The Familiar Strange: Recent Episodes
Your Familiar Strangers
The Familiar Strange is a podcast about doing anthropology: that is, about listening, looking, trying out, and being with, in pursuit of uncommon knowledge about humans and culture. Find show notes, plus our blog about anthropology's role in the world, at https://www.thefamiliarstrange.com. Twitter: @tfsTweets. FB: facebook.com/thefamiliarstrange. Instagram: @thefamiliarstrange.
Brought to you by your familiar strangers: Ian Pollock, Jodie-Lee Trembath, Julia Brown, Simon Theobald, Kylie Wong Dolan; produced by Deanna Catto and Matthew Phung, and with support from the Australian Anthropological Society, the Australian National University’s Schools of Culture, History and Language and Archeology and Anthropology, and the Australian Centre for Public Awareness of Science, and produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
We acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we record this podcast, and pay our respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, past, present, and emerging.
In this episode Familiar Stranger Emma Quilty sat down with Associate Professor Oneka LaBennett to talk about her most recent book, Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond
In this episode Familiar Stranger sat down with Fijian author and political analyst Edward Narain and Associate Professor Tarryn Philips from La Trobe University.Together Edward and Tarryn published Sugar: An Ethnographic Novel which reveals the extent to which the lives, health, and opportunities of Fijians are still dramatically affected by the country’s colonial past and entrenched inequality.Set in Suva, with a tropical cyclone looming, Sugar follows three strangers from different cultural backgrounds as they find themselves entwined in a brutal murder: revealing inconvenient truths about the darker side of global development in Fiji.The story follows a naïve but well-intentioned Australian health volunteer, a jaded Indo-Fijian amateur historian, and a troubled Fijian (iTaukei) teen caring for his diabetic grandmother. The reader is immersed in each character’s world and slowly comes to understand the historical and structural reasons behind Fiji’s diabetes epidemic, exploitative labour and trade practices, and the role Australia and other nations play in both.Head over to our website for a full list of Links and Citations!
Producer’s note: Hi everyone, Executive Producer Matt here, just wanted to slide in here quickly and say that we recorded this panel a while ago, so you might hear some familiar voices! Just wanted to say a quick thank you to Irina, Andrew, Ruonan and Alex for all their effort in recording this panel! We hope you like it. We’ve gone digging and we struck some gold! We recorded this panel a little while ago at the Centre for the Public Awareness of Science’s podcast studio with some of the PhD candidates based at the ANU. In this panel, Familiar Stranger Ruonan opens the floor up to familiar Stranger Alex to talk about some of the differences he noticed around when it comes to “bushwalking”/hiking versus, you know, walking. The Strangers dive into the differences between the two and the interesting societal structures which determines if you’re a hiker or a walker. Familiar Stranger Irina then poses a question around identity as individuals as well as anthropologists. It launches the Strangers into pensive thoughts around who they are, the communities they are interacting with and what makes us, us and them, them. There were some really interesting topics broached on this panel and we hope you enjoy!
This week Emma Quilty sat down with Matthew Archer, Assistant Professor at Maastricht University to discuss his brand new NYU Press book Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability. In this brilliant and incisive new book, Matthew Archer weaves together ethnographic fieldwork conducted among a wide array of sustainability professionals, interviews with private bankers, and apocalyptic science fiction—and features analyses of name-brand companies including Volkswagen, Unilever, and Nestlé. Matthew Archer is an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist interested in the intersection of technology and sustainability, especially in the context of global supply chain governance. Most recently, this has involved research on metal and mineral supply chains, with a focus on traceability and digitization, building on my previous work studying sustainability standards as a technology of governance in global agricultural supply chains, ESG integration in investment practices, and the way corporate sustainability managers think about their impacts. Head to our website for a full list of links and citations!
This week Sean Heath sat down with Noel B. Salazar, Professor of Anthropology at KU Leuven to discuss the celebration of Anthropology Day(s). Their conversation covered the initiation of world anthropology day by the American Anthropological Association and touched on national celebrations of anthropology day, as well as the potential for a World Anthropologies Days. They also discussed Noel’s latest work on emplaced mobilities and mobile places.Noel B. Salazar is Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Founder of the Cultural Mobilities Research (CuMoRe) cluster at KU Leuven. His research interests include anthropologies of mobility and travel, heritage and tourism, discourses and imaginaries of Otherness, world anthropologies, and endurance locomotion.Head over to our website for a full list of links and citations
A brief update on the state of TFS project and a call for new contributors to the team.
Trigger Warning: Please note that this episode makes mention of Sexual Assault and sexual violence. In this episode we walk about MeToo anthropology from the lens of fieldwork and within the academy itself. Familiar Stranger Emma Quilty sat down with anthropologists Holly Walters and Margaret Czerwienski to talk about the MeToo collective and its incredible array of resources as well as what it means to do activist work within the academy. We also covered the prevalence of the witch hunt trope so often leveraged against those who make accusations against powerful individuals and institutions. Are MeToo accusations modern day witch hunts? Listen to find out.
The podcast is back!
This week, we've challenged ourselves to be as meta as possible, with a podcast, about podcasting, released by an academic podcast! Try saying that after a wine or two.
Familiar Stranger Tim and Sean sat down with Dr Ian Cook, who has recently released his book "Scholarly Podcasting Why, What, How?", which actually interviewed some Familiar Strange alumni, keep your ears peeled for the name drops!
It was a really interesting conversation about the future of podcasting, and how academia is shaping podcasting and vice versa.
Make sure you head to our website for a full list of links and citations!
It’s been a while…We’re back, this time with Familiar Strange Emma leading a panel on AI and specifically Chat GPT. This week, Emma is joined by Familiar Strangers Matt and Sean to discuss some of the advancements of ChatGPT and what it means for us as academics and human creativity. Matt dives into how his poetry has been informed by AI and Sean reveals his ultimate AI betrayal. It was a really interesting discussion, with plenty of laughs in between. We hope you enjoy!
Welcome back to the Familiar Strange. We’re kicking off 2023 with an interview with Dr Jasmijn Rana from Leiden University. Dr Jasmijn’s research interests include, gender, race-ethnicity, religion, embodiment and movement. Jasmijn is currently (2022-2023) a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Global Fellow at University of California, Berkeley.This week, Familiar Stranger Sean discusses Dr Rana’s latest ethnographic study “Punching Back - Gender, Religion and Belonging in Women-Only Kickboxing”. Sean and Dr Rana dive into the physical practices of femininity, physicality and how slacking is actually a good thing…kind of. Thank you to Dr Jasmijn Rana for taking time out of their schedule to discuss their ethnography.Head over to our website for a full list of links and citations!
We are back for 2023! This month we welcome our newest Familiar Stranger Nitya! Nitya has just finished their Master of Anthropology and is current doing some further work into Gender and mining. In this episode we deep dive into Nitya's topic and the stereotypes of mining, and dig into the current gender perceptions of the mining industry. In a belated celebration of World Anthropology day, we also dive into the anthropology origin stories of our Familiar Strangers, how they first got into anthropology, and what it means to them. It was a really insightful episode and we hope you enjoy!
This week we’re back for a really important panel. This week, Familiar Strangers Lachlan, Sean, Kath and Claire gather to discuss casualisation of academic jobs and the effects that strikes can have on workers rights. Some of the strangers are currently participating in a unfair labour practices strike along with other members of the United Auto Workers for fair pay, quality health and family-friendly benefits, and a supportive and respectful work environment. The Strangers talk all things industrial action, politics and the power of industrial actions. It was a really important episode and we hope that this episode can offer you a brief insight into what issues are affecting academia on the ground.
Familiar Stranger Emma sits down with Frank Pasquale from Brooklyn Law School. Frank is also currently co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Research in Computational Law! Frank is one of the leaders in relation to AI Law and cross-disciplinary approaches, with his works of The Black Box Society The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information and New Laws of RoboticsDefending Human Expertise in the Age of AI, incorporates a broad range of insight from an even broader range of disciplines. In this conversation, Emma and Frank touch on authority, Trust and the essays of Clifford Geertz. Briefly dive deep into America’s Anti-Trust laws and eventually discuss ideas of where to next for AI technologies, and how disciplines can work more efficiently to drive new insights and findings.
This week we’re back with a conference extravaganza! With the AAS and AAA’s just passed, listen in to Familiar stranger Alex, Lachie, Sean and Ruonan’s thoughts!
Alex and Ruonan attended the AAS while Lachie and Sean attended the AAA in person and virtually.
The strangers dive into their past conference experiences, and ask the big questions like “What Tina Turner coverband gets the most anthrpologists to the dancefloor?” The Strangers more seriously ask the question of the function of conferences and what the future of conferences are.
It was a great podcast and we’re looking forward to hearing from you about your experiences at the AAS and AAA’s!
This week, Familiar Stranger Emma conducts her first interview! Emma sat down with Dr Vaike Fors from Halmstad University. Dr Vaike Fors is a professor in design ethnography, focusing on learning in everyday life.
In the past, Vaike has worked with Volvo as part of a number of projects in relation to user experiences with autonomous vehicles and mobility. Her work has expanded into a number of different projects, with a focus on city infrastructure as well as public transport.
It was a really interesting conversation and we had such a great time putting this together. Thank you again to Dr Vaike Fors for spending the time.
This week we’re joined by Familiar Strangers Kathy, Lachlan, Alex and Sean to talk all things AI Art and activism.
Alex kick’s us off by asking us to consider the recent developments in AI image creation. Alex dives into DALL.E and what it means for people that still consider themselves “artists”. The Strangers explore labour, effort and the “creative” process. What do you think? Should we be using AI art generation? Who owns the art?
Kath then explores further the death of Mahsa Amini in Iran and what it means to conduct activism as anthropologist and vice versa. Questions around positionality and utility were raised by the Strangers, especially when it comes to research. What do you think? Is there such a thing as an activist anthropologist?
It was a series of really interesting topics this week so we hope you enjoy!
We’re back this week and with a very special collaboration. As part of AAS2019, we had a chance to record an enlightening roundtable on the history of feminist anthropology in Australia. You can find parts 1 and 2 here! The wonderful Dr Benjamin Hegarty, Dr Carly Schuster and Dr Shiori Shakuto are back for part 3 of their roundtable where they dive deeper into the history and great works of feminist anthropology in Australia. It was an absolute pleasure to help record this episode and thank you again to Dr Benjamin Hegarty, Dr Carly Schuster and Dr Shiori Shakuto for their time and effort in putting this episode together. We hope you enjoy!
This month we’re joined by the latest member of The Familiar Strange, Lachlan Summers! Lachlan is currently based in Mexico city and researches the 2017 Earthquake.
As part of this panel, we dive a bit deeper into Lachlan’s research and how he has investigated the temporalities and culture changes in Mexico city. We also touch on concepts of sovereignty, who controls what and what people mean when they say “energy sovereignty”. What do you think? Can you even have “sovereignty” over energy sources?
It was a really interesting conversation this week and we had a great time recording! We hope you enjoy!
Welcome back to the Familiar Strange!
This week we welcome Emma, one of the newest familiar strangers!
For this panel, we dive into some of Emma’s work as a “Witchy” Anthropologist and how it plays into her current work in AI. Emma gives us a rundown of her practise of witchcraft here in Australia and the kinds of factors and influences that inform her methods.
It was a really interesting conversation touching on a huge variety of methodologies and concepts!
We hope you enjoy and Welcome to the Familiar Strange Emma!
This week Familiar Stranger Tim speaks with Dr Letizia Bonanno.
Dr Letizia Bonanno is a medical anthropologist working on issues of care and pharmaceuticals. In March 2019 she earned her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester.
In their conversation, Tim asks Letizia about her fieldwork in a social clinic of solidarity in Athens and the impact of austerity policies on people seeking healthcare in Greece at that time. They also discuss modes and practices of care during times of crisis. Their conversation also touches on the role of graphic ethnography as a form of ethnographic practice and as a way to make sense of the ironic and paradoxical situations one often finds themselves presented with during fieldwork.
Letizia is also a passionate advocate for bringing anthropology to broader audiences outside of academia and speaks about her role as a visual editor for Otherwise Magazine, an initiative dedicated to storytelling through ethnographic research, activism, fiction and non-fiction writing, poetry, and visual essays.
As someone who has been following her work for some time it was a real privilege to be able to speak with her.
We’re back! We’re back from our Semester break and keen to get back into creating the content you know and love.
This week, we’re joined by Dr Sean Heath! The newest Familiar Stranger. In the first part of this panel, we dive into Sean’s work with competitive swimmers in Canada and the United Kingdom. We dive into what immersion is, and how it interplays with our lives today. It was really interesting to hear about how swimmers interact with their body-sense and their fondness for chlorinated water.
Next, Ruonan draws attention to the current political instability around the world, paying particular attention to the conflict in Ukraine, the resignation of the Sri Lankan Prime Minister and President and the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. She asks questions of the utility of anthropology in such chaotic times, as well as some of the basis for these crises.
It was an enlightening conversation and we hope you enjoy.
We’re so happy to be back so keep your ears peeled for some exciting content coming up.
Hey Everyone,
From everyone at the TFS team we just wanted to say a quick thank you before we take our season break. Don't worry though, we're not going anywhere and we'll be back around late July. Thank you for all your support this season and we're looking forward to coming back with more of the stuff you love!
Thanks again, and as always,
Keep Talking Strange.
Today we talked about Lisa’s research on sexual and reproductive health technologies in the United States as well as in the Middle East and North Africa. We focused on emergency contraceptives and unpacked the arguments both for and against making them available over the counter in America. Lisa took a deep dive into how the activism for expanded access to emergency contraceptives has created a hierarchy of deservedness that prioritises specific groups above others, diverting public attention away from the universal human rights discourse.
We then turned to Egypt where Lisa has done long-term ethnographic fieldwork on sexuality and dived into a particular sexual technology - hymenoplasty, or hymen-reconstruction procedures. Lisa shared with us a fascinating story of how people used it as a tactic to circumvent or subvert cultural norms and build social respectability. We also touched on the unexpectedly diverging opinions on hymenoplasty from religious authorities, doctors, and laypeople.
Welcome back to the Familiar Strange!
This week is Familiar Stranger Ruonan’s first panel as a host! We think she did pretty well! Ruonan is joined this week by Familiar Strangers Alex, Andy and Irina!
Alex starts us off by telling us he is leaving us! But one thing he’ll miss (aside from the other familiar strangers of course) is the numerous bushwalking or hiking tracks that are around the ANU. He reflects on how bushwalking or hiking has become a new marker for the middle class and the other strangers reflect on what hiking represents. What do you think? When does a walk become a hike? Is it just semantics?
Then, Irina raises the big question of “who are you? Who decides who you are?” A big question for a short podcast! The strangers dive into what that question means for them and their respective field sites, as well as anthropology as a whole. What do you think defines someone? Why do you define yourself the way you do?
It was a really thought provoking conversation this week and we had a lot of fun recording in person again. We hope you enjoy!
Welcome back to the Familiar Strange.
We’re back with a special panel episode with familiar stranger Alex sitting down with some of the First year PhD students doing Anthropology at ANU. Mamta, Maddy and Andy were kind enough to take some time out of their busy schedules and discuss all things PhD. From life pre-PhD to where they could go next, we had a blast making this episode in person! We hope you enjoy!
Welcome back to the Familiar Strange!
This week Familiar Stranger Alex sits down with Dr Eric Hirsch. Dr Eric Hirch is currently an assistant professor at Franklin & Marshall College in the department of Environmental Studies. Eric’s research interests center around local understandings of what it means to be wealthy; the impacts of mineral extraction; cultural branding; and outsiders trying to improve things for people that may or may not want them there.
In this interview, Alex queries Eric about his time living in Peru, living in the cities within the beautiful Colca valley. They dive into what defines wealth, how people can measure growth and artificial insemination of all things. It was an absolute pleasure to interview Dr Eric Hirsch and we hope you enjoy!
Head over to our website for a full list of links and citations!
Ep # 88: Creating Queer Space & The Lenses of War: This month on TFS. Welcome back for another Panel! This week we’re joined by familiar strangers Carolyn West, Matt Phung, Ruonan Chen and Alex D’Aloia. Carolyn starts us off this week by sharing her recent experiences at a Hen’s night she had recently. She shares her experience entering into different spaces and navigating the emotions that come with each space. Do you have any spaces like that? How do you think “queer” space is created? Next Alex asks the strangers about the current invasion of the Ukraine by the Russian Military. He poses the question around truth, what is being seen, what isn’t being seen and how truth can vary from person to person. What do you think? What kinds of things have you been seeing on your news feeds about the current conflict in Ukraine?
Head over to our website for a full list of links and citations.
Before we dive into today’s episode we’d just like to add a content warning for this episode for sexual assault and drug use.
This week, Familiar Stranger Carolyn sits down with Adrian Watts, a PhD Candidate from the University of Melbourne. Adrian spent his fieldwork in a London squat called The Black Stag.
Throughout this conversation, Carolyn asks questions around the lifestyle of a squatter, and Alex helps to paint a vivid picture of the lives that the people living in the Black Stag lived.
It was a great chat with some thought provoking ideas.
Head over to our website for a list of links and citations.
Welcome back to The Familiar Strange! We’re joined this week by our newest Familiar Stranger, Kathryn! You might have heard her on Episode 84 last season but we’ve convinced her to stick around! Welcome Kathryn.
We start this month’s episode by discussing the recent protests that have been occurring in Australia’s capital. Kathryn and the rest of the strangers dive into their experiences with protesting and how we are seeing a shift in the motives and types of people that are starting to participate. What do you guys think? Have you been to any protests recently?
We then jump on the NFT bandwagon, with Alex giving us a crash course into what an NFT is, how it works and why they exist. Carolyn, as a photographer and image maker has some interesting things to say on the topics of creation, scarcity and clout. What do you guys think about NFT’s? Revolutionary new way to sell art or just another ponzi scheme?
Head over to our website for a full list of links and citations!
The team at TFS would like to say thank you to all our listeners this year and to everyone who has listened in to our podcasts and read the blog this year! We are taking a short season break and we will return in February 2021
Let’s keep in touch. Feel free to submit something to the blog, we’re always looking for content, and are keen to hear new voices. The submission guidelines are on our website at www.thefamiliarstrange.com/writeforus
And if you haven’t already, join our Facebook Chats Group, ‘The Familiar Strange Chats’.
Thank you again to all our listeners and readers who have enjoyed our content through out 2021. We hope you have a restful holidays, and we will see you in February.
Until then, keep Talking Strange…
This week Carolyn sits down with Jason De León, anthropologist, photographer and author. He is currently the director of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP) and his research interests revolve around violence, materiality, Latin American migration, photoethnography, forensic science, and archaeology of the contemporary.
Throughout this conversation, Carolyn asks questions around photography, doing ethnography and photography together and how cameras can be used in ethnographic settings.
Jason then discusses his work “The Land of Open Graves Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail” and the various processes and decisions he made in collaboration with his co-creator, Michael Wells. It was an enlightening and very honest conversation about what goes into doing photography for fieldwork and we hope you enjoy!
head over to our website for a full list of links and citations!
This week the strangers are joined by Kathryn Allan! Kathryn is currently completing her PhD at the school of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on stateless persons, refugees, and asylum seekers. She is also regional president of Amnesty international of NSW and ACT. Welcome Kathryn!
In this episode, Kathryn kicks us off by asking the Strangers about activism and anthropology. She poses questions around the issues that arise from the interplay between being an advocate and activist and being an anthropologist. Kathryn, asks questions around representation and amplification of the voices that matter and what we as anthropologists can do to participate in activism in a way that does minimal harm. What do you think? Is there a place for activism in anthropology?
Next, Joe discusses the COP26 Conference held in Glasgow recently. He asks questions about activism and specifically addresses the foreign minister of Tuvalu’s address to the summit. Joe breaks down how it is that people become “humanitarian victims” which leads to discussions around refugees and worthiness. What do you think? How do you think people should respond to crises such as climate change or asylum seeking?
Head over to our website for a full list of links and citations!
Matt’s back this week with an interview with one of the original Familiar Strangers Dr Ian Pollock.
Ian discusses the origins of the Familiar Strange, why it started and whether it helped or hindered his PhD. Matt discusses his involvement in the early days of TFS and what it contributed to his education as a communicator. Ian and Matt then discuss the future of public anthropology and how we can best engage with anthropological knowledge and thought.
This month we dive into the recent political scandals in Australian politics. Familiar Stranger Alex gives us a brief overview of the current scandal involving former New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian. He asks the strangers to consider what the relationship is between the states and their respective constituents. What do you think? Is pork barreling that big of a deal?
Next Matt shares a funny interaction that he had recently and reflects on how social distancing and lockdown measures have changed his social interactions with the people around him. He asks the Strangers if they’ve had any changes in their social interactions and the answers are quite enlightening. What do you think? Has social distancing changed how you interact with the wider world?
Head over to our website for a full list of links and citations.
For this episode, Joe sits down with Susanna Trnka from the Anthropology department at the University of Auckland. Susanna is an associate professor in the anthropology department at the University of Auckland. Susanna received her PhD from Princeton before moving to Aotearoa/New Zealand in 2003. Her research has been undertaken in Fiji, the Czech Republic, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Susanna is the author of three books: ‘State of Suffering: Political Violence and Community Survival in Fiji’, ‘One Blue Child: Asthma, Responsibility and the Politics of Global Health,’ and her 2020 book ‘Traversing: Embodied Lifeworlds in the Czech Republic.’ She is the co-author of ‘Young Women of Prague’ with Alena Heltlinger and has edited five other books. Her many articles and chapters cover topics such as embodiment, state-citizen relations, subjectivity, responsibility, states of emergencies, Covid-19 responses, and the politics of medicine.
Joe begins by discussing Susanna’s upcoming role as editor-in-chief of American Ethnologist and her plans for the journal. They then talk about Susanna’s book ‘Traversing’ and how anthropologists might think about the idea of lifeworlds and conclude with a discussion regarding Susanna’s work on the current pandemic in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Head over to our Website for a full list of links and citations!
This week we’re diving into the world of Reborn dolls and celebrating Social Sciences week! Familiar Stranger Carolyn kicks us off by giving us an introduction into the world of reborn dolls, or dolls that have been “reborn” to mimic human babies. The familiar strangers ask about the uncanny valley, the various uses for treatment and where the judgement of these reborn dolls comes from. What do you think? Are these dolls a bit too life-like? Or just another hobby?
Familiar Stranger Alex then turns the discussion to the purpose of anthropology in honour of social sciences week. The Strangers discuss their personal experiences with reciprocity and what the “true” value of social sciences are. What do you think? Do we still need anthropology? Are we a social science?
Head over to our website for a full list of links and citations!
This week is familiar stranger Jarrod’s first interview!
For this episode, Jarrod sits down with Dr Nicholas Ng, from the Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture, and Institute for Culture and Society (Western Sydney University).
Jarrod and Nicholas start by defining the term of ethnomusicology and where it sits in relation to anthropological practises of the past. They then explore Nicholas’s musical journey and how he ends up in a community centre filled with old men in Western Sydney.
Also, tune in this week for a special musical break!
Head over to our website for a full list of links and citations!
