coe167_bessire.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Welcome back, everyone, to the Cultures of Energy podcast, sometimes you get us with cocktails in the evening, this morning you get us with coffee. Hello, Simone, how are you? It's a Thursday morning in Houston, and so Thursday early.

Speaker2: [00:00:35] I think we hardly ever have cocktails. What are you talking about? We're much. We're almost always fueled by coffee, including during the late afternoon podcasts or sometimes a caffeine spike to drink of some kind.

Speaker1: [00:00:48] I poured a heaping helping of cognac into my coffee this morning. Just no, you did today. No, of course I didn't. I got a teach.

Speaker2: [00:00:54] Come on. No. Oh my God. But I saw, OK, yesterday, I I. This is an admission. This is a confession. Ok. Yesterday, I really had a craving for sushi. Oh boy. So I went to the local place like the few blocks away by myself. Ok, wow.

Speaker1: [00:01:10] Bold so

Speaker2: [00:01:12] Sushi. So I have my sushi thing and it was delicious and divine. Exactly what I wanted to totally hit the spot and I was working while I was there I was, I was proofing my pages. It wasn't like just jacking around. I was actually like hitting where it's at and enjoy my sushi. Then because, you know, there's a lot of like business people who go in there for lunch, right? They do. So I was there at the bar because I was by myself. I was the only one there. And then these these two guys come in and suits like some of these oil oil workers, oil BS oil worker bees

Speaker1: [00:01:44] Because they were smeared with petroleum, which

Speaker2: [00:01:46] Was all I could sell.

Speaker1: [00:01:47] Do they have hats on?

Speaker2: [00:01:49] Yeah, I could. I could smell the petrochemicals leaking through the the blood in their veins emanating out through horrify orifice, every orifice that they have now. They just it was like noon, maybe 12:30, and they come up to the sushi bar because they have cocktails like that bar stuff there. That's right. And the woman behind the bar who's like a waitress, she's like, Oh, hey, how are you guys doing? And she just pulls out these glasses immediately, like, they don't even have to talk about it. She pulls out three glasses and then gets out this bottle of booze. I couldn't see what it was. Maybe it's some kind of whiskey was brown, and she pour shots for all three of them and they just like, throw back these shots. Pretty big shots. I was like, What the fuck are you guys doing? It's 12 30. On what day was yesterday a Wednesday?

Speaker1: [00:02:35] Well, I mean, I mean, Mad Men vibe. I'm glad.

Speaker2: [00:02:38] Ok, maybe that's it. I mean, I'm glad that the I'm glad that the waitress or the manager, whatever she was, I'm glad she's doing it. Like, Get blessed, be like, get through your day, right? But these guys come on. I guess they got to be drunk because they're ruining the world. I don't know. I guess. I don't know.

Speaker1: [00:02:54] Yeah, it would be medicating pretty heavily if I worked in the oil industry. I think, and I don't want to impugn the fine art of day drinking, but I do think that that is something that we're not used to not accustomed to seeing as much anymore. Although I did like, you know, in Germany, for example, Europe, you know, people like to have a beer with lunch. That's fine. It's very common. It's like a soft drink.

Speaker2: [00:03:14] It is like a soft drink,

Speaker1: [00:03:15] But people rarely drink to excess and

Speaker2: [00:03:18] They almost never like, not at, not during the day, not at night. Like only only like really like alcoholics, which you see do that in Germany, like everyone is so prim about their drinking. They have like one

Speaker1: [00:03:29] Beer, they have one beer. They're like an American academic. It's like the whole country of American academic drew.

Speaker2: [00:03:37] Oh my god, I was so excited. One of my many nights out on only, Well, yeah, I'm thing. I sound. Only one night out, I went out with a group from swigs. The gender studies people who are obviously much cooler than your average academics.

Speaker1: [00:03:50] It used to be called chugs. But then they those swings.

Speaker2: [00:03:53] Yeah, I know people like, Oh, do you call it that? And I'm like, Well, we do, but not without controversy. But it's so much easier to say that gas like, yeah, so and so we want

Speaker1: [00:04:04] It to sound like a sorority at Penn State.

Speaker2: [00:04:06] So that's why the former director hate, hated it. Yeah, because it sounds like you're swilling beer at some rate party, right? Some roofie,

Speaker1: [00:04:15] I mean, increasingly careful and try to say KSW, WGS just to be respectful because you guys

Speaker2: [00:04:19] Do you do? I do. I do.

Speaker1: [00:04:21] I mean, we say it at home because we're joking.

Speaker2: [00:04:23] Well, it's also the other thing is is that's what the students say.

Speaker1: [00:04:26] They call it Swick.

Speaker2: [00:04:27] They all do. And so because I'm the undergraduate advisor, I hear it from them too. And I go, Yeah, I'm so excited to be a swigs major. And I'm like, Oh, is that you say that? They're like, Oh yeah, that's we all call it swigs. It makes me. But can I finish my, oh yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry. This is like, Oh, this is not even day drinking, it's night drinking. I'm just saying that this is the exception, rather than the rule. We went out. Everyone except me at the table ordered a cocktail. Wow. And then wine. Wow. They had a cocktail and actually ordered two bottles of wine at the same time so that people had a cocktail on one side of their placemat and a glass of wine on the other. And they actually drank both. Wow. And it was like, Wow, you guys are party people.

Speaker1: [00:05:08] I know that kind of role in their living, that fire lifestyle.

Speaker2: [00:05:11] It just never happened. It just never happens. It's true. Like most academics, they want to have, like they'll have like one beer or one glass of wine or champagne.

