Transcript

Luisa Schneider (LS) [00:00]: So I think here love can really offer a great way forward and at the same time a very politically conscious one that doesn’t celebrate it as just something that is always good and always easy and without friction and without violence, but something that, sees people as what they are, namely just complicated creatures who can hurt each other and help each other and kind of start from there.

[00:22] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

Yichi Zhang (YZ) [00:29]: Hello and welcome back to AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

My name is Yichi and this is the second episode of our miniseries on love and anthropology. Today I’m having a conversation with our guest speaker and producer, Dr. Luisa Schneider, about her work on love and violence in Sierra Leone. Her research uncovers complex dimensions of love situated within contested gender dynamics.

Dr. Schneider’s work invites us to develop alternative and relational understandings of love and reveals how love functions as a key site of legal intervention.

In this episode, we start by getting to know Dr. Schneider and what first drew her to this particular field site and topic. We then dig into her book’s striking opening metaphor of teeth and tongue jammed together and what it reveals about intimacy as a space that’s both deeply personal and political. From there, we turn to how her research reshapes our understanding of love and what happens when the world of law tries to grapple with it. We also touch on the challenges of conducting and writing up this kind of research along with her theoretical inspirations.

Finally, we close by asking what she hopes the reader would take away, especially in the moment that, as we discussed in our last episode, feels full of political and social heartbreak. Please stay with us.

[02:05] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

YZ [02:12]: So my first question will be, just tell us a bit about yourself and the work that you do.

LS [02:20]: Yes, of course. So I’m a sociocultural anthropologist and I work on violence, intimacy, and law. My work is based on long-term ethnographic research in Sierra Leone and now also in Germany. And I’m really interested in how people negotiate the space to live their most intimate needs under conditions that are often not ideal and very often also violent.

So before I’m going to talk a bit more about the work that I did for the book, I worked for quite a while with people who’ve been imprisoned and with people who are houseless, always around the question of how is it possible to realize fundamental needs to intimacy, to love, to relationships, to friendships, when realizing those conditions is so often tied to having some sort of security, some sort of housing, some sort of basic needs.

So I’m really interested in what happens when lived realities meet legal systems and policy interventions. And this is really what the project is about that we’re going to talk about, where I kind of looked at what happens when love and violence are not experienced as being opposites, but as really intertwined.

LS [03:32]: And this is based on long-term research in Sierra Leone. I started going there in 2012. So it’s been a very long time now. And I’m really committed to a kind of feminist engaged scholarship where I work in collaboration. I work very closely with a number of close research collaborators, however, without putting the burden of researcher analysis on them.

And so, yeah, I think this is kind of the background of me or what I stand for and sort of the background of what we’re going to talk about today.

YZ [04:13]: That’s really interesting. So, my next question would just be, how did you kind of discover this topic of love? What drew you about the intersection of love and violence?

LS [04:27]: Yeah, that’s a great question. Thank you. So, I think there’s really two answers to this. The first one is a bit conceptual in that, well, I grew up sort of with this really strong teaching that, you know, my body belongs to me, my intimate decisions belong to me. These are very independent choices. And this is kind of the tradition that I learned to value and where I thought, okay, this is really, this sort of needs to be the basis for any relational engagement.

But then this focus on singularity always only got me so far because when you actually start talking to people, start listening to how they are living relationships, then it’s very rarely about just me and myself, but it is always a kind of relational engagement, right, where your intentions may have very different effects on another person.

So I think that’s kind of the first thing that I realized that bodies are entangled, effects are entangled, that it’s really much more complicated than than this individualistic perspective.

At the same time, I think there is this goal to just to understand what is actually right, what is wrong in behavior, how can we be protective, how can we be supportive? And yeah, so this is the first thing in here I learned a great deal from the field and from how people make very careful decisions about what’s acceptable, what’s unacceptable, but in relationality.

[06:00] And the second reason that got me here is experience. As I also write in the book, I was sexually assaulted very shortly after starting the PhD research. And that happened by the head of the group I was supposed to be researching. So, well, it changed the direction of the research.