This week we’d like to introduce you to our newest Familiar Stranger, Ruonan Chen! Ruonan is currently doing her fieldwork around hospitals and healing practises in the Tibet autonomous region. In this episode, the strangers dive into Ruonan’s work and learn more about how “healing” can take on many different forms. Ruonan describes her work and details a run in with a particularly insightful fortune teller.
Next, familiar stranger Joe brings up the topic of shopping malls, and how certain elements are signifiers of class and social status. Alex regales us with tales of being a listless teenager heading to “Chaddy” and Carolyn describes the in-depth instagram stalking she has been doing on various shopping centres around Melbourne.
Just a note on sound quality: We are still conducting our panels over Zoom so the internet and audio quality might not be as clear in some places. The podcast editing team is working on a solution!
Head to our website for a full list of links and citations mentioned in this weeks episode!
Before we dive into today’s episode we’d just like to add a content warning for this episode for mentions of slavery and sexual assault
This week, we’re bringing you an extra special interview/panel. Familiar stranger Alex Zoomed in with Dr Caroline Schuster, Dr Sarah Abel and Dr Catherine Frieman to take a deeper dive into the dark side of genetic testing and what it means for people today that are trying to interact with the past.
With research interests around race, genetic testing and ancient communities, it was a great conversation which “unearthed” some interesting resonances between our panel members. The panelists ask questions like “Who or what decides how you are in society?” and “What kind of power does data have?” What do you think? Reach out and let us know on our socials!
Head over to our website for a full list of books and papers mentioned in today's episode
And we’re back!
This week we’d like to introduce our newest Familiar Stranger, Joe Clifford. Joe has just completed his Masters in Development Studies from the University of Auckland!
To kick off his first panel, Joe discusses his research into the concept of Gotong Royong or mutual assistance in Indonesia. The rest of the Strangers weigh in on the place of these mutual assistance programs and how “mutual” is “mutual assistance”? How much responsibility do you think individuals should have? How much responsibility should the government take when it comes to mutual assistance?
Clair then raises the topic of the “value” of the Olympics and what it means to the host nation. The Strangers compare the Olympics of the past and how things have changed over time, especially regarding sponsorship and national pride. What do you think about the Olympics? Will you be watching?
Our Facebook page and Facebook group are back up and running so don’t forget to head over to our Facebook group The Familiar Strange Chats. Let’s keep talking strange, together!
If you like what we do and are in a position to do so, you can help us to keep making content by supporting us through Patreon. Our Patreon can be found at www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung Podcast edited by Simon Theobald and Matthew Phung
The team at TFS would like to say thank you to all our listeners this season and to everyone who has listened in to our podcasts and read the blog! We are taking a short season break and we will return with some new and improved content in July!
But keep an ear out for some special content we recorded last year at the AAS! Let’s keep in touch. Feel free to submit something to the blog, we’re always looking for content, and are keen to hear new voices. The submission guidelines are on our website at www.thefamiliarstrange.com/writeforus
And if you haven’t already, join our Facebook Chats Group, ‘The Familiar Strange Chats’. Whether you’re an anthropologist, a student, or just anthro-interested, we’d love for you to join the conversation.
Thank you again to all our listeners and readers who have enjoyed our content throughout this season. We hope you have a restful winter break, and we will see you in July.
Until then, keep Talking Strange…
This week we’d like to introduce a new Familiar Stranger, Jarrod Sim! Jarrod is a PhD student at the school of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. His current research is an anthropologically-led study of how landscape has shaped the auditory cultures of a Paiwanese community in Taiwan. He investigates and comprehends sound as layered and is interested in its role in contemporary understandings of culture. Welcome Jarrod!
This week’s panel centres around the various sounds of fieldwork. Jarrod’s work with the Paiwanese community got us thinking about how our respective field sites sounded and how sound is a really integral part of fieldwork. We also dive into the difficulties of conducting ethnomusicology online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
We then discuss a question sent in by a listener! They wanted to know what kind of considerations the strangers made when choosing a field site and what were some of the practical constraints that had to be considered.
Our Facebook page and Facebook group are back up and running so don’t forget to head over to our Facebook group The Familiar Strange Chats. Let’s keep talking strange, together!
If you like what we do and are in a position to do so, you can help us to keep making content by supporting us through Patreon.
Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung Podcast edited by Alex D'Aloia and Matthew Phung
This week we bring you a special collaboration between The Familiar Strange and the Australian Network of Student Anthropologists or ANSA. In this special collaboration, Familiar Stranger Alex sits down with Hanne Worsoe and Dr Romy Listo to discuss some of the difficulties that arise from working in particularly intense or distressing field sites. Throughout the conversation they model some of the methods that can benefit new PhD students who are potentially entering into their field work.
It was a really interesting conversation and thank you again the ANSA for collaborating with us on this project!
Just a note on sound quality: We conducted this chat over Zoom so the internet and audio quality might vary in some spots. The podcast editing team is working on a solution!
Quotes
“It was very effective in helping and supporting people who were about to go into fieldwork or who had just come back from fieldwork”
“You feel very supported by one person, because you are being listened to and someone’s bearing witness to your experience”
“I think using these kind of things was really very helpful for me in being able to process some of distress that I felt while I was in the field”
“It is tough and you really need that capacity to be able to share with someone when you are going through those things it really does help”
“I think there’s a fear in academia of being able to express vulnerability and difficulty”
“Everyone had some kind of “war story” so to speak”
“Everyone had stories from the field that they would often shrug off and minimize”
“There wasn’t this space or the words to be able to talk about that in the context of research”
“I think academia needs to acknowledge its vulnerability at a number of different levels, but certainly at a fieldwork level and being affected by fieldwork”
This month familiar stranger Tim kicks us off by pondering the ethnographic and anthropological nature of the award winning film Nomadland directed by Chloé Zhao. The strangers discuss the almost anthropological origins of the film and other similar works that deal with the precariat or nomads the movie is based around.
The strangers then dive into the origins of Mother’s Day and the subsequent commodification of the day itself. They discuss some of the positives and contrast it with a similar “Mother’s day” celebrated on the 27th of May in Bolivia.
Just a note on sound quality: We are still conducting our panels over Zoom so the internet and audio quality might not be as clear in some places. The podcast editing team is working on a solution!
Head to our website for a full list of links and citations!
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung Podcast edited by Timothy Johnson and Matthew Phung
This week Clair brings you an interview with Dr Yasmine Musharbash! Dr. Yasmine Musharbash is a senior lecturer at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. Her fieldwork is based in central Australia, and primarily centred on the Yuendumu, an Aboriginal community about three hours northwest of Alice Springs. Over the years, her research has branched out in an impressive variety of directions, including social relations and personhood of the Warlpiri people, the anthropology of sleep and night, the Anthropology of Emotions, Embodiment, Boredom Studies, death and grieving, and so on.
Today, we are talking about Yasmine’s research on monster anthropology, which has blossomed into an on-going inter-disciplinary and comparative project that brings together anthropology and monster studies. Her key publications on the subject include two edited volumes Monster Anthropology: Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds Through Monsters (2020 Bloomsbury w/ Dr. Geir Henning Presterudstuen) and Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond (2014 Palgrave Macmillan, w/ Dr. Geir Henning Presterudstuen)
In this episode, we explore the different ways in which the Aboriginal people live with the monsters that haunt them, in particular in instances of social change and transformation. We first delve into the elementary instability of the term monster, such as how the monstrous bodies rupture classification, transgressing the otherwise clear-cut boundary between taxonomies and how monsters are contingent on the humans they haunt, combining the temporal and spatial perspectives.
Yasmine then compares and contrasts monster studies versus monster anthropology, before drawing on her fieldwork to investigate how one monster, that cannot be named, morphs and changes alongside the settler colonial state that has been inflicting trauma onto the Aboriginal peoples. We then explore how a more well-known monster, “Pankarlangu”, has adapted to the broader processes of climate change and colonialism, and how the Aboriginal people haunted by it perceive such a transformation. We finally discuss the appropriation of Aboriginal monsters, the clash between different ontologies in fieldwork, and how pandemics and apocalypses may impact on monsters in the Aboriginal country.
Head to our website for a full list of links and Citations!
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung Podcast edited by Clair Zhang and Matthew Phung
This week we bring you another panel in our new format! This time, we’re diving into the conflict between Amazon and its workers in Alabama trying to form a union. Clair raises the topic of “corporate sassiness” and how we have started to attribute personalities and personhood to the social media presences of these gigantic companies. What do you think about companies “clapping back” at people on their social media platforms? Does it play a role in how you consume certain products?
Next, Alex shares his recent experience at a friend’s wedding and how it relates to the ideas of tradition and culture. He raises the idea that some traditions can keep replicating themselves, even if the original institution isn’t as prevalent anymore and what this means for people living in the modern era. What do you think about traditions? How do you think future generations will see some of the traditions we adhere to?
Head to our website for a full list of links and citations!
Before we dive into today’s episode we’d just like to add a content warning for this episode for sexual assault.
This week, Familiar Stranger Carolyn sits down with Camille Waring from the University of Westminster. Camille is currently doing her PhD on online representations of sex workers and how photography is being used against marginalized communities.
Throughout this chat, Carolyn dives into the meanings of photography today, what the actual act of taking a photograph means for people and definitions of “Lens Based Violence” and weaponized photography. Eventually, they ask the questions of “what is a photograph” and “who decides what can go on what platforms?”
It was a really interesting conversation with some thought provoking points made. We hope you enjoy it!
Just a note on the audio quality, we’re still conducting some interviews through Zoom so some parts of the interview might be harder to hear than others.
Head to our website for a full list of links and citations!
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung Podcast edited by Carolyn West and Matthew Phung
This week on TFS, the Strangers continue with our new panel format and dive deeper into the topics of entrepreneurism and ethics. They talk about how universities and by extension academia is becoming more and more business-like with academics having to “build their brands” in order to find success. The conversation then shifts to discuss the current ethical framework of Anthropology. The Strangers share their experiences with fieldwork ethics and how modern anthropology has started to slowly adopt new ethical practises.
Head to our Website for a full list of links and citations!
Don’t forget to head over to our Facebook group The Familiar Strange Chats. Let’s keep talking strange, together! If you like what we do and are in a position to do so, you can help us to keep making content by supporting us through Patreon. Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung Podcast edited by Alex D’Aloia and Matthew Phung
This week we bring you an interview with Dr Susan Ellison from Wellesley College. In this interview, Familiar Stranger Alex asks about her experiences working in the city of El Alto and the neighbouring town of La Paz. Alex and Susan discuss Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and how it exists as a second space for conflict resolution for Bolivians and their families. They also discuss how foreign aid adds a layer of complexities to the frameworks already present in Bolivia and potential recommendations for moving forward.
Head to our website for a full list of links and citations mentioned!
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung Podcast edited by Alex D’Aloia and Matthew Phung
Hello and Welcome back to The Familiar Strange!
We are so happy to be back and we can’t wait to keep talking strange with you all!
We’re kicking off this new season with a panel with Familiar Strangers, Alex D’aloia, Carolyn West, Timothy Johnston and Simon Theobald. We’re trying out a new format for panels this season, so make sure you reach out and tell us what you think.
In this panel episode, we dive back into 2020 and the US elections. The Strangers discuss what we as anthropologists can contribute to the conversations around the US. How can the methods, attitudes and values of anthropology be applied? Are anthropologists still relevant in this modern context? What can we as anthropologists bring to the table?
Head to our Website for a full list of links and citations.
We’ve been experiencing some difficulties with our Facebook page and Facebook Chats group. We’re hoping to get them up and running as soon as we can but for now follow us on Twitter @TFSTweets to stay up to date with our new releases!
This is part 2 of the wonderful roundtable we recorded at 2019's AAS conference!
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In this very special collaboration, TFS would like to present a two part roundtable we recorded at 2019’s AAS conference! It’s a shame that we haven’t been able to gather again and talk all things anthropology this year, but we hope that this might be enough to whet your appetite for more things to come in 2021! A big thank you to Dr Benjamin Hegatry, Dr Carly Schuster and Dr Shiori Shakuto for their hard work in putting together this roundtable discussion. We hope you enjoy!
Roundtable Participants Christine Helliwell, Emeritus Professor, The Australian National University
Margaret Jolly, Professor of Anthropology, The Australian National University
Martha MacIntyre,Honorary Associate Professor, The University of Melbourne
Francesca Merlan, Professor of Anthropology, The Australian National University
Kalpana Ram, Professor of Anthropology, Macquarie University
Kathryn Robinson, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, The Australian National University
Roundtable Convenors
Benjamin Hegarty, McKenzie Fellow, The University of Melbourne
Caroline Schuster, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, The Australian National University
Shiori Shakuto, Assistant Professor, The University of Tokyo – Tokyo College
The end of 2020 is in sight! What a year it has been for all of us. The team at TFS would like to say thank you to all our listeners this year and to everyone who has listened in to our podcasts and read the blog this year! We are taking a short season break and we will return with some new and improved content in February 2021!
But keep an ear out for some special content we recorded last year at the AAS before the year is out!
Head over to our website for more links to some cool things happening over our summer break.
This week, we bring you an interview with Dr. Ashley Carruthers. Ashley is a lecturer of anthropology at the Australian National University’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology. His research interests include migration, mobilities, rural-urban relationships, networks and infrastructures, farming, organic agriculture, bicycles, and he has conducted in-depth fieldwork in Vietnam.
It’s also Familiar Stranger Clair’s first interview! We hope you enjoy it!
In this interview we talked about an organic farming community called Thang Dong. It’s located in a peri-urban region near Hoi An. We discussed what insights that WE, urban dwellers and subjects of modernization, could glean from the farmers’ organic agriculture project, which prevented them from being displaced. The project can be seen as a hybrid of multiple temporalities, where the traditional, the modern, and the postmodern are entangled in a non-linear manner. It is also an assemblage or a network of various agents, including non-human actors like the land, or the chemical fertilizers. We talked a lot about Latour’s Actor Network Theory, his book Down to Earth and We Have Never Been Modern. But don’t worry about it being too theory heavy, Ashley has tons of fun stories along the way! We also talked about the emerging culture of cycling as a leisure activity in Vietnam, and how the elites may inadvertently bring about some public good while benefiting themselves.
Head over to our website for a full list of links and citations!
on’t forget to head over to our Facebook group The Familiar Strange Chats. Let’s keep talking strange, together! If you like what we do and are in a position to do so, you can help us to keep making content by supporting us through Patreon. Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Clair Zhang Podcast edited by Clair Zhang and Matthew Phung
Surprise! We are so pleased to show you all a collaborative project we did with our friends and yours at Myanmar Musings!
In this very special episode, Familiar Stranger Alex D’Aloia sat down with Luke Corbin, Anthea Snowsill, Michael Dunford and Dinith Adikari to discuss all things Myanmar. Join us as we explore the tea shops of downtown Yangoon all the way to the mountains of the Northern Shan state. We talk about masculinity, ethnicity and agricultural practises. It was such a pleasure to have collaborated with Myanmar Musings and we hope that you enjoyed it as much as we did! Thanks again to Luke Corbin from Myanmar Musings for collaborating with us! We hope to work with you again in the future!
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung Podcast edited by Alex D’Aloia and Luke Corbin
On this week’s panel, we feature the president of the Australian Network of Student Anthropologists, Hanne Worsoe and Dinith Adikari who is a PhD candidate from the Australian National University.
Hanne kicks us off [1:37] by discussing a recent article by Judith Butler about the recent US election. She asks us to consider how identity politics has come into play more and more, not only in the US election, but also in Australia’s elections. How important do you think identity is when it comes to politics? Should Politics with a capital P be separate from identity?
Continuing in the same vein as Hanne, Dinith [6:31] discusses the spectacle that has been the US election. He poses a commonly repeated question of “why do people care so much about the US election?” What do you think? What motivates people to keep up with elections not in their own countries?
Next, Carolyn [11:31] changes topics to discuss deepfake technology. We have covered this topic previously too, but Carolyn asks some questions about the potentially insidious applications of this technology, and begs the question who owns your face and likeness? How do you think the likeness of people could be used?
Finally, Alex [15:50] the self-professed nerd asks the strangers to consider how our likes and dislikes are shaped by society and social interactions and what that means to us as Anthropologists. If we know how and why these likes and dislikes arise, shouldn’t that answer all the questions of anthropology? What do you think? Where do you think likes and dislikes come from?
Head over to our website for a full list of links and citations
Don’t forget to head over to our Facebook group The Familiar Strange Chats. Let’s keep talking strange, together! If you like what we do and are in a position to do so, you can help us to keep making content by supporting us through Patreon.
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung Podcast edited by Alex D’Aloia and Matthew Phung
“How much time do you actually need to spend with someone to “accurately” represent their lives?”
This week, we bring you an interview with Diana Tung who is currently doing her field work in the city of Iquitos in Peru. This is also executive producer Matt’s first interview!
Diana discusses all things fieldwork and how things have changed since we have experienced a global pandemic. We talk about how she has had to adapt her methods and how very different things are when compared to the start of the year. We also touch on serendipity and how it played into her field work. Finally, we discuss the passing of David Graeber and the effect that he had on her work and our work being a representation of the people we work with.
Quotes
“I think if you’re hanging out with people and the same topic comes up over and over again, it’s probably something you should be paying attention to”
“Just because you didn’t know about it beforehand or you weren’t paying attention to it beforehand doesn’t mean it's not important to the people you’re hanging out with”
“Sometimes it does work, and when it does I”m very very thankful other times I spend the entire week waking up in the middle of the night to download a program”
“It’s really important of course to maintain your relationships with people back home, but having someone close by who I knew could step in and help me when I really needed help at any time I think that kind of support is priceless”
Don’t forget to head over to our Facebook group The Familiar Strange Chats and let us know what you found most interesting in this episode. Let’s keep talking strange, together!
If you like what we do and are in a position to do so, you can help us to keep making content by supporting us through Patreon. Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung Podcast edited by Matthew Phung
This week we bring you a panel with Anthea Snowsill who is currently doing her research with the Intha people of Myanmar. In this panel We’d also introduce our newest Familiar Stranger, Carolyn West. Welcome to the team Carolyn!
Carolyn [1:25] kicks us off by discussing the recent documentary The Social Dilemma. She asks us to consider if social media and the global nature of the internet has created more separation and polarisation. What do you think? Has the internet changed how you debate or discuss certain issues?
Next Alex [5:46], discusses the personhood of corporations. Often called Corporate personhood, Alex asks us to consider how we interact with these “entities” as individuals and as a collective. What do you think? Does the idea of a corporate personhood feel strange to you?
Then Anthea [12:10], introduces the panel to the Buy Nothing Movement. She discusses the different social norms surrounding selling and gifting material possessions such as blenders or even used mattresses. Have you heard of the Buy Nothing Movement before? Would you sleep on a used mattress???
Finally, Simon [16:37] discusses how the effects and presence of colonialism are different depending on one’s location. He asks the panel how Australian colonialism is seen around the world and reflects on how “racism is complicated”. What do you think? Do you think colonialism and its prevalence varies from place to place?
Head over to our website for a full list of links and citations!
'The reasons why uniforms exist is for various reasons. Among them is to visually identify a staff member, which is a functional reason - a really practical reason, rather. It's also to take away any outside... personality that can come through on the person's body.'
This episode, Caitlin Setnicar, Australian National University anthropology graduate with First Class Honours (2018) and current Business Designer at ThinkPlace, chats with Dee. They unpack customer service abuse and the many frameworks in place that allow this normalised violence to happen and continue happening, discuss some pathways to applied anthropology and consulting work, and explore how ethnography can be portrayed through cartoons.
You can learn more about ThinkPlace at https://www.thinkplaceglobal.com/
Quotes, Links and Citations can be found at our website https://thefamiliarstrange.com/
Check us out on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and let us know what you found most interesting in this episode or share your own retail 'horror' story. Let's keep talking strange, together!
If you like what we do and are in a position to do so, you can help us to keep making content by supporting us through Patreon. Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto Podcast edited by Deanna Catto and Matthew Phung
For the panel this week we welcome Luke Corbin from Myanmar Musings and Familiar Strange alumnus Jodie Lee Trembath!
Simon starts us off [1:31] by discussing his recent culture shock in moving to Germany from Australia. Simon thought that experiences with fieldwork and working with other cultures would have prepared him better for a rapid transition to another culture. The Strangers offered some other perspectives about culture shock and their own experiences. What about you? when you went over for fieldwork or even moving to another country, did you experience culture shock?
Jodie then poses a question to the rest of the strangers, “as an anthropologist, what is story to you?” This question stemmed from Jodie’s recent obsession with the book series The Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb. The Strangers debated what even constitutes story and how different disciplines and cultures share knowledge. What do you think constitutes a story?
Next, Luke [11:58] discusses the fastest selling cologne in the Australian perfume industry and how smell and masculinity are related in Australian culture. It might surprise you what the cologne is and what it smells like! The Strangers offer some personal anecdotes about masculinity and how it has shifted over time. What do you think? What does masculinity smell like?
Finally, Alex [17:30] discusses the bureaucracy of play and games discussed by the late, David Graber’s in his book, The Utopia of Rules. Alex brings up how even a game based in imagination and role playing such as Dugenons and Dragons, there are still rules that people need to follow. To play, you have to participate in bureaucracy. This leads Alex to ask the question “Is imagination built on rules? Should we rethink conceptions of play?”
Head over to our website for a full list of links and citations!
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung Podcast edited by Alex D’Aloia and Matthew Phung
This week we bring you a very very special episode!
Last year we partnered with the Australian Network of Student Anthropologists, or ANSA for short and recorded their roundtable at the AAS held at the Australian National University!
The roundtable discussion featured the likes of Dr Marcus Barber, Dr Sophie Chao, Dr Jayne Curnow, Dr Derek Elias, Dr Bronwyn Hall and Leslie Pyne and was hosted by ANSA president Dr Hanna Jagtenberg. All of whom have a wide array of experiences as anthropologists and in their professional careers.
Throughout the roundtable, Hanna asks the guests how they got to their respective positions, some of their learnings over their careers and what sort of skills have they transferred over from their anthropological work.
The audio quality might be a bit different from what you are used to because we recorded at a conference venue and not at our usual studio!
Head over to ANSA’s Twitter and Facebook page and let them know you liked this collaboration!
And head to our website for a full list of links and citations!
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Shownotes by Matthew Phung
Podcast edited by Alessandra Prunotto and Matthew Phung
This week we bring you another zoom panel! Featuring Mike Dunford who is a Phd candidate in anthropology at the Australian National University and Sophie Chao who you might remember from our last panel and her interview on her work with the Marind People.
To kick us off Alex [1:39] reflects on how we have to be performative in some ways to achieve what we want. Alex is in the process of applying for academic jobs and apparently “running a microbrewery that makes beer and liqueurs” and “running a bakery in Bali” aren’t acceptable answers to “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Alex asks the strangers, why aren’t those answers acceptable? How do we make them acceptable? What do you think? Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Next Sophie [6:47], ponders interdisciplinarity and asks how to best work and collaborate with researchers who work in the “hard” sciences. Sophie was inspired by her recent presentations at Sydney University’s"Interdisciplinarity in a More-Than-Human World”. With the current global pandemic, maybe we do need to be more collaborative? What do you think? How have you used other methods/collaborations with other disciplines in your work?
