S03-ish - Episode 07: South Africa Special Feature - Part Two
This is the second of two episodes based on interviews recorded at the 2019 African Critical Inquiry Workshop: African Ethnographies conference that was held at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa by Sara Rendell and Dina Asfaha from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.
In the the first part of this episode, you will hear a conversation between Dina Asfaha and Kharnita Mohamed – a lecturer at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on issues of race, gender, disability, and identity in post-Apartheid South Africa. She is also a novelist, publishing her debut “Called to Song” in 2018 with Kwela Books.
In the second half, Sara Rendell returns for an interview with Dominique Santos – a Lecturer at Rhodes University, whose work explores the nexus of music, play, dreaming and heritage practices as they intersect with intimate experiences of the self, space and social change, as well as on dreams and the role of dreaming in refusing the conditions of oppression
NB: Due to circumstances out of our control, there are parts of this recording with less than ideal sound quality. The episode transcript and close-captioned versions of the episode (linked below) may be a useful resource for following along with the conversation should you have a hard time making out any part of the recording.
TRANSCRIPT
Transcription note: In instances where the speech was unclear, and the transcriber has placed the relevant words and phrases with parentheses (), to denote that the text reflects their best possible transcription of the word or phrase.
( ) = inaudible word
( )= inaudible phrase
SPEAKERS:
Dominique Santos, Dina Asfaha, Anar Parikh, Sara Rendell, Kharnita Mohamed
Anar Parikh 00:00
Anthropological Airwaves is the official podcast of the journal American Anthropologist, whose main offices are located on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Anacostan, and Piscataway peoples. The Anacostia and Potomac rivers have long been places of trade and gathering for Indigenous peoples, and Washington DC is now home to diverse Indigenous people from across Turtle Island. American Anthropologist has published articles throughout its history that have taken knowledge from Indigenous peoples for a scholarly audience and has not required its authors or editors to be good relations to Indigenous peoples and communities. Acknowledging territory is only one step in repairing relationships between anthropologists and Indigenous peoples. The Editorial Collective of the journal is committed to deep listening and engagement with Indigenous scholars, peoples, and communities to explore ways to be a better relation. This episode of Anthropological Airwaves was edited and produced on the Indigenous territory known as Lenapehoking, the traditional homelands of the Lenape also called Lenni-Lenape or Delaware Indians. These are the people who, during the 1680s, negotiated with William Penn to facilitate the founding of the colony of Pennsylvania. Their descendants today include the Delaware Tribe and Delaware Nation of Oklahoma; the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape, Ramapough Lenape, and Powhatan Renape of New Jersey; and the Munsee Delaware of Ontario. Parts of this episode were also recorded, edited, and produced from the traditional territories of the Catawba, Waxhaw, Cheraw, and Sugaree peoples, and specifically in Charlotte, North Carolina—a city located on the traditional crossroads of two Indigenous trading paths: the Occaneechi Path and the Lower Cherokee Traders’ Path, which facilitated the extensive trade network of Cherokee, Catawba, Saponi, and Congaree peoples prior to colonization. While many descendants of Cheraw, Waxhaw, and Sugaree communities eventually joined the Catawba peoples, today, the Catawba Nation continues to thrive as a federally recognized tribe located less than one hour south of where this recording took place.
Intro Music Begins 02:01
Anar Parikh 02:04
Hi everyone! Thanks for joining us for another episode of Anthropological Airwaves – the official podcast of the journal American Anthropologist. This is Episode 7, Season 3-ish.
Intro Music Ends 02:33
Anar Parikh 02:33
My name is Anar Parikh, I’m a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Brown University and the Associate Editor – Podcast at American Anthropologist. I use she/her pronouns and I’m also the Executive Producer of this show. You might recall that last month former lead editor and Anthropological Airwaves producer Kyle Olsen introduced a two-episode series of interviews recorded at the 2019 African Critical Inquiry Workshop: African Ethnographies conference held at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa in 2019. Despite a somewhat extended delay, we’re excited to be able to share the rich conversations Dina Asfaha and Sarah Rendell from the Department of Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania were able to have with South Africa-based scholars Nosipho Mngomezulu, Dominique Santos, and Kharnita Mohamed about the concept and practice of ethnography. Last month, you heard Sarah’s interview with Nosipho Mngomezulu a lecturer at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Her research focuses on national and transnational youth cultures, nation-building projects in post-colonial societies, and community engaged learning and teaching. This month, we’ll round out this two-episode series. First up is Dina Asfaha’s conversation with Kharnita Mohamed, a lecturer at the University of Cape Town whose research focuses on issues of race, gender, disability, and identity in post-Apartheid South Africa. She is also a novelist and her debut novel Called to Song was published with Kwela Books in 2018. And, in the second part of the episode, you will hear Sara’s interview with Dominique Santos, a Lecturer at Rhodes University. Her work explores the nexus of music, play, dreaming and heritage practices as they intersect with intimate experiences of the self, space and social change, as well as on dreams and the role of dreaming in refusing the conditions of oppression. We hope you enjoy the show.
Huku by Sho Madjozi begins 04:30
Dina Asfaha 05:04
Hi, this is Dina Asfaha, and I am interviewing Kharnita Mohamed for Anthropological Airwaves. Hello Kharnita, Thank you for being here with us today.
Huku by Sho Madjozi ends 05:08
Kharnita Mohamed 05:15
Thank you, Dina, for having me.
Dina Asfaha 05:18
So can you just tell us a little bit beginning...You're a novelist as well, as an anthropologist. Can you tell us a little bit about your novel, Called to Song.
