Bringing the environment back into intersubjectivity: an interview with Terra Edwards

ed note: as part of our on-going initiative examining how theory gets made, we are featuring interviews with recent Anthropological Theory authors, inquiring into their writing and thinking process. This interview, with Terra Edwards (University of Chicago) about her article “The medium of intersubjectivity” (2024), is the twelfth of these interviews. See here for others.

(Backstage) What drove you to write this specific article?

This article came out of long-term engagement with DeafBlind people in the U.S. who call themselves “protactile.” Most of the protactile people I know were born deaf and slowly became blind over the course of many years. As they became blind, things associated with intersubjectivity like attributing intentions to others, individuating objects of reference, and arriving at shared understandings, started to break down. My interlocutors didn’t talk about it that way though. They talked about problems at work, difficulty in relationships, unexpected injuries, feeling lonely. It was easy for people to blame all of that on “vision loss”, but protactile people treated these problems as a deficiency in the environment. I observed this on many occasions when I was invited into tactile environments. Recently, I was visiting a protactile training center run by a DeafBlind woman I call Adrijana. In the years leading up to the visit, a new, tactile language had emerged, and it was growing so rapidly that I was having difficulty following routine conversations about things like recent events, schedules, and gossip. So I went to Adrijana’s training center for an extended stay to get caught up. When I got there, I asked Adrijana for a vocabulary lesson. She told me to put on a blindfold. In the days that followed, this sequence would repeat itself. People would ask her, “How do you say…” and she would tell them to be more attentive to their environment.

When Adrijana first told me to put on a blindfold, I wasn’t sure how to behave. I took hesitant steps around the house with my arms extended straight out in front of me, in case I smashed into a wall or something. Adrijana pushed my arms down and told me to stop shuffling around the house like a zombie. She told me I didn’t need to do that because I could learn everything I needed to know through my feet. I knew that it was customary to take your shoes off in protactile settings, and now I understood why. Adrijana showed me that my feet (separated from the environment only by my thin socks), pick up all kinds of information. Standing in the kitchen on the smooth, cool floor, she turned my hand so my palm was facing down to represent my feet. From underneath, she slid her palm slowly past mine, creating a sensation that resembled the feeling of our feet on the kitchen floor. We moved into the living room and this time she mimicked the feeling of carpet by making a scratching motion with her fingertips on my down-turned palm. Crossing over the threshold from the kitchen to the living room, where the two textures met underfoot, she guided my hand from the smooth edges of the kitchen counters to the dry wooden door frame, to the puffy warm couch, where we sat down together in a coordinated series of movements and adjustments. She explained that I didn’t need to walk around with my arms stretched out because my feet would tell me when to raise my arms up, and prepared me for what I would find there. She explained that we were now in “contact space”. The reason I wrote this article was to understand more about what contact space was, and what practical and theoretical consequences it might have.

2. (Contribution) In brief, in which set of theoretical discussions your article engages and what is the article’s contribution to those debates?

“Contact space” is not merely a descriptive phrase. It is a concept that’s part of a unified theoretical framework. It appeared in print for the first time in 2018 in an article titled, “PT Principles”, written by two DeafBlind intellectuals, teachers, and political leaders, aj granda and Jelica Nuccio. The article contains a comprehensive theory, built out of years of teaching people to be in, and communicate about, the world in a more tactile way. For this article, I read and reread their work, and as I went deeper into their framework, I realized that contact space is not primarily about human-to-human contact. It is first about how we relate to the environment in ways that correspond with others’ relations to the environment. This is what drew me to theories of environment. More specifically, reading protactile theory through the lens of biosemiotics and ecological psychology pushed me to consider not only what we mean in performing an action, but how the parameters of intelligibility for meaningful action are established in the first place. A critical part of this, which I focused on in this article, is the medium. By the time I was done with the article, I felt that foregrounding the medium might change the way we, as anthropologists, think, analyze, and, as I suggest in the conclusion, it might change the role we ascribe to theory, more generally.