Next Michael [13:07] discusses how our new online existence has affected his fieldwork. He has been feeling “extractive” and almost “forcing” interactions with his interlocutors. He asks us to consider what the different “levels” of e-communication mean and what the norms surrounding them are. Is a Zoom call more formal than a phone call? What do you think?
Finally, Dee[18:09] asks about how reciprocity appeared throughout the strangers fieldwork and field experiences. She was inspired by one of our earlier blog posts which you can read here. She asks the strangers what some of their experiences with reciprocity in the field were? What sort of situations they ended up in because of the sense of “doing right” by someone who had helped them? What is the strangest situation you’ve been in during fieldwork because of reciprocity?
Head to our website for a full list of links and citations!
Don’t forget to head over to our Facebook group The Familiar Strange Chats. Let’s keep talking strange, together!
If you like what we do and are in a position to do so, you can help us to keep making content by supporting us through Patreon. Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung Podcast edited by Deanna Catto and Matthew Phung
A content warning before this interview. Today’s topic centres around human trafficking activites in the Mekong reagion and our guest does mention some of the physical abuse that does take place in these situations.
“I’m still to this day, very supportive of the UN if I’m going to put my policy hat on if you like”
This week, we bring you an interview with Dr Sverre Molland who is currently head of Discipline in ANU’s Anthropology and Archaeology department. He is also on Alex’s PhD Supervisory panel! Some of Dr Molland’s research interests include, migration, government and politics of Asia and the Pacific and security. Previously, Dr Molland has worked with the United Nations Development Programme as part of the anti-trafficking efforts in the Mekong region.
Dr Molland’s most recent work, “Sedentary Optics: Static Anti-Trafficking and Moblie Victims”discusses the potential weaknesses of anti-trafficking initiatives and how they can often be at odds with what the victims and the communities that are being affected actually need.
Throughout this interview with Alex, Dr Molland discusses how often well meaning Non-Government Organisations (NGO’s) can operate in contrast to how governments want to operate. He also discusses the challenges and learnings from his time working for United Nations Development Programme and academia. He details how the outcomes of both policy and academia can often be different in their applications and use by both private and state actors.
Head over to our website for a full list of links and citations!
Welcome back to a new season!
With Covid-19 restrictions still in place, we bring you another Zoom panel! For this reason, the audio quality will be a little different to our usual studio sound. This week, we are joined by Sophie Chao, who we interviewed previously about her use of multispecies ethnography during her time with the Marind People and our very own Deanna Catto!
Firstly, our guest this week Sophie Chao [01:49] starts us off by thinking about what we do as anthropologists in relation to the global pandemic. Sophie has had to alter her ethnographic practices because of how things have become “suspended” in the face of Covid-19. She asks us to consider how we as ethnographers and anthropologists need to adapt our methods and our ethics to suit this strange new world. How have you had to adapt your ethnographic methods?
Simon [06:49] then reflects on human difference through exploration of the Yezidi creation stories. The Yezidi people are an ethnic and religious minority in Northern Iraq who have two different creation stories which result in two different “peoples”. Simon poses questions of how we, as anthropologists, are able to work with people who have varying world views about themselves and their relationship to others. How do we navigate working with people that have different world views that might be contrary to our own?
Deanna [11:36] reflects on how Covid-19 has affected shared spaces, such as her dojo where she practises Karate and how her practise has been forced online. She mentions Durkheim’s Collective Effervescence and how she has been able to train online with Karate masters who ordinarily are invited to large yearly gatherings. The group reflects on how Dee’s virtual dojo has created an “e-effervescent” landscape. Have you had to do the awkward goodbye at the end of a zoom call?
Finally, Alex [16:45] discusses the problems with field notes. He notes that as time progresses, the memories, the sights and the sounds attached to his field notes start to fade. Alex also discusses how easy it is to plant false memories. Dee mentions that even the memories of our interlocutors can be flawed and that we need to be aware of how we as anthropologists are seeing the world.
Head over to our website to check out the links and citations from this episode!
Don’t forget to head over to our Facebook group The Familiar Strange Chats. Let’s keep talking strange, together!
If you like what we do and are in a position to do so, you can help us to keep making content by supporting us through Patreon.
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung Podcast edited by Alex D'Aloia and Matthew Phung
Just like that, we have already made it through half of what can only be described as a crazy year. To bring this season to a close, we recorded a short message from our homes (hence the differing audio quality ... we are KEEN to get back to the podcast studio soon) as we are still in the midst of corona virus restrictions. But despite the challenging times that 2020 has brought, we've loved bringing you content this season.
This season we welcomed many guests onto our panels, including Kirsty Wissing, Sophie Pezzutto and Saidalavi P.C., and Yasmine Musharbash, and released interviews with Amita Baviskar, Robert Borofsky, Baptiste Brossard and Sophie Chao. We've talked about many topics on the podcast, from the meaning behind Maggi 2-minute noodles to imagined communities during a pandemic, from walking the line between 'friend' and 'researcher' or 'anthropologist' and 'activist' to the social dimensions of Alzheimer's Disease. And that's just on the podcast! We also released many incredibly, thought-provoking blogs about Shaligrams, emojis, cross-cultural perspectives on Covid-19, studying religion as an 'outsider' and racism reproduced through conversations about ice cream. If you haven't checked them out yet head over to https://thefamiliarstrange.com/blogs/
We also wanted to say a fond farewell to Jodie, as she is stepping down from her roles at TFS. During her time at TFS, Jodie has had a variety of roles, including Managing Editor, Social Media Manager, The Familiar Strange Chats Facebook Group Host and Moderator. We can't imagine TFS being as it is today without Jodie. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.
TFS will be back with more content on July 27, until then make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and if you're interested in writing for us head over to www.thefamiliarstrange.com/writeforus to see our style guidelines. We can't wait to keep talking strange with you soon.
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto Podcast edited by Matthew Phung
“Because for a few hours, maybe sometimes a few days, you can shed your human skin and you can take on the body of a creature that will allow you to fly, to swim through the rivers, to glide across the canopy”
This week we bring you an interview with Dr Sophie Chao, who won the 2019 Australian Anthropological Society's PhD Thesis Prize with her thesis titled "In the Shadow of the Palms: Plant-Human Relations Among Marind-Anim, West Papua”. Dr Chao is a multispecies ethnographer who utilises the ontological turn in her work. Broadly, The Ontological Turn"is a movement whereby we don't just consider if people have a different perspective on the world, but live in a different world. If that sounds confusing, don’t worry, because Dr Chao does an excellent job in describing how ontology is used in her work. Dr Chao has published multiple writings about her time spent in Western PNG such as In the Shadow of the Palm: Dispersed Ontologies Among Marind, West Papua and The Plastic Cassowary: Problematic ‘Pets’ in West Papua among many others. Dr Chao’s research interests include dreams, medical anthropology and environmental anthropology.
Dr Chao sat down with Familiar Stranger Alex D’Aloia in Sydney University’s podcast studio to discuss her experiences with the Marind-Anim people and their relationship to the growing palm oil industry. Dr Chao details the conflict between the native Sago palms and the introduced oil palms. She discusses how the introduction of these oil palms is damaging the community in more ways than imagined. Dr Chao makes constant reference to ontology and how it has informed her experience of “walking the forests” with the Marind-Anim people.
Quotes
“Practically everyone I knew had at some point or another been eaten by oil palm”
“This idea of taking seriously a dream for instance, the idea of taking seriously the possibility of someone being eaten by a plant really really mattered for ethical as much as political reasons”
“The idea of ontological anthropology is not that I necessarily have to believe what these communities are telling me is their reality, but I should at least allow myself the possibility of believing that it may be true”
“It is less me going into the field as an ontologist, than me trying to understand Marind themselves as ontologists of their own changing worlds”
“I suppose my stance as an anthropologist, first and foremost my commitment is to the people I work with. And it's their perspectives their making, their fashioning of reality that for me takes precedence”
If you want a full list of links and citations, head to our website!
Don’t forget to head over to our Facebook group The Familiar Strange Chats. Let’s keep talking strange, together!
If you like what we do and are in a position to do so, you can help us to keep making content by supporting us through Patreon.
Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Shownotes by Matthew Phung
Podcast edited by Alex D’Aloia and Matthew Phung
This week we bring you another from home Zoom panel! This week we are joined by Senior lecturer Dr Yasmine Musharbash. Dr Musharbash is currently based in the Northern territory and has research interests in monsters, sleep and death.
Alex [1:44] starts us off this week by returning to a topic touched on in the last panel. He dives further into Saba Mahmood’s work in the feminist space and asks, where does the individual exist in society? What does the conception of “individual” mean in other societies?
Then, Jodie [8:13] takes us into the realm of vampires, teenage girls and fandoms. Jodie recently watched How Twilight Saved a Town: Fandom Uncovered, which is a documentary about the Twilight series. One particular quote stuck out: "We have a tendency as a society to absolutely hate, revile and treat with vitriol, anything that has to do with teenage girls. We hate their music, we hate their icons, we hate their fashion, we hate their behaviour, we hate everything about them." Through this quote, Jodie asks the strangers, why are some fandoms more “acceptable” than others? Does gender have a role to play in that acceptability or disdain?
Next, Simon [13:53] references a conversation that happened over in our Facebook group. In the discussion, Ruby Hamad’s book White Tears/Brown Scars whipped up questions of what constitutes whiteness? What is the nature of whiteness? Is it simply a skin colour? Or is it something much deeper and has much more far ranging effects in society today? What do you think?
Finally, our guest this week, Dr Yasmine Murshabash [17:46] discusses how researchers have “hard” stories from the field and where the researcher fits into the stories they collected. Dr Murshabash had come up against this knotty problem when she was invited to a writing exercise. Dr Murshabash asks us to consider, how do you choose a story to tell? What makes a story “hard” to tell?
Head over to our website to check out the links and citations from this episode!
Don’t forget to head over to our Facebook group The Familiar Strange Chats. Let’s keep talking strange, together!
If you like what we do and are in a position to do so, you can help us to keep making content by supporting us through Patreon.
Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung Podcast edited by Simon Theobald and Matthew Phung
“I’m giving mundane examples here, but it can be a matter of life or death in a sense. Whether people are believed or not, it changes their destiny”
In this episode, we bring you an interview with Dr Baptiste Brossard. Dr Brossard is a sociologist and lecturer currently based at Australian National University. He has an interest in mental health, sociological theory, qualitative methods and utopias. He has authored two books:Why Do We Hurt Ourselves?: Understanding Self-Harm in Social Life; and Forgetting Items: The Social Experience of Alzheimer's Disease, which is the focus of our interview today. This interview was captured during last year’s AAS conference held in Canberra, at the ANU.
Dr Brossard spoke with our own Julia Brown about what sociology and anthropology can bring to the study of Alzheimer’s Disease, and how ethnographic practice informed his time spent with French and Quebecois Alzheimer’s patients. He discusses how he applied some key theories from philosophy and sociology such as Erving Goffman’s Interaction Order, Deference and Ian Hacking’s Looping Effect to his ethnographic observations. He also reflects on narratives of loss, selfhood and social inequity in the context of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease.
Quotes, Links and Citations can be found on our website thefamiliarstrange.com
Don’t forget to head over to our Facebook group The Familiar Strange Chats. Let’s keep talking strange, together!
If you like what we do and are in a position to do so, you can help us to keep making content by supporting us through Patreon.
Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung and Julia Brown Podcast edited by Julia Brown and Matthew Phung
Given the recently instigated social distancing rules in Canberra, this week we bring you a special “online” episode! For the safety of everyone, and especially in line with our own efforts to flatten the curve, we recorded this panel from the comfort of our own homes using the increasingly popular online video conferencing tool: Zoom. For this reason, the audio quality will be a little different to our usual studio sound.
This was our first experiment with this kind of podcast recording, and we look forward to exploring new possibilities and avenues for connecting with each other, other anthropologists, and anyone who is keen to talk strange with us in the future.
For now, though, Jodie [1:30] starts off this episode by discussing how Covid-19 is changing the ideas of what nationhood and identity mean in this new, largely online, world. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s work on ‘Imagined Communities', she asks us about our own experiences, and how things have changed or not over these past few weeks. What do you think?
Next, Simon [6:30] reflects on the concept of freedom (and unfreedom) and how it has been tied to being human, especially in relation to the physical distancing measures put in place during Covid-19 pandemic by numerous governments around the world. Quoting Rousseau that “man is born free but he is everywhere in chains”, Simon questions how people see their freedom now, and, more importantly, what does freedom mean in the Covid-19 crisis?
Then, Julia [12:22] tells us about her recent work in palliative care and asks us to reflect on how the crisis has caused us to think more deeply about death and our relationship with it in our daily lives. How have our conversations changed around death and “moving on”? Alex shares that his family is quite open about death, possibly because they are a secret family of zombies? Simon discusses the findings of a study by Jong and Colleagues in 2015, which suggests that people who are agnostic are the most afraid of death. Has the Covid-19 crisis changed your thinking about mortality in any way?
Finally, Alex [17:23] ends our panel this week by turning our attention from the on the ground personal experiences during Covid-19, to a more macro issue: capitalism. Specifically, the criticisms of capitalism he has seen online throughout the coronavirus pandemic. He has been grappling with the notion that something so large, and pervasive, can be a detriment to our own reflexivity and self reflection. Julia uses Australia as an example, which currently has a conservative government but is also participating in more ‘socialist’ activities, such as seeking to provide financial aid to those who need it and enacting protocols of physical distancing for the 'good of all'. Simon suggests that certain aspects of capitalism, like the “Free Market”, have been somewhat challenged in the current state of affairs that come with a pandemic.
Links and citations for this episode can be found at our website thefamiliarstrange.com
Let us know what you thought about this episode and any of the questions we asked on Twitter @TFSTweets or on Facebook in our group The Familiar Strange Chats. Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung and Deanna Catto Podcast edited by Jodie-Lee Trembath and Matthew Phung
"Realistically there's many people - maybe most anthropologists - are caught up in their own world, like many people are, trying to just get ahead. That’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that I try and do [good]. I try and move forward with it."
Content Warning: This interview has mention of addictions and the rehabilitation process.
In this episode we bring you an interview with Professor Robert Borofsky, Professor of Anthropology at the Hawai'i Pacific University, Founder and Director of the Center for a Public Anthropology, editor for the California Series in Public Anthropology, author of Making History: Pukapukan and Anthropological Constructions of Knowledge, Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn From It, and most recently An Anthropology of Anthropology: Is It Time To Shift Paradigms?, and one of the keynote speakers at the AAS Conference last year, where this interview was recorded.
It is quite fitting that the theme of the AAS was 'Values in Anthropology, Values of Anthropology', since he, along with our own Kylie Wong Dolan, unpack how to do meaningful anthropology. They explore questions like: who is anthropology serving? If we want anthropology to do good, how do we decide what that 'good' actually is, and how do we measure it? Rob also shares his own fieldwork experiences, emphasizing the importance of longevity and reciprocity in fieldwork relationships, and how to find ways to reach beyond the discipline and ensure that the work anthropology does matters.
Quotes, Links and Citations can be found on our website thefamiliarstrange.com
If you like what we do and are in a position to do so, you can help us to keep making content by supporting us through Patreon. Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto and Matthew Phung Podcast edited by Kylie Wong Dolan and Matthew Phung
This month on TFS, we are joined by special guests Sophie Pezzutto and Saidalavi P.C., two PhD candidates from the Australian National University. Sophie's research interests are on social media and the gig economy in relation to the transgender community, while Said is working on caste among Muslim communities in Southern India.
Sophie [1:24] starts us off by reflecting on a fight she had during her fieldwork which centred around her being there as both an ethnographer AND as a friend, saying "I think those two roles often conflicted with one another". In this instance, as an ethnographer, we can find conflict when trying to balance those boundaries. As a researcher, you need to take notes to give your research claims evidence, but as a friend you want to establish a kind of sacred trust of confidentiality. Sophie asks us how do we, as anthropologists, balance our duties as researchers and our duties to give back to the community? Where does trust and loyalty come into the equation?
Next, we turn to Said [7:00] who has just returned from fieldwork in Kerala, Southern India. Here, he researched barbery and the gradual shift from home-services to established barbershops, considering how that reflects the status of barbers in Islamic society. In this instance, Said was asked by some barbers: what can you do with this research to change the community? Sophie shares her experience when this situation is reversed, where a researcher feels like they want to advocate for a community, but that isn't reciprocated. Alex tells us that in his field, he had to "keep promising less and less" since he didn't have the level of power that his informants perceived he did. Simon suggests that anthropology has the power to increase understanding and awareness of niche communities or subgroups of a community, and perhaps it is the responsibility of an anthropologist to share knowledge, as Ruth Benedict (*not Margaret Mead) says: "The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences."
Alex [13:09] steers away from the fieldwork reflections and to the thing everyone is talking about right now: corona virus. "[T]he other day, when I was just checking out at Woolworths, and I noticed everyone around me had two twelve-packs of toilet paper... and I gathered that was the ... maximum amount that was socially acceptable to buy at that moment." He asks whether toilet paper and 'panic buying' habits - 'to hoard or not to hoard?' - reflect an individual's perceived social responsibility to the wider community?
Finally, Simon [18.20] ends our panel with the thorny issue of criticism in the academic world. This was brought forth upon learning his thesis was passed with minor corrections - CONGRATULATIONS SIMON! But despite the good news and accepting that the criticisms of his work are valid and constructive, he feels a sense of burnout, like he just doesn't "have the power to keep going”. He asks: what do you do when faced with this situation? Sophie suggests taking a holiday, Alex has found getting some distance from the criticisms can help - so do something else for a while and come back to it - but that is tricky when you are limited by a time constraint. There are different ways to respond to criticism, so how do you respond to criticism?
Links and citations can be found on our website.
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung and Deanna Catto Podcast edited by Simon Theobald and Matthew Phung
“It was a really difficult dilemma for me, because I felt that I needed to stand by my work, but at the same time what was more important was the social movement, because you know, what am I writing for?”
In this episode (which is our first interview of 2020!) we bring you our interview with Dr Amita Baviskar that was recorded at the AAS Conference last year, which Amita was one of the keynote speakers at. Amita is currently based at the Institute of Economic Growth in India, with interests in food, social inequality and ecological politics, author of multiple books including 'In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley', recipient of the 2010 Infosys Prize, and is a visiting fellow at several universities, including Stanford, Cornell, Yale, The Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) and UC Berkeley.
Amita spoke with our very own Alex D'Aloia about her work on the anti-dam movement in the Narmada Valley, India, discussing the controversy that arose among other activists after publication, her tips for early career anthropologists looking to make meaningful anthropology, and wrap up by unpack(ag)ing the meaning behind Maggi 2-minute noodles and how this relates to caste distinctions in India.
We should also mention that this is Alex’s first interview! Let us know what you thought about the interview, or any questions you have about the episode, certain topics you'd like us to tease out more, or just anthropology in general, at either @ TSFTweets on Twitter or search for The Familiar Strange Chats group on Facebook.
For full list of quotes, links and citations, visit our website thefamiliarstrange.com Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung and Deanna Catto Podcast edited by Alex D’Aloia and Matthew Phung
Welcome to our first podcast of 2020! And to kick of the new year season of TFS, we are joined by the lovely Kirsty Wissing, PhD candidate from the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University.
Alex [1:16] begins off our discussion with a bit of activism. Referring to the work of Nancy Scheper-Hughes, he asks: when you're an anthropologist going to generate knowledge about culture, but you are simultaneously an activist (i.e. going into a field to advocate for a certain cause), how does that shape or influence your perspective? Kirsty draws upon her own experience in her research, Jodie questions how this changes in different contexts (particularly when money is involved!), and Simon reminds us to think critically about what 'doing good' means in the discipline. So, is there a way we can be anthropologists and work without partaking in some kind of 'activism'?
Next, Jodie [6:19] pulls us into the world of Fintech. After first assuring us that she isn't referring to fish, she tells us it's "technology that is aiming to make change in financial areas" to eliminate the likelihood of human corruption. So instead of trusting humans to remain honest in these transactions, the human is removed and replaced with technology - which in turn transfers our trust to the tech. What does this say about the current era if we are determined to replace humans with technologies where trust is necessary? How does our relationship with trust and truth reflect that of humans and machines?
Simon [9:10] moves us onto a more harrowing topic - the recent assassination of Qasem Soleimani by the United States. This opens a broader discussion of truth in politics, especially when we compare politics in the West, which is seen as being an inherently 'dirty business' with politics in Iran, where there is a notion that politics should not be dirty, "that it should be a more noble virtue". We try to unpack the differences between what is the truth in politics, and what are rights, and how their relationship can change the political landscape or response to something like a sanctioned assassination. Thoughts?
Lastly, Kirsty [12:49] wraps up our panel this month by drawing on her own research around water and purity in relation to the hydro-power Akosombo Dam in Ghana, which is reflected in the many different truths that surround and encapsulate it: "there are many different ways of telling the same story". Who decides that water is pure? Who has the authority to decide? Is it a question of how water is packaged, or a question of spiritual values? How do ideas of cleanliness show us who is trusted and trustworthy?
Links and Citations can be found on our website https://thefamiliarstrange.com/
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Matthew Phung and Deanna Catto Podcast edited by Matthew Phung and Alexander D'Aloia
Jodie [1:26] begins our panel this month with a recent incident in Canberra, Australia, where a woman was shot by a 'random' gunman. Luckily her wound was not life-threatening. This story was HUGE here, but at the same time the story was released, Australia was (and currently still is in some places) on fire. Jodie asks us whether we should care so much about one person being shot, when the world is – literally – burning. How do we decide what stories are “newsworthy”? Should we be focusing on the local stories or should we be broadening our focus to the bigger picture, or global-focus, particularly in times of crisis?
Kylie [6:13] then reflects on something she's noticed during these early stages of her PhD - that she is becoming her project. That is, it is becoming a part of her identity, in a way that she had not anticipated. She asks, particularly in instances like this, "how can we as researchers draw the line between life and work; what you DO and who you ARE?" Jodie shares from her own experience that “If you are somebody who identifies strongly with your work – irrespective of whether or not you’re doing a PhD – then I think the longer you spend with a particular type of work, the more you’re going to embody that work and draw that into your identity.” Simon suggests that it comes down to commitment, and that PhD's themselves are transformative. Where do you draw the line? Is there a line that can even be drawn?
Next Simon [12:16] questions the ethics of doing anthropological research in a place or context that is considered "dangerous". If you don't know, Simon did his fieldwork in Iran, where there has been recent attention given to the arrests on dual citizens. Kylie suggests that we should not shy away from researching these places, especially for anthropologists, otherwise we limit the knowledge that could be gained about them. Alex suggests that maybe we need to re-frame our question of "should we research dangerous places?" to "to whom are we ethically responsible to and why when doing this kind of research?" Is the fact we are even discussing this question a sign of privilege?
