was born, has been socially charged with an air of Rousseau’s morality, meaning that two things have been always present in the game: a certain affection for the native and a certain observance of the ethical code in respect to one’s own society. This has never been the case here. First of all, anthropology has never played an important role in society or, for that matter, in the academy. It has never risen to the same level of academic enterprise as in the West. What we used to have here was simple: the native was just an object, and the relationship with the establishment of one’s own society was absolutely unquestioned. Furthermore, as I observe, many anthropologists, especially senior ones, like to think of themselves as the establishment, as some kind of imaginary intellectual elite that presumably knows everything about culture and society. So whether they have liberal or conservative outlooks, that does not change much. What we have got is a problem of a different order, I guess, one of the general worldview. EvFimov: Don’t you then think the divide between the liberals and the conservatives, to the degree it exists in the Russian academy, is closely tied to the traditional divide in this country between Slavophiles and Westernizers, in some sense? Is the way people position themselves in regard to the West still an important demarcation criterion as far as scholars are concerned? SOKOLOVSKY: Yes, it is. Since the beginning of perestroika, the process went this way. First, when we got the doors opened a little and major publications from the West became accessible, one might observe the Westernizing

trend spreading among the scholars. The corpus of literature that had not been formerly available did bring some influence Jo bear on our academic community. I would say it allowed scholars to place local knowledge in a more global context, the result of which was an immediate reevaluation of knowl-

edge. Now the Slavophile trend began to emerge as a reaction to that reevaluation, as a reaction to the influx of books and people from the West (yes, a large number of Western scholars came here in the past years to participate in conferences or just to give a talk). This trend involved mostly conservativethinking scholars, those who openly opposed everything but Marxism prior to perestroika. It is perfectly understandable that they had to rally now around

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ALEXEI ELFIMOV some idea of the orthodox feelings being hurt. And, in my mind, their reaction was a purely political rather than scientific affair. All the constructions they were trying to sell as theoretical were in fact ideological. NIKISHENKOV: There is a tendency, typical for all acculturation processes, that is called “nativism.” Such is the case here. Very often it is hard to figure out who is a Slavophile and who is a Westernizer. It is a mess, like any ac-

culturation process. Tables turn every day, and all kinds of inversions take place where you would least expect them. In retrospect, however, one might delineate a certain order in which these trends flourished for the past ten years. First, there was an intense interest, inflated to a degree, in all things Western. Books became more or less available; trips abroad became more or less available. Every month there would be a guest scholar from the West giving a talk at the Russian Academy of Sciences, and there was great excitement. Then came a period of indifference, as if people had gotten fed up with that. And recently I have observed the coming of a Slavophile trend and the strengthening of an entrenched group within the academy—well, at least, its performance has become more articulate. Within this group you now see many of the same people who had been actively attending the talks of the guest scholars. It goes without saying that there are hardly any academic issues involved in the matter; it is all ideologically charged. I personally find the whole thing highly unpleasant and cannot bear to even speak about it. VAINSHTEIN: I have to say that the problem of the relationship of the Russian academic community with the West is, in fact, a very serious one. There

are many different things involved, not just the Slavophile-Westernizer debate. In fact, there are different kinds of pressure the West brings to bear on

scholars here. One, for example, is closely related to the issues of generational and informational change. Now that the iron curtain between the West and the East has broken and a flood of information has suddenly rushed into our society, scholars have got to face the challenge of navigating the new informational space. Many senior scholars who often do not have an adequate proficiency in foreign languages feel isolated in this situation since they cannot respond to this challenge, which, at the same time, can be more and more often taken up by an increasing number of students who have gone through practical training or graduate studies in the West and who can easily correspond in a foreign language or have a basic experience with e-mail, computers, etc. ... Older scholars, being unable to catch up with this development, naturally take it as a threat that comes from the West and tend to adopt an oppositional stance toward it. Another kind of pressure is still caused by the enormous difference in living conditions to which scholars in the West and here in Russia are con-

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fined. There is always this seduction coming from the West, which is painfully intensified by the fact that many people who are not bound to family and can afford all other costs of emigration do leave and, unfortunately, often

tend to subsequently assume a superior attitude toward former colleagues of theirs who remain in Russia and keep getting a hundred dollars or less for all their toil. And there is still another kind of pressure related to the perception of the Russian academic community in the West. The fact is, Russian scholars have

never been represented or seen in the West as a consistent academic school. The West knows several stand-alone names, torn out of context, and that’s it—the rest is just an ethnographic jungle. For this reason there is a very particular kind of demand the West makes when it encounters a Russian scholar. What the West typically wants from such a scholar is some fascinating native story, not an intelligent scholarly argument. I have experienced this more than once. Having a background in English literature and philology, I went to participate in several scholarly conferences held abroad, and, you know, the same thing would strike me over and over again. When it comes to my talk, I discover that they do not really want to hear what I have to say on Coleridge’s philosophy of language but would rather hear me speak about Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, or just about what’s going on in Russia today. And so, sometimes I have to yield, although I frankly do not understand why at a serious conference I should speak on something that is not within the area of my professional training and my scholarly interests. Besides, this whole attitude has a disparaging ring to it: “Well, it is very good that you came so far as to apprehend Coleridge and the English language, and we appreciate it, but now show us some of that native stuff you really do over there!” In a word, what I want to say is, the West by and large maintains the image of a Russian scholar as some sort of ethnographic curiosity, as an ethnographic informant of a kind who sits there in Russia and studies nothing but their native customs. And, unfortunately, it is this image that makes us most

interesting to the West (““Come, tell something about Pushkin and Dostoyevsky, bring matreshka as a gift, and if you can also dance with balalaika, you'll get everybody excited”). Sadly, this inrage will certainly not allow for any normal scholarly dialogue between our scholars. But, at this point, it is not even a question of dialogue. It is just that if you want to get some recognition from the West, if you want to get a scholarly grant or simply get out to a conference, you have to comply with the demand. So, as I said, there is much more to the issue here than just an internal argument between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers. ELFImov:

All right. What role, then, do you think academics could or

should be assuming in this society in the 1990s, given all their cultural and

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social predicaments? Is it one of participants in the process of cultural production, or one of critical intelligentsia who should stand in charge of intellectual discourse of modernity, or just the traditional one of-university professors and researchers in the humanities? SALTYKOV: The traditional one. If they can cope with it, our academy will be blessed. I mean, first things should come first. Once we have got creative

humanities we can talk about other things. If clever people come to the Ministry of Education (which is highly unlikely), loosen up our terribly centralized educational system, and remove that bureaucratic excrescence from all our academic institutions so that creative people, rather than all these old nannies, could be welcome there, then we can expect a certain change in the intellectual discourse. But as long as it goes the way it.goes, nothing will change. I mean, there will be no discourse as such. What discourse? Scholars from

neighboring universities in this country never talk to each other, nor even about each other, except in disparaging terms. Discussion, you know, is an event that is not specifically particular to our academic climate. So, the academic community here can hardly make what you call critical intelligentsia. It is not even a “community,” for that matter, it is just a conglomerate of separate individuals who do not want to deal with each other. I really wish this could be different. I hope it will be in due course, when the entrenched group of academics finally retire and a younger generation of scholars come to set their own rules. But, you see, the problem is, younger people somehow tend to leave the academy, and those who leave are not particularly excited about returning. So, I guess, there is not much hope to put on the younger generation, either. ... SOKOLOVSKy:

There is a serious generational problem to all this, no doubt.

I believe we have lost an active generation of scholars who have quit the academy within the past ten years. The intellectual resources of those who used to rule the academy are expired. By and large, they have nothing to say. While the younger generation have not been able, or given any chance for that matter, to stand on their own two feet. In my particular corner of the academy,

that is, anthropology, the situation looks exactly this way. Because most of the professors who have been teaching lately are old and like to stick to the old paradigms unquestionably, the discussion and the exchange of knowledge no longer occur in the classroom. Students have lost their interest in learning. They have not been particularly encouraged to study the disciplinary achievements of the West, and they have not been particularly excited by the study of those at home. They have a consumer attitude: “So what? Nothing works. The postmodern debate is said to have failed. Now give us the next theory to consider. What else do you have to say?” I really dislike this attitude. I ask them, “Just what do you mean, ‘What else?’ It is you who should have some-

THE PRODUCTION OF INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSE IN RUSSIA thing else to say!” But no, this does not get them going. So, concerning the role, I do not know. Hopefully, an intellectually oriented generation of scholars will replace the one that still rules today. And then we’ll see. NIKISHENKOVY: As for the generational change and reproduction of cultural values, this issue is now discussed everywhere, to the point that it has become commonplace. If you want to ask me what the humanities do in regard to the issue, I will answer, “Nothing.” The humanities are simply not ready to handle it. They can only talk about it in the same manner that millenarian prophets talk about the end of the world. This might be of some healthy apocalyptic importance; I am not denying that. But it is silly to think that the priest could actually cause the rain; at best he might guess when the rain was about to start. Cultural values are constantly reproduced, and new cultural values constantly come into existence. The humanities would really do their best if they attempted to track this process and verbalize what is going on instead of plunging into eschatology. New values and new meanings are already out there, but we are still not ready to perceive them, having stuck to the old language. I think this is the most important task academics should attend to. S.N.: Iam absolutely sure that the social role academics should assume in the following decade, and in fact should have assumed in the past one, is that of critical intelligentsia who would replace literary, or what they define by that magically misleading word creative, intelligentsia at their post of the teachers of culture, which the latter no longer fits with. This is going to be a hard task to cope with, considering both the amount of social disrespect academics are presently experiencing and a certain lack of interest in the matter on the part of academics themselves. Let me pronounce this criticism: our academics tend to be very inert when it comes to business. The colleagues I am working with are very knowledgeable and intelligent people, but they often would not undertake a step before you bug them for days. I repeat, I do not mean to offend them—you know, a critical word in Russia is just never taken right, but always as an offense of some sort—I only wish they could use their intellectual potential more actively. Because they have much to teach our politicians and to share with our people. After all, this is what real intelligentsia has been all about. i VAINSHTEIN: I have no doubt that after awhile all things will fall into their places. Despite a variety of negative things that could be said about the present state of our humanities, there are signs that indicate a positive tendency as well. New interdisciplinary areas of knowledge find their way to our universities—and this is natural, for it is felt by many that traditional disciplines, like history, philology, or anthropology, are tired of their own subject. Crossdisciplinary cooperation and exchange of knowledge are now seen by an

ol

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increasing number of scholars as perhaps the most interesting potential the humanities can take advantage of. And there is one thing that should be definitely done in this regard. Our humanities people should finally abandon the idea, long cultivated in this society, of striving after the position of the genuine organic intelligentsia, some omni-competent teachers of the nation, and just learn to pursue a normal critically oriented academic discourse. This complex of intelligentsia is an old Russian tradition that goes back to the nineteenth century, when Russian philosophers, such as Berdiaev, Soloviev,

Chaadaey, or Rozanov, indeed occupied the informal position of teachers of the nation, of figures with an aura of knowledge and spirituality around them. This tradition, one must say, did persist throughout the twentieth century. Just

think of such figures as Bakhtin or Averintsev—they actually were regarded as some spiritual genius of Russian scholarly thought. But now that Bakhtin is not with us and Averintsev has left for Vienna, many feel that the sacred place is vacant. And, surely, many would like to see themselves in that place. But, in my opinion, the major issue is: Do we need that place? How long can this state of things last when each historian or philologist will feel obliged to teach people how to live or explain to them how to distinguish between good and evil? I think that we are entering a different time now, when people can tell things apart very well and no longer need a sacred guidance of intelligentsia for that. What our time requires of an academic is not some universal moral empathy of an intellectual, but a critical reflexion of a scholar. And so, speaking about the task of academics, I think it is one of critically rethinking the new cultural and informational space, in which we have found ourselves in

the nineties, and establishing new rules for the humanities that would allow

for an intelligent scholarly dialogue. This would involve many things, like the training of a new generation of teachers in the humanities, not just students, who could competently navigate the cultural space of modernity, being proficient in languages and computer technologies, as well as the reforming of the old institutional structure of the humanities. Which is, I guess, more than

enough to cope with. Notes 1. Dukhovnaia sfera was indeed an enormously charged notion that could absorb virtually all cultural phenomena, magically lifting and separating them from the earthly ground of materialnaia sfera (material sphere), which implied a “mundane” realm of money, work, production, food, actual living conditions, and other things “real.” An

interplay between the two “spheres” was employed by the ideology sometimes to a highest degree of inconsistency. Thus, in the use of Marxist philosophy, the “material” sphere had natural priority over the “spiritual” one (as a matter of priority of being over thinking), so it was usually said that in no society a good “spiritual” sphere could be built without a proper “material” one. But to justify a more immediate and less philosophical reality, the ideology easily granted the “spiritual” priority over the “material,”

THE PRODUCTION OF INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSE IN RUSSIA

asserting that Soviet people were mainly interested in a “spiritual” achievement in life, while the “material” side was for them just something to come along, and that that order of things made their life richer than, for example, life in the West. People in the West, as it was taught perhaps in every school, were actually after the “material” (“low” things like money, careers), which was why their “spiritual” life (literally meaning “‘culture’’) was incomparably poorer and less interesting than life in the Soviet culture. 2. Michelangelo’s famous sonnet “Sleep,” quoted in the beginning of this chapter, served as a condensed expression of Russian intellectual moods at the turn of the century. The reason | used it as an epigraph is because many years later the same moods and the same sonnet would reappear in literary circles of the 1960s and 1970s in Soviet Russia. 3. N. Berdiaev, The Russian Idea (Hudson, N.Y.: Lindisfarne Press, 1992), p. 43 (quoted from M. N. Epstein, After the Future [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995], p. 341).

4. The symbolism of the title 7Am Goya, for example, was obvious to critically minded intellectuals and, at the same time, could hardly be detected by the Communist Party censorship. To party officials Goya was known at best as a “poor Spanish painter who criticized the evils of bourgeois society in his paintings,” so Goya’s name was, so to speak, a positive signifier, from the party’s point of view. The intellectuals, of course, would see a deeper meaning behind the name Goya, meaningfully exposed on the cover of the book, and would unmistakably associate it with the critic who unmasked and bitterly censured the hidden truth of the day. But then again, behind the title, the hidden truth of the day, from the intellectuals’ standpoint, was best depicted in Michelangelo’s sonnet “Sleep.” 5. Here I put “dissident” in quotation marks because Voznesensky’s poems, just like writings by many other Soviet authors, were never really dissident in the full sense of the word. Nevertheless, there was always this pretense of being a dissident of some sort among the intellectuals, for the idea of cooperating with the state was still a very unpopular one and, like a hundred years before, there was the same strong and unpleasant bad-conscience ring to it. 6. The Soviet constitution made truly amazing use of language. Instead of referring to all people of the country as “citizens,” the constitution made a distinction between a class of “workers,” obviously given a priority in the system and often referred to as “the leading force of the society’’; a class of “collective-farm peasantry,” allotted equal rights but sort of put in the second place; and What was called a “friendly layer of people’s intelligentsia [druzhestvennaia prosloika narodnoi intelligentsii],” an amazingly smart and concise phrase that said everything about the intelligentsia’s status in society. Thus the intelligentsia was emphatically denied a class status and reduced to the humiliating word /ayer once and for all. The only comprehensible goal of the adjective friendly was to stress that, originally and by definition, the layer was unfriendly and was not really needed in this cake at all; but, since it accepted the friendly terms of serving the cause of the working class, it was allowed to legally stay under some kind of “alien resident” status, for no legal room had been allegedly envisaged for this group from the beginning. Finally, the possessive people’s was added to make the clear even clearer, that is, to emphasize that the intelligentsia belonged to people, that it was actu-

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ally in people’s possession, simultaneously drawing an astonishing line of opposition between the terms people and intelligentsia and, therefore, excluding the latter category from the former. The rest of the constitution by all rhetorical means supported what was laconically stated in this short and sweet phrase. The words workers, peasants, collective farmers would consistently pop up in every chapter of the text, in some tricky ways alternating with the notions citizen and people, whereas the word intelligentsia would be meaningfully dropped out in every case. 7. There is perhaps no single intellectual in Russia who would not know this phrase. We will return to it later, in a discussion of the academic community, because it can tell much about the social perception of academics and intellectuals in Russia. 8. “The State Committee for Education” is an accepted translation for Narodnyi Komissariat Prosveshchenia, also known in Russian as Narkompros (abbreviated form), and it does convey the essential meaning of the phrase. However, the literal meaning of the phrase, which in this case would probably represent a more culturally sensitive translation, reads like “The People’s Commissariat for the Enlightenment” (a truly bizarre combination of words, in which commissariat is a military term for “‘enlistment or registration office,” enlightenment is still “enlightenment,” and all this was embraced by the people’s). 9. It is a sad truth, but Tarkovsky’s life exemplified the point he was trying to make in his movies even clearer. The Mirror became one of those films that eventually led to his expulsion from the country. His trying to say a word of truth about the present was an unforgivable step aside. Likewise, after The Mirror, the actress Margarita Terekhova, who performed the starring role in the film, was utterly disapproved of by the communist censorship, found herself in deep disgrace in the Union of Soviet Filmmakers, and was offered only unimportant secondary roles for many years ahead, even though she was considered one of the most talented, and most popular among the public, actresses. 10. The phrase “we are not intelligentsia, but just proletarians of mental labor” indeed enjoyed wide currency among the intellectuals and actually was a modest phrase to reply with. However, it has to be noticed that what was just a popular quotation was at the same time a strategically precise expression that served several tasks simultaneously. First, it was a humble way for an intellectual to refer to his or her social status,

emphasizing its inadequacy to the high standard granted to the word intelligentsia. Second, it certainly contained a sad social truth hidden behind the humor. Third, and most

interesting, it was a simultaneous excuse for the inability to act the way a genuine intelligentsia would have acted, and thus allowed

“humble

intellectuals”

to disclaim the

burden of intelligentsia’s responsibilities at any given moment: “after all, we are not intelligentsia, we are just proletarians of mental labor.” 11. Andrei Bitovy is a well-known Soviet/Russian writer, fairly respected in Russia, who gained his popularity with the publication of his novel Pushkinskii Dom (Pushkin House), which was several times rejected by the censor and, thus, got surrounded with a dissident aura. Bitov’s work went along with the work of other writers—such as Aitmatov or Rybakov, who were likewise interested in the reappraisal of the Stalinist past in their writings—but somehow stood the test of time more successfully than Aitmatov’s Plakha (The Place of the Skull) or Rybakov’s Deti Arbata (Children of Arbat). 12. Argumenty i Fakty (Arguments and Facts) is currently one of the most popular newspapers in Russia and arguably has the largest circulation among all the newspapers

THE PRODUCTION OF INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSE IN RUSSIA

published today. It has somehow earned the image of a more or less reliable and leastbiased source of information, having accepted a collagelike format of brief and concise journalistic reviews, often targeted at easy-to-read statistics and firsthand interviews, and having abandoned the traditional narrative style of long surveys, editorial opinions, columns, and topical sections. The success of the paper is indeed indicative of many things: to start with, the fact that, after all, form matters almost as much as content and ending with a certain cultural tendency in society—namely, that the public is reluctant to read long, narratively arranged articles at a time when social life no longer represents an organized narrative, and that the public wants to hear straight facts, mediated as little as possible by the opinion of a journalist. People are tired of opinion and feel they do not need a cultural interpreter to tell them how to look at events. 13. In May 1995 I was present at a conference, held at the Russian State University for the Humanities. Georgii Knabe, a senior historian who had been actually quite respected a decade or two ago, was giving a talk on the subject of power, knowledge, and the humanities. In the discussion part, Olga Vainshtein remarked that the name of Michel Foucault was for some reason never brought up in the talk and asked why Foucault’s works, being so pertinent to the subject, were altogether dismissed in the lecture. The academic did not answer the question, and the remark made him so angry that he expressly raised his voice and asked Vainshtein to “‘call off her irrelevant attacks.” This is a typical reaction of a scholar of the older generation. The question about Foucault was very much relevant to the discussion, and it was least of all an “attack,” but it was perceived as such since Knabe probably took it as a personal reproach concerning his ignorance of Foucault, whom he apparently did not read but was not able to admit in front of the audience.

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1A ni see _ Marples tre exons tale! ain =D (aS Like so many others working within contemporary flows of capital, information, and technology, Subramaniam and Sarkar are continually creating new configurations of self, nation, and world. And, most directly, markets. The interview with Subramaniam and Sarkar here builds up to a film they made about the effect of Indian initiatives to liberalize agricultural markets.

THE WORK OF MARKETS But the interview is also about the ways they have marketed themselves, in unpredictable career paths made possible by India’s changing political economy. The innovativeness of their approach suggests parallels with Reich’s description of the symbolic analyst. By Reich’s description, symbolic analysts do not work within standard operating procedures. Nor are they masters of previously codified knowledge. Instead, they specialize in problems that haven’t yet been identified and in solutions forged with many different kinds of expertise. Symbolic analysts broker in symbols. Their expertise entangles technical and interpretive skills, used experimentally to create options customized for particular contexts. Subramaniam and Sarkar have worked within and for the benefit of Indian contexts. While recognizing that national borders mean something different than they once did, they remain committed to “Indian alternatives” —alternatives to national development that would merely mimic the West and exclude most Indians from both economic prosperity and political authority. Like other middle-class progressives in India, they work within multiple, mutually suspicious, and symbiotic relationships—with the state, with commercial enterprises, with nongovernmental organizations, and with others of the middle class. Kim first met Subramaniam and Sarker during fieldwork in India, 1989-92. She met Sarkar first, in Bhopal, where he was wrapping up work on a government-funded project to improve children’s education in a nearby rural district. Kim was in Bhopal to do research within the political movement organized in response to the Bhopal disaster. Sarkar played a key role as translator—not of languages in the traditional sense but of modes of speaking and acting across caste, class, and ideological divides. Sarkar’s extraordinary ability to negotiate and reflect on these divides has contributed to his success as a teacher and as a television and film producer. It also makes him particularly interesting as an interviewee. In the late 1980s Subramaniam was still working in advertising as a copywriter. But she already knew that the skills she was acquiring would soon be put to use in other domains. Involvement in commodity communications was a way to acquire the skills she needed for alternative communications—produced by Saheli, a Delhi feminist group; by the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, to support the political demands of gas victims; and by her and Sarkar, in the making of a film about a town in her family’s home state of

Tamil Nadu. Sarkar describes his interest in filming markets as a response to the rhetoric accompanying the liberalization of India’s economy around 1992. Prime Minister V. P. Singh, other government officials, journalists, intellectuals —every-

one repeatedly referred to “the market.” Sarker couldn’t imagine what they were talking about, so he decided he should make a film to find out. Subramaniam’s experience in commercial advertising was crucial. They knew that a

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film about markets could easily slip into stereotypical forms that simply celebrated market forces, or simply denounced them. The challenge was to lay out the story in a way that evokes the complexity of crosscutting structures of gender, caste and class, religion, economics, and politics.

