Brigittine M. French: Anthropological Lives

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Transcript

Marshall Poe:

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I’m the founder and editor of The New Books Network, and you’re listening to an episode in Grinnell College’s Authors and Artists podcast. Today I’m very pleased to say we have Brigittine French on the show. She teaches anthropology at Grinnell, and we’ll be talking about her work at Grinnell and also a few of her books, the most recent of which is, Anthropological Lives: An Introduction to the Profession of Anthropology. Brigittine, welcome to the show.

Brigittine French:

Thank you so much for having me, Marshall. I’m glad that we finally have been able to connect and I’m really delighted to be with you for this time.

Marshall Poe:

That’s great, thank you. Could you begin the interview by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Brigittine French:

What to tell you about me? I have been at Grinnell for 20 years. I first came in 2003 on a temporary position. It is really the last place I would’ve imagined ending up. I’m actually a native Iowan.

Marshall Poe:

Really? I didn’t know that.

Brigittine French:

I’m a native Iowan and I really didn’t know anything. It’s not an exaggeration to say I really didn’t know about Grinnell College as an undergrad. It wasn’t really on my radar until I earned my Ph.D. and saw this really amazing opportunity to work at Grinnell.

Marshall Poe:

That’s great. Where are you from in Iowa?

Brigittine French:

I’m from Northwest Iowa actually.

Marshall Poe:

I say this because I used to be a professor at the University of Iowa and I spent a lot of time in Iowa City.

Brigittine French:

My Ph.D. is from the University of Iowa actually.

Marshall Poe:

Is that right?

Brigittine French:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

Well, this is a Grinnell College podcast, but let’s give a shout-out to the University of Iowa, a place I love.

Brigittine French:

Indeed. A fine institution.

Marshall Poe:

Yes, absolutely. Can you tell us why you became an anthropologist?

Brigittine French:

I actually really, I fell in love with anthropology. This is something that I talk about in the book that I co-wrote with Virginia Dominguez. I was at the University of Iowa as an undergraduate and had an advisor who’s probably a graduate student advising masses of undergraduates. I think he understood that I was drawn to the social sciences. I didn’t really have that language at the time. He kept recommending, take a political science class, take a sociology class. I did all of those things. And he said, well, I thought you might, maybe you should consider taking an anthropology class. And I resisted that actually. I resisted it because I didn’t know what it was.

Marshall Poe:

Irony of ironies.

Brigittine French:

Yes. I took my first anthropology class in the second semester of my sophomore year, and I literally became so enthralled with anthropology that I was really eager to declare. I knew this is for me. I recognized myself in the questions of anthropology and I ran out to declare my major very quickly after, because I was convinced that it was going to be full. Everyone would discovered this thing and there wouldn’t be any space for me. I really loved deeply the space and the questions and the endless ability to interrogate almost anything you can think of as long as it pertains to humanity. I got an A+ in my sociology class. I didn’t find, this is not any critique of any colleagues in sociology, but I remember thinking, doing well in sociology, but it didn’t call to me.
And anthropology really called to me in a way that I didn’t even know was possible. In terms of the life of the mind, I was new to all of that and was like waking up almost in some ways.

Marshall Poe:

I really love your expression that you recognized yourself in the discipline. That’s very well put. Because a similar thing happened to me when I was at Grinnell and I recognized myself in history. I was like, this really fits me well.

Brigittine French:

It’s so wonderful to hear you say that because I really think that is at the core of what we try to do in the classroom at Grinnell, to create intellectual, social, ethical spaces where we invite students to find themselves. I don’t mean that it’s not discipline-specific, but it’s that moment of recognition that it’s a space that invites you in to go and gives you, right, and then we give students hopefully the opportunity to go deeper. That I think is one of the things that makes Grinnell special, and I think it’s one of the things-

Marshall Poe:

I think that’s very well put. My advisor at Grinnell was a fellow named Dan Kaiser. He’s now retired. But I met him, I had my freshman seminar with him, and I essentially said, if I could do what this guy does, I think I would be a very fulfilled person.

Brigittine French:

Brilliant, brilliant.

