Transcript

[00:00] [“Can’t Be Faded” by the Stooges]

Sharon Jacobs (SJ) [01:00]: That was an excerpt from the song “Can’t Be Faded” by the New Orleans brass band the Stooges. Some of the Stooges spoke about their craft at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (or triple-A), which was held in New Orleans in November 2025.

Alejandro Echeverria (AE) [01:18]: The band, along with Tulane University ethnomusicologist Dr. Kyle DeCoste, are co-authors of a book also called Can’t Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game—check out our show notes for publication information. Towards the end of this episode we’ll bring you into the roundtable the musicians held with DeCoste at the conference. But before we get there, we’re going to listen in on a variety of presentations circling themes of storytelling, performance, and history at the triple-A.

SJ [01:47]: As anthropologists, stories help us to interpret and represent the human lives we study. The presentations we’ll share with you today revolve around the stories people tell themselves about themselves; the ways people come to connect with and understand history; how people carry and transmit cultural traditions; and the emotional performances that help people process and move forward. We’ll move from political activist spaces to sports performances, from diasporic family histories to more recent narratives around forced migration—guided along the way by music and sound recordings from some of this episode’s interlocutors.

AE [02:24]: I’m Alejandro Echeverria.

SJ [02:26]: And I’m Sharon Jacobs.

AE [02:28]: And this episode is part one of a three-part miniseries we’ve produced, sharing highlights from talks organized by the Society for Cultural Anthropology at the triple-A. We reached out to dozens of presenters, asking them to record and send us their contributions from New Orleans, and we received about thirty-five recordings. With so many presentations, we’re not able to share everyone’s work in full. But over the course of this miniseries, we’ll tease out some running themes and compelling ideas that emerged from this year’s conference.

SJ [02:58]: Today’s episode on storytelling at the AAA will begin with two presentations, from Erin Simmons and David Novak, that engage the notion of voice. We’ll then move on to a collection of presentations that take up haunting and memory; you’ll hear from presenters Dorinne Kondo, Joshua Rubin, Jacqueline Wagner, and Kailey Rocker. Our third group of presentations, from Matt Sakakeeny and Nathan Shearn, consider politics and performance, and finally we’ll return to the New Orleans brass band roundtable.

[03:28] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

SJ [03:41]: Storytelling is as important to social movements as it is in anthropology. Activists and organizers might use stories to document injustice, share knowledge, or shore up group cohesion. Erin Simmons, a PhD student in anthropology at The New School for Social Research, discussed storytelling in the British anti-poverty movement, as part of a panel called “From Refusal to Repair.” Her talk, “Time Against Transaction,” discussed the potentials and limitations of storytelling for political action.

Erin Simmons (ES) [04:12]: So my interlocutors’ turn towards storytelling as a method for doing their anti-poverty work was … an explicit turn away from a flattening process to the expansive act of storytelling that was supposed to give people agency over their own narratives, dignity, and recognition, and give them enough staying power to be part of the conversation.

SJ [04:32]: Anti-poverty activists in the UK are responding to 14 years of austerity policy and dismantling of the welfare state, in addition to the ongoing effects of Brexit, Covid, and the subsequent “cost of living” crisis. In this context, sharing stories of their personal experiences of poverty is meant to refute the government’s “datafication” of them—that is, their quantification, or their being reduced to a number—with humanity and empathy. But storytelling, too, can lead to feelings of alienation when people’s stories are heard but not taken seriously as a vehicle for change. Back to Simmons:

ES [05:09]: Alana is emphatic. “I’m not telling my story again. I’ve told my story so many times. Now it's someone’s job to do something.” We’re at a poverty truth meeting … where Alana’s been an outspoken member of the anti-poverty movement for many years. She’s told her story at local events. She’s been a community journalist, presented at national conferences on lived experience work. She shared her story at a Tory party conference. And she’s been interviewed on television and radio programs. She is now fed up. And Alana is not the only one. Many of my interlocutors have been deeply disappointed by the power and potential of storytelling as an avenue for repair. In fact, many now refuse the vocabulary of story and storytelling altogether.

The Addressing Poverty with Lived Experience, or APLE, Collective, which is a large network of people with lived experience of poverty in the UK, write about the feeling of sharing a story but being left without voice. For APLE members, this feeling corresponds to moments when they’ve offered their stories, but their contribution to an event has been limited to the act of storytelling. Left without agency to frame and contextualize their own narrative or contribute to the wider discussion, they feel isolated and left separate from the conversation, which they had been invited to partake in. APLE’s not asking for the opportunity to tell their stories publicly. This they’ve already been granted, essentially. They are asking for the opportunity to voice their experiences to do the work of addressing poverty. APLE members like Alana and other colleagues do not use the terminology of story, but instead insist on taking voice seriously as a way to move from, quote, “involvement” to actual power sharing.

