Recomendaciones de las investigaciones

The outlines of the story are well known. On 17 December 2010 Mohamed Bouazizi, a young, underemployed produce merchant in the rural Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid, had a run-in with civil authorities, who confiscated his wares. Upset and humiliated, later that day he went to the town square, doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. That act triggered protests that spread across the nation, the region and the world. But the details are less well known. In hindsight, the events have an appearance of inevitability, which detracts from understanding how the movement spread across the country, unifying a nation with disparate visions and experiences of the nation. Crucial to this spread was the use of powerful imagery that helped define and contextualise the protests themselves and the protesters. Over time an increasingly nationalist aesthetic created an ideological underpinning for the movement that allowed the participation of actors from different ideological backgrounds. The power of the images was bound up in the context and the mediating institutions, and following the revolution they lost their unifying power.

As the revolution grew from the isolated individual Bouazizi to the mass protests that brought down the government, it moved through three roughly recognisable phases that were marked and defined by their own distinctive aesthetics. In the initial phase of the movement, in December 2010, increas- ingly large protests broke out in primarily rural cities and towns. Although starting as peaceful marches with fairly broad participation, these often devolved into violent clashes between heavily armed security forces and stone-throwing youths. As the state tried to clamp down and prevent these protests from becoming more serious, it used increasingly lethal force, and dozens of protesters were killed. During this initial phase, the images that circulated were essentially

journalistic photographs of stone-throwing youths and the victims of police gunfire. These images were taken by Tunisians, uploaded by news organisations and other websites, and then transmitted back to Tunisia. The reflection and transmission of these locally taken images by global media institutions recon- textualised them, visually linking them generally to other protesters who were regarded as freedom fighters, and particularly to Palestinians in the Intifada, rather than riotous thugs. The distribution of images after each event helped prompt subsequent protests, establishing patterns that spread across the nation. The second phase, beginning in early January, was one of increasing nation- alisation of the protests, both in marches and demonstrations, and in social media. Some of the emotional motivation for the increasing participation was outrage at the many killed in the earlier clashes. At this time, there still was no shared sense that this was a revolutionary movement. Even the most ardent organisers thought of themselves as championing reform and did not expect the government to fall. While the journalistic recording of events continued, the aesthetics of the protests began to change as more and more Tunisians began creating (rather than merely recording) images for broader distribution. Tunisian flags featured prominently in these images, as the population reappropriated the image of the flag from state domination. The use of these images on Facebook constituted a form of virtual protest that itself helped generate a sense of unity.

That unity led to the triumphalist third phase, beginning around 12 January 2011, when Tunisians began to realise that the movement was so powerful that it would topple the regime. With the end in sight, there was the rise of a celebratory aesthetic that pointed with pride to the local control over the revolution, but also a clear acknowledgement of the global audience and the various media distribution networks. The flag continued to predominate, but its context shifted from one of shame and outrage to pride and celebration. While the interaction with global media sources and, eventually, a global audience was important to the movement, its ideology was nationalist, and the imagery emphasised unifying themes.

After the revolution, public sentiment fractured. Initial elections resulted in a coalition government led by Ennahda, an Islamist party whose leaders had been exiled and imprisoned by the state, and who thus had great credibility with much of the populace. Increasingly, large divisions grew between those who supported an assertively religious form of government and those who sought to keep religion and politics separated. Extremist groups began flying the black flag of Jihad, while students made Harlem Shake videos that featured the Tunisian flag. The power and meaning of the imagery had become fractured.

There had been large claims made regarding the role social media played

in enabling the Tunisian revolution.1 _{Like similar claims regarding previous}

discussed has been the nature of the interactions in which the social media participated. It is easy to conceptualise the internet as a Habermasian public sphere in which reasoned discourse and the dissemination of information plays out for a generic audience. The internet is, however, as Warner notes,

‘a space of discourse organised by nothing other than discourse itself’.3 _{A key}

component of the circulation of material in the Tunisian case (whatever the means of transmission) was the constitution of a public that considered this information relevant to it. Further, there was a bias towards ignoring the poetic and emotional contents of the material circulated, seeing it instead as part of

a rational discussion.4 _{While Tunisian activists did use social media for coordi-}

nating their efforts, and the broader Tunisian public did share (sometimes erro- neous) information through these same channels, the success of the revolution depended not on rational persuasion, but the unification of large segments of the Tunisian population and the bodily spatial participation of this newly self- conscious group. The spaces of protest became reconfigured as public spaces

available to this emerging public.5 _{In order to understand this process, in which}

Tunisians saw themselves as constituting a coherent and real public, one needs to understand the revolution aesthetically.