Lastly, Alex [17:40] ends our conversation with a touch of institutionalisation - or rather, he questions the reality of ANU's recent announcement to cap numbers of undergraduate students coming into the university. According to Alex, Brian Schmidt, Vice-Chancellor of ANU, said that this will allow ANU to focus on the strong link between research and teaching, however ... in practice is this how it will really play out? If we look closer, does academia really value education equally to research?
Links and Citations can be found at thefamiliarstrange.com Support us on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto Podcast edited by Matthew Phung and Kylie Wong Dolan
This episode, Kylie interviews a very familiar guest ... Dr Jodie-Lee Trembath (aka Jodie from TFS)! Now, Jodie's no stranger to qualifications, but this year she completed her PhD - which is a MAMMOTH achievement - so we thought it was about time to pick her brain to understand more about universities and fieldwork. They start off by discussing Jodie's research in Vietnam, about 'authenticity' and the perpetuation of an authentic image, about the navigation of being both an 'insider' and an 'outsider' in the field, and finally they talk about us - that is, The Familiar Strange project.
This is also Kylie's first interview on TFS!
"Is this food authentic? Well, that depends on whether YOU think that authentic food needs to be from a particular place, whether it needs to have a particular flavour, have specific ingredients that come from a particular place? If you don't think all of those things are necessary for authenticity, then you might think that a particular food is perfectly authentic, and vice versa."
The full shownotes with all quotes, links and citations can be found at thefamiliarstrange.com
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto Podcast edited by Matthew Phung and Kylie Wong Dolan
Monica Heller est professeure en anthropologie linguistique à l’Université de Toronto (Canada). Émilie Urbain est professeure adjointe de linguistique au département de français de l’Université Carleton. Elles sont bilingues (français/anglais). Elles ont grandi et travaillent dans des zones périphériques des marchés linguistiques dominants de production du savoir anthropologique que sont les États-Unis et la France (le Canada francophone – aussi bien le Québec que l’Ontario et l’Acadie; la Belgique, la Louisiane). Leur discipline est périphérique et floue: l’anthropologie linguistique n’existe qu’en Amérique de Nord, dans un rapport difficile avec l’anthropologie socioculturelle. Ailleurs ça s’appelle la sociolinguistique; complètement évacuée de l’anthropologie, elle existe dans un rapport difficile avec les sciences du langage. Leur conversation examine les différents aspects de ce point de vue des marges.
Every so often, The Familiar Strange will bring you bonus episodes in languages other than English. In today's episode, Monica Heller, professor of linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto, and Émilie Urbain, assistant professor of French at Carleton University, discuss the work of building knowledge across national, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries.
This podcast was recorded at the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose, California, on November 14, 2018.
CITATIONS Basque, Maurice (2008) "Minorités de langue officielle: Réflexions personnelles." Canadian Issues, , 20.
Frenette, Yves (1998) Brève histoire des Canadiens français Montréal, Éditions du Boréal.
Heller, M and B McElhinny (2017) Language, Colonialism, Capitalism: Toward a Critical History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press
Heller, Monica (2011) Paths to Post-nationalism: A Critical Ethnography of Language and Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Project website: http://www.uncanadienerrant.ca/"
Urbain, Émilie (2016), « Towards a “Bilingual American Citizen”: language ideologies, citizenship and race in 19th Century French Louisiana », Language and Communication, 51: 17-29.
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
This month, Kylie [0:50] kicks off our conversation by reflecting on our blog about racism in sport and asks us about the ethics of ad targeting on social media. This comes after we decided to try boosting the blog post through a paid Facebook advertisement, since we felt this was a topic that needed to be discussed in the broader community. “What happened when we did that was a number of people commented on the blog, [but] they continued with all the racist narratives that the blog was trying to negate” – effectively normalising these kinds of comments. Since we are still digesting this situation, we are left asking many questions: given our founding goals at The Familiar Strange to engage in a public anthropology, should we be pushing into audiences that result in uncomfortable conversations? Should we really expect people to read our content if they find it through advertisements rather than organically, or when they know their values are different to ours at TFS?
Next, we move onto Jodie [6:15] who’s been thinking about a comment we received on our website that was along the lines of "it would be great to hear more about introverted anthropologists". Jodie mentioned her own experiences in this situation, where she needed to find strategies during her fieldwork to recharge and give herself 'space' from her research. Alex suggests being realistic about yourself and the circumstances under which you are doing research. Simon reminds us that fieldwork IS tough – regardless of whether you are introverted or extraverted – and that getting to the “hanging out” stage of fieldwork takes time to reach, but there are some strategies we can implement to help us cope during these tough times. What coping mechanisms work for you?
Simon [11:49] then draws us to Kurdistan, which has been given a lot of attention recently following the American withdrawal from the region and the political ramifications of this decision. Simon asks us to think anthropologically about what happens when relationships, like this one, are torn apart, what is the nature of social change that goes on and what are the end results of such a sudden split? Jodie shares “I think that the relations that have been entangled in a context like that are so much more than just human to human relations; there are ideas that have gotten tangled up that kind of require the relationship space in order to be kept alive … it’s a really complex web, it’s not just, you know, you remove the bodies from the space and then it’s all over and done with."
Lastly, Alex [16:00] ends our conversation by looking at a different political situation: the mass protests in Ecuador, where Indigenous people are being used on a very symbolic way, as defenders of the country (at least this is the case on social media and as depicted in news articles). Alex asks: what does it mean for a people, particularly an Indigenous group, to become symbolic leaders of a movement, where often throughout history they have been delegated to the periphery?
Links and citations can be found at thefamiliarstrange.com
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Make sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook and subscribe to our mailing list to stay up to date on our new content. You can head over to our Facebook group The Familiar Strange Chats and tell us what you thought of the episode, the topics discussed, and ask any questions you have – we’d love to keep talking strange with you! Finally, if you’d like to help support TFS further, check out our Patreon page – every donation helps us to keep The Familiar Strange going.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto Podcast edited by Matthew Phung and Kylie Wong Dolan
"I think you’d be crazy to go into something like anthropology if you want to learn how to say whatever other people tell you to say - you know, maybe you should become a lawyer!"
This week we bring you a special treat – an interview between our good friend Zoe Hatten and her PhD supervisor Professor Andrew Kipnis. Andrew Kipnis, Professor at the Australian National University and author of multiple books, most recently From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese Country Sect, spoke with Zoe at the AAA Conference in San Jose last year. They spoke about the way academics speak at conferences and the divide between younger and older generation anthropologists, about funeral ceremonies in China and how to navigate the intricacies of social relationships when doing fieldwork, and discussed the evolution of methods and ideas in action, reflecting on Andrew’s career.
QUOTES and LINKS can be found at our website thefamiliarstrange.com
And if you haven’t already checked it out, head over to our Facebook group The Familiar Strange Chats. We’d like to keep our discussions going from this podcast episode, so let us know your thoughts: what was most interesting? What was most surprising? Did the episode remind you of something else you’ve read, seen, or heard lately – if so, what is it? Let’s keep talking strange, together.
Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto Podcast edited by Ian Pollock and Matthew Phung
Firstly, we’d like to introduce you all to Alex D’Aloia, who is managing our Facebook group TFS Chats – you might remember the blog post that he wrote for us at the start of this year: "Anthropologists and Dragons". Make sure to check out the chat group after listening to this episode and let us know what questions you have and what you found most interesting.
Julia [1:19] starts off our conversation this month by turning our attention to things – specifically, things that we have an emotional attachment to that are in our home environment. From an anthropological perspective, we could turn to Daniel Miller, who writes about material culture and attachment; but there’s also a rise in minimalistic households formed around Marie Kondo’s example of, essentially, if it doesn’t spark joy, then you don’t need it, which creates a new understanding of what the material household environment should be. How do we deal with stuff and the emotion of stuff in the home environment?
Kylie [6:54] then moves our conversation towards activism, asking us: what is it that insights social action, especially when the social action is for things bigger than us? For instance, in Australia we have seen social support of this kind recently regarding the introduction of the extradition bill in Hong Kong as well as the case against the deportation of the Tamil family. Alex thinks of Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities and navigating our sense of belonging while Jodie questions how much is social action about the organisation of communities and how much is it about the way that social action builds momentum?
Next Jodie [11:42] talks about another topic very close to home for those of us from Australia – bushfire season, which has started much earlier this year than it usually does. We have to think carefully about what a bushfire means in order to manage it, and Jodie tells us that to different people, fire means different things – to a firefighter it means one thing, to an anthropologist it means another, particularly in Indigenous contexts. Touching on Tim Neale’s paper, about the increased inclusion of Indigenous people in fire management discussions (not only in Australia), Jodie asks us about the meaning of fire and how we know when it’s dangerous.
Alex [15:58] wraps up our conversation with some questions about anthropological methods - specifically during the early writing up stage. “Where I’ve been having difficulties is … trying to connect this to theory … my reluctance of imposing my own thoughts and models on my data and my informants”. Julia offers an alternative viewpoint, suggesting that you could approach the task from the opposite end – start with the theory and then find examples where the things your participants have said helps to back up the theory. Jodie encourages researchers to ask themselves “what is it that makes me think this is what I am observing?” and to be transparent about how your thinking developed.
LINKS AND CITATIONS can be found on our website thefamiliarstrange.com If you'd like to support TFS, head over to our Patreon page
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto, with assistance from our intern Sheawin Leong. Podcast edited by Matthew Phung and Kylie Wong Dolan
“Not only do we need engineers working alongside anthropologists to do good quality engineering, I also think that we need to do an anthropology of engineers… Engineers are making our world, right? And, the way that we, as engineers, think collectively, behave collectively, what we consider to be important... I think somebody should be watching that and reflecting on that and [relaying] that back to us, to society, to understand how the people who are making our world actually view the world.”
This is the eighth and FINAL episode in our STS podcast series. The aim of this series was to explore the intersection between science and anthropology, to better understand the contemporary issues that the amazing people featured in this series try to solve. We'd like to take this moment to thank everyone who has been a part of our STS series, as well as everyone who has listened along with us.
So in this episode, Ian chats with Professor Elanor Huntington, the first (and current) female Dean of Engineering and Computer Science at the Australian National University. While Elanor's research has specialised in quantum optics (which, from my understanding, relates to the application of quantum mechanics to phenomena involving light), she is also looking to the future - a future of STEM that needs anthropologists. They talk about the problematic nature of describing human behaviour through numbers and algorithms, unpack what an anthropology of the internet would entail, they discuss the importance of trust in scientific endeavours and the decline of the 'expert', and ponder what the future of engineering will look like, as well as what it means to take control of making your future.
For a list of our links and citations, as well as our favourite quotes from this episode, visit thefamiliarstrange.com
Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto Podcast edited by Ian Pollock
Simon [1:00] begins our chat by asking what happens to your identity when you become a dependent spouse; that is, when your partner is supporting the household financially and you are not, especially in a new country. “For the last maybe 20 or 30 years, the assumption has been that both men and women will probably work together to support a household [financially], what does it mean to be a spouse that works at home? And what does it mean for the masculinities that we will see in the future…?” [Note: this is coming from a middle-class, Australian context] Next, Kylie [6:09] turns our conversation towards fieldwork, as she has just come back from the Northern Territory where she hopes to conduct her PhD research (very exciting!). Because this is the first time doing anthropological fieldwork, she asks us: what does a typical day in the field look like, specifically regarding how to spend your time? Jodie reflects back on her first month of fieldwork, in which she found scheduling breaks for herself to be somewhat ‘away’ from her fieldsite was highly beneficial, especially since she found it exhausting constantly absorbing other people’s words, thoughts, energy and emotions. Simon reminds us that downtime is something you should expect to have and Julia reminds us that even in those times when it isn’t busy and chaotic, maybe there’s a reason for that – why does it seem quiet? Jodie adds that these ‘quiet’ times offer perfect opportunities to write descriptions about your field, which will help in the writing-up process later. We move onto a very current issue in Australia, as Jodie [10:35] discusses the recent meeting between Vice-Chancellors from Australian universities and the Minister for Education, Dan Tehan, regarding international Chinese students. There are two key issues that are framing the debate: (1) that Australian universities are relying too heavily on international Chinese students for funding, and (2) that there is a security risk posed by having international Chinese students who could potentially be spying at Australian universities (for more information see Links & Citations below). Jodie poses the question: where do you find that space between what is purely racist and racist policy and actual security threats, and how do you know the difference? Kylie asserts that “When we use those two lines of arguments, we overlook people’s experiences and think of them as either ‘security risks’ or ‘cash cows’”. Julia [15:13] ends our chat on an unusual note – that some people think anthropologists are ANGRY! This comes after she recently listened to an episode of the Making Sense podcast by Sam Harris featuring Jarod Diamond, in which they were having a laugh about angry anthropologists; Julia had also experienced feeling disgruntled after coming across a book that did not include the rich depth of research it needed, by failing to engage with the wide literature on the topic (the same criticism Diamond had come under). Can we really be mad, if we don’t put in the effort to communicate our research? Does this come from a failure of anthropologists to engage with a wider audience and – especially – scholars from other disciplines on the same topics? How does the issue of this image of the angry anthropologist impact on engagement and communication, which in turn impacts on the issue of representation?
To see our Links & Citations, go to thefamiliarstrange.com
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto Podcast edited by Matthew Phung and Kylie Wong Dolan
This is the 7th episode in our Science and Technology interview series. This time, Jodie is interviewing Annalisa Pelizza, Professor in Technology Studies of Communication at the University of Bologna in Italy, Visiting Professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and lead investigator on the project "Processing Citizenship: Digital registration of migrants as co-production of citizens, territory and Europe". They talk about the way that digital infrastructures, such as the databases used to collect information from migrants when they first arrive on European soil, actually help to shape these people into migrants, basically constructing them as a different category of person than perhaps they were before they arrived.
“Migration issues in Europe are a hot topic right now - it's not news that they have been used in the last 50 years as a way to steer public opinion into right wing positions... They are mobilised as elements in a narration of invasion, losing cultural specificities - not only individuals are mobilised, but there are also infrastructures that createpeople as migrants - not having access to proper work, or being put into certain infrastructures from which it’s virtually impossible to get out, createspeople as migrants, as outsiders to society.”
The project uses multi-sited and multi-scale ethnographic methods. A team of 4 persons including Professor Pelizza conducted research in Greece in 2018 at 4 Hotspots (registration centers), then in Germany, and are now going to work in Italy and at the EU Commission. They are the first researchers to have such access after the Turkish-European agreement.
For a list of key terms mentioned, check out our website: https://wordpress.com/post/thefamiliarstrange.com/2556
Links and Citations
Project’s website: http://processingcitizenship.eu and @ProcessCitizens
Latest publication from Project: “Processing Alterity, Enacting Europe” out open access on Science, Technology and Human Values: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0162243919827927
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Shownotes by Jodie-Lee Trembath
This month, we were devastated to discover that the audio file of the awesome podcast panel we had recorded for you was completely corrupted (cue sounds of wailing and gnashing of teeth!). Not to be defeated, we decided we would re-release one of our early episodes, and chose this one because a) it has one of the lowest listen-counts of any of our episodes (and yet is awesome) and b) it is pretty relevant right now, considering its discussion of deepfakes. All the major social media platforms are considering changing their deepfake policies right now, after a doctored video of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was left on Facebook - this was recorded just as the term "deepfake" was coming to be known in the public consciousness.
It's also good timing considering that we are in the midst of an STS season with our interview episodes. So, apologies that this is not new material, but we hope you enjoy it anyway!
Check out the full show notes here! https://wordpress.com/post/thefamiliarstrange.com/2525
Feature image - screenshot of a YouTube video by The Fakening - https://youtu.be/cVljNVV5VPw
"All of these questions deserve...just that little bit extra thought about what would openness look like for my study and in my discipline? What would it achieve? What effects would it have? And you know that when you have research interview data it's never going to be as simple as just 'publishing it on the internet'. There are all the ethical considerations"
This episode 6 of our STS season, Rosalind Attenborough, who is currently completing her PhD at the Science, Technology and Innovation Studies centre at The University of Edinburgh, talks with our own Julia Brown. Having done her undergraduate training at the ANU, Ros worked for PLoS journals, before retraining in the social studies of science at University College London and then University of Edinburgh. Since 2015, she has been researching how scientists view the idea of scientific openness, which she has explored through numerous interviews with scientists, and policymakers and advocates.
As you are about to hear, the meaning of openness in science is multidimensional and is becoming an increasingly critical topic. Openness in science can refer to open access publishing, open methods and data, and interpersonal openness. Ros explains what has driven open access policy changes in the UK in particular, the funding inequality this produces, and cultures of value and trust economies in science. Ros encourages us to consider the question of openness in ethnographic methods. As a case study of cultural influences on openness, Ros and Julia contemplate the CRISPR-baby scandal.
DISCLAIMER: Ros, nor Julia, know much about the technicalities of the CRISPR case, they were merely discussing it as a way into thinking about cultural differences in value when it comes to ethical codes of scientific conduct.
For the list of our links and citations used in this episode, head over to our website https://thefamiliarstrange.com/
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
If you'd like to support The Familiar Strange, you can find our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Julia Brown and Deanna Catto
Simon (0:48) kicks off this panel by asking us about mediocrity. He reflects on his fieldwork in Iran, where he observed – particularly in the education sphere - that there was a very small difference between being ‘perfect’ and being a ‘failure’. “In Australia we…have this kind of uncomfortable-ness, I think, with excellence and the idea that people who are very good should blow their own trumpets…but in a lot of other societies, there is this real idea that excellence is something that should be shown, demonstrated.” Given the neoliberal culture of competitiveness, Simon asks: do you think it’s okay to be just ‘good enough’? Should we embrace mediocrity or strive for pure perfection?
Next Jodie (6:13) – who has just come back from a wedding in Germany – shifts our conversation towards shared cultural understandings. Or rather, what happens when your expectation of having “coffee and cake” is very different from those around you. She mentions John Law’s concept of the Hinterland, which is (to drastically summarise) about the world being interpreted in different ways by different cultural groups. Thus Jodie’s understanding of “coffee and cake” was drawn from a different cultural ‘Hinterland’ than her German colleagues was, even though the words “coffee and cake” were the same. Simon laughing says that’s his everyday experience. Julia suggests that it’s more about expectations that don’t become explicit until something goes wrong and we need to reflect on it. Kylie reminds us that this is all a learning experience, albeit uncomfortable, and it’s about making the strange…familiar.
Julia (11:14) dives straight into her question: “Where does your expertise end when you become publicly accountable?” She recently attended a masterclass about researcher involvement in public policy making, where it was emphasised that researchers should aspire to conform themselves to a certain ideal of ‘expert’ – such not speaking beyond the boundaries of their field and remaining humble – yet this doesn’t always play out in action. Given this, she adds: How can we effectively use our own expertise in the best way to impact change? Kylie shares her experience of feeling too platformed as an 'expert' in a field where she was only mediocre, while Jodie says it should be more about the skills and broad knowledge that we, as experts, can bring to the table.
Finally, Kylie (16:08) digs a bit deeper into the concepts of giving, receiving, reciprocity and relationships. This has been on her mind with the launch of TFS' Patreon account (Yay!). Kylie wonders whether a relationship can exist before acts of reciprocity are introduced or are they established only through this giving and receiving? Julia says, "It really puts strangers to the test, in terms of how much they will oblige one's request [of giving]" but that "it always requires some kind of reciprocal exchange [for the relationship] to continue." Jodie shares that when it comes to savvy savings during shopping sprees, she feels more comfortable asking for a discount from a stranger whom she struck up a conversation with than a close friend. Simon suggests "If Mauss is right - giving is a relationship, [where] you enter into a relationship by giving something ... I think if you give a gift to someone, you are entering into a relationship with that person ... a relationship of obligations... Is there such a thing as a 'free gift'?"
LINKS AND CITATIONS can be found at thefamiliarstrange.com Our Patreon can be found here: https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto and Matthew Phung
In episode 5 of our STS Series, Inger Mewburn, Associate Professor and Director of Research Training at the Australian National University, founder of the popular blog The Thesis Whisperer and author of How to Tame Your PhD, Becoming an Academic, How To Be An Academic, and How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble, chats to our own Jodie-Lee Trembath. They talk about what it means to be a post-disciplinary or interdisciplinary scholar using ethnography to understand social phenomena, about machine learning and the values that are reflected through the machines we create, and how sometimes these values are ones that we don’t really want to see, and about the future of research and work where algorithms and technology form a collaborative effort between humans and robots.
QUOTES (full list on thefamiliarstrange.com)
“[Machine learning] is a broad area of study, and that’s one thing you don’t see from a distance is how broad it is. We like to do what we call human-in-the-loop type of machine learning, which is a co-creation of something. So, what we’re using is the machine to, sort of, both capture our knowledge and reflect it back at us, but at the same time the machine’s training us … When a social scientist or an anthropologist or anyone for that matter, who’s looking to collaborate with a machine, it’s a collaboration: they shape you, you shape them, what you make is this nexus in between.”
“Ethnography is just a really considered look at what’s right in front of your face – the familiar strange, right. As soon as you slow things down, start to take things apart, you notice things that, in the moment, just pass you by.”
LINKS AND CITATIONS (full list on website)
If you'd like to read Inger's blog The Thesis Whisperer, you can find it here: https://thesiswhisperer.com/
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto
On this month’s panel, we welcome Will Grant from The Wholesome Show onto the podcast and introduce Kylie Dolan, one of TFS' Editorial Board members who is making her podcast debut!
Julia [1:01] dives straight into the Heart Foundation’s latest campaign ‘Heartless Words’, which has caused a bit of controversy in Australia. Julia elaborates: “the message is basically that if you love your kids, you’ll take better care of your heart. Now… [it’s] irresponsible…to suggest that all heart conditions are caused by people’s behaviours” since it portrays the victims of heart disease as selfish. One thing that this campaign does highlight is the radical change in thinking about and approaching health problems from an individual-focus (which has dominated Australian medicine) to one of a collective-body-focus (i.e. your health affects your kin and you do not stand isolated from them). Given this scenario, Julia asks if there is a more effective way that health organisation can demonstrate this shift in thinking about the collective body WITHOUT turning to victim-blaming portrayals?
Next, Will [5:13] changes our focus to stories, since recently he’s been grappling with the questions of what a story is, what a story means to us, how a story works and how it has worked throughout history. After trying to define what a story is, Will alters his question to us: “We engage with stories so much, why is it hard to articulate what it is?” Kylie shares, “for me, when you brought up stories, I thought that the most resonating stories that I’ve ever heard are moral tales… fables … And I feel like maybe they’re supposed to communicate something that can be interpreted and emplaced and taken on differently [by] whoever hears them. And different stories can have different effects on people as well.” Simon contests that “It’s a very hard question Will!”
Kylie [11:05] moves our discussion onto Reconciliation Week, which marks and celebrates two very important moments in Australia’s history – the 1967 referendum to improve services available to Indigenous Australians and include them in both federal protection laws and the national census, and the 1992 Mabo decision that overturned the myth of terra nullius, which held that Australian land belonged to no one prior to British colonial arrival and occupation (obviously NOT TRUE). This year’s Reconciliation Week theme is ‘Grounded in Truth, Walk Together with Courage’, about truth-telling and grounding the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait people and non-Indigenous Australians. So Kylie asks: what does it take to tell the truth about something you’re afraid of or ashamed of?
