Simone Dennis, Andrew Dawson - Doing Anthropology - A Guide by and For Students and Their Professors-Routledge (2022)

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Doing Anthropology
This textbook is written by well-established anthropology professors for, and with, their
undergraduate students. It explores what anthropological thinking is, what anthropo-
logical approaches are, and how these are applied in real-world settings. It provides a thor-
ough introduction to key methods, theories and the disciplinary value of contemporary
anthropology.
This book deliberately steps beyond the standard textbook format. Undergraduate
students reveal the processes by which they came to understand and apply anthropo-
logical knowledge using everyday experiences and common life events as examples, while
also showcasing the research that student authors produced as a result of understanding
and operationalising those processes. This fresh take showcases what can be done with
anthropological knowledge, not what you can do with anthropology when you’ve achieved
the rank of professor. This book is accompanied by practical exercises, and podcasts that
relate to each of the chapters. Podcasts extend beyond the textbook as live resources, with
episodes on a regular basis. This is an accessible, lively, active text that prepares students to
outbound disciplinary knowledge.
This unique and engaging textbook will be core reading for undergraduate anthro-
pology students, as well as a source of teaching inspiration for lecturers of undergraduate
anthropology units. It would also be a useful text for undergraduate students conducting
ethnographic research.
Simone Dennis was Professor of Anthropology and Associate Dean for Engagement,
Impact and Innovation at the Australian National University when this book was begun.
Now, she is Head of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Adelaide.
Andrew Dawson is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne.

His ethnographic and theoretical work focusses on experiences of mobility. He has
published widely, including ‘Driven to Sanity: An ethnographic critique of the senses in
automobilities’ which was recently awarded the Australian Anthropological Association’s
Best Article prize. Andrew has lectured in anthropology for over 30 years, especially at
first-year and doctoral levels.
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iii
Doing Anthropology
A Guide By and For Students and
Their Professors
Simone Dennis and Andrew Dawson

iv
Cover image: © Simone Dennis

First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Simone Dennis and Andrew Dawson
The right of Simone Dennis and Andrew Dawson to be identified as authors of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dennis, Simone, author. | Dawson, Andrew, 1962– author.
Title: Doing anthropology : a guide by and for students and their
professors / Simone Dennis, Andrew Dawson.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022027683 (print) | LCCN 2022027684 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032226491 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781032226484 (Paperback) |
ISBN 9781003273547 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Anthropology–Study and teaching (Higher)–
United States–Textbooks. | Ethnology–Methodology.
Classification: LCC GN43 .D46 2023 (print) | LCC GN43 (ebook) |
DDC 301.071/173–dc23/eng/20220718
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027683
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027684
ISBN: 978-1-032-22649-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-22648-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-27354-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003273547
Typeset in Bembo
by Newgen Publishing UK
v
Contents
List of figures viii

List of tables ix
List of contributors x
Acknowledgements xii
1 Introduction 1
Welcome! 1
Using your uncommon sense 6
First, what is common sense? 6
Snot 11
Finally! What is uncommon sense? 13
How to tell the difference between common and uncommon sense? 14
Anthropology basics 21
Ethnography 24
Complexifying ethnography 25
Complexifying ‘cultural groups’ 27
Ethnography on the inside 28
You are a [research] tool 28
The field 34
Before you read Chapter 2 42
References 43
2 Putting the basics together to understand the university

anthropologically 45
Some orienting notes to get you started 45
Seeing the university like a culture you’ve just entered 49
The circumstances of your arrival here 49
Positions in the university 50
A core of research 51
Especial time 52
Especial spaces, surrounds and buildings 52
Especial language 54
Plagiarism – let’s make some uncommon sense 54
References 67
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vi Contents
3 Taking notice, taking note: how do anthropologists do anthropology? 68
Some basics: fieldnotes 69
Being there 78
The fieldnotes exercise: the hard parts 83
References 98
4 Rites, rituals, graduations and cakes 100

The work of ritual 101
Rites of passage 103
References 119
5 Kinship and relatedness 120

Some theory basics: descent and alliance theories 122
Systems of relatedness 130
Questioning presumptions 141
Family and community 160
Ethnicity –what is it? 174
The ethnicity of stockbrokers 174
Qualities of ethnicity 177
Students –an ethnic group? 180
Ethnicity is slippery 180
References 182
6 Ethical positions in anthropology 185

Some insights into institutional practice 187
Research that has merit 188
Research conducted with integrity 189
Beneficence and risk 190
Justice 198
Respect 200
References 201
7 Food for thought and social animals: (Aka a disobedient history of

anthropological theory) 203
Food (in)security 204
A diversion into smelly oranges and moist tongues 208
A bit more of a diversion into distinction 209
The taste of food insecurity 213
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Contents vii
Food distribution: eating with the plumber 217
Animals and a potted history of anthropological thought: the super-short and
snappy version 220
Animals and a potted history of anthropological thinking: the much longer
and meandering version 224
References 248
8 Space, consumption and the anthropology of things 252

Bah humbug! 253
Sacrificial shopping for love? 254
Back to bah humbug 257
Varieties of reciprocity 259
Is a gift ever just a gift? 261
Things, things, things! 263
References 281
9 Power, institutions and the university: a motivating conclusion 283

Some key thinkers 284
References 312
Index 314
vi
Figures
1.1 Fieldnotes at Coles, p. 1 9

3.1 Fieldnote books 75
3.2 Fieldnote book cover 76
3.3 Page from fieldnote book 1 77
3.6 Friends of the Police Band Newsletter, featuring Simone Dennis 80
5.1 Kinship symbols 1 131
5.2 Kinship symbols 2 131
5.3 Ego symbols 132
5.4 A kinship diagram by Simone 133
5.5 A named kinship diagram by Simone 133
5.6 Bilateral kindred diagram 134
5.7 Lineal and collateral kin 136
5.8 Cross relatives chart 138
5.9 Patrilineal descent 139
5.10 Matrilineal descent 140
5.11 Example kinship diagram from the field #1 146
5.15 Kinship diagram by Kat Babushkina 150
5.16 Kinship diagram by Julia Doherty 155
5.17 Kinship diagram by Emma Hudson 158
7.1 Mary Douglas’s Social Universe diagram 218
8.1 Giselle’s map of part of the ANU campus 270
ix
Tables
5.1 Relationship and letter kin terms 129

5.2 Relationships (Ego’s mother’s sister, and so on) and compound strings
of symbols 130
5.3 Common and uncommon kin terms 130
5.4 Numbered relatives 134
5.5 Kin minus affinal relatives 135
x
Contributors
Simone and Andy’s co-authors are:
Clara Ho
Lachlan Long
Zarah Radih
Evie Haultain
Hannah Nott
Amy Hefernen
Gabrielle May
Hebe Ren
Zixun Lin
Hayley Calderwood
Xinlei Qi
Esther Black
Sarah Pilgrim
Beth Weaver
Anna Chapman
Luke Williams
Sophie McDonald
Julia Chan
Elisabetta Dent
Teesha Shahi
Virginia Plas
Ruth Kravis
Nitya Narasimhan
Yoko Asakawa
Rowena McPhee
Manuela Salazar
Giselle Anderson
Julia Doherty
Kishaya Lye
Ruby Kleeman
Tallis Everard
Kat Babushkina
Jodie Chang
Anna Norden
xi
List of contributors xi
Carys Fisser
Noah Tolmie
Ruby Skeat
Tristan Penfold
Uma Dingeman
Co-author contributions ably edited by:
Rowena McPhee
newgenprepdf
xi
Acknowledgements
Simone and Andy wish to sincerely thank the students who contributed to this book.
They share our passion for anthropology, for thinking critically and imaginatively about
learning and teaching, and for taking anthropology beyond the academy. Simone and
Andy are also very grateful to Rowena McPhee, who patiently and willingly went to
the supermarket with Simone to make an anthropological points, and who read and
edited material for the book with an eye and a wisdom far more attuned and deep than
her tender years. Simone and Andy also wish to thank Max Napier, who recorded and
produced the podcast associated with this textbook.
Simone and Andy want to thank, in advance, those who read this book –they hope
it offers something beneficial and that whatever that is, it is paid forward to others who
might want to see the world a bit differently.
Maureen Napier, Bronwyn Todd and Keaka Dennis read drafts of the work, and made
important insights and suggestions that made the book much better and more readable
than it would otherwise have been. Thank you so much.
They are as always, grateful for the support and encouragement they received from
their families and friends for this project, and to those whose memorable teaching shaped
and encouraged this, their own offering. Simone wishes to thank especially her kind
friend Brooke, who asked after the book every single time she saw Simone. Brooke isn’t
an anthropologist, but she appreciated how important it was for the book to make sense
to people new to the discipline.
Finally, Simone and Andy want to very sincerely thank the team at Routledge for
taking a chance on this project, and for the constant support and encouragement to bring
it to fruition.
Thank you.
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1 Introduction
Welcome!
Welcome to this one-of-a-kind textbook. In it, we want to engage and enthuse, inspire
and encourage you to think with, learn about, explore and most of all, do, social anthro-
pology.There’s a few different branches of anthropology, and you may have heard of some
of them:
• Cultural/social/sociocultural anthropology: (which is what this book is all

about);1
• Applied anthropology: using cultural/social anthropology to solve current social
problems;
• Biological anthropology: the study of human biology over time and how it has
changed/stayed the same (evolution, genetics, growth, development, etc.);
• Archaeology: looking at material culture to make insights into the people who
used it, and
• Linguistic anthropology: descriptive, comparative, historical study of language
sameness and difference over time.
In this book, we are focusing on cultural/social/sociocultural anthropology (as well as

some of the applied kind). We’ll just use ‘anthropology’ from here on.
While you’ll get the sense that a careful and thorough engagement with this book will
result in the acquisition of anthropological knowledge because it’s been written by two
eminent professors who have long taught first-year classes, that’s not what sets this book apart
from other introductory textbooks.
While you’ll find that our introductory classes have served as inspiration for this book,
that’s not what sets it apart from other introductory textbooks.
While you will find that we have adopted a friendly, approachable –even conversa-
tional –style, that’s not what sets it apart from other introductory textbooks.
While you’ll definitely get the sense that the book is focused on how learning to see
the world anthropologically is beneficial, that’s not what sets it apart from other introductory
textbooks, either.
It isn’t unusual to find all of these substantive and stylistic qualities in textbooks these
days; good introductory textbooks are often written by experienced first-year anthro-
pology lecturers who are also decent scholars. Those people are often good teachers
because they have good communication skills. For us, that means making what we’re
teaching accessible, by being conversational, by communicating horizontally. And, it’s not
DOI: 10.4324/9781003273547-1
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2 Introduction
unusual for students and classes to be the inspirations for textbooks, or for textbooks to go
beyond teaching you about something to enlighten you about why studying it is important
and beneficial. Anthropology has many claims to make about its benefits, including its
valuing of difference, learning how ‘others’ are made and hierarchically situated relative to
‘us’, how its ways of thinking and its practical application can help ensure a better world.
But this textbook is different. Really different –because:
• It is not written by well-established anthropology professors who have used their

extensive teaching experience to ensure their textbook is informed by student
perspectives and suitably friendly for a novice student audience. Instead, this text-
book is written by well-established anthropologyprofessors with some of the students
who have taken Simone’s first-year class at the Australian National University, and
Andy’s at the University of Melbourne over the last year.Those students are the best-
informed writers of a textbook because they have taken anthropology before and can
orient other students to key ideas and practices.
It’s also different because:
• We will engage you not as passive recipients of knowledge about anthropology, but
as active producers of anthropological research –just as we did for students in our
courses who have now become authors of this book alongside us.The students you’ll
meet as you read through are not inspirations for this book, or the subjects of its
exercises; they are fellow authors of it. They’re amazing, but they’re not doing any-
thing you can’t do, too. The reason that their amazingness is achievable is because of
the innovation we make in this book. This is really important –read this next part
carefully.
As you may have guessed, in this book we want to make a radical departure from how
students are typically engaged in disciplinary learning (of all kinds, but especially anthro-
pology). This book is a shot over the bow at the maieutic relations that, in our classes, we –
the lecturers and the students –took a decision to rethink and do differently. So, what
are maieutic relations? Those are the kinds of relations that unfurl between students and
teachers when the latter see their roles as principally concerned with bringing ideas that
they are expert in to student consciousness, and getting students to take them up. There
is nothing wrong with experts passing on knowledge; it would be weird to attend a class
or read a textbook where the lecturer or author wasn’t an expert. However, sometimes
experts do not put themselves in a position where they can be affected by the different
ideas of others. That, as we will explain in just a moment, can be a very dangerous and
frightening possibility.
If you were in a maieutic relationship with your lecturer, this would mean they would
assist you to acquire the disciplinary knowledge and understanding that they know
is the most valuable and important in the discipline. In doing so, your lecturer would
never berate or tell you that the ideas you come into the class with are wrong. Instead,
they would skilfully lead you to the ones they know are important, by challenging what
you think. The maieutic approach is essentially Socratic, where a questioner engages a
person in a dialogue until frustration caused by challenges to the person’s ideas leads
them to feel dissatisfied with what might have been their pretty much settled convictions,
and provokes a refinement of their views. The person in the higher position relative to
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Introduction 3
you –the lecturer –already knows what the answer is supposed to be. They lead the
dialogue, supplying clues, evidence, indicators to their students, allowing them to work
out what they should know by the end of the class.You, the student, get to work out the
predetermined answer. The philosopher James Freeman puts it this way:
The challenger exercises a Socratic or maieutic function, drawing out an argument

from the proponent as she recognizes that his case presented so far needs further
development to constitute a cogent argument or the strongest argument possible.
(Freeman, 2011:12)
This means that students can and definitely do have their own ideas that might stand
in stark contrast with what they hear from their lecturer. Lecturers get to grapple with
those throwing down a bunch of challenges from a disciplinary perspective. When they
are successful, lecturers produce replicas of their own knowledgeable selves out of their
students.They preserve the reality of their students as they do so –because students come
to the knowledge by grappling and tussling with the things they believe coming into
the class, in the spirit of going to university to challenge themselves and get some new
perspectives. So what’s wrong with that? Here’s the thing: student positions can never dis-
turb the lecturer’s knowledge. It’s the lecturer’s role to challenge you with their complete
and expert knowledge; your knowledge, however, doesn’t impact them. Again, what’s
wrong with that? You’re new; they’re the experts. Why and how should your knowledge
present a challenge at all?
We don’t mean that you should stand up in class and pit your two-weeks’-worth
of anthropological education against the lecturer’s decades of knowledge. We’re talking
about this in the sense that, in the maieutic mode of teaching that is the dominant one
in Australian universities, a paradigmatic knowledge is promulgated. We think that there are
very important things that students can offer to challenge that. Read on …
Producing students entirely in our own likeness has some important consequences.
We have to zoom out to see some of these. Here, we can draw on the Australian theoret-
ician Rosalyn Diprose (2002), who uses frightening examples drawn from the structural
relations between Indigenous and white Australians to demonstrate the problem. She
says that Indigenous difference is very often acknowledged, accommodated, and even
celebrated in white Australia, but it is very infrequently permitted to disturb the imaginations
and positions of the dominant. White difference isn’t really regarded as difference at all; it
forms the standards, structures, and shapes into which Indigenous difference keeps having
to fit, and into which it is translated. Diprose talks about how white acknowledgement
of Indigenous difference is often thought of as generous accommodation into existing
structures, but really, the structures themselves don’t change; they essentially require
Indigenous people to fit into a uniformity made by the dominant. This is a terrifying
example of how acknowledging, but not being affected by, difference keeps a power hier-
archy in place. If white Australia was affected by Indigenous difference, we’d see a lot of
change to the structures of power, instead of a lot of accommodation and acknowledge-
ment within those structures.
In the final chapter of this book, one of the student authors, Hannah Nott, says a lot
more about how Indigenous people are impacted by the translation of their difference
into dominant white sameness in the context of mothering. Hannah has a bit more
experience than some of the student authors you’ll meet in this book. She wrote her
Honours thesis on Indigenous child removal in Australia and Canada. She looked at
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4 Introduction
why, despite very progressive government language that values different ways of thinking
about and doing mothering that should have decreased the incidence of child removal,
the numbers of kids removed from Indigenous families is on the rise in both countries.
Alongside Diprose, Hannah thinks that the failure of the white state to change in response
to Indigenous difference is extremely consequential for Indigenous people. She thinks,
too, that the ‘generous’ acknowledgement of difference obscures just how consequential it
is for real, live Indigenous people, who suffer enormously under such conditions.
While this example might seem very different from talking about students relative to
their lecturer, there are important consequences for subsuming difference into a dominant
sameness in the teaching and learning situation. Diprose has thought about this a lot in
the context of Australian universities:
There is no teaching or learning, no production of new ideas, on such a [maieutic]

model. One’s mentor, student, companion, or rival is reduced to an intellectual mid-
wife (through the exercise of maieutics), someone who merely helps to bring to con-
sciousness … the teacher and the student are reduced to vehicles for the consumption
and repetition of familiar ideas valued for their utility in allowing easy appropriation
of our world.
(Diprose, 2000:124)
There’s another important consequence for the subsumption of difference in anthro-

pology. You’ll see how difference itself is important, in all kinds of ways, as we move
through the book. One way that it is very important has to do with how anthropologists
get their data. As you will find out when you have a go at gathering data yourself, who you
are –your experiences, biases, gender, age, interests, passions and skills –very significantly
impacts how you understand and approach anthropology and what you get as data. We,
Simone and Andy, work together on a large project we’ll tell you about shortly.We gather
data alongside one another very regularly. We expect to agree on some fundamentals –
things like how many people we’re looking at, what they’re doing, where they are, and
some other basic things –but after that, Simone notices and is interested in different stuff
from Andy and vice versa. That’s the result of them each having different experiences,
training, interests, capacities, passions, genders, ages and so on. Our differences are very
important, both methodologically and analytically. Our differences make us approachable
in different ways, for different people; sometimes being a woman helps Simone to get
data, for instance, and sometimes blokes find it easier to approach Andy. This isn’t always
the case; it depends on the different situations and contexts we’re in, and the individuals
involved. We each interpret the data that we collect differently, allowing a range of ideas
and analyses to emerge from essentially the same data. Anthropology is built on these kind
of differences –each anthropologist’s particular way of being attracts (and repels) different
people who participate (or don’t) in their research, helps them to notice (and miss) cer-
tain things when they’re carrying out their research, and leads them to pursue (and reject)
certain kinds of analysis to explain their data. Anthropologists develop and hone methods
and analyses in and through these differences, so it’s hard to overstate how important they
are. Each anthropological contribution brings something new and different to the discip-
line, and grows it.
That is what you will be doing as you go through this book. You will not only
start to understand anthropological ways of thinking and how to apply them, you will
find out a lot about how you, uniquely, think and do anthropologically. That means
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Introduction 5
your difference is important and, in fact, crucial, to the learning and teaching context.
Here’s how:
Each and every student comes to understand and apply anthropological knowledge
in their own way and if you get a chance to undertake some data collection, as you
will be encouraged to do in this book, you will be able to operationalise anthropology
in and through your difference from us, not by copying what we do. Being aware of
how you in particular understand the processes of learning and practicing anthropological
approaches offers something new to knowledge. And, we cannot teach you how you
learn, or how you as a unique individual will practice anthropology. We can only tell you
how it happened for us, and then compare, be surprised by, challenged by, learn from, how
you did it. In this, we are all rendered equivalent, and the knowledge and ideas we each
hold can be disrupted and impacted by other ideas.You’ll see that all of us in this book are
telling you how we each came to know anthropologically, and inviting you to discover
how you’re going to do it. We are here to equip you with the tools and capacities, ideas
and histories, techniques and principles that anthropologists like to use, and you’re here to
bring us new knowledge about how to operationalise all of that.
How does that all work for the book, exactly?

This book deliberately steps beyond the tried and tested format of distilling profes-
sorial knowledge into friendly and digestible pieces of knowledge that you can read and
then apply. We take an entirely different approach comprising two elements. The first
element involves getting undergraduate students from our classes who have just made key
realisations about what anthropology is, and how to do it, to tell you about how they did
it. As we’ve just explained, you’ll be able to compare your experiences to theirs (and, of
course, to ours) in a knowledge exchange –this is where we get to engage in a horizontal
experience of learning together.You’ll be able to put that together with the advice we’ll
give you about the tools, techniques, ways of analysing –that’s the more vertical experi-
ence of teaching and learning that flows between expert teachers and novices.The second
element involves locating your learning in a context that you can always come back to, to
try to understand and apply it (and to think about your unique ways of understanding and
applying it). We use the university itself as a key example that you can try to understand
anthropologically, and upon which you can practice the methods you’ll encounter here.
To bring these two elements together: you won’t be just students –you’ll be researchers
of the university. In this sense, the book is also a guide to the strange environment that is
university culture and serves as an orientation for understanding some of its key proper-
ties.That might just be useful, if you’re new to the university; researching it could be very
handy for orienting you to it, and understanding how it all works.
Here’s everything in a nutshell

We’re going to treat you less like passive readers and more like budding researchers.
Your contributions to knowledge will not be shiny, mature outputs (like research papers);
they will instead be focused on how you came to understand and apply the anthropo-
logical ideas and methods that we have included in the book. Together, we can showcase
what can be done with anthropological knowledge as a result of understanding how you,
uniquely, will use it (and what you’ll use it for). This is an operationalised, lively, activated
and achievable anthropological textbook –so get ready to get your hands dirty. This isn’t
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6 Introduction
an armchair book. Each chapter includes a number of exercises that you can undertake for
yourself. You don’t need to have access to a university campus to carry these out; wher-
ever you are, and whatever you have access to –even if that’s only your living room –you
can practice anthropology. This book is about learning by doing, researching for yourself,
and in so doing, challenging what the profs know about approaching and engaging the
world anthropologically. In every new course we’ve taught, both of us have incorporated
something we learned from our students in the last class that enriches anthropological
thinking. Now, that new knowledge is coming straight to you –from the students them-
selves –and, at the same time, you can generate it for yourself. Another way of putting
this is that instead of participating in a class that privileges the very popular research-led
teaching model, you’ll be in a research-led learning model. The difference between them
is the way your difference becomes crucial in generating new knowledge and, of course,
the fact that you’ll be getting your hands very dirty.
You’ll have noticed that we said we’ll share with you what we have learned about
anthropology by recourse to our own experiences, ideas, passions –and you can compare
those with your own.We’ve said a lot needs to come from your own examination of how
you’re experiencing ideas, practices and so on. What this all really means is that we’re not
teaching you anthropology. We’re asking you to participate in thinking and practicing
anthropologically and coming to an understanding of how you do those things so you
can make your own unique contribution to knowledge. The first step in that endeavour
is using your uncommon sense.
Using your uncommon sense

What the heck is uncommon sense??? We are inspired to its use by anthropologist Dr
Deane Fergie, who Simone recalls used it in a first-year anthropology lecture series at
the University of Adelaide in the late 1990s, where Simone was doing her PhD and
working on Deane’s course as a tutor. To the young Simone, this seemed a really good
way of describing that otherwise quite-hard-to-describe orientation of the anthropolo-
gist, and she’s used it in her teaching ever since, developing and pushing it further. We
want you to remember that this concept has a history of more than one mind, and that
developments in anthropology are more typically innovations than they are bolts out of
the blue. Indeed, Andy, like most other anthropologists we are sure, has used something
quite like it throughout his career too. Same goes for reading that you do; the book or
article might have a single name on it as the author, but there’s been a lot of input with
fellow colleagues, with publishers, with existing literature that you can’t see.
First, what is common sense?

Before we get to uncommon sense, we need to define what common sense is. Remember
when you were a kid and an adult shook their head at you sadly when you’d done some-
thing wrong or stupid, and said you had ‘absolutely no common sense’? Simone certainly
remembers this from as recently as (at time of writing) yesterday, when she attempted to
defy the laws of physics by stuffing all of her shopping into a single bag, which promptly
detached itself from its handles when she picked it up. One unkind onlooker in the super-
market shook her head and remarked to the man next to her that ‘some people have no
common sense.’ Simone has a very strong urge in situations like this to yell that she is a
professor, but has come to understand, with the help of local authorities and the people
7
Introduction 7
in charge of the supermarket, that this is not an appropriate response. Instead, she silently
considers the meaning of the term ‘common sense’.
The first kind of common sense

When someone accuses you of having no common sense, they are of course saying that you
lack a certain capacity to make sound, intuitive and practical judgements about everyday
matters.2 That’s the part that Simone lacks, and not just in the supermarket. Andy laughs
every time he remembers that Simone painted the high sections of the walls in her new
house on a not-quite-tall-enough ladder in her not-quite-high-enough highest heels
and, perhaps unsurprisingly, fell off the ladder. Simone thinks it’s quite mean to laugh at
someone who fell off a ladder and broke three ribs. She knows that interior decorating is
very important and worth sacrifices. However, it might mean that she lacks the common
sense that would have led her to paint safely. That’s one kind of common sense. There’s a
second and, for our purposes, much more important version of it. When we say common
sense from now on, we’re going to be talking about this second version.The good news is
that Anthropologists have no quibble with good old-fashioned common sense of the first
kind. It’s just that some of them have a little trouble mastering it. What’s the second kind?
The second kind of common sense

Often when people call out a lack of common sense, they are trying to say that the
order of the world that they are familiar with is being messed with, or hasn’t been prop-
erly understood. That usual or expected or familiar order of things isn’t usually even
mentioned –it’s just how things are, and everyone knows it. The knowledge is held in
common.You don’t have to be on a ladder or in the supermarket to understand this part
of common sense, although for this example it’ll help enormously if you are in fact in the
supermarket.
It’s common sense, isn’t it, to not have the hair products in the supermarket next to the
ice cream. Or the fruit. Mousse and gel and hairspray are next to other personal grooming
and hygiene things –like toothbrushes and toothpaste, and hand soap and shower gel.
There’s some good reasons for that, which fall under the first definition of common
sense: practically speaking, you need to refrigerate ice cream; hairbrushes: not so much.
But it would still seem a bit odd if, refrigeration aside, hairbrushes and desserts were right
next door to one another, just as it would seem very weird to stack the toilet paper next
to the peanut butter, or have the tampons or the cat food right next to the fresh bread
and cakes. If you are in a supermarket where the tampons and the cat food are next to the
fresh cakes, leave right now. Probably back out quietly.
It’s likely that you don’t spend heaps of time wondering about why the supermarket
is laid out as it is, or demanding to see the manager about getting the toilet paper stacked
up next to the cakes (that manager would probably wonder about how much of that first
kind of common sense you had if you did). Presuming that the way things are laid out in
the supermarket is just how things are is the second bit of common sense: a pretty much
unquestioned sense of how the world is, that people are expected to know and under-
stand and hold in common, without really saying too much about it.
Having said that people don’t really talk about their held-in-common sense of things,
people do talk about it when someone messes with it, or gets it wrong –in the super-
market, or elsewhere.You can try this out in the supermarket. Go grab a tube of toothpaste
8
8 Introduction
and pop it in amongst the meat. Select a nice cake and make space for it among the fresh
dog food. See what happens –probably people will remark –they might say ‘Yuck!’ or
even ‘Eww! Gross!’ They probably won’t buy the misplaced toothpaste or cake, even
though they’re both probably sealed in plastic, and there’s nothing wrong with either of
them. Rowena, who is studying for her Honours degree with Simone,3 tried this out in
the local supermarket where she lives, in Canberra.This was very brave and you should all
be very grateful to her, because she might have gotten into trouble for it –supermarkets
don’t like it when people move stuff around, especially if it means that people might not
want to buy it anymore. While Rowena did this in the name of generating anthropo-
logical knowledge, Simone very bravely hid among the fruits and vegetables and recorded
what happened.Well, that’s what she wanted to do, but that would have been very unsup-
portive. Here’s what really happened at Coles supermarket –the one that Ro doesn’t shop
at. Just in case you can’t read Simone’s handwritten notes:
A visit to Coles Supermarket

Rowena McPhee and Simone Dennis
Notes written up from headnotes made on Friday, 18 March 2022,

at Coles Supermarket, Belconnen Mall, Australian Capital Territory,
12:58 p.m. AEST (Written by Simone and checked with Ro)
R and S meet at Coles and proceed to the personal care aisle. Ro grabs some men’s
undies in a clear plastic packet and Simone chooses nappy wipes and a brightly
coloured box of tampons. We then proceed to the meat section. We shifted the
items a few times to make them more obvious. After a while, a woman came to
select meat –chicken I think –and, on seeing the tampons, pulled her hand back
as though it had been burned –and beat a hasty retreat without the chicken/meat.
Woman would have been in her 30s? While we tried to look casual, hanging out
in the meat section, a man –40 plus, nicely dressed –came up to buy sausages.
He saw the tampons and shook his head –he also left without meat. Ro then had
the idea of putting the items in the fruit and veg section. We lined them up. No
one had had reactions to the underpants or the nappy wipes as yet –Ro thought
they blended in too well. We got reactions in the fruit and veg –people avoided
the areas of produce where they sat and selected from the farthest area. We saw 4
people –2 men and 2 women –do this. Finally a male Coles employee –prob-
ably early 30s –came along with a cart and cleared away the items. That drew our
experiment to a close and we left about 1:45 pm. We had to be careful to blend
in –it was weird, and cold, having a conversation in the meat section. Easier in
the fruit and veg. We had to take care to blend in while placing the items. (See
Figures 1.1–1.4.)
Let’s take this outside the supermarket for a minute –it’s probably not good if you
get the impression that all anthropology must take place within the confines of a super-
market. The focus on them in this chapter merely reflects Simone’s attempts to deal with
the deep psychological trauma she has endured as a result of incorrectly dealing with
9
Introduction 9
Figure 1.1 Fieldnotes at Coles, p. 1.

10
10 Introduction

1
Introduction 11
the supermarket in the past. As discussed, this is a function of her lack of the first type of
common sense. The point to remember is that in respect of that second kind of common
sense, we have so far decided that:
A common-sense view of the supermarket that most people share is that it’s laid out
in a particular way that makes sense to most of us, with like things together. That’s
just the way things are. It’s not really discussed (expect perhaps in marketing contexts),
except if something goes wrong with it.
Keep that in mind as we turn now to snot.Yes, that’s right. Snot.
Snot
In Canberra, where Simone lived when she first started writing this book, and in
Adelaide, where she lives now, the right thing to do if you have a snotty nose is to
violently expel the snot into a thin piece of cloth. Then you place that cloth into
your pocket or up your sleeve. There’s a fair bit of folding and deft tucking involved –
shoving a fully snotted-up hanky up your sleeve or into your pocket is a bad thing
to get wrong and may be highly consequential. Where Simone used to live, in West
Sumatra, for many people the very idea of keeping your snot on your person, much
less carefully folded inside a small piece of thin cloth –which sometimes even has your
name or initials on it –beggars belief. What kind of insane people keep snot with their
name on it and want it inside their clothes? No, no, no. Much better to expel that nasty
substance into the street, well below all the bits of your body that are best kept snot-
free. Even more extreme, as least until recently, in the English coal-mining area where
Andy grew up, snotting in the street was seen as cool. Snotting was an effective means
of ridding one’s airways of coal dust, and doing so ostentatiously a way of demonstrating
that you have a job.
Aha! Did you see that? Common sense has limits. We just decided that most people
agree ‘that’s just the way things are’ but we need to modify this to: that’s just the
way the world is –for a limited group of people. Comparing these two examples
of dealing with snot is telling: if you tried that second way of dealing with snot in
Canberra or in Adelaide, –that is, expelling it into the street –most people would prob-
ably regard that as quite disgusting. They might not be able to tell you why they didn’t
like it –you’d probably hear them exclaim about how disgusting it is to do something
like that. Or they might whisper it to one another behind their handkerchiefs, assuming
those were not already filled with snot and safely up their sleeves.What they really mean
either way is that this sort of thing is disturbingly unfamiliar in and to the world as they
have come to know it.
Having closely considered snot, we are now in a position to say that common sense
describes how the world intuitively makes sense to the people who share that particular
version of the world.You might be able to see already that the common sense of one group
of people can sometimes be used to lord it over another group of people with a different
common sense. That’s because when the world as you know it seems intuitively right, it
seems, to you, better than the version of the world that other people hold to be intui-
tively right. This often happens in very uncomfortable ways. It could come up as discom-
fort around new foods, smells, practices, languages, ideas coming into a neighbourhood.
12
12 Introduction
It could come up when people with nonbinary identities have to confront profoundly
binary contexts that are ‘just how things are’. It could come up in all kinds of ways. You
probably won’t have trouble finding examples of this. Here is one written by Masako
Fukui in 2017, for an Australian national radio show called Life Matters:
The first time I became aware of my ‘ethnic smell’, I was eight years old. As I sat down
next to my best friend on the school bus, she slammed both hands over her nose in
disgust and sneered: ‘Yuck, you smell like fish.’ I had just ingested a typical Japanese
breakfast of rice, miso soup with bonito stock, and grilled salted mackerel.The ‘smelly
migrant’ is the most subversive of all migrants. Societies, including Australia, have
ways of controlling the practice of other cultures, languages, customs or religions,
but bodily odours just can’t be contained. They ooze out of our pores as invisible
particles, detected only by the odorant receptors in the nasal cavity. And by the time
the receptors have signalled the brain’s olfactory cortex to register ‘yuck’, my immi-
grant bodily emissions have already penetrated your body, invaded you.
(Fukui, 2017:n.p.)
So: the smell of a place, a neighbourhood, a school bus, is part of the common know-
ledge of a group of people –in this case, the dominant white middle-class members of
Masako’s neighbourhood. That smellscape, made up of familiar smells –so familiar they
probably weren’t even remarked upon –was invaded by something different, so different
that Masako’s bestie couldn’t help but remark on it.When she did, it wasn’t only the diffe-
rence she remarked on –it was a smell that was different and bad.
It’s a really good example for us to dwell on, because some smells are welcome in the
common-sense world –but the dominant decide which ones. Masako talks about this,
too, remarking on how difference is subsumed into ‘sameness’, making over the other into
a form familiar to the dominant: ‘Fish is OK, as long as it isn’t pungent. Curry is nice, as
long as the spices don’t cling to the curtains. Kimchi is healthy, as long as the fermented
garlic doesn’t linger on the train.’ Otherwise, she notices, ‘Societies often denigrate the
foods of newcomers as stinky and revolting’ (Fukui, 2017). We will come back to smell
(it’s one of Simone’s theoretical specialities) and to food, especially as it relates to power
(one of Andy’s specialities) later on in this book to make anthropological understandings
of such things as public health programs for smoking cessation and multiculturalism. For
now, it’s very interesting to note that in the same radio show, health researcher Ruth De
Souza, who has an Indian background, talks about how the dish murgh makhani, or per-
haps you know it as Butter Chicken, rose to its current heights of culinary popularity in
Australia: ‘Butter chicken –is mild, not too spicy, and doesn’t stink. It’s exotic, but not
too exotic. It’s Indian, but not too Indian. Butter chicken is tolerably ethnic’ (De Souza,
2017:n.p.).
Of that, Masako says: ‘Championing only the foods deemed tolerable by the dom-
inant culture is to circumscribe what’s acceptably palatable multiculturalism. The effect
is to reinforce a certain kind of “Australian-ness” rather than inclusive diversity’ (Fukui,
2017:n.p.).
See how thinking about difference is really important, as we said earlier on? Here, you
can see how difference has to fit into the conditions set up by the dominant, so ‘they’
become more ‘us’, just like Hannah will talk about in respect of Indigenous families, and
just like we’re talking about with maieutic relationships between lecturers and students.
13
Introduction 13
See also how common sense has limits –and can be used to organise difference into
hierarchy? For Masako’s best friend, the common sense of smell she was used to was
much better than Masako’s –hers was bad, and ‘stinky’. Masako would have to modify her
smell to make it a bit more the same as her friend’s –or she’d be the stinky immigrant.
Difference gets made into a safe and nonthreatening sameness, and the common-sense
conditions of the dominant are preserved.
The idea that we all have access to a world that appears to us as intuitively right is
not only used to make hierarchies, where the most powerful versions of the world are
imposed on other people, it can also make problems seem super-easy to solve. Here’s
one: ‘Drinking is a real issue in this town. If we can reduce the amount people drink,
that’ll fix things.’
Here’s another one: ‘Minority populations have a very high rate of smoking, even as
the rate reduces for white middle-class people across the Western world. It’s obvious.
People are either addicted or they need to have much better info about how dangerous
smoking is –preferably given to them in cultural terms that they will understand.’
These common-sense versions of problems and their answers are very firmly based in
the experience of (in Australia) the dominant white middle class. Both these sentences are
things we’ve had said to us by public health officials in the course of Simone’s work on
smoking and our shared work on alcohol and responsible drinking.While both might seem
to many of you to be intuitively correct, they don’t make great sense beyond the confines
in which they were stated (in both cases, white middle-class views). As anthropologists we
can’t just take someone else’s taken-for-granted, common-sense view of why someone
else does something –like drinking, or smoking cigarettes. Actually, we can’t just take
someone’s taken-for-granted, common-sense view of why they themselves do something;
as we saw in the case of the supermarket earlier on; a common-sense view only runs as far
as ‘that’s just how things are’, and nothing more needs to be said about it. Whether we’re
trying to get to explanations of ourselves or of other people, we need to use uncommon,
rather than common sense. It’s important to get to deep understandings about things like
smoking and drinking because they have real, often deadly, consequences, often for vul-
nerable people. We definitely need something better than presumptions. And, let’s face
it: if it was just a matter of limiting alcohol and telling people cigarettes were dangerous,
then everyone would have stopped drinking and smoking by now.
Quick pause to see where we’re up to with all this common-sense business:
• Common-sense knowledge is based on presumptions about the world that you know
and feels natural to you, to the extent that you don’t need to even say it out loud;
• It tends to be baffling, unsettling, worrisome, or weird when other people don’t share
that view –that’s when people tend to say it out loud;
• Anthropologists do not accept common-sense explanations as good explanations of
the world. Simone and Andy agree that it is useful for going to the supermarket,
though.
Finally! What is uncommon sense?

Let’s go back to the supermarket to get this idea nailed down, and contrast it with common
sense.What exactly does that mean in the supermarket example, to shift beyond common
sense and into uncommon sense? Well, instead of just accepting that supermarkets lay
14
14 Introduction
out things as they do because that’s just how things are supposed to be, an anthropologist
might be interested in how the way things are organised could tell us something about
how a group of people classifies things. Considering things in this way is different from,
say, looking at how stuff in the supermarket is marketed to consumers. Sure, there’s a load
of marketing involved in the way a supermarket is set out, but you don’t need a marketing
expert to tell you to shift the toilet paper away from the cake and put it someplace else.
That is about things not belonging together. And that is not random.That’s a taxonomy –
a system of classification by which people make sense of the world, and in and through
which they organise it. Newsflash: it isn’t just the supermarket that does this.You do this
in your house. We organise cityscapes in accordance with this idea. It’s not just places,
either; it’s ideas, notions, systems. Let’s take another really ordinary example that you can
test our for yourself to see how it works with systems.
How to tell the difference between common and uncommon sense?

The following exercise involves bringing together two things that a lot of people seem
to like: hair and ice cream. Hair: Simone has really long hair and she tends it like a mer-
maid would –lots of combing and flouncing it around. Split ends are one of her greatest
fears and now that she has found a wonderful hairdresser she will probably never move
again in her life. Ice cream: fabulous. Simone likes the vegan kind (probably because she is
a vegan). Andy likes the one with rum and raisins in it. We don’t know many people who
do not like ice cream. Even the people we asked who have sensitive teeth like it; one of
them said she uses a special toothpaste that makes her teeth less sensitive to cold just so
she can eat ice cream.We are agreed: hair is fabulous; ice cream is fabulous. Both together?
Unfabulous. Disgusting, even.
Bringing fabulous hair and fabulous ice cream into unfabulous concert is a very useful
exercise because it provokes an obvious common-sense reaction and allows us to go
deeper to see an uncommon sense explanation for that reaction.
Exercise: Do an ice cream haircut
Step 1: Find a person with some hair (preferably on their head. In fact, we insist
that for this exercise, the hair definitely needs to have come from their head. If
you don’t know any people with hair on their heads, or in the event that none
of the haired people you know have agreed to participate in this exercise, use
your very own head hair).
Step 2: Get the ice cream out of the freezer, and get yourself a nice clean pair of
scissors.
Step 3: Establish that both the hair and the ice cream are clean and unsullied –
nice, clean, recently washed hair and nice, unsullied ice cream with no weird
bits in it that aren’t meant to be there. We know this makes some kinds of ice
cream ineligible; Simone firmly believes that raisins are weird bits that should
not be in ice cream, but then again she thinks that milk shouldn’t be in it. Andy
thinks that material from a (soya) bean shouldn’t be in ice cream; Simone thinks
that vanilla comes from a bean, and things between Simone and Andy usually
deteriorate from there. This is what is called ‘academic collaboration’, and you
15
Introduction 15
should set all of that aside and just make sure the ice cream is unsullied and has
not exceeded its best-before date. Even better would be to buy a new tub of
ice cream.
Step 4: Snip a very small amount of the clean hair into a dish of ice cream. You’re
not re-styling here, you just need a teensy bit to make a point. If the person
has a very short haircut that depends on precision to make it look good, or if
they have a really dope fade that scissors will destroy, don’t choose this person
for this exercise.
Step 5: Offer the dish of ice cream to someone to eat (provide a nice, clean spoon).
Make sure they know that there is hair in it. Make sure you can see some of the
hair. If you’re working alone and have snipped your own hair into the bowl,
offer the dish to yourself.
Step 6: Carefully notice the reactions you’re seeing. And put the ice cream back
into the freezer. If necessary, book a hair appointment for the person whose
hair you cut, if you didn’t take the advice we gave re: precision cuts and really
dope fades in Step 4.
If you are hanging out with the right sort of people, you won’t get anyone agreeing
to eat the ice cream with the hair in it. Most of the time, you get some really full-
on, dramatic reactions, including: Exclamations, like ‘Yuck!’, ‘EEWWWWWWW!
Gross!’ or ‘I’m going to be sick, get that bowl of evil away from me!’ Those are
just some of the things that students in Simone’s class, who encounter this exer-
cise as their very first lecture, say when confronted by the ice cream with hair in it.
Also uttered are things like, ‘What is she doing?’, and ‘Is this really the introductory
anthropology class?’
Those sputtering exclamations and utterances of disbelief, and even visceral
reactions like wanting to vomit are all common-sense reactions. Those are exactly
what we’d expect people to say, because it just isn’t right to eat hairy ice cream.
That’s just the way things are, and we shouldn’t even have to say it out loud. People
do, of course, say it out loud when they are confronted with this unexpected and
horrible prospect.
After you’ve finished revelling in the spectacular word or actual vomits you have
managed to extract from your unsuspecting friends and/or relatives, and after you’ve
made reparations for wasting their ice cream and ruining their hair, it’s time for
Step 7.
Step 7: Consider what might explain and account for the reactions that you saw.
Here’s a few ideas that students come up with, drawn from Simone’s class:
Humans have a hard-wired evolutionary reaction to reject things that are not food –
it’s a safety switch.
This one is interesting, but if it were so, then people would run screaming from things
like Twinkies and some of the more brightly coloured breakfast cereals. It’s not very con-
vincing, also, to call on explanations applying to humans in a different configuration of
16
16 Introduction
the world in the distant past to explain contemporary people –that has its limits. Also,
fingernails are not food and people eat those all the time. If you were feeling really adven-
turous, you could also recall that we have mentioned snot in this book –we have heard
that people eat that, too. That is not food –we feel you’d agree. Fingernails or snot in ice
cream would be just as bad (if not worse) than hair. Give it a try, if you like.
Here’s a more developed version of that first explanation:
Hair is not food, so this grossed-out response helps keep people safe from the poten-
tial harm that ingesting non-food can cause.
We quite like where this one is going. Finding hair in food –say, in a restaurant or in
your takeout –might signal that the place isn’t very clean, so there is something in the
notion that we’re keeping ourselves safe by having a big, rejecting reaction to it. The
hair might stand for a whole range of other standards that are not being met behind
the scenes. Also, while keratin –the protein that makes up hair, and the outer layer of
the skin and nails –is not in itself dangerous, the hair itself might be both physical and
microbiological contaminant. If the hair we’re talking about has fallen into processed
food and then stayed there for a while, the oil, sweat, shampoo, conditioner, dye and
other residues on the hair can make a fertile breeding ground for microorganisms
that can cause illness. Staphylococcus aureus can be transmitted via hair falling from a
contaminated scalp, and so can fungal infections and ringworm. If the hair was thick
enough or if there was enough of it, it might cause a physical choking risk. This is ter-
rifying when you think about how much hair falls off people’s heads every day, and
how many people with all of this hair falling off them might work in the food industry.
According to the Food Safety Helpline:
… every human being with hair on their heads, sheds between 100–150 hairs every
day at a constant rate. Therefore a person doing an eight-hour shift will lose around
33–50 hairs. Multiply this by the number of personnel working in the restaurant or
manufacturing plant and you can calculate the pathogen risk to food. This figure is
attributed to only hair from the head but hair can reach foods from the arms, beards,
moustaches and even from the chest.
(Food Safety Helpline, 2017:n.p.)
Yikes. Luckily, there are very strict control measures taken in most places to ensure hair
contamination is kept to a minimum. Still, even thinking about it is awful. Consider Tony,
who wrote into the website from which the above stats about hair fall were taken:
Tony Bourne says

June 24, 2018 at 1:48 pm
Hello.
I found a string of hair and a string of plastic fiber within my KFC Chicken Nugget
2 weeks ago while I was eating it. It was totally disgusting pulling it out of my mouth.
(Bourne, 2018:n.p.)
We want you to register the experience we think you’re having right now –do you kind
of want to vomit? Keep hold of it because it will help you understand why we proffer
17
Introduction 17
the explanation we think is good for this situation. So, vomit-ty feeling registered, let’s
carry on.
As repulsive as Tony’s experience is, and as much as we like the shape of this explan-
ation, it has a major flaw in that it depends on everyone knowing that there is a serious
and sufficiently frequent danger from hair fall into food that they have to avoid. We are
not convinced that the danger is satisfactorily elevated, or that everyone is whisked aside
and told about the legendary perils of hair at some point in their life, to warrant such a
big reaction.
How about this one?
It’s cannibalism!
See fingernails, above. Granted, people don’t usually eat one another’s fingernails, unless
they are very much in love. But they can and do ingest substances from one another all
the time –we are reliably informed that you don’t have to be in love, necessarily, to do
so. It’s not cannibalism.
It’s dangerous to eat hair because it can’t be digested.
Deliberately ingesting your own hair is called ‘trichophagia’ –or more commonly
‘Rapunzel syndrome’. It’s a very rare psychiatric condition, and it can kill sufferers because
over time, a hairball can form that in turn can cause ulcers that could burst, or cause fatal
blockages of the intestinal tract. Hair isn’t biodegradable, so if a person keeps eating their
hair, the hairball gets bigger over time. This explanation references a serious disorder
whose foundation disorder (severe trichotillomania) can be found in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as an obsessive-compulsive disorder (see Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, 2013). But it’s very rare, so it doesn’t
really explain why almost everyone has such a strong reaction to the hair in the ice cream,
or to Tony’s dreadful story about his KFC.
Here’s the one that Simone likes, and always showcases in her class to provide a possible
explanation to the reactions that everyone had. It’s drawn from a well-known anthro-
pologist, Dame Mary Douglas, who you will meet again in this book. Mary Douglas
thought that people try to make sense of the world by means of classification. Her famous
work, Purity and Danger (Douglas (2000 [1966]) is an analysis of the concepts of ritual
purity and pollution in different societies at different times. In the final update she made
to the preface of Purity and Danger before her death at age 86 in 2002, Douglas tried to
say succinctly what it had all been about, coming back to this central message of Purity
and Danger: “everyone universally finds dirt offensive” (ibid.:xi, 1) What counts as dirt
depends on the localised classificatory systems: dirt is stuff that doesn’t fit into, or messes
up, those systems. Dirt is what Douglas called matter out of place. Think, for example,
of the stuff that gets on your shoe. When in the garden it’s soil, that wonderful substance
that gives life to all manner of plants and that should be nurtured through composting.
But, when you walk into the house it becomes something different –‘dirt … eradicate!’
There’s a few important things here, including that universally, people ‘feel’ kind of
‘naturally’ that something is wrong and thus register dirt feelingfully and in the body
(remember that vomit-ty feeling from Tony’s story … now). Also present is the notion
that dirt is not something in itself, but is instead the result of the failure of things,
18
18 Introduction
persons, ideas, practices, to fit into a classificatory system. That is, dirt is ‘a kind of com-
pendium category for all events which blur, smudge, contradict, or otherwise confuse
accepted classifications’. That’s why you’re not eating a big bowl of ice-cream with hair
in it right now; the hair is matter out of place. Instead of being secured to a head and
romantically flicked around, it’s sitting in bowl of ice cream, outside its place in the
classificatory system. It is, therefore, dirt. It wasn’t when it was in its proper place. The
underlying feeling is that a system of values which is habitually expressed in a given
arrangement of things has been violated. Douglas details four kinds of violations to
classification systems that you’ll meet later on, but the basic idea is that we are always
involved in organising the world into these classifications, ‘making the world conform
to an idea’ (ibid.:2).
The upshot of all of this is that the kind of repulsion that people feel on seeing hair
in the ice cream arises as a result of the merging of things from different categories that
are usually kept separate. And it’s not just the things themselves that are unexpectedly
brought together; the hair belongs on the outside of your body, and ice cream, as a food,
on the inside.
The uncommon sense is to be made when we try to understand why this hair-icecream
combo has caused that ‘yuck’ reaction that we all know is the right one to have.
One uncommon-sense reaction is that people taxonomise (categorise, classify, organise
into different types) all kinds of things, ideas, activities. When two things that belong
in different domains meet –that are not meant to –a reaction like this tells us that the
world is a bit askew, and it has to be set right. Amidst his chaotic life of late bills, missed
appointments and impending deadlines, Andy gets this feeling all the time. What does he
do in moments of heightened chaos? He starts cleaning and tidying of course –books go
back onto bookshelves, dirty socks are picked up from the floor and moved to the laundry,
and a whole host of other things (like the drafts of this book that made their way from
the office to the bedroom where he spends most of his time) are moved back to where
they should be. Who cares that the bills are still late, the appointments still missed and the
deadlines still impending? The exercise brings immense relief, that comes from having a
clean and tidy house with ‘everything in its rightful place’.
The common sense: YUCK! Gross! Disgusting! What’s wrong with you???
The uncommon sense: What organises this reaction? What categories of social meaning
underlie this reaction? One possible answer has to do with categories that are normally
kept apart being smooshed together in a way that makes us recognise the world is out of
order, and makes us want to fix it.You probably want to thrust the bowl away, get the ice
cream into the trash. This tells you something else –the world isn’t really separate from
the body. We don’t have an abstract reaction to the categories being smooshed together –
we have a visceral one. What about when you put your hand in vomit at a party? Simone
has done this, and has also picked up a human poo while having a diving lesson at the
pool when she was little. She thought it was the weight she was supposed to dive for and
retrieve, but she surfaced proudly holding a turd aloft.
Simone thinks there is not enough chlorine in the world to make a pool clean. Andy
loves swimming pools. Anyway –the point is that poo belongs in the body and then
when it breaches the boundaries of the body, when you go to the bathroom, it presents a
problem –one we have solved by the invention of the toilet and good plumbing.4 Food
is only supposed to travel in one direction, too –not vomited up, not detouring past the
toilet and into the swimming pool. This is matter out of its place, and going the wrong
19
Introduction 19
way.The same goes for all other substances that transgress our bodily boundaries and that,
thereby become out of place. Take, for example, wetting your pants. The medical term for
it is ‘incontinence’ which means literally ‘to not be contained’ (Dawson, 2002).
This stuff permeates the very language we speak, and none of that is abstract –you
want to wash your hand for a week, a month, a year. It’s like it’s polluted your body. Body
and world? They’re intertwined. That’s why you want to retch when you see the hair in
the ice cream, or hear about Tony’s KFC story. Poo is a particularly replete matter with
which to make these points, as Julia Kristeva has observed. She sees it as marking a kind
of border zone of being –which death also does. She suggests that poo, which comes
from life and the self, allows us to cross the border into the side of death, the stench of the
corpse, to the extent that
If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which
permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has
encroached upon everything.
(Kristeva, 1982:3)
For Kristeva, human waste is abject, has the capacity to induce disgust and horror. It tells
us about our basest functions, declares an animality in our humanity, our interiority, and
our failure to have full control over our bodies. Its stench betrays our efforts to appear
uniquely human, and has no regard for our agency –as though it is not part of us, as
though we never created it. It quickly slips from our control, and threatens to slip through
our attempts to contain shit –in its actual and metaphoric forms. If you don’t believe
us, go to a public toilet late in the day, after lots of people have been. Bet you don’t
want to use a stall where there has been left a floater, or even go in if it smells. Things
like this have the capacity to infiltrate boundaries –having recently done so themselves.
Yikes. Sometimes it’s only by going to the public toilet that you come to understand
Mary Douglas’ point, that dirt is ‘matter out of place’; a dirty object is an object caught
in a system, caught between the sewerage system and the toilet bowl, the insides and the
outside of the body. The desire for order produces waste. ‘Dirt’, said Douglas, ‘is the by-
product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves
rejecting inappropriate elements’ (Douglas, 2000 (1966):44).
How does all of this relate to the examples of smoking and drinking mentioned earlier?
Simone has studied smoking for almost twenty years, in Australia. Australia is a pretty
hard place to smoke. It has really strong legislation, especially regarding where you can
smoke (only in horrible places, like on vacant lots, at the edge of the road, designated
smoking areas that are stinky and horrid); cigarettes are really expensive and people often
say nasty stuff to smokers –they’re like pariahs, especially in Canberra, which has one
of the lowest smoking rates in the world. There’s been massive, long-term, public health
campaigns in every language for about two decades. There’s meds to help with the nasty
cravings people get when they try to quit.There’s negative incentives to quit, too, like the
aforementioned judgement you get from other people, like landlords, employers, etc. So,
why don’t people just stop it?
In the 2000s, the Australian government was of the view that people kept smoking
because they were either addicted to it, or they didn’t know it was bad for them.The gov-
ernment was far more worried about the people who didn’t know it was bad for them,
because they were the ones who might take it up. The ones who were addicted were
20
20 Introduction
already there. So, how could it stop people from taking it up? It invented what Simone
likes to call the mother of all health warnings –you can see that and its companions in
Simone’s major work on smoking (see Dennis, 2016a). But it was also mindful that while
the really scary health warnings worked really super-well, they didn’t have great reach.
That is, they worked a treat on white middle-class people, but they missed minority
groups –especially Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It decided to make a very
specific campaign to fix that.
This was a good idea –we should always make sure that we do not presume that
everyone understands things made in the dominant language, usually by the dominant
people. Despite the fact that it is indeed a good idea to make sure that things like health
warnings are effectively distributed in linguistic and cultural ways and forms that make
the most sense to their recipients, the big common-sense presumption the government
made was that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people did not know that smoking
was bad for them. It presumed that if it told people, they’d know and make a decision
with the new information, which would lead to a dramatic decline in the smoking rate.
It didn’t.Why not? Principally, because the common-sense presumption was not accurate.
In all of her research on smoking, Simone never ran into anyone who was surprised to
learn that smoking was bad for them. Her whole job was to figure out the sense it made to
them, in their terms. One of the problems Simone thinks is afoot with the Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander smoking rate is that smoking is almost always presented to people as
a health issue and, moreover, the concept of health that is used is usually a white middle-
class one. That is, it might be that common-sense, white middle-class presumptions about
health have limits, and they might not translate all that well beyond their limits (Bell,
2016). You can read about this, and more of Simone’s work on smoking, here (Dennis,
2016b; 2016c), and you can read all about what uncommon sense we made of drinking
alcohol later in this book.
Having said all of that, we’re in a good position to say –as a start –what anthropology
is. We can now settle down into a bit more of a straightforward explanation, after all the
excitement with the ice cream and the hair.
The first thing we can say, and the thing to keep in mind all the way through your
anthropological journey, is that:
Anthropology is about the making of uncommon sense, using information and data
drawn from the people and contexts you’re trying to understand.
There is, of course, a lot more to it than that –like how you get the information and data,
what kind of information and data it is, what you do with the information and data to
make uncommon-sense explanations, and how those sit among all the other uncommon-
sense explanations (analyses) that other anthropologists have made. Time to furnish our
explanation with some details, but before we do that, let us just give you one more
example of the making of uncommon sense, that starts with realising your way of seeing
the world isn’t the way of seeing the world. Have a look at Hebe Ren’s remarks below
on love. As an international citizen with nous in more than one cultural context, Hebe
noticed something about the value the expression of parental love is assigned in the West,
where it’s related to everything from childhood development to success in life. Here’s
what she thought was weird about that:
21
Introduction 21
Weird, weird love