Marshall Poe:

And I did. Not as well as he did, but I did it. Let me ask a very general question before we start talking about your books. What exactly is the discipline of anthropology? Can you summarize for us what anthropologists do? What kind of questions they ask, what research they do?

Brigittine French:

Absolutely. In broadest terms and perhaps plainest language that we can find, anthropology is the study of humans, the human condition, past and present. And perhaps now we’re even thinking about anthropology of the future. That’s very vague. Let me add just a little more specificity to that. In the American tradition, loosely Anglophone, American hemispheric tradition, but then throughout the Americas model has followed, anthropology consists of four subfields. The idea is that as a discipline, we think holistically. Those subfields are cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology, biological anthropology, archeological anthropology, archeology, and then linguistic anthropology.
And the idea is to think about whatever question that you want to ask about humanity, about humans, about why they do what they do from a holistic perspective. We try to paint a broad picture of understanding cultural historical processes over time and in the moment. How does that sound to you?

Marshall Poe:

That’s a very good answer. I really like the breadth of anthropology. Historians study the past. I guess that’s pretty broad, but the fact that you can delve into almost any aspect of the human experience at any time, that’s very attractive to me.

Brigittine French:

Right. Again, the spaciousness of the discipline, you can enter into the discipline from so many perspectives, from so many vantage points. It’s really about raising questions and then trying to use the tools that the discipline provides to answer them. I think as a discipline, anthropology is perhaps at its best — one of the ways that anthropology is at its best — is when, I think across the subfields, we seek to complicate and show complexity and contradiction in generalizations. One of an anthropologist’s favorite pastimes is to take a generalization and then poke holes in it, poke holes in it by showing variation, showing diversity, showing change over time. It’s very vibrant, I would say.

Marshall Poe:

There certainly is a lot of variation.

Brigittine French:

Yes, yes.

Marshall Poe:

No doubt about that. Let me ask a follow-up question. In my experience running the New Books Network, and we have a new books and anthropology channel, a lot of the books are what the anthropologists call ethnographies. What is ethnography?

Brigittine French:

Ethnography is both a method and a product. So really deeply connected to the subfield of sociocultural anthropology, sometimes linguistic anthropology. And the idea with ethnography is that the anthropologist, here’s the methodological part, really immerse themselves over a long period of time in a particular context with a group of people historically that was in a place, which of course we understand to be problematic now. The traditional ethnographic method in the discipline would be to go immerse oneself in community life — generally, right? — in small villages, and try to become or try to do what we call participant observation. The method of ethnography is immersion over time, building deep connections.
Of course the idea of the isolated village in various parts of the global south, that is deeply problematic. But that idea of really doing ethnographic work and immersing oneself in a context with a group of people and coming to know that very intimately has persisted. So now, for example, I’m sure you’re seeing books of anthropologists doing ethnographic method among Wall Street traders, right?

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. I think we did the book you’re referencing.

Brigittine French:

That’s the method part. And then the other part is then writing that up in a particular narrative and analytic way. You can produce an ethnography as well. So both method and text.

Marshall Poe:

Another follow-up question prompted by what you just said. One of the things that we try to talk about in history is that we need to be objective. We need to remove ourselves from the context in order to tell the truth about what was going on. It seems to me that if you’re doing an ethnography, this is particularly difficult because you’re becoming one of your "observants" — I’m not sure of the right word here. You’re participating. How do you maintain a distinction between you as the anthropological scientist and you as member of that community? That sounds very difficult.

Brigittine French:

