Hello everybody. Welcome back to the cultures of energy podcast host. I am here with my co-host, Dominic Boyer. Hello. And we are as usual in the basement of Fondren Library on the beautiful Rice University Campus. We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks and shout out to the Digital Media Center, which has been providing us with a fantastic space and technical support. So we are loving them. And we also want to thank the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the human sciences, which is called sends. You want to go all acronym on it. They support this podcast as well. And today we have a good one for you as always. So we're going to, first of all, full disclosure. My co-host was an extra in the film Lost Boys, which is going to come which is going to come back in a second. But I wanted to I want to say that and see if you had anything you wanted to say about that? First of all, before we introduce our main guest? Well, I do have something to say about that, but I thought you're going to address I thought you're going to introduce our guests first. Okay. You see no lesser authority than Rice University News has declared that you're going to hear easy, quick, easy banter on this podcast. So I was just trying to challenge us with with a curve ball that you thought that was a curve ball, how are they expecting that you were expecting? Yeah. Fair enough. Anyway, our special guest today is John Hart again, who is a wonderful anthropologist who works at the University of Texas Austin. He has done some really cool work influenced by science and technology studies on race and genomics. And Mexico has got a cool new project coming up that we're going to hear more about. But the funny thing is, well, first of all, John Hart again is like a national treasure. He's an amazing guy, just a wonderful, warm-hearted, amazing human being. And it turns out when 70 was at a dinner with him that they discovered that there's this whole other level connectivity that they have based upon that the days in which they both used to live in Santa Cruz. So that was that was my last play shout out, which was actually really hilarious because that was one of the best dinners ever. So after we we had this conversation on a podcast and he and I don't know each other all that well, but we have this history that goes way back. He was your TA ones. Here's my TA which also you'll hear about that. But what I didn't know until afterwards when we're out at dinner with a bunch of people here at Rice. Is that in fact, I knew his little brother who came to live with him in Santa Cruz while John was a graduate student at UCSC. His little brother came as an established what you gotta told them. Well, that was the big reveal as that we were talking about being in Santa Cruz and where did you live and who did you hang out with and et cetera. And then John Hart again says like, oh, my little brother was an extra, Lost Boys. And I was like, Hey, I was an extra and loss boys and arrows like, Hey, who's your little brother? And he's like my little brother was named Z. Then I kind of sat back in my seat and I was like, Hey Ron, I remember as a hey Ron says, Hey Ron, Jon, hard against little brother. Is this really tall, very, very skinny guy who is just sort of EPEC and the downs town street. So Santa Cruz, he was a hunk. He was on clunk? Well, yeah, a bit. He wasn't very Anki he was more kind of he was the rail thin type probably had that he had Heroin Chic before it was even cool. But that is what Anki punk I got second and ask him. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. He was not a skin head. He was of the category dirt punk, which is where that was a whole category in Santa Cruz. Dirt Punk as opposed to the skin had different. But he always had his hock up. He would have like the six, seven-inch Mohawk. Often it was like fire engine red, but sometimes you do like yellow. All kinds of crazy chains hanging everywhere. Of course, a super cool another jacket, motorcycle jacket. And me and my friend Susie had a huge crush on him. Of course. Yeah. I mean, my God. Anyway with him, a hug like that, how could you not? So anyway, we had we cracked up realizing that we knew all the same punks, punk rock, jerry skin had jerry Keith, all of the all the rest of them. And then John hard against wife is like, Oh yeah. Did you hang out at desolation and I was like, Oh my God, desolation decile issue is the place where all the punks would go and drink. That's really bad. Huge like five-gallon jugs of wine like Rosie. And in case you're imagining that distillation is like a building or something I think is like under a bridge, right? It's like under the trestle tracks. So that's like exactly where I would hope, you know, Santa Cruz punks would be drinking. It. But anyway, that's awesome. So you made these, these connections. That's great. It was hilarious. And the poor. So Randall Hall who was out to dinner with us had to listen to all this nostalgia from the late eighties in Santa Cruz. It's beautiful. It's beautiful anyway, so I'm not sure how much that informed, you know, John's decision to become an anthropologist or what. But he certainly has a colorful history and is doing great work now and multi-species. And that's what you're going to talk about as well as his mustache as I understand it. Oh, yes. Yes. Precisely. Okay. So that should be enough of a teaser. Yes. Yeah. Without further ado. 70 and John hard again. So we are sitting here in the basement of Fondren Library with Professor John Hart again. And I'm really happy to be sitting here with you and and able to have this conversation. So you're right up the road from us here in Austin and we're down here in Houston. And you and I have hung out a couple of times at conferences and different seminar stuff like that, but not a whole lot, right? And yet we actually have a kind of ancient history that we shared in a cultural anthropology class that I took at UC Santa Cruz when you were a graduate student and you were that the TA, the teaching assistant for this section of carolyn Martin shots introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology. And because the class was so huge, we had these discussion sections because that's kinda how it was and I guess is still at UT Austin, yes. It's discussion sections