Transcript

[00:00] [Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23: II. Adagio by Classical Heritage Publishing]

Yichi Zhang [YZ] [00:16]: Hello and welcome back to AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. My name is Yichi and in this episode we are diving into a theme as universal as it is often elusive—love.

Love is everywhere in mass media, but it has also become the focus of growing academic and anthropological research interests. From kingship and desire to devotion and duty, love takes many forms across cultures and places. What we are exploring here is: what can anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork, in particular, tell us about love? How do emotions, traditions, and histories shape the ways we love? This is also hopefully the beginning of a new mini-series where we explore conversations between love and anthropology. Our first guest speaker today is Dr. Omar Kasmani, and now I will ask him to introduce himself.

[01:21] [All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]

Omar Kasmani [OK] [01:32]: Thank you, Yichi, for inviting me to this conversation on love. It’s a really exciting prospect. For myself, I’m a writer and thinker based in Berlin, someone who has a somewhat eclectic training in architecture, cultural studies, and finally, anthropology. As a scholar, I’m particularly invested in notions of intimacy, desire, love, belonging, and the like, with a pronounced interest in contemporary Islamic life worlds. It’s something I always return to, like an archive of sorts. My earlier research has focused on queer desire and devotion in the context of Pakistan.

But the work we will be talking about today most likely is Thin Attachments. This is a monograph in the making on migration, love, and queer belonging in Berlin. I’m happy to be here.

[02:26] [Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23: II. Adagio by Classical Heritage Publishing]

YZ [02:31]: Yes, thank you so much. So I guess that brings up the first big question about how did you find love in your research?

OK [02:42]: That’s an interesting question. I think it’s a good question because when I started working on this book Thin Attachments, I wasn’t really thinking about love. I think now it feels kind of naive, but I think at the time I was thinking about migration and belonging, and the work is about my relationship with the city. So it’s an auto-theoretical project written in the third person. It’s fragmented and non-chronologically presented.

It’s a constellation, let’s say, of queer desire and belonging in the city, migrant belonging in the city. Over the years, and more recently, in fact, love became a concern. And I’ve been thinking as to how and why I never started with love, but I kind of chance upon it. As you say, how did you find love? I think maybe love also has a way of finding us. It almost crept into this work, and more so because I started to think about what I call “unlove,” which—we can talk about it later, what that notion does or mean in my work, but it’s a way of thinking about love’s work, if I can evoke Gillian Rose, so the affective labors that are required or are necessary when we, let’s say, are under the spell of love. So unlove then becomes a way to think about what happens when the spell breaks. What kind of work do we have to do as thinkers, as people who are in love, as lovers and beloveds?

[04:30] So I think that’s how I found love in my work. But I think, on a reverse note, I was teaching a course, and this is probably a broader or a longer way to answer your question, years ago I was teaching a course called, “Love: A Glossary of Affects.” And it was a course on writing and writing about love, so to speak, or on love.

What was interesting back then from me, or what I learned through teaching that seminar, was how love was an invitation to think about other messy embroilments in the world. So what happened was, it was envisioned as a course, or I wanted my students to write entries on love. So, like Roland Barthes (A Lover’s Discourse), this idea of love as a glossary. But what happened—because I also organize my courses as conversations. So, they’re not spaces of instruction but more a space of collaboration. Somehow, the conversation during the semester or through the course of the seminar became something else and students started to write really wonderful texts about other things that were related to love. In a way, what we learned was that love was somehow an invitation to think about other affects, so to speak. It alerted us to the capacity of love to go beyond just a romantic involvement. So, this invitation to go beyond, for love to be something else, or be a filter for other effects, was something that I think is still worth taking up, intellectually speaking. I keep thinking about this invitation of love, so to speak. What love is a concept invites us to consider, so long as we take love as something integral to the social fabric of our lives, and not only something that transpires solely between lovers—to think of love as world-making.

[06:33] [Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23: II. Adagio by Classical Heritage Publishing]

YZ [07:01]: When I was still doing my research proposal, I used Max Scheler’s work on love, which is about this active interest towards each other. And that really comes off as very encompassing in everything, every feeling or aspect you have encountered. So eventually in my research I have found a lot of other affects that might not be positive, et cetera. So, I guess my question for you is that, if you start to look at your research in this lens of love, what other things, as you have discussed, have you found there, to be contained or to be developed out of these initial views of love?

