Editor’s Letter

Abstract

The articles collected in this issue of Public Culture all serve as a model for using fine-grained local knowledge to interrogate and refine grand theories like globalization or neoliberalism. We follow tuberculosis research from nineteenth-century Berlin through to mid-twentieth-century Britain and India; we visit the “virtual world” of online poker to understand how people act under and make sense of uncertainty; we explore East African encounters with psychological counseling and witness the local particularities of the globalization of the mind; we see both the violence and the intimacy of extortion in Guatemala; through a study of Gezi Park we come to better understand property regimes in Turkey; and we discover how US nuclear workers are certain to experience exposure and why such injuries and harms are both normalized and justified.In the first Forum essay, Robyn Creswell begins with a lovely illustration of untranslatable words, drawing upon his own experience as a translator of Arabic. While some have claimed that “Arabic is a controversial language,” leading to a kind of estrangement of English and Arabic, Creswell argues that we must assert the “bare translatability” of Arabic, or its interpretability. This does not involve domesticating Arabic for English but instead involves producing “the experience of shock and defamiliarization that any powerful reading experience . . . must include.” Minimal interpretability, suggests Creswell, may well be our path to understanding. In the section’s second essay, Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh continues our exploration of the encounter between the Middle East and North Africa and the West by following the forced migration of political refugees. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh traces “how, why, and with what effect only certain bodies, identity markers, and models of humanitarian response become hypervisible.” Fiddian-Qasmiyeh juxtaposes that which we do and do not see within the growing experience of displacement, drawing upon her framework of “repressentation” to show not only how we represent the refugee but also how refugees represent themselves and others.Building upon this theme of migration, I interview noted sociologist Saskia Sassen about her work and, in particular, about how her conceptualization of globalization has shifted over the decades. We discuss the various misinterpretations of her idea of the “global city” and think through her development, in her newest book, of the theory of “subterranean power” and its relationship to the work of Michel Foucault.Among Sassen’s insights into global cities is how they are enmeshed within a vast network of transnational relations and yet also characterized by specific local dynamics. Megan Vaughan’s careful genealogy builds upon such insights, showing us an example of how the mind is not homogenized by globalization. Through an account of the East African encounter with psychological counseling, we see how understandings of mind, self, and therapy are reengineered and retheorized in local contexts.Bharat Jayram Venkat also reveals the interplay of knowledge and place by exploring the history of how scientists in Germany, Britain, and India evaluated evidence of a “cure” for tuberculosis and how experiences from Berlin to Madras allowed us to think of cures not as outcomes but as temporally bound experiences.Ayşe Parla and Ceren Özgül parallel Vaughan in a different way, with a genealogy not of an idea but of a place: Istanbul’s Gezi Park. Such an approach gives us a different view of the 2013 Gezi uprising, placing it within the context of the evolving relationship of property and citizenship in Turkey, from the founding of the republic to today. This approach brings forth the troubling inheritance of the Armenian genocide and its intimate relationship to the occupied space and its eponymous movement.Anthony W. Fontes also emphasizes the centrality of place; his ethnography uses the brutal case of extortion rackets in Guatemala City to reveal a blurred boundary between the “law-abiding” world and the underworld. Navigating the geography of the capital means managing the deep uncertainty of who is in charge; the stakes may well be survival.This theme of uncertainty and risk carries through to essays by Natasha Dow Schüll and Shannon Cram. Schüll’s ethnography of online poker, where the economy of winning big is ruled in large part by chance, serves as a compelling case for understanding what Arjun Appadurai (2013: 527) has called “the new religion of the market”—filled with faith in the justice of returns. Cram fills out this idea of chance by pairing it with its partner, risk, showing how US nuclear workers don’t just risk exposure but are guaranteed it; it is an “operational necessity.” Workers’ health becomes part of a cost-benefit analysis in which we think not about what we can morally tolerate but about what are “acceptable risks” for our politics and our economy.Taken together these studies reflect what I see as the core task of Public Culture: teaching us something we didn’t know and giving us the tools to understand it.