Kharnita Mohamed 05:35
So Call to Song is a story about a married couple, at first, and the way in which the marriage of fix some divisions within South African society: the work on race that hasn't really been done even with people who have liberatory sensibilities, and how race and gender within intimate spaces reflects a kind of historical information. But in ways that does not feel like the politics, you know, that larger politics. Doesn't feel like the macropolitical, but how it is expressed, is actually with intimate, intimate worlds. So, so this couple got married, because she got pregnant. And it's not a great marriage. And so we follow them, Qaliba and Rashid, we follow them, they're set in the Cape Malay community in Cape Town. We follow them as the marriage shift and Qabila's sensibility around the marriage shifts and then the ways in which she makes sense it.
Dina Asfaha 06:48
Yeah, and so, of course, your research works, or on in your research, you really are focused on social difference, like you were saying, right? experiences of social difference, and also renderings of it through things like visual culture, and how do you see that played out also through, through things like citizenship, right? So can you tell us a little bit more about, more broadly, about for you the relationship between your creative writing and anthropology.
Kharnita Mohamed 07:19
So, the novel emerged out of an anger with anthropology. I was at a conference, and I was listening to a presentation where people within Cape Town were treated as movie characters for an anthropological audience. And that made me really angry. And, of course, one the intervention with within the space of the conference but that that's usually a very limited intervention, and it doesn't quite have the life that you've imagined. And I went away, and I thought about it. And at some point, I said to myself, "Well, you know, if you're this angry about it you should do something about it. Because if you're, you know, those of us who can write a little, we're not going to be able to prevent the kinds of stories and durations of lives that are adaptive, that are cruel, that are misrepresentative, misrepresentations. But what we can do is add to the archives, you know, and different modality of thinking about, but also imagine a different audience, because our audiences assembly is not just the anthropologist or in the anthropological space. Our audience is the very people who are being reduced, frequently, very people who are being treated as objects of inquiry that one can laugh at, because you are so much better than they are because, you know, they don't really see themselves, we do. And so that's where the novel emerged initially, So one of the points, you know, I had a few things happen in life, and so some of the ways in which the story emerges, you know, came out of that moment. And, I was also thinking about violence at the time, but trying to think about how violence works when it doesn't call itself, announce itself as violence. So you know, those tiny kind of psychological violences that structure and restructure a life that one could in some ways trace to larger ideological, modes of being like race, gender, sexuality, etc. Except we don't inhabit quite those categories in the way in which one theorizes it, because those contradictions within the everyday are, um, they're incoherent, you know, there's an incoherence to it that I think fiction holds and allows one to play with, in a way that we can't quite play, play with in ethnographical writing--not that, I mean I think they do very different things, and both, both are very important--and I kind of think of fiction as case studies: you take all the theory or theory you've read, and you condense them these different kinds of characters, and you throw them at each other, and you let them do the work. And sometimes they surprise you.
Dina Asfaha 10:28
That's fascinating. So you're talking a little bit about audience engagement, and what you're able to do with a novel and who you're able to reach. And so, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how this informs your pedagogy as well.
Kharnita Mohamed 10:48
Well, one of the things I ask of students, is while I think that it matters that we write it write ethnographic texts and we write for an academic audience, or an expert audience, and that the language we use for an expert audience is not necessarily the language we use for lay audience. And so, it might be an unfair ask, but I think that--and our students are versed in multiple genre of communication, whether it is a podcast, whether it is YouTube videos, whether it's songs and music, and--and so I think it's really, really important to, to try and communicate some of the things we know to multiple audiences, which require different registers of engagement--different modalities of engagement, and to, you know, do it in ways in which you love, the things that make you happy, to write the things that you happy). So I take that into the classroom, where I think of it as very, very serious work, even though the reception of it might be pleasurable, and I think there's something about how we're thinking about creative work, because the reception is pleasurable as sometimes not as rigorous sometimes, but just because something's pleasurable doesn't mean it's not rigorous. And I don't think that's really the problem of other genres. But rather, that we've sort of, I think, we should be demanding that people read economics too, because they really do, do different things. Whereas for me, fiction takes the theory that you know, and close it, close it in a way that in a way which, like, the bones are hidden, but it's enfleshed in very interesting ways. Whereas academic writing makes the bones visible. And so they do, they do very different things, you know, there's is a kind of explicitness within academic writing that I think is very important. It's really crucially important that there's veiling of the deep, dense language, in recognizable characters, in recognizable modes and pleasurable modes reaches people first to activate and then then into a kind of mode of reasoning whereas, you know really good academic work start, reasoning and gets you gets you to activate, so you know, the process, a little differently.
Dina Asfaha 13:25
Thank you for that. So Kharnita, can you please also talk a also talk a little bit more about the challenges of doing these two different kinds of writing alongside one another?
Kharnita Mohamed 13:40
It's really difficult, and I have different, like, you know, different people sitting on my shoulders, with different, different kinds of writing. So, my critical observer, when I'm writing, academic writing is really mean. And so, my impulse is to move into, you know, creative writing to silence that critical observer, even though I know that I need to speak back to the critical observer in a negative register. So it gets really, really hard because I can't do the same kinds of laying out an argument with a creative modality of writing that I can when writing academically, and, and constantly wanting to shift into the kind of flow that creative writing allows whereas the slowness of academic writing---I mean there is the slowness. The temporality is very, very different for me at least, it might be different for others but for me, the temporality of academic writing, it's, it's slow and its measured and it requires that movement between, between reading and writing. Kind of going down the page of impulses to just take the sentiment, take the affect and work on that effect of registering and render a scene that makes the affect legible in a way, which is much easier to do you know, in some ways. And so, having to shift between those different temporalities, but also the different spaces through which those temporal foldings happen is quite hard, actually. It requires littles rituals. You know, different, different ways of getting into, and I've kind of raised it after you know, you can't be working on two, two projects at the same time. You have to just work on an academic project, and then work on a novel, you know. And that's the only thing that's really worked. Because I think they draw from different, they draw from different places, and it's not that like, I really, really want to write, I have a story I want to write it in, see my characters unfolding they're screaming at me, but I really have to finish, you know, writing this PhD. I've got to write it and finish it. It requires doing. So it's, I think it's quite challenging, it can be quite challenging to actually hold off on moving into a project that allows you to do something funny with reading, with that cat, you know, that parsing out of genealogies of thinking etcetera, that one does, reading for academic writing, that you can just do it go on dates and summarize it in an interesting ways. It's not uninteresting, in interesting ways than when you're writing fiction.
