37. More-than-Human Politics

[Music] Hi and welcome to AntioPet. Today's episode is produced by St. Necroya and Essel Overblubbe Arisen and edited by Cecil Marie-Henrichsen and myself and I am Catrina Minto. What you hear playing in the background is a dandelion, recorded and mediated to you through an interactive machine which tapes the sound of living plants. The recording was made in an eco village in northern Italy where they use this machine to interact with the plants. The story of this dandelion recording is just one of many ethnographic case studies we will learn about in today's episode. We will discuss an upcoming theme in current anthropology based on a workshop held in 2016 on the anthropology department at Copenhagen University. The workshop was titled "Mold and Human Politics" and was organized by assistant professor St. Necroya and postdoc Essel Overblubbe Arisen, both employed at the department. The workshop is inspired by professor Mai Sardilac Adinas monograph, earth beings, ecologies of practice across Indian worlds. For those of you not familiar with the book, it takes it a graphic point of departure in an archive that Mai Sardilac access to. The archive at box of documents was created and owned by Maiano Tuobo, a rune-cuna or ketchup-easant leader in Kusku Peru. The book is the result of continuous conversations between Mai Sardilac and Maiano and also his son Nasario. Mai Sardilac's work raises fundamental questions about how to know non-human beings and the political events they are involved in and how to write ethnographies about them. It is about the encounters and entanglements of non-indigenous worlds and the difficulties and violence implied in translating meaning and events from one to the other. The monograph also raises questions about the conceptualization of politics. The idea behind the workshop was to create a space for an open and collective thinking where the participants brought their ethnographic material to the table as point of departure to discuss its analysis. This form invited to a dialogue across ethnographic material and the different more than human actors it contained. What a more than human actor can be will be further explored during this episode as it can show itself in the relationship to the subterranean as we will hear it exemplified later or as the agency of tree spirits all in the way that we can be enabled to interact with the dandelion as you heard it playing in the beginning. By 12 into three of the ethnographic cases presented at the workshop and the following discussions this episode wish to show how anthropological knowledge is produced in similar form. This episode is built around the ethnographic material presented by PhD student La Sroma, master student Esther Fritz and professor Maizolder Lackadena. With these cases and the following discussions we hope to offer you a deeper insight to what the theme more than human politics is about. The episode will address questions like how can we understand and describe more than human beings and what challenges of translation emerge in this process. How can we conceptualize the political potentiality of more than human entities and thus this lead to a rethinking of the political as such and also how can anthropology and ethnography engage with these more than human actors methodologically and how can these academic disciplines contribute to expand and examine this field. To introduce the format of the workshop we will start with Steena and Estel's presentation. Among with welcoming the participants to the workshop they also share their own interest in the field by presenting some of the ethnographic work. My name is Deena Kuaia and I'm based here at Copenhagen University in the Department of Anthropology. Estel and I would like to welcome you all to this workshop. We have taken the opportunity of Estel's close connection to Mari Solti Lakharena to invite you here to Copenhagen. Basically we organized this workshop because we are both interested in politics in the usual sense of the work but also in the limits of the concept. That is how our usual definition of politics is changed when thinking and writing about other beings. The workshop is inspired by Mari Solti's recent monographed earth beings dealing with an issue I think interests many of us, namely by addressing the multiple ways that non-human beings become political entities. I currently work with a research project called the Political Life of Trees which is a kind of comparative project where I conduct field work both in Germany, Ecuador and during the UN climate talks. Across these fields I have found that there are very different ideas about what a tree is and what it is capable of doing. For example among the Sequoia living in the Ecuadorian Amazon trees are spirits or spirit beings called Watti, capable of influencing human lives and affairs. Probably for this reason a group of Sequoia decided to clear cut their land simply to get rid of the agencies of these beings. And as a result they were fined by the Ministry of Environment for violating the rights of nature which is a set of rights put down in the Ecuadorian constitution. As described by my Solti in her book my research also raises questions about the political lives of non-human beings and how politics become redefined in the process. And I think Astrid who has become my partner in crime in this also have similar concerns in her work. Yes I do. My name is Astro Popovic Anasen. I'm working as a postdoc on an interdisciplinary research project called the Now Project Living Resources and Human Societies around the Northwater and the Tula area in Northwest Greenland. I did my PhD research in the city of Arikipan in Peru on water, water politics and climate change and the string that goes through the work across these quite different fields is human environmental relations and ways that knowledge and politics or how politics and ways of knowing shape each other. And the kind of non-human beings that have been central in my work for the last years are water and water flows in the case of Peru as well as the infrastructures and hydraulic technologies that are built