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SCAN ME

Three QuesTions wiTh JASON DANELY author of Fragile Resonance

1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

Just a short walk from where I lived in Kyoto, there was an older woman who lived alone down a tiny side street. She had looked after her husband, who had multiple health conditions, and died about a month before I arrived. When I think about my fieldwork, I picture the two of us, sharing a small pot of green tea at her kitchen table while her deceased husband “looked on” from the altar in the next room. On one visit, Emiko – a pseudonym – told me that in his last days, her husband was unable to swallow on his own and began receiving nutrition through tube feeding. She told me that

transformation, the way I wrote the book might have been a little different. In the wake of the pandemic, the fragility of the care ecosystems has become undeniable. Its consequences for older people and those who care for them has been tragic and is ongoing. Throughout the pandemic, differences in national responses were closely fol lowed; suddenly culture became more relevant, and family care was right there in the middle of it. In the first wave, for example, countries like the UK had frighteningly high fatality rates for residents in care homes, but in Japan, there were far fewer. When I read this, however, I also knew that the vast majority of older people receive care at home, where there were fewer visiting care staff and more

“he wanted to eat eel,” a kind of rich and savory traditional dish. She did sneak bits of food to him, something that he could taste and enjoy, even if he would have to spit it out. But she never did get that eel to him. As she told me the story, her tears began pouring down her cheeks. I rested my hand on hers instinctively. Then we were just there together and I don’t know how long it was. It was such an honor to listen to the quiet, personal stories like hers, and to be present and vulnerable with carers and post-carers. When I forget to be present (which is often), I think back to Emiko’s kitchen table.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?

I finished the book in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Had I known that we’d go through such a ground-shifting global

relatives staying home from work.

3. How do you wish you could change your field?

Cross-cultural comparative anthropology is still relatively rare when compared to single-society ethnography. This book tries to show how compar ison, even if it is not perfectly matched, can lead to deeper insights regarding both cultural difference and resonance. Appreciating the diversity and commonalities of human experience, organiza tion and expression has been one of the greatest contributions of anthropological imagination. The comparative approach is why I still love going to anthropology conferences even more than area studies ones, and it’s something that I think the field ought to return to if we are to keep our rele vance in a world where social and cultural identities remain sites of creativity as well as power struggles.

“In the wake of the pandemic, the fragility of the care ecosystems has become undeniable.”

Article

ON GALVANIZING NOSTALGIA? INDIGENEITY AND SOVEREIGNTY IN SIBERIA

by Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer

Incursions of Russia or its proxies into Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan have shown that the geopolitical territories of the former Soviet Union are far from stable, and their boundaries are continually being tested.

While these high profile hot spots are in the news, republics left within the legally defined Federation of Russia are less well pub licized. Could President Putin’s current belligerence in part be diversionary, a ploy to unite Russia’s diverse multiethnic peoples against manufactured outside enemies? Domestic political instabil ity, poverty and ecological discontent are growing, with enormous yet varied ramifications depending on the region inside Russia. The country’s vast Far Eastern territories, disproportionately influenced by climate change, hold important keys to its wealth, future devel opment, and stability. Yet precisely these regions are among the least understood.

My book exposes Russia’s contradictions and multiple civilizational solidarities by comparing three republics of the Siberian Far East. Analysis highlights the viewpoints of individuals and groups living in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), Buryatia and Tyva (Tuva). I explore local conditions and social change, on the basis of long-term engaged anthropology fieldwork with Indigenous peoples.

The term “Indigenous” in the context of Russia is prob lematic, since Russian law defines its “Native” (korennye, from ‘rooted’) peoples as only “small-numbered” (under 50,000), while United Nations definitions incorporate larger non-state ethnonational groups with long-recog nized homelands, such as the Sakha, Buryat and Tyvans of the Siberian Far East. Recognition as Indigenous and as peoples with their own republics is advanta geous.

As the Soviet Union came apart, national aspirations of republic peoples living within Russia’s boundaries were satisfied to uneven degrees with various bilateral treaties. Two Chechnya wars in the North Caucasus put chills on any premature dreams of secession by republic leaders. Instead, partial sovereignty claims

Recognition as Indigenous and as peoples within their own republics is advantageous.

within a federation built on historically unequal homelands resulted in a system of ad hoc negotiations, and patterns of decentralization and recentralization. When President Putin came to power, the nested sover eignties that provided potential building blocks for post-Soviet sociopolitical and cultural revitalization be came increasingly precarious. Could Russia fall apart, or would it be held together yet again by repression?

Such difficult questions require historical perspectives and contingent, conditional analyses. A major theme to emerge from fieldwork in all three republics was nostalgia for the past, but that nostalgia was variable, targeted to different time periods for various purposes. Some define nostalgia as a sense of sorrowful yearning that evokes passivity or memories of lost Soviet-period youth. However, just as various forms of sovereignty and identity can co-exist, so can different kinds of nostalgia. When ethnonational leaders tap into longing for civilizational and political solidarities that existed before the Soviet period, they can be galvanizing and inspiring. For many Sakha, Buryat and Tyvans, a presumed golden age when their languages and pre-Christian spirituality flourished has become worth recovering selectively.

Cultural and political renewal is nourished by horizontal interconnections among the Turkic and Mongolic groups featured in this book. While cultural ties bypassing Moscow have been under-funded, they have increased in intensity and diversity in the twenty-first century. Film and art festivals, youth camps, pilgrim ages to sacred sites, and Eurasianist ideologies have thrived across the historically variable borders of the republics. Alarm about forest fires, floods and other ecological disasters has brought people together as well, creating networks for civic society activism.

Demonstrations have become risky, with Russian opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny and his follow ers being jailed or declared “foreign agents.” Fear of arrest has caused protest movement organizers to disperse responsibilities and curtail activities. Yet, after a spiritual epiphany, a Sakha ‘warrior shaman’ Alex ander Gabyshev rose to public prominence in 2018-20 by calling President Putin an authoritarian demon. Critiquing Russia’s corrupt, impoverished and unequal society, he became a voice of civic conscience. His march on Moscow from Yakutsk via Buryatia accumulated numerous multiethnic followers. Arrested several times, he was incarcerated in 2021 in a Novosibirsk psychiatric clinic, subject to an involuntary drug regime, and restricted visitation. His treatment spotlights Russia’s human rights failures, especially the terrifying Soviet era tactic of declaring critics psychotic. A 2022 bard-like pop video in the Sakha language has made Alexander a legend; his followers are hoping he will be neither martyred nor forgotten. Amid speculation about his legitimacy as a spiritual leader, including in the international press, a major question remains as to why President Putin and his powerful Russian Orthodox elites find him threatening.

Russia’s valiant opposition and multiethnic composition are significant because they reveal fault lines in Russian society. President Putin’s insecurities magnify the importance of all political opposition, creating vortexes of violence in the name of stability. Opposition mobilization, ranging from secular to religious, and Russian to non-Russian, has been mostly reformist and non-secessionist. Protests, based on hopes for cultural, personal and societal dignity, have centered on such diverse issues as local environmental causes, election fraud, and unjust arrests. This book puts concerns of Siberians on the map of international awareness.