By Hebe Ren
Being familiar with expressions of familial love in Australia, I sometimes find myself
struggling to communicate with my family, especially when seeking emotional
supports or expressing love. That is, I experience a constant reticence or even resist-
ance to expressing love and emotions verbally among my Chinese family. Any direct
expressions of love and affection would be considered inappropriate and would be
(embarrassedly) stopped by my family. Sometimes I can sense them being at the
edge of saying ‘I love you’, but words come out, quite amusingly, as ‘take care’ or
‘study hard’ instead.
Having talked to multiple East Asians who grew up in families like mine, they
unsurprisingly have reported experiencing similar situations. A study carried out
by Dr. Caldwell-Harris at Boston University in 2013 has suggested that attitudes
founded in Confucianism favour a practice, rather than verbally based expression of
affection. She feels this may have to do with a lively suspicion of easily stated claims,
and a deeper trust based in the body and its actions in the real and observable world,
as expressed in the idea familiar to my family: ‘words have low costs and cannot be
easily trusted.’ Caldwell-Harris tracks the endurance of this idea across generations,
and links it to the practice of ‘doing’ family. That is, she suggests that emotion is not
considered a tool for managing relationships in East Asian family cultures, as it often
is in the West. She links this notion in turn to the relatively less fluid possibilities
for family dissolution, and an emphasis on static, unchanging social and institutional
order. The durability of family may lessen the need for the constant application of
emotional glue. These are speculations, but whatever the case the differences are
important. For a rebel like me, the discomfort supplied by emotion words permits
me to provoke change and movement in the relations between the people in my
family, so that new knowledges of its members can be operationalised, and so that
certain freedoms might come available –like the chance to propel oneself through
life as one feels, rather than in accordance with expectations. Perhaps more import-
antly, no matter how it looks from the outside, the lack of loving expressions in
words doesn’t mean that East Asian parents don’t love their kids. The stereotypical
pushy Tiger Mums and rigid ambitious fathers have added a lot to the devaluing of
East Asian people, but it might not be as straightforward as it seems. Finally, fam-
ilies might not always be founded and maintained on the terms with which we are
familiar in the West. As foundational social institutions, we need to approach them
in and on their own terms, rather than in the preconceived ways that lead early
theoreticians of kinship to produce accounts of ‘others’ that did not really reflect the
conditions of everyday life and interaction most meaningful to them.
Anthropology basics
We’ll revisit a lot of the things that Hebe is talking about, especially the terms in which
anthropologists gave understood social institutions like family, when we turn to explore
2
22 Introduction
kinship, but we had better clear up a few more basics before then. Let’s start by by breaking
down ANTHROPOLOGY:
ANTHRO(P) =HUMAN
OLOGY=KNOWLEDGE OF.
The study of humans. This is a very broad explanation –you could say that all sorts of
disciplines are concerned with studying humans, in one way or another. It also doesn’t
say much about what kind of study anthropologists do. And, you will know it’s an inad-
equate explanation as soon as your parents/relatives/friends/partner ask you what you’re
studying at university. Let’s play this out: imagine you are at a dinner party, or a family get
together, and someone asks you what you studying at university.You say ‘Anthropology’.
There is a short silence.Then, ‘Anthropology, you say.What is that, exactly?’ Someone else
says, ‘Anthropology … that’s the study of insects, isn’t it? Or is it dinosaurs?’
You will of course respond by giving them the explanation we came up with above,
supported by one tub of ice cream and an impromptu haircut. Before you do, you’ll need
to know a few more things to round out your performance. The first thing you could say
when asked is that anthropology is the study of human being, in all its depth, breadth and
range. This will keep dinner-party companions quiet until dessert, until they realise that
the definition is quite broad.
Anthropology is broad. Indeed, you could say that it is the broadest discipline of all the
humanities and social sciences. As long as there are people, you can do anthropology –
there is no restriction on the aspect of human being that can be analysed. Indeed, we
would argue, whatever you decide to study or research anthropologically it should be
understood as a broad phenomenon per se. Other disciplines tend to split the world
up into little boxes. Economists, for example, are guided by the idea that humans are
motivated principally by the desires to maximise profit and minimise loss. Geography
is concerned with how space is a key determinant of human life, and political science
represents the world largely as an outcome of political machinations. There’s nothing
wrong with any of these approaches. But we anthropologists are holists, concerned with
how economy, space, polity and a good many more factors frame human life. So, no
matter how apparently tiny the thing that interests us is –like how in some cultures
people snot in handkerchiefs while in others they do it on the street –we try broadly to
capture every angle.
However, as much as it’s broad, anthropology is also very specific.The specificity comes
with the disciplinary perspective anthropologists bring to their enquiries. What we do is
different from what other people studying people do. Perhaps it will help to contrast it
with other areas of study that seem very similar to anthropology –like sociology.
While they both emerged in the same era –the growth of capitalism in the late 18th
century –sociology and anthropology actually used to be easily contrastable. Sociology
started in the context of the advent of factory production and the development of the
urban centres for the people who serviced that production, and in reaction to concerns
about change and social disorder within those places. Anthropology started in the context
of the colonialism through which the raw materials for those factories was appropriated.
In contrast to sociology’s concerns with change and social disorder, anthropology’s
concerns were in significant measure with their opposites –stasis and social order –
though these assumptions came to be rudely disrupted by changeful events such as anti-
colonial independence movements. Above all, of course, there was one really fundamental
23
Introduction 23
distinction –a geographical division of labour by which sociology did the ‘West’ and
anthropology the ‘Rest’.
That fundamental geographical distinction has been eroded in recent years.
Anthropology can no longer be described as wholly concerned with understanding
people outside the West. Indeed, both Simone and Andy work in their home countries
of Australia and the UK respectively, and Andy works beyond his too, in Bosnia and
Herzegovina and in a particularly exotic place called Australia. There are multiple reasons
for this erosion, for anthropology ‘coming home’. Some anthropologists –such as the
grand-daddy of them all, Bronisław Malinowski, who, when not in his usual Trobriand
Islands field-site, trained his students on the farmers who lived around his Swiss chalet –
realised the intellectual potentials of research in the west. Some state funding agencies saw
greater value for money in domestic research, and many anthropologists felt compelled to
follow the money. Some anti-colonists saw us as handmaidens of colonialism, so kicked us
out. And, in the act of being unexpectedly kicked out, some anthropologists realised that
perhaps they ought to understand how change happens. Who better to learn about that
than from our sisters and brothers in sociology who were already experts and, crucially
working in the West? Conversely, sociology had good reason for anthropology to come
home too. After years of the discipline’s domination by Marxian theory, multiple post-
Second World War social phenomena –such as the rise of feminism and of the emergence
of the teenager and youth sub-cultures –led to a realisation that class was not necessarily
the most significant marker of difference within societies. Importantly, anthropologists
were recognised as being good at understanding cultural differences –between tribal
groups and the like –‘so maybe we can learn from them’ became a common call within
sociology departments.
Nevertheless, despite this coming together, significant differences between sociology
have remained. Sociology has tended to be concerned with society, anthropology with
small groups of people in relation to one another. Anthropologists still concern them-
selves with pretty small groups (although this is not always so). Though there are many
‘micro’-sociologists, the use of large-scale methods, like census and survey, is common-
place. In contrast, anthropologists tend to use methods that elicit the details of life in an
up-close, everyday context. Anthropologists and sociologists ask different questions from
one another (and from all the other disciplines we just listed). The fundamental question
of sociology is ‘How is society possible?’ How is it that individual humans with their
differing and competing needs and desires manage more often than not to work together
cooperatively to form and maintain society? In broad terms, sociology is about the groups
and organisations which make up human society. It is about social forces which work to
hold groups together or to weaken them. And it is about the processes which change the
way societies function as time passes. It tries to understand how society works and how
it influences our personal lives. Using that as a basis, it attempts to investigate and solve
social problems on local, national and international levels. So, sociology’s key undergirding
question is, how does society work, what with all the different individual desires and
orientations going around? And how is it that it works more often than it doesn’t work?
Anthropology’s key undergirding questions are different. It is interested in figuring
out how (not so much what) life means to people as they live it in the widest range of
contemporary social circumstances –from experiences of migration, religious funda-
mentalism, online participation, relationships with animals, food, music, art, TV, money,
values, material things, cars, shopping, ideas and so much more. Anthropologists focus
24
24 Introduction
on the many different ways that people comprehend the world in and through these
experiences, which allows it to make comparisons across different groups. They analyse
these experiences from a huge range of perspectives –some are interested in gendered
elements, some are interested in power, some are interested in embodied experience,
some are interested in linguistic and symbolic analyses, or combinations of these –
you’ll find out more about these analytic perspectives and how you operate them as
we go along. The discipline’s distinctive methodology, ethnographic fieldwork, provides
anthropologists with finely grained and in-depth understandings of these experiences.
The way we get our data –ethnographically –makes the discipline distinctive, but only
when it is combined with the making of uncommon sense. So: It’s an approach and a
particular sense-making, uncommon sense-making, that makes anthropology distinctive. Let’s
define ethnography and put it together with uncommon sense to yield a good, working
definition of anthropology and its specificity.
Exercise: Compare anthropology to sociology using course

descriptions
If you want to get anthropological with this question of how anthropology differs
from sociology, how about going to university webpages and seeing how they
describe both disciplines? See what you can find out about the differences by com-
paring some material that comes straight from those who teach the disciplines –it’s
easy to find online.
Ethnography
If you were to look this word up in the dictionary, you’d find something like this:
Ethnography is the study and systematic recording of human cultures. Also: a descrip-
tive work produced from such research.
(Webster and Merriam, 2022)
You can see right away that ethnography is both a process (the study and systematic
recording of human cultures) and a product (an ethnography). The process is made up of
undertaking participant observation (where you are immersed in what’s going on for the
people you’re studying, both participating in whatever they’re doing and simultaneously
taking note of what they’re doing). The observation part might also involve a series of
other methods and techniques, like making maps of the spaces, documenting the types
of activities that make up everyday life, the sorts of nonhuman and material entities that
people interact with, and are shaped by (like buildings, animals, cars, money, institutions
like schools, families, churches; work–whatever is there), taking note of when particular
kinds of events and interactions happen (like in the day, or night; weekends, what times of
the year, and so on, and how time is broken up and made meaningful (like ‘weekends’ and
‘oh no, Mondays’ for some of us).You might collect material about and analyse the things
they make, produce, make use of, say about themselves –newspapers, films, writings, art,
performances; you might count different sorts of things, like traffic, boats, shells, guns,
25
Introduction 25
babies, assaults, drugs, gardens, services, churches, men, snakes –whatever is relevant.
Simone likes to count how many smokers there are on a given day in each of the sites
where people are allowed to smoke in central Canberra, or how many times antismoking
ads are played on the TV in a day and what times of the day –stuff like that. The product
part might take the form of a book, film, a series of papers, an exhibition) of the results of
all that systematic recording that you did. Andy has a fantastic series of papers on driving,
for instance, among his other works (see, for example, Dawson, 2017; 2021).
Sounds ok, but this sort of dictionary-based definition could actually lead you a little
bit astray.The first problem is that this definition makes it sound like you could get a com-
plete description of ‘a human culture’ by mastering the methods that make up ethnog-
raphy. Go and read it again. It’s easy to reach the conclusion that all you would have to do
is participate in the everyday lives of the people in whom you were interested, learn how
to count, map, calendarise and describe their lives, and then you’d be ready to learn how
to analyse all of that and –bingo! Ethnography done, ethnography produced.
Not exactly.
Complexifying ethnography
There’s a few points to make here and, if you think about it, making them entails us
not accepting the common-sense definition of ‘ethnography’ –we’re giving you an
uncommon-sense one instead. Dictionaries tend to give you the common-sense versions
of the world (as well as technical definitions), so unless you’re analysing their definitions as
a kind of insight into language use, they’re not much good for giving you the uncommon-
sense definitions that anthropologists use. Keep that in mind when you’re writing papers
for anthropology classes (and other ones, too); using them can sometimes indicate that you
haven’t appreciated that disciplines use ordinary words in very specific ways, rendering
them specialist rather than general.
Let’s start with ‘human culture’. Culture is a system of shared beliefs, values, ideas,
practices, actions and things that the members of a society use to make meaning of,
cope with, understand, challenge and live in the world, and with one another. While it’s
learned rather than being instinctive, it is really hard to apply the distinction between
our cultural experience and biological instinct –not least because that is something we
almost never do in everyday life. We don’t walk around wondering, when we feel scared,
whether or not fear is hardwired into our biological selves to keep us safe; we just feel
scared. Culture feels instinctive –there isn’t a moment where we’ve been without it.
Even before each of us was born, a cultural space was created for us. This is more than
just anticipating a baby of a particular sex, but includes cultural expectations around
pregnancy, marriage, the family and social structure into which the baby will fit (and
how well, if the timing of the baby, its sex, the relationship between the parents and a
host of other things are important). Loads of this is gendered; think about your instant
responses to the words ‘teen pregnancy’; we bet you thought of a girl right away, rather
than the father in the equation. Females might bear a greater burden for early pregnancy
than do males (and ‘early pregnancy’ is a culturally loaded term in itself). Think fur-
ther about the presumptions. Take the word ‘father’. That’s biological and social, right?
The person you call father or dad or pop or whatever might be the person who is your
biological father and simultaneously your social father –the person who takes up the
socially recognised role relative to you. Or, this might be two different people, and you
26
26 Introduction
might know one and not the other, for example. Or, you might actually consider your-
self as having more than one social dad –if you have a stepfather and someone you’d call
your biological father who also fulfils a social fathering role relative to you. But, as you’ll
find out in the chapter on genealogies and relatedness, these ideas about what and who
a father is are not the only ways in the world. They’re not even the commonest ways of
defining and naming fathers.
There’s more: there are cultural ideas relating to when a pregnancy becomes ‘a life’,
too, and how different ways of creating life (like IVF) are understood and valued. There’s
a lot of speculation and even more anxiety and tension around defining when life begins,
and just as much around who contributes to its formation, and how. Early scientific
‘facts’, for instance, situated sperm as the key ingredient in life formation; the woman
was simply the receptacle. That’s not considered a fact anymore; contributions are made
by both. It was once ‘fact’ that female foetuses represented a mutation away from a
male template. But now, the reverse undergirds ideas about foetal sex markers. Freelance
writer Laura Poppick describes some of the presumptions in an easy-to-read piece for
the Smithsonian –have a look at this to be stunned by some of them (see Poppick,
2017), but if you want a really mind-blowing analysis of how science has ‘constructed a
romance based on stereotypical male-female roles’, then read Emily Martin’s 1991 piece,
‘The Egg and The Sperm’ –the quote we just cited is its subtitle (see Martin, 1991:485).
Check this out:
As an anthropologist, I am intrigued by the possibility that culture shapes how bio-

logical scientists describe what they discover about the natural world. If this were
so, we would be learning about more than the natural world in high school biology
class; we would be learning about cultural beliefs and practices as if they were part of
nature. In the course of my research I realized that the picture of egg and sperm drawn
in popular as well as scientific accounts of reproductive biology relies on stereotypes
central to our cultural definitions of male and female. The stereotypes imply not
only that female biological processes are less worthy than their male counterparts
but also that women are less worthy than men. Part of my goal in writing this article
is to shine a bright light on the gender stereotypes hidden within the scientific lan-
guage of biology. Exposed in such a light, I hope they will lose much of their power
to harm us. At a fundamental level, all major scientific textbooks depict male and
female reproductive organs as systems for the production of valuable substances, such
as eggs and sperm. In the case of women, the monthly cycle is described as being
designed to produce eggs and prepare a suitable place for them to be fertilized and
grown-all to the end of making babies. But the enthusiasm ends there. By extolling
the female cycle as a productive enterprise, menstruation must necessarily be viewed
as a failure. Medical texts describe menstruation as the “debris” of the uterine lining,
the result of necrosis, or death of tissue. The descriptions imply that a system has
gone awry, making products of no use, not to specification, unsalable, wasted, scrap.
An illustration in a widely used medical text shows menstruation as a chaotic disinte-
gration of form, complementing the many texts that describe it as “ceasing,” “dying’,
“losing,” “denuding,” “expelling.” Male reproductive physiology is evaluated quite
differently. One of the texts that sees menstruation as failed production employs a
sort of breathless prose when it describes the maturation of sperm: “The mechanisms
which guide the remarkable cellular transformation from spermatid to mature sperm
remain uncertain … Perhaps the most amazing characteristic of spermatogenesis is its
27
Introduction 27
sheer magnitude: the normal human male may manufacture several hundred million
sperm per day.”
(Martin, 1991:485–486)
In the same year, Carole Delany (1991) penned The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology
in Turkish Village Society. In it, she asks how metaphors we use to describe procreation
affect our view of the relative worth of each gender. Guess who gets to be the generative,
productive, form-making seed?
What counts as a fact very often depends on the conditions in which it emerges as
such. Societal norms and understandings at a particular time can really dominate and
orient what counts as fact, and that means that facts don’t exist in a vacuum; they are
contextualised by the cultural conditions in which they emerge and circulate. This means
that culture isn’t just the stuff you can see, explain or state: it’s the context in which lives
are lived, the webs that connect everyone up in a shared understanding of ‘the world’.
That means there’s huge cultural diversity beyond what we ourselves take for granted –
‘our’ common-sense knowledge of the world. But: within cultural groups, not everyone thinks
or believes the same things, or accepts the same ideas. It’s useful here to think about preparing
to travel abroad to make this point.
Complexifying ‘cultural groups’

Maybe you’re the kind of traveller who likes to learn things before you go away. You
might look things up, learn about local customs, what’s considered polite, what might get
you into trouble, what the expectations around public displays of affection are –and, of
course, what the swear words are in the local language.You might find yourself something
of an expert –you can tell that you’re heading in this direction when you start saying
things like ‘the people of the [Re] Public [of] Swimming Pool consider it the height of
rudeness to hold a turd aloft anywhere in their country. They worship the turquoise god
Chlorinus, and fear the god Cloginthefilterprobablyabandaid.’
This is a statement of certainty that definitely describes ‘a culture’, but one in which
the everyday richness, complexity and variety of views among the Swimmingpoolians is
reduced to some short stereotypical statements that make you presume that all of them hold
this singular view.This is a pretty easy thing to think about other people, but all you have to
do is turn it in on your own experience to see how limiting it is. Try it out for yourself –
what are the sorts of short statements to which your cultural identity could be reduced?
Even when these statements are trying to be positive, as they often are in tourist guides, they
tend to leave out some very, very important things. Non-white people who don’t come
from a dominant group reading this will instantly know what this means. You might feel
yourself reduced to a ‘traditional’, ‘mystical’, or ‘timeless’ being, to the extent that imagining
you in an urban context drinking a coffee before work would blow a tourist’s mind. You
might feel the weight of being trapped in time –to the extent that if you departed from
such an imaginary, you’d feel accused of being inauthentic. Stilling people in time so they
fit a particular definition imposed from outside them is different from being oriented by,
and orienting others to, meaningful traditions, long-standing values and heritages.The view
is a bit different from inside the culture, because inside it, it’s really ordinary –the stuff of
everyday life –rather than being ‘exotic’, as outsiders might imagine it, with the help of
touristic guide books. Being exotically imagined isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, because it
comes with consequences of fitting into an imaginary not of your own making.
28
28 Introduction
Ethnography on the inside

Anthropologists try to study cultures from the perspective of an insider. What’s ordinary
life like for people? They might not begin this query from outside the culture –they
may well be members of the culture they are studying. Simone works among Australian
smokers, and she and Andy both work among Australian drinkers. In some respects, we
have a hard job in that we have to make a huge effort not to accept the common-sense
version of things as just the way things are. That’s difficult, because it’s familiar to us. If
you’re working outside the context you’re used to, you have the opposite problem: every-
thing is strange and you can’t take anything at face value, which means you probably can’t
understand much of what’s going on at the beginning. In the first scenario, you have to
make the familiar strange; in the second one, you have to make the strange familiar. We’re
going to see how this works in our attendance to the culture of the university which, for
many of you reading this, will be really strange –but as you gain purchase in it, it will
become increasingly familiar to you. We’ll be able to track and trace how anthropologists
deal with those things as we go along.
Remember how we said anthropologists are attentive to difference? That starts in our
conceptualisations of culture.We don’t presume that everyone who identifies as a member
of that culture is reducible to the kind of sameness that would let you know them as a
nice, discrete group with the help of some ethnographic methods. Different people in
any given group will have different views on things. And, as we said before, you will have
views on them. This means that every single anthropologist will –as a result of what
they paid attention to and ignored, who they met and talked to and did not, what they
were interested in, and were not, and who they were and how that attracted and repelled
people –produce a different account of life from the next anthropologist.There’s enough
they agree on to form some general insights into that life that they both looked at, but
differences sufficient to show the diversity of life (and anthropological approaches) that
made the ethnography. Both build over time and anthropologists to yield a kaleidoscopic
picture of life, not a single, sharp image of it.
You are a [research] tool

So, we hope you’re getting a sense that you are a unique research tool. As you’ll increas-
ingly come to know as we move through the book, you need to be able to articulate what
your unique situation in the research context is. That’s because the research you produce
is not just about the people you’re documenting. It has you in it, too.You’ve got to account
for your perspective so we can understand your results. Doing that is part of reflexivity –
where you account for the impact you and your position have on your approach and your
results. Reflexivity has had a series of important effects in anthropology; what you’ll hear
described as the reflexive turn in anthropology came as the outcome of three distinct
disciplinary crises.
The first crisis emerged in the early 1970s, out of the recognition and critique of
anthropology’s complicity with structures of inequality wrought by European colonial
expansion and its aftermath. It called for anthropologists to analyse the practice of eth-
nography as an instantiation of colonial power relations. We’ll suggest to you later in
this chapter that doing anthropology can help to undermine racist power relations, but
anthropology has been put to sinister purposes in the past. Indeed, ‘culture’ became the
29
Introduction 29
dominant way of hierarchically organising people on a scale of civilisation. It was a kind
of evolutionary approach based on the premise that all societies progressed through a
set of hierarchical technological and cultural stages, with Western European culture at
the very top. ‘Savages’ was actually here a technical term, designating the stage a culture
had reached relative to ‘civilised’ (see Sidky 2004, for a detailed explanation). The dom-
inance of this idea in the first part of the twentieth century was challenged by Franz
Boas, who argued that culture developed historically through the interactions of groups
of people and the diffusion of ideas (see Boas, 1940). The upshot is that there can’t be
a singular process towards continuously superior cultural forms. Boas also introduced
the idea of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism holds that cultures cannot be object-
ively ranked as they had been, but that all humans see the world through the lens of
their own culture, and see it and deal with it according to their own culturally acquired
norms. For Boas, the object of anthropology was to try to understand how culture
conditioned people to understand and interact with the world in their unique ways –
that meant getting a sense of cultural practices and language, the material culture of the
people as they did so.
A second crisis came about because of the intersection of the feminist movement with
anthropology. The result of that was the revealing of anthropology’s terribly androcen-
tric bias. It became really obvious that anthropology was claiming to produce objective,
neutral knowledge –but the ethnographic record was filled to the brim with men –the
lives of men, and male ethnographers recording it. Male ethnographers reproduced their
dominance in ethnographic work, presuming that the important aspects of lives that
warranted investigation were the lives of men. This feminist critique led to an emphasis
on positionality –a reflexivity accomplished through the explicit acknowledgment of the
partiality of all claims to knowledge –and the ethnographer’s position in relation to the
people they are researching. Suddenly, in the 1970s and 1980s, the ethnographic record
started to change; the ‘unimportant’ lives of women came to the fore. More on that in our
chapter on kinship and relatedness.
Another crisis came about with the 1967 publication of Bronisław Malinowski’s field
diaries, more than two decades after his death. Malinowski was an important anthro-
pologist. He accidentally pioneered long-term ethnographic fieldwork, just before the
First World War. Before then, most anthropologists got their information about other
people from secondhand sources, like missionaries and explorers, which didn’t really
allow them to make insights into ordinary lives –and in fact undergirded the fascin-
ation with exotic ‘others’ who were different from, and hierarchically arranged relative
to (and lower than) white Europeans. Malinowski’s first trip to Australia in 1914 wasn’t
supposed to last for more than about six months, but war broke out and his nationality
became an issue –he was Polish by ethnicity, but he was a subject of Austria-Hungary,
which was at war with the United Kingdom. In danger of being interred, he elected
to stay in the British controlled territory and went on to do his famous work among
the Trobriand Islanders –which you will hear about later on. Malinowski was not only
important for popularising the ethnographic approach of being among the people you
wanted to study while studying them; he was also important because he refused to see
Europeans and the Trobriand Islanders with whom he worked in a hierarchy. There
were important similarities in their lives, even though the form and style of life was
different. That was a big deal at the time of its expression. It was a big deal because, as
we’ll explain later on, early anthropology was ‘armchair’ –it wasn’t involved in the lives
30
30 Introduction
of the people in whom it was interested, and sometimes didn’t think of those people
as people at all (again, have a look at what Sidky (2004) has to say about that) and it
collected its information by means of missionaries and explorers. The combination of
those things meant that others were considered less developed than Europeans, some-
thing that Malinowski’s work directly disputed. It was therefore shocking when, after
his death, Malinowski’s field diaries revealed that he thought of his interlocutors in very
derogatory terms. Here’s what the anthropologist Michael Young says about this, and
how it relates to reflexivity:
In unmasking his personal weaknesses and prejudices it appeared to give the lie to
his professional image as an empathetic fieldworker whose methodological slogan
was ‘participant observation’. In short, its publication created a minor scandal and
helped precipitate the crisis of anthropological conscience that anticipated the post-
modern turn in the discipline. The damage to Malinowski’s reputation was only fully
restored after the passing of his pupils’ generation with a dawning realization that the
Diary was an iconic text that pointed the way towards a more self-aware and reflexive
anthropology.
(Young, 2014:n.p.)
The ‘postmodern turn’, of which Michael Young speaks, was a huge deal. In plain lan-
guage we might put it like this. If modernism (science and all that) is a kind of faith in
the capacity of human reason when applied to bring progress, then postmodernism is
its converse –doubt in the capacity of human reason when applied to bring progress.
Postmodernism resulted from the failings of modernism and manifested in multiple
fields of human endeavour. Broadly speaking, its schtick was reflexivity and decon-
struction rather than construction. So, for example, when all those housing commission
buildings that were the outcomes of the geometric thinking of modernist architects fell
apart, their successors looked to the past for inspiration –to Edwardian and Georgian
architectures, for e xample –and sometimes deconstructed pastiches of both. A similar
move took place in anthropology. Modernist scholars who, like the Functionalists,
tried to construct grand theories of how societies worked, were challenged by a new
breed of postmodern scholars who, instead, engaged in reflexivity and deconstruction.
Modernist anthropology claimed that it could provide ‘value neutral’ and ‘authorita-
tive’ knowledge about particular peoples, in particular places at particular moments in
time. Instead, postmodern anthropologists argued that the job of anthropologists was to
reflect on the discipline to uncover how, in fact, it had carefully and bogusly convinced
others of its neutrality and authority. Taking a lead from literary theory, the trick for the
postmodernists lay in the careful deployment of tropes –that is, literary devices. For
example, if there is one word that crops up in anthropology more than others it is the
‘field’. What does the word ‘field’ convey? Perhaps a sense of a bounded space in which
the participant observer can see everything that’s happening –a trope of authority. And,
perhaps, the sense that what is socially relevant in our anthropological studies and what
counts as important data is that which comes from observing people who live within
these fields, at the expense of those who merely pass through them. This echoes polit-
ical discourses, such as nationalism’s emphasis on the idea that the righteous citizens of
a nation are those who live permanently within it, rather than those who simply pass
31
Introduction 31
through it, asylum-seekers on temporary visas, Gypsies and the like. The field, then, is
hardly value neutral. It’s politically loaded.
By the 1990s, these elements of the reflexive critique had been incorporated into
mainstream anthropology. What does this look like? We will unfurl this as we go, but for
a start this includes:
• Introducing ethnographic works with brief biographical statements from the author,
designed to lay out the ethnographer’s personal history and stakes in his or her
problem or subject;
• Using reflexive concerns to interrogate the relationship between writing and theory;
• Problematising the role of ethnography in the construction of ethnographic
subjects, and
• Interrogating biases and their effects.
We will explore all of these in this book, and you’ll get to experience them first-hand
in the exercises herein. For now, we want you to notice how student and sex worker
Gabrielle encountered and practiced being reflexive for the first time. For Gabby, this
first meant drawing into the foreground her own position in the field. Second, and just as
importantly, it also meant bringing out elements of that field that that her readers might
not know about, things that might lead them to presumptions about the field itself, as well
as Gabby’s position in it. Gabby’s approach means, then, that she has regarded her reading
audience (that’s you!) as part of her reflexive practice. Where does she sit in the field of
sex-work practice? Where does she sit as an anthropologist writing about that and com-
municating it to others?
On that first reflexive question, Gabrielle took into account her status as a white
woman who is studying gender at university, which meant she had particular kinds of
experiences and knowledges to bring to bear on the field, as well as particular languages
with which to express them. That joins with a politics Gabby has been concerned with
raising the presence of women’s lives in the ethnographic record, but not necessarily
simply in contrast with a male dominance. She wanted to ensure that women are pre-
sent in that record –as workers, as people –in ways that don’t infantalise them, render
them powerless and mute their active participation. As a member of the sex industry
herself, Gabby knows that’s really important, but she also knows it’ll influence what she
looks for when she goes to the field. It’s important that audiences know that’s how she’s
approaching it, so they can understand that the knowledge arising from Gabby’s work
comes from a particular point of view. Have a read of what she’s come up with here, after
reflecting on the kinds of language pressed into service in and around her workplace.
From girl to woman

By Gabrielle May
Two workers arrived and asked the manager the same question,‘Are there any other
girls on today?’.The second worker who had asked this question of the manager
told a story about a woman she’d met over the long weekend at a LGBTQIA+
32
32 Introduction
event. This minute shift in language –from ‘girl’ to ‘woman’ particularly stuck out
to me as I have a keen interest in gender studies and am passionate about language
and discourse proliferating culture, particularly within the sex work community.
I was intrigued that no one seemingly batted an eyelid at the fact that this person
had used the colloquial term girl when referring to an adult peer, a term that
in any other context and spoken by a non-sex worker to and about another sex
worker would most certainly be deemed inappropriate, disrespectful, infantilising
… The list goes on. It is curious that when this person spoke about a woman she
had met and was supposedly a non-sex worker she used a term associated with
adulthood, and not when referring to one of our own. I realised that often if we
have a female client, we also call them ‘woman’ and certainly never girl. I have
found this is to be quite common within the sex industry as some find it liber-
ating to be called a working girl; however I am also aware of the sex workers who
have spoken on social media platforms and blogs their disdain for the word girl to
be used particularly to establishment workers by management. In my experience
I have found context to be essential when using such a word when referring to
adult women or female presenting and identifying people within our industry.
On that second point, Gabby wanted to ensure that her specific point of view on her
workplace was contextualised by her readers’ understanding of her workplace. In a full
length ethnography, Gabby would definitely have spent a lot of time establishing some
things about it that might not be all that well known. Especially pertinent here were
things like the number of people involved in the sex industry. This is an important thing
to know because it might be assumed that we’re talking about a very small number of
people who have been forced into this work, rather than choosing it over other kinds –
that’s a political point driven by the negative ways that sex work has been characterised
in the past. Relatedly is another point Gabby would make in a bigger piece –the role of
technology in sex work.That’s really important, too. Mobile phones play a very important
role in sex work; they obviously help organise the work itself in time and place, and play
a crucial role in communications that can help make people safe, but they might also be
used within the industry to control workers, to create and disseminate profiles of a worker
that part company a bit with their own identity –the gap between those two things might
wind up undermining safety, especially if the worker is inexperienced and hasn’t mastered
stepping in and out of a work persona, if that’s the kind of business model within which
they work. A related point emerging from this point about technology is that there’s a
pretty broad range of models for sex work –and Gabby would want to establish that so
readers would know how to read her particular ethnographic take. This second kind of
reflexivity, then, is concerned with the conditions within sex work takes place. Gabby
notes that in the model of sex work with which she is familiar, a madam can:
take your brand and mould it into an ‘appropriate’ image for the client base. She
can create a more holistic image of the persona you’re all capitalising from. This can
be a problem because you may not know all of the details of that persona, however
lucrative it might be for the business. When client contacts are beyond your control
3
Introduction 33
and they are being presented with that persona of which you may –have no real
understanding –even as you sell it –you can be left with insufficient internet or
personal security.
This kind of insight alerts us to quite different ideas of safeties and dangers than we might
otherwise presume. For this reason alone, work like Gabby’s is of really high importance.
Gabby took her notes a while ago now, just as everyone in Simone’s class of 2021 did.
Of course, when an ethnography is produced, it stops the clock; but the people under
study continue on with their lives. So, anthropologists often return to continue their
ethnographic work, again with an attendance to the differences they can see between
their last ethnographic work, and this present undertaking. That tells you that culture is
elastic enough to change over time, as well as gather up a whole bunch of people who
have almost as many differences between them as they have similarities.
As you might have guessed, it’s impossible for an anthropologist to say that they have
a line on ‘the truth’, or the core of any given culture; they only ever get a partial insight
into it, depending on whose perspectives they’ve gotten, and how those intersected with
their own positions, interests, skills and so on. You also might have guessed that nobody
in the culture being examined by the anthropologist has a line on those things, either;
everyone has their own unique perspective on the culture of which they are a member.
But you also might have guessed, despite our critical remarks about stereotyping the
Swimmingpoolians, that the members of a culture share enough in common to be called
a culture in the first place. The bigger you go, the more vague you get about what these
shared things might be –national cultures are a good example of that. What’s Australian
culture? It’s a bit too big and diverse to say anything detailed of it, and if we tried to, we’d
leave out a lot of people and interests and you can easily see, too, how our statements of it
might become very stereotypical. Indeed, maybe it’s too big to be practically meaningful.
Perhaps that’s why politicians talk less about what Australian-ness is than they do about
un-Australian-ness. That’s really easy to identify. We know, for example, that (reflecting
most liberal democracies the world over) bombing the Federal Parliament is a distinctly
un-Australian way of going about making a political protest. As an aside, this situation
must be pretty difficult for immigrants. If we/they don’t know what Australian-ness is,
then what are they supposed to assimilate to? Having said all this, thinking about the idea
of a national culture is useful for showing that in order to be shared between members,
it must be public.
This doesn’t mean that there are full-sized ads on the sides of buses that remind you
of the cultural norms you should know. Instead, cultural norms are internalised and
externalised each and every day in everyday practice. The way you move, dress, talk, eat,
kiss, think –none of this formed in a vacuum.You lived it in the most ordinary of ways,
without noticing a lot of the time –and now look at you! You’re a fully cultured being –
which does not mean you go to the Art Gallery every Saturday (although that is part of
culture, too, for some people who value that –for others, who might live in the same city,
the Art Gallery isn’t part of their world except as a building they’ve never been inside).
If culture is acquired in everyday experience, and in some respects formalised in insti-
tutional settings like schools –which, for example, teach you how to carry your body,
which forms of knowledge are valued –and everyone else shares this with you to some
extent, then imagine how hard it is to be expected to assimilate, as many people who do
34
34 Introduction
not come from this background are expected to do as immigrants. Talk about making the
strange familiar –imagine having to learn, often as an adult, all the things that go into
making a cultured person in that everyday sense in a new place. Phew!
After all of that, we can certainly say that ethnography is a set of processes by which
we investigate human cultures, and that an ethnography is a product that sets out what
we found out about those human cultures, but it is not straightforward, because ‘human
cultures’ are not straightforward.They certainly aren’t discrete groups of people who con-
veniently share a single set of beliefs, values, knowledge and language, and you’ll certainly
not get ‘the truth’ or ‘core’ of them, because there isn’t one, no matter what they tell you
in the tourist brochures. Doing ethnography is not like doing tourism.
So, what would be a more productive way of describing ethnography than the dic-
tionary definition? Here’s one:
Ethnography means the taking of note of the everyday lives of people, in uncommon
terms. It signals your intention to approach the world anthropologically –that is, to
refuse to make common sense of it.
We’ve used the term ‘people’ here rather than ‘culture’, and even rather than ‘groups of
people’ to counter the dictionary idea that cultures are somehow homogenous, but it still
isn’t enough to capture the diversity we’re dealing with when we work with people.
You’ll come to understand what it means to take note of the world in uncommon
terms in an exercise that compares how you would take note of it as you do the shopping
(or whatever other ordinary activity that comes to mind) and how anthropologists take
note of it, in uncommon terms. It’s hard, but exciting, to see what is revealed when you
signal your intention to approach the world anthropologically. To take note, or notice, of
the world in this new way, you’ve got to also have good techniques for taking note –that
is, recording, it. There’s a huge range of techniques for doing this –everything from very
old-school notebook-and-pen scenarios, to iPhone recordings, to arranging things in
your head for later transfer into your laptop. But what would you record? How would
you even know what to record? At the beginning of ethnographic fieldwork, you have
some clues about what you’d like to know about –that’s because as a researcher, or a con-
sultant, you go in with a research question that you’ve developed, or that you’re trying
to find out about for a client. Doing that is the first step in creating a field, because in
creating an anthropological enquiry, you have signalled an intention to see the world in
uncommon terms. Intending to make a particular kind of enquiry helps you to know
what kinds of methods might work the best. This already lets you know that method and
enquiry, approach and analysis, are never really separate; you’re always thinking about,
and operationalising them, together –as you’ll see later on. You’ll also see that under-
taking ethnographic fieldwork is not about uncovering secret information that only
anthropologists can find. It’s about trying to understand what common-sense, everyday
understandings of the world are in place for the people you’re studying, and then trying
to make uncommon sense of those. Anthropology isn’t like being a spy, although it would
probably mean we’d have better outfits.
The field
As we’ve established, a distinguishing feature of anthropology is its commitment to ethno-
graphic fieldwork (but remember this, like everything, is debatable, and you can absolutely
35
Introduction 35
do anthropology without doing ethnography –as you’ll find out in some of the exercises
we ask you to do). Sociologists (and many others, too, like geographers) do ethnographic
fieldwork, and use some anthropological methods, too, but anthropologists regard field-
work as fundamental to the way we produce knowledge –not as a series of techniques
(lots of disciplines undertake ethnographic methods), but as an intention to approach a
group of people in a different way than usual –differently from a tourist, differently from
a visitor, differently from a common-sense perspective. While entering ‘a field’ sometimes
means going to a physical place in which the group of people you want to understand
dwell, it’s far more productive to think about the field as a particular imaginary.You won’t
be surprised to learn that entering a field means entering into an intention to approach
the world anthropologically. Perhaps it’s helpful to remember that you could go into the
supermarket and treat it like a field –but for the people doing their shopping, the super-
market is not a field, it’s just the supermarket. You are imagining it in anthropological
terms, intending to look past the common-sense manifestation of the supermarket. They
are doing their shopping. The upshot is that the space of the supermarket is not the most
important thing about the field –how you imagined it is. Simone can’t think about some
of her fields principally in physical terms, either; she follows smoke around –smoke is
very disobedient about remaining in a bounded place, and people can be, too. Andy,
who studies driving experiences, can think about his field in physical terms. However,
as he passengers with his informants wherever they go, he certainly cannot think of his
field in the traditional sense of a delineated space. Here’s the reason you can do anthro-
pology without ethnography: you can use your anthropological imagination to see social
worlds anew, as fields of disciplinary enquiry.We think that ethnography is very important,
though –we certainly put a lot of stock in it –but we wouldn’t if it wasn’t dependent on
our anthropological imaginations.
So, why do we want to understand people from the inside of their everyday worlds,
and generate uncommon sense about their lives, including our own?
We think the best answer is that understanding people like this helps make the world
a little bit safer for human difference. If we don’t make uncommon sense of life, then all
we have is what we can see on the surface. As we’ve seen, hierarchisation often goes along
with those surface, common-sense, understandings. Let’s pause here to show you what we
mean –you might be like Lachlan Long, a student in Simone’s first-year anthropology
class who came to know how safety on a train might take on different forms depending
on your gender. We think women already know this, but the process of taking fieldnotes
made Lachlan realise it, and communicate it, in new ways:
Fieldnotes on the Frankston Line

By Lachlan Long
On Sunday April 4, I took fieldnotes on my train trip from an outer suburb of

Melbourne (Frankston) to the primary station in the CBD (Flinders Street). It
was an afternoon/night-time train which left at 6.59 p.m. and did not get into the
final stop until 8.08 p.m. There was a total of 24 passengers, excluding myself, that
entered and exited my carriage during the duration of this train ride. This allowed
for observations on a diverse group with a mixture of genders, group sizes, ages and
36
36 Introduction
so on. The transition between day and night was also something that I took notes
on as it led to a significant shift in who got on the train, and how people responded
to who got on. I deliberately situated myself at the end of carriage so that not only
could I directly observe my carriage but also had a view of the carriages towards the
centre of the train and could view and compare them.
Compared to just making observations on previous train rides my fieldnotes were
a lot more focused on what was happening on the train itself: I’m normally more
interested in listening to music, talking with friends, being on my phone. This in turn
meant that I was paying attention to things that I had never really focused on before
such as where people chose to sit, both in relation to the train and the carriage, how
they were sitting, and with whom, especially when they didn’t know the person with
whom they were sharing a seat. I was also acutely aware of how my activity on the train
might impact people; it made me take my notes subtly, rather than obviously. All of my
observations came to pivot around the idea of safety –and how relative that term is.
One of the first things I noticed was that the women who entered the carriage
on their own mostly kept to seats near the doors and where the interactions with
others would be limited, such as sitting in an isolated two seat chair instead of an
open six-seating booth seat.
Having grown up in the area I am aware of the ‘unwritten rules’ of the train line
when riding as a passenger. Small things like not listening to music or videos out
loud, not sitting next to someone else when a spare seat was free, or even standing
up when approaching your departing station were things I expected to notice, but
I hadn’t expected to understand, in a new way, that being an upper-class white male
made me very aware of the position of privilege I had regarding my own safety.
Having ridden the train with women and seeing them make themselves invisible in
the corners of the carriage, or sit next to other women only, made me very aware of
my own freedom to sit wherever I like in [the] carriage, and to not begin to worry
when darkness falls, about what I wear on the train –and a million other small con-
siderations that might make the difference between being and feeling safe on some-
thing called ‘public’ transport –that clearly has different participations, meanings
and implications depending on your gender –even now. Being a male, particularly
with the presence of a notebook, I was very conscious as to not come across as
creepy or perverted in my actions and therefore resulted mostly to head notes for
this project, and that methodological realisation made me ponder my observations
in a way that, when you think about it, is pretty sad.
Notice how Lachie’s notes and realisations come from seeing the world in a particular
way –an uncommon-sense way, and notice also how he entails the methodological in this.
You don’t have to come at a big theory for this stuff to work to produce new insights –
you just have to think uncommonly. Even though Lachie is sad about the realisation he’s
made here, it’s just those kinds of realisations that help make the world safe for gendered
difference –and other kinds of difference, too.
Entailed in the reasoning that anthropology has important effects for people are the
purposeful operationalisation of practical programs of action –the domain of applied
anthropology. Think about sexually transmitted infections (STIs) for a minute. Condoms
37
Introduction 37
are great for diminishing the chances of spreading some of those around. So, of course, if
we want to stop STIs, the obvious, common-sense thing to do is to give everyone condoms
and a bit of health information about why they should use them, and a correct usage guide.
That sounds really good –and we’d expect to see a significant diminishment in the spread
of some STIs if there was a significant increase in condom use. If you’ve read this far in, you
already know this is kind of a trick question. It is. Assuming that all we’d have to do is dis-
tribute condoms and instructions assumes a great deal, including that semen is understood
in just the same way as you might understand it: as a substance that might bear all kinds of
things in it –from dangerous to procreative –that can be captured and discarded in some-
thing like a condom if you don’t want it to have any consequences. Semen might not be
understood like that for everyone. It might be too important, significant, too powerful to
discard. It might not be thought of as having anything to do with procreation –as you’ll
find out in our chapter on genealogies and relatedness.Those understandings might impact
the success of a condom distribution program. Anyone thinking about doing that would
have to have a very good understanding of the common sense of the world for those
people, and would have to make uncommon sense of them –that’s where you’d be able to
appreciate that semen isn’t regarded in the same way by everyone, that neither is procre-
ation, or the relations between genders, or children, or disease. And, you’d be able to regard
these understandings as different from and equal to the ones that are more familiar to you.
On that seminal note, let’s move on to some thoughts from two student authors, Esther
Black and Carys Fisser, on how they’d explain anthropology. First to Esther, who took
the introductory course in anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU)
with Simone in 2021. It was her first time doing any anthropology; she didn’t really know
much about it before the first class. Here’s what she says about it now:
Waiting to know what anthropology is

By Esther Black
When someone asks me what anthropology is, the first thing that comes to my mind
is describing it as uncommon knowledge. It involves looking below the taken-for-
granted surfaces of human social life. What was the moment I realised what anthro-
pology is? I know for myself and others it was more than just one moment, but
I can remember vividly what the first moment was in my journey of learning about
anthropology. Picture this. It was the first week of my first year of university. I was
sitting in a library on the Australian National University campus and it was the first
anthropology lecture for the semester. I remember this moment because one of the
first things to happen in the lecture was Simone chopping off a piece of her hair
and mixing it into a bowl of ice cream. My first reaction was to burst out laughing
because of how absurd and unexpected this was, and I of course got some strange and
annoyed looks from other students who were just trying to study in a quiet library.
Now I know what you are probably thinking, that putting hair in ice cream is gross
and unsanitary.That was the reaction that I and many others in the class had, and this
is where anthropology comes in. It’s this initial ‘yuck’ reaction that anthropologists
move beyond –to try to understand what organises the cultural categories that sep-
arate hair from icecream and produce the ‘yuck’ reaction in the first instance.
38
38 Introduction
My next big moment of realisation occurred during our first assignment.We were
asked to go out into the social world and take ‘field notes’. Field notes are taken
in many disciplines, and describe the taking of notes from a specific perspective.
They are a kind of evidence that gives meaning to and helps in the understanding
of what is being observed. Field notes in anthropology involve getting beyond the
presumptions you normally and usefully have to make in a social situation,The term
‘field’ signals that this way of observing the world isn’t business as usual, but instead
that you’re trying to find out something about the everyday world that would be
very hard to see if you took it for granted. I ended up in the waiting room of a
medical centre where I was, you guessed it, waiting to see a doctor.
When you go into a public space with an anthropological lens it is amazing what
you end up noticing. It led me to explore the social category of waiting, which is
often assumed to be an empty space or in between events –and how it is actually
bursting with activity that often goes unnoticed. In order to wait successfully in a
doctor office, a person needs to behave in certain kinds of ways, adopt quiet and
constrained bodily habits, and engage in some very few activities (reading, oper-
ating some quiet functions on the phone, talking quietly). Waiting requires mastery
of quiet restraint, and is a very disciplined activity that takes some time to learn –
kids are not often very good at it! It is also very valuable –failure to have mastered
waiting might mean a person is ejected from important places from which experts
can be accessed. Getting waiting wrong –like behaving impatiently, loudly, or rudely
can deeply disturb other people –so we could say that waiting is a profoundly social
activity, even though it seems very individual. And, looking at waiting, especially
when people get it wrong, lets us see the rules that govern the social world and give
us a glimpse into broader social values. There are many types of waiting –in some
kinds, people might collectively become impatient, or sympathise with one another.
Those occasions might let us see into the tensions that can arise between authorities
and the public, perhaps. The fraying of patient waiting might let us see the extent to
which experts can lay claim to our time –and the point at which that might cease,
and let us see the value accorded to the spending of time in late capitalism. Boredom
can also be part of the category of waiting and lets us learn about the idea of wasting
time –and from there we can learn a lot about how time is valued. None of these
things would necessarily be on your radar while waiting in a doctor surgery.
Taking field notes led me to realise how much of anthropology is practicing new
ways of thinking and identifying key themes within your environment.You become
a part of your field notes, and this field can be anywhere at any time. Through this
process I became very aware of my presence in the waiting room and in society,
and this awareness helped build a comprehensive picture across a range of domains
within the social category of waiting.
So what would you say to someone who asks what anthropology is? I remember
trying to explain it to my Mum when I chose her as my subject, known as Ego, for
the kinship diagram project we undertook as part of our class. She was understand-
ably confused at first, but this is where I came back to the hair in the ice cream and
it seemed to help her understand a bit more. Anthropology is something you learn
about over time and it might take a while to properly understand, but there will be
moments like the ones I had that will be lightbulb moments. Moments where you
39
Introduction 39
will be amazed at how much there is to the idea of uncommon knowledge, and how
much there is below the tip of the iceberg.There are so many things that amazed me
during my journey of anthropology. I have learnt to consider what an anthropological
lens on a topic reveals, such as looking at addiction. Maybe it isn’t explained simply
by the relationship between a substance and a person. Maybe we would have to care-
fully consider a whole range of contextual factors, and perhaps also we’d have to set
aside some presumptions to consider a range of possibilities. In anthropology, that
involves questioning taken-for-granted concepts, such as health, for instance, which
might be defined quite differently by different social groups. That is why I think
anthropology is an important thing to learn about, because it can bring us even just
a little bit closer to understanding humans in context. It is quite amazing what you
can discover –including the social category of waiting and how important it is to the
smooth functioning of social life. And all of that came to light on a trip to the doctor.
Esther’s explanation of what anthropology is, why it’s important and how she came to
have ‘lightbulb moments’ is very useful for students who want to track and trace their
particular orientation to the discipline. Can you see how Esther’s trip to the doctor’s
waiting rooms pulled together what she knew about accessing uncommon sense of
the world, seeing the rooms like a field, and her own unique experiences? Simone and
Andy might have gone to the doctors’ rooms and just waited, or approached them
as a fieldsite and found different things from Esther. The fact that Esther is someone
who is interested in health probably helped her to approach the rooms this way. It
was also a field in which Esther could blend in, and not have to worry about getting
waiting wrong, by, for example, writing down what she was noticing. That might
seem odd in a doctor’s rooms, where privacy can be very important. We’ll talk much
more about the appropriateness of methods of recording in particular kinds of fields
in the next chapter, but for now notice that Esther’s unique contribution to know-
ledge (in this case, of waiting) depends on her experiences, techniques, sensibilities,
(dis)comforts coming into concert with the things she learned in the classroom with
Simone. Simone could not have taught her that exact approach to the waiting room.
Now, we have a germ of an idea –about the social category of waiting –that comes
back to Esther’s uniqueness.
How does Carys see things? Carys is a Master’s student, and she’s taken loads of classes
before her anthropology one, in the same class as Esther. She’s got some really interesting
grounds for comparison to say how she understands anthropology:
My three strategies for explaining anthropology

By Carys Fisser
When I say I’m studying anthropology, I am usually met with puzzlement, asked
‘what is anthropology?’ or worse, scoffed at for doing a ‘fluffy’ humanities subject
that has ‘no real world application’ or ‘job prospects’. I have a few key strategies for
retaliating to these often frustrating reactions:
40
40 Introduction
1) explaining the unique qualitative research methods anthropology employs, spe-

cifically ethnography;
2) using the very boring but tried and true method of defining the discipline
literally;
3) (most used): throw my hands up in defeat, because despite being a Master’s stu-
dent, I am still not really sure how to define anthropology.
Especially because of Strategy 3, it’s probably better that you do not take this
specific entry, or even this entire textbook, as gospel. As noted in Strategy 2,
anthropology’s stretch is vast and sometimes a little overwhelming, with areas of
study as diverse as biological anthropology, all the way to corporate organisational
anthropology. That’s part of its beauty, and why I chose it as an area of study. No
matter what I am interested in, I can explore things anthropologically. But that
doesn’t say very much about what it is, or how I would operationalise anthropo-
logical exploration.
Talking about the doing of anthropology, my first strategy, is a good start to
answer questions about what it is. For me –and for most anthropologists –the
doing of anthropology centrally involves ethnography. First of all, when asked by
strangers ‘what is anthropology’, you can respond with something along the lines
of ‘anthropology is a social science that uses a unique form of qualitative research
known as ethnography, to understand the underlying structures of social worlds.’
In very simple terms, ethnography is a form of social research involving a number
of methods –like participant observation and interviewing –that aim to describe
what life is like for members of that group. It’s really the modus operandi of anthro-
pology, and is widely used to understand human practices and understandings of life
in a huge variety of contexts –everything from what it might be like to work in a
hospital, to how economists make sense of and talk about the world of finance. It’s
a big part of why anthropology is distinctive because what really sets ethnograph-
ically informed anthropology apart from other disciplines such as philosophy is
that the research process is inductive, rather than deductive. This means that rather
than using pre-existing theory and applying it to social situations, the anthropolo-
gist goes into a social setting, observes what’s going on, and then builds theory
from this experience. This is why you’ll often hear anthropology described as ‘phil-
osophy with the people in’. Rather than the stereotypical image of the philosopher
locked away in an ivory tower contemplating humanity, anthropologists are deeply
involved in the human situations they study.
That involvement hasn’t always been positive for anthropology’s human subjects,
though. It is also worth mentioning that ethnography, and the whole of anthro-
pology as a discipline, was entwined with colonising agendas and an intention to
establish and maintain racial hierarchy. The effort to decolonise anthropology and
ethnography takes in all kinds of power relations that might become manifest in
relations between researcher and researched. A good example of recent efforts to
decolonise the discipline can be found in works such as Decolonising Ethnography
(Bejarano et al., 2019). In this text, the authors aim to use the knowledge produced
by ethnography to actually better the community they are investigating, as opposed
to publishing their findings, and doing nothing to give back. Additionally, rather
41
Introduction 41
than having a trained anthropologist doing the ethnographic research, they train
two members of the community they want to research in ethnography. Rather than
treating their informants as sources of knowledge to be mined, they coproduce
theory alongside the members of the research community, with the aim of bettering
the community with this knowledge –in the same sort of way that this book
includes students as authors, rather than just recipients, of anthropological insights.
If my first strategy for answering enquirers is one that tries to get across the
distinctiveness of anthropological doing, the second one goes for breadth. The
word ‘anthropology’ is derived from two Greek words: anthropos (human) and logos
(thought, or reason, usually interpreted as ‘the study of ’). What enquirers don’t at
first realise, perhaps, is the vast range of things this permits anthropologists to study;
together, these elements create a word that literally refers to thescience, discourse, or
theory of anything pertaining to what it means to be human. As I said, this means
that I can anthropologically explore my interests, wherever my imaginary of the
social world takes me. However, this unfortunately brings us to my final response,
which is throwing my hands up in the air and saying I am still not really sure.There’s
a few reasons for this. One, of course, is that the world is my oyster, and I’m only
at the start of my anthropological journey. Another one is that anthropology itself
isn’t a static discipline –it’s always growing as a result of the different interpretations
that can be made of human life, and the theoretical positions that emerge from
those examinations. Accordingly, we should not see ethnography and anthropology
as monolithic. Anthropology is a discipline that is constantly in conversation with
itself –about its own ideological blind spots and research methods. Unfortunately,
this means it can often be difficult to define. Fortunately, it means that there is a
great deal that can be done with it.
We love how Carys has worked hard to make it safe for readers of this book to be
confused and disoriented by anthropology. Even as a Master’s student, Carys retains the
sense that anthropological thinking will challenge her –and she says that even as she
clearly gives you a sense of what’s important to her kind of anthropology: the reciprocal
building of knowledge between communities and ethnographers. What’s your anthro-
pology? Here’s Nitya’s.
Nitya’s arrival
With Nitya Narasimhan
We talked to Nitya Narasimhan –she’s just arrived in Australia after having taken
most of her anthropological education in her native India. After an initial introduc-
tion to anthropology that described it as ‘the study of tribes’, Nitya is now being
driven a bit crazy by the fact that she can’t really see the world in anything other
than the uncommon-sense terms we’ve described in this chapter. This has been
really sharpened up for her since landing in Australia –where quite a few things are
pretty different. Food, driving, interacting, residing –everything. Nitya knew that
42
42 Introduction
her arrival into the country would bring to her attention all the things that were
different about home, and she knew she’d see them like an anthropologist might.
She was prepared to deal with racism –Australia has a bit of an international reputa-
tion. She didn’t find it –but she did find herself unwilling to judge the practices and
habits of Australians –she didn’t want to be a racist student migrant –we don’t often
think of that. Another important thing was her relationship with time. Nitya had
zoomed in to her anthropology classes around 5 in the morning when she lived in
India. Her orientation to it came to govern her body –her eating, bathing and other
domestic routines, and those of others, including her parents who had to adjust their
temporal rhythms to come into concert with hers. Then, after a time, her parents
parted temporal company with her, leaving her in her own time. University could
be isolating, she realised –but not always in the ways that were most obvious. Space
came onto her radar too; Nitya noticed immediately how universities here just kind
of blend in with the urban landscape, rather than being fenced off from public access
as they tend to be in India –complete with a passcard system that permitted only
staff and students entry to the place. Nitya wondered what the campus accessibility
meant for the possibility of the dissemination of knowledge, the public relationship
with research, in each nation. Nitya’s ideas are insightful –and we’re going to delve
more deeply into them as we go along.
Before you read Chapter 2
Exercise: Treat this chapter as an anthropologist treats a new field
Try treating the chapter you just read like an anthropologist entering a foreign
field. What kinds of things seem important to anthropologists (at least according
to Simone and Andy)? How do you know they are important? What parts of the
chapter did you understand? What is still utterly baffling to you? What have you
nearly got, but not quite? How will you get to a stronger understanding? All these
questions are the kinds that anthropologists ask of a field. No reason you cannot
turn this to the work of understanding the chapter.
Notes
1 Social anthropology and cultural anthropology respectively designate British and American
traditions of thought and practice. Very basically, cultural anthropology emphasised the coher-
ence of cultures by studying a broad range of phenomena including behavioural norms, lan-
guage, material creations and ideas about the world. It stressed the importance of understanding
each culture in and on its own terms. Social anthropology focused on social institutions and
groups and their interrelationships. It arose in Britain, and was influenced by European intel-
lectual traditions and innovations, especially from France. There’s not much distinction now,
though; sociocultural anthropologists all try to make uncommon sense of everyday life –as
you’ll soon see.
2 You might know that Aristotle had a lot to say about common sense of another kind. He
describes some complex perceptual operations that can’t be explained by recourse to the
43
Introduction 43
individual five senses. He knew animals could do this, and so he wondered about some sort of
higher-order perceptual capacity that sits atop the five senses: the common sense. You can read
Gregoric’s 2007 book on the topic, if you want to learn about this kind of common sense.
3 What’s an Honours degree? In Australia, it’s typically a fourth year of study after the Bachelor’s
degree that qualifies the holder to practice professional anthropology. It comprises a 20,000-
word thesis and coursework designed to instil detailed knowledge of theory and method in
candidates. It’s also the traditional route to the PhD –a First Class degree is considered the key
signal for application into the program and makes a person competitive for a scholarship.
4 You can solve this other ways, too. If you look into poo in anthropology, you’ll find a lot of
material –it’s fascinating.
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44 Introduction
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45
2 Putting the basics together to understand

the university anthropologically
Some orienting notes to get you started

You’ve just taken in a lot of important points about the broad shape and character of
anthropology. We’ve found that a lot of students benefit from immediately connecting
this material to a context. That’s what we’re going to do in this chapter; we’re going to
immediately apply some of those main principles, ideas and practices to the context of
the university. We are assuming that the university is an immediately available context to
you but if it is not, you can try the exercises and ideas in this chapter in pretty much any
context available to you.
Seeing the university like a culture

In the last chapter, we said that anthropologists explore human cultures using uncommon
sense. We also said that you could practice using your uncommon sense by doing things
like going to the supermarket and refusing to accept that the way it’s laid out is just how
things are and trying to speculate about what undergirds its organisation aside from ‘it’s
just the way it is’, or ‘marketing’.We also said that you could practice ushering in this way
of seeing the supermarket by entering it as ‘a field’ –that’s when you signal your inten-
tion to see things using your uncommon sense. You know you’re doing that when you
recognise that you’re seeing the supermarket in a different way from people who are in
there just doing their shopping. Now, we’re going to apply the same kind of approach to
the university.
The first thing to remember is that you have a fantastic opportunity to enter the uni-
versity as a student, in a common-sense way and as an anthropological researcher of it in
an uncommon-sense way. In the common-sense way, you’ll have all the things going on
that most students do when they come to university for the first time, in that you’ll be
concerned with sorting out your timetable, finding out where you’re meant to be for your
classes and at what time, trying to figure out what your lecturers want from you and how
to do well in your classes, what’s on socially, what the rules and regs are if you’re living on
campus, even what the vibe is when it comes to dressing for university. That stuff is all to
be expected when you’re entering this new context, but perhaps it’s a bit more complex
for some people than just getting to grips with the ‘where are my classes?’, ‘what time are
they on?’ and ‘what’s expected of me?’ questions. Perhaps you have feelings beyond this
kind of unfamiliarity; maybe coming to university even feels a bit alienating. Maybe you’re
the first in your family to do so. That can make it feel a very different prospect than it is
for someone who might already have some knowledge of the university under their skin.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003273547-2
46
46 Understanding the university anthropologically

Simone and Andy each have a child; their kids are familiar with the university campus, the
rhythms of university life (at least the ones pertaining to academics), and they’re familiar
with some of the languages, expectations and values that are peculiar to the university.
That wasn’t the case for either Simone or Andy when they went to university for the first
time; as the first in their respective families to go, they’d never set foot on a university
campus before or even seen the ones they went to –both located in their own discrete
sites at the edges of cities they’d only ever visited a few times from their rural villages in
Tasmania and Northumberland respectively. Going to university was an alienating experi-
ence for both of them in all sorts of ways, and perhaps university feels alienating to you in
this or other even more profound ways. As Simone registered the difference between city
and country, experience and ignorance, fear and familiarity in her body and dealt with it
(badly) by putting on a twin set and a necklace that once belonged to her grandmother
for her first day at uni, you might register feeling the difference and the distance between
yourself and university in other ways. You might feel too old, too brown, too poor; you
might feel like you’re not coming from the right experience, gender, or class background.
If that’s the case for you, hold on to that because it’s going to put you at a distinct advan-
tage, for once! Maybe also, as Tristan Penfold, a student in Andy’s first-year anthropology
class in 2021, describes the feeling of unfamiliarity borne of students who are strangers
to one another coming together is one of the few things most students hold in common.
College small talk

By Tristan Penfold
Scene description
You pick your seat indecisively at the dining table.You set your meal down. Faces fill every
corner or your peripheral. A background chorus of a hundred different conversations reverberates
through the hall.You turn to look at the people sat around you; none offer that comfort of close
familiarity. And so you must set out on the daunting task of climbing the mountain of small
talk.You turn to the person next to you and play the common cards: ‘How are you?’ ‘What
have you been up to?’ Predictable answers are exchanged in a flurry, but conversation begins
to fall flat. A laugh is shared over the boorish and banal lockdown situation; perhaps you
even provide a pithy comment on the lack of conversation points –a brief moment of human
connection startles you as the smile fades from your face. The conversation drops off sooner
than desired and coaxes back into that fearful silence. The scarce and precious stepping-stones
of conversation have been exhausted and you have come up empty-handed. Such is the sad
destiny of so many residential college mealtime conversations.
Introduction
In this short ethnography, I have observed the ebbs and flows of small talk amongst
partially acquainted individuals in the context of my residential college’s dining hall.
I have discovered a culture of fake familiarity which conceals the underlying for-
eignness of most students through employing established patterns of topical small
talk, whilst averting direct personal questions. Furthermore, with the lack of small-
talk material available in light of lockdown, there has been a trend of comedic
47
Understanding the university anthropologically 47
metacommentaries upon the very lack of conversation. This accentuates the dis-
tinctive power of comedy as a social tool of relief from the awkward ritual of
strained small talk.
Small talk as false familiarity

Throughout countless meals, each with a ranging degree of enjoyment, a regular
pattern of small talk has emerged during my observations. The customary pleasant-
ries of asking someone about their day and future plans act like pillars of stability
in an otherwise very awkward and unstable social environment. In this context,
the style of conversation therefore coincides with Malinowski’s conception of
‘phatic communion’ (meaning small talk) as intended for the nurturing of social
relations rather than the exchange of useful information (Malinowski, Ogden and
Richards, 1949).
However, the social environment of college is unique. Tables are unallocated to
social groups, leading to an often mixed and diverse arrangement of people –whose
relationship, whilst often surface-level, is curiously familiar.The sheer numeric scale
of college life disallows for deep interactions with everyone; however, the geo-
graphical proximity and passing smiles exchanged daily, means that faces are sim-
ultaneously familiar and alien; that even if you barely know someone, there is a
habituated expectation to act in a friendly and conversant manner.
This whole tension lurks not far below the congenial small talk exchanged at
mealtimes. I seek to posit that this distinctive college environment has essentially
fostered a bewildering, hybridised form of small talk in light of this tension. One
where you hide the lack of knowledge for another person under the cover of false
familiarity.
Indeed, topical small talk about current life events are prized over directly asking
someone about who they are as a person or where they are from. This may be
attributed to the expiry date attached to that self-introductory stage of every college
calendar year –past a certain point, there is simply no socially acceptable way of
freshly introducing oneself to another resident, even if they live across the corridor.
One must simply fake acquaintanceship. This makes it extremely difficult to ask
questions pertaining to one’s identity, and forces one into a concealed pattern of
small talk concerning only events and actions –most prevalently, what the person
is up to on that current day. It seems that one must stealthily get to know someone
under the façade of a fake intimacy rather than admitting stranger status. It seems
too uncomfortable to admit that we have not gotten to know that person over
the past semester, and must instead seek to etch out an image of their character
through asking everything other than who they really are. Propped up by a pattern
of familiar small-talk rituals, it therefore seems that we conceal our foreignness
within a culture of false familiarity.
The role of comedy and metacommentary

The current circumstances of covid lockdown has initiated a pattern of
metacommentaries not only on the banality of life, but also on the sorry state of
small talk whilst it is happening. It usually occurs towards the dead end reached in
48
conversation due to the lack of topical content provided by Covid lockdown and
entails a pithy comment on how little there is to talk about. It acts simultaneously as
a candid excuse, a point of relatability and comedic relief for both parties involved.
It points to a self-awareness over the grand social narrative we are written into, and
displays the supreme power of comedy as a relief from social suffering.
Indeed, the enthusiastic laughter which often accompanies such observations
momentarily breaks the figurative fourth wall and relieves the pressure of small talk’s
ritualised performance. Indeed, like pricking a swelling balloon of awkwardness, this
self-awareness often assuages the sense of thinning conversation. And whilst conver-
sation may still die out, there is a lessened sense of embarrassment. It appears that
in only briefly acknowledging the comedy of the whole charade, we feel more at
ease. This act may be seen as a countermeasure against awkwardness, a reclamation
of agency over an overshadowing social obligation.
This observation does not necessarily happen every mealtime. However, it has
occurred frequently enough for it to be a trend. It is an interesting phenomenon
which counters the dominant cultural ritual of tedious small talk and highlights
the strained and often forced circumstances we are put into. More importantly, it
also advertises the unifying force of comedy as a means of transcending the social
contract college life places over us. It underlines the flimsiness of the construction
of small talk, whilst foregrounding the unifying strength of comedy to reprieve col-
lective suffering.
Conclusion
Within the distinctive context of college life, patterns of small talk therefore dis-
play a culture of forced closeness, where topical forms of small talk disguise the
embarrassing truth that we really don’t know many of the people around us.
Furthermore, the metacommentaries which arise from such awkward interactions
illuminate the transcendent power of comedic relief to liberate us from these suffo-
cating social performances –indeed, humans seem to have an endearing ability to
laugh over and mock their collective suffering.
Whatever the alienating or unfamiliar feelings are for you, they are useful –and particu-
larly so if they’re strong. This is because they will not let you take for granted the context
you’re in. As you know now, that’s something that anthropologists aim for when they
try to see something in the terms of a field, with their uncommon sense –just as Tristan
did when within the apparent banality of small talk and talk about small talk he saw
strategies for coping within an unfamiliar milieu. So, if you’re registering unfamiliarity,
you’re halfway there. The trick is to push that further, to try to figure out the particular
characteristics of the university culture that welcome some people and make others feel
alienated.You’re going to have to make uncommon sense of what’s strange and alienating
about university, instead of just registering that it’s alienating. Conversely, if you feel really
at home at university, your task is concerned with making its familiarity to you just a little
stranger. Whether alienating or welcoming, you’re going to need to use your only-just-
acquired uncommon sense to understand it like an anthropologist, and we’re going to
show you how to do that in this chapter. There’s a series of exercises ahead to help you
49

get your head around this. But before we get to those, we’d better start thinking about the
university as a culture. How could it be seen as a culture?
Seeing the university like a culture you’ve just entered