Of course, you’re absolutely right. It is very difficult. I would say historically in the discipline, the idea was to be as, quote-unquote, objective as possible. I would say that that disciplinary position is not, by and large we understand that to be not tenable. I think instead of where we arrived — so I grew up with anthropology in the middle of a disciplinary crisis. Of course, that’s not a crisis, not a crisis, the kind that we like to want to highlight today. But it was an epistemological crisis in the late 80s and early 90s where the question was around this, well, we understand we can’t be objective because there are all of these issues of power, of inequality, of who gets the right to represent. How do we continue with anthropology? Or as some people said, well, anthropology’s dead because we don’t believe in objectivity anymore.
Well, of course anthropology persists. I would say where we have come, and really this is the anthropology that I grew up with, is epistemologically, right? Rather than trying to be objective, we try to be self-conscious and intentional about our own positionality, vis-a-vis the work that we do. Instead of trying to hide under objectivity, we try to say, okay, here are the fault lines. Here was my position among these people. Here’s why I did the work that I did, so that folks can sort out where and why once alignments in an ethnographic context occur. I started doing research as an undergraduate in Guatemala in the year that a Guatemalan woman named Rigoberta Menchú won the Nobel Peace Prize.
And in the Guatemalan context, indigenous Guatemalans and the North American scholars who were working with them, folks that I trained under, the clear position was there is no neutral place for writing about indigenous language and cultural revitalization. My language and cultural revitalization. You’re either supporting the work of indigenous scholars in a context where there was genocide against them, or you’re part of another project that has served to subordinate them in various ways. I would say most of us, anthropologists of my generation and then going forward, we understand that we’re always positioned as complex human beings, and the best thing to do is to acknowledge that and work with it in our writing and in our text. We call that reflexivity.

Marshall Poe:

I want to use the word obviously. That’s obviously more epistemologically honest, because we are all actors in the world. We do come from places and make assumptions and have positions. I don’t want to say hiding, objectivity is an important idea, but I don’t think you should make too much of it.

Brigittine French:

Well, we can’t. I really like what you said Marshall, about it’s more honest, because in fact that is the truth of it, right?

Marshall Poe:

That’s just true with a capital T.

Brigittine French:

Yes, exactly. Exactly. We’ve matured …

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, I think that’s right.

Brigittine French:

… I think as a discipline.

Marshall Poe:

That’s true. I don’t know if I can say that for history. I’m not sure. I haven’t thought about it, but maybe I should. You were just talking about your work in Guatemala. Why don’t we talk a little bit about that book, which is called Maya Ethnolinguistic Identity: Violence, Cultural Rights, and Modernity in Highland Guatemala. Can you talk a little bit about what you did there?

Brigittine French:

Yes. The transformation in that work is really deeply linked to Grinnell. That book, I probably spent the first — I spent a good 15 years — not on that book but on that research. At its core, the book is really about indigenous linguistic and cultural revitalization. And more specifically, Maya linguistic, cultural, and linguistic revitalization in the context of a very violent state that, the Guatemala state really worked to eradicate by all kinds of means, culminating in genocide, the Indigenous Maya population. As I said, I grew up as an anthropologist, I was a student of anthropology and novice anthropologist in training, aspiring. In conversation with folks my own age who were Maya people really rallying around writing about the importance of maintaining their languages and culture.
Basically to maintain their collective identity, which is distinct from the national identity. And they use scholarship to do that. Scholarship was always political in that context. So the book, I would say in my dissertation, if I can go back that far, I really worked to …

Marshall Poe:

Please.

Brigittine French:

… to map out that history of Maya language revitalization and try to show some of the variation and multiplicity and tensions in the way that indigenous people were and continue to promote Mayan languages in the face of an assimilationist project. The Grinnell pieces that … I should back up and say, when we’re talking about the four subfields of anthropology, I’m trained as a linguistic anthropologist. My dissertation was very much about language politics. When I came to Grinnell, after being there a little while, I had an amazing and transformational opportunity to do a faculty study seminar with colleagues across the college, right? One anthropologist was there, but folks from across the disciplines. We were doing a Holocaust and genocide studies seminar.
We read together for a semester and then we visited both Poland and Germany and thinking about the way that the Holocaust had been written, contested, right? Thinking about ethically, thinking about in a scholarly way. And that, having had that experience, really created a space where I had this urge to write more about the violence and the politics and the genocide behind the work that I had done in my dissertation. But I didn’t know how to bring it forward. It was really in my time at Grinnell that I was able to articulate and transform violence from the background of the research into the foreground of the book that became my first book on my ethnolinguistic identity.