OK [07:43]: Certainly, questions of longing and belonging have been central, but I think of course it’s obvious that if you write about sexuality and desire, those are adjacent concepts. Intimacy for sure. The project began as a project on intimacy, and (I was) particularly interested in the notion of public intimacy, which is to think about the public feelings project, right, through intimacy. And this is also what makes love such an interesting concept to work with. I think you said that in the in the opening of this episode, how love can address itself or it appears as something universal too, right? It somehow offers us a view across the deeply subjective and what we might consider the universal, the personal and the shared. It constantly slides between, let’s say, the grandness of love that we know and the everydayness of it—the ubiquity of love, right?

In a sense, we could say love is everywhere. You know, we tap for it, we swipe for love on our devices, and we endlessly talk about affairs of the heart. And so, in a sense, it’s embroiled with the everydayness of life. So it’s not so surprising that love modulates into other things. I think it’s a question worth asking, what do we speak of when we speak of love? Because we know that there are cultural specificities to how we love, the metaphors and vocabularies we use, the literature and poetry that we rely on to understand something that, you know, is deeply internal. So, there is this kind of interface with the inward and the outward (of love), and there is also something—we know that there is a culturally specificity to love as a vocabulary, but there is something about having known the affective turbulence of love that, that feels so universal, that all of us would have shared at some point.

[09:56] So what it means to be to be smitten by our objects of love and desire, to come under a spell, that the feeling of falling in love per say, that clearly is very much, you know, shared and can be considered universal.

There is this the sliding between the personal and the shared, the universal and particular, but also the inward and the outward. So not just how the world makes us feel on the inside, but also, what we feel on the inside, how that shapes the political, right?

So in that sense, this is why I think love as a concept matters, or is so intriguing, that it becomes this, this filter or this lens—however you want to look at it—it becomes a way to think about other questions, other ways of attaching to the world, our basically our very, very messy embroilments in the world.

[10:50] [Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23: II. Adagio by Classical Heritage Publishing]

YZ [11:01]: Yeah, I think it’s not about whether love as a phenomenon is actually universal or not. I think it’s about, at the moment we feel love, we feel like it is as if it’s universal for us. It connects us with a lot of things in the universe. It’s an interesting way to, I guess, look into this specific research project of yours. And how does that as a way to bridge your subjectivity and the world that’s outside, especially in Berlin, how does that work out into this project?

OK [11:35]: So the scale of the city and to think about the city and desire together is something quite… we can all agree that the city is a desirous form in a way, right? The desire is integral to the ways in which we apprehend, appreciate, or engage with the city. So it’s not only a concern because one writes about sexuality, but it’s about other forms of desire, too. It’s about attachment, so to speak. The work that we’re speaking about, Thin Attachments, it began, I began writing it somehow or sometime in about 2017, I think. It’s also the time when I—so I grew up in Karachi and I moved to Berlin in 2010, and I’ve been living in Berlin ever since. But it was about around 2016 or 2017 that I somehow had this conversation with myself, that this is home, or this is becoming home. I am the process of homing, so to speak.

It’s also around the time that I got my first postdoc project. I was hired to do collaborative research on migrant belonging in the city, and I started doing research in a mosque in my neighborhood, so the project was on religious belonging, how religion shapes people’s notions of belonging in the city.

And I was researching with this, let’s say, a prayer circle, a Sufi circle. These were German Turks with migration histories. And so, their parents had migrated. This was second generation. And I, you know, being the anthropologist, was in the mosque to observe a ritual of remembrance, a Sufi ritual of remembrance called Zikr.

And there were all kinds of concerns at the time. I think one of, let’s say, one of the things that (I) ended up (realizing) while doing that research was that I, too, am a migrant, and I’m sort of observing these other migrants. What does that do?

[13:42] There was a kind of a mirroring that was happening, because I was asking some questions of myself, and these were men in my neighborhood, these were, the mosque was in my neighborhood.

So in a way, I was interacting with neighbors, so to speak, or men that I would have crossed on the street but would not have had any conversation with. There were also questions about, oh, is my queerness known to my interlocutors? What happens when they see me kissing a man on the street, right? Because we are neighbors. These concerns were intimate concerns, so to speak.

And in a way this project, it outgrew the mosque, and it became about all kinds of other attachments, embroilments in the city. And I started thinking about, what is my relationship with the mosque? How am I an insider or an outsider at the same time?