Such difficult questions require historical perspectives and contingent, conditional analyses.

THE EXCERPT

ORDER, AUTHORITY, AND IDENTITY

Abbas Hayder lives in Basra, a city in southern Iraq. On the morning of 7 April 2003, he saw three men walking down the street carry ing chairs and light fixtures— goods that they had looted, he correctly surmised, from a nearby municipal office. He immediately knew that the Baʿ th regime’s grip on Basra must have disintegrated and that the British Army, after two weeks of waiting outside the city, fi nally had entered it. What he did not yet realize, however, was that the Iraqi state was collapsing and, looted to its foundations, would not be quickly reconstituted. Abbas now was living in a newly stateless society.

The sudden absence of a functioning state quickly impacted his family’s qual ity of life and safety: uncollected trash rotted and raw sewage congealed in the street, a staccato rhythm of gunfire routinely echoed, and criminals roamed un checked. In the following weeks and months, Abbas came to understand a way through which he could work with neighbors to achieve common goals and sub stitute for some, but not all, missing state ser vices. By doing relatively simple things in a coordinated way, Abbas and his neighbors managed to keep their street tolerably clean and provide a modicum of security. This book is about how Iraqis were able to produce social order in the absence of a state, the limits of that order, and the unintended consequences of their reliance on par ticu lar ways to achieve order.

The central claim of this book is that Abbas and many of his fellow Iraqis turned to the mosque after state collapse because it had an unparalleled ability to communicate in ways that helped them coordinate their activities with others. The influence of religious authorities is due not only to the message of Islam but

also to the ability of Islam to deliver messages in ways that render them com mon knowledge. But in postinvasion Iraq, the power of the mosque and clerics was limited by the number of persons the message reached and by the types of endeavors to which it could induce individuals to contribute. Mosque sermons could facilitate coordination, but only rarely could they get people to comply with costly edicts, such as situations in which individuals had incentives to free ride by letting others do most or all of the work. Clerics could foster contributions only when the actions required of followers imposed relatively small costs; as costs rose, the effectiveness of clerics diminished. This distinction demon strates that preachers derived their influence not solely from followers’ piety but also from an institutional capacity to solve informational problems. It helps de marcate the limits of religious authority: whom religious leaders can lead, when can they lead, and the set of issues over which they have authority.

Order from Clerics’ Orders

A week after the Baʿ th regime fell, the imam at the mosque near Abbas’s house, for the first time in anyone’s memory, modified the ritual form of the afternoon prayer on Friday and included a pair of brief sermons. In his first sermon, the imam recited a sura from the Quran and stated that from then on, on Fridays they would hold the special congregational prayer (salat al-jumʿ a) instead of the midday group prayer (salat al-dhuhr) that is held on other days. He described ritual differences between the two prayers (e.g., two prostration cycles instead of four) and matter-of-factly stated that this form of prayer was now permitted and preferable. He sat for a moment and then rose and began his second ser mon, which focused on the breakdown of law and order after the collapse of cen tral authority. The preacher condemned the looting of public buildings, told listeners to shun looters, and said looted goods should be turned in at a desig nated mosque.

This ritual of Friday congregational prayers and associated sermons was new for most of Iraq’s Shiʿi Muslims. Except in a few mosques, most notably for a few years in the late 1990s, such sermons had not been heard in Shiʿi mosques in Iraq since the 1950s, and even before then they were relatively rare. Although they are an essential worship rite in Islam, Shiʿi scholars have disagreed for cen turies about the legitimacy of holding Friday sermons in the absence of the Mahdi, the prophesized redeemer. Abbas and his neighbors began to attend these Friday congregational prayers when it suddenly became an acceptable ritual in most Shiʿi mosques. Like many Iraqis, they were pious and had lived amid a

general increase in religiosity in Iraqi society over the previous decade or two. But the local imam, as well as the more senior scholars with whom he was affili ated, were widely known to be proponents of a clerical tradition that disdained politics and mundane affairs. They were respected as guides on religious and spiritual matters, but Abbas and other Shiʿa did not expect—and many did not want—clerics to try to mobilize Iraqis.

Silently sitting together, Abbas and his male neighbors heard the preacher’s messages about looting, rubbish, and security (the few women who attended sat in a separate section). The preacher proposed group actions that, if done by enough residents, would improve their shared situation, and— critically— attendees knew that others in attendance also heard these messages. When the solution to a problem was one in which everyone wanted to do what everyone else did, such as where everyone should dump their trash, this ability of the ser mon to generate common knowledge provided preachers the social weight to determine which solution from among the plausible ones would be selected by the community. Coordination ensued. The preacher’s authority—his ability to induce compliance with edicts—began to ratchet up week after week as neigh bors came to expect each other to look to messages from the mosque to solve other collective dilemmas. In this sense, sermons and the mosque loudspeaker amplified, literally and figuratively, preachers’ preexisting authority, and the guidance and advice they offered touched on a gradually wider set of issues, mov ing from the traditionally religious to the more temporal and mundane. But this augmentation of clerical authority had limits. When the proposed solution to a dilemma entailed sufficiently high costs for individuals, it was in listeners’ self-interest not to contribute to the group action and instead to free ride on others’ contributions, if there were any. Knowledge that others had the same knowledge was insufficient for compliance. In such cases, preachers—unable to punish noncompliance—could foster contributions only when the actions required of followers imposed relatively low costs on them.

Like ink drops on a page, enclaves of social order— centered on Friday mosques— emerged out of anarchy. But the power of “Islam” to generate social order via mosque sermons was limited in two ways: how far the message reached and the types of collective behav iors it could produce. And Iraqis would soon see, although they may not have realized why, that achieving order via this mech anism had impor tant and unintended consequences: religious discourses flour ished, and those discourses included some Iraqis but excluded others; emergent norms varied across congregations; less order emerged in areas where Sunnis and Shiʿa lived as neighbors; and, perhaps, it contributed to the stunting of civil society.

Or D er, a u THO ri T y, an D iD en T i T y

Identity from Orders

As 2003 wore on and US-led transition efforts stumbled, debates raged inside Iraq about how to reconstitute the Iraqi state and select a government to lead it. A cacophony of voices tried to influence Abbas and secure his support: Basrawi regionalists, secular nationalists, monarchists, new and old Islamist movements, and elders of his clan. But beginning in late June, Abbas and millions of other Iraqi Shiʿa increasingly came to rely for guidance on a single voice that rose above the din. An esteemed septuagenarian cleric, cloistered in the holy city of Najaf and long considered apolitical, began issuing statements regarding the transi tion process. Although he almost never appeared or spoke publicly himself, his pronouncements spread widely because he sat atop a hierarchical network that included the majority of the mosque preachers who had been independently pro moting local coordination in their communities since the collapse of the state in April. Abbas and his neighbors heard their local preacher—to whom, over the preceding months, they had already begun to look for shared understandings of what they ought to do in many situations—convey Grand Ayatollah Ali Sis tani’s opinions on aspects of the transition process, including perhaps most im portantly his call for direct elections and rejection of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s (CPA) plan to select a group of Iraqis to draft a constitution. These were new and complex issues for Abbas and other listeners, and their opinions on many of them converged on Sistani’s viewpoint partly because they shared in the collective hearing of it. When Sistani’s preachers later called on followers to engage in low- cost collective actions in support of these positions, many obeyed. A few months later, in January 2004, Abbas participated in his first po litical rally, traveling with a group from his mosque to join tens of thousands of other Basrawis in a northern neighborhood to listen to Sistani’s foremost repre sentative in the city repeat these positions. A year later, when Abbas voted for the first time in his life, he did what he knew others would do: he supported the electoral list that Sistani’s preachers endorsed. This list—the United Iraqi Alliance—was dominated by Shiʿi Islamist parties, none of which Abbas par ticularly liked.