to make water flow. In Northwest Greenland the non-humans are animals that are hunted marine mammals such as walrus, seal and novel that intend strong relations with humans and human livelihoods as food and materials for survival. Also seabirds such as little orcs or eye adults. Other non-humans that work as agents in the Arctic landscapes are hunting tools, GPSs, kayaks, ice and weather. I'm very interested in where the boundaries of something considered political are negotiated and drawn in different contexts and how this is connected to different ways of knowing and valuing the non-human elements we sometimes address as natural resources. We are envisioning a very formal format and that is also why we have placed you around this table. We hope that we can create a kind of interesting academic conversation and also a new kind of dialogue across some of our different fields. So the idea is basically to open up dialogue rather than presenting finished arguments. We are extremely happy that you're all here and we are looking very very much forward to our conversation. Now we will take you to my Zelda Lackadena presenting some central points from her monograph at the workshop. My Zelda describes how she, when working with the archive, met and exists that she did not know how to work with and perceive. This opens a further question about translation which will be the central theme of the first part of this episode. So first, I mean, tiny bit about the background to my book. So those of you who have read the book know that these started with a box of documents. A box of documents that these very astute indigenous politician and a collective of which he was a part had put together during many years, 50 years. And it is in these box of documents, what these box contained was documents that referred to a land struggle between what to me was a group of peasants and the landlady. This box referred to what to me was a peasant struggle in the high high high high lands of Kusko through. So I said I want a short research project this is contained in this box it's an archive that is contained that I don't I won't have to go to the archive and look at disorganized catalogs everything's there and the person the person that collected it still alive I can work on something like the ethnography of an archive that was my first idea and that was like five or six years before I started working with Mariano once I started working with Mariano things style apart in the sense that this wasn't an archive anymore so it made me think what is this right after a few weeks working with him he said there are things that are not here because they cannot be here these was I'm translating very quickly and I'll go back to the idea of translation because this is where I want to go these are things that the state could understand but there were many more things that made these possible that the state could not understand so do you want to hear that or not and I I said okay I want to hear that and when I started hearing that I didn't understand the word what I mean is that I could understand in the terms of in the usual terms of anthropology in the very usual terms of anthropology meaning okay so there is a belief in a spirit of the mounting I couldn't figure out what I was hearing other than in those terms and it took me a while to figure out what I was listening and because I am not a ketchup speaker a native ketchup speaker and I was learning ketchup and I realized as I was not understanding that my problem was not that I wasn't understanding the words but that I wasn't understanding anything that I decided to have a ketchup bilingual ketchup Spanish person translated with me all the time and the way we translated was we translated into Spanish keeping the ketchup with us so it was a translation into Spanish that did not change the words it moved the words but didn't move them that much and I tried not to move the grammar so that I could get to something more than I could get when I was thinking in Spanish so it all started with an issue of linguistic translation because with the usual linguistic translation which was what I could get from knowing ketchup my way that is through Spanish I wasn't getting anything that wasn't already said that anthropology in very old and traditional and the honest anthropology had already said and it's not that very old and traditional and the anthropology is wrong not at all but I didn't want to say that because one it had already been said and I had this gut feeling that that wasn't what I was hearing so this is to say that translation became a huge issue in my work something that I couldn't not think about all the time and that the kind of issue that translation made present in my work was excess that excess was going to be a constant presence in my relationship with Mariano and Nassadio and my relationship with everything local so my next question was so what do I do with excess what is excess obviously I cannot access excess which means I cannot know it so how do I relate analytically to excess if I cannot know it does that mean that I don't consider it in my analysis so excess without knowing in our term okay so that's one of the things that I wanted to say and it all started with an archive so going back to the archive there was excess and there was these very contained knowledge in the archive something that I could read and I could understand and of course it had its own its own epistemic excesses but those excesses were not the same as the other excess so those are the two things that underpin the book an archive that contains excesses about it in its own epistemic terms and excesses that it doesn't know about so what my self presents for us here is how she encountered the excess of the archive something she could not easily perceive or describe which raised a problem of translation this problem of translation was discussed further after master student Estlifridge presentation of her in the graphic fieldwork in Daemanor Daemanor is a community of eco villages in Italy with around 600 people and it's the place where it's the recorded then the line that you heard playing in