RAI Book Launch - Pardis Mahdavi

Good afternoon and welcome, everybody. My name is David Shankland. I'm the director of the Law and Anthropological Institute. And it's a great pleasure to welcome our speaker today, Dr. Pardis Mahdavi, who is really going to talk about her own development as an anthropologist and as a writer through this wonderful trope of hyphen. And certainly, certainly, we completely take on board at the Institute the importance of hyphens. When we reconstituted our Ethnomusicology Committee about a decade ago, it was made extremely clear during the first meeting that after many years of careful debate, the ethnomusicological community had decided that they would not have a hyphen in their name. And so once this extremely important matter was cleared, we could get on with the business of restarting the committee, which was a great success. But once that first point was clarified, indeed there were no further misunderstandings, and so I can certainly understand why that can be so significant within our community. But of course we're talking about very, very important matters here, and I look forward very, very much to learning more and sharing your thoughts with you as well as the audience. So please, Pardis, the floor is yours.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, David, and thank you to Hanina and Amanda and the Royal Anthropological Institute for hosting me today. Good morning to you all from Phoenix, Arizona. Good afternoon to those of you in London. Good evening to our friends a bit further east. And thank you all for joining me. I'm really delighted to be here to introduce to you my book, Hyphen. And lest there be any confusion or misunderstanding, this book, it is about the hyphen as an orthographic mark, but it actually is an ethnographic study. So it actually is living at the— like the hyphen and like hyphenated individuals like myself, Iranian American, many of us who are hyphenated. The book lives at the intersection of ethnography and orthography. And this was sort of my venture into looking at how the history of a tiny orthographical mark like the hyphen is actually so, so richly intertwined with the everyday experiences of hyphenated individuals around the world. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and hope that our colleagues will be kind enough to let me know if for some reason the screen I'm just going to assume that the screen share didn't happen. But we'll just hope that it did. Okay, great. And if it didn't, someone can just wave their hand at me.

No, it looks great.

