This was meant to be a podcast about making podcasts.
But in the end, this podcast is really just a conversation between two people who used to be close friends. It rambles and meanders. It doesn’t always stick to a coherent point.[1]
I wondered then whether it could also be academically useful. Relevant to conversations in anthropology? Or even interesting to anyone other than me?
This podcast is a conversation with Thuy Nguyen, founder of the Berkeley Community Acupuncture clinic and licensed TCM practitioner who has her own podcast, You Are Medicine. We first started talking about what it’s like for her to make a podcast back in March, on a long drive together from Bakersfield, California to Window Rock, Arizona. Thuy runs acupuncture pop-up clinics and is training interns as part of her Navajo Healing Project there and she invited me to spend a weekend with her participating in their activities.
During the drive, she told me she had just finished recording some interviews about giving birth for her podcast. When I told her, laughing, that I have strong opinions about birth, we pulled over and her partner hooked us both up to twin lavalieres. He sat in the back seat with his laptop out, leaning expectantly forward under headphones, as I drove us through green hills becoming brown mountains, and it slowly got dark out.
So, when we eventually started this recording months later, that conversation is what we first started talking about.
If birth wasn’t already an overused metaphor, I might make a comparison to how this experience wasn’t like birth at all. But I won’t be so melodramatic as to suggest it is a death either.
Contraptions for capture, photo collage by author (from “Plants in net bags” by Fay Godwin and “Ripples and Wire, West Sands, St Andrews, East Neuk of Fife” both courtesy of the British Library archive; shelf numbers FG240-5a4-11a and FG 4430-11).
Because this isn’t complete. I’ll continue to go around in circles digging up what I say here, turning it over and reframing it, frustrated by what will always be missing, and the limitations of speaking at all, in the first place.
Footnotes
[1] An incomplete list of topics
00:41 Gravities in conflict
04:38 Some kind of birth
08:49 Agendas or manipulations
14:50 Snippets in time
18:40 On relationships and surprises
20:27 The intimacy of podcasts
23:45 A poem, un/intended
25:59 Speaking to, pretensions
32:35 When positionality loses its weight
34:39 Is it from being a woman?
42:19 Subjectivity orbits
42:45 Research participants as/and friends
45:45 Divisions in words