the beginning I'm gonna start and I'm gonna talk about an eco village in the north of Italy which is one of more than 600 eco villages at the moment in an international network that is just expanding very quickly we have more than 15 Denmark now just within the past two years it really exploded and the eco village I have visited is called Daemanor and it was founded just in the years after 68 and it is situated in the pre-alps zone and they live now around 600 people they have their own laws and their own currency and they live in 25 collectives that are distributed over an area of around 20 square kilometers so they kind of mix with the conventional villages in the area as well and the area is very green and full of these small conventional villages and in Daemanor they experiment with the solar panels building houses in trees with also more magic technologies and agriculture and this is what I have studied and there has been and still is a lot of tensions between Daemanor and the surrounding area because it's mostly a Catholic area and they are very like they are imagined to be a cult and also in academia some sociologists have just published this book about converts from Scientology, Jehovah's Witnesses and Daemanor so it's just to say something about the categorization there and they have often been studied as a religion even though they say we are really not a religion we are researchers we live in a laboratory so in my study I have really tried to take that seriously studying how they do research with growing edible plants and how they exchange these plants with the people in the area to create partial connections even though there are these gaps between Daemanor and the people in the area and also how they try to affect the way people grow their vegetables to grow organic instead of conventional vegetables. Yes so what they really want to do in Daemanor is to reunite the human and the plant world they think these worlds have been separated because human beings didn't respect the plant world and also they all have a plant and animal names so they are called like a shark hemp or end coriander and the animals have human names so there is a cat called Virginia and a dog called Elsa and this mixing of categories is for them really a way to create relations with other beings and also when you enter a territory in Daemanor you greet the tree before you greet anybody else so four or five months I have been growing plants in Daemanor and I've been studying the experiments in the fields and the base is no chemicals and also building the strong relation between the human and the plant and to do this they have invented a technology that can translate the electrosignals from the plant into music because it's like building a bridge because we don't understand anymore so much the signs of the plant directly but if they are mediated to a technology they can be translated into a language we we understand better and I'm just going to play at 30 second video so you can hear it actually get a sense of the atmosphere the Daemanorians way of being with plants opens window that has the potential to challenge subitivity because working in the field I really started feeling like I could kill plants and I never felt that before I felt ethically I had so many struggles at the end because I really started feeling if it's like you plant them and you follow them for many months and if you cut just one wrong place they die and I started feeling it in my own body and I especially think that the constellation plant human technology really is very interesting for this because it's like the tones that translates the signs of the plant they hate you in this bodily effective way and at the same time they speak to your rational technological mind and I think it could just be very interesting to operate with designers of technology in these constellations of human plant technology where it's actually the technology that is bringing us closer to the plant and not making us go further away The people of Daemonore have built a machine that brings forth the sound of the tender line. Through this technology, humans are in a way unable to sense the plants in another register. This theme brings us back to the subject of translation, which was also highlighted in my soul's presentation. Is this presentation addresses how can we communicate, understand and listen to, and unfamiliar, modern human actor, and how can such experience be translated into a geographic text? As it will soon be elaborated, Esther feels limited because she is unsure of how to write and translate her perceptions and experiences from the field. After Esther's presentation, my soul and modern axelpillison, who is a professor at the Department of Entropology at Copenhagen University, continue this discussion of translation and ethnographic writing. I feel like all the time when I am trying to write about the plants, for instance, it's like they are already becoming something else in a way that I sometimes don't like and I try to think how can you put sound into the thesis in some way or can you put a sound track so you open it and it's sound coming instead of, because as soon as you write it, it's something else than the tones already. And I feel limited in a way. Yes, this is something that I restored when I was trying to understand what Bukkara was. Bukkara has traditionally been defined as a place where people that can connect with earth beings get their possibility, I'm translating, and I'll go back to that, get their possibility of communicating with earth beings. So I was asking what is Bukkara, and I, of course, from an analyst at the Nuggethry, I knew what Bukkara was, but I, in usual anthropological practice, was trying to get from my informant what it was. And what he said was, Bukkara is Bukkara. Whatever you're going to write is not going to be Bukkara. You're going to write what you think is Bukkara, or what I tell you is Bukkara, but what I tell you is not Bukkara. What Bukkara is is Bukkara. You cannot re, you cannot define it, because defining it is not what Bukkara is. For us, a definition represents the thing, and in that sense is the