Excellent. Thank you so much for letting me know. One never knows, right? Okay. So I'm sort of tentatively titling my talk, Hyphen: Ethnography in the In-Between, because I feel that this experience of writing this book, what I call a crossover book, has been a really interesting journey through liminality and finding belonging, even as an anthropologist, even as a writer. And for those of you who don't know, the book is part of a series called Object Lessons. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about these books, but they're all kind of similar in format. So this is, of course, hyphen, but you can compare— they're all— They're all the same. This is Blackface by Ayanna Thompson, another ASU professor. I'm just sort of giving you some examples so you can see there. This is High Heels, one of my favorites. This is Hotel, similar in size and structure. And in terms of kind of tone, they're a really interesting crossover experience for academics wanting to reach a larger audience through their expertise. And so I'll talk a little bit more about that as well. Well, so just a brief overview of our time together today. I wanted to start with some contemplations and reflections on the ethnographic pre-terrain. I've been thinking a lot about ethnographic pre-terrain and post-terrain, as that, you know, as the pre-terrain leads up to the fieldwork and then leading up to even the writing of the book, that experience of the in-between as you're writing and then crossing over. from the fieldwork to the written work. And then, of course, the ethnographic post-terrain. And I'll talk a little bit about my experiences in the ethnographic post-terrain with regards to my previous work. Some of you know, and it certainly is in this book, that I paid a very heavy price for my ethnographic work in Iran, which is that the post-terrain of my ethnographic— my ethnography, Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution, I paid a very heavy price, which was that I was arrested and expelled from my native country. I've been thinking a lot about notions of the ethnographic pre-terrain and post-terrain. And so we'll explore a little bit of that today. And then I wanted to end with a reading, some of my favorite passages from the book. This is just a sense of some of my work up until now. Many of you already— I see some old friends in the chat. Thank you for being here. Passionate Uprisings was my first book about Iran's sexual revolution. I did 7 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Iran. I would say that the pre-terrain there was riddled with the politics of entering Iran as an ethnographer post-revolution. I was among the first to do that, and of course getting all the approvals, going through all the challenges of entering a country that has really experienced a bit of a lockdown in many ways. The pre-terrain was riddled with the entry. And then, of course, there's the book. And then the post-terrain was, of course, the response to the book, which many, many Iranians and others around the world sort of wrote to me and said, well, thank goodness somebody's sort of writing about this. But of course, the government was not as pleased with the book. So then I became an anthropologist without a field site. I was kicked out of my native country and my field site. And so some of the work I'd done in Iran had been with sex workers. And so I started following them to Dubai. Had a very interesting experience in Dubai, because most of the sex workers I interviewed not understand or describe themselves as we would think about being trafficked. The women, the men, however, and you've been to Dubai, you've seen it. The men who working in migrant labor very much were trafficked. And this was a time where there was a very heavily gendered discourse around human trafficking. And so my next several books were really looking at these intersections of gender, sexuality, labor, migration in the Middle East and then across Asia, where, again, the ethnographic free terrain was also certainly contoured by questions around access and questions around— I had to be very reflexive about my positionality in entering the field. The pre-terrain was probably a bit more challenging than the post-terrain for all my books after Iran. But so it's something I've really been reflecting on a lot, and particularly with this book, it really kind of resonated with me thinking about the pre-terrain of a book that is really located in a different field site than I ever had before. I mean, this book is really, you know, draws from my autoethnography, but also fieldwork with with my students who are hyphenated Americans over the years. And then I delved into orthography. So, you know, just to kind of get us all on the same page, you know, I'm working with the definition of the ethnographic pre-terrain as put forward by Peter Pels, who introduces a new emphasis in the process of fieldwork called the ethnographic pre-terrain, which he defines as an exploration of the trajectories from which ethnographers enter the field. And so that can be everything from the experiences and the methodologies of reflexivity and positionality, even in thinking about your topic. And here, of course, I'm very— my work is very informed, my thinking is informed by the work of Renato Rosaldo and, of course, Paul Rabinow and Jeanette Briggs. And reflexivity and positionality being one part of the pre-terrain, but then, of course, there's this question of How does one even enter, quote unquote, the field, and as the field changes? For this book, I've been thinking a lot about the pre-terrain as a liminal anthropologist. What the trajectory that brought me into the field of this particular question was a feeling of liminality myself, right? A liminal anthropologist. So I was an anthropologist turned administrator, kind of trying to find my footing, really missing the fieldwork, really missing— the method, the rigor of all the work that I was doing, and also kind of trying to find a sense of belonging for myself as an Iranian American in the era of Donald Trump. You know, how do you be Iran and America in one body when these are two countries that have been narrated as diametrically opposed? And so, you know, there was the politics of the moment. There was also the politics of my own kind of trajectory as as an anthropologist who had waded into a pool of administration for a time, and really just thinking a lot about the question of the hyphen. And so I started to actually explore the politics of the hyphen itself. And the more I delved into the history of the hyphen, the more it resonated with my own experiences as a hyphenated American, but also as a hyphenated— Indian American. anthropologist-cum-administrator. I mean, I feel like I hit so many hyphens, like many of the people, many folks who are probably on this call and many of the folks with whom I've done fieldwork. People see their identities as multi-hyphenates, as many folks would say. And so I started to explore the history and the politics of the hyphen. And if you just go back to World War II, what you see is this notion of hyphen as divider. And there's this anti-hyphenate— hyphenism, and it kind of really— it takes root in World War II. You've got people like FDR and Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill saying a hyphenated person— so in the American case, FDR has a very famous quote. He says, a hyphenated American is not an American. And there's a famous song called The Hyphen by John Wayne, for those of you John Wayne fans. And he actually— it's in my book, I quote it— and he talks about how there is no such thing as a hyphenated American. A hyphenated American signals divided loyalty during the wartime. And so this was this sort of anti-hyphenism moment that stirred up this controversy to drop the hyphen in everything. So those of you who are avid readers of the New York Times, you may or may not know, but it was written always as New-Hyphen-York. There was always a hyphen in New York, as there was in New Jersey. But it was around this time that there was this anti-hyphenism. And so I could sort of see that anti-hyphenism. But the further back you go, and actually when you learn about— when I started learning about the origins of the hyphen, the hyphen was created by Dionysius Thrax, the ancient Greek grammarian wandering the halls of the Alexandria Library. And he was trying to find a way to write words, to signal 2 separate words that belonged together. So this was a time when the written word was not spoken but sung, and Thrax was trying to find a way to signal that these were words that belonged together. Fast forward to Gutenberg, another person who made the hyphen famous, and his printing of the Gutenberg Bible wanted to find ways that he could keep the justification on the page but signal words that belonged together, again, using the hyphen. So that was what kind of piqued my interest. This was part of the pre-terrain. I was more pulled in when I started actually looking at the stories of people like Gutenberg and like Dionysius Thrax themselves. And these were individuals and other individuals I introduced throughout history and in the book who themselves struggled with belonging. Gutenberg is most well-known for the Gutenberg Bible, He came from a family of blacksmiths, but he really wanted to be a poet. So he was a blacksmith-hyphenate poet. He also found himself hyphenated in all these different ways. He invented the printing press in order to marry and bring together the 2 sides of him. And so these were all kind of the experiences and the information and what the learning that, that really informed the pre-training of the work. So as I mentioned, the further back you go, the more you see the hyphen is something that connects. Now, when you hit World War II, the hyphen is narrated as something that divides. That's when the hyphen gets dropped. Fast forward to 2006, our colleagues in the UK will remember when the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary came out in 2006, there was a big controversy and people said there's a hyphen thief on the loose because the hyphen was removed from some 16,000 words. Now, there was a critique, is the hyphen no longer useful. But when you actually delve into the work that the editors of the SOED did, and when you actually delve into the work of the hyphen, what you see is that the hyphen actually ends up being a way station, which also itself is a hyphenated— was a hyphenated word. So way station was 2 separate words, way space station. The hyphen was introduced to signal that these are words that belong together, way-station. Today it's now just Waystation, one word. You have many examples of this. So for instance, you have Bumblebee. Bumblebee was bumble space bee, then it was bumble hyphen bee, and then now it's Bumblebee. It was removed in 2006. The hyphen was removed. Now, is that an indication that the hyphen is no longer useful? No, it actually is a part of the journey of the hyphen in that It's not necessarily a divider. It is a connector, but really what it is, is it's something that creates something else altogether. So the hyphen as a way station created something else altogether. And that for me was a really important turning point where I understood that as a hyphenated individual, I didn't have to live on one side or the other of the hyphen. I didn't have to see myself as fitting in Iranian or American, but I could live inside the hyphen. I could live in that in-between because that creates something new altogether. So that was the sort of the pre-training. It was that those discoveries that brought me then into the autoethnographic work and then the ethnographic work. So I had been conducting ethnography with young people, particularly my students at ASU, but also young people who identified as hyphenated Americans for a long time. It was part of a larger study called the New American Conversation. What are the new— who are the new Americans? Who are we and how do we understand ourselves? Particularly became salient at ASU, a university that defines itself as the New American University. So I started delving into the experiences of my interlocutors, and I really focused— ended up focusing on 3 whose, of course, names have been changed, but I end up focusing on Jaden, Anaya, and Adichike. And these are young people who are all hyphenated Americans who experience their hyphenism in very, very different ways. And, you know, I go through their lives that parallel with mine. And I was trying to find a way to tell their story and to interweave their story, not only with mine, but with the orthography. And what I found was their own stories, like mine, were very much almost like a trajectory in 3 parts. So you have a part of their experiences where they feel the hyphen as something that divides them, that makes them feel, do I have to pick one side or the other? I'm a divided self. I'm neither here nor there. Those experiences of liminalities. Then you actually have a kind of a second part of their lives where they talk about— and myself as well— where they talk about the hyphen as bringing the 2 sides of themselves together as connector. And then finally, there's this moment of release that I also experienced in the, in the writing of the book, in the crossing over, if you will, where the understanding that actually we didn't have to be one thing or the other, divided or connected. We could be something else altogether. Now, people talk a lot about third culture kids, et cetera, et cetera. But it's this notion of the journey of the hyphen, the journey of the hyphenated as being able, as having a freedom to be something else altogether. So then my next task was how to interweave the ethnography and the orthography. And really my goal was to bring the hyphen's past into the future of the hyphenated. which is then what I ended up doing in the book. So the book interweaves the stories of people like Dionysius Thrax, like Gutenberg, like FDR and John Wayne. And it interweaves those with the stories of my interlocutors, as well as autoethnography. And that to me was creating something else altogether, like the hyphen does. It was sort of an homage or doing justice to the hyphen by creating something else altogether. My next challenge, of course, was writing in between. And so, as I've mentioned already, Object Lessons is a series that really is about that in-between, you know, in-between kind of writing. Now, don't mistake their size for the topics that people take on. So I have, again, Ayanna Thompson's book Blackface. Blackface is, of course, a very complex and heavy topic. So don't mistake the size. But here you have a scholar who has been studying blackface over you know, hundreds and hundreds of years. And she's making it accessible to people, having a conversation around how we weave the past into the present and the future. And these books are an exercise in writing in between, in crossing over, in writing for a different audience, and writing for an interdisciplinary audience. And this then became very resonant for me because it seemed like it was the perfect home for a book called Hyphen. Hyphen is an object, yes, in the abstract. Is it an object held? Not necessarily, but the book is definitely an object held. So that seemed to me like the best way to do that crossover. So then the ethnographic post-terrain has, since the book has come out, has allowed me to reflect on how I reflected and what my position was coming in. But also I'm always very, I'm thoughtful and intentional about the responses to the book and how we think about this kind of writing. If it resonates, does it resonate with anthropologists? Does it resonate with non-anthropologists? One of the things that was interesting for me to learn is that it was particularly resonant with philosophers, which I never would've predicted, but also that it kind of brought me into this world of orthography and grammar files. And I hadn't ever been in that world. And so it brought me into a different field, if you will, And really brought me into conversation with new audiences and new discourses. And so I think one of the most salient things for me is that this ethnographic post-terrain has been probably the most fulfilling post-terrain of all the books I've written. And I've been trying to reflect on why that is. Is it the writing? Is it the object itself as being something no larger than an iPhone that feels, you know, you can delve into? Is it that there's connection? But that's kind of where I've been thinking a lot about, you know, the pre-terrain for me was a lot about struggle. The writing was kind of finding my way, and then the posturing has been a release, very similar to the architecture of the actual book. So, you know, it does get a bit meta reflecting on reflexivity, but I do think that it's important to think through the ethnographic pre- and posturing. So I'm going to do a reading, and I'm going to stop the