Once again, we’re indebted to Deane Fergie; Deane liked to orient her first-year students
to the university as a culture, so that they could start to treat the alien environment in
which they found themselves like an anthropologist might treat a new ethnographic field.
We think this is a fantastic idea; Simone uses it in her first-year course all the time, because
it lets students orient themselves to the university in a way that might give them a real,
hands-on understanding of how a person could see coming to university, simultaneously,
as a common and uncommon sense-making opportunity.
The circumstances of your arrival here

The first thing to notice as we try to establish the university not just as the place where
you’re going to study, but as an interesting culture you can explore anthropologically, is that
everyone in it enters it as an adult or pretty close to being one. Not everyone is allowed
to be a member; whether you’re an academic, a student, an administrator, an executive, or
a specialist service provider, you’ve had to qualify to be a member. You probably had to
qualify by achieving the requisite grade required for your particular degree. Even though
that’s likely the case, it might be much easier to enter the university if it has been a part of
your family’s imagination and practice of itself than if it’s never been accorded a value, or
has been understood to be ‘not for us’. We don’t mean here that if you came from a long
line of university-educated people that you got in without needing to have the grades. If
you’re going to that kind of university, it’s time to be very alarmed. What we mean is that
university probably appeared as a natural extension for you, something appearing on the
horizon of your life as a life chance you presumed you could pursue. Having university
valued in that way, as the next step in your life, is different from not having it appear as a
natural progression.You might have to do a load of extra work to make it appear on your
horizon of choices. Some people in Simone’s extended family, for instance, run their own
businesses and have done so in their rural settings for generations. Having someone in the
family want to go to uni instead of into the business or onto the farm has caused friction
and issues before, because what good is that uni degree to the business? The same went
for Andy. What good was an education in the social sciences for someone whose family’s
visions for the future of its offspring usually involved industry, mining, or shipbuilding?
The value of a university education isn’t recognised in all families and indeed, university
isn’t valuable for everyone and every circumstance. But what if you really wanted it to be,
and the conditions of your familial life said otherwise? It’s hard to get to university under
those circumstances. It could be practically hard to go, as well; if you live far away, you
need to set yourself up to perhaps live away from home for the first time, you need some
cash to do that along with other kinds of supports and life skills you might not have down
just yet –stuff like that. And, even if you do wind up having the chances you need and
getting in, for some people it can seem a really natural environment and milieu to which
to belong; for others, being at home in the university culture doesn’t feel like a natural
extension of the self. According to Shipley and Walker (2019), one-fifth of first-year uni-
versity students drop out of their degrees across Australia each year.This is due to a mix of
factors, chief of which appears to be the tension between having to work and study at the
50

same time, but it could also include the kinds of things we’re talking about here, especially
for students from marginalised groups, and for mature-age students.
What does this all mean? It means that the university is a culture that is not equally
available to all people. Universities know this too, and many have tried to extend past
the previous limits of their cultures –there are programmes to make regional, first-
in-family and Indigenous student pathways more legible and available, and there are
moves to make life a bit easier for these students within the institution after they
arrive. In Australia, only one in five commencing undergraduates is from a low socio-
economic status (SES), regional, or remote location –universities are still overwhelm-
ingly attended by urban-dwelling people –and only 10 per cent of these students go
to one of the prestigious Group of 8 universities (which we’ll describe below). Only
about 30 per cent of all the undergrads who do go to one of these prestigious univer-
sities is the first of in their family to do so –everyone else had university appear on
their horizon in some way.
Conditions of entry –whether stated qualifying conditions or alienating hidden
conditions –aren’t limited to the university culture.You can’t just decide to be a member
of a culture; they all have conditions of belonging and these aren’t really ones that depend
on what you can learn or say or intuit about the culture. It’s not hard to imagine what
it might feel like to live in a tree, eat fruit and shit all day. But that’s not tantamount to
really knowing what it’s like to be a possum. It’s much more about holding a key set of
orienting values in common. Another way of saying this is that you’ll never belong in
a culture by studying it. That’s because cultures aren’t reducible to what you can learn
about them –you have to live them.You live the university culture as one of its members;
Simone and Andy live it as academics –you’ll be living it as students. When you study it,
like you would as if you were preparing to go on tour of that culture –as we discussed
in the first chapter –you can make some surface, generalised understandings of it. But
anthropologists study cultures from the inside –from the insider’s point of view. We’re
going to take advantage of the fact that we’ll not only be insiders making common sense
of the university –we’ll be insiders making uncommon sense, from our different vantage
points in the culture.
Positions in the university

That brings us to another interesting thing: the recognition that the university culture
isn’t homogenous. We’ve already mentioned some different roles that people can hold
therein –‘student’, ‘administrator’, ‘academic’. Those roles give different perspectives on
the university culture –just as you found out in the last chapter. Everyone has a different
perspective on their culture –none is any more true or real than the next. All of those
particularities of opinion, ideas, practice and beliefs can tell us something about what
everyone shares, as well as the diversity that persists inside ‘a’ culture. These different
perspectives are arranged hierarchically in the university culture –some positions have
more power than others, and have more capacity to produce effects therein –like when
we grade you, for instance.
So, even though we, the profs, and you, the students, share membership in the uni-
versity culture, we’re going to have very different access to and perspectives on it. Deane
Fergie (2014) sets out the different ways in which different members of the university
engage in and with it, noting that neophyte students are generally permitted a narrow
range of participation.1
51

Executives (who are also often academics), finance experts, marketing gurus, and a
host of different administrators, counsellors, marketing and media experts will have their
own perspectives, too, as will those who produce and tend the grounds, the IT systems,
the collections –like books, artefacts and so on. Even when we say ‘students’, we mean
to reflect that there is great diversity in this broad category –there are postgraduate and
undergraduate students, students of different disciplinary affiliations and clusters, mature-
age and just-out-of-high-school students, generational students who come from learned
families and newbie, first-in-family kids. ‘Academics’ is another huge and diverse cat-
egory: there’s early career academics and senior professors, people who teach and lecture
more than they research, and vice versa. Different values are accorded to research and
teaching activities depending on what university you go to, and different incomes are
derived from each of those for the university. Universities themselves are arranged inter-
nationally hierarchically to one another, in accordance with their research excellence.
Universities are part of a knowledge economy and they could be seen as individual players
in a much bigger culture of that knowledge economy. As we’ll tell you, universities weren’t
always concerned with that –they’ve had different roles in society over time. Coming
back to the individual university, let’s consider how all of that diversity –from gardeners
to librarians to profs to new students –is drawn together to let us call it ‘a culture’.
A core of research
Remember how we said in the last chapter that culture is shared among its members,
and that there are some key, undergirding characteristics that ground diversity sufficiently
for us to say a culture is a culture? How, and around what key notions, could all of the
very different groups we’ve just mentioned be drawn together to share something in
common, in all that diversity? We think that a big part of the answer to this question is
that everyone, in some way, is involved and invested in the business of research knowledge –
in its production, organisation, performance, translation. Academics are producers (and
users) of research knowledge. Libraries are organisers of research knowledge. IT systems
facilitate the communication of research processes and outputs, and protect the integrity
of processes and results. Timetablers organise the communication of research knowledge
to students to facilitate the generational transfer of that knowledge. Marketing and media
specialists translate research results to end users in the public. Administrators of all stripes
are involved in bringing about and maintaining conditions –legal, financial, physical –
that permit research to proceed. Buildings provide the physical conditions under which
research takes place, but university campuses aren’t just utilitarian spaces that provide
research labs and offices and so on; they organise academics in space in accordance with
the kinds of research they produce, by discipline. In other words, the organisation of the
disciplines in campus space reflects what kinds of research universities do, and which
kinds they value the most. If you take a look at a campus map, you might be able to intuit
straight away which disciplines are the most important and successful by their location.
Which disciplines’ buildings do you come to as soon as you enter the campus? Which are
at the centre? Which are on the periphery? Landscaping and gardening is absolutely part
of the way that the value of research knowledge is made manifest on the campus and can
centrally contribute to how disciplines know how important they are to the institution –
and they can communicate that to the public, too.
If you rush up to a gardener and they don’t say that their job is centrally concerned
with reflecting the relative research excellence of the disciplines in and through the
52

differential attention given to important and less important disciplines, this does not mean
they’re not doing this! Our sense is that the condition of campuses –and the relatively
good or poor conditions parts of them are kept in –reflects research excellence and the
value of the discipline to the university; this is the result of our own anthropological ana-
lysis of campuses. It’s our uncommon knowledge, drawn from the common-sense practice
we can observe on our own university campuses, that the most prestigious disciplines,
those that are most valuable to the research excellence agenda, are housed in the best
buildings and have the nicest and best-tended gardens.We think gardeners are involved in
the expression of the relative power of research excellence, but we’d be pretty surprised if
someone doing the gardening just told us that right off the bat. We’d expect to be able to
observe, though, that more gardener labour is spent on the important gardens than lesser
ones, and we’d even expect that the better plants are put there, too.2
So –we could say that everyone involved in the university culture has something to
do with producing, disseminating, displaying, organising, performing research excellence.
And, even though we’ve just said that gardeners might not say this straight up to an
enquiring anthropologist, the university does try to issue statements and documents that
state its core values –and everyone who works or studies there has to agree to advance
those in some way.We will see this when we ask you to consider, of all things, plagiarism, in
just a moment, to see how you’re entailed in the university’s core values around research
knowledge production, protection and dissemination. For now, though, let’s see what else
we could say the university’s members share in common.
Especial time
One of these shared elements could be an especial sense of time. In fact, this is one
of the things that you might find a bit weird when you first come to university. As
a student, you’ll know that we measure things in semesters, and various activities take
place at particular times within those semesters or terms, comprising such activities as
lectures, tutorials, seminars, presentations, assessments, examinations, the releasing of
results, the dates by which you must enrol in, withdraw from, or pay for your enrolment.
While academics might treat the mid-and end-of-semester breaks very differently from
students –we often use that time to do research activities that we couldn’t do while
teaching, while you might work a job, go on holidays, spend time with family, or study in
anticipation of the next semester –we are all yet drawn into a temporal rhythm in which
we collectively participate.
Especial spaces, surrounds and buildings

Space is another that hits you right away. Have you ever been on the campus of the uni-
versity you’re attending before? Covid-19 restrictions over the past few years aside, was
your campus a place you visited before you became a student? Campuses serve to gather
members of the university community together in space and the extent to which they
invite others in can tell you a bit about the parameters of the culture.The space itself can tell
you a lot about the distinctive culture of the university, especially in terms of what it wants
to express about its (prestigious, historical) place in the world. In Australia, for instance,
the sandstone universities are typically the oldest tertiary-educational institutions. They
were, generally (but not exclusively) founded in the colonial era. As the moniker suggests,
they boast buildings constructed of sandstone. But not all the sandstones belong to the
53

exclusive Group of Eight, which comprises Australia’s leading research-intensive univer-
sities: the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University, the University of
Sydney, the University of Queensland, the University of Western Australia, the University
of Adelaide, Monash University and University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney.
This group was incorporated in 1999 –it’s a company –and, since then, it’s been focused
on leading higher education and research, and developing elite national alliances.
In terms of postgraduate education, the group enrols more than one-third of all
students, and almost half of all students in higher degrees by research. Go8 universities
award half of all doctorates in Australia. Seven of the Go8’s members are in the world’s
top 100 universities and all of the Go8 members are ranked in the world’s top 150
universities3 The group receives almost three-quarters of Australian Competitive Grant
(Category 1) funding. More of its fields of research (which are clusters of cognate and
similar disciplines) are ranked above world standard than those outside the group, and 99
per cent of research done at the Go8 universities is world class or above. The group sends
about AU$6 billion on research –more than AU$2 billion of that goes to medical and
health services research. The Go8 contributes significantly to the Australian economy –
about AU$66 billion a year. The Go8 is a signatory to the prestigious Hefei Statement
which links it to elite university groups around the world. Between the members, 380,000
undergrads a year –more than a quarter of all higher education students in Australia –
are educated. One hundred thousand of these are international students; one in three
of Australia’s international students choose a Go8 university, as they are the really high-
prestige options. This is indicated too by the fact that Go8 universities educate more than
half of Australia’s high-prestige practitioners –doctors, dentists and veterinarians; more
than half of Australia’s science grads come from the group and almost half of all its engin-
eers. Go8 universities award half of all doctorates in Australia.4
You can tell from these descriptions that we’re dealing with some prestigious places –
and nothing says ‘prestige’ like sandstone, right? But, as we said, not all of the Group of 8
is a sandstone university. The Group of 8 includes some so-called ‘red brick’ universities,
such as the University of NSW and Monash University, and the Australian National
University.The latter was established in 1946 by an Act of Federal Parliament as a national
research-only institution; that is, it was dedicated to research and postgraduate research
training for national purposes. Its mandate stood in contrast to the pursuit of national
interests made in the terms of economic and technical gains to shore up the Australian
post-war economy in which the other universities were chiefly involved. People would
have to learn new skills in a post-war economy; universities could be used as a national
resource –as exploitable as any other. But the national university would make its contri-
bution in and through research. In the government of the day, led by John Curtin, Minister
for Post-War Reconstruction John Dedman proclaimed the university would lead the
way in translating for civilian use the gains that had been made in medicine during
the war. It would also secure the benefits from developments in scientific and human
relations and operate as a major player in Pacific affairs. Presently, the university continues
to deliver on these fronts, framing its importance around prosecuting its unique national
responsibilities, in and through research excellence.
The red bricks came after the sandstones, but before the verdant or ‘gumtree’ univer-
sities that were founded in the 1960s and 1970s. The gumtree universities are all located
in state capitals and characterised by lush, sprawling campuses; they tend to be a bit more
open to members of the public, partly by dint of their locations in capital cities and partly
because they have less imposing architectures and their campuses are park-like in feel.
54

They’re the kind of spaces people could hang out in as they might a public park, which
might be a bit more difficult on some of the campuses designed to show how prestigious
they are as producers of knowledge.
All of this is important because of the gathering and repelling power of space; that’s
critical to how the prestige and exclusivity of a university is felt –not just understood in
the kinds of statistics we were giving you before about the Group of Eight. Members of
particular universities feel this in their bodies –and that’s a key part of sharing culture too.
You’ll get this in the exercises –stand by!
Especial language
And how about language? That could be something university members share in common
and that people beyond its confines might not really understand.We think that sometimes
the languages universities use are a bit like a foreign language.We’ve already used some of
it here –what kinds of words have we used in this book that you’d not heard before you
enrolled in a university? What ordinary words took on special meanings inside university
context? We found a very interesting website that has tried to list some of these terms –
see what you make of them: www.vocabulary.com/lists/237318
The point we’re making here is that you might notice that we deploy a particular way
of communicating with one another that sounds a bit different from the words and the
use of words that is carried out beyond the university itself. And, there’s more to it than
just the specific use of words and terms that have special meanings inside the university
culture as opposed to outside it. There’s particular value invested in the ways insiders
communicate with one another. Here’s an exercise for you: grab hold of the informa-
tion that advises you how to undertake academic writing, from your academic skills or
study centre. They’ll all express a few key characteristics of academic writing –it will be
formal, structured, supported by evidence, organised in the form of an argument, stuff
like that. Plagiarism will certainly be front and centre. These qualities aren’t just stylistic;
they reflect the core values of the university –let’s investigate plagiarism to get some
insight into this.
Plagiarism –let’s make some uncommon sense

Have a good look at your university’s rules on plagiarism.There’s some pretty serious stuff
going on in these rules.The common-sense reaction you might be having is,‘Oh boy.This
is serious, this plagiarism business. I’m actually a bit scared –what if I do it and don’t mean
to?’ If that’s the reaction you’re having, you’re responding to the usually fairly sternly
worded penalties and consequences for plagiarising.You’re probably also registering just a
wee bit of reassurance because many universities now make students turn their papers in
via a software gateway that detects plagiarism and warns the student that their paper is not
going to be regarded as their own work. Plagiarism is pretty much presented as cheating,
and it’s not going to be tolerated.
Fair enough, nobody likes a cheat. But what would anthropologists make of plagiarism?
University cultures across the western world universally make a big deal out of plagiarism.
They negatively sanction it, they apply stiff penalties to it, and they try hard to prevent it
and detect instances of it by a blend of education and surveillance. There’s probably not
much worse of an academic crime you could commit –it’s really, really bad. Jonathan Hall
(2005) remarks that it’s so bad that academics have a visceral reaction to it, noting that:
5

From the instructor’s perspective, plagiarism is that growing discomfort we feel as we
read a student paper –at first unconscious but gradually forcing its way forward until
we can no longer avoid knowing –that results first in annoyance and resentment, later
in anger and indignation, and sometimes in a feeling of despair and disgust. Because
we as instructors do not find plagiarism so much as plagiarism finds us. It forces itself
into our consciousness against our will, and we sometimes experience it as a sense of
intimate violation. Augustus M. Kolich (1983) admits that I have always responded
to plagiarism as a personal insult against me and my teaching … “[P]‌lagiarism cuts
deeply into the integrity and morality of what I teach my students, and it sullies my
notions about the sanctity of my relationship to students. It is a lie, and although lies
are often private matters between two people, plagiarism is never merely private
because it breaches a code of behavior that encompasses my classroom, my teaching,
my university, and my society …” (pp. 143, 145). Kolich articulates, I think, a very
familiar and powerful emotion that many of us have felt when we come across a case
of plagiarism. Beneath the outrage is an implied definition of plagiarism that is so
widespread and so seemingly natural that we may term it ‘the traditional consensus’:
plagiarism is a crime that offends the basic values of the academic community. We
feel powerless against it, and a desire for revenge begins to grow: offenders, we growl,
must be dealt with severely.
(Hall, 2005:5)
Wow –if you’re trying to understand a culture, you definitely can’t afford to ignore some-
thing that it makes this big of a deal over. So, let’s approach what is said about plagiarism
like anthropologists –let’s make some uncommon sense out of it. It’s worth noting that
Hall mentions ‘disgust’ and a ‘visceral’ response to plagiarism; you might well imagine the
plagiarised words of others in your paper as matter out of place –that is, the words are
loosed from a system that requires them to be tightly stitched to a system of recognition
(that in the publications world includes the accrual of prestige that itself may be trans-
ferred into real capital in promotions for academics and so on). Out of their proper place
in a system, they threaten and menace. But maybe you’re not as into Mary Douglas as
Simone is –but you also know why she is –you’re not the one who picked up a turd from
the bottom of a swimming pool, so give her a break already. Let’s look at some other ideas.
Uncommon-sense idea #1
Set against the common-sense notion that plagiarism is the theft of someone else’s ori-
ginal ideas is the idea that it is an expression of particular cultural values. John Pickering
and Gary Hornby (2005) argue that the concept is laden with Enlightenment values
of individuality and reason; these come under threat when someone plagiarises, so it’s
offensive to a dearly held value system. They further argue that this only makes sense
to Western individuals –and not so much to those who have internalised Confucianist
knowledge/value systems, in which faithful replication of the master’s words might not
be offensive at all. This difference is leveraged, argue Pickering and Hornby, to explain
why Western universities brutally punish plagiarism; it’s offensive to core values, especially
about the pursuit and production of original knowledge (something held at the core of
university values). That’s a bit of a different notion than just accepting that plagiarism is
cheating; it goes beneath that to try to make uncommon sense of the ‘badness’ of pla-
giarism, rather than accepting that it’s ‘bad’ in and of itself. But Ryan and Louie (2007)
56

don’t like this uncommon-sense explication very much; they dispute it by suggesting that
it is actually full of some pretty stereotypical assumptions. Here’s what they say about it:
Discourses of ‘internationalisation’ of the curriculum of Western universities often

describe the philosophies and paradigms of ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ scholarship in
binary terms, such as ‘deep/surface’, ‘adversarial/harmonious’, and ‘independent/
dependent’. In practice, such dichotomies can be misleading. They do not take
account of the complexities and diversity of philosophies of education within and
between their educational systems. The respective perceived virtues of each system
are often extolled uncritically or appropriated for contemporary economic, polit-
ical or social agendas. Critical thinking, deep learning, lifelong and lifewide learning
are heralded as the outcomes of Western education but these concepts are often
under-theorised or lack agreed meanings. Equally fuzzy concepts such as ‘Asian
values’ or ‘Confucian education’ are eulogised as keys to successful teaching and
learning when Asia prospers economically. They are also used to explain perceived
undesirable behaviour such as plagiarism and uncritical thinking when Asian econ-
omies do not do so well. We argue that in general, educationists should be aware of
the differences and complexities within cultures before they examine and compare
between cultures.
(Ryan and Louie, 2007:404)
They certainly have a point; could we say that everyone in the West is an ‘adversarial and
independent’ thinker? Probably not. There is a definite whiff of stereotypical thinking –
just the sort of thing that anthropologists would want to avoid. Perhaps this isn’t the
greatest uncommon sense-making after all. Let’s have another go.
Another idea that tries to get beneath the common sense notion that ‘plagiarism is
cheating and we don’t like cheating’ is based on the idea that universities have changed a
lot over the last few decades. As Thornton writes,
‘skills’ have supplanted traditional forms of knowledge in the public imagination as

to what is deemed to be most desirable in a university education, as they have come
to be associated with modernisation, success and productivity … Universities are
therefore expected to demonstrate their ‘usefulness’ by training large numbers of
productive workers to support the new knowledge economy and by generating aca-
demic capitalism through research.
(Thornton, 2015:3)
In other words, the days of the classic liberal university education –when learning
was undertaken for learning’s sake, and when students didn’t have to acquire their
degrees simply to get jobs –are set against the current conditions of academic capit-
alism. Herein, students are not so much learners as they are clients; they want to quickly
and efficiently absorb the knowledge they need to acquire the degree that they will
convert into employment. The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (1997:315) has argued
that this shift has involved the emergence of new teaching practices that, as Bakalaki
(2021) explains:
57

leave no room for ambiguity, contradiction or hesitation and value clarity above logic,
itemization above drawing connections and simplification above argument building.
Thus, power point presentations, which are emblematic of these new practices, usu-
ally involve the projection of terms and concepts that are disconnected save for the
bullet points that make them equivalent. Such presentations simplify not only the
circumstances and operations to which they refer, but also the prospect of simplifica-
tion itself; they are ideal for copying and memorizing.
(Bakalaki, 2021:29)
Michael Fotiadis (2015:110–111) argues the same point; he contrasts a paucity of student
curiosity and a reluctance to complicate certainties with their eagerness to learn ‘the facts’
and know ‘the last word of science’ and connects these with the shift from education to
training –or the transmission of knowledge as commodity to be traded in the market (see
also Brown, 2017; Fynsk, 2017; Graeber, 2014; 2015).
Relatedly, some of the forms of assessing student knowledge in place in the modern
university encourage students into rote learning –and into doing things like memorising
textbook entries that encapsulate the knowledge they know is most valuable. Plagiarism is
pretty easy to do under those circumstances –and, as you might imagine, students resorting
to rote learning and replication of knowledge is anathema to people –academics –who
see themselves as producers and disseminators of original knowledge. The very idea that
all of that could be bypassed, that students could acquire a degree without engaging
with the knowledge that they produce and disseminate is bound to make them have a
visceral reaction. Finding and reproducing verbatim the passages that seem to fit often
involves the simplification of complex ideas; this too is offensive to academics –especially
anthropologists –as Balalaki points out:
When at a loss as to the right answers, students often resort to common sense
notions and clichés of the sort that anthropology instructors spend much time and
energy deconstructing: geographic, biological or psychological determinisms and
essentialisms; evolutiary assumptions about the progress that comes with civilization;
aphorisms about the value of democracy, the family, environmental protection or
gender equality … Over the years many students have explained to me that they use
such stereotypes because they hope that doing so will work for them as it did in high
school rather than because they find them meaningful or true or even care about the
issues they concern.
(Bakalaki, 2021:29)
We like this idea. Suddenly, plagiarism isn’t just offensive because it’s cheating –it goes to
the very heart of academic identities and the whole purpose they give to teaching.
Here’s another one for good measure.
Plagiarism is thought of not only as cheating but as stealing. What is taken is the ori-
ginal contribution to knowledge that someone has made. This is interesting because it
suggests that a gap existed in knowledge that was filled by an original contribution.
Really, though, what’s more likely to have happened is that the person has repuzzled
existing contributions. This could mean that they have searched for something the first
58

academic missed, or presumed. This happened above, in idea #1. Pickering and Hornby
(2005) proposed that plagiarism was offensive not so much because it was cheating, but
because it stood at odds with Enlightenment values. Ryan and Louie (2017) said that idea
was very stereotypical –that’s a new contribution to knowledge based firmly in the first
contribution –it points out a presumption and makes a big deal out of that. They’re not
filling a gap, they’re repuzzling the position of the first academics, Pickering and Hornby.
If a student copied from Ryan and Louie, we might say that they were the victims of the
theft, but actually, Ryan and Louie and Pickering would each have been the victims. That
is, it would also be a theft from those academics upon whom Pickering depended for his
repuzzling of their work.What does all of this mean? It means that a whole community of
academics is impacted –not just one –and so plagiarism is an offence to us all.
Again, this is an idea that attempts to understand what organises the angry, strong, vis-
ceral reaction that academics have to plagiarism, rather than simply accepting that’s just
how things are. Now, over to you –what do you think? When you look at the material
that this culture produces about its values –and what offends its members –what do you
make of that –not just as a student who must observe the rules of the university, but as a
researcher who is trying to make uncommon sense of the culture? Are you more or less
convinced by any of these explanations? Why? Come back to this exercise and see what
you think as your competency in anthropology grows.
Exercises: Let’s make some uncommon spatial sense
Mapping exercise #1
Don’t take the physical manifestation of the university for granted. Grab a campus
map and have a good look at where all the disciplines are located. Are they organised
in any way you can discern? What’s closest to the centre, to the periphery? Is that
meaningful? Where is the Chancelry, the various libraries? How does the physical
organisation of the place map on to the status of the disciplines? How would you
find out what status they have? There are international rankings you could look at
(like the QS rankings, for instance, which you can search by subject: www.topunive
rsities.com/subject-rankings/2021?utm_source=topnav).You can think about the
historical presence of the ‘founding’ disciplines, too. Maybe you can even figure out
how things have changed over time in terms of where the various disciplines are
housed.We’ll revisit the idea that space gathers power, repels and attracts, rejects and
invites; it’s much more than just the backdrop to social life, but this is a good start
towards that kind of thinking that we’ll do in a much more detailed way in our
chapter on Things.
Mapping exercise #2
You could do another mapping exercise by recourse to that university map you
have: look at the names of the buildings. Are they named for men, or women?
How many for men, women? What kinds? At the ANU, where Simone worked
while she was doing most of the writing for this book, the bulk of the service pro-
vision and student care buildings are named after women; the vast majority of the
59
research buildings are named after men. If we’re right in saying that space is more
than the backdrop against which we act, and has real effects on us, then this is prob-
ably bearing down on particular bodies in particular ways. That’s why we think it’s
good to take this exercise beyond the map. Go stand or sit in the shadows of these
buildings. See how it makes you feel, and record that, too. How else do you think the
space says something about the university as a place? Who does it welcome, repel?
Take note. Doing this sort of exercise also lets you know where you can and cannot
go on campus. This is more than just practical wisdom of an orienting kind. What
we mean is that some places are inaccessible because they’re not meant for you, and
you can feel it. If you’re a woman on campus, maybe you think some parts of the
campus are dangerous at certain times of the night (and maybe even the day, too).
Some places are ‘important’ and are weighted as such –they might actually stop you
from entering them in their very physical manifestations, even though there won’t
be a sign to tell you that it’s off limits. Like where? Which spaces have that impact
on you? Particular discipline buildings, the Law School, the Medical school? The
offices of academics? Take note of them.You’ll also realise quickly that the different
groups of people we talked about –gardeners, administrators, executives, students,
postgrad students –express their different relations with the university in spatial
terms. No one accesses all of it –it’s a great way to start thinking about the different
participations and relationships people have and how they have them.
Other mapping exercises

You could conduct other types of mapping exercises, like that conducted by Uma
Dingemans, a student in Andy’s first-year anthropology class, which gives us an uncommon
sense of how the placing and labelling of things in a student college speaks to issues of
public and private and senses of alienation and unfamiliarity of the kind raised by Tristan
Penfold’s anthropological study of small talk and campus life seen earlier in this chapter.
Communal fridges and the individual

By Uma Dingemans
University residential colleges are places where students make the transition from
their nuclear families, where they have a secure position as an individual within the
family group, to a larger community setting, where their sense of individual security
is altered. I am interested in how students’ reactions to these changes can be seen in
the way they use communal fridges. To see these reactions, I observed the residen-
tial college I live in, with a focus on 13 communal fridges, that are spread across 11
different spaces throughout the building’s four levels and are used by 96 students.
Starting on the first floor I found two fridges. In the first were vegetables, tea and
leftovers, and in the second were beverages, dips and soymilk. Of these items none
were labelled. Descending to the second floor, I started with a fridge in the secluded
‘Joske’ wing. In this fridge I found juice, soymilk, dairy products, eggs, leftovers
60
and strawberries, all unlabelled, as well as two labelled items belonging to two
different students –custard and coffee. In the freezer were unlabelled gyozas and ice
cream. Nearby in Manifold, a section without many student rooms, I found a fridge
containing unlabelled soymilk, alcohol, softdrinks, leftovers and one unlabelled
container of Weis mango sorbet. Next I looked in the Grad Flat, an apartment
that has been repurposed into four student rooms. This fridge was very full, with
condiments, dairy products, eggs, beverages, frozen food and bread. Four of these
items were labelled by two students who live in the Grad Flat: mayonnaise, butter,
pesto and yoghurt. Of the last two fridges on the second floor, the first contained
unlabelled beverages, dairy products, dips, eggs, leftovers, vegetables, condiments and
labelled Weis sorbet and the second fridge contained condiments, dairy products,
leftovers, fruit, vegetables and three containers of eggs (two of which were labelled).
On the first floor I observed another three fridges. In the first floor Joske fridge
were dairy products, eggs, beverages, vegetables and frozen foods; the only labelled
item was an onion. In the next fridge were labelled vegetables, fruit, dairy products
and leftovers. Next was a kitchenette with two fridges. In the bigger fridge were
labelled eggs, leftovers, dairy products, vegetables, ice cream and frozen food. Nearly
all items were labelled except for some fruit and vegetables. In the smaller fridge was
an apple, a labelled jar of garlic and on a shelf a collection of labelled butter, eggs
and strawberries all belonging to one student. Last was the communal ground floor,
with a dining hall, library, kitchenette, study rooms, common rooms and a small
number of student rooms. In the main kitchenette fridge, I found unlabelled milk
provided for all students, a shelf of labelled jams, labelled fruit and beverages and a
tub of hummus with the label ‘free to take’. The final fridge in the college was in a
multipurpose common room on groundfloor.This fridge was filled with unlabelled
items; alcohol, beverages, dairy products, jams, probiotics and tablets, fruit, bread and
ice cream.
As observed, the way students stored food and how they signalled ownership
of food varied across the 13 fridges depending on the location of the fridges. The
ground floor kitchenette fridge is the most communal fridge of the college due
to its location, which is reflected by its storage of unlabelled milk provided for
all students and the tub of ‘free to take’ hummus. In response to the communal
nature of this fridge, students used labels to assert their ownership of items and
individualism as seen in a collection of labelled jams, fruit and beverages. A similar
occurrence is seen in the first-floor kitchen, where a first-year student, used to a
secure fridge used by only a few well-known family members, placed their labelled
food into the smaller of the two fridges in an attempt to create a private space
within the communal context of the shared fridge. For students such as these, the
transition from a nuclear family environment to a college community is difficult
and unfamiliar and so labelling allows students to define what is private and what is
public in a fridge where security is not guaranteed.
One of the coping mechanisms used by students was the recreation of nuclear
family structures. In the ground-floor common room fridge all the items were left
unlabelled despite its location on the communal ground floor. This fridge is pri-
marily used by a group of second-year students who regularly use this common
room and thus feel a sense of ownership over this space. Those who use this fridge
61
feel secure enough to leave items such as medicine, ice cream and alcohol unlabelled
because they have created their own pseudo-nuclear family. The sense of security
gained through the creation of nuclear family-like groupings of students is evident
in other fridges across the college. In the Grad Flat, the fridge is used as would be
typically expected in a family home, with many items and only a few labels. These
labels are only used by students to differentiate between items of which there are
multiple, such as butter or condiments. Thus labels in this circumstance are used
to avoid confusion and for collective benefit with a focus on the items themselves,
rather than the individual owners.
The nuclear family structure is also easily recreated in secluded locations such as
on the third floor where the fridges are physically far from the communal ground
floor and in the second-and third-floor Joske kitchens which are only used by a
small number of students. These students do not feel the need to label every item
such as in the first-floor kitchen, as they trust and feel secure within the small family
like groupings created by their fridges’ locations.
Students transitioning from a nuclear family structure to a larger community
use labelling and food organisation in shared fridges to establish their position and
identity within an unfamiliar communal context or try to recreate nuclear family-
like structures, a behaviour that builds trust between students, allowing them to feel
secure within the communal environment of the residential college.
Keep doing exercises like these. Keep applying this kind of thinking when you notice
something that you’re told is important to university education –like plagiarism –and
that you know is important to the experience of being a student –like the social diversity
of the student body and feelings of unfamiliarity from being in a new milieu. Keep doing
it when you’re presented with a map of the campus. Keep noticing your own visceral
reactions to being in this space. And, take note of them on purpose –by learning how to
take note anthropologically –the subject of our next chapter.

Hold on to what you learned from the exercises in this chapter because the next chapter
takes them a step further.They share in common the intention to expand your anthropo-
logical imagination, and help you to keep getting that orientation to uncommon know-
ledge. Here’s one more bit of inspiration before you go to the next chapter –a little idea
connecting women and umbrellas, by Stella Burgess:
Girly brolliesBy Stella Burgess
Anthropology can be used in everyday life; simply having an anthropological out-

look makes it easier to notice discrete features of your environment, from small
things like the number of women who use an umbrella instead of a raincoat, to
systemic and ingrained practices in our culture. I have found that not only does
learning anthropology at university set you up with a fantastic approach to, and
62
understanding of the world around you, but using anthropology in the univer-
sity atmosphere can serve as a case study or sample population for the cultural
issues within larger society. As universities involve people from different cultural
backgrounds coming together, they are the perfect breeding ground for anthropo-
logical minds; those who may notice the intricacies of the social behaviours and cul-
tural norms surrounding them, and who take the further step in questioning these
behaviours and ideals; that is, without always attempting to answer such questions.
I don’t know if I’m onto something or not; but raising the questions orients me in
new ways, and they might inform how I ask questions, think about things, in the
future.
One of the first assessable anthropological tasks that I ever did was a ‘fieldnotes’
task; exactly as it sounds, this involved going into the ‘field’, which in my case was
a café on our university campus, and taking notes on our surroundings. We were
then expected to expand on themes discovered and trends observed. I was amazed
by how an exercise as simple as sitting down and observing the world around you
can lead to some complex realisations about the very fabric of our society. For me,
these discoveries happened to be centred in the unlikely ways in which gendered
relationships with challenging weather conditions may differ. Taking fieldnotes is a
fantastic skill to develop, especially in university, as it can help frame invaluable life-
long perspectives and mindsets, enabling individuals to observe and understand the
ways in which we as a society interact. Not only does this understanding leave us
more well-informed but enables us to interact with and make changes to the world
around us.
In my fieldnotes task I outlined and discussed a number of observations regarding
the ways in which women and men interact in social settings, specifically a rainy
day in a university café.
The key findings of this task were centred on the ways in which gendered relations
with rainy weather might differ, which was specifically made clear by the observed
trends regarding the different sexes’ use of umbrellas. Sitting at a small table with a
friend, I spent an hour-and-a-half simply observing the environment around me.
Whilst I did not approach the fieldnotes process with an aim of observing differences
between how males and females a) conducted themselves in response to the wet
weather, and b) acted in the public space of a café, these differences soon became
clear as I watched individuals and groups enter the café. First, I noticed significant
trends in whether people would leave their umbrella with the pile of umbrellas at
the door or bring it in with them into the café. I observed that women, most of
whom had umbrellas rather than raincoats, typically kept their umbrellas with them
when they entered the café. In comparison, the men who had umbrellas tended
to leave them outside the front door before entering. These simple observations
prompted a series of questions in my final reflection on the process.
During this first semester of the course, we learnt that in fieldwork you must
suspend judgements and opinions and be open to understanding other ways of life.
Whilst the environment that I was observing was one familiar to me, I had to keep
this learning in mind in order to prevent making judgements about my observations.
In other words, I was aware of not making causal inferences about the process.
The fieldnotes process outlined to me the importance of being open-minded in
63
anthropology; asking questions without trying to determine a definitive answer or

relationship to explain them. A lot of questions and ideas regarding my observations
came to me after the fieldnotes process, even in day-to-day life. I made note of
these and was sure to add them to my fieldnotes proper. I encountered some dif-
ficulties in maintaining a broad perspective throughout the note-taking process, as
I could recognise how easy it could be to fixate on specific ideas or people. My
observations were originally focused simply on those who walked in the door. The
fact that this soon became a gender issue may reflect just how clear these divisions
really are when you look at the uncommon knowledge of environments. Whilst
I was conscious of avoiding tunnel vision when taking and reflecting on notes, my
observations did seem to naturally go down a route of gender observations, which
I leaned into and explored.
Some of the key findings of this task are centred on the observed trends regarding
gendered use of umbrellas.Women were observed to not only prefer umbrellas over
other forms of rainwear in comparison to men, but more women also brought their
umbrellas inside the café than men, who left theirs outside the door. Twenty-one
women brought their umbrellas inside with them throughout the duration of my
observations, compared to three women who left their umbrellas in the pile at the
door. In comparison, six men brought their umbrellas inside with them and 11 men
left their umbrellas in the pile at the door. Further reflection on these observed
trends prompted me to consider the broader implications of the female tendency
to prefer umbrellas to raincoats. I was particularly interested in the idea that these
trends may be the result of how members of modern society are conditioned to
preserve the presentation of the female body in challenging conditions. Expanding
on this, I considered the ways in which these values stem from an inherent sense of
low self-worth amongst women.
On further reflection of these ideas, prompted by feedback from my lecturer,
I looked into the idea that these trends may be the result of how we as a society are
taught to preserve the presentation of the female body in challenging conditions,
such as bad weather. At her recommendation, I read Iris Young’s article, ‘Throwing
Like a Girl’, which supported this idea, as well as raising a number of new questions
surrounding the ways in which the female body is treated by a patriarchal society.
Young’s essays, which aim to examine the ways in which perceptions of the female
body relate to confidence and task performance, can be used to explain what
I understand to be behavioural tendencies as a result of modern patriarchal society’s
conditioning of women’s values and self-relationships. Young raises a number of
alarmingly relevant points, taking into account the 1980 context of the essays’
publication.
In Part IV of ‘Throwing Like a Girl’, Young outlines her belief that ‘Women
in sexist society are physically handicapped … we learn to live … in accordance
with the definition that patriarchal culture assigns to us, we are physically inhibited,
confined, positioned, and objectified.’ Here,Young perfectly encapsulates my finding
that women’s behaviour in social settings is impacted by the ingrained expectations
of themselves to perform in a specific way for a male-dominated society, an idea
which helps to explain the observed tendency of females to use umbrellas in wet
weather rather than raincoats. The reasoning behind this lies with the assumption
64
that women prefer to use umbrellas over raincoats in order to preserve their outward
appearance in challenging conditions; physical features such as hair, clothing and
makeup. Young further suggests that women are ‘culturally and socially denied by
the subjectivity, autonomy, and creativity which are definitive of being human and
which in patriarchal society are accorded the man’, which outlines the complicated
position of a woman in the modern world; neither considered the level of ‘human’
that is afforded to a man, but is still human enough to have subjective opinion.
She point outs, however, that because a woman in a patriarchal society is still a
human existence, she must live a contradiction: ‘as a human she is a free subject
who participates in transcendence, but her situation as a woman denies her that
subjectivity and transcendence.’ Young’s article aim to examine the ways in which
the modalities of feminine bodily comportment, motility and spatiality display the
same inner conflict between subjectivity and being a mere object (Young, 1980).
Whilst society’s expectations of and attitude towards women may have changed on
a surface level since this was written, in many ways this observation carries into my
current context of living in 2021, the idea that a woman fits into a certain group in
terms of being a human, but her sex limits the ways that she can carry herself and
live within a patriarchal society. This is backed up by my findings, which suggest
that the observed trend where behaviour of females in a public setting (and in chal-
lenging weather conditions) was so different to those of males, may be driven by
collective societal attitudes towards the way that women carry themselves in public
and private spheres, often in a way that may be more akin to that of an object than
an individual person.
The observations made about the differences between male and female tenden-
cies to use umbrellas over raincoats in wet weather, and the insights made during the
writing process prompted me to, using Young’s work as a guide, look further into
the ways in which modern patriarchal societal values impact women’s behaviour in
social settings. Young makes the apt conclusion that ‘The source of this objectified
bodily existence is in the attitude of others regarding her, but the woman herself
often actively takes up her body as a mere thing. She gazes at it in the mirror, worries
about how it looks to others, prunes it, shapes it, moulds and decorates it.’ Using this
understanding to shape my thinking about female behaviour, I concluded that it is
this self-awareness that drove many of the observed behaviours in the café, specif-
ically those regarding gendered use of umbrellas. Further, this conclusion supports
Young’s notion that the ways in which women see themselves, as a result of the
ingrained values of modern patriarchal society, is reflected in how they carry them-
selves socially.
This was substantiated by other trends that I observed. When reflecting on the
observed trends in gendered behaviour within the line to the cashier, I made the
finding that both unconscious and conscious forms of behaviour were adopted by
women while in line, as a result of the aforementioned conditioning of women by
a patriarchal society. The first of these observed trends is centred on the previously
mentioned idea that women’s behaviour in social circumstances is driven by their
patriarchally informed view of themselves and resulting low self-esteem. This is a
conscious type of behaviour, as the women in line deliberately behaved in a cer-
tain way so as to give a specific impression or outward appearance. An example of
65
this is my finding that unaccompanied women who were waiting in line for the
cashier would more often than not wear headphones, which seemed to be an indi-
cator of a desire to signal to others their disinterest in social engagement. Whilst
this observation is based on assumption, and the suggested meaning behind such
behaviour could potentially be due to a subconscious projection of these desires, it
is important to consider that an assumed low sense of self-worth, as suggested by
Young, may likely be a driving factor behind the observed hyper-aware and poten-
tially defensive behaviour of women in the public space of the café.
Another suggestion of Young’s, that ‘women often approach a physical engage-
ment with things with timidity, uncertainty and hesitancy’ supports my observation
that women tended to, unless in the company of another person, look solely at
their phones or other devices. They typically tended to look up from these devices
only out of necessity, and even then they would simply glance quickly ahead of
them. This trend is an example of the next of the two observed behaviours of
women waiting in line for the cashier: that females’ habits and their way of carrying
themselves as dictated by the patriarchal society that they have grown up in may
subconsciously influence their behaviour in line for the cashier. Examples of this
subconscious socially influenced behaviour are given by Young, ‘The young girl
acquires many subtle habits of feminine body comportment –walking like a girl,
tilting her head like a girl, standing and sitting like a girl, gesturing like a girl …
The girl learns actively to hamper her movements … Thus she develops a bodily
timidity which increases with age. In assuming herself as a girl, she takes herself up
as fragile.’ Further, I was observed that women who were not looking at a device
or other means of distraction typically fixated a stare towards an object in front of
them, past others in the queue and past the cashier. In comparison, men provided a
more inquisitive outward appearance, even if they were on their phones, conspicu-
ously observing the room around them with what projected as more confidence
than women. The mental processes of these behaviours can be encapsulated by
Young’s belief that ‘we have more of a tendency than men to greatly underestimate
our bodily capacity … [and often] decide … that the task is beyond us, and thus
give it less than our full effort.’Women clearly have been conditioned by patriarchal
society on a conscious and unconscious basis to perform in a certain way in social
situations so as to perpetuate this carefully curated image of what it means to be a
woman in a patriarchal society.
Another theme that I encountered whilst taking my fieldnotes was transparency.
I first noticed this when taking note of the way that the café’s windowed layout
enabled me to notice small anthropological details that I perhaps wouldn’t have
noticed otherwise. This setting really put the idea of transparency in the forefront
of my mind throughout the task, which I believe enabled me to identify larger-
scale ways in which transparency effected my subjects of observation. As I began
to expand on the idea of society’s desire to preserve presentation of female body
in challenging weather, I began to notice other ways in which the theme of trans-
parency related to my study. For example, the use of umbrellas may be preferred
by women not only to conserve their outward appearance, but also simply because
they do not wish to visually impede on their outward appearance during wet wea-
ther. In other words, they do not wish to ruin their perfectly assembled appearance
6
by covering any aspect of it up with a raincoat.This again ties into my previous con-
clusion that women are conditioned from birth to preserve their bodies as objects
for public ‘consumption’ and scrutiny, even to the point of subconsciously favouring
umbrellas over raincoats in wet weather to aid in preserving their appearance. This
exploration soon turned into more of an in-depth exploration into the ways that
women’s bodies are treated by larger society, and the role that transparency plays
in this. In the broadest sense, the ways in which women are metaphorically trans-
parent in society is an interesting factor to take note of, as many women experience
feelings of being transparent within patriarchal society. This ties into Young’s idea
that women are limited in patriarchal society by their treatment as both a subjective
individual and an object of public consumption.
This further exploration into the observed trends of gendered relations with wet
weather indicated that there are noticeable discrepancies in the way that women
behave in social settings in comparison to men, and that these differences are
ingrained into modern society. By drawing and expanding on a number of ideas
from Iris Young’s ‘Throwing Like A Girl’, I have been able to examine a number of
ingrained values that women in modern patriarchal society possess, and the ways in
which these values impact behaviour in public settings, as well as tendencies to try
to conserve presentation of the female body in challenging conditions.
Notes
1 She thinks that they might be offered other opportunities if they’re involved as participants in
communities of practice, if they’re invited to act as participants in new pedagogies, and if the
world beyond the university is permitted to penetrate its walls.
2 If you think about this even more, you might be able to see gardening as concerned with
taxonomising flora –plants are divided into all sorts of classes –and they’re hierarchically
organised in accordance with, in Australia, a colonial history. It used to be the case that native
plants existed pretty much at the bottom of this hierarchy, with lots of European plants and
gardening styles and sensibilities at the top; the best gardens in the country were cottage gardens
filled with roses and the like that replicated English standards. Now, native flora is much more
highly valued. This hasn’t meant a wholesale revaluing of everything native though –just ask
Australian Indigenous people, whose art, artefacts, foodstuffs and medicines have been revalued
even as Indigenous people themselves suffer the highest incarceration rates, the highest death
rates at the youngest ages, and the lowest educational attainment in the country.
3 In the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) from Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
the Times Higher Education Rankings (THES) and the QS World University Rankings (QS).
4 Did you notice that term, Category 1 research? There’s four different categories of research.
Category 1 –Australian Competitive Research and Data Income Classification –is accorded the
most prestige. To be categorised as Category 1, research proposals must be assessed and rated by
a qualified and experienced selection panel, and must have publicly available selection criterial
against which all applications are assessed. The two biggest granting bodies are the Australian
Research Council and the National Health and Medicine Research Council. The funding is
pretty hard to get; there are various schemes but all have a success rate well under 20 per cent.
Category 2 comprises other Public Sector Research Income, including Australian Government
schemes and business enterprises that don’t meet the Category 1 assessment. Category 3 research
describes Industry and Other Research Income, such as that from the private sector, philan-
thropic and international sources, including research grants or contract research with Australian,
67

international industry, or non-Australian Government agencies. Funding through donations,
bequests and foundations (both Australian and international), and Category 4 comprises
Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) Research Income; that’s research income received
from a CRC in which the university was were a participant (that is, a signatory to the CRC’s
Commonwealth Agreement or Participant’s Agreement.)
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(3): 305–321.
Thornton, M. 2015. Introduction: The Retreat from the Critical. In M. Thornton (ed.), Through
A Glass Darkly:The Social Sciences Look at the Neoliberal University. Canberra: Australian National
University Press, pp 1–16.
Young, I. 1980. Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Bodily Comportment,
Motility and Spatiality, Human Studies 3 (2): 137– 156. www.jstor.org/stable/20008753
Accessed 23 August 2022.
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3 Taking notice, taking note

How do anthropologists do anthropology?

This chapter is practically based; it asks you to try your hand at taking notes like an
anthropologist does. You’ve had a wee taste of this if you’ve analysed a map, looked at
the plagiarism rules, or gone for a campus walk with an eye to how space comes to bear
itself into our experiences of the university.This chapter is an extension of those exercises,
with loads of examples for some talented students: Zahra, Elisabetta, Amy, Anna, Teesha
and Emma. The chapter adds some key techniques for making your new orientation to
the world manifest. How do you actually make fieldnotes? We’re going to get you to do a
purpose-built fieldnotes exercise, but we’ll show you loads of examples before we intro-
duce it to you at the end of this chapter.
What’s the uncommon sense to try to get from this chapter?

In this chapter, you’re being asked to compare how you take notice of ordinary, everyday
events with how you do so in an anthropological way, to produce uncommon sense
of whatever you’re looking at for the exercise. Once you have the capacity to distin-
guish between these two modes, you’ll be able to generate some uncommon sense of
social situations –that’s the start of being able to do some anthropological analysis of
your own.
What can you use this for?

Being able to do these things is not only a necessary disciplinary skill, it’s also an advanced
research skill. Being able to see the world in a way that refuses to accept the taken for
granted can be leveraged in everything, from watching the evening news for a deeper
insight into how the world is being presented to you, to demonstrating your capacity to
produce a new angle on data in an employment context.
What insights can you get into the university by thinking about how to do anthropology?
This is the perfect chapter for thinking about the university culture into which you might
have only just arrived –take some fieldnotes on a public context there and see what you
can find out. What else is a library for, besides being a repository of knowledge? How do
people use the campus? Get busy with fieldnotes –but what are they?
DOI: 10.4324/9781003273547-3
69
Taking notice: how do anthropologists do anthropology? 69
Some basics: fieldnotes

You already know that you need to operationalise an intention to see the world
anthropologically from the last c hapter –you see it like a field. But how do you actu-
ally make that into something manifest? Anthropologists take fieldnotes. But what are
fieldnotes? Fieldnotes are the manifestation of your establishment of a field. Go back to
the supermarket –remember how it’s a field when you intend seeing it anthropologically?
You might make that imagination manifest by taking notes on a page, you might take
notes on your phone, or you might take notes in your head to write down later on. This
paragraph tells you instantly that:
1. There are different kinds of fieldnotes, some distinguished by less to more refined,
some distinguished by different media;
2. The circumstances are important in deciding how you take note, and
3. Your own technological preferences and habits of hand have a bearing on how you
take note.
In respect of point number 2, if you were in the supermarket, it might be weird for
shoppers if you were to get about with a clipboard and take notes of them shopping –
but then again, it might be ok if you’re just interested in products and want to blend in,
maybe like a stocktaker. When Simone and Rowena went to the supermarket, they def-
initely didn’t consider taking notes at all, because it would have been obvious and almost
certainly would have caused the shoppers discomfort. There are loads of circumstances
where it isn’t appropriate to take notes in this way. Simone and Rowena were in the field
together, and confirmed what they were observing in a conversation that Simone then
wrote up in a scratchy way, and that you saw in Chapter 1. Rowena and Simone both
had their phones with them; they could also have taken notes on their phones in a way
that would not make people feel like they were under some kind of weird supermarket
microscope, by using the notes function, or by text messaging. Simone chose not to do
this because she’s much more comfortable with paper –not because she’s not down with
phones, but because she can tell a lot from her notes by how she wrote them, what she
underlined, little drawings she did on the side of the page to indicate a space, a mood, an
idea; even how hard she pressed her pen on the page or how quickly she wrote can tell
her something about when she got excited about what she was observing. They probably
wouldn’t have filmed their little exercise at the supermarket; that would have been very
weird for people trying to do their shopping. Teesha, who took her fieldnotes at Kmart
as part of her work for Simone’s first-year anthropology class, noticed something similar:
Teesha in the Kmart

By Teesha Shahi
As I wrote my fieldnotes, it became quite apparent to myself and others that I wasn’t
simply shopping as I was taking handwritten notes. However, I don’t believe that
they recognised that I was conducting fieldnotes since there were a few others with
notebooks, possibly for shopping lists. Despite this, I still obstructed the environment
70
70 Taking notice: how do anthropologists do anthropology?
by taking handwritten notes as I had to stop occasionally to write notes. In week 3,

we learned the techniques to take fieldnotes and their significance to anthropology.
Many of the examples were scratch notes and were handwritten, and I felt that it
was a much more natural and authentic form of notetaking than electronic notes.
I realised afterwards that it would’ve been more efficient if I had taken notes on
my phone as it could’ve allowed me to write more notes. While writing on paper,
I had to stop examining the environment and focus on my notebook. Furthermore,
taking notes on the phone would’ve looked much more natural since it would’ve
looked as if I was just texting someone.
Remember that Simone and Rowena and Teesha were taking notes in public –they were
the only ones who were seeing the supermarket as a field. It’s fine to take notes in public
to practice your skills, but it isn’t fine to make people uncomfortable while you’re doing
so. Everyone else was just doing their shopping. If they were in a situation where they’d
negotiated with a group of people to come study them, filming or another recording
technique might be just fine –depending on its suitability for what you’d be researching.
The sensory mode in which you take notes can orient you to things differently. For
instance, in her research on smoking, Simone takes fieldnotes on smell, where she locates
smells on maps, sounds, and even touch. If she was just to observe and always privilege the
visual dimensions of the field, she’d miss an awful lot of data that has been very important
to her analysis of smoking in Australia in the era of smoke-free. We love how Zahra
oriented herself to different sensory dimensions in the fieldnotes she produced, noting the
importance of temperature and sound, in the form of music:
The ice field

By Zahra Radih
Fieldnotes by Zahra Radih, Recorded 15 March 2021, skate practice at Phillip Ice Rink,
Canberra, ACT, between 6:15 –6:45pm.
Notes on the process

I took some fieldnotes on Monday, 15 March, at my local ice-skating rink in
Canberra. This was during the practice session directly before my session that I go
to every Monday, and so a lot of the people there were people I tend to see weekly.
However, there were some new faces I had not seen before. I would estimate that
there were around 17 people in the rink when I first arrived, though during the 45
minutes that I was there, more people would walk in about every 5 minutes. Upon
first arriving, the majority of people in the rink were scattered across the ice in
small groups –mainly coaches with one or two students.There were only two other
people –a man and a woman –sitting on the benches watching those on the rink.
I went into the rink alone –as I routinely would for Monday practice. While
under normal circumstances, I generally would not pay attention to where I sat on
71
the benches (I would just sit anywhere to put my skates on and to leave my things
there), this time I was conscious of finding an appropriate spot where I would be
able to take my fieldnotes on my phone without people taking notice. Therefore,
I decided to sit away from the man and woman who were sitting on the low
benches –I sat on the highest bench so that no one would be sitting behind me.
I took out my phone to start taking notes, as I thought that it would appear more
casual –and I knew that people I personally knew would most likely approach me
as per usual. I took notes on my phone for about 20 minutes, I then turned my
phone off and started taking headnotes until 6:45 p.m.(the time that my group
lesson starts). I did this because more people I knew started to walk into the rink
and I did not want to make them feel uncomfortable by taking notes on my phone,
especially because I knew that my friends would start conversing with me.
Distinction between taking fieldnotes and casual observation

Taking fieldnotes in an anthropological manner was what I found to be quite
different in many ways from casual observation. Certainly, I found myself really
trying hard to observe in a new way –by trying to focus on every little thing that
would occur to see if I would uncover something that would feel like uncommon
knowledge. I noticed things I would not otherwise pay attention to, including the
number of people there, their behaviour, how they would conduct themselves,
their movements, and the like. Taking note of these behaviours was actually rather
strenuous mentally, and so I did find it difficult to continue taking headnotes after
I had stopped taking fieldnotes on my phone. I had friends come up to me to start
having conversations, which I then lost track of my thoughts. I felt that, mentally,
I could not juggle both anthropologically taking headnotes and having a conversa-
tion with a friend. Fortunately, I was already quite satisfied with the fieldnotes I had
already managed to take down.
Themes and ideas developed

In the field, I took a focus on many things, but I think that one of the main aspects
that stood out to me was the concept of space –and the fact that space is very
interesting in the context of figure skating (this was unknown to me until now –a
form of uncommon knowledge that I think has come out of this fieldwork). The
‘field’ for ice sports is completely different to the field and space in other sporting
contexts. This field is a constantly cold environment. I found that to be a very
interesting element, as it tends to enable people to move in ways which perhaps are
not possible in other sports. In this aspect, temperature for ice sports is an important
component. Temperature is something situating –and it is felt as abnormal and
out-of-range from the normal experience of temperature which exists in our
everyday lives.
The notion of space also had me noticing the very casual sense to skating for
those who are routinely doing it (and this is something I was able to notice because
I was watching these people that I see every week). It almost seems as though skaters
forget that they are gliding on a sheet of ice in a space where your only form of
entering into that space is by putting on a pair of essentially dangerous boots. So
72
largely, entering the space of the ice rink requires the passing through of a high
level of risk and danger. I noticed that people who I had not seen before at the
rink –who appeared to be newcomers –would appear to have a very high level
of nervousness. As they would shakily get on the ice, they moved very slowly and
were very intent on not letting go of that bar on the side. I think that space involves
a high level of comfort for people to feel like they are able to exist without being
on high alert. For ice athletes –there is a high level of comfort and so that sense of
alert is not running high. However, this space is out of the comfort zone for many
people –it poses many dangers, and I definitely noticed this here.
Together with space, it was also sound and music which I thought to be enthral-
ling in this context. I realised that sound has a tendency to orient people in both
time and space –and this became very noticeable in the rink once I paid anthropo-
logical attention.When I was taking fieldnotes, I would notice that once a particular
song came on, somebody would start skating a choreographed routine, and the
other skaters would almost automatically yet subtly slide to the sides of the rink to
watch and allow space. So, even though sound is something that is public and that
does not really belong to anyone, it can actually have the effect of feeling like it
belongs to someone without having been claimed. Sound in this context also begs
for space when it has that feeling that it belongs to someone. This also made realise
that while music orients people to space, it actually also has the effect of making a
space less available to others.
My positionedness as I took the notes

I found it especially complex in some ways to focus on uncommon knowledge as
the field which I was observing was a place that I knew very well, and moreover,
I was there as I typically would be every Monday. In some ways, it was a challenge
to try and ignore my position as a regular skater, and to therefore be reflexive in my
observations. I feel as though my position as a regular skater has probably factored in
on my assumptions I make –particularly when I mention the casualness of people
practicing on the ice, and in how they appear to forget that what they are doing is
quite unusual in the everyday lives of most people. My prior experiences on the ice
have led me to feel this way and to especially observe these things.
My position as a young female with certain athletic abilities (abilities which, say,
males or older individuals may not possess) might also be an important factor in
talking about, or further researching, movement and the way that people move
in space on ice. Particularly, it may contribute to the way in which I think about
movement and the assumptions I have likely made.
How the fieldnotes relate to my anthropology lecture

In Lecture 3, we talked about fieldnotes serving as ‘aids-memoire’ (to aid with
memory). I found that my fieldnotes were very valuable in helping me remember
the themes that I focused on, particularly because I had also opted to take some
headnotes during my time on the field. The themes in my observational fieldnotes
were connected with my headnotes, and so I found it beneficial that I chose to take
both fieldnotes and headnotes in my research. Lecture 3 was also about the idea
73
that while fieldnotes remain unchanged, headnotes will change and evolve over
time. This did become quite clear to me as I moved through the process of being
out in the field, right through to writing this piece and picking out themes. The
observations I took mental note of in the field have definitely been changed and
improved on –as I formed ideas and realisations I would develop and advance my
headnotes further to expand on initial observations.
In one of the readings from Lecture 3, an extract from Fieldnotes by Roger Sanjek
(1990), the author poses that fieldnotes are for the ethnographer to read and,
when combined with headnotes, to produce meaning from. This is very accurately
how the process of fieldnotes went for me. Once I had completed my fieldwork,
reading over and over my fieldnotes had helped me to form connections with my
headnotes –which in turn helped to make sense of the observations I had written.
Hayley Calderwood also oriented herself to this fieldnotes exercise using sound. Hayley
experienced COVID-19 isolation most of all through the absence of the warm and
homely sounds of cafés, the office, the street –sound was such an everyday part of Hayley’s
life that she didn’t even notice how important it was to her sense of wellbeing until it
was gone:
Sounding out the field

