Transcript

[00:00] [“Walking through mud” by freesound_community]

Sarah Muir (SM) [00:04]: Mud and slush and lots of friction, right—a kind of movement that is anything but graceful. Is not rapid, is not graceful, is not clean, and is in a lot of friction with the world. Jessica, I think it was you who came up with the slog for our piece originally. Is that what you were originally thinking of? That’s just what it definitely presented to me.

Jessica Greenberg (JG) [00:27]: Yeah, no. I mean, slog—it came out, again, sort of emically. I think we start with the idea of mud. But it points to, certainly, the temporality, that underdetermined nature, of disappointment as a concept, the sort of not knowing which way something would cut in terms of its political valence, but sort of pushing anyway, because the pushing is the point, much more than the definitive answer….

[00:54] [“Walking through mud” by freesound_community]

Sharon Jacobs (SJ) [01:00]: Disappointment. We’ve all been there—dashed hopes, longing, feeling the distance between the life we’re living and the life we want. It might stem from something as private as a romantic rejection or losing a job, or as public as the toil of governance or failure of an activist project.

Disappointment emerges in today’s world in a variety of spaces and social registers—but what does it feel like, how do we know it… what does it do?

In 2022, Sarah Muir and Jessica Greenberg (whose voices we’ve just heard) published a review article on the anthropology of disappointment, which they describe as, quote, “a space of disquiet in which moral certitude and political righteousness are troubled, if not upended, by a world that is not what it should be” [308]. This episode digs into their article and the affects, aesthetics, and practices around disappointment. Interspersed with Greenberg and Muir’s reflections, we’ll visit three other ethnographers of disappointment. We’ll hear poetry from Chantal Croteau, evoking economic transition, heartbreak, and home in rural Thailand. We’ll chat with Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza about intimate disappointments and queer life in digital spaces. And we’ll end with a longer interview with Fuad Musallam. His 2025 book A Break in the Future traces failure and continuance along a decade of protest in Lebanon. You can find more information about all these scholars and their work in our show notes on culanth.org.

This episode is part of a series called “What Concepts Do,” where we take a concept that’s in the public eye and talk to anthropologists whose work touches on different aspects of it. I’m your host, Sharon Jacobs. From the Society for Cultural Anthropology, this is AnthroPod: “What Disappointment Does.”

[02:54] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

JG [03:07]: My first book, my earlier research, was with student organizations in Serbia, bridging two periods of time, so moving from the late 1990s through the early 2000s. And that was a period that was marked by a fairly significant shift in the way people were approaching political organizing and democratic activism on the ground. And it was really—the question I came to the project with was, what happens the day after a revolution? In terms of your temporalities, your experiences, your strategies for thinking about democracy in action, and really from the ground up.

And so the period I was looking at really bridged a massive student organizing and citizen protest and engagement on the streets in the late 1990s in Serbia, and then at the moment of 2000—October 5, 2000—there’s what’s known as an electoral revolution, the October 5 Revolution, when the Milošević government was finally ousted in formal elections, and then when he refused to step down, there was mass citizen protest on the streets. And all of a sudden you go from this contentious politics to having to engage institutions and be part of the governing structure that had been an object of critique for so long. And so that question of what does that look like the day after, when you move from protest to formal engagement, was really the ethnographic context in which disappointment came up.

SM [04:41]: Yeah, I mean, like with Jessica, this sort of emerged very much out of the ethnographic fieldwork I was doing, which was in Buenos Aires in Argentina, where there were kind of two moments and experiences of disappointment kind of folded onto one another. One was massive disappointment with the failure of structural reform and neoliberal political economic policies over the course of the 1990s to do what they had promised. And in fact, they turned out to kind of do the exact opposite. There was mass immiseration, mass unemployment, and the total collapse, really, of the Argentine political economy. And so that financial crisis of 2001–2002 led to intense disillusionment, disappointment with politics as usual, with economic institutions, and, for many, with the very kind of idea of representative politics, you know, in general. And in the aftermath of massive protests that ousted an administration, and that demanded something radically new—the kind of famous major protest slogan was, “Down with all of them”—you know, there was really a demand that everything be wiped clean.

And yet, in the aftermath of that, that’s not what happened. Everything wasn’t wiped clean. And in fact, not totally dissimilarly to the situation Jessica is talking about, people found themselves also disillusioned with the moment of crisis to produce radical change, disillusioned with their own engagement and participation in protests, disillusionment with the very idea that perhaps things can hit rock bottom and then we can start again. And that proved not to be the case.

[06:25] And so that was a kind of second way in which people, especially middle class people of Buenos Aires, found themselves radically disillusioned, not only with institutions of political economy, but with the idea that history could deliver something different: disillusionment in themselves, in Argentine national culture. And so this was a kind of sentiment that I found to be absolutely saturating everyday life, and to come up in contexts that were both highly relevant to politics and economics, in a very commonsensical way, but also in all kinds of other contexts that didn’t seem on the face of it, necessarily, to have anything directly to do with these kind of big structural issues. So that’s how I came to this topic.

SJ [07:12]: Sarah Muir, who you just heard, studies economic investment and ethical evaluation in contemporary Argentina. That work led to her first book, Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion, which was published in 2021. Muir is an associate professor of anthropology at the City University of New York.

