Cultures of Energy

Cymene discovers the joy of Bob Ross on this week’s edition of the podcast and your co-hosts take a moment to discuss the scandal that is pay to play higher education. Then (18:09) we welcome to the pod the dynamite duo of Lauren Berlant and Katie Stewart to talk about their marvelous new book, The Hundreds(https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-hundreds?viewby=subject&categoryid=80&sort=author in which the contributions are all written in multiples of a hundred words. We hear the origin story of the project and its aim to explore ways of documenting ordinariness in which one could develop concepts based on descriptions.  We turn from there to Katie and Lauren’s different writing styles, affectography vs. ethnography, and the magic of shortness.  Our guests discuss whether there is a new critical and collaborative ethics afoot in the human sciences today and muse on the intimacy of misrecognition. We talk about their new series at Duke UP, “Writing Matters”, and how they came to the idea for the unusual index and reference sections of the book. Finally, we close with their advice to scholars just starting out on fostering collaborations and talk about importance of building trust and why there’s nothing better than good brainstorming.

Cymene’s sushi confessions on this week’s podcast lead us to the idea that supporting daydrinking and carb-heavy lunches in the oil industry might be an effective way to slow down the advance of petroculture (Behold, the Napocalypse!) Then (14:25) we welcome to the podcast the fantastic Lucas Bessire (University of Oklahoma). We talk with Lucas about his award-winning book Behold the Black Caiman (U of Chicago Press, 2014) and how it synthesized years of fieldwork in the Chaco region of Paraguay on indigenous Ayoreo reactions to environmental transformation and devastation. We talk about myths of “first contact” with isolated peoples as a kind of governmental fiction and turn from there to topics such as: Ayoreo irreverence to stable form, anthropology as a bedeviling practice, surviving contact, indigenous radio and poetic realignment, and the need to talk about rebecoming as a value that coexists with loss. We then move to Lucas’s work on the Ayoreo video project https://lucasbessire.net/yocoredie-the-ayoreo-video-project/) and the resource frontier resonances between the Chaco and his native Kansas in the era of fracking. We close talking about his current research ventures including “After the Aquifer”—which grapples with groundwater depletion and responsibility in the American Great Plains—and the Arctic Futures Working Group.

Cymene and Dominic talk about restaurants failed by their bathrooms and “Human Uber” on this week’s podcast. We are then (14:20) delighted to welcome Kyle Powys Whyte—Tinnick Chair in the Humanities at Michigan State, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a philosopher whose work brings Indigenous (Neshnabé) philosophy to bear on environmental issues—to the podcast (https://kylewhyte.cal.msu.edu). We start with the need to decolonize the Anthropocene concept because of how it smuggles in traditional prejudices about Indigenous peoples and often serves as a vehicle for settler privilege and what Kyle terms “settler apocalypticism.” We turn from there to settler colonialism as a mode of ecological domination and Neshnabé conceptions of time, responsibility and morality, and climate injustice as a breakdown in consent relationships. Kyle shares his thoughts about climate change as an insidious loop but also his concern that climate talk too often avoids addressing enduring structures of violence and oppression. Kyle argues for not allowing the politics of urgency to dictate the pace of rebuilding kinship between humans and nonhumans. We close with his thinking about the importance of activism, Indigenous futurism, and the need to get past the idea of protecting this world instead of making a better one.

Is coughing an identity? Well, if it’s your identity your cohosts have the scoop on a reputed new coughing cure on this week’s podcast. We are then (15:26) joined by a dynamic duo—Amanda Lynch (Director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society) and Siri Veland (Senior Researcher at the Nordland Research Institute in Bodø, Norway). We talk to them about how their collaboration on climate change adaptation led to a new book, Urgency in the Anthropocene (MIT Press, 2018) which takes a distinctively positivist-meets-constructivist approach to its problem. We talk about the challenges and joys of talking about the Anthropocene across the earth sciences and social sciences.  We discuss the urgency of thinking with greater imagination but also of being careful what kinds of imagination we embrace. From there we turn to the Anthropocene as a kind of myth that enables but also constrains government and policy responses. We talk modes of coexistence and the recognition of dignity as a starting point for listening. And we close by discussing their latest collaboration, the ArcticChallenge Project and its focus on oil ontologies.

What’s worse than listening to lovebirds on Valentine’s Day? Surely it is listening to them wondering whether the rideshare model can be applied to socks. So feel free to skip past all that nonsense (15:19) to our special holiday conversation with anthropologist and philosopher Eduardo Kohn. We begin with his influential book, How Forests Think, and how Eduardo’s fieldwork in Amazonia and the semiology of Charles Saunders Peirce helped him break down the nature-culture dualities of much western theory. Eduardo walks us through icons and indexes as ways of knowing and being in the world and discusses how the modern (human) investment in symbols and symbolic abstraction has contributed to the Anthropocene trajectory. We talk about academic resistance to engaging the semiosis of life in its broadest sense, why ethnographic method should be celebrated as a form of (iconic) mindful attention to the world, what’s similar about art and science as modes of knowing, and how sylvan thinking can be an ethical practice in the Anthropocene. We turn from there to Eduardo’s current scholarly and creative collaborations that cross legal, scientific and shamanic registers in the interest of “cosmic diplomacy.” We close by talking about the ethical importance of aesthetic experiments and accepting life as a wild guess.