for massive sex. Yes. So I remember you very well as a teaching assistant, as a graduate student teaching assistant. And there's a lot of them I forgotten. And part of the reason I think that I remembered you so well is that, well, one reason was probably totally vein and narcissistic and that was that I wrote a paper in that class that actually had to do with kind of the cultural significance of corn in Guatemala. Yeah. And you love to the paper and I got an, a positive comments and I think it's really ironic that this question of sort of corn and Latin America as, yeah, as we'll see, that's where I ended up. And who knows if you planted a lot long time ago back in the day? Well, I wish I'm happy to take credit, but I'm not going through it because I'm sure that it wasn't I'm sure wasn't that impressive of paper. Well, I remember you being very energetic and engaged. Yeah. I mean, yeah. What stands out yeah. Intersection like that. That's part of it. Yeah. Yeah. So so that's one reason, but then the other reason that I remembered you so well is because of the phenomenal mustache. And continue to have ads, it's ours. Yeah, it endures. And the thing is, is that, you know, now every hipster bar, tender and server in the country, facial hair and they've got their well-groomed mustaches. You've got this fairly massive and robust mustache, but you haven't redeemed it just before coming down here because okay, guy, he's getting a little too. Hello? Yeah. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. So but see you you did this way back in the day away before it was kinda cool thing before they had facial hair clubs. And so I think inquiring minds really want to know, well, I'll tell you. And it had something to do probably with the stress of graduate school or being in Santa Cruz, which is a very odd eco niche in terms of allergens, etc. Had, I developed alopecia, airy ATA, like you to get small round, round bald spots, your head. And I eventually went to an acupunctures and got cheated. I was getting them right here on my chance. I say, okay, well, I'm just going to take all that off there. And then I was like, Oh, what's the hair grew, grew back. I liked it so much that I had just kept shaving it. That's great. That's cool. See, you are at you or a trendsetter. I don't know if you are trying to center at the time. I didn't. And I said, yeah, it's a I think it's very funny though, because as I was thinking about whether I could ask you that question, yes, which I wanted to and then I was like, wait, that's too personal question to ask sky of someone. And then I was thinking about the kind of gender dynamics of it, yes. Because it's almost okay for me as a female person to ask you about facial hair. And yet it would be kind of out a line are considered kind of ****** up and crazy if you said like, Oh, seminary, why do you wear mascara? Yes. Right. Right. Right. Right. My daughter, who's 18, has disabuse me of asking any woman ever about mascara. I tried to talk to her about it and she said, No, she's very Milton. She uses it, she likes it. Rock it out my face. Leave me alone. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of the gender dynamics about beards, the odd thing about it is I get compliments from random guys. Guys will just come up to me and the guy just going to say, I really love you. Do chops UP or whatever? Never from females. Well, only guys. Yeah. And they say chops? Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Stash or hair or whatever. Yes. Yeah. That's pretty good. It's rare for guys to compliment each other? Yes. Especially something about your looks. Something like so embodied as facial hair? Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's say down, I'm glad I I am too. And now the whole world can do this. You have to wear a mustache. So I also know that you are from Detroit, Michigan originally. And so I'm kinda curious how you got from Detroit to history of consciousness. Yeah. By having an excellent undergrad experience with anthropology, I read your writing culture in an undergraduate class. So that was probably just after it came out, 87 or so. I was like, Wow, I really want to go study with his Clifford guy that's got the word or, or marcus cell. Yes, I did. And I had read Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto and I'll see, you know, um, I gotta, I gotta go out there. And so I got out there and I was like, well, what am I going to do here? And it was just at the point where whiteness was emerging as a topic. And Ruth Franklin Berg was actually just kinda coming back from doing her fieldwork in San Francisco. And, you know, the subjects that she talk to, we're typically saying things like, Well, I didn't realize I was white until I was in high school and then we had some racial conflict us, oh my God. Yes. I've gotta race. They'd grown up in very segregated neighborhoods As a while waiting. I know all these white people in Detroit who have never had that experience, who are sort of always thinking about race. And I know that those whites think about it very differently based on their class experiences. In whatever class strata you're in. Races more or less manageable through forms of social capital, etc. Says, Oh, well, well why don't I go back to Detroit and do an ethnographic project there. Because the kind of theorizing that was getting done, what becomes whiteness studies was a bit too abstract. And I thought this really, since ethnographic treatment, mm, mm, and incense. And you've done quite a bit of work on race too? Yeah. Yes. Yes. And so you do the brief trajectory after working race in the US from several angles from current media to cultural history, I decided to shift to study in Mexico and also to shift into science and technology studies. And basically look at how geneticists are reproducing ideas about race. And I started with a genome mapping project in Mexico, the Mexican genome as if it kinda stopped at the border. And, and I gradually shifted from there to the project. I'm just finishing up now, which is another Genome Project but on maize. So effort in Mexico to try to actually catch up with a genome sequencing of the maze species here in the US and 2, or does biodiversity labs in, in one a lot down. And I noticed initially that there was some of the same kind of language