thing. So writing the plant as music, you would have to write a score, perhaps, and that would not be the music of the plant. What if the question is to follow it? They were able to build a machine that translated the language of a plant into something they understood. That's also what you do when you write a box. You have to create a machine, a machine of translation into that. And there's no loss. You don't have to speak, but there's a loss. You don't have to sort of like take as you style the plant. There's something I can't put into words with this. No, words have machining capabilities in the same way as they're kind of machines. Words are not, I'm not going to be able to, of some kind of loss, loss, loss, loss of the world of inebriiveness, or at least that's about contrary specific idea that this should be so. And I would encourage you not to think about prognom of the industry as always a situation of loss. And about it as a situation in which you're aware that what you're writing is not exactly that, but that's the way in which you render it into ethnography and that that situation that not being able to render it is productive in that it makes you write about it and write in a specific way so that you're not lamenting. You're just stopping and saying, "Hey, this happened." And therefore I'm aware of the separation. But that separation, I would say, yes. It's not a loss. It's a moment of difference in which you made the ethnography different from the ethnography that thought was representing what the relationship between the machine, the music, and the plants were because that is, you need to machine music and plants. But you are able to render that in a way that's not exactly that, but that vanishes it. But in that, they are very useful inputs. I completely follow what you say. It's very liberating to not see it as a limit. And still there is something in me that becomes a bit like with the words, I feel, it's like we have to translate everything into words. And sometimes I just start wondering, can we represent it in another way? At take-home point to extract from this discussion is the importance of being very aware in the process of translation. Particularly in the incompleteness of translation. As my soul points out, when you translate, it is never a complete translation, capturing the whole as she says. Ebukara is Ebukara. And whatever this word is translated into will never be exactly Ebukara. Therefore translation is a moment of difference. However as modern explains, we as anthropologists should not take laws as a starting point when translating, but rather see our own anthropological writings as a machine translating the field into words. Another discussion emerging from Esther's presentation is how to talk about the categories that Esther presented as animals, plants and humans. When non-human beings are given names, distinct categories of life are intertwined. In the following, my soul proposes a way to grasp these kinds of entities. Her point is here that the modern human actor needs to be defined and met not as modern human in opposition to human, but in their own terms. Okay, so one of the things that I'm a little bit concerned is that the difference that we're making between earth beings and entities that are unlike earth beings. Translating, for example, earth beings into sacred is translating into a different regime. Into a different regime of being. Into the regime usually occupied at least since the 19th century by religion. And that's something that I think we have to be very careful not to do. We can talk about different kinds of entities without going through laboratories, without going initially, necessarily through laboratories or through landscapes or through religion. Initially, and then as we continue, we can emerge in laboratories, in landscapes or in religion. But we don't start from religion so that we don't translate without being aware of translating. My anxiety is about being absolutely careful with every word that we think and write with. Esther's example is an example that we can all really look at to see how the categories that the entities that we're looking at have to be named with the names that they emerge through relations that are not the ones that we're useful used to. How can we think about other relations? Not necessarily conceptually but very empirically that is at the same time very conceptually, which is therefore very ethnographic. So what you have in your field Esther, I think is something very complex. Something very bold. They're mixing up categories of life. They are completely, they are world in a very different way. And I think that you have to see that as world in a different way. As world in where a cat is Victoria, but Victoria is not necessarily human, but is Victoria and is cat. So that also affects that human. So when you say more than human actors, I think that's something I would not say. I would say cat that is Victoria. That's not animal as in animal in human and that is cat because Victoria is not human. So what my soul is pointing to is that the cat should not be characterized by the dualism cat human. Rather, the cat is a cat in its own way. As she puts it, a cat that is Victoria. It refuses translation and therefore we should stick to the original names. If this sounds confusing, the confusion makes a good point of the complexity of translation and understanding these entities. A point that my soul empathizes here is that the entities have to be understood in the relation that they emerge in because it is in this interface that we might be able to perceive them and it is in this meeting that we should be able to recognize their being. In addition to this, she sheds lights on the importance of how we go about framing the entities. How we should be very aware of whether or how we frame an entity when trying to conceptualize it. (soft music) modern actually Pilesen, who we also heard in the discussion on an effect following Esther's presentation, here continues the discussion about the modern human actor by referring to a theoretical approach called A&T, formulated by Bono Latua. A&T means actor's network