And I told myself that I’m not only going to write about the mosque. I’m also going to write about my relationship with other spaces in the city. So (it) just sort of organically grew into writing about my relationship with the city.

I think I was also concerned about not writing about the mosque in a way that sort of singles it out as this space of prayer. There are all these concerns about how you write about Islam in Germany. Those debates were not exciting or interesting to me. I did not want to plug my work into that project.

And as this queer migrant homing in the city myself, I had an access to the city which was quite expansive, so to speak. I could be in a cruising space. I could be at a gay bar. I was in a mosque. And then there are everyday engagements in the city.

I had this habit of writing in a cafe and then you go to supermarkets, you walk in the city. I mean, they’re all these spaces, which I started paying attention to ethnographically, so to speak. And the work became about these scenes, right? So they’re scenes that happen in various points and places in the city, but they all become one constellation that hang around the figure of the author, who is then referred to in the third person.

[16:10] So I do make the argument that these are not stories about me, but I’m integral to their telling. Right? I’m the observer, the writer, around whom these constellations of intimacy occur.  And by attending to them, by giving them writerly attention, I bring them into view. So that becomes a kind of a queer, affective, desirous geography.

I also say that this is this is an account (which) you can call it an ethnography of the city or ethnography of Berlin, but it is as much an account of an inner life, right. So again, it’s on the interface, just as love is that interface that we were talking about.

Which sort of brings the public and the private together, the inward and the outward. And in that sense, when you read this work, I sometimes also say this is not a Berlin out there that you can go and you know visit, it’s not this city out there but it’s a city that emerges in the interface of the inward and the outward. So in that sense, it’s deeply subjective, deeply particular. It’s my Berlin, or his Berlin in the book, as I would say in the sensibility of the book, because the book is written in the third person. It’s a Berlin that is queer migrant and what all that we want to call it. But it is, it emerges in this very subjective node, which is particular.

YZ [17:50]: And I thought I was really interested in the use of third person perspective.

I feel like there must be some connections or thought process that you kind of employ this perspective in connection with how you portray intimacy. So maybe you could elaborate on that choice.

OK [18:08]: It is almost an homage to Katie Stewart’s work. At the time I was reading Ordinary Affects. She writes in the third person about Austin, and for me, at the time, it was just a note-taking exercise. There were my fieldnotes that I was writing in the third person, and because I was so inspired by her style and her work. And then the fieldnotes became the book, or the book project. What I learned while writing in the third person was that there’s something—as artificial as that device is, it allows that critical distance between who I am and what my life is, and who the author is. The author also over time becomes this figure who’s different.

Writing about one’s life, let’s say, or one’s engagement with the city is different from one’s life. The account we’re able to give of our lives is distinct from life itself. So, the third person allows for that ambiguity, or that distance between the actuality of life, and life that is then written.

[19:14] [Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23: II. Adagio by Classical Heritage Publishing]

OK [19:22]: For a project that is about intimacy, this distance is quite interesting because it enables, it affords certain possibilities. I recognise and realize that I was able to write about events, occurrences, experiences that if I had written them in the first person, they would have felt quite unbearable to me and also the reader. This distance—and it’s not about objectivity. Don’t get me (wrong), you know, I’m not going in that direction, I’m not concerned with objectivity. I am in fact concerned with subjectivity. But it’s this creative, authorly device that, that distance that affords a certain kind of narration that would not have been possible if I used the first person. It also renders the work deeply gendered, which it is, right? So, then gender is not a analytical tool. It’s the ordinary refrain of the text.

And also because a lot of the scenes are about queer intimacy, when I write in the third person there are sometimes two or multiple “him”s  and “he”s in a particular scene, and that creative confusion can be quite interesting to grapple with as a reader.

YZ [20:49]: And I think it’s also, as a massive queer romantic novel reader, it’s a very common problem when you try to write it yourself as well, you get very difficult with the problem of “he”s. But how does the character you created, in a sense, how does these queer migrants experience the city experience, I don’t know, love or unlove, as you said?

OK [21:17]: How does this figure experience a city you mean?

YZ [21:20]: Experience Berlin, or experience the loves or the unloves that comes out of their experience with the city.