The previous speaker, Jessica Greenberg, is a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She published her first book, on Serbian student activists, in 2014. It’s called, After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia. (Greenberg’s new book, Justice in the Balance, came out last year and traces similar themes of disappointment, crisis, and failure of liberalism at the European Court of Human Rights.)

One thing that struck me about both Greenberg and Muir’s early work is how disappointment emerges around the same time, in the early 2000s, as a response to neoliberal economics or post-Cold War politics.

[08:12] So I wanted to kind of probe that a little bit and ask, I guess, why might disappointment be related to this particular moment?

SM [08:20]: Yeah, I think we’ve both thought a lot about the way that disappointment is especially pertinent to the experience of modernity, and to the experience of modernity at a particular moment where the promises of modern progress not being fulfilled is impossible—or almost impossible, or increasingly difficult—to write off as temporary, or an exception, or a glitch, where there is a kind of broadly felt or intuited sense that that’s just not what history is, that history isn’t going to work like that, that it’s not going to have that shape. You know, this broad shape of history as having a telos toward progress, toward improvement in any number of different registers, is something that Koselleck talks about very nicely as really key to understanding the kinds of ethical and moral investments that moderns have in politics.

SJ [09:19]: Reinhart Koselleck was a twentieth-century German historian—and former Nazi soldier and Soviet prisoner of war—who was especially interested in temporalities of modernity, and the ways in which historiography is inflected with political expectation and experience. You can find a full citation for his book, Futures Past, and for all the works mentioned in this episode, in the “References” section on our show notes page.

SM [09:42]: And I think the fact that disappointment seems to have become such a broadly salient affect at this particular historical moment allows us ways of thinking about what politics looks like in the aftermath of that. How do we start thinking about a form of politics, or multiple forms of politics, that aren’t embedded in a kind of modern arc of progress? What is the relationship of politics to the domain of the ethical, or the ethico-moral absent, that sort of lamination that Koselleck describes? And I don't know that I necessarily have answers to that, but I do think that this can be one avenue towards starting to think our way through those kinds of questions.

JG [10:25]: That was beautifully put, Sarah. And I think one of the things we really wanted to think through was what kind of politics comes out of the disjuncture between the banality, as in Sarah’s writing, and the chronicity of disillusion and disappointment against the expectations of radical transformation writ large, right? And so—when you’re inculcated or socialized into the expectation that radical transformation is possible, and that becomes the vocabulary or the imaginary for thinking about what social change might look like, or politics might look like, and yet the experience of that, on a sort of everyday level, is one of the of the chronic and the sort of low-level experiences we talk about in the article, of slog, what kind of political possibilities or impossibilities come out of that moment and that disjuncture? And so, again, I do think maybe there were particular expectations—institutionally, socially, politically—that produced disappointment as this sort of shared ethos, but that it’s not necessarily going away in terms of its, as Sarah says, political salience. Because we’re living in the rubble of that aftermath and that disjuncture.

SM [11:49]: Just thinking about your first book, Jessica, and my first book, the politics of disappointment looked really different in those two contexts, right? So one of the things that I describe in my work is the sense that, you know, this kind of intense, saturated sense of disappointment can produce utter paralysis and a kind of disengagement with the question of politics. And that’s certainly one possibility.

But, you know, Jessica’s work shows us a different possibility, right, where people struggle to figure out how to continually engage in the day-to-day slog of politics amidst disappointment and through disappointment. And so I think one of the things that we want to underscore is the kind of underdetermined implications of disappointment—socially, politically, and so on. And then it really is a sort of open question, what comes out of it? And it’s something that we can think about anthropologically and analytically: You know, what allows a kind of shared ethos of disappointment to produce paralysis? What allows it to produce ongoing engagement? What allows it to produce, like, revanchist right-wing politics? What allows disappointment to produce something that we might want to invest in instead of that? I don’t think we—I don’t think I, at least—have a clear answer to that, either, but I do think that it’s something that we have to really think about empirically and analytically in order to figure out, you know, how to do our work as anthropologists, and also just how to live in the world we’re living in.

SJ [13:25]: Both Greenberg and Muir are primarily interested in the social and political dimensions of disappointment. But for disappointment to produce any kind of politics, it has to be personally felt, lived, and shared.

[13:37] So, like how does disappointment become social? Is disappointment always social? How does it balance between these private and public aspects?

JG [13:46]: I think one of the ways we handle this in the piece is the attention to genres of disappointment. We’re more interested in the way in which disappointment as a genre, as a frame, as a way of, sort of, making sense of and collectively interpreting the world around us, sets up a sense of the possible and the impossible, right? Talking in idioms of disappointment—and there’s sort of multiple different terms and genres and poetics, as Sarah puts it in the piece—has material implications in the world, right? For how it is we imagine what’s possible now and what possible futures look like.

The other thing I would say about the sort of ethos or experiential or phenomenological aspect of disappointment that I found helpful in my own work is making sense of how people live contradictions in ways that don’t necessarily shut down action, right, but navigating the terrain of that contradiction itself becomes a way of making sense of the world and acting in it.