By Hayley Calderwood
I explored my initial fieldwork through the theme of a soundscape –which refers

to a blend of sounds from one’s own perspective. Once things started opening back
up and the option of working from somewhere public was possible, I was the first
to jump back in. Relief in the normalcy and comforting sounds I had missed for so
long gave me pause to think –what was it about a café environment that I found so
soothing? If it wasn’t for the food, what does a café offer beyond its supposed role
of providing sustenance?
When thinking about the experience of working in an office environment before
COVID-19 lockdown, what comes back to me is the sound. Keyboards clicking,
people chatting, phones ringing. In lockdown it was the absence of sound that
I noticed the most. The stark silence and loss of camaraderie. It was noticeable
even being out and about. The roads were quiet, non-essential shops were closed,
it looked and felt like something out of a movie. As humans, we take our senses for
granted. Sound is one sense not many people notice until there is an absence of
it. However, sound is of particular importance when thinking about the impact of
other natural disasters.
In the aftermath of the 2019–20 Australian bushfires, I recall people discussing
in news articles that there were no birds singing, and a deafening silence and
overwhelming sense of loss that followed.The absence of sound, and life itself. Once
you can feel new life coming back into the environment, and hear magpies singing
74
or kookaburras laughing, it is these sounds and signs that we find most reassuring.
When contrasting this analogy with metropolitan areas, it is the soundscape of civ-
ilisation that one most notices. The hustle and bustle, construction noises, traffic,
music, and train horns just to name a few. Once lockdown was in full force, I noticed
it was this sheer absence of sound that I found most disorienting. As if we use sound
to orient ourselves to each other and the world around us. Cafés and other places
where people gather seem to be almost as homing beacons to us. We flock to them
because we crave community, the comfort of noise and the familiar bustle of home.
Did you notice that Zahra used the term ‘headnotes’? This leads us back to point number
1. Headnotes are taken without being written, but they’re not just your observations sans
paper, or film, or whatever you’re using to record. What they do is let you remember the
things that stood out to you in the field the most –they’re orienting for you. When you
leave the field, you can think back across those headnotes for the most orienting things
that stood out to you, complete with the sensory and emotional markers that made them
so –making them more like whole body-notes than just headnotes. Unlike notes set down
on paper or on a filmed record, they move along with you, helping you to track your
own position in the field and your growing knowledge of and competency in it. They are
always and, in a sense, already; you have thoughts and ideas about your field even as you’re
forming it up.
In the supermarket, Simone and Ro also took headnotes, that they shared with one
another, via vocalising them to orient themselves and each other to what stood out
for them. After she got home, Simone made some scratch notes from her headnotes.
Most of the students featured in this chapter produced scratch notes that they considered,
talked with Simone about, and wrote up before presenting the exercise. Both Simone and
Andy regularly take scratch notes in the field, too. They even have brands of fieldnote
books they like to use. They are quick, often pretty rough, notes of what’s happening,
what the ethnographer is noticing. They include all manner of bits of information. If
you’re entering a field over the long term, like Simone did when she did her doctoral
work among the members of an Australian Police Band, scratch notes tend to be really
generalised attempts at noting everything you can at the beginning. Even though the
anthropologist goes in with an idea of what they want to know about, they are trying
to orient themselves, attempting to see how their query might sit in a broader context
that they also have to understand, and probably worried that they will miss something
important. In Figure 3.1, you can see how many notebooks Simone went through in her
first two weeks in the field.
Each of the covers of these notebooks is coded ‘SP’, for ‘scratch pad’, followed by a
series of numbers, to show Simone exactly when she took the notes, and each notebook
of the series (see Figure 3.2).
In Figures 3.3–3.6, you can see what her notes look like inside the notebooks.
Notice a few things about Simone’s scratch notes. First, they are messy. Illegible, some
would say. That’s because they are for an audience of one –just for Simone. They are very
difficult to interpret and there’s some interesting shorthand going on. Simone can still
understand her fieldnotes, but not many other people can. Simone obsessively types up
her fieldnotes every day so she can relive them, so she can think about them, so she can
75
Figure 3.1 Fieldnote books.
start to notice themes coming out that she wants to pursue. Once written up, they become
searchable. And, Simone just likes having them and counts them among her most precious
possessions. She has every fieldnote she ever created, from material collections to archived
computer files and physical bound copies of her final notes (and of course, the books she
wrote from them). Is she a hoarder? No –she revisits them from time to time, in the service
of an emerging project about what else she might have made of notes. Related to
that, you’ll also notice that, well, the notes exist. They have the concreteness that writing
lends to observation –Simone wrote them, and they stayed written (while life went on
in the Police Band). This is part of Simone’s fascination with revisiting them –what life
did she miss by fixing one story in writing? You’ll also see that the notes have all sorts of
things in them, like little map-like drawings, quotes, orientations to space, timetables for the
band’s day, and time stamps.There’s page numbers, too.Those latter things –page numbers,
time stamps, orientations, lend a structure to the notes and serve to locate Simone back
in the field in space and time. The many things that make up the fieldnotes –drawings
and so on –remind us that fieldnotes aren’t always just text.You’ll see a reference on one
of the pages to ‘SK010’; this refers to a Sketchpad series in which Simone made rapid
line drawings of everyday life in the band. She also took photos, sound recordings, videos,
genealogies; she made maps, and collected drawings and writing that band members made
of Simone, including an article one member wrote for the band newsletter.
76
Figure 3.2 Fieldnote book cover.
There’s other kinds of collections that make it into the anthropologists’ collections,
too: things people produce about themselves, letters they might write the ethnographer,
material objects that might be important and, interestingly, journals that the anthropolo-
gist might keep separate to collections of materials and observations. Journals can
be a device that the anthropologist can use to keep track of their own responses to and
feelings about the field. Remember how Malinowski’s private field diaries set out his
feelings about his informants? These can go wrong, but they can also keep track of ideas
to pursue, hopes for the fieldwork, reflections on the process. Some of these things are
included in the exercise we’re asking you to do in this chapter, because they provide
really acute opportunities to reflect on how you’re ‘getting’ or understanding anthro-
pology so far.You can see that Zahra’s notes contain a ‘Notes on the process’ section, in
which she reflects on how she came to figure out something important that wound up
orienting her notes in particular ways, and building her knowledge of anthropological
principles and practices.
7
Figure 3.3 Page from fieldnote book 1.
The notes an anthropologist collects over time tend to become increasingly focused.
This is because the anthropologist does not collect piles and piles of data and, then, after
a period of time, turn to analysing it all. Analysis occurs in the same moment; that’s part
of making uncommon sense. You need to be able to subject your own presumptions
about what you’re finding to scrutiny, including the nice, neat question you went into the
field with. Usually, many avenues of exploration become available for the anthropologist
to consider as they build a picture of everyday life; the angle depends as much on the
data coming to the anthropologist as it does on their interests. The notes change shape,
reflecting the increasingly tight focus on the angle the anthropologist and the data take.
So, you can see that there’s a range of notes that anthropologists take –some might be
collections, videos, sound recordings, paper notes, drawings. You can see that headnotes
accompany the journey from scratch notes to the anthropologist’s writing up of their
fieldnotes into a searchable document, archiving their collections, and revisiting their
notes. But what do you actually do in the field?
78
Being there
You can tell that the anthropologist is taking note of things, but this isn’t everything that
happens. When you’re in a field, you’re generally participating in the lives of the people
you’re trying to understand. You learn a lot by just being in the way that people you’re
with operationalise human being.You learn a lot by hanging out. One thing you’d prob-
ably learn fairly quickly is that you’d be a poor guest among the people you’re studying
if all you did was take notes. That’s why we call fieldwork participant observation. The flow
of action has got to be disrupted in order to observe and to write or otherwise record.
You’re always ‘on’, but it’s a balance that isn’t always easy to strike. This tells you that all
the social relationships that you’d need to observe in an ordinary guest-host relationship
still need to be done. It’s hard to be an ethnographer under these circumstances, and you
often have to remind yourself and the people you’re with that that’s what you’re there to
do. Doing that helps protect people, too; if they forget you’re an ethnographer, they might
tell you things that they didn’t mean to. The line between ethnographer and friend can
79
get slippery and hard to negotiate. And, fieldnotes can get in the way of the very flow
of life you’re trying to get into. That’s hard, too! So, being in the field entails precisely
that –being –participating in life with others, and simultaneously taking that specific
anthropological note we’re always banging on about.You’ll see that even though the stu-
dent authors in this chapter did not actually speak to anyone –that is, they only did nat-
uralistic observation –it was still pretty hard for them to keep engaged in the social world
and simultaneously take note.
Teesha noticed this when she visited a Kmart to take some notes. It’s where Teesha
also usually works, so she made some informed decisions before she even got to the field:
I arrived during the day’s peak shopping period and counted an estimate of over
250 customers within the store throughout my stay. People came both alone and in
groups, and the most prevalent type of crowd were small families.
Teesha knew when this period would be, and wanted to capture lots of interactions in the
store, but it led her to a challenge: she couldn’t navigate while taking her notes, as she was
taking them physically, on paper:
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Figure 3.6 Friends of the Police Band Newsletter, featuring Simone Dennis.
I wandered alone, walking along the main paths and occasionally slipping into an
aisle for better observation. Due to the boisterous crowd, it was challenging to
navigate while taking notes, and I was forced to keep moving to avoid creating add-
itional traffic. The store itself was separated into kids, clothing, and home divisions
and each area were further split into smaller sections. I walked through all areas
several times and visited the main points such as the registers, fitting rooms, and the
service desk. Overall, I stayed within the store for approximately an hour longer
than the average time spent. The prominent differences between anthropological
fieldnotes and general notetaking that I discovered were my lack of involvement
within the store and my observation techniques … I solely observed the crowd
without obstructing the natural incidents. This made me more aware of my position
and role in the store. I had to avoid occupying people’s space or involving
myself in the scene.
Teesha also quickly came up against the frustrations of not being able to talk to people for
this exercise. She cleverly focused on how the store had removed gendered signage from
the store’s toy section, making the toys more available in a more neutral space. Boys and
girls still went for the gender-targeted toys though:
Girls generally stayed in the aisle with Barbies, and boys resided amongst the cars.
Even in the Lego section, girls were more drawn to Lego hair salons, whereas boys
would be engaged in airships.
81

Teesha expected that; but it raised a question for her, around the role of corporations in
gender inequality. Roseanne Russell has argued that corporations have understood them-
selves to play a very important role in achieving gender equity. Russell notes that they
have, over the last decade, created convergences of stakeholders around conceptions of
gender equality. That sounds great –but as Russell says, their pursuit of equity is based on
‘arguments of the “business case” for women’s inclusion and representation in economic
life and is often built upon essentialist notions of womanhood’ (Russell, 2018: 237). This
means that they’re essentially pretty fragile foundations that could be undone, if women’s
participation goes against ‘the business case’.Teesha considered something different: where
Russell talks about decisions taken at the top that see women occupying prestigious
and influential economic and political company positions, she wondered about the local
manifestation of gendered participation in stores at the local level. This would let her
see the social relationships that are operationalised between objects, they way they are
presented, and how people interact with them –a focus on the material manifestations
of transnational companies, if you like. Teesha remarked that she’d explore ideas like this
using interviews with people as they interacted with materials in the store, with the hope
she’d be able to identify things the store could do at a local level to participate materially
in gender-equity practices.
Teesha also had an eye to space, tracking how it impacted what data she could get:
Physically, I was wandering around the store rather than lingering in one area, meaning
my viewpoint was constantly shifting and the people I was examining changed as
well. This told me I got a wide range of data for various customers but couldn’t
study each environment deeply. Due to this, the themes I accumulated through my
fieldnotes may not be entirely accurate … If I were able to conduct a more thorough
observation, I would place myself in each section for a substantial amount of time or
follow a group of customers as they did their shopping.
Teesha’s employment at Kmart let her rehearse this even further. She says:
As a Kmart employee, I was informed about Kmart’s set-up and marketing strategies,
which influenced how I observed the environment during my visit. I knew that there
was an ‘impulse wall’ in kids toys that encourage children to examine as they passed.
I also knew that all the popular outfits in women’s clothing are kept in clear sight
to attract more attention. Most importantly, I was aware that all products that target
a particular demographic are kept together. For example, cosmetics and lingerie are
placed alongside women’s clothing because they both target women.
Perhaps some of Teesha’s ideas about local and small interactions between gender, the
social and the material, could lead to new kinds of relations between kinds of things in the
store, breaking open a little the notion that only certain kinds of things are for particular
gendered consumption.
Note that Teesha did not insist that her idea would work; it’s a teaser, something to
think about, something she would like to think about more. That’s something super-
important to remember, when you do the exercise coming up in this chapter: you’re after
an idea to explore, a question to raise, not in the provision of an answer. It’s about exer-
cising your newly emerging anthropological imagination. Time to give it a go.
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Exercise: Try your hand at taking fieldnotes

Here’s how. Choose a public context (like a café, a supermarket, a mall, a sports match,
a park, lunchtime at the student union, a library, someplace on campus if you really
want to stick with the theme of examining the culture of the university –any public
context in which it wouldn’t seem weird to take some notes.You can choose from a
host of sites –some students have taken fieldnotes in nightclubs and have noticed that
while such spaces do not explicitly say so, they are designed to exclude some people –
such as older people, for instance. Please do not ask people in the space any questions,
or take photographs, or videos, or sound recordings of people. This exercise is based
strictly on your own observations, as you do not have ethics clearance, which you’d
need for anything further. The idea is to take notes in public, which you don’t need
ethics clearance to do.This is all about changing how you see things –just as usual, on
the one hand, and like an anthropologist, on the other.This is the difference between
common and uncommon knowledge. Take a notebook and pen with you, or your
phone, or your laptop computer, or just yourself –the idea is to pick whichever set of
materials blends best with the fieldsite you’ve chosen. Just as you’ll have realised that
you could make really effective use of headnotes, you’ll also need to remember that
‘fields’ aren’t always made manifest in geographic terms. Before you even begin, you
already have some thinking to do about how you’ll constitute yours!
Stay in your field for at least 30 minutes, note the date and time, and start recording
what you observe (smell, taste, touch, hear). Fieldnotes are a cornerstone method of
anthropology, and we all do it in our practice. The idea is to get a sense of ordinary
activity, but anthropologists are always trying to get beyond the surface, to the things
that might organise or underpin the ordinary, and we use those things to build ana-
lysis. The first thing we want you to do is to take the fieldnotes in whatever form
they occur –scratchy on paper, notes on your phone, ideas and things that stick out
from your experience –but remember, no recording in audio or film, please.
When you’ve taken your notes, the next thing we want you to do is write down
the process –where you went, how long you stayed, what was going on there.
The next thing we want is some notes on the difference between taking fieldnotes
and just observing as you would if you were just being part of the scene –that is, how
is deciding that something is a field, and taking fieldnotes there, making you attend to
it differently than if you were just there (at the shops, in the library, and so on)? It might
help to consider how things are coming to you in different sensory registers, too.
Then, we want you to comment on what themes and ideas you would want to
develop if you were using these fieldnotes to delve into a social practice you were
interested in researching.
The last part is for you to relate these fieldnotes to what you learned about taking
fieldnotes from this chapter, from your anthropology class, from other stuff you’ve
read or talked with others about.
You can refer to Zahra’s example provided above, to the things Teesha found out at Kmart,
and to Anna, Elisabetta and Amy’s fieldnote pieces, which feature below –they take us
through the whole process. Anna Chapman has produced an amazing piece all about –you
guessed it –the supermarket, and Amy Hefernan took headnotes at her workplace at a
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burger franchise. Her original paper documented the especial and embodied knowledges
that render a job that can be described on paper precise and very specialist. She noticed
how she and her workmates used a special slang language and anticipated one another’s
movements to make a slick and quick burger-making ‘machine’ out of individual bodies.
this should be ‘Via language and its specificity in the workplace, she revealed a richly
patterned world of expert knowledge and docile bodies. She also noted how the first thing
to go when the stress hit the team was good communication. But it was recaptured very
quickly –and much quicker than teams who didn’t have the shared language and bodily
‘oneness’ she’d observed in her own team. She wondered if special language and activities
could have any capacity to do things like reduce the work accident rate, or prevent profit
loss? Amy revisited her notes a second time, to see what else she could get out of her analysis.
Elisabetta Dent put politeness under the microscope when she visited a gelateria where
she used to work. Elisabetta refuses to see politeness as just a social lubricant that we
expect when making all kinds of transactions; she wondered if it could be transferred into
economic capital for a business, and she wondered if it was differentially extracted from
women. Her insights reminded us of important work that Arlie Russell Hochschild carried
out in 2012, called The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Hochschild
looks closely at bill collectors and flight attendants to show the work each must do to
suppress what they might really feel about the people from whom they collect money and
take care of in the air respectively. She describes how we make a gift exchange between
our own feelings and the expectations of others. This is a kind of work, and it substantially
advances the commercial interests for whom these people work, but it is not recognised or
recompensed. It’s also a kind of occupational hazard, such as when a flight attendant feels
she no longer owns her own smile, but instead owes it to someone else; in the process of
performing managed friendliness, she becomes estranged from herself (see Hochschild,
2012). Elisabetta’s work adds new ethnographic insights to Hochschild’s original idea.
The fieldnotes exercise: the hard parts

There are two hard parts about this assignments. We think that the absolute hardest part
about this exercise is figuring out what is interesting about your notes. Remember how
Esther took notes in a doctor’s waiting room? She didn’t know at first what about her
notes was interesting, or even that she’d made a really cool discovery in her thoughts about
the social category of ‘waiting’, and how full it is –instead of the empty space and time
between ‘real’ activities. So, what did she do? She discussed her notes with Simone. Do
that! Talk about your data, even if you initially think, like Esther did, that there’s nothing
in them. In a class held many years ago, Simone remembers a guy who took notes at the
traffic lights.Yes! The actual traffic lights! He observed people crossing and how long they
took off from the curb before the lights had officially indicated that they could do so.
Material like that prompted him to think that maybe there was negotiation around offi-
cial rules –how far could they be pushed? What could that tell us about the relationship
between rules and practice? He pushed it further in another assignment, thinking through
how people in cars at a tricky intersection he observed on hand signals and gestures to
navigate the difficult crossing. That might lead us to think of all those times we’ve been
abroad and said ‘Oh! There’s absolutely no traffic rules in such-and-such a country! Not
like at home!’ Really? There are always shared understandings in play, otherwise everyone
would wind up in a crash. They don’t –and this clever young man was able to see past
the usually pretty racist ideas about rationality and capacity in favour of the notion that
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the rules might appear and be negotiated in a range of ways. Another example belongs
to Yoko, which you’ll find later in this book when we talk about the power of space, in
our chapter on things. Yoko explored the foyer of the hospital in which she works as a
paediatrician. She made a multisensory examination of this seemingly interstitial area and
reconsidered how it might hold important medical therapeutic value for both medical
staff and patients. She embraced the idea that exploring the spaces that aren’t immediately
obviously important or significant may contribute to health in hitherto unappreciated
ways. She, like all the other students, talked to others about their data –talk to your lec-
turer, talk to a classmate, email an anthropologist you know; you’ll see that the ‘social’ part
of anthropology also refers to relations between the anthropologists.
The second really hard part of this assignment is resisting the temptation to presume
what’s going on in a social situation you’re observing, and then mistake your presump-
tion for uncommon knowledge. In the exercise, we’ve asked you to consider how you’d
develop themes and ideas you found. This is where it can get really hard not to rush to
‘an answer’. We don’t want an answer! We want to see you exercising your anthropo-
logical imagination to raise questions. Here’s what we mean. Say you went to a café. While
you were there, you saw two people, evidently a couple, sitting at a table and both using
mobile phones.You notice they’re not talking to one another.You decide that the mobile
phones are at the heart of relationship breakdown and serve to fatally disrupt social life
and communication.You declare romance dead and finish drinking your latte. Then you
write a fieldnotes exercise up and feel satisfied you’ve solved the case.
There’s loads of problems with this. The most important is that the search for
uncommon sense has been confused with a presumption. If you noticed this scenario of
people on mobile phones, you could do something like wonder in what ways technology
and the range of communicative possibilities it brings has been incorporated into life,
and in what kinds of terms.You could wonder about it, and raise a question about how a
whole other social world that’s being accessed on the phone fits into, disrupts, challenges,
the face-to-face social world. You could even push this further, and apply that kind of
thinking to how university courses offered via Zoom relate to, challenge, and so on, the
face-to-face world of learning. Indeed, some of Simone’s students did precisely this, and
wrote a paper about their findings which appeared in the journal Anthropology In Action
(see Roth et al., 2021).What you mustn’t do is presume to know what people are thinking
or feeling, especially on the basis of 30 minutes’ worth of observation from afar. Raise
questions, subject the bases of those questions to scrutiny, and don’t try to provide answers.
Again, talk with others about your approach. We think you’ll learn heaps from students
who themselves learned heaps by getting their hands dirty. Anna, Elisabetta,Teesha, Emma
and Amy all identify where they made a crucial piece of learning about all of this.
All the robots at the shops

By Anna Chapman
Anthropology is unique as it allowed me to enter ordinary and mundane spaces to

uncover something extraordinary and uncommon. Although it is a daunting task at
first, what I observed and what my imagination discovered, soon led me to certain
themes. In taking fieldnotes, I first uncovered that there is no need to look for an
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exotic location to take fieldnotes. In fact, I found that the most mundane spaces
were home to a variety of interesting and important themes. I personally chose my
local supermarket as my field. I entered and returned to this field on various days
and at different times, and each time I uncovered a new theme about the space.
However, when I did enter the field, I made sure to enter the space like an ordinary
participant. This is a crucial part of participant observation: it’s important to fit into
the environment to understand it and to make other participants comfortable. This
assures that my observations could be authentic, as no one had to alter their activ-
ities by knowing my anthropological intentions within the field. It also means that
the ordinary experience –in this case, of shopping –can be called into question by
the anthropologist. This is hard when you’re really familiar with something. When
you’re trying to understand an activity like shopping beyond the taken-for-granted,
you need to be able to regard it as unfamiliar. Doing that means I could examine my
unreflected-upon practice of shopping from a different perspective, where all of the
things I would necessarily take for granted in order to get my shopping done, are no
longer taken for granted or interpreted at surface level. By entering the field with a
trolley/basket and having my fieldnotes on my phone, to appear like a shopping list,
meant that I was observed and treated as a shopper. Probably if I was unfamiliar with
the field, I’d have the opposite problem, where everything would be strange –and
I’d have to try to get some of it normalised for myself in order to participate ‘natur-
ally’. So, being familiar or unfamiliar can have a significant impact on what emphasis
is placed on the participation side of things or the observation side of things.
Once in the field, I took a variety of fieldnotes and headnotes. While themes
did not appear to me instantly, writing down every minute detail and observation
I thought may be interesting, lead me to later discover some interesting themes.
On reflecting on my fieldnotes, accompanied by my headnotes, I began to draw
similarities between my fieldnotes and uncover some uncommon knowledge about
some aspects of the supermarket space –of course, I could not learn about all of it,
as some of it is hidden from view.
One observation I made about who was shopping, along with one I made
about individuals’ use of a trolley or basket, led me to uncover a gender dimension
underlying within the supermarket. I observed that the majority of shoppers were
women. Additionally, while men and women were both present within the field,
men were typically seen with baskets or even no basket, and were doing small, quick
shops. In contrast, I observed women using trolleys and buying large quantities of
goods –on the face of it, including products for others or the ‘family’ shop. While
I’d have to subject my thoughts to reflexive scrutiny, one of my initial ideas was that
the supermarket could be a really useful site for thinking about the manifestation
of gendered labour. It would have some advantages from a study perspective; the
supermarket is in public –unlike the labour that happens inside the domestic home
that might be hard to access, or that people might have to report –and perhaps mis-
represent what actually happens. It links labour to activity (the shopping) to things,
and to other people (for whom things might be purchased), to money, and perhaps
even to emotion –shopping could be an activity that looks after other people,
and that might make an even strong link to feminised, caring labour. There’s a lot
to consider if I expanded my initial observations into a reflexive investigation of
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gendered labour. I’d always have to keep open that my initial observations could be
interpreted in other ways, but taking things to the next level –like interviewing –
would help me to know if I was onto something.
When I returned to the field a second time, my previous fieldnotes, accompanied
by new ones, offered an interesting investigation from a previously unrecognised
angle. This time, my observations focused primarily on shoppers’ interaction with
self-service check-outs. From these fieldnotes, I uncovered that the way space is
created, through the inclusion of robots, alters individuals’ way of life and involve-
ment within a space. While at first the idea of ‘robots’ seems far-fetched or a bit sci-
fi, I found that anthropology works in conjunction with imagination. In using my
imagination to see the self-service check-outs as robotic entities. In a material sense,
that’s just what self-service check-outs are –and they interact with us in the really
ordinary space of the supermarket. Simone and I talked through this initial idea that
came out of my observations of people checking out their goods and paying for
them without another human being involved in the transaction. Taking fieldnotes
places me as the research instrument –I was the one in the supermarket taking the
notes –but however solo that sounds, I was never alone. I found it most helpful
to discuss ideas with my teacher, so that when ideas seemed too obscure, like my
‘ordinary interactions with robots’ theme, I could get advice. From here, I was able
to develop a theme. Anthropologists do that with their colleagues, and from thinking
with the kind of work that’s been done before them in a particular field, using some
specific ideas –theories –or both.
I observed that via self-service check-outs, the average person was interacting
with robots on a daily to weekly basis. However, these robotic interactions and
the impact of such interactions are probably not recognised, or thought about as
interactions with robots. Rather than trying to decide what people made of the
interaction itself, I wondered about the effects of interacting with a self-service
machine. Creating a robotic space through the inclusion of self-service check-
outs is still pretty new in Australia, and it has impacted and altered individuals’
practices of shopping. The inclusion of a self-service area within the supermarket
has altered the space, as the robotic space that has been created is one that is com-
pact, with multiple check-outs close together which allows other shoppers to see
everyone who is checking out. The cramped physical space is not conducive to
trolleys –they would take up a lot of space, as well as time and seemed likely to
cause tension and impatience among those waiting in the line. This was useful
to notice, too –it would be really obvious to suggest that the self-service area
is under constant surveillance (perhaps by other kinds of robots), but people are
under the gaze of other shoppers, too. That can usher in new expectations about
how long people are supposed to take, how much shopping they can take out
through the self-service area, and perhaps even a new set of norms about what it
means to go shopping.
It seemed to me that shopping habits might be altered to suit the new way of
checking out –I wondered if it had provoked smaller and more frequent basket-
based shops, and I wondered too about how it had impacted those (mostly women)
with trolleys doing big ‘family’ shops –would it impact their experience and time
spent in the supermarket? These speculations also provoked me to wonder about
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how the space of the supermarket itself influenced people in it. This space was not
neutral, and had a certain power over those who were in it.
Along with the impact that space and these interactions with robots has on
individuals, I also explored how this alters one’s involvement within the space.
Interactions with self-service robots is silent in the sense that they do not speak
with customers, and self- service is autonomous. Thus, the grocery store has
become a space in which shoppers are involved in a silent and autonomous way.
The supermarket was once a regular meeting place for individuals to catch up,
replete with the sounds of sociality. Despite the lack of conversation between
shoppers or between shopper and workers, when I entered the field, I noticed
that the supermarket is still a very interesting soundscape. It includes the sound
of fridge doors opening, trollies being pushed, kids whingeing, people talking on
mobiles, and the beeping of robots. One kind of noisy landscape is not neces-
sarily better than the other, but I did think that they might not equally include
everyone. I wondered how people who valued interactions at the grocery store,
and perhaps went there for those as much as for shopping, felt about the reduction
of face-to-face interactions. Again, this would have to be reflexively considered,
but I thought it might not be as welcoming to the elderly compared to younger
people, who might be more accustomed to having interactions with machines
and robots.
My observation of the self-service space allowed me to speculate on all of these
ideas. I explored the ways in which everyday interactions with robots has impacted
the way individuals behave, perceive and include themselves within the new space
of self-service. While I didn’t draw any definitive conclusions, I did find avenues to
explore that could give us some really useful insight into the social dimensions of
shopping with robots, and even what shopping is, beyond the acquisition of goods.
I found it might be about gendered labour, sociality, and new frontiers of interaction
between humans and nonhuman entities.
Check out Amy Hefernen’s fieldnotes:
Burger comms
By Amy Heferen
Over the past eight months, I have taken headnotes on two separate occasions at
a burger restaurant where I work. I will investigate and compare the results of my
two different sessions, and use the comparison of my attitude, tools and methods
in taking the fieldnotes to ascertain information about my own research methods.
I will also compare the results in an attempt to understand the language barrier in
which we’re dealing with. Along this process I will be identifying multiple questions,
some I will attempt to answer and some I cannot. I hope to shed light on the issue
which I am investigating –the use of altered/abbreviated language in a workspace,
as well as the actual process of taking and analysing fieldnotes.
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First fieldnotes
This section investigates the process of taking fieldnotes and analysing them, while
identifying certain patterns and obscurities which I will later analyse with more
research. This was the first time I have taken fieldnotes.
I originally took headnotes in the kitchen of my workplace between the hours
of 6–8 p.m. There were five people (including me) in the kitchen, all people who
I know well and often work with. Taking these fieldnotes was an interesting experi-
ence. I was working in the kitchen while I was making my observations, so I had to
rely on headnotes. The first thing I realised/came across was how quickly I began
to dissect all the weird ways we talk in the kitchen. As soon as I decided to focus on
the obscurities of our language, I could not stop. This came up in many forms –the
abbreviated language, jokes about the obscure nature of the abbreviated language
(abbreviating some words and drawing out others –for example, saying ‘crippy’
instead of ‘crispy bacon and cheese’ –yes, crippy not crispy –that was not a typo. It
takes the same amount of time to say either, but we still change the name. But, then
saying ‘pa-la-chey’ instead of ‘palace’ which is an abbreviation of a ‘Caesar’s palace’).
The number of jokes thrown around which relate to the obscure language we use is
remarkable, especially considering that I have never stopped to think about the odd
language.
I think that if given the opportunity, things would have turned out rather differ-
ently if I were to have taken physical notes while observing the kitchen, without
working. I think that the act of actually being involved in the situation where I was
taking notes posed not only a different perspective but an opportunity to be more
analytical and critical. I could think about why I was specifically adhering to these
norms we had set for ourselves, not just speculating on the reasons why others
might. The ability to have that insight proved quite useful.
Actively taking headnotes in this situation allowed me to analyse and interpret the
language used in the kitchen. Had I just been observing with no real aim, I might
have missed some crucial connections and conclusions from the content observed.
I had never stopped to think about the language and communication style we use.
I found that using an anthropological mindset gave me an advantage to look beyond
what was observable and see into what I now understand as uncommon knowledge.
There is a third state which I would find myself in in this situation –simply existing
in it. Had I never posed a critical eye to the language and behaviour in my place of
work, I might never have taken the time to understand just how obscure it is. I have
worked in this kitchen for over two years, and I had never stopped to even think
about how we communicate differently there as opposed to out in the real world.
The main focus on these headnotes was the communication used in the kitchen.
Not only the use of language, but tone and body language as well. The communi-
cation from most workers is blunt, straightforward and never passive. I would like to
investigate whether we naturally began using this type of language because it was an
easier and more effective communication style, or whether it is more of a cultural
thing. By cultural, I mean that we might use such blunt, harsh communication to
separate ourselves from the customers and wait staff. I think that both are possibil-
ities, and I will reflect on them.
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The first thought I had when realising this use of language was that because lan-
guage is the primary form of communication in the kitchen (we are rarely facing
each other), then it cannot be passive-aggressive –it must be direct and firm, other-
wise the kitchen stops running efficiently. This thought was then reinforced for me
about 30 minutes into my observations, where the kitchen became slowed down by
a staff member (the manager) not adhering to these unspoken rules.
This experience and my analysis may suggest that polite, passive conversation A)
hinders effective communication, and B) is not needed in a functioning kitchen.
Why do we use polite mannerisms anywhere? Would the world run more efficiently
without them? I have a hard time answering this question, but my main thought
is that in the real world we have no need or want to prioritise efficiency. When
working in an environment where we care about the clock literally right down to
the second, efficiency is the main goal. The world as a whole does not run this way,
and it would be pretty unpleasant if it did.This is something I would like to explore
with more research and detail –the difference in situations where prioritising effi-
ciency, and what else we prioritise in other situations. Can we tell simply through
observing communication styles what we prioritise in these situations? Are there
other factors that we can observe alongside communication, and are they linked?
Language and communication styles are intrinsically linked with culture. Often
subconsciously, we use language to reflect and define our culture. Perhaps the diffe-
rence in language use not only serves an economical purpose of efficiency, but
also serves to differentiate the sections of work and customer. From analysing this
behaviour, I have concluded that people enjoy using this communication style. It is
rude and impolite, often involves yelling, but we enjoy it. Is this because we enjoy
being in our own little community, our little culture? With our own in-jokes and
secret language? From a personal anecdotal perspective, I can say that this is defin-
itely a factor. These two ideas of culture and efficiency being the key factors to the
communication style are both demonstrated when the manager (an outsider) enters
the kitchen. For example, it is standard practice in a kitchen to call ‘backs’ when
walking behind someone with their back to you. This is so that if the person with
their back to you suddenly turns, they know that someone is there, possibly carrying
food. This is a clear example of why verbal communication is needed, as sight is
sometimes not an option. There we can clearly see the connection with communi-
cation and efficiency –it is not efficient to ruin food from an accidental collision.
The manager never uses this warning when she crosses in the kitchen, when usu-
ally everyone’s back will be facing her. This is a clear breach of efficiency. Not only
is this warning a useful tool, but it is also culture specific. The manager does not
understand the need for this warning because she is not frequently in this area, and
also does not have to deal with the mistakes this causes. To me, this demonstrates
that you need to be physically in the area to understand the culture. Specific idioms
can be completely arbitrary to outsiders. The manager does not understand these
idioms, because she is not immersed in the culture. She may find this specific call as
arbitrary or useless, as she has not learnt the need for it.
I would also like to analyse how the communication system breaks down. This
is an idea I have come up with inspired by a running joke which was borne out
of a stressful period in the kitchen. When about to call out for the next order, a
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staff member hesitated, saying ‘can I get uhhh’. Everyone thought it was funny, so
thus repeated ‘can I get uhhh’. When the restaurant gets busy, the kitchen staff get
stressed and overworked. I believe when this happens, the first thing to fail is com-
munication. This can be observed in a couple of ways, such as people literally just
not talking, but I think the most interesting example is when people’s language
starts to make zero sense. People start to say nonsense, such as repeating ‘can I get
uhhh’. I would very much enjoy studying this reaction more, because now I am
only going off headnotes and anecdotal experience. But from this, I have observed
that communication deteriorates first perhaps because it is the most exhausting
mentally to keep up. Maybe this is true, maybe not. I would like to research more
to find out.
Second fieldnotes
This section is a direct follow-up to the previous one, written about a month
later, with some extra supporting research undertaken to help my further analysis.
I mainly deal with analysis of questions left unanswered in the previous section.
I took these fieldnotes in an attempt to further understand and engage with the work
I analysed in my first fieldnotes exercise. I was left with a few questions, which I will
attempt to answer now. I would like to state that the findings I am presenting are the
results of my own fieldwork and backed by my own analysis. Also, these questions may
be left open-ended. I will do my best to use my analysis from my previous work and
for this section to provide conclusions, but obviously this area of study is not concrete.
The questions I have left to explore are:
How did the different language style form?

How does our communication style in any situation reflect the given context?
Does one need to be physically present in order to experience culture?
What causes a breakdown in communication, and what further effect does this have?
I believe the answers to these questions are all linked, and the results all help us
understand how linguistics and anthropology connect to give a deeper understanding
of how language and culture intersect. Through the process of analysing these
questions both in relation to the previous section and my current analysis, I have
come to understand how I function in the world in relation to language and culture
on a much deeper level.
How did the different language style form?

In the previous section, I identified two explanations for this idea –efficiency and
culture. I believe both play major factors, but the question becomes which came
first, and which has the larger influence. My opinion, based off my fieldnotes and
experience working in the environment goes as follows: the language first evolved
to become more efficient, and then a culture began to grow out of it. Now, what we
have years later, is a cultural product which was influenced by efficiency, and prac-
tically works as an efficient language, but is mainly a cultural signifier.
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I will now further explicate this answer.

The bulk of the language changes that have formed in the kitchen have been
from the need to be efficient. In the kitchen, whether a burger gets sent to the cus-
tomer in 7 minutes from the time of ordering, or 6 minutes 45 seconds, is a big deal
(do not ask me why, I could not tell you. Management cares about ‘burger times’
(the numbers I am referencing here) in a huge way. It is completely legitimate and
feasible for a change in conversation to result in a more efficient kitchen.
Also, when I am referring to communication change for efficiency, I am not just
talking about the abbreviation of words. I am also talking about yelling so we do not
have to move our heads to convey a message, saying out loud what we are doing at
all important junctures to save others the trouble of asking a whole team of people
where they are all up to, and announcing when we move through the kitchen as to
avoid accidents. These are all examples of language forming directly from the need
of efficiency. These are also examples of types of communication which one would
rarely see in a normal day-to-day scenario.
As mentioned earlier, when the manager enters the kitchen, she does not use the
proper language meant for the kitchen. This not only isolates her as not being a
member of the group, but hinders the efficiency of the whole team. She does not
adhere to the unspoken rules and does not reciprocate others’ use of language. This
is at a detriment to the function of the kitchen.
However, as mentioned, this is not all for efficiency’s sake. I believe there are some
strong examples of language use which speak to the theory that the communica-
tion style is as much a cultural signifier as an efficiency tool.This is shown when we
change words, but do not abbreviate them. For example, saying ‘crippy’ instead of
‘crispy’ (which is already short for ‘crispy bacon and cheese’). Both have the same
number of syllables, but one would only be said by a member of kitchen staff.
When someone (such as the manager) enters the kitchen and uses ‘normal’ lan-
guage, they stick out like a sore thumb.This is, of course, because their language and
way of communicating does not match the rest of the staff. This not only hinders
service, but shows how much of an ‘in-group’ the kitchen has created.When people
are brought into the kitchen to learn, they start off being referred to as ‘newbies’
and soon learn the skills and become one of the team. A part of learning the skills is
learning the language. Once the language is both learnt and used, they are no longer
a ‘newbie’. One would think that the ‘newbie’ title would be shed once someone
learnt the proper skills, but no. Unfortunately I work with many people who are
incompetent when it comes to kitchen skills, but they have the language down pat,
so they are ‘one of us’.
How does our communication style in any situation reflect the context?
Previously, I reflected that if looking close enough, one can see that we priori-
tise efficiency in the kitchen. This can be observed through analysis of the specific
differences in language used from the ‘standard’ language format. As indicated pre-
viously, standard communication styles include a lot of polite conversation, a lot of
‘please and thank yous’, and a conversation style where the converser is aware of
the other’s potential emotional response. While it may not be the main goal of the
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conversation, not offending the other person is typically a large factor in deciding
what language and conversation style to appropriate. That is to say, a person would
likely choose to add in extra polite words even if it takes a longer time to get
their point across. I could say that aside from what the person is communicating,
keeping a civil and kind conversation is important. Comparing this to the kitchen
conversations is interesting, because kindness and civility take no such priority. As
previously identified, efficiency is the priority, and the language style reflects that.
From this logic, does this mean that if I were to analyse another situation, I would
be able to identify what is specifically important in that context?
Does one need to be physically present in order to experience culture?

I originally theorised this point previously. This idea came to me when I observed
my manager acting very much as an outsider in the kitchen (which she is), and very
clearly not understanding the meaning and use for the language we were using.
I feel like I made this point clear early in the context of the kitchen language, so
I decided to hunt down a situation where I am an outsider. At first, I was going to
observe the wait staff, but as they communicate so similarly to how I do normally, it
did not work well. So, I had a better idea. I decided to listen in on my brothers and
their friends talking about basketball while watching the NBA at a sports bar. (I am
going off headnotes that I have not transcribed).
I played basketball for a couple of years, so I am familiar with the rules of play.
But I do not watch the NBA. I did not realise how much of a difference this made
to my ability to understand the conversation until I started trying to pay attention.
I could pick up a couple of phrases here and there which I understood, but overall,
I could not understand what they were saying. I soon realised that it was not just
their language that I could not understand, but they had their own inside-joke
type references that I assume must be a riff off game commentary. Not only did
I not understand the words, but I did not even understand the sense of the message.
I know a lot of stuff about basketball, I know all the rules, but I do not know any-
thing about current commentary on the league, which was the reason I could not
understand their language. This, to me, shows that you need to be immersed in the
culture to understand it.You cannot understand simply by learning the language –
you have to be a participant. I imagine it is comparable to how it is extremely dif-
ficult to learn a language if you are not around people who speak it fluently. If you
try to learn a language individually, it is difficult to become fluent because you are
not immersed in it.
What causes a breakdown in communication, and what further effect does this have?
In my opinion, this was the most interesting finding I came across in the first section
which I did not analyse deeply. I personally find the breakdown of communication
that we suffer in the kitchen to be hilarious –everyone reacts in different ways,
depending on their own personality and situation. While some of my co-workers
when under stress go silent and fail to communicate, one woman I work with just
continuously quotes the movie The Cat in the Hat when her communication starts
to break down. How is that not entertaining? However, the stakes here are fairly
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low –when our communications fail, we would just start producing low-quality
burgers. What would happen in a similar situation, where the performance level
hinges on quality and specific communication, but where the stakes were high? This
thought process is inspired by Simone, where she commented that she had seen a
similar situation in a hospital where communication breaks first. But, obviously in
this situation, mistakes can be life or death.
I believe this breakdown happens when people get tired and cannot keep up with
the constant, high-level communication. In this instance, the language people are
communicating with is almost a new language –people need to put thought into
what they are saying. When people cannot put this thought in anymore, mistakes
occur. Also, in my experience, people sometimes make a conscious choice to give
up on communication when things get tough because they underestimate this
importance.
As mentioned, this example of the breakdown of communication does not lead
to anything serious. The stakes are low. But, what about Simone’s example of the
hospital workers? There are many jobs where communication is paramount to the
success of the work, and many of these have very high stakes. Obviously not every-
thing is going to be life or death, but situations involving large amounts of money
would be considered critical if mishandled due to a communication breakdown.
In a way, this section is a bit superfluous because obviously a language breakdown
is going to be different, depending on the context. So, for this part will focus mainly
on the kitchen and then try and isolate those core universal concepts.
The way I see it upon analysing, a breakdown in communication has a cascading
effect. It will start by one of the team members or even the team leader ceasing to
communicate in the appropriate way for the kitchen to function. This could look
like them talking casually, or them not talking at all, or even speaking absolute non-
sense (that is, quoting The Cat in the Hat). The way communication works here is
it falls in a line, like a chain of command. Once one person stops communicating
efficiently, the person they are supposed to be communicating with will stop as well,
as they are not getting any response, and so on, until almost the whole kitchen has
stopped. This mainly results in more mistakes occurring, resulting in poor-quality
burgers.
What can I learn from my analysis of these answers?

The main takeaway I have from writing this section is the profound effect lan-
guage and communication have on our day-to-day life, especially in a work context.
Going off that idea, language helps shape our ideas of context so thoroughly –
I would imagine most people use language as a huge indicator of what kind of
situation they are in.
Another important takeaway I have is how people undervalue and dismiss the
importance of communication. As we have seen when communication breaks
down, the solid functioning of the team is compromised. I believe that if we all
took the time to analyse our surroundings, the language we use and how that differs
depending on our situation or who we are with, we would learn so much more
about ourselves, and how to operate effectively in different contexts.
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I would like to take an opportunity to reflect on my personal learning as a result of

my original fieldwork section and this extended section. I have thoroughly enjoyed
being able to go over my original work and expand on ideas which iw as very
excited about but did not have the structure to go into deep analysis. I have also
enjoyed being able to go over my original work and appreciate how much I have
learnt from this type of anthropology through my own work and analysis. Being
able to revisit the field has shown me instances where I would have done things
differently; it has shown me where I can grow and analyse my ideas further and has
given me an appreciation and fascination for the anthropological field.
Concluding notes
Learning how to take and analyse my own fieldnotes has given me access to a com-
pletely hidden language, one which I use on a daily basis. Being able to analyse my
own surroundings in such an in-depth and critical way has given me insight into
not only the way I personally interact with the people in my life, but has given me
insight into how people and communities interact and communicate. I am no expert
on linguistics or culture studies, but I feel as if I have uncovered some uncommon
knowledge about the way language forms within cultures, and the ways in which
those cultures protect themselves as to not be accessible to those who do not live in
it/abide by the rules. I have learnt a few things from this process of taking and ana-
lysing fieldnotes, but the primary one is that learning to look at the world through
an anthropological lens opens a whole world of knowledge to be uncovered. I feel
as if I have barely scratched the surface with my findings in this paper, and with
more developed tools and research habits I will strive to uncover more.
Politeness as a form of manipulationBy Elisabetta Dent

Anthropological thinking is accessible to everyone. Taking note of the world
anthropologically is taking notice of (as Simone puts it) ‘uncommon know-
ledge’, meaning to look beyond what is considered presumed, taken for granted or
‘common knowledge’. Through my first-year anthropological fieldnotes, I chose
to dissect politeness using the example of my old place of work, a gelateria in
the affluent Canberran suburb, Griffith. In my fieldnotes, conducted on the 9th of
March 2021, I noticed the calculated way in which the clerks of this store offered
their customers politeness and began to reconsider politeness beyond its evident
function of maintaining positive social interactions by mitigating or avoiding awk-
ward or insulting interactions, as a form of manipulation.This puts a bit of a different
spin on politeness, which is perhaps more usually thought of as being put to the
service of the maintenance of positive interactions.
Fieldnotes
Fieldnotes are an essential technique to ensure you are engaging with social life in
a way that gets beyond just taking everything for granted. Note-taking forces an
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intense focus that is not usually applied when you are a contributing part of a situ-
ation. It’s hard to maintain (polite!) conversations while taking fieldnotes because
you can’t afford to take things for granted.
Initially, I started by selecting a spot in the store where I could see and hear every-
thing yet wouldn’t disturb the dynamic of the small store. Once the store was a little
busier, and there were more distractions, I moved closer to the cashier as this was
where the bulk of the clerk-customer interactions were happening. Mainly, I just
relied on what I could see and hear in this area. I was able to make fast headnotes
and made single-word notes to trigger my memory later. This was the best way to
take notes for me personally, as I have a visual memory. I knew that whatever stood
out to me was a good way of filtering out the miscellaneous stuff. The single-word
notes anchored those memories so I’d be able to call them up in order of their
occurrence later on.Visually, I watched people’s expressions, listened to the tone of
their voices and focused on their interactions.
As my chosen field was an old place of work, I used my prior knowledge to my
advantage and was able to gain more depth by doing so. With this knowledge, I could
ignore most of the superficial aspects of the store, such as rush hours, demographics
and gelato flavour trends and focus more on the social nuances. I specifically noticed
mannerisms, the pace of interactions and activity, facial expressions and voice tone.
I noticed body language, as well as how individuals positioned themselves within their
environment. My observations of all of these things made me notice a link between lan-
guage and power, and I thought that link might have something to do with politeness.
When doing something like taking anthropological fieldnotes, it is important
to include oneself in the process, by evaluating the impact of any personal biases
that could interfere with the fieldnotes process. Personally, memories were heavily
influencing what I noticed and the specific things that were compelling to me. For
example, I thought of the staff as having a lot of power over the customers –and
I definitely noticed hierarchies forming, based off small powerplays that myself and
my colleagues used to exercise. Once I remembered these tactics we would use,
I began to look for similar interactions.There’s nothing wrong with having interests
and experiences that orient the notes, the trick is to be aware of them, and recognise
that your notes are as much a reflection of those experiences and interests as they
are of what you’re observing.This means there’s no single truth to observations; they
always come from a perspective.
What I discovered
During my fieldnotes exercise I noticed two interactions of interest. The following
extracts are from my written-up fieldnotes, from my head notes and single-word
memory-joggers. Firstly, a mother and her child:
a child approached the counter with their mother and the clerk was seen
engaging openly. They entertained the child, spoke slowly with an energetic
voice and overall had a very warm and kind demeaner. However, once the
mother left the child, the tone of the clerk changed. They quickened their
pace when making the gelato and began to mostly ignore the child’s ramblings.
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Because the adult in this situation left, the child no longer received the curated
politeness previously given to them.
This example alerted me to the labour that is behind politeness. It’s a kind of
work, and it can be hard and demanding, as well as time-consuming. Labour-saving
could involve being strategic with politeness, and reserving it for interactions of
high value, or that someone could get the most from. Here I considered perceived
status and an individual’s social merit, perhaps relationally to how much money they
might spend and if they’d be a repeat customer. It is interesting to think of politeness
as a kind of work that might be undertaken to yield benefits.
Secondly, I honed in on an example involving an elderly couple:
The store had become busier, working at a faster pace with shorter social interactions.
As the clerk was serving a small group, an elderly man approached the service
counter and demandingly asked for some napkins. The clerk proceeded to ignore
the man until they had finished serving the small group then innocently turned to
the man and asked, ‘How can I help you?’
From this seemingly irrelevant encounter I began to think of the reciprocal nature
of politeness, and what happens if it’s unequal.
Thinking about this anthropologically

Once I had established my examples, I began thinking of politeness anthropologically.
Considering politeness beyond just what we are taught to do in interactions,
I raised the question; can politeness be considered an act of manipulation? From
my fieldnotes, I explored how interactions at the business revealed something about
politeness in two ways.
In the first example, I thought about how the business could regard politeness
as a very important labour that would have a direct relationship to business success
and profit. When people are socially valued, they might actually produce financial
value to a business.
In the second example, I thought about how the customer and the clerk used
politeness in particular ways, to lend a specific tone to the interaction. On paper, the
clerk and the customer were both polite, but the clerk pushed politeness right out
to its edges, letting quite a lot of time elapse before acknowledging the customer
and his request. Here, politeness limited the extent to which the clerk could ignore
the customer, but still left quite a lot of opportunity for a message about who was in
charge of the social interaction to be sent. I know, of course, from my time working
there, that clerks often use politeness in this way to establish superiority over their
customers. Age, gender and other biases influenced the clerks’ actions, establishing
a social hierarchy.
This knowledge allowed me to link my first and second observations together.
For clerks in the store, the idea that profit is more important than anything else is
paramount. When clerks decide who deserves social investment, they are making
decisions about which interactions might result in the best returns. They are also
establishing who does and doesn’t belong there: anyone slow, unlikely to return,
presenting a challenge or not in the demographic range serviced by the store is
97
unlikely to attract a strong investment. Politeness is still mandatory in such cases, but
it’s the kind of politeness that matters.The best clerks are the ones who make the big
investments seem natural, and the mandatory ones seem polite, but not downright
rude.This is a skilled labour. And, I think it is also a gendered one.There is a decided
preference for female clerks.
I returned to the store, for a second time on the 19th of May 2021 and noticed a
trend in the employees hired. From the five workers I had seen, all were female and
in their late teens/early twenties. I’d have to subject my sense of gendered labour to
scrutiny, but I thought that the business might take the view that women would be
better at this kind of polite labour than men. Perhaps they were thought of in some
way as subservient. This would be an interesting angle to follow up. There were
quite a few leads coming out of my short observations that indicate that politeness
is more than it first appears.
In all of these pieces, you can see that themes are emerging.You can imagine Amy, Anna
and Elisabetta returning to their fields and sharpening their foci. But then what? Let’s
return to the materials that Simone collected during her time at the Police Band to give
you a sense of what happens after you’ve found a bit of a theme you want to pursue.
Simone started off very generally, noticing all kinds of things that she faithfully recorded
in her spiral bound notebooks. She went in with a question she wanted to explore, which
was concerned with the relationship between music and the state. She knew going in
that the police department that the police band worked in was having a bad public
relations period; its reputation was one of unemotional robots who collected revenue
from speeding fines. The band’s job was to appear as police officers, in full uniform, and
play music. The hope was that the public would see that cops really did have emotions,
were really human beings.The band played love songs, metal songs, kid’s songs, pop songs,
old songs all over town to facilitate their brief.
But how did they actually do that? And what could we know about the operations
of power from understanding how they did it? First, she asked about how music could
be used to express emotion. She interviewed band members, and they told her all about
how music does that with key, tempo, arrangement, and so on. But they also told her that
it absolutely didn’t matter one tiny bit what the music was that they were playing; that
wasn’t what they would be feeling. Their emotions would be different from the music.
That was usually because they were playing songs they didn’t like, or had heard way too
many times. This was a bit like Hochschild’s airline stewards and bill collectors.
They explained that they felt big emotions –like joy, and ecstasy, when they were
playing, and only that feeling would produce something called ‘music’. Otherwise, it was
merely sound. What was the difference?
By examining how band members felt after each rehearsal and performance, Simone
was able to figure out that they felt joy when they became one with their instruments,
effectively forgetting they were separate from their trumpet, sax, or flute. You do this all
the time when you drive; when you’re on the open road, busily not remembering that
your feet connect with the accelerator and your hands connect with the steering wheel,
you have become what Jack Katz calls an automobilised person (see Dawson, 2017; Katz,
1999). Similarly, band members became instrumentalised persons. When that happened,
98

they had what they called ‘musical orgasms’, even if they were playing a boring tune
they didn’t like. That could happen to people when they were performing, but it could
also happen when they were in rehearsals. And, during either, people could suddenly
remember they were separate from their instrument, when something went wrong or
when they were learning the piece and still unsure of where fingers or tongue or lips
should be positioned. Simone learned that rehearsals and performances look like really
different events, but for band members, they were not; sometimes during performances,
band members would have ‘rehearsal’ moments, and sometimes they would have per-
formance moments in rehearsals, based on the forgetting or remembering of their
relationship to their instruments. When they forgot it, they became instrumentalised
people –saxaphonised, trumpetised, and so on –so that they were able to say ‘I AM the
trumpet!’ When they experienced that feeling, it was ‘the best feeling in the world’, and
‘like a musical orgasm’. She learned that by asking the kinds of questions that seem irri-
tatingly detailed, dumb, or both. She recalls rushing up to band members after every event,
asking, ‘how did you feel?’; ‘when do you know you’ve learned a piece?’ When people
started to tell her that they had done so when it was under their fingers, in their mouth
and in their tongues, she knew that they didn’t have to think about making music any-
more –they just became part of their instrument.That competency also weaponises them
to make them into effective conveyers of subtle police power, into bodies only too willing
to receive it. But, it’s also more complicated than that.
The upshot of all of this is that music and emotion are both very important in
organising the social world, and particularly in the wielding of and resistance to power.
At the same time as both emotion and music can be pressed into the service of wooing
the public to like the cops, the very means by which that power is being wielded –the
police band –can be disobediently having a musical orgasm that wholly disregards the
audience they are ostensibly relating to. The upshot? Power works in really minute
ways beneath the obvious ones, and if we want to understand those relations, we
might have to look for them, and how they get into bodies. It means that power isn’t
straightforward, and that to understand it, we have to look at it in complex ways (see
Dennis, 2007).
Don’t worry; you cannot go so far as this –as we said, we only want you to exercise
your burgeoning anthropological imagination a little by suggesting what you think might
be the start of some uncommon knowledge. Have a go!

In Chapter 4, we’re going to start thinking about how anthropologists have approached
different areas of human social life. You’ve had a bit of a go at thinking about how
anthropologists get to make their insights, so you’ll be able to read this upcoming material
in a really productive way. Keep hold of that insight as you read the next chapter, and it
won’t seem so daunting and alien, like some bodies of theory sometimes can.
References
Dawson, A. 2017. Why Marx Was a Bad Driver: Alienation to Sensuality in the Anthropology of
Automobility. Advances in Anthropology 7: 1–16.
Dennis, S. 2007. Police Beat: The Emotional Power of Music in Police Work. Youngstown,
NY: Cambria Press.
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Hochschild, A.R. 2012. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Katz, J. 1999. How Emotions Work. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Roth, A., N. Ranjan, G. King, S. Homayun, R. Hendershott and S. Dennis. 2021. Zooming in on
COVID:The intimacies of screens, homes and learning hierarchies . Anthropology in Action: Journal
for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice 28 (1): 67–72.
Russell, R. 2018. The Uneasy Relationship between Corporations and Gender Equality: A
Critique of the ‘Transnational Business Feminism’ Project. In B. Sjåfjell and I. Lynch Fannon
(eds.), Creating Corporate Sustainability: Gender as an Agent for Change Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 237–257.
Sanjek, R. 1990. Fieldnotes:The Makings of Anthropology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
10
4 Rites, rituals, graduations and cakes

Why would anthropologists look at rituals, rites of passage and public events? They are
very useful for getting a grip on things that might be important to more than just a few
people. They do important work; for instance, and as you’ll see in this chapter, rites of
passage convey us from one social state, like being single, for instance, to another one, like
being married. People besides the individuals getting married are involved; communities
are always involved when someone changes from one state to another. Everyone has a
stake in them because they articulate the structure of the community. Anyone who paid
even the scantest attention to recent gay marriage debates across the Western world knows
this very well, and knows how interesting a couple’s decision to marry can be to other
people –even people they don’t know, even whole nations, even the whole world.

In and through paying anthropological attention, we can explore the apparent effects of
public events and make some uncommon sense of them to see what else they might do
besides what they seem to do on the surface. Here’s a good one to think with: going on
strike. What would you say strikes do? Do they make demands for change and present an
avenue for pursuing it? Or are they better at showing the status quo and its limitations?
That latter option seems like the opposite of what a strike does, but some anthropo-
logical analyses would suggest it is far more likely than the former. But why? We’ll see
in this chapter as we look at the uncommon knowledge that can come from looking
anthropologically at rituals and rites.

