In this episode, we speak with Alessandro Rippa about amber – a fossilised resin that not only allow us a glimpse into prehistoric lifeforms and climatic conditions millions of years ago but also works as an entry point into understanding current political, scientific, and commercial frictions.

Alessandro is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, at the University of Oslo, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project called “Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene”. He has conducted extensive fieldwork along China’s borderlands, and more recently in his home region in the Italian Alps, and he has published on themes such as infrastructure development, borders, ‘road animism’, human-environment relations, re-wilding, hunting, and heritage.
His award-winning book, titled “Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China”, came out in 2020 and explores the interplay between developmental processes, various forms of state power, and local experiences and perceptions of transboundary connections in China.

Emerging from this fieldwork, the object of amber caught Alessandro’s interest, and in this podcast, we speak with him about the many aspects and actors that are part of its history and global circulation. The conversation will take us from China and Burma to Italy, Poland and Ukraine, as amber burst out in unpredictable places, and we discuss how amber links the past, present, and future in human lives, visions, and politics. 

You will find links to the discussed publications and to Alessandro’s work in the show notes.

The podcast was recorded in September 2025, when Alessandro visited Bergen to give a presentation as part of the BSAS seminars.

Resources:

Research profile: https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/people/aca/alessrip/

Book: Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China (2020): https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463725606/borderland-infrastructures

Articles on re-wilding in the Italian Alps:

-       https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00141844.2021.1939398?tab=permissions&scroll=top#abstract

-       https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01426397.2024.2309310#abstract

ERC project page for Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene

-       https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/projects/AMBER/index.html

In this episode, we are in company with Hans Lucht to talk about ethnographic poetry. Hans is a senior researcher, and the head of migration research at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) in Copenhagen. He has worked with migration for 20 years, with a special focus on undocumented labour-related migration from West Africa to Europe. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Ghana, Niger, Libya, Italy, and Greece, and his prize-winning monograph ‘Darkness before Daybreak’ chronicles the lives of a group of migrants who travels from Ghana to Italy in search of work.

Apart from his numerous academic contributions of articles and policy reports, Lucht is a writer, and poet, I should say. He has published two novels titled Onko-Mus and Lysene på den anden side and two collections of poems, all in his mother-tongue Danish. The first poetry collection, called Feltarbejde (Fieldwork) from 2022 is a poetic reflection on both the experiences of his interlocutors and the experience as a fieldworker. The second, Vores liv ryster (Our lives are shaking), came out in 2024 and consists of what Hans has called documentary poems. This means that all text of the poems is direct quotes from conversations and interviews with his interlocutors that Hans has then curated by following a few self-imposed dogmas.

In today’s episode, Hans will read out loud five poems from this collection, all titled with a name of the one speaking and where the conversation took place. In between the readings, we ask Hans about what impressions inspired the poems, the dynamic of working between anthropology and art, and how each domain can inform and expand the insights of the other. We discuss the concept of ‘existential reciprocity’ in relation to his work, and how doing fieldwork engenders impressions and transformations that exceed academic analysis and extend into the lives of both interlocutors and fieldworkers.


Resources:

-       Hans Lucht’s academic profile

-       Feltarbejde (2022)

-       Vores liv ryster (2024)

Welcome to a special two-episode series of Anthropology on Air!

In this and the previous podcast, you will listen to selected parts of a lecture series on the subject of slavery and freedom with professor of Sociology at Harvard University, Orlando Patterson. The lectures were held in December 2023 at various locations in London and were recorded by our colleague, Rolf Scott.

This episode features the second lecture given by Patterson titled ‘Slavery and Genocide: Jamaica, the US South and the Historical Sociology of Evil’ at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. After this introduction, the episode jumps straight into the lecture which examines the connection between genocide and slavery with a case focus on Jamaica. Patterson begins by describing slavery through the concept of ‘natal alienation’ before connecting slavery with common definitions of genocide. 