theory, where the actor can be both human and non-human. Modern empathizes how Esther's example shows anthropologist contribution to the actor definition in A&T. In A&T, the actor is measured by its effect, but modern argues how the actor can also be recognized through effect. Therefore, he presents that we might talk about modern human effectors instead of actors. Modern here points to the use of oneself as research instrument when studying modern human politics. The entities might have an effectural effect on you, as Esther described, and these effects can be used in the research process. The example of a conceptual re-imission, there's to say the point of the natural actors is that they're not the kinds of actors that the way you use to think about them, because they're actors that do not necessarily have intensity. The trueest concept of the actor comprises intentional and non-sensual acts. Hence, it's an invention on the concept of actor that uses a map directly onto intentional forms. But then, Michael's coming out of human theory, but it seems to be curious in A&T. To speak about what you are talking about as a more than human actor, I mean, it's not that it's wrong, but it just doesn't seem precise enough. You might even say evocative enough, and I don't think it conveys the sort of ethics and the feelings and the sort of desire of this kind of encounter. So, this just took the thing about the actor and the way actors define the human nature in terms of its effects, that seems somehow fully captured. This is actually a sort of ethical formation, and it's a place where people have desires and feelings and feelings are intensified in different ways. I mean, might one not actually instead talk about more than human effectors, you know, effects that you have to work on whether you can do something that would be going from actor to effector, from effect to effect, to convey what seems to be the sensual aspect of your material, namely the ethical self-procheration that takes place for you and others among your informants in doing these particular practices in around trees, vegetable plants. And it's probably even better equipped than STS scholars in doing this kind of stuff because of the nature in which we conduct our research in comparison to many STS scholars. Mainly that you can actually hear it going and analyze what actually happens to yourself, the fact that you use yourself as an instrument of your research. These effects have happened to you. You're not just observing effects, you are experiencing effects and I think that should be highlight, not just in your kind of study, but in the quality of this kind of phenomena as well. I think that's where our contribution lies in our complementarity to greatly into STS. A returning reflection during the workshop was the consideration about why this small and human field is occurring in anthropology now. My Saldalaketina, Stinakoya and Las Roma, another participant at the workshop shared their thoughts about this. Las Roma is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at University of Copenhagen. I am completely excited and I think that one of the things that Mule might want to reflect upon is why is it that we're talking about these now? Something's happening. I think the modern world has produced problems or which it doesn't have modern solutions. It's not a coincidence that we start talking about this historical moment in time in different places in the world and in different ways and I think in that sense also the languages and the ways people are trying to start talking about something, maybe they've talked about before in a different way and now start to talk about again in a different way and time technologies in different ways of trying to develop a language. We address some of these issues, you know, trying to make music off the plans and trying to just struggling along with how to find ways of talking about something which is quite difficult. I could add on because the like it's been quite a good time with amateur ecologist to use metal detectors for access in the past and that hold the way they talk about how gold sound in a specific way that makes them feel. It's very quite interesting to learn how to sort of hear the past in the sense or hear the soil or look at the landscape, the colors and share that same sense that technologies are at least in some of these cases creating some really intimate connections between either human or nature or the present at the past where they have sort of really become great tools for some sort of engagements. What last and steen are reflecting on is the ability to listen to something that we have not always been able to listen to. Myself presents the problem that modernity has created problems that modernity cannot solve and therefore we need to start listening in a new way. Continuing the workshop Estelle Oberberg Andersen introduces last Khorima who presents his ethnographic work on the Danish island von Hunn. His case raises a question about what constitutes a more than human political field and it tells the story about how studying more than human actors can give rise to political controversies. For instance issues surrounding research priorities and the funding of research in Denmark. We will move on to the next presenter and we'll come back to the points race. Last we will go to Bonheum, public ridicule and private confessions. Notes on non-human aspects of Bonheum's landscape. My name is Lars Roeml. I'm a enrolled here at the department as a PhD student and employed by the Royal Library, the Danish folk archives. It's a long title and I'm currently sort of halfway through my field work on Bonheum, the Danish island, where I'm a departed from like looking at legdms and myths about a subterranean kind of being on the island as a way to get a deeper understanding of how people have related to that landscape, both presently and historically. There's a particular type of legend on Bonheum about it, sort of a natural being called subterrannians for a new or this good in Danish, undergrounders, I'm not sure what subterrannians has been, my translation of it. It fits perhaps more