The Familiar Strange

This month we bring you a special panel episode straight from the AAA (American Anthropological Association) Conference in San José, California. In this episode, our own Julia Brown and Ian Pollock are joined by Dr Esteban Gómez, a professor at University of Denver and co-host of the Sapiens podcast, and Dr Carie Little Hersh, an associate teaching professor at Northeastern University in Boston and host of the Anthropologist on the Street podcast. (This episode was not recorded in our usual studio so you may notice a difference in sound quality – but it really adds to the conference vibe, in our opinion!)

This month Julia (1:26) starts us off by sharing some of her observations at the conference. As a graduate scholar from Australia, she finds it fascinating how under-prepared she feels while trying to network with other academics and compares the way Americans approach career goals compared to Aussies. She asks the other panel members what they think of the ‘elevator pitch’ and the cultural practice of ‘putting yourself out there’ that seems to come across in American academia. Esteban considers that “we’re all in that mindset of … ‘how am I going to benefit from this?’ and that’s how you’re taught in graduate school, to always think of yourself and how you brand yourself … branding has infiltrated academia in so many ways”.

Next Esteban (6:56) draws our attention to another topic in America: the contemporary issues of immigration. His interest is specifically in the cases where individuals are being labelled as ‘undocumented’ migrants despite carrying enough paperwork to prove they're not. Ian compares this situation with our own here in Australia regarding ‘boat people’ and Carie offers further insight from a legal anthropology perspective, where one may observe a disparity between the laws the state is supposed to enforce and those that are acted out in everyday practices.

Carie (11:46) then segues into our next topic about the place of anthropology in public conversations. “So many people talking about these critical issues at the AAA...whether they’re about immigration or health care or about the concepts of race – whatever it is – what I keep hearing over and over again…is that we need to get anthropology out there more”. Coming from the perspective of anthropologists that try to do that through podcasting, questions arise in the conversation about the mode and method of disseminating anthropological enquiry to the public, the importance of target audiences, and the ethical considerations that need to be made when communicating in the public arena.

Finally, Ian (17:30) wraps up the conversation on a political note, by sharing his experience over the past decade as an American living outside America during a time of great political change. Sometimes we forget as anthropologists that we come with our own sets of labels as we move through social worlds. For Ian, coming back to America he feels a “deepening estrangement from this country … I had not thought of myself as a migrant before but just yesterday for the first time in an elevator at the hotel, somebody asked me where I was in from, and I said I’m just in from Australia”.

You can read more about this year’s AAA Conference using the Twitter hashtag #AmAnth2018.

Check out Esteban's and Carie's podcasts here:

Sapiens podcast https://www.sapiens.org/kicker/podcast/

Anthropologist on the Street podcast https://anthropologistonthestreet.com/

For a list of links and citations, visit our website https://thefamiliarstrange.com/

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 body of the people is in that landscape so when its mined and crushed and dug up, you’re not just doing it with rock, you’re also doing it with people, with the remains of people, and we know that happened on Banaba.”

Katerina Teaiwa, Associate Professor at the School of Culture, History and Language at ANU, author of ‘Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba’, and current Vice-President of the Australian Association for Pacific Studies, spoke to our own Simon Theobald about phosphate mining on Banaba Island. They discuss the history of phosphate mining and the spread of Banaba around the world through the global agricultural industry, the impact of the mining on the indigenous people of Banaba, continue The Familiar Strange’s exploration of decolonisation in the social sciences, and critique the current modes of knowledge production in academia, before ending with one of modern anthropology’s ultimate questions: do outsiders have the right to makes comments about other cultures?

QUOTATIONS

Simon: “Banaba ends up spread across the world effectively in the form of this phosphate industry.”

Katerina: “It’s not just a metaphor. It’s literally a material fact that the island gets spread across the world and enters these ecological and food chains, so it ends up in animals, it ends up in humans.”

"Land, body and people are not disconnected from each other ... The breaking apart of that means culturally, socially, spiritually, those relationships start to fragment and become unhooked from each other.”

“We were taught to question everything in academia, to not take texts and ideas at face-value and just because they’d been written down by some powerful guy or, you know, famous people, that was truth.”

“I say this to my students … I am learning as much as you are. This is an exchange of knowledge and ideas.”

