Kirsten Bell on Anthropology & the Everyday

This is the third in a series of conversations I am going to be having with people who make me wonder. Look for them every other Monday.

I first encountered Kirsten Bell - the anthropologist, not the actress - by way of her piece, “Do Washing Machines Belong in Kitchens?” and was hooked. Since then, I have been devouring her newsletter, Silent But Deadly, and looking forward to her book “Silent But Deadly: The Underlying Cultural Patterns of Everyday Life.”

Where do you come from?

Ah, yes, I can see that there are, it's a Rorschach test, isn't it? Where you go with the question. But obviously, in a literal sense, I'm Australian. Originally I moved around a fair bit. So I'm an anthropologist by training, and I suppose as a result of my work, I've done fieldwork in South Korea, I've lived in the U.S., in Australia, Canada, and I'm currently living in the U. K. I have answered your question in a very literal sense.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Actually, very unusually, I wanted to be an anthropologist. Most people, I can say this from years of teaching, most come into anthropology in a fairly accidental fashion. It's something they discover at university rather than something that they want to be. And I think that's just because there's not a lot of understanding of what anthropology is.

But for me, when I was 11 or 12, I saw a movie called The Serpent and the Rainbow. It's a very loose adaptation of Wade Davis's book of the same name. It's a horror movie Wes Craven. And I actually don't remember that much about it, except that it was about this anthropologist who goes to Haiti to study voodoo.

And at the time I was very into the occult, witchcraft, unexplained phenomena. And so when I saw this film, I was like, wow, there's a job that you can do where you get to study this stuff for a living. And so right from the age of 12, I decided that's what I wanted to be. I went to university to study anthropology and become an anthropologist and never really deviated course from that point.

PS: I remember that movie very well, and I don't know, I think it was in the, I've seen it a few times, and it had a strong impact on me too, and what I remember, I think, is a line from the movie that they used in the marketing of it, is what he would say in this gasping voice, he would say, Don't let them bury me. I'm not dead.

Yes, that's right. It is a horror movie and I remember, I don't remember that much about it except for yes, him being buried alive. And then there's a torture scene where I think he gets a nail through the scrotum. So yeah, it's yeah, but it obviously did have a pretty substantial impact on me.

It's funny, actually, lots of movies, like the films that tend to feature anthropologists are mostly horror films.

PS: Is that right?

Yeah.

PS: What other movies come to mind?

So I guess the most recent one would be Midsommar. So that's the one, they're all graduate students in the U. S., I think, for students who go to Sweden to study this summer festival and it it's a terrifying, it is a terrifying film anyway, it's, that's the latest one, but I guess The Relic that would be another one, Anaconda.

Yeah, there's a bunch of movies that there's an anthropological analysis on why that is, and this idea of the anthropologist, there's a mediator between different realms. The fact that often there's a certain kind of expertise anthropologists might have in non-Western context, and so that the films where it typically features is a, obviously Anaconda midsummer, they're set in a certain cultural context where, you know, the presence of an anthropologist might make sense. But yes, anyway, random fact.

What do you make of that?

Yeah. So I guess. Yeah, I think it's a slightly maybe romanticized explanation, but it's this idea, of the anthropologist as a mediator between different roles. And so whether that's a sort of Western or non Western, they're the human and they're the spiritual realm. And so this idea of the anthropologist is a kind of cultural mediator. And of course they often have this role in plot exposition or whatever in, in explaining so called exotic practices to the, to, to the audience in it.

Where are you now? Tell me a little bit about the work you're doing and where you're at.

Yeah, so I'm in London and so I'm a Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology at Imperial College. So I suppose in my, if my academic work I, my specialty is medical anthropology and so really trying to apply anthropological insights to the study of health and illness.

And then I suppose my hobby in terms of the sub stack is very much, I think trying to engage with people outside of academia and show and cater to my obsession with bodily odors, which I mean, I do write an unhealthy amount, I think about that topic, , there's something very freeing about writing for the public rather than for an academic audience, you're very constrained in academic writing.

And yeah, I think there's a lot of topics that really aren't considered to be fit for academic consumption that I'm very interested in. And so I get to explore those in my sub stack, and then also hopefully introduce people outside of academia to what a sort of anthropological approach looks like and the ways that was the kind of insights that might offer.