SJ [06:50]: In an environment of, quote, “vicious hatred of the poor,” as Simmons describes it, storytelling that’s meant as a slow, relational approach towards dismantling systems of oppression is instead understood by powerbrokers as simply an attempt to get a seat at the table. Simmons’s presentation shed light on how story is not enough to make change when the storyteller is prevented from controlling the terms of engagement: Story without voice.

We’re going to move now from social movements to social relations across diaspora, in another corner of Britain—as David Novak, associate professor of ethnomusicology at UC Santa Barbara, took up physical technologies of voicing stories in a presentation about tape cassette recordings in the British Pakistani community.

[07:36] [tape cassette sound effect]

David Novak (DN) [07:37]: What kind of musical history is written on the reels of the audio cassette? Cassettes are the techne franca of physical sound media, having been the standard format for forty years in most of the world. More than any other physical medium of sound recording, the audio cassette symbolizes the inscriptions as well as the absences and erasures of transnational circulation.

SJ [07:56]: In his presentation, Novak is looking at how tape cassettes preserve diasporic histories and relationships, re-collecting border-crossing communities through what he calls “anarchives,” which work against the canon of collective memory in order to probe a misplaced past.

DN [08:13]: Anarchives are meant to be used. They do not center themselves in things, but spread out into improvised, serendipitous, context-specific projects. Anarchives recognize the scrambled nature of collective memory and the multiplicity of sources in a diasporic population, while refusing inscription into a state-driven politics of multicultural recognition.

SJ [08:34]: Novak’s discussion centers around the Tape Letters project, a collection of messages sent on cassette tape between the 1960s and 1980s within the British Pakistani community. The project was directed by sound artist Wajid Yaseen, who described to Novak how it all started when he found tapes in his parents’ attic in Manchester in 2016:

DN [08:56]: Wajid also discovered his mother’s voice scattered across another series of cassette tapes. These were audio letters containing spoken messages sent between his mother in England and her family in Pakistan, recorded over years and mailed back and forth across the ocean. The first tape was labeled with only the inscription, “Dudi Desi Grambate,” or the chatterings of Dudi Village. … Wajid’s mother, Halma Jabeen, who just died last month, spoke only Pothwari, a regional Punjabi dialect that does not have an established script. Like most of her female peers, she was not taught to read or write during her childhood in Pakistan. With telephone calls prohibitively expensive, cassettes were her primary mode of communicating with distant friends and relatives, of hearing their voices and learning about recent developments, and telling them about life in Britain.

… Cassettes were regularly erased in the process of mail exchange, as senders re-recorded over the messages they received and sent back to the cassette with fresh news. By the time Yaseen began searching in 2016, a lot of tape letters across Britain had gone the way of other unlabeled cassettes into the bin. When they survived, the owners were understandably reluctant to allow keepsakes of their personal lives to be collected by outsiders. Their contents were quotidian, consisting largely of details about relatives, children, work, money—punctuated by endless greetings, the chatterings of everyday life. But each tape was nonetheless extraordinary.

SJ [10:14]: Audio recording in its early years, Novak explained, represented a generalized encounter with death—the creepy fact that our voices will outlive us. But the existential meanings of the Tape Letters project extend to survival in the context of a very specific historical trauma that permeates the Pakistani diaspora today: the partition of India in 1947.

DN [10:38]: Like other communities forced into migration by violence, survivors of partition do not always relate these stories easily, even within their own families. If their children know of the historical rupture that split India and Pakistan in the wake of British colonialism—killing over a million people, breaking Punjab and Bengal apart along religious lines, and scattering 15 million from their homes—it’s not always through access to their parents’ personal narratives as much as their silences. An absence can become an archival artifact in itself, something that carries through generations, informing the conditions of dissociation and inaccessibility for parents and their children.

Wajid related the story of a lost tape letter from one interviewee’s mother, who died of leukemia in Pakistan before she could return to see her. She has searched desperately since, but still hasn't found it. Quote: “There is this extraordinarily tragic relationship in this tape she can’t find. She knows it existed, but in some way it’s like an archive made of no cassette. It’s still an incredibly important artifact. It just doesn’t exist.”

SJ [11:36]: Coming to the end of his presentation, Novak shared a sound installation from the project. It’s a correspondence between a couple in the late 1990s—him living in the UK, her still in Pakistan. The sound installation superimposes the still-married couple’s 1990s tape-cassette love letters with an English translation they recorded recently.

[11:59] [reproduce audio – request original from Novak]

DN [12:45]: As Wajid described, the couple’s re-performance of their tapes spoke to the material differences between the voice of the past and the voice of the present. “They were really embarrassed. They’re not actors, you know what I mean? They weren’t able to project the same feeling as on the cassettes. They were like, listen, we're like forty now. We’ve got a couple of kids. We don’t feel the same way anymore, you know, desperate love stuff. But it was amazing to revisit their own words and repeat them.” … Speaking with one’s own past voice in the present becomes a material confrontation with personal memory as historical playback. In this context, a recording measures the balance of continuity and loss in living.

