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In this episode, the finale to season 3, we speak with Atreyee Sen, Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Our topic of discussion is a talk Atreyee gave at our department entitled, ‘No city for lovers: Urban poverty, public romance and violent moral policing of lower-class female youth in Mumbai’, which is based on her award-winning article in the interdisciplinary journal Critical Asian Studies. In it, Atreyee explores the aggressive spatial marginalisation of and violence against lower-class, young lovers in Mumbai.
Over the course of her academic career in India, the UK and Denmark, Atreyee Sen has published extensively, and brought critical insights to studies of gender, childhoods, poverty, urban politics and South Asian cities. She is author of the critically acclaimed monograph, Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum (Indiana University Press, 2007), which challenged feminist and development critiques of right-wing women, and reviewed representations of ‘the bad poor’ in South Asia.
She is also co-editor of Global Vigilantes (Hurst, 2008) and Who’s Cashing in? Contemporary Perspectives on New Monies and Global Cashlessness (Berghahn Books, 2020). Some of her more recent publications include ‘An Economy of Lies: Informal Income, Phone-Banking and Female Migrant Workers in Kolkata, India’ in Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies (2022), and ‘Religious Spaces, Urban Poverty, and Interfaith Relations in India’ in Current History (2022). In 2023, Dr Sen won the inaugural prize for best journal article from the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Asian Studies, for her article ‘“No city for lovers”: anti-Romeo squads, resistance, and the micro-politics of moral policing in an Indian city’.
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In this episode, we speak with Martin Eggen Mogseth and Fartein Hauan Nilsen about their first edited volume, Limits of Life: Reflections on Life, Death, and the Body in the Age of Technoscience (Berghahn Books, 2024). The book explores how fundamental concepts such as life, birth, selfhood, religion, death, and ancestry are being reshaped in an era of rapid technological changes, from a transhumanist movement seeking to disrupt death, to digital avatars ‘replicating’ deceased loved ones and widely accessible DNA tests revealing hitherto unknown genetic relatives. We discuss the book’s genesis in a smoky pub in Denmark; different ways of understanding ‘life’ and ‘limits’; how advancements in artificial intelligence and genetic testing have led to a revival of interest in ancestry in Euroamerican contexts; sperm ‘superdonors’; why California is such fertile ground for exploring topics at the intersection of scientific imagination, technology, and the self; and more.
Martin Eggen Mogseth is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, where he works with the experiences of people involved with assisted conception in the US, primarily in California. His research begins with the moment a person learns that they are donor conceived, what might be called "reconception", and expands to consider the various actors somehow affected by and affecting the trajectories that thus ensue, be they temporal, "non-human", or relational. The project is concerned with topics such as identity, kinship, technology, and biology, and deals intimately with phenomena such as personal misrecognition in the mirror, familial secrecy, familial disruption and connection, and the shifting of fundamental sense-making elements. Martin is also interested in the limits and possibilties of language in conveying ethnographic occurences, thus he tinkers as well with poetry and "the literary" and the idea that "language is technology".
Fartein Hauan Nilsen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He has previously conducted ethnographic research in Iceland for his MA where he explored the impact of modernity and technological advancements on religious revivalism, particularly pagan revivalism, in Iceland and the broader Euro-American context. Currently, Fartein is part of the RCN-funded project "Human Futures: A study of Technoscientific Immortality" led by professor Annelin Eriksen at the University of Bergen. As part of this project, Fartein has conducted 13 months of fieldwork in California focusing on how Generative Artificial Intelligence, mainly in the form of chatbots, is being used for memorial purposes. Initially, his research centered on death, but fieldwork revealed that the current AI boom is equally about life, both in representing a new form of life and in facilitating a specific way of life. Fartein's research interests span a wide range, including the Anthropology of Technology, the Anthropology of Religion, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Digital Anthropology, Artificial Intelligence, New Religious Movements, and the interplay between Science and Religion.
More about the book, released 1 June 2024, here: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/MogsethLimits
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In this episode of Anthropology on Air, we speak with Penny Harvey, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester in the UK. Penny is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the Academia Europaea.
Penny is a highly influential thinker on the topic of infrastructures. She is well known for her 2015 book about highway-building in South America, Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Cornell UP), which she co-wrote with Hannah Knox. The book addresses the deceptively simple question of how roads matter to people – an interest in the social life of infrastructure projects that still broadly animates Penny’s work today.
