Linguistic anthropology has long treated speech as the privileged site of social action. James Slotta's Anarchy and the Art of Listening challenges this assumption by showing how listening is just as politically significant. Drawing on fieldwork in the Yopno Valley of Papua New Guinea, Slotta argues that listening is political action through which people try to act effectively in an uncertain world. The book ultimately invites all linguistic anthropologists to attend not only to how their interlocutors speak but also to how they listen. The book is a major work within a growing body of scholarship on listening, contributing an emphasis on the political. Slotta clearly situates the book in relation to this other work on listening. He states that, while some approach listening through sound studies or the sensory humanities, in this book, listening “is primarily meant to designate not a sensory experience but a communicative activity, the reception of meaningful speech” (p. 12). Although this is a narrower definition than in much other scholarship, it is this focus on reception that allows Slotta to build a compelling argument about the political power of something that is often dismissed as passive. At the same time, Slotta admits a methodological conundrum: listening is largely intangible, so we can only study it through its outward manifestations, one of the most common of which is speech. As a result, most of the data in this book are still speech, particularly metadiscourses and reported speech. While this may appear contradictory, it reminds us that the dichotomy between speech and reception is not always so rigid, and it also challenges us to look at familiar forms of data from new perspectives. The introduction situates the Yopno context in relation to Western liberal traditions that equate voice with political power, and this comprehensive overview should be required reading for anyone interested in political communication. Slotta then develops the book's argument across five chapters that demonstrate how listening is a central practice in the anarchic politics of the Yopno Valley. He defines anarchy as “a political environment without rulers, without governments or state institutions that have the power to issue commands, adjudicate disputes, and enforce laws” (p. 13). While local leaders exist, they hold little power and cannot speak with what Slotta calls the “sovereign word,” speech that is backed by a coercive apparatus, and so they cannot rely on rhetorical persuasion. The subsequent chapters consider both how leaders entice others to listen to their words and the stakes for listeners in deciding who and what to listen to. Each chapter begins with a rich ethnographic account, ranging from discussions of local politics, to school lessons and church sermons, to concerns about global conservation organizations and NGOs, before connecting the ethnographic material to current debates in anthropology and pragmatics. The first chapter establishes the relationship between listening practices and the anarchic politics of Yopno villages. Slotta argues that anarchic listening is not a single practice but is made up of three: “disregarding,” “evaluating,” and “holding onto” another's speech. Taken together, these practices “help sustain the anarchic character of Yopno politics, constraining the would-be leaders while promoting people's self-determination” (p. 35). Crucially, and as has been discussed in other ethnographies of Melanesia, self-determination differs from Western liberal ideals of autonomy or freedom. It is instead based in a relational form of personhood, where the self is constituted by and dependent on others. Self-determination in the Yopno context “places emphasis on the support that people need and the added power they gain from working with others” (p. 44). This directly translates to the three anarchic listening practices: knowing what to disregard and what to hold onto is key to controlling one's future. Each of the next three chapters develops a different aspect of the “art of anarchic listening.” The second chapter situates relational self-determination within a dominant epistemology in the Yopno Valley, in which reality is opaque and difficult to grasp. Because the world is seen as fundamentally uncertain, listening to others, whether that be sermons, stories, or even dreams, is essential to better understand the world and to act more effectively in it. The chapter concludes with a provocative discussion of the ontological turn. While anthropologists like Cadena and Viveiros de Castro have called for taking alternative ways of knowing seriously, allowing them to stand on par with a Western scientific and philosophical worldview, Slotta shows that Yopno people do not seem to take their own concepts and ontologies that “seriously” themselves. However, what begins as critique turns to comparison, as Slotta notes that the uncertainty among his Yopno interlocutors is similar to ontologically minded anthropologists themselves. Both groups are dissatisfied with “their own” concepts, and so listen to others to find new ones. The third chapter turns to questions of expertise, through the contradictions of how leadership works in an anarchic context. While village leaders share their expertise to try to shape the conduct of others, Slotta shifts the analytical attention to the listener's perspective, showing how people actively seek out expertise to gain a better understanding of reality and to empower themselves. This dual purpose of expertise, to influence others and empower oneself, is indicative of the balance between village leaders' control and the self-determination of the community. Slotta concludes the chapter by arguing that key to this balance is the truth of expertise—false representations of how the world works do not empower listeners but lead to deception. This point challenges a trend in Foucauldian accounts of expertise that separate the social pragmatics of knowledge from questions of truth. The fourth chapter extends this discussion of expertise and truth to explore the prevalence of deception in Yopno villages. Deception is a common strategy for maintaining social harmony and avoiding offending someone, but it also makes evaluating others' speech more difficult. Yet, rather than discouraging listening to others, the threat of deception makes listening more important, as people gather as much information as they can, evaluate it, and decide what is genuine. Villagers listen not only to what others say but also to how others listen, paying attention to how friends or family members evaluate the words of fellow villagers, conservation workers, or pastors. Slotta conceptualizes this as a form of collective listening, drawing on Goffman's classic work on how speech production can sometimes be a collective activity, where author, animator, and principal are each separate people. In the Yopno case, it is reception, rather than production, that is collective, as some listeners share their evaluations with others, who then evaluate those evaluations. The final chapter brings together all of these themes to discuss how anarchic listening is key to how villagers navigate their place in the larger world, which is primarily mediated through the institutions of schools and churches. As in many parts of Papua New Guinea, Slotta's interlocutors describe their region as the las ples, or last place. This name carries particular resonance in the Yopno Valley, which was one of the last areas to receive Christianity and Western-style education. Listening within these Western-based institutions is a way Yopno villagers try to access global circuits of knowledge and, hopefully, to create better futures for themselves. While these institutions seem more likely to entrench hierarchies than create egalitarianism, the stakes of that pursuit are increasingly high, as villagers anticipate their children having to confront many kinds of potentially treacherous outside actors, including mining companies, conservation NGOs and government authorities. The epilogue reflects on the ethnographer as listener, and what ethnographers can—and should—listen to. The discussion stems from Slotta's own unease during fieldwork when, having expected his primary task would be to listen to political oratory, he was instead frequently asked to give speeches. This discomfort provoked him to question the assumption that ethnographic practice centers around listening to our interlocutors' speech, and he ends by challenging us to instead “listen ethnographically to the ways others listen,” because those listening practices are not only necessary to understand Yopno politics, but also “integral to other political systems, religious movements, economic activities, educational institutions, and media worlds” (p. 152). This is a powerful provocation, and it also prompts reflection on another set of listeners here: the book's readers. What is a reader of ethnography listening to, and how do they listen? In this case, we cannot directly listen to Yopno anarchic listening—the longstanding critiques of ethnographic representation of speaking subjects apply equally to listening. Instead, we are being asked to listen to Slotta's account of anarchic practices of listening. Through his engagement with the ontological turn, debates around expertise in liberal democracies, Austinian speech act theory, and Goffmanian participant roles, Slotta guides his imagined Euro-American anthropological reader in how to receive his words. Yet, like with his Yopno interlocutors, it is ultimately the reader's job to evaluate what they are told. I would urge readers to hold onto more of Slotta's words than they disregard. While doing so may not result in self-determination, it does invite a welcome reorientation toward our object of study.
Janet Connor (Sun,) studied this question.