notesfromthefielddesk

[notesfromthefielddesk]

Episode 7.5 - The Proposal

(bed of traffic noise)

“The taxi driver jammed on his brakes, eased opposite him and said without venom or bitterness, ''your mother’s arse, don’t you know how to drive?” He drove on. He had heard what was said. It was a part of the day’s driving in the capital”

Answer phone beep (Ends the traffic noise) 

Hi Susan, It’s James. I know the deadline for my proposal is today. I’m running a little behind because well I just had the idea in the forest - it’s a weird story but - you’ll have it by midnight I promise. Midnight counts as the end of the day right? But I just wanted you to know I'm on the right track so here is a little extract from it. 

(Theme fades in) 

Accra is a young, largely unemployed population, living in an increasingly overpopulated and underserved city. Colonialism left a legacy of deficient infrastructure and ethnic neighbourhood based tensions. Many of those colonial legacies have been repeated, replicated and mirrored in the years since independence leading to the creation of a city with a proliferation of social and economic pressures for its young occupants. However, young people’s situation is not without hope, as Oteng-Ababio and Agyemang point out, the city’s occupants have begun to create new solutions. It would not be the first time either, as Ntewusu shows, while road networks lagged behind, city-dwellers imported horses and used them to their advantage in illegal imports from Nigeria. (Ntewusu 2012) This solution counteracted the infrastructural deficiencies of the city and allowed residents to import food to stem a city wide starvation caused by an economic downturn. 

My research is concerned with how an external transport “solution” impacts the city's population when dropped into Accra’s complex social situation. Specifically, I want to examine how Uber transforms urban transport, and with it, the urban youth who act as their drivers.

"How does Uber driving mediate the transition to adulthood in Accra's urban youth?"

My research is concerned with how Uber transforms urban transport, and with it, urban youth culture. Uber represents itself as a disruptor, reducing transportation cost and increasing efficiency, rendering old systems redundant. But what does this process of disruption do to the livelihoods, social networks and identities of their drivers? In this section I have aimed to lay out the factors which make up the identity of young Uber drivers, how those factors are traditionally constructed in a Ghanian or west African context and how the arrival of Uber may disrupt these constructions.

Notes From the Field Desk returns for it’s finale on July 28th. 

This episode references 

Awoonor, Kofi (1972) This Earth, My Brother

Oteng-Ababio, M., & Agyemang, E. (2012). Virtue out of necessity? Urbanisation, urban growth and Okada services in Accra, Ghana. 

And 

Ntewusu, S. A. (2012). Settling in and holding on: a socio-economic history of northern traders and transporters in Accra's Tudu, 1908-2008. African studies.

The music was “dark side of my students.” 

The sounds are from field recordings in Accra Ghana by me. 

[notesfromthefielddesk]

Episode 7 - Tsing part 2

Episode link; https://open.spotify.com/episode/6pzJixj6sJpBufwtzzvYe6?si=a6ff2fe3534e4643

“I’m not proposing a return to the Stone Age. My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I'm trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.” 

John 

We are in the US, in the forests which hem the sides of the Cascade mountains. It’s here where those mushrooms I bought in Tokyo grew, or some of them at least. And where you’ll find their pickers. I headed to the forest services “big camp” for mushroom pickers but it was deserted, they must all be out foraging. So I've set up my desk on the edge of the camp looking into the forest. I must say it’s not how I imagined, the ground is dry and rocky, nothing is growing except thin sticks of Longpole pine. There are hardly any plants growing near the ground, not even grass and when I reached down to touch the earth, you know to connect with the forest, sharp pumice shards cut my fingers. I figured maybe it was best just to sit at my desk and wait it out until someone arrives. I sort of hoped I’d be able to sell my mushroom back to someone here, you know, recoup some of my money but looks like that won’t work out…  

So let’s go over a little history shall we; 

In the mid seventies Lao and Vietnamese communist soldiers captured Long Tieng in the Highlands of Laos. This had been the site of a CIA supported Hmong army which had been fighting the communists for fifteen years. In the wake of the capture thousands of Hmong fled on foot across the Mekong river into Thailand. In the mid to late 80s following pressure from the Thai government, the US increased its yearly resettlement quota to 8000 and attracted by the promise of American freedom or just tired of living in a refugee camp many took up the offer. However, many Hmong were disappointed. Far from the freedom they imagined they were crowded into tiny urban apartments. 

In the early 90s some of these refugees returned to the forests attempting to recreate the freedom of their collective memories. At that time pickers had camped wherever they pleased but after complaints from white pickers the forest service built this camp-site. These campsites came to mimic the structure of those refugee camps in Thailand where many of the pickers had spent more than a decade before their arrival in the US.

Pickers segregated themselves into ethnic groups: On one end, Mien and Hmong; half a mile away, Lao and then beyond them Khmer; in an isolated hollow, way back, were a few white pickers. 

Tsing comments that sitting in the camp “eating the food, listening to the music, and observing the material culture, I thought I was in the hills of south east asia, not the forest of Oregon.” 

What they created here in the forest was a kind of hybrid only possible in the globalised world we’ve created. East Asian refugees, of a war supported by the CIA, recreating a Thai camp, in the mountain forests of Oregan to remind them of the highlands Laos, picking mushrooms for sale on the Japanese market. 

There is a lot of excitement about globalism, and rightly so - in some ways. The world is smaller than it’s ever been and we can experience so much more than our ancestors could imagine. Look at this podcast, we’ve flown all over the world in a matter of weeks. But, Tsing points out that in the idealised form of Globalism, the ability to overcome boundaries and restrictions will benefit everyone equally. 

The idea is this; If supply chains can make cheaper products, like we discussed last time, that means cheaper products for everyone! Right? 

Well, we already kinda know the answer to that one right? As we’ve seen, there are downsides to supply chains and globalism which can lead to worse material conditions for people all along the chain. We talked about some of the people exploited by this system last episode, like enslaved people or sweat-shop workers. We touched on other versions of work exploitation too, like zero hours contracts. But what Tsing saw in the forests of Oregon was people who had fallen through the cracks of this system entirely. 

The Hmong refugees are one example. But in a peculiar twist, another group who live alongside the Hmong in Oregon’s forests are Vietnam veterans. Returning from the war with PTSD and limited social safety nets several veterans retreated to the forest, where they could escape urban life and it’s multitude triggers. However, living alongside refugees from the same war does not mean that there is harmony in the forest. White pickers tend to keep their distance. In describing one such veteran Tsing writes that “Geoff had serves a long and difficult tour in Vietnam. Once, his group had jumped from a helicopter into an ambush. Many of the men were killed, and Geoff was shot through the neck but miraculously survived.” But the war still haunted Geoff. One day whilst picking he had been surprised by a group of Cambodian mushroom pickers, Geoff opened fire.

Another picker Tsing met was Lao-Su who worked in a Wal-Mart warehouse before moving to the forest and picking mushrooms. At Walmart he made 11.50 an hour. To get that rate he had to forgo medical benefits. So when he injured his back and could not afford medical costs he handed in his notice. Despite only being in season two months out of the year, he still earned more from mushrooms than he did at Walmart. 

So huddled in the forest we have refugees, war veterans and people who have fallen out of wage work. Tsing says they are “haunted by labour.” But maybe it’s more accurate to say they are all haunted by globalism. 

Okay - okay it’s getting a little complicated. I’m going to go for a little walk in the woods. That’s participant observation right? Maybe I'll find a mushroom, or a picker? Or Anna Tsing and she can explain what the fuck she means. 

One cold October night in the late 1990s, three Hmong American matsutake pickers huddled in their tent. Shivering, they brought their gas cooking stove inside to provide a little warmth. They went to sleep with the stove on. It went out the next morning all three were dead, asphyxiated by the fumes. Their deaths left the camp ground vulnerable, haunted by their ghosts. Ghosts can paralyze you, taking away your ability to move or speak. The Hmong pickers moved away, and the others soon moved too. 

The U.S. Forest service did not know about the ghosts. They wanted to rationalize the pickers camping area, to make it accessible to police and emergency services, and easier for the campground hosts to enforce rules and fees.

The forest Service’s idea about emergency access did not work out as imagined. A few years later, someone called emergency services on behalf of a critically wounded picker. Regulations aimed only at the mushroom camp required the ambulance to wait for police escort before entering. The ambulance waited for hours. When the police finally showed up, the man was dead. Emergency access had not been limited by terrain but by discrimination. 

This man, too, left a dangerous ghost, and no one slept near his campsite except Oscar, a white man and one of the few local residents to seek out southeast asians, who did it once, drunk, on a dare. Oscar’s success in getting through the night led him to try picking mushrooms on a nearby mountain, sacred to local Native Americans and the home of their ghosts. But the Southeast Asians I knew stated away from the mountain. They knew about ghosts. 

“Open ticket is haunted by many ghosts: Not only the “green” ghosts of pickers who died untimely deaths; not only the Native American communities removed by U.S. laws and armies; not only the stumps of great trees cut down by reckless loggers, never to be replaced; not only the haunting memories of war that will not seem to go away; but also the ghostly appearance of forms of power. 

Matsutake picking is not the city, although haunted by it. Picking is not labour-or even “work.” One picker explained “work” means obeying your boss, doing what he tells you to do. In contrast, matsutake picking is “searching.” It is looking for your fortune, not doing your job.” 

So I said, in the last episode, that Tsing saw a parallel between matsutake mushrooms and the people who picked them in the forests of Oregon. If you remember Matsutake tends to grow on the sites of capitalist ruin, like the site of a nuclear explosion or deforestation. They survive by creating fruitful relationships with their surroundings. Likewise, Matsutake pickers are victims of capitalist ruins whether it be war or just crappy jobs. But they have survived by creating a fruitful relationship with the forest and the mushrooms which grow there. 

Part of this survival, as Tsing alludes to at the end of the extract we just heard, is the rejection of labour. Picking mushrooms is not work, mushrooms, in the hands of these pickers are not commodities, they are trophies. A demonstration of their skill and ability to navigate the forest. Tsing describes it as a performance which doesn’t aim to exorcise the ghosts but to navigate them with defiance and flair. 

Okay - but here is a problem. Is that Freedom not reliant on capitalist systems to survive? These mushrooms end up in the capitalist system right? We can buy them in a market in Japan for a price set by market forces. Tsing calls this “salvage accumulation.” Basically, imagine you steal a truck full of DVD players like in Fast and Furious then you need to sell them. So you use a "fence", basically an intermediary, to sell them to umm lets call them Ballmart so I don’t get sued. (except it's not ball, it's wall with one less L) 

Ballmart, slap a barcode on it and it becomes inventory. They're happy because they get cheap DVD players. And in turn expunge their history. "What? These DVD players?" Ballmart says. “We bought them from a third party who we outsource to for our DVD player purchases.” Hey look, it's those pesky supply chains again. 

The stated aims of Dominic Toretto and co. is family, freedom and ice cold Coronas. They have rejected capitalist wage labour in favour of being Fast, Furious and Free. 

But Ballmart has "translated" their freedom into capitalist logic using supply chains and barcodes. Ballmart profits within the system, Supply chains mean they can claim ignorance of the DVD player theft. Whilst Dom and co risk prison. SO are Dom and his crew REALLY outside capitalism? Are they really free? Or is the system just profiting off them and exploiting them? 

I’m so sorry to the listeners who haven’t seen fast and furious that analogy is useless to you. This isn’t just a hypothetical. Tsing says that Ballmart, and similar companies do this all the time. 

It happens here in Oregon too. Pickers sell their mushrooms in a kind of reverse auction process. On any given evening the price of matsutake may easily shift by $10 per pound or more. Over the years the price is even more volatile, between 2004 and 2008 prices shifted from between $2 per pound and 60. Because of these wild shifts, pickers and buyers use a system called “Open Ticket.” In this system a picker may return to the buyer for the difference between the original price paid and a higher price offered on the same night. 

This creates just ridiculous scenes at sales. Here is Tsing describing it. Every buyer “surveys the buying field like a general on an old-fashioned battlefield, his phone, like a field radio, constantly at his ear. He sends out spies. He must react quickly. If he raises the price at the right time, his buyers will get the best mushrooms. Better yet, he might push a competitor to raise the price too high, forcing him to buy too many mushrooms, and if it goes really right, to shut down for a few days.There will be rude laughter for days, fuel for another round of calling each other liars - and yet no one goes out of business despite all these efforts. This is the performance of competition - not a necessity of business. The point is the drama.” Even just sorting the mushrooms here is a performance, an eye-catching, rapid fire dance of the arms with legs held still. The original TikTok dancers.