SM [14:55]: That makes so much sense, Jessica. And I think we’re trying to find a way to show the material relevance of the particular form in which people experience, narrate, express their sense of disappointment, right, or of joy, or whatever, right, of these kind of affects. But to really take seriously the material relevance of people’s own meta reflections on, and formal expressions of, their own experiences.

[15:28] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

SJ [15:40]: How to express an intensely personal, as well as communal, experience of disappointment is a question for ethnographers as much as for our interlocutors in the field. Chantal Croteau, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, conducts research at the intersections of ecological change, labor, and intercommunal relations. In the fishing village in Southern Thailand where she works, the collapse of the tin mining industry in the 1980s was financially devastating for many local families. Croteau talks about men, in particular, who were pushed toward dangerous physical labor in order to support their families—in a region that was also struck by the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. All this contributes to a shared sense of disappointment around what life could have been, as well as a commitment to place. For Croteau, those deep feelings came out in poetry.

Chantal Croteau (CC) [16:32]: There was something about the experiences that couldn’t simply be chronologically laid out in any kind of clear, you know, English language-standard way. And I think some part of that is also the language that I’m working in: Thai is structured very differently linguistically than English. So when I would start to think about these narratives being shared with me in Thai, the repetition, the way that things come up, the way that narratives will circle back and come forward, but it’s not simply a loop, it’s moving in a way that—time is a little bit different.

Poetry just emerged as the space where that could maybe be held in a different way. And actually, the collection that you’re talking about was written in the midst of my field site. It was—particularly the section “Bridges,” which talks about a meeting between the Department of Rural Roads about a project to build a bridge through this fishing village—it was written only a few weeks after that, when it was very fresh and visceral and that heartbreak that that meeting held, you know, I can even get emotional just thinking about it. It was a very intense moment for a lot of people that I cared about, and a land that I cared about. And poetry was the space that that had to be written first, even before my field notes. That’s what had to come out.

SJ [17:52]: Yeah, and in that particular poem, “Bridges,” you can hear different voices coming out as different stakeholders are actually talking at the meeting, about this project and its effect on their lives. And I'm curious how you balance your own kind of position as an ethnographer, working in a genre like poetry, which is really personal.

CC [18:13]: Yeah. I like poetry for the sense that it allows me to more squarely address who I am in the work, and in the context as well. You know, when we are doing this kind of research, the boundaries between self gets a little bit blurred. I mean, we can of course think about, there are different contexts where “self” is being defined in a different way. But in the process of research, the things that you are living become shared, become defined by other people. You become in this kind of system of relations, web of relations, in a different way. In the Thai context, this is really important actually, you become part of, especially in the Buddhist majority context, this social karmic community, that you’re linked to people and affected by them.

And I think poetry gives this space for those relations maybe a little bit more freely, without being bound to particular structures or conventions, where you can start to share your own autoethnographic experiences as they are also linked to others.

SJ [19:19]: Here’s Chantal Croteau reading her ethnographic poem, “Bridges”—which was published in 2025 as part of a collection in the journal Practicing Anthropology.

CC [19:30]:

“In the case of the land or other resources of yours that will be reclaimed for the development project, are you delighted to give your cooperation with the project or not?”

In the case of the land that you have lived on for decades that you returned to after the tsunami that you rebuilt homes into with the help of the army, the police, Chinese NGOs whose names and stamps and titles are still displayed in plaques secured on the outside of cement walls

In the case of the land that you have lived on for decades that you have planted oil palm trees into and watched them grow, watched them grow and expand and soak up all of the water from the earth, squeeze all of the water into their trunks to produce those globally sought-after red and brown kernels

In the case of the land that you have lived on for decades that you have cultivated morning glories and zucchinis and cucumbers on, that you have scratched open and filled with future potentials, future hopes, future memories, future securities in the form of noodle stands, minimarkets, motorbike repair shops with small generators that keep stores running even amidst the unpredictable and all too frequent power cuts

In the case of the land that you have lived on –

“The project is not clear. You have not said clearly. More details are needed. Community members must know which houses will be hit by the bridge.”

The project is not clear. The images on the projector screen off center, off kilter, off, are not clear boundaries are blurred, obscured, made fuzzy, hard to read, decipher. More than one hundred community members squint at the screens, at the pamphlets in their hands, at the low quality pixelation that hides, eats, consumes the details of their futures.

The project is not clear. Except that it is clear. Except everyone knows that it is clear. Anger courses underneath the plastic chairs. Understanding trickles down from the cups of powdered coffee and banana leaf wrapped sticky rice. Snacks for the meeting. Half-hearted consolations.

[21:28] The project is not clear. Except it is clear. Except everyone knows. But still the questions come. Ask questions and maybe it will change. Ask questions and maybe the answer will be different. Keep asking. “How about Path Four?” “I conducted research as an environmental report volunteer and our team decided Path Four was the best.” “For us, Path Four is the only path that makes sense.” Keep asking.

Asking.

And then –

“This is to say that you have already decided, is that correct? You call this meeting to hear our opinions, but you have already decided on Path Three.”

