coe046_west-and-salyer.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Hello, everyone. We're so we're so, so happy to have you around, and we've got a really, really good podcast for you today. We got. Well, I'm going to let Dominic Boyer do the introductions. We're happy. We're happy. We're glad. Yes. Should I do the I guess we don't have to do the shout out to sense anymore, although sometimes we do.

Speaker2: [00:00:45] Periodically, it's nice to

Speaker1: [00:00:47] Say thanks to the Center for the For Energy for the Study Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences. That's a

Speaker2: [00:00:55] Sad performance.

Speaker1: [00:00:55] I have many acronyms that I have. I also have to say, you know, the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality and the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences. I think I. When I'm rolling, I think it's OK, you do

Speaker2: [00:01:10] Pretty good that last time, so we'll go we'll go without a lot of work sense cultures of energy, dawg, come and find us on the web and a listen to our podcast, but you are already so good for you. We have today a conversation to share a really probably our first. Yes, our first conversation since the presidential election. So. Oh, that's right. And it's with a Page West and J.C. Salyer of Barnard. And we get deep down into their research on Papua New Guinea.

Speaker1: [00:01:42] That's PNG,

Speaker2: [00:01:43] Png. And not only have they done a long history of really important anthropological work there, but also they've got a really fascinating new project on the diversion of asylum seekers right from Australia just kind of decided that boat boat borne asylum seekers should just be sent essentially to another country.

Speaker1: [00:02:06] Yeah, just deposited there. They're just going to offshore there, their immigration and asylum folks to

Speaker2: [00:02:11] To Papua New Guinea. If you can afford a plane ticket, you can get processed in Australia. If you come by boat, which means you're probably a poor person from the Middle East, you're going to get deposited on a place that even folks from the PNG call a hellhole. So Manus Island. So that's a fascinating and tragic case, but very, you know, much something that you know, connects to the thematics of climate refugee ism, among other kinds of refugees, some that we've been talking about.

Speaker1: [00:02:37] Well, you know, what else is interesting is that our student, Helena Izaguirre, yes, originally was going to do work on those those islands and that those it's not really a deportation because people are never allowed to lounge. No, that's right. But they're immediately sent, you know, for, oh shit.

Speaker2: [00:02:54] So in her excitement, Simone knocked over her glass of coffee.

Speaker1: [00:02:57] Well, OK. Yeah, anyway. All right. Well, we've said enough about that. You can hear that on the podcast because that's interesting stuff and important. But meanwhile, we've been here in Houston talking about other deportation and immigration issues with with DACA.

Speaker2: [00:03:14] Yeah, we've been we've been talking about our effort to to make rice a sanctuary campus, but of course, it's unclear exactly what that means. And so still, the conversation goes on and we've been talking around the household here around the homestead about whether or not what we're seeing with this Trumpist movement is something new, genuinely or something. That's kind of a repeat reiteration of things we've seen before, perhaps in the nineteen eighties.

Speaker1: [00:03:44] Well, so can I go back? Can I say one more final thing about the sanctuary campus? Because I think it's important because we have been talking about that terminology, right? And whether that's important. And I think it is important in the history of United States in terms of, you know, protecting freed slaves or runaway enslaved people. And then also in terms of the Latin American origins of many folks who are protected through DACA and a liberation theology movements. So anyhow, I think that there are other people out there having the conversation about whether to, you know, how to do a sanctuary campus and whether it should be called sanctuary or whether to give it another term.

Speaker2: [00:04:22] But I mean, the point is it's mostly discursive because there is even the places that are declaring themselves sanctuary. Campuses are not saying we are going to violate federal law. Well, no, they always stop short and they say, basically, they say, we're going to resist, we're going to make it. We're not going to share information, we're not going to cooperate. We're going to make it as difficult as possible for some Trump, you know, regime initiative to come to deport.

Speaker1: [00:04:44] Right. We're not going to hand over refugees, right? And the U.S. initiative is actually kind of amazing. And it's the University of California University. Yeah, University of California, the UC system and then also the CSU, the California State University System and the California community colleges all came together and came up with a a shared statement. So that's yeah, that's impressive. That is a lot of entities to go.

Speaker2: [00:05:09] Janet Napolitano.

Speaker1: [00:05:10] But anyway, we can go. Let's yeah, it is. Yeah, what's it yeah, tragedy and then farce in the terms of the repetition of history, yes,

Speaker2: [00:05:21] That's a good that's a good analogy.

Speaker1: [00:05:22] Well, I don't know, you know, we were talking about whether, you know, whether these times are comparable actually to the nineteen eighties or during the let's just call it Reaganism, Reaganism plus, because then it turned into a bunch of bushes, right? But, you know, were they similar? Yeah. I mean, we can see a lot of parallels. We were just talking about, you know, police violence against African-American men and people. Remember that Rodney King was severely beaten by a group of of cops, and that was documented on video back in the days when there weren't, you know, a lot of videos just roaming around. And so it was really shocking for people. And then when those cops got off and the trial in Simi Valley, there was essentially, you know, there's an uprising or what people some people call a riot in L.A. and it was major. And so you think about that and then you think about all of the African-American men who have been killed by police. I mean, Rodney King didn't die, but all you know, the many dozens who've been killed this year alone,

Speaker2: [00:06:32] Hundreds, thousands,

Speaker1: [00:06:33] Maybe. Yeah, I mean, you know, we hear about some, but you know, I don't even know exactly what the the full death toll is even for this year. So yes, we still have that that racist, violent issue with law enforcement. And yet it seems that there's sort of less shock or less reaction. I mean, Black Lives Matter has been really important. But it seems like it should be more. And so, as you were saying, it's one of the one of the difficult things about this particular moment is that it feels as though we haven't made any quote unquote progress like nothing's changed. In fact, it seems to be the same issues that have

Speaker2: [00:07:12] Actually gotten worse. Yeah, I think that's kind of what a lot of us folks had had duped ourselves into thinking is, Oh, we've made so much progress in the past 30 years. We couldn't possibly get back to the situation where a kind of woefully unprepared media gennych candidate swoops in with a populist message and then actually starts his administration with people who are going to do everything they can to expropriate and dispossess the working class. Which seems to me that's the that's the argument for we're seeing like some kind of Reaganism 2.0, but with a more virulent, nasty racist, misogynist overtones. But I guess all I would say on that last point is just like, you know, the nineteen eighties were pretty racist and misogynist, you know, that was already there. So, yeah, you know, maybe it's not again, even in that instant, all that different.

Speaker1: [00:08:07] Right. I mean, you know. Yeah, it was maybe maybe it wasn't recognized as much like you were saying, it was just sort of part of the discourse in such a deep way that that people didn't even see it as much. But it's it's bolder and it's given voice now in a different way. Yeah, but you know, but the other thing is, is that back then, because we were talking about the culture wars and the culture wars, you know, back in the 80s and early 90s, like the primary objects of contention were, you know, pro-choice, pro-life, the question of abortion. And then, you know, queer rights. Not even quite to the marriage degree, although that was, you know, that was in the mix at that point, too. But it was really just about, you know, anti-discrimination stuff. It was like really basic gay and lesbian rights at that point. And that's what the moral majority was. You know, arguing against was those two points they didn't have, at least that I remember they didn't have, like an overtly racist white supremacist message. They may have. And I'm just, you know, maybe I've just forgotten it, but I don't remember that being part of what their directive was.