The film, Meals Ready, portrays a rice market in the town of Walajabad, on the rail line between Madras and the inland pilgrimage city of Kanchipuram.* Rice is the focus, relied on as a device for moving from the moneylender’s office, to the seed seller, to the fields, to the mill, and, finally, to buyers and

small restaurants, whose signs advertise “MEALS READY,” promising quick availability of the traditional thali, a fixed-price, rice-based meal. Rice is portrayed as a container of both economics and culture, and as a connector of people and regions. The film is not, however, meant to be ebout rice per se. Rice is used to

illustrate the multiple crosscutting linkages of power that constitute a market— where “buying and selling are reflective of power and status, setting the stage for social and economic hierarchies to play their parts,” as an early voice-over in the film puts it. The film’s jacket describes the context: In these days of liberalization and the free market, it is commonly assumed that markets work simply, uniformly and with equal benefits to all. Yet, what is rarely accounted for, is the fact that markets are

deeply embedded in the societies they function within. Meals Ready examines the market of South India’s most important food grain: Rice. It explores the town of Walajabad in Tamil Nadu and finds that the unequal bargaining power of growers, financiers and buyers has a direct link with the divides of power and privilege that cut across rural Tamil society. Be they the hierarchies of caste and gender, or politics and religion. By ignoring these links, market-led economic reform in India threatens to deepen these inequalities and thereby, the very existence of the symbol of the Indian countryside, the small farmer. Meals Ready is not didactic, but it does carry a strong message, emphasized more through juxtaposition than overt commentary. It calls upon viewers to recognize the way emergent trends operate within entrenched regimes of power, complicating promises that the market can itself operate as corrective. By tracking the chain of connections associated with rice, it is able to portray the lives of particular people, as well as the broader system of political economy ‘that links them to other people, who are also richly portrayed in their own worlds. There are a few surprising characters, such as Chinannukutty, a low-caste

man able to restyle his position in his ancestral village through strategic investment—in politics, as in poultry, fish farming, sugarcane, and fertilizers. But even Chinannukutty has gotten out of rice, where there is no longer profit,

THE*WORK OF MARKETS

even if one is beyond the reach of pawnbrokers and other agents able to “tilt the scales.” The fate of all the characters in Meals Ready is up for grabs, as the new sugar mill on the edge of town becomes an icon of the future. But the roles each character will play in the future seem to have already been scripted. The film poses this as a concluding question: “Can market reforms, that focus on price, and ignore these [social] disparities, ever reduce them? Or will the free market only serve to heighten the differences?” We first heard about Subramaniam and Sarkar’s film through their letters, which described a work process that seemed strikingly like the work many of us attempt within anthropology. They were trying to document both continuity and change, using needlepoint description of a particular locale to comment on a system in transformation. Like so many anthropologists, their goal was to devise a way to present a system, usually conceived as impersonal, in ways that highlight crosscutting social linkages and the quality of the lives caught up within them. They wanted to document how a system works at the level of experience, as a way to engage political rhetorics empty of any critical force. We were finally able to talk with Subramaniam and Sarkar about their film in late December 1996, at their home in Delhi, where we stayed en route to Bhopal. When Kim had last stayed with them, in 1992, they had neither telephone nor television. Now they have both, and a laptop computer. And they have a modem,

given to them by Vani’s sister, but it remains off-line —‘“‘be-

cause we don’t know what to do with the thing.” They still rely on scooters for transport, but now each has their own. Though Subramaniam and Sarker laugh at and criticize their entry into the middle class, they also acknowledge the need for these “techno trappings” to sustain careers outside “the system.” Their willingness to describe their own strange position in the “New India” is part of what made them so interesting as interviewees. The interview is organized around three main topics of conversation. The first section tracks Subramaniam’s movement from a full-time career in advertising to work as a freelance consultant, with time to commit to the progressive voluntary sector and, eventually, to documentary filmmaking. The second section focuses on the institutional orders Sarkar passed through before arriving at his work in film. First a banker, then a rural teacher, then a television pro-

ducer, who entered the Delhi media market just before the upheaval brought by satellite transmission and challenges to state control over broadcasting. The third section focuses on the making of Subramaniam and Sarkar’s first documentary film, Meals Ready.

Together these three sections can be read as an ethnographic glimpse into an emergent world of cultural production, configured by, but critical of, the systemic force of markets. Our intent is to portray the shifting terrain of cultural production in India by following the movements of two subjects within it. The autobiographical interview serves as a prism through which we can watch the

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emergence of new contexts, and new subject positions—for people like Subramaniam and Sarker, but also for people in towns like Walajabad. From Advertising to the Women’s Movement M. ForTuN: You were in advertising. For how long? When? What did you do? What was your job? Who were your clients? SUBRAMANIAM:

Eeks, that was way back—1984, actually. I'll go back

further. I wanted to get out of Lucknow; I wanted to come to Delhi. Do my own work. I knew I wanted to write. I knew I didn’t want to do journalism, so I wanted to do advertising writing. M. Fortun: And the place to do that was Delhi? SUBRAMANIAM: It’s the closest metro to Lucknow. It’s the aspirational point for people who don’t look very high. SARKAR: It’s the big city— SUBRAMANIAM: It’s the big city, nearby. If you’re not planning to go abroad or do something highly specific like— M. Fortun: There isn’t something specific about Delhi’s location in the advertising industry? SUBRAMANIAM:

No, for me there were a couple of reasons. One is that

this is the one place that had a good course on mass communications, which was a full-time proper course. Bombay has a couple that are part-time. Postgraduate diploma. One year. And we knew people working in Delhi. In fact at that point, Delhi was pretty nascent in advertising. It’s never been and probably never will be as big as Bombay. But it was enough. It’s what I wanted. I didn’t particularly want to go to Bombay. I'd been to Delhi. I wanted to be here. Both my siblings had studied here. I was the only one who studied back home. K. ForTUN: What did you study for your B.A.? SUBRAMANIAM: Lucknow is a general graduation course. So you pick three subjects, out of some possible permutations. I had a nice combination, actually: economics, math, and literature. So I really enjoyed it—I hated the math part of it. K. ForTUN: Did you have to do a postgraduate degree to be able to do anything? SUBRAMANIAM: I haven't actually done a degree. In that sense, I’m just a graduate. Diplomas don’t really count for much. Supposedly, they’re your technical training—to give you some kind of grounding. But I didn’t feel like just walking into an agency and saying, “Hey, you know I think I can write .. . maybe I can copywrite—here I am!” K. FortTuN: What exactly is the job of a copywriter? SUBRAMANIAM: I’m having to dredge all this out of my system... I’ve

THE WORK OF MARKETS

forgotten . . . The last time I talked about this was to three young people who thought advertising was the world of promise. And they talked to me just as I was quitting it, which was a bad time. There are essentially three broad departments in an advertising agency: the client servicing department, or what’s called an account, yeah? The client servicing department is traditionally meant to be the management people, business and administration people. Then you have the creative department, which is made up of copywriters and art directors. Or people in art and people in copy. On one side are people who can write, on the other people who can— not necessarily draw but lay things out. Visualize, graphics, design, that kind of thing. They don’t have to be able to draw or take pictures or illustrate or anything. They have to have a visual sense. So most of them come from art schools and commercial art courses. And then there are the media planners. Basically, if the client has X amount of money, then somebody has to know exactly how to spend it, decide what would be more effective media to reach target audiences and all that kind of jazz. Over a period of time, everyone has an idea of everything else. In fact, today you can’t do creative without having an idea of what a certain budget means and therefore what you can spend, or what’s an alternative medium you can spend it in and spend it better. And, increasingly, people in creative also have to meet clients, so they have to be equally swanked up in terms of marketing jargon. Which is sick. K. ForTUN: What caused that shift, where people like you had to start interacting with clients? SUBRAMANIAM: For one, there’s this famous thing called the “international trend,” huh? [laughs]

SARKAR: The foreign hand. The foreign hand strikes again. SUBRAMANIAM: Yeah, literally. I'll tell you what happens. Technically, the account servicing people are also supposed to plan. Where do you take a brand? The larger issues that everyone is supposed to be tuned into: I can’t do creative without an idea of where this is going to go. The product will probably never go anywhere, the product will probably die in your face, but that’s another story. But what happens is that clients like to speak to the people creating the work. They feel more secure. Which is sometimes a good thing. But sometimes that little distance that the account servicing department gives you is nice, because you can really keep your creative space intact. But it’s not an entirely bad shift. It depends. People in servicing may not be equipped to actually transmit an idea. If you’re talking about press layout, that’s fairly simple. And, in the days when I started in advertising, there were no computers. We used to do hand scribbles and take them to the biggest of clients. Someone would illustrate—young students out of art college used to actually illustrate ads for you. There is a mama and a papa and a little boy and a teddy

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bear—somebody will draw it. Because the clients have no power of visualization. You can’t assume any of that. Some of us would actually sit and physically write type, as it would look. And then you would type out the fine text separately and you would hand it over all together. Which is OK when you're talking at a press meeting, which most people end up understanding. For better or worse, they understand it. M. Fortun: So who were typical clients? SUBRAMANIAM: I did a lot of automotive products. I did bikes, lots of bikes: motorcycles, scooters. All of that. Then a whole lot of what’s called

malted-milk foods—I don’t know what on earth you call them in your part of the world. M. ForTuN: Malt balls. SUBRAMANIAM: Mothballs? Nay, nay, nay. It’s like Ovaltine. The kind of things you buy for kids to put in milk. M. Fortun: Nestle’s Quik. SUBRAMANIAM: No, not Quik. But something else. And a whole lot of stuff like that. Then clothes, fashion wear.

SARKAR: A large part of the country’s spending budget goes into maltedmilk foods. All of India grows up on malted-milk foods. SUBRAMANIAM: But it’s a fact: Nestle has made its money on garbage like that—throughout the world, not just in India. SARKAR: It’s this whole thing in India, the notion that if you have milk at night, you’ll feel better. That message has been— SUBRAMANIAM: Not just at night. It’s that “milk is an essential nutritional input” kind of thing. And you traditionally had milk-shortage areas, in the south and in the east, which is where products like Horlicks really came in— M. ForTunN: Products like what? SUBRAMANIAM:

I know it sounds gross, but that’s what it’s called: Hor-

licks. Traditionally a milk substitute; you can actually have it just with water, OK? But as time has gone on, people tend to mix it into milk. SARKAR: It’s my mother’s staple diet. For the last thirty-five years of my life, I have seen her every night, bonging Horlicks into milk and drinking it. And it’s yucky. SUBRAMANIAM: It’s OK. So there was all kinds of stuff, over the years. As far as the job is concerned, you get what’s called a brief on the job. You get a brief that tells you what the larger situation is, where the market is, where this product that you’re supposed to work on is placed, where it wants to get, what the product benefits are, what the intangibles surrounding the product are. All this kind of background. K. Fortun: If they told you that they wanted access to a new market, how would you ever define it, given the layers and trajectories of diversity here, within India itself?

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SUBRAMANIAM: Advertising is so particular. There’s something that really works on the lowest common denominator, OK? Which is why you can have the same Pepsi advertisement in the U.S. as you can in India. You substitute a few images there with a few images here, and you make “you've got the right choice, baby” just “the right choice, baby,” and you’ ve got an international campaign. And they spend crores doing research on stuff like this. And there are times when it doesn’t work. There are times when it boomerangs. All that is true. But, much as this country is diverse—look at where media reaches. If you look at where Doordarshan goes, there is a certain kind of imagery that goes to all of Doordarshan-accessible areas. In that sense, diversity doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that a village in Kerala is very different than a village in Sikkim. Because you're not talking to them, actually. They’re not your market. You don’t give a shit whether they exist or they live or die. You’re interested in the places where the newspapers can reach, where magazines can reach, where TVs can reach, where radios can reach. And if all of that is not enough market for you—let’s say you’re selling a brand of cigarettes that is sold in rural India, OK? Then you have van publicity and stuff like that—you know, where they take films out and do a screening of one or two Hindi films a night. So you do a certain amount of dubbing. And in that sense, movies themselves have been unifying. A huge unifying kind of thing in terms of imagery and public imagination. So diversity, yes and no. In real terms, it’s not that complex. I’m not trying to say that the job is not complex. And now, since the time that I’ve quit, most products are so similar, yeah? The day of what we used to call the USP, the unique selling proposition, is almost a thing of the past. So then you’re talking about stretching imagination in different ways. And it is a little more complex, because you can’t just sell one great line in one language. It has to work in Gujarati and Marati and Telegu. It’s a killer. K. ForTUN: So you have to translate the one-liner? SUBRAMANIAM: Yeah. And you work with translators who have absolutely no imagination. They are basically news translators fall laugh]. You think this is funny? Try working in the agency, man. We’d have these guys from Saatchi and Saatchi arrive and talk to us about “thé great line.”” Occch! And we’d say, yeah, try doing it in three languages, then we’ll talk. That sort of thing is now changed a bit, in the sense that now you try to do multilingual kinds of lines—actually, technically, the choice is a bilingual line, but it does manage to straddle both worlds. And in a lot of ads, you can’t do that. Sometimes you translate into Hindi with a similar kind of imagery and it means the diametrically opposite thing it means in English. So sometimes you have to work primarily in Hindi, which is now increasing. I was one of the few people in my agency who used to work directly in Hindi, if it was only a Hindi job. I didn’t see any point in doing it in English and then having it killed in Hindi.

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M. Fortun: Were there enough advertising firms around for there to be competition between them, or was there just so much work to be done... ? SUBRAMANIAM: Definitely, ten years ago it was easier; there were less agencies. But there was also less work happening in India. So the rate has been proportional. K. Fortun: At the height of when you were liking your job, what was it about it that you liked? SUBRAMANIAM: There is one thing that one continues to enjoy at some level: every job is different. You can come up with the same positioning— you know, “‘they are the leaders” and “they are the pioneers” —but you damn well have to do it differently. So every job has its own little kick when you get it done. It’s that little thrill that actually keeps you going. And, in my mind, that’s the problem with the entire damn thing. Because there are so many small things along the way that can make you lose track of what it is you are liking or not liking in the larger sense. So, in that sense, even today when I do an ad, I have great fun. Because in itself, it’s a lot of play with words and ideas and stuff. Which is great fun. M. ForTUN: You’ve said you went in to this because it would “be enough.” So when did it stop being “enough”? SUBRAMANIAM:

No, no, I didn’t go into it thinking it would be enough.

I went into it because I thought—which is something I still believe—that people who do the business of advertising or selling have to be, by force of all the various things it involves, very sharp. I originally wanted to do documentary film. In fact, after I finished my mass communications course, I attempted to go and join a video course, for television. But I was dying to become economically independent and was just hoping that advertising would give me enough skill, as I went along, to be able to branch out and do different stuff later. M. ForTUN: How are the things you did at the start of your career linked to the various projects you are involved with now? SUBRAMANIAM: Whether it’s a leaflet for Saheli or a postcard for Bhopal, what one is trying to do is linked to advertising. If the skills are only developed within advertising, there are limitations. You have to be so simplistic, so personal; you have to crawl into people’s lives with an end product. It’s irritating. But, somehow, I think it helps you focus on the basics. It simplifies the

logic and tells you that if you really want people to listen to you, you damn well speak in the language that people would want to read. Which is basic at one level, but I just feel that it has taught me that. It’s also given me attention to detail, the kind of detail that would bypass anybody who was not in the business. Those things I’m glad for. K. ForTUN: So how did you decide to leave? SUBRAMANIAM: That was there all along. Even while I was enjoying it,

THE WORK OF MARKETS I was pretty clear I was not going to be there for long. I think it was primarily a function of what advertising was meant to do. And I definitely didn’t want to die thinking that’s what I had done with my life. I mean [laughs], it’s quite serious. That I was pretty clear about. The problem was, I was enjoying myself. I had a great set of people to work with, both personally and professionally. So I rode along, though I took a break after about three and a half years, to try and figure it out. Couldn't figure anything out, so I just went back and was quite happy to be back. Then two years later, I went into a new agency, on the commitment that this would be part-time. That was in 1990. Because I felt that even if I was doing advertising, there were other things I wanted to do. That’s when I started giving time to Saheli. And then this whole move of multinats had a very direct link with the everyday world of the agencies. The kind of accounts you had to deal with, the kind of policies within the agency, the level of autonomy you had within the agency. But it wasn’t just for Saheli that I went part-time. I wanted to be able to travel more, I wanted to be able to hang around more—I wanted to break out of this routine of getting up in the morning and dashing to work. I just felt that unless I gave that a break, I would never be able to think about what I want to do, yeah?

K. ForTUN:

Yeah.

SUBRAMANIAM:

Sounds like that came from the heart! So basically, I was

sorting out the possibilities, huh? K. FoRTUN: Were you confident that you could support yourself on half a salary? : SUBRAMANIAM: I wasn’t on half-salary. Being a consultant is a reasonably exalted position. K. ForTUN: You went part-time. Doesn’t that mean half-salary? SUBRAMANIAM: No, no, no, don’t be silly! [laughs] You sound like my mother, you know? She started weeping when I told herI was part-time. I told her, when anyone else becomes a consultant, it’s like “Wow!” When it’s your own daughter, it’s like “Oh, shit, how are you going to manage?” No, silly, if you flex enough muscle, then you don’t do that, you don’t go down to half wages. What you do is lose out on annual benefits and stuff; you’re not on the rolls. So in that sense, it’s like being back to wage labor. You’re contracting. But I earned virtually the same amount. Most freelancers go freelance because you can make a lot more money. I can make, in one campaign, in a month, three times what I used to as a salaried person. It won’t happen every month, but I can do that. You’re being paid directly, as opposed to a client paying an agency and the agency paying your wage out of it. K. ForTUN: You left the commercial world to have time to do other stuff.

Has it worked?

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SUBRAMANIAM: See, it’s sort of complicated. In retrospect, some things seem clearer, or you apply a logic to it, you know? Which is not necessarily the case initially, while you’re enduring the process. When I started advertising, one of my ideas was that I would get into documentaries and that I would learn a certain level of communication skills from this kind of work. But it was also important for me to be economically independent—I was barely twenty when I started working, and short of twenty-one I was absolutely economically independent— barring some huge medical crisis or something like that. But I think somewhere, the discomfort with what your basic function

is—you see, I think you have to be a certain kind of person. I met people whose trip in life was to build corporations —just like in the alternative circuit, where people’s trip is to build NGOs. One would break down, and they’Il set up another and never ask: Should I be doing this at all? There are people who actually enjoy that. It’s like people playing the stock market: it requires a certain kind of mind-set that I sorely lack. It makes me happy, professionally, when I can see results, but at the end of the day it’s the work itself that is actually more exciting for me, not the end result. Which is actually not a great professional qualification, yeah? But I think as a creative person, that is where your trip should be. So I think there will always be a level of discomfort in terms of what function your creativity is going to fulfill. And in fact, this roommate who was doing the same courses as me, she was exploring going off to a BBC documentary scriptwriting course—she had family money— and I was thinking I would work for a while and possibly go off and do something like that. So that took a backseat. But in actual terms, I’d been interested in films, and there’s a whole lot of non—mass media film work that happens as well. The equivalent of corporate brochures—there’s a hell of a lot that happens on film. So that was one area of interest that I was exploring, but I think it was always clear that I wanted to get out. In fact, about three years after I started working, I felt that I couldn’t take it anymore— despite the fact that I was having a great time at work, with fabulous people, both professionally and personally. But I had been trying to explore options all along. There were a variety of things that had nothing to do with communication that I’d been interested in but not been able to actually get into. I meant to explore options that were not advertising, not communications at all. At that point, there was

a notion of public service advertising, which is very different from the notion today. It was more the notion of charity. Which meant that the agency had to have a client, an account that they would do for free. So there was that, which was interesting, but unfortunately my agency did not have a lot of it. No agency has a lot of it, because they don’t want to invest too much time and money into it.

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There were other things within the busines that got my mind working. It’s a fairly cost-intensive business. A very high-cost business. Even looking at the most basic ads in the newspapers, you would not imagine the kind of cost that actually goes into creating it, fine-tuning it, doing this slightly differently, and so on. So the amount of waste that you see around you is bound to get to you at some point. So some of that played a role in keeping my mind going, looking at different options. I knew about things like Kishor Bharati, and Bhopal and the work there, but more in a theoretical kind of way. Some of it was through my brother Hari; he was an influence in terms of a certain kind of political awareness, which I didn’t get in Lucknow. I’m not a very academic type, so in that sense I’m not necessarily into going on campus; I’m more of a hands-on kind of person. That’s how I’ve learned a lot of things in my life. And I enjoy doing it like that. When I took that break in 1988, I couldn’t take the level of fluidity and confusion there is today in my life. I was still not secure enough or arrogant enough, or whatever you want to call it. So I got back to work, and they were very supportive of such a long break: So I got back, but knew that there had to be an easing out of the entire process. So a couple years later, when I changed jobs, my basic condition was that I would be part-time. Because I had been involved with Saheli as early as 1986 but just couldn’t find the time. The profession is pretty all-consuming; if you’re not at the office on Saturday, you’re catching up on some seriously needed sleep. But before I got more active with Saheli, or around the same time, I started spending a lot of time with Sathyu [Sarangi, an activist in Bhopal]. And I was talking about the need to portray some of the issues differently from the way they had. Because I had been collecting things over the years related to many issues, whether it’s Amnesty International or Exxon or spastic children, or any of a million things like that. All worthy causes, but something that people respond to relatively easily because there’s an element of pathos, and it’s quite clear there’s a disadvantage, and there’s you who has the advantage, and you can do something—whether in real terms or in cash terms. And it’s quite simple to do that work in terms of advertising. What becomes difficult is to portray issues of primarily corporate or state failure—in a way that people will accept them. Because so much of their lives, either professionally or personally, is dependent on them or identified with them. Which is what I was

doing in the rest of my life, in the agency. So I realized that on the one hand I was contributing to the build-up of those corporations, yet that didn’t give them the right to do what they wanted on their own terms. Sathyu and I started talking about this, and he was also getting into this phase of thinking about communication. And I don’t think he had found anybody that actually understood that. So that’s how I started this alternative

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communication work, if one can call it that. The postcards were the first thing,

and the first year was the one with the statue, and the one with the child. Then we decided that the next year it needed to be more focused on medical issues. By the first year we had decided that it all had to be something outside of the general grammar of Bhopal work. K. ForTUN: Could you put into words what it entailed to get out of the predictable grammar of Bhopal? What were you trying to avoid? SUBRAMANIAM: Ina sense, it came naturally to me. Because I’m not an activist who comes from any kind of very Left background. So I don’t come with that baggage, which is both good and bad. There are lots of people who come from a heavier Marxist background, say, who are a lot sharper about the implications of things, which sometimes takes me awhile to figure out. I used to call it the difference between getting into it from a “political background” and from a more “humanitarian background.” A disgusting term, but I just use it to make that difference. So for one, I just don’t have the jargon or thought or whatever. And, in a way, this is terribly important. If you’re reaching for middle-class understanding—forget about support, yeah?—just understanding or sympathy, then you have to speak the language that people speak. It’s ridiculous to keep talking in your jargon, because then you’ll just keep talking within sangathans |[movements]. I felt that that was important, to make that transition. While it’s true and while it’s dramatic, when you start every write-up with “On the night of ...,” I feel it becomes very difficult for people to absorb it after a while. Because that’s what they read the morning after, that’s what they’ve been reading for ten years after. It’s not a derogatory comment at all. I just feel that in some forms, you need to do it in a different way. Which is what I was trying. And I was trying it with other things, too. So, for example, even in the work on the Narmada dam, that’s how our discussions started. I was saying, “Look, there’s been a lot of noise against this big dam, but I think that what

we probably need to do is talk more about what kinds of solutions are possible.” Because the middle class is, by and large, quite clear that development has to happen and somebody has to pay the price—and as long as it’s not them they don’t care, you know? I just felt that had to be done, and that’s how we actually started. K. ForTUN: Did you get any opposition on grounds that it was too middle class or too slick? SUBRAMANIAM: From some people, at first. Definitely. Especially that it was too slick. Because I had been exposed to it a lot earlier in agencies. I had seen the most boring subjects made into the most exciting things. And I feel that there is always a way to do that. And if you’ve got the training, you can damn well put it to more exciting use.

