Anthropology on Air

This episode’s guest, George Paul Meiu, is professor of anthropology and chair of the institute of social anthropology at the University of Basel and associate in the departments of anthropology and African and African American studies at Harvard University.

George’s research and teaching focus on sexuality, gender, and kinship; ethnicity, belonging and citizenship; mobility, memory, and materiality; and the political economy of East Africa and Eastern Europe. He is the author of the prize-winning book Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2017), and his new book, currently in press, is titled Queer Objects to the Rescue: Intimacy and Citizenship in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2023). In addition, George is our companion in the attempt of getting anthropology on air, he is the host and producer of the combined video-podcast platform, Ethnographic Imagination Basel, which we really recommend checking out!

 In this podcast, we talk with George about ways to understand the contemporary homophobic violence and sentiment in Kenya. Instead of imposing perspectives from queer liberalism, George suggests situating the phenomenon in its own social, material, and historical context in order to grasp its local grammar and conditions of reproduction. George then offers an analytical strategy to do this through a focus on what he calls ‘queer objects’. We talk about how objects such as plastic and diapers can be used to grasp the moral panic over homosexuality in Kenya and how this relates to notions of intimate citizenship. Finally, George describes how the queer potentiality of objects has been used in artivism and activism and how we might use it for thinking critically, imagining, and creating new worlds.

Resources:
-       If you want to learn more about George’s work, we recommend listening to this New Books Network podcast episode, where he talks about his prize-winning book Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya

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In this episode you will meet Veronica Strang, who is a professor of anthropology currently affiliated with Oxford University. Her research focuses on human-environmental relations, and in particular, societies’ engagements with water, encompassing conflicts over ownership and governance; cultural beliefs and values; human and non-human rights; and people´s sensory and cognitive interactions with water. Veronica’s main ethnographic research has been conducted in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, and apart from publishing an impressive number of academic books and articles on the topic of water, she has consulted and worked with people from the water industry, the UN, and UNESCO, just to mention a few. 

We talk with Veronica about her more recent work on water beings. After describing what a water being is, Veronica unfolds how thinking with and through these creatures can illuminate culturally specific and historically changing human-environmental relations. We talk about how water beings can be used as a narrative device for criticising a sharp nature/culture divide and how they can provide alternative models for relating to nature and responding to the current environmental crisis. Finally, Veronica touches upon the comparative and co-authoring nature of anthropology.

Books referred to in the podcast:

-       Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Environmental crisis (Reaktion Books, 2023)

-       The Meaning of Water (Routledge, 2004)

-       Gardening the world: agency, identity, and the ownership of water (Berghahn Books, 2009)

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In this episode, you will meet Matthew Carey who is associate professor at the Department of Anthropology at Copenhagen University. Matthew’s main field site is in the Moroccan High Atlas where he has done recurring fieldwork since 2002. His work here has, among other things, focused on mistrust, complicity, egalitarianism, sincerity, subjectivity, medical pluralism, and anarchism. Apart from that, Matthew has written on issues related to apocalyptic discourses, conspiracy, lying, and bureaucracy.

In this conversation, we talk with Matthew about his book ‘Mistrust: An ethnographic theory’ before delving into the subject of infant mortality and parental grief among Tachelhit-Berber speaking communities in Southern Morocco. In trying to explain the radical difference here between showcase and claimed experience of grief when small compared to older children passed away, Matthew provides an anthropological analysis of different forms of emotional attachment and relational bonding.

The podcast was recorded in early May 2023 when Matthew was in Bergen to give a presentation at the BSAS Department seminar.

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In this episode you will meet associate professor at the University of Kentucky, Diane King. Diane’s research focuses on Kurdistan, which is the ethnic homeland of the Kurds encompassing parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Since the mid 1990s, Diane has done extensive fieldwork in the Kurdish communities in Iraq, and her work explores themes such as kinship, the state, migration, religion, and gender. She is the author of the 2014 book, On the Global Stage: Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq and more recent publications include the book titled Kinship and Gender which Diane co-authored with Linda Stone.

In this conversation we speak with Diane on dominant kinship structures in Kurdistan, with a focus on how patriliny manifests and forms both the intimate lives and broader sociocultural context of her interlocutors. Diane also touches upon the relation between ethnic identity and state formation, and the benefits of reflecting on both the specificities and what is general across people and places in anthropological work.

This episode was recorded in early December 2022, when Diane was in Bergen to give the annual Fredrik Barth Memorial lecture, which she had titled “Ethnic Groups and Quandaries: Thoughts on Modern States and Hereditary Belonging”. 

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In this very first episode of AoA, we speak with Kregg Hetherington about his project on “ghost rivers” in Montreal, Canada. Kregg is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, where he specialises in environment, infrastructure and the bureaucratic state. He is the author of the multi-award-winning 2020 book, The Government of Beans, based on his long-term fieldwork on soybeans in Paraguay, as well as Guerrilla Auditors, an ethnography of land struggles in Paraguay. 

As you’ll hear, Kregg’s current work continues to engage with the more-than-human world - this time with rivers, even ones that sometimes cannot be seen any more. Kregg directs the Concordia Ethnography Lab, where he runs a collaborative project called Emergent Waters which aims to understand Montreal’s changing relationship with water as a defining feature of its environment and infrastructure. 

In this conversation, Kregg and I begin by discussing his current work, and the possibilities and limitations of thinking of rivers - and other nonhumans - as “kin” or “persons”. We also talk about the methodological and pedagogical approach Kregg calls “composite ethnography”, as well as STS (science and technology studies), and how the particular qualities of water make it a different kind of ethnographic object compared to land. 

Links

Kregg Hetherington (@krether) / Twitter

Home - Concordia Ethnography Lab (ethnographylabconcordia.ca)

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