Dominic and Cymene review the Green New Deal and the erotic life of Adam Smith on this week’s episode of the podcast. Then (18:52) Daromir Rudnyckyj joins us to talk about his new book, Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance, (U Chicago Press, 2018), which takes us deep into the rapidly evolving world of Islamic finance. Daromir explains to us the spirit and letter of Islamic finance, how its investment and risk-sharing norms depart from those the debt-based model of western finance, and what the implications would be for capitalism were Islamic finance to become the dominant global investment model. We ask him whether a bigger role for Islamic finance would do anything to reign in the growth obsession of contemporary economic thought and practice. Daromir explains how Islamic moral philosophy limits speculative investment and seeks to imagine a form of capitalism beyond debt. We discuss whether the debt jubilee model really breaks with the logic of western capitalism and whether it would be possible to expand the presence of Islamic finance in the global North without inflaming Islamophobic hysteria. We discuss what “halal finance” might be and whether it could better acquaint investors with the real local impacts of their capital investments. We close talking about Daromir’s latest work on local alternative currencies.

Cymene and Dominic discuss frostquakes and fyre festivals on this week’s edition of the podcast. Then (15:49) we are joined by a most esteemed guest, Kim Fortun from UC Irvine, author of Advocacy after Bhopal (U Chicago Press, 2001) and President of the 4S association. We start with Kim’s thoughts on late industrialism and why it became such an important concept for her research. We dig into the doubleness of “hyperexpertise” associated with our late industrial contemporary, and ask what is robust and what is ruined. Kim explains why she favors ethnography as a mode of disrupting ossified forms of expertise. And we turn from there to her ongoing work on environmental health issues and how the challenges of collaborative research spurred her interest in developing better datasharing infrastructures and virtual research platforms like PECE (http://worldpece.org) and the The Asthma Files (http://theasthmafiles.org). We talk about the politics of scholarly communication and Kim tells us what she thinks the obstacles are to the Open Access and Open Data movements gaining traction. We close on her thoughts on where STS is today as a community and field of knowledge and what excites her about its future.

Your co-hosts celebrate MLK day, muse over whether Gattaca invented Tinder, toy with the idea of kale eugenics, and if that weren’t enough, Cymene Howe predicts Ragnarok on this week’s edition of the Cultures of Energy podcast. Valhalla will have to wait though because first (16:51) we catch up with the ever dynamic Eben Kirksey, live and direct from the Hart Senate Office Building in DC. We talk about the climate action impasse in the US capital and contrast that with direct action mobilizations to make New York carbon neutral and to protest BP’s LNG project in West Papua. Eben tells us about his current work on CRISPR gene editing and connects it to his earlier and ongoing interest in multispecies relations. He explains why narratives of apocalypse and salvation surrounding gene editing miss the point even as these technologies do point toward new potentialities of life within biocapitalist regimes of inequality and exclusion. We touch on the ethics of bioengineering and geoengineering and Eben suggests that it may fall to the human sciences (and biohackers) to imagine and enact other modes of care. We close with how he became interested in chemicals and chemoethnography and his next project on multispecies justice in West Papua. Kale Gattaca!

Cymene and Dominic talk democratic do-overs, vegan falcons, Hegel’s bagels, and the 1980s arcade game Dig Dug on this week’s edition of the podcast. Then (19:51) we have a chance to catch up with Matt Huber from Syracuse, author of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (U Minnesota Press, 2013), about what he’s been up to lately. We start with his thinking about what a truly socialist climate politics would look like and how it would be oriented to the problems of the new working class, what Matt terms “the 63%.” Then Matt explains why he thinks taxing the rich and corporations makes more sense than taxing molecules. We talk about what lessons a Green New Deal could take from the original New Deal, the U.S. as a “rogue state” on climate, who should be striking to pressure elites to take climate change seriously, the pernicious individualization of carbon footprints, and what should be grown and de-grown in a climate woke economy. In closing, Matthew makes a strong case for a total expropriation of the fossil fuel industry so that we can focus developing energy that is not the ruin of the planet. Enjoy! PS and please do send us your takes on the most profound video games of the 1980s :)  

Cymene and Dominic are back and borderline alert for 2019. They recently watched the first half of Netflix’s Bird Box and speculate as to whether the alleged “Bird Box challenge” is further evidence of the doom of our species. Then (16:00) we welcome Icelandic anthropological legend Gísli Palsson to the podcast to talk about his latest book project, Down to Earth: A Memoir, a wonderful discussion of human beings and their relationship with earthquakes, stones and lava. We begin with the 1973 volcanic eruption that indelibly impacted Gísli's life as it destroyed his childhood home and buried his town in ash like an Icelandic Pompeii. We talk about homes and habitats both specific and global, the need for a new geosocial contract, the vitality of rocks, life as geolubricant, and the return to premodernist thinking as we confront that volcano in our living room, the Anthropocene. Gísli tells us about some of the amazing volcano projects artists like Nelly Ben Hayoun are undertaking these days. And we close on geological intimacy, necessary optimism and whether we humans are becoming petrified, even fossilized.