share so that I can see you all. And I'm going to read just a few passages from the book, if you'll permit me. And then I'm really eager to hear your thoughts and questions and your responses and how you see the ethnographic pre- and post-terrain of a book like this, but how that resonates or doesn't with your own work. So I thought I'd actually read the preface because I think it sets up the book really probably the best way and gives you a sense for the feel, the tone, and the texture of it. To hyphenate or not to hyphenate has been a central point of controversy since before the imprinting of the first Gutenberg Bible. And yet the hyphen has persisted, bringing and bridging new words and concepts. The journey of this humble piece of connective punctuation reveals the quiet power of an orthographic concept to speak to the travails of hyphenated individuals all over the world. For me, it took being kicked out of my ancestral home to wrap my limbs around the hyphen. As a hyphenated Iranian American growing up betwixt and between, I have struggled to find or make belonging. I've learned that I'm not alone. Like many others whom I introduce in this book, I have learned that I don't have to fit on one side of the hyphen or the other, but rather I can embrace the space between. So many others like me have finally found a way to embrace their voice and authority inside the hyphen itself. I invite you to join us to see how the journey of a humble grammatical marker has the potential to make belonging for hyphenated individuals struggling through identity politics from the ancient times to today. So I wanted to read from the origins of the hyphen. I wanted to read to you a bit about Dionysius Thrax, This is chapter 2 for those of you who actually have the book. Chapter 1 is actually a bit of autoethnography, and it talks about my own experiences as an Iranian American and what informed the writing of this book, really the pre-charing, which I've already talked through with you all. But this is chapter 2. Dionysius Thrax, the tax-evading 2nd century Greek grammarian. And yes, I did try to throw in as many hyphens into this book as possible. So tax-evading 2nd century— yes, the tax-evading 2nd century Greek grammarian gave birth to the hyphen when he was caught between 2 worlds himself. He's spending his time adding to punctuation rules that his teacher Aristarchus, he of asterisk fame, asked him to refine. Or should he give in to his heart's desire to focus on the spoken word? As he roams the halls of the Library of Alexandria, he realized that he didn't have to choose. He could do both. And so the hyphen was born. As Thrax looks— looked at the words that filled the expensive parchment paper surrounding him, he was concerned. There were no spaces. How would a reader or a singer, as readers often preferred to sing the text, know where to put the emphasis on certain words? How would they know what words belonged together? What words needed to be joined? Drax set to work on an essay entitled Technē Grammatikē, or The Art of Grammar. In this piece, he focused on the state of the art of grammar, exploring the construction of words and introducing possibilities for new constructions. Drax drew inspiration from his teacher Aristarchus, as well as Aristarchus's mentor Aristophanes. who was known as the father of Greek punctuation. Tekhnē became an instant success, and the scribal practices that Thrax suggested would be adopted and employed by Greek scribes for centuries to come. In the opening section of his essay, Thrax focused on prostē, or the spoken delivery of written text. He introduced new punctuation that would facilitate the delivery, rhythms, and intonation of the written word for speakers and singers alike. After introducing the apostrophe to clarify syllable boundaries that were ambiguous and the comma-like hypodiastole that would separate concepts, Thrax gave us the hyphen, a U-like construction. So the first hyphen was a U, kind of a bow underneath, a U-like construction placed under adjacent words that clarified for the speaker that the words should be understood and spoken as a single entity. The hyphen, the apostrophe, and the hypodiastole became vital components of writing and speaking to bring clarity for the reader and speaker in interpreting the author's intent. Rax's hyphen, which would later be renamed a sublinear hyphen because it was used as a small bow shape, remained in popular use in Greek texts for centuries. But like many other casualties of empire, the Greeks would see their beloved hyphen robbed, ransacked, and reformed by the brutal Romans some 300 years later. Like many other unfortunate social transformations, it was a combination of colonialism and capitalism that took the hyphen from a magical marker to show belonging in word construction to a facilitator for 8th century non-native speaking scribes who did not want to procure new parchment paper when they made mistakes in order to keep the costs of texts low. While the Romans had initially adopted the Greek writing practice of writing without spaces, that was causing them to remove the dots they had previously put to separate the words, by the 8th century, Celtic monks who were struggling with the unspaced Latin texts found a new use for the hyphen that the Romans would quickly adopt. The Celtic scribes struggled to pry apart smashed-together words and concepts that their non-Latin-speaking linguistic skills could not grasp. In turn, they broke up and inserted words in error, dividing texts in an attempt to make sense of them. In this process, they made mistakes, but rather than start their writing over or procuring a new piece of stone or parchment, They decided to make a new purpose for the hyphen: to divide and conquer. They used the hyphen to divide words or concepts that they did not understand and to cover up their errors. The scribes found it was easier to use their razors to erase and then cover up with a straight line placed in the middle, and thus the elegant sublinear bow-shaped U-hyphen that was used to fuse words together was erased and replaced with a straight line divisional marker of punctuation. This would then be codified in the Gutenberg Bible centuries later, much to the chagrin of the Greeks, who felt an important part of their past erased by what they considered to be a hostile takeover of a previously loved grammatical mark. Some 2,000 years later, when Tula Portakalos's father Gus in the popular film My Big Fat Greek Wedding would claim that everything was invented by the Greeks, hyphenophiles who knew the real story of their orthographic marker would sigh in agreement, Mourning for Dionysus Thrax and his dreams for the Hikmen. So there you get sort of that interweaving of Thrax's story. Now I want to introduce one of the interlocutors so you get a sense for how we kind of move between orthography and ethnography. So I'm going to introduce you to Anaya. Chapter 6 is entitled Like Water for Chocolate. The rich aroma of chocolate and spices filled the kitchen as Anaya stirred the mole. Careful not to let the edges burn in her mother's cast iron pot. Clean the chicken breasts and turn to chopping the onions, letting the tears flow from her eyes with every cut. And she chopped onions. She felt like Tita, the main character in her favorite book, Like Water for Chocolate, or she insisted on referring to it como agua para chocolate. She had watched the cooking scenes from the movie over and over, practicing how Escobedo's characters rolled letters off their tongues. What exactly are you doing? came her mother's voice, snapping Anaya out of her reverie. Anaya wiped the tears from her eyes, careful to use her wrist so as not to get any traces of onion on her face. Are you crying? her mother demanded. Mommy, as Tita says, the problem with crying while chopping onions isn't the crying. It's that sometimes one starts crying and can't stop. Don't call me Mommy. It's Mom or Mother. You know that. And there you go quoting that stupid movie again, her mother said. It's a book, Mom, Anaya interjected. Whatever. And are you making chicken with that chocolate sauce again? her mother asked. Mommy, you know what it is and how to say it. It's mole, Anaya corrected her mother. Her mother rolled her eyes. I wish you would snap out of it, Anaya, her mother said. Snap out of what? My culture? Who I am? A proud Mexicana? Anaya shot back. You're American. Don't forget that. I'd rather forget, Anaya snapped back. Plus, it's technically your fault, all of this. Anaya could tell her mother wasn't exactly sure what her daughter was accusing her of. When Anaya was only 3 years old, her mother had fled violence in their hometown of Oaxaca de Juárez, the capital of the state of Oaxaca, and crossed the border into southern Arizona along with her 2 older brothers. Anaya had grown up in a small town near the border. When Anaya was young, her mother worked as a cleaning lady and would bring her daughter along with her to clean many of the houses at which she worked. While her mom vacuumed or did laundry, Anaya would sneak into the rooms of the owners' young children— owners' young children to read their books. For a time, she had been enamored with the Junie B. Jones series, following the young protagonist on misadventures and living vicariously through Junie's confidence in challenging the adults in her life. Then Anaya started following Ramona Quimby and later the Harry Potter series, but something always felt missing in those books. None of them featured heroes or heroines who looked or sounded like her. Sure, she could relate to Hermione Granger's smarts, Ramona Quimby's practicality, and Junie B. Jones's sense of adventure, but why wasn't she, Anaya, reflected in any of these pages? Where were the Mexican queens, the Venezuelan princesses, the Colombian heroes? When she was 10 years old, Anaya accompanied her mother to the home of a new employer. She was disappointed to find that the house hosted no children, searching various rooms for any sign of children's books and finding nothing. An hour into her search, she stumbled into a home office. There she found several bookcases filled with colorful and interesting-sounding books, but one stood out, a bright blue cover with a Oaxacan painting on the front. She pulled at the spine and the book tumbled into her hands. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. Anaya could barely contain her excitement as she turned the pages of this sumptuous book. Here was something she could sink her teeth into. Here was a book that tickled all of her senses and made her feel alive, feel belonging. When her mother had finished cleaning the house, she called to Anaya from the front door and announced it was time to go home. Only halfway through the book, Anaya could not bear to part with her newfound treasure. She bit her lip as she stuffed the book up her shirt and pulled the sweater— her sweater closed shut. She hesitated for a moment before heading to the door. If her mother found out she had stolen something from a client, she'd be furious. But on the other hand, how could Aniyah not take this book home? After all, the book was practically speaking directly to her, calling her. She crossed her arms over her chest, clutching the book closer to her body as she slunk out of the house and climbed into her mother's car. She didn't speak to her mother the whole way home out of fear that she would be caught. Her mother had taken her silence as a symbol of her daughter's enduring anger. Earlier that year, Anaya's mother had come home one evening with a tall stranger. This man named Robert was introduced as their father-to-be. While her brothers had stormed out of the house, Anaya had just stood there studying the man, his straight blonde hair and crystal blue eyes a sharp contrast to everything she loved about her mother. from her thick curling black hair to her warm brown eyes. Even worse, Robert did not speak any Spanish. And from that day on, her mother had banned anyone in the family from speaking their native tongue. The ultimate insult in Anaya's eyes was that Robert robbed them of their culture. Anaya's mother stopped cooking Oaxacan food, instead favoring dishes she knew Robert preferred, like meatloaf or pasta primavera. At night, Anaya could hear her mother working to rid herself of her Spanish accent. Over the years, Anaya's mother would struggle with this task, but in an ironic twist of fate, Anaya was the first to lose her native tongue, being the youngest member of the family. By the time she was 13, she would remember only the few words of Spanish she pried out of her favorite work— favorite book, Como Agua para Chocolate. It wasn't until some years after Anaya's transgression that her mother discovered what her daughter had done. She was cleaning Anaya's room and found the book under her daughter's bed. pages folded and bent, the front tattered. By that point, their relationship had become so painfully strained that her mother's anger had little bearing on Anaya. Anaya's mother had married Robert before Anaya's 11th birthday, and by then had changed almost everything about herself, becoming almost unrecognizable to her children. She had changed the pronunciation of her first name from Claudia, pronounced Claudia, to the anglicized Claudia, with the middle syllable seemingly swallowed. When her mother announced that she was changing her last name to Smith to match her husband's, Anaya had refused to change hers, clinging onto Lopez fiercely. And while her mother insisted on introducing her daughter with an anglicized version of her last name, Anaya would often correct her mother and others with the Spanish pronunciation. Much to her mother's chagrin, she continued to seek out books written by Mexican or Mexican-American authors, plunging into an imagined adolescence that Anaya felt had been taken from her by her mother's choices not only to leave Mexico but to erase their culture by marrying Robert. Over the course of Anaya's teenage years, she and her mother grew further and further apart. When Anaya enrolled herself in Spanish classes in high school, her mother pulled her out and insisted her daughter enroll in French instead. Whenever Anaya had the chance to do research about her family and culture for a school project, She and her mother would fight. Why can't you just let them go, Anaya? Her mother would say in exasperation. Let my culture go? My people? What are you asking me, Mommy? To get whitewashed like you? Anaya would shoot back. Back and forth the two would argue, Anaya's mother insisting her daughter was American, Anaya insisting she was Oaxacan. Anaya criticized her mother when she became the CEO of her own business for becoming too capitalistic and corporate. Anaya's mother criticized her daughter for her choice in food, clothing, and her insistence on decorating her room like it was always El Día de los Muertos. By the time she was 18, Anaya couldn't wait to move to Phoenix to attend Arizona State University. Her mother had been reluctant to support her daughter's decision to go to college, mostly because she found out through reading her application that her daughter planned to double major in Chicana history and anthropology. That summer was the last time Anaya and her mother would live under the same roof, and rather than be a time to enjoy one another, the two had been bickering almost nonstop. When they fought, the mole sauce simmered and was now threatening to boil over. Anaya quickly turned off the stove and spun around to face her mother. Anaya stood there in the kitchen, her favorite room in their house, and held her mother's gaze defiantly. Her mother walked over to the stove and spooned some of Anaya's mole into her mouth gingerly. Hmm, she said, her black eyebrows knitting together. Though her mother had been dyeing her hair lighter and lighter each year, she usually forgot her eyebrows, something for which Anaya was grateful. Her brows and the rich chocolate brown of her mother's eyes were among the most visceral reminders of their culture. This sauce, she said, avoiding the word mole deliberately, doesn't even taste good. You see, Anaya, you're not even a good Oaxacan cook. Maybe stick to cupcakes, okay? Her mother turned on her heel and walked out the door, and Naya returned to her onions, allowing the flood of tears to take her over. So that's the kind of first part of the book, is all of the characters and myself experiencing this need to choose. Okay, am I, am I Anglicized enough? Am I American enough? Or am I Iranian? Choosing one side or the other of the hyphen and kind of the role of our families in all of that. As the book progresses, people— you see the people, the characters, myself included, finding belonging and creating something else, something in between, something beyond between, something that is crossing over, which is what I see the hyphen as being. So I think I'll stop there. And David, I'll turn it back to you.