Dina Asfaha 17:04
You know, in speaking to you, I'm thinking about what it's like to prepare an academic piece of writing, and what it might be like for you to write something like fiction, and sort of what that process is the type of research you might do, the type of archives you might consult. And so, what has that been like for you in writing Called to Song, for instance, what was your, or the archives that you might have been drawing from?
Kharnita Mohamed 17:38
Well, most of it was, was, you know, writing from a kind of situated knowledge, you know. It's the accumulated stories that for which we understand where we're from, and bring all of them together, but out of context, because that's right, when you're writing fiction, you're, you're being faithful to a sensibility of a context, not, not necessarily the context itself as it unfolded within a particular moment. Because all the stories are placed within, placed through particular characters in contexts that are not the context of emergence. So, so most of it is, you know, the gathering of stories. So stories of people that I've known, stories, you know, stories that come out of my own experience, but again, placed in a different context. A lot of reading, And the cu-, a kind of cumulative body of reading is the...for Called to Song, the story that I wanted to tell was not the way the novel emerged, because my characters refused, they didn’t really turn out for what I wanted to do, you know, and I'd done a lot of reading. It was supposed to be a story about, about tradition and modernity and the ways in which biomedicine frames particular kinds of embodied experiences versus a different cosmology. And so the readings, the reading that I'd done, that a lot of the reading, and the work that I've done was around schizophrenia and thinking about mental institutions and the institutions--and this is not the story. I mean, this just was not the story. You know, I ended up having to rewrite quite a bit in the beginning. because that just working story. So it's, I guess, in a way the archive that was consul--, the archive I consulted with were misdirected, or under-utilized archives, so I don't know how one talks about that. And some of the ways in which we think about the archive is to put--it's an archive of sensibility, it's an archive of affect, which you know, is lodged in a particular (self), with a particular kind of moment, where you are able to not just reflect on experience but also you're able to go back to an experience and mine it, in a way, so that you can communicate the sensibility, or the effect of force, of a particular event or particular...the and I think if you were doing well, you're really mining, you know, a range of feeling which you might not do for an academic text. You hope that you write the sufficient force so that you can meet with a kind of effect of life that might not be in place. But where you're very deliberately utilizing your own sort of affective knowledge, which might not be related to the experience you're writing about, you know, it’s kind of disconnect, you know. You, you mine that so that you can very quickly, you know, kind of show in a recognizable way create that affective response for the reader, I mean, and I don't know how I speak about that archive, right? And, you know, if you've lived life with a reasonable mode of, reasonable amount of openness to the self becomes the archive and attentiveness to, to not just what you've observed, but what the effects and the effects, then, you know, the have the affect of a particular kind of experience, my agenda… I don't know that I can go off and you know, find it, I’ll say. But, you know, and then like literature, how have other people managed to do this, you know, what works elsewhere, what doesn’t work. The kind of autodidactic training, that kind of training one does when you're reading, like, hundreds of takes on writing and how you write fiction or I mean. So, one of the things that I did, for example, was I did hundreds and hundreds of hours of transcription. And somebody, you knows, you're insecure when you think I can never write dialogue. And so of course you overcompensate, and, but I wanted to be able to write dialogue, not faithfully, because you can't actually write… I mean, because you know, it's gonna be transcribed, right? You can't rightly render it in a way that is pleasurable to read, if you were actually doing verbatim
Kharnita Mohamed 22:39
transcriptions, but how can you very quickly provide some kind of characterization through, through dialogue, as well… an almost, you know, kind of strategic essentialism, you know, sort of show that this is a person with a different history, and so the dialogue reflects that, and then, of course, aim destabilize it, because a lot of that, you know set a character, then I show, actually, well, you know, imagine this person has a cultural subject, and particularly sort, but hey, let's not essentialize. You know, so, the play of the generalizations. And so I did hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours, you know, when I asked people to, to, to using their data, because it's different when you're using somebody else's data, and you're not analyzing it whereas with your own data--the impulse is to begin to analyze while you're doing the transcription. So then I could listen to all these, you know, these accents and try and write the dialogue. So, I guess it is that, you know, to begin to compile, sort of compile accents, but that one can represent through language because you don't actually have the embodied register. So, you know what do people do with prepositions, blah blah blah et cetera to be able to show a particular kind of history. So, one of the things that I have begun to worry about, you know, is that in our quest for, for modes of representation that that reaches large amounts of people, so sort of the massification of what we know, and utilizing mass representation within a particular project, we move away from thinking within writing, within academic genres of writing, is is what kind of future that produces if, you know, because there are creative writing departments, there are film schools, there are, I mean these spaces exist, art schools exist. So, what that might entail, for, not modes of representation, but for the capacity to read and own the archive? What does it mean if, let's say, in 20 years all our students, how they learning anthropology or, ethnography, are through these modes that generate an affective force, differently to the way in which academic writing does, because that academic reading is hard, it's really hard. It takes—it’s so dense--the language requires work, the discourse requires work, the conceptual framing and, the toolkit, and this, you know, it's, it's, it's hard work, and, and I see it with students who prefer to to engage with modalities of communication that are pleasurable, and, and rewarding—and who wouldn’t? But what what is the meaning if if we expose, (and I don’t know if that’s a good…) but if we expose new generations of intellectuals to, to these modalities, you know, and enable a large scale refusal of academic writing that's written in a different mode, you know, that's written in modes, that feel alienating. And I think there's a trouble there. Because what we're doing is I mean, it's "we're closing up the archive," it's "we're making that archive, that the work of engaging the archive across time and space, much harder for those who want to engage their archive," and that the tactics and the strategies of reading, not just writing--and I think those tactics and strategies of reading are crucial--if we're not willing. (I don't know if it's about work), but if it's about if, you know, you were saying, the languages to, it's obscure, it does particular kinds of violences in the kind of labor it expects of us, we're also doing something else, and I worry about that.
