Camthropod Cambridge Anthropology

Who is responsible for making a work of art? In each episode of this collaborative podcast series, one anthropologist, specialising in a particular cultural context, has a conversation with an artist of their choosing, exploring issues of authorship and responsibility in art. Ranging across geographical locations and creative practices, discussions address and unpack the conceptualisation of the artistic person, authorship as centred upon an individual or bounded group, and the development of responsibility for artworks during and after their making. Each episode brings a fresh perspective on where ideas come from, what agency an artist feels in the creation of their work, and how, and in which contexts, ownership and responsibility for the artwork are claimed. Ultimately, as a collection, the series encourages listeners to think about ‘the artist’ and ‘the artwork’ as dynamic processes in a relationship of authoring.

Episode 3 features Tuguldur Yondonjamts with Hermione Spriggs

Tuguldur Yondonjamts (b.1977, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia) lives and works in Ulaanbaatar and in New York. His work is very much dependent on research and careful analysis of certain environments and materials, often responding to the nomadic culture of Central Asia and the issues affecting Mongolia’s society and economic development. By using investigational logic, he is able to create large scale drawings and diagrams, representing imagined journeys. His work is widely exhibited in Mongolia, the US and internationally.
https://tugulduryondonjamts.com/
tuguldur_yondonjamts_

Hermione Spriggs is an artist and anthropologist based between London and Yorkshire. She is currently undertaking practice-based PhD research with an ethnographic focus on trapping and pest control in North Yorkshire. Her edited volume Five Heads: Art, Anthropology and Mongol-Futurism (2018) is published by Sternberg Press.
https://hermione-spriggs.com
hermione.spriggs

Artery is a podcast organised by Iza Kavedžija (University of Cambridge) and Robert Simpkins (SOAS, London) and supported by the AHRC.
Music: Footsteps, by Robert Simpkins.

What does it mean to have a voice? And how does a voice need to sound like if it is going to matter? In this episode, Marlene Schäfers (Utrecht University) discusses her research with Kurdish women singers and poets to explore what makes the voice an object of desire and appeal in the contemporary world, particularly for historically marginalized subjects. Field recordings of Kurdish classical and recent repertoires reveal how contemporary politics of voice shape what voices mean, how they sound, and how they impact listeners.

Marlene Schäfers is Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University, Netherlands. She obtained her PhD at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her first monograph, Voices that Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey was published with the University of Chicago Press in 2022. You can find more information, including additional field recordings on her website: www.marleneschafers.com

Acknowledgements: My thanks are due to the Kurdish women who so generously shared their time with me and let me record their voices. The recordings featured in this podcast were made in Wan, Turkey, in 2011-12.

Who is responsible for making a work of art? In each episode of this collaborative podcast series, one anthropologist, specialising in a particular cultural context, has a conversation with an artist of their choosing, exploring issues of authorship and responsibility in art. Ranging across geographical locations and creative practices, discussions address and unpack the conceptualisation of the artistic person, authorship as centred upon an individual or bounded group, and the development of responsibility for artworks during and after their making. Each episode brings a fresh perspective on where ideas come from, what agency an artist feels in the creation of their work, and how, and in which contexts, ownership and responsibility for the artwork are claimed. Ultimately, as a collection, the series encourages listeners to think about ‘the artist’ and ‘the artwork’ as dynamic processes in a relationship of authoring.

Episode 2 features Mzuzile Mduduzi Xakaza with Jeannine-Madeleine Fischer

Mzuzile Mduduzi Xakaza works as Director of the Durban Art Gallery and also paints and draws on a part-time basis. He has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in South Africa and abroad since the early 1990s. His art is inspired mainly by the love and appreciation of his social and physical environment (landscape) as well as social issues that are subtly evoked by such a theme. However, there is always something enigmatic about some of the creative ideas that flow into his mind whilst creating - something that seems to defy definition of any sort.

https://asai.co.za/artist/mduduzi-xakaza/

Jeannine-Madeleine Fischer is a cultural anthropologist at the University of Konstanz and is currently researching aesthetic activism in South Africa. She is part of the interdisciplinary research group "Traveling Forms".

https://www.uni-konstanz.de/en/research/research-institutions/nomis-research-project-traveling-forms/research-fields/activism-as-a-mobile-aesthetic-form/

Artery is a podcast organised by Iza Kavedžija (University of Cambridge) and Robert Simpkins (SOAS, London) and supported by the AHRC.
Music: Footsteps, by Robert Simpkins.