THE WORK OF MARKETS Theek hai {OK}? Professionally, I still want to keep my earnings independent from whatever else I’m interested in. And therefore I make money from many of the same corporations that I might be involved with organizations working against them. For example, one of the clients I had done some work for we later had a campaign against. He knows exactly that I’m the same person. So in that sense it’s a bit frightening, because you have burned some boats behind you. You can’t keep the two worlds separate, and I refuse to do so. M. ForTUN: Back up and tell us what Saheli is. I don’t really know. . . SUBRAMANIAM: I love the casual way he says, I don’t really know what Saheli is. [To Sarkar: ]These two are real slick, no? Basically it’s a women’s group. I know that sounds extremely vague, but I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s something that started off as a crisis center for women, women who were having largely domestic and other trouble. A sort of crisis intervention center. About fourteen years ago there was a group of women, some of whom were going through crises of their own, and they realized that there was absolutely no place for somebody to go if they had a problem. The problem could range from abuse by their husbands to being molested on the streets, and there was absolutely no place to go. So they started a shelter for women and had a full-time counselor who gave everything from legal advice to shelter at home, all kinds of things. And simultaneously women were getting involved in various other issues that were coming up, the kind of personal issues that come into question when you’re talking about divorce or custody, that kind of thing — or women’s health. The health campaign grew out of issues of contraception, of problems with the family-planning program and things like that. Also, this was the time, postEmergency, when all this mass sterilization of poor men and women had happened. And post-Emergency —and until today—no government has had much courage to talk about male sterilization. Because that thing was just so badly misused. They just don’t have the courage to talk about it. And there’s the international bias, the global focus on contraception for women. So there was a whole new focus on women, on IUDs and other kinds of things being inserted, a whole lot of problems. All those issues began to be taken up by groups like Saheli—it wasn’t the only one, but it was pretty much the only one in Delhi at that point. In the last eight or ten years, there had been a fair amount of work—shelters, crisis intervention, legal advice, that kind of

stuff—that several organizations are offering. So at Saheli we decided to move on, to campaign issues that other people don’t work on. Saheli’s what we call an autonomous women’s group, autonomous from political parties as well as from institutional funding sources. It’s only funded by individual contributions. Occasionally —I think twice in the fourteen-year history —we’ ve done a fund-raising event where you do some sort of cultural

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thing. Last time it was a film; the time before that it was a music recital. And it gets somewhat complicated, because while you might take money from a corporation for an ad in the souvenir program—they give you money and you give them an ad. The deal is square, and that’s it. Beyond that they have no control over what you do with the work, what you do before or after. So to that extent it’s not like they’re funding you. And we try to be careful about the kind of companies we take ads from, in terms of what kinds of advertising they do, what policies they have, and so on. M. ForTuN: So who wouldn’t you take ads from? SUBRAMANIAM: We don’t take ads from multinats. We don’t take ads from the Carbides of the world, or distilleries, or anybody whose background you know enough about to know that you shouldn’t touch them. And it’s a crazy world, you know? When Revlon came into India last year, they were looking for a women’s group they could fund, believe it or not. And I was approached by somebody who handles the Revlon account. So I said, “Listen, don’t even suggest Saheli to them because Saheli will chew them up. So just forget it!” And there are loads of organizations run by middle-class women who sort of do a little charity on the side and wouldn’t have compunctions about taking the money. They’d say challo [let’s go], at least they’re funding something good. And that’s OK. That’s their business. You can’t be so black and white. We do a lot of joint work with other women’s groups, not necessarily only with other autonomous groups, although we’re most comfortable with them. A lot of them also try to stay out of traditional hierarchies and have a more collective format and all of that, which has its own set of problems. But

broadly, we try to deal with those problems rather than the other ones. But when you’re doing joint action, you also work with rather unlikely organizations or with a group associated with Left political parties. If they look at the issue the same way, then we do it.

The first large piece of work was the contraception booklet I gave you. There had been a lot of stuff on contraception and women’s health issues, and a lot of them probably are much sounder or deeper in terms of medical knowledge. But this one was designed for health activists, for women, for people who want an overview of what the specific technologies are and how they work, what they do to your body, who should and shouldn’t use them, what to look out for. Information that is very tough to get: you never get what to look out for in government material. The other thing was to try to put in the entire politics of the population lobby. There were questions like, Should we do footnotes? And I said, Look, foot-

notes are the kind of thing I wouldn’t read, and I’m really a fairly good test. I don’t have the patience for something that’s too tedious. It was fairly innovative in its time, in 1994. So some thought it was a little too slick, that it didn’t look like alternative literature. But now I’m being told

THE WORK OF MARKETS

that that was a landmark in the change of alternative literature. And everything looks like that now. K. ForTuN: So the material is better now, in terms of professional quality? Has that helped it circulate more broadly? SUBRAMANIAM: See, I have my reservations. I was very convinced that that’s what I seriously wanted to do. But I found that there’s a surfeit of information, because everybody can take it out and everybody can make it look presentable. There’s far too much material. Somewhere there’s a huge contradiction when you get organizations saying, “They’ ve done it, but it’s not good enough, we should do it.’” And for me, that’s a problem. Then you’re no different from one corporation versus another, replicating the same work. M. ForTun: The contraception book. It’s the kind of thing that Jesse Helms would hold up on the U.S. Senate floor as a disgrace; something that shouldn't appear. Showing people how to put on condoms. Other graphic things. Was there that kind of response to it here? SUBRAMANIAM: No, no. In fact, it’s very different. It does have reasonably graphic details on how to use what and how not to use what—in fact, a hell of a lot more information than you would find at your average doctor’s office or primary health center, or even your product package insert. Nothing ever tells you anything. People laugh, but you have instances like this woman who actually died in Andhra Pradesh—she was given these condoms and she tried to swallow them, and she died. It seems funny but it’s not. Doctors and nurses are so intimidating: people just do what they tell them to do, or what they think they want them to do. So infact the whole response to that booklet has been positive. Primarily it was meant either for women or for health workers;

it’s out in both English and Hindi. We’ ve found a place for these issues, managed to weave them in. We’re constantly screaming that the government or companies never tell anyone anything—they don’t even give the doctors information on what the possible side effects of, say, an injectable contraceptive are. One of the campaigns was around the fact that the same injection sold in India had eight side effects listed on it, and when sold in the U.S. it had eighty-seven possible side effects. K. FortTuN: When you started with Saheli, did you immediately get linked in to doing layout and copy and things in the literature-production part of what they did? SUBRAMANIAM:

Yeah, a little bit too much, actually. In work like this,

there’s such scarce resources —in terms of people, and energy, and time. So it tends to happen: yeah, you do it. But that kind of stereotyping happens anywhere. K. ForTuUN: Was it hard to move from the commercial world to Saheli? SUBRAMANIAM: Yeah, yeah. It was, but I had already done some work on Bhopal. So people had seen that, OK?

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K. Fortun: Has the work of Saheli been affected by liberalization? SUBRAMANIAM: [Sighs.] K. Fortun: Like, the Miss World pageant. What’s up with this? SUBRAMANIAM:

See, it’s not new, in that sense. The Miss World pageant,

for example, is not a new issue at all—we’ve been having beauty contests in this country since 1968, I think. And there have been protests all along— sporadically, but they’ve been there. In fact, two years ago there was a very large one in Delhi. The contest did this thing where they split up women’s anatomy —to get Miss Beautiful Eyes, and Miss Beautiful Skin, and mouth and hair, and what have you. That’s when the protests became really large. A lot of people who don’t usually have anything to do with the women’s movement came out and said, ‘““This is too much.”

I ‘mean, this whole thing of actu-

ally dismembering, with each part sponsored by a related company. So Lakme (an Indian cosmetics company) would sponsor Miss Beautiful Skin, and Sun Silk (shampoo) would sponsor Miss Beautiful Hair, and East-West Airlines sponsored Miss Congeniality, whatever the hell that means. So it’s not new. But definitely some processes are new, and they give rise to their own issues. But I don’t want to get into making a statement about how liberalization has affected the women’s movement, etc., etc. I’m not competent to do that. M. ForTun: Has liberalization affected your own work or the way you understand it? SUBRAMANIAM: By the time the film was happening, I had almost entirely phased out my part-time advertising work. I was planning to do a few other things, like more TV kinds of journalism and things like that, which didn’t work out for other reasons. And suddenly, in the last month, I’ve gotten loads

of advertising work. Which in a way is all right. Times change: when I first started doing alternative work and people asked me what I did, and I would say advertising, it was the worst thing you could say to anybody. You have to prove your intention, almost. And so I was very conscious in those days that I came from this commercial world, and I needed to be careful what I

said and wrote. Suro was reading to me from this Stefan Zweig biography of Balzac and talking about Balzac’s past and the stuff he had written earlier when he was trying to make two ends meet, all the garbage he used to write. And Zweig says that, you know, “Despite all his maturity later, it always shows through.” I didn’t sleep for nights! And it’s a fact: you can’t just erase a part of you. That is one of the problems that happens when you’re trying to straddle two different worlds—bring them together, yet keep them distinct. But that’s not the case now. I don’t get that reaction of horror, because I think the entire disillusionment with the NGO sector, and funding, and corruption in politics has become so apparent. The same people who would earlier say, “Are you sure you want to continue this advertising work?” now say, “Why don’t you just continue this advertising work?” And I don’t take it

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badly. I feel that it is a change in the times. It’s a pretty sad indicator, actually —that you can’t have faith. But you can’t. That’s a fact. You can’t say that one world is clean and one world is not, and what is unfortunate is that this world of funding agencies and groups is so dirty —it’s so problematic. So if I can continue to do this, to be financially independent and yet have enough time and energy for this other work, that will be one of the biggest things in my life. M. Fortun: And do you think you can? SUBRAMANIAM: Time will tell, I don’t know. Because the economy is also changing. It’s not very easy. And that’s one of the reasons I quit as well: it’s very tough to have an approach like this and be working in an agency where you have multinat clients. Freelance, by and large, keeps me in touch with lots of local small-business people. There is something to do with size and power. K. ForTUN: Do you have other people to help you think about this and strategize? SUBRAMANIAM: Yeah, yeah. But not a large percentage. Because a large part of alternative work—] just call it that because I don’t know what else to call it—is funded in some way or another. So the fact that I’m so hyper about funding is not something that everyone understands or appreciates. In fact I’m a kind of fuddy-duddy at Saheli, because they think I’m an ideologue on this kind of stuff. Which is OK. Banker, Teacher, Television Producer

M. ForTUN: What about that Red school you went to, Suro? SUBRAMANIAM: Red school? SARKAR: I showed him that article on Saint Stephen’s College that had a picture of the college and some computer-generated hammer-and-sickle stuff all over it. Some 1996 notions of how this elite English-speaking college is actually a hotbed of radicalism and Naxalites and stuff. It’s hardly a Red school, yeah? In retrospect they would like it to be and like us to believe that it was. When you go to Saint Stephen’s College, like when you go to any one of these better Delhi University colleges, classes are held on time, there’s a fairly high pass percentage, stuff like that. One of the major ambitions that students have is to make it to a government job. So there is a whole set of competitive examinations that you sit for. Over a million students will be sitting every year for these exams, which are for the banks, civil services, forest service—not for the military, though. Even the big corporate houses— Tata, Birla, and such—they have campus interviews at these colleges, where fresh young graduates are ripe for the picking. So, being, at some point in time, a fresh young graduate— M. ForTUN: What year was that?

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SARKAR: Nineteen eighty. And, like everyone else, I decided that college was not bad: you get to read a lot of books; you don’t have to go home; you’re staying in the hostel—it’s a world without any rules and regulations. So, if I could extend it by another couple of years, why shouldn’t I? Which basically means making a deal with your parents: look here, I’1l do my master’s, and I’ll apply for all these competitive exams. The other option is to go abroad, which a lot of people from Saint Stephen’s College did. But I wasn’t much interested in that. So, like everybody else, I applied for these exams, and through them I got a job with the State Bank of India. For two years I was under training, which meant you were rotated to different desks in different branches. K. ForTUN: Were you like the guy who gives us money when we go down there with our credit cards? SARKAR: No, I never did that. I’d hang around behind the counter, pull out ledgers, and say, “Well, you want ten rupees? You’ ve got only twelve rupees in your account, and minimum balance is five bucks.” I'd do things like bal-

ance books at the end of the day—banks have to balance books every day. Sometimes Id be sitting there late at night trying to balance books, and no one having explained to me that the missing figure is in some other ledger somewhere else. So you’re just sitting there and you can’t leave the damn place. And I advanced money when people wanted loans. K. FoRTUN: When you came in as a fresh graduate with an M.B.A., were you at the bottom of the totem pole or already some ways up? SARKAR:

I was at the bottom of the executive level, called the junior man-

agement grade. But there was a fast stream and a slow stream, and you’re already in the fast stream because you’ve come through certain kinds of exams. You get promotions faster, and so on. And promotions are based on sticking your neck out least and just doing the minimum required. At junior management levels, nobody really bothers very much. Which is where it begins to get boring. So I used to stick my neck out in very different ways. I was supposed to be posted in Firozabad, this town about two hundred kilometers from

Delhi, northern India’s glass capital—a lot of glasswares made there. I had a job there, basically balancing books. Which I managed into something where I didn’t need to remain there every day and made a deal with the branch manager: You want a week’s work, I’ll do it in three days, but let me stay in Delhi for the rest of the week. So he agreed, and I used to be in Delhi for three days out of six. So sticking your neck out can also mean making arrangements with your immediate superiors. Eventually I discovered there was very little rush for vacancies to be filled up in small towns and villages. So I chose places that were small towns and villages in areas where I would have liked to go anyway, just on holiday or something.

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K. FoRTUN: You were romantic about village life back then? SARKAR: Not romantic, but very curious. On an everyday level, people spoke a different language; nobody spoke English. To be continually in a place where nobody spoke English for days and weeks on end was definitely a new experience for me. I had lived outside of metropolitan areas. But here nobody spoke my mother tongue [Bengali], nor did they speak English. And finding myself quite fascinated by it, I moved from one to another. I had options—you had to go through four branches in two years. I chose ones that were in places I wanted to visit: a village in Rajasthan, one in Agra—the industrial estate branch, where many of the units served by the bank have now been shut down by an order of the Supreme Court because their pollution is ruining the Taj Mahal. So I learned how small towns and villages operated. And, since I was ina bank and very much a part of institutional authority, people treated me in certain ways. My first experience of corruption was in a fair to sell cattle and camels. I had gone with the team from the bank, at some bloody eight o’clock in the morning. We had just set up tables under a tree, surrounded by hundreds of buffaloes. And I was told: “Today your target is sixty buffaloes.” And I thought, “Shit, man, sixty buffaloes! OK, I'll handle it—handle the transactions and provide credit to the buyer, based on the buyer’s need.” Now everybody knows that’s what the banker has come there for, so the buyers come rushing to you and one chappie— [Phone rings. ] Excuse me. [Later] So where was I? You’re giving credit to people, and usually the people who can’t afford it are the smaller farmers —something that, sitting there, I discovered was very evident from the kind of dress people were wearing. Also, the kinds of sentences used, the words used, language, the degree of humility—all of that depends on your economic status. As a banker, one notices this. So when I went there on this particular day, as the loan officer for

buffaloes. I got this bench and sat down and was approached by this really good-looking guy—but poor, as I could make out from his clothes. He comes up to me and says, ““Sahb, sahb!” “What do I do with him?” Also remember

this was in the region called Mewat, in Alwar, in Rajasthan. So while I speak in Hindi, what they speak to me is not Hindi, it’s Mewati. So I’m getting about 80 percent of the stuff that he’s saying; I’m not getting all of it. So he’s saying, ““Sahb, sahb,” and he’s mumbling something and I can’t really follow him. So finally I look at my colleagues, at a guy who’s much more experienced, with many more years in the bank. I asked him, “What is this guy trying to tell me?” He said, “You see that money in his hand? He wants to give it to you so that you can do a deal in his favor.” I was damn surprised, man. I got really thrown off. Eight-thirty in the morning trying to figure out what to do with all these buffaloes and suddenly this guy—and he was desperate! I mean, it was also a pretty pathetic situation, because the desperation on his

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face was really evident. So finally I told him, “Shove that bloody money aside and tell me what you want.” He said, “I need a camel because my camel died, and I run a camel cart, and that’s my cart, you can come and see it, but my camel died and I need another camel.” Now a camel is far more expensive than a buffalo. So what he was hoping was that maybe he could influence one of the bankers to get him a loan for a camel. A lot of stories like this happen. And they happen not just in villages, but also in towns. M. ForTUN: But what happened in this story? SARKAR: I gave it to him. K. ForTun: Is that how you resolved all the stories? SARKAR: Most of them. I had another one where these Sikhs came to the bank in Agra. The Sikhs at Agra had shops along a stretch of road near the bank, which had been burned down after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. This

was around 1985. It was basically a machinist shop—repairing car parts, lathes for turning metal, and things like that. Not too far from the bank; I used to notice it every day on my way to work. One day those guys came to the branch where I was working, and I was duty officer for advances that day, for giving credits. This was an industrial estate branch—I remember when I landed up there in September, the branch manager said that by December I had to disburse one crore [ten million] rupees: ““That’s the target you have to meet, but be careful: I want you to give it only to reputable parties, parties who got it last year, parties who will give the money back.” So these twelve guys come to the bank and say, ““Sahb, sahb, sahb.”’ ““What happened?” “For one year, we’ ve been trying to get somebody here to tell us if they can help us at all, and nobody’s been saying anything.” I said, “What is the problem?” and they said, “Come see our shop.” So, since it was a short walk from the branch, I just took a walk down and had a look at the place. Trucks used to

stop by the shop because it was an industrial estate branch; they had mechanical problems, electrical problems; overnight repairs would be carried out in these shops nearby. So I figured they were good businessmen, and they’re into the trucking business, and they know what they’re doing. So I went back and told the branch manager that I thought these guys should get at least a lakh and half each, so that they can buy secondhand lathes and start business

again. He said I had funny ideas that may get me into trouble, but if I thought they were worth it, I should just give it to them. He didn’t want to bother because he had too many things on his mind, so I just gave it to them. But, obviously, giving twelve people one or one and a half lakh rupees each meant that there was about Rs 15 lakh less from my budget. Which meant that some bigger foundries wouldn’t get the same amount of loan that they had gotten the last year. And that led to major problems. Finally there was a meeting of the foundry owners association, and this advances officer of the State Bank of In-

THE WORK OF MARKETS dia was abused in public, with people saying he was out to ruin their businesses. Just because I happened to give some guys some money. K. ForTUN: Things got nasty? SARKAR: Yeah, threats were there: “Don’t act too funny, otherwise they’Il put you in the bhatti—the furnace.” This was the foundry owners. K. FoRTUN: What would have been your punishment within the bank if none of the money you’d lent out came back? SARKAR: Id have been shoved into some remote branch and definitely not put into the advances department. I’d have been put into some balancing-thebooks division. You could do it for the rest of your life: balance books. You’d definitely go off your rocker by the end of it. K. ForTuN: Even if you’re cross-trained, they’d do that to you? SARKAR: Yeah, yeah. Because finally a bank wants its money back; it doesn’t matter who the bank is— Chase Manhattan or State Bank of India or whatever. If they’ve given one rupee out in loan, they want that one rupee back whenever it’s due, with interest. They have a certain kind of money kept aside for bad debts, but they exercise very strong control over that money. One day I just gave them my resignation paper and went to this place called Kishor Bharati for three years. K. ForRTUN: How did you know about Kishor Bharati? SARKAR: I kept coming to Delhi and meeting people and telling them how totally frustrated I was getting. I read some newspapers and talked to people, heard about some of these other kind of organizations. Definitely better than working in the bank. But I had no better ideas than that. I mean, I liked hanging around with kids, but that’s separate. K. Fortun: Did Kishor Bharati pay you? SARKAR: Yeah, they paid me one-fifth of the salary I was getting in the bank. K. ForTUN: Was that a worry for you, or did an 80 percent pay cut not matter? SARKAR: It mattered when I left Kishor Bharati, because I’d run up debts with lots of people. That’s when I came back to Delhi, after being in Bhopal. Part of the reason to come back to Delhi and find work here was because it was the only place where I could earn at a rate to pay back debts. K. ForTun: At the outset, did you see your move into the voluntary sector as final? As a no-going-back kind of thing? A one-way street? Lots of people I’ve known here seem to have taken that detour. Or did you think in terms of working a few years, going into debt, then getting out, so you could pay the debts back, then begin the cycle all over again? SARKAR: No, no. In fact, I wasn’t even very sure whether I wanted to pay the money back. The people I’d taken it from wouldn’t have said anything if I never paid it back. But if they got it back, it would be good for them.

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Most of the people I met when I was at Kishor Bharati either had family income or property income to go back to. Or they were people who had gotten into it and adjusted to a much lower scale of living. Which means also cutting down on visits to meet family, and so on and so forth. So there were all kinds. They were all English-speaking, or people who would learn English over time. K. ForTuN: What percentage went to elite colleges like Saint Stephen’s? SARKAR: Very few. Later I discovered there were lots of students from Saint Stephen’s College who were in voluntary groups like this across the country. But it was people who had graduated in 1980 or 1982 who were the last of the lot. After that, Saint Stephen’s College changed—along with the whole tone of things in India. I wasn’t much into poetry until I went to Kishor Bharati. One of the funny things I discovered there was that a lot of poetry was quoted or used somehow. The point is that it was something very new to me. For a long time I couldn’t get used to it. Then I realized that I didn’t like some of it. But some of it I definitely did like. But it indicates the kind of people who were there at Kishor Bharati: the kind of people who quoted poetry. Kishor Bharati was an experiment in rural education, headed by Anil Sadgopal, a physicist from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay. All places like Kishor Bharati, Eklavya—the education crowd in the voluntary sector—have got a high percentage of Master’s and Ph.D.’s. K. ForTuN: And a lot of scientists, especially physicists. Wasn’t Anil a theoretical physicist? ° SARKAR: I have no idea. I never discussed any physics with him. He quit his job at the Tata Institute and got this land on lease from the government of Madhya Pradesh, in Hoshangabad, to start some experiment in rural education. Generally, educating the Indian masses has been a big thing since 1947. I didn’t know all this then, but as I got into it, I discovered that rural education

is the goose that laid the golden egg, as far as the NGO sector is concerned. So there was a lot of funding and a lot of people coming into the field; some of these good minds would come in and get disappointed or become cynical or whatever and move on. K. ForTUN: How was education defined? SARKAR: When Kishor Bharati started, they started with what is called the Basic Education Program. This was a modification of a Ghandian educational tradition in which you take a group of kids from a village and you teach them the alphabet and the numbers and everything else, but you also teach them how to plow the land using a tractor, how to repair machines, how to make sure

that all the kids around you have got their shots for diphtheria, and whatever. K. Fortun: And did Surajit Sarkar the banker know how to do all these things?