Then something weird happens. The mushrooms are sorted again. This is particularly odd because buyers in Oregon are master sorters. Sorting creates the prowess of buyers; it is an expression of their deep connection with the mushrooms. Stranger yet, the new sorters are casual labourers with no interest in mushrooms at all. These are workers in the classic sense of the term: alienated labour without interest in the product. It is precisely because they have no knowledge or interest in how the mushrooms got there that they are able to purify them as inventory. The freedom that brought those mushrooms into the warehouse is erased in this new assessment exercise. Now the mushrooms are only goods, sorted by maturity or size. 

The same way, Ballmart erased Dominic Torreto’s sick heist with a barcode which transformed the DVD players from the fruits of an exciting car based crime. The freedom of pickers is reliant on globalism, on capitalism. So are they really free? Or are they just performing freedom? After all that performance, the mushrooms still just become a commodity and Japanese importers sort of just put up with this idiosyncratic behaviour, saying “if this is what brings in the goods, it should be encouraged.” 

And this sort of defiance of but reliance on capitalism is also present in Matsutake themselves right? They flourish only because capitalist extraction destroys the landscape. They thrive in a “value” sense because of capitalistic structures. 

Tsing says capitalism is often described as a giant bulldozer flattening the earth to its specifications. Yet much of the world economy takes place on the fringes of the economy, like with these mushroom pickers in a forest, or women in sweatshops, or gangs, or made by enslaved people. She says these people “work the edge.” 

I don’t know what to think. It brings me back to Geertz and winking. To the mushroom pickers what they are doing isn’t labour, it’s not capital accumulation. But they do produce products that the market can make into commodities and generate capital. But, and we touched on this last week, when these mushrooms arrive in Japan they aren’t viewed as products in a straightforward way, they are gifts. You don’t buy matsutake to consume them, you buy them as a gift, as a symbol of affluence, to curry favour or to bribe. As it moves across this system the mushroom changes meaning. To the pickers it’s a mocking wink - they are thumbing their nose at labour, to importers it is just an eye closing, a product with no meaning, then to Japanese consumers, it’s a knowing wink with reference to culture and social standing.

Wait - I’ve been walking without paying attention the whole time I was talking. I don’t - um - it’s just trees. There are no landmarks. I mean obviously it’s a forest. Okay, stay calm. What do I know about survival? Umm find some water and follow it downstream...to the sea? That doesn’t seem right. Follow the north star? But it’s day time? Not sure what to uhhh. Okay, right, we will. I’m going to. Well, I will we’ll break format a bit and here is an extract from Tsing - um but I don’t know what one or like okay just yeah give me a minute…

“Getting by without progress requires a good deal of feeling around with your hands. Muddling through with others is always the middle of things; it does not properly conclude… The world has become a terrifying place. Theruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not-human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons - and the elusive Autumn aroma.” 

I’m lost in the woods and I don’t know how to conclude. I have some signal on my phone but who am I going to call. Susan? How would she help me? It’s cold, it’s getting dark and I'm confused. 

[hold for silence] 

(in the distance we hear crunching) 

Still in the distance. 

IJ: Hey idiot. 

JJ: Oh holy shit, thank god it’s the following guy. Hey over here.

IJ: Yeah, I can see you. 

JJ: How did you find me? 

IJ: I have a tracker in both your microphones. How do you think I've been finding you every time?. 

JJ: That’s creepy. 

IJ: It’s my job. Well - not exactly my “job” but you know what I mean. It’s this way back to your desk. 

JJ: What do you mean I thought you worked for a private security company?

IJ: ohh you actually believed what I told you in Papua New Guinea? You are very naive. 

JJ: So you weren’t organising a coup? 

IJ: No, I intern for your sister at Shell. She asked me to follow you around and make sure you didn’t get in trouble. Because, and I quote, “He’s useless.” (sarcastically) Can’t imagine why she thinks that. 

JJ: So you aren’t paid? 

IJ: Well, They pay for my travel and lunch. 

(Awkward silence) 

IJ: And, I mean it’s, good experience, I can’t complain. Well not “good experience”, I just follow you around but it looks good on my CV. 

JJ: Oh - why didn’t you tell me? 

IJ: Your sister didn’t want you to know. 

JJ: So - why tell me now?

IJ: My internship ends this week and I'm going back to uni so - I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. Here is your desk. Main road is up there. Are you going to be alright on your own? I kinda wanna go sightseeing. 

JJ: Umm yeah i’m fine. 

IJ: Can I ask you one thing? 

JJ: Sure about anthropology or like…

IJ: No - just is your name really Johnty Johnson Johnson? 

JJ: Oh, right yeah, it is. 

IJ: So Johnson is your middle name and surname? 

 JJ: Yes. 

IJ: Why?

JJ: You know Armie Hammer? His granddad owns Arm and Hammer and so he named his son Armand Hammer, and he named his son Armie Hammer. Well my Granddad owns Johnson and Johnson, the pharmaceutical company, so my name is Johnty Johnson Johnson. 

IJ: Holy shit! What is your dad called?

JJ: You don’t wanna know. 

IJ: Okay, well good following you. 

JJ: Yeah, good to be stalked I guess. Thanks for saving me. I suppose it’s a good conclusion. Tsing doesn’t know what the answer to any of this is. But she does seem convinced that even when we feel alone, lost and scared we can always rely on something or someone to help us, if we know how to look. 

Theme 

Thanks for listening to notes from the field. It was written by me, James McGrail

This episode references; 

Tsing Anna - The Mushroom at the end of the world and

Tsing Anna - The Global Situation

The follower was played by James Sheehan. 

All the sounds were all recorded in a forest in Hertfordshire. 

Our music, as always, was “dark side of my students.” and Madam Wahalla beat.

Visit us on twitter instagram and soundcloud at notes from TFD for full links!

[notesfromthefielddesk]

Episode 6 - Tsing part 1

Episode link; https://open.spotify.com/episode/3x0cMRYDmN5M8lDCZIZxEK?si=07ec23a2d8ac485e 

The sound of a temple bell is heard in the cedar forest at dusk,

The autumn aroma drifts on the roads below. 

The moving cloud fades away, and I smell the aroma of the mushroom.

Oh Matsutake:

The excitement before finding them. 

This episode isn’t about Japan. It’s not about Mushrooms. It’s about living in our own mess, it’s about international relations, it’s about capitalist trading. But the same way we can trace politics through cows, or social relations through cockfights, the art of anthropology is in noticing the small things which might teach us more. In the face of global capitalism a mushroom might seem humble but that is what Anna Tsing would call a problem with scale, because as the most valuable mushroom in the world it couldn’t be further from ‘humble.’ 

This is notes from the field desk 

(Theme)

(Sounding sleepy) 

It’s about, ummm quarter to five. I’m in Tsukiji whole-sale market in Tokyo. I’m maybe jet-lagged but that would make it like 9pm to me and actually I feel significantly worse than that. I’m here this early because the auction runs from around 5am to six fifteen. Whilst the market is famous for its tuna auctions, if you’ve seen Jiro Dreams of Sushi then you’ve seen the market and it’s ginormous frozen tuna, but they also sell mushrooms here. This market is in fact so famous they had to ban tourists on several occasions. Thankfully it’s not currently one of those times,i’m sat in the tourist section, i’m in the back because of the desk and well because the guards said I was a disruptive influence. 

I’m paraphrasing he actually said “move it, Deku” before shoving my desk to the back. My translation app couldn’t really figure out Deku so if anyone could help me out with the meaning? It doesn’t really matter, seen as almost everyone is here for the Tuna, I have a pretty clear view of the auctioneers arranging matsutake on a trestle table. The staff are wearing, what kind of look like, bowling shirts (kind of questioning) and baseball caps which have a little board on the front which have some kanji which I can’t read. Really someone else should have come on this trip. 

This is maybe petty but to be honest now I’m doing this because I have to, i’m not enjoying it as much. Is there something wrong with me? Anyway that’s a discussion for another time. 

They are organising the mushrooms by, size, value and origin. These mushrooms have probably been sorted at least twice before by value but origin has a significant impact on their eventual sale price. As one Japanese importer explained to Anna Tsing “Matsutake are like people, American mushrooms are white, because the people are white. Chinese mushrooms are black, because the people are black. Japanese people and mushrooms are nicely in between.” Okay, I recognise that we’ve gotten slightly ahead of ourselves here. How does a mushroom come to cost between 1000 and 2000 dollars per pound? 

Matsutake first appears in a poem from 8th century Japan which praises it’s smell which would go on to become synonymous with Autumn in Japan. The mushroom had started popping up around Kyoto and Nara, areas which had been deforested for timber and fuel. In fact, deforestation is the reason why matsutake became common in Japan. This is because these mushrooms have a symbiotic relationship with red pine trees. Red pines tend to grow most successfully in mineral rich soil left by deforestation and could grow more easily without the shade from broadleaf trees which had been cut down. 

This is the start of Anna Tsing’s interest in these mushrooms, not because she’s just really into foraging, although she is, but because of what they symbolise, think Geertz. In the wake of capitalist ruin, here read deforestation, this mushroom thrived. This is so generally understood about Matsutake that people say the first thing to grow after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima was a Matsutake. 

Written in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and with the results of climate change becoming undeniable Tsing wants to find a way that people can pull off the same trick. And she found a parallel in the forests of Oregon, but that is for next week. 

So how does a mushroom you literally find in the trash become the most expensive fungus in the world? Well by 1900 in Japan it had become the culturally ubiquitous idea of Autumn. Think lambs in spring or incredibly drunk, sunburnt bald men with a union jack tattoos and British summer. Matsutake were everywhere, in Kyoto, they became the generic term for mushroom. So far, so cheap commodity right? But then in the 50s people stopped using wood as their main fuel, woodland was cut down and paved for suburban development, broadleaf trees grew back and in the shaded forest, Matsutake started to disappear. By the 1970s Japanese Matsutake were incredibly rare. This coincided with rapid Japanese economic development. The culturally significant and now rare mushroom became gifts, bribes and perks for businessmen. Consequently the price skyrocketed.

Huge demand but limited supply in Japan meant the international market suddenly gained importance. And non-Japanese mushroom pickers from around the world flooded into the market. 

Oh hold on the auction is starting. I wanna see if I can buy one. 

Umm I have no idea what is happening. 

Excuse me. Nope ignored. 

Umm. 

Hello. 

13,000 yen! 

(Awkward silence. Fade out.)

Okay so umm, I won the auction. Is that how you say it? But I bought one mushroom for 120 dollars and then they asked me to leave. So we’re set up in a cafe outside the market. If you’re wondering, yes, the guy who has been following me is here. 

Hi mate. You alright? Cool. 

He was in the auction too but I've decided to live and let live. In part because of what i’ve learned from reading Tsing. 

I guess uhh lets see what the fuss about this mushroom is about. 

Smells mushroom nervously

Yep smells like dirt. Cool. What am I going to do with this now?

Okay smells like dirt. Great. That’s 120 dollars for some dirt. I don’t even like mushrooms what the fuck am I doing. Okay, I guess we should talk about isolation and contamination which is where Tsing starts to get confusing, so, sorry about that. I can really understand why the students don’t get it and I think if the last few weeks have proven anything it’s that the students seem to understand anthropology better than I do. But I’ve done the reading and I've got notes so let’s give it a shot. 

Tsing says capitalism is based on a growth and progress model. Wow, we’re off the rails already. In other words, and I'm not an economist so don’t @ me, the health of an individual, company and nation under capitalism are measured by their ability to generate more than they did previously. The aim is for GDP to grow, for company profits to increase, individuals to earn more etc. One way to achieve this end is to focus on scalability. Which is the ability to create more of the same product without changing the product. This is often achieved through isolation. 

Yikes this episode is like “dictionary corner.” For isolation think of old Henry Ford and his assembly line. Instead of 5 guys working on every aspect of a car, the assembly line isolates each component and has one person make that part. Now you can make lots of cars quickly. Take this podcast, I write it, record it, edit it, and upload it. If I hired a writer, an editor and a social media person. I could just record the episodes and we could all be working simultaneously, produce more podcasts, get more listeners, then maybe this podcast could generate a profit. 