This is to say that you have already decided, is that correct? A young engineer in a polo shirt. Face shining from sweat. He pushes up his glasses. Says “I love my home too. I am not from here, but I understand you.” Eyes cloud and darken at the engineer’s arrogance. Behind masks, heavy scowls. The woman next to me stands sharply, takes the microphone in her shaking hands, demands answers. “This is our home” she says to thundering applause. But her voice breaks over the word home and when she sits down, I see tears on her cheeks.

This is to say that you have already decided, is that correct? We leave quickly. “Can’t listen anymore. It is enough.” In the motorbike cart back, “The people won’t accept it. We won’t allow it.” “It won’t happen.” “They’ll run out of money.” “We won’t allow it.” Won’t allow it. Won’t allow it.

But later Grandfather tells me he won’t plant new oil palm trees. “A waste of money to make the land.”

Later Father speaks about stability, urging me to find security. A secure job, home, place.

Later the street is quiet as households sit together in silence, hunched over lunch packages of government consolation rice.

[23:16] [“Walking through mud” by freesound_community]

SJ [23:26]: One of the key concepts in Greenberg and Muir’s review article on disappointment is slog—which they described at the top of this episode in terms of, quote, “mud and slush and lots of friction.” Slog is movement, but it’s not exactly progress. I wanted to ask the two of them how slog can orient us as anthropologists.

JG [23:47]: We’re engaged in a discipline where, at the end of the day, a lot of times our conclusion is, well, it’s more complex than that. Or what we thought was this, was that. There is no definitive stance, there is no absolute end to meaning, there is no answer. So, again, I think slog represents both, in some ways, the work of being an ethnographer and finding meaning in a punctuated way, in collective and collaborative conversation, and having it be okay that that meaning is going to ultimately be upended.

And then there’s the materiality of it all, right: that sometimes the conditions through which we experience change or agency or action are wholly not up to us. They’re down to the kinds of material and discursive and social affordances, infrastructural affordances, of the conditions in which we’re trying to enact some sense of efficacy and agency. And that sense of, kind of, weightiness and pushy—that sort of having to push the world around us in order to keep going, was something that that slog designated a little bit.

SM [25:01]: Yeah, and I think, like, if disappointment, on the one hand, marks some sort of gap between the norm and what is, you know, one’s attempt to actualize it, the concept of slog, I think, points in part to the way that we need to recognize that there’s necessarily a gap between the kind of concepts that we bring to our analysis and the stuff we’re analyzing, right? And the point is not to close that gap entirely, right—the concept can never fully grasp the object—but the point is the ongoing engagement, right, analytically. So it’s related, as well, to the kind of commitment, you know, a commitment to the ongoing work, that kind of constant work that we have to do to engage with the world, both as actors and as and as analysts. And to embrace the slog, to embrace the schlep as the point is, I think, part of what we want to suggest that we can do as anthropologists.

[26:00] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

SJ [26:05]: Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza is another anthropologist who has embraced an ethos of slog—or moving through failure—in his work. Atienza is an associate professor in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt. His current book project engages the digital lives of queer men from the Philippines in both Manila and Los Angeles. He studies their experiences looking for connection on mobile phone applications like Grindr and Tinder—what Atienza calls in his writing “socio-sexual” apps, but which I glossed in our interview as just “dating apps.”

[26:42]: Failure and disappointment are really the first things that come to mind for me, and I think for a lot of people, when it comes to dating apps. So I'm curious, uh, when you started doing this research, did you think that you were researching failure? Or did you have another idea in mind?

Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza (PMLA) [26:58]: Oh, wow, what a question. Um, I think failure was not the initial impetus to doing this work on dating apps. It was really the relationship of technology and our everyday lives and how we, our kind of learning about ourselves and communicating with one another in relation to these technologies that we use.

And 2009 was, for queer men, Grindr was, like, the first year that was made available, and I started my PhD in 2013. I was thinking about, how can I continue some of the questions I had about relationality [and] belonging on digital spaces to this kind of different genre of digital site. And I was seeing, you know, even before I applied to my PhD program, as a personal user of these technologies, I was seeing some of those relational questions and differences pop up, and I thought that was really interesting to dig more into.

I always think first about what is successful. And I think I wasn’t paying much attention about that failure until later on. And it was really helpful, actually, Greenberg and Muir’s essay. And I think that came on later after I had had some more personal experiences with disappointment in the work. And I think also, as someone who's trying to finish the program… you just want to do it as quickly and as well as possible. And sometimes when you get these ruts and life experiences that kind of become obstacles towards that, that’s when you start thinking, OK, what else is it in this project? Because people can have blinders on about what this project is supposed to be. And to do a lot of self-reflection got me to that place to really examine the failure and disappointment in the work that I do.

[29:00] And that’s also kind of part and parcel with some of the frameworks that I was working with—queer of color critique and feminist studies. Having things unresolved is OK, and that is a human experience that we need to also pay attention to.

SJ [29:17]: In a 2024 article, “Feeling Failure,” in the journal Ethnoscripts, Atienza describes how his personal experiences of failure and disappointment in the field led to and wove themselves through his research.

PMLA [29:31]: Often people say, like, “Mike, you’re so vulnerable,” in some of the work. And I think that oftentimes as researchers, we don’t incorporate, like, our own experience into this process. And oftentimes it really tells a lot about what type of data and information you’re able to share.