[13:18] [tape cassette sound effect]

[13:20] [“Where Ya From” by the Stooges]

AE [13:58]: The theme of this year’s triple-A was “Ghosts,” and fittingly, haunting, in its many significances, was a major topic. Dorinne Kondo, a professor at the University of Southern California, painted an eerie picture in a talk called “Haunting As Atmospheric Violence: Power/Knowledge, Sexual/Racial Violence, and Asian/American Women.”

Dorinne Kondo (DK) [14:18]: Fall 2018. An Asian American woman of a certain age sits in an industrial-chic cafe reading a new book for the graduate seminar she teaches. She begins a chapter about an Asian woman artist, glances at a footnote, stops. She can’t breathe. Can it be? Yes, white male professor at a prominent university, supporter of the artist. She stares at the words. She cannot focus. She feels stabbed, impaled, as she howls inside. Yet no one looking at this Asian woman would possibly know, unless they observe closely that her eyes brim with tears that never fall.

AE [15:00]: Kondo’s presentation was about the quote-unquote “chilly climates” experienced by Asian-American women in academia. It underlined the overlap between Orientalist fetishism and the geopolitical imperatives underlying the discipline of Asian studies.

DK [15:16]: These haunting histories may envelop us from above and they may emanate from landscapes and objects that constitute our everyday affective infrastructures. Objects, spaces, lights, color, textures emit powerful atmospheres that haunt through their sensorial properties, the cracks in an uneven brick sidewalk that strip the leather from a kitten heel, the dull brown and white nubbiness of a tweed jacket, tasteful displays of Orientalia decorating a dimly lit room. Humans, too, can become ornamental objects that exude atmospheres….

I examine multiple forms of haunting that create atmospheres of impending danger, spotlighting the historical experiences of Asian American women, and its more spectacular iterations with the rise in anti-Asian violence during Covid, and now with state-sponsored body snatchings of Asian and BIPOC people, certainly visible in Los Angeles.

Both landscapes and objects can exude, even scream, violent hauntings by class, race, gender, sexuality, ableism, colonialism—the peaceful vials of normative landscapes, but peaceful for whom? For non-European descended minoritarian people, Eurocentricity of place names or the appropriation of Indigenous ones, Euro-inspired architecture, the Euro-norming of everyday life in the U.S., and certainly in academe, produce ambient reminders of imperial histories. … Orientalism and the intersections of power/knowledge haunt the foundations of Asian studies with its Cold War history and its enmeshment in U.S. geopolitical dominance, including field-defining figures who are children of missionaries in Asia or who participated in U.S. wars in Asia. Similarly, the pairing of white men and Asian women in Asian studies is so widespread as to be a cultural common sense. … These interracial pairings are haunted by and reenact the Orientalist geopolitics enabling white men to “be there” as conquerors, missionaries, capitalists.

AE [17:12]: In the face of all this haunting, Kondo admitted, a happy ending seems impossible. But she applauded the work of fellow panelists in her invited session, called “Haunting Atmospheres.”

DK [17:23]: We need what scholars, artists, activists have variously labeled atmospheric competence, atmospheric sensitivity, revolutionary countermoods, and ways to be together in difference. In my plays and my new book project, I want to spotlight the power of the arts, activism, and scholarship to connect us, to keep each other alive as one step toward climate change, even as our hauntings by atmospheric violence may never fully dissipate.

AE [17:50]: The haunting role of history was also a focus for Joshua Rubin, a visiting assistant professor at Colby College, in an entirely different context. Rubin’s focus was on sporting performances, and how a simple move can “evoke” much more:

Joshua Rubin (JR) [18:04]: Even something as simple as a pass, here, thrown hundreds of times in a rugby game, evokes. They can evoke skill and training, but also, crucially, character. A player who offloads in a tackle can seem skillful but reckless. A decision made by a player to keep the ball rather than pass to an open teammate can seem selfish. As passes are thrown one after another, the evocative significance builds into an aggregate pattern of performance and felt sensation. Memories are called up—whether that memory is of a pass thrown or not thrown previously, or an ancestor from many decades prior. Evocation, I think, then helps us understand how a player moves, in the mind of teammates, spectators, and coaches, from making an occasional selfish decision to being a selfish player. This is a move from action to essence, performance to character, and it sheds significant light, I think, on the coercive levers that can be pulled by coaches and trainers and by players themselves to extract more exhausting training from players and their bodies. It also allows for connections to be drawn between a single action by a single player and broad collective sentiments about cultural performance. A player or team plays the right way or the wrong way as a result of patternings in what their actions evoke, and of course, how those evocations then intersect with dominant discourses and perceptions of bodies and so on. And in a circular fashion, discourses of the right way to play become a standard which players, drawing on previous players’ and their own actions, are strongly encouraged to evoke.

