Platypus

Worrying over Speaking and the Pretentiousness of Podcasts

 Rebecca Carlson  October 2, 2024

Read the transcript here. 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. 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 (read more...)

Chaotic Oscillation: Understanding the Paradoxical Presence of Video Games in Contemporary Society

 Iván Flores  October 1, 2024

Esta publicación también está disponible en español

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Common sense tells us that play and work are opposing categories. However, in our society we often encounter situations where the boundaries between these two categories become difficult to distinguish. It’s common that people earn money from hobbies—activities not typically associated with the effort required for any form of work, mostly because they are fun. These include recording oneself dancing on the street, doing product unboxings, or streaming while playing video games. The variety of activities that can now be monetized is vast; almost any activity can become a niche ready to be used by the market to maintain a consumerist dynamic. (read more...)

Critical Metals, Magic Tricks, and Energy Transition: A Social Biography of Lithium

 María Fernanda Lartigue Marín  September 26, 2024

Este contenido también está disponible en español

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A passage from the novel Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor reads: La Matosa was slowly dotted once more with shacks and shanties raised on the bones of those who’d been crushed under the hillside; repopulated by outsiders, most of them lured by the promise of work, the construction of the new highway that was to run right through Villa and connect both the port and the capital to the recently discovered oil wells north of town, up in Palogacho, enough work for fondas and food stalls to start cropping up, and in time even cantinas, guest houses, knocking shops and strip clubs where the drivers, the travelling tradesmen and the day labourers would stop to take a moment from the monotony of that road flanked on either side by cane fields, cane and pastures and reeds filling every inch of land for miles and miles, in every direction, from the very edge of the tarmac to the low slopes of the sierra to the west, or running eastward to the coast, to its eternally raging waters. (2017: 25) When the novel won the 2019 German International Literature Award, the jury called it “the novel of poverty in twenty-first-century global capitalism” (HKW 2019). If poverty feels central to this novel, I believe it is because it lays out the political economy of oil from the perspective of a site of extraction, exploring the violent and exploitative labour and gender relations that orbit and enable the production of the fuel of 20th-century capitalism. In other words, it is not poverty but rather capitalism in its oil-powered dimension that might be considered central, and poverty part of its social world. (read more...)

Geoengineering: De Facto Environmental Governance and Alternative Future Making

 Cody Skahan  September 24, 2024

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I first heard about Solar Radiation Modification (SRM)—a form of geoengineering meant to address climate change through planetary cooling—during the 2023 Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland, at a networking lunch for youth working in environmentalism. My Master’s thesis in Anthropology at the University of Iceland focused on Ungir Umhverfissinnar (English translation: the Icelandic Youth Environmentalist Association), which I (from the United States) had joined the board of both as a climate activist and engaged anthropologist. During my interviews and participant observation with the organization, geoengineering had never come up until my colleague from Ungir Umhverfissinnar and I were approached by representatives from Operaatio Arktis (OA). Intent on “ the polar ice caps and preventing global tipping points,” OA has followed prominent research advocates in fostering discussion around an SRM technique called Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI). (read more...)

The Practice of Not Knowing

 Maythe Han  September 17, 2024

This is a comic that explores the affective experience of sharing a built environment and material cultures, making and re-making more-than-human kinship, and dealing with anticipatory grief with a senior and reactive dog. It touches on the core themes of uncertainty and unknowability—and by extension, speculative imagination—inherent in multispecies entanglements, tying it inextricably to the preemptive grief that arises from living with a senior, and increasingly tired, dog who no longer has the same energy he once did, especially when faced with a motorcycle. It engages with the various emotional valences of everyday life shared with a nonhuman companion. The comic has two pages and 11 panels. It is drawn digitally on a white background with black 6B pencil brush on a tablet. Panel 1: I don’t know where Frank, my nine-year-old collie, has been for the first two years of his life. (Drawing of a young border collie puppy) (read more...)

Space Anthropology with Savannah Mandel

 Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes  September 4, 2024

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View/Download the transcription for this episode. For this episode of Platypod, I interviewed space anthropologist Savannah Mandel about her new book Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration (Chicago Review Press, 2024) where she writes about commercial space exploration in the US based on her ethnographic fieldwork with SpacePort America in New Mexico, and with space policymakers in Washington DC. (read more...)

Foucault, Dialectics, and Randomized Clinical Trials: Bridges Between Medicine and Anthropology

 Ana Paula Pimentel Jacob  August 29, 2024

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Well, actually, I think I really wanted to understand how you guys conduct research. So, I read some articles in anthropology and sociology back when I was in medical school, and I remember three things: First, that dialectics always came up. That word was always there… The other was that Foucault was always cited. And the third, well, I couldn’t understand what was written. Those are the three things I remember: Foucault, dialectics, and that I couldn’t understand it, but I knew it was important, and I wanted to learn. So actually, I think to answer your question, I’d love to see the kind of product you generate… to understand how you work in a broader sense. Moving away from this specific research, when I saw , it was this morning when I told you I was looking at your Lattes profile, and I sent a message to Soraya. (Excerpt from an in-person interview with Afonso conducted at a public university on October 3, 2022) Interconnections, possible dialogues, and translations. These are the three key points highlighted in Afonso’s words during an interview that contributed to my dissertation, defended in June 2024 as part of a graduate program in anthropology at the University of Brasília, Brazil. And these are also key elements for this post, where I will be arguing how we, anthropologists, can build bridges with other fields of science. However, before diving in, I will present the context of the interview with Alfonso, the work that generated the dissertation, and the adjacent reflection that produced this post. (read more...)