The Emic - Anthropological stories from the field

Roanne van Voorst, PhD. Dr. Anthropologist

The Emic is an audio platform produced by Roanne where anthropologists from all around the world share their most beautiful or insightful fieldwork stories.

  1. Jan 17

    18: Jason De León on having more in common with smugglers than he had ever imagined

    Welcome to The Emic, the podcast where anthropologists share a moment from their fieldwork in which they truly took on an emic perspective – seeing the world from the point of view of the people they study.   In this episode, you'll hear from anthropologist and archaeologist Jason De León. De León is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, and the founder of the Undocumented Migration Project, a multidisciplinary research collective that investigates clandestine migration between Latin America and the United States using ethnographic, archaeological, and forensic methods. His influential book The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail has shaped public debates on border policy and migrant rights, and in 2017 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for this work.   The story you're about to hear centers on a moment in De León's fieldwork when he suddenly realized he had far more in common with smugglers than he had ever imagined. It's an uneasy but illuminating recognition — and exactly the kind of shift in perspective that The Emic is all about.   This conversation was recorded by Roanne during a meeting with Jason De León at the American Anthropological Association's annual conference in New Orleans. You may occasionally hear background sounds: doors opening, the murmur of busy corridors, and anthropologists chatting as they pass by. Consider it part of the scene — a live reflection captured in the middle of anthropology's biggest gathering. However, most of the sounds you hear in this podcast are the actual recordings that Jason made during his fieldwork. This means that you hear, what he heard, back then.    More on Jason: Jason De León - UCLA Department of Anthropology   More on his most recent book Soldiers and Kings, which won the National Bookaward for nonfiction 2024: https://www.jasonpatrickdeleon.com/   If you want to receive additional photos from the field, personal drawings and behind-the-screens information accompanying the episodes of The Emic, subscribe to Roanne's free monthly email: www.anthropologyofthefuture.com/the-emic

    8 min
  2. 08/12/2025

    17: Tim Ingold on seeing like a reindeer

    In the autumn of 1971,  when he just turned 23 years old, Tim was living in a tiny wooden cabin on the shores of lake Rautaperajärvi, in the far northeastern corner of Finnish Lapland. He was a few months into his doctoral fieldwork with the Skolt Sámi people. The Skolts had been resettled in this remote area following the loss of their homeland to the then Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Second World War. Tim's plan had been to study the micropolitics of their situation as a minority within a minority, but he quickly discovered that for the people themselves, this took second place to the much more pressing concerns with how to get by, from one day to the next, within an unpromising environment. And nothing bothered people more, he found, than an issue around reindeer pastures. This is where the real politics lay.   Tim Ingold is a British social anthropologist, currently Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He was educated at Leighton Park School and Cambridge University. He is a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His bibliography includes: The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013) The Life of Lines (2015), Anthropology and/as Education (2017), Anthropology: Why it Matters (2018) and Correspondences (2021).   If you want to receive additional photos from the field, personal drawings and behind-the-screens information accompanying the episodes of The Emic, subscribe to Roanne's free monthly email: www.anthropologyofthefuture.com/the-emic

    8 min
  3. 06/10/2025

    15: Giovanna Parmigiani on paganism, magical cards and sisterhood

    In this episode, Giovanna talks about a moment in her fieldwork that she returns to often. A quiet moment shared with women that would become her sisters. A moment where something shifted for her.     Giovanna Parmigiani is an anthropologist of religion and magic, a scholar of Contemporary Paganisms, the co-chair of the Contemporary Pagan Studies Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and a founding co-convenor of the Network for the Anthropology of History at the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Her work is firmly grounded in ethnographic and auto-ethnographic practices, and her main focus of interest is the relationship between religion, politics, and gender.   Her first monograph, Feminism, Violence and Representation in Modern Italy: We Are Witnesses, Not Victims (Indiana University Press, 2019) dealt with violence against women. Her second, The Spider Dance: Tradition, Time, and Healing in Southern Italy (Equinox Publishing, 2024), deals with contemporary pagan women and healing. She writes about conspirituality and conspiracy theories and has a forthcoming book on this topic, Lived Conspirituality: Researching Conspiracy Theories and Alternative Spiritualities (Routledge).   Parmigiani is the host of the Gnoseologies series at the CSWR. At HDS, she teaches courses on contemporary paganisms; earth-based religions; New Age spiritualities; the anthropology of magic, religion, and healing; and religion, materiality, and the senses.   If you want to receive additional photos from the field, personal drawings and behind-the-screens information accompanying the episodes of The Emic, subscribe to Roanne's free monthly email: www.anthropologyofthefuture.com/the-emic

    5 min

About

The Emic is an audio platform produced by Roanne where anthropologists from all around the world share their most beautiful or insightful fieldwork stories.

You Might Also Like