about preserving the natural, excuse me, the National patrimony of the genome. But it was plants instead of people and an indigenous worked in similar ways to it, which got me into a long history of indigeneity and indigenous is used on plants before it's used on people. And so I go, oh wow. And that began opening up a whole string of thoughts which were accelerated when I realized that they had, have races of corn Russes, day mice. And I thought, Wow, how the, how is this possible that the corn has a race? And I initially assumed that it was an ideological construct. But I found out during the history of race that it actually emerges first non-humans. It's used in Spain and Italy in the 14 hundreds to talk about dogs initially. And the idea is that they were trying to, elites were trying to work out ideas of genealogy and making claims of blood. And they were able to do so through their, their, their dogs because these were ballasts, creatures that would go out on the hunt with them. And so they could emblem eyes, their valor in a genealogical sense, do breeds of dog. And then it moved very quickly to two horses. From there to domestic species generally. And it's only after that usage gets really developed that it becomes apply to humans. And as you know and Spanish speaking countries today, Gerasa is used it will just off the cuff for pets, dogs in particular, what breed, and as well for humans. And so that's where I've ended up in, in the zone where I'm trying to use terms and concepts that are applied across species lines. Things like care. Other species engage in it. Domestication. Other species do it too. And that's opened up my effort to expand social theory and social theorizing to look at forms of sociality in non-humans. Me and we were talking earlier about, I think, a pretty new genre of thinking and theorizing that's being called domestication study. Yeah, wha what is that exactly. And what does it look like? Yeah. It's I think it's going to rehearse what happened with kinship and the early 2000s. So that was a topic that had kinda seemed to run its course in anthropology. Anthropology, I guess, right? And then the new reproductive technologies came along and people like Sarah Franklin began working on that and re, animating this classic anthropological concept, it suddenly became much more interesting than what kinship had been. Because you had to think through it basically, the, the, more than human, the technological dimensions were complicating the notion of it as it just pertain to people. Dig, dig domestication. There, there are several things going on about it. The first is an opening up of our understanding of agency in relation to non-humans. It's much easier now to see all kinds of domesticated species doing things to us that actually we interpret as where domesticating them, right? Like you were talking when we are at lunch time in this example of dogs and eye contact, can yes. Yes. You retell that they jumped the circuit of our our our parent infant gaze. They, they're able to lock on to our eyes and have it produce the same kind of physiological reaction. Oxytocin is generated in the, in the brain when we gaze at our infants. A similar physiological reaction occurs when we gaze into our dogs eyes, and apparently it works for them as well. So they jumped the visual gaze somewhere along the way and they've ruled us ever sense, right? They figured out that yeah. That that trick, yeah. And and there's gratification on both sides, yes. Sense that staring into each other's eyes across species lines actually has a kind of chemical effect and a powerful bonding experience too. Yeah, so this is a great way of thinking about how multi-species studies can, can give insights to sort of human behavior and human habits as well and the ways in which we interact with others. And the idea of domestication is such a great framework for thinking about it because it forces us or invites us, maybe more positively put, to think about what constitutes the domestic, right? So you're talking about Domus and what sort of held within the parameters of the Domus? Yeah. And what constitutes domestication? Do we domesticate them? Did they domesticate us or is it a more reciprocal process? Yeah. Kinda interaction and interweaving that's constantly going on and I think we're looking at microbiomes. Biomes more generally wasn't real opportunities. That's a very key aspect of the, the Domus. What we know now from the studies done off of the, the microbiome is that each of us individually are colonized by bacteria. And when we move into a place, they colonize that place. They, they cover the services and when we leave, they go to and then they go and colonize in advance. As we arrive. A new apartment, a new house. So the, the Domus is a good way of thinking about the multispecies assemblage that we would call just in human social terms, the home. But it's full of layers of these creatures, certainly that we've brought into the sphere, from pets on out to the farm animals, etc. But then all of these other attendant species, though, the lice fleas, the vermin, et cetera, that are also part of our living spaces, but that are not transformed genetically in the way we would define a domesticated species. So, so, so the Domus of domestication. Opens that up and then again, thinking about, well, other species that are doing it to leafcutter ants get there. Not only you're fertilizing fungus, they apply an antibiotic secretion from their bodies that works as herbicide. They're engaged in transforming the species of fungi. So that's domestication two. So the idea is by focusing in on it in other species, we can shift again, as you said at the beginning, The conceptualizations of the human seem to be really central. What's distinctive about humans? We have culture and we enculturated other species. You know, all, all, all these a general arrows spinning around from, you know, who's doing what to whom, and what other species are doing it as well. Make it a much more interesting topic then when it was just a set of questions about, well, when did it happen and how did that happen? 10 thousand years ago. Domestication is its current. It's ongoing. Yeah. It's happening right now. Yes. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. As we sit here and I love thinking about the leafcutter ants has a little micro horticulturist yeah. Horticultural that, yes, yes, yeah, it's kinda fascinating idea. And then also as we think about bacteria, we think too about the sort of language, right? So they're colonizing the space. They're colonizing our bodies. Or maybe on the flip side, we're providing a home for these bacteria. Yes. Yes. Yeah, they are the Domus that allow thrive. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And that kind of attention to to language is critical and to have that kind of dexterity to flip it around. I mean, it gives you like, you know, use colonization in and you start thinking differently about that term and it's its meanings and implications. Many which are very fraught. Yeah. So, yeah, but that's why I think it's exhilarating. Yeah, it sucks. I Ancef. Yeah. So I have also here I have this cute little purple book. It's called a sops anthropology, a multi-species approach. And this is a book that you did with University of Minnesota Press, and it's part of a series that's called for runners. I'll just quickly read this. It says is for runners is a thought in process series of breakthrough digital works written between fresh ideas and finish books for runners draws on scholarly work. Initiated and notable blogs, social media conference plenary, these journal articles and the synergy of academic exchange. They call it gray literature publishing, where intense thinking, change in speculation takes place and scholarship. So I, I did want to turn to a couple of passages that you have here in the book. But first I thought maybe you could reflect a bit on the form of, of, of this text because it's very brief. And you know, what it's like or what, what are the advantages or disadvantages to having such a short form? And it essentially open access rights get Creative Commons, creative Commons license so people can just run with it. And just a bit of the background. I was having drinks with the editor of Minnesota, you, Jason Wiedemann. That's always a good way to start, a very good way to share things. And I was mired in, in the project that I've just wrapped up. And he happened to mention this series and I just jumped. So please let me do one. Because I realized I could work out a bunch of ideas that were there were kind of big, but there were taking up too much space in the ethnographic project. So there's things I worked through there, like with native. Here's a term we, we used on plants first, like indigenous and then people become natives. And that's a way of talking about, about race. And I could work through that in 2500 words. And you just get the idea articulated and then move on to the next one. And there's a whole string of ideas in there, including day domestication. But the horticultural hermeneutic, the, the way we, we use plants, roots, fruit and seed to talk about everything from ethnicity to computer. Branches, directory's, root directories, etc. Are thinking is permeated by plants. Well, I was in the midst of doing an ethnographic project in botanical gardens that ended up with me trying to interview a plant. But I didn't want to get into all the sort of intellectual history of this horticultural hermeneutic. Like, let me just kind of a bracket that off. So what this text allowed me to do is just get a bunch like a cluster of ideas which all turn around culture and cultivation. And you know, on one hand, trying to expand the reach of cultural analysis beyond the human MN. And by recognizing that it's usage on humans. Is metaphorical cultivation. The term is got a close to 2 thousand years prior usage for talking about plants and our relationships to them and the soil and this kind of exchange. And we narrow it down to talk about the uniqueness of humans beginning roughly 16 1700s. And then to then talk about non-human forms of culture. And basically, taking culture is that which molds ecologies and biologies. And we're not the only species that does that. And then as well, you know, the range of social species and thinking about adding the social return. Do this other set of turns to the species turned, effective turn. In getting back to some of the most simple forms of social theorizing. Gabriel Tarde, just, you just said, oh, it's all about innovation and mimicry, okay, That's sociality. And you can see that in a lot of other species as well. So I could get all that out. And hopefully people will, will run with some of those ideas. Let me then go on to finish this bigger book. Mm-hm, Mm-hm. Right. So it's kind of yeah. It's sort of like a launching pad in a way. Yeah, and there's a certain freedom that you have in writing and this preform because it's like an essay form and I don't know if you know how many words it is, but it's, you know, each little chapters and it's 20 thousand words. Yeah, total is about 2500. It's no more than 2500 words per essay per chapter. And I said 15, 15 chapters. Yeah. And sometimes that's so much more effective. Right leg along argument, right? So like I use the concept of a, of homology, which means you knew similarities across species. And it's got a certain meaning in genetics, which is keyed in on an evolutionary theory. But it's got a much older usage. But good to talk about morphology. And I can put all that in play and just kind of wrap it up with without them having to demonstrate it in 14 different ways, right? And tear out the, the reader. That I mean, I love it because it sets in, it's such a great way to get really smart thinking quickly on the page. And I think these kinds of forums really are going to be more and more the future of publishing. Not just academic publishing, but all kinds of publishing. Because, because people can approach this work and how that quickly and easily and then go to meditate on it themselves. So yeah, I think it's nice. We have to make our thinking more accessible. Yeah, basically. And it's really nice. It's really clear and nicely written too much, I appreciate it. So that makes a huge difference too, because some of our anthropological colleagues are not clear. Or even well with my edges had the experience in seminar yesterday, I'm trying to explain some passages. I won't say in what reading, but the grad, so I don't understand this and I'm she's I don't know if I understand it either right side. It it seemed to