Speaker1: [00:05:19] And L.Z.,

Speaker2: [00:05:20] I know, you know, I don't know. It's fine. I understand people. Want to get, you know, they want to keep their wits about them, but it's kind of less fun when everyone's like very sober, but

Speaker1: [00:05:29] We have a have toast that is like based upon, you know, pretty strict mental discipline and control and anything that gets you, you know, addled is seen to kind of demean your subjectivity. On the other hand, it's kind of fun to addle yourself sometimes. So what can you say? I would say, you know, everything in proportion.

Speaker2: [00:05:49] I don't know. I mean, I think if you're

Speaker1: [00:05:51] Like when you're having that third shot at lunch, just think about it like the first two shots, fine. But on that third shot, just take a moment and say, Do I need this shot? Is it really going to put me over the edge? And if you work for an oil and gas company, I'd say, go ahead and take that third shot because you know what? That will make you less effective at your job and hopefully give us a little more breathing room and time to catch up to you guys as we dismantle the apparatus of your industry.

Speaker2: [00:06:13] I see. Yeah. Ok, so let them like stunt their mental capacities by day drinking so that they don't, so they don't kill us all as quickly. Ok?

Speaker1: [00:06:22] Maybe that's actually maybe we should start a place that just gives free shots to people in the industry. Maybe that could be something we could do here.

Speaker2: [00:06:28] Well, I mean, because that's the other thing. I think if I ate a big lunch and then had a drink like within about half an hour, I'd be ready for a nap. Like, I'd be like, I'm going to go take a little nap under my desk. That's because I'm tired. And that shot was good at the moment, and I felt kind of high. But now I'm really tired.

Speaker1: [00:06:48] I like this idea of like a gorilla like campaign of corporate day drinking in order to cause a like a rash of naps. Yeah, like a nap, apocalypse

Speaker2: [00:06:59] And nap apocalypse. You could put. Maybe you could put something in the I'm sure they have lots of bottled water. They're like the big jugs of water. Yeah, you can put it like you could get a really pure like vodka. I get a high octane, high octane booze in there that doesn't have much flavor or odor. Yeah, and it'd just be what's it called titrated? Is that what they call it? But you kind of the portioning out? Is that right?

Speaker1: [00:07:22] That sounds very chemically, chemically,

Speaker2: [00:07:25] Chemically, chemically. Yeah, no, I think that's good because then,

Speaker1: [00:07:29] Yeah, I saw it in chemistry, set one. If everyone worked my chemistry set in sixth grade,

Speaker2: [00:07:34] If everyone were asleep at the wheel

Speaker3: [00:07:36] Over there in downtown Houston and other places,

Speaker2: [00:07:39] Then yeah, it's not an apocalypse. It's hard to

Speaker1: [00:07:44] Say, though, and we've talked about like food truck ideas. Maybe this is like a drink truck. It's just a truck that drives around and it's like, Hey, guys, shots. Do you work for the oil and gas industry, like just drive over to the Chevron building? But guys, we got shots for you.

Speaker2: [00:07:56] Yeah, that'd be good. Yeah, you wouldn't have to bother with cocktails. You just had

Speaker1: [00:08:00] To. Now maybe we have to do sushi too, because this is what you're seeing is that there's a big kind of sushi magnet at lunch, and maybe it's like free nigiri or free maki rolls. And then, you know, like a like a mochi and a shot

Speaker2: [00:08:12] You don't want to be even better actually would be like kind of to do a fusion of the German idea and to get some like really like, really good but heavy German bread and like a sausage or something like that and really

Speaker1: [00:08:22] Knock a maximum now

Speaker2: [00:08:23] Like a huge, huge carb, like a huge carb pile with the boost that would be it or pasta. I know something like a huge amount of carbs, as you know, fettuccine alfredo. It's just a handful of fettuccine alfredo shot to go with it. Boom, get back. Come and get back to your office like car.

Speaker1: [00:08:47] Just be like the industry seems to be really sluggish these days, like people aren't reacting to anything anymore. Yeah, well,

Speaker2: [00:08:54] Well, we could hit, you know, after we have, do we lay damage to the oil industry? Maybe we could hit Wall Street next.

Speaker1: [00:09:01] But then on the other

Speaker2: [00:09:02] Side, really early in the morning, though, because they start working like the ones who work on the Asian markets and Europe and stuff, he'd had to be there like two or three in the morning handing out shots,

Speaker1: [00:09:11] Those. That's a harder nut to crack. I think because the finance industry, I think, is much more physically and mentally disciplined. I mean, I think these people like live for the second in a way that means it's going to be really hard to get them to, like, take time off now.

Speaker2: [00:09:25] But they're all they're probably telling me. They're the junkies are kind of, I mean, that's the reputation. And I know that's a stereotype, and I'm sure it's not fair to those poor traders. The traders are mostly algorithms now, anyway. Here's a good like here's a good programming question for some computer engineer out there. What's the equivalent of like? You can get a human drunk with shots of alcohol? How would you get an algorithm drunk?

Speaker1: [00:09:52] Oh my God, it's a question.

Speaker2: [00:09:53] What would you have to do? You'd have to throw some, some Wiley code into the mix to to get it off to kind of whack it out of place to get it discombobulated. Right? This is a good question. You have to throw in some bad data.