Looking at rituals and public events tells you a lot about the history of anthropological
thinking. In some parts of this chapter, we’ll call out some of that thinking as dated and
in need of renovation. Looking at this debate will give you loads of insight into how we
might contribute to existing knowledge. You’ll notice that in this chapter that we don’t
look at the existing anthropological thought and then invent something totally new to
replace it. We look at the presumptions that have been made and say, ‘let’s question that
presumption.’ Our contributions to knowledge are therefore much more often about
doing this re-puzzling and questioning of presumptions than they are about finding gaps
DOI: 10.4324/9781003273547-4
10
Rites, rituals, graduations and cakes 101

in the research record. You can use this technique in your own writing and thinking. It
takes the pressure off, not to have to invent something totally new!
What insight can you get into the university by thinking with rituals and rites of passage?
The university has plenty of its own rites and rituals –what about graduation? This
chapter is directly applicable to an anthropological understanding of the university.
The work of ritual

Ritual has a long and complex history (and not just in anthropology –in religion, in
philosophy, in psychology, to name but a few other areas). Ritual is distinguished from
everyday life; it is especial, often sacred; think for example of the Christian ritual of Holy
Communion in which ingesting bread is very different from the everyday profane act of
stuffing your face with delicious bread. Ritual involves the use of symbols (think of the
bread again). The symbols can serve to communicate the meaning of the ritual. Early
anthropologists –the ones we called the 19th-century armchair anthropologists –focused
on sacred events in their quest to figure out how religion arose in human history.This was
all very speculative –which contrasts strongly with early 20th-century ideas, advanced
chiefly by the functionalists. As you’ll see shortly in our chapter on genealogies and
kinship, the functionalists are so named because they were concerned with questions of
what functions social institutions served.They were split into two groups –one group that
looked for the function of a social institution, like religion, in meeting individual needs
(associated with Bronisław Malinowski) and the other on how social institutions served to
maintain society as a whole (associated with A.R. Radcliffe-Brown). From Malinowski’s
point of view, ritual was what people did when they lacked a grip on the world. It was
put into practice when people didn’t know what to do, when their capacity or social
standing or position was insufficient to have direct control over events in the world, or
to influence events or situations in accordance with their desires or needs. You can see
that, in Malinowski’s view, ritual works to deal with the anxiety that arises between the
world and a person’s reach and influence over it.You can also see ritual’s technical, prac-
tical role: ritual is what you do when you need some control over the world. Here’s what
Malinowski said about that: ‘magic is to be expected and generally to be found whenever
man comes to an unbridgeable gap, a hiatus in his knowledge or in his powers of prac-
tical control, and yet has to continue in his pursuit’ (Malinowski, 1948:65); this includes
everyone –from the gambler to the farmer to the pilot. As we said, Malinowski was into
the idea that people weren’t all that different in their needs, that they just had different
ways of attending to them.
It wasn’t like that at all for Radcliffe-Brown. He thought ritual was much better
described as a symbolic expression of a community that was put to the service of regu-
lating and stabilising social institutions. Ritual could do the work of adjusting social
interactions, maintaining a group ethos, and restoring harmony after disputes. It wasn’t
technical at all for him, as it was for Malinowski; for him, it was structural. He remarked,
‘ritual acts differ from technical acts in having in all instances some expressive or symbolic
element in them’ (Radcliffe-Brown, 1952:143).
You can see that both kinds of functionalists reckoned that rituals do something –
whether contributing to the harmonious continuation of the social system, or serving to
meet individual needs relative to that world. All of them were interested in how rituals
102

contributed to the maintenance of social order. So too were the neofunctionalists, who
were interested in how ritual worked to comprehensively regulate ecological systems
and, in and through them, disputes over food and resources, access to land, surpluses and
shortages, the distribution of animals, plants and other resources and their yields, and
so on.1
This view –that ritual stopped anything from arising that would threaten social cohe-
sion –had a pretty tight grip on anthropological thinking until Max Gluckman exploded
the whole game by suggesting that ritual could actually work to symbolically turn the
accepted social order on its head. He was interested in rituals of rebellion, and effectively
founded the Manchester School. The idea that Gluckman came up with hadn’t been
suggested before; the whole tendency of thinking had been wrapped up in social cohe-
sion, so it wasn’t easy for rebellion to appear as a factor. Indeed, in functionalist thinking,
rebellion was always being dealt with by ritual means before it could even arise; rebel-
lion wasn’t thought of as a kind of ritual itself. So this was some truly sharp thinking on
Gluckman’s part. He thought ritual could be an expression of underlying social tensions
(Victor Turner thought so too, a bit later on). Here’s the kernel of Gluckman’s idea: rit-
uals were like big pressure-release regulators; they could release social tension in a safe
way –in a performative way –before it got to be a real problem. In this view, rituals still
did something –they reinforced the social order because they staved off rebellion. Have
a look at some of Gluckman’s work –he was impassionedly anti-colonialist, something
that comes through all his thinking. Check out his books: Rituals of Rebellion in South-East
Africa (Gluckman, 1954), Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (Gluckman, 1963) and Politics,
Law and Ritual in Tribal Society (Gluckman, 1965).
Get your head around how this works by putting it into a familiar scenario. Maybe
think about your workplace. A certain social order is in place there, but people can and
do horse around at work, in little moments that come available. This could happen in a
situation where, for example, you walk behind your boss, imitating her walk/hairstyle/
bad attitude to the great amusement of your work colleagues. You have to be careful
with that one –you might not have a job for long if your boss spins around and sees
you. Maybe you want to do something like that because you absolutely cannot stand
your boss, and this feels like a good way of operationalising some of the tension related
to that feeling. But maybe your feelings get even more relief on special occasions like
charity events, where they can take something akin to a ritual form. Have you ever
been to one of these events, where you can throw pies at your boss’s face in the name
of raising money? Andy recalls an event of this kind from his schooldays. At the end of
the school year, students were permitted to attend in casual clothes rather than uniforms.
Also, in another once-only moment, teachers had to serve students at lunch time, rather
than the other way around. As an aside, and as we will come to see when we get to
the work of Victor Turner, the timing (betwixt and between years) and the day’s little
‘inversions’ of standard practice are very significant. The day’s events were, by and large,
very safe. By inverting the normalcy of things, they brought into sharp relief their very
normalcy: that teachers are boss. However, some students pushed the game further than
intended, shouting at teachers just a little too loudly, humiliating them with gossiped
details of their private lives and, in one case, spanking a teacher very hard and painfully.
The boy in question also followed this up by putting a predatory fish he had purchased
in the headmaster’s fish-tank –carnage! In these cases, things were seen to be being
pushed too far. However, these excessive transgressions became the stuff of legend within
the school, giving a sense, albeit a fake sense, that the power of the teachers could be
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challenged. It made us naughty kids feel better about being in such an authoritarian
school. It was a pressure valve.
Gluckman explained how this exact thing happens in what used to be Swaziland on
the occasion of the First Fruits Festival (called Incwala). During Incwala, the usual social
order is symbolically inverted. The monarch is publicly insulted, women lord it over men,
the young boss orders around the normally authoritative elders, and so on. It doesn’t
last, though; women go back to being under the dominion of men, the young go back
to recognising the authority of the elders and that the king is symbolically restored to
power. This effectively creates order because it gives people a glimpse of what complete
disarray and discomfort ensues (for some at least) when the world is turned upside down,
and because the relatively disempowered can shake out and express their dissatisfaction
with their usual lot in life. The idea that rituals do things is perhaps most evident in the
work of the folklorist Arnold van Gennep (1909 [1960]), who focused on the kinds of
ritual called ‘Rites of Passage’ –rather than the Rites of Intensification that are all about
social cohesion (and social standing).Van Gennep’s work is extremely important because
it is joined with Gluckman’s insights by an anthropologist called Victor Turner, one of
the major theoreticians of ritual –Turner was a student of Gluckman in 1950, just when
Gluckman’s Manchester School was getting started. Gluckman’s work also influenced a
big name you already know: Mary Douglas.
Rites of passage
What do they do? Rites of passage are concerned with conveying people from one social
state to another. Van Gennep observed that rites of passage are universally very similarly
patterned, something overlooked in the attention given to certain elements in the rites of
passage, rather than to the whole thing. There’s something interesting to note here about
a tendency of anthropological thinking: we tend to look for patterns.Van Gennep’s observa-
tion of the similar organisation of rites of passage allows for that anthropological main-
stay, of comparison across different social and cultural circumstances. What’s wrong with
patterns? Nothing –patterns are helpful. But, as our friend Nigel Rapport has recently
observed (Rapport 2020) what if a lot of life actually falls between what anthropologists
have been taught to think of as the patterns? ‘Patterns’ suggests that this is the important
stuff that occurs with reliable frequency, that undergirds life, but we might be missing an
awful lot, especially if we label the things that fall outside patterns as mistakes, departures,
plans gone wrong, or otherwise as deviations. Keep this point in mind –it will help you
to respond critically to the things you’re hearing about, and it will particularly help you
to understand anthropological critiques of kinship studies (coming up soon, in the next
chapter).
According to Van Gennep, rites of passage unfurl in a particular pattern in all societies,
but he noticed that they seem to be expressed in the greatest fullness in what we might
call stable and cyclic societies. This denotes those that anticipate change in accordance
with seasons –that is, where change from state to state articulated through natural phe-
nomena is a crucial and constant part of life.
The first thing to know about rites of passage is that they concern transitions between
states. States refer to a fixed or stable condition of social recognition. For example: I’m
married; I’m single; I’m divorced.Those things are statements of your marital status (there
are many more). A rite of passage accompanies every kind of change of state. All rites of
passage have three phases –this was the undergirding pattern that van Gennep observed:
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Phase 1: Separation
Phase 2: Transition (margin, limen)
Phase 3: Incorporation (aggregation)
In the first phase, the detachment of the individual or group undergoing the change from
one state to another is symbolically expressed. In the second phase, what we will refer to as
the liminal phase, the person or group of people is ambiguous in state –that is, belonging
to not one or the other. In the third stage or phase, the person or group is reincorporated
into statehood once again. Here is how Warner describes it, in his oft-cited passage:
The movement of a man through his lifetime, from a fixed placental placement
within his mother’s womb to his death and ultimate fixed point of his tombstone
and final containment in his grave as a dead organism –punctuated by a number of
critical moments of transitions which all societies ritualize and publicly mark with
suitable observances to impress the significance of the individual and the group on
living members of the community. These are the important times of birth, puberty,
marriage and death.
(Warner, 1959:303)
Notice that in the separation part of the passage, you belong in a state. In the aggregation
or incorporation part, you belong in a state. But in the liminal phase, you are at once no
longer classified in the state you are moving out of, nor do you yet belong to the state
you are going to be in. So, they are ambiguous. Mary Douglas (1966) has probably said
this most succinctly (in her volume Purity and Danger) that anything that is unclear and
contradictory is unclean. Remember the hair and the ice cream example? How could you
forget that? Being liminally located can be powerful and dangerous at the same time.This
is important, since many changes from state to state require a person or group to come
into closer than usual contact with deities or the supernatural. Moving from the state of
child to adult in some societies might be an example, where simply achieving a certain
age isn’t sufficient to make a person into an adult. You might have to undergo an initi-
ation ceremony –like a circumcision, for instance. This might entail a group of males or
females being separated from everyone else in the society –often to a special place away
from view –where they are stripped of the usual things that give them their identity and
place in the society, their status. No one will have any status during the liminal phase. In
this phase, people receive the wisdom, knowledge and sometimes bodily modifications
they require to inhabit the new state, of adult. If you don’t have a status –like every other
human does –it can make it easier to commune with the nonhuman entities and planes
from which knowledge might come. Pain plays a part here, too; proving that you can bear
physical pain serves as a proxy for bearing the responsibilities of being an adult and proves
you capable of receiving your new status.
Make this familiar to yourself with an example you know. A wedding is a rite of
passage. So is a graduation –let’s go with that one. So, you’ve reached the point of
acquiring wisdom –you’re ready to leave the status of student and become a graduate.
The first step is to get you separated out from everyone else who isn’t going to be chan-
ging states. Just like a wedding, it’s important that people who are not graduating do not
show up dressed like graduates. Can you imagine showing up at a wedding dressed like a
bride –especially the kind of bride who might wear a gigantic white fluffy dress? If you
came to her wedding decked out in that kind of bridal gown, you’d probably be heading
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to your next rite of passage pretty quickly –that is, the ‘death-and-ultimate-fixed-point-
of-your-tombstone-and-final-containment-to-your-grave-as-a-dead-organism’ kind of
rite of passage. We’re all for you testing stuff out, but not this one. Not wearing a bridal
gown to a wedding is important not only to avoid the wrath of a murderous bride,
but because special clothing is a key way of symbolically signalling the phase of separ-
ation, where you’re being taken away from your community so something can happen
to change your state. It should be clear at the event of the graduation or wedding who
is graduating or being wed. This happens physically, too; if you’re at a wedding standing
at the altar and you’re not one of the people getting married, then you’re in the wrong
spot. Physical separation from the community before which you’ll make the state change
is very important, because this community has to recognise your initial status, and then
accept you back as a member of your new status. Weddings and graduations involve more
people than just those making the state change; they involve members of the community
who acknowledge and accept it. That’s why you can’t get married without a witness.
OK, so all the graduands (yes, graduands –that’s what you’re called before you make
the transition to graduate) are separated from their community, dressed in symbolic
clothing that takes them out of their status and renders them all the same.There’s none of
your usual social position coming to the fore, because you’re all equal in this situation. But
when you walk across the stage and receive your degree, you move into a new state and
you are returned to the community with your new status acknowledged. And, of course,
you and your fellows make a big show of demonstrating your exit from the previous stage,
when you were still actually just students, by throwing your hats up into the air all at once.
The liminal stage is very interesting and Victor Turner really focused in on it in his
work, and particularly on the experience people inside it had (see Turner, 1967a; 1967b;
1969). Being between states can render people going through the change from state to
state powerful and dangerous, unclean and polluting, as Mary Douglas noted. Maybe you
can appreciate the character of this power by thinking briefly of Harry Potter films. Now
here is something you can try out! Stop whatever you’re doing right this minute and watch
every Harry Potter movie, in the name of anthropological learning. When you do, think
about how it’s always the creatures that are half one kind of animal and half of another
that are always the magical ones that can travel between earthly and other worldly realms.
It’s always the half-horse/half-human and its ilk who are powerful and a little bit scary.
Compare that with, say, just a regular horse. It’s much harder to imagine a horse having
this capacity because it’s already a firmly established category in the earthly realm. But a
centaur? Not so much. It’s between categories and so it’s not much of a jump to say it can
go between realms. Go read or watch Harry Potter again with this new knowledge and
dazzle your friends! Because those humans are betwixt states, they might have this same
capacity –and so it becomes absolutely crucial to have them separated out from others
who are firmly in their states. Initiations can include this type of feature. Think about
weddings again. Andy recalls from his youth the strange things that happened on hen
nights in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Groups of young women would go out on the town.
At the centre of it all was, of course, the bride-to-be. She was required to wear particu-
larly revealing clothing. However, she was also required to wear a black plastic bin liner
with holes for the head and arms.The other women sellotaped onto this obscene cuttings
from newspapers and magazines. And, whilst drunk, she was encouraged to engage in
often aggressively licentious behaviour –forcibly smooching random men and such like.
However, a few of the women in the group were always charged with staying sober and
ensuring that things didn’t go too far and imperil the safety of the bride-to-be. What was
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going on was pretty clear. Here was a world-turned-upside-down liminal moment where
this woman could celebrate her sexuality between the ideally chaste state of childhood
and the monogamous one of marriage. Maybe you could argue that brides are threatening
and dangerous for their partners to see prior to the actual state-changing ceremony, when
they are in the liminal stage. Or, maybe it’s just that Bridezillas are real and will hurt you
if you get in their way.
In the liminal stage, people might be treated as ‘undifferentiated raw material’, such as
when they are assigned a symbolic genderless and sexless character –symbolically nei-
ther female nor male. This reflects their position between states. Note that this kind of
language and idea doesn’t acknowledge non-binary as a state, which might have just as
much to do with anthropological presumptions about binaries and limitation as it does
with the unwillingness of many (but not all) social worlds to name and make space for
them as states. Remember that we’ve just said that being betwixt states makes people
invisible, makes them powerful, makes them dangerous. Does this start to explain the fuss
over non-binary identities? Does it start to make sense of why having non-binary identity
described as a state is so desirable for many non-binary people? Besides the rendering of
people genderless, initiates might be treated as though dead; this reflects that they have no
social reality. They must be hidden away, disguised, or treated as though dead: they have
no social reality because otherwise, people would have to acknowledge what (or rather
who) was not socially there.
Turner thought these unstructured community experiences, that he called ‘communitas’,
were very important to individuals. He thought people needed temporal and physical sep-
aration from their usual social obligations to process and adjust to sometimes monumental
change. At the same time, when people who are all about to undergo a state change spend
this time away from their usual social roles together, completely divested of everything
that comes as a consequence of their previous social positions and equal participants in
the transition to the new phase, deep bonds can be formed. These kinds of profound
relationships, forged in collectivity, may become foundational to the new phase of life
they are each about to enter. A good example is the Australian tradition of ‘schoolies’
where, following end of school examinations groups of friends holiday together for a
few days of, usually, wild and drunken reverie in which they lose themselves. As this is a
moment marking the end of one phase of life and the commencement of another, where
the friends will go off and do different things –go to different universities or commence
different careers –it sometimes feels like goodbye. However, certain elements of it, such
as the schoolies tattoo, where initiates leave a permanent reminder of the event on their
bodies, emphasise also the enduring solidity of the friendships. Communitas is an intense
community spirit, a full-on feeling of equality, solidarity and togetherness. It is charac-
teristic of people experiencing liminality together, and so refers to individuals and to
communities.
Notice that the term ‘communitas’ distinguishes social relationship from the collect-
ivity experienced by individuals living outside their usual states. One belongs to the struc-
ture, one belongs to the anti-structure. Turner said, ‘I have used the term “anti-structure,”
… to describe both liminality and what I have called “communitas.” I meant by it not a
structural reversal … but the liberation of human capacities of cognition, affect, volition,
creativity, etc., from the normative constraints incumbent upon occupying a sequence of
social statuses’ (Turner, 1982: 44). Turner thought that every social position actually has
something sacred about it –you come to know what it is during the liminal period (that
is, becoming a man, becoming a woman). Acquiring that in concert with others takes that
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whole community to the next level and allows that whole of the community to share a
common experience through a rite of passage.This brings everyone onto an equal level –
even if people are in higher positions, they were at one point lower and know what that
means to be there.
Turner takes some of Van Gennep’s model of initiation rites, and some of Gluckman’s
ideas about inversions, to make this argument. Turner defined social dramas as dynamic
processes through which the community renewed itself. He thought it did that through
the ritual creation of communitas during the ‘liminal phase’ that Van Gennep described.
Later on Maurice Bloch would argue almost the exact opposite to Turner’s view: that rit-
uals could release people from the otherwise tightly binding structures of their lives into
anti-structure (or communitas). Bloch thought ritual produced conformity. He came to
that conclusion on the basis that ritual uses a restricted vocabulary and grammar.
Think about a wedding to understand his argument: that ritual utterances are extremely
predictable, and that they essentially diminish the utterer of ritual words –almost to the
point of anonymity –on the basis that they have very little choice in what it is that
they can say. Think also about school days of ritual inversion and schoolies. The events
that took place might have appeared incredible. However, when you share the stories of
them with others, they too can usually recite near identical stories from their own lives.
Bloch thought that ritual language could only ever be propositional; utterances couldn’t
be, say, creatively argumentative because the ritual structure doesn’t allow it. Imagine a
wedding that was creatively argumentative! (Simone loves this idea and will be using it if
she ever gets married.) Bloch thought that people were pretty much restricted to ‘I do’ –
an utterance that he would call a performative utterance. The overwhelming dominance of
performatives in ritual activity led Bloch to think of them as akin to acts of Weberian
traditional authority.2 Bloch did not think, resultantly, that ritual language supports any
kind of creativity or innovation (see Bloch, 1974).
Thomas Csordas (1997) presents a very different view, of ritual language being very
innovative indeed. He compares groups of rituals that share performative elements, and
shows how they fall along the spectrum of formality. Some are super-formal, like those
that occur with the most formal of ritual languages and processes, that we’d probably
call ‘traditional’ –we are thinking of fruitcake covered in marzipan and big fluffy white
dresses and veils. Some are very loose –like weddings that incorporate their own vows,
different coloured cakes, different dresses, and different people other than a man and a
woman in the positions of ‘bride’ and ‘groom’.
Simone is now thinking of her first shotgun wedding on a Queensland beach at
which she refused to wear shoes (her feet were swollen from being pregnant) and to
which many of her older relatives wore very formal clothing that has probably never
been seen on a beach before (or indeed since). Simone wishes she’d invited Thomas
Csordas to that wedding because he would have explained to the assembled guests that,
over time, innovations down at the informal end of the scale tend to make it into the
formal versions –mudcakes outnumber fruitcakes now, probably, at even the most formal
events –that didn’t come out of nowehere. Hey presto –innovation.
Innovation in symbols is interesting to consider –we wonder what you think of this.
Here’s an exercise. Watch a few episodes of Bridezillas, or go to a couple of weddings
(probably as a guest rather than an anthropological wedding crasher –we don’t have bail
money for you). Do the key symbols –cake, ring, dress, and so on, say what they used
to say? Traditional fruitcakes used to have three tiers. The first tier was to be shared with
guests on reincorporation to celebrate the new status of the couple as married.The second
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tier was saved for consumption on the first anniversary, and the third for celebrating the
arrival of the first child, usually consumed at the child’s christening. It was made of fruit
and covered in marzipan for the preservative qualities of both, so it could serve out its
symbolic life. Rings are forever, white dresses for virgin brides. What do you think they
say now? Maybe they’re no longer symbolic. That’s what Charsley (1992) contends when
he says that to his British informants, wedding cakes symbolise little more than weddings
themselves. He adds that what little evolution there has been in the meaning of the cake
has been driven by technical changes in the cake’s materiality? What do you think?
Turner argued that rituals are chock full of symbols, but they are multiply meaningful.
He thought they could be read in three main ways: exegetical, operational and positional.
The exegetical meaning is the meaning according to the person performing the ritual –
Turner thought this a subjective meaning. The operational meaning is the one observed
by the researcher –Turner called it objective –and deals with the purpose of ritual in a
society. Finally, the positional meaning is clever –it explores the relationships between
the symbols from all perspectives. Turner was good at understanding how different levels
of meaning came available to different people, depending on their position, and he fur-
ther distinguished between what he called the ‘manifest’ meaning –the one the observer
can get a hold of and that articulates what the ritual is for, and the ‘latent’ meaning that
of which the outside observer is only has partial aware. The outside observer who is an
anthropologist tries really hard to build that awareness.To do that, they need to figure out
the meanings of the symbols and the ritual to the people going through it.
Later in his career, Turner developed the idea of social dramas to think about ritual
events. He saw four stages in ritual events. First would come an initial breach in relations,
followed by a crisis. Then there would be redressive actions, and, finally, acts of reinte-
gration. Social dramas happen when a member of a community breaks a rule. It’s easy
enough to think of one. We have a dreadful example in Australia that happened recently
in the Parliament. A staffer called Brittany Higgins accused an adviser to the ruling
conservative Liberal Party of sexual assault. That’s a breach event, when a person –the
adviser –disrupts the norm that usually regulates the relationships between people. After
that happened, the crisis deepened and sides were taken for or against the rule breaker.
This taking of sides extends the gaps between the ‘for’ and ‘against’ parties, so something
has to be done to get back to the relatively peaceable social relations that were in place
before the crisis arose. Brittany’s accusation was a big deal in Australia; it was the straw
that broke the camel’s back.There had been so much dreadful misogyny, abuse and assault
inside and outside Parliament; Brittany’s accusation provided an opportunity to talk about
it. Brittany was joined by Grace Tame, 2021’s Australian of the Year, in talking about it.
Grace had won the honour for her work advocating for sexual assault survivors, of whom
she is one. Grace accusing the government of not doing enough about the situation.
As part of her engagements as Australian of the Year, Grace was invited to an event
at the residence of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, where she refused to play the polite
game –she didn’t smile, and gave the PM a few disapproving looks. That too is a breach,
and it really split public opinion. The PM’s wife (Jenny Morrison) called Grace’s behav-
iour impolite, as did many other public figures. Others felt that politeness and pretence
was the very veneer behind which abuse had occurred; when someone who could do
something about it and didn’t, politeness shouldn’t cover up that fact. It was a tense situ-
ation. Repairs needed to be undertaken. One of the attempts was a formal apology to
women before Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins’ joint address to the National Press Club
in February 2022 (an event not attended by then PM).That’s a kind of public ritual.When
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these work, things go back to peaceable relations; when they don’t, further ructions occur.
There’s still a lot of tension around this –and Turner’s work is very useful for thinking
about how societies try to deal with big tensions. This is especially so, now that the
changes being demanded by women are being introduced, at least in Parliament House,
where the working relationships are coming under new governance so that sexual assault
is more difficult for perpetrators to carry out and easier for victims to report. We can see
here reintegration, where resolution of the problem is being negotiated and the change
is being legitimised. In the whole event, structural social tensions could be expressed and
at least temporarily resolved.
Mary Douglas significantly extended Turner’s theory of ritual structure and anti-
structure. She developed her own contrasting set of terms: ‘grid’ and ‘group’.You can find
these in her Natural Symbols (Douglas, 1970). She saw ritual as symbolic communication
that constrained social behaviour. In her formula, grid is a scale that measures the extent to
which a symbolic system is shared by community members. Group refers to the degree
to which people are integrated into a community –how tightly knit is it? Mary Douglas
evidently loved working with graphs –she produced a lot of them.When graphed on two
intersecting axes, four quadrants are possible from grid/group.You can get: strong group/
strong grid, strong group/weak grid, weak group/weak grid, weak group/strong grid.Try
this out on your unsuspecting community or household.
Douglas advanced the idea that that societies with strong group or strong grid have
much more ritual activity going on those that were weak in either group or grid. See
how this grid/group analysis sits underneath what’s available to people participating in
the rituals themselves? It’s a kind of uncommon knowledge that comes from structur-
alism, a theory advanced by Claude Lévi-Strauss.You’ll learn a lot more about him in the
next chapter –for now, remember that Mary Douglas took a lot of inspiration from his
theoretical position that involved a universally shared deep structure shared by all human
societies, that participants in them couldn’t really access as they lived these structures.
Mary Douglas was deeply influenced by Turner’s use of symbols. We’ll see in our chapter
on animals just how important symbols were to Douglas’ work, and how much she owes
to –and departs from –Turner’s ways of thinking about them.
Clifford Geertz was also deeply influenced by –and departed from –Turner’s symbolic
approach to ritual (see, for example, his Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz, 1973)). He was
not at all enamoured with the functionalist idea that that rituals prevent conflict from
arising in the social order. He argued instead that ritual actively shapes that social order by
imposing meaning on essentially disordered social experience. While he thought Turner
was right to emphasise symbols, Geertz thought they were like codes to be interpreted as
cultural systems in themselves. When arranged in ritual, they could shape the social order
and impose meaning and clarity on essentially disordered social experience. He didn’t
think that ritual action served to resolve social passions and dramas, as Gluckman and
Turner did; he focused on the symbolic elements of ritual that he argued displayed two
different things: a model of reality and a model for reality. A model of reality showed how
to interpret the world as it is, and a model for reality depicted its ideal form. The purpose
of ritual is to bring these together, so people can see and act on themselves and the social
world.We can see from this little run-though that there’s a range of perspectives on ritual.
Different anthropologists and sociologists have emphasised different things On the face of
it, these different insights and emphases tell you that looking at ritual is super-useful for
anthropologists.There’s a sense that as public events, rituals contain something of import-
ance to everyone in the community.
10

However, we think there’s something a bit unsatisfying about these approaches that
we want you to keep in mind, and that is the tendency of anthropologists to take a case as
illustration. The ritual event in anthropological imagination is particularly prone to this
tendency. In functionalist analysis, ritual events are prone to take the case as illustration
because they take a slice of typical society and use it to make sense of the whole thing.
Manchester School imaginaries are prone to it not because they take a slice of society and
then use it to make sense of the whole thing, but because they are regarded as atypical,
unique. Close investigation of these events would let anthropologists look at the things
that are sufficiently special as to be enclosed in an event, as well as the ordinary realities
from which the event stood out. They kind of throw into relief the everyday stuff and
make it more obvious.
Remember that looking at the atypical events this way –including public events –
but especially events of conflict and crisis –was a hallmark of the Manchester School.
Gluckman was trying to get away from the idea that cases for anthropological inves-
tigation were best when they were typical. This was a hallmark of the functionalist
anthropologists. Gluckman thought instead that it was events that broke the routine
that were most fruitful. And, he further thought that conflict events were not signs of
pathology or dysfunction in a society, like the functionalists did. He thought instead that
they were very, very important in defining reproducing social and political relations.
So what’s wrong with the functionalist approach, or the Manchester School approach?
Nothing, really. But they probably say more about the centrality of ritual events to
anthropologists than to the people they study. We think that’s important to note. Let us
explain a bit more.
In contrast with thinking about events in terms of typifications, or atypifications that
departed from everyday dynamics, Don Handelman developed a kind of continuum of
events. At one end, he put the really open, unstructured events. At the other, we find
the highly formalised and institutionalised events. The ones at the formal end of the
continuum, the really uptight formal kinds, he thought, express structuring principles
and processes by which people systematically put together their realities. The ones down
the other end, the more open ones, have potential to lead to new kinds of structural
arrangements.They can actually produce change. Handelman’s claim that ritual should be
examined as a phenomenon in itself led him to describe them as fitting into those two
main categories at either end of the continuum we just described. He called the closed
ones, ‘events that mirror’ the world. He called the more open ones ‘events that model’ the
world (Handelman, 1998:3). He thought the first kind, events that mirror, are organised
to represent or reflect the world as it is experienced by participants. These are mirrors
that are ‘held up to reflect versions of the organization of society that are intended by the
makers of the occasion’ (ibid.).
These kinds of events hold a mirror up to society. Everything is on point. Nothing is
out of place.There might even be a high emphasis on bodies making the same movements
in the same way at the same time. Have you ever seen a really precise military parade? Or
perhaps you have witnessed Trooping the Colour, the ceremony that marks the Queen’s
official birthday? In fact, it’s marked the British sovereign’s birthday for over 260 years.
If you haven’t seen this, find some footage online and take notice of the attention to
detail that characterises it and events like it. Thousands of people are in it. In parts of it,
it’s almost as if all of these bodies move as one. If you turn off the video and just listen
to it, it’s sonically precise, too –and not just the musical components. The horses’ hooves
clap onto the street in time, you can hear the footfalls of the participants occurring in
1

time, you can hear the silences between the sounds. There’s a gun salute, and the noise
of jets participating in the flypast. The event is oriented to the general public –you can
go see it, and it’s always broadcast on BBC1. Thousands turn out to see it in person, and
millions tune in –not just in the UK, but across the Commonwealth. People are given
the day off for it.
Public events occur in specific space and time that helps mark them out as different
from whatever everyday events occur more usually. Imagine a Christmas Parade; it
only occurs in marked off time and space, and is partly distinguished as special by
these locations; the street is otherwise used for more everyday activities. Trooping the
Colours is an excellent example of this. The Queen was actually born on April 21,
but Trooping the Colours occurs in June. That’s because an outdoor event would be
pretty unpleasant in April in the UK, so the event wouldn’t be attended very well. This
arrangement pre-dates the Queen’s reign, and it really does ram home the idea that
public events have to be oriented to publics, as these events need publics to do their
work. That is, as Handelman would have it, Trooping the Colours isn’t just held because
the Queen really likes her music to be played in time, or because Princess Anne loves a
chance to get dressed up and ride her horse along the street. This event takes place, and
has done across more than two centuries, because it shows directly to the monarch’s
subjects the orderliness and control of the institution. It’s an impressive reflection of
the institution’s power, but it’s more than this. The internal orderliness of the institu-
tion that’s putting on the display is also and equally saying, ‘See this? See how there’s
no chinks in this armour? Don’t bother challenging it, there’s no point.’ The event uses
its capacity to reflect internal order to create order. This might be less important now
in the history of the monarchy than it once was in terms of the event itself, but the
preservation of the institution and its reputation is certainly entailed in the operations
of contemporary power.
One of the most powerful ways in which this occurs is in and through the capacity of
the event to reach out to its publics to entail them not just as witnesses to this message, but
as participants in it. People wave flags, they take the day off, there’s a celebratory, festive
mood. It operates across elemental and sensory fields –it’s a spectacular visual and audible
event, and it’s felt in embodied ways too, as special food is consumed, for instance, and
as people throng together to watch it. It’s all around them; there’s events on the ground,
there’s people on horseback, people on balconies. It’s in the air; there’s a flypast, too,
involving multiple aircraft. It involves people’s bodies –it’s not just that they’re receiving
a message of order. Why is that important? Because the event demonstrates its capacity
to organise a large number of people into a system to even bear witness to the event. In
2022, there was even a lottery to determine who could attend in person; that’s a pretty
direct demonstration of power over bodies –and those bodies, once there, are enveloped
sonically, haptically, olfactorily, and from the air and different levels from the ground up –
in the intuitional thrall. That’s very powerful stuff.
Have a look at even more dramatic examples of this –military parades are excellent
examples, especially those put on by dictators. When you see these, you realise just how
devastating it would be to the effects of the performance if something went wrong –if
one of the marching bodies toppled over, or a tank had its gun raised at a right angle,
the message of utterly flawless internal orderliness would not quite work. That might be
highly consequential in tyrannical systems subject to overthrow. It’s also consequential
for non-tyrannical systems. Everybody of a certain age in the UK can recall the death of
Princess Diana, and not just because it was such a tragic event. She was widely regarded as
12

the ‘People’s Princess’ and her death at least partly a consequence of an uncaring establish-
ment and Royal Family. The crisis this brought for the Royal Family seemed, however, to
be resolved by a funeral ceremony in which almost the entire nation participated, a cere-
mony that was almost flawlessly choreographed, until the accidental faux pas of the BBC,
that most Great of British establishment institutions. Amidst his otherwise solemn com-
mentary that also most establishment of establishment commentators David Dimbleby
remarked on the horses of the funeral cortege passing by ‘with their bits dangling’. The
designed atmosphere exploded in an instant, and the frailty of the establishment’s grip
on matters was brought into sharp and hilarious relief. So: these events are meant to be
not just flawless reflections. In and through reflecting perfection, they create orders in
the publics who bear them witness and feel in their bodies the operations of the power
that emanate outbound from the events themselves. But, when they go wrong, they also
threaten to disrupt.
Handelman talks about ‘strike parades’ as events that mirror the world –even though
you might be much, much more inclined to think about them as events that change the
world. Handelman described them as ‘teleonomic’; they have the apparent quality of pur-
posefulness and of goal-directedness for change, but which are actually open-ended and
not particularly or predictably available for change by an agent with intention, purpose, or
foresight. In other words, strikes and protests tend to present the situation as it is (however
undesirable it is) and while it might agitate for change to order, it’s pretty much restricted
to articulating what the order is right now (see Handelman, 1998). All of the events in this
category indicate the structural principles in play to which we make recourse to put our
lives together. They’re different from events that model that articulate transformational
possibilities.
Events that mirror the world can be compared with the event-that-models, which
Handelman notes (1998:27) has an internal ordering that is devised to transform the
lived-in world. Events that model the lived-in world effectively make order in the world by
taking one condition and operating on it, to transform it into a form that is opposed to
the former. Events that re-present the world overturn existing conditions of order, and
then they restore them. They can evoke terror in societies that are only just hanging on
to order, to alert them to the consequences of the disorder that might be just around the
corner. Events that re-present the world take one set of conditions of life and muck around in
them, operate on them, changing them into another set of conditions that look nothing
like the former. An exorcism is a good example of this, because an exorcism begins with
a set of events that are opposed to the ones you end up with (hopefully), in which the
subject of exorcism is transformed from one out-of-order condition to another. Lots of
religious events could be said to be events that model the world. Christenings might be
able to do so: you take one set of events where a child does not yet fully belong in the
realm of the particular Christian tradition, and you transform the child in and through
the ritual process into a full member of the flock. Any kind of initiation event is likely to
be classifiable as one that models the lived-in world.
Handelman’s continuum gives us a way to distinguish between events in a different
way from hitching them to the larger structural/cultural forces within which they are
embedded, as the functionalists and members of the Manchester School envisaged.
Another way of saying this is that, according to Handelman, we should understand public
events in and on their own terms. That’s really different from seeing what public events
reflect about society, like those that follow the Manchester School do when they take
13

public events as atypical events by which we can see into the social and cultural lives with
which they contrast.
Although Bruce Kapferer really likes this approach (he takes a lot of the same positions
as Handelman), he does see a bit of a problem with it, that has to do with the risk of
reductionism. It means if you decided what kind of event something was –open or
closed, then you could compare events of very, very different scales:
The suggestion is that although such encounters may appear to be on the order of
a different register or scale, similar interactional principles may be observed in them:
what is transpiring in the Oval Office is essentially little different from the kind of
negotiation that may be taking place in the classroom. There is a potentially imma-
nent reductionism in this perspective (which Gluckman’s systemic emphasis was
intended to combat), and it is exacerbated by a tendency to overlook the likely pos-
sibility that the dynamic quality of particular events may vary according to the forces
at which they are the locus and which may affect the internal processes of events but
are not reducible to them.
(Kapferer, 2015:11)
How do you get around that? Kapferer has some interesting suggestions that involve
Marshall Sahlins’ (1980; 1985; 2004; 2005) works.That work introduces cultural value into
event analysis, and that helps to damp down some of that reductionism he’s worried about:
Events are not natural phenomena. They are always constructions and do not exist
as events apart from this fact … events achieve their import and effects through the
meaning or the significance that human beings attach to them, and it is this which
yields their generative impact. Initially, they might be conceived of as happenings or
occurrences without any necessary meaning or significance. When they become sig-
nificant, it is in their becoming an event in this sense that they achieve their import
… events … achieve their force in a process of conjunctive cultural construction that
is both a specific arrangement and an invention of meaning.
(Kapferer, 2015:17).
Getting the picture? Continuums, creativity, and not strictly hitching events to their cul-
tural and social surrounds helps centralise the meanings that the people who go through
them. This permits significance to emerge and grow in line with the importance people
attach to them, which is an important antidote to the earlier anthropological tendency
to use public events to cast light on society more broadly. Anthropologists like Csordas,
Kapferer and Handelman have introduced innovations in anthropological thinking –
subjecting that to some uncommon sense, and repuzzling by looking at what has been
presumed and internalised as analytic gospel. This doesn’t mean at all that insights into
ritual can’t be located, for example, in the broader cultural and social milieu in which they
occur. For a good example of how you might do that, have a read of Zixun’s essay at the
end of this chapter. She draws out the things that matter to her –like gender inequity –
that are part of ritual performances. She intervenes in these in her writing, calling them
out as effects on her mind and body as she recalls her childhood experiences of attending
her great-grandmother’s funeral. This is an analysis built from a particular perspective; we
think Turner would have been very interested in it!
14
Exercise: Eventing
Now you have a go. Try going to a public event, or having a look at one online or
on TV.What do you make of it? How are you seeing it now, compared to before you
read this chapter? Can you see other ritual events in the university context? Like
what? Don’t just look for qualifying events; take particular notice of how and when
you’re making ground in anthropological understanding. At what point did you say,
‘Oh! This graduation is a rite of passage!’What made you say it? That is, take note of
the processes you’re going through. As we said at the start of this book, that’s your
original contribution to knowledge.
How did student contributors make this knowledge? Let’s see what Kishaya says
about it.
Kishaya Lye gives a really interesting insight into how she realised the importance of
rituals that convey people from one state to another when the rite of passage that would
have turned her from girl to woman failed. Kishaya told us:
Turning 18 is completely different to turning 17. Or 19, for that matter. The ‘set
sequence’ for a typical 18th is to have a massive party with everyone you know,
drink until you pass out and trash the house that your parents hesitantly left in your
care. After all, you’re now an adult. You have so much more freedom, and so much
more responsibility. You can go to a bar. You can move out. The pay at your job
increases.You don’t even have to ask your parents permission to do anything anymore
because you can always say ‘I’m an adult and I can make my own decisions.’ However,
after you’ve turned 18, celebrations do tend to die down a little. Most people don’t
even celebrate their 19th with a party since they feel they’re too old. And there’s no
newfound opportunities or freedom; it’s just another year.
Turning 18 is a big deal. Sure, it happens by itself; if you reach the right legal age,
you can go into a bar, you can drink alcohol, you can vote, all of that. But it’s really
common in Australia to mark this event, typically by overindulging in alcohol. It’s a
bit ironic; you might, as Kishaya suggested, do your worst, trash the house, do all sorts
of irresponsible things. It’s almost as if you show just how ill-equipped and unready
you actually are for dealing with that which you’re legally entitled to consume. How
on earth does this make sense? We think it has a lot to do with the realisation people
make of leaving childhood behind. It’s the last safe space you have left to do it; as
Kishaya intimates, your parents kind of know you’re going to, it’s socially expected, and
there’s a safe and contained space around for it that perhaps wouldn’t be in place for
your 19th birthday –but might come back in play at your 21st, which used to be the
legal age of adulthood in Australia. It’s such a safe space that sometimes your parents
come to it –as they did for Simone’s brother, who took drunkenness to new levels at
his event. It’s retained as a kind of second coming of age that takes you right out of
the teens –same sort of deal. So it sounded like some special things would occur –
drinking, trashing the house, the last hurrah of irresponsible childish behaviour before
you have to take up the heavy load of being a grown up. Kishaya told us how this had
unfolded for her friend:
15

My friend, who had her 18th birthday earlier in the year, was taken out to the bar
with her parents and sisters and got her first ever cocktail, a much more common
way to spend an 18th.
So why couldn’t Kishaya do something like this?
My 18th didn’t follow tradition. My birthday was right during my year 12 exams, meaning
I never felt like a true adult when the clock hit midnight. I spent the night studying for
my exam the next day. As time went on, I started to go out to bars and clubs more often,
but it felt like I was being eased into it.There were no wild nights, rather one drink at the
bar with a friend and home by 9 p.m. It felt like I was 17 with a fake ID. My parents put
together a party for me once exams were over –they rented out a room at a hotel in the
city for my friends and I, and left us be. Leading up to it, I had visions on how my 18th
party would go. Surely we’d be running through the city at midnight, trashing the hotel
room and drinking exclusively from the minibar while hoping not to get a noise com-
plaint. But it wasn’t that. Some of my friends weren’t even 18 yet. And we all were scared
to leave the room after dark. Plus, my parents expected us to be responsible. So, we spent
the night watching movies and playing boardgames, almost like children.
Epic fail for poor Kishaya –note especially how she remarks how her celebrations were
like ones that kids would have. It didn’t move her from the state she was in to the state she
wanted to be in –and was ‘qualified’ to occupy. Note also that she didn’t get that feeling
of communitas, either; some of her friends weren’t old enough to drink, so they couldn’t
truly share in that intense feeling of community that Victor Turner described.
Kishaya did eventually feel like she had moved properly into the state of adulthood:
It was when I moved to another state for university that I began to experience
adulthood. Here I was, alone in an unfamiliar place. I began to realise I could do
whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and it was wonderful. I began to be freer
and spend more nights out. No longer was I sipping on a cocktail with a friend but
instead doing shots at a dorm party with a bunch of friends I just met. Then it was
clubbing until 3 a.m. and home in time for my 7 a.m. shift at work. I became more
adventurous and excitable and just wanted to properly enjoy my university life.
Despite what we just said about 19th birthdays, Kishaya did her 18th on her 19th:
My 19th was shaping up to be epic. Despite the Sydney lockdown, restrictions were
lifted just in time to host a massive rage with 200 of my closest friends. Well, maybe
not exactly that. But I invited a whole bunch of high school and university friends
over and watched their different personalities clash and mingle. I bought alcohol for
everyone, and we drank and danced and laughed and played drinking games until
sunrise. This was exactly how I envisioned my 18th to be, and it was only now at 19
that I actually felt like I had become an adult.
She told us how she thinks about this, after a bit of anthropological thinking:
My perspective on this is the idea that I didn’t follow the ‘set sequence’ that is
expected of every child turning into an adult. I never had a crazy 18th, rather a crazy
16

19th. It could even be said that my 19th birthday was more of a typical 18th than my
18th was. And simply from not having such an exciting birthday ritual for my 18th,
it delayed the whole transition from a child into an adult. By not experiencing a
ritualistic 18th, it prevented me from experiencing the freedom and excitement that
comes with being an adult. I only was able to develop that more deeply once I had
my 19th birthday, bringing to light how deeply such ideas and rituals are ingrained
in us growing up. I saw it in movies, I saw it with friends and family –having a crazy
18th was a passageway to adulthood I never experienced. But, now I’m 19 and living
alone in Canberra, cooking ramen for dinner and prepping a sandwich for lunch
since I don’t want to buy takeout at work … what is more adult than that?
What about Zixun? We love how Zixun used a particular event that she was also a par-
ticipant in to come to her understandings:
Funeral of my great-grandma
By Zixun Lin
Public events have a special place in anthropological research. I always find cere-
monies, rituals to be powerful cultural representations. These events are like a
window, where one can look through that tiny frame, frequently the very usual
and basic everyday vignette, to the broader world. When I started the introductory
anthropology course, the topic of public events and ceremony recalls my memory
of attending my great-grandma’s funeral.
This essay will not discuss the sorrow and sadness from the death of a family elder,
but I am going to illustrate the topics that arise from the funeral and how it projects
the kinship system, the gender ideology and the cosmology beliefs in my hometown
village, insofar as these things vest themselves in my own body –then, as a child,
and now, as an anthropologist making realisations in new ways, and looking –or
feeling –back in time at my childhood self.
My great-grandma died many years ago, at the age of 97. When the time almost
came, the families took her to the old house where she lived at a young age.There was
a belief that elders should pass away in the old place where they once lived in my home
village. People said it was a comedy funeral, a funeral of an old lady with natural death.
After the death, all the family relatives gather at that old house of my great-
grandma’s. These family relatives include both close relatives and loose relatives,
even acquaintances. Close relatives refer to my great-grandma’s children and the
next generation of patrilineal lines; while loose relatives mean the people we share
the same ancestral hall; usually these are people from the same clan, and we worship
the ancestors in the same place. The female relatives all stayed in the old house to
help prepare the spirit money. It is a kind of paper that assembled paper money and
will be burnt on a particular day after the wake, as an offering to the dead. Several
days after the wake, there will be a grand ritual to send away the dead body, and
these spirit money are all prepared for this great ritual. The time of the ritual was
determined by a fortune-teller who knew how to choose the best time to send
away the dead body. Before that, the family relatives need to stay in the old house.
17
When it comes to the formal date of the funeral, all the family relatives were
asked to line up in particular order to send the dead body to the cemetery. My
grandpa hired a village elder adult to organise the funeral; he is a master of the
norms and rules of a proper burial in the local cultural setting.The elder then asked
all the families to line up. It is worth documenting the rule of lining up. Firstly, it
was queued according to the seniority of generation, the older generations were
lined before the younger generation. Then, among the younger generation, the
sons’ children were lined before the daughters’ children, and within that, they
lined up according to their ages. But among those sequences, there is a general
rule that males were always lined up before the females. As my grandfather is the
only son of my great-g randma, my father was the youngest son of my grandfather,
and I was the youngest daughter of my father, so I was arranged as the last person
in the line.
The line in that funeral then became a clear illustration of the kinship system in my
home village. The abstract kinship ideology was then embodied in the arrangement
of the funeral line. The male-dominated patriarchal system was unquestionable, in
which males were lined up before females. Inside that, there is a sharp division
between the inside (the son’s side) and outside (the daughter’s side). It represents a
strong kinship ideology of who is a legitimate member of the family.
After the line was set and fixed, we walked on a pre-set route to send the dead
body to the cemetery, after walking with the line for a while, to the memorial arch,
which used to be the village’s entrance. The elderly man asked my other cousins,
sisters, and aunts to return to the old house. We were told that females were not
allowed to go to the cemetery, that it was inappropriate for females to witness
the burying process. My aunts walked back normally. It was clear that for them,
that was the commonly accepted norm, the fact that females are not allowed to
walk along the dead body to the burying site. But for me, as the youngest female
child in the family, who was attending a funeral for the first time in her life, all
I felt at that moment was confusion. The elderly female families asked me to walk
quickly and not look back at the line heading to the cemetery. Not until I grew
up did I start to think about these cultural norms and question these gendered
norms from that funeral. I did not know clearly what gender ideology was at that
moment, at an earlier age. But I understand that these public events, the rituals of
an elderly person’s death in the family, become a powerful educational opportunity
to acknowledge the next generations the rules of that line. They were just like a
cultural script that was imprinted in my brain. I learned about the ‘proper’ and
commonly accepted rules of generational, gendered and kinship hierarchy in my
hometown village.
The feeling was weird, and I can well remember my confusion about attending
that funeral and the fact that I was arranged at the tail of that line and was not
allowed to go to the cemetery. That emotionality was difficult to express in written
words. Growing up, the kind of weirdness turns into grievances and anger. At some
moment, between reading and writing and thinking, one starts to make sense of
those events. At some point, I realised that being restricted to the cemetery was a
kind of gender discrimination. It leads me to reflect on the gender ideology and the
hierarchical kinship system in my hometown.
18
Grandpa’s birthday celebration and the food traditions

My grandpa’s birthday is at the Double Ninth Festival (Chongyangjie) in the lunar
calendar; every year the families will gather to have a huge dinner, to celebrate my
grandpa’s birthday. When talking about celebration, we cannot avoid talking about
the food on the special day. In speaking of my grandpa’s birthday celebration, the
most memorable part was not the delicious and fancy food in the dinner, but the
weird rice cakes my grandma used to make. The rice cake is made of around ten
different kinds of green herbs. My grandma used to collect these green herbs all by
herself in the field. The green herbs were ground and mixed with the rice; it then
become a specially made, green-coloured rice cake. It tastes bitter, but my families
always enjoy eating the special rice cake together.
But somehow this weird rice cake become a family tradition; some say that eating
the rice cake around the special season, the Double Ninth Festival which is also my
grandpa’s birthday, is good for one’s health. And interestingly, it seems to be a kind of
special dish that only exists in my hometown. Moving out of the village and having
studied in the town centre for many years, I have never heard or seen that green
herbal rice cake. When I was in primary school, I remember that my grandparents
will take a bus on the special day to town centre; they brought these green herbal
rice cakes as well.
My grandma passed away two years ago, and my aunt inherited the responsibility
of preparing the special green herbal rice cake when my grandpa’s birthday comes.
I never enjoyed the flavour of the rice cake; it tastes weird with lots of bitterness,
but the aftertaste sometimes seems a bit sweet. The ‘weird’ rice cake becomes the
most important part of my grandpa’s birthday until today, it seems to be something
must-have for my grandpa’s birthday. I feel like it is never just about the cake, but the
rice cake carries a lot of cultural values. I am sure people in the past invented this
herbal rice cake for special reasons, such as out of health concerns, and today the act
of collecting different kinds of herbs becomes a way of reconnecting ourselves with
the land and the soil. And more importantly, the green herbal rice cake now becomes
our family tradition for my grandpa’s birthday; it is never just about the rice cake, it
becomes an embodiment of family bonding and inheritance of family values.

Understanding rituals is important and generates some very rich insights. They’re easy
to access, and you’ll get such a lot of new knowledge as a result of thinking about them
anthropologically.That’s also the case for thinking about kinship –to which we now turn.
Notes
1 Roy Rappaport, for example, examined the way gift exchanges of pigs between tribal groups in
Papua New Guinea maintained environmental balance between humans, available food (with
pigs sharing the same food as humans) and resource base. Rappaport concluded that ritual, ‘helps
to maintain an undegraded environment, limits fighting to frequencies which do not endanger
the existence of regional population, adjusts man-land ratios, facilitates trade, distributes local
19

surpluses of pig throughout the regional population in the form of pork, and assures people of
high quality protein when they are most in need of it’ (1968:224).
2 Traditional authority refers to a type of leadership in which the authority of a ruling regime is
attached firmly to tradition. Here, it references Weber’s tripartite classification of authority, com-
prising traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic (see Weber, 1958). Rational-legal authority is
related to a belief in the law –it’s what democracies are based on. Charismatic ones are based
on individuals and are pretty unstable; it’s always hard to say what’s going to happen when the
charismatic leader dies.
References
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of Traditional Authority? Archives Europeen de Sociologie 15(1): 55–84.
Charsley, S. 1992. Wedding Cakes and Cultural History. New York: Routledge.
Csordas,T. 1997. Language, Charisma, and Creativity:The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement. Berkeley,
CA; London: University of California Press.
Douglas, M. 1970. Natural Symbols. London: Pantheon Books.
Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.
Gluckman, M. 1954. Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Gluckman, M. 1958. Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Gluckman, M. 1963. Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa: Collected Essays. London: Cohen & West.
Gluckman, M. 1965. Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society. Oxfordshire: Blackwell.
Handelman, D. 1998. Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. Oxford:
Berghahn Books.
Kapferer, B. 2015. Introduction: In the Event –toward an Anthropology of Generic Moments.
In L. Meinert and B. Kapferer (eds.) In The Event: Toward an Anthropology of Generic Moments.
New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 2–28.
Malinowski, B. 1948. Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1952. Structure and Function in Primitive Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Rappaport, R. 1968. Pigs for the Ancestors. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press.
Rapport, N. 2020. Distortion: Social Processes Beyond the Structured and Systemic. London: Routledge.
Sahlins, M. 1980. Historical Metaphors and Mythical History. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press.
Sahlins, M. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sahlins, M. 2004. Apologies to Thucydides. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sahlins, M. 2005. Structural Work: How Microhistories Became Macrohistories and Vice Versa.
Anthropological Theory 5 (1): 5–30.
Turner,V. 1967a. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Turner,V. 1967b. The Forest of Symbols:Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Turner,V. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Turner, V. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts
Journal Publications.
Van Gennep, A. 1909 [1960]. The Rites of Passage. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Warner, W.L. 1959. The Living and the Dead. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press.
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120
5 Kinship and relatedness

In this chapter, we’re going to have a look at why was kinship so important to the dis-
cipline early in its history. That will get us right into the thick of thinking about how
anthropologists working in the colonial period (and for a long while afterwards) made
sense of ‘other’ people’s cultures –precisely by looking at their kinship arrangements.
This legacy is a bit more enduring than you might think. We’ll consider the lingering
consequences that these anthropologists –especially the structural functionalists –left
behind, and why the kind of thinking that they did worked so well at the time (and why
it doesn’t now). We’ll think about what’s happened since then, and what it means to look
at kinship arrangements now. But most importantly of all, we want this chapter to prompt
you to think creatively about what you can find out using genealogical methods. Simone
especially loves using this method to think about how smokers make smoking safe for
themselves, and how families can be understood in and through the relations of touch.
You need imagination more than you need a complete technical mastery to make genea-
logical methods animate how people are connected, so have a crack at it and see how
yours works to think about relatedness.
Studying kinship entails realising that different people have different ways of making
sense of their relationships, and operationalising them. Perhaps the ways of organising
kinship with which you’re most familiar aren’t the most common ways of being organised.
Some of the ways of being related we’ll tell you about in this chapter will seem really
alien to you. Some will feel familiar. Just remember to come back to a position of making
uncommon sense, and make sure you do that with your own presumptions about related-
ness. It might seem to you that calling one person ‘Father’ is universal. No! Your positions
are familiar to you, but if you remember that everyone else feels that way about their
positions, you might be less prone to make presumptions. That’s important for really
understanding relatedness from the perspectives of people besides yourself.
Things get tricky straight away for anthropologists when they try to convey some of
the techniques for collecting information about relatedness and when they try to depict
it in kinship diagrams, called genealogies. That means you’re going to have to read this
chapter critically. For example, anthropologists use special symbols when they are making
kinship diagrams. Traditionally, those represent males and females and there’s a symbol
for both/neither, but it can yet can be a bit confronting to consider matters familial.
Genealogies are political, too. We’re not going to pretend to comprehensively cover this
topic in just one chapter –our purpose instead is to get you to think about kinship and its
DOI: 10.4324/9781003273547-5
12
Kinship and relatedness 121

representation critically, and sensitively. Take almost everything we say as something you
should regard with lively suspicion.

In this chapter, there’s a few bits of uncommon sense to watch out for. You’re related to
a whole lot of people, and the terms of those relations are familiar to you –you just live
them. Perhaps you think of them in emotional terms (that’s probably about right!). Maybe
you know some things about where your family came from (please don’t get Simone
going about how some of her relatives bang on about where her ancestors came from).
But have you ever considered what the underlying principles might be that organise
you into those relationships, and are they the same for everyone? Have you, for example,
ever considered the fluids by which anthropologists have suggested we principally make
ourselves related? One is blood. Another one could be semen. If you thought of things
like this, you could think of your ancestors and descendants as related to you through
the connecting fluid of blood, and your in-laws and husband or wife as related to you by
the connecting fluid of semen. No semen involved in your case? We’ll cover that in this
chapter, but the important point to note here is that an early anthropological uncommon
sense-making has had to be repuzzled. Just when you were feeling nice and secure about
getting some uncommon sense going on regarding knowing about different ways of
doing relatedness through connecting fluids, we want you to consider another kind of
uncommon sense: not being organised by connecting fluids at all. That leads us to con-
sider the term ‘family’ at the end of this chapter, too.
Want a quick grab of the uncommon sense? Here’s an example. You have an Aunty
who just loves visiting your place with a gigantic roll of paper under her arm. She unfurls
it and it covers the whole dining room table. It smells a bit like the underarm of your
Aunty, and it also smells like your afternoon now belongs to her.Your Aunty pops on her
specs and starts walking you back through the long list of rellies that ends (so far) with
some convicts that came out to Australia in who cares when for the crime of who gives
a rat’s arse what. You can already tell that one of Simone’s aunties has failed to enchant
and beguile Simone with this endless ‘you were descended from convicts!’ stuff. But
what is fascinating is the high interest that people in Australia now have in tracing con-
vict heritage (and enthusiastically telling people about it). It’s a valuable thing to have,
something worth bandying around, it seems. Aha –that’s the start of some uncommon
sense-making. What’s the value undergirding the fascination with convict heritage, and
how is it deployed in the contemporary world? What does it get for the people who
proudly claim and declare it? Could it be a new way of making and operationalising an
identity? People claim all sorts of heritage differently, in different periods of time. All
sorts of characteristics are assigned to it; Simone’s Aunty has recently suggested that her
‘disobedient tendencies’ and ‘bordering on stupid fearlessness of authority’ stems directly
from her convict ancestors. Simone is more of the view that this stuff came from having
unorthodox parents who took the practical decision to deal only with Simone’s more
heinous behaviours. The point is that people in the now could use this sort of material to
put together valuable identities in provisional processes of construction and reconstruc-
tion, as is called for at that moment in time. That kind of suggests that for some people,
identity is creative, and responsive to the moment.That might be especially valuable if the
biological identities we sometimes hang on to (that is, ‘Caucasian’) don’t seem to have
much purchase. Simone is reminded here of a student of hers who had just found out
12

she had Polynesian heritage. She talked about the reaction her mum had had to this news
(found out from one of those DNA ancestry companies): that her kids were ‘so much
more earthy and interesting’ than if they’d just been ‘white’. See what we mean? All sorts
of (stereotypical) value can be extracted from this kind of material. It’s a bit worrying, we
reckon –but very, very interesting.