While this chapter primarily addresses imagery generated during the Tunisian revolution, it also draws on years of fieldwork in and engagement with Tunisia. I began in 1988, doing volunteer development work with the Peace Corps in rural Tunisia (in a region near Sidi Bouzid), subsequently returning multiple times for anthropological fieldwork, most recently in the summer of 2012. Different aspects of that fieldwork involved a wide range of participants. My most recent project has focused on the male community of salesmen in a plaza of Tunis’s old city, the medina, who mainly cater to tourists. Most of my conversations (with the exception of discussions with some Tunisians practising their English) were in Tunisian Arabic.

Teargas

While press accounts in the west focused on Bouazizi’s humiliation, the touch- stone for Tunisian viewers was the implicit corruption of the civil authorities. If they confiscated his wares because of a lack of proper paperwork, the assumption in Tunisia was that this was because he had not paid the proper bribes. Tunisians from all walks of life had complained to me of rampant corruption that made success more dependent on who one knew and what bribes one distributed than on hard work or intelligence. While this corruption was endemic, it was person- ified in President Zine al-Abidin Ben-Ali and his family. The young men on the streets of Tunis knew quite a bit about the family’s lavish lifestyle, describing to me the fancy cars they drove, down to the specific colour of each model.

The anger was not simply that the president’s family lived so well, or that their money was ill-gotten, but that the corruption that created this wealth prevented hard-working Tunisians from making a decent living. Bouazizi’s predicament, of being thwarted in his attempts to work by a dishonest system, was one that Tunisians of all classes could empathise with.

Late on the day of Bouazizi’s self-immolation, his mother led a protest group in front of the municipal hall where he had burned himself. A cousin posted a video of the protest online, where researchers from Al Jazeera, who actively

pursue such videos, found it, and broadcast it that same evening.6 _{The next}

day, spurred on by the video, by rumours spread by word of mouth and with the help of local union officials, a much, much bigger protest was held in the same location. Although some rocks were thrown, it was initially peaceful, until large groups of police tried to break up the demonstration with teargas. At this point it devolved into a riot, leaving two people dead from police bullets. Images and videos from this encounter were again placed online, where they were widely

distributed.7

Several themes stand out from these first days of the movement. While dissat- isfaction with the regime was widespread and deep, images played a crucial role in converting that dissatisfaction to political action. Equally importantly, these were images disseminated online and through global television networks, as well as through other avenues. While the movement was fiercely local, it was plugged into the media stream of a watching world that turned the ephemeral events of protest into concrete texts that could be circulated and read by a global audience. With its origin in the rural hinterland rather than the cosmopolitan city, and the elevation of a victim with a very specific story, the ideology and aesthetics focused on the local ‘Tunisianness’ of the movement, rather than linking itself to global ideological movements.

The images and videos taken by Tunisians − some with mobile phones − that began to circulate in the first days of the revolution are hardly unusual in themselves (see Fig. 2.1). An observer who pays attention to world news might be excused for finding these images − young men with scarves over their faces throwing stones at well-equipped, black-uniformed riot police amidst billowing teargas − effectively indistinguishable from similar photographs that emerge from time to time from the latest global hot spot. Even the method of transmission of these images heightened this sense of generic unrest, for while many circulated through social media or individualised peer networks, Arab cable news channels, particularly Al Jazeera, were also a prime source. So many urban Tunisians received these photographs through the same means that they received similar images from around the world. The power of photojournalist images lies not in any unconventionality, but in their ability to stimulate public

events in the frame of an oppressed population struggling against an authori-

tarian regime. As Butler has argued,9 _{the globalising media establishes local}

protests as local events per se, creating the potential for something to ‘really happen there’.

This is an important step, as such a reading of the events is not inevitable. Over the decades, there have been many flashes of populist violence and demonstration in Tunisia, but they never captured the public imagination. As a general rule, the government tried to suppress information about such outbursts, but in a comparatively small country such as Tunisia, these efforts had little success. More significantly, however, the government could control the frame and narrative of the events. For example, an outburst at a football stadium in 1998 was described by the official (and only) media as having been caused by violent hooligans. Given the broad concern in Europe and beyond with football hooligans, and the strong antipathy between the supporters of various teams in Tunisia, this was a plausible explanation. When Tunisian television and newspapers showed images of the destruction caused by the rioting groups, it solidified the narrative frame of unruly and undisciplined mobs, clearly groups that needed to be better controlled by the government. Although counter narra- tives also circulated − students with family in the area told me that the unrest stemmed from political and economic concerns − these narratives had compara-

tively little impact. Unlike Egypt, Tunisia did not have a ‘culture of protest’.10

