1. In this book, when I refer to the number of torture survivors, I use the estimate of approximately 125, which is clearly conservative, as it refers only to documented and proven Burge-related cases. Nevertheless, by restricting myself to the cases from Area 2 between the years I mention, I hope to shed light on the epidemic as a whole.
2. Area 2 is both the name of a detective headquarters (a building) and a geographical location that covers a certain number of neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. In the 1980s, when most of the events I describe take place, the city of Chicago was broken down into six detective “Areas.” However, when I refer to “Area 2” in this book I am most often referencing the detective headquarters (the building) rather than the boundaries of a district. Although Chicago’s police stations are referenced as “districts,” this parlance is unique to Chicago. So in this book I often refer to Chicago’s “districts” and “areas” as “precincts” or “police stations” for the sake of clarity.
3. For more information on the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission and its expanded role in recent years, see Duaa Eldeib’s “Torture Claims No Longer Limited to Burge, Chicago Police,” Chicago Tribune, October 6, 2016, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-illinois-torture-commission-beyond-burge-met-20161006-story.html.
4. Women have also been tortured. Although Flint Taylor, the lawyer who tried most of the cases involving police torture, has hard evidence of only a single case involving a woman named Doris Miller, over the years, he believes that other women were victimized. At one point he received a series of calls from an anonymous cop who told him the following: “I thought it was OK to torture guilty guys. I thought it just had to be done. But when we started torturing innocent people and women, that’s when I realized we were doing something really, really wrong.”
5. To understand the nature of the open secret, it is helpful to examine the role of secrecy in society, more generally. In his groundbreaking The Secret and the Secret Society, Georg Simmel (1950, 312) tells us that secrecy is linked to the lies people tell. It is grounded in concealment, which is at the root of all social interactions, affecting individuals’ decisions to share knowledge and receive it back in return. In the context of the secret societies that Simmel studied, he found that people wanted to conceal information. Doing so allowed for them to retain power, to boast about misconduct while evading sanction. Ultimately, secrecy worked to ensure group cohesion and to enable certain groups and organizations to maintain power and control in society.
The paradoxical nature of all secrets is that they depend on the members of society’s ability to keep information confidential, but the open secret differs in that it can be widely known but is not articulated. Although I refer to the “widely known” character of these secrets as “open” (because that’s how people in Chicago describe them), within the scholarly literature these kind of secrets are most often referred to as “public secrets.” Most of the academic literature on the public secret is rooted in Elias Canetti’s (1984, 295) work, which notes that “a large part of the prestige of dictatorships is due to the fact that they are credited with the concentrated power of secrecy.” The anthropologist Michael Taussig (1997) famously extends Canetti’s argument, noting that the act of revealing a familiar public secret is often accompanied by a fall from grace, because such revelations are not considered socially acceptable. As a result, people develop elaborate ways of pretending not to know what they do know. Consider, for example, a staffer who is aware that her boss, a politician, is involved in a scandal that could cost him the election. Many of the other staffers may also be aware of the scandal, but they all know that to reveal the scandal would cost them their jobs. Anthropologists who study public secrecy are often interested in the ways people are expected to live and work in situations that obligate them to maintain secrets. The obligatory nature of the secret makes it such that, in this example, staffers’ life and work begins to revolve around the information they know, do not want to know, and are actively avoiding acquiring any more knowledge of. It is important to note that a scholar of public secrecy who is studying the campaign in this example may not be interested merely in the nature of the scandal and whether it causes the politician to lose the election. More interesting is how the scandal shapes the culture of this campaign and sustains and exacerbates some of the power relations among the staff (see Geissler 2013). In this way, public secrecy revolves around power and dominance. As a consequence, people in vulnerable positions protect those who provide them with material resources, which is another way of saying that public secrecy involves substantial risks. For this reason, scholarship on public secrecy raises questions such as “How do people come to live with impunity?” and “How [do] people ‘remoralize’ their social worlds following lengthy periods of intimate violence?” (Theidon 2006, 98). This is also why, as Jones (2014) notes, public secrecy has been of interest to scholars studying violence and historical injustices (Geissler 2013; Mookherjee 2006; Penglase 2009; Roy 2008; Theidon 2006; Thomas 2017).