I was hurt. I was not sure what to do. And I was just in this community and just staying there. I think because I was lost, because I was hurt, but I stayed and I didn’t have a kind of direction for the research for a while. So I was not pushing for specific questions or trying to figure out where I was supposed to be going.

People began sharing and showing me and telling me what I should be focusing on. So it was much more a kind of collaborative creation. And here, you know, it kept, initially I had wanted to study kind of a post-Ebola rebuilding of community, et cetera. And people were very hesitant to talk to me about that and it was really difficult. And then when I sort of let go of all of these preconceptions and I just listened to people about what they found meaningful, then it ended up being relationships, love, relationships, love, relationships, love, but not in this just kind of sweet hearty way, but in a way where love can also hurt, where violence is really close, where it’s just a very complicated entanglement.

And so I think, yeah, I just had to listen to that. And I think it was sort of understanding that while my upbringing and my sort of feminist focus is very important and continues to be very important, it’s not really looking at relationality in the way that it should and then having this experience where people kind of brought research to me and learning through that, really brought me to this topic.

YZ [07:55]: Thank you so much. It’s really resonating. And so let’s talk about the book, which is titled Love and Violence in Sierra Leone: Mediating Intimacy After Conflict. So in the cover image, you have this kind of teeth and tongue jammed together. So is that the kind of entanglement you’re trying to convey through this opening image? And is that a working metaphor for the people that you met in the field?

LS [08:25]: Yeah. Well, actually, I mean, originally my book was entitled Teeth and Tongue Jammed Together, but then the publisher changed that. So it’s really, this is really the core metaphor that kind of runs through the book and that helps us see people’s own sense making about love and violence.

And basically what the metaphor does is it captures that relationships are inherently frictional, right? So the idea is that teeth and tongue may hurt each other, you know, they may bite, yeah, as a result the tongue may swell, it may refuse to cooperate with the teeth, et cetera.

But they remain bound together in one mouth and they also remain focused on having to work together in order to nourish the body. This is the kind of core metaphor. At the same time, the questions around the metaphor are highly gendered.

[09:19] So we of course live in a patriarchal world and Sierra Leone is widely considered a patriarchal country where much violence is executed by men against women.

But then in this metaphor, the men who are considered to be the teeth also have a much less important place in the social fabric than we often assume and than do women, who are the tongues.

So teeth are seen to be rigid, unmalleable. They’re seen to be kind of stuck in their place. So, you know, they don’t really move with what’s needed. They can get infections. They may rot and they may even fall out. And while that really hurts the entire body, the body can survive without it.

Tongues, on the other hand, are considered to be absolutely essential. They are noticed a lot less but they’re very important for moving food around, for speech acts, for basically everything. And the body doesn’t survive without them. So I think immediately we see a kind of overturning of these classic assumptions of who holds control and who has power.

But then the final point that I want to make about this is that this image, this metaphor is very differently interpreted by different actors. So for instance, international organizations or policymakers, they often read it as a kind of very rigid sign for how teeth are controlling the tongue, for how teeth are violent against the tongue, and for this sort of idea of female oppression.

[10:53] So here you see very quickly this opposition between a local understanding that’s much more nuanced and that divides power in a very different way and the kind of other perspective that, sees women to be confined and suppressed and then kind of tries to move forward toward their liberation.

I think this is also where this becomes very political, right? Because depending how you interpret that relationship, that shapes how you intervene, how you legislate and what you judge counts as violence in the end.

YZ [11:29]: So I wonder if you could give us an example or a vignette to kind of illustrate that kind of, how the intimacy or maybe there’s a battlement of control in between the teeth and the tongue in everyday life.

LS [11:46]: Yeah, so for instance, women are considered to be the absolute, they’re the absolute heads of households, they’re the ones who are decision makers around relationships, if somebody wants to do ansa bɛlɛ or wants to get married or wants to, it’s the women who negotiate this in the beginning. They’re also much more often the ones who actually financially sustain a household than men are, most often through the informal economy, but not always.

And at the same time, there is this public picture, this, where men are the heads of households, they’re formally in control, they come in to kind of make decisions in the end. But when it’s about what is really important, then men are seen to like not really know, to kind of not really be around.