Lastly, Simon [17:15] concludes our discussion by asking what happens when prophecy fails? Referring to the recent Federal Election in Australia, in which the predicted outcome of the election - which had received a lot of hype leading up to it - ended up being incredibly incorrect, Simon questions what happens when you invest strong ideas into something which is predicted to come about, but then it doesn’t come true? What happens next? Julia suggests maybe we should lower our expectations, Will tells us a story about balloons, the Trump election and coming to terms with outcomes, and Kylie offers that maybe after the prophecy fails, we naturally try to gain control over whatever we can, such as cleaning our bathroom.
LINKS AND CITATIONS - full list on our website https://thefamiliarstrange.com
If you'd like to listen to the witty banter of The Wholesome Show, check them out here: http://wholesomeshow.com/
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto
“I went into this thinking that objectivity and neutrality were the Name of the Game. That you couldn’t do good research if you were in any way biased or if you had your own opinions or experiences or values that might influence the research.”
In episode number 4 of our STS Series, Dr Jacqui Hoepner, an early career research fellow at the Australian National University. They begin by discussing Jacqui’s PhD experience, where she originally set out to navigate the tricky landscape of wind turbines and public health, with good intentions to be a neutral researcher in a very politicised realm, but after receiving some serious push-backs she chose instead to turn her attention to silencing in academia. Then they unpack further what it means to have academic freedom and question where you draw the line around what research should and should not be done. They end by talking about reflexivity and what value anthropology has in studies of science.
LINKS AND CITATIONS
If you’d like to read the blogpost that Jacqui wrote for TFS last year, you can find it here: https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/05/24/academic-freedom/
And you can listen to Jacqui’s podcast ‘You Need to Shut Up’ here https://www.youneedtoshutup.com/ or here https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/you-need-to-shut-up/id1367884727
If you’d also like to be inspired by the incredible work of Simone Dennis, you can read more about her here: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/dennis-sj
Mary Douglas (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Purity_and_Danger.html?id=QGRUTH8hnQ4C
QUOTES (for full list see our website)
“I was quite naïve thinking that all I had to do was have good intentions and that was enough to… do research in this highly politicised area.”
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto
This month, we’d like to welcome and thank special guests Dr Jill Sheppard and Martyn Pearce from Policy Forum Pod for joining our semi-themed panel discussion, inspired by the upcoming Australian Federal Election.
Jill [1:16] starts us off with a very topical issue right now in Australia – voting for the upcoming Federal Election. Jill tells us that “in Australian politics and the study of Australian politics, we’re really interested in this idea of election day as a ritual”. In Australia, most of the polling booths are set up in local school halls and it’s common for schools to take the opportunity to fire up a BBQ, sell baked goods and raise money for the school. This is where the term ‘democracy sausage’ has come from, as it is customary to buy a sausage on bread after voting and engage in community activities. Given that around half of the voters will be voting at pre-poll booths, Jill poses the question: is that going to change something about the ritual nature of Australian elections and what are we going to lose from that? “What happens when we lose the community spirit?”
Martyn [7:00] moves our conversation onto the meaning behind belonging to a social group. Quite the football enthusiast, Martyn shares that being a Crystal Palace fan, for him, doesn’t mean he just likes the team, but that identifies strongly as being a ‘Crystal Palace fan’ and encompasses the group values that it entails. He asks us what happens when the values of a group you belong to change? Jill reflects on the Essendon football club after their drug scandal where she previously had been a huge fan and describes her disenfranchisement as being “worse than death”. Simon offers that the embodiment of certain values relates to the degree of social solidarity you have with an institution, suggesting that when you don’t identify strongly as a fan (or voter of a particular Party) then you are less likely to embody the values that come with that fan identity.
Next, Julia [12:40] turns our attention to Australia’s dismal mental health care system, after a conversation she had with Dr Sebastian Rosenburg about accountability and the public focus on 'who pays for it' rather than 'what is an effective treatment'. Jill questions what is good ‘value for money’ and what seems “easy” and “hard” when making government policies and how that impacts on the choices on spending. Martyn asks about BIG numbers and BIG announcements - the chance for publicity - and how that impacts government choices? Maybe this is a bigger social question: How much do we trust the government, the choices they make surrounding funding and how much do we ‘nit-pick’ over these choices?
Simon [19:00] concludes our discussion by asking whether anthropologists have any role to play in diplomacy? Julia answers that “I would like to think there is, but I’m not sure that…the Australian government system is ready for it. Because I think there is a role for being able to have diplomatic conversations that are a little more flexible and acknowledge the shortcomings of one’s home government, but I don’t think that’s something that’s really accepted yet.” Jill thinks about diplomats who travel overseas with specific views, and what effect introducing nuance and criticism would have: “what does the anthro-diplomat talk about when he shows up to the dinner party?”
LINKS & CITATIONS are on our website https://thefamiliarstrange.com/ You can find Policy Forum Pod anywhere good podcasts are streamed!
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto
“The claim was 'isn’t this wonderful that remote controls keep humans safe'. Now, all you have to do is recognise that this is referring only to certain humans. The assumption is the humans that matter are those who are involved in US military operations. And it completely dehumanises the humans who are of course the objects, the targets of these weapon systems and it’s really indicative of a much wider problem”
In episode number 3 of our STS Series, Lucy Suchman, Professor of the anthropology of science and technology at Lancaster University, recipient of multiple awards including the 4S John Desmond Bernal Prize for Distinguished Contribution to the Field, and previously a Principal Scientist, manager and co-founder of the Work Practice and Technology Area at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, Chats with our own Jodie-Lee Trembath at the 4S conference in Sydney last year, which Lucy was President of in 2016 and 2017. They unpack the complex choreography between humans and machines, from an anthropological perspective, including what it means when someone says that using the photocopier is ‘too complicated’ (I’m sure we’ve all had this frustrating moment), the fundamental differences between humans and AI, the ethical conundrums that Google has faced with drones and what is involved in STS for an anthropologist.
QUOTES
“I was really intrigued by this complaint that the machine was too complicated, and … what we need to do is start by understanding what people actually mean when they say it’s too complicated? What are the experiences that they’re really having that lead them to report that trouble?”
“Differences between us and machines make it extremely difficult to create machines that are actually human-like”
“In a way as an academic… and in a way as a US citizen…one of the things I do appreciate about the United States is that you can be pretty outspoken in your position. And relative to a lot of places in the world, you can do that safely.”
“I think one of the things that draws a lot of us to STS is that it’s very much an inter-discipline. So it’s a field that brings together people who are interested in historical and contemporary and to a large extent critical … in the sense of questioning received assumptions in the worlds of science and technology”
LINKS AND CITATIONS available on our website Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto
This month Julia (0:59) starts us off with the relationship between loneliness and health after listening to an episode of 'All in the Mind', a podcast that explores the connections between the brain and behaviour. She stresses that loneliness is something that everyone is vulnerable to and is becoming more of a problem in our modern world. In the podcast episode, it was suggested that simple acts of kindness and exchange could help overcome this isolating feeling. Jodie questions whether 'fictive kinship' might be more successful and Simon gives us a comparison between Australia and Iran between the ways people go about their daily activities: is it less about what we do and more about who we do it with?
Next Matt (5:55) has his podcast debut with positionality. This is something he has been looking at in his science communication Masters recently. He asks us what our own positions were during our fieldwork and what these positions mean for anthropologists during their research. Julia adds that "it's about the power that you bring to the space ... [it] could colour the interactions that you’re having with people, and whether or not people can be as natural with you as they might be in everyday life.” Simon says that he was simultaneously different things to different people and even was questioned about being a spy. Jodie tells us that her physical appearance impacted on how her fieldwork played out and how this may or may not foster trust.
Jodie (11:05) then reflects the recent media incident where Trump was portrayed as saying that asylum seekers aren't people but instead animals. Although the Tweets have since been exposed as being misleading, it led Jodie to wonder what a 'person' is: is Superman a 'person'? What about our pets - is the phrase "pets are people too" really accurate? What are the boundaries around 'people' and 'personhood'? Is this a matter of perspective?
Finally, Simon (15:42) wraps up our can-of-worms podcast by asking: what is violence? Given the vague and imprecise concept of violence, he asks us how do we broaden our conceptualisation of violence? Julia offers: "I think that when it comes to violence... it's about how the person afflicted experiences it." Jodie asks whether we can define Government restrictions that have a negative effect on those experiencing it as 'violence'? Simon and Matt consider whether fighting and BDSM is 'violence' and Jodie finishes by suggesting that maybe 'violence' exists where consensual boundaries are crossed.
LINKS AND CITATIONS
The 'All in the Mind' podcast episode that Julia mentioned can be found here: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/loneliness%E2%80%94a-social-pain/10962908
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Shownotes by Deanna Catto
“Wherever you work, science and technology are everywhere … [and] ethnographic methods are crucial for answering the kinds of questions that STS scholars want to answer.”
In the second episode of our STS Series, Emma Kowal, a cultural and medical anthropologist and Professor at Deakin University, author of over 100 publications including Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia and part of Somatosphere’s editorial team, and recipient of the Thomas Reuters “Women in Research” Citation Award in 2015, chats with our own Julia Brown at the 2018 4S Conference in Sydney – which Emma co-chaired. They reflect on Emma's academic journey from medical student to social activist to anthropologist, where her guiding goal has always been to "do the most good" for Indigenous Australians, then discuss the experiences and difficulties of doing native ethnography (that is, ethnography of your own people - so for Emma this was doing work amongst "white, middle-class, left-wing people" trying to make a difference in the Aboriginal health care system) and researching marginalised groups, and finally explore the relationship between anthropology and science and how each discipline may aid the other in the production of knowledge.
QUOTATIONS
“A lot of what individual white anti-racists, as I called them, but also the broader policy frameworks are struggling with the question of how do we enact Indigenous equality; how do we make the lines on the graphs that we draw of Indigenous versus non-Indigenous; how do we make those lines converge and ‘close the gap’, while maintaining Indigenous difference?”
"Making knowledge is a morally risky exercise... Knowledge making matters to people. If you're working in Indigenous affairs, if you're working in Indigenous anthropology, you can't forget that."
Julia: “Why should anthropologists care about science and technology studies?” Emma: “…my one-word answer is knowledge; that science and technology studies is really at its essence about the production of knowledge, the dissemination of knowledge, the reception of knowledge, and particularly the contestation between different kinds of knowledge and different ways of knowing. So all of these questions are also completely central to anthropology”
"Ethnographic methods are crucial for answering the sort of questions that STS scholars want to answer... to understand how people are experiencing disease, using drugs, engaging with new technologies, getting their genetic ancestry tested, making robots. All of these things are really interesting ethnographic questions about what it means to be human in 2018 and beyond."
LINKS
Emma Kowal, 2015, Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia, Berghahn Books, New York/Oxford.
You can find the book here: http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/KowalTrapped
You can read more of Emma's articles here: https://deakin.academia.edu/EmmaKowal
Read more about the 4S Conference 2018 here: https://4s2018sydney.org/program/
For an explanation on the Aussie term ‘tall poppy syndrome’ see: https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2017/06/21/tall-poppy-syndrome/
You can find the first episode in our STS series here and our interview with Kim Fortun here. This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Shownotes by Deanna Catto
This month on TFS, we bring you a special themed panel with Dr Siobhan McDonnell about getting ready to go to the field. Siobhan is a legal anthropologist and Research Fellow the Australian National University with interests in Indigenous land rights, climate change and gender studies.
This is also Ian's last panel podcast with us as he is moving to Indonesia (Don't worry though-Ian will STILL be involved in the project!)
[We had some technical difficulties during the recording of this episode, but despite some audio issues the quality of conversation is top notch! Great work to our executive Matt for saving the day!]
Siobhan [1:48] starts us off by telling us about the online web resource that she and Dr Annie McCarthy developed for anthropologists – especially those new to fieldwork – to help them navigate the field. She tells us that Navigate the Field covers a range of topics presented in easy to digest modules designed to prompt you to think about things related to conducting fieldwork, from considering your own positionality and how that affects the work you do to being aware of boundaries in the field so you are safe. “We really wanted to rupture that kind of Malinowski idea of the lone man heading out into the wilderness to research the ‘Others’. It’s also about challenging what the field is."
Next, Jodie [7:54] asks us all the question: What do you wish you’d known before you did fieldwork? She posed the same question on our Facebook and Twitter pages and shares some of the responses she received, such as having sensory reminders of home, or keeping a list in the back of your field notebook of non-research related things (like reminders to bring tissues to the field), and ensuring that you have the structural support you need. This initial question evolves into a question of: what do you wish you’d known about coming back from the field and how to adjust back to everyday life? Particularly when there’s a baby involved, this can be quite daunting!
Julia [13:13] shifts our focus to the body, after listening to an episode of the Remember your body podcast and reflecting on her time in the field where the embodied experience played a large role. Her research surrounds patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, where a lot of the things they told her about were related to their physical and mental experiences. “Doing ethnography for me…required my embodied involvement and I believe it made my data more reliable because I felt like I really understood in a very connected way what my participants meant.” How can our bodies aid us to make sense and understand our participants and their experiences during fieldwork?
Finally, Ian [19:35] concludes our panel by investigating what it involves when taking your partner to the field with you. “Having her with me there in the field affected all kinds of things about my research”. Just like in a normal relationship outside the field, when this same dynamic is brought into the field there are gives and takes. Julia tells us that she made a decision not to have her partner there because it would limit the kinds of information she could access, and Jodie shares that while she had intended to be only an hour away from her husband, things don’t always go to plan.
LINKS (full full list see website)
The Navigating the Field web resource made by Siobhan and Annie is available here: https://fieldwork.weblogs.anu.edu.au/
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto
"We were bringing the voices of people that didn't get inside the building, inside the building and making them count. And I took that as an incredible responsibility, that you should give those voices weight and dignity and power."
We are excited to announce that this is the FIRST EPISODE OF OUR STS SERIES! The goal of the STS (science and technology studies, or science, technology and society - your pick!) Series is to explore the ways that humans, science and technology interact. While we have released some STS episodes in 2018, we still had some left in the bag from the 4S Conference PLUS many new ones as well. Let's go!
Genevieve Bell, Director of the Autonomy, Agency and Assurance (also known as the 3A) Insitute and Florence McKenzie Chair (which promotes the inclusive use of technology in society) at the Australian National University, Vice President and Senior Fellow at Intel Corporation, and ABC's 2017 Boyer Lecturer, talks to our own Jodie-Lee Trembath about building the future and a question at the heart of STS inquiry: "what is important to humans and how we can make sense of that to unpack the world that we live in?". They begin by reflecting on the Acknowledgement of Country that we begin every podcast episode with and the power that comes from realising our positions, then discuss being an anthropologist in Silicon Valley, learning how to 'translate' anthropology to different audiences, predicting the world in 10 years time and the importance of rituals (especially when finishing your PhD!).
For more about 3AI, check out their website: https://3ainstitute.cecs.anu.edu.au Or check out their LinkedIn page: https://au.linkedin.com/company/anu-3a-institute
QUOTATIONS (full list on website)
"For me, the notion of always being acutely aware of where you are located in time and space is a powerful way of being and to me the ability to do that in Australia is a big thing. Part of why that is an important one to me is the, I've spent the last 30 years living in the United States. And that's a place that also has history with Indigenous people and colonial forces. It also has existing Indigenous communities throughout the nation. And people don't acknowledge that. And there's never a notion of a Welcome to Country or an Acknowledgement of Country."
"Mum was really clear that you should always be working to make the world a better place. That you actually had a moral obligation to make the world better than the one you found it. And not for yourself but for others."
LINKS
For more on Brewarrina, the town with the fish weirs: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jul/10/fish-traps-brewarrina-extraordinary-ancient-structures-protection
If you'd like to read a bit about Genevieve's mother, who is also an anthropologist, see this biography of Diane: http://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0596b.htm
Genevieve mentions doing fieldwork and 'deep hanging out' at Intel, for a quick definition of what this is, give this a read: http://cyborganthropology.com/Deep_Hanging_Out
To become more versed in the English "Yeah, nah"/"Nah, yeah" Life Hacker has got you covered: https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2015/06/the-difference-between-yeah-nah-and-nah-yeah/
To read more about the Cybernetics Conferences: C. Pias (2016) 'Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences 1946-1953: The Complete Transactions', University of Chicago Press.
The article Genevieve mentions called 'For God's Sake, Margaret' is available to read here: http://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/bateson-mead-1976.pdf
In this panel, we welcome Shamim to the Familiar Strange podcast.
This month Ian (1:15) starts us off by asking how we maintain relationships with people that we met in the field. Whether it’s a family that we stay with, or a key informant who shared their lives with us, or anyone who helped us out while conducting research, often we want to show our appreciation. Ian tells us that he wanted to send a package to the family that he stayed with while he conducted his fieldwork, but found it difficult to do so in a way that wouldn’t cause jealousy in the rural community since so many people had helped him out. While he found a solution, he asks: what things do you consider when trying to maintain these relationships?
Next Simon (5:54) (who is in the process of finishing his PhD, go Simon!) changes our focus to a different aspect of fieldwork which can cause some researchers to feel anxious about: collecting proof. Sometimes when you’re writing your thesis, it can seem like you are inferring a lot of information from small amounts of evidence. So Simon asks us how much data do we need to collect before we can say what we’re saying is reliable? Do we take what one person says as being 'true' for the whole community? How do readers know what an anthropologist has written is 'true'?
Shamim (11:24) then draws our attention to something he’s been seeing in the New Zealand news a lot recently: an Air New Zealand safety video. This particular video has been criticised for transforming what should be on an aeroplane Safety Card into rap music based on the 1980's song 'It's Tricky' by Run-DMC. Although the video is very fun to watch from a computer screen at home, Shamim assures us that is was very cringe-worthy to watch whilst on a plane flight: “I was sitting on the flight and the whole flight was just dead silent. People were sitting still in their seats, air staff were just standing there still like statues, while this really bizarre, other-worldly rap safety video was playing, and it just was the most uncomfortable thing I've experienced.” We dive into a conversation about why people cringe and Ian asks whether it's appropriate to use a song that was contextually embedded in the social politics of the 1980s.
Finally, Jodie (17:22) ends our panel with liminality: the in-between stages of our lives, such as when you are a teenager you are between being a child and an adult. She refers to Victor Turner, who explored this concept of liminality and whether this same concept can be applied to PhD students and academia as a whole – always moving towards new goals and deadlines for papers but never settling. She asks us if this could be seen as an addiction. Shamim offers that this is perhaps more to do with the way humans think and perceive our lives; we are always in these in-between states, but more importantly that we should all come to terms with living in a liminal state. Simon questions the theory of liminality itself.
LINKS & CITATIONS
Geertz C. (1988) 'Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author', Stanford: Stanford University Press.
You can find the Air New Zealand safety ad here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYu8kkD0Gy4
For a short explanation on what ‘liminality’ is, try giving this a read: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/laurie-burrows-grad/liminality-the-threshold-_b_13845666.html
Victor Turner (1967) ‘The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual’, London: Cornell University Press.
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and theAustralian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Shownotes by Deanna Catto
"Especially when you’re dealing with questions of representation of the past, politics around the past, especially when you’re dealing with not just the past, but a violent past, right, it’s ethically irresponsible to not recognise your own position in that conversation, in that space. And that doesn’t mean that you necessarily take sides, but I do think that it means that you act as a connector for conversations.”
Tiffany Cain, a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and team member of the Tihosuco Heritage Preservation and Community Development Project, spoke to our own Ian Pollock at the AAA Conference in San Jose last year about her work with the local people of Tihosuco in Quintana Roo, Mexico. IN this jam-packed episode, they discuss the cultural history of Tihosuco and how it has influenced and constructed the identity of the local people today, question how we do anthropology with people who are no longer alive, unpack the process of knowledge collection in an 'umbrella' heritage project, compare solo and team ethnography, and reflect on the attachment that researchers have to their fieldsite.
This episode was recorded at the AAA Conference, so you might notice a difference in sound quality - that's just because instead of recording in our usual studio back at HQ, TFS was on the go!
QUOTATIONS
“You’re bringing so many disciplines together. You’re talking about history, you’re talking about art history, you’re talking about archaeology, you’re talking about anthropology.”
“I think there has been a tradition in anthropology broadly where we like to be able to imagine ourselves outside of the communities within which we work, at least to a certain distance. And I think there is legitimacy to that – in many ways, we will always be Outsiders to our communities unless we are working within our own communities ... And even in that space there becomes a distance because of the ethnographic process.”
“To deny that we have real impact in the communities that we work in is, you know, to misrepresent ourselves”
Ian: “I would love to keep spending more time where I did my research!” Tiffany: “It’s hard to let go” Ian: “Cause you’re writing about it all day back in your office or wherever your home writing site is, you’re writing about it all day. Your head is still there, it’s hard to bring your heart home.”
"A common misconception about archaeology is that we don't work with people who are alive."
"History is way too big for any one person, but when one person holds this portion of the story, and another person holds this portion of the story. When these people meet the history gets longer.”
CITATIONS & LINKS
If you'd like to read more about Tiffany and her work in Quintana Roo, check out her website: https://www.tiffanyccain.com/ and https://www.penn.museum/sites/chc/projects/
Penn University also interviewed her in an article about the project and what is involved for the researchers involved that you can read here: https://www.penn.museum/sites/chc/506-2/ (there are loads more articles about sub-projects available too!)
For more information about the history of Tihosuco and the Maya, Penn Museum has published this article 'The Modern Maya and Recent History', available here: https://www.penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/PDFs/54-1/the-modern-maya-and-recent-history.pdf
P.S. TFS has a new Facebook Group coming soon - so stay tuned!
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Shownotes by Deanna Catto
We, at The Familiar Strange, would like to acknowledge and celebrate the First Australians on whose traditional lands we recorded and produced this podcast, and pay our respect to the elders of the Ngunnawal, Ngambri, Yindinji and Yirrganydji peoples past, present and emerging.
This month on TFS, we bring you a special panel episode recorded at the Australian Anthropological Society's (AAS) 2018 Conference at James Cook University, Cairns, in December. In this episode, our own Simon Theobald is joined by Viktor Baskin from James Cook University, Sacha Cody from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Katherine Giunta from The University of Sydney. The theme of the conference was Life in the Age of Death, so our panel guests embraced this theme to share with us the things they had been thinking about during the week.(This panel was not recorded in our usual studio so you may notice a slight change in sound quality - don't worry that's just our super cool 'travel' mic!)
Viktor [0:53] begins our conversation by reflecting on the enriching experience at the conference. Particularly during the presentation given by Lucas Bessire, she felt moved by the images that accompanied his talk that showed the context in which his presentation was situated - as Sacha put it, you could see the "vastness of this dead, barren land". She asks us about the limitations that text has, and how can we, as anthropologists, take the work that we do into the world and keep it ‘alive’ through a multimodal or multi-media based anthropology – something more than just words on paper.