make sense, yeah. Right back over the Christmas break, I was putting together the syllabi, yes. Yes. And now I'm like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Yeah. So that's great. So I wanted to turn to this chapter in the book and a subs anthropology and the little chapter is called species thinking. And this is kinda ref, and a thought experiment that's coming out of an article that Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote, I think in 2009, but it's called the climate of history for theses. And that's the name of his article. And it's been really influential in thinking about the so-called Anthropocene. And I think a lot of people have read it, but for those of our listeners who might not have read it, I wanted to kinda just give a quick glimmer of what chalk liberty is, is thinking about and talking about here. So he uses this term, species thinking to characterize a mode of thinking that takes humanity as a species as its object of analysis. So this is a much more universal term and way of thinking about humanity than, than Chakrabarty or he argues, you know, other historians have done the past. Yeah, he says that these parameters thinking, species thinking is independent of capitalism. There had been stable for much longer than the histories of its institutions. And these parameters come into view out of a breach between the present historiography of globalization and the historiography demanded by anthropogenic theories of climate change. And that's, that's what he's getting at. Yeah. So he talks about the Anthropocene, a new geologic era, suggesting that species may indeed be the name of a place holder for an emergent new universal history of humans. Flashes up in a moment of danger, that is climate change. So really trying to get to this idea. And then you write that species for a species that is human, species that have given a good deal of thought to species. This is a kind of transformational moment and proposition that Chakrabarty as he's offering. So then you close this chapter with this line, and I just wanted to kind of think back to it. So with species thinking in you, right, we shift from an anxiety over the culture bound way that humans view species. Understanding that the recognition of species is not just cultural, it is fundamental to the argument that culture exists. So I thought that this was a very powerful statement about the constitution of culture and how species thinking might trouble the very underpinnings of culture. Yeah, and so working as an anthropologist, yeah. I just thought it was interesting to hear a little bit more out that that take yeah, so this is our area of expertise, right? Culture. And it's been delimited by a version of the human that Chakrabarty get characterized. When we apply social theory where we're going to talk about power history and in capitalism and economics. And why aren't we just economist anyways, because we say Academy explains everything, right? Okay, so what is culture such that it opens up a much wider scope of attention? With placing species in the frame, you have that immediate challenge of are we being anthropocentric and talking about them? And are we constructing them? And this is the limit of the cultural analysis, is that it seems to insist we are sealed into a vat of representations and we only ever have kept representations. So we can't talk about nature or biology as biologists do, because we know that we're only dealing with the representation. That's the version of culture that goes with the version of the human that Chakrabarty is trying to displace. That doesn't end. All of the perils of being anthropocentric are anthropomorphic. When we look at leafcutter ants and talk about are the gardening is domestication. But the importance of the moment when we're recognizing the precarity of our species, that we have to do much better accounts of the world and the other species in it. Then culture is the thing that we can look for that's already on the other side. So the representational version of culture says, you know, you never get to the outside world. If you look at culture in relationship to species, you see other species have it. Humans only have it because it's evolutionarily derived. The citations most of them have it and some form of it. Locally learned traditions that work on the plasticity biologically of species, mold them, mold. Speech patterns, dialects, et cetera, sculpt, local ecologies, eco niche, niche construction. And he said, Wow, there's culture actually going on all over the place. And, and it's having similar kinds of effects. So not quite on the scale that the Anthropocene names. So we were talking earlier about the domestication and one of the important facts or factoids about it is that 90 percent of the vertebrate biomass on the planet today is our species and our domesticates. And 10 thousand years ago, it was only a tenth of a percent. So we need to be able to count for the kind of cultivations that all of those species entail. And we need to do so in ways that open up our sensibilities about agency that don't see it as just the human driving it. And that anthro center, the, the Anthropocene as a frame. Both recognizing the extent of transformation of the world outside there and the attended precarity that induces on our species is the opening to recognize culture all over the place. And that we as cultural anthropologists, ought to go there and not leave it up to the entomologists to talk about the social relations of ads or the social lives of bacteria. There's an awful lot of current, so analysis of the sociality of bacteria. But they have it on a model that comes out of the origins of social theory, the idea of the individual. That's what we developed social theory to undo this individualism and it's conceptualization. Well, that's still there in evolutionary theory and social theory as it's, it's applied by micro biologists. And so. Could get in there and do a better analysis because we understand how culture works beyond that frame. And it also, it seems like an opening for the discipline of anthropology in itself, because it might be an opportunity to finally overcome the kind of fraught discussions and debates about the use of culture as a concept which has been going on at least since the 80s, but still continues. You know, should we, should we toss it? Should we keep it should be reinvigorated, should we call it ontology? And it's, it's been such an interesting dynamic conversation and the discipline by two, if we opened up the field and said that culture is in fact what all living creatures occupy and or, you know, some at least or sound. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it might take some of that kind of fraught weight off of that discussion as well. I think that's been worries about hierarchies and writes. What has been raised about, about naturalized things to write or to insulate people in their culture, explained their culture. But, you know, when I was learning anthropology in the 19 eighties, there are all these jokes about yogurt as culture, right? I think that they were actually onto something. Do you remember any ethics? You will just get appointing a 0. Well, that's culture, right? Culture in a jar and yogurt. Okay, We know the insight there is that culture is mediums rather than meaning, right? And we didn't run with it then. But if you look at all of the cultures that are deployed in biology labs, It's just fundamental. And you kinda work that's doing. And they talk about it in the same way, either as a verb or a noun. Culture culturing. I think that a lot of the anxiety that we've had, which stems from trying to take on socio biology in 1970s and also race. You know, the, the, the intellectual challenge of trying to disrupt naturalized notions of race, I think made us double down on the representational interpretation of culture. And that race is an idea. And if we can get that idea out, it'll, it'll dissolve. It's not there in nature that hasn't worked or it's not sufficient. And so looking at culture in all of these other kinds of permutations and just making that shift towards it as mediums, as in cultivation, to soils in which plants and humans are engaged. Rather than the meanings and somebody's head. The etiology and the constructs. I think that that'll be very generative. Mmm, it's a, it's a place to inhabit rather than something that's that's locked in between our ears yes. Transmit to our babies, right? Yeah. Right. Yeah. I wanted to also talk about something that's in the news now and yet is quite racialized and has a lot to do with environment and contamination. And that is the case of Flint, Michigan. Yeah. And, you know, you're you're a native of Michigan and Detroit. Detroit and sit and you probably know that Michael Moore, at the beginning of this month, called for the arrest of governor of the state. Yeah. And so I wanted to hear some of your reflections on the case of the lead contamination through the pipes in Flint, Michigan? Yeah. I was just shocking and infuriating. That's this unfolded. The water situation in Southeast Michigan is quite fascinating. In Detroit, in particular, over the last several years, they've been cutting off water for, for tens of thousands of people who have been unable to pay their water bills. And you had the, the UN trying to get involved at 1 because this is a violation of human rights. And you're sitting on, and the largest supply of fresh water in the world, practically great, The Great Lakes, well. And people in Detroit, Highland Park, in particular, a little enclave in Detroit. People getting a $6 thousand or water bills for a variety of reasons, but partly because of the politics in the state of the emergency manager system, taking over very dilapidated infrastructures and trying to operate them on a, on a shoestring and yet generate revenue. Just like policing has been used to generate revenue, right? Infrastructural failings as well have been that source for predominantly African-American disenfranchised communities. But the situation in Flint kind of opens it up more broadly, like I didn't realize when I heard about it, how much lead pipe there still is in use throughout the Midwest, in the Northeast, it's certainly far larger than Flint. There's a chemical process that they use in treating water. That's going to be fed into old lead pipes since basically adding phosphate heads that calcifies the of the the letter, it prevents it from leaching out. They stopped doing that in order to save money. At the same time, they change the source of water to the far more polluted and corrosive water in Flint River rather than from the Detroit River, which coming through the legs is far better in terms of quality and sued. That's an infrastructural failing. They're very simple technique that I was completely oblivious to. This kind of money saving emergency manager technique revealed it. Mm-hm, Mm-hm. It's a really disturbing way to have these kinds of infrastructures revealed. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, part of the conversation in the media right now is on the one hand, I guess, or something New York Times yesterday, about the fact that major media outlets hadn't been covering the story, even though it had been known for quite some time, including the New York Times, had sort of failed to what local reporters were reporting, but now major media weren't to add. Yeah, The question is arising as to whether if this were a white community, if this were an affluent community, whether the news would have been out there and there would have been a lot louder protests down that I am sure that that is certainly the case for a variety of reasons. Because a white community, an effluent one would be more effective at doing and getting the word out to the good they have. The social capital. You know, the racial component of the disregard here is, is, is fundamental. But this also is a matter of infrastructure. It, whether that's an interesting topic or not, right? But I'm thinking of your work as well because I know dealing with infrastructures, it can be very boring. And it's, it's the subject of disinvestment. Until a situation like this reveals how much more there is to infrastructure. All of the social dimensions of race and class. That wouldn't have been revealed. Another way we wouldn't have been, have been tolerated. So it makes our work as cultural anthropologists shift in focus as I think your work is doing. Taking metaphore, Thinking infrastructure seriously rather than as a metaphor, which is what it's been, you know, the structure, social structure, actually infrastructure