Marshall Poe:

Well, you mentioned something which is very present in my own life. I’ve spent much of my life studying Russia, and the country that I love, Russia has just invaded another country that I love, Ukraine. And I don’t know what the hell to do about this, to be honest with you. I really don’t. I don’t know what to think, because I have such strong feelings for both of those peoples. I’ll be honest with you, I just want it to stop. I don’t know what else to say than that. But I do recognize that as a scholar, somebody that studied Russian, writes about Russia, that I’m a player in the game. I can’t exclude myself. I’m there whether I like it or not. I can’t hide behind objectivity. I’m in it. The ethical choices that you have to make as a scholar in such a situation, I find very disturbing, to be honest with you. Maybe the case that history is behind anthropology because we haven’t adopted positionality very well. We don’t know what to do.

Brigittine French:

Well, but you’re standing in that space right now.

Marshall Poe:

Right. And I’m just looking dumb, is what I am. Uninformed and I don’t know what to say, but I correspond with my Russian friends, my Ukrainian friends, it’s just a very difficult position to navigate as a scholar. I definitely, I respect that. Let’s move on to your second book, Narratives of Conflict, Belonging, and the State: Discourse and Social Life in Post-War Ireland. I actually lived in Ireland and I’m very aware since you are a linguist, of the importance of the Irish language to many of these people. And how it was almost, and I don’t want to generalize about Ireland, this is among my friends and the people that I knew. It was almost a constant point of tension that they didn’t know what to do with it. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your experiences there.

Brigittine French:

You have to tell me where you lived in Ireland.

Marshall Poe:

I was in Limerick. I was in Limerick, Ireland. I had a lovely year there at the University of Limerick. The people there were extraordinarily nice to me.

Brigittine French:

I want to just ask one more question. Have you been back or are you still …?

Marshall Poe:

No, I haven’t been back. This was 20 years ago.

Brigittine French:

Wow. The Ireland research … well, let me back up and say, our work is always relational. These questions of a history of violence, violence, national identity, the place of language and politics of belonging were so central in Guatemala and they’re very central in Ireland in a different way. I wanted to continue asking those questions and related questions but in a different context. Because being an anthropologist in Guatemala is very different than being an anthropologist in Ireland. I felt like I needed to take that on, both my positionality as a scholar and then to push the boundaries of what I thought I knew, asking related questions in a very different cultural context and historical moment.
Going back to your question about the issue of language in Ireland, Irish language revitalization was absolutely central to the Irish nationalist movement and really what we would now call the decolonizing project that did result in a violent war and then a subsequent civil war. I think about, so what I heard in your question, I immediately thought of the work of a brilliant author, Irish author, named Hugo Hamilton. I don’t know if you’ve read his stuff, but …

Marshall Poe:

No, I haven’t.

Brigittine French:

… it’s stunning. Hugo Hamilton is an Irish writer, and his father was an Irish nationalist, somebody who was really promoting monolingualism and Irish and making Irish the, well, Irish is one of the official languages of the state, but all of that political work around Irish. His father was deeply committed to rescuing Irish. And his mother was a German refugee, from a Christian, … a Catholic refugee from Germany during World War II. Anyway, they got married. And in — Hugo Hamilton — the book, the memoir, this particular memoir is called The Speckled People, he writes about …

Marshall Poe:

Wait, I’m writing this down.

Brigittine French:

The Speckled People. He writes about growing up in Dublin, south Dublin. And his father made it forbidden to speak in English. He insisted they only speak in Irish. In the household, he learned Irish from his father and he learned German from his mother. English was always outside the house. And that of course put him at odds with certain flows of life in Dublin at the time. He has Irish, Hugo Hamilton. He has it; he speaks it. I came to know him actually when I was on a Fulbright in Ireland. In an amazing, this way we talk about luck or the universe. But the thing that I just remember him saying recently, he talks about Irish as the, he called it the ghost language, that it’s always looming and casting a shadow that never goes away and never materializes completely in a collective sense.

By the time I did that — the Ireland book — I didn’t delve into the politics of Irish language revitalization as much as I really dug into the questions of, through language, what does it mean to build a democratic state that emerges out of a radical history of violence? One of the most profound things that we can perhaps understand from the case of Ireland — and you will probably appreciate this as a historian — the war of independence with Great Britain. There was a united guerrilla front, there were parliamentary elections to make Ireland independent, so that Irish folks were quite united in the independence, i.e. anti-colonial, movement. And the terms of that independence were so deeply contested that it produced a civil war. So then you had people who were on the same side one day …

Marshall Poe:

Same side, yeah.

Brigittine French:

… executing each other five days later. And the division of the island. What I really wanted to dig into is, in those early years of state formation in the Republic, how did conflict and violence persist, transform, and then how did that work out in terms of trying to build a democratic apparatus. So language, discursive data, language rather than an object of interrogation, Irish or English discourse. And the languages that people used to talk about these things really became the object of my inquiry. I’ll say one more thing about that — you should tell me Marshall, if I’m going too far field — but one of the most surprising things to me that I discovered in that process is that …

I was looking at court documents, court records, and in Ireland in the 1930s, there were tons of people brought before the courts for charges of bad language. Here’s the language part, here they appear charges of bad language, and that means they were swearing and carrying on in public spaces. But it turns out that it really wasn’t that big deal if men, men were occasionally brought before the court for cases of bad language. But it was predominantly women whose language was being policed and brought before the courts when they were carrying on about and swearing in public. There’s this really interesting thing happening with gender and language in the context of this new state that’s trying to be equal. I think my overall point is language as an object in the Guatemalan case transformed in my second book into language as a social performance and a code that people use strategically. And then of course gets policed quite differently depending upon one’s identity.

Marshall Poe:

And so just so I understand there were laws on the books that said you couldn’t curse in public?

Brigittine French:

Yes. Yes. Yes. Indeed.

Marshall Poe:

To speak of my own positionality, that’s hard for an American to imagine.

Brigittine French:

Yes. Very true. Very true.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. Very hard. But I really like your expression about the Irish language as the ghost language. And I don’t want to offend any Irish people or anything like that. It brings to mind experiences that I had in Ukraine decades ago now. I would meet Ukrainians, we’d speak Russian, and I’d ask them if they knew Ukrainian and they said, yes, I know Ukrainian, and please change the topic.

Brigittine French:

And why? Because it was dangerous? Or because …?

Marshall Poe:

It’s just that it wasn’t something that they were particularly interested in or proud of. They were much more interested, and they knew I couldn’t converse with them in Ukrainian. But these questions are quite alive in modern Ukraine and in Russia where there are supposedly efforts to get one linguistic group to speak the other one’s language. I tried to put that as neutrally as I possibly could in the interest of state building or belonging. There’s a long history of this in Eastern Europe, very long. And again, from the American perspective, it’s very hard for me to bring to mind the rationale behind this. I sometimes regret that I don’t know Spanish because I think I should.

Brigittine French:

Well, it’s never too late.

Marshall Poe:

No, it is never too late. Duolingo, here I come, because a huge proportion of Americans speaks Spanish. I’m just fine with that. I just feel ignorant that I don’t. Thank you for that. You brought me back to Ireland. Let’s talk about anthropological lives a little bit. You did something which I would like to do with historians, that is interviewed a bunch of them about what they do.

Brigittine French:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

Explain the research process for this and why you did it.

Brigittine French:

Well, this project actually, I have to say, was — the idea for the project and to interview anthropologists — absolutely driven by the vision of my colleague, my mentor, my dear friend Virginia Dominguez, when she was president of the American Anthropological Association. The initial thing, so now I’m revoicing her words, of course … I’m sure you know Inside the Actors Studio?

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, I do.

