Anthropology on Air

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. Her main ethnographic fieldsites include the midwestern dairy worlds of the United States, and various sites in Denmark including pig farms, an insect farm, and a former brown coal mine. Across these sites, Katy has worked with a lot of different co-species social formations and technoscientifically modulated ways of living and dying in agriculture, and in today’s episode, she will speak to some of these, focusing on the relations between microbes, cows, and humans in raw milk consumption, production, and politics. The basis for our conversation is a talk that Katy gave on the day before we recorded the podcast as part of the BSAS seminar series. Her talk was titled ‘Digestive belonging: a microbial ethnography of raw milk in America’s Dairyland’. In the podcast, Katy unravels the notion of ‘digestive belonging’ in this ethnographic context, connecting it to farmlife, microbes, social landscapes, pasteurization politics, and rural nostalgia among other things. We further discuss different modes of care in animal farming practices, the cultivation of trans-species sensing, and the idea of ‘positive animal welfare’. The podcast was recorded in October 2025 when Katy was in Bergen to give a presentation as part of the Bergen Social Anthropology Seminar series. Resources: Katy Overstreet’s research profile Articles mentioned, authored by Katy: Digestive Belonging: A Microbial Ethnography of Raw Milk in America’s Dairyland (2026) Be the boar: sex, sows, and courtship on a Danish pig farm (2022) How to Taste Like a Cow: Cultivating Shared Sense in Wisconsin Dairy Worlds (2021) EU funded Cost Action project LIFT aimed at ‘Lifting farm animal lives’ that Katy participates in: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we speak with Alessandro Rippa about amber – a fossilised resin that not only allow us a glimpse into prehistoric lifeforms and climatic conditions millions of years ago but also works as an entry point into understanding current political, scientific, and commercial frictions. Alessandro is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, at the University of Oslo, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project called “Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene”. He has conducted extensive fieldwork along China’s borderlands, and more recently in his home region in the Italian Alps, and he has published on themes such as infrastructure development, borders, ‘road animism’, human-environment relations, re-wilding, hunting, and heritage.His award-winning book, titled “Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China”, came out in 2020 and explores the interplay between developmental processes, various forms of state power, and local experiences and perceptions of transboundary connections in China. Emerging from this fieldwork, the object of amber caught Alessandro’s interest, and in this podcast, we speak with him about the many aspects and actors that are part of its history and global circulation. The conversation will take us from China and Burma to Italy, Poland and Ukraine, as amber burst out in unpredictable places, and we discuss how amber links the past, present, and future in human lives, visions, and politics. You will find links to the discussed publications and to Alessandro’s work in the show notes. The podcast was recorded in September 2025, when Alessandro visited Bergen to give a presentation as part of the BSAS seminars. Resources:Research profile: https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/people/aca/alessrip/ Book: Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China (2020): https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463725606/borderland-infrastructures Articles on re-wilding in the Italian Alps: - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00141844.2021.1939398?tab=permissions&scroll=top#abstract - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01426397.2024.2309310#abstract ERC project page for Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene - https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/projects/AMBER/index.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to a special two-episode series of Anthropology on Air! In this and the previous podcast, you will listen to selected parts of a lecture series on the subject of slavery and freedom with professor of Sociology at Harvard University, Orlando Patterson. The lectures were held in December 2023 at various locations in London and were recorded by our colleague, Rolf Scott. This episode features the second lecture given by Patterson titled ‘Slavery and Genocide: Jamaica, the US South and the Historical Sociology of Evil’ at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. After this introduction, the episode jumps straight into the lecture which examines the connection between genocide and slavery with a case focus on Jamaica. Patterson begins by describing slavery through the concept of ‘natal alienation’ before connecting slavery with common definitions of genocide. He then provides a comparative history of slavery in Jamaica and the United States, in order to argue that what happened in Jamaica between 1655 and 1838 was not only slavery but also an elongated genocide of ethnocultural destruction, physical killing and brutalisation on a large scale, and the denial of existence of millions of people. Finally, Patterson touches upon how the traumatic memory affects Jamaicans today. During the lecture, Patterson refers to some statistics and figures which can be found by following the video-link in the show notes. If you are interested in learning more about Patterson’s work, you can also listen to his first lecture on the paradox of freedom here on the Anthropology on Air podcast channel, and you can find videos of both lectures in full length including an open conversation session on YouTube. Links are provided in the show notes. We hope you enjoy the episode. Resources: - Lecture series: https://therai.org.uk/events/lecture-professor-orlando-patterson-the-paradox-of-freedom-a-socio-historical-approach/ - Video of this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vurr2AwIu0M - Video of the second lecture on slavery and genocide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW7Nw5aFAgE&t=8s - Video of open conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHZsNu62mas&t=4085s Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode we speak with Martjin Oosterbaan. Martjin is professor at the department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University, with a chair in the Anthropology of Religion and Security. He has done more than two decades of research in Brazil, focusing on topics such as urban and religious transformation, security and citizenship, and the role of mass media and popular culture in identity formation. He currently leads the ERC Consolidator research project: Sacralizing Security in Mega-Cities of the Global South. In the podcast, Martjin presents some of his research findings on the theopolitical constellations of contemporary rule in Rio de Jainero. He begins by describing the hybrid forms of governance in the city and how the religious landscape has changed within recent decades. We then talk about the peculiar and recently emerged phenomenon of evangelic gangs in Rio, and how religion is used as part of territorialization and legitimization of the rule and workings of these gangs. Finally, Martjin shares some comparative insights about how mega cities across the globe display similar developments of new forms of politics and rule infused with religious aspects. We hope you enjoy the conversation! The podcast was recorded in October 2024 when Martjin was in Bergen to present at the BSAS series. Resources - Academic profile - Oosterbaan, M. (2017). Transmitting the spirit: religious conversion, media, and urban violence in Brazil. Penn State University Press. - More information on the project, Sacralizing Security in Mega-Cities of the Global South Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices