The Familiar Strange

With Julia's PhD submitted (!!!) and Jodie back from her travels, the band is finally back together! Jodie starts us off, (2:04) asking if a theory from psychology be applied to a whole population--specifically, whether US president Trump's apparent reversal on family separation work as a negotiating tactic, the so-called "door-in-the-face" technique. She asks, can we expect a public response to such a gambit resemble a private one, or a mass response to resemble individual ones? Simon, citing the narrow and homogeneous populations that usually take part in psychology studies, argues against thinking such theories can be scaled up: "I think humans are constantly creating and redefining and troubling everything we do, and every time we try and say, ‘well, this is a hard rule for human beings,' we get astounded by how it’s not in fact the case."

Simon (6:14) recounts his recent appearance on Counterpoint from Radio National, during which the host asked him to predict what he thought might happen next in Iranian politics. It got him wondering about the role of researchers in the humanities, and whether our work is actually contributing to changing, even improving, the world. He asks, "can we, as anthropologists, have a more productive role in predicting how society can and should be?" Julia points to the development of theory in anthropology, and suggests that, while anthropology isn't an experimental science, we do test hypotheses against theories, and refine those theories in response to our findings.

Julia (11:34) brings up the recent controversy over ANU's rejection of a bequest from the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, and asks, why do people fall so easily into opposition to one another, even over topics they have no information about? "There’s this need to find a clear narrative quite quickly--it just seems that things are getting increasingly nasty, and I’m wondering if you guys think there is any hope for people slowing down a bit and finding the nuances rather than clutching for these quick opinions on topics?" One thing the whole table can agree on: we truly are living in the age of People Talking About Things They Don't Know About. Find ANU vice chancellor Brian Schmidt's statement on the Ramsay Centre negotiations here: http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/vcs-update-our-viewpoints-on-ramsay

Last, Ian (17:42) talks about trying to bring the writings of the people he studies into his own dissertation. Should the emic, insider analyses written by the members of a society be treated as "cultural traces," or integrated with the peer-reviewed Western scholarship we're meant to draw on? As Simon notes, "as anthropology moves haltingly towards a greater decolonization, there is this greater attempt to incorporate Indigenous and non-Western ways of being and understanding the world. Making those academically equivalent to Western materials still requires you to push heavily against many years of accreted tradition in anthropology. Doing this, making them equal, I think in some ways is still a radical act at the moment."

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

"Rather than always studying poor, peripheral peasants, pastoralists, and fishermen, let’s turn the critical gaze of our discipline, which we do so well, let’s pivot it round like a telescope lens and focus upwards at, [Laura Nader] coined the phrase, ‘the hidden hierarchies of power.’"

Cris Shore, professor of social anthropology at the University of Auckland, talked to our own Jodie-Lee Trembath about what today's politics are doing to public institutions like universities, how to break down monolithic, shorthand concepts like "neoliberalism," and the challenges of "studying up:" how to do research when your subjects understand your methods, dispute your goals, and even hold institutional power over you.

This interview was recorded at the 2017 AAS "Shifting States" conference at the University of Adelaide, which stands on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people. Here is the university’s acknowledgement and reconciliation statement. Jodie recorded the intro and outro in Stockholm, Sweden, while temporarily based at the Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research.

QUOTATIONS

"It’s very hard to disagree with or challenge the idea that accountability is a bad thing. It’s one of those weasel words; no reasonable, self respecting, rational person could possibly be opposed to accountability or transparency, or quality. It’d be like saying, ‘I’m against community’ or ‘I think the family is a bad thing.’"

"Anthropology’s a way of thinking, a way of seeing... You get sensitive to the, in a sense, just the conditionality and the fluidity of your own culture, and the arbitrariness of your own culture becomes blatantly apparent to you."

"I think that anthropology producing lots of PhD students who are not just going to go back into universities or colleges is a great thing, because actually, the world needs more anthropologists! We need them in diplomacy. We need them in government. We need them in planning departments. Anything. Any area where people interface with other people, the anthropological skill set is brilliantly useful."