Can you tell me a story about medical anthropology, your academic life? What does your work look like?

I've worked in various different kinds of areas And so I've done a lot of research on say, on cancer survivorship. And so trying to understand the experiences of people who've lived through cancer, because cancer is a very distinctive kind of disease because it's halfway between an acute disease and a chronic disease. It's one that has existential consequences for the person diagnosed because it has these very powerful cultural meanings. It has a very feared form of treatment, chemotherapy. And so trying to understand. The experiences of people living through cancer based on the fact that it's incredibly culturally significant, but also a very life changing disease.

And I've also done work, probably the stuff that's a little bit more related to the work that you do would be stuff I've done looking at tobacco control and smoking. And so I've done quite a lot of work on cigarette packaging because it's an area where of course there's intense legislative attention. So tobacco control is focusing on the cigarette packet as this sort of advertising mechanism to try and encourage people to smoke. And they've tried to invert that, to make that into a sort of anti-smoking mechanism to market anti-smoking messages. And so really trying to understand what sort of impact, if any, that has on smokers, all of this intensive focus on the packet itself.

What did you discover?

And so there was this sense that in effect, the marketing qualities of the cigarette packet could be used against it. to market an anti-smoking message. Cause there's no doubt that they're not neutral health messages that are on the packet.

They're of grotesque imagery with very strong messaging. And so very much coming out of social marketing, which is trying to use marketing principles for, to resolve social problems. But my research would suggest that that's an overly simplistic way of thinking about packaging and that people have much more complicated relationships with their packets that aren't just about the visual.

And because mostly obviously when you smoke in a very habitual way, you're not focusing on the visual qualities of the packet. The packet is a container for your cigarettes. And so the research that I done, I've done on the area, which was just in situ interviews with people smoking on the streets, going up to smoking and then saying Can you remember the warning label on your packet? And almost no one could remember the warning label on their packet. And in fact, they would often guess, but sometimes they would say warning labels that didn't even exist.

And I think there's an assumption, a sort of, mainstream marketing assumption about the power of the visual that I think in the case of cigarette packaging probably needs some rethinking having said that, I think that So the research that I've done in that area would challenge those assumptions, but it has not been widely taken up. I think we've come so far down a certain policy path that people don't want anything that distorts that narrative.

These are much more kind of heavy topics and I think that's partly why with the Substack I want to focus on very light inane, mundane things rather because my professional life is spent studying very heavy topics and sometimes, fairly emotionally challenging or for the people experiencing them like cancer, for example.

PS: I encounter acronyms every once in a while in work and they have a very strong feeling against them and I'm going to ask you. Before I, reveal my own distaste for them and argument against them what's the argument against acronyms and how do you feel about them?

Yeah, I, when I wrote that piece, I'd recently started a new position in at Imperial. And of course, public health is shocking for acronyms. And the first day I was there, the people must have used at least 50 acronyms. And of course, being, being entering a new job, a lot of what you're doing is just learning the language associated with that. And you know that you can do your job once you've mastered the language. And acronyms are a form of technical language or jargon. In theory, they're supposed to make life easier but in reality, obviously they, I think they have the opposite, they have the opposite effect. And and this is very much about identifying you as a member of a particular community once and excluding people from that community in terms of their purpose, I think.

PS: In that piece, there was a couple of pieces of data that I really found pretty fascinating. I guess there's been a threefold increase in the use of acronyms. There was something to about the frequency of usage to that. Most like a vast majority of acronyms are used. They have no life.

That's right. They're never, that's right. And I think too, there's some really interesting shifts that have happened, of course, with with the rise of digital communications. And so you've got acronyms happening on different levels. So you've got these professional technical acronyms, jargon. You've also got social acronyms as a result of the rise of, text based mediums, texting. And for me as someone who didn't own a mobile phone until I moved to the UK and still primarily use it as a GPS device, the social acronyms. I constantly have to look stuff up.

I really genuinely thought that LOL meant lots of love. Yeah, when I first when I first encountered it. And so there's just constant acronyms. And so they have a social function too. Again, if you have teenagers use very different social acronyms to adults. And yeah, these things I think have a, they're very much around a sort of in group and out group and identifying you, if you know the acronym, then you're part of the in group.

PS: Yeah, that's what I end up feeling. It's so exclusionary.

It is, yeah. I'm with you. I know. Certainly in academic writing, it drives me nuts when people use acronyms and I'm always, when I'm reviewing stuff, telling people to tone down the acronyms, because I think they make the life easier of the person using them, but they don't make life easier at all. In fact, they, they complicate life immeasurably for the poor person having to try and. Make their way through.

And of course, you've got these acronyms that have multiple meanings. And so you can run into problems. I just, yeah, I think the example I use in that piece is PMS. And of course, for most of us, when we think of PMS, we think of premenstrual syndrome, but they're all these conferences like the precious metal summit that use the same acronym. And so there's this sort of constant confusion as a result of the multitude of acronyms and the multitude of similar, the same acronym with, a whole variety. of different meanings.

A number of your pieces are about conversation, getting into them and getting out of them. What's your interest there?

Yeah, I think for me, again this is very much about just living in different Anglophone countries. And so When I moved to the UK and again, I'd lived, yeah, born in Australia, lived in the U S and in Canada, and there are just certain, differences here in terms of greetings. And I was just a bit, I very confused.

So for example, when people would greet me with "Alright?". As a greeting, and it was just one of these things. I just didn't really know what it meant. It struck me as a very odd kind of greeting. And so I suppose for me, it's those instances of going, I don't know what the hell that like, I just being just suddenly stopping and going, I have no idea why people are using that. I don't know how I'm supposed to respond. And yeah, I think for me, the interest in has very much come out of living in the UK. And again, just be experiencing differences that are unexpected and that really manifesting in language.

And so I know even when I was living in the U S just, I would use expressions or I would hear expressions that were just incomprehensible to me. And so I was quite surprised at. Yeah, and I had some, embarrassing experiences around yeah, like rubber, pussy. There's certain words that have very different meanings in Australian English, for example, versus American English, and you get yourself into trouble fairly quickly with those sorts of confusions around that.

And yeah, I think that's where it comes from. It's just living in different anglophone countries and being surprised by linguistic differences that I'm confronted with and a bit confused about how I'm supposed to respond in those situations.

There was an observation, I think, in your piece on greeting is that everybody's lying a little bit. You're always lying about something.

Yeah. That comes from Harvey Sachs. He's amazing conversational analyst. They just delving into how complicated conversations actually are. I think if you stop to think about the social minefield that constitutes conversations, we would never ever talk to each other. Because they are fraught with potential confusion, with all sorts of issues. And thank God, they're quite ritualized in how we interact with each other. So we have to lie to keep things flowing smoothly.

PS: Yeah, absolutely. It's funny. I'm in my world. There's often too often very popular talk about empathy. Yeah, when I'm asked to talk about empathy. I prefer to talk about awkwardness is you're exploring awkwardness in a way the way that I understand it. That it's this experience when the script kind of falls away and we're just left with no idea ....what , who we're supposed to be or what we're supposed to do. What's the appropriate kind of we've lost the script and we can.

Yeah, I think that's an excellent way of putting it, actually. And I would say almost in some respects, anthropology as a discipline is intrinsically connected with that sense of awkwardness, which is putting yourself in an awkward, radically different, culturally different situation potentially, and then not knowing at all what to do, and then learning things out the hard way, and then in the process, challenging your own assumptions, because it's why is this awkward?

What makes it awkward? Why am I feeling that way? I think there's something, there's a lot to be learned from that feeling of awkwardness. So that's an, I think that's an excellent way of yeah.

What do you, can you tell me more about how you've learned from awkwardness? I feel like you're identifying, I'd love to hear you talk more about the role of awkwardness in your own work.

When I've moved from country to country finding awkwardness where I didn't expect it. And so when I was doing, so my PhD was looking at a religious movement in South Korea. And my original research was in a radically different cultural context where you're confronted, with pretty radical cultural difference, but you expect that. And so I was constantly committing faux pas, especially in Korea. It's very there's fairly firm social etiquette. It's a fairly, hierarchical etiquette.

And so I was, I can remember I, as an Australian, I wouldn't be thinking about if a meal was served, I would start eating. Not waiting for someone who was more senior to eat.