6. For more on the link between Blackness and criminality, see Muhammad (2011); Hinton (2016); and Alexander (2012).
7. An example of this kind of thinking is evident in torture survivor Madison Hobley’s case. After his wife and infant son died in a fire, the police held Hobley responsible. Despite a paucity of evidence and a coerced confession after being tortured, Hobley was convicted and sentenced to death in 1987. He served sixteen years until, after many hearings, on January 9, 2003, he received a pardon from then governor of Illinois George Ryan. During the investigation into the death of Hobley’s wife and child, the police officer interrogating him, Robert Dwyer, admitted that he had doubts about Hobley’s guilt. “Between you and me,” Dwyer told Hobley, “I don’t know if you’re the one we’re looking for.” But that fact mattered little to the detective: “We have you in custody, so I guess you’ll be the nigger that did it today.” For more information on Hobley’s arrest and the testimony of police officers in his conviction, see People v. Hobley, 637 N.E.2d 992 (Ill. 1994).
8. Later in the book I discuss the context in which millions of dollars have been given to victims of police violence in recent years.
9. On the debilitating effects of state violence, see Puar (2017).
10. For the full context of Judge Joan Lefkow’s statement about how torture damages the criminal justice system, see United States v. Burge, No. 08 CR 846 (Ill. 2011).
11. For more on the history of lynching, see Mitchell (2011).
12. See Sánchez-Eppler (1993).
13. See the Chicago Police Department’s 2017 Use of Force Policy, available at http://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/G03-02_Use-of-Force_TBD.pdf. As of December 2018, the 2017 Use of Force Policy is the latest the department has on record.
14. For the full quotation on deadly force, see the Chicago Police Department’s Use of Force Policy. In addition, for an in-depth analysis of use-of-force policies across the United States, see DeRay McKesson, Samuel Sinyangwe, Johnetta Elzie, and Brittany Packnett, “Police Use of Force Policy Analysis,” Campaign Zero, September 20, 2016, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56996151cbced68b170389f4/t/57e1b5cc2994ca4ac1d97700/1474409936835/Police+Use+of+Force+Report.pdf.
1. See Andrew Schroedter’s article “Fatal Shootings by Chicago Police: Tops among Biggest U.S. Cities,” Better Government Association, July 26, 2015, https://www.bettergov.org/news/fatal-shootings-by-chicago-police-tops-among-biggest-us-cities.
2. See Crimesider Staff, “How Chicago Racked Up a $662 Million Police Misconduct Bill,” CBS News, March 21, 2016, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-chicago-racked-up-a-662-million-police-misconduct-bill/.
3. Hamaji et al. (2017, 60).
4. On restricted versus discretionary funds, every city and county has multiple individual funds within its budget, each of which generates revenue from specific sources and most of which have restrictions on use. Individual funds are created by laws, grant requirements, or decisions made by the governing body. A restricted fund is often limited for specific uses and must be reported separately to demonstrate compliance. All funds that are not restricted are accounted for in the “general fund.” The general fund is primarily funded by property taxes and is the most flexible, discretionary fund. Whether restricted by legislation or allocated through the discretion of city council, each fund reflects city priorities and commitments.
5. Hamaji et al. (2017).
6. Fisher and Reese (2011); and Daly (2002).
7. Hamaji et al. (2017), 25.
8. These figures are projected from a 2007 City Council Finance Committee hearing at which several aldermen requested that a statistical expert project the range of exposure in attorney’s fees, costs, and judgments for which the city could be liable in the five pending torture cases. Upon release of the report, on September 25, 2007, the Chicago Sun-Times ran an editorial titled “Stop the Financial Torture: Settle the Burge Lawsuits Now.”
9. For the symbiotic relationship between police and military, see Balko (2013); Brodeur (2010); Kraska (2007); and Rahr et al. (2015)
10. In this study I use pseudonyms to protect the identities of participants in focus groups and interviews. The statements and the contexts described, however, are real.
1. For an important scholarly discussion of reparations that inspired Coates’s work, see William Darity Jr., “Forty Acres and a Mule in the 21st Century,” Social Science Quarterly 89, no. 3 (2008): 656–64.
2. The complaints about the dragnet are documented in the 1990 Office of Professional Standards report. See also Sanders (1990).