Penny’s long-term ethnographic research in Peru originally looked at Spanish/Quechua bilingualism, language, and power. It grew to include the study of civic infrastructure projects including road construction, sanitation, and waste management systems.
We talk about Penny’s current ethnographic study of nuclear decommissioning infrastructures in the UK, which includes her spending time at nuclear sites like Sellafield, which you will hear about in this conversation. She is involved in many projects relating to nuclear waste management, having co-founded the Beam network for social research on nuclear topics within the Dalton Nuclear Institute at the University of Manchester. She also serves as the Deputy Chair of the UK Government Committee on Radioactive Waste Management.
We hope you enjoy the conversation.
Penny Harvey - The Beam nuclear and social research network (manchester.ac.uk)
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In this special episode, we speak with Tomas Salem, a PhD fellow in our own department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. We do a deep dive on some of the themes covered in Tomas’s first book, Policing the Favelas in Rio de Janeiro: Cosmologies of War and the Far-Right (Palgrave Macmillian, 2024), which is released this week. Based on fieldwork Tomas conducted in 2015 when he was a Master’s student here, the book explores the links between militarized policing and far-right ideologies.
We talk about the social and political conditions that preceded the rise of the man who became the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, forms of everyday violence in the favelas of Rio, masculinity and hierarchy in the police force, doing ethnography with those you might disagree with, and how Tomas’s thoughts about the political and analytical value of anthropology have evolved in the years since he carried out the original research.
More broadly, Tomas’ research focuses on the intersection of inequality and the environment as the two overarching and co-constituting crises of the 21st century. He approaches these crises and their effects by zooming in on emergent social, political, cosmological and economic tensions, exploring the links between non-dualist ontologies and the re-enchantment of the world in politics and science, the material and symbolic conditions for the growth of illiberal ideologies, and technological change—particularly related to technologies of governance, datafication, and AI.
Tomas has carried out ethnographic research in diverse contexts, including Rio de Janeiro's Military Police Forces, and wilderness areas in the Norwegian High-Arctic and in Southern Argentina. In his PhD project he explore romantic pursuits of happiness and the good life in the outdoors and the changing meanings of nature in the Anthropocene.
We hope you enjoy the conversation.
Tomas Salem’s UiB profile: https://www.uib.no/en/persons/Tomas.Salem
Link to book: https://link.springer.com/book/9783031490262 -
To kick off season three of Anthropology on Air, we speak with Andrea Muehlebach. Andrea is Professor of Maritime Anthropology and Cultures of Water at the University of Bremen in Germany, where she also leads the Bremen NatureCultureLab. She was visiting Bergen to deliver a talk entitled, “Do Waves Have Rights?”
The Rights of Nature movement insists that “nature has a dignity, outside and in excess of its use to humans,” Andrea explains. In this conversation, we discuss Andrea’s current research into this movement, its origins in Indigenous philosophy, and what shape it is taking in different European countries today.
We also discuss the difference between privatisation and financialisation of public utilities; collective actions against such moves in Italy and beyond; how to do ethnographic work with such a “slippery substance” as water; responses to water scarcity in Europe at a time of climate change; doing multi-sited ethnographies; and much more.
Andrea’s most recent book, A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe (Duke University Press, 2023) is a multi-sited ethnography with activists across Europe, specifically Italy, Ireland and Germany, as they struggle to preserve water as a commons and a public good in the face of privatisation efforts.
She is also the author of The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy (Chicago University Press, 2012), which explored neoliberal welfare “reforms” and the moral authoritarianisms (and struggles, tensions, contradictions) that often accompany them. In addition to her two books, Andrea is the author of a great many articles on a variety of other subjects including poverty and race in Italy, economic despair, and the concept of citizenship.
We hope you enjoy the conversation.
https://www.andreamuehlebach.com/
http://naturenkulturen.de/
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Tanya Luhrmann is Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Psychology, and an elected member of the American Philosophical Society. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has conducted ethnographic work among groups such as evangelic Christians, American Santerians, Zoroastrians in India, magicians in England, and people hearing voices across cultural contexts. Apart from being the author of lots of academic articles and opinion pieces in the New York Times, her award-winning books include ‘Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft’, ‘Of Two Minds’, ‘When God talks Back’, and ‘How God Becomes Real’.