Kharnita Mohamed 27:21
because I, because I do think that, you know, an expert audience is not a lay audience and to, to collapse those audiences is to do something, which I think, might give us a lot of trouble in 20 or 30 years, or you know? I mean, and so, I've been thinking about that a lot, that, you know, how do you do those, the two kinds of work at the same time? You know, and I don't think I would have gotten paid without having written a novel. And recognizing that, yes, this is deeply rigorous, it is really does represent cumulative, a kind of cumulative praxis of knowledge making, and thinking and worrying about the world that is, you know, there's a politics to this writing, but it doesn't do the actual work. Because of culture, clouded in, building analogy and metaphor, and characters and scenes. And but it doesn't do the explicit work of laying out a line of thinking, or what, if one wants to call it an argument, it doesn’t do that explicit work. Which as difficult as it might be to read and engage with or, and well, I am trying very hard to make it not, to not write the way I speak actually… but as difficult as that is, it’s still necessary and, and it holds different kinds of pleasures, I mean, in you know, like, we know, we read a really difficult text but it says the things, you know, and it engages with the concerns it has for the world or what you thought about, you know, and there's something really pleasurable after having read this text, a number of times and every time something surprising emerges and shift, how you thinking about something, there's something pleasurable about that, and to be able to convey that kind of pleasure. You know, to, to say, "Well, you know, some things are not necessarily palatable and easy on the first encounter, but the joy is actually in staying with it, and with abiding with, you know a text, with abiding with a difficult sometimes text." You know, it's a, it's a, again, it's the kind of temporality because the temporality's different. So, yeah, so that's something I think that I've learned from writing fiction, not just prized really fantastic academic writing that says important things, even though it might not have been easy to read.
Dina Asfaha 30:17
Thank you so much for speaking with us today. And you leave us with some really important insights about the future of anthropology, the future of writing altogether, and where we are going with, with our practices of rendering the social world. So thank you very much.
Huku by Sho Madjozi begins 30:30
Sara Rendell 31:08
Hello!, I'm Sara Rendell, and I'm here in Cape Town, South Africa with Dr. Dominique Santos. Welcome, Dr. Santos.
Dominique Santos 31:16
Thank you.
Huku by Sho Madjozi ends 31:17
Sara Rendell 31:18
Dr. Santos is currently a lecturer at Rhodes University. And she is an anthropologist by training. That's correct.
Dominique Santos 31:28
Yeah, yep.
Sara Rendell 31:29
Um, so I am was really excited actually, to hear about your, throughout your academic trajectory, Do that again.
Dominique Santos 31:45
Okay [laughter].
Sara Rendell 31:48
I wanted to actually start this interview asking you a bit about your academic trajectory.
Dominique Santos 31:53
Yeah.
Sara Rendell 31:53
Um, one that has been organized by a commitment to unsettle the coloniality of being, the words of Sylvia Wynter. I wanted to hear you tell us a little bit about what that trajectory has looked like for you.
Dominique Santos 32:11
Okay, well, it's been an unsettled trajectory. I'd call it a crooked path into academia. One that was not planned, or particularly intentional, but has sometimes felt almost directed by things beyond my control--almost a pushing of circumstances that have kind of created moments of serendipity that opened doors. And then moments of, of absolute frustration, where it felt like no forward motion was possible at all. So I came to academia, kind of via a less conventional route, then most I left school without doing very well. In the UK, I'd moved to the United Kingdom as a teenager from South Africa. And kind of, you know, our family life kind of fell apart. And I was very much sort of raising myself and, you know, not not doing the greatest job of being good at school. So, after school, I kind of flitted around I that I did a, I did an access course in media at a kinda community college in London; got a job in a video shop. You know, in the olden days, we had video shops. And I guess I felt like, okay, where's life, where's life going? And I'd, I had a friend who was doing a degree in anthropology and communications at Goldsmiths, and when he told me about it, I just thought, "gah, I want to do that." You know, because I guess it spoke to my sense of not being placed in the world in a way that made sense in the categories of, of identity or belonging that, you know, that I'd grown up in South Africa, or encountered in in the UK. And something about the way he described anthropology seemed like I might get some answers there, you know, about something I wanted to know about, but didn't have a toolkit to describe yet. And, so I applied and I applied only for that course--anthropology and communications at Goldsmiths--and nothing else. And my boyfriend at the time, his mother helped me do the university application form and you know, all because it was all just, you know, very much not my comfort zone. And they called me for interview because actually it kind of corresponded with this enormous expansion of higher education in the UK in the in the 90s. So, they wanted bums on seats. So even though I'd done really badly at school, they called me for an interview. And I was so desperate to do something more than work in the video shop that I just read all the anthropology I could find. I remember reading something by Joao Pinar de Cabral about Portuguese, you know, fertility figures and some backwater in the Alentejo, I'm probably getting that all wrong. But you know, I was like, I really wanted to perform well in this interview, and I must have done all right, because they offered me a place plus that that whole expansion of higher education thing, so they needed the, you know, they needed the numbers.