You can use the material in this chapter to get some kinship basics under your belt.
You can use it to get competent in using the associated methods to extract data about
relatedness from informants. You can use it to reconsider what you think you know or
have presumed about relatedness –and as insight into things you probably didn’t think
of: Simone, for example, uses genealogies to discover how people make smoking safe for
themselves to do.You can also use the material in this chapter to get a sense of the history
of anthropological thinking (something you can do in most of our chapters!).
What insight can you get into the university by thinking with kinship and genealogies?
You could use the genealogical method to get some initial information about what the
history of relations with universities is in families.You could get a bunch of data that way,
but the really interesting questions would be in asking your informant about how that
history impacted their own decisions to attend. Were they the first in their family? Did
that make it super-hard? Was there a history of doctoring or lawyering or business that
is expected to be continued? How is that genealogically imagined, and is it linked to the
possibility or even the firm expectation of coming to university? Do one on yourself –
what can you find? You could see, across a whole lot of genealogies how gendered or
ethnic participation has changed –but you’d not stop there.You could get that info from
other data, but using this method, you’d be able to ask about how it all came to impact
the person you’re interviewing –who, in the genealogical method, is called ego. Ready?
Let’s go.
Some theory basics: descent and alliance theories

Kinship is a universal human phenomenon that takes a range of forms. Everyone has
kinship –that is, ways of being related to other people. In the 19th century, anthropology
became obsessed with it. At this time, anthropologists were studying non-Western soci-
eties that seemed to lack centralised state administrative institutions. In their absence, how
were rights, duties, status and property transmitted from one generation to the next? The
functionalists concluded that ‘traditional’ societies accomplished this task by organising
around kinship relations rather than property. Kinship categories were always more
important than the people who filled them: this was standing in for an otherwise absent
central administration. In other words, kinship structures appeared to be the main way
that political and economic social life was organised.This proved very useful to colonialist
agendas; understanding how apparently acephalous societies worked provided possibilities
for more effective domination. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that anthropology
was defined by its interest in kinship during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This
was an enduring obsession; if you were studying anthropology in Britain in the late 20th
century, you’d have focused on it in your classes, and you’d be learning about how it made
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the reputations of the leading figures in the field, such as Bronisław Malinowski, A.R.
Radcliffe-Brown, A.L. Kroeber, George Peter Murdock, Meyer Fortes, Edward Evans-
Pritchard and Claude Lévi-Strauss.1
It’s worth homing in a bit on the different approaches anthropologists have taken to
kinship; this tells you a lot about the kinds of disciplinary concerns of different times. In
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the lives of men, as documented by men, dominated
the ethnographic record. The question of how economic and political life unfurled was
paramount, and was explored by recourse to the operations of kinship.
Descent theory
While the psychological functionalism most strongly associated with Malinowski
focused on how systems met individual needs, the structural functionalism most strongly
associated with Radcliffe-Brown regarded systems as enduring and individuals as tem-
porary. Individual people die, but the systems in which they occupy positions, such as
kinship systems, remain and endure. This made Malinowski’s work a bit unpalatable to
Radcliff Brown. Evans-Pritchard was a student of Malinowski, but he gravitated towards
Radcliffe-Brown in the end. He too, was interested in structure, hence the term ‘structural
functionalism’.
Evans-Pritchard produced an important account of the Nuer (called The Nuer: A
Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People [1940]), and
then Marriage and Kinship Among the Nuer (1951), and Nuer Religion (1956).The Nuer are a
group of pastoralists living in the Sudan. Evans-Pritchard’s work among them, beginning
from around 1930, is regarded as really important; he was the first anthropologist to work
in Africa using the research methods of long-term fieldwork and participant observation.
Note that we’re mentioning it here, as just about every other textbook you’ll ever pick up
on anthropology mentions it. People still revisit the work –as they do with first-in-field
texts. The Nuer made his reputation –you certainly wouldn’t know Evans-Pritchard for
his other very interesting and ahead-of-its-time work on the relations between anthro-
pology and other social sciences, something that is one of our biggest contemporary areas
of debate.
His works provided insight into the patterns of kinship and marriage that structure
Nuer life. Note here that we’ve said (and Evans-Pritchard said) ‘kinship and marriage’.
This is because the functionalists were much more interested in blood relations (or
‘consanguines’) across generations than they were in marriage relations.This is called ‘des-
cent theory’, for the extent to which it minimises the importance of marriage (or affinal)
relations in the structuring of kinship –in favour of descent groups. These relationships
were given so much weight because the principle of descent was considered paramount
in assuring the stable functioning of societies which had no apparent institutional struc-
ture. In fact, the biggest arguments between anthropologists of this time were about the
significance of descent relative to that of marriage, especially when a new way of thinking
about kinship arose with Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist account, the Elementary Structures of
Kinship (1949) (more on that in a sec).
Evans-Pritchard’s work was important because of his account of descent. It describes
a lineage, a group of people all related from a common ancestor through an unbroken
line of (in the Nuer case) male succession. The concept of the lineage and descent
Evans-Pritchard described in his continuous work on the Nuer helped provide the
perfect example of the lineage as it had been theorised by Radcliffe-Brown (1952).
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Evans-Pritchard’s work describes descent in the terms of the ‘segmentary lineage’. Nuer
people are organised into groups of people who are tied together by real or presumed des-
cent from a common male ancestor (real or imagined). These descent groups have access
to water and pastures for their cattle, and have different branches (if you’re thinking with
the mental image of a family tree, or ‘segments’ in Evans-Pritchard’s terms). At the top of
the family tree would sit the founding ancestor of the lineage, and then his sons might
be the founders of the branches stemming off of it. Having loads of founders of sub-
lineages forms alliances between people. Close ones might form between brothers, for
example; maybe slightly less close ones between cousins. This helps to smoothly organise
access to water and grasslands, mutual assistance and so on, and in the end it organises
everyone into a single genealogy: large numbers of people fit into a single, cohesive system
that serves to organise politics, economics –everything.
The first half of The Nuer is a detailed and lively (for an academic) account of the Nuer
way of life, the seasonal rhythms of the year, and their intense interest in cattle. Why are
cows in it so much? Cattle have historically been of the highest symbolic, religious and
economic value among the Nuer:
… the only labour in which they delight is the care of cattle. They not only depend
on cattle for many of life’s necessities but have the herdsman’s outlook on the world.
Cattle are their dearest possession and they gladly risk their lives to defend their herds
or to pillage those of their neighbours. Most of their social activities concern cattle,
and cherchez la vache [look at the cows] is the best advice that can be given to those
who desire to understand Nuer behaviour.
(Evans-Pritchard, 1940:16)
Looking at cattle gives you deep insight into economic life. Cows provide milk, they
provide hides, they provide dung, which is great for fuel. Even cattle bones can be put
to structural purpose. Carefully handled, cattle are an ongoing resource. But as useful as
they are to the economic and practical operations of life, they’re even more important to
defining and maintaining social relationships. Politically speaking, tribal and clan divisions
are made in the terms of access to pastures and water. But did you know that young men
take ‘ox names’ as a means of expressing personal identities? Or that they create songs and
poetry about cattle? They’re enormously important –as indicated in the fact that there’s
ten colour terms and about 25 more descriptors for the different patterns that cattle have
on their hides. There’s half a dozen terms for horns. Now you want to read The Nuer!
There’s even pictures of the different markings.
All of that gives you a sense of how important cattle are, but here’s the clever bit: Evans-
Pritchard suggested that all social relationships were inextricably intertwined with the
exchange of cattle, rights in cattle, or factors otherwise related to looking after cattle. We
think this quote says it all: ‘Their social idiom is a bovine idiom … movements of cattle
from kraal to kraal are equivalent to lines on a genealogical chart’ (1940:19).
Probably the most important part of book concerns how marriages are sanctioned and
enacted through the payment of 40 bridewealth cattle from the family of the groom to
the family of the bride. What’s bridewealth? It’s an arrangement that specifies that a pro-
spective husband (usually with a fair bit of the help from his family) provides a substantial
sum of money or highly valued goods to his future wife’s family before a marriage can
be contracted. The Nuer follow the rule of exogamy: a man cannot marry a woman of
the same clan and the same lineage. As long as a relationship could be traced between
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a man and woman through either father or mother, up to six generations, marriage is
not allowed (see especially Evans-Pritchard, 1951). Cattle are important in their role as
bridewealth, where they are given by a husband’s lineage to his wife’s lineage. It is this
exchange of cattle which ensures that the children will be considered to belong to the
husband’s lineage and to his line of descent. No cows, no marriage recognised. Also, a man
and woman are only fully married when the woman has a child and comes to live with
her husband’s people.
Ghost marriage is described in the book, too. This is so important that a man can
‘father’ children after his death. He can because cattle exchanges define relations of
kinship and descent. So, cattle given to the wife’s lineage enable the male children of that
lineage to marry. No cows to pass on, no marriage. A woman would be chosen to marry
a family member of the dead man, and the offspring of these two would be thought of
as belonging to the dead man. This lies in the belief that a man who died without male
heirs would leave behind an angry spirit to trouble the family. The woman marries to his
name so that the children would carry his line. The deceased is the legal husband of the
woman whose name is used in paying for bridewealth. The main idea here is the con-
tinuity of the lineage.You can see here how the kinship system is more important than the
individual, and you can also see how cows offer you a window onto it. Check this out: a
barren woman can even take a wife of her own, whose children (biologically fathered
by men) then become members of her patrilineage, and she is legally and culturally their
father. For the marriage to become , the ‘pater’ has to pay bridewealth to the wife, just as
would occur if a man were to marry a woman. The pater would also receive bridewealth
if any of their daughters were to marry. The underlying motivation is to carry on the
family name –to make descent. A woman who marries as a ‘pater’ is usually barren, and
for this reason is regarded as a man. In addition, because a barren woman usually practices
as a magician or diviner, she acquires more cattle and hence is rich and could have several
wives (Evans-Pritchard, 1951).
In the 1990s, Sharon Hutchinson went to Nuerland, just as Evans-Pritchard before her.
She found that the Nuer had placed strict limits on the convertibility of money and cattle
in order to preserve the special status of cattle as objects of bridewealth exchange. She also
found that as a result of endemic warfare with the Sudanese state, guns had acquired much
of the symbolic and ritual importance previously held by cattle. But Hutchinson (1996)
looked more broadly than Evans-Pritchard had. She looked at Nuer gender relations,
and at elements that weren’t there when Evans-Pritchard did his fieldwork, like money,
Christianity, Western education, government control, migration for wage labour –espe-
cially for young men –and the effects of the ongoing and brutal civil war between the
south and the Muslim north. Holtzman (2008) notes of Hutchinson’s 1996 study (called
Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with War, Money and the State):
Another factor with broad impact has been the introduction of money and its sig-
nificance as a form of wealth accessible outside of the traditional cattle economy.
In the 1930s “cattle and people were one,” inexorably tied together in an intricate
web of economic and social relations, in religious formulations, and in symbolic
conceptualizations of human identity. By the 1980s the widespread use of money and
the commodification of Nuer cattle had begun to sever this equivalence. In the past
cattle could principally be acquired only through forms of exchange within the local
community, such as inheritance and bridewealth payments which served to circulate
livestock within the community’s network of human relationships. With the creation
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of cattle markets, the introduction of money, and migratory wage labor of young
men, cattle could now be acquired directly through the market economy, and this
had enormous implications for relations between men and women, old and young,
and more generally for Nuer kinship networks. Where once there was a seamless cir-
culation of people and cattle, new rifts and tensions developed as it became possible
to circumvent the traditional system.
(Holtzman, 2008:7)
Descent theory was really dominant right up until the mid-20th-century, but it turned
out to be too good for its own good. Societies were depicted as wholly ordered by
unilineal descent (don’t worry, we’ll define this in a minute) into very clearly defined
units of different scale –but this was different from the way everyday social, political and
economic life played out. Maybe the best example of this is that sometimes the people
under investigation couldn’t always unequivocally identify the lineage to which they
belonged, as Evans-Pritchard himself noted (see Holtzman, 2008).
Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism moved away from functionalist analysis of descent in
favour of a focus on kin categories rather than genealogical positions. Both structur-
alism and functionalism focused on whole systems, but where functionalism privileged
descent, structuralism went with marriage. Where functionalist analyses were rooted
in descent theory, structuralist ones were rooted in alliance theory. What the heck is
alliance theory?
Alliance theory
Alliance theory is associated with Claude Lévi-Strauss, who developed French structur-
alism. The most important thing to know about structuralism is that it is interested in
the underlying categories of human thought, and not really in the manifestations of that
thought themselves. This will make total sense when you understand that Lévi-Strauss
drew very heavily on structural linguistics for theoretical inspiration. Just like structural
linguistics, which is interested not at all in speech acts but the underlying rules that
organise them, structuralism was interested not at all in the surface features, but in the
underlying rules that give rise to them. In fact, the Prague School of structural linguistics
was what really led to the development of structuralism as a cultural theory, because it
provided Lévi-Strauss with the idea of binary contrasts: the centrepiece of Structuralism.
The Prague School dispensed with the idea that languages were best theorised and under-
stood diachronically (or in other words, historically), and argued that they were instead
best explored using the main idea that all linguistic meaning is built on a system of
contrasts between units of sound, called phonemes.
Languages are made up of phonemes: these are arbitrary sounds.They mean absolutely
nothing on their own: p, b, g, m. Try it out. Run up to someone and say those letters out
loud. Then probably run away again quickly. But they start to mean things when placed
together, into morphemes (words, phrases, and so on), where they form meaningful units
of sound. See what you can make out of p, b, g, m and whatever letters you want to
add –Simone instantly added an ‘i’ and a ‘u’ for ‘pig bum’.You can prove to yourself that
these are meaningful units of sound by running up to someone and saying them, if you’re
the type that needs hard evidence for everything. We’d probably recommend against this,
though. Anyway, the phonemes are organised into morphemes according to particular
patterns (otherwise known as the rules). Members of the Prague School were interested
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in the phonemic study of languages: the contrasts or differences between the sounds,
because those contrasts are the basis of the rules for language. What contrasts, you ask?
Time for a fun exercise. Hold your hand up in front of your face with your palm facing
your mouth. Now say ‘p’ out loud. Doesn’t matter if you’re saying it upper or lower case.
Next, say ‘b’. Can you feel the difference? There’s a puff of air accompanying the ‘p’, and
there’s not one accompanying the ‘b’. That’s a binary difference, and it articulates the
underlying grammar, the rules; they’re built on the differences between sounds. Otherwise,
‘b’ and ‘p’ would be pretty much the same. Most speakers of language can’t tell you what
the rules are, but they can communicate –they can make speech acts.You can try this out
for yourself, too –should be super-easy if you don’t know the rules; all you have to do
is prove you can communicate using speech! Structural linguists aren’t interested in the
speech acts; they are interested in the rules underlying them –the patterns that organise
the speech. Linguists try to discover the unconscious principles, the patterns, like we saw
with the ‘p’ and ‘b’ example. Now, where linguists are interested in doing in respect to
language, structuralists are interested in doing it in respect to culture. A structuralist’s job, if
you like, is to discover the unconscious rules or organising principles of culture. They are
not so interested in how people categorise their worlds, and the sense they might make of
them, as they are in looking at the underlying rules that produce those categories. So this
is about human cognition, and its fundamental or base structure (hence: structuralism).
Lévi-Strauss saw culture the same way. Culture, to him, is just a collection, and an
arbitrary collection, of symbols, just like phonemes are a collection of arbitrary sounds.
Together, the sounds make morphemes in a language sense, and together, the symbols
make a cultural sense, and each of these only makes sense when organised according
to the rules for language, or the rules for culture. Here, then, we are looking at a the-
oretical position that is deeply interested in the underlying patterns of human thought
that produce cultural categories. But, it’s not a theory of psychology. It’s based on four
principles:
1. Underlying processes structure all human thought;

2. These underlying processes operate within different cultural contexts;
3. Because they operate in different cultural contexts, cultural phenomena (thoughts,
ideas, practices, understandings, beliefs, products, and so on) will not be identical;
4. But all cultural phenomena are the products of an underlying pattern of thought that
is universal.
Binary oppositions underpin the whole thing –again, just as we saw with ‘p’ and ‘b’.
Lévi-Strauss made the claim that fundamental patterns of human thought use binary
contrasts. For instance: night and day, black and white, man and woman, hot and cold, raw
and cooked, and so on.
The most fundamental binary is that between the self and the other. In his major
work, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Lévi-Strauss argued that women were
exchanged between groups (from the group of the ‘self –the people related to you, to
another group, not related to you), to avoid incest. It was in the act of giving that the
category of the self in opposition to other (or of one’s own group to another group)
was made. The simplest form of exchange involved men exchanging their sisters (more
complex forms, he thought, came later –hence the word ‘Elementary’ in the title of the
book). According to Lévi-Strauss, this set up a distinction between those who give wives
(wife givers) and those who receive them (wife takers).Voila, the first kinship categories.
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The observation of the incest taboo itself also involves binaries –between animals (and
nature) and people (and culture). If you’ve ever had pets and stopped them from having
intercourse while yelling at them ‘hey knock it off! That’s your sister, you maniac!’, then
you know that animals don’t necessarily observe the incest taboo. But humans do. The
transition from the animal world of ‘nature’ to the human one of ‘culture’ was, in Lévi-
Strauss’s theory, called ‘alliance theory’, accomplished through the medium of exchange
of women.
Lévi-Strauss suggested that, because women’s fertility is necessary to the reproduction
of the group, women are the ‘supreme gift’.With no fair return for a woman except, of
course, another woman, they must be reciprocally exchanged rather than simply given
away. We will talk much more about gift exchanges and why they are important in
Chapter 8. Lévi-Strauss’s work is a prime example of reciprocity in action. He was pro-
foundly influenced by the work of Marcel Mauss (1925 [2000]) on the central role of
reciprocal gift giving in ‘primitive’ societies, in that he thought that the first social cat-
egories came from the exchange of gifts (women). This is pretty different from descent
theory, which really focuses on the rules of kinship as they work in different cultures.
Lévi-Strauss was interested in how the categories arose from an underlying structure. But
both have to ignore a lot of things to get to their insights. If your blood is boiling right
now, it may be because, as many feminists before you have said, alliance theory really
requires the objectification of women. Descent theory isn’t much better; it’s really only
interested in blokes, and the whole ‘primitive culture’ focus is pretty offensive, too, espe-
cially when descent theorists required people to live up to standards of organisation that
were, well, fantasies on paper in the end.That leads to a critique you might also have –that
the emotional and expressive elements of kinship just aren’t there. That probably led to a
weight of unfounded notions about so-called ‘primitive’ people who were very different
from Europeans, including in their emotional complexity and sophistication. That idea
has been trotted out in all manner of ways to locate Indigenous people as unfit to parent,
as Hannah tells us in her work on Indigenous child removal, in Chapter 9. It’s worth
saying that Simone de Beauvoir felt favourably towards alliance theory, though; women
finally had their important place recognised in a mainstay of anthropology –kinship –
which had hitherto only recognised the importance of men. Lévi Strauss had, after all,
recognised that women were very important.
Lévi-Strauss suggested there are two different models of marriage exchange (of women).
The first one is where the women of a group are offered to another group that is expli-
citly defined (he dubbed this the ‘elementary structures of kinship’). In the second one,
the possible spouses for the women in a group is open, excepting some predetermined
kin (like your dad and your uncle and your brother). That’s the one we’re familiar with in
the West (unless you want to wind up on one of those daytime TV shows –you know the
ones). Lévi-Strauss called that model the ‘complex structures of kinship’.
The big deal about this is that the marriage rules create social structure over time –
because marriages are really between groups who exchange women, not just between
the two people who get married. When groups do exchange women, they effectively
create a debtor/creditor relationship. If your group gets a wife from another group, you
have to pay that back –if not now, then later on, in the next generation. Wife repayment
is essentially what we’re talking about here.You already know that the initial impetus for
getting a wife from beyond your group was so you could avoid the incest taboo and not
marry one of your own –you have to search for marriage partners outside your group,
or your group won’t last very long. That means you’re locked in, essentially, to exchanges
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with another group who has women in it unrelated to you. This also creates a division of
labour; when you send a woman to the other group, you’re losing her labour.You have to
get that back into your group, so they need to be doing the same kinds of stuff.Voilà, the
category of women’s work. And, of course, you get really strong relations with that group
as a result of exchanging wives and labour with them.
Lévi-Strauss also found something else super-interesting. He discovered that a huge
range of historically unrelated cultures that had no knowledge of one another share
something in common: a preference for cross-cousin marriage. What the heck is cross-
cousin marriage?
Cross-cousins are the children of siblings of the opposite sex. For instance, Simone
has a mother called Dianne. Dianne has a sister called Jan and a brother called Jim. Jan
has two kids, and these are Simone’s parallel cousins. Jim has three kids, and those are
Simone’s cross-cousins. Parallel cousins come from her mother’s female sibling, and cross-
cousins come from her mother’s male sibling. Just to ram home the point one more
time, Simone also has a father, called Ian. Ian has about three dozen siblings (or so it
seems to Simone, who can’t remember all of them), so we’ll just make an example of
two of them. Richard, Ian’s brother, has four kids (one of whom was Trevor, who you
will meet again in Chapter 8). Those are Simone’s parallel cousins. Ian has a sister, called
Dorothy, who has three kids. Those are Simone’s cross-cousins. In weird anthropology
speak, from a male perspective you’d say that Linda, one of Dorothy’s daughters, is FZD
(father’s sister’s daughter). Right, we sense that it is time to direct you to some specific
common versus uncommon sense. First of all, here are what we call ‘kin types’. A kin type
is a term assigned to each individual relationship to Ego. Ego is the person who we are
asking about kinship. Everyone they mention is given a kin type term, from the perspec-
tive of ego: ego’s mother, ego’s father, ego’s mother’s brother, ego’s mother’s sister, and so
on. We drop the ‘ego’ from these, because we know that this perspective doesn’t change.
Each relationship is described by letter symbols, which are strung together to indicate the
relationships, as in Table 5.1 and 5.2.
And look what happens with that! Suddenly you have some common-sense know-
ledge and some contrasting uncommon-sense knowledge, as in Table 5.3.
And, you could say that Megan, Jim’s daughter, is (Ego’s) MBD, Simone’s mother’s
brother’s daughter. Confused? Read it again: you’ll get it. Even better would be for you
to apply this to your own circumstances. Try this out: Have you got any cousins? Are
they cross, or parallel? Once you’re good with this bit of knowledge, go tell someone else
about it. Maybe call that cross-cousin up on the phone and let them know they are your
Table 5.1 Relationship and letter kin terms.
Individual relationship to Ego Letter symbols

(Ego’s mother, father son, etc …)
Mother M
Father F
Sister Z
Brother B
Husband H
Wife W
Son S
Daughter D
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Table 5.2 Relationships (Ego’s mother’s sister, and so on) and compound strings of symbols.
Mother’s sister MZ
Father’ sister FZ
Mother’s brother MB
Mother’s sister’s daughter MZD
Sister’s son ZS
Table 5.3 Common and uncommon kin terms.
What you call your relatives if you’re an English speaker What anthropologists call your relatives aka
aka the common-sense kin terms uncommon-sense kin terms
Mother M
Father F
Sister Z
Brother B
Husband H
Wife W
Son S
Daughter D
Uncle FB, MB
Cousin FBS, FBD, FZS, FZD
MBS, MBD, MZS, MZD
FFBSS, Etc.
Nephew BS, ZS
Niece ZD, BD
cross-cousin. Make your own judgement about whether or not you describe them as a
preferred marriage partner, though. Cross-cousin marriage isn’t preferred in every single
kinship system, and it really isn’t in the English-speaking world.That might come close to
incest. Cross-cousin marriage preference is only a thing in unilineal kinship systems: time
to learn about those now.
Systems of relatedness
Anthropologists essentially draw kinship relations between people, rather than writing
them out (which would take ages).They have symbols for this, as you can see in Figure 5.1
and 5.2
Please notice in this and in all the hand-drawn pictures that they are not perfect.
You can use loads of free programs from the Internet to produce super-neat and tidy
kinship diagrams, but you don’t really need to produce such things. For the purposes
of this textbook, we’re more interested in what you can produce using them, rather
than treating them as ends in themselves (it’s a bit different if you’re focusing in on
relatedness specifically, or producing a genealogy in the service of a legal process, for
instance).
You can make up your own symbols if appropriate ones do not yet exist –that’s
accepted practice in the discipline as long as you provide a key for any symbols that aren’t
13
Figure 5.1 Kinship symbols 1.
Figure 5.2 Kinship symbols 2.
orthodox. When you put these together, you can depict as many people and relationships
as your informant knows.Your informant –the person you’re asking –is called Ego, and
that has to be obvious from your kinship diagram, so we know whose perspective the
kinship diagram is being made (see Figure 5.3).
Ego
Relationships are reckoned through Ego. Kinship diagrams are always taken from
someone’s perspective (and in that sense are specific). You could take a genealogy from
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Figure 5.3 Ego symbols.
two people in the same family and they might look different; this can be because people
have different perspectives on and knowledge of their relations (there are almost ten
years between Simone and her younger sister, and Simone knows people in the family
who died before her sister was born, for example). It can also happen because a given
Ego doesn’t like or doesn’t want to recognise a person with whom they are in dispute,
or when a marriage isn’t recognised. While a lot of people in Western contexts won’t
be able to name relatives back more than a few generations, the popularity of knowing
where you came from might mean that the Ego knows a bit more than you expect. Still,
when you have a go at making genealogies, probably use paper that’s more horizontally
generous than vertical. This isn’t really about documenting how far people can go
back in time, it’s more about trying to understand how people think about relatedness.
More on that shortly. As you can see, the symbols represent people, the lines represent
relationships between them. Put them together as you can see in Figure 5.4.
What do you think? Can you say who everyone is in this diagram? Remember,
anthropologists describe relatives by their relationship to Ego (in this case, it’s a guy called
Douglas). Figure 5.5 and Table 5.4 show what the names look like when understood from
that perspective.
Easy, right? You can see why we depict, rather than write this material out. Have
another look at the kinship diagram (Figure 5.6) that Simone took of EGO.
The bilateral kinship network

What you’re looking at here is a bilateral (so, two sides of a) network of kin. All kinship
systems are based on this network, which is the result of combinations of marriage and
13
Figure 5.4 A kinship diagram by Simone.
Figure 5.5 A named kinship diagram by Simone.
descent relationships between people. Like Simone and Andy, you might be familiar with
the idea that you’re equally related to relatives on both sides of your family –you place
equal emphasis on both sides. But in a great many non-Western societies, descent is traced
exclusively through either male or female relatives –unilineally. Even in these systems,
the relationships that are not incorporated into those direct lines are still recognised, as
we’ll see in a moment. The network of kin you can see in our diagram is made up of
consanguines (people related to Ego by blood) and affines (people related to Ego by
marriage). Can you tell in the diagram which are which? Try knocking out all the affinal
relatives, as shown in Table 5.5.
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Table 5.4 Numbered relatives.
1 Mother’s brother MB
2 Mother’s sister MZ
3 Mother’s sister’s husband MZH
4 Mother M
5 Father F
6 Father’s brother FB
7 Father’s brother’s wife FBW
8 Father’s sister FZ
9 Mother’s sister’s son’s husband MZSH
10 Mother’s sister’s son MZS
11 Mother’s sister’s daughter MZD
12 Brother B
13 Ego (male) EGO
14 Sister Z
15 Sister’s husband ZH
16 Father’s brother’s son FBS
18 Mother’s sister’s son’s son (adopted) MZSS
19 Mother’s sister’s son’s daughter (adopted) MZSD
20 Sister’s daughter ZD
21 Sister’s son. ZS
Figure 5.6 Bilateral kindred diagram.
Too easy. Now you can see at a glance one of the important distinctions anthropologists
make between descent and marriage –and the important difference of emphasis between
descent theory and alliance theory.
You might be thinking to yourself at this point that the way anthropologists approach
relatedness is a bit different from how the people in the relationships might experience
things. Unsurprising –we do that to generate uncommon sense, to try to figure out
what lies beneath human ways of being related –what organises the rules we live by?
Some insiders might have a lot of technical knowledge about the rules, but they also
live the rules. Whatever experiences they have of their relatedness is insider info, and
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Table 5.5 Kin minus affinal relatives.
1 Mother’s brother MB
2 Mother’s sister MZ
4 Mother M
5 Father F
6 Father’s brother FB
8 Father’s sister FZ
10 Mother’s sister’s son MZS
11 Mother’s sister’s daughter MZD
12 Brother B
13 Ego (male) EGO
14 Sister Z
18 Mother’s sister’s son’s son (adopted) MZSS
19 Mother’s sister’s son’s daughter (adopted) MZSD
20 Sister’s daughter ZD
21 Sister’s son. ZS
we call those ‘emic’ understandings. Outsider understandings, the ones typically made
by anthropologists, are called ‘etic’ understandings. The difference between these two
perspectives has led to the use of the term ‘fictive kin’.
Fictive kin describes relationships modelled on ‘real’ kinship relations, but which are
not made through blood or marriage. An example might be people you call ‘Aunty’, who
are neither your affinal or consinguineal relatives, but are incorporated into your family
as though they were. In some cases, calling them by a kin name describes the position
and obligations that person has, just as it would be in a kin relationship. Maybe you have
godparents –that’s another example. It’s pretty hard to draw God and the entry into a kin
relationship via shared baptismal sacrament, or the position of honorary Aunt Josepina in
the kin diagrams we have made so far, but to the people in relationships, these kin might
be no less related than your ‘real’ kin. Keep that in mind as you read the rest of this chapter.
Being alert to the differences between insider knowledges and outsider understandings
is really important because the former can articulate the organising principles upon
which relatedness is based. Here’s an example. You might encounter the idea that the
sex act has not much to do with the birth of a child, and that pregnancy occurs instead
though the mother’s ancestral totemic spirit. In that view, kinship hasn’t much to do with
fathers, who might not even be considered relatives. Relatives might be reckoned instead
through females in a matrilineal system –that is, a unilineal way, where descent is traced
exclusively through a male (patrilineal) or female (matrilineal) line. We are referencing a
famous case here. As Carsten notes:
The most famous (and hotly debated) case of this disjuncture was found among the
Trobriand islanders of Melanesia, who had been studied by the eminent anthropolo-
gist Bronisław Malinowski at the beginning of the 20th century. Malinowski
had shown that while Trobrianders were quite aware of the connection between
sex and procreation for animals, they asserted that among human beings pregnancy
was achieved through the action of ancestral spirits. This led to several decades of
discussion between anthropologists, some of which was about the significance or
interpretation of different kinds of knowledge. Edmund Leach, among others, argued
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Figure 5.7 Lineal and collateral kin.
that assertions such as those made by the Trobrianders were actually expressions of
religious beliefs and thus were meant to be read in the same way as Christian beliefs
about the Virgin Birth—that is, as phenomena that took place on a metaphysical plane
that was outside (or at the fringes of) the spectrum of ordinary experience. This was
quite different from more pragmatic, everyday knowledge about farming or animal
husbandry. It was not that Trobrianders were ignorant of the connection between
sex and procreation in humans—they were simply making religious statements that
should be understood at a quite different level.
(Carsten, 2012:n.p.)
To prepare ourselves to learn about lineal and lateral dimensions of relatedness, you need
to know that lineal kin are the direct ancestors or the direct descendants of Ego, and that
‘collateral kin’ describes Ego’s siblings and their children, as well as the siblings of Ego’s
lineal ancestors and descendants, as in Figure 5.7.
Kinship systems of descent

Well, Ego has been busy –he appears to have gotten married and had two kids and
suddenly and unexpectedly remembered a bit about his two sets of grandparents. And,
we’ve become creative with pattern, to distinguish Ego’s lineal kin frrom his collateral
137

kin. You already know that the kinship is bilateral –and you could divide it into two
sides: mother’s side (matrilateral) and father’s side (patrilateral).You might already be very
familiar with this, as in when you say to your friend: ‘Yeah, when we were out clubbing
on the weekend, we saw Bruce.You know Bruce, he’s my cousin on my dad’s side. Uncle
Wayne’s kid. He fell over on the dance floor, it was hilarious.’ Or, you might be at the
doctor, and she says, ‘Is there are history of baldness (for example) in your family?’ And
you say, ‘Yes, on my mother’s side, all of the women in my family are completely bald.
Conversely, all of the women on my father’s side are absolutely covered in hair.’ But what
we’re about to do now is different from divvying up families into the female and male
sides. We’re now going to put our minds to patrilines and matrilines.
What are they? Matrilines and patrilines are examples of unilineal systems of descent.
They are traced through parents and ancestors of only one sex. They can be contrasted
with cognatic systems, where descent is traced through either or both parents. Many
of you reading this book will be like Simone and Andy, and be more used to cognatic
systems, but this isn’t the most common way of sorting out kinship. Less than a third of
the world’s cultures have cognatic systems; the rest are unilineal. About 60 per cent are
patrilineal and most of the rest are matrilineal. There’s another kind of unilineal descent
called dual descent –that’s when you get patrilineal and matrilineal descent going on in
the one society (less than 10 per cent do this –one side might control land, the other
livestock, for example).
Let’s have a close look at unilineal systems. Patrilineal relatives are identified by tracing
descent exclusively through males from a founding male ancestor. Sometimes, you’ll see
patrilineal relatives described as agnatic relatives, too. Matrilineal relatives are identified
by tracing descent exclusively through females through a founding female ancestor. Both
are kinds of unilineal descent. When you trace kin through a single sexed relative, you get
kin on each side who are neither patrilineal nor matrilineal. These are your cross relatives
(remember them? cross cousins are the children of your mother’s brother or father’s sister.
Figure 5.8 is a new kinship diagram for Ego so you can see this clearly (it’s getting too
cluttered up with all of the affines).
As we’ve discovered, the English word ‘cousin’ is a broad term, but in some systems
there are separate words for each of the four possible kinds of cousins: patrilateral cross-
cousins, patrilateral parallel cousins, matrilateral cross-cousins, and matrilateral parallel
cousins. It is not at all unusual for parallel cousins to be called ‘sister’ –a sibling term. In
some systems, marrying one of them would be like marrying your own sister. So, it’d be
an incest taboo.
Remember that Lévi-Strauss found a preference for first-cousin marriage? Now that
you know what that is, let’s find out why that preference might arise. Lévi-Strauss grouped
all possible kinship systems into three basic kinship structures, constructed from two types
of exchange, and he called them elementary, semi-complex and complex structures of
kinship. Elementary structures are based on positive marriage rules. Positive marriage rules
are those that specify who you have marry. Complex structures specify negative marriage
rules: negative marriage rules specify who you are not allowed to marry. You have a bit
more choice with negative marriage structures, because it can be anyone except (your
brother, dad, and so on).
Elementary structures can operate based on two forms of exchange. The first one is
called ‘restricted exchange’ (sometimes called direct exchange). As we said before, this is
a symmetric form of exchange between two groups (you can also call these moieties)
of wife-givers and wife-takers. In the foundational or original restricted exchange, the
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Figure 5.8 Cross relatives chart.
father’s sister marries the mother’s brother. All the resultant kids are bilateral cross-cousins
(the daughter is both MBD and FZD). Continued restricted exchange means that the two
lineages marry together.Those are pretty uncommon, but there are some examples in the
Amazon Basin where this happens.
The second form of exchange within elementary structures is called ‘generalised
exchange’, meaning that a man can only marry either his MBD (matrilateral cross-cousin
marriage) or his FZD (patrilateral cross-cousin marriage). You need a few groups par-
ticipating to do this one. Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage arrangements where the
marriage of the parents is repeated by successive generations are very common in parts of
Asia (if you want a good look at this, look at the Kachin people). Lévi-Strauss thought that
generalised exchange was better and more enduring than restricted exchange because
it allows the integration of indefinite numbers of groups. But: it does involve a bit of
hierarchy. Among the Kachin, wife-givers outrank wife-takers. Say there’s a few groups
involved; the last wife-taking group in the chain is a vastly inferior to the first wife-giving
group, to which it is supposed to give its wives.You can get a bit of an awkward accumu-
lation of wives and bridewealth bunch up at one end of the chain. Sometimes this can
cause destabilisation.
Lévi-Strauss offered a third structure between elementary and complex structures,
too, called the ‘semi-complex structure’ (or the Crow-Omaha system). Semi-complex
structures contain so many negative marriage rules that in effect they effectively prescribe
marriage to certain parties, thus somewhat resembling elementary structures.
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Figure 5.9 Patrilineal descent.
Cross-cousin marriage is preferred in systems of exogamous exchange. That’s because

if you’re tracing descent unilineally, through a single sexed relative, a man’s children will
be in his line of descent, but his sister’s kids will belong to the line of her husband. She’d
have married outside of the group, and the children she has will belong in the line of her
husband. Separate lineages means that incest can’t occur. Check out Figure 5.9.
What you can see in this diagram is patrilineal descent –descent traced exclusively
through males from a founding ancestor.You can see that a man’s children belong in his
patriline, but women can’t pass on that lineage to their children. That’s because daughters
will marry out and their kids will belong in the patriline of her husband.You can see what
happens in the matrilineal example in Figure 5.10.
See how females pass on membership in the lineage, but males cannot? Their kids
will belong in the matriline of their wives. Parallel cousin marriage does occur in some
societies. In this situation, the children of two same-sexed siblings marry. It happens in
lineage endogamy –it’s unusual, because most of the time people practice exogamy in
140
Figure 5.10 Matrilineal descent.
order to widen their sphere of social alliances –they forbid marriages within the lineage,
and treat them like incest; parallel cousins are called the same as siblings. So why would
it happen? It happens to keep lineage resources from being transferred to other groups
through marriage exchanges or inheritance. If you need to keep land or animals, you
might develop a parallel cousin marriage rule. It’s pretty rare, though.
Let’s have a look at cognatic descent. Cognatic systems allow for the construction of
social groups and social categories constructed of a person’s relatives, starting with their
parents. You get all sorts of complexities and variations because of the open, creative
nature of this kind of organisation. There’s two kinds of cognatic systems: bilateral and
ambilineal. Bilateral systems include all of the individual’s relatives. They’re Ego focused,
and that Ego traces relationships from parents out to a wider and wider network called a
‘kindred’. Ambilineal systems involve picking whose group you’re going to be in when
you turn into an adult. These ones are ancestor focused and are organised by tracing des-
cent from either your mother or father (but not both). These are different from unilineal
systems because descent regularly involves cross-sex links (which unilineal ones don’t).
Why do these systems exist? They’re actually important in situations that have fixed terri-
tories and/or assets. Having a flexible kinship system allows people to match population
distribution to available land in Oceania, for example, where the arable land base is very
14

restricted. The population can arrange itself around availability better than if the kinship
system was very rigid and prescriptive.
Questioning presumptions
Many challenges have been posed to these early approaches to kinship. One focused on
the idea that behaviour was ordered and arranged by social categories. This is earliest
associated (that is, from the 19th century) with Morgan (1871) but it endured across the
20th century in the works of Alfred Kroeber (1909; 1917) and Robert H. Lowie (1920;
1928) reaching a peak at mid-century with George Peter Murdock’s typology of rela-
tionship terminologies (1949, see also 1967; 1970).The 20th-century work focused in on
language, taking the view that language shapes a person’s reality and practices. It got really
technical and started to look more like a sub-branch of linguistics –moving a significantly
long way away from everyday understandings and practices of relatedness.
Marxist-feminist scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s was very important for bringing
to the fore the uninterrupted focus on men and the related focus on the political and eco-
nomic dimensions of life. The lives of women and the domestic domain became areas of
study in their own right.This entailed more than just evening up the ethnographic record
so it had more women in it; it went into serious analysis of the androcentric foundations
upon which studies of kinship had been built. As Carsten notes, this led to a much broader
debate over
the mutual definition of kinship and gender. This debate was part of a much wider
questioning of the central tenets of anthropological method and theory, including the
division of the field into discrete domains such as politics, economics, kinship, reli-
gion, and theory. These developments seemed likely to result in the displacement of
kinship studies. However, the advent of new reproductive technologies (including in
vitro fertilization), family forms (such as same-sex marriage), and approaches blending
the separate domains of anthropology instigated the revitalization of kinship studies
in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
(Carsten 2012:n.p.)
Part of the questioning of presumptions involved critically engaging with the idea that
kinship wasn’t very important in the West. You’ll have noticed that anthropologists
interested in kinship up until this time were interested in it in non-Western situations, and
were even more interested in figuring out origins for systems, insights into the broader
organisation of non-Western worlds, and the number of systems in play. It was presumed
that in the West, kinship was bounded by the notion of ‘the family’ –a profoundly
domestic and private practice –and not to do with economics and politics, as it was to
non-Western people apparently wholly organised through kinship structures. But the idea
that the private domain of family that was the purview of women came under scrutiny.
Was it really a private domain separated wholly from the public world of work, of politics
and economics? This is still on our tables; questions about the worth of domestic labour,
the devaluing of work that occurs in the home, and the extension of ideological notions
of home into the workplace as ‘care’, ‘teaching’, ‘feeding’, and ‘service’ into the ‘public’
domain of work haven’t gone anywhere.There’s lots of work on the ideological construc-
tion of the family, and whose interests it serves when it’s thought of as somehow separate
from political and economic life. Check out what student Emma Bentley says about this.
142
The value of women’s work: $22.74 an hour

By Emma Bentley
Keywords: Childcare, gender, motherhood, emotional labour, wages
Abstract
The childcare sector is facing severe staff shortages, with low wages and staff who
feel undervalued. Childcare being an industry dominated by women, the wages and
treatment of staff mirrors the treatment of women as homemakers throughout his-
tory.While the sector is highly valuable to working parents, and by extension to the
government, little progress is being made to make it an attractive career choice for
young people. In order for workers to be adequately paid and valued, the work they
do must be recognised and celebrated.
As more women than ever enter the workforce, the need for childcare options
outside of the home increases too. In the recently announced 2021 Australian
budget, the government committed to more funding for childcare, with higher
subsidies to be given to parents. The goal being that more parents will be able
to send their children to childcare and work, instead of needing to stay at home.
However, critics of this new funding point to the more fundamental issues within
the early childcare industry, one of which is a shortage of people willing to become
carers. The main reasons that people decide not to go into the childcare sector, or
leave it, are that staff are underpaid and undervalued. These two complaints go
hand-in-hand. Childcare workers must have at least a Certificate III to work in
the sector, but are paid some of the lowest wages in Australia. It is important to
note that the vast majority of childcare workers are women, which may provide
an explanation as to why the pay is so low. When women care for children in their
homes while their husbands work, they are not paid. The time spent by women
on unpaid labour has always been significantly more than men, and the emotional
labour that women put into their households is still undervalued. It makes sense
that this logic applies to those working in the childcare sector as well. If a mother
could be looking after that child at home for free, is the work really deserving of
a high wage? The pervasive belief that women are natural caregivers and nurturers
is the reason that caretaking roles are dominated by women, and the reason they
are not valued as highly as those in professions that are male dominated. While low
wages and value may prevent many people from joining the sector, those who are
committed to their careers in early childhood education face more challenges. As
carers of young children, the emotional work of forming bonds with children and
their parents is difficult to navigate. Forming bonds that are similar to the kinship
ties of a child’s family, while still maintaining appropriate boundaries is confusing.
Children view carers they are close to as their kin, something like a surrogate
parent or caring older sibling. Carers must form these bonds in order to aid in the
child’s emotional development, while also being aware of the parent’s jurisdiction
over their relationship. Perhaps these kinds of bonds are natural to us as humans –
after all, it takes a village to raise a child, doesn’t it? But many parents feel immense
143
anxiety leaving their children at daycare; add to that the feelings of guilt for going
to work instead of staying home as women are still expected to do, and these bonds
become even more complicated.
The task of maintaining boundaries (between work and home, as well as caring
but professional relationships with children) can be difficult for carers when
considering the constant erasure of these boundaries occurring daily. Children do
not have boundaries, and the very nature of the work requires some knowledge of
their home lives. Parents must discuss routines, toileting, food and sleep, siblings and
even marriage difficulties with carers, while carers must constantly keep up a face
that is kind, enthusiastic and happy.This all amounts to a huge amount of emotional
labour for the carers. Emotional labour requires carers to regulate not only their
emotions and feelings, but those of others –that is, the children and their parents.
Beyond that, childcare involves a huge amount of teamwork and high levels of com-
munication between staff, so personal feelings must be set aside.
Staffing shortages in the childcare industry lead to a myriad of issues, including
higher fees in order to utilise casual relief staff, long waiting lists for new families,
lower quality of supervision of children, and lack of support for staff already in the
industry. As well as benefiting the economy of the country, the childcare sector
hugely benefits all parents, by allowing them to remain in the workforce. While the
government has attempted to make childcare more affordable, it has yet to raise the
minimum wage for carers or provide any reason why young people should pursue
a career in early childhood education. Not only must women’s labour in the home
be recognised and valued, but so too should the work done by both women and
men in the childcare sector. Not only are they forming unique emotional bonds
with the children they care for, but they are teaching them essential life skills while
allowing their parents to not have to sacrifice their careers. If the work they do can
be adequately valued as more than ‘glorified babysitting’, we might not have a staff
shortage on our hands.
Another part of the refiguring of the study of kinship involved questioning what
constituted kinship. David Schneider’s work is exceptionally important here. In his
Critique of the Study of Kinship, Schneider (1984) suggested that anthropological
definitions of kinship always came down to sexual procreation. Starting from that pos-
ition wasn’t appropriate to generating understandings of kinship that were not based
on sexual procreation. Milk kinship is a kind of relatedness forged not through blood
or semen, but instead through breastmilk, and is a common way of being related across
the Muslim world. When two children are suckled by the same woman, even far apart
in time, they become as firmly and surely related as if they were kin related by blood.
Those suckled by the same woman become milk siblings and cannot marry.There’s a lot
of work on milk kinship that covers, for example, its political and strategic dimensions,
including the manipulation of marriage, but we want to focus on a different point here.
As Long (1996) suggests, in Western systems of kinship, children are born ‘finished’;
no substance can alter their being and their capacity to be related to someone else.
But breastmilk can be used to do these things after birth. A child who is suckled by a
pleasant and charming women will take on these characteristics as they flow through
the milk. Likewise, a bad-tempered and smelly woman will pass on those qualities to
14

the child she suckles. The amount of milk is unimportant; milk itself is a potent sub-
stance. A milk bond can be formed at any stage of life; milk siblings can be created in
adulthood for strategic reasons, such as when women and men have to keep company.
Better that siblings do so than unrelated men and women, lest they become subject to
potentially consequential speculation.
Despite these specificities of milk kinship, anthropologists have been inclined to think
of milk kinship as a kind of social relationship modelled on the real (biological) kind, as
though milk kinship was a variety of fictive kinship. But milk kinship is only ‘fictive’ if all
kinship is founded on a procreative act. Milk kinship is no less real because it’s not based
on such a thing. Neither is adoption, for that matter, or any of the other forms of related-
ness previously labelled ‘fictive’. Schneider’s accusation –that kinship studies were biased
and presumptive –is highly applicable in both cases.
His accusation spawned a new interest in what other forms of kinship might be missed,
and what new practices might be overlooked. As a result, there’s been a huge amount of
work around new reproductive technologies, divorce, same-sex marriage, decisions not
to have kids, and kinship based on relations with friends, colleagues and even pets being
understood as children. Kath Weston’s (1991) work, on homosexual men who had been
rejected by their natal families upon coming out and who had formed enduring and
important networks with their friends and supporters, comes to mind as one of the most
important of these works. Carsten notes of it:
American anthropologist Kath Weston’s informants’ “coming out” stories revealed

that they conceptualized biological kinship as temporary and uncertain because bio-
logical kin had been known to disrupt or sever kin ties upon learning of a relative’s
homosexuality. Meanwhile, her informants’ friendships were invested with certainty,
depth, and permanence and were discussed in an idiom of kinship by those whose
experience of biological kin had been thoroughly disrupted.
(Carsten, 2012:n.p.)
Notice here how a focus on the patterns we presume to be the most important can lead
to other ways of being related as deviations of alternatives. They might actually be the
things that are most important.
Another super-important thing that’s happened as a result of the critical re-engagement
with kinship studies has been the complexification of binary categories, like ‘nature’ and
‘culture’. It’s really ordinary to take the oral contraceptive pill, be fitted with an IUD, or
wear a condom –at what point would we draw the boundary between ‘natural’ outcomes
of relations and ‘cultural’ modifications of them? Kinship isn’t a ‘natural’ world, and it
never was; even declaring it as such is a cultural act. Being able to intervene and make and
create in the only ostensibly natural world of human reproduction has huge consequences
not only for the irrelevance of the boundary work that would neatly separate nature
from culture. Indeed, it has huge ramifications for the operation of Western knowledge
practices more generally. Carsten again:
Marilyn Strathern has argued that the significance of kinship for Euro-Americans in
the past was that it constituted that part of the social world that was naturally given
rather than subject to choice. Once it becomes technologically alterable, as well as
increasingly refracted through the language of consumer choice, this “given” quality
of kinship is profoundly disrupted. Just what the effects of reproductive technologies
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will be—both in the West and in non-Western cultures—remains uncertain and is
the subject of academic and wider debate.
(2012:n.p.)
Lévi-Strauss pops his head back up in kinship studies in the 1970s and 1980s, this time
focusing on households and residency rules (see, for example, 1979; 1987). A focus on
households was interesting because it could capture a whole lot of everyday understandings
of and practices relating to gendered labour, domestic routine, residency, how marriage
roles interacted with actual property and economic practice, and how place itself was
experienced. This could all happen around a focus on marriage, which often entailed a
change of residence for at least one of the partners, and a change in everyday practice
along with it. Meyer Fortes (see, for example, 1970) and Jack Goody (see, for example,
1958; 1987) centralised residential arrangements to figure out how the relations between
marriage rules, property transfers, and the constitution of domestic groups worked, and
what they produced over the long term. Lévi-Strauss, though, used the domestic dwelling
to think about societies whose kinship models couldn’t be adequately explained by either
descent or alliance theory. This was really interesting stuff. Lévi-Strauss showed how the
house itself was a prominent social institution that actually worked like a corporation.
Think the House of Windsor here, and you’ve got it. It has material and symbolic wealth,
and it preserves this wealth precisely through strict rules relating to inheritance.You have
to have a strong demonstrable relationship with such a house to inherit its wealth and
pass it on. There’s a lot more to the work than we’ve let on here, including what Simone
reckons is the best part of it, the analysis of the social meanings of the house. Simone and
Andy’s good friend John Gray (2006) wrote a wonderful book called Domestic Mandala
(2006) that is a cracking example of this, which you should definitely read.
We don’t want to give you the impression that you have to firmly centralise kinship in
order to use genealogical techniques. For example, Simone loves to use kinship diagrams
to get people to describe how they think they’re particularly oriented to or equipped for
something. She used them very frequently in her research on the Police Band. As you
know, the members of the band were organised into a police institutional structure. That
was a bit difficult for many band members to reconcile with the status of their musical
ability; some felt that that structure had promoted people according to police, and not
musical, values. In consequence, many of them relied heavily on the idea of an inborn,
almost biological, musical ability that had been generationally ‘given’. Simone recorded
how people thought of their musical identities in this way using genealogies, in which
two violins could marry and create a baby piano (for example). Simone used these at the
beginning of her fieldwork, too, as a way to get to know people –turns out they liked
talking about themselves and their families. Sometimes, it’s worth including in your rep-
ertoire just for this reason. Figures 5.11–5.13 illustrate some of these kinship diagrams.
The other way in which Simone uses genealogies is to understand how smokers think
about how their bodies are more or less equipped to handle cigarette smoking. While
Simone was living in a small town outside Canberra in 2015, she met Judy, a 63-year-
old woman working in the local supermarket. Judy became one of Simone’s informants
in her work on smoking; she had been a smoker for 50 of those 63 years. She wasn’t a
bit worried about the Australian government’s campaign for smoking cessation, which
attempted to frighten people into quitting with some pretty scary health advice about the
health risks associated with it. To get Judy to talk about her history of smoking and where
it might have come from, she took Judy’s kinship diagram and found that a great many
146
Figure 5.11 Example kinship diagram from the field #1.

147
of Judy’s relatives were smokers –many of then deceased. Judy explained that she came
from a long line of smokers. Here is an excerpt from Simone’s notes on their conversation:
“My dad smoked, his dad, and my mum, smokers them all. And, dad was 92 when he
died, mum was 87, and my dad’s dad had a good innings, too, being close to 90 when
he died. Gawd, imagine if it’s true what they say, that smoking can take 20years off
what you’d expect to live. How old would that have made my old dad, eh? I make
that around 122 years old.” I asked Judy about her responses to the graphics that
adorned her packet. “Well, now,” she replied, bringing her glasses down from the top
of her head and peering at the packet. “This ’un has a pair of lungs on it, see?” “How
does that make you feel?” I asked her. “Not scared, if that’s what yer after!” she said,
with a glint in her eye. “There are people more disposed to it [lung cancer] than
others are—I’ve got iron lungs, like me old man had. He didn’t die of lung cancer,
as you might be supposing, and I suppose you are supposing that—well, you’d be
wrong! He had a fall, see, down the stairs. He was too old, and his old body broke
right up from the impact. Me mum was dead less than a year later—and I don’t care
what nobody says, she died from a broken heart, yes she did indeed.”
(Dennis, 2016c:126)
Isn’t this interesting? Instead of being worried about dying as her parents had, Judy felt
safe because she’d inherited the iron lungs of her father, which in her own words meant
she was ‘well-equipped’ to be a smoker –and not everyone was, or had the right to smoke,
in Judy’s view. That’s a view that we might not understand without close anthropological
work; the notion that people could inherit a safety, a biological, inherited protection from
smoking relatives is new. Figure 5.14 shows Simone’s messy, in-field kinship diagram.
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Exercise: Your turn!

Now, for the big, important and very hands-on exercise in this chapter. For this
exercise, we want you to produce a kinship diagram. Do this one of a friend or
family member. Choose a focus for this –it could be education in the family,
health and illness, career patterns, religion, migration, ethnicity, or combinations
of these things. Then, we want you to tell us what kinds of questions you would
want to then explore, from what the person was able to tell you about that topic
as it relates to their family. It would be excellent to bring this back to your familiar
context, the university. For instance, if you were looking at education and ethnicity,
you might be interested in chasing up how Western education models interact or
disturb practices of specific cultural education. If you were looking at education
and gender, you might be interested in examining how women’s participation has
changed over generations. Don’t fancy it? If you were looking at a family who had
a strong presence of the BRAC1 breast cancer gene, you might be fascinated by
how people make decisions about the removal of breasts and ovaries as a preventa-
tive measure by recourse to their own family histories, which might play just as
important a role as the medical information they get. Have a look at the example
pieces for inspiration. Too many skeletons in too many closets to make this exer-
cise comfortable? Take a look at Luke William’s genealogical work in this book, on
what knits Britney Spears’ defenders together and do this exercise from a distance.
Here’s what Luke did with it. He realised that fictive kinship could be pressed into
quite interesting service, to describe his relationship –and that of many others –to the
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embattled Britney Spears, who had been placed under a conservatorship by a US court
in 2008. Luke writes:
It wasn’t until November 12th, 2021 that Judge Brenda Penny terminated the
conservatorship of Britney Spears, a restraint that had been in place since 2008. In
the US, a conservatorship is the appointment of a guardian, or conservator, by a
judge to handle the responsibilities of an individual deemed gravely disabled. As for
the Princess of Pop, her highly controversial arrangement began with an involuntary
psychiatric hold and ended up as a nearly-14-year ordeal in which she saw control
of her finances relinquished to her father, had her car driving privileges taken away,
and was allegedly forced to take medication as potent as Lithium to regulate mental
health symptoms associated with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.
Luke understood that fictive kinship could be used to describe the relationship that fans
had to Britney. He could certainly have drawn up something that reflected the significant
relationships between people who all traced an emotional connection to Britney (rather
than one forged in any biological way). Luke knew that such relatedness had purchase in
anthropology, and he was in no doubt of the weight and significance of the feelings that
organised people in relation to Britney and each another –one of which was anger. He
also knew that these were productive and consequential. He remarks:
While it’s not my job as an anthropologist to comment on whether sustaining Spears’

conservatorship was the best choice, I can uncover the interesting role that fictive
kinship systems played in reinvigorating discussions around it. Enter the focus of my
anthropological research, the fandom known as the Britney Army. One could say the
Britney Army, like other such subcultures defined by camaraderie among individuals
with a particular common interest, is organised almost like a family, with our shared
knowledge of her music providing a sibling-like bond –or, for those who are a little
more involved, the marriage of minds on the online forum Exhale. As the Britney
Army comprises fans from all over the world, forums like Exhale played a crucial part
in organising protests against the restriction of her lifestyle. In turn, the increasingly
amplified voices of this fandom turned the media’s attention to Spears’ case, which,
while accompanied by a long history, drew particularly high ire in 2021. If it weren’t
for the resolve of the Britney Army, we may very well have never seen the end of her
conservatorship.
Luke even speculated on the functional benefits of the fandom for its members them-
selves, just as Malinowski might have: ‘it can’t be ignored that being in the Army provides
growth, relaxation, and, maybe even for the lucky few, reproduction for Britney’s fans.’
Perhaps most interestingly of all, Luke realised that the thing that related Britney’s fans to
one another and to Britney was marginalisation:
Janet Carsten’s work on chosen family introduced important anthropological know-

ledge that helps us understand the necessity of fandom-based kinships for some
people, because many fandoms –especially Britney’s –include many people from
marginalised groups. Many of Britney’s fans identify as members of the LGBTQ+
community, for whom there have been parallels between our own experiences
of marginalisation and Britney’s. Avenging Britney, in a way, became an outlet for
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those who felt maligned, whether they shared her experience with dysfunctional
conservatorships or had otherwise endured similar forms of oppression.
There’s nothing fictive about that.

Have a look at what Kat Babushkina did with this exercise. You can see the points at
which Kat exercises her anthropological imagination to produce her unique insight into
the value of exploring relatedness, which she did with her dad. Note that Kat privileges
broken ties over continuity in her piece, which makes it a very important one.We so often
think of connection, especially as a positive term; but disconnection, rupture and breakage
can characterise relatedness just as much.
Documenting kinship amongst broken ties

By Kat Babushkina
Process of obtaining information and creating kinship diagram
For this kinship piece, I chose to map out my father’s (Ego) family tree (see
Figure 5.15). Growing up, he would tell me countless stories about his life in the USSR,
so I felt compelled to acknowledge and honour even a small portion of his story.
Figure 5.15 Kinship diagram by Kat Babushkina.
His stories and adventures have always been a part of my life, however as I have
gotten older, he has entrusted me with the circumstances of his and by exten-
sion, my, family. Having some knowledge about our family and his experiences
15
allowed me to formulate some pointed questions before sitting down to talk on the
phone with him. The process of mapping out the kinship diagram was fairly simple
as I already knew a large portion of the information depicted. Most of our time
talking was spent exploring memories of his family and his emotions surrounding
past events.
I prefaced the interview by outlining what I was planning on discussing and
established that he was free to refuse to answer questions and later, was able to
detract any statements. However, he was extremely open and willing to share not
only information and his feelings, but also his time.
Initially, my notes from our conversation were disorganised as I wanted to focus
on actively listening and asking questions. Afterwards, I was able to compile all the
information in a document and sort it into the various themes that appeared.
My positionedness
I believe my positionedness as his daughter and the already-built trust and comfort
between us allowed him to divulge personal information and discuss difficult topics.
Additionally, because I partially knew the stories mentioned, I was able to begin
with targeted questions focusing on certain experiences in his life. Furthermore,
through introspection, I have begun to share my father’s feelings regarding aspects
of our family, allowing me to connect to his story and relate to the issues at hand.
Ultimately, my familial relationship with Ego allowed me to explore his kinship
more thoroughly and thoughtfully producing a joint piece of work.
Overview of information
The key points I want to acknowledge mainly focus on my father’s connection to
name and family.
My father is the child of his mother’s third marriage and he had a half-sister, from her
first marriage, with whom he was extremely close. Both of his parents were extremely
private, with my father facing repercussions if he were to ask personal questions.
According to him, their relationship was infused with mutual respect but remained
distant. We both speculated on the possibility that it could have been due to their
experiences in the Second World War, but my father said it was primarily their nature.
Our surname came from my grandmother’s second husband (not pictured in
the diagram) as that was the name she had taken, and my father’s parents were not
married until the end of my grandfather’s life. However, my father only became
privy to this information well into adulthood, learning of it from his sister; he
had always thought it was his mother’s maiden name. Finding out so late made
it troublesome to change my father’s surname to match his father’s, particularly
because he himself had already had a daughter (my half-sister). This has led to my
father deeply regretting not finding out about the origin of his name earlier, and as
he has aged, he has had to come to terms with the effects of his, in his words, lost
name. He mentioned the gravity of having to contend with and carry a name that is
not his father’s. The role of the father in our names holds a particular weight, espe-
cially because most Russians’ middle names are patronyms.
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Born in 1950, my father spent his first few years in Belarus, with his parents and
maternal grandparents, aunts and uncles. His father was the leader of the local com-
munity farm (essentially a socialised farm sector) and a member of the Communist
Party.When he was asked, my father’s grandfather refused to combine his farm with
that of the community’s. My father assumes that his grandfather did not like the
USSR and its rules, and did not like his hand being forced in joining the collective
farm, particularly when he spent so much of his own time tending to it. Because
of the refusal, my grandfather was reprimanded and expelled from the Party. The
consequences included potential imprisonment or death.
What followed was a massive falling-out between his mother and grandfather,
that led to my father moving to Kazakhstan and his mother never talking to her
own parents again. Because of the fight, my father knows almost nothing about his
grandparents, only maintaining relationships with a few of his mother’s siblings.This
was largely due to the efforts of his sister, who has since passed away and therefore
is another lost connection between my dad and his family. Additionally, in the after-
math, all his mother’s siblings moved away and split up. In my father’s words, the
bureaucratic systems that were in place, at the time, and the consequent falling-out
led to the break-up of his extended family. According to him, as he has aged and
begun to reflect on his history and upbringing, not knowing much about his family
has made him feel less whole.
My father also spoke about his relationship with his first daughter, who lives in
Russia. To this day, she refuses to speak to his current wife (my mother) due to
personal opinions and differences. He has had to essentially sacrifice one relation-
ship for another.This was particularly true when I was young, as she initially did not
want a connection with me either. However, their relationship has improved over
the years, only really evolving after our family’s move to Australia.
When my aunt passed away, she left three children. My dad has only become close
with his nephews as more time has passed, and they have aged. However, according
to him, he only maintains contact out of a familial obligation.
Themes to develop
The main themes appearing throughout my father’s life followed the lines of loss,
regret and familial disputes. We tend to associate overwhelmingly positive feelings
with family: belonging, connection and support. This means we might often forgo
acknowledging the upsetting or dispiriting possibilities of such connections. It
would be interesting to develop and shed light on those aspects. I believe it is
important to acknowledge that for some, family, and the thought of them, is not
always comforting.
Over the years, whenever the conversation has led to my father’s family, he
has always expressed some sort of sadness or regret whenever we talk about the
‘unknown’ of our family.
The concept of surnames is worthy of note –in particularly, how they affect the
formation of identity and trigger various feelings, such as pride, envy and sadness.
Our surnames connect us to existing norms, societal expectations and beliefs, and
provide a continuation, from one family member to another. Analysing this could
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further assist in conveying the true complexity of our connection to our surnames
and family names. A focus on migrants, and even divided families, could assist in
shining a light on the detachment and loss from identity they feel in connection
to surnames. In my father’s case, he did not find out the origin of his surname
until adulthood and only began reflecting on the meaning and feelings behind his
surname later in life. In my case, I knew about the history of our surname from a
young age and therefore have had more time to contend with its history and I am
able to now form my identity around my last name being my father’s, not just my
grandmother’s second husband’s, who neither of us knew. However, for my father,
he will always have to face the fact that his surname is not his father’s, muting his
connection to his patrilineage.
The bureaucratic processes in Stalinist Russia and my grandmother’s adamant
nature affected my father’s connection to his grandparents, aunts and uncles. Even
towards the end of her parents’ lives, my grandmother refused to speak to them.
Because of this, my father was not able to build traditional familial relationships with
his maternal family. As mentioned, my father believed his mother was, by nature, an
unforgiving and stubborn woman. However, it would also be of interest to explore
the effects of the Second World War on survivors and veterans, and how that affected
their parenting; maybe it was my grandmother, the standard way of parenting at the
time, or maybe my grandparents’ experiences in the war, that affected the way they
viewed relationships (even with their own parents), and the way they parented, and
interacted with their children. My father said that he would have been hit had he
asked questions about their life, which impacted his knowledge about his family and
in turn, affected his daughters’ knowledge.
My father’s connection to family, and us being separated by continents, has
impacted my relationship to my family, and the general concept of family. I am not
close to my sister or cousins. Additionally, as I have aged, I have had to come to
terms with the fact that I am not able to trace my lineage through many generations.
Consequently, I have never placed much meaning and weight on traditional familial
connections outside of my parents, always leaning on friendships I have formed. It
would be interesting to explore the generational effects of inter-familial disputes
and secrecy. Will my lack of connection to my family extend to possible children
I may have?
Another theme worthy of exploration would be the effects of one’s upbringing
and surroundings on their parenting style. My father grew up amongst many
hardships with distant parents. However, my parents raised me with support, warmth
and, especially in recent years, with increased openness about their experiences.
Despite my tentative connection to my distant relatives, it seems my father raised
me in direct opposition to his own upbringing. In my sister’s case however, their
relationship seems to parallel my father’s relationship with his parents. I would
like to delve more into how one’s parental relationships affect the upbringing of
their own children and the modifications one must make to change that. Did my
father’s parenting style change with age (due to introspection, emotional evolution),
because of his surroundings (despite being born in Russia, I was raised in Australia,
in an overwhelmingly Western environment with different values and practices), or
did my mother’s own parenting style influence his (it was a joint effort after all)?
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Issues found with traditional kinship diagrams

Through my conversation with my father, I found out that his mother had had a
son before him who had passed away when he was a few months old. My father
had secretly found out but was never told directly. Neither my father’s half-brother
nor my grandmother’s second husband are pictured on the kinship diagram. After
speaking to my father about the possible inclusion of them, he said there was no
reason to, as he had no meaningful connection to them and only accidentally knew
of them. In this diagram, I only included Ego’s significant familial relations and the
ones he wanted to include. In a traditional kinship diagram, it might be expected to
include all relationships.
Another problem I encountered was the issue of unknown family members. My
father knew that his mother was one of approximately 10–12 siblings, but he did
not know the exact number or all of her siblings’ genders. Because of this, there was
no precise way to traditionally document the rest of the siblings that he was unsure
of. However, I felt the need to acknowledge them and therefore had to include
another symbol and provide a key.
Can you see how Kat develops angles –like realising that the confines of traditional
diagrams would present difficulties –and sharpens them –like using techniques of
omission and privileging significance –rather than technical correctness? These things
give us insight into what she thinks is important about relatedness, and how she’d pursue
that. But can you also see that any one of us reading Kat’s material might want to develop
other angles? Like what? For Simone, Kat’s notes are gold, because they articulate the
great power of absences and silences.The piece is full of people being cut off from familial
communications, not spoken to, sometimes over generations. Absences and silences are
not empty –this piece reminds Simone of how replete they are, and their power. In this
way, Simone is reminded of Esther’s piece about waiting, way back in Chapter 1. Esther
recognised that waiting is not an empty category between the real social action; it’s a thing
in itself. Kat has lots of the same sort of material going on. What could you make of it?
Here’s Julia Doherty’s take on this exercise:
Losing things, keeping things: handing on skills, stories and culture

