In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, George Paul Meiu clarifies his concept of ethno-erotic economy and the commodification of ethnic
sexuality; reflects on the role of objects in shaping political representations; discusses belonging and citizenship as well as mobility, memory, and materiality – and shares his insights concerning possible
interpretations of the Greek God Dionysus episode at the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games.





Adrian Matus: You have done extensive research on East Africa,
particularly Kenya. As a result, you published “Ethno-erotic Economies:
Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya”[i],
where you propose the concept of ethno-erotic economies to grasp what is going
on in the tourist resorts of the country. Could you tell me a bit about your main
findings concerning the Samburu ethnic sexuality and what they may tell us
about belonging in today’s postcolonial world more
generally?
George Paul Meiu: My project in ethno-erotic economy started in a very
specific place in Kenya. Since the 1980s, young Samburu men from Northern Kenya
have begun migrating seasonally to the coast of the Indian Ocean, where they
sold souvenirs and danced for tourists, but also increasingly started
developing relationships with women from Western Europe. By the time I started
doing research in 2005, in Northern Kenya–where these men come from–some of the
richest men in the area were in relationships with white women. For me, this
raised all kinds of questions. How do you commodify ethnicity and sexuality in
order to produce a certain kind of future at home? What does it mean for an
indigenous population like the Samburu, who have been marginalized and peripheralized
by both the colonial and independent states, to now seek a certain kind of
economic emancipation by commodifying colonial stereotypes of themselves and of
their sexuality?
Increasingly, what I started seeing is that this is actually very
little about sexuality, as such. This is not about what people do sexually.
This is about all kinds of imaginaries that one brings in terms of tourist
commodification, consumption and so on. What was really interesting for me was
how these things reverberate beyond tourism. I ended up going back to some of
these men's villages where I did the heavy part of my research and saw how the
money that they brought home gave rise to all kinds of gossip and debates over
what it means to make money through sex and feed your children and parents with
it. All of these moral dilemmas raise questions about what it means to belong,
to belong to that area and to an ethnic group. A lot of what these young men
were also doing was trying to use the capital they acquired through sexuality
to gain respectability.
In many parts of the world today, people use sex economies to
try to move to the West or other more affluent parts of the world. What was
interesting for me here is that these young men did not. Most of them wanted to
go back to their home village, where the value of the money was higher, where they
had the comfort of being at home and where the ability to negotiate
respectability was very different. This created all kinds of puzzles. What does
it mean to be a young man in your early 20s, to already have so much money and to
gain access to becoming an elder, a respected elder, through your sexuality?
All these conundrums raise the issues over what it means to belong. This is a
story about East Africa, about Samburu indigenous people and the colonial
discourses of their sexuality. In many ways, it is closely related to the global
phenomenon of intensified migration.
We see the commodification of ethnic sexuality everywhere. What
I mean by ethnic sexuality is the very modernist idea that we carry within our
bodies something that we can call sexuality.
On the one hand, we see across the world now a growing
commodification of migrants. I am currently doing research in Romania. A lot of
Romanian migrants in Western Europe– men and women–commodify their sexualities
and sexual economies, as Eastern Europeans and Romanians. This fantasy has very
strong repercussions. On the other hand, we see growing ethno-nationalism
everywhere that plays out in the name of sexuality and ethno-sexuality. Sexuality
becomes quite key in both consumption and governance in the contemporary world.