Episode 25. The Future of the Anthropological Journal. by Cambridge Anthropology

Who is responsible for making a work of art? In each episode of this collaborative podcast series, one anthropologist, specialising in a particular cultural context, has a conversation with an artist of their choosing, exploring issues of authorship and responsibility in art. Ranging across geographical locations and creative practices, discussions address and unpack the conceptualisation of the artistic person, authorship as centred upon an individual or bounded group, and the development of responsibility for artworks during and after their making. Each episode brings a fresh perspective on where ideas come from, what agency an artist feels in the creation of their work, and how, and in which contexts, ownership and responsibility for the artwork are claimed. Ultimately, as a collection, the series encourages listeners to think about ‘the artist’ and ‘the artwork’ as dynamic processes in a relationship of authoring.

Maree Clarke is a Mutti Mutti/Wemba Wemba/Boonwurrung/Yorta Yorta artist, from Mildura in northwest Victoria, Australia, now living and working in Naarm (Melbourne). With over 30 years experience as an artist, Clarke’s work focuses on new ways of telling old/ongoing stories through art-making, much of which occurs in her backyard.
https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/maree-clarke/
https://vivienandersongallery.com/artists/maree-clarke/

Fran Edmonds is an interdisciplinary scholar who has worked extensively with Aboriginal artists, community organisations and galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) for almost 30 years. Her work supports First Nations people to reclaim their stories from the ‘archives’.
https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/livingarchiveofaboriginalart/
https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/livingarchivenaidoc/blog
https://www.facebook.com/LivingArchiveofAboriginalArtandKnowledge/

Artery is a podcast organised by Iza Kavedžija (University of Cambridge) and Robert Simpkins (SOAS, London) and supported by the AHRC.
Music: Footsteps, by Robert Simpkins.

With the arrival of home recording technology in the early 1980s, many Shi’i Muslims in Pakistan started to record the majlis mourning assemblies and processions that are central to their faith. Soon after, some established family-run religious media stores beside Muslim shrines or in Shi’a-majority neighbourhoods. In this episode, Dr Timothy Cooper (Research Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology) examines the distinct sonic aesthetic of Shi’i religious media in Pakistan through interviews with his interlocutors in Lahore, as well as through extracts from their personal archives of Shi’i majlis assemblies, rituals, and recitations. He is joined by Karen Ruffle from the University of Toronto and Charles Hirschkind from the University of California, Berkeley, who help to put Shi’i relationships with sound in a wider geographic and disciplinary context.

This podcast forms the final part of a three-part multi-platform sound essay titled The Recorded and the Live that examines Shi’i faith, ritual, and recording media in Pakistan. It was produced through the support of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship (ES/V011669/1).

Part 1 is an ethnographic film titled This is a Majlis: A Sound Essay co-directed with Abeera Arif-Bashir that was screened at the 2021 Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival. https://festival.raifilm.org.uk/film/decolonising-the-archive-shorts-2/

Part 2 is an hour-long collection of laments and elegies from the collections of Shi’i media traders in Pakistan titled Recitations for Muharram and Ashura, broadcast and archived on NTS Radio. https://www.nts.live/shows/pirate-modernity/episodes/pirate-modernity-2nd-august-2021

Acknowledgements: My immense gratitude goes to Karen Ruffle, Charles Hirschkind, and Abeera Arif-Bashir for taking the time to work with me on this podcast, and to my interlocutors in Lahore, Muhammad Shehzad, Muhammad Ashiq, Ali Raza, Hurr Abbas, whose patience and intellectual generosity knows no bounds. The interviews featured in this podcast were conducted in Lahore between January and February 2020.