Conversations in Anthropology Conversations in Anthropology

In this episode, Mythily talks to Anne Galloway and Laura McLauchlan. Anne is a former academic and current farm witch who, in both roles, has spent a weird amount of time getting to know sheep. Laura is a multispecies anthropologist at the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW and lectures with the UNSW Environment and Society group. Anne and Laura are also, it must be said, dear friends. As they speak of friendship, policy, care, death, and killing, anthropology emerges as a way into practices and relations that could maybe (we hope) inform a ‘better world’. Anne and Laura are both deeply invested—through their entanglements with sheep and farmers (Anne), hedgehogs and ecological conservation workers (Laura)—in understanding what sophisticated practices of love, kindness and friendship look like. So we talk through the sticky and unruly nature of lived ethics; of what it means to dislike with respect. Or, to kill with love. And also, of choosing to walk away from academia.

This episode was produced by Mythily Meher, with editing and production support from Tim Neale and Matt Barlow. Mythily lives and works in Aotearoa New Zealand, and we recognise Māori in Aotearoa as tangata whenua (people born of the whenua [land/placenta]), whose right to sovereignty here is inalienable.

Conversations in Anthropology is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and with support from the Australian Anthropological Society.

Works mentioned:
‘Lively Collaborations: Feminist Reading Group Erotics for Liveable Futures’ by Laura McLauchlan (in Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy)

‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’ by Anna Tsing

‘Power in the Helping Professions’ by Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig

Also, more generally, the expansive works of Deb Bird Rose, and Maria La Puig Bellacasa

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”; Teresa Montoya’s work on permeability; Courtney Lewis’s book, Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty; and Carla Scaramelli’s book, How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey.

Show Credits
Lead Production: Cameo Dalley
Editing: Cameo Dalley and Tim Neale

This conversation was recorded by Tim Neale on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.

Check us out on Twitter @ anthroconvo and our website anthroconvo.com

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 @ anthroconvo

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.

Show Credits
Lead Production: Tim Neale
Editing: Mythily Meher, Tim Neale, and Matt Barlow.

This episode was recorded by Tim Neale on the lands of Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.

Check us out on twitter @ anthroconvo.

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. Durham: Duke University Press.

Myers, Fred (2019) The Difference that Identity Makes: Indigenous Cultural Capital in Australian Cultural Fields. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

Remembering Yayayi (film) Directors, Pip Deveson, Fred Myers, Ian Dunlop.


Show Credits

This episode was produced by Cameo Dalley on the lands of the Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, and it was edited by David Boarder Giles and Mythily Meher.