or all of these bacterial components that actually are full of multispecies, relations and entities in the, in, in the plumbing, in the walls in the roads. We can see that there's a great deal more vibrancy, I guess, to something that's been disregarded. That's like infrastructure that's full of life itself. Perfect. Yeah. And I think too, I mean, in the case of flat shows us that, you know, for decades now we've been talking about institutional racism and we've been talking about environmental racism. Yes. And this almost starts to look like something like infrastructural. I says Yes, Yeah, Yes. I don't know. Yeah, I need to have those kinds of particular categories, But that seems to be the locus it, Let's have one here and our recognition of it might be new, but it's been around for a long time. Yeah. Olivier Xun's urban historian wrote an excellent book on Detroit, where he keep track the ethnic neighborhoods through the different kinds of plumbing that the city was laying out. The more advantage and the more you're disadvantaged, you can go back and see the ethnic racial texture of the city through its extension of infrastructure. Yeah. Yeah. And and it's very telling yeah. A good study. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There is speaking of class. We were speaking of teaching class, socio-economic class, although I guess that's related here to one of the other things about the Flint case is that it brings up these questions around the concept of pollution and contamination, right? So I, I'm teaching a history of anthropological theory class. And yesterday we were reading the very eminent and classic Mary Douglas chapters out of her book, Purity and Danger and analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. And so for Mary Douglas, the way she thinks about pollution and the way she writes about pollution is in terms of ritual pollution. So it's symbolic pollution that occurs within certain cultural contexts. Maybe the best example to share is the question of cast, right? So the, you know, the, the kind of contaminated effect being in contact with someone who is of a different cast, right? So it's symbolic contamination is pollution for her. But ever since the advent of a more popular environmental movement in the United States, Coalition has meant something distinct. And that is pollution is a material substance in the environment, contaminates a and environment and perhaps people in that environment. And so we have these two ideas or concepts operative as to what constitutes pollution. One is ritual pollution, symbolic, and it happens between humans. The other is material contamination, pollution. And it happens between humans and their so-called environment or they're right there, EcoRI air or their world. So the relationships are different. Yeah, And, and the effect of, of the term is different to one is very patently social, the other has more kind of eco possibilities, but it seems smooth. The case of flat you have a kind of conflation of, of the two and this is not the only case, but sure. It's just, you know, thinking about these parallels of what do these terms mean. What do they do in social life and how did they change over time? Because for Mary Douglas, the 1950s and 60s, pollution was a thing. And it's a thing now, but they're very different. Yes, she would take it in a ritual context, right? And there was a time when that was what anthropologists study drug that we studied ritual. And, you know, and, and then we stopped and we're going to do power history just because somebody much broader and inequality and disadvantage and all of that. And it spirals out. And then you come to the moments where a wage isn't, it's still relevant, right? Well, that's from, from, from symbolic anthropology. I I've had several colleagues and other departments ask, is it still located sites? Mary Douglas. Is that Cronus a yes, it is. Because those basic dynamics don't go away. So I was able to use that to think about white trash, yeah, in terms of cultural representations because it's literal instantiation of pollution in biology. It's matter out of place. Alright, well, I, you know, in ritual contexts that, that works one way as you framed it very nicely. The shift is from a concept used to talk about human, human interactions to human and environmental actions. The risk. In risk, of course, she's written on it in terms of the via Persia environmental movement would be to take pollution and its material effects as, as, as the real. And say that, Okay, now we don't have to think about these symbolic dimensions. Also be a mistake to only construe environmental concerns as a pollution ideology. And that would be up for us to work through as cultural anthropologists. So there's a pollution ideology at work with race. In the US where African Americans are seen as matter out of place. Any place outside of very intensely segregated residential areas, or through being subject to the excess of placement, a waste incinerators, waste dumps, all kinds of dumping in predominantly minority neighborhoods. You know, that kind of pollution ideology plays out in a series of infrastructural effects where we're waste can be placed and where the idea of taking water from highly contaminated river didn't raise concerns. Partly that's an ignorance of the, the science of water treatments and just an engineering understanding of infrastructures. And so it's just very callous, ruthless cost-cutting and just trying to not worry about the complaints that followed because we're saving money here. And then you do more complexly as you brought up with in terms of the media coverage, why that doesn't become a story. Until a year later. That's the tangle of race. It's material and symbolic. Dimensions very deeply interwoven. Let some, yeah, talk about something a little more cheerful. Okay, this is a topic that I love, yes. And in fact, I have a whole category of movies I like to see because these particular creatures are featured in the movie prominently, okay. And then watching kid movies every once in a while. And I'll admit to gain a very good like gendered female North American person. Yeah. In the sense that when I was a kid, the only thing I begged for every Christmas guys, a pony. Ha ha ha ha ha. So let's talk about horses. Okay, great, Good. You're