This four-part series on “The Military Present” features interviews with scholars of war and militarism that explore how our present is shaped by the technologies, logics, histories, and economy of war. Episode 3 features an interview with Wazhmah Osman, filmmaker and professor of Media Studies and Production. Building on discussions with scholars Joe Masco (Episode 1) and Madiha Tahir (Episode 2) about the uneven distributions of war’s material effects and visibility, the interview with Wazhmah Osman in Episode 3 focuses on the United States’ dropping of the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) in Afghanistan in April of 2017. The MOAB is the largest and most powerful non-nuclear weapon ever used. The final episode of this special series will feature an interview with physician and anthropologist Omar Dewachi in which he discusses war, wounding, and the production of ungovernable life in Iraq. Each of the episodes in this special series ask anthropologists (or scholars in related disciplines/trained as anthropologists) to engage with pressing issues of our present. Our hope is that the episodes will be of interest to anyone concerned with US militarized violence, domestically and internationally, and that they will contribute to public scholarship. Full episode transcript.
Image Caption: A picture of Wazhmah as part of a US diplomatic mission in Afghanistan.
Wazhmah Osman spoke on Democracy Now about the MOAB immediately after it was dropped by the United States, which . For a full transcript of this episode, please follow this link: http://www.americananthropologist.org/the-military-present-episode-3-transcript/ 


Featured Audio: 
P.J. Harvey - "The Glorious Land"

Special Feature: "The Military Present" - Episode 3 (Feat. Wazhmah Osman)

Anthropological Airwaves is the official podcast of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. It is a venue for highlighting the polyphony of voices across the discipline’s four fields and the infinite—and often overlapping—subfields within them. Through conversations, experiments in sonic ethnography, ethnographic journalism, and other (primarily but not exclusively) aural formats, Anthropological Airwaves endeavors to explore the conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical issues that shape anthropology’s past, present, and future; experiment with new ways of conversing, listening, and asking questions; and collaboratively and collectively push the boundaries of what constitutes anthropological knowledge production. Anthropological Airwaves shares the journal’s commitment to advancing research on the archaeological, biological, linguistic, and sociocultural aspects of the human experience by featuring the work of those who study and practice anthropology within and beyond the academy.

Society & Culture

Personal Journals

History

Philosophy

Places & Travel

This episode is the second of a two-episode series on the production of archaeological knowledge in Lebanon produced by Nelly Abboud, contributing editor to the Archaeology Section at American Anthropologist. The series invokes the concept of an “open mic,” or a live show in which members of the audience–no matter their professional stature–take the stage to share their observations, critiques, and analysis. Nelly’s guests are early and mid-career archaeologists working in archaeology and museum worlds that remain elitist and exclusively reserved for members of a privileged and well-established social class. In each episode, she gives the metaphorical floor to a young voice in Lebanese archaeology and asks them to discuss their career within this system and the place of archaeology in contemporary Lebanese public life. 
Today, we hear from Dr. Sarah Mady, lecturer in anthropology at Fordham University. Before moving to the United States in 2015, Sarah was a full-time field archaeologist and a research assistant at the University of Balamand, where she had been building a career since 2006. In this episode, Sarah connects the current state of the field of Lebanese archaeology to decades of colonialism, politics, sectarianism, and elitism. 


Nelly Abboud is a freelance museum educator, founder, and director of Museolab, a cultural Lab that works on promoting cultural heritage through the use of experiential learning tools and methods. She is also a researcher interested in heritage and museum studies, cultural memory, public archaeology, and social collective impact.
Dr. Sarah Mady holds a Ph.D. from Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is an adjunct lecturer at Fordham University. Her research studies healing shrines in North Lebanon and the ways in which women and mothers have produced and used these spaces as a part of their daily lives and lived religion. 

NB: Since this episode was recorded, Sarah Mady has successfully completed her doctoral studies and now holds a PhD in Archaeology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.


Credits:
Writing, Production, & Editing: Nelly Abboud
Production Support: Anar Parikh
Thumbnail Image: Sarah Mady
Featured Music: ‘Hanging Moon’ by Le Trio Joubran
Executive Producer: Anar Parikh

Season 05 - Episode 04: Dismantling the Ivory Tower (Open Mic Edition) - Part Two

This episode is the first of a two-episode series on the production of archaeological knowledge in Lebanon produced by Nelly Abboud, contributing editor to the Archaeology Section at American Anthropologist. The series invokes the concept of an “open mic,” or a live show in which members of the audience–no matter their professional stature–take the stage to share their observations, critiques, and analysis. Nelly’s guests are early and mid-career archaeologists working in archaeology and museum worlds that remain elitist and exclusively reserved for members of a privileged and well-established social class. In each episode, she gives the metaphorical floor to a young voice in Lebanese archaeology and asks them to discuss their career within this system and the place of archaeology in contemporary Lebanese public life. The series begins with reflections from Lebanese archaeologist Lorine Mouawad about the nature of the archaeological field in Lebanon and how Ottoman and French colonial mentalities continue to inform how the field is managed. She shares her thoughts on the current state of the field and these sociopolitical entaglements in the context of her own experience as a field archaeologist.