“Empowerment isn’t just about race, or class, or ethnicity. Empowerment is about helping people feel comfortable to be able to critique their own positions, their own positionality, without falling apart.”

CITATIONS AND LINKS

Teaiwa K. (2014) Consuming Ocean Island: stories of people and phosphate from Banaba, Indiana: Indiana University Press.

For an introduction on the concept of 'emodiment', give this a watch by Nicholas Herriman (2012):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF7ksSmd4Wg

For an overview of the life of late Professor Greg Denings and his contributions, see:

www.smh.com.au/national/historians-way-opened-new-roads-into-the-past-20080411-gds90q.html

You can read more about Kirin Narayan here:

https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/narayan-k?term=kirin+narayan

and Paige West here:

https://paige-west.com/

For more on TFS’ discussion about decolonisation, check out our podcast episode with Sana Ashraf and Bruma Rios-Mendoza here:

https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/10/01/ep-23-decolonizing-anthropology/

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

Show notes by Deanna Catto

Julia (0:59), starts us off with a discussion about zombie nouns – words that are created by nominalisation – such as sociality, irrelationality, neoliberalisation, etc. Julia asks us the ultimate question: why can’t social scientists communicate with simpler words instead of jargon? Jodie argues that the jargon can be beneficial when used within a discipline, but problematic when communicating with a public audience. Ian reminds us that jargon is a part of our identity at The Familiar Strange: “We don’t want to sort of run away from ourselves because who are we – we’re a bunch of anthro geeks!”

Next Ian (5:12) brings our attention to the revelations that can arise through material objects. He reflects on one instance during his PhD fieldwork when he was shown a sarong that revealed the social history of the local people and the complex hierarchical relationships that surround it (and theft!). The other Familiar Strangers reflect on similar instances during their own research when objects have crystallised something important about their fieldwork, including blood, power point sockets, and plastic bags.

Jodie (10:24), changes our focus to the recent Kavanaugh hearings. This court case centres around the controversial nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as a Judge to the United States Supreme Court, after Professor Christine Ford released a testimony stating he had sexually assaulted her. Jodie proposes the potential of viewing the affair through the lens of biopolitics. Essentially the idea of biopolitics is that the state governs our bodies, what we can and do with our bodies, and uses certain technologies to control our bodies. Particularly in relation to the Trump Presidency, Jodie asks us to think about women’s bodies: what are women allowed to say about their own bodies, what are men allowed to say about women’s bodies, and what is and isn’t appropriate to say in public for a about women’s bodies?

Finally, Simon (16:25) steers the conversation towards ethic in anthropology: what to do when our values are challenged.  “We, as anthropologists, tread this fine line between not judging our informants and yet, at the same time, wanting to adhere to a particular kind of universal set of values”. Simon asks us how we should respond when we strongly disagree with something our informants do: is it wrong or is it just their culture? Ian argues that “It is difficult to draw those lines and the more you get to know the people that you are working with, often you end up retreating from some of those values”.

CITATIONS (for a full list of citations and links please see our website)

Alex Di Giorgio’s blog post ‘Academic Jargon and Knowledge Exclusion’:

https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2017/03/23/7-jargon-exclusion-and-the-public-sphere-how-academias-use-of-language-does-no-favours-for-making-knowledge-publicly-accessible/

Jodie’s definition of ‘biopolitics’ available here: https://anthrobiopolitics.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/biopolitics-an-overview/

Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, by Kate Manne, 2017, Oxford University Press.

Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, by Kim Tallbear, 2013, University of Minnesota Press.

Nancy Schepper-Hughes article about ethics (1995) available here:

https://www.academia.edu/7509881/Primacy_of_the_Ethical

Julia’s interview with Kim Fortun can be listened to here:

https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/10/15/ep-24-kim-fortun/

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 need to be experimental because we’re not up to the task at hand; there’s a real practical and ethical call to responsibility, that drives that experimental commitment.”

Kim Fortun, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, author of ‘Advocacy After Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New World Orders’ which won the 2003 Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society, current president of 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science), and founder of The Disaster-STS Network established during the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, spoke to our own Julia Brown about the beneficial role of anthropologists in the wake of disaster. They discuss the importance of fieldwork – particularly being situated in unfamiliar places - to offer new ways of understanding society, the possibilities of teaching anthropological methods to engineering students or even six year olds, about the lived experience as an anthropologist of science during disasters, and about the intersection of different worlds of expertise as science and politics interact in these disaster zones.

