In this interview, Lachlan Summers reflects on the craft of his article and offers a compelling critique of liberal tendencies and imaginaries in contemporary anthropology. He emphasizes the importance of giving space to emic perspectives and to people’s own theories of life, while remaining mindful of the discipline’s at times overpowering impulse to seek solutions to others’ problems.

Yichi Zhang (YZ): First, I would like to ask about your journey into this research. You mentioned that, coming from Australia, you were not previously familiar with earthquakes. How did you eventually find your way into Mexico City’s “geosocial stratum”? Furthermore, how has your own “geosocial” background shaped your experience and understanding in conversations with your interlocutors?

Lachlan Summers (LS): Yes, I had never experienced an earthquake before moving to California, where I felt only a couple of small tremors. In Mexico City, that quickly changed. Where I grew up, tropical storms and cyclones were reasonably common. In the summer, the small town I grew up in would lose power for several days each year. After big storms, my family and I would go from house to house to help neighbors get rid of fallen branches, or clean things up, or—and this was my specialty—eat food in their fridge that would go bad. I have a really vivid memory, I must have been eight or nine years old, of fires on the hillside that surrounded my parent’s house. Nothing goes down a hill slower than fire, people would say, but nothing goes uphill faster, and my dad sat on the back verandah all night, waiting to see if the wind would turn and bring the fire down through the forest to our house.

But earthquakes, no; none of these experiences of suddenness, none of these experiences of immensity. I didn’t have any understanding. I became interested in Mexico City’s earthquakes through my partner at the time and friends living there, and I was in the city shortly after September 19, 2017. I was researching something else at the time, but gradually realized all my thinking was absorbed by that event.

YZ: You noted that political bureaucracy and official institutions often failed to alleviate people’s anxiety and fear. Could you expand a bit more on people’s everyday understanding of the state? On a more practical level, what kinds of further support might actually help those who are tocado?

LS: I’m not sure that failed is the most appropriate idea here. “Failed” would presume that states should function or that they usually function; this is not something I think, nor is it something that many people in Mexico City think. It would be great if the state were more reliable; it would be amazing if people could trust that their buildings were safe. Yes, absolutely. But I don’t think many people in Mexico City expect that to be the norm, and that an indifferent state or unsafe building would be the exception.

And to me, critique aimed at government oversight or inaction is useful and necessary, sure; but such critique carries an investment in the idea that the liberal state can or should be benevolent. I don’t really share this investment. So, I find little political purchase in critiquing a state for not living up to this imaginary form. I’m more interested in trying to understand how people live when they do not expect the state to function, or when they expect that state action, well intentioned or otherwise, is likely to exacerbate a problem.

As for practical support that might help, who knows? I have been told some things that residents find useful, but I still don’t feel like it’s a topic I can talk about with any real understanding. And I’m uncertain about the tendency to see the world in terms of problems and solutions. These urgencies come from outside the discipline, to be sure: that a problem demands a solution, and that a politically engaged social science would be one that responds or intervenes. But I’m hesitant here. Why does it seem self-evident that problems can be solved? Do problems actually get solved? What do solutions do? I could make a call for more governmental oversight in the real estate sector, which would no doubt help in some ways, but it might also either deepen corruption or cause it to be hidden by a euphemism like “lobbying.” I could advocate for more geological research into Mexico City’s subsurface—which some activists did in 2018, demanding a risk atlas for the entire city—and this would, no doubt, be useful too. But as scholars with training in STS will tell us, we shouldn’t assume that science is inherently good, that good science is causal of good politics, or that the discipline of geology had nothing to do with the earthly problems that Mexico City currently faces.

I don’t really share the compulsion to solve problems, nor a commitment to the idea that all problems can be solved. This is not to say that I think remedies are impossible, but rather to say that conceiving of the world in terms of problems and solutions is more or less the type of thinking that produced the modern world.

Sometimes I feel like there’s something therapeutic for the ethnographer in this type of analysis, as if we search for solutions and remedies and possibilities in order to convince ourselves, over and over again, that the future is open and the world is ours to shape. Where does that desire come from? Why is it still so commanding? Why do we remain committed to the idea that maybe, this time, good science and good governance will work? And what is foreclosed upon by this commitment?

In this essay, I’ve only really tried to understand an experience in its specificity. I feel like advocating for things would largely be self-serving, that I would be able to pretend that writing in an academic journal is “politically engaged.” I don’t know. That’s what I was thinking while writing this.

YZ: I was struck by how vividly feelings flow through your text, by how you vividly portray anxiety, distrust, angst, and claustrophobia. What kinds of writerly choices did you make when transforming raw fieldwork data into crafted stories? How might these stories intersect or contend with the use of analytical theory?

LS: In a basic sense, I wanted to describe the things I was encountering without turning them into an example of something else. I wanted to avoid any words or concepts or modes of narration that would dislocate the experience from the situation. I wanted to resist the allure of generalization. This is not because I think that what happens in Mexico City has no parallels around the world, but because there’s an ugliness to reducing someone’s life to an example of something else. And, to me, working with generalities also makes writing worse. I wanted to describe the world more or less from inside this experience, and generalization demands a view from outside, so I have sought to avoid that where possible.