OK [21:29]: So there is a certain kind of, I think with Thin Attachments—how should I put it? So if you look at the constellation, there are all kinds of desires, longings, experiences, and loves that come together. They’re not all romantic. But many of these are romantic liaisons, affairs, experiences, crushes, loves, right. But I also read them in a broader frame because what I realize is there are other forms of longings that determine migrant life. It has also helped me think about the figure of the migrant as a lover, not thinking of the migrant in the usual tropes that we are used to. So—I’m digressing, but trying to make a point about migration and love, maybe that will answer your question.

I wrote this text called “Migration: An Intimacy,” and while writing that text I recognized that the Urdu word for migration, hijrat, borrowed from Arabic, at the core of that word is the word hijar. Hijar means “separation from the beloved.” So, migration, as a separation from the beloved, allows us to think of it, allows a different set of questions to emerge the moment we think of migrant, the word muhajir as the one who is separated from the beloved. Those are ways in which I started thinking of the migrant as a figure who’s a lover in the city.

[23:15] [Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23: II. Adagio by Classical Heritage Publishing]

OK [23:17]: But also because, at some point, I realized that I had started to almost jokingly refer to myself as a Berliner-by-love. Now that we talk about introducing myself, funnily enough, today I did not say that. It usually pops up if you Google me or, you know, it’s also on my Insta profile.

And I realized at some point that I’ve been using this term for some years without having addressed the question of love explicitly in the project. This also goes back to our conversation about what do we speak of when we speak of love or what are other ways of speaking about love. There are maybe other placeholders for love, that there are other terms that we are more comfortable using, but we’re actually wanting to speak about love through those terms.

There’s this wonderful text by Ammara Maqsood called “Love as Understanding,” which is about Pakistani women, especially wives, who are thinking about romantic relationships through this notion of understanding, or they’re seeking understanding, and it becomes a placeholder for love. Or there is the work of Akanksha Awal, who thinks about love as enjoyment in Delhi. So, it’s interesting to think about what other names does love to take in other geographies, in other contexts?

So I was somehow using the term Berliner-by-love, but I was not really addressing love in the work itself. I was talking about attachment. I was talking about intimacy, talking about sexual desire, other forms of desire and longing, (such as) longing for other histories, coming close to histories that are removed from view or are not significant in a particular context. When you start thinking about migration as a spatio-temporal displacement, then the migrant lover is also seeking or is desiring not just sort of physical, romantic love, but longing for other histories. It's coming close to forms of attachments that make life and migration bearable.

[25:38] And through that process I think my relationship with Berlin started to falter in the past two years, especially given the current political situation, the repression that we are all seeing vis-à-vis the Palestine issue in Germany, and I think that has really shaken a lot of my friends and myself. I think we’ve had to reexamine the question or the project of homing, or at least address it differently.

And it’s also then that I started thinking about unlove vis-à-vis my relation to the city. And I think what I’m trying to say is that, arriving at unlove already means that there must have been love.

I’m trying to retrospectively think about love in this work, which is a bit, you know, when I was talking about earlier the course that I taught and we started with love, but we arrived elsewhere. And here it’s like I’m arriving at love via other affects.

So unlove, the way in which I’m now thinking about it is, I at least make the claim—and it’s in process, I really can’t say much other than the fact that I think that unlove is not the absence of love or the opposite of love. Rather, I now describe it as the affective labor that becomes necessary when the spell breaks.

So in a way, I’m thinking again with Gillian Rose and thinking about love’s work, how it also expands into or extends into this moment when you fall out of a story. This is Maggie Nelson’s term. There is something there to be unpacked, and I’m trying to think about this project on migrant belonging, attachment, desire in the city and now also through the notion of unlove, if that makes any sense.

YZ [27:56]: Yes. So I suppose talking about the political situation now and in the past few years, how does this unlove feel, does it feel like a heartbreak of some sort?

OK [28:10]: I think heartbreak is also an interesting notion. Gargi Bhattacharyya has this wonderful notion where she said something like, heartbreak is the unhappy knowledge that, I shouldn’t misquote, but something just to do with that, that there’s nothing special about personal grief, actually, that everything is transposed. It’s a way to think about, let’s say, how do we connect what feels very personal to larger political questions? Political heartbreak, so to speak.

I keep saying that I do not know whether this heartbreak will lead to a breakup, right? But it certainly is an interesting space, or at least intellectually, I’m concerned with sort of unpacking this moment and what it means in my relationship with a city that I had once really cherished as home. And I had wanted it to work. I mean, we’ve all been in romantic situations where we want it to work and we do everything we can, or we also go through naive or, let’s say, rose-colored phases, but that is that is part of being in love, right, being under the spell. What does it mean to be under the spell?

