Conversations in Anthropology

In this episode, Mythily talks to Anne Galloway and Laura McLauchlan. Anne is a former academic and current farm witch who, in both roles, has spent a weird amount of time getting to know sheep. Laura is a multispecies anthropologist at the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW and lectures with the UNSW Environment and Society group. Anne and Laura are also, it must be said, dear friends. As they speak of friendship, policy, care, death, and killing, anthropology emerges as a way into practices and relations that could maybe (we hope) inform a ‘better world’. Anne and Laura are both deeply invested—through their entanglements with sheep and farmers (Anne), hedgehogs and ecological conservation workers (Laura)—in understanding what sophisticated practices of love, kindness and friendship look like. So we talk through the sticky and unruly nature of lived ethics; of what it means to dislike with respect. Or, to kill with love. And also, of choosing to walk away from academia.

This episode was produced by Mythily Meher, with editing and production support from Tim Neale and Matt Barlow. Mythily lives and works in Aotearoa New Zealand, and we recognise Māori in Aotearoa as tangata whenua (people born of the whenua [land/placenta]), whose right to sovereignty here is inalienable.

Conversations in Anthropology is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and with support from the Australian Anthropological Society.

Works mentioned:

‘Lively Collaborations: Feminist Reading Group Erotics for Liveable Futures’ by Laura McLauchlan (in Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy)

‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’ by Anna Tsing

‘Power in the Helping Professions’ by Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig

Also, more generally, the expansive works of Deb Bird Rose, and Maria La Puig Bellacasa

We return with a conversation recorded, this past summer, between Ceridwen Dovey and our own Timothy Neale and David Boarder Giles. Dovey is a Sydney-based writer of fiction, creative non-fiction, and in-depth essays and profiles, as well as a filmmaker. Born in South Africa, she grew up between South Africa and Australia, studied as an undergraduate at Harvard University and as a postgraduate in anthropology at New York University. But, as we learn in this episode, Dovey did not become an anthropologist, and instead moved to a different but related set of analytical and representational problems as a fiction writer. Is fiction ethnographic? How do the commitments of creative non-fiction and anthropology differ? And, what does the moon think about all this? Tune in to find out.

Interested in learning more? Check out https://www.ceridwendovey.com/

Show Credits

Lead Production: Timothy Neale

Deputy Production: David Boarder Giles and Mythily Meher

Editing: Timothy Neale and Mythily Meher

This conversation was produced by Timothy Neale on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.

Check us out on Twitter @ anthroconvo and our website anthroconvo.com

For this episode, Cameo and Tim caught up with Professor Jessica Cattelino of the University of California Los Angeles. Jessica is a sociocultural anthropologist who has worked extensively with Seminole people of Florida in the United States. Her first book High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke, 2008), explores sovereignty and the politicisation of gaming, while her soon to be released second book, follows water in the Florida Everglades. Both works develop critical approaches to recognition politics, settler colonialism and Indigeneity, with relevance across settler states. The conversation also covers Jessica’s approach to service and governance within the academy, and the ways in which it reproduces societal structures and inequities.

Interested in learning more? Jessica recommends Melanie Yazzie and Cutcha Risling Baldy’s introduction to their special issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity Education & Society, “Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Water”; Teresa Montoya’s work on permeability; Courtney Lewis’s book, Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty; and Carla Scaramelli’s book, How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey.

Show Credits

Lead Production: Cameo Dalley

Editing: Cameo Dalley and Tim Neale

This conversation was recorded by Tim Neale on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.

Check us out on Twitter @ anthroconvo and our website anthroconvo.com

This month we bring to you a wonderful conversation between Matt and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Western Sydney University, Dr. Malini Sur.

Malini is a socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests in India, Bangladesh and Australia on the themes of agrarian borderlands, cities and the environment. This conversation orbits around Malini's recently book 'Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border' (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), which recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along the violent--yet generative--borderlands between India and Bangladesh. Equal parts ecology, infrastructure, surveillance, and bureaucracy, this conversation will resonate for many well beyond the eastern Himalaya.

Show Credits

Lead Production: Matt Barlow

Editing: Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow

This conversation was recorded on the unceded lands of Kaurna and Dharag First Nations People.

Check us out on Twitter @ anthroconvo

In this episode, Tim sits down with Associate Professor Monica Minnegal to chat to Dr. Will Smith, an environmental anthropologist and research fellow at Deakin University. Will’s book, ‘Mountains of Blame: Climate and Culpability in the Philippine Uplands’ recently published with University of Washington Press, explores the political ecologies of forests in relation to the experiences and effects of climate change on the island of Pala’wan, in the Philippines.

This conversation tackles some thorny questions around Indigenous understandings of changing climates, the refusal by communities to be categorized by governments as vulnerable victims or resilient saviours, and more-than-human relations marked by fear and violence, rather than reciprocity, flourishing, or love. As Will states, the forests are full of malevolent spirits, and he has been bitten by a lot of stuff in the forests of Pala’wan.

Enjoy this great conversation between Will Smith, Monica Minnegal, and Tim Neale.

Show Credits

Lead Production: Tim Neale

Editing: Mythily Meher, Tim Neale, and Matt Barlow.

This episode was recorded by Tim Neale on the lands of Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.

Check us out on twitter @ anthroconvo.

