coe023_mol.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:27] Welcome back. Cultures of energy listeners,

Speaker2: [00:00:30] I was just overtaken by my co-host. I was about to introduce it and such is the well,

Speaker3: [00:00:37] You got it. I paused for a sec. I said, what waiting for you to jump in and you didn't.

Speaker2: [00:00:42] Now I've got to edit that out. I got into the whole thing out. Folks, if you hear a little bit of ambient noise, it's because these are the sweet sounds of a Berlin, Germany summer. We are sitting on a pretty little porch in the fading late afternoon light. The sounds of Kreuzberg around us that includes birds and leaves and wind and sunlight. If it made a sound and

Speaker1: [00:01:09] A little kanders down the street, I hear lots

Speaker2: [00:01:12] Of children's. And anyway, so we are

Speaker1: [00:01:15] The sound of bicycle gears turning on churning.

Speaker2: [00:01:18] We are a bit in transit, but we have a super exciting episode this week. We had a conversation with the University of Amsterdam based ethnographer anthropologist and philosopher Anne-Marie Mol, who we were very lucky to cross paths with, and Durham, England earlier this week and to have a really wonderful conversation.

Speaker1: [00:01:42] Yeah, I'd say you've been a riveting conversation. I was riveted and I think that I will not and perhaps listeners will not ever see the eating body quite the same again. It gives you a new perspective on that, that end of consumption and many of the ends of consumption and the metabolic transformations that happen, a lot of energetic materials in there. I don't want to give away the plot line here, but there's there's a lot of good, juicy stuff to be heard.

Speaker2: [00:02:11] But basically what you're saying is if you're into bodies and into eating and into eating bodies, then this is definitely the podcast for you.

Speaker1: [00:02:17] Yeah. And I'm even saying, if you are an eating body, which I suppose we mostly all are, unless some maybe we have some listeners who are air Rotarians, it could be they'd be very thin. But it's possible. So anyway, what I'm saying is that this is like a of pan interest, universal interest and quite philosophically informed and ethnographic informed too. So very good conversation

Speaker2: [00:02:43] Given, given the fact that we ourselves are about to run off to dinner and we plan this, you know, specifically so that we could talk to you about eating bodies right before we became eating bodies. We're going to keep this short, but listen in and we should send a special shout out to all of our European listeners since we are traversing across Europe and of which there of whom there are few.

Speaker3: [00:03:06] I'm sorry. You said we need to no to spittle. But as people shout

Speaker2: [00:03:14] Out a spittle shout out,

Speaker3: [00:03:16] We just fast pass subway that was spittle balled or spittle marked spittle knocked.

Speaker2: [00:03:22] A spittle shout out is when you want to shout somebody out, but you might have a little bit too much liquid in your mouth at the time. And so or you're

Speaker1: [00:03:30] Missing your front teeth, you

Speaker2: [00:03:32] Just it's like a spittle Alizee, you know, just a little bit of spit you got on

Speaker1: [00:03:35] Someone. Or if you're learning German.

Speaker3: [00:03:37] All right.

Speaker2: [00:03:38] Ok, crazy people. We we we're going to leave it at that.

Speaker3: [00:03:43] Yeah. Peace out.

Speaker2: [00:03:44] Peace out, Berlin.

Speaker1: [00:04:05] Emory Mall. Am I pronouncing your surname correctly?

Speaker3: [00:04:09] Just fine. Good. Close.

Speaker1: [00:04:12] We're so glad to have you here and really glad that you could make the time out of your busy schedule and your writing and meeting and everything you're doing to to be able to meet with us here in Lovely Durham, England. It is. It's actually a cool yet slightly warm, wonderful day out there, so it's a surprisingly summery day out here in northern England. Yes. So we're glad to have you here. I wanted to begin by asking you a question about some work that you were highlighting last year, which you were calling nature's intention, which is a wonderful kind of double entendre, right? Because it's nature's intention. Three words, but it's also the intention of nature.

Speaker3: [00:04:52] Right? I didn't even think, Oh, really?

Speaker1: [00:04:54] Oh, oh, I just realized when I was saying it out loud, I would. It's like really interpreting it. We're being a little discursive academics. So this was a this was a project that was a kind of meeting of great minds where you had these different discussions with people like Bruno Latour or Roger Scruton, Wilhelm Schmid and then yourself talking about nature for people, people in nature frameworks and how that gets operationalized. The changing role of nature and how it relates to themes like sustainable food and healthy cities and renewable energy. So those are the kind of broad frameworks. But I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about nature's intention and what your proposal was in that context?

Speaker4: [00:05:43] Yeah, I'll try. I'll do my best to put that shortly. What I tried to bring in is that there is no such thing as one nature that is always already there before we know it and before as humans, we engage with it. Which is not to say that nature only is what we know about it, but it merges in various ways as humans interact with it. And so nature. I had done work earlier on bodies where I had claimed that bodies. There is no one body, but that in relation to different medical technologies, a different body emerges. That's my long time ago. Book the body multiple and in a way, I did a sort of similar trick, but in a light version with nature by saying that there are different versions of nature. So, and one of the most important tensions, so different versions are in tension with each other. And if you reason along one of along with one of these versions or with the other, you dream up very different ways of handling nature. Or I mean, nature is a grandiose word, of course, with all kind of other problems, but good. So one of the tensions that I pointed out is that in many discussions where people dream up when they talk about nature and also in a lot of research into it, nature appears to be as a set of, let's say, object. There's a tree, there is a rabbit, there is a meadow. That's pretty much in British nature.

Speaker3: [00:07:11] Maybe that sounds really good about us sheep.

