The Familiar Strange

This month Julia (0:59) starts us off with the relationship between loneliness and health after listening to an episode of 'All in the Mind', a podcast that explores the connections between the brain and behaviour. She stresses that loneliness is something that everyone is vulnerable to and is becoming more of a problem in our modern world. In the podcast episode, it was suggested that simple acts of kindness and exchange could help overcome this isolating feeling. Jodie questions whether 'fictive kinship' might be more successful and Simon gives us a comparison between Australia and Iran between the ways people go about their daily activities: is it less about what we do and more about who we do it with?

Next Matt (5:55) has his podcast debut with positionality. This is something he has been looking at in his science communication Masters recently. He asks us what our own positions were during our fieldwork and what these positions mean for anthropologists during their research. Julia adds that "it's about the power that you bring to the space ... [it] could colour the interactions that you’re having with people, and whether or not people can be as natural with you as they might be in everyday life.” Simon says that he was simultaneously different things to different people and even was questioned about being a spy. Jodie tells us that her physical appearance impacted on how her fieldwork played out and how this may or may not foster trust. 

Jodie (11:05) then reflects the recent media incident where Trump was portrayed as saying that asylum seekers aren't people but instead animals. Although the Tweets have since been exposed as being misleading, it led Jodie to wonder what a 'person' is: is Superman a 'person'? What about our pets - is the phrase "pets are people too" really accurate? What are the boundaries around 'people' and 'personhood'? Is this a matter of perspective?

Finally, Simon (15:42) wraps up our can-of-worms podcast by asking: what is violence? Given the vague and imprecise concept of violence, he asks us how do we broaden our conceptualisation of violence? Julia offers: "I think that when it comes to violence... it's about how the person afflicted experiences it." Jodie asks whether we can define Government restrictions that have a negative effect on those experiencing it as 'violence'? Simon and Matt consider whether fighting and BDSM is 'violence' and Jodie finishes by suggesting that maybe 'violence' exists where consensual boundaries are crossed.

LINKS AND CITATIONS

The 'All in the Mind' podcast episode that Julia mentioned can be found here:

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/loneliness%E2%80%94a-social-pain/10962908

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com

Shownotes by Deanna Catto

“Wherever you work, science and technology are everywhere … [and] ethnographic methods are crucial for answering the kinds of questions that STS scholars want to answer.”

In the second episode of our STS Series, Emma Kowal, a cultural and medical anthropologist and Professor at Deakin University, author of over 100 publications including Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia and part of Somatosphere’s editorial team, and recipient of the Thomas Reuters “Women in Research” Citation Award in 2015, chats with our own Julia Brown at the 2018 4S Conference in Sydney – which Emma co-chaired. They reflect on Emma's academic journey from medical student to social activist to anthropologist, where her guiding goal has always been to "do the most good" for Indigenous Australians, then discuss the experiences and difficulties of doing native ethnography (that is, ethnography of your own people - so for Emma this was doing work amongst "white, middle-class, left-wing people" trying to make a difference in the Aboriginal health care system) and researching marginalised groups, and finally explore the relationship between anthropology and science and how each discipline may aid the other in the production of knowledge.

QUOTATIONS

 “A lot of what individual white anti-racists, as I called them, but also the broader policy frameworks are struggling with the question of how do we enact Indigenous equality; how do we make the lines on the graphs that we draw of Indigenous versus non-Indigenous; how do we make those lines converge and ‘close the gap’, while maintaining Indigenous difference?”

"Making knowledge is a morally risky exercise... Knowledge making matters to people. If you're working in Indigenous affairs, if you're working in Indigenous anthropology, you can't forget that."

Julia: “Why should anthropologists care about science and technology studies?”

Emma: “…my one-word answer is knowledge; that science and technology studies is really at its essence about the production of knowledge, the dissemination of knowledge, the reception of knowledge, and particularly the contestation between different kinds of knowledge and different ways of knowing. So all of these questions are also completely central to anthropology”

"Ethnographic methods are crucial for answering the sort of questions that STS scholars want to answer... to understand how people are experiencing disease, using drugs, engaging with new technologies, getting their genetic ancestry tested, making robots. All of these things are really interesting ethnographic questions about what it means to be human in 2018 and beyond."

LINKS

Emma Kowal, 2015, Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia, Berghahn Books, New York/Oxford. 

