The notion of the Unreliable Narrator is, for me, not a critique of the perceived moral failings of the anthropological project, but a methodological narrative construct integral to the work of writing culture. The question of unreliability is not a question of believability but of what parts of a complex and convoluted truth we the readers are willing to sign on to and invest in. It reflects an understanding and acceptance that no single truth is wholly accurate but also that no individual account is without some measure of reality.
Month: August 2020
Ep#62 Job Fantasies, Working with Others, Extractive Calls & Reciprocity Revisited:This Month on TFS
The Familiar Strange · #62 Job Fantasies, Working With Others, Extractive Calls & Reciprocity Revisited This week we bring you another zoom panel! Featuring Mike Dunford who is a Phd candidate in anthropology at the Australian National University and Sophie Chao who you might remember from our last panel and her interview on her work … Continue reading Ep#62 Job Fantasies, Working with Others, Extractive Calls & Reciprocity Revisited:This Month on TFS
Strange Work in Familiar Places: Inside Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Border Hotels
The new appreciation of previously dismissed types of work may be short lived, and their ongoing fight for a living wage is certainly not won. However, this crisis has opened a space in which broader conversations about the value of the work of someone like Rose may become unavoidable. If the lessons of these hotels are to be translated to national politics, it is that we cannot afford to return to the pre-COVID economy that tolerated people like Rose not receiving a living wage and rough sleepers lining Auckland Queen Street while warm rooms and homes sit empty.
Ep #61 Switching Hats: Sverre Molland on Anti-Trafficking Initiatives in the Mekong Region
The Familiar Strange · #60 Switching Hats: Sverre Molland On Anti-Trafficking Initiatives In The Mekong Region A content warning before we get into this week's interview. Today’s topic centres around human trafficking activites in the Mekong reagion and our guest does mention some of the physical abuse that does take place in these situations. “I’m … Continue reading Ep #61 Switching Hats: Sverre Molland on Anti-Trafficking Initiatives in the Mekong Region
Blurred lines and dead chooks in fieldwork
My own fieldwork experience, like many others, demonstrates a blurring in what is ‘professional’ and ‘personal’, what is ‘leisure’ and ‘work’, whether you are researcher, student, or known by another identity. While researchers may strive to draw boundaries, distinctions in field research are blurry, because the nature of fieldwork means an element of the unknown and the out-of-control, and the intersection of different people, things, position, gender, power, knowledge and culture. As feminist geographers and anthropologists note, fieldwork is messy.
The Familiar Strange 