Anthropologists TO-GO: Roundtable

For this episode I had the always sunny company of Aja Smith, whose an anthropologist working on leadership training, spirituality in Denmark and even the practices of anthropologists themselves, and how they come to embody academia. We talk about her work and about catching yourself and your words as you venture into the business of writing about people and relations. 

Denne episode er særlig, da den er på dansk. Jeg har selvskab af Docent Emeritus Ole Høiris, som i løbet af sin lange karriere har været vidt omkring, og har skrevet flere bøger om antropologi, fagests idéhistorie og flere af fagets grundbegreber. Han har også skrevet tænkepausen Mennesket. Vi taler om fagets begyndelse, nye bogprojekter og antropologiens rolle i samfundet. 

In this episode I walk with professor Lotte Meinert, who has worked in Uganda for many years on all kinds of post-conflict issues. Now she is writing a book on the mountainous land of northern Uganda and the people that live there. We discuss ownership not only to land but also to the knowledge we produce and the potentials of sharing and collaborating.

Welcome back to our not so fast nutritious podcast series. For this second season we begin with the anthropologists from the first. This episode is a conversation between them and your hosts Kaila Bolton and Katrine Pahuus on the future of anthropology and the discipline's role within academia and society.

In this episode we are joined by Professor of Anthropology, Cheryl Mattingley, at the University of Southern California. Mattingley is a renowned scholar in the fields of medical anthropology and anthropology of morality and ethics among others, and since 1992 she has been travelling to Aarhus University to participate in several research projects and collaboration. In this talk, Cheryl takes us through her path to anthropology, her use of philosophy and her aspirations for the discipline of anthropology in the future.

Marie Rask Bjerre Odgaard is Ph.d.-student at the Department of Anthropology, School of Culture and Society, at Aarhus University. In this episode, Marie gives us the opportunity to reflect upon the field of ethics as norm-critique, and as a space for queering academic representation. Marie introduces us to a notion of ethics as dwelling within the uncertainties and paradoxes that we come across in the field, and in the writing process, as anthropologists. Marie considers an anthropology of ethics as a toolbox for doing just that: making space for dwelling in the strangeness of norms, including our own as scholars.

Rasmus Dyring is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas, at Aarhus University. In this episode, Rasmus reflects upon ethics as a critical possibility for breaking down disciplinary boundaries, and as a necessary critique of traditional philosophical categories and methodologies. Epistemologically, Rasmus considers ethics to be a phenomenal field of interruption, opening up for other core questions on human experience such as health and illness, and he introduces us to an understanding of ethics as world-openness, and argues for a concept of world-open care in addition to person-centered care dominating much dementia care work.

Maria Elizabeth Louw is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, School of Culture and Society, at Aarhus University. In this episode, Maria gives us the possibility to reflect upon how we can understand ontological others, like a breadcrum, as part of peoples webs of ethical co-existence. Maria introduces us to an understanding of ethics as something that is, and perhaps remains, a riddle for our interlocutors themselves, and how working with these perplexities is part of the project of the researcher on ethics. In Marias field, working with elderly people in Kyrgyzstan, ethics manifests itself as a sense or impulse, not quite graspable and not quite embedded within the individual, problematizing ethics as well defined virtues and individual cultivation.

Anders Sybrandt Hansen is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, School of Culture and Society, at Aarhus University. In this episode, Anders reflects upon the discussions between Dark Anthropology and Anthropology of the Good, and how an Anthropology of Ethics emerged as a response. Anders also introduces us to a notion of ethics as at once interpersonal and risky, demanding the recognition of the freedom of the Other. In this conversation, we are also introduced to his own field where normative notions of ethics are disturbed by moral economy, and his examination of the links between trust and control in contemporary China.

Maria Elizabeth Louw is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, School of Culture and Society, at Aarhus University. In this episode, Maria introduces the Center for the Study of Ethics and Community, ponders upon different ways of approaching and thinking about ethics as both an ontological and relational experience, but also as a field of inquiry within Anthropology. Further, Maria gives us an introduction to her own fields where she reflects upon other-wordly presence in the lives of elderly people in Kyrgyzstan, and how an Anthropology of Ethics can illuminate why people engage in religious experience, specifically Islam.