Brigittine French:

Well, Virginia had this idea that she wanted to do Inside the President’s Studio when she was the president of AAA and interview anthropologists of all ilk — or at least not of all ilk, because we can’t do that, but of a variety of different kinds of anthropologists positioned very differently, institutionally and in public life — precisely in this public-facing way, in the way that we’re talking about here, to say, what is anthropology and what do anthropologists do? And to show, I think the robusticity and the space of the discipline outside, in public, because we all, all of us, I’ve never met an anthropologist who hasn’t confronted the Indiana Jones scenario or the digging up bones scenario.
And we don’t necessarily as anthropologists do a good job of … I think we do a great job, often, in the context, for those people who join us, but for outsiders, folks don’t understand what anthropology is because we haven’t done a good job of that. And then therefore, I think, and Virginia and I would agree that we lose space in creating relevancy for our work and making it matter somehow. It is a book for potential interlocutors of anthropology, students whose parents want to know what they’re spending all this money and theire undergraduate education for, or what if somebody wants to hire, somebody applies for a position and they have a Ph.D. in anthropology, well, what’s going to happen with that? The impetus was really about public-facing, opening the doors and saying, this is what the discipline does, and here’s what lives can look like, and here’s where our contributions might be.

Marshall Poe:

Well, kudos to you and Dr. Dominguez, because this is an issue quite close to my own heart. One of the things that I felt when I was a professor is that we didn’t do a very good job of explaining to the public what the hell we were doing. Because the pressure at least in history, is to publish articles in obscure journals and books, that not very many people read. But a general explanation of the value, which historians in my case do for the commonwealth, was almost universally lacking. And so in the absence of us telling people what we were doing, we would let other people do it. That did not work well.

Brigittine French:

That’s never good. It’s usually better to be the author of your own narrative.

Marshall Poe:

That’s exactly right. One of the things the New Books Network tries to do is get the voices of scholars across a hundred disciplines out there so you can actually see that they’re real people. The first question that I always ask in all of the interviews I do is, tell us about yourself, because you and these books you write and the articles and the teaching you do doesn’t fall out of the sky. There’s a story there that is often very interesting and revealing, as in your case. This may be too general a question. What did you generally discover having done all these interviews?

Brigittine French:

I would say the thing that stands out most to me if I were to … Yeah, the thing that stands out most to me about that work is — you hear me pause like, what is my hesitation? I’m going to say this and then I’ll qualify.

Marshall Poe:

Well, that means you’re thinking, and I like that.

Brigittine French:

I would say, and I tend to think this might be something inherent … I mean, not inherent, but this might be something about the particulars of the discipline, is that folks who study anthropology and then who became anthropologists, it’s almost like a secular vocation in the sense that folks … You know the thing that I said about how I fell in love with anthropology, which is deeply linked to my development as an adult human being, this spirit of people feeling like anthropology is a calling occurred again and again and again and again. It’s this deep dedication to, not to the discipline, but — of course to the discipline — but a deep dedication like, this is the work that I must do, that I’m compelled to do, and anthropology allows me to do it. Because everybody’s doing different work.
There’s not unity in "oh, we’re all dedicated to doing the same work." It’s like we’re all, the folks, not all, but the folks with whom we were able to talk and think, all shared this deep commitment to their trajectory of becoming and remaining in anthropology. But that might be from inside a museum. That might be from inside a classroom. It might be from working on advocacy issues or within a legal context. That was surprising to me.

Marshall Poe:

Well, I think this notion of calling is true for a lot of scholars across a lot of disciplines, because I think one thing the public at large doesn’t recognize is the degree of sacrifice that you have to make to do this. They think of the tenured professor in their office, with their feet up on their desk, teaching six hours a week, and think, what a cushy job. It’s not like that at all.

Brigittine French:

Right. Marshall, I’m very curious about that. Do you find that secular vocational calling to do this thing, do you find that across disciplines? Is it something that you hear all the time?

Marshall Poe:

I definitely think so. Yes.

Brigittine French:

That’s so interesting.

Marshall Poe:

These people are very devoted to their work and their disciplines. It is like a calling, they will do it for almost nothing. They will continue to do it. Just to speak autobiographically for a second. I resigned my professorship at the University of Iowa. I didn’t stop doing history. I ran the New Books Network. I built the New Books Network. I’m a business person now, I guess you could say. But I have a book coming out in March.

Brigittine French:

Well, congratulations.

Marshall Poe:

That I will not be paid for. I will make no money off of it. I just wanted to continue to do it because I am never happier than I am when I have a pile of documents and someone says, figure out what happened.