SJ [29:55]: Failure and disappointment on these apps is inflected by race, body image, and other social factors that filter into self-image.

PMLA [30:03]: I think a lot of the corporate side of the narrative is about the successes. But oftentimes I think, in an everyday conversation or in group chats and social settings at bars and restaurants with close friends, you know, it’s always that kind of, like, bad experience or interesting, weird, kooky experience that people share about this technology. The story and the experience of failure is some of the initial stories that I got. Whether it’s like, yeah, I don’t get a lot of people messaging me, or I don’t know if I’m good enough for this platform. You know, a lot of people judging their own kind of bodies, their potential to make connections.

I’ve been talking to someone for over ten years now, and when I met them, they were like twenty [or] twenty-one, finishing school, and had a different type of body. And ten years later, you know, their body has changed to be a little bit bigger, and their kind of experiences on dating apps have drastically changed. And that led them to different practices and different platforms where they felt they could be more seen or they could find more connection.

And it’s not just our bodies, you know, the technologies are changing. For Grindr in the beginning, there was an ethnicity/race category that they ended up removing.

SJ [31:36]: Atienza highlighted how apps known for sex—and sometimes discriminatory sexual politics—can also be places where community and intimacy are built. But some of his interlocutors have responded to disappointment with the digital sphere by leaning into in-person parties and happy hours for queer men of color.

PMLA [31:53]: They’re kind of building a different kind of togetherness. That doesn’t mean it’s separate from the digital life, but I think they’re having less emphasis. A lot of the, I think, concern with normative digital queer spaces is sexual racism. And for these queer Asian men, building their own space outside, and supporting each other in parties or gatherings, is a little bit, much better. And it kind of, like, moves them on.

SJ [32:27]: In closing our conversation, Atienza urged that anthropologists should be prepared for difficult moments in the field—trained, perhaps, in what theorist Jack Halberstam has called the “queer art of failure.”

PMLA [32:40]: We didn’t really talk about that in methods class, right? What do you do when things fail? When I speak to more junior researchers, I say, you know, prepare for that. Prepare for, if you’re able to find mental health resources ahead of time or at your site, who are your support systems that you can rely on? I mean, there are so many other things that go wrong that I could talk about, and we can’t plan for that, but, you know, to just foreground other support ways. I think that would be one thing I’d like to add. Particularly when some of our projects go to traumatic moments of lives, I think that’s a good practice to have.

[33:27] [typing and deleting sounds by AnthroPod]

SJ [33:41]: I guess, how do we know nihilism from possibility? Because it sounds like they both exist in disappointment.

SM [33:49]: Yeah, I mean, I think that nihilism and apathy and paralysis are very real possibilities that, you know, it behooves us to kind of look out for in conditions of disappointment like this.

JG [34:04]: Yeah, I think the, what I find really fascinating is the reflexive attention to those categories of, you know—is this nihilism? Is this failure? Is this apathy? Is this disappointment?—as itself the grounds for organizing. I think it’s really astonishing the ways in which harnessing the temporalities and expectations of a disappointed moment has itself become the terrain of activism. And, and that requires sort of narrowing temporalities or expanding temporalities, or thinking about coalitions and solidarities or ethical commitments or affective states in really reflexive ways that get people through moments where sometimes it feels like change is utterly impossible. But let’s really step back and think about what’s going on in this moment, and how can we be reflexive and attentive to—you know, there’s a quietude or a pause now in what we think of as political transformation or possibility. It feels impossible. But it won’t always be this way. And I think that’s been really, really productive to think alongside activists who are theorizing that in their own right.

SM [35:20]: Yeah, and I think that, you know, one of the things I think we wanted to point to is that activists, and we as anthropologists, don’t necessarily know, right, like, what is going to come of our actions, or of the actions we’re observing and analyzing. And part of that is that, as Jessica was saying, judging that, right, as either stasis or movement, or what have you, requires a kind of temporal perspective, right—requires a temporal anchoring of the judgment. And that can shift with time. And so part of the job, perhaps, that we as anthropologists can give ourselves is not necessarily to judge whether something has been successful or not, or, you know, is moving us or not, but simply to lay out what is actually happening, to really pay attention, and to engage with the people that we’re studying with, as they’re trying to sort these things out as well, and to leave open the question that what appears to be movement now might, in five years’ time, look like stasis, or vice versa. And to kind of foreground that as, you know, a necessarily open question.

[36:35] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

SJ [36:48]: Our final segment of the episode is concerned with precisely this question of how people on the ground register and respond to what’s felt as failure, as time goes on and movements endure and change. Fuad Musallam is a lecturer in anthropology at University College London. His book, A Break in the Future: Feeling Like an Activist After the Arab Uprisings, came out just last year.

A Break in the Future follows social movement participants in Beirut, Lebanon, over the course of the 2010s. The book’s timeline begins in 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring movement—which brought down longtime dictators in countries like Tunisia and Egypt, but hardly registered in Lebanon—and ends with Lebanon’s mass uprising of October 2019, in which people across geographic regions and religious sects came together to demand changes to the country’s political system. Along the way, Musallam tracks incremental social movement “breaks,” like the 2013 protests against a proposed extension of the Lebanese parliament’s term, and the so-called “trash crisis” in 2015, when garbage piled up in Beirut’s streets for months following the closure of a major landfill. But he’s particularly interested in what happens in between these exceptional and consequential moments—in moments of slog, or attrition, or disappointment, or failure.