Dominique Santos 35:44
But as it turned out, I was quite good at it, university. And it's probably because for the first time, in my educational life, I was actually learning about something or, or learning in a way about things that meant something to me. And I do think it's, gah, it sounds almost religious, isn't it like a conversion story, but I felt a little bit like Neo in the in The Matrix, you know, that that film where you know, you, there's a point in the film where he suddenly kind of gets how to operate in these, you know, multiple dimensions, and he starts picking bullets out the air. And that's a little bit how it felt like I was getting this information that was helping me to pull the bullets out the air about why the world is the way it is, why I'm in the world, why, you know, bodies are the way they are, and all the rest of it. And interestingly, the very first course I did at Goldsmiths was the ethnography of the Caribbean, which for me, as someone who'd grown up in South Africa was actually a perfect starting point. And I think it's the sort of first serendipitous moment because of, you know, the ethnography of the Caribbean is really, an ethnography of, of how cultures and societies are dynamic, are in a process of becoming, but also about the formation of the modern world system, about the emergence of, you know, the consumer capitalist economy, its foundations on plantation slavery, you know, all these things. And for me, that was just a profound toolkit to kind of understand it, and I could also apply that, to the South Africa that I'd grown up in, which emerges out of very similar processes and power flows--well the same ones, right? They're all just circulating. And so yeah, so I so I did well, and I got I got a first class degree and, and, and actually, in the, in the course of the degree, I kind of became obsessed with knowing more about South Africa, where I, where I grown up, so every essay, everything I would try and write about South Africa, because I wanted to know more. And then I did my undergraduate thesis on Kwaito music, which is a post-apartheid youth cultural form--form of electronic dance music. And I was a house head I was really into garage, and UK garage, all of this in London, and, and kind of returning to South Africa for the first time in those University years, I found that that music was a bridge for me, but also it spoke to a kind of global flow of beats, and, you know, dance that, that helped me to connect the dots between disparate places. So I got this first class degree, and thought, you know, I didn't kind of know what was coming next, and someone just made an aside to me, a teacher who'd really inspired me made an aside saying, “No, you should come and do research with us," I went, "Should I?" That never even occurred to me, I could do that. And I went and chatted to them. And I, you know, I didn't, I wasn't thinking straight because of course, if you're, if you're thinking straight, you would, you probably see where else you could go to do your research or who's the best sort of fit for you, but I was just so grateful that someone had said, "come and do research with us," that I just went straight there, you know, back to Goldsmith. And I got some, some funding and and tarted a PhD straight off the degree with a with a kind of masters of research sort of stuck on to it. And, and this PhD was meant to be about kind of continuing this work on Kwaito, and post-apartheid youth culture. But it didn't end up being about that at all. Because, and this is the thing with with ethnography with anthropolog, you know, it's, it's not lab conditions, it's it's life. And for me returning to South Africa to sort of do the research for this, this PhD. you know, it was a it was a big homecoming for me. And I was a performer as well. I was by this point DJ and myself and you know, I came back to Joburg because this is where I'd, Jo-burg was where I grown up, and, you know, reconnecting with, with, with, with people there, with people I knew and...
Dominique Santos 40:22
Yeah just, I guess rediscovering a sense of rootedness in the city. Kind of coming back around again to a place I'd left as a teenager and was coming back to a country which had profoundly changed since I'd left. And, and, and yeah, I mean, I was playing out and you know, doing all kinds of things and not even sure that I wanted to carry on doing anthropology, you know, I was kind of doing quite well as a performer and, you know, opportunities were opening up for me, then I was very much on the brink of saying, you know, what, actually, the performance side is where I want to go, actually, you know, and then I got pregnant, I had a little baby. And that threw everything out. And it threw everything out because I was, like I said, kind of ready to give up academia and go on another path. But I had, you know, I had, I was pregnant and you know, not not a well resourced person, neither was my my partner at the time. And we still my partner, he's now my husband, and we've got two more children to just so you know there's a lovely happy ending here.
Sara Rendell 41:36
Aw.
Dominique Santos 41:36
But there was the sense of, "okay, survival mode." So my research funding gave provision for maternity leave. So I kind of stayed with this academic trajectory because it was supporting me with resources to kind of live out what was playing out in my life. But having this baby was like a big shock, because, you know, I had the baby in the UK to make sure she had a British passport and then came back South Africa when was very small and, and found myself very isolated in Johannesburg. And off the back of that I would--none of my friends are babies, all of this stuff--and it's a hostile city for you know, [phone rings in the background] women, and children generally. Sorry, should I say that again.
Dominique Santos 42:05
Sure. And then, while we're pause, you could talk more in this direction. I don't know if you wanna come sit here...o you want to come here, I feel. Yeah.
Sara Rendell 42:40
That's alright All right. We were saying it was a hostile..
Dominique Santos 42:46
Yeah, it was, it was a kind of hostile environment. And, and very lonely, you know, so I would, I would walk...I was living in my, my then-boyfriend, now husband, sister's house, with her family, and him. And my mother-in-law lived just down the road. So I would track over to her every day with the baby, and kind of watch Oprah and do housework and listen to music. And my research had been on post-apartheid youth culture and on boundary-crossing between people who'd been previously segregated by apartheid in this kind of youth cultural frame. But sitting with her every day for, you know, almost a year, I kind of spoke to her. What emerged out of our conversations was, was her story of also similar kind of music cultures that brought or permitted a space in which people who were, whose bodies were positioned in different ways in the apartheid state kind of found a meeting point. And that was both in a very intimate level and how her parents met in in Durban in the, in the 1940s, a white woman and so-called colored man--colored been a term in South Africa to refer to people of mixed race. And then her own trajectory, kind of coming to Johannesburg in the 1970s and being immersed in the jazz scene. So, when I when I kind of realized that I had no choice but to sort of pick up the PhD again, to kind of survive and and have something to do, I found that I could only start with her story. And so the PhD kind of became a story about about, about social change about, about multiracial youth cultures, but over many generations, and sort of tracing that, that intimate, that intimate story through through her life narrative, and then as it came to sort of meet meet mine. And it took a very long time to finish. Because I had another child and, you know, it was there all kinds of, you know, issues with housing and blah, blah, blah. But somehow I just kind of held on. And eventually it got through. Although dreams were a very key part of that, that what I'll get to. Yeah.