Ultimately, I think it’s unhelpful to argue that this capacity of sports to call up memory and sentiment turns them into another art form. There’s little to be gained, I think, in the categorical shift from sport to art …. Rather, I find it much more helpful to think about how this capacity situates sporting performance along other forms of performance—sometimes called art in particular contexts—that characteristically are evocative.

Some activities belong to a broader domain of practices that are available for focused aesthetic attention. They’re especially available to be withdrawn from temporal succession, as Gottfried Bohm puts it. In this domain, evocation is more easily sought and found, and haunting sought and found too, than in other domains of life. Art forms certainly belong to this domain, and it would seem that spectators and athletes treat sport as part of this domain as well. I suggest in this presentation, then, that there are good reasons for contemporary anthropologists of sport to do the same.

[20:21] [“Where Ya From” by the Stooges]

AE [20:48]: How do we understand our own histories? Jacqueline Wagner, adjunct professor of sociocultural anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, looked at the affective ghosts of personal experience in her talk, which was called, “Regretting resettlement, holding onto hope: Syrian refugees’ imagined futures in Spain.” Wagner’s interlocutors had been sent to Spain through the UNHCR’s resettlement program. People on that list can wait many years to be resettled—in fact, the large majority are never resettled at all.

Jacqueline Wagner (JW) [21:22]: Given the lengthy waiting period for resettlement, and the fact that only one percent of the world's refugees are ever resettled, it is not surprising that this was seen as a rare and exciting opportunity. Most resettled Syrians expressed to me that they had hoped to be resettled in such countries as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, or Germany, but they had known that they might not be offered another spot if they refused. They could wait months or years for another placement that might never become available. Thus, resettled Syrian refugees set their dreams and their expectations—for socioeconomic stability, educational attainment, stable employment, and even upward mobility—upon their lives in Spain. But their dreams were seldom realized, their expectations rarely met. Memorably, in response to a question about how his experience compared to his prior expectations, Omar told me, “Spain is like a stone that destroys all expectations and all dreams.” … Omar articulated a process by which his expectations had gone from high, expecting to have a proper house, to low, feeling that things were good as long as his family had food to eat.

AE [22:33]: Omar, one of Wagner’s Syrian interlocutors, had spent years living in Lebanon before being resettled in Spain, along with his family. Wagner emphasized that resettled refugees struggled with disillusionment, disappointment, and regret—but also resentment.

JW [22:49]: I argue that disentangling the relationship between regret and resentment is essential for understanding the struggles and frustrations of resettled refugees, who are subject to a disempowering and paternalistic humanitarian system that regards refugees’ own wants and desires as among the least important of considerations for determining their futures. Specifically, I highlight choice as the distinguishing factor between these two feelings, suggesting that the current refugee resettlement regime fails to allow refugees to make decisions about their own lives.

AE [23:22]: Of course, Wagner’s resettled interlocutors hadn’t chosen Spain at all, but rather had been sent there—and being sent to Spain foreclosed the possibility that they might have been resettled in a country they would have chosen for themselves.

JW [23:34]: For example, when asked how he had decided to come to Spain, Omar told me, “This is the big problem: I didn’t really decide for myself. … I didn’t have a choice to come here to Spain, really, because they (the UNHCR) called me [and asked], ‘Do you want to leave Lebanon?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, of course I want to leave Lebanon.’ But I was thinking, like, in Canada or Germany, France, the UK, for example. … They told me, ‘Okay, the Spanish government just called about you, so you have to go to Spain.’ ... My file was passing through embassies of different countries and was accepted by the Spanish embassy. So bad luck for me … and I had no choice to say, ‘No, I don't want Spain. I want another country’.” In Omar's opinion, the UNHCR and the Spanish Embassy had decided for him, eliminating the true sense of choice in the matter.

Herein lies the distinction between regret and resentment: not only in the internal versus external direction of the sentiments, but also in the feeling of having made a decision versus having had a decision essentially made for one. Of course, this was just one in a series of limited choices that Omar and other Syrians had encountered in their lives. As part of one of the largest forced displacements in recent history, Syrians have been forced to leave their homes and their country to avoid the death and destruction of war, they have been presented with a limited number of countries that would accept them as they fled, and they have been compelled to undergo dangerous journeys to reach other locations, due to Western countries’ desire to keep migrants outside of their borders. Other resettled Syrian refugees expressed similar feelings about the process of resettlement, indicating their resentment of the international humanitarian systems and institutions that controlled their fates and constrained their agency. I believe that doing so also partially relieved their regret at having made the decision to resettle and allowed them to resist such institutions in some limited way.

AE [25:33]: Here, Wagner proposes that her interlocutors’ expressions of regret and resentment can be worked as a limited form of resistance to the refugee resettlement regime. Indeed, the interlocutor she quotes at length here, “Omar,” first sought her out because he was looking for help to get in touch with the UNHCR’s Madrid office to request that he be sent back to Lebanon.