Musallam gives an on-the-ground example of some of the ideas that Greenberg and Muir have expressed throughout this episode—including the day-to-day slog of political activity; the questions of paralysis-versus-engagement and stasis-versus-movement; and people’s meta reflections on discouraging experiences. We’ll take a little more time in this segment to delve into this ethnography of disappointment in a Lebanese social movement.

[38:32] There is one protest slogan, in particular, that illustrates the slog of Musallam’s research context—the complicated political dynamics at play and the slow-motion work of the Lebanese activists.

Fuad Musallam (FM) [38:43]: So, Killun ya‘ni killun means, “All of them means all of them.” And it was a slogan that kind of first came to light in the 2010–11 isqat al-nizam al-ta’ifi protest, or the Lebanese chapter of the Arab uprisings.

SJ [38:57]: Lebanon is organized in a confessional parliamentary system, in which political and institutional positions are apportioned among the country’s eighteen officially recognized religious sects, or “confessions.”

FM [39:09]: What this means in practice is that the president of Lebanon, by expectation, although this is not actually written down anywhere, has to be a Maronite Christian. The Prime Minister has to be a Sunni Muslim. The Speaker of the House has to be a Shi‘i Muslim, and so on and so forth.

It’s in that context, to come back around to 2010–11, that when everywhere else in the Arab world you had the slogan of, Al-sha‘b yurid isqat al-nizam, the people want to bring down the regime or the system, they often had a particular kind of figurehead to be pointing that towards, right? A Zine El Abidine Ben Ali right, in Tunisia, or a Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. But in Lebanon, that would never have been possible. Because who is the figurehead?

And it’s for that reason that the movement was called Isqat al-nizam al-ta’ifi, “Bring down the sectarian system” overall, right? The sectarian regime. And as part of that, this further slogan, to try and supersede sectarian readings of the movement itself. “All of them means all of them,” without exception, it’s the system itself and all of those who benefit from it, who are our targets.

It didn’t work in 2010–11, because there are a number of figures within the protest movement themselves who had their own exceptions to this—in particular, Hassan Nasrallah as the leader of Hezbollah, one of the, kind of, few groups that actually did have cross-sectarian appeal for its role in the resistance against Israel in the south of Lebanon, and successfully ending the occupation of South Lebanon in 2000, and also substantively winning the 2006 war, against Israel again.

So in 2014, it’s the second parliamentary extension protest, the year afterwards, which is really this kind of protest that goes nowhere. And, you know, the slogan of, Killun ya‘ni killun, continues to really not work there. 

SJ [40:54]: By 2019, though, the same slogan and the sentiment behind it—of grassroots, inter-confessional solidarity challenging Lebanon’s entire ruling class—had become central to a mass uprising. On October 17, 2019, protests broke out in response to a proposed tax on WhatsApp, in the context of a larger nationwide economic collapse. Musallam describes in his book, quote:

FM [41:20]:

In the past, this chant [killun ya‘ni killun] came with the risk of being beaten bloody, and on many occasions this is precisely what happened to those who uttered it. Now, however, it was taken up by thousands, led by the feminist bloc with the megaphone, blasted from sound stages up and down the occupied sites across the country, scrawled on every surface that might take it, and conjured as the first words on the lips of all those who participated in the uprising. [179-80]

[41:48] [“كلن يعني كلن- ثوار احرار - الثورة اللبنانية- طرابلس ٢٠١٩” by lebanese revolution]

FM [41:59]: The ways in which that slogan was taken up more and more is testament, I think, one, to the ways in which over the decade of the 2010s things develop in Lebanon, but also the work of a number of these oppositional movements to continue to try and get across this perspective that there is a structural set of concerns within the Lebanese polity, which the confessional system itself and those who benefit from it have stakes in maintaining. They all hate each other. They may well be willing to assassinate one another, which definitely happens, but when the system itself that benefits all of them as a class of individuals is brought into question, they close ranks. 2019, in a sense, was a testament of this for a number of people in Lebanon. And getting there, I think, is also a testament to the decade of work, both in these exceptional moments, but also in the kind of slow work of the day-to-day outside of them, when the activists who I worked with would at the same time say, “If only you were here a year ago, things were better then,” or, “nothing’s going on now,” and yet continue doing this work in the day-to-day that brings us to that slogan working far, far better in a quite massified way by the end of it.

SJ [43:11]: The slow work of the day-to-day constitutes what Musallam calls the “ebb and flow” of political engagement in between exceptional, break-in-the-future moments. During these times of slowness, he describes a sense of “failure in the air”—that’s a quote from a close friend of Musallam’s. Activists worried that this atmosphere could cultivate disappointment within the movement. 

FM [43:33]: It was part of a real concern that a number of slightly older activists—though, when I say older here, I sort of mean more in terms of their activist biographies than necessarily age. Some of these more experienced activists, if you like, were really worried about imparting this sense of failure to some of the younger, or less experienced, activists, who were doing a whole bunch of things.