Well, thank you very much indeed for such a stimulating overview of your work. Really, it resonated so much with, I'm sure, many of us who have struggled with similar issues, but not nearly as articulately and as interestingly as you have. I think I might just sort of start things off a bit by saying, if you had written that book, as it were, before your other ones, would it have changed your earlier writings in the way that you approached your ethnographic I mean, that would be a very interesting thing for us to learn, I think.

I mean, I think it would have absolutely changed the pre-terrain, right? So I think it would have changed the way in which I entered the field, right? I think that, I think, you know, that lens, right, that, you know, that is often talked about when discussion, you know, Peter Pauls talks about the pre-terrain, what drove me you know, into that pre-terrain, what drove me into those fields. I think one of the things that drove me into my, you know, first book certainly was a quest for understanding myself. And I thought, okay, I'm going to fit over in Iran. So I actually became an anthropologist to study Iran because I thought that that would help me find belonging. And so the pre— you know, as I think about the post-terrain now, that pre-terrain was really You know, it was really about understanding of myself. And so I went to Iran trying to say, okay, I don't— I've never fit in America, right? My parents came here during the revolution. I grew up here in the United States, but I never fit in. And so for me, going to Iran to do fieldwork and the work that went into that first book, that was about me trying to find belonging in Iran. When I was kicked out of Iran, there was that moment of existential crisis. I still wasn't ready to say, okay, maybe I'm something else altogether. I continued to do fieldwork in the Middle East, stationing myself in Dubai and Kuwait. And so I think that, you know, again, the pre-terrain was colored by this absolute drive and desire to belong, as opposed to looking at the hyphen itself. I was still trying, like, trying to fit on one side or the other of the hyphen, right? Like, I'm this or I'm that. One of the characters in the book who I call Ada Chike, trying to be— no, I'm Nigerian, I'm not American. And then, oh, maybe I'm more American. Trying to fit yourselves into these molds. I do think as an anthropologist, those molds, that question of belonging, that question of— I love Leila Abu-Lughod's How Native Is the Native Anthropologist? you go to the field and you realize, like, I'm not actually— I'm a halfie. As Abu-Lughod writes, he's a halfie anthropologist. I think going to the field starts to also make you question that belonging. But the pre-terrain is absolutely inspired by a desire to belong.

Yes, yes, yes. Goodness me, yes, I completely sympathize with what you say. I mean, many of the people I've worked with say this is partly a function of distance. They say that they belong half in Turkey and half in Germany. go to Germany, they miss Turkey, of course, and when they go to Turkey, they miss Germany. And so they really have no answer to this dilemma. But I see there are some questions from the floor. It's slightly helpful if you're going to write them down, please, if you would kindly put them in the Q&A box, although we can try and manage them in the chat. The first one was from a gentleman whose hand's gone up and down and disappeared. It's Jeffrey Ben Nathan. Did you want to ask something? You're most welcome if you would, although your hand's gone down now, or maybe that was just an accident. Um, go ahead if you would, or, um, whilst we're waiting for that, Paul Basu has his hand up, so why don't we go to Paul? So please go ahead, Paul.

Ah, there we go. I think I'm on YouTube now. Hi. Hello.

It's going now.

Hi there, guys. Thanks so much. It sounds like a really fascinating book. I love this, you know, in-betweenness between orthography and anthropology. It's really great. And as a fellow dweller of the hyphen and explorer of the in-between, I was really interested in, you know, what you're talking about. I suppose my question is about this journey that you're describing, you know, where the hyphen is the step in a journey to something other. And I'm just— I suppose I'm wondering about actually whether that kind of structure of relegating the hyphen to this in-between, this liminal moment, is Well, I'm not sure it's my experience or whether I wonder if I value actually the uncertainty of the hyphen and whether actually dwelling in the hyphen, sticking with the hyphen, as it were, sticking with the trouble to borrow a phrase, has its own kind of value. That kind of, rather than feeling that new consolidated coherent sense of self that you're describing as this kind of endpoint, whether we actually lose something in that, that actually it's good to be uncertain and untroubled, that the hyphen seems to kind of suggest, and particularly the multi-hyphenate that you're describing. I think that's really interesting.

That's an excellent— I mean, thank you, Paul, and glad to hear that, you know, you resonate in that in-between. I think that, you know, I think it's First of all, when we look at the orthography, right, there are words that the hyphen sometimes will never get pulled out of, right? Or, or, well, maybe will, but, but most likely won't. And then there are words that were hyphenated and never came together. So let me give you some examples. And then there are words that some people use hyphens on and some people don't. So email— how many of you write email? Like a lot, right? It used to be e-mail. Right? It was e-space-mail, then it was e-hyphen-mail, and now some people just write it as email, right? There are certain words that people, orthographers, largely agree the hyphen will likely not be taken out of. For instance, ex-boyfriend, ex-husband, mother-in-law. So there are some words that the hyphen will kind of stay in, people think. Now I want to talk about, you know, your question, is the hyphen really kind of a troubled space? And I think many of us saw it as a troubled space, but I think looking at the journey and the power of the hyphen, of the orthography to create new things, whether you stay in that hyphen or whether that hyphen is bringing you something new altogether, I think that instead of seeing the hyphen as a troubled place, What I wanted to do with the book is shift that paradigm and look at it as a space of power, right? As a space of openness and creativity, right? Where it can be what you want it to be. So instead of constantly trying to fit yourself into a box or a mold, that you actually experience a release or a freedom of creativity that perhaps you didn't have when you were feeling that neither here nor there, that liminal betwixt and between.

Yeah. I suppose it's actually that very thing that I feel the work, and it's troubled as a a good thing. It's productivity, the creativity of the troubled, I suppose, which I identify with the, with the hyphen rather than the resolution that you're describing. But, you know, I get your point entirely. It's great to think about that.