Next, Sacha [6:10], turns our attention to China. With China’s increasing assertiveness on the global scale, he wonders what that means for him as an anthropologist of China in situations where the country is framed as a threat, as “a yellow peril out there to destroy the world and eat up our resources, infiltrate our governments, steal our technology…”. He asks the panel how they navigate sensitive topics and the balance between advocation and participant observation.
Katherine [13:13], brings the conversation back to the conference, during which she has been watching her social media fill up with comments regarding social media policy changes. With Tumblr’s new bans on sharing adult content and Facebook's ban of discussions about sexual preferences, Katherine is concerned about the resulting effect that this will have on self-expression in the queer community: “As we are talking about life in the age of death, I’m thinking about what is going to happen to...the queer community – when some of the key ways in which we connect with each other across physical borders is taken away from us.” Can computer algorithms appropriately filter content?
Finally, Simon [15:50] wraps up this episode with a brief look at the recent and highly publicised death of John Allen Chau. The missionary had decided to make contact with the North Sentinel Island indigenous people, who had remained largely untouched by the outside world, with the intentions to bring Christianity to the island. This incident incited a range of responses from the public about John, either criticising his actions or eulogising his martyrdom, so Simon asks us to put on our 'Anthropology Hats' and consider how we would respond to this incident.
LINKS AND CITATIONS - see our website for fill list https://thefamiliarstrange.com
The official site for the AAS2018 Conference, including information about the speakers and information about the theme, can be found here: https://www.aasconf.org/2018/
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto
“The flies that go from feces into the water, into the food, don’t look at your bank account…” When a problem cuts across social divisions, “we call this the ‘binding crisis.’ What are the ‘binding crises’ that would generate enough political will and drive amongst a population that’s polarized around caste, class, gender?”
Dr. Assa Doron, Associate Professor of anthropology at ANU (https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/doron-a), spoke to our own Ian Pollock about India’s waste, both liquid and solid, and the physical and institutional infrastructures that handle it — or fail to. This wide-ranging conversation also touches on the transformative effects of cheap mobile phones on India’s poor, how trash turns back into treasure, how to write anthropology that’s both “appealing and authoritative,” and where to find schnitzel on the Subcontinent. To keep up with Assi’s research, follow him on Twitter @AssaDoron, and like the ANU South Asia Research Institute on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/SARIatANU/.
Subscribe, rate and review The Familiar Strange on iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Blubrry, TuneIn, Player.fm, or wherever you get your podcasts.
CITATIONS
Carlebach, E. הודו: יומן דרכים (Hodo: Yoman Drakhim; 1st ed. הוצאת עיינות, Tel Aviv 1956), ספרית מעריב. Tel Aviv-Yafo 1986. (For some reason I couldn’t find an English citation, but the English title is “India: Account of a Voyage.”)
Books of Assi’s mentioned in the show:
Doron, A. (2008) Caste, Occupation and Politics on the Ganges: Passages of resistance, Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Doron, A. & Jeffrey, R. (2013) The great Indian phone book: how the cheap cell phone changes business, politics, and daily life, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Doron, A. & Jeffrey R. (2018) Waste of a Nation: garbage and growth in India, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
For his other work, check out his page at Academia.edu: http://anu-au.academia.edu/AssaDoron
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.
As 2018 draws to a close, this week on TFS we bring you a special ‘End of Year’ message from our own Ian Pollock, Julia Brown, Simon Theobald and Jodie-Lee Trembath.
This past year has been an incredible one for us, with 27 podcast episodes and almost 60 blog posts. We have touched on topics ranging from dog-spotting to decolonisation, ethnographic practice to trade agreements. We’ve released interviews with Annie McCarthy, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Elizabeth Watt, Ghassan Hage, Vijayendra Rao, Cris Shore, Brad Weiss, Mick Dodson, Steve Woolgar, Kim Fortun, Katerina Teaiwa, and Deborah Heath. We’ve hosted special guest panellists Justine Chambers, Stephanie Betz, Saidalavi Thodika, Liam Gammon, Sana Ashraf, Bruma Rios-Mendoza, Patrick McCartney, Esteban Gomez and Carie Little Hersh. We’ve released podcasts in both Thai and Indonesian, have one coming soon in French, and would like to continue producing episodes in other languages. We’ve recorded interviews at conferences in multiple countries, including the 4S Conference in Sydney, the AAA Conference in California, and the AAS Conference in Cairns. These experiences allow us to grow as we learn from and share knowledge with others – something that is very important to us.
This year has seen the expansion of our team. Thanks to the help of our amazing interns, Alisa Asmalovskaya and Alina Rizvi, we were able to start adding transcriptions to some of our podcast episodes - stay tuned, there's an entire back catalogue of episodes still to be done. Having Alisa and Alina involved has been invaluable and we are happy to now welcome Alisa as our new international talent scout. Ian is stepping down from his role as Executive Producer (don’t worry - he’ll still be with us!) and Deanna Catto and Matthew Phung have joined our Executive Team. We'll also be introducing some new members in the social media management space in 2019. We’d also like to welcome our new regular contributors to our blog: Esther Anderson from the University of Southern Queensland, Holly Walters from Brandeis University and Stephanie Betz from the Australian National University -- if you'd like your name added to that list, let us know! Finally, we’ll soon be starting a new project … so keep an eye out for more exciting things happening in 2019!
While the other Familiar Strangers are working hard to finish their theses, we’d like to congratulate Dr Julia Brown (how awesome is that title!) for completing her PhD, and Matthew and Deanna for graduating from their Undergraduate Bachelor’s Degrees – all in December! If you've recently graduated, a HUGE congratulations to you, too. Woohoo!
Finally, we’d like to give a massive shout out to everyone who has contributed to TFS and thank all the listeners of our podcast and readers of our blog for your ongoing support. 2019 will be another big year for TFS and we look forward to seeing you again then. Until then though...
KEEP TALKING STRANGE!
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
“If wine hasn’t been turned into a standardized beverage, there’s room for variation. There’s an appreciation for variation that has something to do with the taste of place. And there’s different vintages, if not manipulated to achieve a standard outcome, will be distinctive. You’re tasting 2009 compared to 2016. And that tells you something about how warm it was that year or things that are more complex than that”
Deborah Heath, a leading anthropologist of wine and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Lewis & Clark in Portland, Oregan, chats (over a glass of wine, of course) with our very own Jodie-Lee Trembath at the 4S Conference in Sydney in late August. Keeping with the theme of Deborah’s workshop with Mike Bennie, Natty Wine and Its Companion Species, they discuss the meaning behind wine by comparing the differences between commercial winemaking and natural winemaking, how chemicals used during the production cycle of wine create post-apocalyptic worlds around Donna Haraway’s “contact zone”, and about living with the trouble of anthropology, the work that can and has been invasive and has privileged our relative power concerning those that we work with.
Just like our last panel episode, this interview was not recorded in our usual studio so you may notice a difference in sound quality.
QUOTES
“Wine doesn’t exist in nature. Grapes don’t turn themselves into wine without some sort of collaborative relationship with people who make wine.”
“The loose umbrella of so-called ‘natural wine’ is variously used to refer to wines that are manipulated less – wines that don’t have chemical inputs in the vineyard, which have become routine especially since World War Two, and that minimize interventions in the wine cellar” … “It’s pretty common practice to do what’s called chaptalization which means to add sugar which boosts alcohol, it’s fairly common practice to add acid, but a natural winemaker wouldn’t do either of those things.”
“In a fully self-sustaining vineyard environment, there will be lots of other critters involved. If you have animals like sheep, chickens, cattle, horses, that graze on the property and produce manure, then that manure can then be composted, you’ve got their participation in this nutrient soil that also then contributes to the micro-flora in the soil.”
“Composting is described by those who do it as magical!”
“Each of us can decide what tastes good to us. And then again we’re in the cross-hairs of marketing.”
“People are only patients when they’re in the middle of an appointment.”
“We all strive to, as Donna Haraway says, live with the trouble, live with the contradictions of the work that we do that can and has been invasive, that has - many times - privileged our relative power, vis-à-vis those that we work with.”
LINKS AND CITATIONS - see our website for full list
Haraway D. (2008) When species meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
For an explainer about chaptalization, give this article on Vine Pair a read: https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/what-is-chaptalization/
Trubek A. (2009) The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir, Berkeley: University of California Press.
The Brad Weiss episode Jodie mentions can be found here: https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/07/23/ep-18-brad-weiss/
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Show notes by Deanna Catto Music by Pete Dabro
This month we bring you a special panel episode straight from the AAA (American Anthropological Association) Conference in San José, California. In this episode, our own Julia Brown and Ian Pollock are joined by Dr Esteban Gómez, a professor at University of Denver and co-host of the Sapiens podcast, and Dr Carie Little Hersh, an associate teaching professor at Northeastern University in Boston and host of the Anthropologist on the Street podcast. (This episode was not recorded in our usual studio so you may notice a difference in sound quality – but it really adds to the conference vibe, in our opinion!)
This month Julia (1:26) starts us off by sharing some of her observations at the conference. As a graduate scholar from Australia, she finds it fascinating how under-prepared she feels while trying to network with other academics and compares the way Americans approach career goals compared to Aussies. She asks the other panel members what they think of the ‘elevator pitch’ and the cultural practice of ‘putting yourself out there’ that seems to come across in American academia. Esteban considers that “we’re all in that mindset of … ‘how am I going to benefit from this?’ and that’s how you’re taught in graduate school, to always think of yourself and how you brand yourself … branding has infiltrated academia in so many ways”.
Next Esteban (6:56) draws our attention to another topic in America: the contemporary issues of immigration. His interest is specifically in the cases where individuals are being labelled as ‘undocumented’ migrants despite carrying enough paperwork to prove they're not. Ian compares this situation with our own here in Australia regarding ‘boat people’ and Carie offers further insight from a legal anthropology perspective, where one may observe a disparity between the laws the state is supposed to enforce and those that are acted out in everyday practices.
Carie (11:46) then segues into our next topic about the place of anthropology in public conversations. “So many people talking about these critical issues at the AAA...whether they’re about immigration or health care or about the concepts of race – whatever it is – what I keep hearing over and over again…is that we need to get anthropology out there more”. Coming from the perspective of anthropologists that try to do that through podcasting, questions arise in the conversation about the mode and method of disseminating anthropological enquiry to the public, the importance of target audiences, and the ethical considerations that need to be made when communicating in the public arena.
Finally, Ian (17:30) wraps up the conversation on a political note, by sharing his experience over the past decade as an American living outside America during a time of great political change. Sometimes we forget as anthropologists that we come with our own sets of labels as we move through social worlds. For Ian, coming back to America he feels a “deepening estrangement from this country … I had not thought of myself as a migrant before but just yesterday for the first time in an elevator at the hotel, somebody asked me where I was in from, and I said I’m just in from Australia”.
You can read more about this year’s AAA Conference using the Twitter hashtag #AmAnth2018.
Check out Esteban's and Carie's podcasts here: Sapiens podcast https://www.sapiens.org/kicker/podcast/ Anthropologist on the Street podcast https://anthropologistonthestreet.com/
For a list of links and citations, visit our website https://thefamiliarstrange.com/
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto
"The body of the people is in that landscape so when its mined and crushed and dug up, you’re not just doing it with rock, you’re also doing it with people, with the remains of people, and we know that happened on Banaba.”
Katerina Teaiwa, Associate Professor at the School of Culture, History and Language at ANU, author of ‘Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba’, and current Vice-President of the Australian Association for Pacific Studies, spoke to our own Simon Theobald about phosphate mining on Banaba Island. They discuss the history of phosphate mining and the spread of Banaba around the world through the global agricultural industry, the impact of the mining on the indigenous people of Banaba, continue The Familiar Strange’s exploration of decolonisation in the social sciences, and critique the current modes of knowledge production in academia, before ending with one of modern anthropology’s ultimate questions: do outsiders have the right to makes comments about other cultures?
QUOTATIONS
Simon: “Banaba ends up spread across the world effectively in the form of this phosphate industry.” Katerina: “It’s not just a metaphor. It’s literally a material fact that the island gets spread across the world and enters these ecological and food chains, so it ends up in animals, it ends up in humans.”
"Land, body and people are not disconnected from each other ... The breaking apart of that means culturally, socially, spiritually, those relationships start to fragment and become unhooked from each other.”
“We were taught to question everything in academia, to not take texts and ideas at face-value and just because they’d been written down by some powerful guy or, you know, famous people, that was truth.”
“I say this to my students … I am learning as much as you are. This is an exchange of knowledge and ideas.”
“Empowerment isn’t just about race, or class, or ethnicity. Empowerment is about helping people feel comfortable to be able to critique their own positions, their own positionality, without falling apart.”
CITATIONS AND LINKS
Teaiwa K. (2014) Consuming Ocean Island: stories of people and phosphate from Banaba, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
For an introduction on the concept of 'emodiment', give this a watch by Nicholas Herriman (2012): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF7ksSmd4Wg
For an overview of the life of late Professor Greg Denings and his contributions, see: www.smh.com.au/national/historians-way-opened-new-roads-into-the-past-20080411-gds90q.html
You can read more about Kirin Narayan here: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/narayan-k?term=kirin+narayan
and Paige West here: https://paige-west.com/
For more on TFS’ discussion about decolonisation, check out our podcast episode with Sana Ashraf and Bruma Rios-Mendoza here: https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/10/01/ep-23-decolonizing-anthropology/
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro Show notes by Deanna Catto
Julia (0:59), starts us off with a discussion about zombie nouns – words that are created by nominalisation – such as sociality, irrelationality, neoliberalisation, etc. Julia asks us the ultimate question: why can’t social scientists communicate with simpler words instead of jargon? Jodie argues that the jargon can be beneficial when used within a discipline, but problematic when communicating with a public audience. Ian reminds us that jargon is a part of our identity at The Familiar Strange: “We don’t want to sort of run away from ourselves because who are we – we’re a bunch of anthro geeks!”
Next Ian (5:12) brings our attention to the revelations that can arise through material objects. He reflects on one instance during his PhD fieldwork when he was shown a sarong that revealed the social history of the local people and the complex hierarchical relationships that surround it (and theft!). The other Familiar Strangers reflect on similar instances during their own research when objects have crystallised something important about their fieldwork, including blood, power point sockets, and plastic bags.
Jodie (10:24), changes our focus to the recent Kavanaugh hearings. This court case centres around the controversial nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as a Judge to the United States Supreme Court, after Professor Christine Ford released a testimony stating he had sexually assaulted her. Jodie proposes the potential of viewing the affair through the lens of biopolitics. Essentially the idea of biopolitics is that the state governs our bodies, what we can and do with our bodies, and uses certain technologies to control our bodies. Particularly in relation to the Trump Presidency, Jodie asks us to think about women’s bodies: what are women allowed to say about their own bodies, what are men allowed to say about women’s bodies, and what is and isn’t appropriate to say in public for a about women’s bodies?
Finally, Simon (16:25) steers the conversation towards ethic in anthropology: what to do when our values are challenged. “We, as anthropologists, tread this fine line between not judging our informants and yet, at the same time, wanting to adhere to a particular kind of universal set of values”. Simon asks us how we should respond when we strongly disagree with something our informants do: is it wrong or is it just their culture? Ian argues that “It is difficult to draw those lines and the more you get to know the people that you are working with, often you end up retreating from some of those values”.
CITATIONS (for a full list of citations and links please see our website)
Alex Di Giorgio’s blog post ‘Academic Jargon and Knowledge Exclusion’: https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2017/03/23/7-jargon-exclusion-and-the-public-sphere-how-academias-use-of-language-does-no-favours-for-making-knowledge-publicly-accessible/
Jodie’s definition of ‘biopolitics’ available here: https://anthrobiopolitics.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/biopolitics-an-overview/
Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, by Kate Manne, 2017, Oxford University Press.
Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, by Kim Tallbear, 2013, University of Minnesota Press.
Nancy Schepper-Hughes article about ethics (1995) available here: https://www.academia.edu/7509881/Primacy_of_the_Ethical
Julia’s interview with Kim Fortun can be listened to here: https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/10/15/ep-24-kim-fortun/
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Shownotes by Deanna Catto
“We need to be experimental because we’re not up to the task at hand; there’s a real practical and ethical call to responsibility, that drives that experimental commitment.”
Kim Fortun, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, author of ‘Advocacy After Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New World Orders’ which won the 2003 Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society, current president of 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science), and founder of The Disaster-STS Network established during the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, spoke to our own Julia Brown about the beneficial role of anthropologists in the wake of disaster. They discuss the importance of fieldwork – particularly being situated in unfamiliar places - to offer new ways of understanding society, the possibilities of teaching anthropological methods to engineering students or even six year olds, about the lived experience as an anthropologist of science during disasters, and about the intersection of different worlds of expertise as science and politics interact in these disaster zones.
Find more of Kim’s work on her website: http://kfortun.org
QUOTATIONS
“Anthropologists can be useful during disasters and not just afterwards when we sort through our ethnographic findings. This is also about being interdisciplinary in practice to contribute to both theory and policy.”
“A key teaching was that we can use empirical studies, and ethnographic studies in particular, to really question the explanatory power of an established social theory … And I think in Bhopal I learned that kind of using ethnographic work to query entrenched ideas certainly had social theoretical mandate but also profoundly political mandate”
“Even after the disaster, if you knew how to fix it, you’d just fix it. But in a disaster you don’t know how.”
“Disaster often causes scholars to respond quicker than we’re used to.”
“Even after the disaster if you knew how to fix it, you’d just fix it… but in a disaster, you don’t know how.”
CITATIONS
Althusser, L. (1977). Reading capital (2nd ed.). London: Nlb.
Bateson, G. et al (1956) "Toward a theory of schizophrenia." Behavioral Science 1(4): 251-254
Felman, S. (1991). Education and crisis, or the vicissitudes of teaching. American Imago, 48(1), 13-73
Fortun, K. (2001). Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.
For ‘Computational toxicology,’ look here: Fortun, K. and Fortun, M. (2005). Scientific imaginaries and ethical plateaus in contemporary US toxicology. American Anthropologist, 107 (1), 43-54.
Morris, R. C., & Spivak, G. C. (2010). Can the subaltern speak?: Reflections on the history of an idea. New York: Columbia University Press.
The TFS blog post Julia mentions: https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/02/08/ethics-in-psychiatric-anthropology/
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro Show notes by Deanna Catto and Ian Pollock
"We think we are supposed to be comfortable. As long as we are trying to do everything to be comfortable, we will never make a change."
In this themed panel discussion, our own Jodie and Simon sat down with Sana Ashraf and Bruma Rios-Mendoza, two PhD candidates in anthropology at ANU, to talk about decolonization: what it is, and what it means for anthropology, in the academy, in the field, and inside our own minds.
Sana Ashraf's work looks at blasphemy claims and related violence in Pakistan. To learn more about Sana's research, check out her latest publication:
Ashraf, S. (2018). Honour, purity and transgression: Understanding blasphemy accusations and consequent violent action in punjab, pakistan. Contemporary South Asia, 26(1), 51-68. doi:10.1080/09584935.2018.1430745
Bruma Rios-Mendoza's research looks at ritual and world-making among Biak people in West Papua, Indonesia. Find more of her work at Academia: http://anu.academia.edu/BrumaRios
QUOTATIONS
Sana: "Decolonisation to me means recognising the privilege we hold and exercise in everyday life, in our everyday interaction. It’s not just limited to governments and the militaries anymore, it’s the various organisations, institutions, universities, the development sector, a lot of other areas where this privilege is exercised."
Bruma: "Decolonisation is always a process...because there are many new ways in which power is inflicted over others and subjugates them, because there will emerge new ways in which people are being subjugated, no? So this decolonising has to keep on going."
Simon: "As someone who lives in a settler colonial state, I would say that decolonisation is a recognition of the mental and physical violence that was meted out to indigenous peoples by European settlers, and the fact that that was not just at one particular point in time, but has been an ongoing process that continues to this day."
Bruma: "Colonisation is not only about territories, it’s also about ways of engaging between each other...So even countries in Scandinavia, where many have not been active colonisers, still, being part of a world system, we are all kind of in this domination by the status quo of disparity."
Simon: "It [decolonisation] is a matter of justice… people who have been colonised have - again, not a historical gripe, but a legitimate, ongoing claim to having been meted out an injustice that deserves to be corrected, in the same way that you would expect an injustice done to you to be corrected."
Bruma: "We think we are supposed to be comfortable. As long as we are trying to do everything to be comfortable, we will never make a change."
Sana: "I think making decolonisation convincingly beneficial to the people who are in positions of power is basically making it all about them, again, and it’s not all about them, it does not have to be beneficial to them. Why does everything, including decolonisation, have to be beneficial to the people in power?"
Sana: "Your skin color and your nationality and where you come from does not define how you can, or whether you can study a particular country or not. But being conscious of the privileges you bring to the study or to the field is really important, because if you are not conscious and aware of your privilege you can sound and be very patronizing towards a culture, which is not okay."
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Show notes by Ian Pollock
"Although this stuff is very ordinary, very day-to-day, very unremarkable... it's actually quite dangerous, too."
Steve Woolgar, emeritus professor at the Saïd School of Business at Oxford University and giant in the field of science and technology studies (STS), spoke to our own Jodie-Lee Trembath about the little niggling rules that we run up against everyday. Together they unpack what it means to be an "everyday person," how we all operate in a thicket of regulations, the storytelling that elevates rule-breakers and vilifies enforcers, and how to turn your speeding tickets into a valuable part of your research project.
Find more of Steve's work on his Academia page: http://oxford.academia.edu/SteveWoolgar
QUOTATIONS
"There's been a long history of looking at the products of science or the products of technology and trying to develop an analytically skeptical perspective on those things. So you say, with a scientific claim, which appears very objective, you approach that by saying, well, actually, that's the upshot of a whole series of complex social and political processes, it's contingent, it could have turned out differently, and so on."
"Ideas like 'proof' and 'facts' and 'theories' and so on, you can re-specify those as the practical work that scientists do. The same with ideas like 'governance' and 'control' and 'regulation;' you can re-specify that as the ordinary stuff that people get on with in their lives."
The "mundane" is "a state which cannot be reduced any further, because it's just 'the way things are.'"
"It's a very mundane act to try and check somebody's bag, or to put a parking ticket on them. But the system at work which makes all that possible is very vulnerable to people documenting it and producing information about it, and so on. So, I mean, it was a big insight for me, because I realized that, again, although this stuff is very ordinary, very day-to-day, very unremarkable, and son on, it's actually quite dangerous, too."
"For sure, it seems like one has delegated to the extent that the system now has more power than you do."
"We [academics] have a very poor ability to figure out what it is that people outside the academy actually want from us, and I always find that a really fascinating gap."
CITATIONS
Pollner, M. (1974). Mundane reasoning. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 4(1), 35-54. doi:10.1177/004839317400400103
Woolgar, S., Neyland, D., & UPSO (University Press Scholarship Online). (2013). Mundane governance: Ontology and accountability (First ed.). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Jodie also mentions The Wholesome Show podcast: here's a link: https://soundcloud.com/wholesomeshow/magnificent-mundane-governance-steve-woolgar-simone-dennis-kate-henne
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Shownotes by Ian Pollock
Jodie (1:04), drawing on the book Down Girl by Australian philosopher Kate Manne, starts us off by asking what misogyny is, and how we should tackle it as a culture. “If our goal is behaviour change, for bigots to stop being bigots, racists to stop being racists, misogynists to stop being misogynists… is the approach to say 'there is no place for you'… do we castigate them, or do we try and find [other] ways, even though that seems unfair?”