This is particularly in relation to student lockouts, and the students at a number of the private universities in Lebanon, particularly the American University of Beirut, in the springtime of 2013, possibly 2014, kind of shutting down the university—over tuition fees, but also a number of other related social and political questions to do with Lebanon as a polity.

They were really worried about taking this sense of failure that we might consider, maybe commonsensically, as a thing that you feel deeply yourself, but by discussing it, in fact making it a thing present in the atmosphere, if you like, “in the air,” such that these other, younger activists would also feel the weight of it, the pressure of it, on themselves and their own actions.

Failure really did, particularly at those times, develop this kind of object quality, right? It became a thing that you could feel out there. And it lived interpersonally.

SJ [44:54]: Here, Musallam describes failure as a kind of “negatively enforcing affect.” But his book also shows how activists were able to take up past failures in productive ways:

FM [45:04]: And there we might think of failure as a resource that you might be able to draw on, to understand in your present and your future, who you should work with, how you should go about doing it, and to what end.

SJ [45:16]: Activists used storytelling, in particular, to make failure into a political resource.

FM [45:21]: People were constantly telling stories and anecdotes and narrativizing their own personal immediate past. And by “personal” here, I don’t only mean your own individual experiences, but I suppose the kind of experiences of the subset of people, the community of people, who were engaged in certain kinds of political action.

SJ [45:39]: Musallam described a 2014 meeting in which representatives of an NGO were trying to recruit student activists to do groundwork for a new campaign. There was, though, some wariness among the activists toward the NGO, due to some of the students’ previous, disappointing experiences with NGO representatives toning down protests, shying away from confrontation with authorities, and criticizing more direct forms of action. Here’s Musallam talking about the aftermath of this 2014 meeting:

FM [46:10]: The NGO representatives then leave, and the minute they left, the conversation loosened up, as you might expect, but also became this sort of open-ended reminiscence about what had happened the year before, and the ways in which each of the people there—who had not been from the same groups necessarily, who had not all been there at the same time, but nevertheless had all these stories about how they had related to one another—who had been at the front lines, who had fought with the police, who had been taking photos, who had then done the kind of write-ups and shared things afterwards, who had made use of that information and those kind of media elements, and so on and so forth. 

And then, as a kind of a capstone to this, one of the students who was there said out loud a recollection of his—whether it was true or not, is sort of, I think, by-the-by—but he suggested that he remembered somebody from the back as they were trying to break through the police line, shouting, “No, everyone, no, we don’t want to go in there. It’s not in our project proposal.” Right? As a way to try and suggest the ways in which there was this really strong division between the people at the back of the protest and the people at the front. And by extension, the meeting we’d just been in—the people who had just left versus the people who were still there. Right?

And this was quite a pithy… it got good laughs in the room. We were in a kind of a coffee shop, in the neighborhood next to two of the English-language universities in Beirut, Hamra. It got good laughs and it was a really clear way of setting out the stores of who was who, why they were who they were, how they related to other people within, if you like, the kind of oppositional or the protest space—and all in quite an informal way, following on from what was a much more kind of formal situation, but it really sedimented the approaches that the people in that room would then have moving forward, even as they were intending to continue doing some kind of work in cooperation with certain of these NGO groups, but having a very clear sense of who they were and how they were apart from them.

SJ [47:58]: The following year, in 2015, the private contractor in charge of Beirut’s waste collection stopped picking up garbage when a deadlocked Lebanese parliament was unable to renew its contract. Piles of trash started gathering in the city streets. It was another social movement flashpoint, a break in the future, in which his interlocutors’ past disappointments (and narratives of disappointments) informed their actions.

FM [48:22]: And initially a more NGO-like coordinating group called Tilʿit Rihitkun—“you stink,” “your smell rises,” right, but called “you stink” in English—started doing symbolic protests of throwing trash bags into Parliament Square, you know, powerful symbolic stuff, no doubt. But didn’t really get a lot of traction with some of the more direct action-y groups because of their previous involvement in some of these actions.

As the trash crisis continued over the summer, in August, late August particularly, when the kind of street movement, the Hirak, really started to be opposed quite dramatically by both state and non-state security forces in Lebanon, including the use of water cannon, rubber bullets, against people, the Tilʿit Rihitkun representatives absented themselves, kind of quite explicitly stating, we are removing ourselves from this space because we have lost control. The kind of other group of people within the oppositional space, the people who I’d spent more of my time with, had already seen this play out two years earlier.

And so, rather than being themselves taken by surprise by it, this time they were ready for it. They had expected it. They’d spent the previous two years sharing, formally and informally, these kinds of anecdotes about that kind of thing potentially happening from within the protest space. And so when it happened, these particular figures refused to leave the protest space. They stayed to make sure there were as many bodies on the ground as possible.

And one of the effects of this was that then the next day, a number of the Tilʿit Rihitkun representatives came back and said, “Okay, actually, that was the wrong move, how can we attempt to try and work together”—accepting that there were other organizations, other oppositional tendencies within a kind of a wider protest space, including those who I’d been working with, sort of independent left, feminists, queer activists, and others, who ought to, and in fact did, have a say in how to kind of organize moving forwards as part of the protest movement.