Well, and I think as we think about the politics of the moment we live in, right? So, you know, you've got identity groups where the hyphen has been dropped, right? So the Japanese American, was the first to drop it during World War II because there was this question of divided loyalties, right? And so that question of the hyphen, a hyphenated person as being someone with divided loyalties, I think is a really salient question for our times today. So I'm trying to reframe that.

Great, thanks, thanks very much.

Well, thank you. And we do have another person with their hand up, so let's go to, go to them straight away. rather than keeping them waiting, and it's Soraya Tremaine from Oxford. Are you able to connect?

Yes, can you hear me?

Oh, wonderful.

Hi, hello, Pardis, how are you?

Hi, good to see you, well, good to hear you.

Thank you, well, it was good to hear you, and thank you. And as you know, I am familiar, very familiar with your work, all your work, and I think you have done magnificent ethnography Wherever you have done work. Thank you,

inspired by you.

I've always enjoyed reading all your work. What I was thinking was this question of, obviously you have tried to make very good sense of your own personal experience of fieldwork originally, in that, what is your position as an anthropologist basically? who is an insider and outsider at the same time, which is very much a problem of anthropologists anyway, but with an overlayer of having been a native who has not been brought up in Iran.

Right.

This is— that is why I was always thinking maybe this is a generational problem. I think back from before the revolution when somebody like Brian Spooner went to Iran and immediately was labeled as a spy. Right. Iranian anthropologists like Soheila Shahshahani, who went to do studies in her own— among the Mamasanis, immediately people— we all have done. I have done over 40 years of fieldwork in Iran. So I was wondering that it cannot be just a generational thing, really. It is in a way a search for your identity as an anthropologist, Iranian, non-Iranian. And I wonder, how widespread is your personal experience among other anthropologists of Iran? Could you elaborate on that?

Yeah, that's a great question. Lara Deeb has a book actually that's— it's, I think it's called Anthropology Politics. It's about Middle Eastern anthropologists, so not just anthropologists of Iran, but anthropologists of the Middle East. So it's Arab Americans, Iranian Americans that they focused on in that book. So I didn't focus my study for this on Iranian American or Iranian British anthropologists or even anthropologists of Iran. I was really looking, you know, I of course read that book. I'm an interlocutor in that book. And then, you know, as as many of us have, you know, those of us who study Iran, you know, we get together, of course, as you know, and we contemplate and we talk about where are the fractures. You know, I think about, you know, you mentioned, you know, several folks who went in. I'm thinking about like Bill Beeman and how Bill Beeman was received as an anthropologist in Iran in such a different way than I or, you know, Roxane Varzi was received. Right. And then there's that question of the reception of the anthropologists and kind of, that gaze, right? It's— and he was received like, you know, the red carpet was rolled out for him, right, in a way that it certainly wasn't for many of us. And I've wondered that question of the generational. I've also wondered the question of gender. I've also wondered the question of ethnicity, right? And, you know, I think for me, I thought I would be more of an insider going there, and I realized I was actually much more of an outsider. When I went there, to your point, but I but I really do take you know Leila Abu Luqod's work that that the halfie can be a really interesting position and perspective from which to write. I I think that I think our identities as anthropologists, I think our identities affect the ethnographic preterrain more than we typically disclose or write about as our methodological vantage point. So while I haven't interviewed anthropologists of Iran in particular, I've certainly, you know, over the years spoken with a lot of anthropologists who see themselves as hyphenated anthropologists, many of whom go, quote unquote, home to do fieldwork. I'm thinking a lot of my friends and colleagues, you know, when I was at Columbia, who did fieldwork in India, right, who identify as Indian American, you know, and then— and were doing fieldwork in India. And there's that question of going home. There's also the politics of, like, you know, there was a turn in anthropology, as we all know, right? You know, who gets to go? Who gets to do the fieldwork? Who gets to speak for, right? The politics of representation. And so one of the questions I've been asking myself is, we even have to step back before that and live in that ethnographic pre-terrain for a moment longer than we're comfortable doing.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Well, please do feel free to put your hand up if you would like to ask your question live. That's absolutely no problem at all. But we've had a few questions put in the chat, so why don't we turn to those whilst colleagues are thinking about that? And Gary Marvin says, as well as saying thank you, he says, some of us define work with human and other animals that the sort of work that he does is human-animal studies, with the hyphen not only simply indicating words that belong together, but with the hyphen indicating a place or a space of coming together, connected lives. It's a little bit similar to Paul's question, but I don't know whether you want to think about that in terms of human-animal relations at all.

I am, you know, a hyphenophile, right? I think that the hyphen can be used in many ways, One of the interlocutors that is introduced in my book is someone who identifies— he, you know, when I met him, he said, I'm a hyphenated American. I said, oh, what is your hyphen? He said, I'm rural American. And I was like, oh, okay. Like, that was not one that I had thought, but I can see the hyphen connecting so many different things. And so why not human-animal? And I think that the power of that, Is that how it brings things together that you may not have thought about, like human-animal ethnography? It's an interesting marker that can bring together. I am more in the sort of camp of hyphen not as divider but as connector. And really, so there's the 2 main camps: hyphen as divider, hyphen as connector. And I'm definitely more in the second. But But I'm trying to introduce a third camp, which is like hyphen as creator of something else entirely. And so I can see that, you know, human-animal— I'm an avid equestrian. My connection with my horse, you know, with my palomino gelding, is stronger than my connection with almost any human other than my children. So, you know, I can see that as being a really interesting space. I hadn't thought of it, but I can see that as being a really interesting space and one that I'd love to think more with you about in terms of the power, not only of the power of it as connector, but as creator.

Yes, and in this country, dogs would be an obvious one.

Yeah, for sure.

Absolutely. I mean, Gary, I don't know whether you have a live connection. Do you want to ask our speaker a bit more about that topic? Most welcome to, if you would. I don't know if you would just put your hand up, perhaps. Hmm. All right, we'll move on to the next one. That's what Gary's thinking about. His—

Yeah, no problem.

His hand is up now.

Oh,

so I am going to allow him to speak now.

Yeah, great. If Gary wants to speak, he's most welcome.

Yeah, I mean, it was— thank you, it's thought-provoking. You know, this field that I'm— I mean, it's to the side of what you're talking about, but we who work in human-animal studies deliberately use that hyphen to say, to indicate a connection. Yeah. And again, I think you brought it up somewhere else, is what is created in that hyphen, you know, what are the lives human and animal have brought together, you know, like horse rider. I mean, there is— and we're deliberately using it not as separation but they're coming together. So it's really just an extending of the thought, more perhaps more serious things that you're talking about, about human identities. But animals, this is my area of study, animals are important in human lives, and therefore this thinking about using a hyphen, I think, indicates the seriousness and complexity. Just, that's the only point.

No, I agree 100%, Gary.

Well, thank you very much, Gary. It's nice to hear from you. And then we have a follow-up question from that, where G.F. Taylor says, I echo Gary in thanking you, but I have a question. What are the echoes of the hyphen in languages beyond English? Perhaps you could start with Persian.

We've got our— Soraya, I'll let you jump in here with that, with Persian, because her Persian is definitely probably better than mine. I know Ateşe is on here too. Y'all should jump in. You know, I started with the Greeks for a reason. Well, not only because Dionysius Thrax invented the hyphen in, you know, but because Greek, Latin, and then of course, you see it in the Romans. So you know, certainly in that language grouping, you see the hyphen as very salient because of its history and because it is trying to create different signals. You had the dots for a time. Many of you probably go to, you know, you've visited Roman temples, you had the dots, right? You had the different markers. And I think that it is salient to think about, you know, where it started from and And why? I do think languages like Persian have a different rhythm, are more melodious sounding naturally, right? So this, you know, the hyphen was invented to help those who are speaking, singing, right, by Dionysius Thrax. I think that Persian, the way it's sort of the intonations and the way that it's written, the words kind of come together in different ways. But of course, there are hyphens, of course, in Persian, and there are hyphens, you know, in Arabic. That question, though, of the hyphen as a divider or connector was not one that I heard agonized as much over when I was doing fieldwork in Iran. But I invite my colleagues to jump in. Not that there aren't hyphenated folks in Iran, there very much are. But as you think about the history of the hyphen in places like the US and the UK, and World War II being that really lightning bolt moment of anti-hyphenism. I think that, that, that, that was where, you know, I became interested in that sort of that tortured, you know, what made the hyphen become this tortured thing or this thing that divides and this, this tiny orthographical marker that was seen as something that was such a threat that you actually had politicians and people going, you know, to court to say, take out the hyphen from the New York Times, take it off of the New York Historical Society. So I have a whole chapter about New York, New hyphen York. And really these controversies, and we may sit here and kind of chuckle a little bit, but these controversies were raging in the UK and the US in World War II, you know, ripping out the hyphen as much as you possibly could. Where, where, as I looked in and throughout history, you didn't see that same huge controversy, let's say, around, you know, hyphen, the hyphen in Persian.