"Policy enunciates, and creates, it doesn’t simply describe."

"The phrase ‘faculty land’ summed up the sense of disdain, and contempt and distance that these senior administrators were having for academics."

"I do sometimes feel I’m sticking my neck out [by researching universities], but then, on the other hand, as someone said to me once, if the professoriate can’t do it, and don’t do it, then who the hell can, and will?"

CITATIONS

Wright, S., & Shore, C., 2017. Death of the public university?  Uncertain futures for higher education in the knowledge economy. Berghahn Books. New York.

Pickett, K. and Wilkinson, R., 2010. The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. Penguin UK.

Hannerz, U., 1998. Other transnationals: Perspectives gained from studying sideways. Paideuma, pp.109-123.

Nader, L., 1969. ‘Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives gained from ‘studying up’’ pp. 284–311 in D. Hyms (ed) Reinventing Anthropology. Random House. New York.

Marcus, George E., 1995 Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95-117.

Shore, C., & Wright, S., 1997. Anthropology of policy: critical perspectives on governance and power. Routledge. New York.

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

We're taking a short break, but will be back in two weeks with a new episode.

Announcing the launch of the "Single Shot" visual anthropology series: submit a single, unbroken piece of video or a single still image, plus a short description, and we'll share it on The Familiar Strange. Instructions at thefamiliarstrange.com.

“What economists obsess about is equality of opportunity… What they miss is equality of agency. How do we make equality of agency happen? How do we bridge those discriminatory boundaries that exist in the world? … That’s where anthropologists can contribute: by thinking through those issues in a creative way.”

Vijayendra Rao (http://www.vijayendrarao.org/), lead economist at the World Bank, talks to our own Ian Pollock about how anthropology could help poor or disempowered people engage with powerful institutions; his frustration with a discipline that only critiques, and won’t commit to promoting the development project; and the cultures of development itself: the faddishness of ideas, the reliance on scale and quantification, the bureaucratic inertia, and the ways that the the cultures, struggles, and aspirations of ordinary people can be missing from the picture.

Dr Rao also gave a talk at ANU’s Development Policy Centre, on the World Bank Social Observatory: “integrating the social sciences for adaptive practice.” Listen here: https://soundcloud.com/devpolicy/the-social-observatory-integrating-the-social-sciences-for-adaptive-practice

QUOTES

“Creating goals for change, creating processes to achieve those goals... how do you make that change happen, how do you make it happen over the long term? That requires, in my mind, a process of co-production. It’s a process of dialogue. How do you bring dialogue into interventions, is really what I think our goal should be as development practitioners, and development researchers even. Which is not yet the common practice.”

“The notion of a ‘best practice’ is the most unhealthy thing in development.”

“The big difference between colonialism and development should be that ‘beneficiaries’ are being facilitated to have a voice in how they are being ‘helped.’ And I think how you do that, where you do that from, how all that comes in, how you change processes to make that happen, how you institute change to make that happen, that’s where anthropologists could play a very important role. And they’re not doing so.”

CITATIONS

Appadurai, A. (2004) “The Capacity to Aspire.” In Rao, V., & Walton, M. (2004). Culture and public action. Stanford, Calif: Stanford Social Sciences.

Freire, P. (1996;2001;). Pedagogy of the oppressed (Rev. ed.). London: Penguin.

Gupta, A. (2012). Red tape: Bureaucracy, structural violence, and poverty in india. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hirschman, A. O. (1967). Development projects observed. Washington: Brookings Institution.

Mansuri, G., & Rao, V. (2013;2012;). Localizing development: Does participation work?. US: World Bank Publications

Open access link: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/11859

Mosse, D. (2005;2004;). Cultivating development: An ethnography of aid policy and practice. London;Ann Arbor, MI;: Pluto Press.

Rao, V., Ananthpur, K., & Malik, K. (2017). The anatomy of failure: An ethnography of a randomized trial to deepen democracy in rural India. World Development, 99, 481-497.

Rao, V., & Walton, M. (2004). Culture and public action. Stanford, Calif: Stanford Social Sciences.