He then provides a comparative history of slavery in Jamaica and the United States, in order to argue that what happened in Jamaica between 1655 and 1838 was not only slavery but also an elongated genocide of ethnocultural destruction, physical killing and brutalisation on a large scale, and the denial of existence of millions of people. Finally, Patterson touches upon how the traumatic memory affects Jamaicans today. During the lecture, Patterson refers to some statistics and figures which can be found by following the video-link in the show notes. 

If you are interested in learning more about Patterson’s work, you can also listen to his first lecture on the paradox of freedom here on the Anthropology on Air podcast channel, and you can find videos of both lectures in full length including an open conversation session on YouTube. Links are provided in the show notes.

We hope you enjoy the episode.

Resources:

-       Lecture series: https://therai.org.uk/events/lecture-professor-orlando-patterson-the-paradox-of-freedom-a-socio-historical-approach/

-       Video of this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vurr2AwIu0M

-       Video of the second lecture on slavery and genocide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW7Nw5aFAgE&t=8s

-       Video of open conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHZsNu62mas&t=4085s

In this and the following podcast, you will listen to selected parts of a lecture series on the subject of slavery and freedom with professor of Sociology at Harvard University, Orlando Patterson. The lectures were held in December 2023 at various locations in London and were recorded by our colleague, Rolf Scott.

This episode features the first lecture given by Patterson titled ‘The Paradox of Freedom: a Socio-Historical Approach’, held at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. The episode begins with an introduction by David Scott, professor at Colombia University, who summarises the line of thought going through three of Patterson’s most treasured monographs: ‘The Sociology of Slavery’ from 1967, ‘Slavery and Social Death’ from 1982, and ‘Freedom in the Making of Western Culture’ from 1991. Patterson then proceeds with unfolding the deeply contested value and concept of freedom with regards to its intimate connection with slavery. The first 40 minutes of the lecture, Patterson supports his claim that freedom is a socially constructed value and a cultural product of the West made possible by relations of slavery. In the last 50 minutes, Patterson then relates this dialectic of freedom and slavery to its historical development through Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, and Christianity.

If you are interested in learning more about Patterson’s work, you can listen to his second lecture on slavery and genocide here on the Anthropology on Air podcast channel, and you can find videos of both lectures in full length including an open conversation session on YouTube. Links are provided in the show notes.

We hope you enjoy the episode.

Resources:

-       Lecture series: https://therai.org.uk/events/lecture-professor-orlando-patterson-the-paradox-of-freedom-a-socio-historical-approach/

-       Video of this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vurr2AwIu0M

-       Video of the second lecture on slavery and genocide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW7Nw5aFAgE&t=8s

-       Video of open conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHZsNu62mas&t=4085s

Welcome to a special episode of Anthropology on Air.
In this episode you will hear the recordings of the 2024 Fredrik Barth Memorial Lecture, held by Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern. The episode begins with an introduction by Synnøve Bendixen who is head of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Strathern then takes us on a historical and global tour through various ethnographic signposts from the Melanesian Baktaman to current activism, on this tour, inviting us to think about “Journeying anew, with or without knowledge” in the context of climate change and biodiversity loss.


About the lecture, 'Journeying anew, with or without knowledge'
Global consciousness of climate change and biodiversity loss endures in the face of what we know to be inadequate responses.  For all the attempts to act on knowledge, failure to scale up reactions – by citizens, by governments - makes one wonder where the power of knowledge has gone.  Not dealing very well with relations and connections is one widely acknowledged short-coming; it is of course a shortcoming to which many anthropologists would point (speaker included), in promoting the relational insights of their interlocuters.  This makes Fredrik Barth’s 1975 monograph on the Melanesian Baktaman, then an unusual voice against the easy making of connections, now appear rather intriguing.  His own search was for places new.  Starting a twenty-first century journey there brings one to a point where the power of knowledge – when it is tied to action -  is not quite what it promises.