This to me has to do with the status of anthropology’s interlocutors, who are more or less prohibited from being theorists by the hierarchies that structure ethnographic writing. As ethnographers, we undertake inductive research, generate data, then try to produce theory to explain it, and in that theoretical work, we find other theories, show how they don’t quite work, then produce more theory to make them work. I feel like there’s three things to consider there. First, the people we work with already have theories of the world, and these theories are much more interesting than any theories I could come up with. I personally felt like I was most ignorant person in Mexico City for five years; it seemed dishonest, after all that research, to write an account that suggested I had any grasp on what was happening. Second, a corollary of the first, is that privileging the explanatory capacity of theory reduces interlocutors, the stories they tell and their theories of the world, to data for our own theories (which are also just stories). Alongside being on the nose, this places limits of written expression that inhibit truly exploratory writing. So, I wanted to write in a way that the stories I was told would be theory, rather than data. Third, if all of anthropology’s conceptual and theoretical work demands locally specific nuance, then maybe we should reconsider how worthwhile theorization is as an intellectual practice. It’s certainly useful in some contexts, making different situations mutually intelligible, but if we’re developing concepts and theories for each specific circumstance, I don’t really know what it’s for anymore. To theorize specificity is a little redundant. Maybe theorization is not always necessary.

But the demands of publishing in an ethnographic journal make this difficult. As anthropologists, we tend to make a crude distinction between low, direct description and high, abstract analysis, but there’s a thousand things we can do between those two poles. My approach in this essay was to put my own conceptual thinking into the writing itself, into narrative structure, into the transitions between sections, into tenses, into voice, into form. Then, where possible, resist the urge to theorize or generalize, and to situate the people with whom I spoke as theorists. It’s still a very traditional piece of ethnographic writing, and my authorship is evident, of course; there’s no way that this isn’t my writing or that this essay isn’t a story I’m telling with and over the top of the stories I was told. But I thought that finding a different syntax for ethnographic writing might be more honest and more interesting. I don’t think I achieved that, but that’s what I wanted to do.

YZ: As a former seismologist, I was used to understanding earthquakes through waves, some of which we call the “earth’s dance.” From these waves, seismologists could explore the unknown worlds beneath the ground. I wonder if there is something more to their reactions to the earth’s movement beyond the “earthly seasickness”? For instance, I was particularly struck by Figure 4, which seemed to capture a strange beauty in the breaking of boundaries, between private homes and walls, and public, natural space, between human time and deep time. Do you see any potential through the cracks of time and space? Or, if I am mistaken, perhaps I should simply ask whether there are alternative ways of (understanding) being tocado and the “surreal” urban landscape, especially if certain sociopolitical conditions in Mexico City were to change?

LS: I would feel uncomfortable suggesting that anything in this essay has a positive valence. It’s also not only negative: even the people that live with this fear tease themselves for how they act, their families poke gentle fun at them; people do laugh at themselves, at least a little. But I wouldn’t aestheticize residents’ lives and living conditions. Some of these situations do provoke in me a sense of horror at how exquisitely awful the experience is. And horror, as a feeling, is adjacent to awe, I suppose. I’m trying to convey this in my writing.

If I understand correctly the question about “alternative ways of understanding” and “potential,” it’s asking if there is some room for hope, or some kind of reprieve from the bad situation that I’m describing. I guess this essay could kind of lend itself to this type of thinking. In a way, the norms of ethnographic writing as a genre forced me to write about this experience as a form of knowledge. If we were to follow that line of thought, we could say that being tocado opens itself to a form of “planetary thinking,” or is a mode of being with the Earth that’s distinct from other modes of imagining human-geological relations, one that has a certain humility toward the capacity of humans, our technologies, and the demands of massive scalar difference. Maybe that’s true. But I don’t really want to say that. I don’t think that “knowledge” is the best idea to use here; it’s really just a placeholder that renders experience legible to other anthropologists.

This, to me, is related to your second question. I don’t know, but I’m not really compelled to find spaces for hope. This is not to say that hope is not present; it’s to question who that hope is for. To me, it is part of a liberal metaphysic that searches for spaces of agency, contingency, resistance, or whatever in order that the discipline may assert that things as they are could be otherwise. But who would this be for? I know firsthand that people living in falling buildings don’t feel better if things could be or could have been different. They want things to be different; they need things to be different. Such declarations are, I think, for us, the discipline. There’s a therapeutic impulse in this drive: that things are bad, but things could be different; it is possible to imagine things being different; it is possible to not give up. Isn’t this kind of weird? A discipline that aims to describe things specifically as they are in order to declare that they could be otherwise? Even though they aren’t currently otherwise?

This might seem like I’m saying that things can’t change, or that humans lack the capacity to do anything about their situations. I don’t think any of this. I see this as actually being symptomatic of what I’m mentioning in my response to your third question: ethnographic writing is stuck in a trap of describing people’s lives in generalizable specificities, so the most latitude interlocutors are afforded in our depictions is a small space for agency, or resistance, or hope, or speculations about what could be otherwise. But if we were to write in a different way, we would not be trapped in this analytic structure, and we wouldn’t be forced to offer such a circumscribed field for the actual experiences and lives of the people we work with.