Speaker1: [00:09:19] And then now, when you think about what they're, you know, these alt right people who I'm just going to call white supremacists. That is explicitly their message. And you know, they also, in addition, have misogynist messages and anti queer messages and et cetera. So they're they're everything that the moral majority was. And more. And I think worse, deeper and more profoundly. And hateful. That may be and then the other thing about the moral majority, remember, is that they, you know, it sort of stand behind the Bible. I mean, you know, there are real Bible thumpers. And so they had this aegis of believing it. That's what they were carrying out. And I'm not saying that. That's that's right. And I'm sure these these white supremacists also see themselves as Christians and stand behind the Bible in different ways. But they seem to me to be two different kinds of popular movements that are happening during and that have motivated a certain political period. So that would be, I don't know, that's one contrast I would want to make.

Speaker2: [00:10:24] Yeah, and there are definitely others. I mean, you know, one thing that's strikingly different between the 80s and now is that you've got, you know, the big drum that that Reagan would beat was the kind of anti-Soviet evil empire from. So now instead of that, we have, you know, anti-ISIS clash of civilizations, you know, Muslims are out to get us enemy within. And I think that that is different, in part because the logic of of demonization is not like this geo power that controls half the world. But it's a religion of of which there are great many representatives and believers within our own country. So you begin to this idea of systematically targeting and maligning and dispossessing people who are citizens. I don't think that that's quite different than the Reaganesque anti-Soviet rhetoric which is on us versus them and all Americans versus all Soviets.

Speaker1: [00:11:17] Yeah, this is yeah, that's right. I mean, to go back to that kind of parallel, you'd have to go back to the McCarthy era when there were reds among us, right? And they had to be rooted out.

Speaker2: [00:11:29] Yeah. And that's why things like this, this thing you people may have noted that circulating through the internet, that this kind of like Professor Watch List or you know this, this web site that's been set up encouraging students to like out professors for leftist tendencies and like, that's totally McCarthyism. And that's really and something we should be incredibly vigilant about and concerned about that. That is kind of being normalized as this idea of kind of the ideological vetting. But of course, you know, that was happening in the 80s too. Like, there was a lot of vetting.

Speaker1: [00:12:00] Of course, there was a lot of what they call blacklisting,

Speaker2: [00:12:02] Blacklisting and a lot of people afraid to speak out for fear of being classified as being communist. And I don't know. It's of course, very dispiriting to see that cycle if you want to believe it is a kind of iteration of something that happened. Another thing that's different, though, is that this kind of like anti-globalist, you know, kind of revanche nationalist position because I feel like what was happening in the 80s was more was more globalist in this idea of like, we have to take over the world and bring American freedom everywhere. And now it's really about, you know, we need to like, focus on ourselves and not so much worry about that globally. This this world that is going to remain completely globally interconnected. Sorry. Right? You know,

Speaker1: [00:12:45] It's yeah, but it is. It's yeah, it's kind of a retrograde sort of isolationist position.

Speaker2: [00:12:52] But can I bring this around to? I had a I had a thought about just climate Staton since that is our nominal topic here. I had this weird thought when I was preparing a lecture to give to my class of of older students like returning students, master's students on neoliberalism. When I was reading that, I was wondering for a second, you know, because we were talking about the prospect of the EPA being gutted and like all of this, you know, terrible stuff that might come down the pipeline and especially the kind of climate denialism as being, you know, one of those litmus tests, those ideological purity tests that people on the right have to have these days. And I was wondering for a second like what if? What if it wasn't really about denying climate science? But what if it was really at some level about denying the capacity for international collaboration that a real climate action plan would need? So in other words, what if it was more about the threat of something like the Paris Agreement becoming something that could manage international finance? You know what I mean? Like, it's like the first domino to fall. Like if we figure out how to manage climate, maybe we could figure out how to manage the banks right? And in that case, that would be super frightening to the lords of Finance, right?

Speaker1: [00:14:07] No, I think that's that's valid. And that's a kind of shadow discourse that appears in in the denial rhetoric or the rejection rhetoric is that, you know, we are not going to be told what to do by, you know, one hundred and eighty plus other nations, you know, we have our our autonomy and our singularity as a nation state and we refuse to bow to any, anyone, any shared agreement. So that's that's certainly one piece of it is this kind of worry about, you know, not just big government, but massive intergovernmental control over our economic process because that's always what it comes down to, that these emissions, if we control them, it, you know, it will become more expensive and businesses won't make as much on the bottom line. And it always it always revolves back to economic questions and that's always the the point of rejection.

Speaker2: [00:14:57] The other argument is, of course, oil and gas is funneling so much money into these into these political campaigns that they can't do without it. But I just that's something rings slightly hollow that one industry could could leverage so much power. It feels like there must be something else involved with that, too, like some more fundamental threat that's being perceived for how the world is governed, right? As for how the economy is run or how finance is supervised and that sort of stuff?

Speaker1: [00:15:26] Right. There's a concern about the the systematic, the possibility of systematic global governance to which everyone has to agree. Right. And there's a real concern about that.

Speaker2: [00:15:38] So let's let's not ever say you didn't hear some good conspiracy theories on this podcast because there's one for you.

Speaker1: [00:15:44] Yeah, it's a good one.

Speaker2: [00:15:46] And with that, do you have anything else or shall we?

Speaker1: [00:15:48] No, I think we've probably blathered on for quite a while.

Speaker2: [00:15:51] Do some blathering. Thank you for listening.

Speaker1: [00:15:52] Should listen to Paige and J.C. now. So I'll say go J.C. and Paige. Yeah. Well, here we are live coming to you, live from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and yes, there is there's snow and just a little touch of ice on the ground out there, and it's it's very pretty and sparkly, and we're really glad to welcome Dr. Paige West and J.C. Salyer to our conversation. We're really happy to have you both here. Welcome to the Pod.

Speaker3: [00:16:41] Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker4: [00:16:42] All right. It's very nice to be here, especially in Minneapolis. We should maybe all take a moment and just think about Prince. Oh yeah,

Speaker1: [00:16:50] Yeah, yeah. You know,

Speaker2: [00:16:52] 2016 was a hard year in so many ways. I mean, I wouldn't even begin to enumerate them all that we may want to touch on some of them later. But losing Bowie and Prince in one year was hard.

Speaker1: [00:17:01] Yes. Yes, it was. And then Leonard Cohen, too, but maybe not as heavy duty, not as heavy duty as Prince and and Bowie. But and then, of course, we acquired a monstrosity in the presidency. So that was the other ugly.

Speaker2: [00:17:14] We may get back to that topic later on because you are

Speaker1: [00:17:16] We can't stop talking about

Speaker2: [00:17:18] You have the virtue of being the first podcast episode we've recorded since the election. Everything else was back. So you are on the pulse of it as so maybe we can start page with your most recent book, Dispossession and the Environment, Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea. And I feel like this this book, I mean, I'm not saying it. It culminates, you know, your work in any way. But it seems to me to be a really powerful statement of some themes you've been working with for years. It's a beautiful book. It's got its experimental passages, which are really interesting in it. But maybe the place to start, as is with the main argument for it, right? And this relationship between between dispossession and environment and the context of PNG, if I may call it that, which I think, you know, both illuminates that particular case, but also seems to me something that has you say a lot of things that also resonate very strongly with what we saw in Mexico, for example, to along the way. So it seems to me you've got a very argument that travels really well there, too. So I don't know is that is that too general questions to start with or that's going to take it from there?