like the type of pixie that lives underground. And after a couple of years of thinking about how could I do, I've sort of ended up thinking, well, this subterranean being because it's not only legends of the past, I've seen it. They pop up every now and then on the contemporary island, like the Turund H and C, the museum use them in different ways, also as a sort of marketing figure for selling ice cream and whatever, a popularized version of things like that might be sort of at least a different way to approach the Bonheum's nature and Bonheum's landscape than it would otherwise come about. So I said a side sort of, well, okay, the legend's subterrannians, that will be my sort of point of entry, that's where we'll start approaching Bonheum's field. I was sort of quite happy about sort of that idea, I liked it and it was really pleased when like in the fall of 2014, learned that I got a grant from the independent richest councils in Denmark, I was also, yeah, that was great. But what I hadn't imagined was that how this sort of might bring about, that has controversy in the sense about how was this, like I mean the, well at least now the farmer minister of science and research in Denmark is not last but he was one of the frontmost critics of my projects, a few weeks after at least was published, he was wind out and said, well this is absolutely out of touch with Denmark's need as a society, how can we, if the research councils in Denmark have money to spend on a project like, have money to spend on a project like this, it certainly shows that they have too much money and can administer their funding. So we have to do, yeah it is, I think it's my fault that like, and I don't have to say any word with it. Yeah, no, and I'm deeply sorry, I'm not sure I wish that would have been differently, but he was out there and that really cured a sort of like that, you can do that, well people, I don't know where it came from, but he's sort of, well people are allowed to hug trees but in the spare time this is not something that should be the object for serious science, this is not science. And it fits perfectly with the whole tradition of sort of Western societies, for the church and science to attempt to undermine local beliefs and local foreclose and try to eradicate that from sort of the public mainstream versions of what is, I mean, allowed to be believed. And I think, yeah, or to be, or whatever, whatever is sort of as a relevant thing to talk about and that critique that ridicule word I've had to defend myself, in newspaper and across the globe in sense, there's been from Russia to Argentine that I've had requests from media campode and whatever. That was put interested in how can Denmark fund such a project? And I'm curious, at one point I'm curious about this, what have I been saying with this project was about spirits in Mongolia or Indian spirits? Probably not, because there's a tendency to, at least that's my personal view, that these types of spirits, they belong either in the past or somewhere else, not in a backyard. Or in the present that's still in the past. Yeah. Right. And this is what I've met in the beginning field work on, but I'm living there at the moment, probably continue living there. That's a great place. But when I meet people for the first time, it will sort of be, oh, you're that guy with the subterranean. Oh, oh, there's the sorcerer. How can you-- how can you even do something like, how can you take the series, how can this be? How can this your job? And would this have been a very sort of methodological challenging, obviously, to face with the immediate critique? Lassus case backs a discussion about what is political and whether we can conceptualize the political or if we should rather redefine the concept of politics itself. In this discussion, modern reflects on the limits of the political, as political limit points. One of the good things about things as a concept is precisely that, you know, as part of one, and others have written by, that is, this particular sort of generic, almost empty character. That might actually be quite helpful, you know, because it's kind of open and graphic question what a thing can be, not the sense of being as material, et cetera. Likewise here, you could say that they're in part politics, you know. So how can we ask the question in such a way that the concept of politics remains as heuristic as possible? So the question is, like, what do we need to do the policy? It's an order to understand, make sense of, better analyze a number of different kind of scenarios. To stay always, when the concept of trying to find politics is everywhere, or so we actually rather to reinvent something else, you know. So it might also be, it might actually point just a little limit point. It's not because, of course, concept can be reinvented into anything, but it's actually useful. It might be, as you also sort of, I think, a little bit to say, maybe there are some topics point where it sort of indicates that we need to start doing some other conceptual work. Now that we have done these all these necessary things about expanding the concept of politics, so a lot of domains, which was really illiterately and otherwise necessary, it's also interesting to us is their kind of limits, and what's the implications of doing that, and so on. And of course, as Marisol then says, well, maybe there's no limit, because of course, the principle of whether the development of politics itself is one that can travel, if you like, does to say whether the concept of politics is not a definition, but it's a concept of politics that can change for itself, if you like, as it travels. So as long as it accomplish that, there's no particular kind of a stop its point at all. It doesn't mean there's not other kinds of definitions of concepts of politics that are not extremely relevant, but maybe this is the one that's political politics is about. That's what political politics is doing, is examining the limit. That doesn't mean that we cannot engage in other kinds of politics as well as unspoiled, but maybe that is not actually what unspoiled is, particularly good at it. What