Find more of Kim’s work on her website: http://kfortun.org

QUOTATIONS

“Anthropologists can be useful during disasters and not just afterwards when we sort through our ethnographic findings. This is also about being interdisciplinary in practice to contribute to both theory and policy.”

“A key teaching was that we can use empirical studies, and ethnographic studies in particular, to really question the explanatory power of an established social theory … And I think in Bhopal I learned that kind of using ethnographic work to query entrenched ideas certainly had social theoretical mandate but also profoundly political mandate”

“Even after the disaster, if you knew how to fix it, you’d just fix it. But in a disaster you don’t know how.”

“Disaster often causes scholars to respond quicker than we’re used to.”

“Even after the disaster if you knew how to fix it, you’d just fix it… but in a disaster, you don’t know how.”

CITATIONS

Althusser, L. (1977). Reading capital (2nd ed.). London: Nlb.

Bateson, G. et al (1956) "Toward a theory of schizophrenia." Behavioral Science 1(4): 251-254

Felman, S. (1991). Education and crisis, or the vicissitudes of teaching. American Imago, 48(1), 13-73

Fortun, K. (2001). Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.

For ‘Computational toxicology,’ look here:

Fortun, K. and Fortun, M. (2005). Scientific imaginaries and ethical plateaus in contemporary US toxicology. American Anthropologist, 107 (1), 43-54.

Morris, R. C., & Spivak, G. C. (2010). Can the subaltern speak?: Reflections on the history of an idea. New York: Columbia University Press.

The TFS blog post Julia mentions:

https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/02/08/ethics-in-psychiatric-anthropology/

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

Show notes by Deanna Catto and Ian Pollock

"We think we are supposed to be comfortable. As long as we are trying to do everything to be comfortable, we will never make a change."

In this themed panel discussion, our own Jodie and Simon sat down with Sana Ashraf and Bruma Rios-Mendoza, two PhD candidates in anthropology at ANU, to talk about decolonization: what it is, and what it means for anthropology, in the academy, in the field, and inside our own minds.

Sana Ashraf's work looks at blasphemy claims and related violence in Pakistan. To learn more about Sana's research, check out her latest publication:

Ashraf, S. (2018). Honour, purity and transgression: Understanding blasphemy accusations and consequent violent action in punjab, pakistan. Contemporary South Asia, 26(1), 51-68. doi:10.1080/09584935.2018.1430745

Bruma Rios-Mendoza's research looks at ritual and world-making among Biak people in West Papua, Indonesia. Find more of her work at Academia: http://anu.academia.edu/BrumaRios

QUOTATIONS

Sana: "Decolonisation to me means recognising the privilege we hold and exercise in everyday life, in our everyday interaction. It’s not just limited to governments and the militaries anymore, it’s the various organisations, institutions, universities, the development sector, a lot of other areas where this privilege is exercised."

Bruma: "Decolonisation is always a process...because there are many new ways in which power is inflicted over others and subjugates them, because there will emerge new ways in which people are being subjugated, no? So this decolonising has to keep on going."

Simon: "As someone who lives in a settler colonial state, I would say that decolonisation is a recognition of the mental and physical violence that was meted out to indigenous peoples by European settlers, and the fact that that was not just at one particular point in time, but has been an ongoing process that continues to this day."

Bruma: "Colonisation is not only about territories, it’s also about ways of engaging between each other...So even countries in Scandinavia, where many have not been active colonisers, still, being part of a world system, we are all kind of in this domination by the status quo of disparity."

Simon: "It [decolonisation] is a matter of justice… people who have been colonised have - again, not a historical gripe, but a legitimate, ongoing claim to having been meted out an injustice that deserves to be corrected, in the same way that you would expect an injustice done to you to be corrected."

Bruma: "We think we are supposed to be comfortable. As long as we are trying to do everything to be comfortable, we will never make a change."

Sana: "I think making decolonisation convincingly beneficial to the people who are in positions of power is basically making it all about them, again, and it’s not all about them, it does not have to be beneficial to them. Why does everything, including decolonisation, have to be beneficial to the people in power?"

Sana: "Your skin color and your nationality and where you come from does not define how you can, or whether you can study a particular country or not. But being conscious of the privileges you bring to the study or to the field is really important, because if you are not conscious and aware of your privilege you can sound and be very patronizing towards a culture, which is not okay."