Episode Transcript
Closed-Captioning


Credits:
Producer: Nelly Abboud
Executive Producer - Anar Parikh
Featured Music: "Relative Serenity Houdou’ Nisbi هدوء نسبي,” by Ziad Rahbani.

Season 05 - Episode 03: Dismantling the Ivory Tower (Open Mic Edition) - Part One

This episode features a conversation between Dr. Yannis Hamilakis and Dr. Naor Ben-Yehohada about Moria, once the largest refugee camp in Europe until it was completely destroyed by a fire in September 2020. Dr. Hamilakis had been researching, experiencing, and witnessing the materiality of contemporary migration on Lesvos, the Greek island where Moria was located, since 2016. And, in the aftermath of its destruction, he convened a cohort of archaeologists, social anthropologists, activists, teachers, and authors with direct connections to and experiences of Moria to reflect on what the place meant to them and possible directions for the future. These contributions came together in the form of a multimodal portfolio, “What Was Moria and What Comes Next?” comprising research and photo essays, ethnographic fiction, first-person accounts, lyrical prose, illustration, and more. Dr. Hamilakis’s introduction to the collection, was published in the February 2022 issue of American Anthropologist and the entirety of the collection is available open-access on the journal’s website. To round out the multimodal scope of this project, this episode contributes an oral and aural dimension to the reflections to “What Moria and What Comes Next?”


Episode Transcript
Closed-Captioning


What Was Moria and What Comes Next?


Credits:
Producer: Anar Parikh
Executive Producer - Anar Parikh
Featured Music: "Vertigo feat. Sponty" by Krav Boca

Season 05 - Episode 02: What Was Moria and What Comes Next?

In this episode,  a professor-student pair, Dr. Atreyee Majumder and Manhar Bansal, provide a glimpse into their ongoing conversation on the enduring role of universal categories and their relationship to anthropological knowledge. In light of the discomfort around universals in contemporary social sciences, we offer the provocation: can there be universals beyond those of capitalist modernity? We talk about the dominant time-space compression account of modernity, the possibility of uncovering other, more liberating and revolutionary temporalities, and the fun of doing theory in anthropology. We argue for the need to revisit the question of universal categories to think through our time and politics, albeit on a broader canvas. Tune in to ask, along with us, who’s afraid of universals? 


Episode Transcript
Closed-Captioning


Further Reading:
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. “Time/Space” pp 91-129.
Li, Darryl. 2020. The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. “Introduction” pp 1-26.
Tsing, Anna L. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. “Introduction” pp 1-20.
Walker, Gavin, and Naoki Sakai. 2019. “The End of Area.” Positions: Asia Critique 27(1): 1–31.


Credits:

Writing, Production & Editing: Atreyee Majumder

Executive Producer - Anar Parikh

Thumbnail Image: "Railroad Sunset" by Edward Hopper (1929)

Featured Music: "Air on a G String" by J.S. Bach

Season 05 - Episode 01: Who's Afraid of Universals

This episode is the third (final) installment of a three-part series produced by Eleanor Neil, contributing editor at American Anthropologist and Anthropological Airwaves. From the African American Burial Ground in New York City to the memorialization of violence in Northern Ireland to professional archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean, Eleanor asks archaeologists with different regional and methodological specialties to choose a single object or site, and, in their own words describe how this this site or artefact speaks to the interaction between archaeology and political or social identity across time and place. Here, Eleanor, an archaeologist herself, takes up the very prompt she posed to Dr. Cheryl Janifer LaRoche and Dr. Laura McAtackney in first two episodes of the series: to consider the role archaeology plays in the creation of contemporary political social discourses in the context of her own research on community archaeology on the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus. 
Episode Transcript
Closed-Captioning


Further Reading: 
Counts, Derek B., and Elisabetta Cova, P. Nick Kardulias, Michael K. Toumazou. “Fitting In: Archaeology and Community in Athienou, Cyprus.” Near Eastern Archaeology 76, no. 3 (2013): 166-177. 
Counts, D.B. “A History of Archaeological Activity in the Athienou Region.” In Crossroads and Boundaries: The Archaeology of Past and Present in the Malloura Valley, Cyprus, Annual of ASOR 65, edited by M. K. Toumazou, P. N. Kardulias, and D. B. Counts, 45–54. Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2012.  
The Kallinikeo Museum 


Credits: 
Writing, Production & Editing: Eleanor Neil Editorial 
Production Support: Anar Parikh 
Thumbnail Image: Eleanor Neil 
Featured  Music: “Westlin’ Winds” by Eoin O’Donnell 
Intro/Outro Music: "Waiting" by Crowander

Special Feature: "The Military Present" - Episode 3 (Feat. Wazhmah Osman)

Download our free app to listen on your phone