You can find the book here:

http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/KowalTrapped

You can read more of Emma's articles here: https://deakin.academia.edu/EmmaKowal 

Read more about the 4S Conference 2018 here: https://4s2018sydney.org/program/

For an explanation on the Aussie term ‘tall poppy syndrome’ see:

https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2017/06/21/tall-poppy-syndrome/

You can find the first episode in our STS series here and our interview with Kim Fortun here.

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com

Shownotes by Deanna Catto

This month on TFS, we bring you a special themed panel with Dr Siobhan McDonnell about getting ready to go to the field. Siobhan is a legal anthropologist and Research Fellow the Australian National University with interests in Indigenous land rights, climate change and gender studies.

This is also Ian's last panel podcast with us as he is moving to Indonesia (Don't worry though-Ian will STILL be involved in the project!)

[We had some technical difficulties during the recording of this episode, but despite some audio issues the quality of conversation is top notch! Great work to our executive Matt for saving the day!] 

Siobhan [1:48] starts us off by telling us about the online web resource that she and Dr Annie McCarthy developed for anthropologists – especially those new to fieldwork – to help them navigate the field. She tells us that Navigate the Field covers a range of topics presented in easy to digest modules designed to prompt you to think about things related to conducting fieldwork, from considering your own positionality and how that affects the work you do to being aware of boundaries in the field so you are safe. “We really wanted to rupture that kind of Malinowski idea of the lone man heading out into the wilderness to research the ‘Others’. It’s also about challenging what the field is."

Next, Jodie [7:54] asks us all the question: What do you wish you’d known before you did fieldwork? She posed the same question on our Facebook and Twitter pages and shares some of the responses she received, such as having sensory reminders of home, or keeping a list in the back of your field notebook of non-research related things (like reminders to bring tissues to the field), and ensuring that you have the structural support you need. This initial question evolves into a question of: what do you wish you’d known about coming back from the field and how to adjust back to everyday life? Particularly when there’s a baby involved, this can be quite daunting!

Julia [13:13] shifts our focus to the body, after listening to an episode of the Remember your body podcast and reflecting on her time in the field where the embodied experience played a large role. Her research surrounds patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, where a lot of the things they told her about were related to their physical and mental experiences. “Doing ethnography for me…required my embodied involvement and I believe it made my data more reliable because I felt like I really understood in a very connected way what my participants meant.” How can our bodies aid us to make sense and understand our participants and their experiences during fieldwork?

Finally, Ian [19:35] concludes our panel by investigating what it involves when taking your partner to the field with you. “Having her with me there in the field affected all kinds of things about my research”. Just like in a normal relationship outside the field, when this same dynamic is brought into the field there are gives and takes. Julia tells us that she made a decision not to have her partner there because it would limit the kinds of information she could access, and Jodie shares that while she had intended to be only an hour away from her husband, things don’t always go to plan.

LINKS (full full list see website)

The Navigating the Field web resource made by Siobhan and Annie is available here: https://fieldwork.weblogs.anu.edu.au/

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com

Shownotes by Deanna Catto

"We were bringing the voices of people that didn't get inside the building, inside the building and making them count. And I took that as an incredible responsibility, that you should give those voices weight and dignity and power."

We are excited to announce that this is the FIRST EPISODE OF OUR STS SERIES! The goal of the STS (science and technology studies, or science, technology and society - your pick!) Series is to explore the ways that humans, science and technology interact. While we have released some STS episodes in 2018, we still had some left in the bag from the 4S Conference PLUS many new ones as well. Let's go!

Genevieve Bell, Director of the Autonomy, Agency and Assurance (also known as the 3A) Insitute and Florence McKenzie Chair (which promotes the inclusive use of technology in society) at the Australian National University, Vice President and Senior Fellow at Intel Corporation, and ABC's 2017 Boyer Lecturer, talks to our own Jodie-Lee Trembath about building the future and a question at the heart of STS inquiry: "what is important to humans and how we can make sense of that to unpack the world that we live in?". They begin by reflecting on the Acknowledgement of Country that we begin every podcast episode with and the power that comes from realising our positions, then discuss being an anthropologist in Silicon Valley, learning how to 'translate' anthropology to different audiences, predicting the world in 10 years time and the importance of rituals (especially when finishing your PhD!).

