Show Notes
Welcome to a special episode of Anthropology on Air.In this episode you will hear the recordings of the 2024 Fredrik Barth Memorial Lecture, held by Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern. The episode begins with an introduction by Synnøve Bendixen who is head of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Strathern then takes us on a historical and global tour through various ethnographic signposts from the Melanesian Baktaman to current activism, on this tour, inviting us to think about “Journeying anew, with or without knowledge” in the context of climate change and biodiversity loss.About the lecture, 'Journeying anew, with or without knowledge'Global consciousness of climate change and biodiversity loss endures in the face of what we know to be inadequate responses. For all the attempts to act on knowledge, failure to scale up reactions – by citizens, by governments - makes one wonder where the power of knowledge has gone. Not dealing very well with relations and connections is one widely acknowledged short-coming; it is of course a shortcoming to which many anthropologists would point (speaker included), in promoting the relational insights of their interlocuters. This makes Fredrik Barth’s 1975 monograph on the Melanesian Baktaman, then an unusual voice against the easy making of connections, now appear rather intriguing. His own search was for places new. Starting a twenty-first century journey there brings one to a point where the power of knowledge – when it is tied to action - is not quite what it promises.
About the lecturer, Professor Dame Marilyn StrathernProfessor Marilyn Strathern studied Social Anthropology at Girton College, Cambridge (PhD 1968). She held posts in Canberra (ANU), Port Moresby and UC Berkeley (visiting) before returning to the UK in the 1970s. In 1985 she took up the chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, followed by the William Wyse Professorship of Social Anthropology in Cambridge in 1993-2008. Professor Strathern was elected to the British Academy of Sciences in 1987 and made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2001. She was the Presidential Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, Trustee of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College and is now Honorary Life President of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK. Strathern’s work has focused on Melanesian and British ethnography. Papua New Guinea was her principal area of fieldwork, from 1964 to most recently in 2015. Her research has explored developments in knowledge practices in the UK and Europe. She developed her work on gender relations in two main directions: feminist scholarship and new reproductive technologies (1980s-1990s), which led to her groundbreaking books “The gender of the gift” (1988) and “After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century” (1992), and legal systems and intellectual and cultural property (1970s, 1990-00s). Her subsequent work on regimes of audit and accountability, including the edited volume “Audit Cultures. Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy” (2000) has attracted broad interdisciplinary attention. The Strathern Annual Lecture was established at Cambridge University in 2011 to honor her significant achievements.
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In this episode, we speak with Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, Katy Overstreet. Katy is coordinator for the Landscapes, Senses, and Ecological Research Cluster as well as a core-member of the Centre for Sustainable Futures – both located at the University of Copenhagen. Katy’s core fields of research include multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, feminist STS, and agrarian political economy, and she has written on themes such as farm animal welfare, foodways, bioindustrialisation, technoscience, trans-species sensory worlds, and care.
In today’s episode, we talk to Tom Bratrud about his ongoing, long-term work with city-dwellers who migrate to rural parts of Norway. This research forms the basis of Tom’s forthcoming book project, which has the working title Rurality 2.0: Redefining Urban-Rural Divides in the Mountains of Norway.
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In this episode, we are in company with Hans Lucht to talk about ethnographic poetry. Hans is a senior researcher, and the head of migration research at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) in Copenhagen. He has worked with migration for 20 years, with a special focus on undocumented labour-related migration from West Africa to Europe. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Ghana, Niger, Libya, Italy, and Greece, and his prize-winning monograph ‘Darkness before Daybreak’ chronicles the lives of a group of migrants who travels from Ghana to Italy in search of work. Apart from his numerous academic contributions of articles and policy reports, Lucht is a writer, and poet, I should say. He has published two novels titled Onko-Mus and Lysene på den anden side and two collections of poems, all in his mother-tongue Danish. The first poetry collection, called Feltarbejde (Fieldwork) from 2022 is a poetic reflection on both the experiences of his interlocutors and the experience as a fieldworker. The second, Vores liv ryster (Our lives are shaking), came out in 2024 and consists of what Hans has called documentary poems. This means that all text of the poems is direct quotes from conversations and interviews with his interlocutors that Hans has then curated by following a few self-imposed dogmas. In today’s episode, Hans will read out loud five poems from this collection, all titled with a name of the one speaking and where the conversation took place. In between the readings, we ask Hans about what impressions inspired the poems, the dynamic of working between anthropology and art, and how each domain can inform and expand the insights of the other. We discuss the concept of ‘existential reciprocity’ in relation to his work, and how doing fieldwork engenders impressions and transformations that exceed academic analysis and extend into the lives of both interlocutors and fieldworkers. Resources: - Hans Lucht’s academic profile - Feltarbejde (2022) - Vores liv ryster (2024)
Welcome to a special two-episode series of Anthropology on Air!