JW [25:54]: He told me, “Even though I faced discrimination there, at least I could work and eat.”

AE [25:29]: Some of Wagner’s interlocutors actually took the step to leave Spain, sometimes moving to other European countries, where they could not legally work or reside permanently.

JW [26:09]: I view my interlocutors’ unsanctioned departures as an extreme response to the lack of choice Syrian refugees faced in the resettlement process. And I argue that the exaggerated nature of such actions is exactly where their potential for catharsis and relief lies. In leaving Spain, they sought to alleviate their regret at having accepted resettlement, while also addressing their resentment at the international refugee system by rejecting and resisting its grip on control. Despite the significant risks and the fact that they might regret their decision in the future, they made a choice that felt like it was all their own. Perhaps what my Syrian interlocutors’ experiences tell us is that the best future is the one we choose—regrets be damned.

AE [26:55]: Where Wagner’s interlocutors were pushed by affective states of regret and resentment to imagine alternative futures, we’ll now move to a situation in which the built environment itself prompts future thinking. Kailey Rocker, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wilkes University, has written on communist ruins and memory politics in the Balkans. Her talk at the triple-A’s was about Piramida, an otherworldly building that emerges from the ground with concrete arms splaying in all directions, in the center of Albania’s capital, Tirana.

Kailey Rocker (KR) [27:27]: The story of Piramida shines light on how Albanians draw on narratives of the past and visions of the future to contextualize and relate to this distinctive urban environment as a place. Beyond Albania, Piramida provides an opportunity to explore how urban placemaking can become a process to critique futures that did not come to pass and to start to operationalize those that they would like to see.

AE [27:58]: Rocker explained how some element of imagination has always pervaded Piramida since it was built.

KR [28:05]: In 1988, Piramida opened its doors as a memorial museum for the country's former communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, who died in 1985. Ilir, an interlocutor who had been recruited by the state to help with the building’s interior design at the time, emphasized the museum’s focus on using historical imagination to tell the former dictator’s story. Skilled photo editors had been hired to touch up the former dictator’s life by adding and subtracting various political figures.

AE [28:43]: In the ensuing decades, Piramida played many roles, from a cultural center after the fall of the communist regime to a NATO headquarters during the Kosovo war, falling into disrepair in the early aughts.

KR [28:56]: In its ruined state, the building became a canvas to imagine and play with urban futures. In 2010, the Albanian state announced their plan to replace the ruined Piramida with a brand-new parliament building whose architecture would reflect the state’s desired values of openness and transparency. In response, the Save the Pyramid movement was born and lasted through 2011, ending once citizen protesters had disrupted the state’s plan.

Redesigning Piramida became a regular assignment in Tirana architectural programs that master’s students engaged in. Some argued that it needed to be a space for youth who played a large role in the 2010 and 2011 protests to save the building and who also saw the building beyond its symbolic roots and associations with the country’s communist period. Still others emphasized that this building should belong to the people and not to the state.

AE [30:09]: Piramida was renovated as an innovation and technology hub that opened in 2023. Still, Rocker shared how the building remains a mechanism through which her interlocutors continue to variously imagine futures.

KR [30:22]: Vjollca was a journalist by training who left the country in the 1990s to pursue higher education in Germany. Today, she teaches courses at the University of Tirana and manages a small nonprofit organization that focuses on youth education. When I asked her what she thought about the reconstructed Piramida, Vjollca responded, “I don’t think I really like it to be like that. … I want a museum, a museum of Albania’s communist dictatorship, something that says ‘never again’.” Vjollca believed that a healthy democracy engaged openly and critically with its past, and Piramida represented that opportunity. While disappointed in the new Piramida, Vjollca’s comments did not end there. With a glimmer in her eye, she told me … “I have an idea to have a workshop at Piramida with an exhibition—a small one that can sit in one of these cubes that they have, and it can be a history of the pyramid.” Vjollca continued with the sentiment that if Piramida wasn’t the place she imagined, she could make it such.

[31:28] [“Fat Boy” by the Free Agents]

Kyle DeCoste (KDC) [32:04]: You know this, this song is part of, like, a really important album, I would say, in the brass band world, made in the years after Katrina. The Free Agents, when y’all came out, it was kind of like you were, it’s kind of like y’all had to do a lot of memorial work for the city in general.

Ellis Joseph (EJ) [32:18]: We did a lot of memorial work for the city because it was on the heels of, just, massive death, like from Katrina—then once we got back, like it was still like bad air, you know, like all of those chemicals were in the air. People’s houses, you know, was still, like, dilapidated. Trash piles everywhere. It was a lot going on. So people was just dying at a rapid rate. So in the formation of the band and us coming back home, it was just even more death. But I mean, by that time, we had become numb. We were just totally numb to anything. So we were like zombies for a minute.