For more about 3AI, check out their website: https://3ainstitute.cecs.anu.edu.au 

Or check out their LinkedIn page: https://au.linkedin.com/company/anu-3a-institute

QUOTATIONS (full list on website)

"For me, the notion of always being acutely aware of where you are located in time and space is a powerful way of being and to me the ability to do that in Australia is a big thing. Part of why that is an important one to me is the, I've spent the last 30 years living in the United States. And that's a place that also has history with Indigenous people and colonial forces. It also has existing Indigenous communities throughout the nation. And people don't acknowledge that. And there's never a notion of a Welcome to Country or an Acknowledgement of Country."

"Mum was really clear that you should always be working to make the world a better place. That you actually had a moral obligation to make the world better than the one you found it. And not for yourself but for others."

LINKS

For more on Brewarrina, the town with the fish weirs: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jul/10/fish-traps-brewarrina-extraordinary-ancient-structures-protection

If you'd like to read a bit about Genevieve's mother, who is also an anthropologist, see this biography of Diane: http://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0596b.htm 

Genevieve mentions doing fieldwork and 'deep hanging out' at Intel, for a quick definition of what this is, give this a read: http://cyborganthropology.com/Deep_Hanging_Out 

To become more versed in the English "Yeah, nah"/"Nah, yeah" Life Hacker has got you covered: https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2015/06/the-difference-between-yeah-nah-and-nah-yeah/ 

To read more about the Cybernetics Conferences:

C. Pias (2016) 'Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences 1946-1953: The Complete Transactions', University of Chicago Press.

The article Genevieve mentions called 'For God's Sake, Margaret' is available to read here: http://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/bateson-mead-1976.pdf

In this panel, we welcome Shamim to the Familiar Strange podcast.

This month Ian (1:15) starts us off by asking how we maintain relationships with people that we met in the field. Whether it’s a family that we stay with, or a key informant who shared their lives with us, or anyone who helped us out while conducting research, often we want to show our appreciation. Ian tells us that he wanted to send a package to the family that he stayed with while he conducted his fieldwork, but found it difficult to do so in a way that wouldn’t cause jealousy in the rural community since so many people had helped him out. While he found a solution, he asks: what things do you consider when trying to maintain these relationships?

Next Simon (5:54) (who is in the process of finishing his PhD, go Simon!) changes our focus to a different aspect of fieldwork which can cause some researchers to feel anxious about: collecting proof. Sometimes when you’re writing your thesis, it can seem like you are inferring a lot of information from small amounts of evidence.  So Simon asks us how much data do we need to collect before we can say what we’re saying is reliable? Do we take what one person says as being 'true' for the whole community? How do readers know what an anthropologist has written is 'true'?

Shamim (11:24) then draws our attention to something he’s been seeing in the New Zealand news a lot recently: an Air New Zealand safety video. This particular video has been criticised for transforming what should be on an aeroplane Safety Card into rap music based on the 1980's song 'It's Tricky' by Run-DMC. Although the video is very fun to watch from a computer screen at home, Shamim assures us that is was very cringe-worthy to watch whilst on a plane flight: “I was sitting on the flight and the whole flight was just dead silent. People were sitting still in their seats, air staff were just standing there still like statues, while this really bizarre, other-worldly rap safety video was playing, and it just was the most uncomfortable thing I've experienced.” We dive into a conversation about why people cringe and Ian asks whether it's appropriate to use a song that was contextually embedded in the social politics of the 1980s.

Finally, Jodie (17:22) ends our panel with liminality: the in-between stages of our lives, such as when you are a teenager you are between being a child and an adult. She refers to Victor Turner, who explored this concept of liminality and whether this same concept can be applied to PhD students and academia as a whole – always moving towards new goals and deadlines for papers but never settling. She asks us if this could be seen as an addiction. Shamim offers that this is perhaps more to do with the way humans think and perceive our lives; we are always in these in-between states, but more importantly that we should all come to terms with living in a liminal state. Simon questions the theory of liminality itself.

LINKS & CITATIONS

Geertz C. (1988) 'Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author', Stanford: Stanford University Press.

You can find the Air New Zealand safety ad here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYu8kkD0Gy4

For a short explanation on what ‘liminality’ is, try giving this a read: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/laurie-burrows-grad/liminality-the-threshold-_b_13845666.html

Victor Turner (1967) ‘The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual’, London: Cornell University Press.