Sara Rendell 45:34
So I was gonna say you anticipated my next question. I was wondering, because now your work is primarily concerned with dreams. I was wondering if at the time, dreams had already become a part of your interrogation. Or if that happened later?
Dominique Santos 45:55
No, they were not a part of my interrogation. But they were becoming important. And they became certainly in in the, I don't want to call it data, but in the in the story, so that my mother-in-law was telling me one story in particular, which was not related to music, but which was related to an occurrence of a sort of multiple dreaming event that happened between herself, her father, and another friend, that caused an intervention in her life that profoundly altered the course of it, to the point where I could almost attribute the birth of my own children to this dream altering the course of her life, because of course of her life hadn't altered, she would have never had her son, he would have never met me, we would have never had my children, right? So I kind of, it really, and I couldn't forget, I couldn't forget it, I couldn't forget this kind of enormously significant dreamdream, you know, multiple dreaming event, for want of a better way of putting it. And yeah, I mean, I couldn't forget, and I and I, I just felt there's something here that's really significant about, about the dream itself, as a space of social action, as something that can activate docile bodies, bodies, which are in social spaces, which are incredibly restricting. And yeah, and I, you know, I couldn't let it go. And when I was struggling with my own PhD to sort of finish it. I started using a dreaming practice to engage with my academic work through the dream space. So I've been a lucid dreamer, someone who wakes up in their dreams, since a young age, but I started to engage with it in a more, I guess, conscious, seized upon way, in that, you know, if I found that I was awake in the dream that I was conscious that I was dreaming, I would ask a question. And in one dream, I asked a question about my PhD work, and how to finish it. And what resulted was a kind of incredible sort of series of both dream explanations, and then real life--I wouldn't say real life because the dream life is a real life--waking life occurrences which, which helped me to complete my PhD. And so yeah, so that the combination of those two things meant that I couldn't ignore the fact that the dream is a significant social actor, that there's something about the dream itself, which mobilizes or can mobilize and have affect in the waking world that I found profoundly interesting.
Sara Rendell 49:09
Really interesting. Now, it, there is a jump, maybe, and tell me if there isn't, from interrogating, acting within moving in one's own dreams, and then when the dreams of others become the object of your own ethnographic inquiry, so maybe talk to me about how other people's dreams--how you approach those ethnographically and why?
Dominique Santos 49:43
So, the the project I'm developing is is called dreams in solitary. And what I'm what I'm interested in there is how dreams can intervene in situations where actions are severely constrained. So solitary refers to, you know, people in solitary confinement or in social situations where their agencies is severely limited. So, in that sense, it's kind of hearing from from people who've been, who've experienced those conditions, how, or if at all, dreams came up as as part of that experience, and what that meant, or what that performed for them. And the project in its very early stages, but in one, in one example, a woman, and I'm particularly interested in Sou- in the South Africa-, people who were in solitary confinement during the South African liberation er- liberation struggle era. And in one, one story, a woman had been arrested by the Security Police on suspicion of aiding and abetting the the African National Congress, and the security police who I think were hoping to get information from her about someone they felt was quite significant player. And she was placed into solitary confinement with with kind of no sense of how long that would last for and then interrogated every day. But what she told me was that every night, she would dream about forests, and rivers: really beautiful, open, natural spaces. And, she would wake up in the morning, feeling absolutely refreshed, as if she'd been in the open air and in a forest, and in this space of incredible natural beauty all night. And that that gave her the sort of strength to be interrogated. And, and that also, that struck me as, as another sort of an absolutely fascinating example of, of what kind of support is generated by our, you know, and I use these words with an absolute recognition of their cultural frame, but the, but our subconscious or the unconscious? What kinds of supportive mechanisms can come be put in place that rise up from that, where, where other kinds of agency are completely foreclosed?
Sara Rendell 52:53
If I'm hearing you, right, part of what you're talking about is a kind of fugitivity through dreaming, for people who are whose agency, whose mobility, whose ability to relate to others socially, outside of interrogative contexts are constrained.
Dominique Santos 53:13
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But there's also an interest in how the dream can also activate waking, waking worlds' shifts. So so we're, we're, so in another situation where it's, it's not an interrogation situation or the solitary confinement situation, but where it feels as if social action is utterly constrained or impossible. How the dream can activate the docile body. And so yeah, so not simply that, it's so yes, the dream as a refuge as the as kind of an alternative mode of being that that permits survival, but also the dream as an activator, as something that pushes certain waking world actions to take place.
Sara Rendell 54:16
Yeah. And you use the term subconscious refusals in deaning, what does that mean?
Dominique Santos 54:24
Well, you know, in the, in the examples, I've looked at it, it feels as if, in the situations experienced, there was a sense of capitulation to to an authority or, or a situation of imprisonment. That was un-overcome-able, you know, it can't be overcome,a sort of surrender to that. But something else comes to refuse that condition. And that something else is the dream. And that is interesting to me. And and and I think even though the the term subconscious is probably one that must be interrogated a little more fully, because that also I think the word subconscious implies....eit kind of limits it to an individual kind of mind, right. But I kind of also get a sense of something that breaks down this idea of the individual body being a kind of self contained entity. And that the dream world is sort of something that is less limited. And that subconscious makes it feel like it's just within a person, but it might be more productive to consider how this might be a way of exploring how, how spaces of communication open between people, or between spirits, between ancestors, between the natural world, between, you know, all kinds of non-human actors. And, in ways which I think anthropology is becoming increasingly interested in as a serious mode of inquiry, right? And, then this is going beyond the sort of rationality debate, and is it real? Or is it not real? It's, it's kind of taking seriously the idea of a more than human, more than human communication, or more than human connection more than human sociality.
Sara Rendell 56:47
Which would be different from Jungian notion of the collective unconscious, are these archetypes that...