Speaker4: [00:18:23] Yeah, it's a great question. So in some ways it does. It's a culmination of my 20 years of thinking about why in the world Papua New Guinea always gets cast as the most primitive, the last place that's developed, the place of savagery. You know, you look at the representational rhetoric around Papua New Guinea today. Twenty sixteen and every international media outlet still goes to the figure of the cannibal. And so watching that for all of this time and wondering why, how after all of these many anthropological analyses of that and not just in Papua New Guinea, but in other places of the world, we all know that nobody lives in the past in the present, but Papua New Guinea seems to be a place that always gets return to as the savage. And what I wanted to do was really think about that in a way that connects it to political economy, and I wanted to use some theoretical material that I had not worked with before. And so instead of just thinking about New Guinea, I turned to work in in geography. I turned to work on gentrification to say, OK, so there's been this amazing body of literature and geography on urban gentrification in the United States that points out the way in which discourses of the frontier discourses of the savage allow for a kind of hollowing out that gives capital a place to go. And I wanted to say, Well, maybe there's an economic incentive for constantly casting Papua New Guinea as the most savage place. Maybe if you do, that then allows external capital to come in, get a foothold and then begin to amass. So I really thought, well, maybe this rhetoric of the primitive is a form of accumulation by dispossession. And so that's really the central argument in the book. That accumulation by dispossession and certainly other people have said this from Rosa Luxemburg many years ago to some of the Native American scholars who are writing about ongoing dispossession today. You know, people like my colleague Audra Simpson say, maybe this ongoing process of dispossession is connected to this representational rhetoric.

Speaker2: [00:20:35] And I'm so glad you worked with Rosa Luxemburg, who I feel like is always getting lost behind Lenin and Marx, right? You know? But you know that that work that that you talking about in the accumulation of capital is terrific because it's talking also about the need for capitalism. To have an outside from which you can draw can kind of suck and hoover things in, right? So PMG in this case becomes that sort of a place. And maybe especially when you talk about different thematics in the book, you talk about tourism, you talk about biodiversity. But of course, given our own interests, I was especially looking at the stuff on liquid natural gas and the way in which this is recently. I guess PNG is being repositioned as a kind of a petro state or a petro domain of some kind. So did that have anything to do with the writing of the work or was it in other words, how much is the is the kind of the coming of the oil and gas industry to PNG? Part of what made you want to write this book?

Speaker4: [00:21:30] It's a huge part of it, and it's for two different reasons. The first reason is because, you know, in all of these other domains that I had written about before and. Environmental conservation and tourism and international development, I had worked through some of these questions of the constant return to the primitive. Then the LNG project comes online. Exxon comes to Papua New Guinea and immediately every external actor associated with that project flips into this rhetorical work around the savage. And so partially, it was so really, we're going to see this again with LNG. The other piece of it is that, you know, Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea for many years, was a big city in the Pacific, but it was not a cosmopolitan international city, and that LNG project changed that city. It is now, I would say it's one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world because you have the over eight hundred languages from Papua New Guinea, all of those folks coming to Port Moresby. Then you have people from all over the world. And so there are probably more languages spoken in Port Moresby than any other city. It's got a vibrant youth culture. It's got a vibrant culture industry. It's got a vibrant restaurant scene.

Speaker4: [00:22:45] I mean, it's just got all of the stuff that really in many ways is connected to the massive influx of capital that Exxon brought. And still, there's this way in which it always gets cast as as primitive. And so that's part of why I thought, well, maybe I need to work through this again. The other piece of LNG that was incredibly influential is, I sort of said after my conservation book that I was not going to write another critique of conservation that I had done that intellectually. I had said what I needed to say. One of the things that I don't write about a lot is that out of that first work kind of came. I helped found an NGO that's focused on repatriating sovereignty over biodiversity to Papua New Guineans. And so what we basically do is work with young Papua New Guineans who want to get a PhD in ecology or anthropology or biology. And we kind of top up their national degrees so that they're competitive internationally for master's and PhD programs. And after doing that for a long time, I thought so. That's now my contribution to the critique of conservation in Papua New Guinea. I'm going to do this positive thing in the world. I'm not going to write about it anymore.

Speaker4: [00:23:53] But one of the things that happened with LNG is that, as you all know and probably people listening know, one of the conditions for financing for these international resource extraction projects is that there has to be offset funds. One of them is a cultural offset fund, one of them is a biodiversity offset fund. And I watched international conservation organizations vie for this access to this offset fund, which was going to be or is going to be in excess of a hundred million U.S. dollars to offset the negative effects of the project on biodiversity and those conservation organizations. People who had worked in PNG for quite a long time immediately slipped into these representational practices that they know to not be true. And that's when I really thought, Well, so what does that do? What form of accumulation can happen around that? That can't happen around, say, actually help New Guinea, really modern society, really cosmopolitan place. You should maybe give us some money to help people figure out how to do conservation that's just immediately turned into these. People are savages. They don't know how to take care of biodiversity. And so I really had this moment of saying really 20 years and working on this.

Speaker1: [00:25:05] Yeah. Can you tell us some examples of how people slipped into that representation of that particular form of representation and what what it looked like and what it sounds like?

Speaker4: [00:25:15] Yeah. So one of the chapters in the book is on capacity building and a very short version of the ethnographic example I have in the book is sitting on a porch in Morocco, which is a mountain town in PNG with a group of Papua New Guinean scientists. People with PhDs, people with master's degrees really kind of the top top notch scientist for the country from the country and a group of folks from the United States working for a major conservation organization sitting with us. And they said, So what would you all do with a hundred million dollars? And my Papua New Guinean colleagues did what we would all do if we're asked that question, which is stop and think for a second. Yeah, right? Because that's an awful lot of money. Oh my God. And yeah, and then they started to kind of come up with examples of what they would do that are really good examples based on things that they know work in the country. And immediately, the Americans who were visiting stopped the conversation and said, Well, those are really good ideas, but what they show is that Papua New Guineans don't have the vision or the capacity to actually think about this much money. And then the next step was most Papua New Guineans are actually living in rural villages, in kinship based societies where they're worrying about bride price and they're worrying about sorcery, and they're not worrying about this. So let us handle it. It was just kind of patronising rhetoric. And so it went from that to kind of and then it always then goes back to this question of savagery and cannibalism. And I just saw it happen over

Speaker1: [00:26:47] And over again over the decades, right? How where do you see the role of anthropology in this reproduction in this kind of recursive deployment of savagery and primitive peoples? What is the role, if any, of anthropology? I imagine there's some role in it. And here's a kind of bigger question, and I don't know if you can answer it, but I know that you can sort of think with us about it. Why Papua New Guinea? Like, why do we keep seeing that reproduction of that particular set of discourses about these particular groups of people in that place now, because you make a very strong argument about the kind of the reiteration of it over and over again and how it just refuses to to kind of let go.

Speaker4: [00:27:34] So part of it, I think, is because of the history of anthropology in Papua New Guinea, right? I mean, you have this is a place that I would argue is basically the source for most of our important theoretical work in the discipline of anthropology, right? Yeah. Yeah. You look at anything about exchange. It's got that genealogy to Papua New Guinea, you look. It anything about sort of subjectivity and transaction and personhood that's connected to Papua New Guinea. A lot of the very important work we do today on gender goes back to work done in Papua New Guinea. All of that is great. But there is a way in which early anthropology of the place that focused on violence that focused on. So a lot of the work from the Highlands early on was about warfare. A lot of the work really was that moment. A lot of the work was done in that moment in anthropology, where there was still a sense that there were people that were cut off from the modern economy. I just did an analysis of the PhDs that were granted between nineteen fifty two and nineteen seventy four at Columbia University, where I now teach and there were 16 PhDs in cultural anthropology focused on New Guinea, and they were all about societies that were cut off from the rest of the world. And so there's this way in which, you know, even when people in PNG in the fifties, sixties and seventies were part of the global coffee economy were part of the global mining economy, were part of trade networks that are thousands of years old. Anthropology worked to entrench the idea of bounded societies cut off from the rest of the world, and I think that literature gets pulled on by people today outside of anthropology. So you'll have a conversation with someone that works, say, for Exxon, and the only thing they will have ever read about Papua New Guinea is about cargo cults, and it just gets stuck in their head, right?