Good news right? More of everything is made more quickly for less money, which means we can all have a car. Or a podcast. But Tsing sees some problems. She takes a different example of scalability. Portugese sugar plantations in Brazil. Sugar cane was grown by splitting a sugar cane and sticking it in the ground. Functionally it was a clone brought from New Guinea and planted in Brazil. As a farming product it couldn’t be more isolated. Unlike a matsutake say, which can’t be scaled because it grows almost by random in relation to the soil and the trees around it, the sugar cane has no relationship to its surroundings. 

Now let's talk about the farm workers. Sugar plantation workers were slaves brought from west Africa to Brazil. Like the sugar cane they were isolated with no social relations in Brazil which prevented escape. This is why slave traders split families, social and cultural groups. Their alienation and isolation made them a controllable, standardized workforce. Portugal made huge profits from this and could keep the uncomfortable effects hidden, seen as the whole project took place in west Africa and south America, far away from the Portugese eyes. This is maybe the first example of what academics call “space-time distanciation” I know what the fuck is distanciation other than a great way to be the most hated person at a dinner party or the pub. 

Basically it’s just a bullshit way to say doing things from far away but in real time. So like ugh I don’t know, (Rising anger) a kid in America can snipe you on COD and call you a homophobic slur and you experience it as it happens even though he’s thousands of miles away. And however much you threaten him he won’t experience any consequences because he’s far away and you’re thirty and trash at shooters. (awkward pause) Not a real thing that happened to me, just a random example. 

So this scalability and distanciation were created and spread around the world by European colonists but it was Japanese markets which modernised the idea. In the 60s to the 80s Japan actually gave American economic dominance a little scare because of its shift to outsourcing. Instead of Japanese companies making products in Japan where labour was expensive they made products abroad where labour was cheap and took advantage of increasingly speedy global supply lines to turn huge profits. 

Matsutake picking is an example of this which we’ll talk about more next time but in short, casual workers pick and sell them for a fraction of their market value in America, the middle men then transport it to Japan where it’s market and cultural value is increased and sell it for a huge profit. 

Another example would be fast fashion. Everyone remembers the scandals when it came out that gap or nike or primark had their clothes made in terrible conditions. A lot of brands defended themselves by saying they had no idea about the conditions. To an extent this is true, but it was deliberate ignorance. They put their production in the hands of intermediary companies in countries far away from their shareholders, employees and customers creating plausible deniability.

There is another problem which is obvious really. Scale can only go so far, which is until all the resources are gone. Then the project has to move on and do something else. Think of Japan after they had cut down all the trees. Or if you really want to depress yourself, fossil fuels. 

Okay, okay what’s the point! Tsing says all this stuff, the distanciation, the scalability, the obsession with more profits, the isolation is the cause of the precarious lives more and more people are experiencing. Think of zero hours contracts, or uber driving or amazon workers pissing in bottles. It’s easy to cut wages, to allow bad working conditions, to strip mine the rainforest when we are distanced from the consequences. So long as it happens somewhere else, to someone else, when we have no relationship with the products we consume, or create. Think of the podcast again. If I hired all these people it would be more efficient but then I wouldn’t have the same relationship with it. I would become alienated from it. That’s how little by little people have less of an understanding of the things around them. That’s how we can separate the petrol we put in our cars from the environmental damage that doing that causes. 

Wow. Depressing. Jesus. Remember when this show used to be about cows and magic? 

(sigh) 

Taking things seriously sucks. Okay but Tsing reckons that by looking at these expensive mushrooms there is hope. Capitalism can make us feel lonely but looking at Matsutake reminds us that even in capitalist ruins like a destroyed forest new things can grow. Those things grow from relationships, the encounter between the mushroom and the pine tree and the soil from deforestation. It’s a reminder that we aren’t actually alone that there aren’t any “challenges we might face without asking for help from others, human or not human.” Through relationships we change and Tsing says “The important stuff of life on earth happens in those transformations.” So you know, join your union, talk to your neighbour, forage for mushrooms. It might just make the world better. And if it doesn’t, well at least you have some friends and mushrooms. Wait did i just say join a union? Am I woke? Must be the jet lag.  

Time for the extract; 

How does a gathering become a happening, that is, greater than the sum of its parts? One answer is contamination. We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world making projects, mutual worlds - and new directions - may emerge. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option. One value of keeping precarity in mind is that it makes us remember that changing with circumstances is the stuff of survival. 

But what is survival? In popular American fantasies, survival is all about saving oneself by fighting off others. The “survival” featured in U.S. television shows or alien-planet stories is a synonym for conquest and expansion. I will not use the term that way. Please open yourself to another usage. This book argues that staying alive - for every species - requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across differences, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die. 

The problem of precarious survival helps us see what is wrong. Precarity is the state of acknowledgement of our vulnerability to others. In order to survive, we need help and help is always the service of another, with or without intent. When I sprain my ankle, a stout stick may help me walk and I enlist its assistance. I am now an encounter in motion, a woman and stick. It is hard for me to think of any challenge I might face without soliciting the assistance of others, human and not human. It is unselfconscious privilege that allows us to fantasize - counter factually - that we survive alone. 

How do you conclude something as complicated as this? Okay how about this. Often you’ll hear people talking about capitalist alienation and it’s not really clear what that means. I think what Tsing is saying is that capitalism wants people to be individualised. That way labour can be scaled up, because the products aren’t related to the context that they are made in. So you can make a ford car in a factory in Detroit or Dhaka and the product will be the same. But Tsing is giving us a warning and a reminder that we aren’t individuals. That we have a relationship with everything around us and forgetting this can destroy our surroundings. This means humans and non-humans too! If we’re going to survive late capitalism and climate change we have to re-engage in these relationships. 

[notesfromthefielddesk]

Episode 5 - Judith Butler

Episode link; https://open.spotify.com/episode/6yCPTlFz7uk7nhojByDwRI?si=5fc75b929803458e

John J: I bet you can guess where I am. I concluded that it was probably best for me to come back to London, tail between my legs so I can apologise. I’m up on the fourth floor of the social sciences building. When I came on the open day I saw all these old buildings in the centre of town. But of course the social science building is about twenty minutes walk away in what you might charitably call a “brutalist” building. Other people...might call it ugly. A reflection I am sure of anthropologies perceived value. Look we aren’t the law department you know lots of students and money and career paths and a separate library. But whatever I mean the quality of the education we get in this building is in my view better. I mean laws fine... if you’re into that kind of thing. 

Sorry, I got off track there. My sister studied law. Good for her I guess. Anyway, you’ve seen a hallway like this one before, every few steps there's a pushpin board with some notices for psychology experiments run by undergrads and events which happened two years ago. I’m opposite a display case with books written by people from the department. There is a draft from the window behind me which is one of those single pane deals with that adhesive plastic which I assume is to stop the glass shattering? But it’s peeling away at the corners. It was a nightmare getting up here, the lift on one side of the building only goes up to the third floor, so once I got there, I had to drag the desk to the lift on the other side of the building to get up here. Then Susans office is back on the other side. So I’m sweaty and umm quite nervous about facing Susan. Who I am pretty sure hates me. I should say there is someone else waiting here, What did you say your name was;

Julie K: I didn’t, it’s Julie.

JJ: Hi, umm thanks for being quiet while i did the intro…(awkward) So what’s your research about? 

JK: I’m not sure really, still at the planning phase but something about gender I think… maybe about cocoa farmers.. 

JJ: Like de Beauvoir? (Doesn’t leave room for an answer) But she’s not really an anthropologist? 

JK: So? 

JJ: So… she was a philosopher, an ethicist to be exact, that’s not really anthropology. Is it?

JK: I never even said I was using de Beauvoir. 

JJ: (Not listening) Although…(goes into a spiel about de Beauvoir which I need to research) de Beauvoir did argue that the views of individuals are socially and culturally produced. She said “one is not born a woman but becomes one.” She said women are taught through social interactions three facts; 1. That women need to fulfill the needs of men. 2. Their women’s self worth was built on external validation a.k.a being pretty and 3. They have less influence because they have less legal rights. De Beauvouir said that dolls given to young girls are an example of the way girls are taught to think. She said young girls identify with the doll and through it learn to see themselves as pretty objects without their own agency, which is just a fancy way of saying choice. None of this is innate to being a woman, they aren’t born objects but made into them by society which aims to suppress them. Which is kind of like Geertz and his webs of significance. Except Geertz said you spun your own webs where as De Beauvoir seems to think society spins the webs around women trapping them in certain norms. Women, De Beauvoir said, needed to see these constructs to escape them. Like how, if a fly is in a bottle, it needs to first see the bottle to get out. 

(Smug pause)

JK: Why did you just explain De Beauvoir to me?

(awkward Johnson noises)

JK: And yeah De Beauvoir is a start but like the waves of feminism built up on each other, so did the people who studied gender: so where De Beauvoir pointed out the distinction between sex and gender, Butler makes the line between them a bit fuzzy. Or.. she actually questions it. Sex, according to Butler, is not just the biological one, and gender the socially constructed one. Sex is socially constucted as well. Which people find a tricky idea right? Like, men have penises, women have vaginas, there are biological facts. But what Butler is pointing out is not about biology but about categories, and that we’re not born with sex just as we’re not born with gender. Man and woman are two really broad categories with a lot of variation within them.  Women with beards, men with boobs etc. All these biological features, are features that we have grouped into categories of sexes. Remember Caster Semenya? She was the South African runner who was so fast people complained that she must be a man. She was forced to undergo sexual verification procedures which determined her to be a woman. However, it was later decided that her testosterone was too high to compete as a woman. If the binary between men and women is as clear as we’re socialised to believe then surely that would have been determined the first time around. The truth is, what we call “woman” is a collection of traits which we as a society have agreed make someone a woman. It’s like that shower realisation that maybe what we’re all agreeing is red is being experienced differently by every person! And guess what the way we’re judging whether someone is a woman is not biological, or otherwise you wouldn’t say “hello miss” till you’d seen a DNA test. It’s based on a whole bunch of other assumptions about how a woman acts and looks, which are socially constructed! 

Butler said, influenced by Austin, that Gender and sex are a performance. We behave in certain ways which conform to certain categories but we don’t have a free choice in those behaviours because society has set the stage that forces us all to conform. It’s like that bit in fleabag when she says “Sometimes I worry, I wouldn’t be such a feminist if I had bigger tits.” Maybe she’s right you know like if you conform to society's ideas of femininity, like having big tits, then it’s harder to break out of the performance? So maybe you, explaining De Beauvouir to me, is you, performing your masculinity? The set dressing around you, you know your masters degree, the desk, the books, your tweed suit, Western societal expectations, inform you that you should not only be smart but demonstrate that fact by showing off that intelligence by explaining De Beauvouir. Whereas my set dressing tells me to be quiet and let you explain, despite me being the one who studies gender. Thinking about it this way, and realising the performance of it all, gives women more agency, you know, which means choice. In De Beauvoir women should not act in feminine ways because by not conforming you’re resisting patriarchy. But in Butler’s view if you’re a woman who likes make-up, more power to you, the problem is with the category that says make-up equals female. 

Then, bell hooks came along and recognized that a woman’s race, political history, social position, economic status among other factors influence the way her value is perceived. And that none of these factors can be left out.

She also rightfully pointed out how the feminist movement is dominated by white women fighting for white women’s, upper class, causes. She mentions how this actually kind of imitates the power structure of white patriarchy. So that’s not good.

(Pause this was all said very breathlessly) 

JK: So. I don’t really know how I’m going to approach this at first seemingly small subject of doing research about women who are cocoa farmers in a small town in Ghana, cause that’s what I think I want to do, but then I can’t just look at those women in that small town and their cocoa farms, you know? I feel like I have to think about the whole world and all the thoughts that go in that world before I can even begin to research something like that. Like, for example one part of it for me is that the domestic work these women do isn’t considered work. Which Crawford says is a function of capitalism, like before capitalism, all work which helped make sure everyone could survive, like cooking, was considered work but now work is only labour exchanged for money. She wrote that based on Marx and Engels. So do I need to read Marx now? Am I freaking out? I don’t even know anymore.