For example, many social scientific debates have to do at some level with the decisions people make and their reasons for making them. Since it’s hard to confirm motivations empirically on a societal scale, social theory has played an important role. However now, as Illana Gershon, Nick Seaver, Krystal Smalls, and other anthropologists have pointed out, the reasons why people make a decision or take a stand are being amplified, manipulated, side-lined, or silenced by new communication infrastructures that collect constant streams of data on what we are attending to, interacting with, and what we are doing, in real time. These data are then used to paint a picture of who we probably are and what we are probably feeling (Brubaker, 2020; Cheney-Lippold, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). Given this, it seems strange to establish theories meant to explain people’s motivations to act. What seems more pressing is understanding how the parameters of intelligibility are being structured and re-structured, for whom those changes are operative, and what effects they are having on broader socio-political processes, e.g. how democracies function, how financial markets behave, or how work and education are structured. The first problem is to understand the medium itself, and only then can we understand actions performed within it, and their consequences.

Foregrounding the medium is not the same as attending to “multimodality” or “the affordances of technology”. As I discuss in the article, linguistic anthropologists already know that communication unfolds across diverse modalities (e.g. gesture, language, gaze) and channels (e.g. visual, tactile, technological). Socio-cultural anthropologists have always been attentive to the proliferation of cultural forms via media such as painting, film, and design. Anything can be studied action-first or medium-first. When we opt for the former, though, we tend to turn channels and modalities into different ways of doing the same “thing”. In this article, I argue that starting with the medium turns that around. Instead of asking which channels are being used to accomplish this or that (where this or that is roughly the same in all cases), we ask: What are we in when we’re together? How does it render my actions already intelligible and to whom? Who created the medium, who benefits from it, and who suffers within it? These questions, which come from putting protactile theory into dialogue with theories of environment, draw our attention not only to what people are trying to do, and what resources they are drawing on to do it, but also the always-shifting existential and environmental conditions that prompt us to act, prevent us from acting, or give us no choice but to act.

3. (Reflection) How do you make anthropological theory? Is there a way that theory making in anthropology diverges from theory making in other disciplines? What are some of the challenges one faces in making anthropological theory?

Anthropological theory is made slowly. The other fields I am familiar with, including psychology and linguistics begin with a theory or set of theoretical commitments. In analyzing a particular phenomenon, the researcher develops a hypothesis or “intuition” based on those commitments. They then set out to collect the evidence they need to test it. If all goes well, the result is a relatively manageable corpus or collection of data that can be analyzed systematically and compared to related phenomena. There are great benefits to this kind of procedure. You know what you’re looking for and you know where to find it. In contrast, my research generated 240 hours of videorecorded interaction and language-use, dozens of interview transcripts, and pages of ethnographic fieldnotes. This came after several years of reading, formulating research questions, and coming up with a plan. It didn’t work out how I had imagined though. So when I came home from the field, I felt overwhelmed. I napped. I looked at my research questions again. I felt unsure if I was on the right track. I don’t think this is that uncommon in anthropological research. You know there is a problem, but you’re not sure what it is. You ask yourself why the framework you brought to the field is failing you. And then slowly, you realize that you hold assumptions that are actually blocking your ability to understand what you’ve learned, and those assumptions are hiding somewhere in your thinking. While psychology and linguistics have powerful floodlights that reveal patterns, the process I am describing is more like turning off the lights and discovering fire flies.

In this article, the assumption I identified is that there are actions, and then there are ways of accomplishing those actions that differ by channel, modality, or medium. This is a very basic idea that is assumed by many theories, approaches, and ways of thinking, and I found that it was making it difficult to grasp the stakes of the protactile movement.

4. (Expansion) Why does theory matter (to you and/or in a broad sense)?

For me, theory is important because it helps me understand what I’ve learned. Without it, I would be more prone to impose my own common sense and fail to appreciate the significance of what I have been taught.