In the first episode in the series, Cindy Isenhour talks with David Giles, an anthropologist who has long been working with the Food Not Bombs movement in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Boston and Melbourne. In these urban hearts of global capitalism David has scavenged food out of dumpsters and cooked with members to feed the community with food discarded by restaurants, grocers and food distribution facilities. Cindy and David talk about the absurdity of the criminalization of food sharing, David’s thoughts on abjection and about his new book coming out this spring with Duke University Press, A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People: World Class Waste and the Struggle for the Global City.

For more of David’s work, please check out his website.

In this fourth episode of Mergers & Acquisitions’ inaugural series on Economic Anthropology’s symposium issue on climate change, Aneil interviews Michael Bollig. Economic anthropology for Michael has always been closely linked with political ecology, both in his PhD work on violence in Northern Kenya and current research on large scale conservation projects in Namibia. They discuss Michael’s research, and highlight how economic anthropology allows individual and personal logics to be connected to macroeconomic systems. Thus, knowing political ecology but seeing things at the actor level is a great strength of economic anthropology. Michael and Aneil reflect on the effects of large scale conservation and what it means that climate change adaptation funds are set to overtake development funds across Africa. They end with a discussion on finding hope in humanity’s history of adapting to dramatic environmental change, how anthropologists can work in teams and across disciplines, as well as ways anthropologists can present alternative solutions to current macro scale problems such as climate change.

Michael Bollig is a Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Speaker for the Cologne Global South Studies Centre at the University of Cologne. He is also member of the German Committee for Sustainability Research, which is part of the Future Earth Initiative. He has conducted fieldwork in northern Kenya and northern Namibia with pastoral communities. Michael’s research interests center on the political ecology of conservation, multi-species entanglements in the age of climate challenges, and conflict over environmental governance. He is the author of “Materiality, inequality, and future-making as focal points of future engagement of economic anthropology with climate change” in the Economic Anthropology symposium issue on climate change.

In this third episode of Mergers & Acquisitions’ series on economic anthropology and climate change, Aneil interviews Thomas Reuter. Aneil and Thomas start their conversation with a reflection on economic anthropology as a critique of mainstream economics which through comparative study opens up alternative forms of economics. In responding to climate change, Thomas reflects on how we can use economic anthropology to give us an awareness that allows us to step back to see how current mainstream economic systems that dominate globally cause and further climate change.

Thomas debunks the idea that you can have an economy without moral foundations. Thomas discusses his shift from more symbolic to economic anthropology and also his varied career in organizing anthropologists globally with the World Council of Anthropological Associations and as well as working across disciplines in the International Science Council.

Thomas Reuter is a Professorial Fellow at the Asia Institute of the University of Melbourne and is affiliated with the Southeast Asia Institute, University of Bonn. He was President of the Australian Anthropological Association (2002-2005) chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations (2008-2012), Senior Vice-President of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (2008-2018), a member of the executive of the International Social Science Council (2013-2018), and a member of the board of Future Earth (Asia). He is a trustee of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS 2018-), and a fellow of the European Academy of Science (EASA) and Academia Europaea (EA). His research in Indonesia and beyond has focused on indigenous people, social movements, religion, political elites, ecology, climate change, food security and globalization. Thomas has published fifteen books and over 150 articles.

He is the author of Climate Change as cultural artifact: Anthropological insights to help avert systemic collapse in Economic Anthropology’s recent symposium issue centered on the question “What does economic anthropology contribute to the understanding of climate change?”

Pam and Aneil dive into how her long-term fieldwork and study of forest policy and management in Vietnam informs and shapes Pam's professional work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We discuss how to bring anthropological insights into the world of global climate change policy, how to navigate critical approaches and contributions to consensus knowledge, collaborating across disciplines and in teams. We also reflect on the meanings of equity, value, and justice in policy and market-based solutions as well as on how economic anthropologists can work to make sense of, change and inform important policy models.

In this second episode of Mergers and Acquisitions’ inaugural climate change series, economic and climate anthropologist Aneil Tripathy interviews Professor Pamela McElwee at Rutgers University. Pam is the author of “Anthropological Engagements with Integrated Assessment Modelling” for Economic Anthropology's symposium issue on climate change.

Pamela McElwee is an associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University. For the past 15 years her research interests have concerned human adaptation to global environmental change with particular expertise in biodiversity conservation and climate change in Asia. Pam's work focuses on how individuals and households respond to changes in the physical environment, and how their responses are shaped by external policies, markets and other constraints. Her research combines qualitative and quantitative household-level social analysis of environmental decision-making and resource use, with most of her fieldwork focusing on Vietnam. She has also been a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Aneil and Vern discuss economic anthropology, archaeological relevance to current climate change concerns, making linkages between past and present, sustainability, interactions between ancient people and their environments, and what we can learn from them, population dispersion, inequality, interdisciplinary decision-making, laughter, and the value of taking the long view.

In this first Mergers & Acquisitions podcast episode, Aneil Tripathy interviews Vernon L. Scarborough. Vern is a Distinguished University Research Professor and a Charles Phelps Taft Professor in Anthropology at the University of Cincinnati. His topical interests focus on settlement, land use, and water management in the context of the archaic state. By examining ancient, engineered water systems and landscapes, he reflects on and assesses societal sustainability issues from a comparative ecological perspective. To achieve this end, he has emphasized cross–disciplinary exchange and international fieldwork. Vern is the author of “What ancient landscapes contribute to climate change” in Economic Anthropology’s symposium on climate change.