JK: I don’t know.. I think it’s important to look at feminism in an intersectional way you know..as if standing on a traffic intersection, with all kinds of different directions that influence a possible accident. The car could’ve come from just one direction, or maybe all of them! This term is coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, by the way. So you can not really study gender without studying capitalism, or race, or (post)colonial studies. Because they will intertwine and overlap and influence each other and you can’t look at one without the other. You know?!

JJ: uhh that’s a lot. Do you have, like an extract that sort of sums some of this up?

JK: Umm I mean I guess hold on (riffling paper) yeah this…

Starts to play the music 

JK: Did you just put on music to go under me reading?

JJ: uh yeah - do you mind? 

JK: Umm I mean, I guess not - 

Music plays (here we need an extract.)

Okay, so well.. In Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity (1990) Butler said that “Although the unproblematic unity of “women” is often invoked to construct a solidarity of identity, a split is introduced in the feminist subject by the distinction between sex and gender. Originally intended to dispute the biology-is-destiny formulation the distinction between sex and gender served the argument that whatever biological intractability sex appears to have, gender is culturally constructed: hence, gender is neither causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex. (…) When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a freefloating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily a female one.” 

She then continues to show that sex is just as culturally and socially constructed as gender: “If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender: indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. It would make no sense then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category (..) As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive’, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. (p.7)

She goes on about the performance of sex and gender by writing that “(..) gender proves to be performative - that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed. (..) There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.’

And then bell hooks, with no capital letters by the way, or Gloria Jean Watkins, wrote in 1981, before Butler, that “It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term “feminism,” to focus on the fact that to be “feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.”

An important thing she then mentions is that “[Our] struggle for liberation has significance only if it takes place within a feminist movement that has as its fundamental goal the liberation of all people.”

This aligns with Crenshaw’s term ‘intersectionality’: “Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects.”(https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality-more-two-decades-later#:~:text=Crenshaw%3A%20Intersectionality%20is%20a%20lens,where%20it%20interlocks%20and%20intersects.) “Cultural patterns of oppression are not only interrelated but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society. Examples of this include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.”

JK: Hey, there are a few of us doing our research in Ghana. We leave in like a month so if you want to do your research there, other people will be around.

JJ: Oh, okay, yeah i’ll umm think about it. 

(door opens) 

S: (in a happy voice) Oh hello Julie, (with displeasure) John. You can come in now John, Julie I’ll be with you shortly. 

JJ: Okay, Umm julie would you help me to move the desk in there? 

S: Leave the fucking desk.

JJ: Can I bring my microphone? 

S: Sure just, quickly yeah?

JJ: Susan

S: Johnathan 

JJ: it’s actually not short for Johnathan

S: What? What else could it possibly be short for?

JJ: Johnty 

S: With a h? 

JJ: Yeah with a H 

S: Okay...I’m going to stick with John. 

JJ: First of all I just wanted to say I did some soul searching in Bali -

S: you and everyone doing a gap year.

JJ: And i’m really sorry, I want to take it seriously now and - 

S: Yeah, I listened to episode 4. Do you think that does it? One episode where you say oops biffed it a bit, i’m a bad academic and maybe a misogynist then you’re done? How has your behaviour changed? Did you reply to my emails? Mark any assignments? Run a tutorial? 

JJ: Well in my defence I had the epiphany after about two weeks so I missed a couple but after that I flew straight back here! 

S: Look here is what is going to happen. I’ve reassigned your students and classes. I want to fire you but the department has made it clear to me that we need your fathers money.

JJ: Grandfather,

S: Shut up. So if you’re serious about taking this seriously here is what is going to happen. I want you to go away, get all this podcast shit out of your system and come back and do your job properly. To make it worth the department's time I want you to make it about Tsing. The students don’t really get what she is trying to say and i guess your podcast will be a good change of pace. And! I want a research proposal, a real one, not just (mocking voice) “desk go in field.” then come back and do your job properly okay? If you don’t you’re fired. You have a month to be back here, two podcast episodes and a proposal. Now get out. 

JJ: Look I get it and I can see you’re angry. But I need you to know that if you look out the window behind you - 

S: No.

JJ: But the guy he’s in the building opposite. 

S: I don’t care 

JJ: He has binoculars! If you’ll look you’ll know I wasn’t completely lying! 

S: Even if there is a man with binoculars over there what does that prove? 

JJ: He’s waving! 

S: Get out. 

JJ: Okay. Bye. 

Credits 

JJ: Okay, umm weird I just found this note in my pocket. It says “stop mentioning me on your podcast. Firstly, i’m not a bad guy just because of that Papua New Guinea stuff. Secondly, I'm meant to be undercover. And third the more you mention me the more you build anticipation for the reveal. You’re creating an untenable situation for yourself. 

Yours,

K” 

What the fuck! 

[notesfromthefielddesk]

Episode 4 - Clifford Geertz

Episode link; https://open.spotify.com/episode/7MwsvHP2VFdpU8uDIRXBYh?si=d980149c963e44f7 

(Ambient sound of birds chirping)

John

How do I start?

I’ve been rushing around it feels like, it’s been frantic. I took couple weeks off. Switched off my phone. I’d been flying here and there, Papua New Guinea, South Sudan, North Sudan. So today i’m slowing down, the desk isn’t in the sea or surrounded by cows, I’m just in the room I rented in Bali. I’ve been just travelling around Indonesia for a while. I saw the guy in amongst the crowd but he seems to be keeping his distance now.

Really, I was just trying to get here. I’ve always wanted to come to Indonesia. All through my undergrad I imagined myself here. I thought of myself as Geertz 2.0. When I needed to write an essay I reached for Geertz. Essay about methodology, I’d open up “toward an interpretive theory of culture.” writing about Islam - then Islam Observed was right there. When I imagined myself in the field it was at the side of cockfight in Bali.

I always thought of myself as like him, I don’t know why. It’s funny the way memory works isn’t it?  I’ve been sort of just mooching around Indonesia. I’ve been reading Geertz, and listening back to the other episodes and I haven’t really liked what i’m seeing. In myself I mean. It made me look again at what Geertz, the way my students would. It made me realise I wasn’t a good student, I don’t mean grades, my grades were fine - good even. But i had no relationships to these texts, I was just looting them for arguments which I could line up, one after another, and win the argument - get the grade. The colonial equivalent of learning. I didn’t take what was in them into the world, and into my life.

I guess what I mean, is not memory generally, I mean it’s funny how my memory works. Because when I think about Geertz, I picture this story where a Cock fight gets broken up by the police. Everyones there in a circle cheering screaming, the crowd a single organism, moving in unison when a truck full of policeman roars up to the fight. Amid the cries of police, police, from the crowd they jump from the truck into the centre of the ring, waving their machine guns around. In an instant the crowd has scattered, and Geertz is running too. That frenetic energy was what I wanted. Geertz is a few strides behind a man he’s never met but when a gate into a courtyard opens and the man leaps through, Geertz follows. Seeing them sprawl onto the floor the mans wife whips out a table chairs and tea. Moments later the police enter the courtyard, to find two men in deep conversation about culture over a cup of tea.

I remember that story from “Deep play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” ,Which sounds like the title of some high brow porn by the way, so clearly. That was kind of the genius of Geertz to me. The way he conjured these scenes that were so visceral. I wanted a slice of that life. But when I turned up in Bali, no-one would talk to me. I didn’t know when the cock fights were even taking place. When I found one, I sat outside the circle behind my desk ignored. I went back to the room I was renting, and I read notes on the Balinese Cockfight again. And i’d ignored some parts. Before the Cock fight story, Geertz talks about spending months being ignored, by everyone. Not just talking to people and they give short answers but people were actively turning their backs to him.

Guess what? I don’t remember the Cock fight story that well either, I missed out a key piece of information. Greeted never travelled alone, in his part memoir, part ethnographic overview “after the fact” he says “I have never worked in the field alone for more than a month or so, and I doubt very much that I could have managed it.”

At the table in the courtyard, there were three chairs, three cups of tea and three people pretending to talk about culture. The person absent in my memory is Hildred Geertz. Clifford’s then wife. But she wasn’t just his wife, she’s an acclaimed anthropologist in her own right. What does it say about me that when I imagine Geertz he’s swashbuckling in the field alone, that I remember the excitement, forget the struggle and forget his wife. But it isn’t just me forgetting Hildred, the subtitle of Geertz’s memoir is; “Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologists.” Laura Nader said in her review that Geertz comes across frustrated by his inability to understand his four decades of work; her conclusion, is that maybe we need two ethnographers to look back. I re-read that scene of the police chase again. Hildred is there, just. But only as “my wife” not as an active participant, she goes completely un-described, which is weird for a guy who believed that description took priority over explanation. Does that absolve me?

(Break for silence, bleed into some lo-fi curious music)

Geertz is famous for two things. The first is his description of culture. He said “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore, not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.” Which is kind of a bummer. When I read Malinowski it really seemed like culture could be a key to getting answers about the world. And EP made me believe that too. Malinowski made me think you could understand the link between what someone does and why, and EP made me think I could do that at scale, why is this society like this? Because of cows, oh okay. Looking back it seems a bit…silly. But I wanted it to be true so badly. I wanted certainty but reading Geertz…it’s like being drawn in to a vortex of uncertainty and doubt. Which is exactly what I wanted to escape.

So what are we doing? In the field I mean, if were not revealing the structure of societies then what are we doing? Yeah we’re interviewing people, keeping a diary participant observing but those are just practices, what’s the essence? What’s the aim? Before 1967 and the release of Malinowski’s diary it seemed like the answer was going native but as we discussed… probably not a great approach. We can’t be detached either though, because as I’ve been reminded over and over that’s not great either.

And this is the second thing Geertz is famous for; Thick Description. I always took that to mean just lots of description. The kind of description that when you read it gives you the thrill of running from the police through a Balinese village. And Geertz definitely does a bunch of that but thick description means something…more than that.

Okay to explain i’m going to have to spend quite a while talking about winking. Sorry.

Geertz says imagine three boys. One has a twitch, one is winking and the third is an asshole. From an objective “I am a camera” perspective meaning you just describe what happens, the first two boys are doing the same thing, they are closing one eye. But, because we all know what winking is we can tell the difference between the boy who is winking and the one with a twitch. Now think about the asshole kid, he’s closing his eye as a way to mock the boy with a twitch. So we’ve got one act but three meanings, twitching, winking and mocking. Geertz adds a fourth. If the mocking kids fake twitch isn’t convincing enough or is too convincing the joke doesn’t work. So maybe earlier in the day at home when he was planning his joke, he stood in the bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror and practices his mocking twitch, adding a grimace here, an exaggerated head turn there. In this case he’s rehearsing. Four meanings.

I’ll add another wrinkle. Is the winking boy winking at the mocker or the twitcher? If it’s the first then maybe there is a conspiracy between the boys. When I wink you make fun of him! Or he doesn’t want to laugh in front of the boy with the twitch but still wants to give his approval of the performance. So maybe two of the boys are assholes. But if it’s the latter and he’s winking at the boy with the twitch maybe it’s an ill conceived attempt to console the boy with the twitch. So now we’re also getting into the relationships between the boys. But wait! What if they boy who is winking isn’t winking, he’s trying to mock the boy but he hasn’t rehearsed!

Side note; this isn’t Geertz’s idea he just popularised it, this theory comes from Ryle. So i’m summarising Geertz’s summary of Ryle… welcome to academia.

Anyway, the point of this long ass analogy is that the essence of ethnography isn’t going to far flung places, explaining society or going native. It’s the process of description which takes the three boys from three people closing one eye, to a boy with a twitch facing a preplanned conspiracy to mock him. That is what Geertz, via Ryle, calls thick description.

Geertz said description over everything! And that requires radical empathy and self reflection because to understand the three boys we have to be the opposite of an impartial observer we have to engage in the game, get the joke and be able to tell a wink from a wince. As researchers we aren’t a camera, we are one of the boys.

I can tell what you’re thinking. “Great, whatever, three imaginary people stood in a circle winking at each other. What’s this got to do with Indonesia.” Which is fair so let’s apply it to a cockfight.