SJ [32:56]: The next two presenters we’ll hear from spoke on themes of political storytelling and performance. Musical performance has a unique capacity to bring people together, to help us feel and process as a community at times of death and numbness, as Free Agents band leader Ellis Joseph just described. But as important as music is, nothing can take back the un-natural disaster of government failure that occurred around Hurricane Katrina in September 2005.

Matt Sakakeeny, an anthropologist working as an associate professor of music at Tulane University, wrote the book Roll With It about New Orleans brass bands. More broadly, Sakakeeny studies the relationship between sound and inequality, and his presentation at the triple-A engaged the limits of music and sound in enacting political change.

Matt Sakakeeny (MS) [33:47]: My question is, what are the conditions of possibility that produce a wager on music to carry the impossible burden of hope in a time-space that by every measure should be suffused with hopelessness.

SJ [34:01]: In his presentation, Sakakeeny zoomed in on the university encampments and protests resisting U.S. support for the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza following the attacks of October 7, 2023. Here, music, chanting, speeches, and other sounds of resistance were met with the reality of state power.

[34:22] [sounds from encampment]

MS [34:41]: Protest studies have shown how music and sound reconfigure bodies in time and space and thus catalyze the intensities of social cohesion, embodied synchronization, and political expression that constitute direct action. But a holistic accounting would need to go beyond the time-space of the event and measure not only the potential of voicing and mobilization but the political resonance in the halls of power. What defined this political moment in the U.S. was the live streaming of mass killings overshadowed by the language policing of which words were acceptable to describe it. While voicing and mobilization did elicit a political response, it was an extraordinary show of top-down bipartisan force to break up these collectives and stifle their voices. The president made a speech from the Oval Office declaring, quote, “The American people are heard, but we are a civil society and order must prevail.” Biden says the quiet part out loud. Certain American voices precisely cannot be heard. After a bipartisan Congress brought university leaders to task, we witnessed a near-universal clampdown on free speech, with 3,100 students detained or arrested, including fourteen at my university, three miles up St. Charles Avenue from here, after my employer called in tanks to break up a peaceful encampment.

This brings me back to the limits of protests and their potential for political transformation. … We can herald the effectiveness of voicing, of mobilization, to enact resistance, prodding and provoking the state and other hegemonic institutions, while also acknowledging the effectiveness of those institutions in enforcing silence and stifling dissent. Further, the curtailment of free speech, assembly, and other basic rights is not owned by conservatives, of course, but is built into the supposedly liberal structures that the right is now dismantling.

SJ [36:44]: From resistance and limitations we’re now going to turn to belief, and the ethics and politics of organized religion in a liberal secular state. In his presentation, CUNY PhD student Nathan Shearn discussed two examples of Catholic hospitality whose practices might point to what he calls the “world-making capacities of a liberatory theopolitics.” We’ll tune in for just one of these examples.

Nathan Shearn (NS) [37:10]: While Annunciation House was established in 1978 by a group of young Catholics who were looking to serve the locally disenfranchised in El Paso, its focus began to shift in the 1980s as increasing numbers of refugees fleeing U.S.-backed interventions in Central America were crossing the border. During this period, Annunciation House drew inspiration from the idea of civil initiative developed by activists in the burgeoning sanctuary movement. Civil initiative challenged the state’s claim that sanctuary was a criminal and threatening act. It held instead that asylum was a political obligation under international law that the U.S. government was failing to uphold. Sanctuary activists thus refused to let the state frame their movement on its own terms.

SJ [37:55]: Doing exploratory research in 2024, Shearn learned how Catholic social teaching responds to state sovereignty.

NS [38:02]: Catholic social teaching relativizes secular state sovereignty with respect to the needs of individuals and refers to the conditions that produce such needs in the first place as “structural sin.” … In this sense, Catholic social teaching may serve as a potent source of refusal.

SJ [38:17]: Today, Shearn explained, Annunciation House provides shelter, transportation, and basic needs to people on the move. It holds to an ethic that prioritizes the needs of the oppressed over the interests of the state—a position that has gotten it in trouble with the state of Texas, where Annunciation House operates. In its ongoing legal struggles, the organization has been pressed to emphasize the authentic religiosity of its practices in order to qualify for First Amendment protection.

NS [38:48]: These dynamics illustrate the way secular power operates within the U.S. legal system. Secular power here does not simply structure the law; it compels the reinforcement of the arbitrary distinction between religion and politics. The Christian moral injunction to welcome the stranger without exception thus undergoes profound transformations within a secular legal context where religion is constantly being defined and redefined. At stake here is the very legibility of religion within the law. Here, religious obligations based on an ethic of hospitality emerge as a potent site of political struggle. Through their quotidian enactment, they refuse the disciplinary terms of the U.S. legal system. They also threaten to reveal the vulnerabilities of secular sovereign power. But perhaps most threateningly, they can exceed the nation-state and build transnational connections, as they did with the sanctuary movement and continue to do so. This can be a powerful form of theopolitics.