Speaker1: [00:29:31] Maybe even something they learned in their intro to anthropology class back in the day, and they just are sort of repeating those stories over

Speaker2: [00:29:38] And over again. So on the one hand, we're glad they know something about anthropology, but unfortunately it's that status.

Speaker4: [00:29:44] I think there's also, you know, there is a deep, deep, deep racism about Melanesians that is from the outside of the region of the Pacific and also from the inside. Recently, we've seen this new kind of push in genetics and genomics to trace where the kind of oldest the oldest out of Africa ancestors are and it always ends up in Australia, New Guinea, right? So there's this way in which there's a whole industry of thinking about human origins and very racialized ways that gets fixated in on northern Australia and Papua New Guinea. So I think there's also a a race component to it that is incredibly important.

Speaker1: [00:30:25] And do you find among the people that you're working with or people that you know of that there are sort of movements of resistance against these kinds of depictions? And you know, what are the what are the alliances look like between, say, Aboriginal Australians and folks living in Papua New Guinea? Are there kind of relationships to try and undo some of this?

Speaker4: [00:30:46] So there's more of what I see is an emergence of a set of young, dynamic intellectuals in Papua New Guinea who are riding back against these racist representations. You know, there are people in cultural studies, there are people in anthropology, there are people in sociology that are really thinking carefully about this in a more public forum. There is a really important world of people writing in the blogosphere and PMG and pushing back against international representations.

Speaker1: [00:31:17] Yeah, yeah, that's good.

Speaker2: [00:31:18] So you I mean, one of the things that this is a bit of a caricature, but I always feel like there's been a kind of a a bit of a split in the Melanesian literature between people who are taking a more kind of roughly speaking, Marxian or political economic approach and the people who are taking more of a state attorney and approach to it. And one of the things I liked about the book again, I'm not I don't have any stake in that conversation as somebody who's never been to that part of the world. But but I know that there's kind of almost like a legendary feud, if you will, between those two sides. But I felt like your book in some ways it seemed to to to speak to a lot of those issues. And you were talking a lot about the distinctive forms of Melanesian personhood, for example, and trying to reconcile them with your political economic interests. I wanted to give you credit for that, but also maybe to talk, you could talk to us a little bit about that, whether that was something you're trying to do and what your strategy was there analytically.

Speaker4: [00:32:11] Yeah, I mean, I feel like the wonderful work of people who draw on Maryland, strengthen and think about personhood really carefully has gotten taken up as if Papua New Guinea and subjectivities don't change over time, as if people still make self and society and other the way that they did in the nineteen sixties and seventies. And we all know that's not the case, and I think the political economy work allows me to think about, well, so what are the outside forces that have transformed social institutions in PNG in a way that forces people to? That forces took it. Sorry. Yeah, we'll just

Speaker2: [00:32:59] Edit things out, is that a problem? Little dings and

Speaker4: [00:33:03] Podcasting,

Speaker2: [00:33:04] That's

Speaker4: [00:33:04] The way of because we're at the meetings. I know I get like one text a week right here at home. But so the connection between the larger political economy and the way in which that strain changed in Pag and how that then forces societal structures to change and people to engage with others in very different ways. And so I did try to bring those two things together. Mm hmm.

Speaker1: [00:33:30] Yeah. I mean, it reminds me the kind of mistranslation of space into time that anthropology has been struggling with and guilty of for for such a long time. You see that in the case of PNG. I also see it in terms of some of the literature coming out of questions of sexuality and practices of sexuality. And I'm thinking of Gill Hurt's famous work or sometimes infamous work on a group of people that he that he calls the zombie. Right. And much of that work, and it had a lot of recognition and I think still does get some recognition in introductory textbooks, for example. And that material was really drawn from impressions that that older people men in the village had had about what had happened in the past before the kind of evangelism and really deep colonial interventions that happened. And so already that material was drawing on something that was already passed. But being being made, being articulated as though it was a contemporary occurrence and when students today would, undergraduates today read that? Mm hmm. There's a kind of belief it's that ethnographic presence presence in itself again, where they they're like, Oh, this is still happening. You know, these rituals of the flutes is still and you have to explain several times over. No, this is past. But but the way that it's articulated, the way it's represented, and again, it's that recapitulation of not quite the savage, maybe, but primitive forms of. Discordant sexuality, I say that with scare quotes, right?

Speaker3: [00:35:11] Yeah, yeah, but I mean, almost more importantly, right, that it's not that these things are simply passe, but there are also things that people are still drawing on, right? Yeah. That this sort of idea of personhood and this sort of way that people construct their present is both thinking about who they are and who they came from. But then what that means and contemporary, you know, sort of sort of structural, you know, situations, whether it be political, economic or political or trying to make alliances. And so some of those things get drawn on that sometimes. And, you know, sometimes they're less important. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker1: [00:35:47] And I mean, you know, I don't want to be too harsh on our on our discipline here. But also you wonder about the influence of Malinowski in shaping the entire discipline,

Speaker4: [00:35:57] Right

Speaker1: [00:35:57] And how it goes deep. Mm hmm. Right. I mean, intellectually and in terms of the history of of our discipline, it goes back to the beginning, essentially all of these dynamics that you're talking about. Mm hmm.

Speaker2: [00:36:09] So we should turn to the new work. Yeah, because you guys, much like us, it sounds like you've been experimenting in collaborative research together. Yeah. So how's that going? I think it brought us closer together.

Speaker3: [00:36:24] I could probably say it's going.

Speaker2: [00:36:26] Yeah, we're OK. Yeah. Author or therapist says we should say it's okay.

Speaker4: [00:36:30] Maybe, maybe. I'll say the moment when we decided to do it. Please. So we have been up in Pag doing some research during the North American summer of 2013, and we were in northern Queensland, Australia, having a little break before we came back to the United States and we got the newspaper and the Australian had on its cover this extraordinary story that basically said any asylum seeker who attempts to reach Papua New Guinea by boat or sorry, any asylum seeker that attempts to reach Australia by boat will be diverted to either Nauru, Christmas Island or Manus Island in New Guinea. And if they're diverted to Manus Island, New Guinea, which remember is part of a sovereign nation, they will then be resettled there permanently. And so we read this newspaper article, and the first thing I thought was, here's this frankly insane story. And the first comment from an Australian, a well-meaning Australian in the world of human rights was How can we send these poor people to Manus Island? It's a hellhole. And he really all of these representational rhetoric that I've been writing about for 20 years, he repeated all of that right there. And so my initial interest was in this question of really again and really, you're going to configure your very careful laboratory politics around human rights and folks from the Middle East around calling Papua New Guinea and savages. And so I was intrigued by that.

Speaker3: [00:38:10] Yeah. You know, so there's there's obviously a continuation of the work Paige has been doing for a long time on the way the world sees New Guinea, the way these sort of representations have material consequences for the nation state. You know, and in some ways, I'm not sure that, you know, part of the way New Guinea was sort of brought into this was to sort of being offered, you know, you know, a possibility to be part of this sort of humanitarian project to be stepping up and being, you know, doing what developed nations do in terms of helping other other nation states right and helping other people who are part of the global community. So, you know, in some ways, you know, I think the project even sort of played on these rhetorics and said, you know, in this, you know, here, New Guinea is going to be part of, you know, international humanitarian norms. Isn't that great? You know, and part of this project required them to adopt the refugee convention, which they hadn't been a part of before. So it's sort of, in some ways, the sort of modernizing project. But at the same time, it is sort of assuming there's a, you know, sort of un variegated ability of nation states to offer refuge and to be part of this humanitarian infrastructure. And it's, you know, we see across Europe as we see across, you know, the world where people are dispossessed due to war or whatever other sort of issues, you know, the it's not the same response.