Srinivas, M. N. (1962). Caste in modern india: And other essays. New York;Bombay;: Asia Pub. House.

The Jeevika project: http://www.jeevika.org.uk/

On Indonesia’s KDP program: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/501751468041102531/Crises-and-contradictions-understanding-the-origins-of-a-community-development-project-in-Indonesia

Li, T. (2007). The will to improve: Governmentality, development, and the practice of politics. Durham: Duke University Press.

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

Ian (1:25) starts us off, by asking, how well-written does a thesis need to be? "As anthropologists, basically what we do is write... whether it's writing your field notes, or whether it's writing up your articles or your dissertation... and most of us have never actually been trained in how to write." As Julia says, "there are so many ways of articulating the human condition and our field experiences, that what we do will be good enough as long as it's true to us, and with any luck, it might resonate with someone else one day."

Stevenson, Lisa (2014) Life Beside itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Julia (6:12), reflecting on a recent viewing of Wild Wild Country and some news items about an Australian group called Universal Medicine, asks: what makes a cult? "Does this popular discourse of 'cult' have anything to do with what scholars might otherwise explore in those communities?" As Simon argues, the new religious movements imagined as "cults" are often indistinguishable from other religions in their early days. Said reminds us, "it is in the popular discourse that there is this identifications of these groups as cults, but they do not themselves identify as cults."

Special guest Saidalavi P.C. (10:00) pays tribute to Justice Rajinder Sachar, and tells us about caste among India’s Muslims, some of whom find a political advantage to inclusion in the Hindu caste structure. "The majority of Muslims claim that their religion is egalitarian. So any claim of having hierarchy or socio-economic disadvantages based on hereditary relationships actually contests their idea of egalitarian religion." Simon reflects on questions of “pure” vs. localized Islam in Iran: "It's a very unpalatable discourse, because they feel themselves to, in some ways, to have helped Islam reach its full potential, its full capacity, through Persian culture. But that doesn't seem to be what's happened in India. People seem to be uncomfortable with the notion of Islam having mixed with Hinduism."

Ahmad, Imtiaz. (1973) Caste and Social Stratification among the Muslims. Manolar Book Service (distributed in U.A.A.: South Asia Books, Columbia, Mo.), Delhi.

Dumont, Louis. (1970) Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.. Vikas Pub. House, New Delhi.

Fuller, C. J. (1996) Caste Today. Oxford University Press, New York.

Hutton, J. H. (1946) Caste in India: Its Nature, Function and Origins. The University Press, Cambridge [Eng.].

Lindholm, Charles. "Paradigms of Society: A Critique of Theories of Caste among Indian Muslims." European Journal of Sociology, vol. 26, no. 1, 1985, pp. 131-141.

Madan, T. N. (1976) Muslim Communities of South Asia: Culture and Society

Vatuk, Sylvia J.(1990) "Hindu Women and the Power of Ideology . Vanaja Dhruvarajan." American Anthropologist, vol. 92, no. 3, pp. 789-790.

Said is a PhD student in anthropology in ANU's School of Culture, History, and Language. You can find more of his work on his blog, Naked Eye (saidalavipc.wordpress.com).

Last, Simon (15:32) follows on from a recent blog post of his, on boredom during fieldwork, that stirred a big response. "Boredom in the field can actually be informative," he argues. "It is potentially in and of itself a moment to further understand the culture. But that doesn't mean that people--" ethnographers, that is--"don't get bored."

Narayan, K. (1993). How Native Is a "Native" Anthropologist? American Anthropologist, 95(3), new series, 671-686.

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

"Storytelling: that's part of the power of podcasts, and just the power of ethnography in general, to really have people tell their own stories. And I think it's those stories that really capture students' interest and attention, and make them start to think about why anthropology really matters."

This month, we're bringing you an episode from our friends at Anthropod, the podcast for the Society for Cultural Anthropology. In this episode, Angela Jenks, medical anthropologist and Assistant Teaching Professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, talks to Anar Parikh, PhD candidate at Brown University, about how to teach with podcasts. They cover the strengths and weaknesses of using audio in the classroom, teaching students how to listen, strategies for engaging both graduate students and undergrads, and how to encourage students and teachers to engage with the technology of audio production.