YZ [12:37]: So I guess my question now is that, what kind of contributes [to] this sort of relational dynamic, from your analysis?

LS [12:45]: So I think at first we get a different understanding of love, right? It moves from a kind of singular to deeply relational understanding of love. So if we ask the question, what’s love, then obviously that’s kept people busy for a very long time. And the book looks at all of these as like love as an emotion, then an affect, a kind of practice. But it takes it away from this idea of, I love, you love me, do you love me? I want you to love me.

Toward a deeply entangled sharing, doing and feeling that’s importantly not only constrained to two people. So relationships are really about the wider social network that is involved in the way it’s being sustained through that, et cetera. And so this is the kind of understanding of love and then where violence comes into that is in different ways.

So one is that love is not understood as the absence of violence. Instead, certain forms of violence are interpreted as part of emotional engagement and as a sign that a relationship matters.

[13:52] Examples of this, for instance, are neglect is considered to be violence, and by neglect, I don’t mean neglect as it’s often understood in a classic sense, but like neglecting to listen to somebody or neglecting to sleep with somebody, which, there’s a lot of community cases where women sue their partners for not sleeping with them. Or neglecting to change your physical appearance in order to appear more beautifully to your partner, these kinds of things.

But at the same time, people make very clear differentiations between what is and what isn’t acceptable. And the way in which they do that is that they measure the intent, the act and the effect of it, right?

So why did she do it? What did you actually do and what was the effect of it? Were you trying to help? Were you trying to hurt?

And so actually a whole lot of acts are considered to be really unacceptable, like harming somebody, like causing harm that doesn’t have repair, especially hurting people outside of relationships, right? Like all forms of rape, sexual violence, et cetera, totally unacceptable.

But at the same time, this idea of there being a certain degree of jealousy, of friction, of harm which actually sustains a relationship. And that’s very, I think, difficult and uncomfortable to think about. But at the same time, if we ignore how people understand these dynamics, then the kind of interventions that are taking place really risk missing their mark.

And I think this kind of neat separation, if it doesn’t work in people’s lives, then maybe we need to conceptually overthink that as well.

YZ [15:37]: So yeah, love is like a field of contestation, very complicated. And I guess what you want to say is that there are certain kind of ugly moments of it that deserve our attention, right?

LS [15:53]: Yes, and also, as many of my research collaborators would put it, these ugly moments are also, they’re part of the wider narrative of love, so without them, we may not have the love that we imagine. So this kind of shiny side, dark side balance as well.

YZ [16:14]: Yeah, so do people still want love? I mean, because, despite of the beauty and ugliness of it.

LS [16:23]: Yes, very much, but also no. So I have this entire chapter where I write about how people very carefully differentiate between different kinds of relationships, and love is not part of all of them, right?

So there is also this idea that, for instance, you can have a very well-functioning marriage that works more as a kind of partnership and that then the love is a kind of appreciation of friendship.

And that if we look at this, yeah, what we often consider sort of like passionate love or romantic love, then that’s often outsourced toward, yeah, lovers, toward more sort of short-term kind of relationships.

So yes, people really want love, but in very different forms. And they also selectively have different kind of relationships that adhere to these various forms.

YZ [17:18]: Great, thank you. So let’s now talk about the other side of your book and your research, which is law. So I guess my question is, how does love show up as a topic of importance in legal justice? And what happens when the world of law [is] trying to understand this very complex field of love?

LS [17:42]: Yeah, great. I think in order to go there, we need to first do two things, look at what law actually does and then look a little bit at the historical context. So, I mean, generally, we just talked about complexity, layers, relationality.

Law doesn’t work like this. Law needs fixed and simple categories. Right, law also does not consider somebody’s, I mean, to a limited extent somewhere, but not in this context, somebody’s social standing, you know, in relation to what they did. It’s an understanding of acts of the people directly involved. And otherwise, law gets too complicated to actually function.

So law needs simple categories. It breaks relational complexity. and it focuses on acts, not relationships.

And law, especially in this context, also encourages rupture. So community mediations are very often about how can we maintain a relationship, how can we maintain a sort of stability within the community.

And, well, the law is about who’s wrong, who’s right. And justice often then is attached very often to rupture or removal.