Speaker1: [00:10:08] I'm going to throw in a little plug here, OK, person who might be able to answer that is our PhD student, Ian Lowry, who's teaching at Portland State. We are going to be at Portland State tomorrow to show our movies. So if you happen to be in the Portland area, maybe you want to come out for that. We love. To meet you. But tomorrow, that's tomorrow. That's what you've named, that's one of the reasons why we're up so early recording now. I think that's an excellent idea. How do you discombobulation algorithm? I'm sure there are ways to do it. I think they're probably viruses and things like that, but I don't know.

Speaker3: [00:10:38] Discombobulated is a special, high

Speaker2: [00:10:40] Tech Silicon Valley computer engineering

Speaker1: [00:10:43] Term. We have so many ideas this morning. I think we're going to need to edit them down a little bit. But I do think free shots for the oil industry is a solid that's like a nine out of 10 idea. So let's run with that. But speaking of sleep, you know who likes a good nap? Our guest today? Oh, it's nice to see her.

Speaker2: [00:10:59] We don't know that he likes it now. I think he probably does.

Speaker1: [00:11:01] He seems like a guy who enjoys a nap.

Speaker2: [00:11:03] So you're going to say, I like a

Speaker1: [00:11:04] Nap, I'm nuts. He's obviously he's obviously pony productive. But I'm just saying, I'm just saying, I think Lucas seems like a guy who knows how to relax and take a nap sometimes. Well, not because he's doing shots much

Speaker2: [00:11:14] Less good and saying good and sane people take naps because that's a healthy

Speaker1: [00:11:18] Choice. But you know, he's been working at the University of Oklahoma for some years, so he has seen this oil culture, of course, and

Speaker2: [00:11:24] He's probably seen some day drinkers down there

Speaker1: [00:11:26] Anyway. Lucas is a marvelous writer, ethnographer anthropologist. You may know his book Behold the Black Caiman, which is a very powerful, haunting study of the iRadio people in the Chaco region of Paraguay, with people who some of whom were believed to be kind of first contacted indigenous people. And his book is much about what it is to go through that experience, but also how it doesn't correspond to these kind of western stereotypes of these mythically disconnected others. And he really shows how people living in these resource frontier regions, indigenous people are profoundly impacted by this in tragic ways, but also in ways that are inspiring, given that they show a great interest in not so much in trying to hold onto indigenous life ways, but to create futures for themselves that enable them to to live in these challenging worlds in between.

Speaker2: [00:12:25] That sounded pretty good, except for all the little burps in between. Owen Burke,

Speaker1: [00:12:29] Did you talk about

Speaker2: [00:12:31] Burp? I mean, the words were pretty good in the pacing was about the pace. He was a little bit slow, but the burps, I don't know.

Speaker1: [00:12:38] I didn't burp coffee any burping anyway. Lucas, sorry about that. My eloquence has been undermined by incidents

Speaker2: [00:12:46] Like Squelch, what do you call squelched perps holding in the world, like holding in the bird? Ok, they're just small.

Speaker1: [00:12:54] It's like a bagpipe. It's like a bagpipe. You need to fill it with air.

Speaker2: [00:12:57] Somehow what your your lungs are like,

Speaker1: [00:13:00] They need to. They need to

Speaker2: [00:13:01] Be. I guess it is. Yeah, a little bit that way. What happens if I squeeze you? Are you going to make more interesting sounds?

Speaker4: [00:13:10] It's going to be

Speaker1: [00:13:11] Like Braveheart in here in a second. Anyway, the other project we talk with them about is a project about the fastest disappearing aquifer.

Speaker2: [00:13:20] That's yeah. Now that's the new work. That's very interesting, too.

Speaker1: [00:13:23] I think it's Kansas, right?

Speaker2: [00:13:24] Yeah, Kansas, where he's from. And so he has like some genealogy as some family history there with that aquifer and kind of farming in the region, and it's being depleted at a rapid rate.

Speaker1: [00:13:33] We are going to miss those aquifers when they're gone. Oh boy.

Speaker3: [00:13:36] Yeah, they do a lot for us and

Speaker2: [00:13:39] For the corn, and

Speaker1: [00:13:40] There's no glaciation coming anytime soon to to re stalk

Speaker2: [00:13:44] Them, to replenish

Speaker1: [00:13:45] Or resupply them. So yeah, so that's our that's our guest today. I think it's going to be a terrific talk. Simone, any other thoughts you want to have before we round things out and hand it over to our man, Lucas?

Speaker2: [00:13:56] I know I think that that is a wonderful compendium of introduction. Ok. And so now I'm ready to say, Go, Lucas? Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:14:25] Well, cultures of energy listeners, we are so very pleased to not only have you back on the line, but to have Lucas Bassir joining us from Radcliffe. I just goofed the name Cambridge, right? Cambridge.

Speaker2: [00:14:37] It's called called Harvard left

Speaker1: [00:14:38] Harvard joining us from I'm leaving this this. I'm leaving all in. So you don't have to. Yeah. Joining us from an undisclosed location in the Greater Boston area, where currently there's a lot of people are fretting quite a lot about their basketball team's future and et cetera, et cetera. But that needn't concern us now because we're not that type of a podcast.

Speaker2: [00:15:01] Well, if anyone, if anyone was if anyone was worried about the natural form of this podcast, which is dispelling any of that,

Speaker1: [00:15:07] It's pretty sketchy, pretty shaky. A lot of the time.

Speaker2: [00:15:11] Very authentic. But, but but in a good way.

Speaker3: [00:15:14] So hi, Lucas, it's so good to have you on the line.

Speaker4: [00:15:17] Hello. Thanks for having me.