[39:40] [“Can’t Be Faded” by the Stooges]

KDC [40:32]: Um, are y’all ready? OK. Good morning. How are we all feeling today? All right. Good, good. I’m really, really happy to have convened, like, a panel of some really incredible brass band music—well, musicians just in general, from here in New Orleans. My name is Kyle DeCoste, I teach at Tulane in Music and Gender and Sexuality Studies, and I write about brass bands. So, to my right is Ellis Joseph. Ellis is a founding member of the Stooges Brass Band and the bandleader of the Free Agents Brass Band. To his right is Clifton “Spug” Smith. Spug is the tuba player for the Rebirth Brass Band, is also a founding member of the Big 6 Brass Band, one of the most in-demand tuba players in the city right now. And to his right is Walter “Whoadie” Ramsey, Walter Whoadie Win. Walt is the leader of the Stooges Brass Band, and also, like, a real estate investor, and all kinds of other things, has done a lot of production work as well.

AE [41:30]: The brass band selections you’ve been hearing throughout this episode were shared as part of a roundtable called, “ ‘It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday’: New Orleans Brass Bands, Grief Work, and the Afterlives of Sound.” We’re going to listen in on some of that roundtable now.

Brass bands are uniquely important in New Orleans for processing grief. During jazz funerals, a brass band accompanies the funeral procession through the streets, making their way to the cemetery amidst music and dancing. Here’s Clifton “Spug” Smith remembering a particular jazz funeral early in his experience:

Clifton “Spug” Smith (CS) [42:04]: Me personally, one memorable person that passed was Big Chief Lionel [Delpit]. Also a Mardi Gras Indian here—Black Masking Indian. Per se, just through the music of New Orleans, the vibration of being in the area. How do I want to say it? Just being in the essence of everyone’s positivity throughout, the music and enjoyment. And—my hands are sweating just thinking about it. That’s crazy. That was my first time having a feeling that I can feel through everybody in the room. Everybody had the kind of same perception, and everybody felt that he was present at that moment. And a lot of people started crying, like, sporadically at the same time. I was like, oh shit, this is real. So that’s what kind of kept me wanting to continue on to play music and understand emotions, and everyone goes through different things in life. Just to understand life a little better, coming from New Orleans.

AE [43:08]: Walter Ramsey, who you’ll hear next, and Ellis Joseph, who comes in with the really deep voice, spoke more generally about what jazz funerals mean for the city.

Walter Ramsey (WR) [43:17]: It’s just a celebration.

EJ [43:18]: It’s a celebration, yeah. But there’s a lot that goes into it.

WR [43:19]: We have to celebrate everyone’s life. That’s the importance of our jazz funerals, is we have to celebrate. We all gonna die. Yeah. But, you know, some of us refuse to die without the band. You know, like we ain’t dying unless we had a band with us, you see what I’m saying, like, so it’s the celebration of why we do this here, and why every walk of life here is that important. And it just so happens the brass band community provides that for a lot of people. You know, we play funerals every Saturday here. I mean, it makes a living for us, but it's also like, you know—we understand it and we feel it. At one time, we stopped—it was like, we started crying at a funeral, and we ain’t even know these people. And it was just like, you know what? This might be too much. We start crying at people’s funeral, we don’t even know them. Like, oh, man—

EJ [44:28]: I mean, we human, bro.

WR [44:29]: Yeah, we human. But it was just like—

EJ [44:31]: That was a reminder that we are human.

WR [44:32]: Yeah, yeah it is. And then, you know, it’s just—New Orleans is New Orleans, man. New Orleans is like no place ever. We have people that passed along, like Jerry Lewis. We have characters here—we got real street characters in New Orleans—and he was one of the street characters. I remember him coming to a funeral one time and saying, man, what’s up y’all? Who died? We was like, we don’t really know. He’s like, “Man, give me 20 dollars, I’ll cry.” Whoaaaa! I couldn’t even play my horn. You know, even in a sad and dying moment, we still celebrate.

AE [45:17]: The roundtable participants shared stories about friends and fellow musicians who have passed.

KDC [45:23]: One person that passed away while we were writing this book was Arian “Fat Boy” Macklin, who played with the Stooges, played with the Hot 8 a little bit too. Really really in-demand tuba player, was often in Jackson Square teaching kids how to play…

CS [45:38]: I met Arian probably in 2007. I remember us going to take a ride to Baton Rouge to get me a sousaphone from a guy that marched at Southern University. But before we hit the interstate, we got like a four-piece box of chicken—yeah, he was a big guy—and we had a lot of great moments talking and just understanding the sousaphone role.

The sousaphone itself—it’s everything. I know a couple y’all may not be from here, but the sousaphone represents New Orleans, fa sho fa sho. It’s just a style of how we play. Man. It’s deep, bro! It’s deep!