I think generally when law enters the domain of intimacy, it often strips away context, right? And in doing so, it can be very effective and very important in some cases, but it can also produce new forms of harm by breaking social ties or by misrecognizing what’s happening, for instance, by not being able to work in broken systems, [or] by not being able to take into considerations a very classist society, et cetera.

[19:28] Now if we look at the kind of context in Sierra Leone, then of course what we had there was a civil war which ended in the early 2000s and that war became known for incredibly widespread forms of violence against women and girls, and also the involvement of child soldiers.

So you have this backdrop of minors being very deeply involved in violence, of it being very insecure for women and girls. And the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the entire sort of after-war process, trying to rebuild community, trying to build a state, was very deeply focused on making recommendations for legislating toward zero tolerance for violence and toward improvements.

And this is great, but what ended up happening is that a whole range of laws were being passed that were supposed to protect and safeguard. But these laws hit a very underfunded system.

They hit very different local perceptions. And what ended up happening is, for instance, I talk in great detail about the Sexual Offences Act, which what it basically did is it moved the age to give sexual consent to eighteen and it criminalizes any and all relationships below eighteen, and the idea to do that was to protect minors from being abused by very powerful older men.

However, that continues to happen and these men are almost never appearing in court. They’re almost never sent to prison.

Who is being sent to prison at a very high rate is poor boys who are either themselves minors or have a very minor difference to girls and where both parties are themselves saying, we’re in love, we want to be together, and mind you that’s a context where people tend to get together younger, they tend to have children younger. And so, you have this idea of like protection and what ends up happening is that you end up inadvertently punishing the poor, breaking up relationships that cross class boundaries because often the parents of girls who are not happy with a certain relationship can report, a pastor can, a teacher can.

[21:55] So you create this policing of intimacy and at the same time you’re saying we’re doing really well and we’re legislating, we have no tolerance. So you’re also taking away the grounds for teaching consent, talking about, you know, respect and responsibility.

And so I think legislation is really very important, but, as Sally Engle Merry would say, it needs to actually adjust to the context, and we need to actually look at what then happens on the ground, and if the wrong people are being punished, and if we have a situation where [what is] punished is not rape, very often, but punished is actually consensual, early, intimate experimentation, then you’re really doing something very different.

And these girls who are supposedly being safeguarded also completely lose, I mean, their voice is really silenced in the process, right? Because it doesn’t matter what they say, they’re considered to not be able to consent. Yet at the same time, the partners that they wanted to build lives with very often go to prison. Sometimes they’re pregnant and then they’re with a child and they’re by themselves. So you’re creating like a whole avalanche.

And so this is why I think what we really need in order to understand which laws work well is not just the numbers of who’s convicted and how it looks on paper, what we need are the actual experiences of people to understand who’s being prosecuted and why, who’s not even in the picture and why, and whether we are actually moving toward a better situation for the people who are attempting to be protected.

YZ [23:32]: Thank you. And I understand you work with the community, you work with maybe policymakers, et cetera. Because of how the law is like this, we need more contextual understanding. Was there any difficulty into implementing or promoting change in your practice?

LS [23:52]: Well, so to answer the first part of your question, I worked really across scale. So, I worked in households, but I also did a lot of work with communities. So, I observed a lot of community mediation procedures. And then I attended different kinds of courts and listened to court procedures there.

And then I also worked in prison with people who’ve been convicted under these kinds of acts. And through this, of course, I had interviews and conversations with a whole range of lawyers, police, judges, policymakers, politicians, et cetera.

And interestingly, what you see is that there is a very, I mean, especially people who have to implement these kinds of acts, see very clearly what is happening, and also have a very clear resistance to it. At the same time, the perspective on this differs.

For some people, the thinking is this is a kind of collateral damage toward a bigger good, which will eventually be less violence, or how else are we supposed to do it in a way? Other people are extremely critical of it and very frustrated because they feel that, yeah, you still have a system for the wealthy that they can do out-of-court settlements. That they’re never actually called to justice.

And so where is the justice?