By Julia Doherty
The person I approached about doing my kinship piece was my friend Maddy
(Ego), a fellow anthropology student (see Figure 5.16). We set up a meeting on
couches in the living room and talked for about forty minutes, sharing details about
both our lives in more of an exchange than a cold interview.
I knew that Maddy was the first person in her family to go to university, as her
family primarily entered trades instead of traditional academia, so I was interested in
how that fact played a part in her relationship to kinship and education. I started the
conversation by enquiring generally about her family structure, where she was from
and what those close to her did for work. I took light notes, general words and ideas
15
Figure 5.16 Kinship diagram by Julia Doherty.
as well as headnotes, as I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of conversation by leaving

long pauses so I could write. Maddy is from outside Darwin and is Aboriginal and
we did talk about cultural education and how her culture and background has
influenced her and her perception of ‘kin’ and different types of education. I tried
to handle this topic and subject matter with full sensitivity and gave Maddy control
over what questions she answered and what I wrote down, as the Indigenous
community has both historically and contemporarily had a complex relationship
with Western education, and the destruction and depiction of cultural knowledge.
Although Maddy made no changes and was happy to share information about her
family, life and relationship to education, I would consider her input, ideas and
self-censorship of her own information –which is inevitable when interviewing
someone about their family –to make this work partially produced by her as the
subject.
Maddy is from outside Darwin in the Northern Territory, and has lived there for
the majority of her life. I decided to only extend the kinship diagram back to her
grandparents, as with that I still had two siblings and parents, seven aunts and uncles,
15 cousins and their children and six grandparents. She has two younger siblings
and a vast amount of close extended family, with her dad’s siblings in Victoria and
the rest in Darwin. In Darwin, her family is incredibly close, with second wives and
ex-wives all accepted as part of the family, which Maddy described as matrilineal.
Her family is mostly women, on both sides, which has shaped her understanding
and perception of family as highly important. Her grandmother had Maddy’s mum
at 16, and her grandfather has been married twice more with three children after
Maddy’s mother, and she considers all of them to be her grandparents regardless of
blood relation. The majority of Maddy’s family went into trade or administration-
focused roles, as at the time a university degree wasn’t necessary for such careers.
Her father is a miner, spending a week in Darwin and a week out; he finished school
at year 11 and got a certificate in trade instead. Her mother works in administra-
tion, and her grandfather, before he retired, was an adviser to the Department of
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Health and is a valued elder in his community. In Maddy’s family, education was not
always something that was guaranteed. Her grandmother was a part of the Stolen
Generation and her siblings and many of her cousins are finding alternate pathways
through job-ready programmes. As the first person to go to university in her family,
the second being her uncle on her mother’s side; while there was no pressure to
go, there was a pressure to go and do well. Maddy described it as her Nan saying,
‘Darwin’s still gonna be here’, and that if she was choosing to go to university she
should make the best of it. Maddy also talked about her connection to cultural edu-
cation, saying that while her grandfather has Bush and Western learning, the loss
of culture and language is something that affects her family. She said that they still
know how to care for the land and have some of their traditions, and that the way
they value and cherish their connection to country and community is important
and a vital and continuing part of education in her family.
Maddy’s perception of kinship is heavily influenced by her culture and environ-
ment, and while making this diagram and conducting the interview, I was surprised
both by how many women are in Maddy’s extended family and how her family
structure is more removed from the traditional Western nuclear family style. Maddy
described how her grandmothers run the show and her complex family tree has led
to everyone being ‘Aunty’ or ‘Uncle’, even if that isn’t their title by the traditional
Western definition of family. If I was allowed the opportunity for further study,
I would be interested in how the relationship between the generations and the
ability, and need for higher eduction, has evolved. I would also be interested if any
of Maddy’s younger extended family will choose to join her in tertiary education,
and if her decision to pursue opportunities outside Darwin and in a more academic
affect will have an influence on her local community. I think that an important fact,
however, to remember when doing kinship diagrams is understanding the history
and boundaries, both political and societal, that there have been and continue to be
imposed on Indigenous youth, or Indigenous people as a whole, in terms of gaining
education. Through talking with Maddy and hearing her own lived experiences
about barriers and inequality, my own understanding of family and its connection
to education was changed. As an upper-middle-class white woman, I have not
been denied opportunities based on my race, and it was important that my own
experiences with race, opportunity and education influence my ideas and thoughts
as little as possible.
I would be interested in also exploring the work-ready programme which provides
certificates of trades, a programme which Maddy’s sister is currently undertaking.
I would also like to explore the changing requirements for jobs, as more and more
a university education is required for many governmental, administrative, or engin-
eering jobs, which Maddy pointed out when she said her father has recently had to
gain certifications in order to be employable. While these programmes and chan-
ging ideas do fascinate me, I would like to explore the relationship between that
cultural knowledge, passed down mostly orally directly by the community, and the
Western education system which is similar no matter where in the world you travel.
The link between Indigenous knowledge and education is something that I would
love to look at further, and the value of cultural knowledge which, as Maddy stated,
is something that is finite and must be passed down in order to not be lost. I also
157
would like to develop ideas about trauma, and the effect that colonisation has had
on the community –for example, when an elder in Maddy’s community wanted
to pass on her knowledge of language, but Maddy said that since the elder and her
cousins and siblings were so old, they found it hard to learn a new language.
Sliced meat kinship

By Emma Hudson
Introduction
Sitting alongside my grandmother, Rata (kin no. 25), I explore the value of pros-
perity via Chinese cuisine and commensality; specifically, through the signifi-
cance of whether an animal is served sliced or whole at mealtime. This distinction
reveals the enactment of social values, that transfer the omnipresent symbolic into
a corporeal and embodied process of unity across marriage, generations and place,
through shared meals.
Process
My matrilineal grandmother Rata is highly family oriented, very chatty, and has a
living memory of every person represented in the kin diagram in Figure 5.17 (which
enrichingly includes her two brothers marrying two sisters from another family).
This diagram was drawn from conversation with Rata. I intentionally sketched a
bilateral diagram that did not extend to her cousins and their future generations,
even though this information was available; the longer I sat with Rata, the more
complex and infinite the diagram became, as well as her astounding memory.
This led to the realisation that part of the practice of drawing kin diagrams is
to select an Ego and to keep in mind when to stop. In an informal interview, we
discussed our family and were engaged in broad concepts such as ethnicity, wealth,
health, gender and religion –all that intersect. As expected, answers amassed from
past memories and comparison to life here and now, as we spoke with an entire
generation between us. I noticed Rata refer to ‘sliced meat’ as a way to recall mem-
ories where she thought most perceptively of her family.
I was asking questions toward both her matrilineal and patrilineal lines and her
responses were almost always situated around mealtime, not matter who became the
subject. Our conversation thus centralised around Rata’s experience and memory of
Chinese cuisine, which was never relinquished throughout her family’s diaspora in
New Zealand and Australia. More than this, it reinvigorated Chinese traditions that
could only be evoked through food when migrating to a new place.
The socialisation of sliced meat

Recalling the preparation of meat had a lot of embedded meaning for Rata and her
family as Chinese migrants adapting to Anglo-Celtic culture in Australia. Rata was
newgenrtpdf
158
Figure 5.17 Kinship diagram by Emma Hudson.
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raised in a Chinese community and intermarriage was discouraged; her father (kin
no. 6) did not allow the family to go to her sister’s (kin no. 27) wedding because
she married a Lebanese man (kin no. 28). There was something sinister about her
sister leaving the round table of Chinese commensality, that threatened the social
fabric of her family. In a parallel narrative, Rata’s mother (kin no. 5) was raised in an
affluent family in China and was a noticeably underskilled cook when she married.
Rata says, ‘A woman learns [to cook] in a very social house and with less money
because you would live with a lot of family and have many people to feed without
any workers.’
When Rata’s mother moved to Australia, she raised her six children above a fruit
shop, which her affinal family operated in Haymarket, Sydney, whilst her husband
worked as a potato merchant. During this time, she learnt how to cook from her
affinal mother (kin no. 4) and sisters, which was a highly social task and a necessary
skill to have in their household and community. According to Rata, her mother
would spend a lot of time plucking feathers from birds and slicing the meat for the
whole family, which would ‘go a long way’ –the preparation from whole meat to
sliced being concerned with prosperity, when there are many to feed.
When I asked Rata whether her family was considered wealthy, her direct answer
was, ‘Well, we ate sliced meat, and it went very far, so was not expensive because
the animal was mixed with some vegetables and rice; it kept everyone healthy
because variety was shared; not like now when everyone is eating only their own
plate.’ Rata’s answer seemed parabolic to me at first, but what I recognised was her
logic in addressing the question through comparison to an Anglo-Celtic home’s
diet, where a whole cut of meat is a staple meal in a household and encompasses an
associated wealth. Rata was raised in a lower-to progressively middle-class home,
but her answer suggests this did not inhibit good nourishment and prosperity
because of her family’s specific preparation of meat. This made me wonder how
difficult it would be to eat a whole cut of meat with chopsticks … Sliced meat
is not just symbolic, but a corporeal process of caretaking in our Chinese family.
Once this was realised, many other aspects in our family could be understood as
an extension of this.
I asked Rata if she ever ate out to have a break from cooking and she responded,
‘Not really, maybe once a week to be social with other Chinese people in
restaurants. I would take the children [kin no. 47, 48 and 50] for short soup because
we could only afford this.’ ‘Short soup’, like many other Chinese broth and soupy
noodle dishes, is associated with a basic diet and would have a small amount of
green vegetables floating on top with some wonton. In response, I asked what Rata
thought to be a meal for wealthy people or expensive occasions; she reminisced
over the whole animal: ‘At yum cha (lit. ‘drink tea’, casual eating of snacks and
staples), the family can eat a variety of food, which is good, but on special occasions
like family banquets, it is important to order a whole animal for good health and
prosperity.’
From Rata’s perspective, the more people at mealtime, the more prosperous you
would be, because you would eat a wider variety of shared food. A Chinese banquet
was an expensive and special occasion where eight or more people would share a
set menu and eat a whole animal. Marks of wealth would be embedded (publicly) in
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the meal configuration, in contrast to sliced meat at home. I have my own memories
of my grandparents looking at the order on other tables in Chinese restaurants to
gauge the wealth of the family.
Rata mentioned, ‘When you eat the whole animal, even once you’ve sliced it, it is
bringing the family together.’ She exemplified this by recalling a visit to the Chinese
cemetery where she cares for her mother’s and father’s graves; she noted that slices
of pork were being handed out on a special occasion:, ‘You would take some home
as well as leave some on the graves, so everyone was eating from the same animal’ –
everyone incorporated by the same spirit (being the animal), including the dead.
Conclusion
My speculation of embedded meaning in sliced meat requires further research. But
from the observations and personal exchanges I had with my grandmother Rata,
it seems that sliced meat contains a reservoir of knowledge about family unity as
well as enculturated wishes for prosperity. In my diasporic Chinese family, ances-
tral values are reinstated through the preparation and shared consumption of sliced
meat, ultimately to ensure social stability.
Family and community

All the thinking we’ve done in this chapter about relatedness leads us to an important
speculation. Andy has spent a long time thinking about ‘community’ and Simone has
spent time thinking about ‘the family’. Both of these are undergirding concepts to related-
ness, and so they both deserve thorough investigation too –just as we’ve made of all the
other concepts in this chapter. In fact, we reckon doing so is urgent. For instance, both
concepts have certain properties that rely on the interaction between particular body parts
and deployments. But are they always positive, as they seem to be? They were certainly
portrayed as such during the worst days of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and during
the Australian bushfires of the same year. They were deployed not only positively, but also
pretty vaguely –what did they actually mean? What does that vagueness and positivity
obscure, and what does it tell us about the parameters of anthropological thinking? Andy
tells us about his concept –‘disaster nativism’ –that lets us think about community a bit
more critically; Simone thinks about families, touch and smoke. In this part of the chapter,
we want to get across the idea that you should question the concepts that sit underneath
a lot of work you’ll come across –either scholarly work, or media work –that tells us
stories about people in communities and families dealing with unfurling situations –
usually disasters and crises. (If not, we want to know right now what newscast you’re
watching!) Treat this chapter as a little reminder to subject big, seemingly foundational,
concepts to scrutiny. Come back to it often –everyone needs to remind themselves about
what they’ve uncritically accepted. Let’s start off with Andy’s community, and then move
to Simone’s family.
Have you noticed how ‘community’ is used a lot of the time to describe the ways that
people pull together in the face of some kind of disaster? Have you heard it used as some-
thing people can fall back on after a fire, a flood, or during a pandemic? It’s almost as if
community is, by definition, ‘good’. As Watts (2000) argues, the core conceptualisation of
16

community as both something ‘good’ and as a ‘unity as an undifferentiated thing … that
speaks with a single voice’, has lent community ‘intrinsic powers’ that mute a multiplicity
of differences and conflicts (Watts 2000:37). That is, ‘community’ is thought of as a sin-
gular entity that is there to ensure the consistent production of good outcomes (Williams
1976:76). One way in which it does this is mitigating conflict, so conflict is subsumed
under the capacity of community to ameliorate any dispute. Difference and conflict are
wholly encompassed within the conceptual embrace of ‘community’, rendering them
intrinsic problems within bounded localities that ‘community’ itself exists to address. Any
suspicions about this? It sounds a bit too good to be true, doesn’t it? We thought so, too.
This understanding of conflict emerged from Max Gluckman’s seminal and enduring
definition of community as ‘a lot of people co-operating and disputing within the limits
of an established system of relations and cultures’ (1958:35n1). Gluckman placed a lot of
emphasis on recognising the importance of conflict. Remember his views on ritual, and
how rituals of rebellion were there to guard against actual rebellion? He also built conflict
into his overall approach: he combined Marxist objections to inequality and oppression
with structural functionalism so he could criticise colonialism from within structuralism,
whereas other forms of it tended to support colonialist ventures. That meant he could
look at the conditions that colonialism had created, including conflict and cooperation. In
his research on the social organization of KwaZulu-Natal in Zululand, Africa, Gluckman
assert that there was a single system composed of two ‘colour groups’ –each of which was
internally subdivided. He showed how the systematic interrelationships create conflict as
well as cooperation among social groups, leading to both change and stability in the social
system.The data are largely confined to a micro-description of two brief events involving
interaction between Zulus and Europeans. The account, which focuses closely on actual
social interactions between people from the two different groups lets Gluckman argue
that the rupture into two racial groups of Africans and Europeans actually formed the
basis of its structural unity –and the foundation of a single social system.That’s how com-
munity comes to stand as ‘a lot of people co-operating and disputing within the limits
of an established system of relations and cultures’! At the end of the day, ‘community’ is
the enclosure in which all of this takes place and it somehow manages to deal with all
the disputations and press all the cooperation into the service of its members. This means,
too, that ‘community’ is sufficiently nebulous as to enable its members to hold entirely
different views about what ‘it is’, while simultaneously believing that they are sharing
something in common. It’s sufficiently elastic as to contain everything and everyone, and
sufficiently coherent as to let people believe in a singular homogenous, or unitary, entity
(Agrawal and Gibson, 2001:9–10).
We think there could be a few issues with this take on things. For one thing, it’s a bit
hard for social scientists to say anything else, ever, about community –it does everything!
Innovating in the concept might let us see a few other important things, though, about
how life might unfold in this apparent enclosure of ‘community’.
Andy got a massive bee in his bonnet about this, and a good thing he did too –his
thinking about it has produced a good chance for us to rethink ‘community’ and how we
might make a better and more fruitful anthropological sense of it. He led a paper that he
and Simone wrote together in which he coined the term ‘Disaster Nativism’ (Dawson
and Dennis, 2020) to illustrate his very important points.
Disaster is at the heart of Andy’s thinking here, not only because ‘disaster’ is the focal
point around which the ‘goodness’ of community most frequently appears, but also
because he was working with Simone in a town (and indeed in a country) that had had
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its share of disasters. We did fieldwork on conceptualisations of responsible drinking –
funded by Alcohol and Beverages Australia –in a little farming and tourist town on
Australia’s eastern coast, that we called ‘Anonyton’ in the paper. Drought, bushfires and
then COVID-19 had all hit the town in rapid succession. This meant that concatenating
disaster had lasted for years, but the different kinds of disasters that hit the town made for
different reactions and responses.
It was really clear to us that the sort of definition of community that you see on the
evening news was definitely in play; it was the means by which local people survived and
would be able to reconstruct their town after the terrible fires that it endured. People
helped one another to rebuild fences, deal with injured and dead animals, gave each other
places to stay, and distributed food and other resources. That’s definitely the kind of stuff
you see on the news: locals pulling together for everyone’s benefit, the strong and resilient
community rebuilding their town together. But what often doesn’t make the news is the
stuff that happens underneath that story.
When we were doing our fieldwork in Anonyton,2 we saw locals blaming one
another for the fires’ causes. They accused one another of not coming to the assistance of
neighbours –some people stayed to defend properties, some left in the overwhelming fer-
ocity of the blaze. They argued bitterly over the allocation of post-fire relief. Sometimes,
people even argued about whose fault the fire was –some thought it was probably the
tree changers who’d come to town and waxed lyrical about the lovely foliage, instead of
controlling it for fire management like a proper local would have done. Sometimes that
resulted in people coming down to the food relief tents in town to physically stop ‘tree
changers’ from getting food aid: why should they get it, when it was their fault in the first
place? Why should people who abandoned the town get food relief? Who was really who
here? Who was part of the community, and who had no place in it? Who decided? These
questions had decidedly unpleasant answers.
In many ways, the fires required people to be in direct relations of cooperation and
conflict with one another. People gave one another food, shelter, clothes, or stopped
people from eating the free first-aid food, or told people who they blamed that they
weren’t welcome to visit anymore. They hugged one another, they yelled at and insulted
one another –it was all very observable and entailed. Those physical proximities became
impossible to operationalise when the COVID- 19 pandemic hit, however. Virtual
communications technologies provided the platform for community members to com-
municate. That sounds like a good thing –the sort of thing that would make a good
human-interest story on the news. But the key discourse for that coming together was
pretty disturbing. ‘Outsiders’ –those ‘tree-changers’ who had been blamed for the ferocity
of the fires, along with weekenders and immigrant workers undertaking seasonal labour –
emerged as the core around which community formed. They had brought in the ‘green
values’ that interrupted ‘burn off ’, a traditional farming method of fire prevention. And,
they are most likely to bring disease, so the stories go (see also Dennis, 2009a; 2009b) –
why, hadn’t COVID-19 come from outside Australia?
This narrative was a tricky one to sustain, though, because as we have noted, we’re
talking about a tourist town and a farming town here that depends on visitors and agri-
cultural seasonal labour. It also depends on tree changers who tend to ramp up prop-
erty prices and make the town a desirable haven beyond the more utilitarian practice of
farming. This is the success story of many a regional Australian town that once made its
living on the sheep’s back, and nowadays makes it on the romance of a wedding destin-
ation complete with rustic former shearing shed. If enough cashed-up former city slickers
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come into town, property prices shift upwards, business starts to diversify, and the town
starts to get a whimsical vibe that would make anyone want to get married in a rustically
decorated former shearing shed.
As locals became caught in a bind between wanting the outsiders to return with their
much-needed cash and willing them to stay away lest they bring contagion and their
crazy ideas about trees, a narrative of a toxic dependency emerged. This is a new nativism
that is all the more powerful because it is aligned to matters of disaster, and because of its
multivocality. Residents who define belonging in terms of, for example, historic ancestral
residency or, conversely, knowledge of local ways of being (like land clearing) find accord
in a shared sentiment –‘our town should be for us alone.’
It’s no surprise that a really powerful version of nativism is emerging as a default reac-
tion to crisis and disaster. All you have to do is look at Brexit to see the same kind of thing
going on:
… the desire to ‘Take Back Control’, as it was so perniciously articulated in the Brexit
campaign of the UK (the colonial motherland). Within this, the free movement of
people is scapegoated for all manner of ills whose causes actually lie elsewhere: in
de-industrialisation, neoliberal restructuring, the global financial crisis and political
disenfranchisement of sectors of the population, such as the white working-class
(Dawson 2017), the kind of people who predominate in Anonyton.
(Dawson and Dennis, 2020:252)
This is more than just the ugly side of community –what we’re suggesting is that per-
haps in focusing on the capacity of community to deal with situations like this, we’re
missing something important. Here we have a situation in which, before and during
the bushfires, community members made decisions about what to do in the face of the
threat. While the fire threatened everyone, a collective decision about what to do about
it was not made. There was a marked difference between householder decisions about
whether or not to clear fuel loads beyond their own property boundaries to protect
neighbours in the coming fire season, and whether to stay and fight for one’s own and
one’s neighbours’ homes or evacuate in accordance with Emergency Services instructions
during the blaze itself. Some decisions articulated existing alignments between people
who had worked out what they would do prior to the blaze –and some of these plans
fell apart and were made anew, sometimes with different people, in the heat of the
moment. Other loose collectives were forged between people who had not made plans
together; these too were made in the midst of the crisis. Many of these different decisions
have brought people into conflict with one another. Conflict continues to emerge after
the blaze over what caused the fire, and how to recover from it. These conflicts that arise
from the different positions and alignments people take and make with one another
are missed in the very definition of community that is used in scholarly work on ‘com-
munity’ that we’ve described above, and in the practical responses that are designed to
facilitate community recovery after crisis events. Undergirding both is a static definition
of the community arranged in morally good relation to all of its members that speaks
with a unitary voice. As a result, the full gamut of problems and issues that communities
face remains unrecognised, as only one united community voice speaks for all. This can
produce disadvantage and festering dissatisfaction among those not represented in this
single voice and can significantly impact the capacity of the whole community to fully
recover from a disaster like a bushfire.
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Maybe, by focusing on disaster and crisis, we could approach community as created
in the thick of a crisis, instead of community pre-dating crisis and existing to miti-
gate its effects. Crises, like bushfires and their aftermath, are opportunities for observing
the processes of ‘coming together’ that have been the focus of Community Studies and
recovery agencies in general, and the processes of conflict that are frequently elided in
this focus. In stepping beyond the current conceptual bounds of community, this project
will permit issues of concern to the full range of community members to emerge from
behind the present presumption of community unity, and allow multiple responses suited
to different concerns to be developed, in collaboration with community members and
recovery agencies. In this sense, and perhaps counterintuitively, identifying fissures and
conflicts has the capacity to strengthen communities. Concrete strategies of community
utilisation and development that reach across the entirety of community members will be
foundational to the success of post-crisis reconstruction –perhaps this is important in a
world that currently seems to be experiencing more than a few crises.
Whatever your thoughts on this, the point to remember is that it’s worth thinking
about the concepts that bear up a lot of other ideas in the social sciences. Community
is most definitely one of those, and definitely one in need of a bit of innovation. We like
conflict for that innovation, but what other things occur to you? Perhaps you would focus
more squarely on decolonising community, or thinking about what it obscures. Simone
hates how minority voices have to be ‘added’ to it, or have to be incorporated into it after
the fact –such as on occasions of ‘community consultation’. Her objection isn’t based on
the fact that minorities are included as a matter of perfunctory order so much as it is on
what is already conceptually and practically in place about both community and consult-
ation before to a minority group is consulted. Simone has this same problem with how
Indigenous communities are approached to participate in making antismoking campaigns
for Indigenous people, because the definitions (of health, what and how smoking means,
and so on) are already set out. What would you focus on? We asked student Megan
Sharman to comment on the intersection between community, disaster and ‘goodness’.
Reflections on community
By Megan Sharman
The idea of what a community truly is, rears its head in the face of disaster. From what
we observe in everyday life, communities show their best and worst sides when disaster
strikes. The most recent account of this is the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While back in my rural hometown we were seeing the best of people, every night on
the news my family and I would see the bad side of communities facing hardship.
When the COVID pandemic made its way to my residential hall at university,
I very quickly made the decision to return home to my family, away from the
dangers of a virus spreading through the hall, and my customer-facing pharmacy job.
Whilst at home, my community showed its best side, but some attitudes reflected a
darker side of community. In many aspects, I saw the better side of humanity during
the hard times presented by the pandemic. The people of my town rallied together
to support each other, as well as our local businesses. My favourite thing I observed
was people setting up a Teddy Bear Hunt around town: everyone put a teddy bear
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out in their window or on their verandas, so children could walk around town and
try to spot as many teddy bears as they could to alleviate the boredom caused by
the stay-at-home orders. People also supported as many local businesses as they
could –for example, the town does not have many restaurants where we can go
out and eat, so when they started offering takeaway meals these became incredibly
popular. The people of the town didn’t want to lose the few restaurants we had, so
we made sure to support them so they could remain open when things returned to
our new normal.
While my town was rallying together, other communities were falling apart.
Every night on the news, my family and I would watch in horror as reports of
supermarket anarchy and ignorant, fear- driven hate crimes. Anthropologically
speaking, humans make associations within our minds –we have set ideas of how
things fit. When we perceive that something doesn’t fit, we get uncomfortable, and
for some more than others, this can cause an emotional or angry response. This is
what we see when communities face hardship and fear of the unknown. My small
community sees that we all fit together and help each other, while bigger and more
diverse communities will find something/someone that doesn’t fit. In the instance
of the COVID pandemic, people were scared and looking for something to blame
for what we were going through. It is well-known that racism, specifically toward
people of Asian heritage, is a large problem in society. Some saw the Chinese origin
of the virus as a justification for their hate, dividing communities when people
needed human connection most. This is the ugly side of community: there are
always people excluded for not fitting a particular mould.
While most of the experience of community in my town during the pandemic
was positive, there were a few situations where the ugly side would show itself. Early
during the pandemic, many buses full of people from the Sydney area arrived in
town, looking to enter the stores in our town and buy out all the essential supplies.
What these people failed to understand is that our stores aren’t restocked as often as
stores in metropolitan areas, so if they bought all of the toilet paper (an item as valu-
able as gold in early 2020) in our IGA, local people wouldn’t have access to these
supplies for at least a few days. The other concern was that the town has an ageing
population, and we all knew that the elderly had a much higher risk of falling ser-
iously ill with COVID. These bus-loads of people came to our town, tried to take
essential supplies away from locals, and put the elderly population in danger by trav-
elling from a high-r isk area. As can be expected, local residents were angry. Local
merchants did not allow these visitors to enter their stores, and sent them away on
their buses. My local community became a bubble that no one else was allowed to
enter; even as the pandemic eased, locals didn’t want people travelling to our town
from cities and endangering our older residents. While this initial fear response
was appropriate considering the risks and unknowns, the attitude stuck around,
bringing those within the community closer in a way, but exiling everyone else.
One aspect of community that I find fascinating, is how people censor themselves,
and present themselves in different ways, in order to fit within a community. One
thing about communities is that there will never be a single one that can encapsu-
late every aspect of a person, so people will have more than one community they
associate themselves with. We have all noticed how sometimes people we know will
16
act differently when they’re with their friends, family, or a club/team they’re a part
of. This is because each community reflects one aspect of their personality, and so
each community brings out a different side of them. I have noticed within myself
I change depending on who I am with. Upon moving to university, parts of me
changed as I learned to fit with my university community, and when the pandemic
hit and I moved back home, I could feel myself slowly changing back to the person
I was before I moved away. For me this was an uneasy feeling, as I felt that moving
away from home had increased my confidence and I was enjoying the person I was
becoming at university. In total, I was back home for three months; when I moved
back to university, the transition back to the me I was within the community of
my friends there was a difficult one. I have also observed how my voice and accent
change depending on which community I’m with: when I am back home visiting
family, sometimes I will speak and be taken aback by how different my voice sounds.
For lack of a better term, my accent becomes more bogan when I’m with my rural
community.3 I love how this idea of presenting ourselves to different communi-
ties highlights the versatility of the human mind and personality. Seeking human
connection can make people say and do crazy things, which to me highlights how
important community is to us, and what we are willing to do to fit into a community.
We can see how community is a driver of human interaction and responses to
disaster, making it a key concept in the study of anthropology. Community can
be observed anywhere, from observing the different people browsing the different
sections in a bookstore, to observing the communities formed by people through
a shared interest in a franchise online. To get started in studying community
anthropologically, it can be as simple as making a list of all the different communi-
ties you are involved in, and thinking more deeply about which part of you each
community reflects, and how you present yourself within each one of those com-
munities. Community is a truly fascinating subject in anthropology, and is crucial in
understanding culture and how people interact.
Sophie McDonald revealed community via an app. Read this inventive and highly
imaginative piece to see how it’s possible to illuminate something big and amorphous in
and through a particular and focused lens.
The CBR check-in app and community consequences

By Sophie McDonald
In the midst of the medical crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, ACT (Australian
Capital Territory) Health introduced the CBR COVID-19 check-in app as a tool
for contact tracing in the community (CBR is short for Canberra, and is the
government’s label for the app. The app is downloadable on smartphone devices
and is used to scan barcodes in public venues around Canberra. Once registered,
the app records the location and personal contact details of the user, assisting in the
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monitoring by health authorities of any spread of infection. At any indoor setting

across Canberra, it is currently mandatory to check-in using this app.
The entire check-in system revolves around the patron’s ability to scan a barcode with
a smartphone and in some circumstances fill out a subsequent online form. For those
individuals who do not have a smartphone or who struggle to navigate the technology,
this task can present a challenge, creating not only a physical but also a psychological
barrier. The paramount reason for the development of this system was to support the
safety of the whole community by facilitating rapid contact tracing. Its successful use
would ideally facilitate a return to physical socialising as COVID-19 outbreaks were
better managed and community confidence returned. However, it seems that failure to
consider the needs of some segments of the community has resulted in exclusion.The
reliance on the check-in app as the primary means of contact tracing has by default
created a narrower target audience, to the exclusion of certain demographics that may
not have the necessary smartphone hardware or technological know-how.
After undertaking my own fieldwork earlier this year (2021), I noticed a trend in
behaviour when individuals encountered the check-in procedure. I spent time in a
local hospital waiting room and quickly became aware of the recurring roadblock
that the check-in barcodes caused. At the entrance to the foyer, a number of check-
in posts were displayed for visitors to approach with their smartphones.This process
is almost identical for any other venue in the state. Particularly among an older
age group, the check-in app caused significant confusion, frustration and discom-
fort. I think these feelings were connected to the task of using a smartphone and
the awkwardness that came with standing at the entrance of an establishment and
fiddling with an unfamiliar application. This often led to further frustration as the
patron searched for a staff member to help them. Often staff were difficult to source
or inaccessible, exacerbating unease and agitation. Congestion was caused as more
and more people entered the building and attempted to complete the process but
were forced to stop and wait for anyone in front of them to move on.Though some
emotions were visible, I could only imagine the anxiety and embarrassment that
those who had difficulty signing in must have felt. By contrast, a younger demo-
graphic had significantly greater ease with the process. Only on a few occasions did
I witness any delays when teenagers or young adults navigated the check-in.
The CBR check-in app is supposed to make community activities and inter-
action easy for everyone once again, but for some it has done the opposite. For those
who can’t complete the process and are forced to seek help, it can quickly become
an unpleasant and disenfranchising experience as they are made dependent on the
assistance of others. It is interesting to think that perhaps the most vulnerable age
demographic during the pandemic could be so overlooked in the attempt to tran-
sition back to normal community socialising.
As technology constantly evolves over time, we continually develop new
gadgets and systems to accelerate day-to-day tasks and make them easier to com-
plete. Whether this be more efficient transport, devices to connect with others, or
speedier access to information, we are constantly moving on to the next best thing.
As we look to the future, a heavier reliance on our smartphones is an unsurprising
next step. However, it is unrealistic to think that we all adapt to new technology
at the same swift pace and it is unavoidable that some will be slower to familiarise.
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What is perhaps unique about the CBR check-in system is how abruptly it was
introduced and made mandatory. Today, carrying around your smartphone is not
just for convenience: it is a required tool for any physical socialising. In the past,
adapting to contemporary technology was more of a luxury than an absolute neces-
sity. There were no issues with using a CD player instead of the latest iPod. Today
this is different. Without sufficient knowledge of the newest technology, exclusion
is a serious consequence in our day-to-day lives.
As we all adapted to a new environment when the pandemic first began to change
how we gather as a community, the older generation has been faced with an extra
challenge. They have no choice under the circumstances but to play catch-up with
the required technology in order to participate in their previous everyday activities.
Or alternatively remain excluded and become more isolated. I think that instead of
bringing our community together again, such a heavy reliance on this tech actually
threatens to divide the older and younger generations.
During my initial hospital observation, I noticed some individuals did not seem
to possess a smartphone, and it was made impossible for them to check-in without
assistance from a third party. Having become aware of this challenge, I continued
to see this happen quite often in other venues. Once again, this is a trend evident
among older visitors, but not exclusive to them. I also saw others of a younger
age demographic who did not appear to have a smartphone, suggesting economic
discrimination. Implementing a health requirement under the assumption that
everyone has a smartphone or a phone that can scan a QR code is simply misguided.
By extension, this makes me wonder what other rapidly introduced mandatory tech
advancements have alienated, perhaps unintentionally, segments of our community,
especially as we go through such a time of disconnect and social distancing.
Following my fieldwork in early 2021 and subsequent observations elsewhere,
I have continued to think about the effects of the CBR check-in app in our com-
munity. While I can appreciate the motivation for introducing a more efficient data
collection procedure was to safeguard the community against the spread of the virus,
the unintended consequences of its abrupt introduction has alienated sections of the
community.The reliance on a smartphone has become a health and safety issue rather
than simply a useful but non-essential tool. I believe that a cross-generational com-
munity divide has been fostered by the reliance on smartphones in this environment.
Intended as a counter to its overwhelming positivity, Jodie Chang made a really interesting
set of insights into community by looking at its online manifestation and the outbreak of
COVID-19, to reveal its less savoury sides.
What is a community?
By Jodie Chang
What is a community? A community is a group of people that share a common

denominator, whether it be a shared interest, experience, attitudes, religion, or
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location. In the age of globalisation, new communities are able to form through
social media platforms and online forums. Technologies such as the mobile phone
allow for communication that transcends geographical boundaries faster than ever
before. This phenomenon is called ‘time-space acceleration’, which refers to the
squeezing together of time and space through technological and economic changes.
People are able to communicate quickly with little regard to distance, which allows
communities to form transnationally. As a result, people are able to find their niches
more easily regardless of time or distance. Digital technology has allowed people
to form online communities, to search for communities both online and in person,
and to spread awareness to existing communities all from the comfort of the home.
Online algorithms learn users’ preferences which can also speed up this process and
make it easier to find like-minded people.
(It is important to note that accelerating technologies are not evenly distributed
around the globe. Time-space compression is experienced differently depending
on factors such as the availability of technologies of instantaneous communication,
economic status, geographical location.)
Community can also be an obligation. Feeling like you need to ‘do your part’ for
the community implies that it is a working system of people, almost like the human
body. Each body part is distinct and unique but needs to interact cohesively in order
to function as one singular entity. There is a sense of connectedness, loyalty, mutual
interdependence which provides feelings of self-fulfilment and responsibility.
The term ‘community’ is commonly associated with positive connotations such
as feeling connected to people, the sense of belonging or fitting into a group; how-
ever, communities may not always be positive. For example, the COVID-19 pan-
demic showcased examples of how communities can be cultivated online and how
communities can easily be fragmented. The anti-vax and anti-lockdown protesters
are key examples of how communities can be cultivated and mobilised. Many far-
right groups gather on unmonitored forums or encrypted messaging platforms to
share extremist ideas and recruit members. In this case, the algorithm created a
‘tunnel vision-like’ spread of information. Users were exposed to a singular per-
spective, as online algorithms pushed a biased agenda which prevented people from
exploring alternate perspectives and fuelled fake news. In addition, unmonitored
online forums allowed members to freely spread hate speech that contributed to the
formation of a radicalised community.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia and other countries such as the
US experienced a fragmentation in community. Australia is often referred to as a
diverse ‘melting pot’ in which people from different ethnicities, beliefs, religions
and cultures live seemingly harmoniously. The line ‘we are one, but we are many’,
from the popular song by the Seekers, ‘I Am Australian’, is frequently quoted and
seen to encapsulate Australian values of celebrating diversity. However, during the
initial COVID-19 outbreak, the community response to the pandemic was fear.
The wider community felt threatened by the virus and felt that the only way to
feel protected and avoid taking responsibility for the spread was to scapegoat and
scaremonger. A train of anti-Asian hate plagued the country and suddenly diver-
sity was no longer celebrated. Many Asian people were victims of racially targeted
hate crimes and were accused of spreading the Coronavirus. There were countless
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incidents of both verbal and physical attacks, graffiti of hate speech on the roads
and on houses belonging to Asian people, snarky looks or comments, avoidance in
public, and so on. Not only was there an Asian vs. non-Asian fragmentation, there
were also divisions within the Asian community. The Coronavirus was labelled the
‘Chinese virus’, most notably by former US President Donald Trump. In order to
feel protected from racially targeted hate crimes, many Asian people felt the need to
distinguish themselves as not Chinese, or not East Asian. My Korean mother, who
works at an Asian grocer’s, was accused of being ‘infectious’ during the height of
the pandemic in 2020. A Caucasian man refused to be served by her, because he did
not want to be ‘infected’ by my mother or be in close proximity to the South-east
Asian customer beside her. The customer replied quickly, ‘it’s okay I’m not that type
of Asian, I’m fine!’ During the COVID-19 pandemic, scaremongering tactics and
the scapegoating of Asian people was used to protect the majority community from
the perceived threat that Asian people posed to the well-being and stability of the
majority community.
Asian people, particularly East Asian people, were perceived as enemies and
betrayers, who could no longer belong to the community. Similarly, India
experienced an upsurge of an anti-Muslim rhetoric, where Muslims were labelled as
‘Corona Jihads’, which was also fuelled by misinformation, scapegoating and scare-
mongering. The majority communities in Australia and India felt as if they could
not properly function with a cancerous body part, but they could not properly
detect which body part it was. So instead, they picked one and ran with it.
Communities are able to flourish under the right conditions and attitudes. In the
case of the COVID-19 pandemic, it exemplified a situation in which loyalty to a
certain community had negative consequences.
If Andy had a ginormous bee buzzing around in his bonnet about community, Simone had
just as large a bee in hers about family. As we saw from our work on kinship in Chapter 4,
‘family’ has had significant conceptual innovation –we can’t just take for granted what we
think we know about it. Like ‘community’, family has that essential social good sort of feel
about it. Unlike community, it’s had a fair bit of public and anthropological conceptual
investigation. But it’s still very much worth investigating here because it will help you to
consider the range of ways in which family might be considered. Here, we want to give
you the example of thinking about family as an institution, and of thinking about it using
different sensory approaches.
That sounds weird –but Simone’s work on smoking, touch and the family reveals
some possibilities that might help us think about family in new ways.
First of all, Simone draws on the idea of touch to articulate how it is that family is
formed up. This involves seeing family as premised on bodily bases –that is, the family,
broadly defined, is that of whole bodies living in fleshy proximity. More than that, the
family is, as Lyon and Barbalet (1994) say, a kind of institution that is made in just the
same way as other institutions are, in and through particular touches between bodies (or
things). In a factory, a worker’s hand reaches out to manipulate a robot or a component
part of a product. On a warship, different people operate different parts of the machinery.
No one touch from a whole entire body makes the whole entire product or effect. In a
family, different bits of different bodies reach out to bits of other people’s bodies to create
17

the sorts of relationships that together form something called the family. For example, a
father might press his lips to the forehead of his child. A mothers’ nipple meets the mouth
of her infant. Depending on what kind of family you come from, you might have felt the
hand of a parent slap your thigh.You might have used your hands to push your irritating
little brother in the back. Emotion usually drives you to touch people in those ways, and
the kinds of touches we’re talking about here are pretty much restricted to people in
the family. A very great deal of pain and anguish can ensue when they shift beyond that
institution. Even more pain ensues when the wrong kinds of touches happen within the
family that are not appropriate to the institution. Indeed, the kinds of touches between
body parts that generate the family are highly regulated and specific. They’re sometimes
modified –spanking is one of the kinds of touches that used to be considered typical –
now, not so much.
As Collins (1981:988) suggests, the maintenance of social institutions is tethered to the
‘distinct engagements of aspects of bodily disposition with pertain to them’; in the case of
the family, ‘The most repetitive behaviours that make up family structure are the facts that
… the same men and women sleep in the same beds, that the children are kissed, spanked
and fed’; they are touched, within, through, and according to particular registers that we
recognize as familial (see Lyon and Barbalet, 1994:56). Notice how heteronormative this
description is; this is another aspect of ‘bodily disposition’ on the change. Familial touches
conform to corporeal expressivity, to the signs and codes that are immediately understood
as the space and time a body should occupy in the family or, more properly, within a given
family, which might do more spanking than stroking, or which might even stand at odds
with how touch is to be made between bodies, something which is codified in and signi-
fied by our legal systems. The point is that Simone doesn’t think they express relations as
much as they create this thing called the ‘family’.
With this idea in mind, Simone looked at a bunch pf parenting websites across the
UK and Australia, that exist to offer advice to new parents who are feeling a bit ner-
vous or anxious about what, exactly, they should do with their new baby. New babies are
often baffling to first-time parents; it’s hard to figure out what all the different cries mean
(assuming you can distinguish between them), and there’s a lot of pressure to get things
right when the existence of the tiny example of a human depends on you for its very life.
No wonder so many helpful parenting websites exist; otherwise it’d just be you and your
new best friend, Relentless Anxiety.
Simone was attracted to these websites not because she had a new baby, but because
she knew they were beginning to dispense advice to new parents on how to deal with
smokers in the family who wanted to have contact with the new baby. Mothers in par-
ticular were consulting these websites and receiving advice from health professionals
about the risks of letting the baby come in contact with members of the family who
smoked, and how that risk could be dialled down. At the same time, Simone was doing
a lot of work on something called ‘thirdhand smoke’. While firsthand smoke describes
smoke that the smoker draws in from the cigarette, and secondhand smoke describes that
smoky air that is expelled by the smoker for others to breathe in (in its ‘used before’) state,
thirdhand smoke is as an affixation of smoky residue to objects and people with whom
that smoke has come in contact.The Mayo Clinic defines it as residual nicotine and other
chemicals left on a variety of surfaces by tobacco smoke:
This residue is thought to react with common indoor pollutants to create a toxic
mix. This toxic mix of thirdhand smoke contains cancer causing substances, posing
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a potential health hazard to nonsmokers who are exposed to it, especially children.
Studies show that thirdhand smoke clings to hair, skin, clothes, furniture, drapes,
walls, bedding, carpets, dust, vehicles and other surfaces, even long after smoking has
stopped. Infants, children and nonsmoking adults may be at risk of tobacco related
health problems when they inhale, ingest or touch substances containing third-
hand smoke … Thirdhand smoke residue builds up on surfaces over time and resists
normal cleaning. Thirdhand smoke can’t be eliminated by airing out rooms, opening
windows, using fans or air conditioners, or confining smoke to only certain areas of
a home … The only way to protect nonsmokers from thirdhand smoke is to create
a smokefree environment, whether that’s your private home or vehicle, or in public
places, such as hotels and restaurants.
(Mayo Clinic, 2014:n.p.)
Thirdhand smoke is currently presumed to stay on objects and persons like a sheen for
an interminable period. Since it can’t be expunged by normal cleaning procedures, the
safest thing to do is to presume it’s always there. In hotel rooms where smoking used to be
allowed, you’ll often find a warning sign to alert you to thirdhand smoke danger, especially
in North America. It’s considered to be there for the foreseeable future. Not only is third-
hand smoke a real stayer, it does something we don’t expect smoke to do: it stays still in
place. At the same time as it stays put –on people and on things --it also offgasses, making
it doubly dangerous, especially if it is on a person who wants to hold your new, perfect baby!
Some of the ideas about thirdhand smoke haven’t been well-evidenced as yet, and so
they border on the intemperate. But Simone really wanted to see how people were being
advised on how to deal with thirdhand smoke on parenting websites. This is part of what
she found:
In Australia, the “What to Expect” website advises that smokers should remove the
clothing that they smoked in, wash their hands and face, and rinse their mouth before
being permitted to touch a baby. This advice is replicated on every parental advice
website I visited (some 30 in all, across the United States, United Kingdom, and
Australia). Interestingly, these sites include information about how to manage smokers
who react badly to being cut off from establishing haptic relations with the new
baby. One poster on the “What to Expect” site expressed trepidation about giving
instructions to her FIL [Father in Law] about face washing and clothes changing after
a cigarette and before holding her newborn baby. Another poster quickly responded
with, “Why on earth couldn’t you say something?? If some dirty smoker stuck their
finger in my babies [sic] mouth, there [sic] life wouldn’t be worth living. Isn’t standing
up for the health and well-being of your baby more important than upsetting your
FIL [Father in Law]?” (What to Expect.com, 2012) Where smell entails bodies in
relations, willing or not, a politics of untouchability denies relations between bodies.
The admonition “do not touch” (my baby) signals a potential danger but also the
command to undo relations that are, in fact, at the heart of the construction and
maintenance of the institution of the family itself.
(Dennis, 2016b:159).
Simone thought this meant that the spectre of thirdhand smoke could threaten the very
integrity of the family, effectively excluding some people from belonging to it, and con-
tributing to its formation, noting that
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FIL reaches out to touch the skin of his newborn grandchild, with freshly washed hands,
a recently laundered shirt, and shampooed hair. But his hand might be yet restrained;
for the invisible sheen of thirdhand smoke cannot be scrubbed away by shampoo, hand
wash, and laundering. Prevented from doing the body work that creates and sustains the
family, FIL is cast out from its operations. He may well not be allowed to touch.
(Dennis, 2016b:159)
Riffing off the idea of the untouchable, Simone then noticed that in the US, bodies
that are regarded as contaminated by thirdhand smoke have already suffered job losses
and exclusions from employment in particular industries. Michigan’s Weyco Insurance
Company, for instance, banned smoking among its employees in 2005, and now engages
in ongoing random testing for remnant nicotine among its employees. A fail result means
dismissal. Simone wrote about that not to defend smokers’ rights, but to suggest the
importance of touch to the construction of social institutions: the family, the company, the
public. A touch made violent by the presence of invisible smoke excludes contaminated
bodies –and the contaminated bodies we’re talking about here tend to be the ones that
belong to the most marginalised people. Excluding them is highly consequential, and it
means we’d have to know for sure what the effects of thirdhand smoke were, before we
made them into untouchables and banished them from making family, employment and
public institutions. For Simone, this is an ethical issue, because the knowledge of third-
hand smoke that is being used to operationalise exclusions is equivocal and conditional. In
the next chapter, we say more about the problems with incomplete knowledge, and how
we think it impacts the people who agree to participate in our research.
All of this made Simone want to create a kinship diagram founded on key and specific
touching relations, in order to describe the family. Simone thinks that this might actually
diminish the primacy of biological relatedness; perhaps it is possible to render all familial
relationships through specific and specified touches.Transgressions would also be trackable
in such an endeavour. Simone is still thinking about this idea, but even if it doesn’t work,
it tells you something about the possibilities offered up by the anthropological imagin-
ation, as well as how anthropologists are given to creatively reimagine that which has been
proffered as orthodoxy. What will you do with all of this relatedness material?
All of this talk about relatedness made Andy think about ethnicity. No guide to
anthropology would be complete without, at least some mention of ethnicity. For surely,
studying ethnic groups is, at least as commonly conceived, what anthropologists do, right?
It makes sense in so many ways to deal with this matter straight after considering kinship
and the family. Families and the practices of in-group marriage and reproduction are so
often cornerstones of the ethnic group. On a more abstract level, as in Turkey for example,
ethnic groups and nations are so often metaphorised as families writ large. These are
issues that one might see covered in any standard anthropological introduction to ethni-
city. However, offering such a standard introduction is not our purpose here (as you may
well have realised by now!) Rather, our aim is to seek inspiration in some of the many
fine anthropological studies of ethnic groups for how we might achieve the illumination
of the uncommon sense within things –any social things –that is at the heart of the
anthropological endeavour. The basic, but rather controversial proposition in this chapter
is that if we start to look at each and every social group as we do ethnic groups, we can
begin to discover hitherto unseen interesting things about them. However, we must first
begin by outlining a few foundational observations that anthropologists have made about
ethnicity.
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Ethnicity –what is it?

The concept of ethnicity appears to have been around since the dawn of time. However,
as we will see in this chapter, it has only really become ubiquitous as a consequence of
specific and peculiarly modern developments, especially urbanisation and globalisation,
and the heightened migration that they entail.
Furthermore, given that anthropology is concerned with cultural diversity, one might
be tempted to think that the study of ethnicity has always been at the heart of our discip-
line. In fact, anthropologists only really started using the term ‘ethnicity’ more regularly in
the late 20th century. Prior to that, ‘tribe’ had been the thing. However, the word ‘tribe’
has rather nasty colonial overtones. It conveys a sense of ‘we’ the advanced people, and
‘them’ the backward tribal people. In contrast, while in common parlance people some-
times think of ethnic groups as minorities, the term ‘ethnicity’ lacks that patronising sense
of some people being more advanced than others. And, especially since the seminal work
of E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1937), that’s something that anthropology has always tried to
avoid, and rightly so we think.
What, exactly, is ethnicity? Actually, that’s a much stickier question than you might
imagine. Being big fans of Mary Douglas and, indeed, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Andy and
Simone are much enamoured with binaries and dichotomies. So we feel it is useful to
think of two extreme versions of how ethnicity might be conceptualised. On the one
hand, there is what might be labelled an ‘objectivist’ approach, which is to say that an
ethnic group is characterised by the presence of certain objective characteristics. For
example, David Manning-Nash (1989) defined ethnic groups as characterised by, ‘bed,
blood and cult’. In other words, ethnic groups involve people who intermarry, share
ancestral roots and a culture, including things like a religion and a common language.
On the other hand, there is what one might label a ‘subjectivist’ approach to ethnicity.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen provides a concise definition when he states, ‘ethnicity is an
emic category of self ascription’ (1993:122). Another way of saying this is that any group
that regards itself as ethnic-like should be accorded the status of being an ethnic group.
Radically and playfully the anthropologist Abner Cohen (1974) toyed with the idea that
stockbrokers might be regarded as an ethnic group since they often see themselves as
being somehow very distinct. Preposterous? Think again. If, for example, as Horace Miner
(1956) invited us to do when he described the tooth-brushing practices of Americans in
an exoticizsing way that made them sound like ancient rituals of the mouth, then surely
the things that stockbrokers do can be made to look decidedly ‘ethnic’. Let’s give it a go …
The ethnicity of stockbrokers

It is commonplace amongst some stockbrokers to engage on a daily basis in a strange and
magical ritual, which entails a number of complex procedures. At the heart of them is
the preparation of a white powder, which cannot be bought from just any old merchant.
It must be purchased from someone known as ‘The Man’. Once obtained, it must be
placed carefully upon a reflective surface. Then with a small oblong-shaped object made
from oil-based resins it is finely desiccated and divided into thin lines. Next, a token of
currency is taken from a pouch crafted from the hide of an animal. High-status pouches
are often decorated with the symbols of specific high priests of taste. And, the concern
with status that is clearly evident here also marks the choice of currency denomination.
The higher the denomination, the greater the ritual’s magical effect is thought to be.
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Once selected, the currency note is then rolled tightly. The master of ceremonies inserts
the note into his nostril and inhales the first line of the powder. Up to this point, other
participants in the ritual are mere onlookers, sometimes displaying awe at the skill of the
master of ceremonies. However, in an act of profound sharing and communalism, he then
offers the note to others who one-by-one ingest their own designated line of powder. On
completion of the ritual the reactions are palpable, with participants uttering animalistic
noises, like ‘whoaaa’, and exclamations like ‘what a hit!’ Furthermore, the combat meta-
phor of ‘the hit’ is carried through into conceptualisation of the powder in and of itself.
For example, it is commonly labelled ‘Amazonian Marching Powder’. This refers to its
magical quality. It is often claimed that, like tribal warriors travelling to war, those who
imbibe the powder can go on and on for days without need for sleep.
There are a few things we want to take from this, besides highlighting that cocaine
abuse may have certain ritualistic qualities. Of course, it is absurd to characterise any
group as an ethnic group just because we or they think they are a bit ethnic-like. Rather, a
sort of common-sense middle ground between objectivism and subjectivism has emerged
in anthropology. Most of us recognise that while objective criteria such as intermarriage,
shared ancestral roots and shared culture are not necessary characteristics of what it takes
to be an ethnic group, surely at least the idea of them ought to be. To illustrate the point,
it is clearly absurd to suggest that the English are characterised by a deep-seated shared
ancestry. Historically, England and the English have been made up of all sorts of people
from different parts of the world.Yet, the idea of the English sharing an ancestry is integral
to at least some people’s sense of their Englishness.
However, in seeking to illuminate an uncommon knowledge about our own cultures,
or cultures which are close to our own, perhaps a useful device may be to try describing
them as if we/they were ethnic ‘others’. For inspiration in this regard, we highly recom-
mend the book Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, in which the
English anthropologist Kate Fox (2004) illuminates the mystery of things about her own
people that she normally takes for granted. A short way of saying this is that, perhaps
it’s practically useful –one of several roots to capturing that uncommon sense which is
anthropology’s core task –to think of any group we study as being ethnic-like. We get
a clear sense of this in an interesting piece by Ruby Skeat, a student in Andy’s first-year
anthropology class in 2021. What, surely could be less ethnically specific than the culture
of global capitalism? However, by way of a thought-exercise, Ruby sets out to describe
shopping at a multinational retailer as though it was a ritual-like and ethnically peculiar
event. In the event she discovers that, in fact, it is. The uncommon sense she brilliantly
illuminates is that for many Australians, shopping in Bunnings superstore provides some
of the ritual life lost to them through the process of secularisation:
The Church of Bunnings

By Ruby Skeat
By 10 a.m. on a warm Sunday morning, a weekly ritual has already begun. The
Bunnings car park is busy with SUVs, the staple suburban family car. The cars
are marked with greasy handprints on the windows, left by the kids they have
ferried around between school, sport and home during the busy week past. Fathers
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walk with their children in drabbles toward the glass sliding-door entrance, holding
the younger ones’ hands in the busy traffic. There are some lone men within the
drabbles, even less lone women and, unlike during the working week, ‘tradies’ are
few and far between. It seems Saturday morning Bunnings is a family affair.
Closer to the entrance, a crowd surrounds a green marquee and the scent of a
barbeque wafts through the air. Families leaving the shop, laden with trollies full of
home improvement purchases, form a rough line for a greasy sausage sandwich. The
line is abuzz with chatter, parents make small talk while their kids run in and out of the
queue, cans of soft drink in hand. A blackboard in front of the marquee tells the crowd
the funds from their $2.50 sandwiches are going toward fixing the local Scout Hall.
The servers are made up of young, excited Scouts, handing out serviettes and sauce, and
their busy mothers and fathers, taking money and cooking as fast as the orders come in.
Inside the glass doors, a worker greets families; they return a nod but walk past
without conversation and head toward the trolleys. Smaller kids run, keen to use
the mini-trolleys provided for them, while young teenagers jump on their parent’s
trolleys, urging them to go faster. There are many staff, marked by their red polo
shirts and green aprons, all busy directing customers while others mill around,
waiting their turn. Some customers already know what they are after and simply ask
in what aisle they need to look, but most start by sharing details of their weekend
project followed by questions which imply a deep knowledge held by staff. While
their kids run ahead, parents ask what wood they should use to extend their deck,
which tools they need for building a chicken shed, what paint to use for the bath-
room, which plants will grow best for the upcoming spring. Staff answer questions
with a confidence that reassures the asker.
At the end of the long, high aisles sits a colourful playground, loud with the
screams of children playing. Many parents make this an early stop during their time
here, dropping their youngest children off, so they may graze through the many
aisles, uninterrupted. Couples and families plan their projects as they browse, the
smiles on their faces revealing their excitement to better their homes.
Once their lists are all crossed off, families queue for the checkout, making friendly
conversation with staff as they scan through their many purchases. Once completed,
customers push their trolleys through the opened glass-sliding doors once again and
line up for a sausage sandwich.
Anthropological interpretation
On the surface, the weekend Bunnings visit is a commercial transaction between
families and the ubiquitous hardware retailer, with the aim of profit on one side and
house improvement on the other. However, in the history of Australian suburban
family life, Sunday mornings have not always featured such trips. It was not long
ago that for suburban families, this time was reserved for attending weekly church
services. It is in this historical change that one can look for a deeper meaning in the
weekend Bunnings visit.
In this interpretation, I focus on the parallels between the Christian denominations
and weekend Bunnings visits. I use the term ‘priests’ to cover all spiritual leaders of
congregations –for example, ministers, vicars, pastors.
17
The Australian Census reports that rates of Christianity have decreased within the
population by 36.1 per cent since 1966 (ABS, 2016). Only 16 per cent of Australians
continue to attend a weekly church service. With the current trend towards secu-
larisation, the focus of the weekly Bunnings visit –on family, community and the
home –in many ways fulfils the role weekly church service once played.
Much like church, the primacy of the family is at the forefront of the weekend
Bunnings visit.The car park is filled largely with suburban family cars, reflecting the
demographic of customers on a Sunday morning. If the trip were only an exercise
in consumption, surely the whole family would not be in attendance –yet many
families attend in full. In this way, the outing, the sausage sizzle, the playground are
elements of a ritual social family practice, one without explicit religious or mythic
elements. In this regard, the weekend Bunnings visit mimics the weekly church visit
as one of the few times families would make an outing together.
The sausage sizzle, as part of the family Bunnings visit, is analogous to church
practices of charity and communion. As part of the weekly service, tithes and
offerings are a fundamental way in which families may give back to the church, as
their community. The sausage sizzle, with its blackboard stating the weekly cause
and its staffing of enthusiastic local Scouts and their leaders, gives families a similar
chance to feel a sense of charity. The sausage sizzle may also be compared to the
ritual of Holy Communion. Although not representative of the body and blood of
Jesus Christ, the eating of the sausage sandwich, much like Communion, is the par-
taking in something as a whole.
Much like priests, customers place strong faith in the knowledge of Bunnings
staff in seeking their counsel. Customers detail their project before openly and hon-
estly admitting their lack of knowledge, thus seeking guidance. This nonjudgmental
atmosphere, where it is safe to openly confess shortcomings, is one that emulates that
of the church’s confessional or other spiritual guidance. In this way, staff are assumed
to hold deep knowledge of hardware products and techniques and are treated as a
guide whose knowledge is as trusted as a priest’s, who has studied the scriptures.
The weekly Bunnings visit’s emphasis on family, community, charity and openness
makes it a ritual that in many ways fulfils the role weekly Church service once did.
Thus, the repetitive social practice in some way reflects the increasing secularisation
of Australian culture.
After the next few paragraphs, we’ll try doing just what Ruby did, focusing on an ethnic
group that might not be commonly thought of as an ethnic group: cyclists (yes, that’s
right … cyclists). However, before we go there, we want to outline a few of the qualities
of ethnicity that anthropologists have identified.
Qualities of ethnicity
Probably the first and most important point to mention about ethnicity is that, rather
than a thing, it is a relation.This is to say that groups develop a sense of themselves as being
ethnic groups by comparison with other ethnic groups. For example, the sense I have of
myself being distinctively English emerges, in part by virtue of comparison with English
people’s most significant others: Scottish people. Indeed, a radical version of this approach
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would have it that no matter the uniqueness of the culture of a particular group of people,
if it hasn’t been made aware of that uniqueness by coming into contact and comparison
with other cultural groups, then we can’t really accord it the status of being an ethnic
group at all.This relational approach also has profound implications for how we should go
about studying ethnicity. Frederik Barth (1969), who was undoubtedly the guru of eth-
nicity studies in anthropology said that ethnicity is best studied at the boundaries of ethnic
groups, rather than focusing on the cultural stuff, like religious practices and so on, that
we often think of as being the characteristic features of ethnic groups.
This relational approach leads on to some other key dimensions of ethnicity. It is
intrinsically modern, in the sense that it emerges as a consequence of phenomena related
to modernity –such as migration –that have intensified through time and that bring
culturally distinct groups into relation with one another, so that they become aware of
themselves being ethnic groups. Furthermore, ethnicity is modern in a second sense, in
that, rather than being some ancient thing, it is made in the here-and-now. Clyde Mitchell
(1956) provided a rather wonderful example of this in his study of urban migrants in
Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was once called. They danced a rather colourful dance called
the Kelela. Apparently traditional, Mitchell found that the Kelela had emerged only after
migration, and when the migrants became aware of themselves as distinctive.
Finally, it must be pointed out that, of course, no two groups that make for an ethnic
relation are ever equal. Another way of saying this is that all ethnic relations are power
relations. Furthermore, the power relations between ethnic groups manifest frequently
in ethnic stereotypes, by which one group often denigrates its significant ethnic other. By
way of example, all of the aforementioned processes are portrayed wonderfully in Judith
Okely’s 1986 classic study of Traveller Gypsies. Gypsies are among the most marginalised
of ethnic groups where she conducted her research in the United Kingdom.That margin-
ality results in the production of a plethora of negative stereotypes, such as that Gypsies are
dirty people. And, in a sense, they are. After all, their marginality has pushed them to the
fringes of the economy where they work in dirty jobs like scrap-metal dealing. However,
in the way that ethnicity is relational, Gypsies embrace their stereotype as dirty, but invert
it. Their means of doing this is through a particular conceptualisation of the body. They
celebrate a distinction between the inner and the outer body, the former of which must
remain clean while it does not matter if the latter accrues dirt. Furthermore, through this
they are able to subvert the stereotype to which they are subjected. Non-Gypsies, they say,
do not appreciate the distinction and frequently violate it. For example, it is commonplace
in the United Kingdom for Gypsies to have two kitchen sinks. Gypsies use one to wash
items for the inner body, such as cutlery, and the other for items for the outer body, such
as dirty clothing. In contrast, non-Gypsies simply use one for washing everything and the
other for rinsing. In short, non-Gypsies violate the inner-outer body distinction and so it
is they, in the eyes of Gypsies, who are the dirty ones.
This brings us to another quality of ethnicity. Rather than through the pomp and cere-
mony of things like flags, ethnicity is substantially maintained through mundane practices,
such as how we go about washing dishes. The list of the mundane practices by which
ethnicity is maintained is almost endless: ethnic cuisines, ethnic sports, ethnic music, eth-
nically specific ideas about gender and sexuality, ethnically specific practices of bodily
comportment, ethnically specific ideas about the natural world and, even ethnically spe-
cific driving practices.
Another key dimension of ethnicity is that it is situational. In other words, ethnicity
increases or diminishes according to different situations. In particular, its manifestation is
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determined by particular relations and, in their context, whether ethnicity may be benefi-
cial or not for us. Let’s provide an example. Northern Ireland, one of the United Kingdom’s
four parts, has for years been faced by a sectarian divide. On one hand, the ‘Loyalist’ and
largely Protestant population seeks maintenance of Northern Ireland’s status as a member
of the United Kingdom. On the other hand, the ‘Nationalist’ and largely Catholic popu-
lation seeks for Northern Ireland to leave the United Kingdom and become part of the
Republic of Ireland. The sectarian divide has at various times erupted into violence, with
many innocent civilians becoming victims simply because they can be identified as being
either ethnically Protestant or Catholic. There are multiple give-away signs. For example,
carrying a violin may be read as a marker of Catholic-Nationalist ethnicity because of the
long tradition of violin-based folk music within that community. In contrast, carrying a
trombone may be read as a marker of Protestant-Loyalist ethnicity because of the long
tradition of brass bands in that community. Likewise, names are often markers of ethnicity.
That’s why when, as a lecturer in Belfast (Northern Ireland’s capital city), Andy occasion-
ally bumped into his students in local pubs and clubs, they would refer to themselves by
fictive names such as, for example, Jane and John rather than their real and ethnically dis-
tinctive names of Elizabeth and William or Fionnuala and Patrick. Interestingly, as Sidsel
Saugsted Larsen (1982) pointed out such practices of situationally ‘playing down’ ethni-
city result often in the intensification of ethnic stereotypes, for people, like these students
in Belfasts’s pubs and dancehalls, do not meet one another as total social persons. In the
absence of being able to learn about one another, they rely instead on the stereotypes of
ethnic others that are generated within mono-ethnic communities of one’s co-ethnics.
This is an example of how ethnicity can be played down in certain situations because
it makes us vulnerable. However, ethnicity may be instrumental too. In particular, we may
wish to play up ethnicity because if offers political or economic benefits.This was another
focus of the work of Abner Cohen, he of the stockbroker fame. He researched an ethnic
group called the Hausa (Cohen 1969). They had become a particularly economically
successful and distinctive community in the Yoruba city of Ibadan, Nigeria, where Cohen
conducted his main fieldwork. They did this through monopolisation of the cattle trade,
which was enabled through ethnic organisation, through the development of very effi-
cient cattle-trading networks with other Hausa in rural Nigeria. Furthermore, Cohen
contends, without the economic success that being Hausa affords, as a worthless ethnic
identity Hausa might well have disappeared.
Now, when you break down ethnicity in this way to illuminate its core qualities, the
subjectivist position which says that any group which sees itself as ethnic-like, and that led
Abner Cohen to think about stockbrokers as an ethnic group comes to seem less absurd.
Let’s push the point by turning, as we promised, to the case of cyclists. In his research on
inter-vehicular conflict in Australia Andy highlights how all these qualities of ethnicity
are present (Dawson et al., 2020). Cyclists often develop a sense of who they are in relation
to other road users, especially motorists. The relation between motorists and cyclists, and
their respective identities is modern –they came into increasing contact with one another
through the development of a modern road network. The cyclist’s identity is expressed in
mundane ways. Lycra clothing, for example, may have the practical functions of keeping
one streamlined and keeping one less sweaty too, but much like the attire worn by the
Kelela dancers, it marks cyclists out as distinct. The relationship between cyclists and their
significant other motorists is clearly one of unequal power –a flimsy aluminium frame is
no match in an accident for two tonnes of steel. Out of that relationship comes stereo-
types –‘uhhh … look at those cyclists in their silly lycra outfits, using the roads for their
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leisure and clogging them up, while we motorists are serious travellers trying to get from
A to B as efficiently as we can.’
On the face of it, characterising cyclists as a kind of ethnic group in this way may
seem to be no more than a rather pointless intellectual exercise. However, it has certain
instrumental values. Indeed, as Andy and his colleagues show, when cycling activists do this,
to represent themselves as an oppressed ethnic-like minority, it adds a certain weight to
their struggles, for the development of safe bicycle lanes, for example. Furthermore, it has
certain practical values. For example, conflict on the road tends to be rendered as an out-
come of individual psychology –that is, road rage. However, if we can start to think of it
as something like an ethnic conflict, then transport managers can look for inspiration to
the field of ethnic conflict resolution. One such method has been multiculturalism, where
policies are designed to promote inter-ethnic understanding and tolerance. Likewise,
transport managers may promote similar processes on the road, such as education about
the affordances of bicycles so that motorists could develop a greater appreciation of the
limitations that cyclists face as they move around the roads. Perhaps a route to peace on
the roads is what Andy and his colleagues describe as a kind of ‘multiautoculturalism’.
Students –an ethnic group?