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and theAustralian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com

Shownotes by Deanna Catto

"Especially when you’re dealing with questions of representation of the past, politics around the past, especially when you’re dealing with not just the past, but a violent past, right, it’s ethically irresponsible to not recognise your own position in that conversation, in that space. And that doesn’t mean that you necessarily take sides, but I do think that it means that you act as a connector for conversations.”

Tiffany Cain, a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and team member of the Tihosuco Heritage Preservation and Community Development Project, spoke to our own Ian Pollock at the AAA Conference in San Jose last year about her work with the local people of Tihosuco in Quintana Roo, Mexico. IN this jam-packed episode, they discuss the cultural history of Tihosuco and how it has influenced and constructed the identity of the local people today, question how we do anthropology with people who are no longer alive, unpack the process of knowledge collection in an 'umbrella' heritage project, compare solo and team ethnography, and reflect on the attachment that researchers have to their fieldsite.

This episode was recorded at the AAA Conference, so you might notice a difference in sound quality - that's just because instead of recording in our usual studio back at HQ, TFS was on the go!

QUOTATIONS

“You’re bringing so many disciplines together. You’re talking about history, you’re talking about art history, you’re talking about archaeology, you’re talking about anthropology.”

“I think there has been a tradition in anthropology broadly where we like to be able to imagine ourselves outside of the communities within which we work, at least to a certain distance. And I think there is legitimacy to that – in many ways, we will always be Outsiders to our communities unless we are working within our own communities ... And even in that space there becomes a distance because of the ethnographic process.”

“To deny that we have real impact in the communities that we work in is, you know, to misrepresent ourselves”

Ian: “I would love to keep spending more time where I did my research!”

Tiffany: “It’s hard to let go”

Ian: “Cause you’re writing about it all day back in your office or wherever your home writing site is, you’re writing about it all day. Your head is still there, it’s hard to bring your heart home.”

"A common misconception about archaeology is that we don't work with people who are alive."

"History is way too big for any one person, but when one person holds this portion of the story, and another person holds this portion of the story. When these people meet the history gets longer.”

CITATIONS & LINKS

If you'd like to read more about Tiffany and her work in Quintana Roo, check out her website: https://www.tiffanyccain.com/ and https://www.penn.museum/sites/chc/projects/

Penn University also interviewed her in an article about the project and what is involved for the researchers involved that you can read here: https://www.penn.museum/sites/chc/506-2/

(there are loads more articles about sub-projects available too!)

For more information about the history of Tihosuco and the Maya, Penn Museum has published this article 'The Modern Maya and Recent History', available here:

https://www.penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/PDFs/54-1/the-modern-maya-and-recent-history.pdf

P.S. TFS has a new Facebook Group coming soon - so stay tuned!

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com

Shownotes by Deanna Catto

We, at The Familiar Strange, would like to acknowledge and celebrate the First Australians on whose traditional lands we recorded and produced this podcast, and pay our respect to the elders of the Ngunnawal, Ngambri, Yindinji and Yirrganydji peoples past, present and emerging.

This month on TFS, we bring you a special panel episode recorded at the Australian Anthropological Society's (AAS) 2018 Conference at James Cook University, Cairns, in December. In this episode, our own Simon Theobald is joined by Viktor Baskin from James Cook University, Sacha Cody from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Katherine Giunta from The University of Sydney. The theme of the conference was Life in the Age of Death, so our panel guests embraced this theme to share with us the things they had been thinking about during the week.(This panel was not recorded in our usual studio so you may notice a slight change in sound quality - don't worry that's just our super cool 'travel' mic!)

Viktor [0:53] begins our conversation by reflecting on the enriching experience at the conference. Particularly during the presentation given by Lucas Bessire, she felt moved by the images that accompanied his talk that showed the context in which his presentation was situated - as Sacha put it, you could see the "vastness of this dead, barren land". She asks us about the limitations that text has, and how can we, as anthropologists, take the work that we do into the world and keep it ‘alive’ through a multimodal or multi-media based anthropology – something more than just words on paper.

Next, Sacha [6:10], turns our attention to China. With China’s increasing assertiveness on the global scale, he wonders what that means for him as an anthropologist of China in situations where the country is framed as a threat, as “a yellow peril out there to destroy the world and eat up our resources, infiltrate our governments, steal our technology…”. He asks the panel how they navigate sensitive topics and the balance between advocation and participant observation.

Katherine [13:13], brings the conversation back to the conference, during which she has been watching her social media fill up with comments regarding social media policy changes. With Tumblr’s new bans on sharing adult content and Facebook's ban of discussions about sexual preferences, Katherine is concerned about the resulting effect that this will have on self-expression in the queer community: “As we are talking about life in the age of death, I’m thinking about what is going to happen to...the queer community – when some of the key ways in which we connect with each other across physical borders is taken away from us.” Can computer algorithms appropriately filter content?

Finally, Simon [15:50] wraps up this episode with a brief look at the recent and highly publicised death of John Allen Chau. The missionary had decided to make contact with the North Sentinel Island indigenous people, who had remained largely untouched by the outside world, with the intentions to bring Christianity to the island. This incident incited a range of responses from the public about John, either criticising his actions or eulogising his martyrdom, so Simon asks us to put on our 'Anthropology Hats' and consider how we would respond to this incident.

LINKS AND CITATIONS - see our website for fill list

https://thefamiliarstrange.com

The official site for the AAS2018 Conference, including information about the speakers and information about the theme, can be found here: https://www.aasconf.org/2018/

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com

Shownotes by Deanna Catto

“The flies that go from feces into the water, into the food, don’t look at your bank account…” When a problem cuts across social divisions, “we call this the ‘binding crisis.’ What are the ‘binding crises’ that would generate enough political will and drive amongst a population that’s polarized around caste, class, gender?”

Dr. Assa Doron, Associate Professor of anthropology at ANU (https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/doron-a), spoke to our own Ian Pollock about India’s waste, both liquid and solid, and the physical and institutional infrastructures that handle it — or fail to. This wide-ranging conversation also touches on the transformative effects of cheap mobile phones on India’s poor, how trash turns back into treasure, how to write anthropology that’s both “appealing and authoritative,” and where to find schnitzel on the Subcontinent. To keep up with Assi’s research, follow him on Twitter @AssaDoron, and like the ANU South Asia Research Institute on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/SARIatANU/.

Subscribe, rate and review The Familiar Strange on iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Blubrry, TuneIn, Player.fm, or wherever you get your podcasts.

CITATIONS

Carlebach, E. הודו: יומן דרכים (Hodo: Yoman Drakhim; 1st ed. הוצאת עיינות, Tel Aviv 1956), ספרית מעריב. Tel Aviv-Yafo 1986. (For some reason I couldn’t find an English citation, but the English title is “India: Account of a Voyage.”)

Books of Assi’s mentioned in the show:

Doron, A. (2008) Caste, Occupation and Politics on the Ganges: Passages of resistance, Ashgate Publishing Ltd.

Doron, A. & Jeffrey, R. (2013) The great Indian phone book: how the cheap cell phone changes business, politics, and daily life, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Doron, A. & Jeffrey R. (2018) Waste of a Nation: garbage and growth in India, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

For his other work, check out his page at Academia.edu: http://anu-au.academia.edu/AssaDoron

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.

As 2018 draws to a close, this week on TFS we bring you a special ‘End of Year’ message from our own Ian Pollock, Julia Brown, Simon Theobald and Jodie-Lee Trembath.

This past year has been an incredible one for us, with 27 podcast episodes and almost 60 blog posts. We have touched on topics ranging from dog-spotting to decolonisation, ethnographic practice to trade agreements. We’ve released interviews with Annie McCarthy, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Elizabeth Watt, Ghassan Hage, Vijayendra Rao, Cris Shore, Brad Weiss, Mick Dodson, Steve Woolgar, Kim Fortun, Katerina Teaiwa, and Deborah Heath. We’ve hosted special guest panellists Justine Chambers, Stephanie Betz,  Saidalavi Thodika, Liam Gammon, Sana Ashraf, Bruma Rios-Mendoza, Patrick McCartney, Esteban Gomez and Carie Little Hersh. We’ve released podcasts in both Thai and Indonesian, have one coming soon in French, and would like to continue producing episodes in other languages. We’ve recorded interviews at conferences in multiple countries, including the 4S Conference in Sydney, the AAA Conference in California, and the AAS Conference in Cairns. These experiences allow us to grow as we learn from and share knowledge with others – something that is very important to us.