Speaker4: [00:07:16] But then I mean, about the sheep you can question, and are they nature or are they they? They live with humans and they have co domesticated humans for so long that that you can but are not so much interested in these boundary questions when someone is in nature or not. But to contrast that type of nature with of the objects, with nature as processes and what you see if you dream up nature as processes is you see the seed turning into a tree and you see the meadow changing from a matter with flowers to without flowers, or you see the sheep giving birth and dying and and all that kind of thing. So. And and you see them eating each other, huh? And that is my the relevance of my entrance into these issues is that if you see nature's process, you see not just one generation after the other, the genetic type of nature, but you see the metabolic type of nature, the sheep eating the grass and the sheep feeding your tree. Mm-hmm. And you see this this whole timely aspect of nature that I think deserves to be foregrounded. So one of the reasons I bring up this version is not just to be philosophically clever, hahaha. The reference to do to do a multiple, but but it's really to to highlight that oftentimes in Western tradition, the sort of more what you would call a medicine anatomical. The spatial objects are sort of foregrounded and attended to more than the timely objects within. So it would be physiology and in this case, ecology and ecology is, in a way, a far more processional process. Type of. Of way of engaging with nature than landscape painting or with dreaming up objects in nature. So that was my argument

Speaker1: [00:09:13] There and I could see. I mean, we're all familiar with the kind of conceit of Western medicine that you know, you're treating the injury or the lesion or the problematic wrist or whatever the object is that the physician becomes focused on. And of course, there are versions of Western medicine that think in more systemic processes of the entire body. But what you're saying is my point. Yeah, it's even beyond that. It's it's even more interlinked.

Speaker4: [00:09:41] Well, it's not even I. It's hard to say it as well. My point is not between being reductionist and being holistic. My question is how to reduce which reduction to make. So if you.

Speaker3: [00:09:56] Uh.

Speaker4: [00:09:58] If you make a reduction, it actually I mean, this is. Other people have thought this before me, but there was a Barbara Smith who wrote in the early 80s, I mean, so it is a long thought about different ways minor lungs were dealt with in the Virginia mine. Reaching and cheaper without really well is how you can look at it and atomically. And you see black lungs within. You can see white shadows on an X-ray image, or you can deal with it physiologically and then you have two options. One is to make people breathe, and that doesn't overlap what you get from that with what you see on the image and the other is to ask people to walk a staircase. Now these are all three reductions, but in terms of the daily lives of people, walking a staircase might be more relevant than what you see on the X-ray picture. Mm hmm. So, so it's not reductionism and holism. It is which kind of reduction has which kind of effects for for daily life practices? Mm hmm. So that's the the argument there.

Speaker1: [00:10:59] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. It's kind of the consequential, the consequential.

Speaker4: [00:11:03] It's taking knowledge, not as a picture, but as a technique. Mm hmm. And and you can have that if you take to these natures, you have that again, if you take these knowledge is not as two ways of seeing nature, but it's two ways of dealing with nature both handling nature. Then that makes a lot of a difference. And that's in a way the crucial difference that science studies one or one or most of the kind of science studies I grew up in. Yeah, and it's from taking science is not as referential, but as engagements.

Speaker1: [00:11:37] Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Speaker4: [00:11:37] As ways of dealing with the world. And then the question is not which picture is right, but or which picture is true rather, but which engagement is more worthwhile than the other?

Speaker3: [00:11:50] Mm hmm.

Speaker1: [00:11:52] I wanted to go back to something that you mentioned earlier, too, about sort of how we're seeing right? And so you brought up the example of the seed that's transforming into the tree, right? And immediately I start living that with notions and an actualities of technology. Mm hmm. Right. Because I can see that in in my mind's eye, but I can only see it because I've seen time lapse photography of the process. And so I'm wondering how, you know, how are we either constrained or enabled as human beings to be able to see different forms of reduction within nature? I mean, do we require technology to be able to do that? How does our our human capabilities to our eyes or nose or in our senses?

Speaker4: [00:12:37] It's I would treat that at no graphically and not in terms of humans, but in terms of different humans. Mm hmm. And you and I might know the seat more from these time frames, right? But I guess if you go out here in the fields in northern England and talk with the farmers, they have very different stories about the relation between seeds and plants. So they may remember if they're old enough, they may remember that as a as a young boy, they planted that tree with their grandfather or as a young girl. They had a their mother gave them a little plot there to grow their own letters and and how they learned with smaller plants. I mean, it's quite magic. If you put a little seed of a sunflower in the Earth, and a few months later, you have these gigantic sunflowers, so you can also learn time in relation to that kind of practice. So, yeah, but that's technology, too. It's just low key technology. It's agricultural technologies. We don't necessarily experience that as technology. So my interest is not in what humans do. But listen, if you're a young farm girl with sunflower seeds, what kind of relation to the sea do you build and and what kind of technique is that in the absence of? And and then how have scientists build on that and transform that, maybe to make timelines and. And how is photography come in? But all these kind of different technological relations allow you for different ways of doing and seeing time. Mm hmm. So that blows up the human.

Speaker1: [00:14:13] Yeah, that's a wonderful illustration

Speaker4: [00:14:15] That you have a human plus her or his technologies. Sure. And once you take technology seriously, you have no longer have the human. But then you have to question how different people learn to work with different technologies slower or faster. Because it's not necessarily that if you grew up with one technology that that's what you end up using your whole life. People can make amazing transitions between technologies as the global success of the mobile phone has shown. Right? Uh, endless people to say this endless attempt to do technology transfer to all kinds of African settings failed comms in the mobile phone. Everybody has a mobile who can basically afford it. Just a little can work with that technology, so it's quite unpredictable, really, but. Well, that will change people's relation to distance. So it's not how does the human feel about distance? But if suddenly you can phone your cousin in in the market, in the big town while you're in the village and you no longer have to believe the the person who says, oh in the market is only cost five. Whatever it is. Look, currency and you can phone your cousin, he says. No, it's doing 10. Huh? Everything changes. Oh, no, everything. But your relation to distance changes your relation to money changes with that technology.

Speaker3: [00:15:33] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:15:35] So I wanted to ask you and a little bit about what you've what you've written and a collaborative network that you've been working on that's focused on. I guess you could say, eating bodies and how you found eating bodies good to think with. And just before we before we began, you were talking a little bit about in your own thinking, wanting to push past a sort of more neuromuscular understanding of what a body is towards something that's more metabolic, which I thought was really fascinating. I don't know if you'd care to elaborate, OK?