[50:11] So that was a very clear way in which some of those experiences of one’s own failure and those of others from previous years directly impacted on another kind of exceptional event as it came into being by enabling people within the protest space to act and to react in, from their perspective, better, more sophisticated, more learned ways than had been the case two years beforehand.

SJ [50:36]: My interview with Musallam ended on a difficult note. Since the uprising of October 2019, Lebanon has experienced a full financial crash, COVID-19, the August 2020 Beirut port explosion (still unaccounted for) and ongoing Israeli bombardment and occupation.

FM [50:54]: The book talks about this decade between the uprisings as a particular kind of discreet moment in time. And I have asked myself since whether the time that we now find ourselves in is qualitatively different.

Perhaps the Israeli attacks, occupations, have really substantially transformed the nature, or the rhythm, of these moments in the future, these breaks in the future. I think it would be difficult to know that entirely until, and if, there might be some normalcy [to] return to. Another thing that has happened off of the back of these attacks, is, for some within oppositional groups, a reassessment of the role of Hezbollah and the resistance, right? And perhaps an acceptance, or an understanding, of what previous generations of leftists, in particular, had said over and over again, which was the necessity of some kind of deterrent. Because they had had the experience of multiple previous invasions of Lebanese soil. And meanwhile, for others within the kind of oppositional space, you’ve had a doubling down of Hezbollah as a kind of a key domestic opponent.

I think it will be interesting to see over the coming months and years how it is that Lebanese oppositional politics—oppositional to the kind of sectarian system itself—constitutes and re-constitutes itself, as we move forward across things.

[52:17] And actually another part is that, yes, now post-2023, but also post the port explosion and COVID lockdowns and the financial collapse, a number of the forms of day-to-day slog, attritional [work of] solidarity, mutual aid, and in particular, a compulsion to bring front-and-center the marginalized groups of people on Lebanese soil that both the Lebanese state, but also quite a few Lebanese nationals themselves, would choose to ignore. A lot of these activists and oppositional groups have gone out of their way to make sure that those stories are not gone—whether that be a number of campaigns after the port explosion to make sure, for example, that the official death and injured count included Syrian workers and migrant workers who also perished, not only Lebanese nationals and Western nationals. Whether that include kind of mutual aid networks, not only with migrant workers, but also with those who were made destitute by the financial collapse.

Through to now the real, widespread emergence of grassroots mutual aid organizing for displaced families and individuals from the south and from everywhere else that has been being bombed and leveled by Israeli aggression. That has also been happening, and which also activates organizations that were themselves products of the organizing of the 2010s, often in those moments of attrition, those moments of hiatus and slog, in between the flashpoints of 2010 or 2015 or 2019. That, if you like, continuous attritional work has been maintained and is contributing to the kinds of organizing that we see on the ground, even in these sort of exceptional moments of crisis and darkness.

[54:01] [“Walking through mud” by freesound_community]

SJ [54:07]: I did want to ask if you have kind of a favorite poetic evocation of disappointment?

JG [54:14]: There’s a great movie that I write about in an earlier piece. It’s a Romanian movie, the English name is “12:08 East of Bucharest.” It’s the moment when the, sort of, world decided that the Romanian revolution happened, the final moment when, you know, post-socialist transition happened in Romania. It’s a local town, and there’s a talk show. The talk show host gathers a bunch of people. He says, you know, “Where were you at this precise moment when the revolution happened?” in this little town east of Bucharest. It’s a sort of, an old communist functionary, I think, and a local schoolteacher who’s been ousted because he was a drunk. And they’re arguing about where they were at the moment of the revolution, and what their role was in bringing about this massive transformation. The conversation sort of descends into a series of very minor-key, petty disputes about who was or wasn’t the hero of the events. And out of that milieu, a woman calls up—

[55:22] [clip from “A fost sau n-a fost? (12:08 East of Bucharest)” by Corneliu Porumboiu]

JG [55:35]: She basically says, “I remember that moment, the snow was falling.” She says something to the effect of, “It was the moment when my son was killed.” Because a number of people were killed in the uprising, that final uprising in Romania.

And the sort of punctuated quietness of sorrow, and of grief, and of hope, and of loss, that you get when you pay attention to the deep sense of both possibility and loss at a human scale, so throws open the idea that we could ever know, or even claim to know, when a revolution happens. Because, in fact, what it really is is about these moments of human connection and human loss and their total indeterminacy over time, right? So, what does it mean to have had a revolution, in the face of that experiential—you know, the humanity of it all?

And the grandstanding, and the need to call for a redemptive moment, a final moment of political transformation or political change, against a much more deeply humanist understanding of what it means to live that change—I think it’s the strength of our field, to keep reminding ourselves of the really human scale of everything that’s unfolding around us.

[56:59] [“Walking through mud” by freesound_community]

SJ [57:13]: Thank you for listening to AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. AnthroPod is the work of a collaborative and nonhierarchical collective of Contributing Editors.

I’ve been the producer and host of this episode, Sharon Jacobs. Special thanks to Yichi Zhang and Steffen Hornemann for review, and of course thank you to everyone who participated in this episode. You can find a full transcript of this episode in the show notes at culanth.org—that’s c-u-l-a-n-t-h-dot-org. ’Til next time!

[57:20] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]