Yet, despite this seemingly im mense power, Sistani’s influence remained limited. The grand ayatollah’s authority vis-à-vis many political issues—that is, his ability to get Iraqis to follow his messages—depended on Iraqis’ expectations that other Iraqis also would obey his messages. Sistani’s edicts would be unsuc cessful if the cost of compliance demanded of individuals was too high. This gave him an incentive to avoid issuing rulings he knew would be ignored or disobeyed by large numbers of his followers. Sistani could induce Shiʿa to coordinate, but he largely avoided asking Iraqis to participate in activities that entailed significant

costs and for which many had an incentive to free ride on others’ obedience. Like all grand ayatollahs, Sistani must consider competition from other clerics for followers; if enough of his edicts were ignored, Iraqis would be less likely to expect other Iraqis to act on his future messages and might look elsewhere for guidance. Sistani’s statements and fatwas reflected these constraints. Sistani was unable to stop many Shiʿa from retaliating against Sunnis after the bomb ing of a Shiʿi shrine in February 2006. As his messages demanding restraint went unheeded, he dramatically scaled back his political involvement as Iraq descended into sectarian conflict.

Abbas had never thought of himself first and foremost as a Shiʿi Muslim; he still does not, but in many ways, he acts as if he does. Until mosques affiliated with Sistani began delivering similar messages in Friday sermons, Abbas did not know what other Shiʿa thought about the myriad of issues facing Iraq or what they would do in new circumstances. Although his life, like many other Iraqis’, had been steeped in Shiʿi narratives and symbolisms, that background did not automatically lead to a “we-ness” with other Shiʿa or a shared understanding of new issues, such as how an interim constitution should be written. In this sense, the mosque as a technology of communication made it possible for listeners to be part of a much larger community concurring on (or acquiescing to) shared posi tions. It increased the social and political relevance of “being Shiʿi,” albeit without calling it such. But that technology did not reach all Iraqis; the boundaries of the imagined community did not include Sunni Muslims or non-Muslims. Over time, a cohesive imagined community of Iraqi Shiʿa came to dominate Iraq’s po litical order. This was unintentional sectarianism: Sistani’s messages were over whelmingly “Iraq-centric,” not “sect-centric.”1 While they may have been directed at all Iraqis, the means by which they were delivered limited them to the Shiʿ a.

Many Sunni Arabs in Iraq also had come to rely on messages from their lo cal mosques to produce social order. Both Sunni and Shiʿi preachers gained in fluence in their local communities because they derived their power from a similar source: their ability to solve problems of coordination and low-cost con tribution. But Sunni clerics in Arab Iraq are less hierarchical than their Shiʿi counter parts; they lack the orga nizational equivalent of a grand ayatollah who can consistently induce preachers to deliver the same message in di fferent localities. Sunni Arabs did not act cohesively on the national level. It is often claimed that one of the central issues in postinvasion Iraq is “Sunni inclusion,” which, in effect, often implies national-level leaders who can represent Sunni Arabs as a group. This assumes that Sunni Arabs exist as a coherent group and share a sense of “we-ness.” But sharing a culture did not automatically translate into community or a shared set of beliefs about what should be done when con fronted with new issues. During the US-led occupation, Sunni Arabs did not

Or D er, a u THO ri T y, an D iD en T i T y 5

adopt unified bargaining positions or electoral strategies. Most did not think of themselves as a group, and they did not have a set of institutions—like Shiʿ a did—that could bring them to collectively think of themselves and act as a group. Their mosques advocated di fferent strategies, leaving them split regarding how and under what conditions they should participate in the political process. No unifying national-level Sunni Arab leaders emerged.

Iraqis’ reliance on mosque sermons and religious networks for information and the production of social order contributed to an increase in public expres sions of piety, including assertive expressions of sectarian identity.2 Mosque mes sages were couched in religious terms, and the ways that Iraqis coordinated reflected clerics’ preferences. In some locales, residents came to tolerate or even condone the enforcement of conservative norms by militias, including attacks on alcohol sellers and insufficiently covered women. The sounds and images of Shiʿi Islam permeated public discourses and spaces, including those associated with the Iraqi state. Pictures of martyred Shiʿi clerics replaced those of Saddam Hussein at intersections and even on many government buildings. The perva siveness and public acceptance of “sectarian” iconography was partly an unin tended by-product of the mechanisms by which Iraqis had come to collectively understand a new Iraq. But Sunni Arabs felt increasingly alienated from this or der; to them, their country and its government felt occupied by something for eign, even after coalition authorities and troops withdrew. Sunni Arabs remained fractured and, over the years, some turned to violence, others engaged in elec tions, and some did both. No strategy led to a sense of “groupness” or “we-ness” that was sufficient for Sunni Arabs to act as a cohesive group, which created fertile ground for extremist groups, including al- Qaeda and its descendant Islamic State (ISIS).

Three Central Puzzles

Although this book seeks to help explain specific phenomena in post-Saddam Iraq, a larger goal is to speak to three problems of enduring significance for so cial scientists and political theorists. These are the problem of how societies cre ate social order in a stateless environment, the origins and limits of political authority and leadership, and the social and political salience of collective iden tity. Often discussed in separate literatures, this book shows the interconnect edness of these topics and treats them as sequential problems.

After the collapse of the state and in a postauthoritarian environment where people did not have strong preexisting trust or ties to spread information, why were individuals in some localities but not others able to work together to pro

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THE EXCERPT

Introduction LAW, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND EXPERT WITNESS

Tuesday, September 22, 2015 (Newark, New Jersey, USA)

As I sit at my desk, finishing a book manuscript on an international criminal tribunal being held in Cambodia, I receive a surprise e-mail from that very court. The message confronts me with a dilemma. It also raises questions about my role as an anthropologist and my responsibility to bring scholarly insights into the public sphere.

“I would like to inform you that your name has been put before the Trial Chamber of the ECCC on a confidential and provisional Expert Witness list,”1 reads the message from an official at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). This UN-backed international hybrid tribunal was estab lished to try former leaders of the Khmer Rouge for genocide and atrocity crimes that took place in Cambodia while they held power from 1975 to 1979.

The book I am completing, Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Tor turer, focuses on the first person to be tried at the court, Duch, the head of a Khmer Rouge security center where over twelve thousand people were killed, many after being tortured and forced to confess. Even as I read the e-mail, my desk is covered with piles of prisoner confessions and other documentation used as evidence in his trial. Duch was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in Case 001. The second case is now underway at the ECCC.