Brigittine French:

Are you bringing someone in to interview you about your book? I hope.

Marshall Poe:

Probably. Given that I’m the editor of the network, I can probably find someone to talk to me about it.

Brigittine French:

Congratulations.

Marshall Poe:

I just really wanted to continue to do the work, even though in terms of my more general project, which is the New Books Network and public education and these things, which I think is very valuable, there was still this piece missing. I wanted to do this other thing, and so I carved time out of my schedule. I told you in an earlier exchange of emails, I get up at 4:30 every morning, partially so I get a couple hours to do this, because then I have to go to my day job, which is the New Books Network.

Brigittine French:

You’re writing at 4:30. You get up to do your own writing.

Marshall Poe:

I give myself a couple of hours to do the thing that I really love to do. I love this too. It’s very valuable and I get to talk to people like you, which is very rewarding. We’re educating the public and that’s great too. But from an idiosyncratic, or almost I want to say narcissistic point of view, I like doing this work. I’m not paid for it now. I don’t care.

Brigittine French:

Right. It’s never about the money. No. Nope.

Marshall Poe:

No. Anybody that goes into academia looking for money is in need of a talking to.

Brigittine French:

Indeed. Indeed.

Marshall Poe:

Well, thank you very much for talking with us today. We have a traditional final question on the New Books Network. And that is, what are you working on now? Because that’s another thing people don’t understand. Academics always have another project, always.

Brigittine French:

I have two projects actually.

Marshall Poe:

There you go.

Brigittine French:

One project is a circuitous return to the Guatemalan context. I’m working on a project that’s focused on indigenous genocide, survivor testimony. Maya genocide survivor testimony, again, thinking about language and narrative, a way of telling stories, what that can tell us about survivorship, about justice, about hopes for the future. I’m chapters into a book project on that. I’m really gratified to say that this book, this research project I’m working on with my colleagues in Guatemala, folks who were doing advocacy, scholars who were doing advocacy around indigenous language and identity, who have continued to work. I’m finally arriving at a place where we’re doing explicitly collaborative work rather than maybe implicitly before. I’m working on that.
It’s very much a book about memory as opposed to history, memory and how violence lives on and transforms and is transformed. How we can find that in my genocide survivor testimony. And then the other thing that I’m working on is a project, some connected projects, around also the linguistic part around what we call femicide or feminicide, which is the murder of women as a gendered crime. So when women are murdered because of their gender, as a social political phenomenon that crosses borders. I’ve written a little bit about that. Public pieces, actually. I had the support of Grinnell College to write a couple of things that appeared in recently, very short things in Ms. ms[magazine].com. And I have a new chapter coming out on femicide in the global context. We don’t name … Why is this important, or just, what do I want to say about this?
I think that matters is that we don’t recognize formally, legally the crime of femicide in the United States, which is an anomaly in the Americas and lots of other places. Guatemala, for example, which has a horrible history of human rights violations, has adopted a law against femicide in, I think the Guatemala law is 2010, 2008 or 2010, and so forth and so on. Really thinking about when we name crimes and when we don’t, and what are the consequences of that? And thinking again, comparatively, this comparative thinking is really, I think, core to what I hope to do in the classroom and then what I hope to do as a scholar. That’s something I’m very deeply invested in as well, I would say.

Marshall Poe:

Well, good luck on those projects.

Brigittine French:

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Marshall Poe:

They sound fascinating. I’m a little bit envious because I have to run a business and I don’t get to go do a lot of research.

Brigittine French:

Well, you didn’t say anything about your new book, so I’d like-

Marshall Poe:

It’s a secret. It’s a secret. No, it’s not very much of a secret. I’ll send you a copy.

Brigittine French:

Yes, that would be grand. Send me a link. Send me something. I’m very curious.

Marshall Poe:

All right. Well, let me tell everybody that we’ve been talking to Brigittine French about all of her work as an anthropologist and the discipline of anthropology. And this is the Grinnell College’s Authors and Artists podcast. I’m Marshall Poe. Thanks Brigittine.

Brigittine French:

Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk with you.