So... what should I say? I’m not judging myself for having fallen in love.

[29:40] [Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23: II. Adagio by Classical Heritage Publishing]

OK [29:41]: But it’s to reckon with a with a love, with a big love. How do you reckon with falling out of a story? How do you reckon with what feels like a betrayal? If the city is a beloved or a lover. Which is the word, right?

To call yourself a Berliner-by-love is also to think about your relationship with a place and with migration in ways that are otherwise not given or feasible. I mean, I couldn’t be an original Berliner. There’s a term called Urberliner, which is to say, you come from here. I cannot make that claim as a migrant. Then there’s a term called Wahlberliner, which means Berliner by choice. People who’ve chosen Berlin to be home. And I feel choice is, like, for migrants, is too fluffy a word. So I never also thought that this was a choice.

And love, I think it’s a question worth asking whether we choose love or love chooses us. I don’t think there’s something very rational about who we love and how we love. And so those terms did not make sense. So, it’s a way of reckoning with a world that is very difficult to bear.

I’m thinking about what happens when the world in which a certain love was possible is no longer there, right? It’s a way of thinking about displacement which is not about moving, but about the world around us changing.

[31:32] It’s not that I could say, proverbially speaking, love has left the building. That’s why I’m not thinking about the absence or the opposite of love. But it’s about whether this love is tenable anymore. Because the world in which that love was possible no longer exists. The ecology has shifted, and so must the relations then.

And this is again a way of thinking about love. I mean, in the beginning I was talking about love as the social fabric of our lives, not only as something that transpires between two lovers. So, this is not something that’s happening between Berlin and me, or me and another boy. Love is always happening in a context and that affective ecology also participates in how we feel and what we feel and the intensities and the messiness of it. So the moment that ecology shifts, the moment the world shifts, our relations are also put into question.

So the question I’m left with in this moment is, how do I not resolve but just sort of respond to all that is changing? And I think it will also be unfair to say that only one of the lovers of beloved is changing, right? I mean, I’m also changing with time, and so there’s all these shifting pieces of the puzzle in it, like in any relationship.

YZ [32:59]: I guess it really make me think about the work of Laurent Berlant, Cruel Optimism, which I am sure you have read or take inspiration from. And sometimes there are left with this feeling of what else is there to do, if not to love? What else can we do in front of everything? A lot of traumatic experience or various sorts of neocolonialism or displacement, but what can we do in a city, in a place, that we feel so strongly attached to, except to love regardless.

OK [33:37]: Yes. I think love comes with its own risks and vulnerabilities, and we allow ourselves that. You know, that is why—Billy-Ray Belcourt, this poet and theorist that I really, absolutely admire has this description of love as a body spilling outside of itself, a body not living up to the promise of self-sovereignty. It’s a very Berlantian way of looking at love. Because what is love, if not the condition of being willfully unsovereign? This is my paraphrasing of Berlant, but these are questions that a lot of scholars ask in various ways. Gillian Rose has this wonderful line where she says, “in love we are at the mercy of others, and we have others in our mercy.” And it is inevitable in any experience of love that we will also fall, that love will run its course at one point, or that lovers will find other beloveds. This is the inevitability of allowing ourselves to be under a spell, allowing ourselves the vulnerability of being a lover and a beloved.

The role of risk, the question of power, the issue of affective trouble in romantic relationships.

I recently read the first few chapters of this new book called Love Troubles by Federica Gregoratto, and she has this wonderful question: can we love and be free at the same time?

It’s all these authors that, you know, we’ve just spoken about, they’ve all thought of these questions and I think this is exactly what I’m reckoning with in this project as well in some ways. How do you deal with affective trouble, so to speak.

[35:27] [Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23: II. Adagio by Classical Heritage Publishing]

YZ [35:55]: Thank you so much. And then I guess to ask about your theoretical inspiration, as we talked about, I think throughout the conversation about several authors you have drawn from, and you mentioned a bit earlier that you didn’t really draw as much from anthropological work on love, but perhaps more from cultural studies and other disciplines.

I wonder if you have any thoughts, further engagements between love and anthropology, since personally, in my own writing, I also sometimes find anthropological literature on love for me treated it as something very static and fixed without digging much into the complexities and the myriad feelings it might incur.