Cameo Dalley talks to Fred Myers (Silver Professor at New York University) and Jason Gibson (Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Fellow at Deakin University), both of whom work on Aboriginal Australian ceremony and material culture. The conversation roams over reflections on happenstance in their careers, the making of and reception of their work, and the evolving role of the anthropologist and anthropological knowledge in Indigenous communities.

https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/jason-gibson

https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/fred-myers.html

Works Mentioned

Gibson, Jason M (2020) Ceremony Men Making Ethnography and the Return of the Strehlow Collection, SUNY Press, Albany, N.Y.

Myers, Fred (1986) Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines Smithsonian Institution Press, Wash., D.C. (reprinted in paperback by University of California Press, 1991)

Myers, Fred (2002) Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham: Duke University Press.

Myers, Fred (2019) The Difference that Identity Makes: Indigenous Cultural Capital in Australian Cultural Fields. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

Remembering Yayayi (film) Directors, Pip Deveson, Fred Myers, Ian Dunlop.

Show Credits

This episode was produced by Cameo Dalley on the lands of the Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, and it was edited by David Boarder Giles and Mythily Meher.

In this episode, Cameo speaks with Imelda Miller, of the Queensland Museum, and Olivia Robinson, of the State Library of Queensland. With over two decades of curatorial work and collaboration, they not only share their insights about collection and exhibition, but — as an Australian South Sea Islander and Bidjara woman, respectively — they share their insights about reimagining curation itself in a way that engages, empowers, and gives voice and agency to their communities.

We are delighted to bring you a conversation between Matt, Tim, and Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought at The New School, Hugh Raffles. Raffles is the author of three books. The first of which, In Amazonia: A Natural History, is an ethnography about how rivers and humans co-constitute one another in the east Amazon of Brazil. Raffles’ second book, Insectopedia, is a collection of tales about humans and insects that takes us from the discovery of language among bees to artistic representations of contaminated butterfly wings in Chernobyl. His most recent book, The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, is a bracing tale of time, memory, and loss, written through stories of stone. Across all three books Raffles has developed a deeply philosophical, historical, and poetic way of writing stories anthropologically that remain open to readers beyond the academy. What Raffles does with these subjects, in researching and writing about them, is somewhat alchemical, spinning them into meditations on humanity that are searing, deep, and evocative, like art; his fascination on the page is contagious. We hope you enjoy this conversation with Hugh Raffles, on his career and process, what he is learning from newer generations of anthropologists, crafting an authorly voice, and supporting others to find and craft theirs.

https://www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty/hugh-raffles/

Works mentioned

Hartman, S 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. WWNorton Press, New York.

Stepanova, M 2021. In Memory of Memory. Fitzcarraldo Editions, London, England.

Show Credits

This episode was produced by Matt Barlow and Timothy Neale, and edited by Matt Barlow, Timothy Neale, and Cameo Dalley. Conversations in Anthropology is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society and made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association.

This episode brings together historians and anthropologists to explore questions that are anthropological in scale: race, racism, whiteness, white supremacy, and white nationalist movements in North America and Europe. Kathleen Belew is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago, whose book, Bring the War Home, explores the recent history of white nationalist movements and organising in the years between the Vietnam War and the Oklahoma City bombing. Alexandra Minna Stern is a Professor of History, American Culture and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, whose work has investigated the intersections of eugenics, racism, and gender in American politics. Her most recent book is Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate. Britt Halvorson is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Colby College whose most recent work, along with our fourth guest, has turned to investigate the ways in which whiteness and white supremacy are embedded in narratives of Mid-Western identity and place-making. Their forthcoming book is provisionally titled Real Americans: A Global History of the Midwest and White Supremacy. And Joshua Reno is a Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University, and the co-author, with Britt, of Real Americans.

Pop the kettle on and sit back for our first 'tea' themed episode! For this episode, Matt invited Michael Dunford, a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at ANU whose research explores labour, language, and tea in Myanmar, to join him in conversation with Sarah Besky and Mythri Jegathesan.

Sarah Besky is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in the International Labour and Labour Relations School at Cornell University. Her research uses ethnographic and historical methods to study the intersection of labor, environment, and capitalism in the Himalayas. Her work analyzes how materials and bodies take on value under changing political economic regimes and explores the diverse forms of labor that make and maintain that value.

Her first book, The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) explores how legacies of colonialism intersect with contemporary market reforms to reconfigure notions of the value of labor, of place, and of tea itself.  Her second book, Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (University of California Press, 2020) blends historical and ethnographic research on science, value, and the idea of quality in the tea industry to analyze efforts at economic reform in India. Another book, How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR Press, 2019), a volume co-edited with Alex Blanchette, brings together contemporary theoretical conversations in posthumanism with classic and continually relevant questions about political economy, precarity, and the meanings of work. 

Sarah’s new research explores the intersections of agricultural extension and experimentation, colonial and postcolonial governance, and the everyday productive and reproductive work of farming in the Himalayan region of Kalimpong, West Bengal.

Mythri Jegathesan is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Santa Clara University. Her research focuses on gender, labor, minority politics, and development in the Global South, and has explored the social and economic experiences of Tamil women tea plantation residents and workers in Sri Lanka, where she has conducted field research since 2005. She is currently researching the first women's trade union in Sri Lanka, the dynamics of transnational organizing across formal and informal employment sectors, and the changing development practices of local NGOs in postwar Sri Lanka. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and has received grants from the National Science Foundation, American Association for University Women, and American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies. Her first book 'Tea & Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka', published in 2019 by the University of Washington Press, was awarded the Diana Forsythe Prize by the Society for the Anthropology of Work.