In this podcast we talk with Tanya about how people make God and Spirits real through various forms of practice and ideas. Tanya shares stories of world- and self-transformation from her fieldwork among magicians in England and evangelic Christians in the United States and unfolds some of the factors influencing such changes. We talk about the world-building effects of prayer, and how faith changes the person of faith. Finally, Tanya describes how cultural theories of mind also have an impact on the manifestation of anomalous, sensory experiences across contexts.
The podcast was recorded in early December 2023, when Tanya was in Bergen to be a panellist of the annual Holberg Debate.
Resources:
Academic Profile: https://anthropology.stanford.edu/people/tanya-marie-luhrmann
Personal website: https://www.tanyaluhrmann.com
- When God talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (2012)
- Of Two Minds: An anthropologist looks at American Psychiatry (2001)
- Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (1989)
- How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (2020)
- Special issue: ‘Mind and Spirit: a Comparative Theory’ (2020)
- Article mentioned: ‘Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths’ (2021)
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In this episode, you will meet professor at the University of Oxford, Harvey Whitehouse. Harvey is the director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion, he is Statutory Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Fellow of Magdalen College. Harvey has worked extensively with rituals since his first long-term fieldwork in Papua New Guinea in 1980s. His list of publications includes myriads of interdisciplinary contributions, articles, and edited volumes apart from books, with the most recent being ‘The Ritual Animal’ (from 2021).
Currently, Harvey is testing and developing his theory of modes of religiosity which proposes that the frequency, transmission form and emotionality of rituals influences the scale and structure of social organisation. In recent years, his research has expanded beyond religion to examine all kinds of ritual behaviour globally and their role in binding groups together whether being in the context of football, war, or ex-convicts. Apart from that, Harvey has been occupied with questions on the evolution of social complexity, something which is also explored in his forthcoming book ‘Inheritance: the evolutionary origins of the modern world’ that will be published in June 2024.
In this podcast, we talk with Harvey about what characterises rituals, what kinds of social effects they can produce, and how they have developed throughout history and influenced social organisation. Harvey explains the modes of religiosity theory and we discuss how it can be usefully applied in relation to conflict and contexts as diverse as football fandom, violent extremism, and the environmental crisis. Finally, Harvey shares his vision of an anthropology that reaches beyond interpretive exclusivism and disciplinary silos when trying to understand cultural and social systems.
The podcast was recorded in November 2023, when Harvey visited Bergen to give the yearly Barth Memorial Lecture.
Resources:
Academic profile: https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-harvey-whitehouse
Personal website: https://www.harveywhitehouse.com
Paper mentioned: Rethinking ritual: how rituals made our world and how they could save it (2023)
Books mentioned: The Ritual Animal (2021), ‘Inheritance: the evolutionary origins of the modern world (forthcoming)
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In this episode you will meet Jennifer Hays, who is professor in social anthropology at the University of Tromsø (UiT) – the Arctic University of Norway. Jennifer has been working with hunter-gatherer San Populations in southern Africa for 25 years, as a researcher, and as a consultant for governmental bodies and local and international NGOs. She is, among other things, a founding member of the Hunter Gatherer Education Research and Advocacy Group (HG-Edu), a board member of the Kalahari Peoples’ Fund. She also works as a consultant for UN bodies on global human rights issues. A primary focus of her work has been on issues relating to education, language, and indigenous rights, including the impact of formal education on San lifeways and on their own efforts to attain educational self-determination.
In the podcast, Jennifer gives us insights into what characterises the ways of life of the approximately 10 million people worldwide who live in contemporary hunter-gatherer communities. Focusing on the Ju/’hoansi in the Nyae Nyae conservancy in Namibia, where Jennifer has conducted decades of extensive fieldwork, we discuss some of the challenges that this community face, especially in terms of education and knowledge transmission.
Finally, Jennifer offers some reflections on the complex topic of how we can uphold the rights to self-determination of indigenous peoples, and some of the pitfalls that we must take caution to avoid.
We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did.
The podcast was recorded in early November 2023 when Jennifer was in Bergen to give a lecture at the Bergen Anthropology Department Seminars.