“The Trial Chamber has requested that I make contact with you,” the mes sage continues, “to determine your willingness and availability to travel to

R od U ct I on

Phnom Penh, Cambodia to testify before them as an Expert Witness” in the trial of the Case 002 defendants, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan.

Khieu Samphan held the largely ceremonial title of head of state during Democratic Kampuchea (DK), the period of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia. Nuon Chea is more notorious. Some call him a monster. He claims to be a cham pion of Cambodia’s poor. He is known for his devotion to cause and willingness to do whatever was necessary to ensure the success of the revolution he and his Khmer Rouge comrades undertook when they seized power in Cambodia on April 17, 1975, following seven years of civil war.2

Although he served as “Brother Number Two,” Nuon Chea emphasizes that he and “Brother Number One,” Pol Pot, worked hand in hand, more or less as equals, while they attempted to completely transform Cambodian society. They sought to bring about a “Super Great Leap Forward” that would outdo even Mao by cata pulting Cambodia, renamed Democratic Kampuchea (DK), toward communist utopia.

Pol Pot held the title of prime minister. Nuon Chea served as deputy secre tary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). Together, they led the bru tal DK regime until January 6, 1979, when they were toppled by another group of Cambodians, some former Khmer Rouge who had fled purges, with the help of massive Viet namese military support. By this time, the DK regime had im plemented policies resulting in the deaths of around a quarter of Cambodia’s eight million inhabitants.

Pol Pot died in 1998. Nuon Chea is the most senior leader left alive to stand trial for the group’s crimes. Due to geopolitics, it has taken over thirty years for Nuon Chea to face justice.

Many scholars would leap at the chance to be a part of his trial at the ECCC, one of the most significant international criminal trials since the Nuremberg Tri bunal’s prosecution of Nazi leaders. My initial response is ambivalence and ap prehension. I have reservations—and questions.

The Cons of Expert Witness

There are two reasons for my hesitation. The first involves a risk, the second a major quandary that is a focus of this book.

The risk is professional. I have been conducting research on the Cambodian genocide since the 1990s, and I have spent the last half dozen years undertaking research on the court. I am well aware that expert witnesses put their reputations on the line. During my research, I have observed firsthand how their testimonies

FIgURe I.1. Pol Pot (aka “Brother Number One”), prime minister of DK and the leader of the Khmer Rouge. Photo courtesy of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC- Cam) / Sleuk Rith Institute (SRI).

are picked apart and their methods, analyses, and research impugned. I know I will become a target if I agree to testify.

The quandary is epistemological, a philosophical concept that refers to our ways of knowing and making truth claims about the world. Anthropology, like other academic disciplines, is based on epistemological assumptions reflected

I nt R od U ct I on

FIgURe I.2. Nuon Chea (aka “Brother Number Two”), deputy secretary of the Communist Party of Cambodia.

Photo courtesy of DC- Cam/SRI.

in its methods, practices, concepts, facts, and validation procedures. So, too, is law as practiced at courts like the ECCC.

These epistemological assumptions may vary. They can also clash, sometimes dramatically. And I am well aware that they often do during academic expert testimony on the courtroom floor, since there is an underlying tension between scholarly research that prioritizes context, theory, and explanation (answering the question why?) and the legal need for cut-and-dried answers and facts that provide the basis for determining the guilt or innocence of the accused (answer ing the question guilty?). The academic mantra “it’s complicated” doesn’t play well in court, where time is precious and the goal is a verdict delivered in an ef ficient manner.

And indeed, some people claim that academic explanation doesn’t belong in the courtroom. Such skeptics argue for legal minimalism, contending that law has impor tant but strictly limited goals— determining guilt and rendering a verdict—that are accomplished by specific legal procedures and forms of rea soning.3 This perspective was perhaps most famously pronounced by Hannah Arendt, who proclaimed that the purpose of a trial “is to render justice and nothing else.” 4

LAw, A nt HR o P o L og Y, A nd e XP e R t w I tness

FIgURe I.3. Khieu Samphan, DK head of state, in late May 1975.

Photo courtesy of DC- Cam/SRI.

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on

Others have articulated minimalism in terms of disciplinary epistemologies, including historian Henry Rousso, who refused to testify in a Holocaust-related trial because he believed that the historian’s enterprise diverges too greatly from that of law. Rousso feared the “judicialization of the past” and a situation in which the historian would be “hostage” to legal procedure and the courtroom “line of questioning.” 5

My situation is even more complicated because I have been conducting longterm research on the very institution of which I am now being asked to become a part. Participant observation is a key anthropological method. But, if I testify, I will engage in a form of participant observation that not only is extreme but also raises ethical issues related to anthropological research.

In my e-mail reply to the court, I express these concerns. “ There are a couple of factors that might make providing such testimony difficult,” I write. “First, as you may be aware, I have been conducting ongoing research on the ECCC since 2008. I have completed one book . . . and am working on a second one on tran sitional justice and the ECCC more broadly.”

“In carry ing out this research,” I continue, “I have interviewed hundreds of people, including court personnel. I worry that testifying could create difficul ties in this regard, including making it harder for me to continue carry ing out my research and interviewing people, especially at the ECCC.”

“And second,” I go on, “all of my research, dating back to my research in Cam bodia in the 1990s . . . was done in accordance with university human subjects protocols. Many of the interviews were of the record and many of my inter viewees asked that they not be identified. I expect that this situation might also cause some problems and restrict what I could say.” 6

These issues, I realize, may lead the court to rescind their invitation and therefore make it unnecessary for me to decide whether to testify. Either way, while awaiting a response I will have more time to consider the pros and cons of academic expert witness. Justice moves slowly. And it will be months until the court replies. As a result, I have plenty of time to ponder my dilemma. Testify ing poses significant challenges. But there are also reasons to agree. Two loom large: explanation and obligation.

The Pros of Expert Witness

The first reason to testify is to ofer academic explanation—helping to answer the question why?—in a public forum.

Some people, for example, argue that the legal minimalist position is over stated and overlooks the ability of international justice to fulfill goals beyond just

Three QuesTions wiTh CAMILLA HAWTHORNE author of Contesting Race and Citizenship

1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

I came to this research because the entanglements of race and citizenship in Italy have intimately shaped my own life. My mother is Italian, from a small town in northern Italy. My father is Afri can-American; he was born in rural Virginia and grew up in Oakland, California. As a result, I was raised in a bilingual household; I spoke Italian before I started speaking English; I traveled fre quently to Italy to spend summer or winter months with my mother’s side of the family; and I have dual Italian and American citizenship (the former, notably, due to the same restrictive citizenship law

probably encourage myself to see uncertainty and ambiguity as opportunities. There were mo ments in my research that I initially thought of as my own analytical failings, but ultimately proved to be important ethnographic anecdotes (e.g., when a white Italian scholar scolded me for using razza, the Italian word for “race,” when describing my research). There were other initially disorienting but ultimately generative moments when my own preconceived notions (for instance, concepts like citizenship) were challenged and transformed through the process of really listening, rather than trying to squeeze the world into someone else’s theoretical frameworks.

based on blood descent that disenfranchises many of my Black Italian comrades). My life has been shaped by a deep connection to both diasporic Blackness and Italianness. As I started the research for this book, I was struck by the profound reso nances between the stories of Black Italians in Italy and my own lived experiences, and their insights ultimately helped me understand myself and my family in powerful new ways.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?