Speaker4: [00:16:08] Yeah, one thing that struck me when I looked at how to say this. Also, an anti-abortion elsewhere, there has been a lot of attention for embodiment, yes, and if I look carefully at these theories of embodiment, what I found is a very peculiar version was not peculiar, very particular, I should say. Is my slippage,

Speaker3: [00:16:28] My spine,

Speaker4: [00:16:30] My English, a very particular version of the body. And I went back to my Aponte and read up on it, and it made sense. It is what in his time was very fashionable and up to date in neurology. Ok, so the neurologist of his time were trying to think, Uh, how if you had a shot want in your brain, how that would affect your home body, or how if you had a shotgun in your leg that could also affect your whole body because you would walk in a different way. So they were pushing that neurologically speaking. The body is not fragments and bits and pieces. It hangs together, but the kind of body they were concerned with had to do with the neurons and with the muscles because their concern was was with soldiers from the First

Speaker3: [00:17:11] World War, I was going to say, yeah, and

Speaker4: [00:17:13] How they could still maybe, uh, be brief and rehabilitated and get to do some job to earn a living, etc. and so on. So it was all about moving and seeing and coordinating. Now, when he did his his stuff, this was highly up to date and it was fascinating. And it's good and I have no criticism, but it's just it's also located to that context. And I thought, Well, if I look at other sites and situations and simply if I take inspiration from other medical disciplines that say, if I go to another reductionism. So it's not that neurology is bad, it's a fitting reductionism for treating wounded soldiers. But if I go to other reductionism. What emerges and the one that interested me most was that of eating now eating itself is very many things. I had a chance to work with a wonderful team of of good, energetic young people on eating. And we exploded eating, of course, because everybody went into another direction and and we each time had fun saying, Oh no, no, no, it's not just it. But, but by and large, if if you then sort of zoom in on the difference between neuromuscular and and metabolic, what you see with eating is that it's all the time not about coordination, but about transformation, or it's it's not about getting your movements right, but ingesting and excreting. And that gives a very different relation to a different way of understanding the human as being in the world, because the moving human has to look around to coordinate and to walk well and to not fall.

Speaker4: [00:18:49] And that's among the bodily task. But an eating body in just bits and pieces out of the surroundings. So that's about selecting Do I eat the apple, but I don't eat the brunch. And I know that because not because of me. It's also it completely it merely the individual choices, because my mother taught me to eat the apple and not the brand. Or so it comes in the whole way you learn to eat what you eat, etc. and so on. And in excreting you also. Well, the apple transforms me. I transform the apple. My experiments transform the surroundings. So you have this whole way in which human bodies are sort of no longer closed off and walking through, but interacting with and with their surroundings and transforming it. And that is both interesting and relevant, I think, in and of itself. Is a social fact. But I also think it's really interesting, theoretically and as the kind of as a model and metaphor to think with about all kinds of other concerns and topics that we don't. And of course, this is done without eating by other people. I mean, this is a way of thinking that emerges in in other people's work as well in other ways. But to think it through eating gives me really substantive metaphor, so to speak.

Speaker2: [00:20:13] Do you think, I mean, to go back to what you said before that that, you know, with with the the the northern English farmer, it kind of also depends what what sorts of bodies we're talking about, right? So that, you know, one thing that's really striking is the conceptualization of the metabolic body, at least in the global north. Among a certain class of people in some ways seems very restricted to this issue of sort of calories in a calorie. Management excreta are kept as far away from polite society as possible. So you don't see that that that looping that, that part of the loop at all. Have you found that that that in the way you're thinking about now, metabolic bodies, that has it given you any interesting critical perspectives on the sort of, you know, everyday metabolic of life in the the middle classes of of places like England, the United States and the Netherlands?

Speaker4: [00:21:13] Yeah. Although we don't approach these things through class, but through practices, OK? Because if you approach them through practices, you can see because if you do classes, the question is always who's which class and which? How do you categorize which people uh, and which is good enough for some questions, but for this particular, so sometimes that's relevant for these practices. What we like for these questions, what we like to do is study practices. And then of course, you know that different people enter through these practices in in different ways. But but if you focus on the practices anyway, yes, the calorie way of handling metabolic is obviously just one way of handling metabolic. Even even if my own fieldwork actually is very provincial, it's mostly within, let's say, biking distance from where I live or I travel around a bit. And because I think it I mean, this is a personal hang up. It's really good for anthropology to open up the so-called Western or kind of what we could separately talk about that and also the northwest, because there's one risk is with anthropology going out elsewhere and then say, Yeah, it's different here than in the West, you get a sort of neophyte west.

Speaker4: [00:22:29] Exactly, yes. And uh, and that real fight west is a very thin layer of what's going on. And as I'm currently put it somewhat provocatively, this what it tells this body attended to. That's neuromuscular. If you look at it almost in ancestral ways, it's the Freeman of the Greek city states, and it's not the women in the slate. So if I do emancipatory stuff, it's not in the name of. The name of the women and the slaves is a very different way to do the category, but but the former I mean, the tradition of who were in the Greek city said the women and the slaves have been pushed out of the Western intellectual tradition. So this is a sideline. But if you look at the metabolic, indeed, one way of doing metabolic is through energy, and it's through saying eating is a matter of getting in calories and then spending them right. And that's a late 19th century way of of doing energy that's featured in.

Speaker1: [00:23:27] Mm hmm. It's like an accounting.

Speaker4: [00:23:28] It's an accounting system, and it fits in with thermodynamics of the times and that kind of thing. Interestingly, the early 20th century way of doing food emerged in next to that. Of course, the calories are still hunting us and they're still all there. What emerged next to that is a. Eating is assembling building blocks. And what is so interesting is on every food package. In most countries, actually not just in the north, you have printed the calories and then you have printed protein, fats and and carbohydrates and these are the the calories are physics and the and the nutrients are chemistry. And they are in a way they come with entirely different logics, but they're juxtaposed there next to each other. So thinking about food and energy terms is very different from thinking in building terms and energy. You can quantify in a way in a one dimensional weight, more or less. And with the building blocks, it gets really complicated because already, if you have to, the calorie obsessed people will notice. If you have to translate the proteins into calories, you get all the fats into calories. You get this very difficult translations of how many calories there are in so many proteins, etc. So on which lap in a lab are quite difficult to do, but in a body of even more difficult, because then you get all these stories of how proteins keep you satiated longer than carbs, and that recently emerged as stories around that.