Speaker3: [00:15:19] So you've done a lot of amazing work over the course of your career so far, and we wanted to dig in to a marvelous book that came out that you wrote that came out in twenty fourteen and it's called Behold the Black Caiman, a chronicle of real life. I had it right the first time in real life. Yeah. And this book is just brilliantly put together and so gracious in the writing and evocative and a page turner. And those are hard to come by, I think, in most academic anthropological publications. So we really applaud the work that you've done on it because it's a beautiful read and very powerful and its insights. Yeah. So we wanted to touch you a bit about how you came to the work. I mean, essentially, the story begins really with kind of deforestation and the loss of biospheres for ighodalo people. But there's much more to it than that as they move from forest, the forest that they have inhabited in the past. And there's a reckoning with kind of this movement to new spaces of habitation in South America and the kinds of challenges they face with missionaries and NGOs and anthropologists, anthropologists that are very central in the beginning, you know, looking in the mirror and, you know, googly eyed tourists, among others. So we thought it would be good to just kind of hear about how you came to the project in the first place, like how you landed here or landed there, I should say.

Speaker4: [00:16:50] Yeah, thanks for that and I appreciate the kind words about the book. You know, I think like most anthropologists, we have kind of a random path to the projects that we take. And in my case, it was something that accreted over many different years. So I started in Bolivia as a Fulbright scholar, and that turned into a certain kinds of sets of relationships with area communities who were involved in certain dilemmas and that turned into personal relationships and investments. And in those communities, which expanded in the aftermath of a two thousand four contact with a previously concealed band in Paraguay. And then the project kind of took on its own momentum. And I think that if there's anything in the writing that's that's worthwhile, it comes from that kind of long process of making mistakes and trying to understand something and thinking, I got it and then doubling back and realizing I was completely wrong. And then finding another insight and trying to pursue that and then going back again and correcting it. And that's the kind of method of ethnography. I think that I was very blessed and privileged to have an opportunity to to really stay immersed in a really complicated set of dilemmas. And that prevented me, I think, from being able to make a kind of comfortable set of conclusions and led to something else which was a kind of unraveling of my own expertise. Right.

Speaker1: [00:18:34] I wanted to ask you because of what you're just talking about, this previously concealed band that that you were focused on for many years. You know, there's been a lot of talk in anthropology over the years, a lot of fascination and not just in anthropology. I think this is a broader public cultural fascination with the idea of first contact with Hidden Peoples and this opportunity to somehow engage something that's at once exotic, but also perhaps to learn from, you know, the non west. And I was struck by when you were talking about this part of the work, how your process of realizing that, you know, this first contact myth is really something that really troubles our understanding of what peoples with whom settler societies have not had a great deal of contact have nonetheless been. Highly impacted by those societies and their industries, for example, so could you tell us a little bit about that?

Speaker4: [00:19:27] Yeah, I think that's another great prompt. And like a lot of other people, I think that I was initially seduced by that kind of ideology that we have around some sort of transformative encounter with alternative or radical clarity that would illuminate X, Y or Z. And in the case that I came to know, and that's really the only one I can speak to with any pretension of authority. All of those meta narratives and myths really acted to obscure what was a more compelling and more complicated set of human dilemmas. And in the case of the people or Iranian people, it was more like less like Avatar and more like Ishi than you had, you know? Yeah, people who were highly aware and highly attuned and actively working through these kind of existential dilemmas of witnessing but being muted by the frontiers of an extractive, you know, industrial machine that was that was eroding certain possibilities and opening some others, but in a very narrow and peculiar kind of way. And so, you know, as I got to know those people after they had changed their relationship with that frontier, they really taught me a lot about how the how the fiction of that idea that initially brought me there was also a governmental fiction and a political fiction that that was brought to bear on them in a really harsh kind of way. And so this imaginary of isolated people or isolated life that is hyper visible and global and, you know, a real industry in and of itself enabled certain kinds of dispositions and marginalizes that otherwise wouldn't be possible. And so, you know, I was always struck by that tension and it's something that I tried to to work with and trouble even while recognizing, of course, that that the idea or the fiction of isolation may for some people be closer to to what they're going through and maybe one of the only refuges for for certain kinds of lives. So it's a complicated set of questions.

Speaker1: [00:21:58] Absolutely. And I think you do a really amazing, powerful job of narrating that too, because you know, you get the sense that people are are felt hunted. I mean, living on these resource frontiers of of settler nation states where you know, they're being deforested like Simone was saying. And and you know, people are kind of like moving from like on forested patch to patch, but but not with the sense of wandering kind of naively out of the Garden of Eden, but rather with the sense of really living hard and on the run.

Speaker2: [00:22:26] And, you know, in the password, literally hunted, right?

Speaker1: [00:22:30] Mm hmm. I wanted to see if we could connect that to the way in which people greeted you or accepted you experience your presence there as an anthropologist, because then there was this really striking passage where you know you, you become a kind of a which figure yourself a kind of a spectral figure. The people who come there to gather knowledge and are interested in the old ways and so forth. And I think we learn a lot from your book as well about both the precarity of traditional forms of knowledge, but also of, you know, people's ability to assert a kind of sense of power over their present to this is something Terry Turner you talk about in the book. A lot was always really emphasizing this with his work with the Kayapo. The point was not to cling to ancestral traditions, but it was to have power over their futures.