Dominique Santos 56:55
I think there's a resonance there, I think the collective unconscious, certainly resonates with, with what I'm, I'm sort of grappling with. But again, that, you know, there's been so many ways to describe this, you know, beyond the western canon. So, to kind of use that as a beginning point, and then extrapolate from that also feels profoundly limited. So, you know, subconscious refusals kind of came to me, but I think part of the work is to interrogate even that kind of framing. Yeah.
Sara Rendell 57:40
Have you tried to enter into conversation with someone only to find that they don't dream? Or they don't recall dreaming? In other words, you know, for whom is the dream, not this useful space?
Dominique Santos 57:55
Absolutely. I mean, this is the thing. It's, and that's also what's interesting, why do some people dream in this way? And why do others not? That's not a question I have an answer for. But it's, it's interesting to me. It's also interesting when people who don't dream or don't have a cultural framework for taking dreams particularly seriously have one really significant dream, or, or find themselves acting because of a dream, you know? So yeah, you know, that, and that, for me, speaks to something that is more than simply a belief system, or a set of cultural practices or, you know, a propensity for dreaming. Yeah.
Sara Rendell 58:45
Yeah. And this is a question I think, a bit about method. I'm curious how, how you...do take field notes on other people's dreams? Do you do interviews with them? Talking about the dream and how it's affected them? How do you listen for dreams?
Dominique Santos 59:08
So well, so far, and this may change as things develop, but, but so far, I've I've really only worked with people who, who I know or who, whose stories come up through the course of another kind of interaction. And this is what I what I mean when I talk about serendipity. Right? So so for example, one of the stories I got came about because I was talking about the project, and this person started to tell me a story of significance. And so I then asked them if I could interview them, and I already had an existing relationship with this person. And I think that that is you know, so I think, you know, having an existing network or coming to people about very intimate, you know, things in their lives, that the power of the of having already cultivated a relationship is invaluable to be able to then sit down and and record it. And yeah, I would sit and kind of sit in a situation like this and talk about it so there's the formal recording, but there's also the sort of way in which you come to the story in the first place, which is not formal. I mean, I don't know how this will change if I were to, to try and kind of extend the, the range of people I'm connecting with about things like this. And I, you know, how to kind of consider, you know, the methodological implications of that. Yeah.
Sara Rendell 1:01:02
And why dreams and not fantasies? Or are you? Are you also concerned with fantasy?
Dominique Santos 1:01:10
Well, no. I like a bit of fantasy. But for me, the fantasy is coming from a place of, of intention, right? Whereas the dream comes from something else. I mean, it may be I mean, and when I say that, I mean people can there's all kinds of dreaming practices that that can be done intentionally, right? Dream seeding. And, you know, I mean, my own lucid dreaming adventures of intentionally asking a question in the dream. But there's, there's an interaction in the dream with something that has almost a power and a life of its own. And I'm sure there's a better way of putting that but but that's, that's the only way I can express it right now is that there is a sense of being in conversation with something more than yourself. Whereas a fantasy is something else, it's another modality.
Sara Rendell 1:02:25
I'm wondering then, looping back to a commitment to decoloniality. How do you see, I guess, because I know it is early, you know, it's hard to talk about a project when you're just embarking on it, but what is the decolonizing purchase of these dreams, or of interrogating dreams like this, in the real and for whom?
Dominique Santos 1:03:04
Well, I guess in terms of, of whose dreaming stories I'm interested in these are people who've, whose, whose bodies and whose lives have been acted upon in particularly violent and limiting ways by colonial forms of logic, control. And I am deeply invested in examining how the more than human world responds to these kinds of controlling violent systems. And, I'm not the only one. I mean, in the 80s, the anthropologist David Lan, his ethnography on spirit mediums in the Zimbabwean war of liberation, and the you know, incredibly productive relationship between soldiers and spirit mediums in order to call on the the ancestors to assist in in the liberation struggle. You know, these are, these are not these are not new, you know, alliances. I think there's probably much more to be said or to be found out about the ways in which struggles for sel-determination, for liberation, to refuse conditions of control and violence have been supported by relationships with with the more than human world. Whether that is the ancestral spirits, or whatever, and dreams are, of course, a very important space in which communication with the more than he human world particularly ancestral, you know, as the ancestors can take place, you know, in in the Southern African context, you know, that's that's well documented, you know, the dreamers as one of the places where we're contact and where communication can take place.
Sara Rendell 1:05:21
Points of contact and communication that isn't the immediate, everyday moment that might be profoundly oppressive for the person who's there and that time, yeah [overlapping speach]. And otherwise,
Dominique Santos 1:05:35
And otherwise. Yeah, I mean, I think certainly in the Zimbabwean case, this was a, you know, an absolute military tactic to, to draw on the technology of spirit mediums in order to, to support the liberation effort. You know, and I think that, also that, you know, there's a caveat, which is, that it's not that these forces or this, you know, this way of engaging with the superconscious, the unconscious, the subconscious, the more than human is always utilized, you know, against oppression, I mean, you know, in a way, I think, looking forward into the, you know, I don't know, whatever our future looks like. And the fact that there is a real sense of power at work in this power that can be mobilized and directed. You know, and I think anthropological work on witchcraft and, you know, across across Africa, you know, speaks to how, you know, power is, and the play of power, and how it's used, and by whom, and against whom is, you know, as is a profoundly important part of, of, of considering, this is a realm of, of social action. You know, I kind of keep an eye on how lucid dreaming, for example, is, is being deployed in, you know, in all kinds of corporate and tech contexts to, to generate ideas to generate innovation, right to, to engage the dream in order to, you know, serve the interests of, you know, the, the new realms of consumer capitalism, I mean, this is not a, you know, a dimension of sociality, which is exclusively the province of a counter or a decolonial narrative, it's, it's a realm of power. And, and we, we must take it seriously.