THE WORK OF MARKETS SARKAR: No, but that was about fifteen years before I landed up there. Kishor Bharati started in about 1972 or 1973. In those fourteen years, they had tried this Basic Education thing, which fell flat on its face because the villagers said “bug off.” K. FoRTUN: Why? SARKAR: They said, “What do you mean, plow this land? Any stupid child will tell you this is sandy soil and you can’t grow anything here.” And they said, “No, we can improve it, we can add this fertilizer, we can do this, we can do that.” And the village fellows said, “Do what you will, this soil won’t

grow anything, but if you go twenty feet on that side, beyond that changed color of the ground, there it will work.” And it was, actually, a situation like

this—it sounds very comical but it happened. This was in the Narmada valley so, like any river valley, there is a distinction between the alluvial part and the rest of the ground, so soil qualities differ. The villagers knew this. It was for reasons like this that the agricultural part of the Basic Education Program fell flat on its face.’ K. FoRTUN: Why were the Kishor Bharati people so naive? Were they just convinced they could make something grow in any soil? SARKAR: In 1972 you were just five years away from the Green Revolution, chemical fertilizers, it’s-possible-to-feed-India rhetoric. All of them had come from the U.S., or at least learned ideas from Ohio State or Iowa State—all from textbooks—which forgot the basics: first ask somebody who lives there about where things grow and where they don’t! They didn’t do that. K. ForTUN: So by the time you landed up there, it was clear that the Basic Education project was a failure? SARKAR: They had lots of funny incidents. They tried to shift crops that would grow in the kind of soil that Kishor Bharati had, but there was no mer-

chant in the nearest market center who wanted to pick it up—because he didn’t want to have a new crop on hand. Where was he going to get rid of it? He has to have his own distribution system, to pick it up and pass it down the line. So you can’t just have an agricultural experiment in isolation. So they moved into milk, because dairy development was another big thing. They got these bulls—imported Holstein, premium kind of stuff—to service the local

breeds, so you’d get hybrids that would give more milk and so on and so on [laughs]. I'm telling you stories that have been told to me ten, twelve years later, by the villagers. So they have this milk that doesn’t taste like milk anymore, because it was so watery. So people get their own cows for milk to drink at home and kept these cows to produce milk for the market—because they figured it would sell in town. But what happened? They put the Holstein premium milk, which, according to them is very watery, into big cans, which they take on cycles all the way to the nearest railway station. Then onto the train in Itarsi, which is the changing point for trains to Bhopal and Nagpur, to

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sell it to agents for distribution. And they found that this pain of carrying it from here to there was too much effort and it wasn’t paying well. Before, men just went to town on their cycles to sell whatever they wanted to sell, or buy, with just a half hour of cycling there and back. With the Holstein milk they ended up spending most of the day just to sell milk. So the dairy experiment also ended in disaster. People just gave it up. A few people continued to keep the cows, and they did catch on later, when a market for the milk developed.

Holsteins sort of became the pride of that place about ten years after they first came into the area; the Kishor Bharati experiment was an experiment ahead

of its time. K. ForTuN: How was it that the cows came of worth ten years later? SARKAR: It was ten years later when the dairy boom happened in the country, and networkers—dairy middlemen— came

into existence. At that time,

people who had maintained their cows, which were largely the richer farmers, found that they had a gold mine. Suddenly these cows meant money. For ten years they were basically a thing that didn’t work and they couldn't get rid of. Then, suddenly, they became big. Basically, once you set up a system to carry the milk, it’1] work.

K. ForRTUN: Was this government money that was buying all these bulls? SARKAR: Partly government, partly corporate, partly NGO. K. ForTuN: Why wasn’t KB in the picture when things finally worked out? SARKAR: In the intervening ten years, Kishor Bharati had stopped direct village educational intervention and moved into school education—textbooks, curriculum development, training. They had forgotten about working with this village or any other village around. When I landed up there in 1987, Kishor Bharati was finally talking again about projects working in those same villages —in schools, but this time primary schools, and formal and nonformal work. So I was there as a teacher and associate coordinator of the program. K. ForTUN: How large was the staff of Kishor Bharati? SARKAR: In the children’s activity program, the number of people varied from five to sixteen. In all, KB had, say, twenty-five at its max—while I was there. Before my time, I don’t know.

K. ForTUN: Did they think of themselves as radicals or Gandhians or Marxists or what? SARKAR:

Definitely Marxists. I never talked to them about it, but I’m sure,

because there were a lot of Marxist books in the library. The Kishor Bharati story is a story in itself, and it’s a very big, fascinating story. | won't talk in detail about it, because it would lead this whole thing into another line altogether. In my mind it showed that people from different backgrounds and classes, middle-class types working with the rural poor— they can work together and a fairly good balance can be achieved. On the

THE WORK OF MARKETS other hand, it also showed that isolated experiments really don’t work. I mean, you can’t just do good in one place and hope it will sustain. But, at the same time, it doesn’t mean you don’t do good in one place. Even today, the solidarity is strong among landless, agricultural labor and tribal people in the region. The networking has stood well after Kishor Bharati was gone. And now it’s continuing without any outside middle-class support at all. K. ForTUN: And why couldn’t it have happened without a middle-class catalyst? SARKAR: Some people have said it very simply. Village people don’t go to some places. Their days are so occupied; they only need certain predictable things, meet certain predictable people. To get out of the rut, you need somebody out of the ordinary. Kishor Bharati happened to be the out-of-theordinary thing there. But it doesn’t have to be an institution every time. Even with individuals, it happens, where a new group comes together. Anything could have been the catalyst. Kishor Bharati happened to be the catalyst there. K. FoRTUN: But what needs to happen is new social interfaces? SARKAR: Sparks. Sparks need to play. K. ForTUN: Sparks that do what—bring people together that otherwise wouldn’t meet? SARKAR: Bring people together who share the same ideas but live in geographical locations that, though near to each other, don’t overlap. K. FoRTUN: Were the shared ideas there before the networking happened, or were they created out of the network? Was the culture of solidarity just waiting for a venue, or did it have to be crafted?

SARKAR: The single event that catalyzed the organization of landless peasants and small farmers was the gherao [picketing] of the silk farm and its manager. It led to police action that set the sangathan’s [movement’s] political agenda for many years. It all started because the government decided to stop local recruitment to a silk farm, which was a major source of employment for villagers—especially the tribals, because the tribals reared silkworms in their houses, then sold the cocoons to the silk farm. And the silk farmers would

take the cocoons, take the silk out of it, and send it out for processing. Some government scheme came along that said that this subcontracting was to be stopped and all rearing to be done in the silk farm by people to be hired by the government. And this had major employment consequences for the village. So they were very angry about this decision by the government. Kishor Bharati started hassling the manager and meanwhile going up the line of authority to the Hoshangabad collector’s office and the Bhopal secretary’s office. So they worked at both levels: pressuring the silk farm itself, which the villagers were already planning to do, and linking it together with this other network, to see if anything could be done. K. Fortun: Did it cause anxiety when Kishor Bharati moved into this type

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of advocacy, or was it just an obvious extension of their educational work? SARKAR: There must have been lots of debates. Kishor Bharati was the kind of place where you debated everything —even whether someone was going against the interests of the group if she took six chapatis instead of four chapatis from the kitchen every day to feed her three dogs. I mean, it was a paranoid place, man. K. ForTun: Sounds familiar. M. Fortun: Back up. How did you convince them you were qualified? Here’s this banker boy who had no experience in education— SARKAR: In 1987 there was a dearth of people going into the voluntary sector. There were lots of jobs outside the voluntary sector. K. Fortun: Does this support the argument that one of the reasons there was so much activism in the seventies was because there were no jobs for university graduates? SARKAR: Absolutely. That was a major factor. M. ForTun: But, again, what were your qualifications? SARKAR: Before I went to Kishor Bharati, I was told that they were going to try to run some schools. And they asked, “Do you like kids?” “Yeah.” “Then you'll enjoy working with them.” I thinkI said, “I guess so.” “OK, come.” I’d already given in my resignation letter to the bank. I’d done that without even seeing the place. So three months later, I just landed up. In a sense it was a very liberating kind of atmosphere. To begin with, Kishor Bharati was an oasis of English-speaking people in a completely non-English-speaking landscape. And people were extremely bright, intelligent, thinking. So I did a lot of reading and talking with people there. By and by, work came along. We started by telling stories to kids and hearing stories from them in return. And then asking them if they would mind writing it down, and then writing them down, cyclostyling it—you know, a cyclostyling machine?— stapling it together like a magazine, and bringing it out every week. And selling it at twenty-five paisa each in the villages, in the market. Then we decided that a group of kids who used to come to this place where we met every night would form the nucleus of the evening school. Since the project that was paying me was a government of India project, we had government permission to try the same thing in regular government schools. There were five schools where we were trying the same experiment. The whole idea was to get kids to be able to read and write. Kids entering middle school could not even construct a simple sentence in writing and could barely read the textbooks.*® K. ForTUN: Why did you need to have an evening school? [Phone rings. ] SARKAR: Evening schools because 60 percent of the children in most Indian villages will never be able to attend the regular government schools. For

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the simple reason that they have to work at times that clash with school timing. So if the school is to be taken seriously, then the school timing has to be changed to accommodate kids, not the other way around. I did this for about two and half years as teacher, and then as an absentee teacher and a “picking-up-the-pieces man” for about eight or nine months. M. ForTUN: What’s a “picking-up-the-pieces man”? SARKAR: “Picking-up-the-pieces man” means that work of this kind, invariably, if it follows the interests of the community —which is a community of landless or small farmers—ends up having interests in land and property —in work that does not match that of the voluntary institution’s official mission. There was a clash in Kishor Bharati over whether teachers in the children’s activity program could stand for panchayat [local] elections. KB was being hassled by local elites with warnings that outsiders should stay outside of politics. And these people had political connections that could sabotage the next year’s funding for this and other programs that KB ran. This became a bone of contention with members of our team who were standing for election in one of the villages. Because they believed it would give them a certain political voice—a voice that was not easy to get and was coming their way after a long struggle. Most of the teachers were village people. Tejy and I (we ran the project together) were the only regular nonlocals. [Phone rings. ] SARKAR:

So it was pointed out, in the middle of an argument, that in the

constitution of Kishor Bharati there is a clause that says that office bearers of any project of Kishor Bharati cannot stand for election into the village panchayat. So Kishor Bharati, bemg the institution that controlled the purse strings, declared one fine day: “Shut your work.” So we were forced to move out. But we didn’t want our work to stop. So what was decided was that Tejy and I would shift office to Bhopal, get the money through Eklavya, and continue work in the village, until the official project timetable ended. Once the official project ended, we would not have further responsibility for people’s economic well-being. Many members of the team had become dependent on the income the project provided, so we couldn’t just shut it down at the whim

of Kishor Bharati.

id

In September 1990 it was all over. But the story doesn’t have such a bad ending, becaues today there are something like ten schools running in ten different villages, all run by either members of the team or students who passed through those schools. M. Fortun: Then?... SaRKAR: After Bhopal I moved to Delhi, looking for work. M. Fortun: Did you know what kind of work you were looking for? SARKAR: I had no clue. All that I knew was that there was something

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called ‘“‘book editing,” which was given as freelance work by publishing houses, and it paid you something that I heard on the grapevine was enough to live on in Delhi. So I thought I’d do that, as a starting point. I spent a full month editing a book on personnel management and got paid 2,500 rupees. And I said bug off—this is not worth it, man. Then, through a series of coincidences, a friend at Delhi University —Pro-

fessor Krisha Kumar—mentioned how somebody was looking for somebody to work with him in a television company. So I found out his name, address, phone number, and landed up at his office. He was the general manager of a production house, owned by the Times of India group of newspapers, which made programs for broadcast television. He got very excited that I worked at Kishor Bharati—“‘ You mean you know science?” So I said, “Yes, I know sci-

ence, I know everything, what do you want?” But he had heard about Kishor Bharati, he had heard about Eklavya, he had heard about the Hoshangabad science teaching program. M. ForTUN: Was there anything going on in the television industry at this time that made new jobs open up? SARKAR: No, when I joined it wasn’t like that. The Gulf War hadn’t happened.? It was two or three months before that—lI think I met him in November 1990. And the Gulf War was significant, because CNN came in here,

BBC came in here. You got pictures of the war, and you somehow got to understand why your car was forced to stand for one hour before getting its fuel. But those two months put me in a different league altogether. Because suddenly, at the end of 1991, I discovered that my work was in major demand. Everybody’s asking me to join them. You wonder why. And then you discover that all these different television channels that have started appearing all need people to run the software for them and make the software for them. But there are very few people experienced in it. And I had experience by then. So, suddenly, I was in big demand. My first job with Times Television was basically to sit down and figure out how a science program could be made, and make one program every month for a year, to see if the idea worked. K. FoRTUN: How was Times Television related to Doordarshan? SARKAR: Doordarshan broadcast about eighteen hours every day, of which they gave about one hour every day to private producers. One or two hours, not more. All the current affairs work and anything that required some level of [laughs] “culture” went to English-speaking people in Delhi who had big money. Which basically means these big newspaper chains, and so on and so forth.'° So I was hired as a researcher and scriptwriter for a yet-unnamed television program on science. That was to be started in 1991, as Doordarshan’s response to making television more interesting after the Gulf War influence.

THE WORK OF MARKETS K. ForTuN: Did they start extending the hours that they outsourced, so that their programming would be more competitive? SARKAR: Would look better, yeah. K. ForTUN: Was it just because CNN decided they wanted to come to India, or was the technology newly available—what was behind this development? SARKAR: I remember seeing ads for dish antennas, if these are anything to go by, even before the Gulf War. Also, by that time, a phenomenon had happened in small towns, because Doordarshan reception was not very good. Like in Piparia [where Kishor Bharati was located], I noticed this: the whole town was covered by a network of cable distribution, going to one or two competing cable wallahs [fellows], whose only job was to run Hindi films six times a day. Buy a VCR, stick a tape in, and send it all through town and charge two hundred rupees. Lots of people had started paying for the service. All the VCR guys needed was to spend five thousand bucks on a satellite dish and they’ve got CNN, BBC— K. FoRTUN: They sold that to people? SARKAR: Nobody here pays for watching television. You don’t have to pay licenses, or anything. K. ForTUN: But those fellows who bought the satellite dishes in villages, how did they recoup their costs? SARKAR: They charged the households, just to run their business. But they never paid any television corporation for using their signals. And they still don’t, and they refuse to. , K. ForTUN: It’s happened really fast, hasn’t it? Once CNN came, and then the satellite boom—aren’t you getting something like two hundred channels now? SARKAR: We get twenty-nine channels at home here. But I’ve heard of places where you can get up to forty or forty-five channels. M. ForTuN: Can you just run through what some of the channels are? SARKAR: One group may own more than one channel. One group is Doordarshan, which has about three channels showing three different kinds of

program—that’s Government of India. Next is Rupert Murdoch and Star Television; they have five channels, two in Hindi, three in English: sports, star movies, ZTV, and ATV—which are Hindi channels, in which they have a

49 or 50 percent stake. Then there is Ted Turner: he’s got his TNT and I don’t know what else. They are the big players. Then there are the little players. K. ForTun: So restraints on access prior to the Gulf War was not because of government regulations, but because the technological infrastructure wasn’t in place? SARKAR:

The infrastructure was in place, but nobody put the two things

together. You had the cable distribution network, and you had dish antennas,

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which people used to use in private houses. But it had never caught on as a popular thing. After the Gulf War, cable television was really sold. People could see pictures of war—that’s a major attention gatherer. You’d have towns like Piparia, where they are saying, “Look there! Now we can see the Gulf War on Times Television.” K. Fortun: I know this is a trite question, but . . . what’s the cultural effect of all of a sudden getting twenty-nine channels instead of just boring Doordarshan? M. Fortun: Or, if you don’t know what the effect is, how have people talked about the effect? SARKAR: No, the effect is very clear. Everybody talks about it; they might like it or dislike it. But they all agree on what it is. One is: dress codes in India have changed. Female dress has, in five years, taken a sea change. That hassles one set of people and doesn’t hassle another set. K. ForTUN: One more trite question: the typical argument that all this influx of foreign culture is going to threaten the integrity of Indian culture and lifestyle. What’s your answer, or what are people saying? [Phone rings; tape shut off. ] SARKAR: A lot of people seem to take it seriously. I think it’s too early to tell. Some things have changed, like I’ve already said, at least in the towns and cities. K. ForTUN: Is it something you think you could stop, or is it something you just have to get used to? SARKAR: See, it won't be like yesterday, right? That it will not be. But whether tomorrow will be something more likable than today is a difficult thing to tell. So at the most, what you can do is yell about the things you feel are vulnerable. Often, I feel this means that you’re not looking at anything at all very closely, you’re just making a noise—because it’s the done thing: to make a noise. But that doesn’t mean that I’m against making a noise. I just wish more people knew why they were doing it, because it would make a lot more sense. One of the other problems, I feel, is the way we talk about cultural imperialism, about the pernicious influence of television—before this, remember, it

was the pernicious influence of film on Indian youth—TI’ ve written an enormous number of essays on this topic, when I was in school. Because every bloody teacher felt it was one of the better essays to give in a test. So you had to suffer this one. Murder, kissing on screen, blood on the screen, Hindi films

should only have these songs that are good and uplifting. K. ForTUN: And what was your answer when you were in school? SARKAR: I haven't a clue. I don’t remember. But certainly the “pernicious effect of television” at some level reminds me of that. But there is another thing— cinema hall experience was not the everyday thing television is. Any-

THE WORK OF MARKETS one who walks into a cinema knows what they’re seeing. It’s somehow very different with television. So when you see it happening on television, you feel a little more worried. How often it’s happening and to so many more people. So it’s not once you're seeing the message, but repeatedly. And when that happens, it puts it in a very different league than films. So it seems to me more worrisome. But at the same point you can’t deny it, because just because you don’t like television doesn’t mean that people are going to stop buying them. I think this is what led a lot of people into community television, decentralized television— earlier it was educational television. People realize that the problem is theirs, but it’s a different way of approaching it. It’s tough for me to say which one will be most effective. I have no real experience in these things. K. ForTUN: When you go to villages now, do you see the difference? SARKAR:

Yes, I do. But at the same time, I also discover that television

watching is not an all-day activity. Especially if you’re a kid. You’re going to have to do some work. Your dad might lie at home, but he’1l make you work. Which means that during the day you’ve got something to do. The only time that’s free is in the evenings—I’m talking here of families in which the children have to work. There are obviously a set of families in which the children don’t have to work, but they’re much fewer in number. And so kids finally will watch only between five and seven in the evening, and Sundays between eleven and one or something. It'll probably be one of the richer families who keep their TV set in the courtyard. And then you’!l watch whatever is on in those hours. A lot of studies have-been made on who watches what during those hours. K. ForTUN: Let’s go back to the story of your working at Times Television, on the as-yet-to-be-named science program. SARKAR: And then the Wheel of Fortune and Lady Luck smiled upon this poor young man, and he made a killing in the big city! K. ForTUN: This is a good story! Did he also get to name the show? SARKAR: No, he never got to name the show, because there were bigger wheels than him in the business. K. ForTUN: Did you really make a lot more money than you had anticipated? SARKAR: Not initially, but once the cable boom happened, then I suddenly did. But I discovered that all through my bloody career, I have quoted rates that were like half the market rate and never discovered it. K. ForTUN: How could you be so stupid? SARKAR: Everybody’s asked me that, and I don’t know. I think I used to just get excited about whatever was happening. M. Fortun: If they didn’t have a name for the show, did they have concept for it? Or was it just supposed to be “about science”’?

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SARKAR:

The main idea was to make a half hour program on science, to

be telecast once a month, in the beginning. But if there was a good audience, it would go to once a week. The stories were to be about science and technology all across the country. It was from an idea that the Ministry of Science and Technology had given to Doordarshan that there should be such a show. The pilot had been lying somewhere for a long time, and once the competing channels started, Doordarshan decided to improve its image. So a lot of money was given to the program. It became a prestige program for the first two or three years that it was running: it had good time slots in prime time and good viewership— one of the highest for nonentertainment programs, second only to a program called World This Week. About 36 percent of the Doordarshan audience, which was about 500 or 600 million people. So the first year was monthly programs, starting in October 1991, and then in September 1992 it became fortnightly for two or three months, and then weekly, from December 1992 until March 1993. Then it stopped for about six or eight months. Then I went back on a freelance basis until September 1995, when I stopped for good. K. ForTUN: How did you decide what each show was going to be about? Did somebody tell you, or did you develop your own ideas? SARKAR:

The first time, I was called to Doordarshan and introduced to the

bosses there as the writer and researcher. I asked what programs they would like to show. They said, “Show some programs on ships, some on planes, some on this, some on that.” I asked why they wanted to do a show on ships or on a plane or on a lathe machine? You can’t make science programs like that. A ship is a big thing; let’s talk about the air-conditioning on ships. Or the engine of a plane. I mean, after all, these are going to be five-minute stories.

So you’re talking about a Doordarshan that hadn’t much of a clue about how to do programming like this. And the sum total of my writing on science was a few magazine articles over the years. But that was more than enough to answer their questions, as far as I was concerned. And they said, “Fair enough,

go ahead—but show us a pilot.” So we had to make a pilot program, which was an interesting exercise, because by that time the woman at Doordarshan who was in charge had figured out that you’ ve got to start looking like CNN or BBC programs. There wasn’t much questioning of the topics I chose, except for a few. I made sure they never did a program on anything about atomic energy: mining to extraction to processing to generating to using to disposal. Because suddenly I discovered that Doordarshan had another boss, called the Atomic En-

ergy Regulation Board. And they wanted editorial control on any film on atomic energy shown on Doordarshan. And I said, “Bug off.” K. FoRTUN: How did you find this out? SARKAR: I made a program, and they said, ““Uh-oh, we have to show it to these agency people.” I said, “Why?” They said, “Because we always do it

THE WORK OF MARKETS that way.” And the AERB saw it and asked for the script, so that they could “suggest some changes.” So I said forget it. M. ForTUN: What other topics were like that? SARKAR: Another that was completely killed was on the so-called plague of last year. I had a theory, which I had got from some scientist publishing in the journal of a Pune-based institute, that said the disease was similar to one of 1967—68. And I wanted to use that data to make a program on how diseases move in populations, and what it means when you say that a disease is “spreading like the plague,” and what you can do to stop it. I wasn’t taking the current disease as a focus, because no one knew at the time what the disease was all about. They had a completely immediate response to the whole thing, which was, “This is not the plague, and if you have to do it, say we are cleaning up the dumps and no more mosquitoes will breed there and there will be no more rats.” They had some standard stuff, and they did not want any program on the plague shown in any other way. Which I thought was pretty ridiculous, so I said, “It’s not going to work.” I have personal opinions that are very much against “big science.” But if I’m going to spend money on making a program about science, I can’t say, “Let’s have no big science, let’s have only small science.” Because I’m showing it on television, which is definitely a big science. Everybody would laugh at me if I say, ““No big science” and it comes on somebody’s TV screen. It doesn’t make any sense. So what you do is you show many little things. M. ForTUN: Were you trying to say other things like that about science? SARKAR: I wasn’t trying to say anything about science. The only thing that I saw myself doing was to not do programs on “Are cornflakes good?” Kellogg’s would have been very happy to open its factories for Turning Point, for a film that showed how cornflakes come from the best corn, which comes from the research done in Kellogg’s labs. K. ForTUN: Were you supposed to present indigenous science? SARKAR: The program had a slot that was basically “alternative science’’—innovations, low-cost science, science for the people, or traditional

science. That was already slotted into the scheme of things. If you wanted to come up with something you had to put it ifto its proper slot. The program was divided into five segments: one was on the human body; one was on major scientific breakthroughs of some kind; one was called “Planet Earth,” which was basically environment-related stuff; one was “Interactions,” a

question-and-answer thing with a professor of science who was a science popularizer; and one was “2001,” which is like future science and the directions being taken. So your story has to fit one of these slots. But there was enough leeway within them to shove in any kind of story I wanted. And over the 70 programs that I did, which was about 280 stories, I managed to put in a wide variety of things. M. Fortun: So how did you choose what stories to do?