I remember being in a religious service that was outside. And I knew that if I was in an a ceremony indoors, you needed to remove your hat, that it would be very inappropriate to have a hat on. And there was a religious ceremony I was observing outdoors and I had my hat on and it just never occurred to me that would be considered disrespectful. And someone came up to me and yanked my hat off. And then I was like, s**t, okay. I just. It's a religious ceremony that trumps the setting of the ceremony.

So it's a sort of learning experience because you're like, Oh, okay, this ground is now sacred ground, even though it's in an outdoor setting, the nature of the service has made it sacred. And so you learn from the experience of awkwardness. And then I suppose. I was seeing awkwardness where I didn't expect it when I'm, moving between different Anglophone countries.

And then again, like when someone greets you with, all right, and you're, it's an, it's really awkward because you're my, I would be like, I think so. And then the person would look at me and I would look at them and I clearly hadn't responded appropriately. And so the whole thing is really awkward. And so then it's that's really interesting. Why is it awkward? Why are they using this word? Why do I not use this word? And thinking that through about what that means. So I think you're right. Almost every piece I've ever written on that subject, a substack is about something like, farting is obviously intrinsically awkward.

PS: Yeah. The piece on so much to talk about, but the piece on I guess the long goodbye, which I'm an, I'm American. I don't, I have some interactions with people that are with people in England and but I've had enough that I experienced that though. What do you call it? It's the wall of goodbyes. Is that what it's like?

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Yes. The wall of goodbyes. Yeah.

PS: Which strikes to me in an awkward moment, there's like a panic where you just, there's a total panic and this wall of goodbyes you throw at it just to get out of.

That's right.

PS: It's just, it's shocking how terrifying this can be, right?

So conversational analysts like Harvey Sachs, who I've, I only discovered fairly recently, I don't know why I hadn't read his stuff years ago. This is a guy who spent hundreds and hundreds of hours just analyzing naturally occurring conversations. And so this is where he starts to see all these fascinating patterns in, and they're, they're highly predictable and ritualized the kind of interactions that people have with each other in the context of greetings and goodbyes and all of that. And they sort, they do have to manage what otherwise would be, a tremendously stressful experience that could go potentially anywhere.

I think language and conversation and the complexities and dynamics of that are super interesting. And of course, yeah. When you're an American doing business with a Brit and then there's this weird thing that happens at the end of the phone, and it was an American who noticed it actually brought it to my attention.

He was like, why the hell are these British, like, why do they say goodbye 10 times? And until he mentioned that it wasn't something I'd consciously registered. And then I was like, yeah, he's right. What on earth is that all about? It's really weird.

PS: There was, oh in that same piece about the long goodbye, you quote somebody else who talked, who's just pointing at the fact that this stuff doesn't happen inevitably. Like getting to the end of a conversation required, the language is it involves work and it requires accomplishing.

As soon as you start to think about this, it is a bit mind blowing because we just assume that conversations come to a natural conclusion, but if you've ever talked to anyone who is not getting the hints that you're like. Sending you realize that no, actually they have to cooperate with you to end the conversation unless you just want to be rude and hang up on that person. There's a whole sort of cooperative act that's required and it requires accomplishing to get to the end.

So you've written a lot, you mentioned it on farts and flatulence and I just wonder where did that begin?

The very first academic paper I ever tried to write. So I'd done, finished my PhD and my field work was on a South Korean religious movement. And rather than writing about that, the first academic paper I tried to publish was called Silent But Deadly, Bodily Odors and the Dissipation of Boundaries.

Because actually in my field work, I was seeing all these really quite interesting things around bodily odors, et cetera. And so in the family that I was living with, the, the father would fart and just, seeing the reactions to that anyway, it was rejected very resoundingly from the academic journal.

And it was, then I just realized that it was not considered appropriate for academic. It wasn't, yeah, it was just considered too, puerile, facile not appropriate to write about academically. And I found that fascinating because anthropologists are living it for the most part they're obviously the nature of anthropological full work is a sort of intensive immersion where you're living in a context with a community for a long period.

I'm assuming you're hearing farts. I'm assuming you're farting yourself, but nobody ever writes about it. And I was just like. It's but it's so interesting the whole area because it's this totally natural bodily function that's incredibly symbolically loaded.