unspoiled could be particularly good at is that examination of the limit. Modern asks if we, by examining the limits of the political, can elucidate the concept of the political itself. In relation to modern human politics, he reflects on whether we should seek the political or if we should seek to reconceptualize what is political. Modern points to how in conceptualizing politics, the concept itself should remain open for reinterpretation and configuration. This might sound paradoxical, but basically, this means that the concept of politics is a temporal concept that should take form in relation to the context in which it is situated. As modern argues, when working with the concepts, there should be a scope for maneuvering. The concept should be able to move with its contextual framing. So in relation to Lazar's work, it is interesting to note how his field shows its political limits in the encounter between Lazar's tragic and the minister's perception of academic relevance. The minister judges Lazar's project as irrelevant, and thereby the public debate itself comes to illustrate the limits of the political. But you might ask, what is the meaning of relevance? - I am also very sick of thinking that the only relevant research is a research that has some political relevance. And I think that for me, what has political relevance now, and I like to practice that, is thinking at my limit, pushing the concepts to their limit, and think what that limit offers me, like the clue to how anthropologically political your concept was when the minister threw the fit. When that guy said, how can we spend money on these? That's exactly a moment in which the dart was thrown to show the political relevance of your way. - Exactly. - I think this is impossible. It is very important because it's so impossible, in your mind. And then the other thing is that this limit of concept, what I like about working on the limits of concepts is that you don't need the earth being. You don't need the weird. It's just made weird because it's indicating a limit. That's what makes it weird, because it indicates a limit. It's not pretty weird. It doesn't pre-exist its weirdness. It is when the limit, pop, takes you to the door where you often are unable to handle. And that is where the weird appears. - Because that didn't envision my prosthetic at all as something that was politically in nature, but that sort of rupture, a whole disagreement across the globe, I think it's perhaps because of the sort of incoherency in terms of modern politics or what's politically insensible. And that was my, I think, if I would have given myself an advice beforehand, it would be thinking about that, as you say, more than the anthropological political aspect of my work rather than thinking of it in terms of fixed relevance. - Big second, and then say. - Which is where I've often surprised by myself how irrelevant it actually is in terms of how much discussion it has generated. So there's something there that has spurred an interest, which I'm not at all in any point of time going to be done with exploring, but that's really the exciting part of it. - Again, maybe what has put us, a good or actually maybe what the universe is, a good or it's precisely about expanding what relevance is rather than being relevant. So, you know, universities are places where you redefine relevance rather than where you are relevant. - So, my intuition is that the state, in whatever impersonation, the state has very difficult time dealing with these, the minister who couldn't deal with it at all, right? But the funny thing that I really think is important is that I'm not dealing with it, they're dealing with it. And that is something that I don't think we had ears before to be aware of that, ears or hands or eyes to see it. In the workshop, myself proposed a concrete way to approach the field of more than human politics, namely by working on how we methodologically and theoretically understand our anthropological approach. She presents what she calls methods as unusual, proposing that we understand method not as in how we collect material in the field, but as tools to think. By merging the theoretical and empirical, we are better disposed to practice a more coherent approach in anthropological research. My soul reflects on this more with Steen and Koya adding to this discretion. I want to tell you about how think about methods and concepts. Last year I organized a workshop in Davis. I named it "Methods as unusual". So what I wanted to do in that was to think about methods in a non-representational way if you want and if I want to use the current way of speaking. So methods not as that with which we collect material in the field but methods as analytical tools, as tools to think and in that vein to think about concepts as methods and to think about to think collapsing, completely collapsing, the separation that we have been trained with between the empirical and the theoretical. Thinking about concepts as methods, aka as tools to think, for a very specific genre and that is ethnography which is I say it's very specific genre because I along with many others define it as that seamless composition between the empirical, what we call the empirical and what we call the theoretical through the conceptual. So that once we put it together it is very difficult to pull what we call the empirical apart from what we call the theoretical. So with these I wanted to alter the usual methods class in anthropology departments and the usual theory classes in anthropology departments whereby we separate both right and we teach methods as methodology and it is you I mean everything we do when we are in the field and then what we do when we are writing is something else. If we start there and perhaps I don't know it depends and this is where we have to be very ethnographic conceptually methodologically as we emerge in the place where we are thinking and by that I mean the field in front of our computers then we can start thinking about how that assemblage is separated depending on where it is emerging because that place is making it is making that separation. But what I wanted to