Cockfighting is a big deal in Bali. Maybe less so than when Geertz did his research here in the 70s but still. Even the grumpiest Balinese man will transform when the topic comes up, and will launch into excited description of his… Rooster. And look I know what you’re thinking, and no the falic implications are not lost on people in Bali. If you can think of a penis joke on this topic, I assure you a Balinese man has 10 more in the same vein. Bateson and Mead two other anthropologists who wrote about this said and I quote “Cocks are viewed as detachable self operating penises, ambulant genitals with a life of their own.” An image that will now haunt my dreams.

Okay, but heres another comparison, Balinese men deeply personally identify with their…fighting chicken, when they talk about the fights they will say “I won” or “I fought so and so.” It’s like guys who are really into football and say “We got a good win today.” Except for instead of 22 men kick a ball around you’re strapping knives to the feet of chicken. Also like in football gambling is a major central part of cockfighting but it’s not exactly the point.

The point is, according to Geertz, to play out social tensions. So for example, in Bali you never bet against a cock from your social group and fighting always between rival groups. Therefore, what’s really at stake is each groups status in Bali, the cockfight then is a symbolic representation of social tensions. The fight is really a way of addressing fights between groups without bloodshed…well except chicken blood. Or to put it the way Geertz does the fights are a way to play with fire without getting burned.

It reminds me of clowning in Native American communities. In pueblo villages a secret society of clowns spend all year examining the social weak points of the community. Then for a day they are unleashed to overturn social convention. They steal babies, they dress the most beautiful girl in the village in ugly clothes, whilst the woo old women, if they see white people they are forced into mock gun fights re-enacting the genocide of native Americans. And at the end of the day all the things that have been bothering people are dealt with. Which might decontextualise the mocking boy right? Maybe not so much of an asshole.

Now that’s an example from half way around the world, in a totally different social context. But I don’t think Geertz would have minded the comparison. I know we’re jumping around but bear with me. In Geertz’s book “Islam observed” he compares Moroccan and Indonesian Islam. He says that different social conditions led to the religion being expressed in different ways. We won’t get into the details but by arguing this we’d assume that Geertz agrees with Asad - that Islam, and in fact all religion, is about personal embodiment or in other words, an individuals relationship with God or whatever. Remember what he said about culture “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” But no that’s not what he concludes. He says that there is one Islam which is a symbol all Muslims have in common which helps to “render the strange familiar, the paradoxical logical, the anomalous, given recognised, if eccentric, ways of Allah, natural.” On the sliding scale of Gellner to Asad Geertz falls somewhere in the middle.

That’s how Geertz wanted us to read culture, symbolically, like it is literature. Memories are fallible, facts are elusive, generalisations have limited value. Meaning is central, description takes priority over explanation and metaphors of culture over reliable data.

(fade in on some sad music)

So what does the absence of Hildred symbolise. Maybe the erasure of women from my memory, and Geertz’s descriptions is symbolic of the erasure women in American and British Society? And what about the other absences in Geertz’s work? Laura Nader points out “Geertz went to Indonesia as part of a modernisation project to fight communism.” That’s absent from all the texts I mentioned.

Nader again “In his summary statement about the 1966 massacres in Pare (A town in Java Indonesia) he says that by 1986 the massacres were “hardly a memory at all.” Geertz may advocate a humanistic, reflexive, situated knowledge, but does he possess it himself?”

I see flashes of myself there. My students, Susan telling me that I shouldn’t be doing what I am doing but me ignoring it because it interfered with what I wanted to do.  Which of the winking boys does that make me?

(Pause)

I think it makes me the one who knows the joke about the boy with a twitch is mean, so doesn’t laugh but winks at the mocker, to let him know he still thinks it’s funny. By failing to confront the parts of Malinowski and EP and Gellner that I didn’t like or made me uncomfortable, I was giving them my tacit approval to imperialist ways of thinking. The absence of female ethnographers and my constant ignoring of Susan betrayed my patriarchal biases. I guess it just seemed right to slow down and think about that today. Here’s the extract.

(Fade into theme music)

Monologues are of little value here because there are no conclusions to be reported. There is merely a discussion to be sustained. In so far as the essays here collected have any importance. It is less in what they say than what they are witness too. An enormous increase in interest not only in anthropology but social studies in general and the role of symbols in cultural analysis. The danger that cultural analysis in search of all to deep lying turtles will lose touch with hard surfaces of life, the political economic realities in which men are elsewhere contained and with the biological and physical necessities those surfaces rest is an ever present one. In defence against it is to train such analysis on such realities and necessities in the first place. It is thus that I have written about nationalism, violence, identity, human nature, legitimacy, revolution, ethnicity, urbanisation, status. About death, about time and most of all particular attempts by particular people to place these things in some kind of comprehensible meaningful frame. To look at the symbolic aspects of life, art, religion, science law, morality, common sense. Is not to turn away from the existential it is to plunge into the midst of them. The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions but to make available to us the answers of others guarding other sheep in other valleys and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said. 

Thank you for listening to notes from the field desk. Follow us on twitter and Instagram @notesfromtfd This episode references;

Geertz, Clifford - notes from a balinese cockfight

Geertz, Clifford - The interpretation of Cultures

Geertz, Clifford - Islam observed

Nader, Laura - review of after the fact by clifford geertz

And comedian Stewart Lee in conversation at oxford Brookes University

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-2rVyizLt8&t=2705s

The sounds were;

Madam Wahala Beat by Nana Kwabena

Something is Going On by Godmode

Decision by the tower of light

and June songbirds You can find these sounds on youtube creator sounds.

As always our theme music was dark side of my students. freesound.org/people/miastodzwiekow/sounds/341770/

[notesfromthefielddesk]

Episode 3 - Talal Asad Khartoum International Airport

Episode link; https://open.spotify.com/episode/07Pf4STyxpY5EcMMvBv4uH?si=7b4b9c36d9f44368

(Beep indicating a voicemail message) 

Susan 

Do you think I’m stupid? You think I believe your flight got diverted to South Sudan? South Sudan? Oh and it just so happens that it’s thematically appropriate for your little podcast? Get back to London. Now. We need to have a serious conversation.

(Fade in on airport sounds) 

John 

That’s the voicemail I got just after I arrived at Juba airport. I’d been ignoring Susans phone calls, because… well because i was scared of talking to her and I knew I was in trouble. 

I’m going to level with you listeners, in the spirit of honesty and full disclosure which I have learned is important to some people in anthropology. For some reason. The truth is my flight did not get redirected to Juba. The trunk of ethnographies is real but I already knew about evans-pritchard. I saw he did research in South Sudan and I fancied it, I’d never been and what’s the point of anthropology but to visit new places? 

It was actually really hard to get there. I flew from Brisbane to Dubai then from there to Kenya. Stayed in Nairobi for a night then went to Juba. Took me almost two days. 

I think that that gets lost in all this. That I’m working really hard, and in some ways what i’m doing is very innovative! 

I had been planning to go to Indonesia, I was going to cover Geertz next but I suppose I should head back to London and placate Susan. I just hope she doesn’t fire me. God my dad and grandad would be so angry. Do you ever feel like the useless one? My sister works at Shell you know? What am I doing? Sitting in an airport talking to no-one. I guess Indonesia can wait, an airport is as good a place to do an episode. I guess we’ll cover Talal Asad, seen he did his first ethnography in North Sudan. And we are in Khartoum. I’m not going to describe it, you know what an airport looks like. 

In Anthropology we are kind of into liminal spaces like airports. Liminal is just a fancy way of saying between two places. Anthros like a liminal space because they tend to be areas where normal social rules break down a bit, witches in some contexts tend to live in liminal spaces for example. Usually between the village and the brush. 

In other good news I managed to lose that weird guy who has been following me around. Gave him the slip at the airport, I told him I’d go back via Nairobi but then I booked myself onto a flight here. I mean it sucks now because the flight back to London isn’t until tomorrow, if i’d gone to Nairobi i’d be home by now. Worth it to get away from that guy though you would not believe what he told me he was doing in Papua New - 

(Phone rings) 

John 

Hi Susan. 

Yes I got your messages. 

Well I think you maybe weren’t getting through because I was in umm south Sudan, signal wasn’t amazing. I called O2 about it, they said it was not really within their service area.

Yeah, no i understand why you’re angry, but really it was purely an accident that I ended up in Juba. Act of God is a pretty good excuse right? 

Where am I now? Well… you’re gonna laugh, I mean it’s pretty hard to believe but there’s this guy who has been sort of following me around and I was running away from him so…

No, it is the truth…

Right… 

No I understand why you wouldn’t believe me - and why you’re angry. In my defence though, and I was just saying this on the podcast - 

No! No, no, Don’t listen. - 

Just because it’s not very good. - What do you mean you can believe that? Anyway, in my defence I think what i’m doing is quite innovative....

Well Derivative is a little harsh - 

Well, that’s as maybe but I think they students are getting a lot out of this, you know they’re more engaged with the texts than if I was just in London talking dryly about them - no, not your lectures they aren’t dry. 

Ah, I hadn’t thought of office hours. No, that’s my bad. No I didn’t reply to the students email but again, the plains of South Sudan aren’t great for wifi - yes I suppose that is my own fault. 

Well I’m coming back as fast as I can. 

(We hear from down the phone “What do you mean as fast as you can? Where are you!?”) 

I’m in Khartoum, like I said I was trying to run away from that guy. 

(Down phone “You have a tutorial today! When do you fly?”) 

Sorry, not till tomorrow. But I can do it from here, the airport has pretty good wifi. 

(Exasperated noises “If I could fire you right now I would.”) 

Sorry, Susan. 

She hung up on me! Well I suppose I should give you guys a little bit of background on Talal Asad before the tutorial seen as the students have dictated that that is what we’re doing next. 

The students have been insisting on Talal Asad for a while. So here it is. I was honestly unsure if Asad really fits into the tutorial, but then I found out Evan-Pritchard’s was Asad’s doctoral advisor.  So we’ve got some continuity going on. 

Anyway, I have been getting insistent emails about Talal Asad for a while. Hold on, let me read out one of them. (shuffling noises) ummm “Dear Mr. Johnson, You still haven’t given me feed—” okay sorry wrong email. Oh, here it is 

“Dear Mr. Johnson, I actually enjoy your tutorials. But I have some suggestions for the future. Also, if you could check my latest assignment and” Blah blah blah this and that, oh here it is. “I think Talal Asad would be a good fit for your tutorials. Asad is a postcolonial cultural anthropologist, he is Saudi-born and brought up in Pakistan—”

Ok see, here is where I think we all go wrong as a generation. People think where this man was born and brought up somehow changes what he has to say? Is he automatically post-colonial because he was born in the Middle East? Anthropology in practice is about being objective, being the fly on the wall, I know we’ve talked about objectivity, but I still think being an outsider gives a less biased look. What does identity politics have to do with it?

And I know the students have been insisting on alternate field work and auto-ethnography, but the feeling of being on the field. Being part of somewhere different, the grass under your feet, water in your shoes? Slipping out of yourself and becoming someone else! That’s irreplaceable. 

Tannoy

“Can the owner of a large wooden trunk full of books come to the customer service desk. It is blocking the Mens toilets. If the trunk is not collected it will be removed and destroyed. The name tag says John Johnson. Again, can John Johnson come to the customer service desk and retrieve his large wooden trunk.”

Oh that’s my trunk give me one second.

(transition thing)

Okay, where were we? Yes, the student's email. She says “Asad is a post-colonial anthropologist. Much of his work focuses on anthropology of religion. He will fit right into the introduction to anthropology course we are studying because he moves away from locations and towards themes. 

Most of his work focuses on being critical about the things in anthropology which are taken for granted. 

Specifically, the conceptualization of Islam and human rights in the global arena. He said that a lot of the colonialist anthropologists concentrated on categorising different groups of people. They went to the field and found differences through limited observation which they then turned into official documents. Those documents were used to justify colonialism and/or to divide and conquer”

Isn’t that a bit harsh? I said as much in my reply to this student. Which I CC’d to the whole class. I said these are still the fathers of anthropology. And as Asad himself says, historical context is important (smugly) Besides what is anthropology without the field? “A move to themes” Sounds like someone didn’t like getting their hands dirty. 

The back of that guy's head looks familiar. Is that him again? But no, I’m pretty sure I lost him in Juba Airport. 