Speaker4: [00:24:59] But so the first but the first tangent to me is another nature intention. The first tension here is that between energy, food and building block food, right? And Hannah Landecker has really beautifully brought out that recently in the in the research, there is this third emerging food. Uh, how to say a way of fantasy about or not fancy is reading the fantasy about food as information and in epigenetics, food being what would trigger bodies to do death that of the other. So that's in a way a third language logic, but also practice of dealing with it. Mm hmm. Now there are many others. Because what, uh, struck me, I did some fieldwork with dietitians. And what struck me there, even in an ordinary, just an ordinary in the Netherlands at the time, dietitians would advise people who had been with a general practitioner and who were troubled by their overweight. In one way or another, they had back pain or knee pain or diabetes and that kind of thing, and they wanted to lose weight for that.

Speaker4: [00:26:04] And the dietician was supposed to help with that. Now she has the energy story. She also has a story that comes from epidemiology, which has to do with which food is healthy and which food is not. And there again, tensions between the epidemiology story are supposed to eat fatty fish in the energy story. You're not supposed to eat fatty fish. So, so already, that's fairly confusing, huh? And then and then there was a third story which is about what what you could call sensing satisfaction. And that is, it's learning to what our friends in Paris, Antonio, ensuring we have charcoal learning to be affected. And that is all these stories about eating, sitting down to eat, not moving your food down, really sending it very well and also vocal who worked with me as a. Further on obesity has explored the latter one. She has worked with all kinds of professionals who who work with people in that way. And they are all really scandalized by the calorie story because they say the worst you can do for yourself is counting calories, because then you cannot feel affected. That blocks your satisfaction. So that's a really interesting tension

Speaker2: [00:27:22] And the whole slow food activism to this idea of reconnecting. That's right. I mean, that's maybe another

Speaker3: [00:27:27] Step, too.

Speaker4: [00:27:27] Yeah. But that resonates with in some ways, yeah. But that's yet another story. It's attending to the food. What do you eat? Because the calories and the protein stories are blind to whatever it is. The calorie, which is often just criticized. But again, I like to make things difficult. For instance, the word protein really helps building vegetarianism. Because if you didn't with otherwise, people could say, but you need meat. But if you say, Ah, but there is enough bean protein in beet, not necessarily in, let's say, in India among Hindus, where vegetarianism has a long tradition. But if you want to push vegetarianism in, let's say, places where it

Speaker3: [00:28:14] Is in Texas, it might be a good idea, right? Yeah, OK. Mm-hmm.

Speaker1: [00:28:20] Yeah, I was thinking, I mean, shared so many wonderful things, including this inside of, you know, the sort of the physics of the calories and the different sort of scientific gazes that get operationalized there. I wanted to go back to a point that that you were making about attentions right and being affected and then connect that to epigenetics because one of the stories that gets told about epigenetics, especially around the question of the pregnant body, as I'm sure you're aware, is that there is fault and blame and intention to be leveled against the pregnant body who is usually a woman. And, you know, so her choices become consequential in the sense that they have these generational effects on it, you know, has has an impact on her reproductive body. So there's there's agency, there's choices being made there when we think about eating and in the cases that you've given, especially the wonderful one of the apple and the branch, right, there's a choice that that's being made in terms of your metabolic decision to eat the apple rather than the branch. I'm wondering if there's any distinction to be made between things that have a kind of agency or intention behind them choosing Apple rather than the branch and those processes metabolic processes like breathing or sleeping or dying that don't have that same sort of quality of what we might call intentionality around it.

Speaker4: [00:29:53] I'll push that something where you wanted. Great. I wouldn't say I have a choice between the Apple and the branch, OK? I think that is nonsense. I don't have a choice between Apple and the branch because that kind of I think really this choice language in this agency, language is doing a lot of harm, and it's much more interesting to think the world in how to say to think the world against the choice language. So rather than spreading agency, I'm trying to rethink moments where people think there is agency and not not to fall back to structure because it's also not structure, but to fall back again, to not to fall back, to try to reinvent these kind of things in terms of care. Mm hmm. And so I wrote this book, The Logic of Care, which on the face of it is about living with diabetes. But actually, it is about the difference between choice logics and care logics and beginning by and they are how to say this in other all kinds of circumstances it is might be wise to get into some choice language, but particularly, for instance, in these food issues. I think it's very good to to try to see if we can do without that and tell the story in other ways. So for instance, if I eat an apple, as I said earlier, my mother told me to eat an apple, so I'm not forced to do it, but it's what you do. So it's part of the ways of engaging with the world that that's what what we do if I go to the market or to the supermarket, I can buy apples. Mm hmm. I can't buy branches. And, uh, uh, actually within walking distance of my house, I there's nowhere I could eat the branch of an apple tree or etc. and so on. So and if you start eating a branch, it's not.

Speaker3: [00:31:45] It's filthy, right? It's not nice. Right?

Speaker1: [00:31:48] So car exhaust on it.

Speaker3: [00:31:50] And while they're fine, even if it's clean, it's nice.

Speaker4: [00:31:54] So and that's not a choice. And it's also not forced because if I wanted, if I bet with you for enough money that I

Speaker3: [00:32:03] Can take a bite of it or I could do

Speaker4: [00:32:06] It. So but I think seeing that kind of issue in terms of choice is really impoverishing us and and it has in a way a lot of theory is still stuck in the emancipating ourselves from feudalism and saying, we don't want to be forced, we want to have choice. Now, in moments where you actually have to liberate yourself of feudalism, that's a good idea. But in all these moments, in all these ways of doing daily life, it's not a good idea. So we need other. Four cabinets and what is nice about the way we try to. Also, again, this is collective work. We try to retell care stories is to tell them as what in technology would call tinkering, to tell them as trying so you can take a little bite. It doesn't work. You tried this. You maybe you eat the apple and you're maybe that doesn't work for you either. It's too hard. You don't eat it. But if you bite an apple and you feel pain because it's too hard, you're old. Your teeth are no longer good. You don't say, I choose not to eat it. Just stop eating it right. It's not. It's not good for you.

