Anthropology on Air

This episode is the second of two podcasts focusing on the longstanding partnership between Bergen and Khartoum.

In the episode you will meet, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, who visited Bergen in October 2023 to give the keynote lecture at a 3-day symposium that marked the 60-year anniversary of this collaboration. An-Na’im is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory Law, associated professor in the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, and senior fellow of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion of Emory University. He is the author of several pioneering books within human rights and Islamic law, including Decolonizing Human Rights(2021); What is an American Muslim (2014); Muslims and Global Justice (2011); and Islam and the Secular State (2008).

In the podcast, professor emeritus at the Department of Social Anthropology at Bergen University, Leif Manger, interviews An-Na’im about his background and main work. An-Na’im begins by describing his defining relationship with Mahmoud Mohammed Taha and Taha’s teachings about “The Second Message of Islam”. Taking us through some of his major academic contributions, An-Na’im then reflects on his previous engagements with human rights in a cross-cultural perspective and his commitment to advocating the agency of people to protect their own rights. Finally, Leif asks for An-Na’im’s thoughts on the question that he himself posed in the title of his keynote lecture, namely: ‘Sudan’s tragedy – a repeated failure or a learning adaptation process?’

Read more about Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im’s work on his research page and on his professional website evolutionofsharia.org

In this episode, we speak with Martin Eggen Mogseth and Fartein Hauan Nilsen about their first edited volume, Limits of Life: Reflections on Life, Death, and the Body in the Age of Technoscience (Berghahn Books, 2024). The book explores how fundamental concepts such as life, birth, selfhood, religion, death, and ancestry are being reshaped in an era of rapid technological changes, from a transhumanist movement seeking to disrupt death, to digital avatars ‘replicating’ deceased loved ones and widely accessible DNA tests revealing hitherto unknown genetic relatives. We discuss the book’s genesis in a smoky pub in Denmark; different ways of understanding ‘life’ and ‘limits’; how advancements in artificial intelligence and genetic testing have led to a revival of interest in ancestry in Euroamerican contexts; sperm ‘superdonors’; why California is such fertile ground for exploring topics at the intersection of scientific imagination, technology, and the self; and more.

Martin Eggen Mogseth is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, where he works with the experiences of people involved with assisted conception in the US, primarily in California. His research begins with the moment a person learns that they are donor conceived, what might be called "reconception", and expands to consider the various actors somehow affected by and affecting the trajectories that thus ensue, be they temporal, "non-human", or relational. The project is concerned with topics such as identity, kinship, technology, and biology, and deals intimately with phenomena such as personal misrecognition in the mirror, familial secrecy, familial disruption and connection, and the shifting of fundamental sense-making elements. Martin is also interested in the limits and possibilties of language in conveying ethnographic occurences, thus he tinkers as well with poetry and "the literary" and the idea that "language is technology".

Fartein Hauan Nilsen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He has previously conducted ethnographic research in Iceland for his MA where he explored the impact of modernity and technological advancements on religious revivalism, particularly pagan revivalism, in Iceland and the broader Euro-American context. Currently, Fartein is part of the RCN-funded project "Human Futures: A study of Technoscientific Immortality" led by professor Annelin Eriksen at the University of Bergen. As part of this project, Fartein has conducted 13 months of fieldwork in California focusing on how Generative Artificial Intelligence, mainly in the form of chatbots, is being used for memorial purposes. Initially, his research centered on death, but fieldwork revealed that the current AI boom is equally about life, both in representing a new form of life and in facilitating a specific way of life. Fartein's research interests span a wide range, including the Anthropology of Technology, the Anthropology of Religion, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Digital Anthropology, Artificial Intelligence, New Religious Movements, and the interplay between Science and Religion.

More about the book, released 1 June 2024, here: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/MogsethLimits

In this special episode, we speak with Tomas Salem, a PhD fellow in our own department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. We do a deep dive on some of the themes covered in Tomas’s first book, Policing the Favelas in Rio de Janeiro: Cosmologies of War and the Far-Right (Palgrave Macmillian, 2024), which is released this week. Based on fieldwork Tomas conducted in 2015 when he was a Master’s student here, the book explores the links between militarized policing and far-right ideologies.

We talk about the social and political conditions that preceded the rise of the man who became the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, forms of everyday violence in the favelas of Rio, masculinity and hierarchy in the police force, doing ethnography with those you might disagree with, and how Tomas’s thoughts about the political and analytical value of anthropology have evolved in the years since he carried out the original research.

More broadly, Tomas’ research focuses on the intersection of inequality and the environment as the two overarching and co-constituting crises of the 21st century. He approaches these crises and their effects by zooming in on emergent social, political, cosmological and economic tensions, exploring the links between non-dualist ontologies and the re-enchantment of the world in politics and science, the material and symbolic conditions for the growth of illiberal ideologies, and technological change—particularly related to technologies of governance, datafication, and AI.

Tomas has carried out ethnographic research in diverse contexts, including Rio de Janeiro's Military Police Forces, and wilderness areas in the Norwegian High-Arctic and in Southern Argentina. In his PhD project he explore romantic pursuits of happiness and the good life in the outdoors and the changing meanings of nature in the Anthropocene.

We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Tomas Salem’s UiB profile: https://www.uib.no/en/persons/Tomas.Salem
Link to book: https://link.springer.com/book/9783031490262

In this episode we speak with Martjin Oosterbaan. Martjin is professor at the department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University, with a chair in the Anthropology of Religion and Security. He has done more than two decades of research in Brazil, focusing on topics such as urban and religious transformation, security and citizenship, and the role of mass media and popular culture in identity formation. He currently leads the ERC Consolidator research project: Sacralizing Security in Mega-Cities of the Global South.

In the podcast, Martjin presents some of his research findings on the theopolitical constellations of contemporary rule in Rio de Jainero. He begins by describing the hybrid forms of governance in the city and how the religious landscape has changed within recent decades. We then talk about the peculiar and recently emerged phenomenon of evangelic gangs in Rio, and how religion is used as part of territorialization and legitimization of the rule and workings of these gangs. Finally, Martjin shares some comparative insights about how mega cities across the globe display similar developments of new forms of politics and rule infused with religious aspects.

We hope you enjoy the conversation!

The podcast was recorded in October 2024 when Martjin was in Bergen to present at the BSAS series.

Resources

Academic profile

Oosterbaan, M. (2017). Transmitting the spirit: religious conversion, media, and urban violence in Brazil. Penn State University Press.

More information on the project, Sacralizing Security in Mega-Cities of the Global South

In this episode of Anthropology on Air, we speak with Penny Harvey, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester in the UK. Penny is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the Academia Europaea.

Penny is a highly influential thinker on the topic of infrastructures. She is well known for her 2015 book about highway-building in South America, Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Cornell UP), which she co-wrote with Hannah Knox. The book addresses the deceptively simple question of how roads matter to people – an interest in the social life of infrastructure projects that still broadly animates Penny’s work today.

Penny’s long-term ethnographic research in Peru originally looked at Spanish/Quechua bilingualism, language, and power. It grew to include the study of civic infrastructure projects including road construction, sanitation, and waste management systems.

We talk about Penny’s current ethnographic study of nuclear decommissioning infrastructures in the UK, which includes her spending time at nuclear sites like Sellafield, which you will hear about in this conversation. She is involved in many projects relating to nuclear waste management, having co-founded the Beam network for social research on nuclear topics within the Dalton Nuclear Institute at the University of Manchester. She also serves as the Deputy Chair of the UK Government Committee on Radioactive Waste Management.

We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Penny Harvey - The Beam nuclear and social research network (manchester.ac.uk)