Resources:
- Read more about Jennifer’s work and find her publications here
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This episode is the second of two podcasts focusing on the longstanding partnership between Bergen and Khartoum.
In the episode you will meet, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, who visited Bergen in October 2023 to give the keynote lecture at a 3-day symposium that marked the 60-year anniversary of this collaboration. An-Na’im is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory Law, associated professor in the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, and senior fellow of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion of Emory University. He is the author of several pioneering books within human rights and Islamic law, including Decolonizing Human Rights(2021); What is an American Muslim (2014); Muslims and Global Justice (2011); and Islam and the Secular State (2008).
In the podcast, professor emeritus at the Department of Social Anthropology at Bergen University, Leif Manger, interviews An-Na’im about his background and main work. An-Na’im begins by describing his defining relationship with Mahmoud Mohammed Taha and Taha’s teachings about “The Second Message of Islam”. Taking us through some of his major academic contributions, An-Na’im then reflects on his previous engagements with human rights in a cross-cultural perspective and his commitment to advocating the agency of people to protect their own rights. Finally, Leif asks for An-Na’im’s thoughts on the question that he himself posed in the title of his keynote lecture, namely: ‘Sudan’s tragedy – a repeated failure or a learning adaptation process?’
Read more about Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im’s work on his research page and on his professional website evolutionofsharia.org
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This episode is the first of two podcasts focusing on the longstanding partnership between Bergen and Khartoum. The first episode provides a historical view into some of the main characteristics and effects of the academic collaborations between these two cities. The second episode features an interview with Sudanese professor of law, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, who offers a framework for how we can think about the past and imagine the future of the people of Sudan.
In this episode, you will meet two anthropologists whose work and lives testify to these bonds between Sudan and Norway. Munzoul Assal, professor of social anthropology at both the University of Khartoum (UoK) and the University of Bergen (UiB) and senior researcher at Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) and Leif Manger, professor emeritus at the department of social anthropology, University of Bergen (UiB).
Our conversation takes departure in the cross-country links established in 1963 through the Norwegian anthropologist, Frederic Barth. Leif and Mounzul describes how Barth connected Bergen and Khartoum both physically through his professorship in Khartoum and spiritually in his modes of thinking and conducting anthropology. Moving through historical key-events, we then discuss what such a cross-country academic partnership can offer in terms of generating knowledge and stimulating collaborative learning – for example through friendships, exchange of ideas and time, and the sharing and writing of histories of places and people. Finally, we touch upon what role such a collaboration might have in the current times of devastation and war in Sudan, and especially in terms of building a post-war future.
The podcast was recorded in October 2023, a few days before the symposium.
Find more resources and a film on the collaboration here
Read further about the Sudan-Norway Academic Cooperation (SNAC) here
See an elaborate program of the 2023 symposium here -
This episode’s guest, George Paul Meiu, is professor of anthropology and chair of the institute of social anthropology at the University of Basel and associate in the departments of anthropology and African and African American studies at Harvard University.
George’s research and teaching focus on sexuality, gender, and kinship; ethnicity, belonging and citizenship; mobility, memory, and materiality; and the political economy of East Africa and Eastern Europe. He is the author of the prize-winning book Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2017), and his new book, currently in press, is titled Queer Objects to the Rescue: Intimacy and Citizenship in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2023). In addition, George is our companion in the attempt of getting anthropology on air, he is the host and producer of the combined video-podcast platform, Ethnographic Imagination Basel, which we really recommend checking out!
In this podcast, we talk with George about ways to understand the contemporary homophobic violence and sentiment in Kenya. Instead of imposing perspectives from queer liberalism, George suggests situating the phenomenon in its own social, material, and historical context in order to grasp its local grammar and conditions of reproduction. George then offers an analytical strategy to do this through a focus on what he calls ‘queer objects’. We talk about how objects such as plastic and diapers can be used to grasp the moral panic over homosexuality in Kenya and how this relates to notions of intimate citizenship. Finally, George describes how the queer potentiality of objects has been used in artivism and activism and how we might use it for thinking critically, imagining, and creating new worlds.