Speaker3: [00:39:44] And there are, you know, all sorts of things that condition, whether a country is able to receive refugees or not. My work as a lawyer, I work at a place called the Arab American Family Support Center, which is part of the settlement house networks, you know, and we provide social services and help people get health care or in ESL, you know, all sorts of services for people newly arrived in the United States. You know, we help them apply for government benefits. Know, so there are all sorts of things that allow people to get on their feet when they come to the United States. And on top of that, there's, you know, established immigrant communities that people are part of, you know? And so, you know, my response to reading that newspaper and knowing how difficult it is for the clients I work for with all of those things in place was, this is never going to work, right? I mean, how on earth are you going to take people and try and settle them in New Guinea, where you know, life is very hard? If you're Papua New Guinea and you know, there is no welfare state, you know, if you have an issue, you're dependent on your family, on your kinship networks

Speaker1: [00:40:48] And people are fleeing wartime contexts. And where are they coming from?

Speaker3: [00:40:54] Yeah, yeah. I mean, so these you know, the you know, one of the things about the Australian policy, right, where they essentially say, if you come to Australia by boat, if you flee without a visa, if you come in without permission, we're going to put you in Manus or we're going to put you in Nauru, as opposed to people who arrive by plane with a visa is that, you know, if you look at the statistics of who was being, you know, evaluated as a refugee and who is getting their case approved and being found to be a genuine refugee compared to the folks that were being found to not have actually established that they were a refugee. The folks that came by boat, the people who didn't have visas, who risked their lives to cross the ocean, to get to Australia, they were overwhelmingly found to be genuine refugees because you wouldn't do that if you didn't have to. And so there were folks that were coming from Sri Lanka, from Afghanistan, from Iraq, from Eritrea, from Somalia. There's some folks from Sudan, from Iran. Yeah. So, you know, you know, essentially, you know, the the folks that are there and the folks we talked to, you know, we're almost overwhelmingly from countries. You know that we're having, you know, either civil war or authoritarian governments that were persecuting folks. So like a lot of the people from Iran were Christians, you know, so so sort of the stereotypical kind of people that get refugee status when they apply for asylum.

Speaker1: [00:42:17] Some of them fleeing war that the Australian state had been an ally and invested in? Right? Yeah.

Speaker4: [00:42:23] Participant in. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:42:26] Yeah. And it hasn't been so much an issue as to whether they were actually refugees is so much a threat to the sovereign and its ability to control who comes and who doesn't,

Speaker2: [00:42:39] Which is increasingly, you know, an issue in the Anthropocene, right? Yes. I mean, because I think, you know, we know the Syrian case at least has gotten a little bit of attention for the droughts that helped to spark the Civil War, although of course, there are a lot of other problems in Syria. Historically, no one saying it was so wonderful before the drought, but that that was it set off some dry tinder that really created the total dissolution of the country. But I think, you know, Afghanistan, that's part of the story there, too, that people don't often think about. And so sometimes these areas that we think of these as wartime refugees, they're also, in a sense, climate refugees, although the dots aren't always connected. So. But it seems to me one of the things you're looking at then is also, as you said, the kind of capacity of these sovereign entities to manage unprecedented forms of mobility.

Speaker4: [00:43:30] Right. But one of the things I think we also think is that this whole configuration is a test whereby one sovereign nation that has a deep colonial history with another sovereign nation says, Look, there's this massive influx of people or this assumed massive influx of people because we have this post-colonial relationship with you, we're going to have you take them right. And, you know, given that it's happening in the Pacific, given the estimates of the number of people that are going to be moving around the Pacific because of climate change over the next 50 to 100 years, maybe because of what just happened in the United States a week ago, maybe much sooner than that. I mean, this is going to be a place where there are lots of people who need to go live somewhere else. And I think we think it's Australia testing the waters and testing the waters to see where they can send people. And that's something that is a global question.

Speaker1: [00:44:25] Yeah, right? Yeah, that was that was what I was going to ask you next, actually, is how much you see this kind of articulating what sort of more conventional climate refugees you are leaving small island nation states because of sea level rise? Right? The kind of more straightforward, obvious model and how much this kind of fits in with the paradigms of refugee status or asylum status and, as you said, kind of testing out those waters. Mm hmm.

Speaker3: [00:44:53] Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that initially drew us to the project was this question of how much is this is going to be a model for the future. Something that we need to think about is what nation states are going to do as people are moving around the Pacific and huge numbers, right? And you know, I think, you know, one of the things about the Manus project that maybe we learned as we got into it is it was wildly ill conceived. There was no thought put into this. Yeah. And the, you know, I won't go into the depth of the lack of consideration that went into it. But you know, the prime minister of Papua New Guinea was really didn't consult with anyone, didn't think about how this would be implemented when he went to Australia and signed the agreement. And so I'm I think there is some way that these sort of, you know, offshoring of immigration problems, trying to push them outside your own borders is, you know, part of a much larger project of trying to avoid migration in general and refugees in particular. But, you know, I'm not sure if it was conceived as an experiment to deal with, you know, this future problem, you know, but you know, sort of, you know, brought with the Syrian context, you know, I think what's actually becoming clear in the climate refugee context and migration in general is that these sort of categories we use climate, migrant, economic, migrant, refugee, I mean, those are really they don't make sense, right? Right.

Speaker3: [00:46:28] You know, you know, the, you know, Syria. Yes, you know, the conflict kind of was erupted because people were moving to cities and the cities couldn't deal with that, you know, or people move because, you know, so you know, the outskirts of small island states in the Pacific are no longer conducive to the populations, partly through climate change loss of, you know, drinkable water. But you know, also because the urban areas are lacking infrastructure that they've been neglected, that you know, they're, you know, wildly underdeveloped through post-colonial relationships. And, you know, so what are people who are leaving those situations? Are they climate migrants? Are they economic migrants? And so, you know, I think the the you know, the thing that we sort of see in general is that these immigration systems and refugee systems are breaking down. You know, sort of through the sheer weight of displacement and part of its climate, part of its refugees, but part of it's just blatant inequality. And you know, you know, Western states use their borders to protect themselves from the consequences of that inequality. And, you know, I think places like Manus or the sort of hardest pointy part of that, yeah, you know, but our border, you know, the southwestern border is a fairly brutal act of that as well.

Speaker1: [00:47:56] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the distinction between, you know, a climate refugee or a climate migrant coming from central Mexico or from Central America versus an economic migrant coming from those same places or or. People who are fleeing the drug war at various different stages. All of that is going to be is already becoming a very, very sort of inconsequential distinction. They're all overlapping and I don't know that we can even separate the causes in migration, what they call the push right, the push and the pull factors.

Speaker3: [00:48:27] In my immigration practice, I had two teenage boys from Mexico come to my office and I asked them, Why are you here? They're unaccompanied minors, you know? And they said, Well, we come from, you know, our family had a farm, right? And you know, we've had tropical storms like destroy the farm three years in a row. Right? So, you know, they have no way of sustaining themselves or their kind of economic migrants, but it's because of increased extreme weather events. So they're very much looking like climate refugees. So how do you untangle this right?