3. For details of Wilson’s arrest and interrogation, see Conroy (2000) and Sanders (1990). See also State of Illinois v. Andrew and Jackie Wilson, Indictment No. 82-1211, Charge: Murder, etc. (November 12, 1982).
4. For the long-term effects of Wilson’s torture, see John Conroy, “The Persistence of Andrew Wilson,” Chicago Reader, November 29, 2007.
5. In preparing this letter, I investigated Burge’s military career, finding that he enlisted in the army in 1966 and quickly rose through the ranks to attain the position of staff sergeant. Immediately hailed as a promising cadet, Burge served time as a drill instructor and attended military police school at Fort Benning. His superiors, impressed with his performance, sent him to Korea and then Vietnam, and he served as military police in both places. Burge was twice awarded the army commendation for valor, both times for leaving a bunker to drag wounded men to safety in the midst of incoming fire. He was also given the Bronze Star for meritorious service, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and a Purple Heart. In 1969, Burge took an honorable discharge after suffering an injury on the battlefield. A year later, at the age of twenty-two, he joined the Chicago Police Department. Soon after, he subsequently became a lieutenant in charge of the Violent Crimes Unit at Area 2, where he would introduce to detectives devices that “helped along” confessions. For more information on Burge’s biography and military career, see Conroy (2000).
6. On the role of John Yucaitis, see State of Illinois v. Andrew and Jackie Wilson (November 12, 1982).
7. The details of Wilson’s hospital visit, including testimony from hospital workers and doctors, are detailed in Sanders (1990).
8. Here I am referencing Hortense Spillers’s concept of hieroglyphics of the flesh, those hidden messages that obscure social inequality because of society’s collective preoccupation with Western man. While the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben distinguishes a legally recognized life from a disposable, “bare life,” Spillers distinguishes a legally recognized personhood (which she calls a “body”) from someone who is considered not quite human. Because the state does not recognize this being as belonging to a political body, what justifies the being’s deprivation is the nature of his or her “flesh.” If the body represents legal personhood, the flesh designates a deprived social being upon which state violence is enacted. Yet the flesh is different from Agamben’s idea of bare life because “racializing assemblages” are inscribed on the skin. These assemblages consist of state institutions that produce social and political differences that masquerade as biological and thus natural distinctions. For more on Spillers’s notion of the flesh, see Spillers (1987).
9. For more on the concept of the black box, see Bateson (2012): 313.
10. Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary, s.v. “black box,” http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/collegiate/black%20box.
11. For more details on the Gettleman ruling and Burge’s firing, see Conroy (2001, 235).
1. For the present-day corruption in the criminal court system, see Van Cleve (2016).
2. It is important to note that Jon Burge referred to his elite unit by other names in addition to “the A-Team,” such as the “Mission Team” or the “Midnight Shift.”
3. For this quote, see Joan Lefkow’s ruling in United States v. Burge, No. 08 CR 846 (Ill. 2011).
4. See Mary Ann Ahern, “Former Chicago Police Supt.: Code of Silence ‘Has Always Existed,’” NBC Chicago, March 3, 2016, https://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/Former-Chicago-Police-Supt-Code-of-Silence-Has-Always-Existed-370994101.html.
5. The events and descriptions detailed in this section are from a letter William Parker submitted to Flint Taylor, the lead attorney on many of the torture cases. Statement of William Parker on Oct. 12, 2004, Patterson v. Burge, 328 F. Supp. 2d 878 (N.D. Ill. 2004) (No. 03 C 4433).
6. Statement of William Parker, 7–16.
7. Statement of William Parker, 7–12, 16–17.
8. Before I decided to make all the letters in this book open letters, I did attempt to send some of the letters to the people they were addressed to. But even in those rare cases where people received and read the letters I had written to them, no one has read the final version of these open letters as they are written now. For more on the letter-writing process, see the appendix.
9. A postconviction case refers to a legal process that takes place after someone has been convicted of a crime. In this case, Aaron Patterson challenged his murder conviction on the grounds that he was tortured, arguing that John Byrne was among the police officers involved in his unlawful detention. For more on the deposition of John Byrne in People v. Patterson (March 1, 2001), see Report on the Failure of Special Prosecutors Edward J. Egan and Robert D. Boyle to Fairly Investigate Systemic Police Torture in Chicago (April 24, 2007).