You can follow Dr. Jenks on Twitter at @angelacjenks, and interviewer Anar Parikh at @anarparikh.

Find Anthropod on the Cultural Anthropology website (culanth.org), Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

CITATIONS

Invisibilia: "the power of categories." https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/384065938/the-power-of-categories

Only Human: "I got Indian in my family: an Anther Round takeover." https://www.wnyc.org/story/i-got-indian-my-family-another-round-takeover/

QUOTES

"A lot of podcasts are designed to communicate among anthropologists, and that can be really useful... or sometimes they're designed to communicate across academic disciplines... But I think when there's a focus on pedagogy, I think very often a lot of that focus has to be on considering an audience that may only have a very vague understanding of what exactly anthropology is, what we do, what major debate or issues in the field have been. And so oftentimes trying to sort through those topics and kind of explain them in ways that may be very different if you're talking to an audience of anthropologists."

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

KEYWORDS: Anthropology, ethnography, podcasts, podcasting, audio, pedagogy, teaching, education, graduate, undergraduate

This month, Ian (1:12) asks how we should engage when people describe their culture one way, but our observations of their behavior don’t match those descriptions. What is a “culture,” Ian asks, if its members don’t adhere to it? As Julia argues, “what people say is just as important in their cultural imaginary of who they are as what they do.” Ian mentions his blog post about kasti: find it at https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/01/25/searching-for-home-plate-in-indonesia/

Next, special guest Stephanie Betz (5:50) brings up “deepfakes,” the new technology that enables video to be manipulated so convincingly that it’s hard to distinguish fake clips from real ones. Besides the obvious application (porn), the technology has potential for advertising, art, blackmail, and bringing about nuclear war. Deepfakes, she says, “further confound the relationship between image and reality.” When any fictitious word or action becomes possible to create on video, it’s the plausible that becomes political.

Steph is a digital anthropologist and PhD student at ANU, and the president of the Australian Network of Student Anthropologists. You can find some of her work on her Academia page: http://anu-au.academia.edu/StephanieBetz.

Simon (11:27) brings up the problem of extreme emotions, and particularly hatred, for the ethnographer. He asks, does hate need to dissipate before analysis is possible? “We often talk about hate as an emotion that clouds one’s vision, and the aim of anthropology I think has always been to make clearer social relations.” As Steph argues, “there’s a reason we inhabit these places in the same way as our informants, and that’s so we can use the full breadth of our humanity in order to understand and analyze and interpret the situation.”

Last, Julia (16:56) considers Steph’s work with video game players against her own work with schizophrenia patients, and the common thread of dissociation, when the sense of self temporarily dissolves. “How might fictional characters or avatars which temporarily result in a loss or diversion of who we are, how might this help or hinder us to be with other people in real life?” Steph describes ways that immersion in familiar stories, combined with distancing tactics such as gender-flipped avatars, allows some players to incorporate traumatic events into their personas, with profound affects on their “real-world" sociality.

CITATIONS

Ataria, Y. (2018) Mindfulness and Trauma: Some Striking Similarities. Anthropology of Consciousness, 29(1), pp.44-56.

Baudrillard, Jean (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

Hage, Ghassan (2009) "Hating Israel in the Field: On Ethnography and Political Emotions." Anthropological Theory, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 59-79.

Snodgrass, J.G., Lacy, M.G., Dengah, H.F., Fagan, J. and Most, D.E. (2011) Magical flight and monstrous stress: Technologies of absorption and mental wellness in Azeroth. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 35(1), pp.26-62.

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

KEYWORDS: culture, anthropology, ethnography, deepfakes, emotion, self, video games, dissociation

“Any concept -- capitalism, neoliberalism, etc. -- leaves an excess that it is the aim of anthropology to unearth. These are spaces that are not dominated by whatever’s dominating at a specific time. So there are existing alternatives, there are not just Subscribe on imaginary alternatives.... Anthropology in this sense does provide the possibility of thinking of alternatives. There are ways of living that you can build on, that are not aligned with the dominant ways of being.”