Speaker4: [00:48:59] And then also, how do you intend or how do you untangle the international migration question with the internal migration questions, right? It's got to be the same in Mexico as it is in Papua New Guinea that people are moving around all the time for various reasons. And that climate, I mean, in Papua New Guinea, at least, internal climate migration is putting pressure on urban areas. Urban areas don't have the infrastructure to take all of the people. And so that's I mean, that's a mess in and of itself. And then you throw in the international migration and it just it's just a new I mean, this is this is part of the Anthropocene, right? That in addition to all of the environmental stuff, there's a new set of human configurations that we have to think through and we have to think through with some new tools. I think so, yeah.

Speaker2: [00:49:47] Can I just add, I mean, not to not to bring us back to close to the ground again, but I mean, I'm interested in what what you found in your research and Manus. I mean, what were you? What, what, what did that look like and what was the situation that you encountered? Were people immediately being resettled or is it or were they just preparing? I mean, it sounds like there wasn't a lot of preparation going on, but I was curious what the ethnographic terrain looked like, sort of.

Speaker4: [00:50:09] So maybe I'll talk a little bit about the sites and then you talk about the findings. Sure. Ok. So because it's been this long term project because we started it in 2013, we've actually worked in multiple sites. So we did some work on Manus itself. We did some work around the detention camp. We did some work in other urban areas where Papua New Guineans are talking about this. And then also we did some work in Australia. We spent last summer, all of last summer in Port Moresby. And so really what we wanted to do was flesh out the kind of flesh out the social networks around this and think about the institutional relationships and the social relationships that gave rise to this camp. And I mean, one of the findings that I was a little bit surprised by, you know, there's been a lot of. Well, actually, we'll cut that part, you talk. Keep rolling back. Yeah, I was going to talk about individuals and yeah, we probably shouldn't.

Speaker3: [00:51:05] Yeah, no, I think, yeah, I think, you know, maybe a way to avoid that is to sort of period ize the sites we visited. So there was sort of three visits that three different well, so initially we visited Manus when the detention centre was started, right? So this is a detention centre within an existing Papua New Guinean naval base, which is sort of the superseding naval base to the Australian colonial naval base. Right. And it's on an island Los Negros island, which is off of Manus Island, which is itself an island off of the island nation of New Guinea. Right. So this is sort of, you know, Gitmo to the third degree. Yeah. And you know, when we went there at this point, it was still very much meant to be high security. Nobody was allowed in. You know, we talked to people in the Lorengau of the capital Manus province and talked to the government officials there and the people who were, you know, sort of working at the camp. But, you know, it was very hard to get access to things. And you know, one of the things we sort of learned talking to the provincial government and they weren't given access to things, right? There was no real consultation with, you know, not just local communities, local landowners, but not even the local government. So this is part of this aspect of it being like wildly ill conceived and sort of just rushed.

Speaker3: [00:52:33] And I think, you know, on some level, to oversimplify, I think this initial stage was Australia wanting these folks out of the newspapers, out of public view before the election, and they put them there and they were going to figure out what to do next. And folks languished right. And this is before the riot which occurred, you know, so we were there in what, July, August and then that following December. You know, there have been protests because people have been, you know, stuck in this camp with no indication of what was going to happen to them. They had not yet even begun to process the refugee claims. So they didn't have a process by which to determine whether people were refugees. In fact, there was no law in New Guinea that defined what a refugee would be or how you determine that well. So they were literally being held. You know, in detention in determinately. Without any possibility of being found to be refugees, because it wasn't that category didn't even exist. And, you know, so as a result of that, there's huge tensions. People protested. One person was killed during the protests. Many people, you know, reported being injured. You know, so you know, so the system was sort of breaking down under the weight of, you know, just being sheer repression without any real effort or thought about being a humanitarian process.

Speaker4: [00:54:07] Can I add something here? I think also at that stage, Australia had not anticipated the way in which Papua New Guineans were going to think about talk about right about the detention camp. They had assumed that they would put these refugees in PNG and that they would disappear because they were thinking of a much older PNG in terms of international networks. So Papua New Guineans blog, they're all on Facebook. They're all tweeting, they're all reading the international news. And Australia got hit back not only with an internal critique within Australia, but also with Papua New Guineans saying What is going on here and them really having a kind of voice in this in the international media that Australia did not expect.

Speaker1: [00:54:54] See, this is where their belief and the primitively of PNG actually bites them in the ass. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. They have computers.

Speaker4: [00:55:02] Oh yeah.

Speaker3: [00:55:03] On the even on the, you know, sort of more structural level, the provincial government, the the provincial administrator, went to the camp and demanded access, you know, and he said, I don't care what you say, this is my province. I have a right to know what's happening here. So, you know, even the governmental structures were sort of pushing back in ways. I'm sure they, you know, they sort of thought that probably the prime minister had authoritarian control over the, you know, the provinces.

Speaker1: [00:55:33] Yeah, I mean, I hate to ask this, but if if if people are effective in refusing the gift, I mean, the Australian state is clearly offering this as the gift of modernity and welcome to the developed world. We're going to allow you right to to settle refugees and asylum seekers and others who are fleeing various troubled times and troubled waters to come to come live in your country and that's being sold its kind of form of negative reciprocity. That's part of this colonial regime. If they can't go there, where will they go?

Speaker4: [00:56:07] Well, so that's an interesting question.

Speaker3: [00:56:11] As of to the beginning of this week, the U.S. announced that the United States will be taking the refugees. So this is probably, you know, it's not entirely clear, but it looks like it was probably an agreement that was worked out back in September, when Obama had his refugee summit at the U.N. General Assembly and Australia announced that they would be expanding the number of Syrian refugees that they were receiving. There was not an announcement at that time about the U.S. taking the Manus refugees, but I imagine it must have been sort of a quid pro quo and that the administration didn't want to announce it ahead of the election,

Speaker2: [00:56:52] But out of the frying pan into the fire,

Speaker1: [00:56:54] Right? Well, yeah,

Speaker4: [00:56:56] But our sense some contacts in Pag told us that all of the people who have been permanently resettled, so the people who have been processed already sent out of the camps to find their way around the country have now been taken back to the camp. And my sense is that they're trying to get this processing on this process underway so that it's potentially done before January 20th.

Speaker2: [00:57:20] I see.

Speaker4: [00:57:21] But who knows? Who knows if that can happen? Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. One of the other things I was going to say about the fieldwork that was surprising to us. I think so. We did the work in Manus two summers in a row and then,

Speaker3: [00:57:35] Yeah, and the second summer, you know, they had actually. Started the processing on some level, they had found many people to be refugees, you know, and you know, at this point, what they've done is they brought in UNHCR and essentially Australian asylum officers to do all the processing because there wasn't any capacity in New Guinea. And so they built a transit centre, which is essentially a smaller prison, which they put in the town of Lorengau to allow the people who were already had been found to be refugees to start being acclimated to living in New Guinea. And so sort of that second summer of work was sort of looking at this beginning of trying to think about how you're going to settle people in New Guinea.

Speaker4: [00:58:24] And then last summer, which is the third summer that we worked, we spent time with people who had been resettled, so people who had been resettled in Port Moresby. And so trying to get a sense of all of these stages now. And what we were surprised about in Port Moresby, I think, was that we had both been there a lot. You know, you go through a Port Moresby when you're going to other parts of the country, but it was fascinating to do urban fieldwork in that way in PNG, even for all of our collective thinking about Papua New Guinea as this incredibly modern cosmopolitan place to spend several months in Port Moresby was something that was fantastic, and I think we now have a million project ideas about Papua New Guinea in the Anthropocene that that we didn't expect, which is cool. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:59:10] Yeah, I was going to ask. No sure. Ahead. So one of the things you said a few minutes ago page is that we need new tools and new ideas and new ways of theorizing these these concerns to put it euphemistically. And I know that you've been sort of thinking through some ideas that that you've been calling the assemblage of the now. Mm-hmm. And I wonder if you could fill us in a bit about what that what that looks like and what its properties are and how you're thinking about these things.