Resources:
- If you want to learn more about George’s work, we recommend listening to this New Books Network podcast episode, where he talks about his prize-winning book Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya -
In this episode you will meet Veronica Strang, who is a professor of anthropology currently affiliated with Oxford University. Her research focuses on human-environmental relations, and in particular, societies’ engagements with water, encompassing conflicts over ownership and governance; cultural beliefs and values; human and non-human rights; and people´s sensory and cognitive interactions with water. Veronica’s main ethnographic research has been conducted in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, and apart from publishing an impressive number of academic books and articles on the topic of water, she has consulted and worked with people from the water industry, the UN, and UNESCO, just to mention a few.
We talk with Veronica about her more recent work on water beings. After describing what a water being is, Veronica unfolds how thinking with and through these creatures can illuminate culturally specific and historically changing human-environmental relations. We talk about how water beings can be used as a narrative device for criticising a sharp nature/culture divide and how they can provide alternative models for relating to nature and responding to the current environmental crisis. Finally, Veronica touches upon the comparative and co-authoring nature of anthropology.
Books referred to in the podcast:
- Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Environmental crisis (Reaktion Books, 2023)
- The Meaning of Water (Routledge, 2004)
- Gardening the world: agency, identity, and the ownership of water (Berghahn Books, 2009)
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In this episode, you will meet Matthew Carey who is associate professor at the Department of Anthropology at Copenhagen University. Matthew’s main field site is in the Moroccan High Atlas where he has done recurring fieldwork since 2002. His work here has, among other things, focused on mistrust, complicity, egalitarianism, sincerity, subjectivity, medical pluralism, and anarchism. Apart from that, Matthew has written on issues related to apocalyptic discourses, conspiracy, lying, and bureaucracy.
In this conversation, we talk with Matthew about his book ‘Mistrust: An ethnographic theory’ before delving into the subject of infant mortality and parental grief among Tachelhit-Berber speaking communities in Southern Morocco. In trying to explain the radical difference here between showcase and claimed experience of grief when small compared to older children passed away, Matthew provides an anthropological analysis of different forms of emotional attachment and relational bonding.
The podcast was recorded in early May 2023 when Matthew was in Bergen to give a presentation at the BSAS Department seminar.
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In this episode you will meet associate professor at the University of Kentucky, Diane King. Diane’s research focuses on Kurdistan, which is the ethnic homeland of the Kurds encompassing parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Since the mid 1990s, Diane has done extensive fieldwork in the Kurdish communities in Iraq, and her work explores themes such as kinship, the state, migration, religion, and gender. She is the author of the 2014 book, On the Global Stage: Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq and more recent publications include the book titled Kinship and Gender which Diane co-authored with Linda Stone.
In this conversation we speak with Diane on dominant kinship structures in Kurdistan, with a focus on how patriliny manifests and forms both the intimate lives and broader sociocultural context of her interlocutors. Diane also touches upon the relation between ethnic identity and state formation, and the benefits of reflecting on both the specificities and what is general across people and places in anthropological work.
This episode was recorded in early December 2022, when Diane was in Bergen to give the annual Fredrik Barth Memorial lecture, which she had titled “Ethnic Groups and Quandaries: Thoughts on Modern States and Hereditary Belonging”. -
In this very first episode of AoA, we speak with Kregg Hetherington about his project on “ghost rivers” in Montreal, Canada. Kregg is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, where he specialises in environment, infrastructure and the bureaucratic state. He is the author of the multi-award-winning 2020 book, The Government of Beans, based on his long-term fieldwork on soybeans in Paraguay, as well as Guerrilla Auditors, an ethnography of land struggles in Paraguay.
As you’ll hear, Kregg’s current work continues to engage with the more-than-human world - this time with rivers, even ones that sometimes cannot be seen any more. Kregg directs the Concordia Ethnography Lab, where he runs a collaborative project called Emergent Waters which aims to understand Montreal’s changing relationship with water as a defining feature of its environment and infrastructure.
In this conversation, Kregg and I begin by discussing his current work, and the possibilities and limitations of thinking of rivers - and other nonhumans - as “kin” or “persons”. We also talk about the methodological and pedagogical approach Kregg calls “composite ethnography”, as well as STS (science and technology studies), and how the particular qualities of water make it a different kind of ethnographic object compared to land.
Links
Kregg Hetherington (@krether) / Twitter
Home - Concordia Ethnography Lab (ethnographylabconcordia.ca)