[25:16] And especially in communities, there’s a lot of resistance because communities are very focused on reparations that actually support. And so what often happens is that people are found, like a lot of people in a case are found at fault, but to different degrees, and then punishment is dished out against all of them. And that punishment often takes the form of labor or support or financial contributions, whereas imprisonment is of course a form of removal that, where communities think, okay, but what is gained through that.

So you don’t immediately see a lot of resistance against, I mean, it’s more a kind of picture where people say, yes, we know. But then Sierra Leone is also in this very difficult phase of, having incredible people and having an incredible history, but also having this legacy of violence and trying very strongly to rebuild itself and wanting to do that well. And so the higher up you go on the kind of policy political ladder, the more critical people are toward actually implementing change here. And what you see throughout the years is that it’s actually gotten worse.

So we moved from this act that I just talked about. We moved toward a national emergency in 2019 on rape and sexual violence. And what came out of that was an even stronger law that allows imprisonment of boys from the age of twelve, which actually lowers the age of criminal responsibility just for them.

It also allows life sentences. It moves cases straight to high court. And it creates this political momentum of really zero tolerance for violence. So I think whether or not there really is openness for change depends how close people are to the lives that are being affected.

YZ [27:03]: Thank you. Yeah, it must be difficult at times. And what are some of the other difficulties that you encounter in your research? Maybe this can be about writing and other things.

LS [27:24]: So I mean, I think there was a number of things actually doing the research. One thing is that it’s, love and violence are very, they’re topics that are very close to the hearts of many people. There’s also a lot of suffering there. And so working on this very intensely for a long time, it’s, yeah, for a lot of people it produces a kind of, yeah, kind of immense pain that you’re then constantly exposed to.

It was also really difficult, I mean especially the work in prison I found very difficult because the conditions there are absolutely horrific and to follow very young boys who are imprisoned in an adult prison and then have their girlfriends visit them for a few minutes and them actually being there because of this relationship that continues nevertheless, it’s very painful.

But then I think I face an even bigger challenge kind of translating all of this work into writing because I sometimes get challenged and there’s, that it’s very important to not conflate. Like I do have to, I have done research on rape and sexual violence, but this part is not that. This is, you know, consensual relationships that are being criminalized.

And so I think there is generally, in a very violent world where too little is done to protect women and girls, it can be very difficult to put forward an argument that says, but strong laws can also create a lot of harm. And we also have to look at the men and boys that are being harmed. But I think that’s the only way to have an actual feminist practice.

YZ [29:07]: So I’m kind of curious about, during fieldwork, were there situations where you were more exposed to conflicts, and how do you kind of handle those situations?

LS [29:22]: Yes, I mean, there were, and also on a relatively regular basis. So, I think, I was very full on within communities. So I lived in Allen Town in a kind of one-bedroom, one-parlor place with eleven other people. And then I lived in central Freetown with fourteen men in a kind of one-room place that, they shared and hustled around there.

So, and here, kind of conflicts around relationships and also conflicts that would get violent were very common. Yeah, I think here my kind of take on this, I mean, this was, this often happened at night, and this often happened close by and you would hear it. And if I was somewhere where sort of intimate violence broke out, I did try to sort of find a way to make it possible for people to remove themselves from that context. But when that wasn’t possible, then I removed myself from that context.

And then, but this is much more controlled. It’s also, especially in community mediations, people are actively asked to vent their anger.

And so what you get before you get any sort of resolution, you get a lot of straight-out conflict. And that can be very violent, and people, you know, all their emotions are out there and it’s very bad, and it sort of puts on a show. And I think that I understand why that can actually be a great move toward resolution, but it’s also very difficult to be to be a part of.

And then finally, but that was of course before I started this research, I mean, I had my own experience with sexual violence, which in a way is very different to this research because it didn’t have any sort of relational or relationship intimacy basis, but which, at the same time made it, yeah, it kind of really hit home what, yeah, what the dangers and risks are also.

YZ [31:24]: I understand, and you said, you mentioned that in your research you want to actually have this real feminist practice, which deals with a lot of, many complex issues. You also, you just talked about this kind of anger and [it] seems to be so many different type of emotions under the framework of the rubric of love.

So I’m just wondering if there’s any like theoretical inspirations you take in anthropology or in other disciplines?