Speaker3: [00:33:11] Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Speaker4: [00:33:12] Now, going back to your earlier concern with the pregnant women, I think if what choice does is individualized a problem, it's not an individual problem. Mm hmm. So it's also on the level of individual, let's say, if it would be my niece or my daughter or whatever, or then I might tell them, Hey, do you know what you're doing? Take care of you might interpolate people individually, but as soon as you only talk about it, if as soon as late professionals start to talk about it on the individual level, or if the state talks about an individual, that is scandalous because that's not how the problem is. If if you have an agricultural system with endless amounts of pesticides and you tell people to choose their food, well, well, that's a bit weird.

Speaker1: [00:33:58] Yeah, it's paradoxical and impossible in many ways. Yeah. And I think that, you know, this choice rhetoric has been used against the women and the slaves, right? As as an individual choice, you know, you smoked while you were pregnant, therefore, you should feel ashamed, etc. And so it does get used in really, really wicked sorts of ways. Exactly.

Speaker4: [00:34:19] Yeah, that's one of the reasons that I think it's worthwhile to search for other vocabularies, to talk about dating practices and to get out of this agency structure. And that's also why I'm sad that a lot of the work on attending to materiality has been taken up as yes, materials have agency too. I think that's stupid because it spreads that liberal in the philosophical sense of liberal vocabulary out to, rather than, uh, seeing how materials are indeed embedded in all kinds of processes and do things. But doing is not necessarily having a choice. Mm hmm.

Speaker1: [00:34:58] Mm hmm. Yeah, that's a way of multiplying agency to immaterial things. A material things.

Speaker2: [00:35:05] So do you think? I mean, I'd like to hear you say a bit more about care because this is this is really interesting, and especially because you just sort of oppose that to the logic of liberal philosophy and agency and choice. I mean, do you do you see the ethics of care, the aspiration to care as being part of our general struggle to find a way past the the kind of the at least at some level, the kind of moral collapse of neoliberalism, even if it still is out there and informing our policies and so forth. It seems to me that in a lot of different parts of the world, people are struggling to find a ways towards new political potentialities, new ways of living together. It sounds to me like this might be part of that, too. Do you see it that way or is that is that straining to pull it too much in a different direction? And in other words, the question is, is this is there a political aspect to it? Sort of course, of course.

Speaker3: [00:36:05] Okay, good.

Speaker4: [00:36:09] Yeah, you can set up the care idea both against choice and against as far as I'm concerned, against control. Ok. And these are both that say fantasies while they go together. In many ways, their fantasies of a human who is outside the world and who can choose and control and care is about being inside the world and handling it and dealing with it and tinkering in it. And of course, one of the risks at the moment of care is that the war this term multiplies or spreads all over it and starts to mean too many things. And one of the things that we've tried to do with with Jeanette in England was we've added to the book care and Practice where we've tried to specifically address the issue that in 20th century philosophy care was the opposite of technology and we've tried to think care along with technology and to because this opposition of technology is is naive and not very helpful. And in my case, work on diabetes was really good in pushing that because if you have diabetes type one diabetes and you don't have technology, you die. So it's a bit it's very cheap to say to be against technology in that kind of context in all kinds of other ways, the apple tree that we talked about, that that's technology. So what we tried in that book and with a lot of of the authors who worked in it is to see how we could get technology thought into care and then care can be. Also, John Lowe wrote an article about caring, killing, for instance, how care for animals can at a certain moment involve killing the animals, or this was in a foot and mouth crisis. Or so we tried to get care out of the, uh, the niceness, so to speak. And the excessive warmth. And that care would be just love. No, we try to rethink care as a mode of relating carefully. The careful of care push that that's nice in English or sometimes English has advantages

Speaker3: [00:38:15] You can never, often more

Speaker4: [00:38:17] Carefully is it is a good word. So yeah, and as it can be helpful indeed. Also, I think to think with in its own ecological context where rather than trying to think through control, you think through care. And one of the changes that makes is that control has this linear timeline. You begin here and you think that you know what is going to happen there. It's like close cybernetic systems or other or deterministic causal systems. And you think you can know what is going to happen now. What care helps you to think is that you never know what's going to happen and it's always, you try and it may fail. You try again and it may fail. You try again. So there is it's less hubristic as a model. As far as I'm concerned.

Speaker2: [00:39:01] It's encoded. It's experimental, yes.

Speaker4: [00:39:04] Provisional, yeah. Which of course, resonates with what's being said in a political movement.

Speaker2: [00:39:09] I think so. Yeah, no, it's it's very interesting to me. I guess I had one if can I just follow? This is a this is just something that's been in the back of my mind for a while, and I just would be curious to hear your thoughts about it too. In this kind of brings back the question of the metabolic into it. There's been a lot of discussion about, I guess you could say, political apathy or political cynicism. And I'm not talking about soda for the committed people working in movements. Those people, you know, are not apathetic or disengaged, but this idea that the kind of the masses of society somehow are not engaged in political process. And that's why we have populists like Donald Trump in the United States or here in England, people who are able to appeal to these sentiments of nation in a way that actually seems to be leading back from the the progressive political path, whatever that might be. And you know, I am somebody who studied socialism for a long time and again, this socialism as a technology of the 19th century that maybe saw its heyday in the early 20th century around the same time of World War One. And you know, I think it seemed to me that part of the the the metabolic of socialism at its ascendant was this idea that it was it was working from a it was driven by a certain kind of hunger, a certain kind of desperation and conditions that one of the things that 20th century capitalism did a good job of doing was trying to produce a lot of stuff, a lot of goods, a lot of food, even right.

Speaker2: [00:40:48] We've seen that. So that, you know, there's this idea of a certain type of satiation metabolically speaking that in a way, maybe. Has limited that hunger. I mean, there's a lot of kinds of desperation. Hunger is only one, but but has limited a hunger for political change of the kind that we might like to see if we actually wanted to change society in this direction. And that's speaking in very broad terms. I'm sorry, and I know you would rather, I think, talk about the practices and the differences. But I'm just curious whether you think because you've been looking at issues like obesity, for example, and people often link obesity to apathy politically or otherwise. And I think that that I feel like that link is problematic, and I'm trying to think for a way to recognize the fact that maybe obesity is a certain kind of political pacification, but also that it's not again, a matter of individual fault is the way it's always framed in the United States. These people have made bad choices. Thus they're obese. They need to be disciplined, etc..