(Deep breath)

Besides I’m pretty sure that student is wrong. Asad did do field work. His first book was built on his ethnography in North Sudan hence why we’re in Khartoum. Although it is true that Asad is careful to specify that his work does not encompass the lives of the Kababish tribe but rather focuses on certain aspects of their lives, such as their ecology, economics and social organization of the tribes. That’s a big change from traditional ethnographers like Malinowski who said the aim should be to describe all of society. 

After that first work Asad shifts towards being critical; critical of secularism, critical of human rights, and even of what his peers had to say. 

Like there’s this guy, an anthropologist, Ernest Gellner, and he is not exactly what my students would call ‘woke’ and the thing is I am not much for “cancel culture”. 

But Asad really rips him a new one. Very unprofessional. Asad criticizes Gellner for having a limited perspective of Islam. Gellner thought Islam had a strict blue print, whilst there is more flexbility in Judaism and Christianity. So Gellner is kind of a structural functionalist for Religion. But Asad said Islam was also felixible and Gellner failed to apply his critique of Islam to other religions...maybe because he had other motives? Like my students and their “anti-colonial” issues with EP. 

And personally I don’t think EP or Gellner were intentionally being colonial. Gellner’s ideas are based on the Middle East aka the birthplace of Islam. So surely that’s the authentic form? Also, I mean Gellner is an older man, he can make mistakes and he was a product of his time…. wait what? Sorry, it says here Gellner is only 7 years older than Asad. (clears throat)

Regardless, I don’t understand why we have to cancel EP or Gellner for it. 

Oh shit it’s time for the tutorial. 

(Skype call sound)

John

Wait is this everyone? Should I wait five minutes to start or something?

Zahra

No...I think it’s just me. After they read your email where you kind of ranted about cancel culture they all said they weren’t going to come. 

John 

Oh… Right, I guess I should keep my opinions to myself. (kind of mumble this) 

Zahra 

Um, Mr. Johnson? Sorry, I don’t want to be rude. But I don’t think anyone is trying to cancel Gellner? I just don’t think you understand what Asad is trying to say with his criticisms.

John 

Well why don’t you just explain it to me then. Because clearly you all understand anthropology better than me.

Zahra

Well that’s kind of your job but okay. 

Asad is not just being critical of Gellner, to be mean. He is being critical of the kind of academia that Gellner represents. Especially in Anthropology, where much of the colonial discourse argued that when someone goes into the field the outsider has an objective idea of the field. Hence, Gellner believing as a non-Muslim, and as not being a part of the group, that he has a more neutral understanding of the group he is looking to study.

While Asad is criticizing this exact practice, he is also saying there needs to be more of a focus on the history behind how certain concepts come to be rather than just the group. So for example, Gellner says Islam is political, and Christianity isn’t. So Asad wants people to examine where that idea comes from. 

To do that Asad says there needs to be like frameworks that look at religious tradition not as static and the opposite of modernity, but rather look at tradition and modernity together and how they create specific social structures and varied collections of beliefs and customs. So we should think of  religions as conversations between lots of people throughout history rather than a monologue laid down by a handful of powerful people.

So it’s like academia, we build it together, Malinowski has an idea then EP criticises it and improves it and so on. It’s not cancel culture, we’re building knowledge as a community. Sometimes that means saying your hero is wrong, or even - maybe - like racist. 

Are you listening to me?

John Johnson 

Yeah, yeah sure...I - I just saw this guy who has been like chasing me. It’s definitely him! 

Zahra

Chasing you?

John 

Well not exactly chasing but like pursuing? 

Hey sir, can you help me take this desk into that toilet?

Yeah that toilet there. 

Hey Zainab, sorry I need to hide. Why don’t you just finish out the tutorial by listening to this extract. 

Zahra 

It’s actually Zahra--

Extract 

In 1975, while I was teaching at the University of Hull, I learned that my mother had advanced cancer. I decided to go to Saudi Arabia and stayed with her there until she died a year later. The political atmosphere and the social rigidity in a society awash with newfound wealth was very uncongenial, but the entire experience had a considerable impact on me and my ideas. I tried—unsuccessfully—to sort things out in my 1978 Malinowski Memorial Lecture (which I had been invited to give before my year in Saudi Arabia) in which I dealt with the definition of ideology, the classic Marxist theoretical term for false consciousness, as well as with the ‘authentic’ accounts of cultures studied by anthropologists. I tried to distinguish language in life from the language used by anthropologists about life, and to trace the slippery role of ‘meaning’ in anthropological accounts of other cultures. I tried to think in that presentation about matters that interested anthropologists of the time, as well as larger issues that had shaped my life up to that point.

Improbable though it may seem, my struggle to articulate my ideas and criticisms was largely prompted by my reflection on my mother's religious life. My father spoke and wrote impressively about the religion to which he had converted. My mother, by contrast, lived as a Muslim without expounding the doctrines of Islam, without defending it from attack or trying to persuade others of its superior virtue. My point is not simply that she was a pious woman—that she performed her prescribed prayers regularly, read portions of the Qur'an aloud early every morning, and fasted during the month of Ramadan. It is that I now realized I had thought of her life in terms of a lack instead of trying to understand it in her own terms, as she had lived it. I began to see that, like so many non-intellectuals, her religious practices were embodied, and that her embodied religion did not offer itself to hermeneutic methods—to the deciphering by observers of the real meaning of what she did—although it obviously ‘meant’ much to her.

In a very fundamental sense, these ‘religious’ activities had been no different from the mundane part of her life because they were mundane and integral to her everyday life. And while I had seen her act in this way as far back as I could remember, it was only after her death—when I turned in a sustained way to Wittgenstein for an understanding of religion (although he himself was not ‘religious’)—that I began to see her life differently. I saw it now not as an attempt to deepen and aestheticize her experience (as it is fashionable in some quarters to say), but as a way of being. My mother didn't intellectualize her religion, but by that I don't wish to say that she was ‘a blind follower’. Her prayers, recitations, and fasting were intended neither for other people to decode nor for enhancing her own experience; they were addressed to her God. During her married life she had not been always receptive to my father's enlightened arguments about changing some of her religious practices. Was this because she was irrational, incapable of responding to a rational argument, as I thought at the time? I have come to believe that I was wrong in thinking so: she didn't abandon particular practices because she felt that the change wouldn't fit easily into the entirety of her life as a Muslim. The idea that her feelings of fear, reverence, love, and so forth were to be understood as ‘emotions’ and therefore as ‘non-rational’ had for long seemed to me an unsatisfactory way of thinking about devoutness. This became clearer over time as I learned to think of embodiment not as mechanization but as the articulation of a particular encounter—in my mother's case, of her relationship to her God.

John

Okay, i’m safely in the bathroom, so sorry for any - (flushing) interruptions… 

I’ve been really struggling with my students. It’s like they want to challenge everything. What about theories that are good? Can’t we leave well enough alone? Do they think i’m like stupid or something? I just have respect for those that went before me. Even if I didn’t agree with EP, or Malinowski or Gellner, academic freedom is a thing you know? I’ll defend their right to say their theories to the death. Students be damned.

Zahra 

Umm Mr. Johnson - I’m still here. 

John 

Oh, hi Zahra, look I didn’t mean you. I’m sure you’re a very respectful - okay she hung up on me. Why is everyone doing that today? 

Gellner was trying to make an honest attempt to understand Islam. Objectively. Not with the bias of being a muslim. Isn’t that what we were criticising EP and Malinowski for? Their personal opinions affecting their theory? Sure maybe if you’re muslim you can have a more nuanced view and understand how it feels to be within that religion. 

And maybe people should have a say in how they are defined. Especially when those definitions can have a massive impact on your life. Like under colonialism. And maybe Gellner had a blindspot for Christianty, but so what? I like Gellner. His theories make the world simpler. Sometimes you need to use simple categories to clarify a complex world. Asad just complicates everything. And if Asad can see everything that’s wrong in Gellner, What’s his solution? 

Susan calls

What do you mean “a complaint”? 

The email? Oh my goodness I'm being silenced! I have complaints about them too like how they aren’t showing up to the tutorial. 

Well, yes the tutorial was a little short today but in my defence that guy is after me. And I had to run away. 

Well, You don’t have to believe me but it’s true. Do you think I usually take phone calls in a bathroom?

(flushing sound/bathroom sounds)

Yes I’m in a toilet. 

You know what, i’m sick of being told what to do and think by you and the students and my parents and my grandparents! I’m going to indonesia. And if you want to fire me then go ahead and talk to my grandfather, I believe he made a very generous donation that he would like back!

Ha! His time I hung up. Okay, I’m going to get a flight to Indonesia, hopefully that’ll shake this weirdo following me. 

Thank you for listening to notes from the field desk - this episode was written by Fatimah Ahktar and me. 

Lucy Hansen was supervisor Susan 

Our artwork was by Julie Karremans 

Our music was “dark side of my students” 

Asad, Talal The Kababish Arabs 1970

Asad, Talal Genealogies of Religion 1993

Asad, Talal Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter 1973

Asad Talal Autobiographical Reflections on Anthropology and Religion 2020

Gellner, Ernest Muslim Society 1981

Acclivity - Dubai Departures 

https://freesound.org/people/acclivity/sounds/49118/

Astounded - Christopher J Astbury Switzerland Airport departure lounge Zurich International

https://freesound.org/people/Astounded/sounds/481818/

Polymorpheva - London Heathrow Airport 

https://freesound.org/people/polymorpheva/sounds/104541/

Mario1298 - Waiting for passengers at the airport background. 

https://freesound.org/people/mario1298/sounds/155798/

For full Links visit us on Soundcloud, twitter and instagram at notesfromTFD

[notesfromthefielddesk]

Episode 2 - E.E. Evans Pritchard

Episode link - https://open.spotify.com/episode/0LqJQ1q2kv5utkoct7V8Cg?si=485ef5c24837440e

John

I’m looking out over the plains of what was once Nuerland. The heavy clay earth is broken apart by the relentless sun. Deep cracks and the threaded depressions of rivers which rarely fill, even in the rainy season, are the only features on the dead flat, almost alien landscape. Around me cattle rest on the slightly (We hear gentle mooing) elevated sandy spot I found for my desk. From here I can see clear to the horizon where I spot sporadic patches of trees but all other greenery has browned and died back months ago. What these cows are living off is beyond me.

In years past the sodden clay retained water allowing certain plants to survive through the dry months. When the rain came this whole plain would be covered in grass reaching over my head as I sit behind my desk. Near the rivers edge they’d reach up to my shoulders even when standing. The rivers would fill then overflow making the whole plain a marshy swamp. At times like those this sandy mound would be prime real-estate and i’d be sharing space with far more cows.

Nowadays, this is South Sudan. The rainy season has become more sporadic and unpredictable. Often the relief of rains arrival is followed - shortly - by overwhelming flooding. Right now people are still waiting on that rain.

(we hear the wind starting to pick up)

The wind is picking up. A cloud of dust is rising on the plain. The horizon, with it’s sporadic trees and the cracked earth disappear from view behind a wall of air thick with clay. I can see about two cows away. Out of the dust emerges a figure. They’re walking towards me.

This is notes from the field desk.

Theme

oh! you. Look after what you told me in Papua new guinea I don’t think we should be talking. What are you doing here anyway? -

what do you mean am I following you? I am here by chance. My flight back to London from Brisbane got diverted because of technical fault with the plane and we landed in Juba. So there is no way I could have followed you here. If anything you’re probably followed me!

(sigh) Fine, I suppose there is no harm in you sitting here. There’s a tree stump just there you can listen to me record if you want. That is if you’re not busy organising a coup or whatever.

Anyway, when we got grounded in Juba I had a look through my collection. Oh, I should explain, I travel with a trunk of the one hundred most influential ethnographies, that’s what we call the books anthropologists write.

Side note, I never thought the trunk would be a problem, in all these Ethnographies they talk about getting porters to carry all their stuff, but when I asked at the airport for a porter, they just laughed at me?

Anyway, we were grounded a while before they cancelled the flight. So I had a look and it turns out another anthropological founding father did research in South Sudan. E.E.Evans-Pritchard. Or as I call him EEEE Pritchard. Okay well look, I don’t even want you to find my jokes funny so you just sit there rolling your eyes all you want.