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

Show notes by Ian Pollock

"Although this stuff is very ordinary, very day-to-day, very unremarkable... it's actually quite dangerous, too."

Steve Woolgar, emeritus professor at the Saïd School of Business at Oxford University and giant in the field of science and technology studies (STS), spoke to our own Jodie-Lee Trembath about the little niggling rules that we run up against everyday. Together they unpack what it means to be an "everyday person," how we all operate in a thicket of regulations, the storytelling that elevates rule-breakers and vilifies enforcers, and how to turn your speeding tickets into a valuable part of your research project.

Find more of Steve's work on his Academia page: http://oxford.academia.edu/SteveWoolgar

QUOTATIONS

"There's been a long history of looking at the products of science or the products of technology and trying to develop an analytically skeptical perspective on those things. So you say, with a scientific claim, which appears very objective, you approach that by saying, well, actually, that's the upshot of a whole series of complex social and political processes, it's contingent, it could have turned out differently, and so on."

"Ideas like 'proof' and 'facts' and 'theories' and so on, you can re-specify those as the practical work that scientists do. The same with ideas like 'governance' and 'control' and 'regulation;' you can re-specify that as the ordinary stuff that people get on with in their lives."

The "mundane" is "a state which cannot be reduced any further, because it's just 'the way things are.'"

"It's a very mundane act to try and check somebody's bag, or to put a parking ticket on them. But the system at work which makes all that possible is very vulnerable to people documenting it and producing information about it, and so on. So, I mean, it was a big insight for me, because I realized that, again, although this stuff is very ordinary, very day-to-day, very unremarkable, and son on, it's actually quite dangerous, too."

"For sure, it seems like one has delegated to the extent that the system now has more power than you do."

"We [academics] have a very poor ability to figure out what it is that people outside the academy actually want from us, and I always find that a really fascinating gap."

CITATIONS

Pollner, M. (1974). Mundane reasoning. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 4(1), 35-54. doi:10.1177/004839317400400103

Woolgar, S., Neyland, D., & UPSO (University Press Scholarship Online). (2013). Mundane governance: Ontology and accountability (First ed.). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

Jodie also mentions The Wholesome Show podcast: here's a link: https://soundcloud.com/wholesomeshow/magnificent-mundane-governance-steve-woolgar-simone-dennis-kate-henne

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 Ian Pollock

Jodie (1:04), drawing on the book Down Girl by Australian philosopher Kate Manne, starts us off by asking what misogyny is, and how we should tackle it as a culture. “If our goal is behaviour change, for bigots to stop being bigots, racists to stop being racists, misogynists to stop being misogynists… is the approach to say 'there is no place for you'… do we castigate them, or do we try and find [other] ways, even though that seems unfair?”

Next Simon (5:45) looks at a mad week in Australian politics--with one prime minister dumped, and a new, less-popular one (but not the less-popular one we expected) sworn in--and asks, when a political party self-destructs in public, what forces beyond rationality might be at work? As Ian argues, it's a question of ideologies, and power and purity: “This seems to be part and parcel of a movement sweeping the democratic world which is a movement away from the kind of big tent idea of what a political party can be… the idea that a nation should have disparate elements… and to think that they can form a smaller, harder, purer core of a party and still seize and hold power with that.”

When we recorded this, it really looked like Peter Dutton would get the big chair, but it ended up going to Scott Morrison instead.

Julia (10:02) brings us to the ontological turn, a controversial view of anthropological theory and thinking: "the ontological turn…. is premised on the idea that cultural relativism isn’t enough, that it’s not relativistic enough. That what constitutes the world and nature is also disputable, and not just different viewpoints on the world and nature.” She asks, how can we try to write, not just from a different culture, but from a different world?

Finally, Ian (16:30) asks, what could podcasting, or other non-traditional media, bring to classroom teaching? And what is being lost by the move away from lectures and scholarly articles? As Simon argues, “the idea that you could consume everything through podcast or some audio manner, to me seems like we’re losing the kind of disciplinary nature of the university.”

CITATIONS

Anderson, Benedict (2006) Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Rev. ed.). London;New York;: Verso.

Manne, Kate (2018) Down Girl: the logic of misogyny. Oxford University Press: New York.