Speaker4: [00:23:16] Mm hmm. That's exactly it. And there's a strange resonance between the kind of extractive dynamics of agricultural agribusiness frontiers and missionaries who are looking for a kind of interior soul matter that can be extracted and collected while living people can be discarded. And then the way that anthropology and the Chaco has often not always but often been practiced with area where people are very interested in pulling out a kind of timeless mythic structure or a kind of philosophy that is presumed to be stable and is the only valuable part of what some tribal communities like I have to offer. And I arroyo, we're so clear on the ways in which those extractive modes were fused that it was impossible to ignore and quite uncomfortable. And I think that Terry Turner. Work is exactly right in that what was at stake and a lot of so-called traditional practices for Irish people was never about stability or ossification. It was precisely the opposite. It was rearranging insoluble forces in order to create new spaces to inhabit certain kinds of things and channel new possibilities. And IRA were my IRA reo teachers were very insistent on a kind of irreverence to stable form that I tried to stay close to, and I think it was a really a really good lesson for me.

Speaker3: [00:25:01] I mean, I think one of the other things that we see throughout the ethnography is the kind of refusal of stability of certain doctrinal, religious spiritual forms as well. There seems to be a lot of kind of experimentation and play and sort of poking poking at the Christian idols such as they are among Israel people. And one of the things that you discuss early on in the book is your interest in speaking with and learning in some of these chants and ways of describing the world through song form, I guess I would say, and how bound up with the devil that is, and I think the devil comes out in really interesting ways in the book, you know, the kind of classic that devil and commodity fetishism sort of reading. But also you have a section where the ethnographer is the devil

Speaker2: [00:25:52] And you you.

Speaker3: [00:25:55] You later learn the secret of the devil. And so I'm wondering if you can speak a bit about how how this devil or maybe it's even plural devil's sort of operated through the field work and through your own analytics of the project?

Speaker2: [00:26:12] Yeah, that's a big one.

Speaker4: [00:26:15] Yeah, I mean, you know, the episode you're referencing in the book is really this kind of layering on of the way in which certain kinds of traditional caring practices had been signified as satanic by missionaries and the way that ethnographic extraction of tradition had simultaneously been signified by Irish people as satanic. Through this kind of caricature figure of the devilish anthropologist who's running around and taking pictures and paying people and not respecting the moral boundaries of of existence and threatening them all the time. And I think that it was just such a strange, surreal doubling over for me that it made me start to think about less about Devil Tree and more about bedeviling as this kind of constant mode that was resurgent or emanating around the extractive frontier that swept all of us up into a kind of insufficiency or an instability or a, you know, a lack of being able to to ever really evoke and control and unleash the devil devilish ness that was around precisely because there were so many different kinds that were contradictory and interrupting and haunting any pretension towards towards authority or a claim to seal something into a place. You know, that was such a hard thing to try to think about how you could run that through ethnographic writing and its and its particular genres and potentials. But I think ethnography is so much more open to to those sorts of challenges than other other genres.

Speaker1: [00:28:13] Yeah, I think that you're able to leverage that potential, you know, brilliantly in this project. I was curious to ask you about how as the other shoe fell, the penny dropped whatever. As you realizing, you know, the kind of the obviously complex and not always positive presence of an anthropologist or an ethnographer in this type of a setting. How did that impact how you spent your fieldwork? I mean, did you shift in terms of your sense of yourself as an interlocutor and as well, I don't know an ally to these people?

Speaker4: [00:28:47] Yeah, absolutely. I feel like, you know, I'm not claiming that I was able to ever do that successfully or entirely, but I do think that it was a kind of condition of my being there to move away from the obvious sorts of devilish practices. And so on one hand, there was a methodological shift that that had to happen, which was giving up a search for certain kinds of logics. And there was another sort. Existential shift in terms of trying to find spaces of alliance that were within terms more amenable to those desired by the communities that were really hosting me and that I became quite close to. And I think that one of the things that I ended up with, or maybe the only thing I ended up with at the end was trying to write with and translate the sorts of intense translations or the projects that people were were really invested in into a language that would let people see that as something more than just loss or death or an inevitable decline or a degradation of some sort of desired fantastical pure. And that was a point that I thought was one not only clearly made by Israel, but one that had a kind of a sharp political and conceptual edge. And a lot of implications for the terms of advocacy work. The terms of missionary labor. The terms of land tenure and all of the different kinds of governmental practices that are premised on one very narrow, artificially constrained indigenous subject and iRadio subject in particular.

Speaker3: [00:30:44] Hmm. I mean, you and one of the chapters, maybe it's the first chapter with a man who you might meet, whose name is ouJ Neary. Is that right? Sort of.

Speaker4: [00:30:56] Yeah. So all the names are pseudonyms. Ok. But that would be called lie.

Speaker3: [00:31:01] Yeah. Oh hi. Cool. So you write like it. So you said, I'll never forget the first time I met in high and then you say, of course, you'd seen him in photographs before and these fundraising brochures because he was part of the sort of first contact narrative. And I wanted to just read a couple of lines a couple of paragraphs down from that. So you say ONIY was one of those old a€ who see through you? I ran into a handful of them contact survivors who possess the rarefied gaze of the unreachable like they had seen beyond the world, like they could never be surprised again. And then you say, for all his strangeness, ONIY was an extraordinarily gentle man. And then he told you that he was starving because children of powerful families were always stealing his food. So you started to bring him little packets of beans and fruit and aspirin. So I wanted to. He's striking, and I'm also struck by this idea of contact survivors. I think this is a really important moment in the book and it's threaded throughout, right? But this idea of surviving contact is is a fascinating kind of perspective, I think, on colonialism, imperialism, post colonialism and draw in all these different kind of lines of thought around that. And so I wonder, you know, what is the kind of relationship between surviving contact and being post-colonial or having survived colonial conditions? And then I also was curious about him as a figure like what? What's important about him? What is the story that he's telling us in the narration of your ethnography or in a broader sense, what can we learn from from this man, do you think?