Sara Rendell 1:07:51
Okay, so, I'm, this is leading to me, we've been talking about a lot about how you, yourself, and what you understand to be the importance of dreams, how they act on the real, how to relax within them, that their domain not outside of power relations, and also the way in which they're not individual spaces. What happens in dreams is collective and it brings in multiple bodies. One of the things I'm wondering then is, how do your interlocutors themselves describe to you the importance of these dreams, what they find them to do? Or why they even care to share about them or to mark them as important? And I imagine that they're probably as many answers to that questions as there are dreams you've talked to people about. So I don't mean to give you an impossible question to answer. But maybe if you could give me a sense.
Dominique Santos 1:09:03
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think I'll, I'll maybe speak to a specific example, the one that that kind of triggered all of this in the first place, which was my mother-in-law's experience as a young woman. And, and how she understood what happened versus how I interpreted it. And so I interpreted it as this, this event that had, you know, profoundly altered the course of her life to the point where it had given her life. And that that kind of gift of life had even resulted in the gift of life of my own children, right. So this very liberatory discourse around it and refusing the conditions in which the dream took place, and that I should tell you a little bit more about that she was. It was in the 1960s, the early 1960s, in South Africa--at the height of the apartheid era, and she was a mixed race woman--young woman--who had a white mother and a colored father to use the terminology of South African racial taxonomy. And she had become pregnant following a violent event and had been sent to a Catholic mission station. So they were a Catholic family. She'd been sent to a Catholic mission station in the in the hills of Kwazulu Natal and was living in isolation there with with with priests and nuns who didn't talk to her. There were no other young people there. So it was this incredibly isolating confinement. And one night, she decided that she couldn't go on. And she was going to just walk over one of the cliffs. So she headed off and, and was walking over to the cliff. And just as she was about to go over it, three nuns appeared to enter around and walked her back to her room where they sat embroidering on the bed until she fell asleep. And she describes hearing the swish of their habits, their nuns habits as they walked her back to the to the room. And the next morning, she woke up, and she heard the sound of a Studebaker Lark, beautiful 1950s motor car, coming up the drive, and she recognized it immediately as the car of her father's friend. And she packed her bag and stood outside the room. And no sooner did her father appear with his friend in this car, they didn't say a word, she got into the car and drove off away from this terrible isolation and this sense of being suicidal. And her father told her when they stopped for a pie in some something to eat. He told that he'd had a dream the previous night, that he needed to get her. And when he called his friend Peter in the morning, his friend had also had a dream the previous night. And so there was this convergence of what seems to be a sort of miraculous intervention, and two dreams. And we've we've spoken about it since quite a lot. And she thinks perhaps that, you know, she wasn't awake when she went over the bed, that was also a dream, but that she wasn't even aware that it was a dream, it was so real. But either way, I mean, it speaks to a kind of an enactment of, of the, you know, the despair, she was she was feeling and, you know, prepared to sort of end her life in order to escape what was an impossible situation. But she's also reflected on how she felt about it at the time. And how she felt about it at the time was that it was God who had intervened in her desire to end her life. It was God, who had stopped her from going over the cliff, God had sent the dreams to her father and his friend. And she was actually angry with God. Because she was like I was, I didn't want to live. I didn't want to live. You know, she had the baby, the baby was taken away and given up for adoption, she was devastated and she didn't want to live and she was angry. Of course, she's she put, her words were "I was angry with God for years.
Dominique Santos 1:13:44
For years, years of being angry with God, before she kind of came to a different relationship to what had happened. So, in her telling of the story, there is actually many years of not even wanting that intervention, of not even recognizing it as something that was opening up the possibility of life for her. That was only to come many years later. And yeah, and the framing of of it being an act of God. But that's also something that that that I take seriously. And I think I spoke to it earlier about about not limiting the, the interventions and the sociality of the dream to an individual's body or to the subconscious or the unconscious as it's kind of understood in you know, Jungian or Freudian terms, but to to recognize a kind of power inherent it in a way that is more than human however, that's conceptualized--as God or ancestors or whatever.
Sara Rendell 1:13:44
For years?
Sara Rendell 1:14:58
Wow. Well, thank you so much Dr. Santos
Outro music begins 1:15:00
Dominique Santos 1:15:03
You're welcome welcome
Sara Rendell 1:15:04
For doing this interview with us.
Dominique Santos 1:15:06
It was nice.
Anar Parikh 1:15:23
And, that’s a wrap on this South Africa Special Feature. Thanks for tuning in for another episode of Anthropological Airwaves, we’ll be back in your ears next month with more great anthro audio.
Outro music ends 1:15:33
Anar Parikh 1:15:35
Many thanks to Kyle, who edited and produced this episode, for making a (re)appearance on Anthropological Airwaves. I hope he and all of the founding members of Anthropological Airwaves know that they are welcome back any time. Interviews were conducted by Sara Rendell and Dina Asfaha at the African Critical Inquiry Workshop: African Ethnographies conference held at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa in 2019. Many thanks to Dominque Santos and Kharnita Mohammed for their time and insights. The intro and outro music you hear is “Waiting” by Crowander. This episode also features the song Huku by artist Sho Madjozi. As always, a closed caption version of the episode will be available on the Anthropological Airwaves YouTube channel and a full transcription on the episode page on the American Anthropologist website. Links to both are included in the show notes. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Anthropological Airwaves wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, don’t forget to rate and review us while you’re there. A five-star review in particular will help other listeners find the show! We would also love to hear from you in general. If you have feedback, recommendations, or thoughts on recent episodes, send an email to amanthpodcast@gmail.com. You can also reach out to us on our Facebook page Anthropological Airwaves or on Twitter with the handle @AnthroAirwaves. Find links to all of our contact information in the show notes and on the Anthropological Airwaves section of the American Anthropologist website.
end of episode 1:17:11