And so to me, I don't, yeah, I think there are certain areas, that in academic writing have not received the attention they deserve and farting happens to be one. And so I've done my level best to try and address that. But I think as soon as you say farting people, it's not serious. It's not academic.

And I know I used to teach a course called being human. And on the first day I would do a lecture on the anthropology of farting and I could see the students. They're like, is this like, why are you talking about this? This seems like completely inappropriate for the students themselves. I just, even though I, I would try and use this as a way of getting them thinking anthropologically and some students would get it, but others like, why the hell is my lecturer talking about farting?

This is yeah, it's not I don't expect this in my university lectures. So there's certain topics I think that just, yeah, they're considered too inane, too mundane too facile, too juvenile to be, yeah, considered.

PS: What do you say to that challenge? It strikes me as I think it's a wonderful thing that all that you're paying attention to farting and all the various forms. What do you say to the, is it still the case? You think that this is not not fit for academic consumption or what's your argument for, no, this is meaningful. This is part of the human experience.

Yeah. So I think there are some people, so I just, there's a book coming out by Berghan called “Matter Out of Place,” which, and I think I, the, one of the editors of the knows my interest in this stuff. And so I was asked to review it. And so the book is all around notions of dirt and pollution.

And so people have written about some of this stuff, but even things like defecation, right? This universal process, every society has to manage it. And yet it's massively underwritten about by anthropologists, despite the, incredible significance of shitting.

And so there again, so that's changed recently. There are a few people, Zach Van De Yeese, Matthew Wolfmeyer, a few folk who are writing, but there's nothing like the volume of work there should be on something that is so significant.

We all have these associations with these things, toilet humor, juvenile, and those associations that we have culturally around those things tend to make the, tend to manifest academically as well. We have our blind spots, academically, I think.

PS: I traveled around India with some friends for a while.  They have the International Museum of Toilets in Delhi. So the organization that has this International Museum of Toilets is also an organization that's trying to get rid of the, it's creating public toilets so that the caste system is still alive in India. The caste to people whose job is to manage other people's waste. Yeah. And he's trying to eliminate that need by creating these public toilets.. I told people that I was going to go to the international museum of toilets when I was in India and they thought I was a lunatic.

Again, it's just, it seemed to be this thing that's fascinating, but in a fairly puerile sort of way. And those prejudices definitely make themselves feel academically. So there is some stuff, but we're all fascinated by these things. And of course, when you're doing, when you're working in a different country. So in Korea, for example, you've got squatting toilets and what you realize is a certain I realize that I just don't have the right leg muscles. My leg muscles haven't been trained to use, to squat, even though probably from a biological standpoint, it makes the whole defecation process a lot easier squatting versus sitting on a toilet.

And there's a whole history there. And there is some stuff actually around toilets in particular. There's a great book by a sociologist, David Ingliss.. And what I find interesting though, because the whole book is around the sociology of shitting basically, but he's very careful to couch it in the excretory experience. You can tell reading the book that he's really concerned that to show that he, this is very serious scholarship. And so the whole thing is a lot more inaccessible than it should be in terms of the language, because he's trying so hard to convince the readership that this is a serious piece of scholarship. And it is a serious piece of scholarship and very good. And it's, it's unfortunate that it's written in the way that it is. Cause I think there's a lot of people outside of academia who would be very interested in it, but the language is a bit off putting because it's so incredibly academic.

Tell me more about Mary Douglas and the matter out of place, her definition of dirt, right?

Yeah, so I guess she's, she's, these days considered fairly old fashioned in anthropology. She was a structuralist, influenced by Levi Strauss and they were very much interested in cross cultural universals. Especially this idea of binary opposites. So they were looking at really big picture stuff. Which I find fascinating but it's definitely become very unfashionable in anthropology to be focusing on big cross cultural universals, etc. There's a sense that it's, over simplistic, it's decontextualizes things, and that there are conceptual and intellectual problems with that work.

And so Mary Douglas, though, I suppose one of her key contributions, she is one, probably she has two very famous books Natural Symbols and Purity and Danger. And one of her key insights was that what we think of as dirt so this is stuff that we consider to be polluting is matter out of place.

