We return with a conversation recorded, this past summer, between Ceridwen Dovey and our own Timothy Neale and David Boarder Giles. Dovey is a Sydney-based writer of fiction, creative non-fiction, and in-depth essays and profiles, as well as a filmmaker. Born in South Africa, she grew up between South Africa and Australia, studied as an undergraduate at Harvard University and as a postgraduate in anthropology at New York University. But, as we learn in this episode, Dovey did not become an anthropologist, and instead moved to a different but related set of analytical and representational problems as a fiction writer. Is fiction ethnographic? How do the commitments of creative non-fiction and anthropology differ? And, what does the moon think about all this? Tune in to find out. Interested in learning more? Check out https://www.ceridwendovey.com/ Show Credits Lead Production: Timothy Neale Deputy Production: David Boarder Giles and Mythily Meher Editing: Timothy Neale and Mythily Meher This conversation was produced by Timothy Neale on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Check us out on Twitter @ anthroconvo and our website anthroconvo.com
For this episode, Cameo and Tim caught up with Professor Jessica Cattelino of the University of California Los Angeles. Jessica is a sociocultural anthropologist who has worked extensively with Seminole people of Florida in the United States. Her first book High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke, 2008), explores sovereignty and the politicisation of gaming, while her soon to be released second book, follows water in the Florida Everglades. Both works develop critical approaches to recognition politics, settler colonialism and Indigeneity, with relevance across settler states. The conversation also covers Jessica’s approach to service and governance within the academy, and the ways in which it reproduces societal structures and inequities. Interested in learning more? Jessica recommends Melanie Yazzie and Cutcha Risling Baldy’s introduction to their special issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity Education & Society, “Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Water”...
This month we bring to you a wonderful conversation between Matt and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Western Sydney University, Dr. Malini Sur. Malini is a socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests in India, Bangladesh and Australia on the themes of agrarian borderlands, cities and the environment. This conversation orbits around Malini's recently book 'Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border' (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), which recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along the violent--yet generative--borderlands between India and Bangladesh. Equal parts ecology, infrastructure, surveillance, and bureaucracy, this conversation will resonate for many well beyond the eastern Himalaya. Show Credits Lead Production: Matt Barlow Editing: Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow This conversation was recorded on the unceded lands of Kaurna and Dharag First Nations People. Check us out on Twitter @ anthro...
In this episode, Tim sits down with Associate Professor Monica Minnegal to chat to Dr. Will Smith, an environmental anthropologist and research fellow at Deakin University. Will’s book, ‘Mountains of Blame: Climate and Culpability in the Philippine Uplands’ recently published with University of Washington Press, explores the political ecologies of forests in relation to the experiences and effects of climate change on the island of Pala’wan, in the Philippines. This conversation tackles some thorny questions around Indigenous understandings of changing climates, the refusal by communities to be categorized by governments as vulnerable victims or resilient saviours, and more-than-human relations marked by fear and violence, rather than reciprocity, flourishing, or love. As Will states, the forests are full of malevolent spirits, and he has been bitten by a lot of stuff in the forests of Pala’wan. Enjoy this great conversation between Will Smith, Monica Minnegal, and Tim Neale. S...
Cameo Dalley talks to Fred Myers (Silver Professor at New York University) and Jason Gibson (Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Fellow at Deakin University), both of whom work on Aboriginal Australian ceremony and material culture. The conversation roams over reflections on happenstance in their careers, the making of and reception of their work, and the evolving role of the anthropologist and anthropological knowledge in Indigenous communities. https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/jason-gibson https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/fred-myers.html Works Mentioned Gibson, Jason M (2020) Ceremony Men Making Ethnography and the Return of the Strehlow Collection, SUNY Press, Albany, N.Y. Myers, Fred (1986) Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines Smithsonian Institution Press, Wash., D.C. (reprinted in paperback by University of California Press, 1991) Myers, Fred (2002) Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. ...
In this episode, Cameo speaks with Imelda Miller, of the Queensland Museum, and Olivia Robinson, of the State Library of Queensland. With over two decades of curatorial work and collaboration, they not only share their insights about collection and exhibition, but — as an Australian South Sea Islander and Bidjara woman, respectively — they share their insights about reimagining curation itself in a way that engages, empowers, and gives voice and agency to their communities.
We are delighted to bring you a conversation between Matt, Tim, and Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought at The New School, Hugh Raffles. Raffles is the author of three books. The first of which, In Amazonia: A Natural History, is an ethnography about how rivers and humans co-constitute one another in the east Amazon of Brazil. Raffles’ second book, Insectopedia, is a collection of tales about humans and insects that takes us from the discovery of language among bees to artistic representations of contaminated butterfly wings in Chernobyl. His most recent book, The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, is a bracing tale of time, memory, and loss, written through stories of stone. Across all three books Raffles has developed a deeply philosophical, historical, and poetic way of writing stories anthropologically that remain open to readers beyond the academy. What Raffles does with these subjects, in...
This episode brings together historians and anthropologists to explore questions that are anthropological in scale: race, racism, whiteness, white supremacy, and white nationalist movements in North America and Europe. Kathleen Belew is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago, whose book, Bring the War Home, explores the recent history of white nationalist movements and organising in the years between the Vietnam War and the Oklahoma City bombing. Alexandra Minna Stern is a Professor of History, American Culture and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, whose work has investigated the intersections of eugenics, racism, and gender in American politics. Her most recent book is Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate. Britt Halvorson is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Colby College whose most recent work, along with our fourth guest, has turned to investigate the ways in which whiteness and white supremacy are embedded in narratives of M...
Pop the kettle on and sit back for our first 'tea' themed episode! For this episode, Matt invited Michael Dunford, a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at ANU whose research explores labour, language, and tea in Myanmar, to join him in conversation with Sarah Besky and Mythri Jegathesan. Sarah Besky is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in the International Labour and Labour Relations School at Cornell University. Her research uses ethnographic and historical methods to study the intersection of labor, environment, and capitalism in the Himalayas. Her work analyzes how materials and bodies take on value under changing political economic regimes and explores the diverse forms of labor that make and maintain that value. Her first book,The Darjeeling Distinction:Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India(Universityof California Press, 2014) explores how legacies of colonialism intersect with contemporary market reforms to reconfigure notions of the value of labo...
Hello anthro-enthusiasts, we are back for 2021 with a conversation convened by Cameo Dalley on animals, industrialisation, eating and all the manifold issues that unfold at their intersections, featuring special guests Alex Blanchette and Catie Gressier. Dr Blanchette is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and has published widely on the politics of industrial labor and life in a post-industrial United States. His books include 'Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm' (Duke University Press, 2020) and the collection 'How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet', edited with Sarah Besky(University of New Mexico Press, 2019). Dr Gressier, an ARC DECRA Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Western Australia, has written extensively about the anthropology of food, settler identities, and issues of health and illness, including in her books 'At Home in the Okavango: White Batswana Narratives of Emplacement and Belongi...