Talk On — Debates in Anthropology

In this episode, Jovan Maud and Arne Harms discuss Arne's book 'Enduring Erosions: Environmental Displacement and Relocation on India’s Sinking Coasts', based on his ethnographic research in the Indian part of the Bengal Delta. This low-lying island region is highly vulnerable to erosion, storms, saltwater flooding, and sea-level rise. Harms introduces the concept of “distributed disaster” to describe coastal erosion. Unlike sudden disasters such as cyclones or earthquakes, erosion unfolds gradually across time and space. Residents may lose and rebuild their homes five to seven times, retreating inland as the coastline advances. For them, storms are damaging but survivable; the irreversible loss of land is the real disaster. The book challenges the label “climate refugee.” Islanders are not simply settled people suddenly displaced by climate change. Their communities have longer histories of migration and uprooting, while current displacement often occurs through small movements within islands or to nearby areas. Mobility and immobility are closely connected: families send sons to construction work and daughters to domestic work elsewhere so that remittances can allow relatives to remain on the islands. Arne uses “the thinning of life” to describe both ecological decline and shrinking human possibilities. Saltwater kills trees, makes farmland unproductive, and leaves ruined landscapes. At the same time, falling land values, homelessness, declining livelihoods, and perceived state abandonment reduce people’s prospects for a secure future. The state plays a contradictory role. Residents blame port infrastructure for redirecting tides and worsening erosion, while authorities selectively build strong protections around strategically important port assets. Elsewhere, communities receive temporary mud-and-wood embankments that must be rebuilt repeatedly. This demonstrates that the state has the capacity to protect land but chooses which places and interests to prioritize. The conversation also emphasizes multiple, overlapping temporalities: tides, monsoons, repeated rebuilding, gradual retreat, personal histories of displacement, and expectations about when particular fields or homes will disappear. Residents live with both uncertainty about the islands’ long-term future and precise knowledge of which places are likely to be lost soon. Arne hopes the ethnography will encourage humanitarian and disaster-response systems to recognize slow, recurring erosion—not only dramatic events—as disaster. Although climate change may eventually make large parts of the delta uninhabitable, he rejects simplistic calls for the mass relocation of millions. Instead, he advocates better concepts and more just forms of assistance for people living through environmental decline that has become part of everyday life rather than an exceptional event.

In this episode of Talk On, Xenia Cherkaev speaks with Amiel Bize about their forthcoming special issue, 'Who Gets the Remainder? The Ethics and Politics of Gleaning'. They explore gleaning—the gathering and reuse of leftovers—as both a material practice and a moral claim. Drawing on examples from biblical traditions, East African fuel economies, Soviet factories, artisanal gold mining, urban recycling, and early modern dockyards, they examine why practices that may be illegal are often regarded as socially legitimate. Central to the conversation is the concept of “indeterminate property”: resources that are neither clearly private nor public. The episode shows how claims to such remainders challenge conventional ideas of ownership and market value while expressing obligations to prevent waste, redistribute resources, and preserve their usefulness. Gleaning thus emerges as a source of dignity, freedom, community, and resistance to alienating economic relations. Read more about the project here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02757206.2026.2670645

In this Episode of Talk On, Jagat Sohail discusses his research on the experience of refugees in Germany during and after the "long summer of migration" in 2015. His research sheds light on the unexpected wave of hospitality towards refugees that characterised that summer, the subsequent turnaround in the public eye, and the rise of anti-immigrant, right-wing populism. As a researcher from India, Sohail inverts the classic dynamic of anthropologists from Europe and the US researching in the Global South, reflecting on the significance of this perspective and the methodological implications of such vantage points for ethnographers.

In this episode, Xenia Cherkaev speaks with Alice von Bieberstein about her book ‘Temptations in Ruin: Sovereign Accumulation and the Making of Post-Genocide Turkey’. The book develops the concept of sovereign accumulation to analyse the political-economic afterlife of the Armenian genocide under conditions of 21st-century neoliberal extractivism and ongoing counterinsurgency warfare against the Kurdish freedom movement. It does so ethnographically through the story of an urban regeneration scheme in the historically Armenian quarters of the city of Muş in what is today far-eastern Turkey, but which is also part of Northern Kurdistan and was once part of the heartland of Western Armenia. Following the quarter’s demolition, residents moved on to dig the foundations of their homes in search of what is locally known as ‘Armenian’ treasures or gold. Some individuals and groups also developed ideas and concrete projects of heritagization. The book thus looks at how Armenian material remains are targeted in different modalities of value-extraction, stewardship, and care in ways that re-animate the 1915 genocide against Armenians in its specificity as a moment of primitive accumulation that brought into being a racialized property regime that continues to reflect in different positionalities today. Cherkaev and von Bieberstein discuss how the history of sovereign violence continues to shape relations between state, capital, and citizens in this predominantly Kurdish region of Turkey; how this history becomes recursive and itself a kind of necro-economic frontier; and how these broader analytical insights point beyond Turkey to illiberal undercurrents structuring logics of accumulation in the 20th and 21st centuries.