And so she very much in this frame that you have categories and things that don't fit the categories, tend to be considered to be powerful and polluting. And so she was very interested in bodily excretions, for example, because they're from the body, but they're separate from the body. And so they're the kind of ultimate matter out of place. And so they become very symbolically charged.

But she also has those same arguments about things like certain kinds of animals. And so Yeah, so for example, pigs there's, she has arguments about the fact that pig, pork is often tabooed and so from her point of view, that's about the anomalousness of the pig, because it's a hoovened animal, but it eats anything. Whereas most hoovened footed animals eat cud eaters. And so her argument is that it becomes symbolically charged and highly polluting in, is Islam and Judaism because of its anomalous properties. So she has all these sort of interesting arguments about categories, things that defy categories. And those are the things that become charged symbolically and either very powerful or very polluting or mostly both at the same time.

PS: I wanted to share. I had a project that I worked on and just talk to you about it and see if anything, it triggered anything. It feels like it's in your sweet spot. It's in the silent, but deadly territory. I did a project for a mattress company. So a bed in a box company. And one of the things that I felt like I observed in those interviews and in those conversations with people was like decorative pillows and this whole idea of making the bed. And it was the first time I really ran into Mary Douglas because it was so obvious how important it was for some people to make the bed, and for it to be very, it's a very special place. This place we put ourselves down to sleep is just unbelievable. It's unbelievable what we're doing for those eight hours. But some places were just unbelievable, so many different pillows and so much decorative. And it blew my mind a little bit. And I wondered if you had any if that triggered any thoughts for you in terms of maybe what does your bed look like? Do you have decorative furniture? What's your relationship with

It's actually a great topic and it's given me an idea for a sub stack. So if I end up writing about it, I'm going to have to mention you. The whole area is fascinating. You're a hundred percent right. Decorative pillows, of course, are interesting because they're quite gendered. And so we tend to find, this was I think, satirized a little bit in the movie Along Came Polly.

And so I don't know if you ever saw it, it's a Ben Stiller movie, but there's a scene in where his wife has left him and he's, and Jennifer Aniston is Polly. And then he's got these decorative pillows on the bed and she's like, why do you have all these pillows? You already spent hours taking them off, putting them on. And he was like my wife liked them.

When my husband and I first got together, I did have a couple of decorative pillows and he was like, these are completely pointless because you take them off the bed before you go to sleep, right? So they are just, they're not only serve no purpose, they create additional work for you because you're taking them off the bed. You're putting them on the bed. There is an interesting gender dimension to those as well.

But yeah, the whole area of bedding in general, I think is again, one of those areas that anthropologists think it's just. Too mundane. It's too inane. And they don't write about it, but it's so interesting.

You're saying, it's doing something. What is the work that the decorative pillows are doing?

Think, obviously, if you're concerned with the aesthetics of the bedroom space as a whole, then I would say that the function that they serve is as part of a scheme. If you have such a thing in your bedroom, a visual, like a decorative scheme, and it might be a focal point. So it's serving an aesthetic purpose as part of a larger, decorating scheme in a bedroom.

And it's a good example of the bedroom being a place, which is sort of your point. A bed has a function to help you sleep, but it also gets tied up into aesthetics, notions of homemaking, notions of Decoration and all of that, that means that you end up with these completely pointless decorative pillows. 

So no, I have no decorative pillows on my bed as a result of those early conversations that my husband and I had about the pointlessness of of the decorative pillow.

Can you tell me a little bit about your book, “Silent but Deadly: The Underlying Cultural Patterns of Everyday Behaviors”?

Oh, the book is just, yeah, it's called Silent but Deadly, the underlying cultural patterns of everyday behaviors. And it's really like a series of essays on a whole variety of things, obviously farting. Teeth. Like when I lived in North America, the obsession with white straight teeth, which was very foreign to me as an Australian. Dogs, like dog lovers, I'm not a dog lover. What the whole, like a dog obsession is all about. Tipping, left- handedness. So being a lefty, I'm very interested in, the symbolism and also, mechanisms of handedness. Yep.

So the book is just, again, all those inane, mundane topics that aren't considered to be fit for academic attention. And I guess, yeah, Brits keeping their washing machine in their kitchen. That's all the sort of stuff I focus on in the book.

PS: Thank you so much.

Thanks a lot. Good to talk to you. Bye.

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