This year has seen the expansion of our team. Thanks to the help of our amazing interns, Alisa Asmalovskaya and Alina Rizvi, we were able to start adding transcriptions to some of our podcast episodes - stay tuned, there's an entire back catalogue of episodes still to be done. Having Alisa and Alina involved has been invaluable and we are happy to now welcome Alisa as our new international talent scout. Ian is stepping down from his role as Executive Producer (don’t worry - he’ll still be with us!) and Deanna Catto and Matthew Phung have joined our Executive Team. We'll also be introducing some new members in the social media management space in 2019. We’d also like to welcome our new regular contributors to our blog: Esther Anderson from the University of Southern Queensland, Holly Walters from Brandeis University and Stephanie Betz from the Australian National University -- if you'd like your name added to that list, let us know! Finally, we’ll soon be starting a new project … so keep an eye out for more exciting things happening in 2019!

While the other Familiar Strangers are working hard to finish their theses, we’d like to congratulate Dr Julia Brown (how awesome is that title!) for completing her PhD, and Matthew and Deanna for graduating from their Undergraduate Bachelor’s Degrees – all in December! If you've recently graduated, a HUGE congratulations to you, too. Woohoo!

Finally, we’d like to give a massive shout out to everyone who has contributed to TFS and thank all the listeners of our podcast and readers of our blog for your ongoing support. 2019 will be another big year for TFS and we look forward to seeing you again then. Until then though...

KEEP TALKING STRANGE!

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

“If wine hasn’t been turned into a standardized beverage, there’s room for variation. There’s an appreciation for variation that has something to do with the taste of place. And there’s different vintages, if not manipulated to achieve a standard outcome, will be distinctive. You’re tasting 2009 compared to 2016. And that tells you something about how warm it was that year or things that are more complex than that”

Deborah Heath, a leading anthropologist of wine and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Lewis & Clark in Portland, Oregan, chats (over a glass of wine, of course) with our very own Jodie-Lee Trembath at the 4S Conference in Sydney in late August. Keeping with the theme of Deborah’s workshop with Mike Bennie, Natty Wine and Its Companion Species, they discuss the meaning behind wine by comparing the differences between commercial winemaking and natural winemaking, how chemicals used during the production cycle of wine create post-apocalyptic worlds around Donna Haraway’s “contact zone”, and about living with the trouble of anthropology, the work that can and has been invasive and has privileged our relative power concerning those that we work with.

Just like our last panel episode, this interview was not recorded in our usual studio so you may notice a difference in sound quality.

QUOTES

“Wine doesn’t exist in nature. Grapes don’t turn themselves into wine without some sort of collaborative relationship with people who make wine.”

“The loose umbrella of so-called ‘natural wine’ is variously used to refer to wines that are manipulated less – wines that don’t have chemical inputs in the vineyard, which have become routine especially since World War Two, and that minimize interventions in the wine cellar” … “It’s pretty common practice to do what’s called chaptalization which means to add sugar which boosts alcohol, it’s fairly common practice to add acid, but a natural winemaker wouldn’t do either of those things.”

“In a fully self-sustaining vineyard environment, there will be lots of other critters involved. If you have animals like sheep, chickens, cattle, horses, that graze on the property and produce manure, then that manure can then be composted, you’ve got their participation in this nutrient soil that also then contributes to the micro-flora in the soil.”

“Composting is described by those who do it as magical!”

“Each of us can decide what tastes good to us. And then again we’re in the cross-hairs of marketing.”

“People are only patients when they’re in the middle of an appointment.”

“We all strive to, as Donna Haraway says, live with the trouble, live with the contradictions of the work that we do that can and has been invasive, that has - many times - privileged our relative power, vis-à-vis those that we work with.”

LINKS AND CITATIONS - see our website for full list

Haraway D. (2008) When species meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

For an explainer about chaptalization, give this article on Vine Pair a read: https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/what-is-chaptalization/ 

Trubek A. (2009) The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir, Berkeley: University of California Press.

The Brad Weiss episode Jodie mentions can be found here: https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/07/23/ep-18-brad-weiss/ 

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

Show notes by Deanna Catto

Music by Pete Dabro