10. On the racism Lacey faced, see Statement of Sammy Lacey on October 12, 2004, Patterson v. Burge, 328 F. Supp. 2d 878 (N.D. Ill. 2004) (No. 03 C 4433).
11. Jodi Rudoren, “Report on Chicago Police Torture Is Released,” New York Times, July, 19, 2006.
12. It is important to note that Biebel has denied that Egan ever informed him that his nephew worked under Burge. This conflict of interest gained attention after the special prosecutors’ report was issued, when the Chicago Sun-Times broke the story on August 6, 2006. The news outlet informed the public that Egan was the uncle of a violent crimes detective, William Egan, who had worked under Burge at Area 2 from 1982 to 1986. The Sun-Times also wrote about the long history of Edward Egan’s family on the police force. More important, for our purposes, the paper wrote that Area 2 Detective Egan had participated with Burge and another officer in the 1983 arrest of torture victim Gregory Banks. The major conflict of interest came from the fact that the special prosecutors investigated this case, with no criminal charges being pursued.
13. Opinion and Order of Judge Joan H. Lefkow, United States v. Jon Burge (N.D. Ill. 2011) (No. 08 CR 846).
1. This event was also recorded and can be seen on YouTube: “We Charge Genocide Reports on Chicago Police-Part 1,” video, 11:19, posted by Kevin Gosztola on October 22, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn-bMbNaWX0.
2. See Nixon (2011).
3. For more information on the interview, see Frank Green, “A Year of History: Martinsville Seven Executions Remain ‘A Raw Wound’ for Many,” Richmond (VA) Times Dispatch, February 6, 2011.
4. Mariame Kaba, “We Do This for Damo . . . ,” Prison Culture (blog), May 20, 2015, http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2015/05/20/we-do-this-for-damo/.
5. Mariame Kaba, “We Do This for Damo,” Prison Culture (blog), May 20, 2015, http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2015/05/20/we-do-this-for-damo/.
6. See also Simpson (2007).
7. Patterson was ordered to surrender his passport at the US embassy in France. When he refused, US agents said they would seize it at his hotel room. Patterson fled to Budapest, where through the newspaper Szabad Nép, he accused the US government of attempting to stifle his voice by prohibiting his travel and hence his ability to engage in international activism. The US government ordered Patterson to be detained when he passed through Britain and seized his passport when he returned to the United States. “W. L. Patterson Says U.S. Bars Him at U.N.,” New York Times, January 1, 1952, 10; and “U.S. ‘Muzzle’ on Genocide Charge Alleged,” Washington Post, January 1, 1952, 2.
8. I am referring to what happened after the verdicts of the Black men accused of rape. All the families of the Martinsville Seven, except for the Graysons, retained attorneys from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to adjudicate the appeals process. Even though most agreed that the NAACP was the right choice, the Graysons had faith in William Patterson and the Civil Rights Congress. But because the lawyers from the NAACP feared that involvement by the Civil Rights Congress could endanger the defendants, they pressured Francis Grayson to abandon Patterson because the organization had heavy communist leanings. Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel for the NAACP, personally informed Francis Grayson that unless the Civil Rights Congress relinquished the retainer the Grayson family gave them, the NAACP would completely withdraw from all cases. The Civil Rights Congress returned the money, stating that they did so in “the interests of the other men whose lives would be jeopardized” by their presence. For more information on what happened, see “NAACP Leaders Are Asked for Joint Drive by CRC to Save ‘Martinsville 7,’”Arkansas State Press (Little Rock), June 16, 1950.
9. The Convention against Torture reads: “Under article 19 of the Convention against Torture, the Committee against Torture (CAT) is mandated to examine reports on the measures that State parties are taking to implement the provisions of the Convention” (in Schulberg 2014).
10. On April 12, 2015, Baltimore police officers arrested Freddie Gray and placed him in a police van. Gray emerged from the van severely injured and in a coma. He died three days later. Gray’s death was followed by a series of peaceful protests, but on the day of his funeral, April 27, the city erupted in what the national media called “riots,” with Maryland’s governor declaring a state of emergency, installing a curfew, and calling in the National Guard. All six police officers involved in Gray’s arrest were eventually acquitted of all charges.