Speaker3: [00:41:56] Oops, you say a lot there. Yeah, no, I'm sorry.

Speaker2: [00:41:59] Sorry.

Speaker3: [00:42:00] It's been that's been simmering there for too long.

Speaker4: [00:42:02] I think kind of more or less of if I start at the last bit or kind of demoralization of obesity as passivity of apolitical or whatever fault, I think it's scandalous and I would want to do that. Uh, there are very many reasons and very, very many trajectories through which people may get obese. And uh, this may I mean, this may range indeed from,

Speaker3: [00:42:31] Uh,

Speaker4: [00:42:32] Let's say, uh, all kind of pollutants in the surroundings to sugary drinks, uh, to to, uh, hormonal, uh, shifts to uh. And it's also not the case that once you have acquired weight, that this is necessarily reversible. It may not be. I mean, this is always thought of as something we're reversible that if you have character, you can reverse it, which is medically very doubtful. So, so block on that. Yeah. And I also am not very much inclined to think that the story that put it that there is saturation. I would think that's that that makes people passive or something like that, that seems in 19th century fantasy that that would happen. Uh, and there are all kinds of other misery. And I also, if I look at it, I haven't studied this. But if I just as a citizen, so just look at it from the kind of politics, the populist politics that's going on right now in north western Europe in various types of way. The people concerned are not my political friends, but but there are in all kinds of ways disrespected by and they also are in all kinds of ways, victims of globalization and pushed out of jobs. And they may not hunger for food, but their hunger for all kinds of other good

Speaker3: [00:43:58] Things in life. Yeah, if

Speaker4: [00:43:59] We use the metaphor for hunger there. So they feel,

Speaker3: [00:44:04] Uh,

Speaker4: [00:44:05] For all kinds of reasons, this acknowledged or they feel marginalized.

Speaker3: [00:44:09] And uh,

Speaker4: [00:44:12] And you can tell all kinds of different stories about that. But I think this. How does it is there is this Protestant gluttony

Speaker3: [00:44:25] And then

Speaker4: [00:44:26] Satisfaction story in the background of what you say and I revolt against that story?

Speaker2: [00:44:33] No, no, I agree with you. That's kind of what I was trying to get to. You put it very elegantly. I mean, my sense is that there's a there's a certain story on the left that is very moralizing about the classes of people who, as you point out, are hungering and are dispossessed by globalization, an idea that they're kind of frankly fat, lazy, disengaged and actually. Yeah. And on the left, we have that too is what I'm saying. It may

Speaker3: [00:44:58] Be a

Speaker4: [00:44:59] North American problem. I mean, we have all kinds of

Speaker3: [00:45:01] Problems on the left, you know, shining. But but but

Speaker4: [00:45:07] Actually, that was not so much.

Speaker3: [00:45:09] Okay. Ok. Uh, the no. Yeah. But so do something about it, I would say. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll get on that. Yeah, we can.

Speaker1: [00:45:19] We can start in Texas. As I know you're aware, there's been a lot of conversation in anthropology and in other related, humanistic and social sciences that have focused on ontology as a kind of an approach and an optic. So going all the way back to the kind of high agrarian way of of considering being as such or such as it is to more recent conversations about worldin and humans of various kinds occupying literally different kinds of worlds in which they can imagine and see different processes. So again, going back to the example of the farm girl or or the, you know, the academic who sees the time lapse photography versus the, you know, the blooming apple tree. I wanted to get your take on the value of this kind of analysis, whether a kind of ontological orientation towards the questions that you're asking is useful. And the reason I'd like to hear your thoughts on it is because many people in our discipline associate you as one of one of the people who very early on kind of took up these questions very much ahead of your time. And so I just wanted to hear your reflections on what Ontology is doing for us now if it's doing anything.

Speaker4: [00:46:41] And yeah, from anthropology may have seen that I was ahead of my time, but in science studies, I had a bunch of friends. And that was again, collective work. I also don't think in academics are individuals and make good choices. I think we think collectively so. For instance, Charisse Thomson was writing about ontological choreography at the same time that I was trying to push, uh, the ontology ontological politics. Yes. And Steve Walker had even earlier written about ontological gerrymandering. So it was a rant in in my circles, but to come back to the substance of the question. One of the reasons at the time, I mean, this was when was it the the 90s when that we took up this? This ontology term was in a way to provoke the philosophers we were in sane studies in in debate with the philosophers about the sciences. And the classic philosophical idea was that was to make a split between ontology and epistemology. And Ontology was the real, really real, which in post country and philosophy the sciences could never get because there was always epistemology, there was always this whole language between them and the world. And we were challenging that as a group in science studies, not by saying that we could reach the world, but by saying that in the techniques and in the handling of the world, versions of it arose. And we call that ontologies in the plural, which was nonsense on philosophical terms to provoke the philosophers and to provoke this whole separation.

Speaker4: [00:48:30] So that was why we did that at the time. And so we did ontology in the plural. That was unheard of. But what we also did and that's relevant to the current debate is not close them off against each other. And one of the concerns that I have with with what is emerging now is that you get this closed off ontology. Actually, the relevant person here to talk about is Helen Farren. She wrote about science and African logic, and she what she did is say. It's telling a story of how she came in, she was in Nigeria and Yoruba country to teach mathematics. And first she thought they don't do mathematics well, and then she understood that there was another Yoruba system of doing mathematics. So for a while, she was a cultural relativism, and then she thought with that and closes people in different worlds. In this it so it it locks them up. So then she made the shift to practices, the kind of practice shift that I talked about earlier, and that allows you to say, but English counting is one way of practicing. Yoruba is another way of practicing in the market. You can combine them. If you're if you have both education, so she was also interested in people who have learned to count in both ways. Now the same in my own work on in the hospital anatomist deal with bodies in spatial terms, physiologists deal with bodies in terms of processes and times. But in