In this episode, Jovan Maud talks to Anna-Lena Wolf about her book *Labor on the Line — Justice at Work at Tea Plantations in Assam, India*. The book examines the concept of justice in the context of tea plantations in Assam, India, and how different actors—including workers, managers and activists—have differing notions of justice. Anna-Lena conducted long-term field research in Assam, where she observed the complexity of notions of justice and how these are negotiated between different actors. She argues that justice functions differently at various levels, from the plantation to the nation-state, and that agency is not only about rebelling against oppressive structures but also about making decisions within them. During the discussion, Anna-Lena highlights the changes on the plantations, including the abolition of the Plantation Labour Act and the rise of smaller producers, which may not please workers employed on several plantations. Anna-Lena concludes by examining the wider implications of her research, including the potential to apply the concept of workplace justice to contexts beyond Assam's tea plantations.

In this episode, Jovan Maud speaks with Jeremy Rayner about his co-edited publication 'Back to the ‘30s? – Recurring Crises of Capitalism, Liberalism and Democracy', that explores the political and economic dynamics of the 1930s and their relevance to contemporary issues. The discussion delves into the rise of authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and the role of economic power in shaping political landscapes today. Rayner reflects on how the legacies of the 1930s continue to influence current debates, particularly around democracy, governance, and the environment. Drawing on various interdisciplinary perspectives, he emphasizes the importance of a nuanced understanding of history, highlighting the similarities and differences between past and present struggles. The conversation offers a thought-provoking take on how historical insights can inform our understanding of today's complex global challenges. Rayner argues for a nuanced understanding of history that recognizes both continuities and critical differences with the past, while warning that once authoritarian figures gain control, they rarely give it back. The conversation underscores the importance of historically informed political analysis as we navigate increasingly complex global issues.

In this episode, Christoph Brumann speaks with Xenia Cherkaev about her book 'Gleaning for Communism', which Focaal: The Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology has listed among their "One Hundred Indispensable Works for Thinking in Our Times." The book is a historical ethnography of Soviet-era collectivist economies and their lasting legacy. It examines its object through a conceptual lens informed by everyday recollections of pilfering industrial scrap home from the work to make useful things, and by Soviet legal scholars' theories of the state as a "socialist household," characterized by shared resources and communal ethics. Cherkaev and Brumann unpack how these ideas played out in practice—ranging from the Stalin-era personal redistribution around the plan to the tensions between collective interests and personal ownership during Gorbachev’s perestroika. Delving into the ethics of exchange, the concept of gleaning, and the symbolic relationship between socialist ideals and individual responsibility, they discuss the broader implications of these ideas for understanding modern economies and the role of the state in balancing public and private interests.

In this episode, Christoph Brumann talks to Julia Vorhölter about her research on sleep and sleeplessness. Julia's personal struggle with insomnia led her to investigate why sleep, despite being essential, is under-explored in anthropology. They discuss the challenges of studying sleep, a private and indirect experience that is difficult to observe or communicate. Julia's fieldwork in sleep labs examines the relationship between subjective sleep experiences and objective data. She contrasts sleep apnea, which is measurable, with insomnia, which is harder to diagnose and often dismissed by doctors despite its significant impact. Her research also explores sleep's political, economic, and social dimensions.

In this episode, Christoph Brumann talks to Philipp Demgenski about his book "Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City". The conversation centers around Demgenski's fieldwork in the Qingdao neighborhood of Dabaodao, a former German colony, where he explores the transformation from a slum to a heritage site. Demgenski's research aims to answer a crucial question: why do urban redevelopment projects in China often go wrong, stagnate, or fail? His book delves into this issue, focusing on the city's urban redevelopment projects that have stalled due to a preservation mandate imposed by the government. Through ten years of ethnographic fieldwork, Demgenski sheds light on the diverse experiences of residents, migrant workers, preservationists, and government officials, revealing a bureaucracy that is often scattered and ineffective, leading to deadlocks and stalled redevelopment projects.

In this episode of Talk On, host Jovan Maud talks to his guest Marek Mikuš about a topic concerning (almost) everyone: Debt and how people understand, manage, and live with it. They discuss Marek Mikuš's work in the Emmy Noether Group "Peripheral Debt", his research in the field, and how his forthcoming article "Tracking mortgage pathways in Zaghreb: Everyday economics of debt, housing wealth and debtors agency in a European semi-periphery" came to be. In this article, Marek sheds some light on the financial peculiarities of housing mortgages and how these peculiarities, i.e. the pegging of the mortgage to the Swiss currency instead of the Croatian, can work against debtors and their dream of home ownership. The two talk about debtors' movements, political and legal battles, and a Croatian couple struggling to pay their soaring principles but persisting, even against the hurdles built up by creditors.