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SARKAR: I did a few series, just to make it easy on myself. I did a series on the problems and lifestyles of fisherpeople and what they’ve done collectively. I did a show on an institute that developed plastic boats for them. Another was on artificial reefs. And we did a series on insect life in India. A difficult subject to do but very fascinating. I tried to do a few shows on astronomy, but they were real disasters. We couldn’t get the footage. I discovered that in one particular film that NASA had released—it must have been in the late 1970s, everywhere in the world—you see the same shot of the moon going behind something and a spaceship coming out. Whether it’s Germany, Maldives, Doordarshan, or Indonesia, it’s the same shot of the moon and the spaceship.

Because they’re the only people who can give you this kind of footage. M. ForTun: It sounds like there was never any simple line like “Science is the great savior of the world” or ‘“‘Science is the great demon of the universe” or “Science is better than religion.” SARKAR: There’s something called the “scientific temper’ —you’ ve heard the phrase? It’s very commonly used here in India: you’re rational, you’re logical, you’re not superstitious. But it doesn’t matter when your daughter’s wedding comes—you’ll go to your astrologer to fix up the dates. But you still have a scientific temper. So it’s a very ambiguous phrase. It could mean anything, but I feel it’s a phrase that captures a lot of stuff: seeing science as just a series of observations. You just have the patience to observe. Finally, for me, it was a television program. And you want people to watch. If your job is to make a product, you want people to see it and not just switch and go past it. So you have to make it watchable, which is another set of skills that you have to learn or figure out. Nothing in science is so simple. So even if you have only three to five minutes, you’re better off complicating things, throwing in a few dimensions, not showing it as one flat problem solution. It’s never like that. It adds to the story and also makes it a lot more interesting to watch. SUBRAMANIAM: At the same time, part of the idea was to make science simpler, friendlier, less intimidating, so that people would be able to relate to it. If Iwere to draw a parallel with what we are trying to do in Saheli: we’re looking at alternative communication, to try and make medical information and other things easier—removing the jargon, making it easier to read. The same program done by the same production company would have been very different if Suro had not been around. The fact that his boss actually chose someone like Suro, with an alternative background, is very indicative of the

kind of man he is. Suro was not a technical person but someone ready to look at things a little differently. M. ForTun: So, of the various stories, what do you think people most liked to watch? SARKAR: Stories on health and medicine had a surprisingly high number of letters and queries. In fact, people ended up at our offices asking for de-

THE WORK OF MARKETS tails. I was pretty disappointed because the insects never really got much of a response, nor animals for that matter. The “Planet Earth” stories got good responses. Some responses were more general, like about their notions of science. There was one whole set of letters that were like, “I have observed that . . ..".—at home, school, in the kitchen, among friends —“Why is this so?” There were also a fair amount of letters that were along the lines of “TI have discovered how to sort out the world’s petrol problem” or the sugarsupply problem. One letter wondered if it were possible to make a bomb that would kill a few people yet destroy all weapons and materials. The cheekier ones said, “If you want to know anything further, send a ten-rupee note to me.” M. ForTun: What about the production side of things? SARKAR: The first time I tried making a film, it was a disaster. I spent thirty-five thousand bucks of the company’s money before I was told by the big boss to just stop and come to his office immediately. And he ticked me off. But he was good enough to just tick me off, because I’d spent a fair amount of money on a program that never got made. It taught me a lot about how to make a film, which I had no experience in. It’s the kind of experience you'd pick up otherwise by going through a film school or something like that, which I had to learn on the job, in about six to eight minutes.

Times Television was a regular production house, which means it made other programs as well: business programs, entertainment, fashion shows, and other things. So we were just another team on the third floor of a big building. We were looked upon a little differently by the rest of the crowd because we were doing science. z M. ForTun: Yeah, I know that feeling. SARKAR:

Doordarshan sanctioned something like two and a half lakhs,

which is 250,000 rupees per episode of this program. But about 100,000 rupees was eaten up by overheads, so you’re stuck with 150,000. Which was all right, actually. What that did not include and what I used with great pleasure was the travel budget. I went all over the place, canceled tickets a hundred times. Eventually, by 1995, balancing budgets was getting to be too important to them and a bit too much for me. Every day you’re out with a production crew, you're costing the production house 15,000 to 20,000 rupees. And because I tried to complicate stories, I would go to two or three different sites,

whereas other production units for the show would usually only go to one. When they start telling you that you’re spending too much on hotel bills, the budget watching has an effect on the quality of the show. And you don’t feel like continuing to work. Turning Point still has a kind of credibility as a “thinking person’s program.” I never appear on the show, but I’ve walked into offices where people say, “Oh, you’re Surajit Sarkar, I’ve seen your name on Turning Point.” So when that kind of thing happens, it means that this guy reads what comes on the screen; he doesn’t just watch it.

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When I left Times Television and took a break, I was looking for work. I made a documentary for Doordarshan and did other things. I thought I would go back to Turning Point but discovered that it was easier for me to freelance. One, because it was a science program, I was known in the industry as the person who had been doing science programs. So it was easy for me to get work. There were just two or three other people who fit the bill of making science programs. And now there are medical programs coming on and environment programs, which are all spin-offs, post—Turning Point. [Phone rings; tape shut off.] K. Fortun: Is it proper to call you cosmopolitan? Where are you in the social structure? SARKAR: I haven't a clue. I don’t know how I would describe myself. K. FoRTUN:

Well, we couldn’t do it for ourselves, either. So just tell me

yea or nay: cosmopolitan? SARKAR: I don’t know what it means. K. ForTUN: You are. Progressive? Yuppie? SARKAR: I’m not a yuppie, but I have some number of yuppie friends. M. ForTuN: And you’re not a civil servant... SARKAR: I’m not a civil servant. M. ForTunN: ... And you’re not a banker. SARKAR: I’m not a banker. I earn my living as a freelance film or TV producer. K. ForTUN: Are you an intellectual? Well, you are, but— SARKAR: Then why are you asking? [Laughs] See, there is a way I can do it, which is by describing what I’ve heard others call me. People have called me a diggahj, which is basically a chappie—an organic intellectual, is one way of describing it. Others have called me a bloody bastard—actually, a cynic. Another that I particularly like, actually my favorite one: they said, basically you figure out what makes Delhi tick, and you figure out how to use it for your own good—to get your life going. But this has been from people who are living in villages; no townspeople have come up with this one. Others think you’re a social worker and are very confused when they discover you don’t make a living from social work. I don’t know what social work means,

but this is what they say. K. ForRTUN: How do you feel about the term activist? SARKAR:

[Phone rings.] Unclear. Hallo? [Tape off: ]

Meals Ready SUBRAMANIAM: The kind of logic that we were trying to carry through in the documentary, in terms of pure form, involved acknowledging the world we're living in: who are the people, what are the signs and symbols that they are responding to, and in what way? I’m not saying that people’s attention

THE WORK OF MARKETS span is a second and a half, so let’s try to make it a second so that people watch you better. You have to strike that balance. You have to watch what you're doing, what kind of process you're actually contributing to. But you also have to acknowledge the fact that there is a certain grammar of the time, if you want to call it that. And there’s also the matter of medium: the whole dynamic between a film screen and a viewer is so different from a TV screen and a viewer, in terms of pure dimension, concentration, attention, distractions—there are a million things, actually. A scale of viewing that is literally larger than life—you can do a lot that you cannot do on TV, and vice versa. So this film is a TV or small-screen projection kind of thing. K. ForTUN: How did you understand the difference? SUBRAMANIAM: You learn. I had done a lot of TV work, in terms of commercials and stuff. And Suro has done a lot of TV work in terms of mainstream programming. And we're both sort of reasonably interested in films, but I wouldn't say absolute film buffs. I had studied it a wee bit at a film-appreciation course. These things just help you tune into the differences. And in that sense, we knew that we were both more competent at the TV screen, despite the fact

that I actually want to work on film seriously. Film has this greater capacity for a kind of mind control, is one way of putting it. At one level, cinema was known to be the controlling thing: that you had somebody in your grasp for an hour or three hours, depending on which part of the world you’re watching cinema in. But the fact of the matter is that you do leave after three hours or you stop for popcorn or whatever. As opposed to this, on video, which is a totally different kind of mind eontrol, despite the fact that you’re on the phone, you’re cooking, you’re fighting with your lover, you’re screaming at your kids—you’re doing a million things, but there’s a certain kind of— Jerry Mander has this really fabulous thing in his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television—which you don’t have to agree with completely. There’s a lot that he hasn’t gone into, but he’s raked up a lot of issues that are great. And you must read it in public. I happened to be reading it on trains and buses, traveling somewhere, and I had zillions of people come up to me and ask, “Does this man make sense? Does he have scientific evidence? What does he say? Tell me quickly!” “I’nf getting off in thirty seconds, how can I tell you quickly? Just write down the name and look for the book.” But he talks about the almost supernatural kind of energy you need to put that damn TV off. See, at one level we could have looked at it as a purely academic exercise. Because it was made for students. We could have looked at it as a classic academic kind of film. But we wanted to go beyond that. I don’t think Oxford University would have griped if we made them a classical documentary. In fact, they were very surprised when they saw the film. They loved it, but I don’t think they expected something so— M. ForTuN: How did Oxford come to fund the film?

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SARKAR: We had gone traveling to the U.K. And just about two months before leaving, I had been thinking about markets. Liberalization had started in 1992, when Singh came in with the big economic reforms. But no one seemed to be very clear what a market was. But they were all talking about all kinds of markets. And I felt, That’s some subject to make film on. But I had no idea how to go about it, because it was really very difficult to actually narrow down a market: you have to select a market, and you have to get into it in depth. And, to me, a market has always been some kind of economic institution you can’t see, you can only sense. SUBRAMANIAM: That very abstract notion of the market and the free market, and everything’s equal and you know what money is and everything’s beautiful, you know?

SARKAR: About two months before we left I found this book published in 1952—a picture book, published in Japan, called Marketplaces of the World. In 1952 two Japanese photographers went around the world photographing marketplaces. That was it. Because those pictures gave me an idea for how to start the whole project. It set things flashing all over. So, from the abstract, it began to become concrete, at some level. But then, as usual with me, I think

of an idea and then forget about it very fast. Maybe it comes up again three years later. But, in the middle, on this trip to the U.K., I was chatting to

people about markets. A friend of mine, Michael Anderson, said, “Markets? Why don’t you talk to Barbara Harris-White at Oxford? She’s the authority on markets, and she’s lived in India for twenty-five years. She’s contemporaries with Clifford Geertz; she’s done all this research and written a book. She’s very good on this subject so why don’t you talk to her?” I said, “OK, I’ve heard of her, I’ve read a few pieces by her, but that’s about all.” So finally he got very insistent and said, “Shut up! You’ve spent two and a half months in England, you haven't met her, you’re in Oxford, I’ve fixed up an appointment, go and meet.” I went and met her. We started chatting, and she was very excited about the idea that the film could be made. She said she’s been wishing somebody would come up with this. I said, ““To begin with, I need more detail.” By the time I left her office, after spending more than half a day with her—I met her at twelve and I left her about seven in the evening, and I went to a class with her, and we had lunch with some other people, got introduced, met her kids, went to their school to pick them up, and all kinds of things—

I came back home with a lot of paper. And an idea that maybe a film was possible. Came back, talked to Vani about it, matters went into limbo for

a few months. Then I got a letter from Barbara saying she was coming to Madras and asking if we were going to be there and could we meet? I said I’d love to, and then I said, “Vani, I need help in writing this out.” She said, “First you write out what you want to write out, then we can work at it.” So

that’s how it started. SUBRAMANIAM: Never mind how it really started. Because we had been

THE WORK OF MARKETS chatting about it from the days of Kishor Bharati—this whole substitution of rice and traditional diets. And this whole thing of the marketplace, and how who is located where in the physical space of the market is reflective of where they are placed in the market per se. SARKAR: Your mentioning Kishor Bharati reminds me. I was in Piparia from 1987 to 1992, 1993—then I kept going there every year until the film got made. Over those six or seven years, I discovered families who changed the crops they grew, who sold off their land. And I chatted with them about why they did it. And about how some of them found that when their neighbors, who had more land, shifted to another crop, the pests of the earlier crop came to their fields—because there was nothing for them to eat. They were getting squeezed out by the pests, and they had to put in more and more pesticide, which was getting more expensive. So this whole business of how people get forced out of a particular kind of farming happens in ways we can’t even imagine. This one was new to me, that those creepy-crawlies come from one field to another because they smell it out. SUBRAMANIAM: And you'd be discussing organic farming with them, and they’d be saying, “Yeah, come and try doing that in a field that is surrounded by people using pesticide—then talk to us about organic farming.” M. ForTun: So Suro wrote, and Vani pitched. SUBRAMANIAM: No, that’s how I was initially drawn into the discussions and the proposal writing. But then I went down to Madras with Suro—for personal reasons, I just wanted a break from Delhi—and met Barbara. And

from there on I just found myself more and more drawn into it, because it’s something that I was genuinely interested in, but I wouldn’t have selected it on my own as a subject to make a film about. K. ForTUN: Did you divide the work in any specific way? SUBRAMANIAM: The major task of research was his. That’s something I didn’t do. M. Fortun: As part of the proposal, did you also have to talk about distribution? SARKAR: Yeah. They had two or three criteria. They said, ““We need to know whether it will go on mainstream channels, or whether it will go on any other network.” That wasn’t a problem: All channels are glad to have a film that is film—which somebody else pays for and they can air. So I got a couple of letters from people. And the networks are also relatively happy to have these kinds of things. So that wasn’t very much of a problem. Once you’ve got a film that someone has paid for, the distribution is relatively easy. M. FortTuN:

Which is different from alternative cinema in India, where

there’s money for production, but then there’s no theaters to distribute them in? SUBRAMANIAM:

See, even if you were to make an alternative film, the the-

ater network is essentially a commercial network. It’s very big bucks, and a very low rate of survival of movies themselves. Even mainstream cinema. So-

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cially based films are not part of the mainstream in that sense. There was a time when a feature film would be preceded by a Films Division documentary. They were usually boring, but some could be interesting: on the big dams, the Green Revolution, modern science. It was a mass screening, and

even though not everybody watched it, some people would watch it. But now that doesn’t exist. M. Fortun: Did Oxford University give you a decent budget? SARKAR: It was a big budget. It’s even funded this disaster on my [broken] knee. M. ForTun: Did you have to define the site for the proposal? SUBRAMANIAM: Yeah. Initially we were planning to do a comparison between Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, and Bengal. Then a filmmaker friend of ours stepped in and said, “Look, don’t do this. You’re not going to be able to swing this; it’s far too complex. If you can get people to understand one place, they can project from there onto the others.” And it was a good reminder. Tamil Nadu was a place that the Oxford people had done a lot of research on, so that became the lead option. And Barbara suggested this place called Walajabad and people there to talk to. So Suro went there three or four times before we even started filming, getting to know the people there, getting them to trust him, getting the local gossip. So he was in a position to actually write enough of a storyline, with characters close to what are in the film. But the film has grown a lot since then. We got into issues that we didn’t think we were going to be able to deal with. K. FoRTUN: So you were actually able to deal with more than what you planned to, not less?

SARKAR: Much more. But the answer to that lies partly in the form we decided to give to the film, the style of making the film. Using the broad thread of rice and what happens to it in this town, we could do a lot of things that we couldn't have done through characters’ lives. Or, it would have at least gone off on a different tangent—if we went through characters. The idea was to arrive at a thread, which lets you cover as much as you want to say, rather than what the film ends up saying willy-nilly—from the force of the logic of film, and what you would have to include for consistency.

SUBRAMANIAM: It also depends on personal obsession. M. ForTuN: So what was your obsession in making this? SUBRAMANIAM: We set out with a basic economic story but not really economic, in the sense that we were looking at things like social connections,

trusts, and temples. We had gone that far in our concept, and we weren’t sure how we were going to show some of it or how we were going to get people to talk. But some of the other stuff, like caste and gender, those things we hadn’t thought we’d be able to explore. But those, the place demanded from us. So, for example, caste is something that you cannot escape in Tamil Nadu. It’s

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just constantly there. The first thing they'll ask you is what caste you are— actually, they don’t even have to ask me: I open my mouth, and in three words they know I’m Brahmin speaking. They can tell from the way I look—I don’t have to wear a bindi, I don’t have to wear a sari. Ninety-nine percent of the time they can place me as Tamil Brahmin. I could go in jeans and smoke a cigarette and they would know. And a lot of them would assume that Suro is high caste, because of their definition of what caste-based roots are. So caste is something that is staring you in the face. And gender is also something that really came out of the place. When you're spending three months hanging around the place and realizing the actual volume of the work that was being done by women— gender is not a theoretical kind of discussion anymore. We had a lot of people say: “It’s so nice to have a woman on screen not described as ‘woman farmer’ or ‘woman something,’ but just as “small farmer.’ You’ve just sort of given her respect, that’s what she does.” We had started doing the storyboards and everything was going reasonably all right—we were not happy with the beginning we had written out, but it was going to be OK for a shooting script. And we both just froze on this one character and said: “It’s got to be a woman. I don’t care where we find her, but

it’s just got to be someone who deals with it independently, who is the one taking primary responsibility.” K. FoRTUN: You talk about having to use the grammar of the time, using the symbol system that makes sense colloquially. Colloquially, the most predictable way to work yourself through a story is through people’s personal narratives. Did you worry about accessibility once you switched to rice instead of personal biography as the central thread? Was that a shift in grammar that you had to pay careful attention to? SUBRAMANIAM: I don’t know how Suro would articulate this, but basically I felt that in the early history of documentary films, some of the most powerful documentaries have been the story of one person, OK? Which in something like this, we were worried about it even up to the end, when we were

working on our final edit script. There are different ways of stringing this together, and when you’re in a town, you almost want to tell it like the history of the town or the history of one person, showing how differently everyone else is placed vis-a-vis him or her. There’s just loads of ways of doing that. And one problem is that it’s been done; it’s been done ad nauseum. So you're trying to also find a different way of expressing it, because the subject per se— One of the comments we’ve had on the film is, “I didn’t expect to enjoy it so much.” Because the subject is a very tough subject; it’s not a typical documentary subject. K. ForTuN: No pathos? SUBRAMANIAM: In fact, we’ve had people say to us at screenings, “The

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story’s so sad, why is your film not that full of pathos?” There was this one chap in Bangalore who we ended up chatting to at length about this, and I said, “Look, it’s much easier for me to make a film with pathos. But one, I

feel it’s a highly overused emotion. But more seriously than that is the fact that people are getting screwed really bad, but that doesn’t mean they’re sitting around whining about their lives. They have a lot more strength than you and me and everyone put together.”” And somewhere we felt that our film had to reflect that strength. You meet Rajamma; you cannot believe the hole she is in, you know? I still sometimes can’t believe it, and I have known her closely for a few months. It’s amazing; if it gets too bad, she’llsay, “Forget it. It’s God who put me here; He made me out of this earth, placed me in this place, got me married into this village. He’s brought me to such a situation; you mean He’s not going to take care? He has to.” And she’d say it with a laugh, that you and I are laughing with. It’s not like out of absolute fatalism. People have ways of surviving, and in some ways you also have to recognize that and, ideally, reflect that. Otherwise you’ve imposed your sense of pathos on them, but not imbibed any of their sense of strength or humor and how they actually deal with it. SARKAR:

For me, I was in the middle of this film and I suddenly thought to

myself, Hey, this way of looking at it is very similar to books I’ve read. One is this Hindi novel written in the fifties, where this chap writes the autobiography, as he calls it, of a one-rupee coin. It’s the story of a coin, and it’s a story full of despair. But when you read it, the emotion that you get is not one of despair, but of amazement that so much is possible and so much happens that is not all despair. Everyone is trying in their own ways, given their situation. The other thing that I suddenly realized was that the film was looking like those Readers and Writers Cooperative books —Marx for Beginners, Freud for Beginners, and so on. So the film reminded me of those, too. But whether it was this novel or these kind of comic books, both of them had a kind of

audience that we knew existed, because those books have been around for a long time. They’re available in bookstores, and you can see influences of them elsewhere as well. The Autobiography of a One-Rupee Coin led to a hell of a lot of school essays. SUBRAMANIAM: All of us had this essay subject at some point in our lives. K. FoRTUN: In negotiating what to do with pathos and things like this, did you think about what kind of effect you wanted to provoke in your viewers? Or, in another way of asking: What did you want them to learn? SUBRAMANIAM: You're trying to lay out the complexity, the real-life complexity, of this thing called a marketplace, OK? If you go to the Delhi School of Economics and discuss a marketplace, they would separate it off: caste would be discussed in the sociology department, and gender in the gender studies department, and economics in the economics department. And you’re

THE WORK OF MARKETS trying to crossover. You're trying to bring some of it together. You’re trying to socially map a market. So that was the primary task. You're trying to draw some links that are clearly important in the functioning of the market but not clearly recognized—either at the personal level or at the policy level. K. ForTUN: Could you put into words what difference you think it will make if an audience senses those links? What do you get from your film that you don’t get from the traditional bifurcations in academia? SARKAR: One comment that I heard after the screening was, “These bloody Marwaris are everywhere.”’ The Marwaris are the moneylenders. K. ForTuN: So the connections kept going... SUBRAMANIAM: Yeah, yeah. And for example, people would talk about the traditional role of Brahmins elsewhere—because the Brahmin history in Tamil Nadu is very different from everywhere else in the country. Even IJ, who had a Brahmin grandfather who was a farmer, had no clue all my life what it means to be a lower-caste farmer or person in the market. And, from a Brahmin point of view today in Tamil Nadu, you assume that all the lower castes are empowered. That’s all bullshit. All that’s happened is that the next caste has stepped into the shoes of the Brahmin, and everybody else is exactly where they were, to put it very crudely. Bringing these things together—it may affect policy. Hopefully, it develops a certain kind of understanding. Or even, for example, we talk of political connections. But what does that mean for a guy who had a fertilizer agency? Sometimes it’s very tough to make that kind of connection. You see that when you talk with sombody who’s doing arms deals, but you don’t necessarily see that when you’re looking at something small like the fertilizer agency or growing cauliflower in Tamil Nadu. Cauliflower is traditionally known as an English vegetable— cauliflower and carrots and tomatoes and peas. They’re not native to the place. So what does it mean to be able to grow that kind of fragile stuff, and sell them, and hold your own, and suddenly move from a family where you have nothing, where your father gathers rice by these small measures from people and goes and hand-pounds them and sells them in the market, and you suddenly own twenty-five acres. How do you make that leap? What is your role in that market? What is the connection between that and the political party that’s operating in the town? Sometimes it’s tough to pin these things down, and that’s what we were trying to do. Like a trust, for example. They have such huge respectability. And one is not casting aspersions on the man who started it, because he did start off with some interesting work. But the point is, what does it get used for? Or even the Marwari in the temple, which was the reason for that one comment—because the Marwaris in Bengal have set up Durga temples, all the Birla mandirs in the country —their temples, set up by the Birlas, a Marwari community. It helps you integrate. A cousin of mine who was watching kept insisting:

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“What difference does it make if the Marwaris set it up?” He started getting his hankers up because of the temple. And, he’s not particularly religious; he’s not particularly anything. But he just thought we shouldn’t push it. I’m not saying that there is a conversion there—I just wanted to show that these are the links. If you met the Marwari who actually started the trust, he’s more South Indian than my grandfather. He’s just so bloody integrated; but they all go back to Malwar to get married. They get these English-speaking bahoos [daughters-in-law], who then learn Tamil. You know, it all goes on. This is OK. I’m not saying they shouldn’t move or do whatever; but, some-

times, the garb is so difficult to see through. It’s important to see how people use it to climb. Because one has always known how religion has been used in other contexts; to break down another religion, or to build a following for a king, or this or that or the other. But it’s also used to develop a certain aura—

you set up a temple, get the credibility. That temple is so South Indian, I would have never known that anyone other than some good Brahmin ran the joint. But you see that they are all institutions of power, which lead back to a marketplace. Looking at a grain like rice helps you see these connections. SARKAR: If we had looked at cauliflower, we would not have discovered all these connections. SUBRAMANIAM: Rice is so much the main thing for the rural economy —it gives you a window into all this. K. ForTUN:

It’s fascinating how it worked. Even with your Indian viewers,

who seemed to bounce into ever larger comparisons. SUBRAMANIAM: We’ve had people see it from all over, and what they see is that the fundamental process is the same. Some of the details vary. That’s very interesting. But we were able to see it by going into one culture or location deeply, because then you can map it out a bit. Then, you can see patterns. Even if seen in a completely different part of the world, I think you could see some connections. K. FoRTUN:

You knew that your viewers wouldn’t just be Indian, no?

SUBRAMANIAM: It was a problem, but yet it wasn’t. In terms of actual content, it didn’t change anything. We would have explored the same thing. Technically, it affected some of the language. We’re used to using words like harijan and Brahmin. They mean something here. But we called him “low-caste elder”’; originally, he was subtitled as harijan elder. SARKAR: But harijan is much more than just low caste; it even places one within the hierarchy of Hindu society. SUBRAMANIAM: But no one in Mexico, or even Oxford, would even know what harijan meant. For example, we have an introductory line on the caste system, about how India, in addition to being a patriarchal society, also has this thing called the caste system. I hate it. It just grates on my nerves. Even though it makes sense for who it was made for. But it just rankles.

THE WORK OF MARKETS K. FoRTUN: Why do you hate it? SUBRAMANIAM: It’s simplistic; a reduction. Two lines on what the caste system is? But it’s all right. It had to be done. And most audiences aren’t going to be as hyper about it as I am. K. ForTUN: Again, why rice? Why not focus on the town or something else? Did knowing you had to cross audiences affect your decision to follow rice? What makes sense as a narrative focus is historically and culturally inflected— SUBRAMANIAM: The film was about rice, with a big cast of people to go with it. It’s not about the big farmer versus the small farmer; it’s not a portrait of somebody. Suppose you're trying to talk of a forest—what leaves in the trees, in the undergrowth, in the bark, how it all connects. But, the forest is how you know where everything is, where the bark is relative to the leaves, relative to the water. In the marketplace, the bark and the leaves and the water are not so apparent. You have to draw them up. You need to keep coming back to that thing—the rice market. K. ForRTUN: Funny how rice can be located, photographed, but not the market. You had a heavy thing and an.abstraction. SARKAR: Unlike people, things just do a few things, so you can track them down. SUBRAMANIAM: It’s not just a story about a grain of rice: how it’s sown, grown, harvested, polished, eaten. Then the grain itself would be central—

and we would have made more use of it visually. But it’s not just about that. It’s about what happens to people around rice—an even more intangible area. Your visual mnemonic is not rice; it was not the story of rice, per se. What we were trying to do was look at that intangible area. K. ForTUN: Why, then, the title Meals Ready? SARKAR: In South India you see these boards marked “MEALS READY” everywhere—where you can get fiffen, thalis. It’s an announcement that food is ready. SUBRAMANIAM:

No, no. Not exactly. In Tamil, it means that a full meal is

ready to be served—at a flat rate. Essentially, it’s a way of indicating that it’s not just a snack joint; it’s a meals joint. For rice-based meals. One mound of rice, dumped on a steel plate or banana leaf, with some vegetables, pickle. The classical meal of the south. SARKAR: But, now, rice is getting more and more difficult to get, even in the south. They have to bring it in from outside. M. ForTUN: One thing that’s great about the film is that you do leave it as a question. Was there any pressure from Oxford, or from anyone who saw it here, to wrap it up and end with a message? Propose a solution, take a line? SUBRAMANIAM: There are a lot of lines, just no solution. There was some pressure; there’s still debate. But the goal from the start was to map out the

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whole problem. Complexity, basically. What we were trying to avoid was any suggestion that this was a simple phenomena. It’s certainly not only a matter of who has access to money, because even if we both do, it doesn’t mean the same thing, OK?

M. ForTuN: Why is complexity better than a simple straight story? Complexity in itself—why is this a good thing? SUBRAMANIAM:

Because, as far as we know, complexity has never been

tried on this issue. SARKAR: Also, anywhere where there are people, it’s complex. SUBRAMANIAM: Always, there are always more factors. I may be a professional today and can work around the handicaps that come with being a woman, but a lot of working women can’t. They have obstacles, of so many kinds. You can’t just go out and fix one of them and think you have the solution. Anyway, how can you not be complex when trying to portray a market? It was complex; many times we thought we were in way over our heads. SARKAR: I remember at one point when I met Barbara. She was saying something about how we should rewrite the proposal. I was beating around the bush but basically saying that I didn’t feel like changing it—not the complexity part of it. And, she said, “Finally, you have to remember that you, too,

are in the market—for film. Remember that.” SUBRAMANIAM: We wanted to make it around Pongal, the rice festival. It’s a very typical thing: to start with a festival, then come back to it at the end. I was very bored with that, so I looked around... . M. FortTwun: I’m pressing on this because it comes up so often in our work: whether complexity is valuable or just a mess that you haven’t worked down to a simple argument. I’d rather provide the kind of map you draw here. SUBRAMANIAM: There are situations where you need to offer a solution. Where you need to look at things looking for options. Like to big dams. K. FORTUN: Why is a rice market any different? SUBRAMANIAM: It’s not that a market is different; maybe the solution is as complex as the problem itself. And, we were working in the medium of film;

you do have to stop at some point. We couldn’t look for both and do both well, OK?

SARKAR: Once your head agrees that you have to show the complexity, then the challenge begins: how to show this complexity in ways that don’t seem complex but seem like a simple story that you can follow. That’s the challenge for a creative person. Whether you're writing a story or making a film. SUBRAMANIAM: Many people have commented on how the film doesn’t claim to have the wisdom of the world within it. Seriously. It’s not something we did intentionally. But I’m glad it’s happened. People are sick and tired of being told the answers. Meanwhile the world’s whirling all around them. We did, consciously, try to keep voice-over to a reasonable minimum. We tried to

THE WORK OF MARKETS use other people’s words, rather than our own. Not getting into lines, except for the way we pulled it together. K. ForTUN:

As a matter of form, isn’t voice-over somewhat analogous to

having a solution? SUBRAMANIAM: Definitely. K. Fortun: Isn't complex display of an issue itself political, because it’s so generative? A film with an easy one-line message; you could leave thinking that your thinking about the problem is finished. This kind of film, one can’t but leave with a head whirling with all the ways caste, gender, class, so much more .. . compounds. There’s a kind of momentum to it. SARKAR: But it need not seem apolitical. Think of James Agee’s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It’s a book that shows complexity yet has a very clear political line. One thing that might have helped: there were photographs by Walker Evans along with the book. One of them is of this southern sharecropper standing below a store; on the steps beside him are a whole lot of black people who are obviously the workers. The caption given was something like “Southern sharecropper with his laborers.” That same photograph has been cut so that you see only this white man with his feet apart, in a bloody authoritative kind of position, used to represent a southern sharecropper. Now the political line changes. One shows authority, in isolation. The other shows the network on which authority is based. It’s the same thing here. If you become too simple, then you end up taking a photograph of that sharecropper without the network that makes him who he is. Of course it’s a political line. Both photographs are. SUBRAMANIAM: But there is a difference in what we would call a campaign film. Even with the same footage. K. ForTUN: By contrast, this is a documentary? SUBRAMANIAM: Many people have told us how rare it is to have a film that deals with these issues, which doesn’t sound like agitprop. It’s not a campaign film. For once, we’re trying to accept that this thing is complex; it’s messy, OK?

Sarkar: A lot of Lefty sorts were very upset. M. ForTUN: One of the reasons for the Series we’re working with is to give people a venue for presenting material without voice-over. Structured around interviews or memoirs. With only a minimal amount of explanation or even interpretation, except as occurs within the material itself. It’s one of the

great things about the series; it’s also one of the things that has gotten most criticized. SUBRAMANIAM: I was very keen to make a film absolutely without voiceover. We tried various kinds of things. In some films, things can speak very clearly. But, here, where we were trying to connect things that didn’t appear in connection previously . .

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Meals Ready begins with a collage that takes viewers into a market, through preparations for Pongal—the rice harvest festival held every year on 15 January, through stalls of rice products, past billboards plastered with pious images of politicians, past a man eating rice heaped on a banana leaf, to a close-up shot of fingers deep within the mound of rice that centers a thali surrounded by small metal dishes holding sambar, chutney, and curd. Cuts between shots have been fast, paced to the music: there is a sense of movement and excitement. The opening sequence ends with a phrase that ties the film together: “The business of rice. The question of food.” The film will end with a return to Pongal—the last Pongal on which Rajamma, a local farmer,

will cook rice she has grown herself.

“Walajabad, like many towns in the region, has become a rice packing center—with cartloads of paddy making their way into town every morning and truckloads of polished rice leaving every evening for the big city... . Walajabad has a local nickname: WalajaBAD ... ° because the business of rice is no longer a business of hope.”

Rajamma, a farmer who owns

one acre of land, producing five bags of rice a year, which is only enough for two or three months. Here she makes a kolam, a rice powder design redone daily at the entry to homes in South India. Today, even Rajamma is moving from rice to sugarcane.

Ramanathan, a Brahmin farmer who owns twenty acres. Ramanathan is one of few Brahmins left in the Tamil countryside, after the “ousting” of Brahmins in the 1920s and 1930s following protests by the Justice Party. Ramanathan explains that the “profit margin for rice is very low. In 1960, if you sold paddy for Rs 1,000, net profit was Rs 900. Labor and other things, only Rs 100. Today, if you sell for Rs 3,000, net profit is only Rs 500.”

Part of the problem is attributed to the erosion of the tank irrigation system, which was taken over by the government and which “people quit seeing as a community asset’”’ (according to a local environmentalist). The water crisis

has created a new class of middlemen—water sellers who are able to dig deep wells. Declining profits are also attributed to chemical fertilizers: the expense of buying it; the way it “sucks”’ nutrients from the soil and hardens it, making plowing more difficult. Fertilizers, too, have created new social roles: for fertilizer agents and various kinds of moneylenders.

Landless laborers sowing, weeding, and har-

vesting paddy.

Thirunavakarasu, one of twenty-five mill owners in town. His family set up their mill in 1935 and modernized it during the mid-1980s. The wealth and status of mill owners give them easy access to loans from banks, which

allows them to negotiate the cash-flow problems created by the four-month growing cycle for rice—in their interest. Mill owners advance money to growers, for guarantee of paddy at harvesttime—when scales are set against the small farmer, who has little posi-

tion to negotiate when faced with underweighing, arbitrary deductions for poor quality, all of which are exacerbated by the small size of the deals they can make.

Neela (eff), a mill worker who comments on the effects of mechanization and the change from payment in kind to payment in cash. Thirunavakarasu has already explained: “In the old days, we gave laborers one measure of rice and broken rice per eight bags produced. Modernization has improved production, so we now pay at arate of Rs | per bag. . . . This

is better for us. We just pay cash and send them off.” Before, Neela’s family ate the daily measure of rice each evening, the broken rice in the morning, and used the cash for other things. “Now we spend all the cash on rice.”

The temple at Paliservaram, seven kilometers from Thirunavakarasu’s mill. The temple was built by Chola kings. Today, temple trustees are Marwaris and Gujaratis, who have been financing the growing of rice in the region since the nineteenth century. Patronage of temples secures their social position.

One of Walajabad’s pawnbrokers—“‘the safest business, the only one which is a plus business.”

Vijaya, the only woman shopkeeper in town, explains gender dynamics: ‘“‘Generally ladies are given work because they do it sincerely, and even then they are paid less.” Six out of ten households in Walajabad depend on women wage earners. Comments one: “Men can keep untimely hours and no one questions them. But if we return home even after seven

P.M., we are expected to explain the delay.”

The school run by the trust. Trustees have high

status.

Chinannukutty, a self-made man, free-tradeadvocating politician, and local legend. Politics is an investment for Chinannukutty, “like many others he has made, to reestablish him-

self in his ancestral village.” He has also invested in poultry, vegetables, sugarcane, fish farming, and fertilizers—which he now sells

to both Rajamma and Ramanathan. He is the only man in the village to openly pipe water from the Palau River to his fields.

A 1993 government report titled “Liberalizing Indian Agriculture,” provides the backdrop: “Let Indian produce fetch the best price, so the farmer is enthused to grow more.” The filmic response: “The small farmer’s ability to get the best price for their produce is compromised even before their crop is sold. On the other hand, it works to your advantage if you are an upper-caste male with a large landhold-

ing. Can market reforms that focus on price and ignore these disparities ever reduce them? Or will the free market only serve to heighten these differences?”

THE WORK OF MARKETS Notes

1. As Robert Reich explains: “Symbolic analysts solve, identify and broker problems by manipulating symbols. They simplify reality into abstract images that can be rearranged, juggled, experimented with, communicated to other specialists, and then, eventually, transformed back into reality. The manipulations are done with analytic tools, sharpened by experience. The tools may be mathematical algorithms, legal arguments, financial gimmicks, scientific principles, psychological insights about how to persuade or to amuse, systems of induction or deduction, or any other set of techniques for doing conceptual puzzles” (1992, 178). 2. “In the older, high-volume economy, a ‘professional’ was one who had mastered a particular domain of knowledge. The knowledge existed in advance, ready to be mastered. It had been recorded in dusty tomes or codified in precise rules and formulae. Once the novitiate had dutifully absorbed the knowledge and had passed an examination attesting to its absorption, professional status was automatically conferred—usually through a ceremony of appropriately medieval pageantry and costume. . . . But in the new economy—replete with unidentified problems, unknown solutions and untried means of putting them together—master of old domains of knowledge isn’t nearly enough to guarantee a good income” (Reich 1992, 181-82). 3. Cornel West’s description of contemporary cultural critics is relevant here, so long as his reference to co-option is understood in terms of contextual constraints rather than in terms suggestive of “selling out”: “The new cultural politics of difference are neither simply oppositional in contesting the mainstream (or malestream) for inclusion, nor transgressive in the avantgardist sense of shocking conventional bourgeois audiences. Rather, they are distinct articulations of talented (and usually privileged) contributors to culture who desire to align themselves with demoralized, demobilized,

depoliticized and disorganized people in order to empower and enable social action and, if possible, to enlist collective insurgency for the expansion of freedom, democracy and individuality. This perspective impels these cultural critics and artists to reveal, as an integral component of their production, the very operations of power within their immediate work contexts (i.e., academy, museum, gallery, mass-media). This strategy,

however, also puts them in an inescapable double-bind—while linking their activities to the fundamental, structural overhaul of these institutions, they often remain financially dependent on them (so much for ‘independent’ creation). For these critics of culture, theirs is a gesture that is simultaneously progressive and co-opted” (1990, 20). 4. Meals Ready was produced by Other Media Communication (Delhi), for Queen Elizabeth House, IDC, with the support of Bafbara Harris-White, Oxford University,

and the Overseas Development Agency. 5. The timescape of Subramaniam and Sarkar’s work around television seems noteworthy: it was only in 1984 (the year of the Bhopal disaster) that Doordarshan, the government-controlled broadcasting service, commissioned the first serial to draw significant numbers of viewers. Hum Long (We People), inspired by Mexican “prodevelopment soaps,” was initially developed as part of an argument that government control over Indian television was necessary to ensure a balance between education and entertainment. Only a few years before, for the occasion of the Asian Games in 1982,

had the Indian government initiated the expansion of television beyond a few metropolitan areas and introduced color broadcasting. Hum Long was supposed to teach

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family-planning in a series of 156 episodes about the life of a lower-middle-class urban family; the first few shows were mercilessly didactic—no one watched. Show fourteen brought the shift: Hum Long became a breathless soap opera shorn of a schoolmarm’s edge; the show became a great success. By 1985 Doordarshan was premiering private sponsorship of programs, leading to Ramanand Sagar’s renowned reproduction of the Hindu epic Ramayana. Sixty million watched, many of whom burned incense or took purifactory baths before gathering for what became a Sunday morning ritual throughout India. Doordarshan earned Rs 20 million in advertising revenues. Doordarshan’s monopoly remained relatively unthreatened until the war in the Persian Gulf, when CNN began transmitting into India. Not long after, Star transmissions out of Hong Kong was hooked into nearly half a million Indian households; a year later the figure soared to two million households. 6. Anil Sadgopal played a lead role in the early years of activism in response to the Bhopal disaster. Only one example of the kind of intervention he made: In late February 1989, Dr. Satish Dhawan, former chairman of the Indian Space Research Institute, an-

nounced to the press that Bangalore’s scientific community would be filing a petition before the Indian Supreme Court to voice collective protest against the out-of-court settlement of the Bhopal case. This announcement followed a lecture at Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science by Sadgopal, who argued that the Supreme Court would have a difficult time rejecting a review petition filed by the scientific community, and that the two primary reasons for the “Bhopal sellout” were lack of human conscience and badquality science education. 7. Many argue that shifting responsibility for rural education to the voluntary sector was a way for the government of India itself to avoid responsibility. An Economist survey of India in February 1997 reports that while India has promised to increase the share of GDP spent on education to 6 percent, the ratio has actually dropped since 1992-93, when education spending was cut. Now India spends less than 4 percent, with only 65 percent of that going toward primary education. Skewed spending toward secondary and especially university education accounts in part for the surplus labor of graduates who have populated the voluntary sector during certain periods. It also accounts for the ways India is able to attract foreign investment interested in cheap skilled labor. The outsourcing of software development and pharmaceutical manufacture to India has been particularly visible. 8. Figures provided by Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze indicate that in the late 1980s, barely half of all boys in rural areas between ages 5 and 9 attended school; the figure for girls was 40 percent. These figures, however, conceal significant variation between states. In Kerala 87 percent of boys and 83 percent of girls ages 5 to 9 attended school, while in Uttar Pradesh only 45 percent of boys and 28 percent of girls attended. Average rural literacy rates for 1987—88 were 73 percent for boys ages 10 to 14 and 52 percent for girls of the same age. In Madhya Pradesh, where Surajit worked, average rural literacy rates for this age group were 68 percent for boys and 40 percent for girls. In rural Kerala 98 percent of both boys and girls ages 10 to 14 could read in the late 1980s. The worst figures came from Rajasthan, where 77 percent of the boys in this group could read, but only 22 percent of the girls (Dreze and Sen, 195, 112, 47).

9. Most commentators track the fiscal crisis that brought on aggressive liberalization

THE WORK OF MARKETS

measures in 1991—92 to the Gulf War, which caused an acute fuel shortage. Loss of access to Soviet oil in the late 1980s is also noted. 10. At the outset, the government of India reacted to satellite with antagonism, denouncing it as a “cultural imperialism” and considering both bans on dish antennae and the jamming of foreign signals through an earth station in western India. As of February 1997 there were at least five digital platforms planning to beam into India, despite claims that digital services could not be expected to make money anytime soon. Digitization will allow providers access to the multiple channels necessary to tailor their feeds to specific audiences, with specific language preferences (Krishen 1993). References Dreze, Jean, and Amartya Sen. 1995. India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferguson, R., M. Gever, and T. T. Minh-ha, eds. 1990. Out There: Marginalization and

Contemporary Cultures. Cambridge: MIT Press. Krishen, Pradip. 1993. “Cinema and Television.”

In India Briefing. Edited by Oldenburg. Oldenburg, Philip, ed. 1993. India Briefing. Boulder, Colo.: Westview. Singhal, Arvind, and Everett Rogers. 1989. India’s Information Revolution. London: Sage. Reich, Robert, 1992 [1991]. The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism. New York: Vintage Books. West, Cornel. 1990. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Edited by Ferguson, Gever, and Minh-ha.

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BRANDHORST: We have had this culture that says you gotta do everything with paperwork—you gotta have dual, triple, and quadruple redundancy on things that would have never failed anyway. . . . My last project came in under schedule and under budget. In that contract, there were zero change orders. The contractors start building the thing, and then they want to come in and say, “You want to change it, right?” And I said, “No. There are no change orders. Your objective is to deliver this hardware in two years. . . And we’re not going to talk about change orders. That’s paperwork.” And they had to change their internal business systems—there were great stresses in these companies. But we ended up with a much more efficient process, with a team that truly worked and did it and did the paper that they had to do. But not these other kinds of paper that you don’t need to do. Davis-FLoypb: And so you're saying that if you used that streamlined kind of process to build an RLY, that you could do it for $2 billion instead

of $15 billion? BRANDHorsT: Yeah. Probably could. Cox: Close. See, it’s like building a house. The guy starts to build it, and halfway up you're saying, “I don’t like the windows there,” or, “Let’s tear up the foundation because I want to move the plumbing.” Now do you think that’s gonna cost you some money? Davis-FLoyb: Of course. Cox: Well, that’s what the government does, all too frequently. Davis-FLoybD: They change it. Cox: They change it. And, the contractor depends upon the changes when he makes the bid in the first place. Because there’s a huge profit every time you change. . . . The companies live on the government agreeing to changes, not on the original contract. Davis-FLoyD: Wow. Well, I was excited when I first heard that NASA was

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ROBBIE E. DAVIS-FLOYD

going to build an X33 —it sounded good until I learned that X means “experimental.” They’re building an experiment rather than the actual thing. Gary Lee and Ray Garbos were telling me earlier today that the most efficient thing to do would be to build a real, not an experimental, SSTO.

BRANDHOoRST: Right. Davis-FLoyp: And put all the money into that. But, instead, the money’s going into the designs for subscale prototypes for the SSTO, . . . which won't actually penetrate the atmosphere. And it’Il take three to four years to design and build the prototype. And, then, based on that, then maybe you do, maybe you don’t go for the next stage. . . . In the meantime, Motorola and Teledesic will be launching their big communication satellite networks, and that initial business will be lost. BRANDHORST: Right. Davis-FLoyp: Why does it have to be that way? BRANDHORST: It doesn’t. The point is that if an industry was to decide “I see a market out there, that I can capture, and I believe in our designs,” then

they should build. Cox: And that’s exactly what France and Japan and others are going to do, when they don’t start with all this past history. BRANDHoRST:

When you see a void in the market, you can decide to fill it.