Speaker3: [00:49:57] In

Speaker4: [00:49:58] The moment patients are, let's say, processed through the hospital. They may very well be moved from one to the other, dealt with in one way and in the other. So you have this many ontologies, but the question that for me was actually the interesting question was not just that there are many, but how they relate. And let's see. Um. So having many is indeed you have pathology here. You have the clinic that you have an anatomy here you have physiology that they all come with different ways of knowing and different ways of practicing. But somehow in Western medicine, they're there. Hang together, sometimes by being combined, sometimes by king, carefully kept apart so that you don't have a clash, sometimes by being even included because you need the one to do the other. And so it sounds a bit abstract, but you can. You can actually only do that through particular cases and really get that. So what happens now when this? I think the way the ontology world emerged in anthropology was for quite different reasons. Actually, it has a very different story, and it has a story with how best to respect and make space for otherness. And then there is a certain. Uh, well, actually, I think maybe this gets too long, but I think there are two versions of Ontology in in anthropology that are relevant now. One is this how to best make respect for others and then it's interesting to again, if you go back to this epistemology ontology difference of Western philosophy, that's in a way how we view the Castro does it to say, OK, we need to get over that division. So far, anthropology by and large said, OK, the other is notable differently. Now we want to push that. No, no, no.

Speaker4: [00:51:44] They do the world differently. Their ontology is different. So in a way that resembles what we did in science studies because it's pushing the others. But it's not then as clear what that means for the relation, which also depends on where you are globally. Whether that's relevant, let's say the politics there is about Brazil and the way Iranians are treated there. So it's not necessarily transportable, but that's another story. What I wanted to say again, is that another other way I see Ontology emerging in anthropology is among people who think who for very good reasons, want to push the relevance of trees, birds, jaguars, sort of who want to push the relevance of what we used to call the natural world. And and then they say, Oh, but we also have to attend to ontology. And then they they sort of align with object oriented ontologies in philosophy or with new materialism and the risk that I see there as a science studies person or somebody who comes through that history, is that the risk to to be very naive about what that material reality is and to believe the latest issue of science or nature or or whatever the biologists have turned up recently. And just go with that and forget that in science studies, we have spent such a long time and so much energy from Donna Harrower premature and all the rest of it to to attend, to carefully how biologists do versions of reality. But so I of course, agree with the push to attend to the material, to flesh and blood and trees and apples. But the question how we do that is is a challenging one. So in that sense. There are three that, say three traditions of dealing with this ontology word. Mm hmm.

Speaker1: [00:53:31] Mm hmm. And we're seeing some confluences of all of those coming together now and some arguments about whether or not they can live together or not.

Speaker4: [00:53:39] Well, from my perspective, of course, they do live together because I have to say that this is an atmospheric effect. The question is how they relate and when, what tensions they have and when these tensions are productive and when these tensions are getting fights that are unproductive or when they're just attracting too much attention. While all kind of other things are going on that are equally relevant without this ontology, because this there is a, I think in academia also a risk with sort of celebrating dirty words and then making them too important. I'm very much inclined at the moment to do my own work without the word ontology and see if I can bypass it. If a word gets too fashionable, it might be good to just let go of it.

Speaker1: [00:54:24] Right, right, right. Time to exercise

Speaker2: [00:54:26] It. There's a weird tendency, I think in part, it's because we're not particularly good. Even as anthropologists and students of cultures of expertise, let's say we're not very good at recognizing our own ethnographic facts. Sometimes we're not as good at being able to do a kind of auto ethnography of what's happening in our epistemic communities. Rather, we tend to polarize and factionalized around whether this term is good or bad. And what's more interesting is the fact that everyone's talking about ontology now. What's what's up with that? I mean, that, to me, is the interesting thing, and I do think that is, you know, in my view, something that has a kind of an ecological dimension to it, to the fact that we're attending so much more to the non-human world has something to do with the moment we're living in as human beings.

Speaker3: [00:55:12] Sure. Of course,

Speaker4: [00:55:14] The fact that we attend a lot to do non-human world, it's hard to say that it's, uh, it's as well. I mean, we have to it's the bigger crisis that's looming. So or one of the bigger crises, that's new. So of course, I mean, but in that sense, you can make these grandiose statements. You could say that in the 20th century, at least in Western Europe, that it's very obvious the 20th century has been thinking about war and it was about wars that killed millions of people. And then it was about class being thought through in terms of war metaphors. And it and in all kinds of ways, well, if if we do that ground of grandiosity, then you could see that the start of the twenty first century is about ecology and care. Well, that's one of the responses. It's about destruction, rather.

Speaker2: [00:56:04] So but but the hopefully an antidote to destruction or a different path would be one of care or one of, you know, a smaller scale, more humbler kinds of responses rather than, you know, a new control plan.

Speaker4: [00:56:18] Yes. Well, that that is pretty obvious.

Speaker2: [00:56:21] Yeah. Yeah. Not everyone, but not. I'm glad you're I'm glad you're you're speaking up for for for the smaller scale, right?

Speaker1: [00:56:29] Because the control plan is out there, too. Oh yeah, they're out there. Geoengineering being a very obvious example. Yeah.

Speaker4: [00:56:36] Well, that's the next disaster then. Huh? Mm hmm. How to say this in that sense, learning. I mean, learning is a good way overall. But learning from which technologies have gone wrong and how technologies go wrong might be very good for an obligatory teaching for engineers if they do control fantasies. Because as people who have studied disasters have amply shown, if there is a technology, it can go wrong. So that's fine. What that means is that you design control technology in such a way that it doesn't matter so much if they go wrong. Mm hmm. So what you design the technology for is not success, but failure.

Speaker3: [00:57:15] Mm hmm. Right.

Speaker4: [00:57:16] And not that you want the failure, but if you do it well, the failure is not that bad. So you have all kind of counter those against the failure. And as long as you design a technology without without thinking through what happens if it fails, that's bad technology design. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Speaker1: [00:57:32] The least bad failure is the objective. In some ways, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker4: [00:57:36] I mean, technology has always failed, but you see that also in ways. Technological systems that are all kind of inbuilt systems in the technology as to what happens when it fails. So that, let's say, in an old windmill, it decouples if it starts to the wind blows too hard or that kind of thing, that's how you build the technology.