OK [36:40]: Yeah, it’s true that, you know, the bulk of my readings so far come from outside anthropology, mainly from philosophy and literary studies. In fact, I feel literature itself and poetry, especially, are excellent sources, to think about love and of love’s archive per se. So thinking about histories of desire that shape our relation to love or vocabularies we rely on when we speak of love, or when we speak, rather, in love.

I also think that poets make for great companions and co-thinkers when it comes to love as an affect. I’ve been a reader of poetry all my life, as long as I can remember. Even as, you know, when I was in my early teens. And so that explains why I’m drawn to maybe those spaces of conversation. I also think that poetry is my first relation to abstraction and theory, so I do return to all of that as a way to think about love.

But I do return to anthropology, and that’s something interesting because I think anthropology, and this is to say the obvious, affords us a view into the lived dimensions of love and possibly because of that, what you were also mentioning, we often end up speaking of adjacent concepts in the anthropology of love. It’s also true that for many social scientists, love feels like too tricky an object for theory or analysis. Too mushy, even. So we see a more sustained engagement with concepts—in social sciences, I feel, and anthropology in particular—there’s a more sustained engagement with concepts like desire, attachment, relation, intimacy.

[38:44] My feeling is that love often becomes an indirect citation, or it stands in for other feelings and affects. This is not necessarily a shortcoming, because I think the question what do we speak of when we speak of love is infinitely interesting, and something that anthropology can help us tackle more than other disciplines.

There’s also the writerly promise of anthropology I feel, which I’m more interested in, which I lean towards. I was recently reading Denise Levertov, who’s a poet, and her essays on writing, and I was reminded what ethnography shares with fiction. As ethnographers, we often make this voyage, and it’s not just about going to a place. But we, you know, have these stories we want to tell.

There’s something about an ethnographic moment that the anthropologist as writer must resurrect, and which is always after the fact. And this is also what I’m thinking about the voyage. It’s also a voyage in time. It’s not just going to a particular location, but we’re always writing after something has happened. An encounter has taken place, and we’re trying to write it up in ethnography.

So there’s something about that which makes me always think about the work of the anthropologist and the work of the writer, and in that sense, the challenge of good writing or good ethnography, then, is to transmit some of that, not merely as a record of something, not in the sense of simply bringing the information to the reader, but to put the reader in the place of the event. This is where I’m thinking with Denise Levertov, is to turn that into something alive.

[40:49] So if we are to think of ethnography in such terms, then writing keeps the possibility of that voyage open, not as a place we go to record or to capture, but as a journey that your reader can partake in, on their own. So in a sense, I’m sort of now thinking about the particularity of love that we may find in the field or as ethnographers. And the uniqueness with which it is felt and lived, I feel that is that necessary texture which helps us understand the ways in which love is a shared experience.

This is the point about why anthropology, I think is a good fit for love. Because I think, like love itself—and we’ve talked about it earlier, like, love operates across scales. Yeah. So love is as grand feeling as it is deeply subjective, which is also what makes it so fascinating. But something kind of tricky to work with.

But I think, then, anthropology steps in with the right tools, because it helps us analytically move across something that’s deeply personal, local, inward, felt subjective. And, let’s say, the public, the outward, the collective, possibly also the universal dimensions of a social phenomenon.

[42:04] [Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23: II. Adagio by Classical Heritage Publishing]

YZ [42:23]: Thank you. Since you talk a lot about poetry and writing love and anthropology, I guess my final question here is about that, your ethnographic context and writing about love. So I guess time for a bit of a storytelling. So, is there a particular scene, setting, or story you wrote about that you find especially expressing of love? Share a small example with us.

OK [42:52]: There’s one instance, I think. I don’t know how insightful it is, but it’s a sticky moment, right? Something that you, that stays with you. And there’s this one scene in my book manuscript where I describe waking up next to a lover and the first sentence, I utter that morning while being in bed is, “I’m too short to spoon you.”

And I remember being struck by my own utterance. Somehow knowing that this line or this string of words go beyond the moment. I had this kind of inkling of sorts. Now there’s an immediate context into which in which the words make sense, which is that the lover that I’m describing, or this lover of mine, was really tall.