About the lecturer, Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern
Professor Marilyn Strathern studied Social Anthropology at Girton College, Cambridge (PhD 1968). She held posts in Canberra (ANU), Port Moresby and UC Berkeley (visiting) before returning to the UK in the 1970s. In 1985 she took up the chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, followed by the William Wyse Professorship of Social Anthropology in Cambridge in 1993-2008. Professor Strathern was elected to the British Academy of Sciences in 1987 and made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2001. She was the Presidential Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, Trustee of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College and is now Honorary Life President of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK. Strathern’s work has focused on Melanesian and British ethnography. Papua New Guinea was her principal area of fieldwork, from 1964 to most recently in 2015. Her research has explored developments in knowledge practices in the UK and Europe. She developed her work on gender relations in two main directions: feminist scholarship and new reproductive technologies (1980s-1990s), which led to her groundbreaking books “The gender of the gift” (1988) and “After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century” (1992), and legal systems and intellectual and cultural property (1970s, 1990-00s). Her subsequent work on regimes of audit and accountability, including the edited volume “Audit Cultures. Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy” (2000) has attracted broad interdisciplinary attention. The Strathern Annual Lecture was established at Cambridge University in 2011 to honor her significant achievements.

In this episode, we speak with Karin Lillevold, a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies, and Religion at the University of Bergen. As part of the research project Gardening the Globe, Karin traces relations between three species that are increasingly coming into contact with each another: muskoxen, wild reindeer, and humans. Karin’s interest is in how these relations are managed, as well as the aesthetics and performance of wilderness, in Dovrefjell National Park in Norway. Dovrefjell is a place of great significance for Norwegian national identity, and these days is a site of contested notions of belonging, wilderness, and the right to roam (“allemannsretten”) – a much cherished and legally inscribed norm in the country.

Karin also holds a master’s degree in social anthropology from the University of Bergen where she wrote about visions of nature and national identity in Iceland. Her research interests include rewilding, imaginaries of wilderness, sense of place, tourism, national identity, cultural heritage, human-animal relations, posthumanism, and ethnographic methodologies. Karin has also studied art history, and worked with cultural heritage at various museums. Before embarking on her PhD, she worked as a research assistant at the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation at UiB where she published on sustainable urban development in relation to cultural heritage. She is part of the Environmental Humanities research group at UiB.

We hope you enjoy the conversation!

In this episode we speak with Martjin Oosterbaan. Martjin is professor at the department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University, with a chair in the Anthropology of Religion and Security. He has done more than two decades of research in Brazil, focusing on topics such as urban and religious transformation, security and citizenship, and the role of mass media and popular culture in identity formation. He currently leads the ERC Consolidator research project: Sacralizing Security in Mega-Cities of the Global South.

In the podcast, Martjin presents some of his research findings on the theopolitical constellations of contemporary rule in Rio de Jainero. He begins by describing the hybrid forms of governance in the city and how the religious landscape has changed within recent decades. We then talk about the peculiar and recently emerged phenomenon of evangelic gangs in Rio, and how religion is used as part of territorialization and legitimization of the rule and workings of these gangs. Finally, Martjin shares some comparative insights about how mega cities across the globe display similar developments of new forms of politics and rule infused with religious aspects. 

We hope you enjoy the conversation!

The podcast was recorded in October 2024 when Martjin was in Bergen to present at the BSAS series.

Resources

-       Academic profile

-       Oosterbaan, M. (2017). Transmitting the spirit: religious conversion, media, and urban violence in Brazil. Penn State University Press.

-       More information on the project, Sacralizing Security in Mega-Cities of the Global South

Welcome to season 4 of Anthropology on Air! With autumn on the way in Bergen, we kick off a new season with a resident of another North Sea city: dr. Andrew Whitehouse. Andrew is a multispecies, environmental anthropologist and a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Aberdeen with a lifelong interest in birdwatching, the main topic of our conversation today.

We begin with how Andrew’s own bird-watching – mostly carried out at his local ‘patch’ of Girdle Ness, a promontory next to Aberdeen harbour – informs the kind of anthropology he practices. We also discuss the role of bird sounds in people’s perceptions of environmental changes; how watching birds can give people a strong sense of place; the legacy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962); the benefit for anthropologists of drawing on multispecies approaches, and much more.

Andrew Whitehouse is co-editor of the book Landscapes Beyond Land (Berghahn Books, 2012) and the forthcoming volume More than Human Aging (Rutgers UP, 2024), and he has published extensively on various aspects of human-bird relations. Andrew’s articles have appeared in journals such as Environmental Humanities, Conservation and Society, Social Anthropology, The Swiss Journal of Musicology, and Sociological Review.