I have come to understand that an important part of the research and writing process is leaving room for the unexpected, for the chance encounters that can reorient the arc of your story, for the nonlinear unfolding of politics. So, if I could travel back in time and give “past me” some advice, I would

3. How do you wish you could change your field?

During the summer of 2016, I started to notice the language of Black Lives Matter being taken up by Black activists in Italy. A lot of conversations began to emerge around this time among Black Italians about the extent to which Black Lives Matter could translate to the Italian context, given the different lived experiences and struggles tied to Blackness in Italy. In response to one particularly heated debate that unfolded on Facebook, an Italian-Ghanaian friend responded with perhaps one of the most beautiful and insightful summations of how we can forge Black diasporic solidarities even across our distinct subjectivities, geographies, and histories. In short, he was saying that while we all swim in different waters, at the end of the day these waters all flow into the same sea.

“If I could travel back in time and give “past me” some advice, I would probably encourage myself to see uncer tainty and ambiguity as opportunities.”

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

AUTHORITARIAN LAUGHTER

It was a dreary November night in 1980 when Juozas Bulota returned home with an unusually crammed briefcase. His teenage son ran to open the briefcase in search of new magazines his father often stashed within. “Be careful, my head is in there,” the elder Bulota warned.

The son saw an ugly, red clay bust with a grotesque version of Bulota’s face staring out from inside. Bulota’s wife also peeked into the briefcase and told him, “You have to hide it, so nobody can see it.” They put it into a cupboard.

“The fun will start,” Bulota quipped with amusement, “when I am gone. You will not be able to throw it away or break it since it is my head. You will feel bad about hiding it somewhere since it is a piece of artwork by the famous artist Petrulis. You will plan to take it to our summer house, but you will be afraid it will get stolen. You will see, when I am gone, my head will bother you for the rest of your life.”1

Indeed, when Bulota passed away fourteen years later, the head was moved from place to place until they finally left it in the corner of the apartment balcony facing the woods and hidden behind a vase. Before what would have been Bulo ta’s hundredth birthday in 2018, his family remembered his “head” and brought it back into their living room (figure 0.1).

Juozas Bulota was the editor in chief of the Lithuanian satire and humor mag azine the Broom (Šluota in Lithuanian), which was founded in 1956.2 The maga zine was instrumental to authoritarian statecraft—laughter had to serve the cause of the Communist Party in building and governing Soviet society in Lithuania. Bulota presided over the magazine for almost three decades (1956–1985). At the

time he brought his “head” home, five more years remained until his retirement. In this briefcase also traveled censored Broom issues, various Communist Party documents, satire and humor magazines from other Soviet socialist republics, and readers’ letters. In the mid- and late 1980s, he brought back small unfolded pieces of paper with scribbled questions sent to him by people from the audience during his public lectures.3 Some of them expressed nationalistic sentiments and were openly anti-Soviet. Bulota’s wry smile on the clay head must have testified to the failures of authoritarian statecraft—Soviet laughter ultimately turned against the regime itself.

Authoritarian laughter, the Soviet government’s project of satire and humor, was seemingly paradoxical: while it aimed to serve Communist Party ideological agendas and involve editors, artists, writers, journalists, and readers in creating communist society, it encompassed opposition that undermined the govern ment’s initiatives.4 This apparent paradox of authoritarian laughter, integral to the political history of the Broom, is the major focus of this book. I argue that authoritarian laughter was multidirectional; it was a communicative exchange among artists and different audiences that was both ideologically correct and oppositional. While all laughter is ambiguous and contextual, the concept of

FIGURE 0.1. The clay head of Juozas Bulota and photos of him in the Bulota family apartment, 2019. Photo by the author.

multidirectionality allows me to explicate its circulation and reception and underscore the fact that the same jokes were often meaningful in different ways to different audiences—authorities, censors, and readers. Communist Party ide ologists could see the Broom artists and writers fighting against unresponsive, inept bureaucrats or the shoddiness of industrial production, while readers could generalize Broom criticisms to the socialist system itself. Authorities read depic tions of criminals, robbers, homeless people, or sexualized images of women in the West as a critique of “rotten capitalism.” Yet these same images aroused some readers’ fascination with the West and desire to visit it.

Studies of authoritarianism usually focus on state power, violence, and the abuse of human rights. This book contributes to these studies by exploring inti mate commonplace experiences of power—creating cartoons and satires, nego tiating with censors, laughing and embracing official popular culture. I show that in the absence of democratic forms of political participation, the Soviet author itarian state involved citizens in statecraft and provided meaningful forms of engagement through the outlet of a satire and humor magazine.5 Looking into intimate encounters with authoritarianism through the lens of laughter, I seek to understand how authoritarian regimes become part of everyday experiences of their citizens, involve them in their political projects, and make their ideolo gies appealing at moral, emotional, and embodied levels—or fail to restructure visions of social and everyday lives.

The Broom was an ideological institution of a Soviet authoritarian state.6 In Lithuania it was regulated by the policies and norms of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (CP CC): only one satire and humor magazine was published in the Lithuania language; the ideological profile of the magazine was set and policed through editorial offices, censors, and the CP CC; and satire and humor were used as forms of disciplining individuals as well as tools of propa ganda to serve the regime’s interests.

The Broom, however, from when it was founded, was an unstable and incom plete project of Soviet laughter. Lithuania was a site of contested Sovietness, owing to its pre-Soviet history of sovereignty, the violence of World War II and of the postwar era, religious and linguistic difference, and proximity to Eastern Bloc countries and Western Europe. These contexts, as well as Lithuanians’ minority status in the USSR, shaped Soviet laughter in Lithuania.

This book covers the period from 1956, when the Broom was founded, to 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, came to power. Juozas Bulota’s almost thirty-year leadership of the Broom partly explains the relative consistency of the magazine’s content from the time of its founding to 1985. Neither after the Prague events of 1968, nor the youth riots of 1972 in Lithuania, did the Broom visibly change its course. As

I discuss in my post scriptum, the Broom radically changed during perestroika, becoming a revolutionary magazine advocating for Lithuania’s independence from the USSR. Although the Broom continued to be published in the 1990s, the post-authoritarian Broom did not survive long in post-Soviet times, ceasing publication in 1998.7 Nostalgia for jokes past shows how deeply political humor was rooted in everyday life.

Laughter and Statecraft

While we do not usually think of laughter as a tool of statecraft, the Soviet gov ernment did. Laughter was used as a weapon against the enemies of the USSR, a propaganda tool directed at international as well as local audiences. It was a form of regime governance through public criticizing, shaming, and ridicule. The Soviet authorities anticipated that citizens would contribute to the socialist construction of the new society by laughing at drunks and speculators, snobs and loafers, priests, bad managers, and clumsy bureaucrats, all with a view toward getting rid of “enduring shortcomings” from the “bourgeois past” to advance to communism.8 Soviet laughter thus was also a means for shaping citizens into Soviet subjects.