Evans-Pritchard was a student of Malinowski at LSE and in the late 1920’s he set out for what was then Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. He wrote a couple of Ethnographies about the Azande which mostly focused on magic, kind of an obsession with early anthropologists. Then he headed south in 1930 to do research on the Nuer, which focused mostly on politics. A good hard subject we can get our teeth into! Anglo-Egyptian Sudan came Sudan in 1956, then split into the mostly Muslim North and mostly Christian South in 2011. Then in 2021 I arrived to do some peer-reviewing. I’m hoping Evan’s Pritchard is a bit less of a controversial figure so my students will get off my back.

(phone rings) ignore that, i’m ignoring, that’s nothing.

(Clearly still flustered) Okay, last time, we talked about the two sides of anthropology, the field and the desk. If Malinowski represents the innovation of field, you know participating in society, going native, spending years in the field. Then Evans-Pritchard is the OG anthropologist who developed the desk. Anthropology trades on being able to create a sense of being there through vivd description, where Malinowski could be a bit stiff and scientific Evans-Pritchard had a bit of flare with his flowing prose.

Is that cow looking at me? That one there with huge horns. I swear to god it’s looking at me.

Anyway, EP, I like calling him EP when I do he feels like a friend. (clear throat) He made drawings, he took tonnes of pictures, he described the plains, some of his diary crept into the ethnography. No racism as far as I could tell but He talks about being frustrated, he shows his work. A move towards modern anthropology. So reading his The Nuer, which is the ethnography he wrote about this region, is really like the experience of being here. Way less of a slog than boring old Malinowski.

(Email Chime)

Ohh an email, do you mind if I just check this? I just got assigned a student whose thesis i’m supervising. Very exciting. Shaping the next generation of anthropologists and all that.

okay, here we go.

“Dear Professor Johnson”

Not a professor but i’m quite pleased with that.

“I discussed briefly with Susan, uh-huh, during the introduction lecture that I’d be interested in researching the club scene, queer identity and youth in London. I’ve been reading tony Adams and Stacy Holman Jones on Auto-ethnography and that’s inspired me to try it myself. If you could point me in the direction of some readings to get myself started with.

All the best,”

I’ll leave their name out of it, bit of privacy. Hmm well i’m not sure about that. I mean really ethnography should be done in a rural place, not the city, should they even be doing research in the UK? This is anthropology not sociology. Plus auto-ethnography? I’ve never heard of it but we’re supposed to be studying the other not ourselves, this isn’t psychology. Hmm well I need to think about a reply, don’t want to stamp on the young fellows aspirations but he needs setting straight.

What is that cow doing. Is it - it’s coming over here isn’t it. Shoo, shoo! it’s licking me. Do something don’t just laugh. No do not nibble my suit! Argh. This suit cost a lot of money cow! Get off me. Shoo. Fine, i’m getting up. it’s your desk now!

Go on get out of here!

You know what happens now because you wouldn’t help me? We’re going to talk about theory. Yes groan away, there isn’t even a sea for you to paddle in this time so I guess you’ll just have to sit down there with the cows and listen.

This book actually is mostly about cows. All three hundred pages of it, I don’t think there is a single sentence that doesn’t mention cows or cattle or I don’t know bovine. I mean I like cows as much as the next englishman but it’s not exactly thrilling. But in fairness to Evans-Pritchard the Nuer didn’t exactly give him a choice. He said that

“whatever subject I would start on, and approaching it from whatever angle, we would soon be speaking of cows and oxen, heifers and steers, rams and sheep, hegoats and she-goats, calves and lambs and kids.”

Basically the Nuer loved cows. He said this fact was the underlying structure of Nuer society. So everything in Nuer society comes back to cows. Love, war, religion, politics, it was all about cows.

Our boy EP is a structural functionalist, - look the terms are important so just get used to it - meaning he thought there are underlying structures to all societies, that cause us to behave in a certain ways. Where Malinowski and functionalism thought post hoc ergo propter hoc - I can see you rolling your eyes, sometimes latin is useful! (deep sigh) Fine, i’ll explain it another way.

Malinowski would say the Nuer like cows because they give them milk - our boy EP would say okay but why love cows instead of say… soy beans which can also give you milk. It’s because the conditions the land in which the Nuer live aren’t good for growing soy beans, but they are good for raising cattle.

What would be a good comparison. Okay, Malinowski would say you like your iPhone because it gives you messages from friends. Those messages make you feel nice, so it fills a need. And EP might say, yes that’s true but it’s also possible that you like the phone because the underlying structure of Western society values objects especially expensive ones. Or else you’d have a nokia 3310. It still fills the same function but EP aims to explain why people choose one thing over another. If you’re a quote fan here is how Evans-Pritchard put it.

“Although the Nuer have a mixed pastoral-horticultural economy their country is more suitable for cattle husbandry than for horticulture, so that the environmental bias coincides with the bias of their interest and does not encourage a change in the balance in favour of horticulture.”

Oh there is a guy over there! (Shouting) Hey! Hey sir! Sir! Who do these cows belong to? Sir? (Biggish pause) (Snort in distance) He’s gone. Well I didn’t have time to chat anyway, i’ve got a tutorial. Just keep that cow away from me while I’m teaching. I doubt you care but here’s a Nuer song that Evans Pritchard translated.

Extract

The wind blows wira wira;

Where does it blow to?

It blows to the river. The shorthorn carries its full udder to the pastures;'

Let her be milked by Nyagaak;

My belly will be filled with milk. Thou pride of Nyawal,

Ever-quarrelling Rolnyang.

This country is overrun by strangers;

They throw our ornaments into the river;

They draw their water from the bank.

Blackhair my sister,

I am bewildered.

Blackhair my sister,

I am bewildered.

We are perplexed;

We gaze at the stars of God.

White ox good is my mother

And we the people of my sister. The people of Nyariau Bui.

As my black-rumped white ox. When I went to court the winsome lassie,

I am not a man whom girls refuse. We court girls by stealth in the night,

I and Kwejok Nyadeang.

We brought the ox across the river,

I and Kirj oak

And the son of my mother's sister Buth Gutjaak.

Friend, great ox of the spreading horns,

Which ever bellows amid the herd. Ox of the son.

Return from tutorial

You let the cows eat my notes!? I thought I said watch the cows! What happened? Was it that same cow again? What do you mean they all look the same, the one with the evil eyes!

Okay, so it seems like I missed some things again. The students pointed out that on page one of the preface, I might have skipped the preface, says “My study of the Nuer was undertaken at the request of, and was mainly financed by, the Government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.” Which means the colonial government most likely paid for him to do the research because they wanted to control the Nuer. He describes them as violent willing to go to war over cattle at the drop of a hat. In text he says;

“At the present time cattle are the main cause of hostility

towards, and suspicion of, the Government, not so much on

account of present taxation as of earlier tax-gathering patrols

which were little more than cattle raids and of the avowedly

plundering expeditions of the Egyptian Government era that

preceded them.”

The students pointed out that given theat the government violently took their property, it was kind of understandable that the Nuer were angry. Again, if he was there trying to collect information so the colonial officers could control them, can we trust his findings?

During the second world war he used his ethnographic relationships to recruit Sudanese troops who he then led in Guerrilla warfare against the Italians. I said that sounds pretty cool right? Which made them angry, academic knowledge shouldn’t be used as a weapon to manipulate people into fighting in a war, which, regardless of the outcome would leave them colonised. They asked why we were spending so much time focussing on old men.

(Phone rings) Ignore that!

Pause takes a breath

I said fine, but we have to cover foundational figures who would they rather cover? What about Boas? He thought races were biological different and with some inferior to others. Ruth Benedict? They say she wrote a book for the US army in the Second World War about how to defeat the Japanese based on their culture without ever setting foot in Japan. Fine, Margret Mead? Exoticised the sex lives of Samoans and thought they were primitive.

I’m taking off this jacket it’s so hot and it’s got cow slobber all over the shoulder.

Well if all of them were racist then let’s just pack the whole thing in! They said I wasn’t understanding. I was thinking about racism as an individual failing caused by ignorance. But they weren’t ignorant, their racism was a product of society. In that way Evans-Pritchard was right. They lived during colonialism and the rise of the nation state. Which meant Nations had to justify their difference from others and their superiority over others.

People had to have a reason to believe in “Being British” rather than French or Sudanese. Or why would you think it was okay to rule them? Or to enforce boarders?  These ideas of superiority and difference permeated the early anthropologists the same way the utility of cow herding led to the Nuer loving cattle. So everyone from that era was bound to be Colonialist.

They also said It doesn’t help that doing fieldwork confirms the differences between people. My head felt like it was going to explode. Still trying to figure it all out and it doesn’t help that that cow is still looking at me. I asked where they were getting all this from? Lentin and Visweswaren they said, apparently it’s on the reading list… I haven’t read the reading list.

(Phone rings once but he immediately hangs it up)

So, they said maybe next we could talk about Talal Asad. Apparently he is an anti-colonial ethnographer or something. I said fine whatever. They seem to know more than me anyway. Maybe we shouldn’t do fieldwork, maybe we should all do auto-ethnography. My students said maybe, but we still need to pay attention because racism hasn’t gone away, it’s still in our society. Which means we still might make arguments for it in our work unless we’re careful.

I guess before I do field work I should look at what the underlying structures of Britain are effecting my thinking. Not just my assumptions like I thought with Malinowski but what it means for a British person to turn up at a former colony. What does that act mean even before I start interacting with people.

I know that sounds like the same conclusion as episode one but my students assure me it’s subtly different. My head hurts, let’s go.

Nah leave the desk I’ll just get another.

Theme

This was notes from the field desk written by me James McGrail.  

This episode references

Evans-Pritchard, E.E., The Nuer, 1940, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Lentin, A. (2004). Racial states, anti-racist responses. Picking holes in 'Culture' and 'Human Rights'. European Journal of Social Theory 7(4): 427-443.

Pocock, D. (1975). Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard 1902–1973: An appreciation. Africa, 45(3)

Visweswaran, Kamala (1998) Race and the Culture of Anthropology, American Anthropologist 100/1: 70-83.

Theme ends

Susan

Do you think I’m stupid? You think I believe your flight got diverted to South Sudan? South Sudan? Oh and it just so happens that it’s thematically appropriate for your little podcast? Get back to London. Now. We need to have a serious conversation.

https://freesound.org/people/Mystikuum/sounds/401636/

https://freesound.org/people/JarredGibb/sounds/233143/

https://freesound.org/people/selcukartut/sounds/504882/

https://freesound.org/people/felix.blume/sounds/187756/

https://freesound.org/people/darrinsmith/sounds/274434/

https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/405561/

https://freesound.org/people/t-man95/sounds/553265/

[notesfromthefielddesk]

Episode 1 - Malinowski

Episode link; https://open.spotify.com/episode/6nIUBg5IthVY6F1caobf1N?si=04759ed73f474e39 

We hear the fizz of the surf and some seagulls

John

Imagine yourself set down surrounded by all your gear alone on a tropical beach, close to a native village, while the dinghy which brought you sails away out of sight.

Now imagine, you look down that beach and see a man. He’s sat behind a desk wearing a tweed suit. Is that a microphone? You head over to investigate and realise he is narrating your actions.

Hi! this is notes from the field desk.

Theme

John

Why don’t you grab a seat… I guess on the sand. I’d offer you a chair but honestly getting this one here was hard enough. It’s a good one though, one of those ones with lumbar support. I insisted on it.

I said “if i’m going to sit behind a desk on a tropical beach for months you better believe i’m having lumbar support.” The guys on the fishing boat were not impressed. You should have seen their faces when they saw the desk.

Oh.. I seem to be sinking in the sand a little, would you mind, yeah if you just grab the other side. (Skuffling) Okay should be good now.

Transport and sinking aside it’s a pretty good office though right? I know you can see it but do you mind if I just describe for the benefit of the tape?

I am sat on Maliu Island just off the coast  of Papua New Guinea. We’re at the North West Shoreline. It’s early morning the sun still rising. Looking out over the bay the lightly rippled sea shimmers in a thousand tints caught briefly on it’s continuously moving surface. In shallow spots amid turquoise vegetation, you see rich purple stones overgrown with weeds. Where the water is smooth unruffled by wind the sky and land are reflected in colours ranging from sapphire to the milky pink shadows of the mist enveloped coastline.

brief silence just washing of waves

John

I know what you’re thinking. Why the desk? I actually think this is a stroke of genius. I was talking to my supervisor, Susan, and she told me theres a debate in anthropology about the separation between field and desk.