Ghassan Hage, the Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne, sat down with our own Simon Theobald to talk about the everyday work of being a public, radical, and engaged intellectual. Their conversation covers dealing with the press, navigating the neoliberal university, and engaging with a hostile and truculent public, plus how anthropology reveals alternative ways of existence that already exist in the real world.

This episode was recorded at the 2017 AAS conference at the University of Adelaide, on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people.

Find Professor Hage’s work on his Academia page (http://unimelb.academia.edu/GhassanHage) or his blog, Hage Ba'a (http://hageba2a.blogspot.com.au/)

QUOTES

There’s an almost naive theory that circulates in university bureaucracy about external engagement... that you teach students so therefore you can teach other people, the general public. However the problem with this is that today, many in the general public will not treat you with respect. It’s not that they think your ideas are too complex. It’s that people actually think you’re the enemy, an elite. So it’s become, how do you talk to the enemy?

If you are an intellectual — not just an academic, an intellectual, that is, someone who wants to think independently, who wants to be active etc — today, you have to do it against the university. You don’t do it with the help of the university.

If all you know how to do is sit down and whinge and criticize neoliberalism, I don’t think you want to be an academic. But you don’t want to NOT criticize neoliberalism.

Nothing totally homogenizes space. You talk about neoliberalism, you talk about the dominance of neoliberalism, that does not mean that every single crack in society is neoliberal.

A lot social analysis assumes that the object is analytically dead. Maybe not socially dead, but analytically dead. That is, they’re not capable of analyzing themselves, or if they are analyzing themselves, it’s naive, and let me come give you the seriously hard analysis… What happens when you start saying, “Well, what if indigenous thought can analyse us?”

Indigenous people are not sitting around waiting for anthropologists to come and analyse what they’re thinking. They can do this for themselves very well. So the question now is more, “Can we enrich our analytical stock so that we can understand ourselves better?”

CITATIONS

Charbonnier, Pierre, Gildas Salmon and Peter Skafish, eds.,2016, Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology After Anthropology, Rowman & Littlefield, London, New York.

Hage, Ghassan, 1998, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Pluto Press, Annandale, Australia.

Wright, Erik Olin, 2010, Envisioning Real Utopias, Verso, London and New York.

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

This month, Julia (1:12) questions Australia's black-and-white moral stance against vaping as a way to help people stop smoking, arguing that Australia's uncompromising stance borders on “the definition of psychotic thinking, where you become fixated on ideas to the point that you’re not open to exploring a middle ground or someone else’s viewpoints. And I would contend that the situation we’ve got in Australia, in regards to harm minimization around smoking, and the reluctance to endorse vaping as a harm minimization tool, starts to border on that psychotic edge.”

Simon (6:09) asks, why don’t ethnographers use their noses as an ethnographic implement, and pay more attention to smell when they’re crafting descriptions of their field sites? “When you talk about the things that you hear, not just the things that you see… those add to the richness of ethnography. And one of those things that I think we can draw our attention to, in terms of making more alive the material that we write, is this idea of smell. What are the smells that we had in the field, and what do they mean, not only for our informants, but also for us?”

Special guest Justine Chambers (12:30) reflects on the film Black Panther, about a nation that was never colonized, and asks: given that she knows so much about colonialism in her field site in Karen State, Myanmar, how does she, and other citizens of settler colonial nations, engage so little with the colonial legacy of Australia, her home society? As Ian asks, "there's the difficult issue of whether justice is about finding room for indigenous people within colonial legal frameworks, like a rights framework, or whether justice would be about withdrawing those institutions altogether."

Justine is a PhD student in anthropology at ANU's school of Culture, History and Language and associate director of the ANU Myanmar Centre.

Finally, Ian (18:44) looks at the gun debate in America, and asks why the two sides are described as “tribes,” a term that anthropology gave up on decades ago? The use of the term, he argues, “seems to suggest that people’s preferences are inbred… It racializes the problem,” as if “everything about a culture has to do with blood.”