AM: In your book Queer Objects to the Rescue[ii],
you shifted and narrowed the focus of your investigation by pointing to objects
that play a surprising role in shaping political imageries that represent
queerness as a societal threat and the resulting practices to exclude queer
people. Your claim is that, if we want to understand and critique homophobia,
we need to understand the role of such objects. One of your central points is
that plastic plays an important role in this type of representation, as Chapter
4 of this book argues. What are the main reasons behind associating plastic
with queerness?
GPM: The deployment of political
homophobia has played a central role in morally legitimizing the sovereignty of
the state. In many contexts, the state actually works to monopolize capital and
claim monopoly on various forms of extraction and exploitation. In this very
moment, it seems to me that when we talk about these things, such as moral
policing and moral panics, our ability to imagine has become quite bankrupt.
When we talk about homophobia, for example, we end up
demonizing homophobes versus positioning ourselves as scholarly critics;
activists on a position of superiority to those irrational Others who hate.
While not condoning any form of hate or relativizing it, I do think that as
social scientists we have a responsibility–ethical and political–to try to
understand the conditions in which hate is reproduced, also.
Thus, working on objects was not necessarily an attempt to
narrow the focus, but to escape this discursive realm that keeps us trapped in a
kind of liberal, emancipatory discourse versus irrational, backward, demonic
hate dichotomy. We need to understand things differently. We need to step a bit
outside. Objects, in a way, did that for me. The paradox of homophobia,
xenophobia, racism, misogyny and hate towards migrants creates a globalized
grammar of hate. If these things indeed are global, then that still does not
explain how people and populations–vast populations across the world with very
different contexts of life, work and governance– pick them up.
These discourses have to be made to resonate. I was trying to
look at those poetics. How does a leader come in front of the masses and say: “your
children are in danger immigrants, are in danger of the homosexuals?” For
people to pick up, I do not believe these discourses that just assume masses
are these irrational, malleable things. In reality, we have to pay close
attention to the sentiments and desires that they are expressing. Therefore,
for me, objects became an interesting coincidental way to tap into the
production of collective sentiments. While doing previous research on my first
book in Kenya, I started seeing a lot of concern and panics over various kinds
of objects, and then I thought, how might panic over various kinds of objects tell
us something about the panics over homosexuals or immigrants?
Just to give a quick example, early on in my research I came
across a Facebook post by somebody in Northern Kenya who made a homophobic
statement. The way it was formulated was quite intriguing for me as an
anthropologist. It said that “homosexuality is a foreign plastic import that
doesn't fit African chemistry”. There's a lot of cultural and historical
baggage that goes into formulating and understanding what is being said here.
For me, this resonated because I had already started working in northern Kenya
on questions of plastic and panics over them.  The fact that there is a whole category of
young men in the area called plastic boys, children of refugees who do
not claim any belonging to clans or lineages in the area, and therefore–like
plastic–seem to come from elsewhere and never attach themselves to any
particular place, is significant. Plastic became a very evocative medium,
object, or set of objects, that gave a certain kind of material expression to
anxieties over belonging, autochthony, bodily well-being, and integrity, as
well as to concerns over reproduction, whether biological or social.
In that regard, objects give us the certainty of a definitive
cause for all our troubles it's because of plastic, it's because of the
plastic boys, it's because of this that we cannot live our lives fully as an
ethnic group, as a nation, and so on. Something very similar, in fact,
happens with the homosexual body. These objects, I argue in this book, enable a
certain kind of displacement of meanings, but also of sentiments, anxieties, and
desires, from a very diverse set of contexts, where they often have very legitimate
reason to exist, particularly where opportunities of work and social
reproduction have shrunk. Yet while these anxieties are very legitimate, their
projection upon objects, whether it's plastic or the homosexual or the
immigrant, can be very problematic. This is, in a way, how I think contemporary
politics works, and therefore we do need to pay attention to these forms of
displacement.
When you have a sexuality politics that only looks at what it
names; when we say we're studying sexuality or we're activists of sexuality and
all we care about is sexual identification and sexual expression; we miss out
on how sexuality ends up taking on anxieties, concerns and desires that have
nothing to do with sex or sexual identity at all. Rather, they belong to other
domains like work, reproduction and consumption sovereignty.
AM: Could you tell us about your fieldwork and how you try to
make sense of the objects you encounter? What methodologies do you prefer when
trying to account for the role of commodification in the routes of violence and
displacement?
GPM: I think that my methodologies
over the years have become messier and messier. I am doing things that I would
never advise my graduate students to do because it is, in a way, messy. I do
find myself more and more in need to embrace messiness in order to decentre
certain discourses. A proper methodology about sexuality would be to do some
participant observation such as interviews – to talk to people about sexuality.

What I'm doing is a bit different in the sense that, in order
to understand what sexuality politics is about or what the commodification of
sexuality is all about, you need to look elsewhere. You need to leave sexuality
aside and look at the places in which its effects or, or conditions of
possibility emerge. I am studying homophobia, but I am putting homophobia on
hold, and I'm going and looking at what plastic signifies before I can connect
it back. I call these ethnographic detours with other anthropologists who have
written them in a similar vein.
These kinds of methodologies pursue ethnographic detours. In
other words, rather than look straight on at the subject that we claim to
observe, and only engage with the literatures pertaining to that subject or
take that subject very literally, I am trying to walk in circles around that
subject in order to see how its effects or conditions of possibility emerge or
register beyond it. To be a scholar or an anthropologist of sexuality, I have
to actually pay attention to labor and economic value. I have to pay attention
to questions of ethnicity and autochthony. I have to pay attention to questions
of commodity production and consumption. In other words, you have to be
everywhere and nowhere.
AM: Your most recent publication On Hate, its Objects, and
the Poetics of Sexuality juxtaposes the Romanian and the Kenyan cases of
highly mediatization panics over sexuality. You argue that one of the reasons of
defending the “family values from the foreign plight” is determined by “a late
capitalist political economy when sexuality—its politics and poetics—plays out
in uncannily similar ways across the world” and creates “an interplay between
globally circulating grammars of identity” that are able to resonate with
inherited historical anxieties. What creates the objects of hate in these
cases? Could you expand on such patterns of panic?
GMP: I think I can try to distil
two patterns, maybe through an example or two, to help. Because one of the key
issues of this modularity of objects of hate, whether we talk about the
immigrant, whether we talk about the sexual other, whether we talk about
various forms of sexualized indigenous people or racialized others and so on, there
is something quite similar happening across the globe.
For instance, the fact that Russia has anti-LGBTQ politics
and the fact that previously Bolsonaro's Brazil had similar politics, those
things resonate with one another. You cannot say that these are separate
places, separate cultures –we live in a global world. We recognize the enemy,
as it were, by virtue of its appearance everywhere. But what I am arguing as an
anthropologist is that we cannot stop there. The work that this does in every
place is really important to pay attention to. One interesting example was a
few years ago when radical right protesters in Brazil, for example, protesting
for family values, anti-LGBTQ policies, or against what they call “gender
ideology”. Any discourse or film or culture production associated with gender
and sexual diversity was depicted as somehow threatening to the fabric of a
nation or a culture.
When these protesters gathered in Rio in front of a venue
where queer and feminist theorist Judith Butler was to give a talk, they produced
an effigy of Judith Butler dressed as a witch and set it on fire as though to cleanse,
as it were, the nation state of the plight of “gender ideology”. To me, what
happened there of course is scary, but if you take a deep breath and try to analyse
ethnographically what is going on there, it gives you a sense of the quite
complex grammars through which this sort of sexuality politics and ethno-nationalism
plays out.
There is a growing sense of ambiguity and uncertainty around
the center. I argue in my book Queer Objects to the Rescue: Intimacy and
Citizenship in Kenya that you do not need to be queer for elements of your
life to already have been deeply non-normativ

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