The images and their forms of transmission in late 2010, however, allowed for the construction of a different narrative. Their aesthetic was that of jour- nalism, asserting the verisimilitude of images captured, amidst streaming chaos, of grainy mobile phone photos of dead bodies. They carry the authenticity and power of global news and its well understood genre of similar images from around the world. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006 had focused Tunisian public attention on the genre of international cable news. Its ubiquity arose one day in the summer of 2006, when one of the young salesmen I worked with teased me about my Arabic accent, saying that I sounded just like the US State Department Arabic-speaking spokesman that they saw on al- Jazeera. Upon hearing this, others chimed in, saying that yes, that was exactly who I sounded like. Similarly, I met elderly uneducated Tunisian women who could hold forth at great length about the inadequacies of Condoleezza Rice, then the US Secretary of State. Certainly the amount of close attention that Tunisians paid to the news varied, but the general patterns of news coverage had become a widespread cultural referent. This contextualisation helps explain some of the power of the circulated Tunisian photos. The sight of clashes between rock-throwing youths and well-armed state forces made them more than just generic images. They also invoked the very specific context of the Intifada, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and were broadcast by Al Jazeera, which was one of the first sources that Tunisians turned to in seeking information about the Intifada. While it would be difficult to find strong ideological parallels between the Intifada and the Tunisian revolution, the resemblance of the imagery is inescapable and helped created a moral landscape for evaluating the events in Tunisia.

Invoking the context of the Intifada and the genre of photos of insurrection also suggests that the pictures of revolution were also pictures for revolution. They became a model to be replicated. As much as they defined the actions that had occurred, they also created meaning and expectations for what was going to occur. While this was not as clear a ‘citation’ as Manoukian’s example of the Iranian 2009 protesters chanting ‘Allah Akbar’ in invocation of the 1979

revolution11_{, it still functioned as a citation, insofar as past practices helped}

define contemporary activities and provided a framework for future actions. The distinction is that in the Iranian case the citation was of an explicit slogan, while in the Tunisian example it was the form of protest itself and the aesthetics of representing it that were being cited. It is important to note that in this context citation is more than an evocative reference, but also, as Werbner puts it (in this volume), a form of contagion, a method for replicating the protests in other places. While a great deal of attention, including in this volume, is paid to the process of transmission across the globe, it is also important to see this process of transmission at work on the local scale.

While the actions of Bouazizi provided the catalyst for the first protests and remained a touchstone throughout the movement, the individual protests created the impetus for the protests that followed. In particular it is the images from those protests that provided the emotional and contextual framework for the later events. The protests provided a format for expressing ideas and emotions that were culturally resonant. However, there is more to the images of protest than that, for while they helped define the form of protest, they also helped generate its emotional power. They did not simply supply an activist vocabulary for a population that had no voice. The emotional power of the images helped create the outrage, which then had to be channelled in the form of protests. It created a self-perpetuating cycle. The common metaphor used by global media in describing the spread of the revolution was that of a spark that ignited a fire that spread across the land (and eventually the world). A difficulty with such a metaphor is that it leaves little room for analysing the paths and means of transmission. The spread of a fire appears inevitable and disconnected from human actions. A more useful model might be that of viral spread, as it draws attention to the mechanisms by which the ideas, attitudes, emotions and

behaviours spread and perhaps mutate over time.12

The model of a virus also provides a helpful format for understanding the role of channels of media distribution. Many early commentators on the Tunisian uprising labelled it the Facebook revolution, the Twitter revolution or the Al Jazeera revolution, and so on. On reflection, analysts backed away from these overstated claims and the consensus seems to be that none of the media channels caused the revolution; indeed, there is plenty of evidence from earlier eras of revolutionary messages spreading without the benefit of the internet. While it is undoubtedly true that the media did not create the revolution, however, they certainly played a role in how it unfolded. Using a viral epidemiological model, one can view the media as vectors of transmission that play a role in where and how the viral outbreak of protest spreads. By providing the legitimacy of contextual associations, at the same time they provide a medium in which the virus could flourish and grow. As Postill (in this volume) notes, different media forms have different identities that create different possibilities. For example, the broadcast of images and videos by television news channels creates a sense of ‘veracity, [of] history-in-the-making’, something that Facebook and Twitter lack; but they, in turn, can supply a decentralised mechanism for spontaneously sharing images and information and building connections among potential activists.

One must be very careful in using the viral metaphor, however, as there is the ever-present danger that the revolutionary sentiment will appear as an inde- pendent actor with an agency of its own. In the case of Tunisia, this viral model works particularly well for the first stages of the revolution, when the dominant

aesthetic was the verisimilitude between the journalistic images and the protest itself. The images appeared as mere reflections of a reality that was spreading

beyond any one group’s control.13 _{However, as the uprising continued, a new}

aesthetic element arose, that of the images consciously created for consumption, both locally and beyond. If the power of the journalistic images partly rested on their generic links to similar images and movements around the world, the new aesthetic emphasised the localness of the uprising. While the early images cast protesters as the objects of a journalistic gaze, the new images featured protesters as creative subjects speaking to other Tunisians and the world directly.

Not surprisingly, the change in aesthetics was linked to a change in the