Speaker4: [00:32:49] Well, I appreciate that that prompt in terms of the the ethnography, which is maybe the easiest way into it. You know, he was a kind of a person that had really gone through the most extreme edges, both whatever this kind of concealed state would be and the extreme edges of the consequences of trying to shift into a different existential mode and never quite being able to do it. And so in terms of his prior life in the forest, he had him and his family had been outcasts by other forest bands. And so he was told by his parents to marry his sister and they had children together. And it was they lived entirely in that small group of himself and his sister and their five children for most of his adult life. And so when he was shifting from that forest life into life on the mission, he was particularly fetishized in opposite and extremely contradictory ways that that distilled and condensed maybe the other kinds of contradictions that other area bands had gone through because. He was such a he was alone in that with his family, and so I think I was always just struck by the way that he he never quite sealed himself off in that transition and some people did. There was a lot of people who reacted to that by putting a strong barrier up or you refusing to talk about things. And he he refused that he was able to kind of be in the middle in a way that was both extremely powerful and extremely resilient and also, you know, ultimately quite tragic for him. And so I think that that poses a stories like his or lives like his really cut through a lot of a lot of the artifice and a lot of the conceptual work, a lot of the philosophical claims, a lot of the institutional posturing around these kinds of dilemmas. And you get to something much more complicated. And and I felt quite close to him.

Speaker2: [00:35:23] So yeah, here's a really a very powerful figure and person

Speaker3: [00:35:29] Who you know who we get to have some time with. I wanted to I was thinking about the kind of relationship between the medium of chance not going to try and pronounce.

Speaker2: [00:35:40] I'm not going to try and pronounce again

Speaker3: [00:35:43] The chance that you learn and that you're taught by your teachers and the role of radio. Another saw no form. If you will write another sort of audio form of communication because radio operates in contradictory ways, of course, but it also in a sense creates, on the one hand, a sense of community among people. And yet it also has these other vacancies, not the least of which are pretty tied into kind of mission design imperatives, right? So I wonder if you can talk a bit about how radio as a medium operated within communities and how you see it connecting maybe to other dimensions of everyday life in the present or even during the time that you were doing the fieldwork, how these media sort of create kind of activities and disconnects in various ways in different planes and operations.

Speaker4: [00:36:40] Yeah, you know, the dissertation project really started as a radio project, and it quickly devolved into something else to try to make sense of what people were doing on these radios, which at the time there was this kind of transnational two way shortwave solar powered radio network that all Iria villages were participating in, and it had its own codes and etiquettes and set forms and conventions. And one of the things that I think you're really rightly picking up on is that it was on one hand, citing these earlier sonic practices that were about a poetic realignment of forces at the other. On the other hand, it was only citing a kind of reduced part of that through the circulation of different kinds of sole matter that accompanied certain sorts of exchanges and verbal the moving sound of a voice. And so the radio network, I thought, was a really again complex way in which IRA people were were making this what turned out to be the same argument, which is that you could take a new form or a new technological capacity, and you could you could use it to reproduce a kind of value, which was not a value of reproduction or of stability, but a value of instability and a constant capacity to rechannel and reinvent and become.

Speaker4: [00:38:17] And so that was something that was very striking to me, and it also opened the way to understand the abandonment of the radio network, which was by the time I went back in twenty ten and now radios aren't used anymore. And so it's kind of a counter image to the other narratives of nostalgia and loss that so easily accrue to indigenous practices in the Chaco, where you can see the abandonment of a radio network as one hand, you know, a kind of look, they were doing all these amazing things and they've let it go. And does that mean that all these amazing things are now lost? And should we feel upset about that or what exactly is being lost? Or you can see it as just another example of people really being open and and asserting the same kind of values that were asserted previously.

Speaker1: [00:39:12] Yeah. You know, it's funny. You mention that this kind of came out of a radio project because what I wanted to ask you next was to talk a little bit about your films. You've made a lot of films. So you've done a lot of film work as part of your ethnography, and I was just curious if you wanted to talk a little bit about how that became so central to your work and then also whether you think that there was. I mean, again, there's a lot of there's been a lot of debates. I'm thinking of Turner again, the Kayapo video project about, you know, it was a whole the whole argument and media anthropology over to what extent, you know, quote unquote indigenous non-Western peoples, you know, had the same filmic capabilities as everyone else. And whether it was doing a violence by just, you know, giving them cameras, et cetera, et cetera. So what were some of your thoughts about what got you interested in the filmmaking and then what do you think it's kind of political statuses in the field?

Speaker4: [00:40:02] Yeah. So I think my filmmaking follows the same sort of trajectory as my larger ability to understand what's happening in my own relationship to ethnographic representational practices with Aereo, because I started in a very conventional documentary mode and I made a couple of student films. The second one was in the aftermath of the two thousand four encounter, which really was unsettling to me. And even though I feel like that film was kind of a proto attempt to stay close to the uncertainty of knowing that those moments entail, it ultimately wasn't able to really inhabit that uncertainty enough. So I've always been a little skeptical or uncomfortable or unsettled by that film, and I I decided to give up that genre for a while. Until recently, I had an opportunity to go and do a kind of updated indigenous media participatory video project with Iria with the same communities. And in terms of that, the old debate about cultural imperialism or whether it destroys indigenous cultures. I think that debate is settled. I think that that is no longer, you know, up in the air, especially in cases like Rio, where they enthusiastically and remarkably use the medium to make precisely these. These kinds of visual documents that intensified and unleashed that the same sort of energy of rupture and regeneration and interruption. And and they did it to great play and fun and humor in a way that brought people together to a degree that was, you know, surprisingly effective for me.