talking about horses now? Yes. Spanish horses and other horses without the ones in Spain. And I'll just say that i've I've segwayed from the project I was doing. I'm I'm botanical gardens there. And I was casting about for for another project and one of our graduate students who's from Gillies, Yes. Tell me about this fascinating ritual that, that takes place midsummer. Across rural areas. There people go out and gather in these feral horses and they take them into a rodeo like environments. And over a series of days, shear off the mains, just shave off the maids and then turn them loose again equal to k. Well, I guess the, the, the story is, and this has been going on for hundreds of years. It goes back to the plague. And there were two elderly sisters who were unable to keep horses. And they wanted to. So they took their horses to the priest and the priest said, Well, let's give them to the st, and we'll turn them loose and maybe the village will be spared from the plague. And it was spared. And so now every year this ritual is reproduced. So that's why there are feral horses in Spain. Because it's not really intuitive that you have wild horses in Spain. No, it is not. I was, I was surprised and I actually got into this obliquely because the project I was trying to do was on, on rewilding Europe. There's a series of efforts to basically both breed back towards a pre historic life form for, for horses and cows, but also to turn these creatures loose in abandoned fields and let them become wild again. Okay. So I was trying to look at official institutional efforts to rewild. And here I stumbled upon this thing where they take wild horses and temporarily tame them. And it just goes to show, well, ritual is still really interesting. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And what I've decided is I really don't care why the people are doing this. And I'm not spending much time at all with them. Horses are very social chances social species, and they have fission, fusion dynamics where they, they form bands and those bands break up, much like hunting, gathering humans used to do. They share a territory and they compete over resources. And so that's why they had to be intensely social. What I'm going to look at in this ritual is what happens to the horse sociality through the process. So the people from the villages grew up and gather in a variety of bands and they all get mixed together in this ridiculously too narrow space. And when the event occurs, the horses are kicking in, biting each other. It looks very violent. I I didn't see one injured. No flesh broken, nose, bytes that scarred an ER. So there's obviously a lot of sociality and how they restrain those kind of acts as well. I am going to use a very simple concept. So Erving Goffman phase, the concept of face and the idea that this is something that we socially present. People will engage in restorative acts to help us reparative if it's been good, blemished or ruptured, do some kind of faux pas or something. I'm looking for restorative acts among the horses when they're in these big corrals following the plays out over four days. So they bring him in that like shave a few. And it's like a rodeo scene where a team will tackle one horse and hold it down. And they also introduce some modern things like spray. Antibacterial veterinary foams into they're out there on nostrils to, to maintain their health. They're described as wild, but they're actually cultivated through these kind of access. And they're all, are mostly owned by individuals. But they're just allowed to be feral, so they're running free. But they're owned. And that's an interesting dimension to it. But what I was able to observe in my initial foray last summer was a lot of boundary work between the horses when they're there or turn loose. Could they advance on others? Would they form up together as a group who could get to the water trough? And they're doing a lot of social negotiation. Hey, I'm a cultural anthropologist. I'm, this is what I study. So I'm only going to focus in on, on horse sociality and see how mobile this concept of face might be. Yeah, that's great. I, you going to look at gender dynamics tail? Yes. And it's a very interesting story about gender because the initial theories where that, Well, it's, it's the male who dominates the bands. But everybody, like I talked to said, Oh no, it's the mares who are in charge. And they just keep the stallion around like you to fend off intruders. So I don't know, but I will certainly try to find out. Yeah, yeah. But there are definitely gendered dynamics to horse sociality and how it's interpreted. At any of the interesting thing here is ethology. This kind of study of non-humans has been around for a while. And i'm, I'm stumbling upon these techniques that are going to be fantastically useful. How is ethnography different and the etiology? And I think mainly because the older forms of ethology really tried to get the animal in a situation where there was no human contact at all. To get it a kind of a pure state. And ethnography realizes that that was never there or not as long as horses had been domesticated. And so that's one of the kind of interdisciplinary challenges I guess I face. Mm-hm, Mm-hm. Alright, well before we, before we finish up here, but this fantastic conversation that we've had, I wanted to ask a question that again, everyone wants to know the answer to. And you may actually have the answer, at least add an answer. And that is what is the coolest place to go in Austin. Austin. Who if if I told you, they would kill me when I get home, Really, dad exclusive. Know, we're trying to spread rumors there about the cancer bats. Don't come to Austin because the cancer bats will get you. So they buy any product yet cancer, Exactly, yes or no cool, cool places. But if you can fight your way through the bats, Barton Springs, this giant wonderful natural spring that they've made into large pool, break down off the the the rivers. The best place to test it? Yeah. Yeah. When I was thinking of this question, that was my answer to that with strings. Now everybody else, nothing we got. The word is ounce out. What? Thank you so much, John, for taking the time to talk. I enjoyed it so much. Yeah. Great question. So yeah, my grandma had luck with those horses. Thank you.