West, Paige, 2016. Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea. New York, NY: Columbia 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 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 Ian Pollock

“We don’t look back enough to go forward, I don’t think. We need to look in the rear view mirror everyday.”

Professor Mick Dodson AM, a Yawuru Aboriginal man, Australian barrister, academic and recently retired Director of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at ANU, talks to our own Julia Brown about some of the ongoing struggles for Indigenous Australians. They discuss education and language, calling out everyday racism and unacceptable behaviours toward women, the role of anthropology in Indigenous Australian affairs, the Northern Territory Intervention, the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and self determination. The Native Title Act (or Settlement) is also mentioned, along with the Stolen Generations and the 2008 Apology. Their conversation concludes with a reflection on Indigenous meanings of health and well-being.

QUOTES

“These are probably the oldest languages in the world. There’s something wrong with your values if you don’t think that that heritage is of any worth.”

“The thing that troubles me about anthropologists is that there’s a level of preciousness that seems to afflict the discipline.”

“I think the great thing that’s happened in research of any sort but particularly anthropology is the ethical clearances processes... how are you going to be impartial, independent - that’s where preciousness gets in the way.”

“Maybe we should select people to study anthropology with greater scrutiny.”

“‘Going native’ ought to be frowned upon. You know, you can understand it but don’t try and become it.”

“In its essence self determination is having control of your destiny, as a group. It’s a right of peoples... coupled with social justice it means that you as a group are in control of the decisions that affect not just your daily lives but what happens to you as a group, into the future.”

“With the Uluru Statement, it’s been framed in a negative way ... The response is really mean-spirited, and unfair, unjust, and a perpetuation of the colonial project really - ‘we’ll decide what’s best for you black fellas, cause we have the power and whatever you dish up we can say yes or no to.’"

"The black armband is going to be worn until there's reason to take it off. And we haven't given, as a nation, any reason to take it off. And it's not about blaming the present generation. But we can blame them if they refuse to accept this history."

"Subsection 26 of section 51 [of the Australian constitution] allows the parliament to pass laws that can be racially discriminatory. And they have. Since 1967, they have, at least five times, used that power to discriminate against Australia's Indigenous people and only Australia's Indigenous people."

“There is a connection between culture and identity confusion... connecting the young with the broader family, clan, nation, universe, has broken down, through colonisation and dispossession.”

“Yawuru people have a notion of Liyan, which is a feeling of well-being... health is not just a physical condition, it’s also a spiritual and intellectual and cultural condition."

CITATIONS

Dodson, M. 1994. ‘The End in the Beginning: Re(de)finding Aboriginality’ Wentworth Lecture.

On the Northern Territory Intervention: https://www.monash.edu/law/research/centres/castancentre/our-research-areas/indigenous-research/the-northern-territory-intervention/the-northern-territory-intervention-an-evaluation/what-is-the-northern-territory-intervention

The Uluru Statement from the Heart: https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/2017-05/Uluru_Statement_From_The_Heart_0.PDF

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

Show notes by Julia Brown

Simon starts us off (1:08) asking, how can we make anthropology matter for policy and government? "There’s no reason why [anthropology] can’t be scaled up. There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be a chief anthropologist to the government.” As Jodie argues, "unless, as a discipline, we are willing to step outside our disciplinary mores and our disciplinary boundaries and make ourselves indispensable to people who have power in government, then no, we are not going to be useful." And Simon reminds us, "we need to make what is good about anthropology its selling point, which is its ability to do long-term, intimate research."

Next, Jodie (6:53) asks about digital disruptions, and their unintended consequences. Are we looking only to a future of corporate power and social atomization? Can it all be bad? "Surely some of them must be positive, in a non-hedonistic way." Patrick gives us some hope, by telling us about a use of technology that we didn't foresee: "I was actually, the other day, trying to find an app that would allow me to scan someone's body for the health of their chakras." And Julia points out that "what digital disruption might mean is that our imagination and our superstition and our beliefs in various systems like chakras could be destroyed, through relying more and more on 'digital objectivity.'”

Special guest Dr. Patrick McCartney (11:52) talks about his research with yoga groups on Facebook, calling the online yoga scene "a heterotopian series of worlds within worlds," and asking, what are kind of research ethics are called for when working in an online community? Are statements made before an online community of 30,000+ people in the public domain? Or is more explicit consent required? Julia makes a stand for strong ethics around consent: "what our participants tell us, knowing that they're already participating in a study, counts... it gives them autonomy to decide what they disclose and what they don't disclose based on the fact that it's going in a research study."