And you do it on the guess of whether you’re going to make a profit on that. And sometimes you’re right. And sometimes you’re wrong. Boeing bet their company on the 747. It wasn’t the government that came in and said, “We need an airliner that will carry five hundred people to Europe.” Cox: It was a tough decision. BRANDHORST: Yes, it was. And, they recognized that they bet the company on it. But that’s what business is about. Cox: Instead of talking about entrepreneurs as risk takers, why don’t we think about them as risk “managers”? A risk taker says, “Oh, you’re willing to take risks.” What you want to do is manage, responsibly manage risk. BRANDHorsT: I agree. And when you hear the companies talk, they’re all caught up in this old way of doing business, all this paperwork. No rocket has ever been built that will lift the paperwork that it took to create it [laughter]. OK? And, we don’t need that. We need enough of that—you need the right kind of paperwork. But you don’t need what we’ ve got. You don’t need the thousands of engineers working on, each working on a little piece. You need an integrated activity with fewer people. Davis-FLoyp: It seems so simple and clear when you two sit here and say this is what is needed. And yet, in the taxi today, Gary and Ray were saying, “Well, we’re going to lose Motorola’s Iridium business and part of the Teledesic launches—those will go to the Japanese and the French and the Russians.”” Lockheed has a stake in the Russian commercial launch program, so

COMMERCIALIZING OUTER SPACE they won't totally lose. But I want to know—why are we building an X instead of the real thing? Cox: Well, let me go back now. Remember that roundtable I went to in Washington a year ago? During that meeting, the head of Lockheed, Dan Tellup, got up and said, “X series is unnecessary. Lockheed is prepared to put on the table the full-up vehicle and go full bore.”” And Dan Goldin, NASA administrator, said, “We are planning an X vehicle series with joint government-industry financing.” Davis-FLoypD: Oh, no. Why? BRANDHORST: Partly because it fills a lot of NASA jobs. Davis-FLoyD:

So he consciously, knowing, I mean, he had advice from in-

dustry that this was a marginal endeavor and he chose to do it anyway? Cox: Well, the truth is that industry was split on this issue, so he did get conflicting advice. Davis-FLoypD: And Congress is agreeing with him? I mean why —? Cox: Well, you heard the chief congressman speak today. His district benefits by going to X vehicle. The political process is very complicated. Davis-FLoyD: I see. So, short-term gain in jobs, and we lose in the longterm launch market. Cox: It’s a complicated system. BRANDHOrST: That’s why I talked earlier about changing the culture. Davis-FLoyD: How do you guys keep your spirits up? I mean, you can see the problems that could have been avoided and you have to just sort of work with that. ... BRANDHORST: Some days are better than others. Some days are diamonds. Some days are stones [laughter]. I mean, you can grind away on us, but any system created by humans can be subverted by humans. Davis-FLoyp: I mean, it is phenomenal how administrators can make decisions that affect thousands of people. BRANDHORST: Yep. You see, what the people get worried about. .. . “Do we dare bet the company?” The answer is, ““Why not?” Isn’t that what entrepreneurs do all the time? Davis-FLoypD: Well, evidently, the president of Lockheed was willing to, more or less, bet the company. Cox: He was. He said so. I was right there. BRANDHORST: Now Lockheed could have chosen to no-bid this current activity. Cox:

Well, be careful... . I had a conversation after the end of SATWG

today. The conversation was simple. There are three prime bidders. Conversation was . . . what happens if all three refuse to bid on the NASA contract? BRANDHORST: Right. Davis-FLoyD: Whoa. That would be powerful.

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ROBBIE E. DAVIS-FLOYD

Cox: Yes. Davis-FLoyp: That would be a real statement. .. . “We’re not going to play this game.” Cox: This was the discussion. Davis-FLoypD:

So instead of bidding the NASA contract, why don’t the

three teams just get together and build the rocket? BRANDHORST: That’s one option. But the other option is that any one of them can go it alone. If they have the courage of their convictions. Davis-FLoyp: So it would be a lot easier for one company to make the decision to do it alone if all three companies agreed not to bid the contract. Because, otherwise, it will be two of them, or one of them at least, getting all

this federal money, while the other one is taking all the risk. BRANDHOrST:

That’s right. So even if Lockheed says, “Yeah, we could

build this on our own,” and they are willing to, you have to say, “Wait. If there’s still a federal government contract out there and Boeing gets it, then we can’t compete because it’s not costing Boeing as much money to develop their model—they’re going to get subsidized by the government.’ So Lockheed would be weakening itself, and they would have to make a decision whether to do that. Unless they all get together and decide to no-bid. Davis-FLoyp: Is it really possible that they might decide to no-bid? Cox: Uh...I’d have to give you a Las Vegas bet answer. I wouldn’t give you fifty-fifty that they wouldn’t, but I will give you fifty-fifty they would each and every one consider it. BRANDHORST: Yeah. There’s enough dissatisfaction. Every one of the three is going to be thinking seriously about it. Davis-FLoypb: How are these three team arrangements working? Cox: [have heard that the Boeing—McDonnell Douglas merger, in order to bid on this, is having difficulties. In some cases, the cultures have not adjusted very well between the two companies. Davis-FLoypb: I see. McDonnell Douglas already had a bit investment in the Delta Clipper, right? Was that the problem? Cox: Well, it was actually more than that. There were three cultures. There was a McDonnell Douglas out at Huntington Beach that had the Delta Clipper. There was a McDonnell Douglas at Saint Louis, which is a totally dif-

ferent culture, with another design that was not the Delta Clipper. And then there was Boeing, who had a third design that was not either of the two. They mushed them together. And instead of playing a win-win game, they made an arbitrary “you will go this way” —which may have generated some unhappiness among two out of the three. BRANDHorsT:

It may not have been arbitrary, but, I mean it was—

Cox: —1in essence— BRANDHORST: —an inappropriate decision.

COMMERCIALIZING OUTER SPACE Davis-FLoybD: But —there’s a whole book about how Boeing changed their culture, developed all these management skills, refined the teaming approach... Cox: They have done all those things —within Boeing. Tribal community number one may do all this learning, but when they interact with tribal community number two, they may not reconcile anything. BRANDHORST: And they may not share. And they may not understand. Davis-FLoyp: Is it that the engineers refuse to get along with each other? Or is it that the management didn’t allow the context within which the engineers could— BRANDHORST: No. First of all, the management didn’t allow the context. Cox: Right. BRANDHORST: But, second, the engineers would have had a great deal of difficulty in dealing with it and building the trust up between the groups. In our community, particularly, trust is very important. [But it’s hard to build trust among the workers when you start with top-down management decisions that don’t work.] Far too often, we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory—by management decisions. There were some challenges there that were not insurmountable. . .. But they chose not to surmount them. Cox:

And look, Robbie, this explains some of my dance characteristics.

Davis-FLoyD: Cox:

Your Dance of Whitewater Management?

[Yes.] When I do the dance, and I get too near the edge, sometimes I

have to back off. Because it’s better to back off than to get picked off and you're no longer a player.

BRANDHORST: That’s right. Davis-FLoypD: I see. So, you have to stay in the game? Cox: Ihave to stay in the game! You don’t have to say in the box, but you do have to stay in the game. Davis-FLoyp: And you can change the game while you're in it. But, if you get too far out of it, then you lose. Cox AND BRANDHOorsT: Right!

DavIs-FLoyD: So it is a dance. Cox: It’s a hell of a dance! P BRANDHORsT: It’s a hell of a dance. You’re steering a raft down this real risky river. How far out can you go? And then you go over the waterfall, it’s over with. Cox: And you may have two outcasts right at this table with you. On the edge. Or maybe over it? [Laughter. ] BRANDHorsT:

Yeah, that’s what the deal is.

Cox: That is what the deal is. God, I think it’s wonderful to have such a dynamic dance, myself! [Laughing.] Even though it would be a hell of a lot easier to retire and go vegetate somewhere and watch television.®

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Notes 1. The financial crisis in the Far East in 1998 has forced Japan to cancel virtually all earth-orbit and lunar-base commercial activities, such as tourism plans, including theme

parks and space hotels. 2. In keeping with his consistent efforts to mediate the government/industry, competition/cooperation dichotomies that generate the dynamic of the contemporary aerospace story, Ken conceived SATWG as a networking and information-sharing enterprise. The spirit of the meetings encompasses cooperative and mutually supportive relationships between NASA and industry, and among corporations as well. Nevertheless, this harmonious ideal often comes into conflict with various companies’ insistence, at times, on the high-level secrecy of certain of their projects. When such conflicts arise, the engineer making the presentation will pause and state apologetically, with head downturned, that his company requires secrecy and so he can say no more about this particular issue. Everyone nods understandingly and the presentation goes on with the nonclassified material: Cox: Can you tell us if you are going to form partners with other industries, or consortia, or any plans with regards to technology demonstrations, etc.? SPEAKER: Not really, not at this time—lI wish I could share more with you—but, uh [someone in background loudly says, “Could you repeat the question?” generating general laughter]. The question I can answer is that our strategy is to basically either form partnerships or get funding for this vehicle. When the information cannot be shared, as we have just seen, an effort is made to make that refusal as polite as possible. I discovered when I probed into areas that were too secret to discuss that one strategy for accomplishing this often employed by the business managers at SATWG

is to attempt to make the refusal invisible, and I learned

a lot about the art of doublespeak: Davis-FLoyD: So what exactly is your role in this possible joint venture with the Russians? Gary LEE: The details are what we are keeping very proprietary at this point. Davis-FLOYD: But what’s your role in the process? LEE: Personal role? Davis-FLOYD: Yes. LEE: Just as a technologist right now. We have a separate organization coming out of research and a central engineering function. . . . |have people assigned now fulltime to pull together the study. Davis-FLoyD: You have people assigned? Are you in charge of this process? LEE: The Boeing company is a matrix organization... . 3. In Disembodying Women (Harvard University Press, 1993), Barbara Duden analyzes this image as a dead abstraction of “life.” But for the SATWG attendees, “the blue planet” profoundly connotes the astronauts’ visual and visceral experience of one world consciousness—an experience in which they can share through this image; for them, the image of the blue planet with its swirling atmosphere is one of surpassing beauty and transcendence—a visual culmination of “the vision thing” and a powerful testimony to the worth of the space enterprise in which they are so personally engaged. 4. Flight technology demonstration programs are being built today, and both the X34 and X33 may provide valuable information for future space-movement activities. How-

COMMERCIALIZING OUTER SPACE

ever, by 1998 it became clear that the SSTO was not going to represent the wave of the immediate future. Rather, the present trend is to explore two-stage-to-orbit launch capabilities by upgrading the present shuttle or by building a second-generation shuttle. The key drivers that have taken the single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle out of competition are the concern over operational costs and the need for some agreed-upon combination of commercial and government cost sharing. Virtually all of the commercial space activities in earth orbit will depend upon expendable launch vehicles in the next decade. 5. Here is how Ken describes the “Dance of Permanent Whitewater Management”’: “We are living in a time of the most rapid change in the history of human development and evolution, where the challenge is to provide both individual and collective leadership in the midst of this turbulent environment. Organizations and institutions must adapt to increasing levels of complexity to remain viable and to properly evolve. We must take individual responsibility and avoid searching for someone higher in calm water who, we hope, knows the big picture. We should support lifelong learning and encourage individual discipline, integrity, risk taking, and leadership practices. In the area of teaming, we must develop creative partnering skills and utilize dialogue, shared imagination, and active listening in order to align intentions, visions, and goals. We should encourage individuals to create meaning in the work environment, and collectively value diversity, creativity, and intuition.” 6. Far from retiring to watch TV, Ken continues on in the dance. Since this essay was written, he has gotten NASA, Rice University, and various high-tech companies to pool their resources to put on two conferences in Houston on nanotechnologies. The second of these, the International Nanospace Conference of 1998, involved eleven countries and focused on blending nanotechnologies and biotechnologies for application for human exploration and settlement of the solar system. His most recent NASA assignment is to serve as the chief technologist for human exploration and development for space, coordinating all the technologies for NASA’s various space projects. He has provided me with an update on recent SATWG activities: In June 1996 SATWG was hosted by the Air Force Space Command. The meeting theme was “Cooperative Space Strategies.” In October 1996 the host was Lockheed, and the meetings focused on “Earth Orbit Operations and Development as an Enabler for Exploration.” Auburn University was the host for the April 1997 meetings, and the theme was ‘Facilitating and Nurturing Human Exploration and Development of Space.” Boeing hosted in October 1997, appropriately on the theme “Space Plane.” April 1998 saw SATWG hosted by the Shuttle Upgrade Program Office and centering on a discussion of ““Cross-Cutting Partnerships and Shuttle Upgrade Technologies.” The host for the latest meetings, in October 1998, was the U.S.A. and Shuttle Upgrade Program Office on “Space Launch Operations for the Future.” The original Strategic Avionics Technology Working Group (SATWG) was renamed the Aerospace Technology Working Group (ATWG) before the October 1998 meeting in Florida. The ATWG charter identified four focus technology areas as (1) electronics, (2) software, (3) systems engineering, and (4) operations engineering. These represent a strong shift away from policy discussions and a reorientation toward technology sharing and development. Recent products of ATWG discussions have included:

48]

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ROBBIE E. DAVIS-FLOYD

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Assessing standards and avionics design guides Reviewing cross-cutting technologies Evaluating new ways of doing business and cooperative sharing concepts Recommending potential upgrades for existing NASA systems Proposing improvements for NASA/Industry systems

According to Ken, emphasis in the future will focus on “integrating avionics technology with operations concepts development, engineering design, and ground/flight demonstrations,” as well as on ensuring that ATWG concepts and suggestions get acted upon by NASA and the aerospace industry.

483

CONTRIBUTORS

Ron Burnett is president of the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.

Robbie Davis-Floyd is a research fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. Alexei Elfimov achieved his doctorate degree in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. Michael M. J. Fischer is director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kim Fortun teaches in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Michael Fortun is a historian of science and executive director of the Institute for Sci-

ence and Interdisciplinary Studies at Hampshire College. Marie Theresa Hernandez is a photographer and doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. Gudrun

Klein is a research associate in the Department of Anthropology

at Rice

University. Jennifer Law is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

George E. Marcus is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Rice University and is the founding editor of the Late Editions series. Jeff Petry, a doctoral graduate of the Rice University anthropology department, has

worked for several years in Thailand. Olga Vainshtein is a professor teaching in the graduate program at the Russian State University for the Humanities and is a permanent research scholar at the Center for

Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Moscow.

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INDEX

Abbey, George, 462, 463 academia: in contemporary Russia, 225-55; in Thailand, 111; writers in, ix Adorno, Theodor, 237, 239, 258, 264, 266, 267 advertising: career in, 288, 289, 293-98, 304; writing, 292; and Year 2000 problem, 399, 404 aerospace industry, 433—82 Agee, James, 335 AIDS: clinic at Cambridge City Hospital, 21, 25, 78; epidemic, 15, 57, 96n. 5; Eric Av-

Antonioni, Michaelangelo, 364 apartheid: complicity in, 169; restrictions during, 152, 192n. 2; structure of, 154, 161, 168, 179. See also South Africa

Apollo mission, 438, 453, 461, 465, 471-72 art: alternative, 1, 12; alternative centers for, 349-75, 377-92; American Indian, 29—30,

73; avant-garde, 350, 352, 354, 362, 364, 369; classical, 58, 64; in clinic space, 19—

21, 22—23; collaborative, 385; collectors, 29-30, 38, 57, 73, 79-80; and community,

ery’s artistic/medical work with, 79—92; pa-

353, 354, 356, 364, 365, 366, 368, 369, 371,

tients, 17, 19, 95; as retraumatizing, 30. See

380; dressmaking as, 211; and education,

also HIV testing Hi air traffic control systems, 397, 400, 402, 415-16 Alsace, 377-79, 381, 383 alternativity, 1,4, 5,8 Alvarado Genesi, Eduardo, 271, 274-75, 281

Alvarado American Amnesty 68-72,

Ortiz, Horacio, 11, 257—85 Baptist Mission, 106, 141 International, 16, 19, 24, 51, 64, 66, 75, 76, 97n. 9, 142, 299

382, 385; experimental, 349-75; funding for, 365—66, 375n. 3, 388—89; German Expressionist, 22; and history, 37, 351, 357; installations, 5, 10, 38, 79-80, 83-88,

151-53, 158, 169-70, 183, 354, 366, 425; international, 351, 356; mail, 355—57; markets, 63—68, 94; and neighborhoods, 383— 85, 388, 390; performance, 5, 10, 79, 83—

ANC (African National Congress), 160, 163,

88, 94, 95, 350, 351, 353, 358-60, 373, 397, 424-25; and photocopy technology, » 356; and poetry, 357; and politics, 349, 350,

185 anthropologist: positioning of, 152, 157-58 anthropology: aesthetics of, 104; and art, 384;

69; and race, 75, 362-63; redefinitions of, 350, 365, 369, 378; religious, 20-21; and

critical, 1; and film, 291; globalization and,

research, 384; ritual in, 67, 68; South Afri-

103-49; graduate students in, 18; and inter-

can, 9, 10-11, 151—94; and trauma, 73, 89;

353, 354, 364, 372; postmodern, 350, 368—

pretation, 437; and myth, 434; postmodern

video, 1, 381. See also art actions; artists;

era of, 265; program at Rice University,

printmaking

103, 105, 106; and philosophy, 136; and

art actions, 79-88, 94

scenario writing, 395—96, 397; in Russia,

Art History Gallery, University of Wisconsin-

240-41, 247, 250, 251

Milwaukee, 83, 85-86

INDEX artists: aboriginal, 361; as collaborators, 359;

and community, 380, 381, 383, 391; hiphop, 381, 389, 390, 391; Indonesian, 371; needs of, 354; as researchers, 351; rap, 381,

385, 389, 391, 392; self-defined, 5, 11, 66— 67; teaching, 366 audience: bourgeois, 345n. 3; bureaucratic, 107; choice of, 57, 163, 165—68, 293; ethnicity and, 383; film, 331, 333; museum, 424 —25; in performance art, 352; reactions of, 25, 156, 354, 371; and satellite industry, 347n. 10; television, 320; for woodblock prints, 64; writing for different, 114-15,

141 authors: affinity with subjects, 2; as cultural producers, 5; recurrent participation of in series, 9 Avery, Alfred Harlow, 26-27 Avery, Eric, 10, 15-102 Avery, Harlow Fuller, 27-28

10; trace of, 176-77; vulnerability of, 178; in fashion design, 210 Boeing Co., 435, 440, 442-44, 449, 458, 473-74, 476, 478 Boone, Mary, 67 Borain, Nic, 166, 167 border, the: and art, 383; cross-cultural work addressing, 379, 381, 386-87, 390; crossing of, 11, 377, 390-91; and economic interests, 378; folklore of, 257, 260-61, 264, 276; languages and cultures at, 141— 42, 377; myth and folklore of, 260-61; Texas-Mexican, 257, 263, 266, 269, 272,

276, 281, 283 Botha, P. W., 154 Brand, Stewart, 405 Brandhorst, Henry, 475-79 Breytenbach, Breyten, 153 Brooker Group, the, 108-9, 113, 122-23, 127, 136. See also consulting Brown, Jon, 453

Bachelard, Gaston, 40

Bruguera, Tania, 367

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 252

Bull, Hank, 350, 352-53, 359-74, 375n. 1

banking systems: in India, 288, 291, 306-9,

bureaucracy: academics as a, 239, 243; com-

Baudelaire, Charles, 229, 230 Baudrillard, Jean, 268, 273

munist, 234-36; as a lifestyle, 245 Burma, 106, 141-42 Burnett, Ron, 1, 4, 12, 13n. 1 Burns, Chester, 87 Burroughs, William, 358

Beck, Ulrich, 396, 404

Bush, George, 57, 62, 76

340; and Scottish legend, 412-13; and Year

2000 problem, 417, 418-19, 421 Barthes, Roland, 172

Becker, David, 79-80 Beckett, Samuel, 176

Behr, Mark, 11, 157, 159-68, 187, 189, 192n.5

Belaya, Irina, 195, 214-15 Benjamin, Walter, 15-16, 93, 94, 95n. 1, 261,

263, 264, 267, 284n. 10 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 230, 252, 253n. 3 Bettelheim, Bruno, 262, 263, 264 Biko, Steven, 10-11, 171-75, 178-79, 183-

84, 192n.7 Bingham, George, 59 Bischofsberger, Bruno, 67 Bitov, Andrei, 241, 254n. 11 Blake, William, 20 Blanchot, Maurice, 137 Bloch, Ernest, 284n. 10 Blok, Aleksandr, 232-33 body, the: as a site for mourning, 171-72,

174-75, 178; socialist approach to, 209—

Cage, John, 354, 357, 360, 371, 372 Canada, artistic work in, 349-75; race relations in, 362-63 Cardenas, Jose, 269, 273-75, 278 Carmichael, Douglas, 400, 403 Carpentier, Alejo, 276-77 Carpignano, Paolo, 258 caste system, 328, 332, 344 Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town: artistic interventions at, 152, 158-59, 164-65, 169, 171-72, 179, 192n. 6, 200 Certeau, Michel de, 6-7 Chaadaey, Piotr, 230, 252 Challenger disaster, 454, 473. See also NASA: shuttle program; space; space program change, contemporary, ix, xi—xii, 2, 3, 5, 9, 227, 372, 451, 457 Chatchai Choonhaven (former prime minister of Thailand), 113, 126

487

INDEX class: and audience, 64; and Soviet fashion, 197, 206 clinic: indigent, 21; moved into an art space, 19-20, 58, 77-78, 83-88; the Rosenberg, 89-90 clothing: designer, 207—8, 213, 220-21; ideological message of, 196; ready-to-wear, 204, 210, 215, 217-19; simple cut-out, 210 Coe, Sue, 68, 71-73, 85, 94, 100nn. 32, 33 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 377 colonialism: dissolution of French, 380; and an imaginary other, 361; lack of in Thailand, 118, 140; legacy of in South Africa, 153-54, 157, 165, 179; transformation of in Africa, 388 collaboration: of artists and audiences, 425; “found,” 5; of government and industry, 435—40, 449-54, 461-62, 473, 475-76, 480n. 2; with situated persons, x, 2—3, 104 Collyns, Napier, 405 computer: code remediation, 398, 400—2, 409, 413; Macintosh, 411, 420; programmers, 397, 407-24, 428n. 16; systems testing, 408-9, 414-15, 418, 421; software and Y2K, 410, 416, 418, 420-21. See also consulting: computer; Year 2000 problem confession: alternative sites of, 156; amnesty for, 155; and audience, 168; in South African truth seeking, 152-53, 157—67, 187— 89, 192n.5 consulting: computer, 12-13, 120, 123, 135, 407—426; global financial, 106, 110, 115,

cultural critique, ix, x, 2—3, 9, 17-19, 104, 345n. 3 cultural studies, 1, 4 culture: American, 389; and class, 382, 389—

90; high, 380—82, 384, 388-89, 391; neighborhood, 385; redefinitions of, 382— 83; working class, 383-84 curanderas (healers), 267, 279-80 Cureton, Ken, 441—42

cyborg, 446-49 cynicism, 3—4, 7, 9-10, 324 Das, Veena, 184 Davis-Floyd, Robbie, 12 defense: American national, 400, 402, 412,

419; civil, 400, 403; and space program, 439, 443 Deleuze, Gilles, 18, 277 Desprez, Jean Louis, 76 development: ideologies of, 104; in India, 287, 289; and the Karen, 142—43; outsourcing

of, 138; Thai national, 103, 107, 111, 124; Third World, 129 Draper Labs/MIT, 435, 436, 442, 448, 472 Duchamp, Marcel, 356, 357

Diirer, Albrecht, 20, 81, 176 Dyson, Esther, 405 education: alternative in India, 288—89, 310; aerospace, 436; and art, 371; and class, 382; rural, 310—15, 343, 346nn. 7, 8; and Thai

economic policy, 127, 130-34; women’s in

120, 135, 404-5; management, 427n. 12;

Soviet Russia, 197, 205. See also Kishor

and Y2K, 406. See also Brooker Group, the

Bharati

Contemporary Arts Museum (CAM), Houston, 83—85

contingency planning, 397, 414, 416, 426 Coplan, David, 10 Copley, J. S., 75 corporations, multinational, 297, 302, 305; and Y2K, 403, 426 Corrections Corporation of America (CCA),