Laughter as a tool of statecraft had its roots in Bolshevik revolutionary thought. For Lenin, both the press and literature had to fulfill an important mission in educating the people. Lenin advocated that “art must serve propa ganda,” and laughter had to become “a weapon of class struggle.” For Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik commissar for enlightenment (1917–1929), art had to organize social thought, to act on emotions and intellect (Gérin 2018, 28).9 Laughter was a sign of strength of society and a sign of victory (Lunacharsky [1931] 1964, 76, cited in Oushakine 2012, 195). Many diverse thinkers of the Soviet period—Mikhail Koltsov, Boris Efimov, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Sergei Eisenstein, among others—also saw Soviet laughter as a form of power (see Norris 2013; Oushakine 2011). They anticipated, in Lunacharsky’s words, the role of laughter to be “as important as ever in our struggle, the last struggle for the emancipation of human beings” (Lunacharskii [1931] 1964, 538, cited in Gérin 2018, 3).

Under Stalin, intellectuals were further engaged in developing common “communist humor language” (Low 1950). Humor was valued “as a corrective, ‘scourging,’ ‘lashing’ or otherwise castigating ‘relicts of the bourgeois past,’ which were impeding the development of the new, healthy socialist society” (Milne 2004, 3). In post-Stalinist years, Nikita Khrushchev claimed that satire was “armed in defense of our Party and the people” with the intention of destroying

“everything that hinders our advancement towards communism” (Mesropova and Graham 2008, 2–3).

Officially, Lithuanian satirists after World War II embraced Soviet perspec tives on laughter.10 Juozas Bulota would scribble a note for himself on a newspa per that he might have been reading from the book Malaia zemlia (Small Land, 1978) by Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, echoing Lunacharsky’s position: “Laugh ter is a great force, expressing optimism and spiritual health of people.”11 In one of his lectures, Bulota paraphrased Marx by saying that “laughter is needed so people would separate with the difficult past cheerfully.”12 Journalist Albertas Lukša (1958, 55), reflecting on Marxist beliefs that state coercive institutions will disappear in communism, wrote in his college thesis in 1958 that the power of laughter will be stronger than law. As a Broom journalist for thirty-six years, Lukša used the power of laughter to discipline wrongdoers and prevent various transgressions.

The opposition I encountered in the official Soviet satire and humor maga zine made me wonder if Soviet theorists of laughter might have been wrong about the functions of laughter as a tool of statecraft. Emil Draitser, a freelance journalist for Krokodil (Crocodile) and other print media in the 1960s and early 1970s, captures the paradox of Soviet laughter as both serving and undermin ing the regime when he notes that Soviet satire may seem an oxymoron. “How could a totalitarian state tolerate public criticism? How could it encourage this criticism by putting professional satirists on its payroll?” Draitser asked (2021, 3). Official media debates in the 1920s and 1930s about the appropriateness of laughter in Soviet Russia illustrate that some Bolshevik ideologists and writers were concerned that critical satire and humor would turn people against the government (Oushakine 2012).13 They knew that the prominent Russian writers Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–1889) built their success on their scathing critique of corrupt, stupid, and lazy bureaucrats, a satirical tradition Soviet Russia inherited (Oushakine 2012). Russian satirical literature, according to Oushakine, “practically creat[ed] a subgenre of antigovernmental satire” (196). In 1923, Bolshevik historian Iakov Shafir argued that “it is not an easy thing to know where exactly a critique of concrete individuals stops and where a critique of the regime starts” (Shafir 1923, 8, cited in Ousha kine, 197). In 1929, Literaturnaia gazeta (Literary newspaper), a newspaper of the Federation of Soviet writers, published a series of essays on the role and func tion of socialist satire, including Vladimir Blium’s commentary on Soviet satire as an oxymoron (Oushakine 2012, 200). While a majority of writers affirmed that satire could be repurposed for Soviet society, Blium argued that since “satire knows no positive content . . . therefore every attempt to develop satirical forms

under socialism would amount to a ‘counterrevolutionary’ assault, to ‘a direct strike against our own statehood and our own public’ ” (Blium 1929, cited in Oushakine 2012, 200). “The very notion of ‘the Soviet satirist,’ ” Blium suggested, “was an oxymoron, equal to such similarly unimaginable phenomena as ‘Soviet banker’ or ‘Soviet landlord’ ” (E.G. 1930, cited in Oushakine, 201).

Stalinist-era debates about Soviet laughter did not see criticism itself as dangerous (see Oushakine 2012). The critique itself was founded on Marxist beliefs about art, media, literature, and ideas of historical materialism. Criticism generally—and critical satires or cartoons particularly—were mechanisms of the betterment of society anticipating advancement to communism. Criticism was not an issue as long as it was not directed against the regime and did not contradict Communist Party ideology. Nevertheless, throughout Soviet history, a question of potential critique of the regime in satires and cartoons remained a key political and aesthetic issue for Soviet authorities (cf. Oushakine 2012). The theorists of Soviet laughter would aim to resolve the issue by endorsing laughter’s propaganda role and disciplining function, by creating realistic satire with an educational purpose, as well as “positive satire” that would provide a construc tive alternative (see Oushakine 2012). Satire and humor that merely entertained were rejected because they were seen as bourgeois in nature. Realistic portrayals of Soviet life and disciplining pedagogy allowed Soviet authorities to direct a reader in meaning-making. Oushakine notes that debates about Soviet laughter under Stalin were replaced by the instrumental deployment of laughter for the affirmation of the consolidated regime (205).

By 1933, in the Soviet Union, Krokodil was the only major union-wide satirical magazine left, published under the supervision of Pravda (Truth), the Commu nist Party newspaper (see Alaniz 2010, 52). When Lithuania was incorporated into the USSR in 1940, the Broom for several months coexisted with another major Lithuanian leftist satirical magazine, Kuntaplis (Wooden clog) (see chap ter 1). After World War II the Broom was the only satire and humor magazine in Lithuania published in the Lithuanian language. Editors’ self-censorship, as well as censorship by Glavlit (the Main Directorate on Literature and Presses) and the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party (LCP CC), had to ensure that satire and humor were appropriate for the newly emerging Soviet society. Among Lithuanian authorities and satirists there was little debate of the established principles of Soviet laughter, although Juozas Bulota, in Moscow in 1972, raised the issue of revisiting comic strips as an acceptable rather than capi talist genre for Soviet society (see chapter 6). Instead of debating, editors, writers, and artists created multidirectional laughter. The intrinsic ambiguity of humor, editors’ transgressions, the absence of clearly articulated ideological censorship rules, critical audiences, and the changing cultural landscapes in late socialism

Three QuesTions wiTh SANDRA BÄRNREUTHER

author of Substantial Relations

1. What inspired you to write this book?

When I started this project over ten years ago, In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) in India was prom inently portrayed in the global media. Most reports focused on the country’s then flourishing transnational surrogacy market. However, IVF as a mundane medical intervention received less attention. I was curious to know how clinicians and patients in India practice and experience IVF in their everyday lives. And how the procedure has changed over recent decades: from a public research project to a largely privatized practice; from a ‘hobby’ undertaken by inventive doctors to a commercialized object of consumption; from

collection program for a Dutch pharmaceutical company in Kolkata in the 1970s. It turned out that the collected urine was exported to Europe where it was purified into human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone which is used during IVF procedures. It was great fun following these historical connec tions between India and the Netherlands through archival material and the stories of former compa ny managers, workers, and urine donors.

3. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

I wish I had realized the extent to which normative discussions in Europe and the US had informed

an experimental procedure to a standardized inter vention. Historically situating contemporary IVF practice in India also inspired me to examine the country’s long-standing role in the field of repro ductive medicine globally: not only as a transna tional market but also a provider of resources for the pharmaceutical industry in Europe or a pioneer in IVF research.

2. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for the book?

When I was tracing the story of (the late) Dr. Subhas Mukherjee, who claimed that he had successfully conducted IVF in the 1978 – just a few months after the world’s first IVF baby was born in the UK – I interviewed one of his good friends. He mentioned in passing that Dr. Subhas Mukherjee had helped him establish a urine

my thinking about IVF at the beginning of my research. The questions I posed changed sub stantially over the course of my fieldwork – an experience which is certainly familiar to many anthropologists. The more I learnt about the different concerns of my interlocutors and their diverse perspectives on IVF, the more I had to reorient my own avenues of inquiry. While this was an exciting journey, it also made the writing process more challenging.

“Historically situating contemporary IVF practice in India also inspired me to examine the country’s long-standing role in the field of reproductive medicine globally.”

THE EXCERPT

Introduction ENVELOPED CARE

After forty-five minutes of moving through the sleepy, snowy, and gray streets of the city in November 2009, a prerecorded female voice announced to the passen gers on the bus: “The clinic: last stop.” For the sick, the clinic is sometimes indeed the last stop on a journey through the maze of public health care that begins with the family doctor and may continue with visits to the local polyclinic, the regional hospital, or a private clinic. Patients are referred to this clinic in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, for complex diagnoses and advanced surgery.

The passengers—patients, nurses, relatives, doctors, students, and residents— stepped off the bus and dispersed, passing crowded parking lots and a line of kiosks that had sprung up in the city in the early 1990s, following independence from the Soviet Union. The kiosks, which are almost obsolete in other parts of Vilnius, sell necessities and treats for hospital patients, staff, and visitors: flowers, pajamas, slippers, deep-fried pastries, and a wide variety of chocolate bars and boxes. There is also a newsstand that carries newspapers and an abundant supply of white envelopes.

Inside the main entrance of the hospital there is another newsstand, a café, a pharmacy, and an ATM. That morning I tried to buy a little white envelope at the newsstand on the first floor of the clinic. It was not my first attempt. A middleaged saleswoman wearing a sheepskin vest told me, as she had before, “Sorry, I am out of them; they go pretty fast. Try the kiosk outside, at the bus stop.”

When a woman behind me in line also asked for an envelope, the saleswoman said, “I am sorry, but you know what—just use a piece of regular white paper and fold it,” and handed the woman a sheet of paper from the printer on her desk.

While I was still at the counter, caught by the scene, the saleswoman turned to me. “Miss, do you also need one? Take it, it will work,” she said reassuringly. What are these envelopes, and how do they work?

little envelopes

Vokelis (in Lithuanian), the little white envelope, epitomizes the relations of health care in contemporary Lithuania. Its function is to hold cash that patients or their families offer to doctors working in the public health-care system. These envelopes are variously described as “bribes,” “gifts,” “honoraria,” “thank-yous,” “informal payments,” “additional,” “nontransparent,” and “nontaxable income.”1 Often they are placed in gift bags that might also contain boxes of chocolates, bottles of alcohol, or postcards. Although this practice of informal payments to doctors is ubiquitous, it is also contested. Some patients and their caregivers said they felt no qualms about giving thank-you payments, while others condemned the doctors who accepted them as greedy. Doctors talked about their conflicted feelings of gratitude for and dependence on patients’ alms and their obligations to their families. Almost everyone was caught up in these dilemmas.

These informal payments are a distinctive element of medical culture in East ern Europe and other postsocialist contexts. They have been linked to the scarcity of resources in socialist economies and to the turbulent transitions to capitalism, both working against and sustaining the socialist state. In 2009 and 2010, I was doing research during health-care reform led by the Ministry of Health of Lithu ania. The reform project (2008–18) focused on hospital optimization and aimed to transform the practice of informal payments for medical treatment into a system of official copayments.2 Transparency International Lithuania (TIL), the local branch of a global nongovernmental organization that exposes corruption in government and business transactions, had organized seminars and produced visual materials urging Lithuanians not to engage in what it called bribery.3 State officials, however, were reluctant to blame doctors or accuse them of accepting bribes and were ambivalent about the privatization of public health care. Man agers of private health-care clinics and experts from the Free Market Institute (Laisvosios rinkos institutas), a neoliberal think-tank, complained extensively in the local media that informal payments, “the culture of envelopes,” were signifi cantly impeding the transformation of public health care from a social function of the state to a business matter.

Envelopes were being blamed for the failure to develop viable private health insurance policies and standards that could effectively demarcate and organize patients according to their health insurance cards. Thus, they were characterized

as an obstacle to the growth of private medical services. Policymakers, inter national and local experts, and scholars represented the shift from informal to official payments as more ethical, lawful, and moral. According to many of the free-market proponents, this transformation would also open fair competition between public and private health-care institutions and provide more choices to health-care consumers. If money changed hands, it had to be on the open market, they said. Otherwise, the health-care system would be stuck in the Soviet past, burdening the state with too many financial obligations. This characterization of the envelope as an obstacle to both the privatization of health care and the sur vival of public institutions intrigued me. Over the course of my research, I came to understand it as so much more.

This book examines the envelope as an ethnographic concept through the notion of relations, complicating the distinction between gifts and bribes, money and payment, transparency and corruption. I perceive ethnography as a conceptmaking genre and its concepts as “concrete abstractions” (de la Cadena and Blaser 2018). The envelope as a concept emerged from my fieldwork in Lithuania from 2009 to 2010. In this book, it is simultaneously concrete and abstract. The envelope is a situated relation that allows me to follow and describe practices of care. It is a container for complex, moral doctor-patient-caregiver transactions— a nexus of relations. When opened, it reveals the ethics of care, the economy of relationships, and the political economy of health at the intersection of neolib eral reforms and the fragmentation of socialism. It thus epitomizes the conten tion between different ethical, political, and economic regimes.

This relational practice—what I call “enveloped care”—is configured through the interactions between people, stories, rumors, affect, money, and other mate rial objects that patients and their caregivers offer to doctors. These items alter the market logic of exchange and interrupt the relation between service provider and customer. As patients are being transformed into customers through the introduction of fees for elective procedures, the persistent practice of enveloped care invokes the ongoing desire to be perceived not only as a patient but as a person and sometimes even to be treated as kin. It is thus embedded in complex social relations driven by webs of obligation that include both gratitude and the pressure to give. As this book shows, enveloped care operates through conflicting notions of care, treatment, and neglect. The relations it mediates are character ized by asymmetry, vulnerability, and dependency. Yet this practice can provide recognition and the potential for care in uncaring conditions. Enveloped care exposes the gaps in institutionalized medicine and, in some ways, fills them.