You know anthropology? We’re like sociologists who like travel and hate maths.

Just so you know in academic circles that joke kills.

Anyway, apparently theres loads of articles about how anthropologists go to the field and they meet all people. Then they go back to their desks, in the universities and libraries and whatever. And then they write things that don’t relate to the people. Which makes going pointless in the first place. At least I think that’s what they were getting at, I sort of skimmed them, and they seemed to fit with this other idea of mine so… Sort of just ran with it.

My main idea, was that i’d recreate the research of the first anthropologist. Sort of a peer review, what did he get right, what did he get wrong. So i’m recreating “Argonauts of the Western Pacific” By Malinowski.

There were others before him, some old english blokes called Taylor and Frazer. Some people even say this Greek fella Herodetus was the first. But Malinowski was the first one to get the travel bit down. Before him most of these guys relied on reports they got from colonial officers or missionaries or even worse amateurs, usually wealthy people, running around writing nonsense.

Nowadays we’d call Taylor or Fraser armchair anthropologists. Taking the observations done by others and theorising about it. AKA philosophers, am I right?

Not a joke fan, noted.

Malinowski thought that the studies done before him were theoretically strong but the data unscientifically gathered. To successfully study the “other” you had to go and live with them see the world through their eyes. If you lived with them and participated in their community you could make objective observations about how their society worked. He said this becoming native was key and to achieve it you have to stay in the field for at least a year.

So the problem of early anthropology was people not leaving their desks to collect data, and the problem of modern anthropology is people leaving for the desk and forgetting the field. I thought two birds, one stone. I’ll bring the desk to the field.

(Disappointed) Oh. You were wondering about the tweed on a tropical island. Well in scientific study you control the variables right? If I want to see the Trobriand Islands like Malinowski did I need to recreate his experience. He was a posho, and in the photos he wore this weird colonial outfit which I couldn’t find but I figured this would work just as well.

Same deal with my travel route. I flew to Brisbane, not clear how he got there but we will say Brisbane was the starting point. I sailed up the coast from there to Cairns. From there I chartered a boat to Papua New Guinea. I’m not really a big boat guy and it was a lot longer than I expected so I was sick most of the way. But good news, so was Malinowski so we’ll count that as scientific accuracy.

We arrived pretty late at Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. Malinowski doesn’t describe it but to be honest, I was a bit disappointed. It’s a massive city. I was sort of hoping to be far flung you know, cut off from civilisation the way Malinowski says you should be. I knew this was a risk though, in the intro to Argonauts Malinowski mentions that even back then in 1915 Native communities were melting away.

I tried to put my disappointment aside. After all, this wasn’t my final destination. And hey look at this, pretty cut off right? I took a car the following morning down the coast to Deba, I know that’s not how he would have done it but I couldn’t find a boat willing to take my desk. At Deba, I managed to bribe my way onto a fishing boat. Now here I am.

I know it’s not really the Trobriand Islands. But Malinowski hung around here and Moresby for a while and with the desk this is as far as I can get. I have now, in the words of Malinowski “spread my nets in the correct place” now it’s time to wait and see what falls into them.

Waves washing on the shore. Drag this out 10-15 seconds, see how it feels in the edit.

John

Seems like no-one coming. So Let’s go over some theory in the mean time. Don’t whine we’ll keep it light. You can paddle while I talk it’s mostly for my notes anyway.

Sound of someone paddling in sea

Malinowski was a functionalist, which means he thought all our social behaviour is an extension of our physical needs. He argued that thinking about it this way you could understand any behaviour, however strange, by understanding what need it filled.

Example, magic, weird right? Malinowski said no. It’s a response to emotional distress. When something bad happens that you can’t explain it’s comforting to fill that void of understanding, with Magic. Malinowski says that’s why magic persists in modern society. Like when you have a shit month and say it’s because mercury is in retrograde, it’s comforting even if you don’t fully believe it.

But this doesn’t just happen after the fact, participating in magic can make us feel like we’re in control of the future, which is strange and scary. That’s like saying “Next month Mercury is in retrograde get the incense ready.”

Remember that guy Frazer I talked about earlier? This is basically his theory of magic and religion. He said people realise they aren’t powerful enough to control nature so they ask higher powers to help. Malinowski loved Frazer, total fan boy, used to carry his book around, so it’s not surprising he borrows a lot of his ideas.

That other guy, Taylor, he would say we’ve advanced as a society beyond the need for magic. Through industrialisation we can control nature. Any magical belief left over in society was a “survival.” It used to serve a useful function in society but now it doesn’t, it’s just a silly ornament that we should throw out. Imagine a twitter atheist bro, “uhh horoscopes are stupid, haven’t you heard of this thing called science.”

Malinowski, not so much a fan of Taylor. He said no Taylor you dummy, society is functional. How can there be a social behaviour that doesn’t have a function. Doesn’t make sense. He said the function probably just changed to serve a different purpose.

Despite that little spat, they all basically agreed in an evolutionary perspective. That less advanced societies are what our society looked like in the past. By studying other people maybe it can help us understand the weird things we do now.

So i’m here to take an objective look at Malinowski’s objective look. A hundred years ago he was on the Trobriand Islands, so now they should look like the UK did in 1920. I suppose that big city at Port Moresby was a good sign they were right.

Oh shit, I’m actually late to teach my tutorial. Just gunna Skype in. In the mean time i’ll leave you with a recording of a passage from “Argonauts of the Western Pacific.”

Waves washing on shore maybe ten seconds

“The goal is, briefly, to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him. In each culture, the values are slightly different; people aspire after different aims, follow different impulses, yearn after a different form of happiness. In each culture, we find different institutions in which man pursues his life-interest, different customs by which he satisfies his aspirations, different codes of law and morality which reward his virtues or punish his defections. To study the institutions, customs, and codes without understanding the desires and feelings of these people is, in my opinion, to miss the greatest reward which we can hope to obtain from the study of man.

These generalities the reader will find illustrated in the following chapters. We shall see there the savage striving to satisfy certain aspirations, to attain his type of value, to follow his line of social ambition. We shall see him led on to perilous and difficult enterprises by a tradition of magical and heroical exploits, shall see him following the lure of his own romance. Perhaps as we read the account of these remote customs there may emerge a feeling of solidarity with the endeavours and ambitions of these natives. Perhaps man’s mentality will be revealed to us, and brought near, along some lines which we never have followed before. Perhaps through realising human nature in a shape very distant and foreign to us, we shall have some light shed on our own. In this, and in this case only, we shall be justified in feeling that it has been worth our while to understand these natives, their institutions and customs.”

Waves washing on shore for maybe ten seconds

John

Well…that was… an interesting tutorial. In the end we talked a lot about Malinowski’s diaries rather than argonauts. They were published in 1967, a while after he died. In part probably to protect his reputation, as it turns out. To be honest, I hadn’t read them in depth. But my students said they show he was kind of a racist. More like he was a racist, throughout. He curses the Trobriand Islanders, calls them lazy and stupid. Also it seems like all through his research he was bribing the islanders with tobacco to include him, and dance, or do magic. It all comes across… unscientific.

But I said to them, this is just his diary, his private thoughts. I’m sure, when he went to the field he was able to set his personal prejudice to the side and carry out good research.

They didn’t agree. First they said, objectivity wasn’t possible because people know their being watched and that changes things. They gave the example

From of a photo from Argonauts of the Western Pacific with the caption “A Ceremonial Act of the Kula." A shell necklace is being offered to a Trobriand chief. Behind the guy presenting the necklace is a row of six bowing boys, one of them sounding a conch. All the figures stand in profile, their attention apparently concentrated on the rite of exchange. But if you look again, you see one of the bowing Trobrianders is looking at the camera.

To be honest when you look at the other pictures, Malinowski does look awkwardly out of place. Hardly, a member of the community. And Malinowski definitely skewed the results with the bribes.  

Sorry, the tide is coming in and the waves are now washing onto my brogues. Would you mind helping me shift the desk a bit further up the beach.

General awkward moving the desk sounds.

Sorry where was I? Right, secondly, they said Malinowski was wrong. Those colonial officers and missionaries, it wasn’t that they couldn’t be objective because they weren’t scientists. But because nobody is objective, we’ve all got baggage, things that have happened to us that make us think a certain way.

He couldn’t just leave his racism in the diary because it effected the way he thought about everything. They said when you claim something is objectively true you’re really making a claim about authority.

Remember, before, how we were talking about the evolutionary stuff. They said that is based on the assumption that European civilisation was the peak of human society and everything else is on the same track to becoming that.

They said that’s what colonialism was, British people going around the world claiming they were the height of civilisation so they should be in charge. By being in charge they’d make them better. They called that “The White Mans Burden.” Not the students, the colonial officers. What Malinowkski’s diary proved was that he was just as prejudiced, just as guilty of this way of thinking. He saw them as savages and backwards, less evolved. and that wasn’t just a private opinion, that formed the basis of his theories.

I said, wasn’t that just cancel culture?

They groaned at that. One of them said really cancelling someone was just challenging the authority of their statements and actions. When Malinowski was “cancelled” it challenged the authority of colonial racism. Even if he only thought in private that the Trobriand Islanders were lesser it still effected how he treated them and described them. The same way it effected British colonial officers descriptions and treatment those they ruled.

That’s why anthropology is suspicious of objectivity, because objectivity is a claim to authority and authority leads to misrepresentation and mistreatment. In other words, arriving as an anthropologist and claiming to be able to see someone else society objectively is like saying “I’m big your small, I’m smart, you’re dumb and there is nothing you can do about it.”

They stumped me a bit at the end there, couldn’t really follow, but I did feel hurt. I said “if that’s all true and I’m replicating his work then how am I different from Malinowski. Am I a racist?” It got a bit awkward after that.

Still, I think there is some merit in what I’m doing. I’m not a racist. So I can asses Malinowski’s work, see the flaws. Societies still advance so, i’ll just see how things have changed, have they become like us? I told them I would carry on and prove I could be objective.

Anyway a lot to think about. [Phone ring]

John

Apparently, the students have complained. And Susan has reminded me that my contract requires I teach the tutorials in person. That this fieldwork was not cleared and that I have not done an ethics form. Further, she reminded me that the department does not subscribe to a teleological perspective. I asked what that meant and she said to do some fucking reading for once.

Still, Malinowski teaches us a lot. Fieldwork is still really important in anthropology, you’ve got to go and talk to people and understand their perspectives. That’s his lasting legacy more than the theoretical work. Plus, I suppose his diary teaches us that we should keep an eye on our assumptions. And remember that no matter what we do, like bring a desk to the field, we always sneak into our work. So maybe we should just be upfront about that.

So - would you mind helping to carry this desk to that village? I need to get back or i’ll get fired.

more desk moving noises

I just realised I never asked what you were doing here.

Really!? that’s disgrace-

Theme

This was notes from the field desk written by me John McGrail.  

This episode references

Clifford, John (1983) On Ethnographic Authority in Representations, No. 2 (Spring, 1983)

Dahl, Roald (1988) Matilda published by Jonathan Cape

Malinowski, Bronislaw (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific Routledge

Malinowski, Bronislaw (1948) Magic, Science and Religion Waveland Press

Malinowski, Bronislaw (1967) with introduction by Firth, Raymond (1989) A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term Stanford University Press

Tylor, Edward Burnett (1871) Primitive Culture published by the Cambridge University Press

Young, Michael W. (2004) Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist 1884-1920 Yale University Press

The sounds were all taken from Freesound. If you can donate to them you totally should, I would not have been able to make this podcast without it.

The sounds were;

Water Lap by snog https://freesound.org/people/snog/sounds/67031/

Sand slidding out of shovel slowly by XfiXy8 https://freesound.org/people/XfiXy8/sounds/467301/

Tropical Ocean Waves » Mau U Mae Beach Waves by tombenedict https://freesound.org/people/tombenedict/sounds/397594/?page=2#comment

Tropical Island by rich wise https://freesound.org/people/richwise/sounds/451743/

The theme music was dark side of my students, posted by Mia Stodzwiekow created by Tadeusz Maszewski https://freesound.org/people/miastodzwiekow/sounds/341770/