This week we bring you a very special episode! Last year we collaborated with the Australian Network of Student Anthropologists, or ANSA for short and recorded their roundtable at the AAS held at the Australian National University. The roundtable discussion featured the likes of Dr Marcus Barber, Dr Sophie Chao, Dr Jayne Curnow, Derek Elias, … Continue reading Anthropology in the “real world”: A Roundtable Discussion About Applied Anthropology
Author: The Familiar Strange
The Fallible and the Untrustworthy: Writing Culture as the Unreliable Narrator
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.
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.
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.
Ep #60 Adapting Methods, Human Difference, Virtual Dojos and Foggy Field notes:This Month on TFS
Welcome back to a new season! With Covid-19 restrictions still in place, we bring you another Zoom panel! For this reason, the audio quality will be a little different to our usual studio sound. This week, we are joined by Sophie Chao, who we interviewed previously about her use of multispecies ethnography during her time … Continue reading Ep #60 Adapting Methods, Human Difference, Virtual Dojos and Foggy Field notes:This Month on TFS
End of Season Message: June 2020
The Familiar Strange · End of Season Message: June 2020 Just like that, we have already made it through half of what can only be described as a crazy year. To bring this season to a close, we recorded a short message from our homes (hence the differing audio quality ... we are KEEN to … Continue reading End of Season Message: June 2020
Balancing Acts: An Ethnographer’s Thoughts on Studying Religion
Anthropologists sometimes study sensitive topics and it is therefore not uncommon for ethnographic work to attract serious criticism along such lines. In a recent social media thread, I encountered one such critic whose principal argument was, that both I the ethnographer and the academic study of religion in general had no business writing about religious traditions (Shaligrams, in my case), should not be participating in rituals or engaging with sacred objects. What should the ethnographer’s response to this be then? What is our role in all this?
Ep #58: Individuals, Whiteness, Gendered Fandoms and Picking Field Stories to Tell: This Month on TFS
This week we bring you another from home Zoom panel! This week we are joined by Senior lecturer Dr Yasmine Musharbash. Dr Musharbash is currently based in the Northern territory and has research interests in monsters, sleep and death. Alex [1:44] starts us off this week by returning to a topic touched on in the … Continue reading Ep #58: Individuals, Whiteness, Gendered Fandoms and Picking Field Stories to Tell: This Month on TFS
How COVID-19 makes us use our bodies differently
COVID-19 has prompted a renewed awareness of how we use our bodies under “normal” circumstances. COVID-19 is also demanding that we change our bodily behaviors to prevent the spread of the pandemic. This entails both transforming existing techniques and learning new ones. These hygienic practices are all part of a particular set of bodily techniques that Marcel Mauss called “care of the body,” or prescribed, everyday physical acts that serve to maintain the well-being of individuals and to affirm their belonging within broader social communities.
The Familiar Strange 