So, there’s this physical dimension right of not being able to spoon an object of desire, and at the time I was also rather anxious about, let’s say, how this love situation of ours was unfolding. On the surface, it’s a failure, or it’s a worrying about physical intimacy. It’s either failure or physical intimacy, or one’s worrying about it.

[44:17] But in the process of writing this scene, I became aware of the larger implications of not being able to spoon one’s object of desire, whether that be a person or a city. And because Berlin in the work appears as a lover, as a beloved figure, what struck me the most was how, folded within this scene of love or intimacy, which is a situation unfolding in the private between two people, I found greater questions of historical disaffection or migrant belonging, right, which I could only access with the act of writing. So what I’m trying to say is that this line “I’m too short to spoon you” made me aware of the ways in which I was coming short of history in the city, the ways in which struggles of belonging and being were playing out. So in a way, there was this kind of affective sliding across feelings of romantic love and migrant belonging that I hadn’t really appreciated before that. It was somehow a confirmation of this idea that these situations that might appear minor to us, that these are things that we think they happen in our private life or in a minor moment—it was a confirmation that these are somehow connected to larger questions of belonging in the city. So, kind of, intimacy and love as an unfolding of larger historical public questions, so to speak.

I mean, this is the kind of thread I’m interested in when I look at questions of love, intimacy, desire: as to how the personal, the inward, is always engaged with in conversation with or in dialogue with questions of the public, the political, and the collective.

[45:55] [Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23: II. Adagio by Classical Heritage Publishing]

YZ [46:22]: Thank you. I really, I really like that quote, “I’m too short to spoon you,” which you wrote about in an article, right?

OK [46:30]: Yes, that piece of migration begins with that line.

YZ [46:34]: Yeah, it’s very beautiful. So we talked about previously about love and breakup during the difficult times now in Berlin. So given that, especially the recent state of affairs, you know, so many changes and issues. I just wonder, do we still have any more faith or hope of love?

OK [46:59]: That’s a difficult question, of course. I mean, the times are soul crushing, no doubt. The apathy towards Palestinian lives, the double standards, the refusal to see things as they are, or to name the atrocities for what they are. These are all unbearable, but also very revealing, right? It’s revealing of how insufficient the West is as a moral intellectual project. How hollow. I’d like to believe that’s also dispensable, right? I mean, more than before, we must think outside established frames, institutional scripts, and also known epistemologies.

All these are exceedingly outing themselves as part and parcel of a colonial project of knowledge making. So yes, I think there’s a greater need to sort of rethink these categories, rethink the structures. The failure of the university is a spectacular example of all that.

In a way, what we need are new ways of worlding, right? So bigger, broader, more capacious, less colonial infrastructures for living and also for loving. And these are connected, for me, to infrastructures of life and love. I’m thinking with Julietta Singh, one of my favorite thinkers. In her book The Breaks, she calls upon us to collectively build another world, and by this she does not mean a new world, but this one toppled and reborn.

So that call, I believe, is a call for love. Change can be a loving endeavor. That is what I’m trying to say. So even if our capacities for love in this very hard moment might be diminished, and I totally understand that and relate to that, we must remember still that love is not only something that sort of happens to us. To love is to violate our existing attachments, right, in favor of new ones. So it’s a process of change, it’s a name for solidarity, for care, for world-making, eventually.

[49:18] [Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23: II. Adagio by Classical Heritage Publishing]

OK [49:21]: Now more than ever, we cannot abandon loving, just can’t afford it.

YZ [49:30]: Yeah, because what else, you know, is left.

OK [49:35]: We must proceed in love. That’s the only way to get through this, I guess.

YZ [49:40]: Thank you.

YZ [49:45]: Our episode closed on undeniably idealistic note: that love feels too vital, too necessary, to be set aside, especially in today’s world.

Though different structures, whether it’s religion or mass media, may generate both a fascination and sometimes a rejection of love, I think love remains as an analytical concept and a cultural discourse. The force that empowers, inspires, and unsettles across societies.

To learn more about the scholars, stories and ideas shared today, please visit our website at culanth.org. That’s C-U-L-A-N-T-H dot org.

You also find a transcript of this episode and the curated list of recommended readings exploring love from anthropological and critical perspectives.

[50:42] [All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]

YZ [50:43]: I want to thank my reviewers for their thoughtful comments on the episode, and a huge thanks to Sharon Jacobs for her work and help in the post-production process. I also want to thank our fellow podcasters and friends for their continuous interest and support.

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