LS [31:59]: Yeah, thanks. That’s a great question. And maybe I just, you know, we often look at anger as something that’s kind of like a quick emotion that we see, but a lot of policy and a lot of law is also very angry, writing being extremely harsh and in not considering any kind of contextual factors and in treating very different cases exactly the same way.

So I mean, I’m very firmly embedded in kind of feminist, critical feminist scholarship, but also phenomenology. But then, I mean, I think in this context, I’m of course also incredibly lucky, because there is a really great body of scholarship on Sierra Leone in particular and then also on West Africa more generally. And well, I think what really helped me besides this orientation is also work in critical legal studies and kind of legal pluralism, et cetera, which really, I mean, I talked about Sally Engle Merry already, but which really brings home this point of needing to look at context and needing to look at affect in order to be able to understand what certain laws and certain policies do and where we need to be going.

You know there’s this huge body of scholarship on youth and the navigations of young people because the continent is getting ever younger and so of course you know young people are really big preoccupation in research and I mean, I stand firmly on this body of scholarship that sort of looked at how young people strategize in the moment because building futures is becoming so very difficult.

But then, you know, what I found is, on the one hand, really a rejection of becoming big men, especially big men, because big women, that just happens much quicker, because young men felt that they cannot possibly carry the burden of a household, of children, of financial responsibility, et cetera.

[34:06] So, yeah, so that was a really strong kind of point, but then underneath of that you get this experimentation with different forms of relationships in the present, which are interestingly, you could think of them as being very different to what’s kind of traditionally the case in Sierra Leone.

But at the same time, they are trying to reinvigorate and take with them the securities of other forms of relationships that came before them. So, affairs, cohabiting, different kind of arrangements without marriage, are being introduced that mirror the security of the community, of the resources that were attached to marriage.

And so I think for me it’s extremely valuable to look at these really old classic ethnographies on Sierra Leone and then compare what’s happening with youth now, and seeing that there’s just all of these creative ways in which they’re reinventing a kind of impossibly lost path.

And I think that, well, a final, of course, big conversation that I’m having is with gender parallelism because this region is very well known for this argument that says, you know, there is this assumption that women have a certain role and men have a certain role and together they kind of form the perfect puzzle. So they are not necessarily hierarchically oriented, but they’re in parallel, but with very different rules and responsibilities. And then of course, critical and well done scholarship focuses on the nuances of how this is overturned, of how it actually might look very different in practice. And here my kind of communication with this scholarship based on my data is that I did not find any sort of clear model of parallelism; what I found really was a much more a mosaic of different ideas of gender and relationships that are also, some are inspired by human rights principles, some are inspired by international frameworks, some are inspired by political kind of communities, some are inspired by the past, and all of them are kind of competing and vouching for the upper hand.

[36:17] And that is also part of where the friction comes from, right? You have a very, very modern, very quickly evolving urban environment that has lost some of the securities that it claims to remember. People also always remember the past, I think, better than it actually was—but, where security is very difficult to come by. At the same time there’s great aspirations, you know, for freedom, for equality, for rights, et cetera. And people are trying to make it work.

And in trying to make it work, they’re redefining gender roles, they’re redefining relationships, and they’re kind of grasping for the security of it all. And so I think, these are kind of the bodies of scholarship that I talk with.

And as you probably heard from me, ethnography is kind of collaboration with people. And theoretical work is also collaboration with people, but then through texts and through what they wrote. So I don’t really discriminate here.

YZ [37:20]: Thank you so much. So I’m wrapping up on the last two questions.  The first one is based on the ethnographic context. So looking at the, we talked about the past, literature, et cetera.

Looking at the future of Sierra Leone, especially the region you worked with, how do you think about, the situation will get a bit better, what kind of change might happen in the next couple of years?

LS [37:46]: Yeah, that’s an interesting and at the moment very sad question, because right now things are not getting better; right now things are getting a lot worse. That is generally true because of the geopolitical situation that we find ourselves in and because of the ways in which certain national leaders are making it extremely difficult for countries that are not so—right.