Patrick is a post-doctoral researcher at Kyoto University, currently studying global yoga in Japan. Have a look at his upcoming conference, Yogascapes in Japan (Nov 2-3 in Kyoto), or follow him on Twitter at @psdmccartney.

Finally, Julia (15:05) asks the eternal question: what is love? And what can anthropology tell us about love, in our own cultures or around the world? "How has our culture shaped this notion of having what is described as our 'other half,' or even a 'better half' sometimes, especially if being in a partnered or even a polyamorous relationship doesn't mean co-dependence, or even romantic love?" Patrick muses, "I adopt a very kind of queer epistemology in general... when thinking about how love brings people together, I can't help thinking about that kind of pathological side of love."

CITATIONS and LINKS

Fisher H 2008 The Brain on Love. Ted talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_studies_the_brain_in_love/up-next

What Jodie thought was Laura Nader was actually Geertz, C. (1975). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. London: Hutchinson.

Hardt M 2007 About love. European Graduate School. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?

v1⁄4ioopkoppabI (accessed 27 June 2016):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ioopkoppabI

The Iranian movie Simon mentioned: "No Entry of Men," https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1985266/

Zigon J 2013 “On Love: remaking moral subjectivity in post-rehabilitation Russia,” in American Ethnologist, vol. 40, no. 1.

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/amet.12014

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, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com

Show notes by Ian Pollock

"Livestock are essential to our lives. We live in a world that is saturated with livestock, and not just with the food that we eat, but with the lives that we live and in the other byproducts that come through livestock production."

Brad Weiss, head of the anthropology department at the College of William and Mary and author of the book "Real Pigs: shifting values in the field of local pork," talks to our own Simon Theobald about the intersections of American farming with big industry, animal life, and international social movements. In this funny and accessible conversation, they talk through the process of building a research project where you are, instead of traveling to a distant "field;" how taste arises out of relationships and ideas, as much as from the food in your mouth; and how it feels to know the name and personality of the animal you're eating.

QUOTES

“I knew that to study local food, or the slow food movement, which is an international movement, to do that would be beyond the grasp of any one ethnographer. But I thought, if I’m in North Carolina, I could look at pigs... pig production was seen as an icon of that [slow food] movement.”

“It has a certain kind of moral cachet, it was a certain kind of hipster cachet as well, what it doesn’t have is the real economic viability.”

“Part of what that entails [making local pigs] is creating the idea that to be local is somehow significant and important... What makes something local is having a community who is interested in making something local.”

“Locality is... it’s not about a spatial plot, as though you can just sort of map the universe and say, 'this place is equidistant from this other place... so that makes it a place.' No. It’s about these values. It’s about the way the social relationships are meaningfully acted upon to create relationships that are important and significant to the people who, and they may not even live in that place... It’s not necessarily that you’re from that locality, but it is that you have an idea that place matters.”

“So taste is not simply something that is in the thing, let alone in the thing because it emerges out of a particular kind of place. But taste is a little bit like place itself. It comes out of a commitment to recognising that there is something important about thinking about how food is located in a particular context, and then you can experience that, and you can learn how to come to experience that.”

"You cannot help but taste in the context of memory, in the context of social interaction."

CITATIONS

"The Green Pill," June 11, 2018. The Ezra Klein Show, featuring Ezra Klein and Melanie Joy: https://www.vox.com/2018/6/11/17442558/ezra-klein-show-book-melanie-joy-vegan-vegetarian-carnism-amazon

"Ugly Delicious," David Chang's show on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/au/title/80170368

Paxson, Heather (2012). The life of cheese: Crafting food and value in america (1st ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Weiss, Brad (2016). Real Pigs: Shifting Values in the Field of Local Pork, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina.

Weiss, Brad, 2009, Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops: Global fantasy in urban Tanzania, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Weiss, Brad, 2003, Sacred Trees, Bitter Harvest: Globalising Coffee in Northwest Tanzania, Heinemann, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Weiss, Brad, 1996, The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World: Consumption, Commoditization, and Everyday Practice, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina.

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, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com

Show notes by Ian Pollock