Well, thank you. I mean, we have a— Farzin Illich has their hand up. We'll go to you. But first of all, Soraya, you've been invited to comment if you wish on the intricacies of Persian and the hyphen. Would you like to say a word?

Well, I really don't know what to say. I haven't really given the question very much thought, so Pardis herself is in a much better position to talk about it.

Well, I mean, I don't know if you heard that, you know, it's just, it's not, it's not something that was discussed as much in Iran. When you look at the vast amount of archival material, and even material till today, Right? The, like I said, this SOE disorder Oxford English Dictionary that came out in 2006 created an eruption in the media everywhere around the controversies around the hyphen. You don't have that same, you know, debates around this particular orthographic mark.

That's right. Yeah, no, no, absolutely. That's correct. Yeah.

Maybe it'll come now we put it out there.

I have to think about it because more than thinking about the actual language and hyphen, I was thinking of you as the hyphen. Yeah, yeah, Iranian society, absolutely. You know, it's just, uh, very, very interesting, the, uh, intensely personal experiences we go through. For example, when I did fieldwork in small cities, I don't look the slightest bit, for those who know me, like an American or a Westerner, but people always said to me, are you American? And after a while I, I said, why are you saying that? I mean, my Persian is better than yours. I don't— I look like you. But what they were really saying was, you're not one of us.

Yeah, you don't belong.

But it also gives you an advantage on the margin, you know. to be able to sort of, in that sense, you know, you are actually looking at people, you are accepted more even by men. I mean, you raise the question of gender, for example. As an American that I was, I had easier access to men, obviously, to talk about them than just being among the women. So in that sense, you were connecting as an outsider on the margin much more with the society than— But language was— I have to think about it. The Persian language has changed so much as well, as you know.

Yeah, it's hard to keep up. I would agree with Soraya in terms of like that question of the hyphen plays a major role in the identity of those of us who are Iranian hyphen something, right? Especially when we're in Iran. But I would say it also— I feel it here. You know, when, when I walk into a room, particularly in leadership, I walk into a room and people say, where are you from? And I say, hi, I'm a dean at Arizona State University. And they say, no, no, no. And they don't ask anyone else this at the table. They— and I don't know if any of you hear any kind of accent in my English. I don't feel like I have one. And people, well, where are you from? Well, where— you're not from here. You're not from Arizona, though. Where are you really from? Where are you from? Well, I was born in Minnesota. Where are you really from? Well, I grew up in Cali. You know, many of us can resonate with that, right? It's like they can't accept it until you say, I'm originally from Iran.

That's very true, absolutely. But as I say, one becomes a bit marginal to every society, but you can actually bank on that marginality, you know.

Yes, and that's what— that's exactly what this book is about, is like, yeah, we can take that as a marginalization, or we can take that as a creative position.

No, absolutely. No, absolutely. So, um, I think, you know, a lot of anthropologists of Iran, even young— your generation— I am several generations before you, of course.

But yeah, there's like 3 more after me. I feel like I'm like, I'm like, oh, now you've got the young generation.

Even the ones who now go to Iran, you know, they have got these various experiences. I mean, as everything in Iran, it depends depends on who you know rather than what you know.

Totally.

And therefore, the way you approach things, you work with people. I've been going back to Iran all the time, all these years before and after the revolution, and have worked actually with, with people who are in power, the authorities. But it's the way you approach them, I think, that even in the end makes you connected. And that's what anthropological skill does for you.

Yes, exactly. We live in the betwixt and between, and rather than be tortured by it, let's use it creatively.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, thank

you very much. All right, let's include now Pardis into the conversation if we have a connection. Please go ahead.

I think there's a mute.

Yeah, so far— All right,

great,

go

ahead.

Okay,

so on that creativity note, I think, and on a practical level, I'm wondering if there could be an emerging hyphenated person or people or creature that could help us deal with the current state of collective amnesia, which, which in fact is perpetuated and reinforced by academic rituals. You know, we are facing at least 2 forms of extinction right now, and we have no idea what to do about it. And unless we disrupt this process, you know, we have people in the US, we have 2 groups who are fully committed to their own half-truths, right? And that, you know, is a recipe for disaster. And we somehow don't know how to come to terms with reality even.

I hear you. I would invite our colleagues to jump in. That's probably a bit outside my expertise, but I hear

you

very much.

Yeah, that chimes in with something I've been thinking as well, which is clearly there are many cases where what you describe appears to encapsulate a great deal of the identity negotiations which are taking place. But of course, there are also very systematic attempts where people who have that potential to draw on different backgrounds opt instead for a third one. And I think perhaps that also is behind Farzin's question. I mean, if— And there are also major nation-state building initiatives long before Roosevelt's where they try to do the same thing. The French Revolution is an obvious one, and also the Turkish foundation of the Turkish Republic is one as well. There the message is quite simple: you can have a— you can have ethnically— you can have a Kurdish mother and a Turkish father, it doesn't matter at all, you simply become Turkish citizens. And this was astonishingly successful for, oh, for, for certainly for 5 or 6 decades, and then only in the 1980s did it begin to get unpicked and people began to be a bit bit more self-aware and more explicit about the multiplicity of their ethnic backgrounds, and now it's talked about much more openly. But even today, there is an idea that there is something else you can jump to if you wish to, rather than emphasizing a particular communal background. And of course, in Islam more widely, it can simply— of course, people can also simply join the Muslim faith in an explicit manner, which is also a very useful way of— where the common phrase is, there are no foreigners within Islam, is a very, very common phrase which I'm sure you're very, very familiar with. So yes, I think the question is, is there a way out of this, of this dilemma, the one or the other, into a further space? I think that would be very interesting to hear you speculate on that.

Yeah, well, look, I think one of the power and the beauty— I mean, you started speaking to this as well, David. You know, one of the powers and beauties of the hyphen is that it doesn't have to be just around ethnic— like, so I think that the challenge with, you know, some of the narratives around, as you mentioned, you know, Turkey and this kind of wanting to, you know, nation-building and really, you know, stories of nationalism and then this question of divided loyalties. One of the things that I found really salient in the research I was doing is that almost, at least in my fieldwork, actually not almost, everybody I interviewed, regardless of their ethnicity, regardless of when you— like, I would be sitting down with someone and my assistant would walk by and be like, well, that's not a hyphenated person. I said, well, he identifies as Jewish American, gay American. Like, people have different ways of identifying themselves. And then I, you know, I would have people who inserted other identities that you would have never thought of. But one of the things that was really interesting is when you brought people together for a focus group, they might be people who never would have thought, oh wow, we both have this connection of sometimes feeling betwixt and between, even though maybe just the appearance or the ethnicity or the nationalism or the faith— the faith wouldn't suggest that, right? But many of us experience being hyphenated. And so that's actually something— not only is the hyphen as a connector of different parts of our identities, but the hyphen serves as a connector of us to others, to other humans that we may not feel connected to. When we realize that hyphenism, that all being hyphenated in different ways, of course, we all share an experience of hyphenism of betwixt and between, even though maybe at the face of it you might not think someone I'm interviewing or talking with considers themselves as a hyphenate, right? Many people experience the in-between. Almost everyone has. And that in and of itself can be a connector. And then maybe, you know, to come back to Farzaneh's question, it's like we got to find these connections as we're facing extinction, right?

I just have to let my son back in from school, so excuse me for a moment. But Carrie, I mean, the question is perhaps when it becomes part of the national identity and how many sub-identities we can just carry on mixing with until we have to plump for one or the other. But I'll be back in just a moment.

