TREAL Anthropology Podcast
TREAL Anthropology is a podcast created and performed by me and Christopher Lirette, a PhD student at Emory University. We met by chance in the public library in Chauvin, Louisiana, where I was conducting research for my BARA fieldwork, while he was visiting his hometown and crafting his own ethnographic foray. In the course of the month of June, we became fast friends and what we called "tandem ethnographers," engaging individuals in the community while learning together how to explore the liminal, haunting, and radical space of anthropological fieldwork. At some point in that month, we decided to take the ideas we bounced around in Cajun dance halls and on trawl boats into a podcast format.
Christopher described the podcast in a paper he wrote for his program. I'll quote him at length, as he summarized my intention rather perfectly:
"We find ourselves straddling well-established genres in popular culture and the academy: the talk show and the scholarly interview. One of our goals is to have the entertainment appeal of the talk show and the sophistication of the scholarly interview. That said, even the interview form can often yield surprising, fun, slightly crazy stuff. We hope to exploit the unpredictability of the oral speech act, and enter into a kind of anthropological “flow.” While we obviously value writing and the practice of solitary scholarly production, there is something potentially magical in freeing yourself from that kind of rigor, something that can be still smart and critical, but also improvisatory, make-shift, unexpected. It is often while talking to our friends and coconspirators that we find great ideas that transform our thinking, shape our analytic paths, open our eyes. We hope to catch moments like these and broadcast them to anyone who is interested.
This effort hopes to inaugurate a new mode of scholarly production: casual scholarship, which is certainly different from the highly formalized modes of academic production. Forms of scholarship such as the monograph, the peer-reviewed article, the tenure portfolio, etc. are all valuable, but they often lack the immediate, lived experience of the academic who appears in solid bursts, fully formed, argumentative, erudite. Instead, TREALanthropology hopes to perform the everyday work academics do for public consumption. I am suspicious of the term “public scholarship,” because I feel it harbors certain judgments about what a public might like: something less complicated and boring than academic texts. It also implies that scholarship is not already public, which is slightly weird when academic recognition comes from publication. That said, what we don’t often release for public consumption are our half-formulated ideas, our jokes, our enthusiasm, our eagerness to perform knowledge. We don’t often perform our roles as academics in a way that suggests that we live for ideas, for their fracturing and mending, for the strange turns a conversation may take. A way that demonstrates ways of living theory."
- Click here to listen to the beta* version of TREAL Anthropology, Episode One: "How did I Become a Ghost"
*this episode isn't quite finished yet...there still needs an ending and some editing before we don't call it "beta" anymore. but to get a taste, listen in.
- Episode 2 is in production!
Christopher described the podcast in a paper he wrote for his program. I'll quote him at length, as he summarized my intention rather perfectly:
"We find ourselves straddling well-established genres in popular culture and the academy: the talk show and the scholarly interview. One of our goals is to have the entertainment appeal of the talk show and the sophistication of the scholarly interview. That said, even the interview form can often yield surprising, fun, slightly crazy stuff. We hope to exploit the unpredictability of the oral speech act, and enter into a kind of anthropological “flow.” While we obviously value writing and the practice of solitary scholarly production, there is something potentially magical in freeing yourself from that kind of rigor, something that can be still smart and critical, but also improvisatory, make-shift, unexpected. It is often while talking to our friends and coconspirators that we find great ideas that transform our thinking, shape our analytic paths, open our eyes. We hope to catch moments like these and broadcast them to anyone who is interested.
This effort hopes to inaugurate a new mode of scholarly production: casual scholarship, which is certainly different from the highly formalized modes of academic production. Forms of scholarship such as the monograph, the peer-reviewed article, the tenure portfolio, etc. are all valuable, but they often lack the immediate, lived experience of the academic who appears in solid bursts, fully formed, argumentative, erudite. Instead, TREALanthropology hopes to perform the everyday work academics do for public consumption. I am suspicious of the term “public scholarship,” because I feel it harbors certain judgments about what a public might like: something less complicated and boring than academic texts. It also implies that scholarship is not already public, which is slightly weird when academic recognition comes from publication. That said, what we don’t often release for public consumption are our half-formulated ideas, our jokes, our enthusiasm, our eagerness to perform knowledge. We don’t often perform our roles as academics in a way that suggests that we live for ideas, for their fracturing and mending, for the strange turns a conversation may take. A way that demonstrates ways of living theory."
- Click here to listen to the beta* version of TREAL Anthropology, Episode One: "How did I Become a Ghost"
*this episode isn't quite finished yet...there still needs an ending and some editing before we don't call it "beta" anymore. but to get a taste, listen in.
- Episode 2 is in production!
Conference Presentations
Click here to listen to my presentation at the Society for Applied Anthropology 2013 Conference. I presented a paper called "Strong Hands and True Grit: Making a Ranching Identity Work in the Altar Valley," which was based on the fieldwork and data from my master's research.
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