Before we dive into today’s episode we’d just like to add a content warning for this episode for sexual assault and drug use.

This week, Familiar Stranger Carolyn sits down with Adrian Watts, a PhD Candidate from the University of Melbourne. Adrian spent his fieldwork in a London squat called The Black Stag. 

Throughout this conversation, Carolyn asks questions around the lifestyle of a squatter, and Alex helps to paint a vivid picture of the lives that the people living in the Black Stag lived. 

It was a great chat with some thought provoking ideas. 

Head over to our website for a list of links and citations.

Humours

Ep # 87: Squatters in The Stag: Adrian Watts on Activism & Squats

Vijayendra Rao, an economist with the World Bank, talks with anthropologist Ian Pollock about the theory and practice of development, anthropology’s relationship to development, and how ethnography might help the disenfranchised engage with powerful institutions and effect social change.

All the colors in the world

43. AnthroPod Crossover: The Familiar Strange with Vijayendra Rao

“We don’t look back enough to go forward, I don’t think. We need to look in the rear view mirror everyday.” 

Professor Mick Dodson AM, a Yawuru Aboriginal man, Australian barrister, academic and recently retired Director of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at ANU, talks to our own Julia Brown about some of the ongoing struggles for Indigenous Australians. They discuss education and language, calling out everyday racism and unacceptable behaviours toward women, the role of anthropology in Indigenous Australian affairs, the Northern Territory Intervention, the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and self determination. The Native Title Act (or Settlement) is also mentioned, along with the Stolen Generations and the 2008 Apology. Their conversation concludes with a reflection on Indigenous meanings of health and well-being. 

QUOTES 

“These are probably the oldest languages in the world. There’s something wrong with your values if you don’t think that that heritage is of any worth.” 

“The thing that troubles me about anthropologists is that there’s a level of preciousness that seems to afflict the discipline.” 

“I think the great thing that’s happened in research of any sort but particularly anthropology is the ethical clearances processes... how are you going to be impartial, independent - that’s where preciousness gets in the way.” 

“Maybe we should select people to study anthropology with greater scrutiny.” 

“‘Going native’ ought to be frowned upon. You know, you can understand it but don’t try and become it.” 

“In its essence self determination is having control of your destiny, as a group. It’s a right of peoples... coupled with social justice it means that you as a group are in control of the decisions that affect not just your daily lives but what happens to you as a group, into the future.” 

“With the Uluru Statement, it’s been framed in a negative way ... The response is really mean-spirited, and unfair, unjust, and a perpetuation of the colonial project really - ‘we’ll decide what’s best for you black fellas, cause we have the power and whatever you dish up we can say yes or no to.’" 

"The black armband is going to be worn until there's reason to take it off. And we haven't given, as a nation, any reason to take it off. And it's not about blaming the present generation. But we can blame them if they refuse to accept this history." 

"Subsection 26 of section 51 [of the Australian constitution] allows the parliament to pass laws that can be racially discriminatory. And they have. Since 1967, they have, at least five times, used that power to discriminate against Australia's Indigenous people and only Australia's Indigenous people." 

“There is a connection between culture and identity confusion... connecting the young with the broader family, clan, nation, universe, has broken down, through colonisation and dispossession.” 

“Yawuru people have a notion of Liyan, which is a feeling of well-being... health is not just a physical condition, it’s also a spiritual and intellectual and cultural condition." 

CITATIONS 

Dodson, M. 1994. ‘The End in the Beginning: Re(de)finding Aboriginality’ Wentworth Lecture. 

On the Northern Territory Intervention: https://www.monash.edu/law/research/centres/castancentre/our-research-areas/indigenous-research/the-northern-territory-intervention/the-northern-territory-intervention-an-evaluation/what-is-the-northern-territory-intervention 

The Uluru Statement from the Heart: https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/2017-05/Uluru_Statement_From_The_Heart_0.PDF 

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. 

Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com 
Show notes by Julia Brown

#20 Wearing the black armband: Mick Dodson talks ongoing colonisation in Australia

“If wine hasn’t been turned into a standardized beverage, there’s room for variation. There’s an appreciation for variation that has something to do with the taste of place. And there’s different vintages, if not manipulated to achieve a standard outcome, will be distinctive. You’re tasting 2009 compared to 2016. And that tells you something about how warm it was that year or things that are more complex than that”

Deborah Heath, a leading anthropologist of wine and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Lewis & Clark in Portland, Oregan, chats (over a glass of wine, of course) with our very own Jodie-Lee Trembath at the 4S Conference in Sydney in late August. Keeping with the theme of Deborah’s workshop with Mike Bennie, Natty Wine and Its Companion Species, they discuss the meaning behind wine by comparing the differences between commercial winemaking and natural winemaking, how chemicals used during the production cycle of wine create post-apocalyptic worlds around Donna Haraway’s “contact zone”, and about living with the trouble of anthropology, the work that can and has been invasive and has privileged our relative power concerning those that we work with.

Just like our last panel episode, this interview was not recorded in our usual studio so you may notice a difference in sound quality.

QUOTES

“Wine doesn’t exist in nature. Grapes don’t turn themselves into wine without some sort of collaborative relationship with people who make wine.”

“The loose umbrella of so-called ‘natural wine’ is variously used to refer to wines that are manipulated less – wines that don’t have chemical inputs in the vineyard, which have become routine especially since World War Two, and that minimize interventions in the wine cellar” … “It’s pretty common practice to do what’s called chaptalization which means to add sugar which boosts alcohol, it’s fairly common practice to add acid, but a natural winemaker wouldn’t do either of those things.”

“In a fully self-sustaining vineyard environment, there will be lots of other critters involved. If you have animals like sheep, chickens, cattle, horses, that graze on the property and produce manure, then that manure can then be composted, you’ve got their participation in this nutrient soil that also then contributes to the micro-flora in the soil.”

“Composting is described by those who do it as magical!”

“Each of us can decide what tastes good to us. And then again we’re in the cross-hairs of marketing.”

“People are only patients when they’re in the middle of an appointment.”

“We all strive to, as Donna Haraway says, live with the trouble, live with the contradictions of the work that we do that can and has been invasive, that has - many times - privileged our relative power, vis-à-vis those that we work with.”

LINKS AND CITATIONS - see our website for full list

Haraway D. (2008) When species meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

For an explainer about chaptalization, give this article on Vine Pair a read: https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/what-is-chaptalization/ 

Trubek A. (2009) The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir, Berkeley: University of California Press.

The Brad Weiss episode Jodie mentions can be found here: https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/07/23/ep-18-brad-weiss/ 

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

Show notes by Deanna Catto
Music by Pete Dabro

#28 Relational Wine: Deborah Heath talks wine anthropology & living with the trouble

Sabilulungan, Mang Koko K vs DJ Knalpot

The Familiar Strange is a podcast about doing anthropology: that is, about listening, looking, trying out, and being with, in pursuit of uncommon knowledge about humans and culture. Find show notes, plus our blog about anthropology's role in the world, at https://www.thefamiliarstrange.com. Twitter: @tfsTweets. FB: facebook.com/thefamiliarstrange. Instagram: @thefamiliarstrange.

Brought to you by your familiar strangers: Ian Pollock, Jodie-Lee Trembath, Julia Brown, Simon Theobald, Kylie Wong Dolan; produced by Deanna Catto and Matthew Phung, and with support from the Australian Anthropological Society, the Australian National University’s Schools of Culture, History and Language and Archeology and Anthropology, and the Australian Centre for Public Awareness of Science, and produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. 

We acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we record this podcast, and pay our respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, past, present, and emerging.

#28 Relational Wine: Deborah Heath talks wine anthropology & living with the trouble

The Familiar Strange

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