Well, and so that, I think, David— David's not going to hear the answer to the question, but that, I think, that's where we go back to the orthography actually, and we look and we see, okay, like Do we have to have hard and fast rules? Does email— does email as a word always have to be written as E-M-A-I-L, or can some people still hyphenate it? Yeah, some people can and do still hyphenate it. Waystation is another really good example. Some people write waystation in one word, some people hyphenate it. There have to be hard and fast rules like there are with, you know, ethnonationalism? Maybe yes, maybe not. Can we look to the orthography to learn something new? Right? I mean, and then there are words that, you know, that the orthography without the hyphen, like, it would— they would have never come together, right, without that hyphen. So, David, I'm just saying that in answer to your question, I think we look to the orthography, particularly a word like email. Some people can write email with a hyphen, some people don't. So you don't have to have this hegemony of, like, you have to use hyphen, you don't have to use hyphen. I think the point of it is, is that where it resonates. Now, some cases it's— the hyphen is useful. Some cases the hyphen has been dropped because we know that these are 2 words that belong together, even though we don't put them together. Ice cream is a great example, right? Ice space cream. They played with the hyphen for a while, and then they were like, nope, let's just keep them separate, right? They're 2 words that can be seen as belonging together. Bumblebee is a better one, right? Because you had bumble and then you had bee, and then you had the hyphen bringing them together. And then just the rhythm of it, bubblebee as one word, kind of that— because people don't use bumble as often, so that they brought bumblebee together as one word. So it's also a living thing. I mean, people say, well, you know, orthography and ethnography, you know, ethnography is a living sort of— you're talking to live, living people that are ever-evolving. Well, orthography is too, because we all know all our linguistic language is constantly evolving. So orthography has to constantly bend and shape and dance. Does it mean it's less relevant? No. Orthography is using— is being used and is also a device to create new cultures, to create new ways of thinking, new discourses, new spoken words.

So is there a changing history of dual citizenship permission in America? Because I think many people do have dual citizenship at the moment, but has it always been permitted?

Well, I think it depends on the country, right? You're not supposed to have dual citizenship with Iran. All of you can jump in here. At least in the United States, you're not. But there— but there, that's where you've got citizenship as being distinct from identity. So they stripped me of my Iranian citizenship when I was kicked out in 2007. Is that ever going to make me stop identifying as an Iranian American? No. I'll never be an Iranian citizen, but I'm never going to stop identifying as Iranian American. And so there you have something very useful, right? So that no one can take away.

Yeah, that's very moving. Well, we've got more questions in the chat, so we'll go back there now. Jonathan Skinner. Good evening, Jonathan. Yes, so he would like to echo Joanna Overing's comment on anthropology being the bridgehead of communication, and can the hyphen reify the two and a middle path, a hybrid path, a bit betwixt and betweenness develop from this conversation? It's a little bit similar to the thoughts we've had before, but please go ahead if you would like to say anything about that.

Well, I mean, so is the question about the reification Of the, of the space of the in-between? Is that the question?

Well, literally it's written here, can the hyphen reify the two, i.e., the, the—

The two on either side of the hyphen? Like, this is supposed to be Iranian American. So are you saying, are you saying, does the hyphen reify what's on either side of it? Or are you saying, is the conversation reifying the hyphen?

Good question. If you're here, Jonathan, you're welcome to jump in and ask your question live.

Okay, Jonathan actually had written in the chat just a moment ago saying that he unfortunately had to leave. Oh, okay. So he won't be able to clarify.

Never mind, thanks for that clarification, Hanyin. But not to worry, we can— Jonathan can always write later if he wishes to follow that up.

Absolutely, he's got my email.

So Jeffrey Ben-Nathan says he would— it's an implication he would like to ask his question live. So do go ahead if you would.

Yes, please.

So Jeffrey, I have allowed you to speak. You will need to unmute for that, and then you can.

Yeah, can you hear me now?

Yes.

Oh, lovely. Good. Um, I got your book and enjoyed it very much indeed. and read it from COVID to cover. And so let's go to the very end. I love the idea that you make of the hyphen. By the way, I have a hyphenated name, so I live with it.

I see it. I love it.

And there's quite a bit of background to this, actually. I just contacted other members of the family and asked whether they use the hyphen or not. They all do. But 2 of the members, their fathers ran a shop an antique shop in New York. And it turns out that they had to, because of the matter that you mentioned, the Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt at that time, pre-World War II, they had to take Ben Nathan and put it into Bentham.

Oh.

And the shop in New York was reduced. But you— I love the idea of the hyphen being the connector But in the end, as you say, being the creator. And at the end of your book, you have, I thought, a wonderful summary to the whole thing: E Pluribus Unum, the motto of the United States. That from the batch of identities which everybody has, at the end of it, there comes out a wonderful single identity which the Americans can benefit, the British benefit, everybody benefits. So, E Pluribus Unum, can you speak to that?

Yes, absolutely. Thank you. And thank you, Jeffrey, for buying and reading the book. And I'm honored that it resonated with you.

It was a huge pleasure.

I love the hyphen in your last name. I love it. My kids have hyphenated last names. And thank you for sharing your story of the experience in New York. I think that was the experience of many people. That I have spoken to in New York, which is interesting. Yes, I'm actually quoting one of my interlocutors there that— one of my interlocutors, Danny, is throughout the book, you watch this individual begin as someone who identifies as a Chinese American man, then as a Chinese American gender non-conforming nonconforming individual, and then as a Chinese American female by the end of the book.

Yes, yes.

And she says, you know, at the end there, she says, look, I realized that I could be tortured by the many me's, or I could embrace that out of the many me's comes this one wonderful me, right? This e pluribus unum. And that was kind of— that kind of connects back to what I was saying in answer to David's question, which is that the hyphen can be something that connects all of us because out of the many, many me's that we all have comes something else, which is, you know, I am— what am I? I am a multi-hyphenate. I am one. And that's something that, that, that many of us can connect to, right? That many of us in the UK, many of us in the United States, like, yeah, we all have these multi-hyphenate identities and yet here we are, out of the multiness comes something one and unified. And so that for me was really salient. Like I said, when I had this really hard moment, and Jeffrey, you'll have seen it in the book, I had this really hard moment in 2016, you know, during the election of Donald Trump, when, you know, I was living at Pomona College. My daughter, who is also Iranian American and knows a little bit about my story, She had, you know, she had come home from school and kids at school had said to her, well, you know, once Donald Trump is elected, you're going to have to go where you came from. You're going to be sent back where you came from. And she's like, okay, where are we supposed to go? Because we can't go to Iran. Like, where is that place? And, you know, at some point someone threw a MAGA brick through our window. And, you know, there was this moment of like, I am nobody because the sides of me are warring within each other. So it's this— it can be this torturous moment, or it can be this moment of like, actually, no, I'm not this divided inside. I am this something. Out of the many me's comes one, comes one that can be unified. And I think that's an experience that has helped many hyphenated folks connect to each other.

Yes, I mean, if I can just say that I think it's largely a question of who you're allowed to be in the society in which you live. And there's a quote I love. I could never find the source, but Queen Victoria greatly disliked, um, Mr. Gladstone, her Prime Minister. And, um, one day she said to him, Mr. Gladstone, it really doesn't matter what you think of me. What matters is what I think of you. And being as I am a member of the Jewish community, I hear so many Jews identify themselves as this, I'm that, I'm a socialist. I say to them, it doesn't really matter what you think you are yourself. What matters is what society thinks about you. And, um, I think that this is the overall question of being objective or subjective or whatever it is, you know. Yeah. And, um, one hopes that when you live in America and we live here in Britain, we live in a society in which we could all flourish and which we're accepted and we can contribute. And I think we all do. So, but one thing, if I may, David, is just one— the particular characters is very interesting, was Adichie and his mother and father. It's the contrast was very extreme of the mother who really wanted to celebrate everything Yoruba while she was in the United States, and the father who wanted to be all American. But was this really a family that you met, or was it—

Absolutely, yeah. These are based on interviews, and I interviewed the father many times at, you know, at football games, and really watched that journey.

I just wondered how a family, a husband, a father, and a mother could be at such extreme polarities in their move to the United States.

Well, they're divorced. You see that he doesn't live with his father at the beginning of the book. He lives with his mother. So perhaps that's why they divorced. I didn't get into that component of it. But you see that he's living with his mother. And then, of course, when the tragedy happens and his mother passes away, then he's made to live with his father. And this is where he starts to get that whiplash.

Yeah. Anyhow, I really enjoyed the book. Thank you very much indeed. It was brilliant.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate that.

Well, thank you very much for your question. I see there's one more in the chat, which is from Liz Thompson. And she says, would the self-identification of a non-binary person reflect this hyphenated between or integration Yeah,

so thank you for that question, Liz. And that's, that's the character— that's the character— I mean, interlocutor, but I call them characters because I've changed their names. That's Danny in the book, is someone who identified as non-binary for most of the field— for most of the period that I was doing the fieldwork and writing the book. And actually, and then you'll see there are several other folks in the book because, of course, while I do focus on 3, I introduced a number of others who are kind of So they come in as sort of a peripheral and then they're supporting it. And yes, actually a number of the people that I interviewed— so I interviewed roughly 85 people for this book in particular, 85 in-depth interviews, series of interviews with 85 people, like over and over a period of time. And yes, the non-binary is absolutely seen as a hyphenated identity, that that is something that's taken up. I have a piece in, actually in UK-based Times Higher Ed on the Council of Coalitions here at ASU. I have a piece about that, and these are different coalitions of different identity groups. Actually, one of the— Anaya, who I introduced to you all, she was active in El Concilio, which is one of the groups in the coalition. But there's also the Rainbow Coalition, and so you'll see a description of the Rainbow Coalition. and folks who are identifying as non-binary who identify as hyphenated individuals. And actually, some of them, they found that the non-binary, that component of being non-binary and having the hyphen as unifying, that for them felt a lot more freeing. Like in focus groups, when people talked about that, the hyphen as creating something new, that really resonated with them because they're like, we're just creating a new gender.

Well, thank you very much. And we have two more people who'd like to ask a question live.

Yes.

And the first one is is Keshav Rajput. So thank you very much, and we'll try and connect you.

Hello. Hi, Vice Chair. Hi, Keshav. I'm an anthropologist from Indian University. I did my master's. So my, uh, can you hear me?

Um, it's, it's just breaking up a bit on my end. David, is it clear on your end?

Yes. Could you speak very clearly, please, Keshav? It's breaking up a little bit, but we can just about hear you.

Okay, okay. Am I audible and clear now?

Yes, please go ahead.

Hello?

Hello?

Yeah, uh, I want to ask about Pardis. It's a wonderful conversation which I have here. I want to ask, can you give any example of hyphenating from daily life, from everyday life?

Hyphenating in English in everyday life? Yes. Well, so email is a big one, but, you know, I think, you know, Some of the— many of us use, you know, well, I use pre-terrain. I use a hyphen there. Many of us do use pre-terrain and post-terrain. You know, many of us use hyphen for postdoc. Some people do postdoc as one word. I think there are a number of words that are hyphen-flexible, is what orthographers would say, right? You can use the hyphen or not, email being the most popular one. And then there are words that always have a hyphen. And then there are words where the autocorrect will take you out of the hyphen and you can still put it in. So, you know, probably when you're writing ages, if you're writing them out, a 6-year-old, 6-year-old is typically hyphenated. And like I said, that there are words that most of the orthographers and linguistic anthropologists and language experts I've talked to say will never be unhyphenated because words like ex-husband or ex-wife, people like that hyphen in there. They don't want it to be one word. And leaving the ex just by itself is not as— for the way in which we read a sentence, it makes the ex without the hyphen, the space, it makes it difficult to see the 2 as coming together. So a lot of this is coming from studies on how people interpret the written word, how people interpret the spoken word differently, and what rhythms make sense. As I said, language is evolving constantly, and, and language is making culture, and culture is making language, etc. And orthography is a really important component

to it. I think I have one more follow-up question. Can I— please go ahead. Can I go ahead?

So it's about when you said hyphenating is more like, uh, not like Separating or connecting something, it's like, uh, like a creativity. So what the examples you just shared, it's more like we are connecting 2 things.

For example, email.

For example, six years old. And other examples, they are like connecting. We are connecting here.

How we are creating or being creative creative here?

You don't have to come. I think I'm understanding the question of how it's creating, and that's where, again, the idea of the book is that the hyphen is creating new identities. So you don't have to say I'm Iranian or I'm American, but rather I'm an Iranian American. I'm a hyphenated person, which is creating something new altogether, not something that has to fit on one side or the other. And with words, it's the same. You heard me give the example of bumblebee. Bumble space bee, then it was bumble hyphen bee, and then a whole new word was created, which is bumblebee. So you see it in, in, in the words, right, in the, in the, in the creation of words, but also in the creation of identities. So that's where the creativity comes in.

But also, I think our friend was asking about the connectivity. So for example, when you say half-eaten apple, The hyphen gets eaten. And then these 2 words connect the 3rd word.

Correct.

Rather than divide. They're not really— so it has the function of bringing together rather than dividing, even though it's a hyphen.

That's correct. Right. And, and, and, and that is what Dionysius Thrax intended, right? And so that's where, when people think about the politics of the hyphen, they usually only go back to World War II, where there was this idea The hyphen is a divider, right? That's why they had to take it out of New York Times. But that's why I'm saying you have to go back further. Half-eaten apple is an excellent example. That's exactly why Dionysius Thrax invented the hyphen.

There we are. Well, thank you for the question. We've got one more here. Perhaps as the poor speaker has been asking questions, answering questions for more than an hour now, we ought to allow her some relief. But there is a last person with their hand up, which is Katajun Medhat. So please, please go ahead if we can connect you and ask your question.

Um, hello and thank you very much with your hyphen philosophy because it goes, I think, to the heart of an existential conundrum. Um, I— it's not so much a question, it's really a free association thing, and it goes back to what a previous person asking the question said about subjectivity and objectivity. And I was thinking, who really are we in terms of identity definition? Who are we trying to oblige? Is it ourselves or is it others? I mean, I'm very multi-hyphenated in every— I've given up, I've given up to define myself, dispensed with hyphens. I was also thinking that, for instance, in German, obviously one has hyphens, and you will see that I've got an Iranian name and a German accent, and I live in the UK, and I did my fieldwork on the Navajo Nation. So, you know, so it'd be— All right. But I was wondering, really, is this, this hyper-hyphenation, I would almost call it. You know, there is a kind of, there is a tendency or turn towards hyper-hyphenation. Does that reflect our quest for certainty? Is there a desperate, the more confusing things get, the more we try to micro-define them to get, To have the certainty. And then I was thinking, because I'm also a psychotherapist, Keats's negative capability, which is the capacity to dwell in the gray zones and not to define. Do I make any sense?

For sure. No, no.

And I wanted to give one example which I found quite interesting, and that was in my fieldwork on the Navajo Nation. Now, I don't look anything like a Navajo at all, but there was something about, I think, giving up on defining myself that I would— I did field research on alcohol and drug rehabilitation on the Navajo Nation, and so I would go into cultural education groups, and I ended there was one client who was a Ute Mountain Ute, and then there was me, and everyone else was Navajo. And one thing was that the Ute Mountain Ute, who came from 20 miles up the road from Toyaque, was exactly as foreign amongst Navajo as I was. So we were both kind of outsiders, which I found interesting, but also that people never ever thought— I mean, people very often came and said, um, what tribe are you from? So they didn't think I was Navajo, but they thought I was something else. And I thought maybe it is just because I'd so much given up defining myself that I'm actually so comfortable, you know, that the payback was being so comfortable being nothing. that almost it served some kind of— there was— because I didn't, you know, I did not place myself. Anyway, this was a very long free association. No, I

appreciate it. No, I mean, I think your observation and your comment and your insights really dovetail with what Jeffrey put forward, that, you know, that lovely Queen Victoria quote that I'm definitely going to look up, Jeffrey, which is, you know, does it you know, it doesn't really matter what I think of you, it matters— or what you think of me, it matters what I think of you. That question of like, well, to whom are we trying to prove things, right? And I think that part of it is ourselves, and part of it is learning. You know, I wrote the very first line in my book is, it took me— it took being kicked out of my country to wrap my limbs around the hyphen. You know, so it's about ourselves, our own journeys, but it's also about about finding those connections and those bridges to others, and that, that e pluribus unum, you know, with which I end the book. So you've got the first sentence of the book and the last sentence of the book trying to kind of connect, right? Which is that, you know, look, a lot of us are in this same place resonating in this beautiful orthographic mark. Is that something that can bring us together in a moment when we're in a a highly fractured and divided society.

Well, thank you so much. We, as I explained, we've really been keeping you far longer than we should have done away from all your important— is there any final comment you'd like to make to leave us with before we wish everybody a good evening or a good morning wherever they are?

Or a good day. Yes, exactly. I just think, I guess I'm glad to hear, so with That it's resonating with so many of you all. And, and, and I hope that you all, you know, as you write those hyphens throughout your day, that every now and then you pause and you think about what you're connecting as opposed to what you're dividing, what you're creating.

There we are. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much. And, and Haneen, Amanda, thank you very much for your support. And we'll just wish everybody a very good day wherever they are. So thank you.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you for having me.

Thank you so much for coming, Pardis, and thank you to our audience. I'm going to close the meeting now. Bye-bye, have a lovely rest of your day. Bye.