EJ [46:28]: So Walter and myself’s relationship with Fat Boy goes back a bit more. Fat Boy was one of the original Stooges. … And he always took, til the day he went to his grave, he felt like the name Stooges come from him, like he was the originator of it. We were very close. We shared—Kyle’s bringing up all these old memories, like, I did not wake up this morning thinking I was gonna be thinking about this crying and all this kind of stuff. So excuse me, if you know, I start tear-jerking or whatever. But he was always happy. He brought a different kind of flavor to the tuba. You can still hear it on the streets today. People try and duplicate his sound. He had this funk about him. Sometimes used to be funky—smelly, and he was funky on the horn. But that was my boy, and we loved him! And we talking about the chicken. I’m serious, y’all. This is my boy. God strike me down if I’m lying. Chicken was found on the bed, like, when he died, like he died eating chicken, in real life. He was good on the horn. He was a pioneer of our generation with the tuba, and he had a lot of soul, he made a lot of connections for us, he knew a lot of people...

[48:00] [clip from the funeral of Arian “Fat Boy” Macklin]

AE [48:34]: That last clip comes from a recording of the celebration of life for Arian “Fat Boy” Macklin. The musicians on the roundtable were all born and raised in New Orleans—and they played an important role in bringing life back to the city after Hurricane Katrina. The Free Agents Brass Band formed in September 2005, in the aftermath of the flooding, bringing together scattered New Orleans musicians.

WR [48:57]: We was all displaced after Hurricane Katrina. So for Ellis and the guys to come back home and get, like, the spirit of New Orleans moving back was very important, that the Free Agents did that. They formed a band based off of all those, all the guys in the band played with everybody, played with different people. And so they was like, “We all Free Agents now, because we all, our bands are all over everywhere.” So, what they done was bring the spirit back to New Orleans so people could come home.

And that was pivotal, like, for the city. Without them, who knows? You know, because who wants to be out here, dealing with that devastation and depression, all at once, and you don’t have the music, you don’t have the people, you don’t have the culture, you know?

EJ [49:50]: Yeah, because we weren’t just, like, sad. We were mad, you know, at what had just happened. Like, everybody was like, pissed. We was so mad. Like, when we first came back, we had to stay in, like, hotels down here, while we were working on the city. I was working for a particular company, we would like sort through debris piles and make sure there weren’t any, like, hazardous materials or whatever going on to the trucks that was going to the landfill. Walking amongst that, getting sick, stuff like that. … Police was heavy on us. They ain’t want you doing anything. They were trying to get their numbers up. Oh, man, it was just a shit show. … But like I said, we were angry. And a lot of times when we played that music, like a lot of those emotions came out, too. Like us playing.

AE [50:36]: Finally, the roundtable participants balanced their own contributions to the long life of the genre—the fact that brass band music started long before them, and will keep going after they, too, are gone.

WR [50:48]: It’s just a cycle. We just part of the cycle today, you know. And a hundred years from now, somebody else will be part of the cycle. So it’s—for us, it’s not new. We’re just participating in it. We’re not getting exposure. Like, it’s not commercial success. You see what I’m saying, like, no one got a million dollar check, “Hey, you play that tuba very well, we wanna sign you to a million dollar contract.” That’s not happening. You know?

CS [51:15]: It could, though. I’m optimistic.

WR [51:17]: But, I say that to say, like, it’s a business, but it’s also like family, or it’s just fun. Like this, this is my brother. You see what I’m saying, like, even if we get into it—like, Ellis say I fired him or whatever. You see, we right here. You see what I’m saying? You know, I’m sorry you couldn’t get the beat together. You know?

But, I say that to say that we’re just in our time of doing this. Hopefully it could grow past us and become something bigger, but our generation that took it to that level, like, we the ones—because outside of us playing music, we produce music in the industry. This team has created the theme songs for ESPN. Like, these people right here, and a few more other people with us. You see what I’m saying—that was unheard of, from New Orleans brass band musicians. Not them, you know?

EJ [52:14]: Yeah, we definitely evolved, and we brought the music to another level.

WR [52:18]: And by us being the ones that done it, we still humble enough to understand it, like, Alright, cool. That don’t make us better than nobody.

[52:24] [“Fat Boy” by the Free Agents]

SJ [53:03]: You’ve been listening to AnthroPod’s coverage of the 2025 American Anthropological Association annual meeting in New Orleans. This is the first part of a three-part series—stay tuned for the next two episodes.

This miniseries is produced and hosted by myself, Sharon Jacobs, and my colleague Alejandro Echeverria. Thanks to Michelle Hak Hepburn for review.

You can learn more about all the presenters featured in this episode, and find a transcript of the episode, in our show notes at culanth.org—that’s c-u-l-a-n-t-h-dot-org. As always, thank you for listening to AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. ’Til next time.

[53:17] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]