11. On May 2012, thirty-one-year-old Marissa Alexander was prosecuted for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and received a twenty-year prison sentence for firing a warning shot in her own home. Alexander said that she fired the shot after her husband attacked her and threatened to kill her. The case has gained some public recognition because of comparisons made to the widely covered case of George Zimmerman, who was prosecuted for fatally shooting Trayvon Martin. Both cases were prosecuted by the same Florida state prosecutor, Angela Corey. Alexander, a Black woman, was sentenced to decades in prison for firing a warning shot; Zimmerman, a white man, was acquitted for pursuing and then killing an unarmed Black teenager. Many argued that the sentencing revealed the disproportionate forms of punishment African Americans face today. In part because of the protests surrounding Alexander’s story, she was eventually granted a new trial. She was released from prison on January 27, 2015, under a plea deal that capped her sentence at the three years she had already served.
12. For more on Black maternal grief, see Ralph (2015) and Smith (2016).
13. I mean to point out that, as justification for stop-and-frisks, it is common for police officers to claim that someone told them they were doing something illegal; that is, someone says to the officer, “I have weed in my pocket.” Incriminating oneself in this way justifies a search. However, many Black Chicagoans claim that the police have been known to lie, and that when they do not incriminate themselves, police still search them and claim they have done so. In a court of law, they lose this argument every time because the judge always takes the police officer’s word over a criminal suspect’s.
14. Police Accountability Task Force, “What Is the Task Force,” https://chicagopatf.org/about/what-is-police-accountability-task-force/.
15. In tracing the history of police formation to legacies of colonialism and slavery, Seigel (2017) argues that “state racism leaves no hope for successful reform,” but demands a commitment to police abolition. However, in Chicago I find a practical and thoughtful commitment to police abolition that also grapples with strategic reform to make everyday life tolerable for people who have to navigate the city under the persistent threat of police violence. Former members of We Charge Genocide, for example, are among the most vocal leaders of the police and prison abolition movement in the city. Improving the conditions that make life livable all while attempting to imagine a world that does not yet exist is a key challenge for police and prison abolitionists, as Angela Davis and Dylan Rodriguez (2000) point out.
16. For more information, see Coates (2015).
17. For the full transcript of the opposition, see the No Cop Academy website, at http://www.nocopacademy.com. See also Laura Rodriguez, “Chicago Youth Stage ‘Die-In’ at City Hall to Demand Defunding of $95 Mil Cop Academy, More Community Resources,” Chicago Tribune, March 28, 2018.
1. For Zuley’s recruitment to Guantánamo, see Ackerman (2015); and Linnemann (2018).
2. For more on Rumsfeld and “enhanced interrogation,” see Gallagher (2009); Johnson (2016, 121); and Smeulers and Van Niekerk (2009).
3. For more on this scandal, see Lewis (2005); and Danner and Fay (2004).
4. For the quote, see American Civil Liberties Union, “Slahi v. Obama—Habeas Challenge to Guantánamo Detention,” October 25, 2016, http://www.aclu.org/cases/slahi-v-obama-habeas-challenge-guantanamo-detention.
5. Slahi (2015). For more on the nature of the redactions themselves, see Goyal (2017); Trapp (2016); and Moore (2016).
6. Slahi (2015).
7. Rasmussen (2009).
8. Ackerman (2015).
9. The quotes here from Boyd are from Spencer Ackerman’s (2015) article.
10. The quotes mentioned here referring to Zuley as a “bad apple” also frame the discussion of Slahi’s torture in Spencer Ackerman’s (2015) article.
11. Ackerman (2015).
12. I was unable to find the exact broadcast that Mohamedou referenced in his letter to me. But his account of Clinton’s stance on Chen Guangcheng is compatible with various media reports. See, for example, the BBC article from October 18, 2003, titled “Hillary Clinton: Chen Guangcheng Crisis ‘Touch-and-Go,’” at http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-24577038.
13. See Sidanius and Pratto (2001).
14. This Baldwin quote is from the historic debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. at Cambridge University on this question: “Is the American dream at the expense of the American Negro?” Video of the debate is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFeoS41xe7w&t=1621s. Published on October 27, 2012 by The Riverbends Channel, 58:57.