I mean, we have tax problems, there’s huge inflation and there’s all these kinds of additional hurdles being placed on countries who have already been exploited for a long time, and Sierra Leone very strongly feels that. So, the cost of living is in comparison to what people are earning is very bad, unemployment... it’s just, it’s getting a lot worse. And at the same time, you have people who are extremely devoted to trying to make that better.

I mean, I already talked about how the legal context is worsening. At the same time, there’s also upsides. So a new law on child protection was just passed, which is trying to really get away from imprisoning minors and children. So it would be very interesting to see what that actually does to these young boys who are imprisoned in this context.

There’s a number of very engaged kind of grassroots organizations trying to advocate for consent, for support, for local experiences, local voices, et cetera. So I have great hopes there. And generally, if I look at the region and I just, I keep thinking that we have so much to learn from the experiences there.

And fortunately, people are also getting more vocal and are coordinating more. And I really hope that these voices are going to become undeniable and that we actually have to sort of listen and rethink, both in terms of the national context, but also internationally. But if I’m really honest, then right now it’s just, it looks all quite dire. So I wish I could do, like, a positive, you know, this is all great, but I don’t know.

YZ [39:52]: I mean, it seems like, yeah, and this is coming to my last question, because the whole world doesn’t seem to currently stand on a very good moment. And you know, following our last episode on love, in the end we talk about kind of political heartbreaks people are experiencing across the world right now.

So I guess in that kind of context, how do you think your research might speak with kind of a broader understanding of love or into speak with the broader kind of social political situation of the contemporary societies?

LS [40:26]: Yeah, so I mean, I think the kind of, why it matters now, or what can be taken away—I think on the one hand it’s really the danger of of single and simple narratives, right? And I think that travels across the world. Like, these don’t work. And at the same time, the need for plurality and for humility in that. And I think as a third point, the fact that policies fail without local grounding.

So, I mean, as particular to this case, I would say, okay, simple stories about love and violence don’t work. If it is the job of anthropologists, we are supposed to stay with complexity, with multiplicity and with people’s own sense-making, but also don’t stop at, oh, it’s complicated, but actually do solid work to figure out where the complications lie and how the layers look like, then I think we can really understand how this entanglement plays out in a certain context, and what kind of freedoms and trusts and understandings there need to be for people to flourish relationally, and where we need to have protections, whether it be it through law, or whether it be through education, or whether it be through material support, to safeguard against violence.

And I think, in a more general perspective, what these kinds of stories do, I think, is not—this idea of love in a contemporary moment, it takes us, I think, away from a Euro-Western kind of problematic celebration of Valentine’s Day love, or something like that, toward a real grounded kind of practice of doing love, which is partially rooted in intimate relationships, but which is also rooted in friendships and our political positioning and the way in which we are actually allowing ourselves to look twice at a case. Yeah, to uncover other sides there may be to it and to kind of stay in relation with people despite all these attempts to pull us apart.

So I think here love can really offer a great way forward and at the same time a very politically conscious one that doesn’t celebrate it as just something that is always good and always easy and without friction and without violence, but something that sees people as what they are, namely just complicated creatures who can hurt each other and help each other and kind of start from there.

YZ [43:02]: Thank you. Thank you so much.

LS [43:05]: To learn more about the scholars’ stories and ideas shared today, please visit our website at culanth.org. That’s culanth.org.

You also find a transcript of this episode and the curated list of recommended readings exploring love from an anthropological and critical perspective. I also want to thank all the people who made this research possible, without whom I would not be able to have any of these conversations. This includes my research collaborators, of course, but also a number of colleagues who’ve been by my side for many, many years, giving critical, rigorous feedback, and the friends and family who make this work possible.

I want to give a shout out, especially to Hanneke Stuit, Anastasiia Omelianiuk, Robbert Dillema, Andrew Jefferson, Nadine Tami Coetzee, Freek Colombijn, Maaike Matelski, and many more colleagues at Oxford, Max Planck and the VU. I’d also like to thank all reviewers for their thoughtful comments, as well as our sound engineer for helping with post-production process of the episode, as well as Youri van Ingen, who did a cut of the episode.

My name is Luisa Schneider, and thank you for joining us today for this episode on love and violence in AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. We look forward to connecting with you again soon.

[44:32] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]