Speaker1: [00:41:55] Mm hmm. Yeah. And people can find out more information about the IRA video project on your website. Is that

Speaker4: [00:42:01] Right? Yeah, that's right. And one of the real films is circulating a little bit now in Latin American indigenous film festivals. The others are kind of still being discussed with the filmmakers and the communities, how people want those to be shown or not. But yeah, you can find out more information about it. I have little blurbs on the website,

Speaker1: [00:42:21] So we'll put a link to that. Yeah. Very good. And then maybe as a way of shifting gears, I wanted to observe that obviously the Chaco is not the only resource frontier. You've spent a lot of time in. You happen to have worked for many years in Oklahoma right through the period of time in which the fracking boom happened. And so I was curious whether you have any observations or comparisons you'd want to offer about those two experiences. And maybe it's a different way of coming back to the idea of what the experience of people living in those frontiers like Paraguay might be able to to instruct us in terms of what's happening as we come to terms with our own coming out of the forest into the dizzying world of the Anthropocene.

Speaker2: [00:43:01] Wow. Nicely, nicely put, Dominic. That's good.

Speaker4: [00:43:06] Yeah, it's it's beautifully stated. I think,

Speaker1: [00:43:10] Wait, let me trade market. Let me say my.

Speaker4: [00:43:12] Yeah, I think you should answer this. But yeah, I think that there are. I'm struck by the resonances not only in Oklahoma, but also in Kansas, which is where I'm from originally, where you have a kind of, you know, it's all too easy to displace these narratives of resource frontiers and the apocalyptic overtones of them to places like the Chaco right, where there's a kind of sentimental mode that is already in place to let us both consume the spectacle of that destruction and also mourn it in a way that lets us off the hook. And I think that in the case of the United States and the heartland and these sorts of, you know, red corners of Trump country, it should prompt us to to really revisit all of those sentimental modes. And what is that exactly at stake for the ranking of of lives and the distribution of regard or disregard? So I think that that's something that comes up. Really, really closely for me, but I don't think I would have been able to to really see that or feel that the same way without the experiences in the Charcot. And so, you know, at the same time, the Choco is deeply connected to western Kansas in kind of unexpected ways. There's a lot of people that move back and forth between Paraguay and Kansas through a Mennonite diaspora. There's a lot of there's flows of cattle genetics and crop genetics that go back and forth, and there's future markets where the failure of certain kinds of crops in different places are extremely linked. And so I think that, you know, the Chaco is was a great place for me to to rethink or revisit my own complicity in these sorts of logics.

Speaker3: [00:45:09] Right? Well, Lucas, I wanted to kind of, I guess, stick to the plains still and get into this new project that you've begun, that you're calling after the aquifer, which I'd love that title because it's

Speaker2: [00:45:21] Quite haunting, actually.

Speaker3: [00:45:23] So it's an ethnography of groundwater and responsibility on the high plains of the United States. And I know you're in the initial stages, but I wonder if you can tell us a bit about the the ethos of the project and its goals, how you imagine it unfolding and what kinds of research and thinking you want to do around this question of aquifers and what I imagine to be their dramatic depletion.

Speaker4: [00:45:50] Yes. So the the High Plains aquifer in western Kansas came to my attention during trips to to connect with my father who lives out there. And, you know, I was raised in western Kansas and five generations of my family are from there on one side. And that family or those those ancestors were really instrumental in the rise of deep, well, irrigation. So when I learned that it has one of the highest aquifer depletion rates in the world, it really I was just struck by that. And then it coincided with the rise of Trump in a way that really, I find I find like it was an unavoidable prompt to try to think about again, collusion and complicity and the nature of knowing and the contemporary and how we can use ethnographic methods or storytelling modes to try to accept responsibility for the role we all play in it. And I think that this notion of responsibility for me really came up reading James Baldwin and Margaret Mead's rap on race from which, you know, I'm sure you and most of the listeners know this text. But it's remarkable in the middle because James Baldwin and Margaret Mead can't ever quite say what they're talking about.

Speaker4: [00:47:19] And so, you know, James Baldwin is pushing Mead on this notion of responsibility, and what it means and need is taking it in an entirely different direction, and they're circling around any sort of stable object. And they're outlining and said a lot of gaps in the way that we understand responsibility. And I think that in the aftermath of the twenty sixteen elections and in the aftermath of these sort of depletion, airy structures on resource frontiers, a lot of us are grappling with those same kind of questions. And so I think that, you know, the book is really just my response to that and I'm trying to to right through it. But it is at an early stage and I don't know how, how you write, but I I start with something that I'm not sure about and I try to figure it out through the writing process, which in this case is a really has turned into a really powerful way for me to reconnect with my own family and my own family history and sort of uncomfortable gaps in knowing that most of us from settler families have to deal with and have to contend with or should have to.

Speaker2: [00:48:30] Yeah, I mean, there's a powerful, reflexive impulse happening in the work, it sounds like to which is should imagine it's going

Speaker3: [00:48:38] To give it a lot of texture and layers of kinship and responsibility and complicity. What what is happening with the aquifers in western Kansas? I mean, I'm imagining it's intensive agriculture, but maybe there's more to it. What have you found in terms of the kind of the hydro physics of what's happening?