Speaker4: [00:59:37] So I've been frustrated with the way in which so we teach a class together on it, on the Anthropocene. And you know, we've this is the third year of doing it, and I've been frustrated with the way in which the anthropology that focuses on the Anthropocene. Not all of it, but a lot of it uses the same theoretical tools that we use to think about things in the past. We seem to turn to the same body of theory, and part of that's the nature of the discipline and that there are certain genealogies of thinking and you replicate those in all of your work. But it just seems to me, it seems to me that we need to start thinking about social relationships and their potential in a new way. And I know you all have talked to Ken Talbot on the podcast. Is that true? No, but we'd love to talk to Kim. She's amazing. Yeah. But, you know, so she and some other native scholars are thinking about kinship as a new way to theorize what's happening now and what could happen in the future. How do we create a new world? The other person who's worked on that is Tai Tangen. He has a wonderful, wonderful piece from a while back about kinship and relatedness.

Speaker4: [01:00:46] And just what if? What if we took theory that's generated not out of continental Europe are not out of the discipline of anthropology? Traditionally, what if we took theory that has made somewhere else and that can this help us think about something new? And the assemblage of that now comes from thinking through work on the prior and the the very serious consequence of any prior thinking, which is basically that it embeds the sorts of structures that got us to where we are now. And I think we need to maybe quit thinking with nostalgia about what was in the past, especially with regard to the biophysical environment, because we're not going to get that back where we're going to have to think about where we are now and what kinds of new forms we can have in the future. Yeah. And I was just the discussant on the Rappaport panel plot prize. So Rapaport panel is for young PhD students who are writing their dissertations, and I read five papers that are all thinking super carefully about the sort of convergence of environment, society and technology. And I think that's a really fascinating place for us to be thinking. That's correct.

Speaker1: [01:01:59] Yeah, right. And I can see, I mean, not having heard the papers, but I can imagine that that idea of the assemblage comes in really profoundly there now at this point, too. You made that kind of really inspecting the prior, right, like not taking these intellectual genealogies for granted because there is a kind of tele ology at work here and there's some toxicity in those intellectual paradigms that we need. I mean, maybe we don't need to cast them out entirely, but we need to be really careful about how we take them up.

Speaker4: [01:02:29] Yeah. And this is partially what you've been thinking about, from teaching that class to the but Chakrabarti thing, right? Yeah.

Speaker3: [01:02:38] Yeah. And, you know, I think one of the things that you know, certainly the Anthropocene literature that you see is everyone seems to say, Oh, look, this proves everything I already thought, right, this is, you know, capitalism is ideal. If we were just, you know, Marxist, none of this would have ever happened. You know, and I think there is this way that, you know, the consequences and the sort of causes are so complex and so far reaching that you can't sort of pick one of these genealogies and say that this is actually the correct way of addressing it. You know, this is a complex and newer problem that requires sort of complex endeavor answers. And you know, I think how do we get to that is is sort of one of the questions, you know, when you know, I think, you know, in some ways, similar this question of how we get away from genealogies. It's interesting we have a seminar called Pacific Climate Circuits, where we sort of bring in folks that are thinking about climate change and the Anthropocene, mostly in the Pacific. You know, we're talking to folks around the world and we're thinking about who is thinking about this, who aren't sort of bio, you know, climate scientists who aren't, you know, policy people who aren't the economists, the sort of people that have sway in the discussions about this. And so we're talking to social scientists, anthropologists and indigenous scholars. And without sort of meaning to it, we've brought in a series of indigenous scholars whose work all focuses on sort of practices of, you know, thinking about traditional practice, but doing it in revitalizing it in the present.

Speaker3: [01:04:22] And what does it take to now? Have, you know, taro farming and fish traps in Hawaii? And what does that mean in terms of building sociality today and for contemporary sovereignty? And you know what is, you know, sort of having Midwestern revitalization of rice growing through? And how can you expand that to have environmental messages to publics outside of the native community? And so, you know, I think in some ways, you know, having these ideas and these ideas about culture that have to be in practice and have to actually be put into play, you know, gives you a sense of what will work, right? So you can't just say this past is what's important because, you know, if you're just thinking about it, it may work. It may not. But when you start actually trying to do it and engaging with other people who have different ideas and different, you know, sort of perspectives, then you learn what might actually work. And so trying to think about what what that would mean, save for a sense of theory, how do you have, you know, our idea about theory that is now actually out there and being subject to different points of views? And you know this this lauded to the point where we can't criticize it.

Speaker2: [01:05:35] Yeah, I was just going to say this work is that type of work and insight is so important, especially in an era when, you know, again, recent presidential election reminds us that we can't count on the state to save us. We need, we can't. That's not. And in fact, that was probably always the case. But it's a really stark reminder of we need decentralized practices, we need movements, we need alternatives that are never going to be vetted by a bureaucracy, but it just needs to be done and forms of knowledge need to be mobilized and there have to be renaissance. And the good news is a lot of that is happening. It's just, you know, it's happening in a decentralized way. So every time you can, I guess part of what you're doing is gathering that together, communicating and moving into teaching people. That's that's great, exciting, really

Speaker4: [01:06:20] Important work, I think.

Speaker1: [01:06:21] Well, I mean, I would agree, you know, we can't count on the state, but then again, the state is ours. If you know, if we have the capacity to manage it and control it in the ways, I mean, as a as a democracy, ideally we have that capacity. It's just a matter of engaging people to be able to do it. I wouldn't trust it, but I'm unwilling to cede it. I don't want

Speaker2: [01:06:44] To. I'm not going to see it either. I'm just saying, you know, we we had we needed direct action before and we need action.

Speaker1: [01:06:51] We all we need other we

Speaker3: [01:06:53] Need, you know, we need all the tools. Yeah, I have to say that's actually the day after the election. We had our class that we teach together and our students were literally in tears. And, you know, I was looking for sort of a silver lining. You know, this is an Anthropocene climate change class, and

Speaker4: [01:07:08] They're all young activists. So it was just heart wrenching.

Speaker3: [01:07:12] And I have to say, the one sort of silver lining I found was almost exactly what you said that we can look at what was agreed to in Paris and that wasn't going to get done, even if even if the states were going to do it. So now we can sort of stop pretending that the nation state and the international community of nation states is going to fix this for us and start thinking about what sort of networks and actions we need.

Speaker4: [01:07:35] We have two silver linings that one and that punk music is going. Come back. Yeah. More good cultural production against the state. Yeah, I believe the exact words for Taylor Swift is going down.

Speaker1: [01:07:48] Oh yeah, yeah. Have you heard that was my fantasy, but you've actually we actually know that's going to happen,

Speaker4: [01:07:54] That there's going to be

Speaker1: [01:07:55] Nothing against Taylor, but no punk is coming back. Yeah, I wrote about Thursday or Friday of the week after, you know, it was like, I think there's going to be a resurrection of punk coming.

Speaker2: [01:08:04] I don't know the Reagan years.

Speaker3: [01:08:07] Let's see what's on.

Speaker1: [01:08:07] Yeah, right.

