The Familiar Strange · Season Break: A Message from TFS The team at TFS would like to say thank you to all our listeners this season and to everyone who has listened in to our podcasts and read the blog! We are taking a short season break and we will return with some new and … Continue reading Season Break: A Message from TFS
Month: June 2021
Ethnographic Poetry and Academic Writing: A Reflection
“Whatever your eye can see, it's vecik.” This line resonated with me while I was conducting my fieldwork in Taiwan with the indigenous Paiwan village known as Paridrayan. Good friend and prolific artist, Etan Pavavaljung, once mentioned to me this Paiwan concept known as vecik. The concept, briefly speaking, implies an interconnectedness that links all tangible things with each other. From humans, rocks, and trees to winds and words, they are connected to each other through vecik...“However,” he added, “something like poetry can be vecik.”. He continued, “let’s take for example, a village elder reciting a poem about his childhood. He recites verses about his flower garden from his childhood home as well as reminiscing his childhood days. These words become vecik.”
Ep #76 The Sounds of Fieldwork & Choosing Your Field Site: This Month on TFS
The Familiar Strange · Ep #76 The Sounds of Fieldwork & Choosing Your Fieldsite: This Month on TFS This week we’d like to introduce a new Familiar Stranger, Jarrod Sim! Jarrod is a PhD student at the school of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. His current research is an anthropologically-led study of … Continue reading Ep #76 The Sounds of Fieldwork & Choosing Your Field Site: This Month on TFS
A Five Course Degustation for the Changing “Australian” Palette
To this day, I love fried Spam and eggs. The crunchy and salty slice of processed mystery meat dipped in just cooked egg yolk is one of my favourite breakfasts. After all, it was the breakfast that I grew up eating on Sunday mornings when we’d all sit around the table and mum would hand out these small rectangles of fried salty goodness. I didn’t think it was that strange till I had a conversation with some of my friends who furrowed their little brows in disapproval, “ew, Spam is gross, it’s like dog food”. I quickly learned that my beloved Spam breakfasts were not as commonplace as they seemed, but rather they were an oddity. In a world of bacon and egg rolls with hash browns, my beloved family breakfasts of Spam and rice were distinctly different.