In this episode, the finale to season 3, we speak with Atreyee Sen, Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Our topic of discussion is a talk Atreyee gave at our department entitled, ‘No city for lovers: Urban poverty, public romance and violent moral policing of lower-class female youth in Mumbai’, which is based on her award-winning article in the interdisciplinary journal Critical Asian Studies. In it, Atreyee explores the aggressive spatial marginalisation of and violence against lower-class, young lovers in Mumbai.

Over the course of her academic career in India, the UK and Denmark, Atreyee Sen has published extensively, and brought critical insights to studies of gender, childhoods, poverty, urban politics and South Asian cities. She is author of the critically acclaimed monograph, Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum (Indiana University Press, 2007), which challenged feminist and development critiques of right-wing women, and reviewed representations of ‘the bad poor’ in South Asia.

She is also co-editor of Global Vigilantes (Hurst, 2008) and Who’s Cashing in? Contemporary Perspectives on New Monies and Global Cashlessness (Berghahn Books, 2020). Some of her more recent publications include ‘An Economy of Lies: Informal Income, Phone-Banking and Female Migrant Workers in Kolkata, India’ in Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies (2022), and ‘Religious Spaces, Urban Poverty, and Interfaith Relations in India’ in Current History (2022). In 2023, Dr Sen won the inaugural prize for best journal article from the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Asian Studies, for her article ‘“No city for lovers”: anti-Romeo squads, resistance, and the micro-politics of moral policing in an Indian city’.

In this episode, we speak with Martin Eggen Mogseth and Fartein Hauan Nilsen about their first edited volume, Limits of Life: Reflections on Life, Death, and the Body in the Age of Technoscience (Berghahn Books, 2024). The book explores how fundamental concepts such as life, birth, selfhood, religion, death, and ancestry are being reshaped in an era of rapid technological changes, from a transhumanist movement seeking to disrupt death, to digital avatars ‘replicating’ deceased loved ones and widely accessible DNA tests revealing hitherto unknown genetic relatives. We discuss the book’s genesis in a smoky pub in Denmark; different ways of understanding ‘life’ and ‘limits’; how advancements in artificial intelligence and genetic testing have led to a revival of interest in ancestry in Euroamerican contexts; sperm ‘superdonors’; why California is such fertile ground for exploring topics at the intersection of scientific imagination, technology, and the self; and more.

Martin Eggen Mogseth is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, where he works with the experiences of people involved with assisted conception in the US, primarily in California. His research begins with the moment a person learns that they are donor conceived, what might be called "reconception", and expands to consider the various actors somehow affected by and affecting the trajectories that thus ensue, be they temporal, "non-human", or relational. The project is concerned with topics such as identity, kinship, technology, and biology, and deals intimately with phenomena such as personal misrecognition in the mirror, familial secrecy, familial disruption and connection, and the shifting of fundamental sense-making elements.  Martin is also interested in the limits and possibilties of language in conveying ethnographic occurences, thus he tinkers as well with poetry and "the literary" and the idea that "language is technology". 

Fartein Hauan Nilsen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He has previously conducted ethnographic research in Iceland for his MA where he explored the impact of modernity and technological advancements on religious revivalism, particularly pagan revivalism, in Iceland and the broader Euro-American context. Currently, Fartein is part of the RCN-funded project "Human Futures: A study of Technoscientific Immortality" led by professor Annelin Eriksen at the University of Bergen. As part of this project, Fartein has conducted 13 months of fieldwork in California focusing on how Generative Artificial Intelligence, mainly in the form of chatbots, is being used for memorial purposes. Initially, his research centered on death, but fieldwork revealed that the current AI boom is equally about life, both in representing a new form of life and in facilitating a specific way of life. Fartein's research interests span a wide range, including the Anthropology of Technology, the Anthropology of Religion, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Digital Anthropology, Artificial Intelligence, New Religious Movements, and the interplay between Science and Religion.

More about the book, released 1 June 2024, here: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/MogsethLimits