CITATIONS

Antrosio, Jason “Semi-Automatic Anthropology” on the blog Living Anthropologically: https://www.livinganthropologically.com/semi-automatic-anthropology-complexity/

Black Panther http://marvel.com/blackpanther#/

Brown, Julia E. H. (2018) ‘Doing Things Little by Little’: Smoking and Vaping While Being Pharmaceutically Treated for Schizophrenia, Anthropological Forum, DOI: 10.1080/00664677.2018.1440192

Csordas, Thomas J. (1993) "Somatic Modes of Attention." Cultural Anthropology, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 135-156.

Dennis, S. (2016) 'Smokefree: A Social, Moral and Political Atmosphere. Bloomsbury Press. https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/smokefree-9781472569226/

Douglas, Mary. (1969) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Hirschkind, Charles. (2006) The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. Columbia University Press, New York.

Ingold, Tim. (2011) Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge, London.

Kipnis, Andrew B. (2011) Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics, and Schooling in China. The University of Chicago Press, London;Chicago.

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

KEYWORDS: smoking, vaping, harm minimization, smell, anthropology, ethnography, colonization, Indigenous Australia, Indigenous America, Black Panther, guns, tribalism

This month, Ian (1:25) digs into Bitcoin, arguing that the cryptocurrency is no different than regular currencies, and can be analyzed along all the same lines: symbolically, materially, institutionally, relationally. “The same material problems of decay that would affect some other kind of material currency like a Subscribe on Androidcoin or a bill still applies to Bitcoin.” Ian mentions podcast episodes from NPR's Planet Money (“#816 Bitcoin Losers”) and and Gimlet's Reply All (#115 The Bitcoin Hunter”), and Chris Gregory’s classic study of currencies and value, Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange (Harwood Academic, Amsterdam, 1997).

Next, Julia (6:40) brings us the curious case of the hamster in the bathroom: a woman who, when challenged by an airline, flushed her emotional support hamster down the toilet. Arguing that even rodents can be granted kin-like status, and referring to Simone Dennis’s ethnography For the Love of Lab Rats: Kinship, Humanimal Relations, and Good Scientific Research (Cambria Press, Amherst, N.Y, 2010), Julia says, scientists “spoke about this sacrificial economy that was happening, where the animals would ultimately have to be killed after the experiments, was balanced with this calculus of care.” So how could this flushing happen?

Jodie (11:12) asks, are academics working too hard? Or not hard enough? And what does the debate means about the nature of academic work? She takes us through a recent Twitter battle, when Jay Van Bavel (Social Neuroscientist from NYU), following the work of John Ziker (anthropologist from Boise State), tweeted: “The average #professor works over 60 hours a week (from one university) and 30% of their time is spent on emails or meetings.” Then Nicholas Christakis, a Yale professor whom Jodie wrote about in a previous blog post, replied: “I tell my graduate students and post-docs that if they’re working 60 hours per week, they’re working less than the full professors, and less than their peers.” The debate soon hit blogs and the mainstream media, including the Atlantic. As Ian argues, “These parameter of what counts as an appropriate amount of work seem to have come out of completely other areas of labor. Whereas, with this life of the mind, which, when it’s at its best, is fun, and doesn’t feel like labor in the same way that other kinds of work do; which, at its worst, is a nagging earworm in your skull that even invades your dreams, and that there is no time, conscious or unconscious, when you’re not working; it becomes very hard along those parameters to determine what’s an appropriate amount.”

Finally, special guest Liam Gammon (16:20), the editor of New Mandala, the ANU-based blog for Southeast Asian studies and politics, talks through the special contributions anthropologists can make to political commentary. “I think that the methods and the perspectives of anthropologists really lend themselves to the kind of medium that New Mandala promotes... in a sense it’s looking at national affairs, and politics, history, and culture from the ground up.”

Find these shownotes at www.thefamiliarstrange.com/podcast

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

KEYWORDS: Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, emotional support animals, kinship, academia, blogging, Southeast Asia