say also is that once set back I think that one of the things that I do very deeply want to keep is the an evenness of what we're listening to. So if we're releasing it we listen we hear and even things I think that that is what we want to keep. We don't want to interpret them in a way that then homogenizes. So a point that my soul makes and that we can take with us from this episode of Antropod is about being aware of not harmonizing what we hear in the field. This draws back to the discussion about translation and the importance of being very aware in the process working within this field. Steenie brings forth reflections on how we engage with the field that we study and how ethnographic studies are a mutual relation where things and knowledge flow back and forth. Thereby she starts a discussion on how the point of the patch of ethnographic work is a relation. The work itself is an interface between the ethnographer and the field. As a clothing remark modern sums up some of the discussions held by marking that we need to be aware of never providing ontological answers. Instead we need to continuously ask ontological questions and like my soul says never harmonize the answers. But then again well maybe thinking about thinking about the relevance of of of of anthropology coming back to your to your issue about what what we consider and what what you also said what we consider and political politics. What is it actually that is our our labor and our work of politics might not be to be politically in the same way as the people that we study but being it in in a different sense and being it in a way that thinking beyond the limit of what we are capable of. But then on the other hand I don't think that that we can distinguish so clearly again between who is who is it actually who's thinking beyond the limit and who is doing anthropological politics because on the other hand we could also say well even the work of ontologists flow back into the people that we are studying. Amazonians are reading the Vedic stichastro and so are my German activists and they are using it in a new way to also start thinking beyond themselves. So in that sense it might not be so clear cut who is actually doing the intellectual labor or doing the thinking beyond because the domains again maybe not. But you need to be clear. No I don't think so. It's us. Yeah exactly. Yeah it's all the time us in yeah and that's the other thing also then in terms of method concept I think that it is a trap to think as them. I rather think here in the interface where we encounter each other and think about us interface. Not us then but us interface because every method is underpinned by a concept. So if you say me, Marisol, they, Mariana, and Nasario, I'm doing a kind of ethnography that won't allow that seamless composition of the empirical and the theoretical through the conceptualization. Already that me then will take me to something else. Yeah so I prefer to talk about us interface. It's of course it's an interface that has the as them but it's a as them. It is as them. Do it always involves asking questions but never taking on time as an answer. Exactly. That is precisely what it's all about. That is what answer is about. If you cannot avoid those questions and that's why we can't just pretend that we're not dealing with answer questions but we should never provide an ontological answer. And here I'm just really repeating what you said is a consequence of a particular seamless integration or weaving together or stitching together of what we might call the theoretical and the ethnographic. That was really nice. And I also really like to say we already talked about this idea of thinking about methods, thinking about what I just talked about, before about concepts as methodological invitations. Invitations to also rethink the relationship between method and theory also in direct terms. Like to say to actually teach them in a proper way that's an accordion to these kinds of insights. Certainly this department I do not speak with you and interesting more or less with the precise words that you have you said today, but I and others have you know for simply just try to sort of like ask, can we sort of revamp our methodology classes in this department. So we don't always think about methodologies or something you do in the field but also when you do when you analyze. But maybe we are also coming to our limits. We hope this episode has provided you with an insight into some of these very exciting discussions surrounding the study of non-human beings in anthropology. A special thanks to my Saldalakadena and all the participants at the workshop, especially Esther, Morden and Lars, whose work and comments were featured in this episode. This episode was produced by Estelle Uwebobig, Anasen and Stene Koya. Sound and editing was done Bye, good dreams Andrea, see you soon. and Cecil Marie Himrexen, students at the Department of Entropology on University of Copenhagen. We also would like to thank the Danish Research Council for independent research for financing the workshop and the Department of Entropology at the University of Copenhagen for its support in hosting and producing this episode. For more information about this episode, also explore other ancient bread episodes visit cultenth.org. There you can find links to subscribe to this podcast via iTunes, Stitcher or SoundCloud. You can also keep updated by following Antropod on Twitter or liking cultural and educational sites. You've been listening to Anthropod, produced by the Society for Cultural Anthropology in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. Our co-sponsored, The Triple A, will be holding its annual meeting in Washington, DC this year from November 29th to December 3rd. The Anthropod team will be holding our own workshop at this year's meeting on November 30th from 1 to 3pm. In the workshop, entitled Podcasting 101, will work with participants on basic podcasting techniques and introduce what it takes to make an episode. You can register online by visiting American Anthropod.org and clicking the link for the annual meeting workshops. We hope to see you there.