Amina Tawasil

Reframing Graffiti: The Writer’s Itch
Amina Tawasil, PhD
Lecturer, Programs in Anthropology, Teachers College, Columbia University

Since spring 2021, I have been conducting extensive ethnographic fieldwork—what Renato Rosaldo calls "deep hanging out"—with over 200 graffiti writers across New York City, urban New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Through this immersion, I've documented their urban spatial practices and peer education networks, amassing over ten thousand audiovisual materials, fieldnotes, and social media interactions. For these practitioners, graffiti writing is fundamentally a spatial practice involving the inscription of letter-based names using spray paint on public and private property. My interlocutors who began writing in the 1970s, 80s and 90s tell stories of teachers making them feel like failures, of living in buildings without heat, of running out of staple foods at the end of the month, of playing in junkyards, and of witnessing buildings burning down. By writing the graffiti name onto the urban space, they enunciated themselves as important to the workings of the city. It comes as no surprise that graffiti has been framed as inherently subversive. The urban landscape that birthed graffiti in 1970s New York City, however, has transformed significantly since then. My research reveals a more complex contemporary reality. I demonstrate how graffiti writers write for purposes that extend beyond resisting authority; specifically, to write for the sake of writing. To understand one aspect of these experiences, I look closely at what writers call the “writer’s itch”—a distinctive urge that transcends simple emotional categorization. I take my cue from scholars of affect to explore this self-generating and self-sustaining experiential state of writing graffiti.

Amina Tawasil is an anthropologist serving as a Lecturer in the Programs in Anthropology at Columbia University's Teachers College since 2017. She has published several articles from her fieldwork in the Islamic Republic of Iran on seminarian women, and has recently published a book entitled, Paths Made by Walking: The Work of Howzevi Women in Iran through Indiana University Press. Previously, she taught at the International Studies Institute, University of New Mexico after serving as the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Middle East and North African Studies program, with courtesy appointment in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. She is particularly interested in ethnographic and theoretical framings of anonymity, slow labor, time, urban situations, and performance. She is currently completing her fourth year of ethnographic fieldwork among graffiti writers in New York City, Philadelphia and urban New Jersey, which she has published a chapter on in the Ethnography of Reading at Thirty edited volume.