69-71, 100n. 31 Coste, Gerald, 25, 96n. 4

Elfimoy, Alexei, 10, 11 elites: creative, 227, 237; intellectual, 247

engineering: aerospace, 433-34, 439, 445— 48, 453-54, 457, 462, 471-73, 479 environment: contamination of the, 18, 123—

-“24; and logging, 116-18; and space commercialization, 447—48, 456—60; sustain-

ability of the, 454, 469 Estes, Billie Sol, 27-28, 97n. 12 ethnography: collaborative, 425; conventional,

Cox, Ken, 433-82

xii, xiv, 103; experimental, 103, 152-53;

Craig, Kate, 352, 353, 357-58, 362-66, 369— 70, 372 Craig, Mark, 456-57, 459-60

taposition, 396—97; multisited, 193n. 9;

“found,” 3; “in-house,” 135-36; and jux-

postmodern, 270; readers of, 141-42

Crow, Thomas, 354

euro currency, 402, 422-23

Cubitt, Sean, 364-65

European Parliament, 379, 385

INDEX European Space Agency (ESA), 440, 441, 445, 450 European Union, 379 Evans, Burke, 40, 50, 65, 97n. 14 evolution: human, 433, 437-38, 450, 455, 464, 466, 481n.5 expatriates: Indian, 288; in Thailand, 10, 104, 108—9, 120; Soviet, 231 expertise, 138, 289

Goldin, Dan, 462, 463, 466, 477 Goldsmith, Oliver, 151 Gémez-Pefia, Guillermo, 96n. 5, 424 Gonzalez, Yolanda, 262, 276, 277 Gorbachey, Raisa, 197 Gorky, Maxim, 232 Goscilo, Helena, 200 Gramsci, Antonio, 4 Grant, Bruce, 139

Greenblatt, Stephen, 221—22n. 9

farming: and caste system, 331; local, 336; organic, 327; small, 290, 329, 338-40, 343-44

Guattari, Felix, 18

fashion: in Soviet Russia, 11, 195-223 Fault Lines project, the, 151-59, 168-69,

Haraway, Donna, 448

192n.6 Federal Aviation Administration, 396, 400 Feinberg, Karen, 50, 86—87 fieldwork, 103-6; first, 18; among the Karen, 141-42; styles of, 20

Filliou, Robert, 349-51, 360, 372-73, 375n.1 film: Disney, 369—70; and gender, 328-30,

342 filmmaking: collage in, 336; educational, 288: documentary, 291, 296, 324-44; Soviet, 234, 254n. 9 Fischer, Michael M. J., 10, 12-13, 139 Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, 20, 57, 72, 76, 78, 83, 94 Fordred, Lesley, 9 Fortun, Kim, 10, 11 Fortun, Mike, 10, 11 Foster, Hal, 177-78 Foucault, Michel, 169-70, 186, 189, 228, 255n. 13 frontera, la. See border, the: Texas-Mexican

Fukuyama, Francis, 405 future: emergence of, xii; planning for, 462: and risk, 397 Galison, Peter, 396 games: chess, 395; simulation, 399-407; sociological, 402; strategy, 397 Gamelan, the, 361, 372 Garbos, Ray, 476 Garza Guajardo, Celso, 265, 265, 270, 273,

283 Geertz, Clifford, 326 genealogy, 262—63 Géricault, Théodore, 75 globalization, 107, 129, 140, 390

Hadler, Warren, 81, 83 Harris-White, Barbara, 326, 334, 345n. 4 Harvard Medical School, 16, 20, 94. See also medical education healers. See curanderas Heidegger, Martin, 156-57, 189, 191 Helms, Jesse, 57, 63, 99n. 27, 303 Henson, Dave, 138, 149n. 1 Hernandez, Marie Theresa, 11 heterotopias, 169-70, 186, 189 Hillis, Danny, 405 HIV testing: public, 21, 23-24, 84-85. See also AIDS; Zinberg HIV Clinic Holbein, Hans, 20, 58 Holder, Ferdinand, 81, 163 Holiday, Anthony, 163 Horn, Stephen, 400 Hunter, Joseph, 270-71 Hurstel, Jean, 379-92 Huyssen, Andreas, 3—4, 7, 188

imaginary, 225-26, 370 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS),

62-63, 68-69 Information Technology Association of America, 402, 427n. 4. See also technology Isenberg, David, 403 intellectuals: academics as, 226, 241; as dissidents, 231, 236-39, 253n. 5; fear of under Soviet regime, 234; oppression of, 244; organic, 225-26, 252, 324. See also intelligentsia intelligentsia: contemporary Russian, 11, 225, 252, 253 n. 6; creative, 242, 245, 251; critical, 250-51; history of Russian, 226-41;

Soviet, 195, 209, 221n. 1, 235-36. See also intellectuals intermedia movement, 355, 362, 367

489

INDEX International Monetary Fund (IMF), 145-46,

287, 401 Internet: developing Web sites on the, 108, 119-20, globalizing effect of the, 390; maintaining Web sites on the, 104—8; pornography on the, 116; Thai Board of Investment’s Web pages on the, 110, 112, 115-

Latour, Bruno, 396 Law, Jennifer, 9, 10-11 Lee, Gary, 444-45, 458, 473-74, 476, 480n. 2 Lenin, 197, 199, 231, 232 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 371

life history, 15, 96n. 6, 195 Life magazine, 19, 40, 55

16, 124 intertextuality, 105—6 interview: ambivalence in an, 5; autobiographical, 291—92; contexts of an, 288; descriptions in an, 195—96; editing of an,

Limonoy, Eduard, 206 Lockheed Co., 433, 435, 442—46, 449, 460, 466, 473-77, 481n. 6 Lorraine, 377—79, 381, 386-87

240—41; format of the, x, xiii, 8, 9, 16; journalistic, 240, 255n. 12; preparation for an, 25; role of languages in an, 378; shaping of an, 104; situated, x—xi; subjects, 138, 227, 259; as a form of writing, xi investors: foreign in Thailand. See Thailand Ivanoyna, Varvara, 208, 219

Lotman, Yuri, 240 Lown, Bernard, 20, 95

Lunacharsky, 232-33

Macbeth (William Shakespeare), 151, 153, 157, 167, 170-71, 185-87 magazines: and advertising in India, 295; international, 207, 216—17; Western fashion,

Johnson, Ray, 351

198-99, 207, 217; women’s of the Soviet era, 197—99, 213, 222n. 16. See also Life magazine; National Geographic magazine; zines Malinowski, Bronislaw, 397

Kahn, Hermann, 404

managed care, 22, 24, 57, 78, 94-95 Mandela, Nelson, 154, 156

Kaprow, Alan, 354, 357, 371

Mandelstam, Osip, 210

Karakhan, Vera, 196-97 Karen, the, 106-7, 140-43

Mander, Jerry, 325

Jager, Peter de, 406 Jartseva, Valentina, 195, 209, 216 Jesus Cepeda, Maria de (curandera), 267,

280

Kazavchinskaya, Tamara, 195, 203—4, 207,

210, 216-17, 222n. 22 Kelley, Jason, 407, 426n. 3 Kelly, Kevin, 405 Kernberg, Otto, 34 Khrushchev, 198, 233, 238 Kishor Bharati, 309-17, 327 Kiyooka, Roy, 351 Klein, Gudrun, 12 Klerk, F. W. de, 154 Koskinen, John, 400

©

Mapplethorpe, Robert, 84, 99n. 27 Marcus, George, 139, 193n. 9 markets: new configurations of, 288—89, 294; reforms of, 291, 344; representations of in film, 287, 289, 336—44; rice, 290, 328, 332-34, 336-41; satellite, 440—46; for

woodblock prints, 72; and Y2K problem, 399, 405 Martin, Winston, 33

Martin-Jones, Nigel, 400 Mary Ryan Gallery, 22, 79, 83, 85

* Marx, Karl, 172-74, 356, 396

Kosuth, Joseph, 187

Mayakovij, Vladimir, 210

Kozlov, Viktor, 245

McDonnell Douglas Co., 435, 443, 473-74, 478, 444, 449 McEvilley, Thomas, 67

Krog, Antjie, 184—85, 191 Krutikova, Irina, 195, 220-21

McLuhan, Marshall, 359, 360

Lacan, Jacques, 177—78, 185, 186 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 20, 95n. 2 Lamanova, Nadezhda, 196, 200, 210-13,

222n. 18 Lanna Enterprises, 103, 116, 119-20

Mead, Margaret, 397 Meadows, Donella, 405 Meals Ready (film), 287-91, 324-44, 345n. 4 media, xi, 48, 372; Russian, 240; and the Y2K

problem, 399, 402, 404, 406-7

INDEX medical education: ritualization of, 88; stu-

NASA: alternative visions in, 12; as a bureau-

dents’ experiences during, 51-56, 60-62, 77, 86; as trauma, 30, 32, 33. See also Har-

cracy, 434, 470; as collaborator, 435, 439,

vard Medical School; medical humanities;

322; interface with industry, 433, 441, 452, 455, 461, 473, 468, 477-78, 480n. 2, 482n. 6; as government owned, 436, 445, 454; power technology division of, 475; shuttle

medicine medical humanities, 35—36, 57, 86-87, 94 medical illustrator, 178-79 medicine: as art, 15-102; brutality of, 32, 77;

contemporary practice of, 10, 22; doctor-patient relationship in practice of, 22, 23; his-

464; culture of, 464 —65; film footage from,

program at, 437, 465-67, 472, 481n. 4. See

also Challenger disaster; space; space program

tory of, 22; redefinitions of, 24. See also

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 84,

medical education; medical humanities;

99 n. 27, 374 National Geographic magazine, 19, 40, 50, 55 newspaper: advertising in India, 295, 299;

medical illustrator memory: listener’s, 261; national debates

around in South Africa, 152, 155, 157-59, 165, 167, 192; and nostalgia, 269; recording of, 196; representations of, 257; workings

of, 185, 187 Mendeleev, Dmitrii, 232 Menil, John and Dominique de, 23, 65, 66,

99n. 28 Metcalf, Eric, 353, 356-57, 360-61, 364-65, 368-71

Russian, 240, 242-44, 246, 254-55n. 12 Nichols, Bill, 271, 273 Nicodemus, Tom, 442-43, 462 Nicol, Mike, 156 Nikishenkov, Alexei, 240—41, 246-48, 251 Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs): in

India, 289, 298, 304, 310, 312; and the Karen, 143; in Thailand, 126

norteno: culture of the, 257-58, 271-72, 276,

Meyer, Walter, 90

283; definition of the, 284n. 1, diaspora and

Michelangelo, 37, 99n. 26, 227, 231,

the, 270; as hero, 262—68; magical realism

Pei, 2, A

middleman: role of, 103, 118-22, 127, 13334; water sellers as, 339 Minsky, Marvin, 405 Mkhize, Khaba, 9

Moody, Betty, 66 Moscow Fiim Institute, 199-200 Motorola Co., 435, 436, 448, 476 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 399

Munch, Edvard, 24, 39, 42, 96n. 3 museums: curators of, 20-21, 25, 29, 79-80;

clinic in spaces of, 58, 77-78, 83-88; and funding, 389; as protected spaces, 24; pur-

pose of, 22. See also Art History Gallery; Fogg Art Museum; Mary Ryan Gallery; the Whitney Museum myth: action in, 435; aerospace industry’s, 434; of American expansion, 437; Bettelheim’s concepts of, 262, 263-64; of the

border region, 260-61, 265; capitalist, 458-59; of competition, 449; about govern-

and the, 277-79 nostalgia, 258, 265, 268-72, 275, 277, 280, 283

Ogilvy, Jay, 405 Okudzhava, Bulat, 206 oral history, 17, 195, 213, 384 other, the: 2; the devalued, 283; imaginary, 361; in Western terms, 276 Oviedo, Dofia Olivia, 261, 264, 269

Palatinate, 377-79 Papert, Seymour, 405 paradigm shift: from competitive to cooperative, 449-54, 461-62, 470, 473, 480n. 2, 481n. 5, 482n. 6 para-site, as a trope, 6-13 past, the: artistic interpretations of, 351; images of, 277; mythic, 269; nostalgia for, 265, 387; within a person, 260; in Russian

culture, 229-30; unexplained, 276

ment, 439, 444; of the hero, 263, 265, 267;

patient: definitions of the, 24; relationship

and magic, 277—78, 280; as premodern, 267—68; about technology, 448; televised, 259

Peace Corps, 15, 18, 25

with doctor, 22, 23 perestroika, 219, 221, 239, 244, 246-47

.

49]

INDEX

performance: confession as, 160—63, 166, 187; hermeneutic approach to, 156; theater, 381-87. See also art: performance Petro, Jane, 36, 38, 75, 76, 78, 80, 85, 86, 92, 97n. 14, 98n. 17

Petry, Jeff, 10 photography: of Death’s Head (Eric Avery), 39, 40, 42, 58, 59, 79, 86, 98n. 18; as disruptive, 53; documentary, 24, 41, 56; and experience, 52; experimental, 10, 35; fascination with, 93; forensic, 172—75, 179; journalistic, 94; of marketplaces, 326; of photographers, 48; and printmaking, 25; of Somali refuge camp (Las Dhure), 61; of surgery, 36-38 Piranesi, Giambattista, 21 Popova, Lidia, 195—97, 218 Posada, José Guadalupe, 20, 66

Refugee Assistance Council (Laredo, Texas),

76. See also refugees; refugee camps refugee camps: Central American, 15, 63—64, 66; at Namibia-Angola border, 181—82; Somali (Las Dhure), 19, 40, 42, 44-57, 60-—

62, 92, 98—99 nn. 20-25. See also refugees; Refugee Assistance Council; Somalia Reich, Robert, 288—89, 345

representation, 282—84; crisis of, x, xi, 1; ethnographic, 106; means of, ix; new languages of, 364; strategies for, 357; styles of and art, 372

resistance, 1|—2; narratives of, 4, 7, 8; as virtuous, 9 retraumatization, 15—102; defined, 17. See also trauma revelation: act of, 156-57, 159-60, 178, 188; moment of, 162; witness to, 168

for, 64; as bodily, 52; markets for, 72; as

Reynolds, Pamela, 167 Richards, Colin, 10-11, 169, 171-84, 187, 190 Ringland, Gill, 406 Rivera, Diego, 76 Rockwell Co., 435, 440, 441, 453, 466, 473

mechanical reproduction, 93—94; Mexican

Romero, Oscar, 66

tradition in, 58—59; and overprinting, 16, 25, 51, 56-59, 62, 64, 76; and photography, 25; portraits, 92; and trauma, 19; as a way

Ross, Fiona, 167 Rosten, Leo, 404 Rothko, Mark, 65 Ruane, Christine, 205, 222n. 12

post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 19, 51,

10; T8579 9296n5 Powers, Richard, 395 printmaking: and AIDS patients, 95; audience

of seeing, 83; woodblock, 10, 15—16, 20,

28-29, 40, 41, 50, 53, 57, 60-62, 65 psychiatry: profession of, 33-34

Rush, Andrew, 29, 35-36

Radul, Judy, 350, 360, 361

Saarland, 377—79, 386-87

Raimondi, Marcantonio, 63, 64 Rathbone, Justus, 374 Ray, Nicholas, 370

Sacher, Ed, 34 Saheli (Delhi feminist group), 289, 296, 297,

Reagan, Ronald, 63, 73, 75 reconciliation: and South African truth seek-

ing, 151, 154-55, 158, 166, 188, 190-92 reflexivity, 35, 136, 396, 404

Red Cross, 69; German, 46, 56 Redfield, Robert, 397 refugees: Central American, 15, 19, 51, 56, 60, 68-70; Cuban, 73; detention centers for,

69-71, 79; Haitian, 15, 70, 73, 75, 94, 99n. 29, 100n. 33; Indochinese, 19; Jamaican, 70; Jewish, 206; Vietnamese, 39—42, 45; UN High Commissioner for, 46, 49, 142; U.S. Committee for, 73-75. See also Refu-

Ryan, Mark, 452

299, 301-5, 322. See also women’s

movement Saiz, Mel, 436 Saltykov, Aleksandr, 241-45, 250-51

Saper, Craig, 356

* Sarkar, Surajit, 11, 287-347 satellites: commercial market for, 440-48, 459-60, 476; and Indian television access, 317-18, 347n. 10; in low earth orbit (LEO), 441-42, 447, 457, 459, 468; and Y2K prob-

lem, 415. See also space; space program Scarry, Elaine, 184 scenarios: brainstorming, 397; building, 396, 402-5, 424-25; imaginative, 12; prisoners’

gee Assistance Council; refugee camps;

dilemma, 399; use of, 13; writers of,

Somalia

395-96

INDEX Schnabel, Julian, 67 Schwartz, Peter, 405, 406, 424, 427n. 10, 428n. 13 Schweitzer, Albert, 29, 35 science: education, 346n. 6; programming on Indian television, 316, 319-324 Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Program, at MIT, 16, 20, 94 scientists: space, 12, 433-82 Scruggs, Dave, 445, 461, 462 Self-fashioning: Soviet women’s, 195, 202, 205, 221—22n. 9 Selzer, Richard, 38, 98n. 16 Serrano, Andre, 84 Serres, Michel, 8 Seth, Vikram, 362 sewing: collective, 209; at home, 204-6, 21314; Singer machines, 204—6, 222n. 14 Shawn, Wallace, 96n. 5 Silver Age, Russian, 229-31 Singer, Isaac, 205 Siopis, Penny, 159 Sloterdijk, Peter, 3-4 Smith, Anna Devere, 16, 100n. 36

Sokolovsky, Sergei, 241, 244-45, 247-48, 250 Somalia: feeding stations in, 48-49, 53-55; starvation in, 46—47, 79. See also refugee camps South Africa: art in 151—94; postapartheid, 10, 151—94; Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in, 10-11, 151-59, 163, 166-67, 183-84, 188, 191-92, 192nn. 6, 7; truth seeking in, 152, 157, 191; white

artists in, 9, 10-11. See also ANC; apartheid; Castle of Good Hope; confession; Fault Lines project; memory; reconciliation space: global commerce in, 437—38, 442-46, 454, 464-65, 469; infrastructure, 438-40, 442, 458, 462; international station, 449, 454, 457, 465, 468; tourism, 439, 442, 448, 456, 480n. 1. See also NASA; space program space program: American, 433-482; Chinese, 440, 441, 448; French, 440, 441, 449, 476; Japanese, 441—43, 445, 448-49, 458, 476, 480n. 1; Russian, 440, 441, 448-49, 452, 476, 480n. 2. See also NASA; space spansexuality, 91-92 Sputnik, 438

Stalin, Joseph, 233, 241 Star Trek, 241 Stepanova, Varyara, 210 Sterling, Bruce, 405 Stewart, Kathleen, 258, 268, 271 Stewart, Susan, 270-71 stories: adventure, 260; and art, 368-69, 384; autobiographical, 196-223; border, 386— 87; connections between, 369; Disney, 369— 70; economic, 328; educational, 314; environmental, 460; family, 11, 257; framing of, 396; hero, 263, 265, 284; multiple versions of, 167; as myths, 434-35; New Age, 277, 434; original, 276, 277; reenactment of, 280; of self-fashioning, 195-223; transformation of, 175. See also storytelling storytelling, x, xiii; and anthropology, 107; art of, 185; Benjamin’s notion of, 261, 263, 267; mythic, 464; reporters’, 258; space scientists’, 12, 466; testimony as, 167 Strategic Avionics Technology Working Group (SATWG), 12, 433-82 style: personal, 204, 207, 214: self-fashioning

and, 202-3 subjects: as counterparts to authors, 2, 8, 9; cultural work of, 7; identities of, 4

Subramanian, Vani, 11, 287-347 Sunanda, D. H., 12-13, 407-24, 426, 428n. 17 surgery, 15, 18-19, 32, 36-38

Taussig, Michael, 273, 276-77, 284nn. 9, 10 Taylor, Jane, 158, 171 technology: appropriate, 439; and art, 15-16, 354-55, 360, 365-67, 371-72; avionics, 435, 461, 482n. 6; awareness seminars, 421-22; bio-, 470, 481 n. 6; computer, 12324, 368; distributed light, 399, 400, 403; dual-use, 437; and ethnic stereotyping, 425; experimentation with, 369; flight, 480-81 n. 4; and government mandate, 434; ideologies of, 407; imaging, 35; information, 400, 401, 426; as labor with reason, 266-67; nano-, 467-68, 470, 481n. 6; networked, 371-72;

new, 366, 367, 395; remote-sensing, 460; rush of American, 261, 269; soft, 451; space-driven, 461; for Thai export, 117 Teer-Tomaselli, Ruth, 9

television: cable distribution in India, 317-18; Canadian, 369; documentary, 257—85;

?

493

INDEX

Doordarshan, 316—24, 345—46n. 5; popular Soviet, 214; production in India, 289, 291,

295, 305, 325; X-Files series, 72, 426n. 1

Wallace, Anne, 66, 69-71, 75 Warhol, Andy, 67, 85 Watson, Scott, 355, 356

Thailand: economic policy in, 103—49 therapy: institutional, 19, 24, 57, 78-79, 83 Tijerina, Ernesto, 262, 272 tourism: and economics, 10; in space, 439,

Western Front, the (artist-run center), 12,

442, 448, 456, 480n. 1; in Thailand, 108, 117-28, 132 Tracey, Michael, 45, 46, 49-50, 64-68, 81 transsexuality, 88—92

Whitman, Walt, 229

trauma: and art, 19-20; and beauty, 39; childhood, 89; contending with, 40; defined, 17; of force feeding, 53; intergenerational transmission of, 78; origins of, 20, 186; place of,

349-75 White, Frank, 453 White, Hayden, 263

Whitney Museum, the, 1, 80 Wilkinson, Lawrence, 405

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 184 Wolfe, Thomas, 10 women’s movement: in India, 301—4. See also

Saheli Wong, Paul, 363, 375n. 2

185; spaces of, 30. See also

Wood, Dennis, 453, 472

retraumatization

World Bank, 109, 145—46, 401

Turner, Victor, 91, 100n. 38, 156, 162, 163, 188, 190 Tutu, Desmond, 155, 192n. 6 Tyler, Stephen, 270

World Vision, 35, 40, 46, 48-50, 55-56, 98n. 20, 99n. 22 writing: anthropological, 7; culture, 10, 103— 49; ethnographic, 3; experimentation with, x; freelance, 103—6, 123; genres of, 107; as

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 46, 49, 142 United Space Alliance, 466

performance, 153; and the political, 137; speech, 105, 111-15, 131, 140

Yarborough, Ralph, 28 Vainshtein, Olga, 10, 11, 240, 245-49, 251-— 52, 255n. 413 Vancouver, Canada: experimental art in, 350— 52.355, 358, 366, 373,475 0) | Van Riebeeck, Jan, 164, 192n. 4 Varela, Francisco, 405 Vasconcelos, Jose, 263, 283 Vastyan, Al, 36, 40, 97n. 15 Verjee, Zainub, 358, 360-62, 368, 371-72 voice: author’s, xiii, 17; of situated others, x,

16 Von Neumann, John, 395 Voznesensky, Andrei, 231, 238, 253n. 5

Yardeni, Edward, 402 Year 2000 problem (Y2K), 12-13, 395-430 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 238-39 Young, Bob, 460

Youngblood, Gene, 354 Yourdon, Edward, 428 nn. 18, 19, 20

Zarzhitskaya, Maria, 195, 199-200, 208, 212, 25,219 Zinberg HIV Clinic, Cambridge City Hospital, DI WS, Ths) zines, 1, 385, 391 Zweig, Stefan, 304

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