Speaker4: [00:48:57] Yeah, it's almost all industrial agribusiness and center pivot irrigation for corn growing, which of course in certain places isn't an ecological catastrophe, and in other places it is. But it's also due to the peculiar characteristics of the aquifer itself, which aren't very well known strikingly enough for high. Drug geologists or for farmers. And so you have this sort of really uneven groundwater terrain that that mystifies everyone, especially as it nears the bottom of the aquifer. So I'm really struck by that kind of tension between, on one hand, a huge amount of data, a huge amount of science, a huge amount of modeling that's being done around it. And on the other hand, this kind of enduring or intensifying mystification of what water is and what it does and what role it plays in people's lives.

Speaker1: [00:49:57] Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's haunted us on this podcast. Ever since their first episode, which was with Paolo Bacigalupi, the Cliffie writer and his book The Water Knife, which had just come out. And you know, that book envisions a pretty dystopian future for the American West involving, you know, in increasingly militarized politics surrounding access to water in a in a time of depleting aquifers and. And that also in Texas, just being basically eradicated by storms and Christianity. So. But but you know, it's serious, and I think it's I'm really glad you're investigating this issue because I don't I can't really think of another project that's coming at that problem from this angle. And again, you know, I want to think about some of the connections between the work you've done in in Latin America and those resource frontiers and then what you're doing now in the United States and thinking about how people come to terms with what very well may be a rapidly changing set of circumstances. Are you ever imagining doing some kind of a comparative aspect to this project or is it really going to be so solo on Kansas?

Speaker4: [00:51:08] Yeah. So I think you're right in that those those resonances are so striking that they're really a part of a global or a planetary set of stories. And, you know, as the aquifer book kind of creeps in its own way and it it really emphasizes the granular and the intimate registers of these kinds of depletion dilemmas. The goal or the eventual aspiration. And by the way, I hate it when people always are talking about three or four books down the line of what they're going to do. But in this particular case, I think it is amenable to a kind of comparative study in the future, but really also with the Arctic, which is another kind of project that I'm that I'm setting up. And so eventually, after the Kansas book, after an Arctic project, the idea would be to come back and do a book or some other kind of textual thing that reflected on the principles and the logics that that link all three of these kind of hemispheric zones in a way that may be applicable to other places like the Great Barrier Reef or these other iconic kind of sites.

Speaker2: [00:52:24] Well, Lucas, I'm

Speaker3: [00:52:25] Glad you brought up the Arctic because that was my final question for you is to talk about this the Northern Future's working group, which looks like it's located in Alaska, but maybe it's beyond that as folks who've been doing some work in the Arctic over the last couple of years. I think we'd both be curious to hear what it is you're up to with collaboration in these Arctic contexts, and especially as it has to do with the environment and energy and well-being too, I guess is in the mix.

Speaker4: [00:52:52] Yeah, we just had a wonderful opportunity to set up the Arctic Futures Working Group in collaboration with my my friend and collaborator David Bond and anthropologist Stacey Rasmus, who's based at the Center for Alaska Native Health Research in University of Alaska Fairbanks and seven partner communities. And so the Arctic Futures Working Group is really it's just beginning, it's just getting off the ground. We had our inaugural meeting a month ago in Fairbanks, and we just have a really fantastic set of leaders and experts and advocates who are coming together and sharing reflections on what it's like to inhabit the frontlines of climate change and oil extraction. And then what kind of bigger conclusions or reflections can be drawn for social science. And this again, these sorts of narrative modes of understanding these these resource frontiers right now. So I'm just always struck by what can be seen from the Arctic and the way that the planetary seems to be condensed and distilled there, too.

Speaker3: [00:53:58] Yeah, really? Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:53:59] Nicely put. Yeah. The processes that are happening there are truly, truly global and their implications and often pretty invisible from from down in the

Speaker2: [00:54:08] Latitudes, lower lats. The lower

Speaker1: [00:54:10] Laughs. Yeah. So, so, Lucas, before we sign off, is there, is there anything we missed about projects you're working on right now that you want to, you want to speak to or anything you want to learn? People that might be on its way out soon, articles, books, films, anything like that.

Speaker4: [00:54:25] No, I think that's I think we've covered a lot

Speaker2: [00:54:27] Of it comes a lot.

Speaker4: [00:54:28] Yeah, I really appreciate it. And you know, it's a great opportunity to reflect on it. I hope to hear what you guys are doing also sometimes so.

Speaker1: [00:54:35] Yes, well, you can. Every week, you can hear various

Speaker2: [00:54:40] Ranting and raving

Speaker1: [00:54:41] Miscellaneous reflections from the era of our everyday lives. I mean, I'm not sure that's the same. If you will hear, you will hear about like our problematic dog and you'll hear about things like that that may not be what you had in mind.

Speaker2: [00:54:53] So it's pretty banal, but some of it's like downright brilliant. Everyone, every once in a while,

Speaker4: [00:54:59] A

Speaker1: [00:54:59] Nice, pure platinum banality. Lucas, it was. It was a lot of fun to talk. Thanks so much for for taking the time and for going back some time in terms of your own work and reflecting on early projects, as well as giving us a glimpse of what's to come. It's all very exciting work.

Speaker2: [00:55:16] Yeah, super cool.

Speaker4: [00:55:17] Appreciate it.