Speaker2: [01:08:09] But maybe this is a way of tying things up a little bit. And page, I want to ask you, you know, the coda to the book is moving and personal, and one of the things you talk about is your own growing up in Appalachia, which in a way is America savage slot, right? If we have one, is Appalachia. And and I mean, again, I just had a sense that part of your sensitivity to what's happening in PNG is also colored by that biographical experience. And this is precisely the slot that has been made yet again, savage in the eyes of of of demographically speaking, folks like us, let's say. And so I just I don't know, what's your thinking about this? I thought you might have an interesting perspective on it.

Speaker4: [01:08:53] Yeah. Well, so I should say outright that since the election, I haven't read anything or watch the news because I just couldn't do it. But prior to the election, I feel like the coverage of white working class America cast it as if it was one thing, and white working class America is a diverse set of people, right? I think people that live in Appalachia and are dependent or were dependent on coal mining, coal mining, they have different kinds of histories and interest than, say, people in the Rust Belt. So that's one thing. I think the sort of comenzaron ability making and the casting of working class white America has been incredibly problematic, and I think poor people feel that they see that they see how they're portrayed in the media. I think that one of the other things is that it's not just those folks that voted for him, it's a much larger demographic of people across the United States that voted for him. But I think there is a way in which people wanted to maybe not call out, and I'll just think about the South here. People like us and others maybe didn't want to call out the racism in those places, right? There is a really, really, really deep well of hate that exists around race in much of America.

Speaker4: [01:10:19] And I think people, elite liberals and people on the left want to not think about their own culpability in that. And so I think they didn't pay attention to it, right? I mean, so I spoke with my mother, who is the only one of her many Silberman siblings who didn't vote for Trump. And her question to me was, Where does that hate come from? Why do we have so much hate? And so I think that I think we need to think more carefully about the white working class, but I think we also need to think much more carefully about hate. And I think that there is a kind of growth of hate around race that happened in the Obama administration because people in the South didn't like the idea that black man was in charge. And I think we can't say that enough. I think that that sort of racism, that group that was already there burbling underneath because Obama was, well, he was he is a great president. People hated him, right?

Speaker1: [01:11:16] It was really capable.

Speaker2: [01:11:18] Yeah. So so it's it's fine to be to be critical of economic dispossession in places and the fact that jobs have disappeared, whole economies have disappeared, haven't been replaced and. And I think the dispossession of Appalachia is ancient, right? And it almost goes back as far as this country has existed. At the same time, that doesn't mean that you are naturalizing the racism that also has to be the object of criticism.

Speaker4: [01:11:41] I think it does. I think also, I mean, so you look at and I write about this in the book, you look at those legacies of dispossession on top of dispossession, on top of dispossession, dispossession, right? I mean, the whole movement of the Scotch Irish out of Scotland, Ireland first and then Scotland

Speaker2: [01:11:57] During the clearances. And yeah,

Speaker4: [01:11:58] All of that happens. Then they come to the United States, then they're in the Northeast and they are cast to savage. Then they move down to Appalachia, sort of annihilating the coasts of chiefdoms and dispossessing people all the way. And then they themselves become once again, this figure of the worst that is America. So it's, you know, I have this brilliant graduate student that one day in class, I sort of said, Cut, how far do we trace back dispossession? It just gets exhausting. And he said, all the way down, all the way down. And I think that's what we maybe need to do.

Speaker3: [01:12:34] Yeah, I mean, then that Kemp box book on Kentucky, right? She starts very. Rematch much was almost a too pointed description of white privilege being created as a way of sort of ideologically dividing dispossessed whites from people they had common cause with. And so, you know, all three people were allowed to vote until, you know, they, you know, needed to sort of separate these dispossessed whites. You know, it was sort of land, you know, became more scarce and people who dispossessed the land. And you know, the the idea that you got something ideologically being white, you know, including political rights, even if you aren't materially beneath that it by the society you're supposed to support. And so I think that, you know, you say, goes all the way down.

Speaker4: [01:13:24] I have a question for you all. I mean, so one of the things I think we've talked about a lot after the election is we all have limited energy in the world, right? So where do we where do we focus our energy now? I mean, part of it obviously is going to be our scholarship because that's what we do as our passion on our wage labor. But what do we do? Mm hmm.

Speaker2: [01:13:46] Well, I mean, we got we weren't really like many of us, were not planning for this eventuality. I think part of the problem. I mean, I think there are things personally you can do the center that we're involved with at Rice, which has been trying to push a push, a stone up a mountain in Houston, center of petro culture, really to try to get people to tend more to climate change issues. I know we're going to be working on that. We actually have a great punk anarchist, a TV comedian and writer. Yang are coming with us as artists and residents. One of the things he's going to be working on is creating a television series, a dark comedy about climate change, and that's based in Houston. So I mean, some of those creative projects, I think, can be meaningful because again, it gets us out of our typical loops of perception and circulation. But I just think, you know, it really is a time when all of us are going to have to get more engaged politically again and on a local level. And you know, I think this whole question of the role of cities in the next four years is going to be really important as a counterweight to a Congress and a national political culture that's going to be headed in one direction. Fortunately, Houston is one of the many major cities, as is New York, that have, you know, our democratic strong democratic institutions. And so I think that's something we're working on, too.

Speaker1: [01:15:07] I'm in the role of cities is going to be important, but proceeding carefully so as not to exacerbate that obviously already existing divide between the rural and the urban that came out so ferociously in this in this campaign to so it's going to be a balancing act between those. And as Dominic was saying, direct action is going to be important and so we should be out there. But I think one of the really kind of literally maddening consequences of of this election is the frustration in terms of our own work because I think most of us already feel that we're working at capacity to try and improve the already existing challenges, shall we say, you know, pushing it up a hill, OK? And, you know, doing everything we can to try and address these questions about climate and environment and racism and the whole picture. And this feels truly like a slap in the face because it shows us that we haven't done enough, and it also shows us that we have to do a whole lot more. So it, you know, I don't know what the answer is to that question, except my response is we have to we have to keep on doing what we're doing, but we have to do it better and we have to do it more. But we should keep doing what we're good at and because we have we have skills, you know, you have legal skills, we have scholarly skills, we have those things and I think we have to enhance them and increase them and put those those things to work. So I don't know, we need to do what we've already been doing. But we do need to do it more and better. That's all. And it's going to be more hours and it's going to mean more energy. And it's hard because we don't have a whole lot of extra there. We don't have a lot of surplus.

Speaker2: [01:16:48] Yeah, but I mean, it was a wake up call, but I think we're awake now.

Speaker1: [01:16:52] Yeah, that's true. It's yeah, it's like getting thrown in a, yeah, an ice bath or something. Yeah, really.

Speaker4: [01:16:59] I mean, it's it's one of the reasons I think this podcast is interesting because I've been thinking about ways in which to have conversations that we have with each other all the time that we maybe don't have with people outside of our kind of intellectual communities of anthropology or our students to have these more public conversations. I think it's I think it's interesting.

Speaker2: [01:17:21] We have people listening to us all over the world. Hello, Mongolia.

Speaker1: [01:17:25] Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so huge following China. That's Canada and Australia.

Speaker2: [01:17:31] So I hope you're listening in. But when you guys start your podcast, we would love to come on this. To put

Speaker1: [01:17:39] That out there, we should podcast solidarity,

Speaker2: [01:17:42] We should let you go because it's been a long American Anthropological Association meetings already and we know much has been going on.

Speaker1: [01:17:47] Thank you so much for coming.

Speaker4: [01:17:49] It's been a great show.

Speaker2: [01:17:51] Thank you.

Speaker4: [01:17:51] And and thanks for listening. Very nice.