Next Simon (5:45) looks at a mad week in Australian politics--with one prime minister dumped, and a new, less-popular one (but not the less-popular one we expected) sworn in--and asks, when a political party self-destructs in public, what forces beyond rationality might be at work? As Ian argues, it's a question of ideologies, and power and purity: “This seems to be part and parcel of a movement sweeping the democratic world which is a movement away from the kind of big tent idea of what a political party can be… the idea that a nation should have disparate elements… and to think that they can form a smaller, harder, purer core of a party and still seize and hold power with that.”
When we recorded this, it really looked like Peter Dutton would get the big chair, but it ended up going to Scott Morrison instead.
Julia (10:02) brings us to the ontological turn, a controversial view of anthropological theory and thinking: "the ontological turn…. is premised on the idea that cultural relativism isn’t enough, that it’s not relativistic enough. That what constitutes the world and nature is also disputable, and not just different viewpoints on the world and nature.” She asks, how can we try to write, not just from a different culture, but from a different world?
Finally, Ian (16:30) asks, what could podcasting, or other non-traditional media, bring to classroom teaching? And what is being lost by the move away from lectures and scholarly articles? As Simon argues, “the idea that you could consume everything through podcast or some audio manner, to me seems like we’re losing the kind of disciplinary nature of the university.”
CITATIONS
Anderson, Benedict (2006) Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Rev. ed.). London;New York;: Verso.
Manne, Kate (2018) Down Girl: the logic of misogyny. Oxford University Press: New York.
West, Paige, 2016. Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Shownotes by Ian Pollock
“We don’t look back enough to go forward, I don’t think. We need to look in the rear view mirror everyday.”
Professor Mick Dodson AM, a Yawuru Aboriginal man, Australian barrister, academic and recently retired Director of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at ANU, talks to our own Julia Brown about some of the ongoing struggles for Indigenous Australians. They discuss education and language, calling out everyday racism and unacceptable behaviours toward women, the role of anthropology in Indigenous Australian affairs, the Northern Territory Intervention, the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and self determination. The Native Title Act (or Settlement) is also mentioned, along with the Stolen Generations and the 2008 Apology. Their conversation concludes with a reflection on Indigenous meanings of health and well-being.
QUOTES
“These are probably the oldest languages in the world. There’s something wrong with your values if you don’t think that that heritage is of any worth.”
“The thing that troubles me about anthropologists is that there’s a level of preciousness that seems to afflict the discipline.”
“I think the great thing that’s happened in research of any sort but particularly anthropology is the ethical clearances processes... how are you going to be impartial, independent - that’s where preciousness gets in the way.”
“Maybe we should select people to study anthropology with greater scrutiny.”
“‘Going native’ ought to be frowned upon. You know, you can understand it but don’t try and become it.”
“In its essence self determination is having control of your destiny, as a group. It’s a right of peoples... coupled with social justice it means that you as a group are in control of the decisions that affect not just your daily lives but what happens to you as a group, into the future.”
“With the Uluru Statement, it’s been framed in a negative way ... The response is really mean-spirited, and unfair, unjust, and a perpetuation of the colonial project really - ‘we’ll decide what’s best for you black fellas, cause we have the power and whatever you dish up we can say yes or no to.’"
"The black armband is going to be worn until there's reason to take it off. And we haven't given, as a nation, any reason to take it off. And it's not about blaming the present generation. But we can blame them if they refuse to accept this history."
"Subsection 26 of section 51 [of the Australian constitution] allows the parliament to pass laws that can be racially discriminatory. And they have. Since 1967, they have, at least five times, used that power to discriminate against Australia's Indigenous people and only Australia's Indigenous people."
“There is a connection between culture and identity confusion... connecting the young with the broader family, clan, nation, universe, has broken down, through colonisation and dispossession.”
“Yawuru people have a notion of Liyan, which is a feeling of well-being... health is not just a physical condition, it’s also a spiritual and intellectual and cultural condition."
CITATIONS
Dodson, M. 1994. ‘The End in the Beginning: Re(de)finding Aboriginality’ Wentworth Lecture.
On the Northern Territory Intervention: https://www.monash.edu/law/research/centres/castancentre/our-research-areas/indigenous-research/the-northern-territory-intervention/the-northern-territory-intervention-an-evaluation/what-is-the-northern-territory-intervention
The Uluru Statement from the Heart: https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/2017-05/Uluru_Statement_From_The_Heart_0.PDF
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Show notes by Julia Brown
Simon starts us off (1:08) asking, how can we make anthropology matter for policy and government? "There’s no reason why [anthropology] can’t be scaled up. There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be a chief anthropologist to the government.” As Jodie argues, "unless, as a discipline, we are willing to step outside our disciplinary mores and our disciplinary boundaries and make ourselves indispensable to people who have power in government, then no, we are not going to be useful." And Simon reminds us, "we need to make what is good about anthropology its selling point, which is its ability to do long-term, intimate research."
Next, Jodie (6:53) asks about digital disruptions, and their unintended consequences. Are we looking only to a future of corporate power and social atomization? Can it all be bad? "Surely some of them must be positive, in a non-hedonistic way." Patrick gives us some hope, by telling us about a use of technology that we didn't foresee: "I was actually, the other day, trying to find an app that would allow me to scan someone's body for the health of their chakras." And Julia points out that "what digital disruption might mean is that our imagination and our superstition and our beliefs in various systems like chakras could be destroyed, through relying more and more on 'digital objectivity.'”
Special guest Dr. Patrick McCartney (11:52) talks about his research with yoga groups on Facebook, calling the online yoga scene "a heterotopian series of worlds within worlds," and asking, what are kind of research ethics are called for when working in an online community? Are statements made before an online community of 30,000+ people in the public domain? Or is more explicit consent required? Julia makes a stand for strong ethics around consent: "what our participants tell us, knowing that they're already participating in a study, counts... it gives them autonomy to decide what they disclose and what they don't disclose based on the fact that it's going in a research study."
Patrick is a post-doctoral researcher at Kyoto University, currently studying global yoga in Japan. Have a look at his upcoming conference, Yogascapes in Japan (Nov 2-3 in Kyoto), or follow him on Twitter at @psdmccartney.
Finally, Julia (15:05) asks the eternal question: what is love? And what can anthropology tell us about love, in our own cultures or around the world? "How has our culture shaped this notion of having what is described as our 'other half,' or even a 'better half' sometimes, especially if being in a partnered or even a polyamorous relationship doesn't mean co-dependence, or even romantic love?" Patrick muses, "I adopt a very kind of queer epistemology in general... when thinking about how love brings people together, I can't help thinking about that kind of pathological side of love."
CITATIONS and LINKS
Fisher H 2008 The Brain on Love. Ted talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_studies_the_brain_in_love/up-next
What Jodie thought was Laura Nader was actually Geertz, C. (1975). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. London: Hutchinson.
Hardt M 2007 About love. European Graduate School. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch? v1⁄4ioopkoppabI (accessed 27 June 2016): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ioopkoppabI
The Iranian movie Simon mentioned: "No Entry of Men," https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1985266/
Zigon J 2013 “On Love: remaking moral subjectivity in post-rehabilitation Russia,” in American Ethnologist, vol. 40, no. 1. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/amet.12014
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Show notes by Ian Pollock
"Livestock are essential to our lives. We live in a world that is saturated with livestock, and not just with the food that we eat, but with the lives that we live and in the other byproducts that come through livestock production."
Brad Weiss, head of the anthropology department at the College of William and Mary and author of the book "Real Pigs: shifting values in the field of local pork," talks to our own Simon Theobald about the intersections of American farming with big industry, animal life, and international social movements. In this funny and accessible conversation, they talk through the process of building a research project where you are, instead of traveling to a distant "field;" how taste arises out of relationships and ideas, as much as from the food in your mouth; and how it feels to know the name and personality of the animal you're eating.
QUOTES
“I knew that to study local food, or the slow food movement, which is an international movement, to do that would be beyond the grasp of any one ethnographer. But I thought, if I’m in North Carolina, I could look at pigs... pig production was seen as an icon of that [slow food] movement.”
“It has a certain kind of moral cachet, it was a certain kind of hipster cachet as well, what it doesn’t have is the real economic viability.”
“Part of what that entails [making local pigs] is creating the idea that to be local is somehow significant and important... What makes something local is having a community who is interested in making something local.”
“Locality is... it’s not about a spatial plot, as though you can just sort of map the universe and say, 'this place is equidistant from this other place... so that makes it a place.' No. It’s about these values. It’s about the way the social relationships are meaningfully acted upon to create relationships that are important and significant to the people who, and they may not even live in that place... It’s not necessarily that you’re from that locality, but it is that you have an idea that place matters.”
“So taste is not simply something that is in the thing, let alone in the thing because it emerges out of a particular kind of place. But taste is a little bit like place itself. It comes out of a commitment to recognising that there is something important about thinking about how food is located in a particular context, and then you can experience that, and you can learn how to come to experience that.”
"You cannot help but taste in the context of memory, in the context of social interaction."
CITATIONS
"The Green Pill," June 11, 2018. The Ezra Klein Show, featuring Ezra Klein and Melanie Joy: https://www.vox.com/2018/6/11/17442558/ezra-klein-show-book-melanie-joy-vegan-vegetarian-carnism-amazon
"Ugly Delicious," David Chang's show on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/au/title/80170368
Paxson, Heather (2012). The life of cheese: Crafting food and value in america (1st ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Weiss, Brad (2016). Real Pigs: Shifting Values in the Field of Local Pork, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina.
Weiss, Brad, 2009, Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops: Global fantasy in urban Tanzania, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Weiss, Brad, 2003, Sacred Trees, Bitter Harvest: Globalising Coffee in Northwest Tanzania, Heinemann, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Weiss, Brad, 1996, The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World: Consumption, Commoditization, and Everyday Practice, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina.
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Show notes by Ian Pollock
With Julia's PhD submitted (!!!) and Jodie back from her travels, the band is finally back together! Jodie starts us off, (2:04) asking if a theory from psychology be applied to a whole population--specifically, whether US president Trump's apparent reversal on family separation work as a negotiating tactic, the so-called "door-in-the-face" technique. She asks, can we expect a public response to such a gambit resemble a private one, or a mass response to resemble individual ones? Simon, citing the narrow and homogeneous populations that usually take part in psychology studies, argues against thinking such theories can be scaled up: "I think humans are constantly creating and redefining and troubling everything we do, and every time we try and say, ‘well, this is a hard rule for human beings,' we get astounded by how it’s not in fact the case."
Simon (6:14) recounts his recent appearance on Counterpoint from Radio National, during which the host asked him to predict what he thought might happen next in Iranian politics. It got him wondering about the role of researchers in the humanities, and whether our work is actually contributing to changing, even improving, the world. He asks, "can we, as anthropologists, have a more productive role in predicting how society can and should be?" Julia points to the development of theory in anthropology, and suggests that, while anthropology isn't an experimental science, we do test hypotheses against theories, and refine those theories in response to our findings.
Julia (11:34) brings up the recent controversy over ANU's rejection of a bequest from the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, and asks, why do people fall so easily into opposition to one another, even over topics they have no information about? "There’s this need to find a clear narrative quite quickly--it just seems that things are getting increasingly nasty, and I’m wondering if you guys think there is any hope for people slowing down a bit and finding the nuances rather than clutching for these quick opinions on topics?" One thing the whole table can agree on: we truly are living in the age of People Talking About Things They Don't Know About. Find ANU vice chancellor Brian Schmidt's statement on the Ramsay Centre negotiations here: http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/vcs-update-our-viewpoints-on-ramsay
Last, Ian (17:42) talks about trying to bring the writings of the people he studies into his own dissertation. Should the emic, insider analyses written by the members of a society be treated as "cultural traces," or integrated with the peer-reviewed Western scholarship we're meant to draw on? As Simon notes, "as anthropology moves haltingly towards a greater decolonization, there is this greater attempt to incorporate Indigenous and non-Western ways of being and understanding the world. Making those academically equivalent to Western materials still requires you to push heavily against many years of accreted tradition in anthropology. Doing this, making them equal, I think in some ways is still a radical act at the moment."
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Show notes by Ian Pollock
"Rather than always studying poor, peripheral peasants, pastoralists, and fishermen, let’s turn the critical gaze of our discipline, which we do so well, let’s pivot it round like a telescope lens and focus upwards at, [Laura Nader] coined the phrase, ‘the hidden hierarchies of power.’"
Cris Shore, professor of social anthropology at the University of Auckland, talked to our own Jodie-Lee Trembath about what today's politics are doing to public institutions like universities, how to break down monolithic, shorthand concepts like "neoliberalism," and the challenges of "studying up:" how to do research when your subjects understand your methods, dispute your goals, and even hold institutional power over you.
This interview was recorded at the 2017 AAS "Shifting States" conference at the University of Adelaide, which stands on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people. Here is the university’s acknowledgement and reconciliation statement. Jodie recorded the intro and outro in Stockholm, Sweden, while temporarily based at the Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research.
QUOTATIONS
"It’s very hard to disagree with or challenge the idea that accountability is a bad thing. It’s one of those weasel words; no reasonable, self respecting, rational person could possibly be opposed to accountability or transparency, or quality. It’d be like saying, ‘I’m against community’ or ‘I think the family is a bad thing.’"
"Anthropology’s a way of thinking, a way of seeing... You get sensitive to the, in a sense, just the conditionality and the fluidity of your own culture, and the arbitrariness of your own culture becomes blatantly apparent to you."
"I think that anthropology producing lots of PhD students who are not just going to go back into universities or colleges is a great thing, because actually, the world needs more anthropologists! We need them in diplomacy. We need them in government. We need them in planning departments. Anything. Any area where people interface with other people, the anthropological skill set is brilliantly useful."
"Policy enunciates, and creates, it doesn’t simply describe."
"The phrase ‘faculty land’ summed up the sense of disdain, and contempt and distance that these senior administrators were having for academics."
"I do sometimes feel I’m sticking my neck out [by researching universities], but then, on the other hand, as someone said to me once, if the professoriate can’t do it, and don’t do it, then who the hell can, and will?"
CITATIONS
Wright, S., & Shore, C., 2017. Death of the public university? Uncertain futures for higher education in the knowledge economy. Berghahn Books. New York.
Pickett, K. and Wilkinson, R., 2010. The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. Penguin UK.
Hannerz, U., 1998. Other transnationals: Perspectives gained from studying sideways. Paideuma, pp.109-123.
Nader, L., 1969. ‘Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives gained from ‘studying up’’ pp. 284–311 in D. Hyms (ed) Reinventing Anthropology. Random House. New York.
Marcus, George E., 1995 Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95-117.
Shore, C., & Wright, S., 1997. Anthropology of policy: critical perspectives on governance and power. Routledge. New York.
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
We're taking a short break, but will be back in two weeks with a new episode.
Announcing the launch of the "Single Shot" visual anthropology series: submit a single, unbroken piece of video or a single still image, plus a short description, and we'll share it on The Familiar Strange. Instructions at thefamiliarstrange.com.
“What economists obsess about is equality of opportunity… What they miss is equality of agency. How do we make equality of agency happen? How do we bridge those discriminatory boundaries that exist in the world? … That’s where anthropologists can contribute: by thinking through those issues in a creative way.”
Vijayendra Rao (http://www.vijayendrarao.org/), lead economist at the World Bank, talks to our own Ian Pollock about how anthropology could help poor or disempowered people engage with powerful institutions; his frustration with a discipline that only critiques, and won’t commit to promoting the development project; and the cultures of development itself: the faddishness of ideas, the reliance on scale and quantification, the bureaucratic inertia, and the ways that the the cultures, struggles, and aspirations of ordinary people can be missing from the picture.
Dr Rao also gave a talk at ANU’s Development Policy Centre, on the World Bank Social Observatory: “integrating the social sciences for adaptive practice.” Listen here: https://soundcloud.com/devpolicy/the-social-observatory-integrating-the-social-sciences-for-adaptive-practice
QUOTES “Creating goals for change, creating processes to achieve those goals... how do you make that change happen, how do you make it happen over the long term? That requires, in my mind, a process of co-production. It’s a process of dialogue. How do you bring dialogue into interventions, is really what I think our goal should be as development practitioners, and development researchers even. Which is not yet the common practice.”
“The notion of a ‘best practice’ is the most unhealthy thing in development.”
“The big difference between colonialism and development should be that ‘beneficiaries’ are being facilitated to have a voice in how they are being ‘helped.’ And I think how you do that, where you do that from, how all that comes in, how you change processes to make that happen, how you institute change to make that happen, that’s where anthropologists could play a very important role. And they’re not doing so.”
CITATIONS Appadurai, A. (2004) “The Capacity to Aspire.” In Rao, V., & Walton, M. (2004). Culture and public action. Stanford, Calif: Stanford Social Sciences. Freire, P. (1996;2001;). Pedagogy of the oppressed (Rev. ed.). London: Penguin. Gupta, A. (2012). Red tape: Bureaucracy, structural violence, and poverty in india. Durham: Duke University Press. Hirschman, A. O. (1967). Development projects observed. Washington: Brookings Institution. Mansuri, G., & Rao, V. (2013;2012;). Localizing development: Does participation work?. US: World Bank Publications Open access link: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/11859 Mosse, D. (2005;2004;). Cultivating development: An ethnography of aid policy and practice. London;Ann Arbor, MI;: Pluto Press. Rao, V., Ananthpur, K., & Malik, K. (2017). The anatomy of failure: An ethnography of a randomized trial to deepen democracy in rural India. World Development, 99, 481-497. Rao, V., & Walton, M. (2004). Culture and public action. Stanford, Calif: Stanford Social Sciences. Srinivas, M. N. (1962). Caste in modern india: And other essays. New York;Bombay;: Asia Pub. House.
The Jeevika project: http://www.jeevika.org.uk/ On Indonesia’s KDP program: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/501751468041102531/Crises-and-contradictions-understanding-the-origins-of-a-community-development-project-in-Indonesia Li, T. (2007). The will to improve: Governmentality, development, and the practice of politics. Durham: Duke University Press.
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Ian (1:25) starts us off, by asking, how well-written does a thesis need to be? "As anthropologists, basically what we do is write... whether it's writing your field notes, or whether it's writing up your articles or your dissertation... and most of us have never actually been trained in how to write." As Julia says, "there are so many ways of articulating the human condition and our field experiences, that what we do will be good enough as long as it's true to us, and with any luck, it might resonate with someone else one day."
Stevenson, Lisa (2014) Life Beside itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Julia (6:12), reflecting on a recent viewing of Wild Wild Country and some news items about an Australian group called Universal Medicine, asks: what makes a cult? "Does this popular discourse of 'cult' have anything to do with what scholars might otherwise explore in those communities?" As Simon argues, the new religious movements imagined as "cults" are often indistinguishable from other religions in their early days. Said reminds us, "it is in the popular discourse that there is this identifications of these groups as cults, but they do not themselves identify as cults."
Special guest Saidalavi P.C. (10:00) pays tribute to Justice Rajinder Sachar, and tells us about caste among India’s Muslims, some of whom find a political advantage to inclusion in the Hindu caste structure. "The majority of Muslims claim that their religion is egalitarian. So any claim of having hierarchy or socio-economic disadvantages based on hereditary relationships actually contests their idea of egalitarian religion." Simon reflects on questions of “pure” vs. localized Islam in Iran: "It's a very unpalatable discourse, because they feel themselves to, in some ways, to have helped Islam reach its full potential, its full capacity, through Persian culture. But that doesn't seem to be what's happened in India. People seem to be uncomfortable with the notion of Islam having mixed with Hinduism."
Ahmad, Imtiaz. (1973) Caste and Social Stratification among the Muslims. Manolar Book Service (distributed in U.A.A.: South Asia Books, Columbia, Mo.), Delhi.
Dumont, Louis. (1970) Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.. Vikas Pub. House, New Delhi.
Fuller, C. J. (1996) Caste Today. Oxford University Press, New York. Hutton, J. H. (1946) Caste in India: Its Nature, Function and Origins. The University Press, Cambridge [Eng.].
Lindholm, Charles. "Paradigms of Society: A Critique of Theories of Caste among Indian Muslims." European Journal of Sociology, vol. 26, no. 1, 1985, pp. 131-141.
Madan, T. N. (1976) Muslim Communities of South Asia: Culture and Society
Vatuk, Sylvia J.(1990) "Hindu Women and the Power of Ideology . Vanaja Dhruvarajan." American Anthropologist, vol. 92, no. 3, pp. 789-790.
Said is a PhD student in anthropology in ANU's School of Culture, History, and Language. You can find more of his work on his blog, Naked Eye (saidalavipc.wordpress.com).
Last, Simon (15:32) follows on from a recent blog post of his, on boredom during fieldwork, that stirred a big response. "Boredom in the field can actually be informative," he argues. "It is potentially in and of itself a moment to further understand the culture. But that doesn't mean that people--" ethnographers, that is--"don't get bored." Narayan, K. (1993). How Native Is a "Native" Anthropologist? American Anthropologist, 95(3), new series, 671-686. This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Show notes by Ian Pollock
"Storytelling: that's part of the power of podcasts, and just the power of ethnography in general, to really have people tell their own stories. And I think it's those stories that really capture students' interest and attention, and make them start to think about why anthropology really matters."
This month, we're bringing you an episode from our friends at Anthropod, the podcast for the Society for Cultural Anthropology. In this episode, Angela Jenks, medical anthropologist and Assistant Teaching Professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, talks to Anar Parikh, PhD candidate at Brown University, about how to teach with podcasts. They cover the strengths and weaknesses of using audio in the classroom, teaching students how to listen, strategies for engaging both graduate students and undergrads, and how to encourage students and teachers to engage with the technology of audio production.
You can follow Dr. Jenks on Twitter at @angelacjenks, and interviewer Anar Parikh at @anarparikh.
Find Anthropod on the Cultural Anthropology website (culanth.org), Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
CITATIONS
Invisibilia: "the power of categories." https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/384065938/the-power-of-categories
Only Human: "I got Indian in my family: an Anther Round takeover." https://www.wnyc.org/story/i-got-indian-my-family-another-round-takeover/
QUOTES
"A lot of podcasts are designed to communicate among anthropologists, and that can be really useful... or sometimes they're designed to communicate across academic disciplines... But I think when there's a focus on pedagogy, I think very often a lot of that focus has to be on considering an audience that may only have a very vague understanding of what exactly anthropology is, what we do, what major debate or issues in the field have been. And so oftentimes trying to sort through those topics and kind of explain them in ways that may be very different if you're talking to an audience of anthropologists."
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Show notes by Ian Pollock
KEYWORDS: Anthropology, ethnography, podcasts, podcasting, audio, pedagogy, teaching, education, graduate, undergraduate
This month, Ian (1:12) asks how we should engage when people describe their culture one way, but our observations of their behavior don’t match those descriptions. What is a “culture,” Ian asks, if its members don’t adhere to it? As Julia argues, “what people say is just as important in their cultural imaginary of who they are as what they do.” Ian mentions his blog post about kasti: find it at https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/01/25/searching-for-home-plate-in-indonesia/
Next, special guest Stephanie Betz (5:50) brings up “deepfakes,” the new technology that enables video to be manipulated so convincingly that it’s hard to distinguish fake clips from real ones. Besides the obvious application (porn), the technology has potential for advertising, art, blackmail, and bringing about nuclear war. Deepfakes, she says, “further confound the relationship between image and reality.” When any fictitious word or action becomes possible to create on video, it’s the plausible that becomes political.
Steph is a digital anthropologist and PhD student at ANU, and the president of the Australian Network of Student Anthropologists. You can find some of her work on her Academia page: http://anu-au.academia.edu/StephanieBetz.
Simon (11:27) brings up the problem of extreme emotions, and particularly hatred, for the ethnographer. He asks, does hate need to dissipate before analysis is possible? “We often talk about hate as an emotion that clouds one’s vision, and the aim of anthropology I think has always been to make clearer social relations.” As Steph argues, “there’s a reason we inhabit these places in the same way as our informants, and that’s so we can use the full breadth of our humanity in order to understand and analyze and interpret the situation.”
Last, Julia (16:56) considers Steph’s work with video game players against her own work with schizophrenia patients, and the common thread of dissociation, when the sense of self temporarily dissolves. “How might fictional characters or avatars which temporarily result in a loss or diversion of who we are, how might this help or hinder us to be with other people in real life?” Steph describes ways that immersion in familiar stories, combined with distancing tactics such as gender-flipped avatars, allows some players to incorporate traumatic events into their personas, with profound affects on their “real-world" sociality.
CITATIONS
Ataria, Y. (2018) Mindfulness and Trauma: Some Striking Similarities. Anthropology of Consciousness, 29(1), pp.44-56.
Baudrillard, Jean (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Hage, Ghassan (2009) "Hating Israel in the Field: On Ethnography and Political Emotions." Anthropological Theory, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 59-79.
Snodgrass, J.G., Lacy, M.G., Dengah, H.F., Fagan, J. and Most, D.E. (2011) Magical flight and monstrous stress: Technologies of absorption and mental wellness in Azeroth. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 35(1), pp.26-62.
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Show notes by Ian Pollock
KEYWORDS: culture, anthropology, ethnography, deepfakes, emotion, self, video games, dissociation
“Any concept -- capitalism, neoliberalism, etc. -- leaves an excess that it is the aim of anthropology to unearth. These are spaces that are not dominated by whatever’s dominating at a specific time. So there are existing alternatives, there are not just Subscribe on imaginary alternatives.... Anthropology in this sense does provide the possibility of thinking of alternatives. There are ways of living that you can build on, that are not aligned with the dominant ways of being.”
Ghassan Hage, the Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne, sat down with our own Simon Theobald to talk about the everyday work of being a public, radical, and engaged intellectual. Their conversation covers dealing with the press, navigating the neoliberal university, and engaging with a hostile and truculent public, plus how anthropology reveals alternative ways of existence that already exist in the real world.
This episode was recorded at the 2017 AAS conference at the University of Adelaide, on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people.
Find Professor Hage’s work on his Academia page (http://unimelb.academia.edu/GhassanHage) or his blog, Hage Ba'a (http://hageba2a.blogspot.com.au/)
QUOTES
There’s an almost naive theory that circulates in university bureaucracy about external engagement... that you teach students so therefore you can teach other people, the general public. However the problem with this is that today, many in the general public will not treat you with respect. It’s not that they think your ideas are too complex. It’s that people actually think you’re the enemy, an elite. So it’s become, how do you talk to the enemy?
If you are an intellectual — not just an academic, an intellectual, that is, someone who wants to think independently, who wants to be active etc — today, you have to do it against the university. You don’t do it with the help of the university.
If all you know how to do is sit down and whinge and criticize neoliberalism, I don’t think you want to be an academic. But you don’t want to NOT criticize neoliberalism.
Nothing totally homogenizes space. You talk about neoliberalism, you talk about the dominance of neoliberalism, that does not mean that every single crack in society is neoliberal.
A lot social analysis assumes that the object is analytically dead. Maybe not socially dead, but analytically dead. That is, they’re not capable of analyzing themselves, or if they are analyzing themselves, it’s naive, and let me come give you the seriously hard analysis… What happens when you start saying, “Well, what if indigenous thought can analyse us?”
Indigenous people are not sitting around waiting for anthropologists to come and analyse what they’re thinking. They can do this for themselves very well. So the question now is more, “Can we enrich our analytical stock so that we can understand ourselves better?”
CITATIONS
Charbonnier, Pierre, Gildas Salmon and Peter Skafish, eds.,2016, Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology After Anthropology, Rowman & Littlefield, London, New York.
Hage, Ghassan, 1998, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Pluto Press, Annandale, Australia.
Wright, Erik Olin, 2010, Envisioning Real Utopias, Verso, London and New York.
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Show notes by Ian Pollock
This month, Julia (1:12) questions Australia's black-and-white moral stance against vaping as a way to help people stop smoking, arguing that Australia's uncompromising stance borders on “the definition of psychotic thinking, where you become fixated on ideas to the point that you’re not open to exploring a middle ground or someone else’s viewpoints. And I would contend that the situation we’ve got in Australia, in regards to harm minimization around smoking, and the reluctance to endorse vaping as a harm minimization tool, starts to border on that psychotic edge.”
Simon (6:09) asks, why don’t ethnographers use their noses as an ethnographic implement, and pay more attention to smell when they’re crafting descriptions of their field sites? “When you talk about the things that you hear, not just the things that you see… those add to the richness of ethnography. And one of those things that I think we can draw our attention to, in terms of making more alive the material that we write, is this idea of smell. What are the smells that we had in the field, and what do they mean, not only for our informants, but also for us?”
Special guest Justine Chambers (12:30) reflects on the film Black Panther, about a nation that was never colonized, and asks: given that she knows so much about colonialism in her field site in Karen State, Myanmar, how does she, and other citizens of settler colonial nations, engage so little with the colonial legacy of Australia, her home society? As Ian asks, "there's the difficult issue of whether justice is about finding room for indigenous people within colonial legal frameworks, like a rights framework, or whether justice would be about withdrawing those institutions altogether."
Justine is a PhD student in anthropology at ANU's school of Culture, History and Language and associate director of the ANU Myanmar Centre.
Finally, Ian (18:44) looks at the gun debate in America, and asks why the two sides are described as “tribes,” a term that anthropology gave up on decades ago? The use of the term, he argues, “seems to suggest that people’s preferences are inbred… It racializes the problem,” as if “everything about a culture has to do with blood.”
CITATIONS
Antrosio, Jason “Semi-Automatic Anthropology” on the blog Living Anthropologically: https://www.livinganthropologically.com/semi-automatic-anthropology-complexity/
Black Panther http://marvel.com/blackpanther#/
Brown, Julia E. H. (2018) ‘Doing Things Little by Little’: Smoking and Vaping While Being Pharmaceutically Treated for Schizophrenia, Anthropological Forum, DOI: 10.1080/00664677.2018.1440192
Csordas, Thomas J. (1993) "Somatic Modes of Attention." Cultural Anthropology, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 135-156.
Dennis, S. (2016) 'Smokefree: A Social, Moral and Political Atmosphere. Bloomsbury Press. https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/smokefree-9781472569226/
Douglas, Mary. (1969) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
Hirschkind, Charles. (2006) The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. Columbia University Press, New York.
Ingold, Tim. (2011) Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge, London.
Kipnis, Andrew B. (2011) Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics, and Schooling in China. The University of Chicago Press, London;Chicago.
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Show notes by Ian Pollock
KEYWORDS: smoking, vaping, harm minimization, smell, anthropology, ethnography, colonization, Indigenous Australia, Indigenous America, Black Panther, guns, tribalism
This month, Ian (1:25) digs into Bitcoin, arguing that the cryptocurrency is no different than regular currencies, and can be analyzed along all the same lines: symbolically, materially, institutionally, relationally. “The same material problems of decay that would affect some other kind of material currency like a Subscribe on Androidcoin or a bill still applies to Bitcoin.” Ian mentions podcast episodes from NPR's Planet Money (“#816 Bitcoin Losers”) and and Gimlet's Reply All (#115 The Bitcoin Hunter”), and Chris Gregory’s classic study of currencies and value, Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange (Harwood Academic, Amsterdam, 1997).
Next, Julia (6:40) brings us the curious case of the hamster in the bathroom: a woman who, when challenged by an airline, flushed her emotional support hamster down the toilet. Arguing that even rodents can be granted kin-like status, and referring to Simone Dennis’s ethnography For the Love of Lab Rats: Kinship, Humanimal Relations, and Good Scientific Research (Cambria Press, Amherst, N.Y, 2010), Julia says, scientists “spoke about this sacrificial economy that was happening, where the animals would ultimately have to be killed after the experiments, was balanced with this calculus of care.” So how could this flushing happen?
Jodie (11:12) asks, are academics working too hard? Or not hard enough? And what does the debate means about the nature of academic work? She takes us through a recent Twitter battle, when Jay Van Bavel (Social Neuroscientist from NYU), following the work of John Ziker (anthropologist from Boise State), tweeted: “The average #professor works over 60 hours a week (from one university) and 30% of their time is spent on emails or meetings.” Then Nicholas Christakis, a Yale professor whom Jodie wrote about in a previous blog post, replied: “I tell my graduate students and post-docs that if they’re working 60 hours per week, they’re working less than the full professors, and less than their peers.” The debate soon hit blogs and the mainstream media, including the Atlantic. As Ian argues, “These parameter of what counts as an appropriate amount of work seem to have come out of completely other areas of labor. Whereas, with this life of the mind, which, when it’s at its best, is fun, and doesn’t feel like labor in the same way that other kinds of work do; which, at its worst, is a nagging earworm in your skull that even invades your dreams, and that there is no time, conscious or unconscious, when you’re not working; it becomes very hard along those parameters to determine what’s an appropriate amount.”
Finally, special guest Liam Gammon (16:20), the editor of New Mandala, the ANU-based blog for Southeast Asian studies and politics, talks through the special contributions anthropologists can make to political commentary. “I think that the methods and the perspectives of anthropologists really lend themselves to the kind of medium that New Mandala promotes... in a sense it’s looking at national affairs, and politics, history, and culture from the ground up.”
Find these shownotes at www.thefamiliarstrange.com/podcast
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Show notes by Ian Pollock
KEYWORDS: Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, emotional support animals, kinship, academia, blogging, Southeast Asia
“Doing history ideally is like doing anthropology of people who are gone, except that you don’t have native informants, you only have these written fragmentary sources. But the same hermeneutic struggle goes on: you’re trying to understand somebody from their point of view.”
Dipesh Chakrabarty, the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of history & South Asian languages & civilizations at the University of Chicago and Distinguished Dean's Professor at the ANU's School of Culture, History, & Language (College of Asia & the Pacific), talked with our own Ian Pollock about the intersections of history & anthropology, the struggle of scholars from poorer countries to understand their societies own their own terms, & the appeal of western-style academics, plus what it takes to do history right: training, judgment, & how to use theory (and not let theory use you).
Find Dipesh’s bio, including a list of his published works, at https://history.uchicago.edu/directory/dipesh-chakrabarty. His latest book was The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth (2015), from U Chicago Press.
Subscribe, rate, & review The Familiar Strange on Soundcloud, iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow The Familiar Strange on Twitter @tfsTweets, or look us up on FB & Instagram.
CITATIONS
Davis, Natalie Z. (2000) Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Descola, Philippe, translated by Janet Lloyd (2013) Beyond Nature and Culture. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. (2016) Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism. Duke University Press, NC.
QUOTES
“Life is not always enjoyable. You have to make a story out of lived experiences to write history, and that story has to be enjoyable.”
“All disciplines basically work with implicit models. The more formal a discipline is, the more explicit the models are.”
“When you do your thesis and you defend it, you have to defend it in terms of what it contributes to the general understanding of anthropology. And that general understanding of anthropology or history is in the end more Western, even though we think of it as 'general.’ But the ‘general’ is a Western ‘general.’ So what happens is, because of this unevenness of resources, these poorer countries actually have a tough time coming to understand themselves. Because their students get scholarships to go out and immerse themselves, like I did, into these ‘general’ discussions, but the ‘general' discussions are Western. So I actually think sometimes that the West is producing its own intellectuals everywhere in the world.”
“What we are faced with is a predicament where, as humans, we cannot not wish other humans to have the rights that we enjoy. But at the same time, our numbers have grown, and that also has some consequences. And how to combine our thinking about those consequences and our thinking about rights without some kind of optimistic leap of faith, either in technology or just sheer faith in human ingenuity, we don’t know how to combine them.”
"If you looked at the planet without thinking about rights, without thinking about justice -- because in Darwin's book there's no justice -- if you look at the planet through that framework, you have a language for talking about other species. But you can't bring it into the language of rights and things. And therefore it's like the 'truths' of evolution, and the aspirations in political philosophy, they just stare at each other, having nothing to say to each other."
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, & Language and Archaeology & Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
KEYWORDS: History, anthropology, research, academia, ethnography, human rights, colonialism, India
This month, Jodie (00:53) points to what the men didn’t say at the Golden Globes, and the problems of performing allyship. “So if we’re looking at the men at the Golden Globes who appeared to not behave like allies… are you saying we can’t rely on appearances because we can’t see inside to really understand their intentions, or that we should?”
Ian (6:05) asks about using sickness as an ethnographic method, and just how far recreating someone’s physical experience can help you understand their point of view. The topic follows a chat Ian had with friend-of-the-pod Michael Rose, whose research was shaped by the times he got sick in the field: “...he made his body very vulnerable, but he didn’t choose to get sick in those ways. The real question is how much credence we can give to trying to recreate somebody’s physical experience as closely as possible?”
Next Julia (10:55) asks how we should understand the “gaps” in health or life expectancy between groups, and the politics of placing the blame on structural factors versus individual choices. “A lot of my patient participants are very aware of the dangers in various health behaviours that they pursue. However, they enjoy living in a very present-centred way that is also representative of a quality of life that wouldn’t sit comfortably with clinicians.”
Simon finishes us off (16:40) with a paean to slow research and slow thinking, which lets ideas shift and adapt: “I think there really is something to be said about a long stewing in one’s intellectual juices, to think about what it is that we can learn from other societies.”
Complete show notes at https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/01/21/ep-6-golden-globes-allyship/
CITATIONS
Here’s the article that sparked Jodie’s thinking, “What the men didn’t say:" https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/what-the-men-didnt-say/549914/
Mike Rose was inspired by Michael Jackson’s “From Anxiety to Method in Anthropological Fieldwork: An Appraisal of George Devereux’ Enduring Ideas,” which appears in Jackson, Michael (2013) Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Mike has published a couple of articles on affect and anthropological fieldwork, which can be found at his Academia page (https://anu-au.academia.edu/CharlieRose). He also has a piece on The Familiar Strange blog, called Inedia with a Grain of Salt (https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2017/12/28/inedia-with-a-grain-of-salt).
In Ian’s segment, Simon uses the term “qualia.” Here’s one definition: “The 'what it is like' character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc." Chris Eliasmith (2004-05-11). From the online “Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind” (https://sites.google.com/site/minddict/q) [accessed Jan 21 2018].
Here's the book Julia refers to: Kowal, Emma (2015) Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia. Berghahn Books, New York, 2015. http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/KowalTrapped
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.
Subscribe, rate, and review The Familiar Strange on iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Blubrry, TuneIn, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Show notes by Ian Pollock
Keywords: anthropology, ethnography, health, mental health, golden globes, writing
“...the child operates as a powerful figure in our society, where children can mobilize anything, from anxieties about same sex marriage to fears about children in detention, and all these things that we see in our own society today.”
Dr. Annie McCarthy, who teaches anthropology at the Australian National University, tells our own Jodie-Lee Trembath about the moral pitfalls of aid and development in the slums of Delhi, India, how the poor and the young take power back from NGOs that may inadvertently objectify them, and how “stunting,” a term that should describe low height for age, becomes a shorthand for cultural assumptions about family life. Annie also talks about teaching, what it’s like to research children, and the importance of getting to know “the anthropologist behind the anthropology.”
Find Annie's work on her Academia page, or follow her on Twitter at @anni_mc.
CITATIONS
Ferguson, James. (1990). The anti-politics machine : "development," depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.aspx [accessed 7 Jan 2018]
QUOTES
“We’ve all seen those images of those children with the bloated bellies and the fly-besotted eyes… We’re very familiar with the rendering of that kind of abject state of child poverty and the way it’s used as a kind of lever to get donors to generously part with their money."
“...the word ‘stunted’ was just so much more than a kind of bodily referent, you know, I just felt like, well, you know, you don’t know anything about me. You don’t know what I might do in my life, you don’t know where I might go in my life. You know, maybe I’m going to be a few centimeters shorter than I would have been, but who even knows what I would have been? Who are you to say that my life is somehow less than it could have been?”
“It’s eugenics that enables this population norm to measure people against.”
“It’s like, okay, these kids have survived, but the rest of their lives are kind of called into question by these paradigms, and the life of the nation [India] more broadly.”
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.
Feature image by Dr Annie McCarthy - A group of girls work together to create a booklet advocating against child marriage as part of an activity for a media NGO that visits their South Delhi slum weekly.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Find these show notes at https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/01/07/ep-5-stunted-thinking-annie-mccarthy/
In this month’s panel discussion, Jodie (1:14) tells us about documents with agency: “Ideas just get up and grow legs, and they run away with themselves.” (Trigger warning: this segment mentions the recent Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. If you want to avoid that part, skip to 3:45.)
Next, Ian (6:00) considers what it’s like to live in an imaginary landscape: “the kind of imaginary landscape that I’m talking about [is] where the one that’s around you, that’s physically substantiated, is the one that isn’t real.”
Simon (11:09) taps into his work in Iran, where people seemed to have a basic expectation that their politicians would tell the truth, to ask why, in democracies, we so often assume our politicians are liars: “they had a greater expectation that people should be telling the truth than we do."
Finally, Julia (15:44) lays bare the emotional danger she faces when the emotions of the people she studies — in her case, schizophrenia patients — percolate through her own body: “I don’t think I would be able to access my participants’ experiences the way I have without putting myself at some kind of emotional risk.”
CITATIONS
Here’s Ian’s post on the Pulse Nightclub massacre and emotions in the field: https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/08/30/when-the-world-invades-the-field/
The Familiar Strange is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Find these show notes at https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2017/12/17/ep-4-killer-docs-imaginary-landscapes-political-lies-and-emotional-risk/
“The flies that go from feces into the water, into the food, don’t look at your bank account…” When a problem cuts across social divisions, “we call this the ‘binding crisis.’ What are the ‘binding crises’ that would generate enough political will and drive amongst a population that’s polarized around caste, class, gender?”
Dr. Assa Doron, associate professor of anthropology at ANU (https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/doron-a), spoke to our own Ian Pollock about India’s waste, both liquid and solid, and the physical and institutional infrastructures that handle it--or fail to. This wide-ranging conversation also touches on the transformative effects of cheap mobile phones on India’s poor, how trash turns back into treasure, how to write anthropology that’s both “appealing and authoritative,” and where to find schnitzel on the Subcontinent. To keep up with Assi’s research, follow him on Twitter @AssaDoron, and like the ANU South Asia Research Institute on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/SARIatANU/.
Citations:
Carlebach, E. הודו: יומן דרכים (Hodo: Yoman Drakhim; 1st ed. הוצאת עיינות, Tel Aviv 1956), ספרית מעריב. Tel Aviv-Yafo 1986. (For some reason I couldn’t find an English citation, but the English title is “India: Account of a Voyage.”)
Books of Assi’s mentioned in the show:
Doron, A. (2008) Caste, Occupation and Politics on the Ganges: Passages of resistance, Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Doron, A. & Jeffrey, R. (2013) The great Indian phone book: how the cheap cell phone changes business, politics, and daily life, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Doron, A. & Jeffrey R. (in press, 2018) Waste of a Nation: garbage and growth in India, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
For his other work, check out his page at Academia.edu: http://anu-au.academia.edu/AssaDoron
The Familiar Strange is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.
Music by Pete Dabro: https://dabro1.bandcamp.com/releases
Subscribe, rate, and review The Familiar Strange on iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Blubrry, TuneIn, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Find these show notes at https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2017/12/03/3-assa-doron-on-waste-in-india/
Quotes: “Try to write it as a story. Use theory as a treasure trove to illuminate what you’ve learned in the field, what you’ve seen, the stories, the myths, the rituals, the everyday life that you encounter, rather than let the theory dictate how you do so.”
"Part of my role in teaching medical students is to peel back the inculturation that they're in, to be able to relate with patients. Remember before you were a med student, what it actually meant to be the person sitting with your dying grandmother...That's something that, as an anthropologist, that's part of my role is to be able to see where those boundaries are, what it means to be a doctor, and what it means to not be a doctor."
Dr. Tanisha Jowsey, a medical anthropologist at the University of Auckland (https://unidirectory.auckland.ac.nz/people/t-jowsey), spoke to our own Julia Brown about how to analyze a medical emergency, how machines and people communicate in the ER, and how to keep your head when there's blood on the floor.
Citations: Rapport, Nigel and Joanna Overing (2000) "Social and Cultural Anthropology: the Key Concepts." Routledge: London and New York. This open access PDF is available on www.antropologias.com: http://www.antropologias.org/files/downloads/2010/08/OVERINGJ.RAPPAPORTN._Social-and-cultural-anthropology-key-concepts.pdf
The Familiar Strange is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Find these show notes at https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2017/11/19/2-tanisha-jowsey-talks-medical-tribes/
Julia, Simon, Jodie, and Ian preview what's coming up on www.thefamiliarstrange.com in the coming month. On today's show, Jodie (1:40) follows up on 2015 fracas at Yale about free speech and Halloween, in response to a discussion on Sam Harris' podcast "Waking Up" (https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/facing-the-crowd); Simon (7:10) takes us to Iran for a look at gender-segregated public transportation, and the ways rules unwind in authoritarian countries, original research he'll present next week (http://sociology.cass.anu.edu.au/events/mundane-governance-conference); Julia (12:25) reflects on conviction and openness in political speech, reacting to the departure of (former) Australian senator Jacqui Lambie; and Ian (17:55) talks about creeps, assholes, and the deeply personal process of social categorization that shapes people's behavior.
The Familiar Strange is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the Australian National University's schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.
Music by Pete Dabro: http://dabro1.bandcamp.com
Welcome to The Familiar Strange! In this brief introduction, the four hosts of the show introduce themselves, the podcast, and The Familiar Strange blog (https://www.thefamiliarstrange.com).
This is a podcast about doing anthropology. In intimate conversations and open panel discussions, the hosts (four PhD students) and our guests (senior academics and experts) explore the world by taking part and being with, struggling toward knowledge through experience.
Brought to you with support from the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.
Music by Pete Dabro: https://dabro1.bandcamp.com/releases Find these show notes at https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2017/11/19/introducing-the-familiar-strange/