Anthropologists have examined the bribe-gift opposition, discussing ques tions of recognition and misrecognition, and the monetization of exchanges in informal relations (Humphrey 2002, 2012; Jasarevic 2016; Kornai 2001; Ledeneva

1998; Patico 2002; Rivkin-Fish 2005, 2011). Some argue that neoliberal reforms in Eastern Europe have intensified the predatory side of monetary offerings to doctors, turning them into payments and thus succumbing to market forces (Stan 2012). But in my observations, the envelope exceeds the notions of a gift or a bribe, while also being included in them. Instead of elaborating on the giftbribe or gift-commodity foil or focusing solely on the material transaction itself, I examine the ambiguous relations and ambivalent practices that constitute this informal practice. These dynamics go beyond economic rationality and thus allow it to persist.

I view the envelope as a precapitalist economic form and a site to rethink the “unquestioned authority of capitalism in our lives” (Tsing 2015, 65). Often con sidered a remnant of socialism, the envelope is surviving amid market capitalism. It remains an integral and vexing part of the Lithuanian healthscape.4 This book, then, looks at why this precapitalist economic form is still thriving and what it might mean for ongoing neoliberal reforms. I argue that one key to its survival is that the envelope is both a vehicle for and an expression of what I refer to as the “will to care.”5 In the Lithuanian context, the will to care is a manifestation of the personal or collective attempt to preserve life and relationships in the face of illness and the shifting political economy of health. It both pushes back on the limitations of the health-care system, whether socialist or market-based, and demands recognition of a patient’s singularity. This will to care emerges from kin obligations to take care of family members, friends, and relationships at all costs, forging what I call “caring collectives.” This collective care gives people the sense that they have more of a grip on medical encounters and illness. In this context, the envelope is a collective explanatory site for patients and caretak ers to interpret medical encounters, illness prospects, and potential outcomes. The envelope thus is built on and facilitates relationships between doctors and patients and between patients and their families, while also being an incarnation and practice of care.

It’s Personal

“I don’t know about you, but for me the little envelope is an emotional contact (vokelis—tai jausminis kontaktas). It saved my life.” Lucija, a fifty-four-year-old copy editor of a cultural magazine, told me this when we sat down to talk at a café in Vilnius. She had given quite a few little envelopes to doctors in the public health-care system, and I was a bit surprised that Lucija started our con versation with such a firm, positive statement about envelopes. Knowing that she was skillful and careful with words, I realized that Lucija had thought about

our conversation beforehand and wanted to define her position. Her opening sentence contrasted sharply with Transparency International’s narratives of cor ruption and the definition of all informal material or monetary transactions between patients (or their families) and doctors as bribes. Lucija’s explanation of how the envelope was an affective transaction that saved her life shaped my inquiry into the informal economy of illness.6

I had run into Lucija two days before, at a bus stop on a breezy November afternoon in 2009. I was on my way to the TIL office, located in the old part of town in a building owned by George Soros. I had just returned to Lithuania, my home country, after eight years living abroad, to conduct my dissertation research. Suddenly, a woman walking by stopped, turned to me, and asked: “Rima? Do you remember me?” After a moment I recognized her voice and remembered her thin, metallic, oval eyeglasses. We had chatted occasionally back when I lived in Lithuania. Her appearance startled me: the plump and round-faced Lucija I had known ten years ago was half the size I remembered. When I asked her how she was doing, Lucija answered that it was a long story, not for an encounter at the bus stop. She inquired what I was up to. I told her briefly that I was studying informal payments that patients gave to doctors, and I was interested in healthcare reform in Lithuania, including the envelope system. I asked her whether she had spotted any posters asking patients not to bribe or signs with crossed-out envelopes. She had not seen any. When the bus arrived, we got on and continued our conversation. “I can be your subject,” she told me, “I have spent more time in hospitals and polyclinics than in the editorial room in the last five years. I even thought about writing down everything that I have been going through. I will tell you. Call me.” I called her the next day.

Lucija told me that after falling sick with a rare intestinal disease, she had undergone three years of treatment without any significant improvement. She was among 2 percent of patients with this disease who did not respond to medi cations. When Lucija was facing complicated surgery (doctors gave her a 20 per cent chance of survival) and her world was collapsing, she made a bet with her self: if her doctor accepted the envelope, she would get better, but if he refused it, she would die soon. The envelope gave her hope.

Lucija was already familiar with the practice of giving money or food to doc tors. She had given envelopes before and shared her experiences with friends, relatives, and colleagues. Now she was an expert. “I thought I was buying doctors, their service,” she reflected on her past experiences. Like many patients and their family members, Lucija was ambivalent about giving envelopes. Some patients described this practice to me as “something you cannot escape,” an “organic part of life,” and a “cult of giving.” Some said they had “no moral hesitation” in giving envelopes, whereas others felt pressured by greedy doctors or argued that patients

were “spoiling” doctors in trying to procure exceptional care for themselves. Almost everybody agreed that the state was not spending enough on health care and doctors’ salaries, even though they noticed improvements in medical tech nology and hospital facilities. Only a few supported an increase in taxes to fund health-care services for the rapidly aging population.

Giving envelopes to doctors, along with sharing illness experiences, was a common topic of conversation among families, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and in the media. I was even referred to a website where patients informally ranked doctors. The appropriate size of the gift was included in the question naire and displayed on the website.7 Even those people who otherwise strongly opposed corrupt practices and supported policies of transparency made an exception when they or their family members faced illness. According to them, doctors were the only professionals who were “worthy” of envelopes because they “worked hard.” Alternately, some felt provoked (provokuoti, provokuoja) that is, urged to act in a certain way through verbal or nonverbal signals from doctors or nurses—while others said they gave money in response to pressure from fellow patients, friends, or family members. When doctors found themselves in the role of patients or caregivers, they too struggled with questions of whether and how much to give. Envelopes were a lens through which patients and caregivers tried to interpret or make sense of medical encounters.

When faced with serious illness, people often changed their positions from being against the envelopes to using and believing in them. Lucija vividly described how her perception had changed once she had pinned her hopes on the envelope she presented to her doctor. When the surgeon seemed hesitant to accept the envelope, Lucija started crying. Then the doctor took her envelope, which held 100 litai.8 “It gave me hope that I would get better. . . . I think it is inhumane for doctors not to take money from patients who are giving them envelopes, even if they have terminal cancer and are going to die soon.” As she spoke, she reached for a napkin to wipe away her tears. “They must take the money, and then, if they want to or they feel bad, they can return it to the families if the patient dies or when there really is no chance,” she said passionately. For Lucija, the envelope was related to her belief in the future. She perceived the medical encounter as a pendulum swinging between life and death. The envelope could stabilize anxi eties and uncertainties; it was a force that could keep death at bay, even if only temporarily. It became part of the treatment and healing process itself.

Medical clinical care, with its objective and impersonal scientific approach, often rubs up against local practices, patient experiences, and plural heal ing systems, as Lucija’s story and many others in this book illustrate. Care is always ambiguous and local (Mol 2010). On the level of the individual, it seeks to maintain life in ways that are not necessarily rational or just, yet it still has

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