15. For coverage of the Republican endorsement of torture during the Republican Party primary debate, see Zack Beauchamp’s February 10, 2016, article in Vox, “Why Republicans Are Debating Bringing Back Torture,” at http://www.vox.com/2016/2/10/10961760/trump-rubio-torture. See also Tessa Berenson, “Donald Trump Defends Torture at Republican Debate,” Time, March 4, 2016, http://www.time.com/4247397/donald-trump-waterboarding-torture/.
16. On the states secrets privilege, see Zagel (1965, 875); Frost (2006, 1931); and Lyons (2007, 99).
17. More specifically, Ladin notes that “both the Bush and Obama administrations . . . sought to use claims of secrecy to completely shut down lawsuits by survivors of torture, claiming that even considering their claims would harm national security.” This is why claims in the past have not been adjudicated in American courts. This could have changed recently with Salim v. Mitchell in March 2017. But an undisclosed settlement was reached, and the suit against psychologists who designed torture techniques for the government never went to trial. Dror Ladin, “In a First, the Trump Administration Moves to Invoke Secrecy Claims in Torture Lawsuit,” ACLU, March 9, 2017, http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/torture/first-trump-administration-moves-invoke-secrecy-claims-torture/.
18. For the initial exposé of Zuley’s book review on Amazon, see Ackerman (2015).
19. Masco (2014); Douglas and Zulaica (2010).
20. For more on Trump’s pledge to “load [Guantánamo Bay] up with bad dudes,” see Carlo Muñoz, “10 Years After Taking in Its Last Detainee, Gitmo Is Ready and Waiting for Trump’s ‘Bad Dudes,’” Washington Times, March 13, 2018, http://wwww.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/13/Guantanamo-bay-waits-donald-trumps-bad-dudes/.
1. Wiggins v. Burge, Sworn Statement of Marcus Wiggins (Chicago, IL, 1993).
2. Liliana Segura, “Families of the Victims Tortured by Chicago Detectives Rejoice at First Arrest,” AlterNet, October 27, 2008, https://www.alternet.org/2008/10/families_of_the_victims_tortured_by_chicago_detectives_rejoice_at_first_arrest/.
3. Sam Roberts, “Jon Burge, 70, Ex-Commander in Chicago Police Torture Cases, Dies,” New York Times, September 21, 2018, B13.
4. On the systematic way misconduct spreads within the Chicago police force, see Rob Arthur’s article in The Intercept, “Bad Chicago Cops Spread Their Misconduct Like a Disease,” August 16, 2018: https://theintercept.com/2018/08/16/chicago-police-misconduct-social-network/.
1. Mike Thomas and Monifa Thomas, “28th Chicago Public School Student Killed this Year: Gregory Robinson, 14, Died Shielding Kids from Bullet,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 25, 2011.
2. There are other approaches to letter writing in cultural anthropology, of course. Another lesser-known approach to letter writing that I do not explicitly address in this book is the tradition established by Margret Mead. In Letters from the Field, 1925–1975, Mead writes correspondences to friends and family about her time in conducting research in different countries. The many letters that span fifty years are largely a day-to-day account of her life in places she regards as “remote.” So much so that the text as a whole takes on the feel of a travel book. My approach in this book differs from Mead’s in that the letters I write are not meant to reinscribe the distinction between field and home. My work highlights the social production of the “field,” as I seek to unsettle common conceptions of the role of the ethnographer and the practice of ethnography. See Mead (1977).
3. Garcia (2016).
4. See Dunbar-Ortiz (2014).
5. On the “unfinished” nature of ethnographic fieldwork, see Biehl and Locke (2017).
6. Ferguson (2002).
7. See Piot (1999, 43–44).
8. Middleton and Cons (2014).
9. Fortun (2009).
10. Barthes (1981); and Derrida (1987, 5).
11. Smith and Mwadime (2014). Smith and Mwadime’s approach is just one prominent example of the anthropological examination of letter writing as a form of exchange. See also Parikh (2016).
12. Kemper and Peterson Royce (2002); and Rouch (2003).
13. Gupta and Ferguson (1997, 12, 16).
14. Bunzl (2004, 435–42).
15. Trouillot (1995).
16. Guest, Bunce, and Johnson (2006)
17. Harrison (1991).
18. Fischer (2018).