Speaker1: [00:57:57] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. And it's iterative over time. Can I ask one final question and it's going back to the body multiple in that book. You have a very innovative and different interesting structure in the way that you use exposition in the book. And so I'll just give a very quick picture of it. As a reader, you come to to the pages throughout the book and in the top half of the pages, we have what I'll call the ethnographic story, the kind of narrative. As you're seeing these different interpretations of of a body, you know, going through medical processes and then on the bottom half of the pages as we go through, there's what I'll call kind of an academic story where you're sort of situating the case and your thinking and your philosophy and your theorizing within the debates and questions of the time. And, you know, making the references and doing that kind of academic work and you made a decision to

Speaker3: [00:58:53] To make a decision. Are you going to get in trouble if I did the decision? Ok, you already shifted from choice to decision decision this better. But no, and then we're gone.

Speaker1: [00:59:03] So, OK. So I mean, on a kind of banal level, I'm curious how how that was taken when you delivered this this baby to the press, but in a more political register, it made me think about the different kinds of voices and narratives that that we use as academics if we want to call ourselves that right. So is there a way in which telling the narrative that seismographic narrative is can be equated with the kind of popular narratives that we hear about environmental destruction, about the need to to address the Anthropocene? And is there a way in which academic life or the work of scientists or the work of philosophers or anthropologists gets lost in the mix? Gets gets put in the bottom half of the page and there's a failure to kind of bring those two together? Is that is that one of the hurdles that we're facing?

Speaker4: [01:00:01] That's a difficult one, just to go back to the bottom. Yeah, I would disagree with the top half of that book being ethnographic because it's theorized all the way through. So the ethnography there is the excuse to tell the theoretical story. In that sense, it's the ethnography of a philosopher, I must admit. Yeah, because I had a I had an idea and I went to look for the material. I mean, and the idea came not out of nothing. I mean, I had been studying health care for 20 years. So then I wanted a case by which to make clear this multiplicity. And of course, the case drew me in because it made me tell the story in a different way than if I had had another case. But it's the top half, is the book. Mm-hmm. Hmm. But then I had that, and then it was clear that I couldn't get that published. I wouldn't get it because there was no relation to the literature. Right? So I actually John Locke, who was helping me with it. Read it, read it for me. And he said, So how are you going to relate to the literature? I said, I don't know. And then talking about it, we decided that the best thing to do if you don't know is to face the problem. So that's why the bottom half is about the question how to relate to the literature. So it's not about the literature, it's also about that, but it's about the literature. While it is about the question how to do that? So in that sense, it's slightly different. Ok, so it's not. And in that sense, I also don't think that, uh, that there's that the difference that you have popular stories and then science gets or academic stuff gets squeezed to the bottom.

Speaker4: [01:01:35] Mm hmm. Uh, in actually, when I wrote that bottom half, I also thought when I was a student, I was often bothered by the fact that books were either inaccessible because they were written as if you knew the literature or they were for dummies and they were all the time didactic and explaining everything. So I tried to write that half so that every clever person with some education but could follow it, but that it would be an introduction, but not not so hard to say that not for dummies that you could, that you could enter the book through different levels of reading. But that's another story. But it's it's not another story. I think that's important for ethnography and for academics if we want to spread and be heard. We have to find voices that are not just that are not too parochial and that right in story that write in ways that are not for the uninitiated, but that are. But at the same time are not just popular, that there are all kinds of ways of mixing these genres and not necessarily always in the same book. You can also do a book and two popular articles or. But but and it's a bit a shame in that sense that a lot of journalists are very, very strict on one or two formats that they allow for. And it's great. I think that we this face that there was an 80s the thought that we should experiment with with formats. I still cherish that. I think we should experiment with it. Can I?

Speaker3: [01:03:10] Yeah. Yes, please. Yeah.

Speaker4: [01:03:11] What we did at some point while I was studying or while with the team we were doing is eating is the the article. Maybe my favorite of that period is that we sat down with four finger eating experts and three finger. Eating novices and we ate with our hands and all seven of us, we were all antibodies, we wrote articles about the evening, so it was an ethnographic experiment. So we joked with what an experiment is. And so we all wrote field notes. And then we passed them together and I made a sort of coherent narrative and everybody commented, and we think it. So it's an article with seven authors and it's has we and it has I it both for different parts of the text. The eye is when it's, let's say, quotes from somebody that never fails, but you never know quite who is what, because it doesn't matter. So that was fun to do because it also, of course, because we like this whole idea of challenging the proper eating, because in people like Elias have taken eating with utensils as a symbol of civilization so that in that sense, it was another provocation. So this slightly playful way of doing things I think helps, especially in dire times, to shake up what academia can be a bit. Yeah. And by the way, Duke University press, when they saw the book in two halves, they were delighted and I actually didn't see it in two halves. I must say I gave it a must to text

Speaker3: [01:04:43] And the

Speaker4: [01:04:46] The designer invented it in this way, and she proposed it to me in this way and I was deeply moved because she got it. Yeah. And I thought she understands this book and and I was. I think it's a wonderful job she did. I was deeply grateful.

Speaker1: [01:05:00] Yeah, that's neat. I didn't realize that. So but I have to ask, what did you eat and how in the expertise of finger eating, what did you eat and how did you drink the wine?

Speaker4: [01:05:10] We didn't drink wine.

Speaker3: [01:05:13] I think if I

Speaker4: [01:05:14] Remember, maybe I don't drink wine, so I don't remember. But we. But you would dirty the glasses. But anyway, we ate,

Speaker3: [01:05:21] Uh,

Speaker4: [01:05:22] Kishori and rice and some aubergine dish of which I don't remember. We ate all kind of vegetarian dishes. Nice. Yeah.

Speaker1: [01:05:31] Well, I hear stomachs rumbling. Happy.

Speaker3: [01:05:34] I know.

Speaker1: [01:05:34] Thank you. Marie, first, thank you so much. This was a really wonderful conversation, and I'm glad that we got to have it here. Due to the generosity of Catherine Alexander, shout out to Catherine, who has a beautiful home here that has very well insulated for sound, and it really feels like quite the salon. Yeah, it's so wonderful.

Speaker4: [01:05:52] Well, thank you for having me. Yeah, I hope to continue to converse.

Speaker2: [01:05:57] Oh yes, absolutely. Come back again.