Now, having engaged in this exercise of ethnicising cyclists, we want you to give it a go by
describing a group that’s closer to home for you … students perhaps.Try, as Abner Cohen,
Kate Fox and Ruby Skeat did, to describe you and your group of university classmates as
though you were an ethnic other. Ask yourselves, through your time at university, have
you noticed your colleagues adhering to and developing specifically student rituals and
other practices? Crucially, ask yourself, who are our most significant others? Then, per-
haps, you could conduct a participant observation exercise at the boundaries where you
students come into contact with these other non-student groups. In turn, ask yourself
what do we think of them and how does that feed into senses of who we students are?
Also, investigate what these non-student others think of you students, and reflect on how
that feeds into senses of who you students think you are too, and what you are all about?
Are there power relationships between you and these significant other non-students?
Do students and non-students hold stereotypes of one another? What are the mundane
markers of your identity as students … styles of dress, ways of speaking, things we carry?
Are there moments when you might want to play up the fact that you are students, and
moments when you might want to play it down. To ask such questions is one route to
developing the uncommon sense, in this case about yourselves, that is central to the prac-
tice of anthropology.
Ethnicity is slippery
Now, one thing that should have become clear in all of this is that ethnicity is a really
slippery concept. To emphasise the point, let’s go back to Abner Cohen. If people like
the Hausa remain Hausa principally because Hausa-ness brings economic benefits, then
might it be the case that, at least some ethnic groups are really just classes? Indeed, on
inspection, in many cases the distinction between ethnicity and class is a lot less clear than
one might normally imagine. Let’s also return to Gypsies as a good example. Certainly,
there are many cases where particular groups are associated with specific occupations,
such as Gypsies with scrap-metal dealing in the UK, the mortuary industry in Spain and
18

entertainment just about everywhere they live. In some cases, it has been suggested that
Gypsies were an occupational underclass that transformed into what we conventionally
conceive as an ethnic group, one characterised by the practice of intermarriage (or ethnic
endogamy as it’s often called), ideas of common ancestry and the sharing of cultural
practices. Judith Okely argues this line, demonstrating also that the idea that Gypsies have
common ethnic roots which can be traced back to the Indian subcontinent is a myth
propagated, often by Gypsies themselves. It had a certain ‘instrumental’ value –a useful
self-exoticising way of selling their wares as itinerant entertainers, as fortune tellers and
the like.
Other anthropologists have gone even further than this, arguing that contemporary
classes are coming increasingly to resemble ethnic groups. For example, in a piece pro-
vocatively titled, ‘The Aboriginal People of England’, Gillian Evans (2012) hints that such
a process is taking place amongst England’s white post-industrial working class. Through
the 1990s, they faced all at once unemployment, mass immigration into their communi-
ties and the rise of multicultural politics. The combined effect of this was an increasing
tendency to come to see themselves as one more minority group amongst others. This
has led to particular political reactions within the white working class itself. Notably, once
its anti-immigrant politics might have been framed solely as about preventing immigra-
tion to preserve its jobs. Now they have an ethnic flavour, with, for example, immigration
presented as resulting in the potential genocide of England’s so-called ‘original’ ethnic
group. Simultaneously, we see also a kind of ethnicisation of the white working class
taking place in media and popular culture. Its totemic figure is the ‘Chav’, a sort of stereo-
typically indolent and criminal working-class figure. And, interestingly, the way the Chav
is depicted frequently draws parallels with Gypsies. Chav girls mirror the styles of Gypsy
girls, with pulled-back hair and large gold earrings. And, as one commentator suggests,
one possible etymological root of the term Chav is ‘Charvor’, the Gypsy word for small
child (Sveinsson, 2008). Perhaps what we are seeing is a process in which ethnicity is
instrumentalised in a negative sense too, in order to marginalise specific groups in society.
And, it is not hard to see how this could work. If marginalised of groups of people like
England’s post-industrial working-class can be cast as ethnic groups, then it is so much
easier to represent their marginality as an outcome of their culture rather than structural
factors. In other words, it is so much easier (and as politicians of the Right have done) to
represent their marginality is ‘their fault’, rather than the outcome of the ways economy
and society have been organised.
What can we do with this kind of knowledge as budding anthropologists? You will
recall that the proposition in this chapter was that if we start to look at each and every
social group as we do ethnic groups, we can begin to discover some very interesting
things about them. If ethnicity is a slippery category, such that ethnic groups can begin
to resemble classes and vice versa, then, perhaps so too other groups. You might want to
think, for example, when you observe, compare and interpret student culture, is what you
are illuminating also part of a broader culture of class relations?

Taking genealogies can open some wounds. Families aren’t always good at looking after
their members. Some anthropologists think we shouldn’t teach kinship to students by
having them practice the techniques among family.We think it’s ok, if students know they
can use friendship groups or other networks with which they might be more comfortable.
182

But it is right to suggest that it brings up issues that require a close examination of
anthropological ethics –the topic of our next chapter.
Notes
1 This is one of the places you can separate out social and cultural anthropology a bit; the schools
of functionalism and structuralism in social anthropology focused on the mutual rights and
obligations between people as a result of their position in the kinship system, and cultural
anthropologists were oriented more to the meanings attached to being a particular kind of rela-
tive. They have also been interested in the symbolic dimensions of kinship, and particularly in
how symbols of (and perceptions of) personhood, the body and gender inform the practice of
kinship.
2 See how it might have to be places, as well as people that are anonymised in research? If we
didn’t, what we have to say here might make the people of the town seem hostile –highly con-
sequential if you’re trying to be a tourist destination.
3 A bogan is a bit of a derogatory class insult –it’s a bit similar to American redneck, but without
the overt racist implications, necessarily. It denotes a kind of uncouth or roughness in dress,
speech, refinements, attitude, and is associated with rural life. The word is often associated with
the mullet haircut, and an almost proudly borne lack of knowledge about fancy food, art, music
and so on.
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6 Ethical positions in anthropology

So far, we’ve been poking our noses into ordinary social life in public and into relatedness
in our own family and friendship circles. Are you getting the sense that anthropology is all
about looking into the lives of people under study for extended periods of time? Getting
the sense that this might need a bit of regulation? You’re on the right track. In this chapter,
we’re going to draw on a range of ethics guidelines, hypotheticals and exercises to help
give you a sense of how anthropologists have thought about ethical engagement. There’s
a twist at the end, though, because, like anthropologist Kirsten Bell, we think a consider-
ation of ethics has missed a very important trick.

We think that the uncommon knowledge in this chapter is really interesting.Anthropologists
have been pretty vocal in criticising Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs) for
privileging the elimination of risk, and for imagining risk as incalculable (that means
imagining the worst-case scenario, and then planning for that, so that research seems, at
the outset, a super-risky activity to do for participants and researchers). The argument,
at least as far as we’ve witnessed it, is one based on the idea that politically and socially
sensitive topics, often just the sort anthropologists would want to look at –would never
get ethics clearance if HREC criteria were rigidly and literally applied. Medical anthro-
pologist Hans Dilger describes the tensions between ‘the discipline’s methodologically
and epistemologically open work … the flexible approaches of ethnographic research’,
and the sometimes exacting requirements of ethics committees, noting that politically and
socially sensitive research would ‘rarely receive ethical approval’ (Dilger, 2017:205). Our
colleague Kirsten Bell (2014) has made this point in particular around the doctrine of
informed consent, which was embraced in the 1990s in the US, and has become a firm
foundation for ethical research.This describes the situation where the people you want to
study must be fully informed of what the research is for, what it’s trying to find out, what
the possible impacts are for them, including benefits and risks, and what form the research
outcomes will take. Informed consent sounds fantastic, but Bell points out that the pro-
cess of informed consent requires us to imagine ‘research subjects’ almost as the victims
of researchers, from whom they need protection. The process of securing ethics clearance
to conduct research from a university requires researchers to imagine a range of risks that
their research will pose to the people they want to study, and then how they will act to
mitigate those risks. Bell writes that this sets up research ‘subjects’ precisely as subject to
DOI: 10.4324/9781003273547-6
186

the potentially exploitative actions of researchers, from whom they require institutional
protection. This, she notes,
sets the wrong sort of standard (by implying that there is one); it forces researchers,
research participants, and research ethics boards to focus on the wrong sorts of
questions; and it enacts a certain type of ‘subject’ –one that seems designed to pro-
mote even less ethical research. While we make and remake subjects constantly in
our research –in our fieldwork and field notes, in our anecdotes and our published
accounts, the particular subject ‘materialized’ (cf. National Statement on Ethical
Conduct in Human Research, 2007 [2018]) in the doctrine of informed consent is
one we should emphatically reject.
(Bell, 2014:519)
So here is the uncommon knowledge to find: what organises the rules that the ethics
committees play by? Bell’s sense is that it’s organised by a particular imaginary of the
researcher and research subject. You’ll have to think about why you hold the views that
you do about the ethical scenarios we’re going to run past you in this chapter.
Another thing to keep in mind: perhaps you’re experienced in ethical thinking in
another discipline. Don’t just transfer that over –think about how anthropological
contexts might occasion and entail especial ethical thinking. Also keep in mind that even
though you might have really strong responses to things as they come up, there’s no hard
and fast right or wrong answers (however much a response might seem right or wrong
to you). Try to figure out why you’re thinking in a particular way about the ethical situ-
ations and ideas we’re discussing, instead of just having a particular view or position. Try
to do this, too, if you change your mind about a situation to which you first had a strong
reaction. We find that happens a lot when we talk about ethics.

This is a chapter you can use to think carefully about your own approach to each idea and
case we present. As we’ve said, the whole point of this book is to get you to think about
the processes you use to come to anthropological knowledge. Knowing and being able
to speak about those moments is a bona fide contribution to research knowledge; it’s a
whole new contribution to knowledge because it leverages your unique position relative
to a context or situation, and offers one new idea to our knowledge of how to approach
it. Try to keep that in mind as you’re reading this chapter.
What insight can you gain about the university by thinking with ethics?
Research universities are necessarily concerned with ethics, but in this chapter, we’ll pre-
sent the idea that they can fetishise certain elements of research –for example, informed
consent. By thinking through this critique, you can get a picture of the core concerns that
drive universities to define ethics in certain ways.You can also get an insight into the key
ethical debates in anthropology. More than this, the students who talked with their kin (in
the last chapter) had to think about ethical practice as they carried out the work.The head
of the Human Research Ethics Committee at the ANU remarked to Simone how, really,
this was the only way people could really understand what it was like to be careful with
people –but equally, not to regard them as wholly subject to the will of the ethnographer.
187
Ethical positions in anthropology 187

We think this is an interesting balance to keep in mind and, as you’ll see, it sits in a context
very much inclined to think of research participants as the potential victims of researchers.
Some insights into institutional practice

What happens when you want to undertake some anthropological research and you’re a
member of the university? If you’re an academic staff member, or a Master’s or PhD stu-
dent, you’ll need to get ethics clearance to conduct your research, from the university’s
Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC). If you’re an undergraduate student
and you’re going to be engaging with people and asking them questions, you’re going
to need clearance, but in Australia, that’s often worked out for the whole class under
your lecturer’s supervision –it might be different where you are. That could be an
interesting difference –see if it is!. Universities very often take the position that under-
graduate students aren’t experienced enough to operationalise research methods that put
them in direct and unsupervised contact with people. That’s a fair call –there’s a lot to
learn. That’s why, in our classes, students stick to public observation or the immediate
circumstances of their own lives. This tells you that ethics is bound up with risk and its
mitigation, but we’re talking about people and getting involved in their lives, often for
extended periods. The ‘extended period’ part is important here because researchers are
required to imagine the risks for people at a single point of time before the research
commences. This is what Bell (2014) means when she says that anthropologists ‘make
and remake’ research subjects; we come to know people in the circumstances of their
lives and, like any relationship sustained over time, people acquire increasing knowledge
about one another that shapes their relationships. Anthropologists come to know how
their findings will impact the people they’re studying by gaining an increasing sense of
everyday life for those people.
As we indicated in our opening remarks, ‘risk’ is constituted in particular ways by
HRECs, where it is always weighed against benefits.What does this equation have to look
like, before ethics clearance is granted? There’s a national ethics statement to turn to that
regulates the university environment, which is the place from which we get our ethics
clearances to carry out research. Let’s start there, and interleave some anthropological
specificity as we go. As we’ve suggested, some examples comfortably nestle, and some jar
most uncomfortably indeed.
Generally speaking, HRECs at Australian higher education institutions are made up of
two lay people –a man and a woman –who are not researchers and have no affiliation
to the research institution; one person with experience in counselling; one person who
performs pastoral care in the community –for example, an Aboriginal elder or minister of
religion; a lawyer, and at least two researchers. HRECs must include at least eight people,
an equal number of men and women, and at least a third of the members should be
external to the institution for which the HREC reviews.The fact that there are members
of the public involved tells you that researchers have obligations to the public.
According to the Australian National Ethics Statement, ethical research is grounded in
the values of:
• Research merit and integrity,

• Beneficence,
• Justice,
• Respect (see National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, 2018:12).
18

The National Statement was been jointly developed by the National Health and
Medical Research Council (NHMRC), the Australian Research Council (ARC) and
Universities Australia (UA). This makes it a powerful document that undergirds how
localised HRECs take decisions, constructed by powerful entities. The NHMRC has
been around since 1992; it’s a statutory body and the dominant national funder of health
research in Australia.The Australian Research Council Act 2001 (the ARC Act) established
the ARC to provide the responsible Federal Minister with advice and recommendations
about research, including which research programmes should receive funding. The
functions of the ARC include administering the regimes of financial assistance for research
and providing for the funding of research programmes. Universities Australia (UA) is the
peak body representing Australia’s 39 comprehensive universities in the public interest,
nationally and internationally. Its main role is to set out the positions that will make
Australian university regulatory, policy and fiscal settings the best in the world. This is a
serious document and it impacts everyone, given its foundational institutional presence.
Research that has merit

In the national statement, research that has merit needs to have six characteristics. It must be:
• justified by its potential benefit;

• designed and prosecuted using methods suitable to the project’s aims;
• developed in relation to literature that exists;
• designed to make sure that participants are respected in the development of the aims,
the methods and the results of the research;
• supervised by someone who is qualified to do so, and
• conducted using the right facilities and resources.
Have you ever thought of the production of a literature review as an ethical act? Notice
here that a project that you alone ostensibly design and carry out is always attended by other
anthropologists.This is the case with your reading, too –when you’re assigned texts to read
for class, it might look like there’s a single or a few named authors. But anthropologists
always create research by reference to that which has gone before –repuzzling, disputing,
arguing against, enhancing, pushing back on –that which has gone before. This is fun-
damental to research –you’re treating the literature as a populated field and figuring out
where your approach and way of thinking will fit. When you do that, it means you have
to think very carefully about presumptions that have been made in research; you have to
think about methods that have been pressed into service, and you have to think about how
the findings that came from the research subjects were interpreted, distilled and articulated.
What if, for example, you noticed that the research record concerning the group you
wanted to study was dominated by men, who had focused on men? You, as a woman (for
example), might have something to say about presumption that would seriously impact the
methods and the outcomes you’d achieve, as well as profoundly impacting your approach
to the community. We use this example in particular because the ethical value of the lit-
erature review is concerned with situating your research in a kind of safety net of existing
research that’s related to the core principles and practices of your discipline. But, as you can
see from this example, sometimes those very principles and practices –here the ones that
are androcentric –might need to be called into question. This might serve to make the
research record more equitable, and more ethical.
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Research conducted with integrity

Research that is conducted with integrity is carried out by researchers with a commitment
to four main principles:
… searching for knowledge and understanding; following recognised principles of

research conduct; conducting research honestly; and disseminating and communi-
cating results, whether favourable or unfavourable, in ways that permit scrutiny and
contribute to public knowledge and understanding.
(National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, 2018:12)
These seem super-straightforward, but they might not be as easy as they seem. Searching
for knowledge and understanding can be put to instrumentalised purpose. For example;
Simone’s work on tobacco (see Dennis 2016) demonstrates how knowledge and
understanding of smokers’ relationships with tobacco are narrowly constituted in most
cases, so that knowledge about how to get smokers to quit is the most valued. Sometimes,
people who try to understand how the legislative environment feels for smokers –like
Simone –are forced out of the space when they’re misidentified as smokers’ rights
apologists. We have to be careful about how these qualities are arranged in research prac-
tice. It’s easy to say that tobacco is ‘bad’ so we shouldn’t research how people use it unless
we’re trying to stop people from using it, but that would seriously constrain the research
space, limiting what questions can be asked and answered. It’s also easy to think that ‘bad’
players, like tobacco and alcohol, are guilty of influencing research so it goes in their
favour. There’s two points to make about that; first, ‘good’ players are equally inclined
to instrumentalise research, and second, it may not always be the case that parties have
interest in manipulating research results.
On the first point, it is easy enough to contrast research that tries to bring about smoking
cessation, for instance, with research that seeks to support its continuance. One can easily
imagine rejecting out of hand research conducted by the tobacco industry, which might
have interest in finding, say, that graphic packaging imagery does little to dissuade smokers
from lighting up, but perhaps we would be less inclined to reject research conducted by an
anti-tobacco organisation that might have interest in confirming that packaging imagery
is very effective. Both would hold equal capacity to constrain research enquiry, in the
sense that each would likely be uninterested in understanding how smokers encounter
packaging warnings beyond this agenda. Simone has detailed the nature and extent of
these entailed agendas and the striking but unsurprising result is that the ‘goodies’ invari-
ably find in favour of packaging warnings and the baddies do not –often on the basis of
the same data, but they might equally be considered very similar indeed when considered
in the terms of their shared instrumental agenda. Their differences, of course, lie in the
intended results and outcomes of the research enquiry, but their orientation to research
enquiry can be decidedly similar.
On the second point, Simone and Andy have recently agreed to worked with the
alcohol industry, namely Alcohol Beverages Australia. Our client shares agreed to an
intention with a ‘good’ public health agenda: dialling down problem drinking. ABA is,
unashamedly and forthrightly, aligned to securing its bottom line. Problem drinking pro-
foundly impacts the capacity of ABA’s members to make money and threatens their pos-
ition in the commercial arena.This is often because of legislative responses to incidents of
irresponsible drinking that receive high-profile media coverage –for example, one-punch
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attacks, street violence, unruly behaviour, gendered violence –as well as the problems that
occur out of sight, behind closed domestic doors. No industry player wants to be part of
those problems, but they might want to be part of research that gets to the bottom of how
people understand responsibility and risk –so they can support responsible and less risky
uses of alcohol. Another thing that seriously harms the alcohol industry’s relationships
with the state is the practice of problem deflation, where the industry attempts to unhitch
alcohol from harmful outcomes in favour of other factors. Whenever it does this, it fur-
ther polarises the industry from a ‘good’ public health agenda.Thus, the industry is deeply
invested in producing unentailed research that produces information it can use to secure
its bottom line.
See how this industry player’s interests are actually not in manipulating research
outcomes? OK, good for them, but why did Simone and Andy agree to do it? How is it
ethical from their point of view? We did so on the basis of an ethical imperative to guard
against any interests but our own interest in retaining the right to be surprised by our
research results, and our right to express our research results in the terms we deem most
appropriate. By surprise, we mean the imperative to hold the field open to whatever it
might yield when addressed with disciplinary methods that hold no regard for paradig-
matic controls enforced from beyond; that is, our contract says that the research results
are the research results, like it or not! This means that our conditions of agreement are
that we retain complete control over the design, carriage, presentation and dissemination
of our research and its results. In so doing, we can do a great deal to establish our own
integrity.This is what the industry buys in us: our capacity to cut through any industry or
public health agenda –that has gotten the industry closer to understanding how people
understand risk and responsibility as they live it. And that, in turn, lets the industry figure
out how to support responsible use, which is good for its bottom line, and for drinkers.
Beneficence and risk

Beneficence basically means you’ve got to maximise the benefits of research, and min-
imise the risks –mainly for the participants, but also for the university and for yourself.
But how does the institution expect you to make the calculations that let you be sure
that there’s maximum benefits and minimum risks? Well, you can’t do any of that until
you know what a ‘risk’ is. The national guidelines talk about risk as harm, discomfort and
inconvenience (constituted physically, mentally, emotionally, legally, medically, and so on).
Harm might be read as a kind of violence –someone might get physically hurt, they
might made to feel worthless, they might be excluded from a part of life, from a service,
or from participation in some context. That’s different from discomfort, which could be,
for instance, a side rather than main effect of research –like the side effects of a medical
intervention that could save your life, or having to answer questions that are uncomfort-
able to think about. Inconvenience is more in the realm of having to give up your time
to participate in the research. It’s really hard to separate these things into neat categories;
when does inconvenience become discomfort, when does discomfort turn into harm?
Couldn’t these things change over time? When you’re dealing with people, you can’t rely
on things being as stable and constant as they might be if you were studying rocks, for
example. Here’s what the National Statement say about that:
In designing a research project, researchers have an obligation to minimise the risks

to participants. Minimising risk involves an assessment of the research aims, their
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importance, and the methods by which they can be achieved. Where a researcher or
review body judges that the level of risk in a research proposal is not justified by the
benefits, either the research aims or the methods by which they are to be achieved, or
both, will need to be reconsidered if the research is to proceed. Do the benefits justify
the risks? Research is ethically acceptable only when its potential benefits justify any
risks involved in the research. Benefits of research may include, for example, gains in
knowledge, insight and understanding, improved social welfare and individual well-
being, and gains in skill or expertise for individual researchers, teams or institutions.
Some research may offer direct benefits to the research participants, their families, or
particular group/s with whom they identify. Where this is the case, participants may
be ready to assume a higher risk than otherwise. For example, people with cancer
may be willing to accept research risks (such as treatment side-effects) that would
be unacceptable to well people. Those ethically reviewing research should take such
willingness into account in deciding whether the potential benefits of the research
justify the risks involved.
(National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, 2018:14)
Tricky –and not least because sometimes the high benefits might not align with where
the risk is borne. For example, it’s probably quite easy to think of the benefits to know-
ledge that come from research right off the bat. Simone is thinking of how her work on
smoking offers a pushback to the bounds of anthropological thinking; she thinks the way
she approaches smoking, without insisting on either a libertarian agenda defensive of
smokers’ rights or a smoking cessation agenda, opens up a space we might not otherwise
have in anthropology. She could talk about that all day –but would her research offer
anything to the people upon whose information she depends? Simone would say that it
does; she thinks the research offers the chance to understand smokers properly and on
their own terms instead of in and through a particular agenda. She’d want to see a better
understanding of smokers be in place for better health policy to be developed. She has
a particular bugbear about research that presumes a dominant Western understanding
of health and its meaning, experience and value, for instance. But at least in the present,
probably the research would offer more to knowledge of the scholarly kind than directly
to the people Simone studies. We can see here that risk and benefit might not match up
temporally: benefits might have to be waited on,while risks might be immediate. These
are hard to articulate in a single project, and might (or might not) unfurl in a multiple
of ways across the life of her project, and would have different meanings for her research
participants.
Would her research present immediate risks for participants?

It might: Simone had to ask smokers questions in her research that involved reminding
them about the risks of smoking. Sure, smokers already know that smoking is risky. They
know that from everyday relations with cigarette packets and from pointed public health
messaging. Really getting into how they feel about smoke entering into their bodies,
explaining how smoke feels inside the lungs, speculating on the possibility of illness –how
they conceptualise of all of that in and on their own terms –and how they reflect closely
on it and say it to a researcher requires a different register of embodied knowledge.
The possibility of new feelings about smoking arising for participants would require
much more than Simone just telling people that it might happen. She had to think
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carefully about the risks and benefits it could present. It could be a benefit because it
might develop a more fulsome knowledge about the practice, allowing her participants
to make ever more nuanced insight into and decisions about it, maybe even a decision
to quit (which could definitely be seen as a benefit to health). It could be a risk to the
emotional well-being of participants, as they realise in the moment of expressing things,
how something impacts them. That’s different from knowing something by recourse to
information. So, risk might be different on paper than in experience.
How would that kind of risk be managed relative to the potential benefit?
This kind of risk might pop on any given day of Simone’s research, including when
participants read the draft of her book, so it couldn’t just be thought of as something she’d
have to deal with in only one part of the research. She had to build it into the whole life
of the research, by consistently checking with participants to see how they were feeling
about what they were being asked to think about and say to her. If it was a risk, would this
be a discomfort? Or a kind of violence, a harm she was visiting upon them? Simone had
to deal with this directly in her research. On the one hand, she was asking people to think
about their relationship with cigarettes, public health information, and the embodied
experiences of having smoke go inside of them and then leave their bodies to potentially
go to someone else’s lungs. On the other hand, she was using cigarette packages to start
conversations, something designed to provoke people to think about their insides and
their impact on other people. Even though she was asking them to consider these things
even further, she was inviting people to say from their point of view what smoking was
like –something not available to them in their relationships with public health messaging.
She felt therefore that it was more a discomfort that arose from thinking about their own
smoking rather than a whole new harm. So, she decided to manage that discomfort by
making sure she constantly checked in with how people were feeling and finding ser-
vices to which she could refer people if they seemed to think they needed help in man-
aging their feelings. These were not smoking cessation services; they were services that
directly addressed and helped manage feelings of anxiety, stress, worry and concern. The
risks described here are differentially borne across individual participants, shifting across
time, and they might turn into benefits –like people stopping smoking, for example. But
Simone has no way of knowing all of that at the start –it arises across the life of a pro-
ject, in particular relations, and may not entail participants being threatened by Simone’s
research, but perhaps being empowered by it. These are possibilities that are emergent,
uncertain and provisional –not exactly language reassuring to HRECs.
Let’s entertain the idea that Simone’s research entailed risk to participants, in just the
way the ethics committee identified it.There’s things to notice here that may be important.
While it might seem ridiculous to suggest that people who already know about the risks
of smoking might be harmed by talking about them, it could well be the case that talking
about familiar things in the terms introduced by a researcher often requires people to
access different registers of their experience, and it might make them rearrange or rethink
what they know or feel. That’s a remark about the particular power of being a researcher
that has to be acknowledged, without agreeing that researchers invariably present harm to
research subjects.To dial down that particular risk, Simone fell back on her expertise as an
anthropologist with a record of writing about these kinds of experiences with vulnerable
populations –like refugees and asylum seekers and new migrants. She’d be able to spot it
arising, and know what to do next –like referring people to specialist services.
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Simone is not a mental health expert, so she would not have been able to address
any feelings of stress or anxiety herself. Instead, she had to find appropriate services that
could take care of anyone effected. It’s really important –and Simone would definitely
say ethical –to recognise the limits of your expertise. If someone is in emotional or
mental distress, you can give initial first aid, but after that it’s over to the experts. This
feels like an excellent moment to introduce you to one of the ethical hypotheticals listed
by the American Anthropological Association. In fact, it’s the first case you’ll find on the
site: ‘Case 1: To Medicate or Not to Medicate’. This case is principally about addressing
a problem for research participants and it’s not so much about emotional distress as it is
about physical distress, but the key question is the same: what do you do when someone
is in distress and you’re not an expert in their problem? Here’s the case:
Terry Kelly received a National Institute of Mental Health grant for research in the
Western Tropics. As part of her personal gear, she took along a considerable amount
of medication, which her physician had prescribed for use, should Kelly find herself
in an active malaria region. Later, after settling into a village, Kelly became aware that
many of the local people were quite ill with malaria.
Kelly’s Dilemma: Since she had such a large supply of medication, much more than
she needed for her personal use, should she distribute the surplus to her hosts?
(American Anthropological Association, 2022a)
Think about what you’d do in this situation (and remember that there is a great luxury
in being distant from a situation and considering it, as opposed to being in the thick
of things and having to make decisions in the moment and among the people you’re
working with). Some anthropologists wrote in to say that not distributing the excess
medication would be callous. Some worried that distributing it would set in play a pol-
itics that would profoundly impact the relations between the community members, and
between the community members and the anthropologist. How would distribution be
decided? Would it cause infighting? Would there be enough? Would it last –what would
happen after the anthropologist left? Would distributing the medication be the equivalent
of buying information from community members?
Simone’s main worry is different. Kelly isn’t a doctor –what if she distributed the meds
without sufficient understanding of their effects? What if someone was injured or killed
as a result? So, what did Kelly wind up doing?
Kelly’s Decision
Kelly decided not to give any medication to the villagers who were exhibiting
symptoms of malaria, even though she had a considerable surplus in her personal
supply. She reasoned that since the medication did not confer permanent immunity
to the disease and because she would not be present to provide medication during
future outbreaks of the disease, it was more important to allow affected villagers to
develop their own resistance to malaria “naturally.”
(American Anthropological Association, 2022a)
For us, this feels like a presumptive response –exactly what Simone is worried about.
Kelly doesn’t have a background that would let her take such a decision (even though the
villagers are not going to receive the meds, as Simone would prefer, the decision basis, for
Simone, isn’t ethical). What do you think? Remember, this case is on the AAA website
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because it represents a dilemma, a complex situation. There’s no right or wrong answer
to the case, only responses that can be justified one way or another. Here’s an excellent
chance for you to make a bone fide contribution to research: what is your response to this
case? How do you reason it? This involves noticing all the positions you bring to the case
at hand. Look at the relationship between all of that and the case. Tallis Everard thought
about this one. Here’s what she has to say about it:
Tallis Everard and the Terry Kelly case

Ethics in anthropology is a tough subject.As a student in this, I find myself constantly
asking questions about how it is possible to study other people in a respectful, eth-
ical way while invading their lives and gaining personal knowledge. Anthropology
asks us to study other people and assess their lives and movements and cultures, yet
how can we do this without making them feel like they are under a microscope?
When writing our findings, we must not only protect the subjects of study, but
also provide robust, detailed information. This is a fine line to walk when trying to
maintain scientific integrity as well as ethical considerations.
Anthropologists don’t just study easy situations; they get into the parts of human
life which are complex. There have been several instances when anthropologists
have found themselves caught between their duties to their subjects, the law, and
their own personal morals. In effect, ethics has been a subject of discussion after
many scandals arose in the late 20th century. In 1986, the American Anthropological
Association (AAA) codified some ethical guidelines with the aim of institutionalising
the correct behaviour for anthropologists. It states many different obstacles which
the anthropologist should be wary of and most critically, that their priority should
be their subjects. While these guidelines serve as an important framework for
anthropologists to refer to, they do not provide a comprehensive rulebook on how
to act in every situation. So, what should the fieldworker do when she finds herself
in a situation the rulebook does not cover?
Imagine that you are working in the field in a small malaria-r idden town, and you
have a surplus of medicine to treat the disease for your personal use, and the people
you are working with are sick. Two questions emerge: 1) do you then dispense
your surplus medicine to them? And 2), if you do, what if there is not enough for
everyone? Hopefully, this example illuminates to you how the first question seems
to have an obvious solution to the ethical person: yes. But the second question
begins to make it clear that such a decision cannot be taken lightly or ethically,
because you are not a doctor, the subjects may get malaria in the future again, and
you cannot decide who should live or die.
When studying hypothetical ethical problems, or simply taking fieldnotes or
reading about anthropology, we must keep in mind that ethics is never simple.
Hypotheticals like this one are posed because they are scenarios which have stumped
the anthropological community for a long time. As a student, you do not have to
answer every ethical question. Instead, the very point of anthropology as practice is
to look beneath the norm and assess human interaction in the field.
When performing anthropology, we cannot forget that we are subjective, flawed
humans, and therefore we should include this and any bias in our work. This is a
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process called ‘reflexivity’, and it makes the work more accessible and unique. All of
us will have a different upbringing and ethical background, and we must address this
to avoid our work being overly influenced by it.
As you can see, I have come out the other side of this process with more questions
than answers. This is a good thing! By asking lots of questions about ourselves and
our ethical processes, we can avoid bias, and consider our own perspectives and
upbringing. Looking at hypotheticals is a great exercise to train your ethical abilities,
because while they are difficult, you can see how other anthropologists think and
use these to guide your own reflexivity.
Of course, researchers are not the only ones who have to make a calculation of the risks
involved in research. Participants have to decide from their perspectives if it will be OK
for them to be involved. That means that the research has to be explained in full detail –
but in lay language –so that people can make informed decisions about participating.
This can be highly consequential. For some people in some situations, participating could
be imperilling. What if you wanted to do a big study on drug use –specifically the
relationships between users and dealers? Those relations might seem one way to you, and
quite another to those in the relationships. It’s an obvious one, and you’d be hard pressed
to get people to talk to you about it, but you can instantly understand how, from multiple
positions, things might get dangerous for people under study. It’s not always this obvious
for the anthropologist. Insiders know this better than anyone, so they need to have things
explained that make the research processes, intentions and outcomes clear. That way, they
can decide if it does present risks, and what kind –and when they’ll come to pass.
Well, that all sounds lovely and neat and super-safe. Guess again! Anthropologists and the
people they study might not be able to see off all the risks, even if they work together to
comprehensively imagine them.This is for two main reasons: 1) no one can see sufficiently
far into the future to stave off every single risk that might come to pass, and 2) research
processes and results can easily leak beyond the parameters of the field that’s been set up.
What happens after the research is published, for instance? Who could use the info, and for
what? These kinds of questions link 1 and 2, and probably make you think that research is
so high risk it should never be carried out! Here’s a very grave example that anthropologist
David Price gives to illustrate the uses to which social science research may be put:
In 1962 the US Department of Commerce, without authorization or permission

from the author, translated from French into English the anthropologist Georges
Condominas’ ethnographic account of Montagnard village life in the central high-
lands of Vietnam, Nous Avons Mangé la Forêt. The Green Berets used the document
for assassination campaigns targeting village leaders. For years, neither publisher nor
author knew this work had been reprinted in English for military ends.
(Price, 2011:135)
In 1973, Condominas described his anger:
How can one accept, without trembling with rage, that this work, in which I wanted
to describe in their human plenitude these men who have so much to teach us about
life, should be offered to the technicians of death –of their death! […] You will
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understand my indignation when I tell you that I learned about the ‘pirating’ [of my
book] only a few years after having the proof that Srae, whose marriage I described
in Nous Avons Mangé la Forêt, had been tortured by a sergeant of the Special Forces
in the camp of Phii Ko.
(Condominas, 1973:4)
From the Australian Anthropological Society code of ethics comes this reassuring anti-
dotal passage:
8.2. That information can be misconstrued or misused is not in itself a convincing

argument against its collection and dissemination. All information is subject to misuse;
and no information is devoid of possible harm to one interest or another. Individuals
may be harmed by their participation in social inquiries, or group interests may be
harmed by certain findings. Researchers are usually not in a position to prevent
action based on their findings. They should, however, attempt to pre-empt likely
misinterpretations and to counteract them when they occur.
(Australian Anthropological Society 2012:n.p.)
As we’ve suggested, this isn’t as straightforward as it sounds; we’ve advanced the view
that heading of risk is something that can only be done in the thick of things and, as Bell
(2014) argues, that possibility is reduced by the stern and abiding emphasis that HRECs
accord to informed consent.
We want to dwell here on informed consent –something that is required for any
ethics application involving people. It seems absolutely unproblematic to suggest that
informed consent is the right and most appropriate standard to have at the heart of any
ethical ethnographic fieldwork. Did this fieldwork have informed consent, in all the ways
we’ve described it above? But, as Kirsten Bell points out, the idea of informed consent is
premised on the notion that research is an intrinsically risky enterprise:
Research is often quite explicitly configured as a violation or invasion: biomed-

ical research violates the physical integrity of the body and social science research
violates the individual’s privacy. Thus, one textbook on ethical issues in field research
warns: ‘the central ethical issues in field research are likely to revolve around potential
invasions of privacy.’ This constitution of research as a ‘violation’ or ‘invasion’ helps to
explain why informed consent is deemed so central to contemporary conceptions of
research ethics. After all, to consent is quite literally to acquiesce to ‘being done to’. In
this framing, research is a violation to which, like sex, one must willingly consent (but
presumably not actively participate in, like the Victorian bride counselled to ‘lie back
and think of England’). Informed consent to research participation, like questions of
consent to sexual intercourse, is thus based on certain underlying assumptions about
the nature of the protagonists in this encounter.
(Bell, 2014:519)
So far, we’ve been imagining that research subjects are the ones that need protection from
potentially harmful researchers, but it’s not just the case that researchers need to protect
informants.They also have an obligation to other researchers who might want to research
a similar group or context. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) Statement
on Ethics and the Australian Anthropological Society (AAS) Code of Ethics each state
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that anthropologists must always be ‘alert to possible harm their information may cause
people with whom they work or colleagues’ (American Anthropological Association,
2012:n.p.; Australian Anthropological Society, 2012:n.p.).The preservation of the field for
future research has been important in anthropology because we often organise research
knowledge ethnographically (Simone plays truant from this school and organises her
material theoretically, probably because she has so many fieldsites). To whom else might
obligations flow? Your first obligations go to your informants –the people who you’re
going to study. But they’re often not in isolation. This feels like another good moment to
drop in a case study, again from the AAA website. This case, the case of the damaged baby,
is a really hard one. The researcher in this case is studying the staff in the hospital, but
they’re intimately connected with the patients. She’s got to make a decision about what
to do in the context of an difficult situation that, to complicate matters, might impact the
ability of anthropologists to gain access to and carry out fieldwork in hospital contexts.
Yikes. Here’s the case –think about what you’d do, but also think about what is propelling
you towards your inclination. Notice who you’re privileging and in what terms:
Case 17: The Case of the Damaged Baby

Halfway through a research project in a newborn Intensive Care Unit, Sarah
Michotte, a medical anthropologist, learned that a premature infant had not been
given the state-required test for phenylketonuria (PKU), a pathological condition
that can be reversed by diet and medication. Without immediate therapy, cretinism
develops. The ten-weeks’ premature infant weighed only 700 grams (one and one-
half pounds) and had to be fed intravenously; this may have confused the staff, since
the test must be given to a baby who has had approximately six oral feedings. The
error was not discovered until two months after the test should have been given and
the infant suffered permanent damage. The unit staff as a group “felt bad” about the
mistake but had no one specific to blame. The house officer in charge of the case
initially had finished his training in paediatric intensive care and had been transferred
to another department; the nurse in charge had left her job. In communicating with
the parents, the staff did not mention an error. Instead, the working-class parents,
still in their late teens, were told that the baby had a long-term incurable problem.
The parents were enthusiastic about their infant and told the staff, “We’ll love her
anyway, God made her.” What should the anthropologist do? Leave well enough
alone, protecting access to the field situation? Alert the parents that they have cause
for legal action? Inform the appropriate state agency? Anonymously use the Baby
Doe hotline available in the nursery?
(American Anthropological Association, 2022b)
There’s so much diversity in the responses made to this case (to see it, go to the AAA web-
site; www.amer icananthro.org/LearnAndTeach/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=12937).
Some respondents advise the anthropologist not to get involved in the staff ’s ethical
dilemma, nor to intervene with the parents at this point. Some suggest that both patients
and staff are research subjects and informants for the anthropologist, regardless of the spe-
cific focus of the inquiry, and regardless of their apparently opposite interests. For example:
In devising a plan of action, the researcher has obligations to both the patient and
parents, and the staff. If the anthropologist were to take any of the actions listed
at the end of the case, without first attempting to move the staff to act, she would
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unnecessarily violate a trust with the staff. If she fails to act at all, she colludes in the
deceptions and behaves irresponsibly toward the child and parents. The researcher’s
goal must be to get the staff to deal with the parents and the child in the honest,
responsible, and competent ways they have thus far failed to do. Protecting access to
the field is not an acceptable reason to refuse to act. This would place a greater value
on the anthropologist’s project than on the quality of life of parents and child.
(American Anthropological Assiciation, 2022b)
Another contributor remarks:
What should Michotte do? First, as noted, she should do some reading on the problem.
She should discuss the general problem of error and its management with the senior
staff of the unit in which she is working. She should request their advice on how to
act if she believes she has discovered an error. These discussions should have taken
place when she first started her study. In doing all of this, she ought to act as if she
has become a temporary but especially privileged member of the staff of the neonatal
Intensive Care Unit. She is especially privileged because the staff, at their risk, have
allowed her access to something without the training and socialization required of
everybody else on that unit who is responsible for the lives of others. If, after all of
this, she believes that an error is being concealed from a patient but is known to all
those in the chain of responsibility, I believe it would be unwise of her to act inde-
pendently of the social system that she has entered. This incident alone should make
her aware of the complexities and burdens imposed on individual caregivers by the
constant danger of error. She is not required to suspend her critical judgment out
of sympathy for the staff, but if she sees them as the adversaries of both the patients
and herself (an attitude implied by the case report) after she has carefully studied this
problem, there may be other aspects of her work where her understanding fails.
(American Anthropological Association, 2022b)
Working out to whom one is responsible, under what circumstances, what risks and
benefits flow to whom and when, is complex –and, as you can see, it’s not possible to
make hard and fast rules, only guidelines.
Justice
Justice has a very important place in ethical anthropological research. Research can be
hard work for participants. It’s a lot of labour to say, demonstrate, explain what you know
to a researcher. It takes a lot of generosity to make your life available to someone else for
research purposes. So, it’s important not to overburden people with it. Really, this is about
distributing, fairly and equitably, the risks (and the benefits!) of research. It means that no
one group should disproportionately bear the risks, and no one group should get all the
benefits. If you look across the ethnographic record, you can make out who has borne
the weight of our particular fascinations. Indigenous Australians, for instance, are one of
the most researched groups in the world –to the point that many people who serve as
research subjects effectively train the anthropologists who arrive in their communities in
how to approach them, what to ask, how to act. It’s been generational –they’ve seen that
many come and go. On the one hand, this could be the start of a decolonising method-
ology. Decolonising methodologies are methods of research which involves Indigenous
19

peoples’ leadership to direct research to improve their welfare, rather than disempowering
them and imposing external ideas of what should be done ‘for their own good’. Being
able to direct how you’re researched could be very empowering. Decolonising method-
ologies design research projects and interventions collaboratively, in dialogue with com-
munities and elders. This must be the future of an ethical approach to research with
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. On the other hand, thinking about this
could make you worry about the labour that’s involved in training anthropologists that
seems to have been required, not as a result of anthropologists thinking about involving
people in methodological approaches, but instead as a response of Indigenous people to a
problem. Everyone has the right to the burden and the glory (?) of being interesting to an
anthropologist –but you’d have to ask some questions about where our fascinations lie.
We might, as a collective of social scientists, retain a fascination with ‘others’, even though
our collective includes (not enough) others; and/or we might want to make the world
safe for the difference of others, or both. But our patterns of fascination probably should
not go unexamined.
We have to provide an important disruption here, that being that when we say that
Aboriginal people are among the most researched in the world, we don’t mean everyone.
More than 70 per cent of Australian Aboriginal people live in urban contexts, but the
ways in which different groups and individuals live in cities varies according to where
the people concerned originally came from, their relationships with each other, their
relationships with the wider Australian society, and how they relate to the city. There’s a
tonne of diversity in how people live in city and suburban, regional and remote contexts –
but that diversity isn’t really reflected in the ethnographic record; remote dwelling people
are far more present in the anthropological literature. That’s a burden for one part of the
community, but it’s also sometimes hidden diversity. That’s a matter of justice, too. In May
2000, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS)
released a set of Guidelines for Ethical Research in Indigenous Studies to address this and
many other issues in research, which it updated in 2020 to ensure Indigenous leadership
of research (see AIATSIS 2020). This principle updates existing guidelines that establish
11 principles of ethical research. The first guideline includes consultation, negotiation
and mutual understanding, which is all about reconstituting the foundations of research
so they’re less hierarchical than the research record suggests has been the case, and so that
the outcomes of the research are more squarely in the interests of Indigenous people.
The second principle –respect, recognition and involvement –calls for Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems and processes to be respected. The third one
is really relevant to Indigenous diversity: ‘There must be recognition of the diversity
and uniqueness of peoples as well as of individuals’ –no matter how that individuality
is expressed. And, there’s a requirement for Indigenous people to be collaborators in
research –not simply understood as research subjects. This tells you that a huge under-
taking –of correction, de-hierarchisation and decolonisation –is operationalised through
research processes. That means every piece of research undertaken is enfolded into that
endeavour. Another principle –concerning benefits, outcomes and agreement –specifies
that research results should be agreed upon, that the community should benefit, and that
the research should service the specific needs of the community. The principles of con-
sultation and negotiation are wholly reformed in the guidelines, so that they cannot be
seen as matters of courtesy, or permission, or access, but instead as genuine opportunities
to abandon the presumptions of the past and understand what research participants might
want out of research. We’ll talk much more about this in the last chapter of this book,
20

which is all about how the university orients itself towards people outside of it –and how
it might fail to do so.
Respect
Respect, the final principle of the AIATSIS Guidelines, is concerned with the capacity of
each participant to make their own decision relative to the research and its processes.This
principle includes the assertion that each person has the right and capacity to make her
or his own decisions, to be empowered with information to make free decisions about
participating in research, to have their confidentiality and anonymity respected, and the
right to informed consent.
All of this sounds good, but instantly presumes that respect for the individual goes
without saying. Does it, always? Even if you thought the individual was a constant of
all human societies (this is debated in anthropology), you’d have to consider whether
individuals can always appear as such. Sometimes, women can’t appear on their own.
Sometimes, people who aren’t regarded as having the cultural authority to speak can’t.
It’s not always with the researcher to find and access people in the terms they expect; you
have to deal with the conditions people bring to you. As the guidelines say, collectives
must be respected –that is, particular customs, traditions, cultural heritage and sensitiv-
ities. But respect is not to be thought of as a template. Now’s a great time to remember
what we said about treating people touristically –those poor Swimmingpoolians! We are
of the view that if you decided to say something like ‘this culture has no concept of the
individual and so cannot be designed for the singularity of the person’, that would be
foreclosing possibilities, placing stereotypical parameters around, a group of people. And,
it requires thinking about the relationship between power and research processes,practices
and outcomes all the way across a project and its products.
We’ve already seen, of course, in the case of the confiscation of information at airports
by the US government, we can’t guarantee confidentiality; there’s too many situations, now
and in the future, where things can leak out of our control. It’s also the case that if you’re
working in a small community, people will know what others thought and said, even
if you anonymise their information and give them pseudonyms –so the circumstances
here matter a great deal. We also can’t presume that everyone wants to be anonymous;
some people want to be named and have their remarks attributable to them. Erica Weiss
and Carole McGranahan have thought about the ethics of pseudonym use. This is, in a
way, long overdue; for a very reflexive discipline that is always questioning its own bases,
there hasn’t really ever been a close examination of pseudonym use in the discipline, and
it has never really appeared as an ethical debate –only as an ethical solution to protect
informant confidentiality. This is what they think:
Why do we use pseudonyms? For many scholars the unironic answer is:“I don’t know.
We’ve just always done it this way.” How is it that we explore the habitus of others,
but are unable to recognize our own? That is, despite the energy and time anthro-
pology invests in its own reflexivity, anthropologists have left such a major topic as the
effects and ethics of pseudonym use mostly unexamined. In this collection of essays,
we contend that the use of pseudonyms often has high ethical stakes for research
participants and ethnographers that we have not sufficiently considered as a discip-
line. Real consequences are involved; this is not simply a technical or methodological
matter of anonymity. Decisions about whether to use or not use pseudonyms concern
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anthropologists around the world and from different subfields … Pseudonyms affect
us all.
(Weiss and McGranahan 2021:n.p.)
Weiss and McGranahan are right to contend that the use of pseudonyms often has high
ethical stakes for research participants and ethnographers, and that we really haven’t
sufficiently considered those stakes very much as a discipline. What do you reckon
those consequences are? Maybe you think along the lines that Kirsten Bell does, and
lean towards the idea that some of the ways anthropologists imagine ethics render
research participants powerless or infantilised. Maybe you reckon pseudonyms lead
us to treat participants a bit too cursorily –it could be a bit of a perfunctory act that
doesn’t let us see the more detailed and nuanced ethical issues we should be seeing.
Whatever the case, we probably shouldn’t just take this established practice for granted.
As you can see, this conversation takes us back to Bell’s concerns, about the ways in
which research subjects are thought of as potential victims of research. This is what we
want you to think about, more than the AAA two case studies cited in this chapter.
This is an exercise in thinking beyond the paradigm in which ethical decisions are
currently made, in favour of making some uncommon knowledge, instead of saying,
‘that’s just how things are.’

Brace yourselves: the next chapter deals with food and animals. We say brace yourselves,
because it’s possible to get a potted history of the discipline in and through them. We
unapologetically range all over the place, covering a very broad range of topics and ideas,
using animals and food as beginnings –but not necessarily as end points.We want to spark
your interest too –not only in the topical (the food and the animals) but in the themes
and analyses they have provoked in anthropology.You’ll find some of the most interesting
debates in the discipline in this next chapter.
References
AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies). 2020. Australian
Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Research. Canberra: AITSIS.
American Anthropological Association. 2012. AAA Statement on Ethics. www.amer icananthro.org/
LearnAndTeach/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=22869 Accessed 14 July 2021.
American Anthropological Association. 2022a. Case 1: To Medicate or Not to Medicate? In J.
Cassell and S. Jacobs (eds.), Handbook on Ethical Issues in Anthropology: Special Publication of the
AAA, 23. www.amer icananthro.org/LearnAndTeach/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=12917
Accessed 30 July 2021.
American Anthropological Association. 2022b. Case 17:The Case of the Damaged Baby. In J. Cassell
and S. Jacobs (eds.), Handbook on Ethical Issues in Anthropology: Special Publication of the AAA, 23.
www.amer icananthro.org/LearnAndTeach/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=22869 Accessed 30
July 2021.
Australian Anthropological Society. 2012. Code of Ethics, Australian Anthropological Society. www.aas.
asn.au/ethics Accessed 25 February 2022.
Bell, K. 2014. Resisting Commensurability: Against Informed Consent as an Anthropological
Virtue. American Anthropologist 116 (3): 511–522.
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Condominas, G. 1973. Distinguished Lecture 1972: Ethics and Comfort: An Ethnographer’s View
of His Profession. In Annual Report 1973 American Anthropological Association.
Dennis, S. 2016. Smokefree: A Social, Moral and Political Atmosphere. London: Bloomsbury.
Dilger, H. 2017. Ethics, Epistemology, and Ethnography: The Need for an Anthropological Debate
on Ethical Review Processes in Germany. Sociologus 67 (2): 191–208.
The National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian Research Council and
Universities Australia. 2018 [2007]. National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research.
Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra.
Price, D. 2011. Weaponizing Anthropology. Chico, CA: AK Press/Counterpunch.
Weiss, E. and C. McGranahan, 2021. Rethinking Pseudonyms in Ethnography: An Introduction. In
C. McGranahan and E.Weiss (eds.), Rethinking Pseudonyms in Ethnography. https://americanethn
olog ist.org/features/collections/rethinking-pseudonyms-in-ethnography/rethinking-pseudon
yms-in-ethnography-an-introduction Accessed 14 January 2021.
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7 Food for thought and social animals

(Aka a disobedient history of anthropological
theory)

It’s time to get topical –and theoretical. Did you know that if you took a really top-notch
Anthropology of Food course, you could effectively get a potted history of major dis-
ciplinary theory? It’s amazing how much of anthropological theory includes speculations
about food, but we’re going to demonstrate a potted history by recourse to animals. Do
you like watching animal documentaries? Some people absolutely love them, but they
probably don’t watch them like an anthropologist would. Uh oh –do you have that
feeling that yet another thing you thought was a straightforward pleasure is about to
become complicated? You know us well enough by this stage to know that this is exactly
what’s going to happen, so put away that popcorn and prepare to approach animal doccos
like an anthropologist. Actually, there’s no reason to ditch the popcorn.

The material in this chapter will make you question some of your common-sense
presumptions. Here’s an example from the animal side of things. Have you ever thought
about how the animals in those doccos are presented to you? One of the things we notice
is that they’re chiefly presented as almost necessarily heterosexual. Animals need to feed
and breed, right? Actually, it is highly consequential to present animals this way. At the
very end of this chapter, we’re going to rethink notions of animals as entirely heterosexual
and consider the data collection that has represented animals as such. What could this
tell us about our own notions of nature and how its laws are applied to persons? We’re
going to look at a famous case out of Texas in the 1990s when understandings of nature
were put on trial alongside two homosexual men who broke the then sodomy laws. We
just leave that hanging out there for you to consider before you watch your next wild-
life docco.

Use the material in this chapter to give your presumptions a thorough going-over –they
might be consequential, for humans and for animals. That’s always a good idea! We really
want you to use this chapter to think about how important animals and food have been
to illuminating a range of cultural circumstances, as well as the discipline’s theoretical
terrain –you’ll get a rangy, conversational introduction to some of the discipline’s main
bodies of theory by thinking with food and animals.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003273547-7
204
What insight can you get into the university by thinking with food and animals?
The theories you’ll encounter in this chapter could tell you a great deal about institu-
tional life, especially in the sense that speculations about food and animals have the cap-
acity to give us great insight into the operations of power. As students, you may be very
interested indeed in such speculations. How about more topically? It might not seem
as though questions about food and animals are particularly relevant to developing an
understanding of the university. But perhaps a question relevant to a lot of university
students is, are you food secure? Let’s begin there.
Food (in)security
Are you someone who has to worry about food? We talked to anthropology student Clara
Ho, who lives on the ANU campus as a student Senior Resident. She had to deal with
this directly when COVID hit, for other residents. Suddenly, food insecurity was visited
upon people who hadn’t previously had to worry about it before:
Insecure lockdown
By Clara Ho
As Canberra went into lockdown in August, Senior Residents were called into
emergency meetings. No one was allowed to leave their room or the building. As
an SR during this period, a fundamental aspect of my job was to deliver food to
residents, three times or more every single day. This lockdown period prompted me
to consider the food security of university students living on campus, access to food
items required for particular diets and the values attached to what we choose to eat.
Lockdown made me question the food security of residents living on campus, espe-
cially in self-catered halls. As our residential hall had several close contacts, we were
subjected to a building lockdown. Residents in self-catered halls are not provided
meals but must cook their own meals instead.Therefore, being prohibited from leaving
the building, let alone our rooms, meant that we did not have access to food. As we
were not allowed to leave our building, we did not have access to grocery stores or
other commodities and services that were essential to residents –for example, access
to a pharmacy for medications. Our restricted access to food and other amenities
severely limited our food security and ability to procure meals. However, under our
building lockdown, the university temporarily provided us with meals, which the SRs
delivered, until our situation became less severe. While most students at ANU may
consider themselves food secure, food security is not always a certainty. It is only when
unexpected situations arise that we begin to realise and understand that food security
is not as consistent or permanent as we may have assumed. It is contingent on our
circumstances and subject to change, as evident in sudden COVID-related lockdowns.
My pod, or the group of residents under my care, had a rather high percentage
of dietary requirements compared to other pods. Seventy per cent of my pod had
some sort of dietary requirement that needed to be accommodated. However, they
often did not have access to food items that were required for their particular diets,
205
Food for thought and social animals 205
either because we ran out of dietary meals or meals were mixed up and missing.
A lack of dietary meals meant that residents were often left with the options of sour-
cing meals from elsewhere or obtaining a non-dietary meal. Having to deal with
constant missing meals made me wonder if people were willing to change or alter
their dietary requirements for convenience, if it was based on values rather than life-
threatening allergic reactions. Some residents who were on diets based on values
requested non-dietary meals when they were informed that there were no vege-
tarian or vegan options available. Due to a lack of food availability, one might be
compelled to resort to meals outside the realm of their dietary restrictions. To what
limit and extent of desperation must one be at to eventually cave to convenience?
Within my pod, there was an array of various diets, some based on values and
socio-political causes, others for health reasons. The values attached to the food we
consume can signify our socio-political stances, to change lifestyles and habits of
food consumption due to social, political and ecological awareness. For example,
some residents adopted vegetarian or vegan diets to reduce their carbon footprint
from meat production. Conscious decisions to change one’s consumption patterns
can be used as a political stance to send a message about one’s values and beliefs.
Altering lifestyles and consumption choices can produce powerful messages about
current issues regarding the food industry and food production.
Along with food and diet changes, the lockdown also introduced significant
lifestyle shifts. As all residents were prohibited from leaving their rooms, everyone
was required to consume their meals in their rooms. This altered the meaning
of what makes a meal, and how mealtimes were interpreted during this period.
Many residents used to have dinner together in the kitchens; however, with new
restrictions in place, common spaces were closed off. Our situation forced us to
become accustomed to having meals in our rooms, alone. Meals are a culmination
of the people we eat with, at a certain time and place, with specific foods that can
create a culminating sense of comfort, familiarity and routine. However, during the
lockdown, new definitions and understandings of ‘meals’ were created. Solitary meals
at specific and rigid times with unfamiliar food items changed our understanding
of and approach to mealtimes, introducing new, rather jarring routines in residents’
lives. These turbulent changes produced substantial disruptions to residents’ study,
work and lifestyles, creating feelings of discomfort and confusion.
When the lockdown was first announced, there were massive scrambles at gro-
cery stores: whole aisles were cleared out. While we experienced food insecurity
during our building lockdown, food insecurity was also prevalent for those who
were able to leave their homes.The lack of availability of food and other items from
sources such as grocery stores increased overall food insecurity in certain cities.
Food insecurity increased as a result of low food stocks, with many grocery stores
imposing limits on the number of units of an item one was allowed to purchase.
While we may consider ourselves food secure most of the time, our security is
highly contingent on external forces, and the access and availability of food, over
which we have little control. As evident in our experiences with extreme lockdown
measures, circumstances regarding access to food are subject to drastic instantaneous
changes, altering the way we access and consume food, the different food items we
choose to consume and the ways we interpret mealtimes.
206

Keep what Clara had to say about food insecurity in mind as you read what we have to
say in what follows; her work lets you know straight away that we’re not dealing merely
with caloric requirements here. Keep in mind, too, that food insecurity doesn’t just impact
people who live in the poorest of socio-economic conditions; circumstance has a great
deal to do with temporary food insecurity. Many people bear this worry around with
them, especially when they are betwixt the worlds of university and work –that is, before
you’ve had a chance to convert your educational capital into money capital by securing
a job. If you’ve been in this situation, you might have at one time or another received
food charity. There’s a few ways of thinking about food charity that we think are pretty
interesting.
The first one comes from our Canadian colleague, Melanie Rock. Known to her
friends as ‘The Rock Star’, Melanie and her co-authors Lynn McIntyre and Krista
Rondeau focused attention on how people who donate food in Canada imagine those to
whom they give it, and then focused on people who received the donations, to see how
they experience things as recipients (see Rock et al., 2009). This is a really good example
to use to think about how anthropologists might approach something that seems like a
simple movement of resources from generous people to those who don’t have sufficient
resources of their own. Some of the things that Rock and colleagues found out about
how donors imagine donees involve enquiring whether charity is ever given freely –that
is, without the expectation of some kind of return. That’s something that we’re going
to think about carefully in the next chapter, but worth keeping in mind now, especially
when you consider that they found that it was well worth it for large corporations to
donate food to the needy. That raises the speculation that corporations might not be
the only entities who benefit; individuals might also profit in some way. Donations of
surpluses spare corporations from having to pay tipping fees and other costs entailed in
disposing of products that, for many reasons (including manufacturing errors, damaged
packaging, stocked past expiry date, wilted, or unpopular) cannot be sold for a profit
(see also Tarasuk and Eakin, 2005). Corporations also get to accrue the benefits of doing
something good for others –being a good citizen might give them the edge over a com-
petitor and so contribute to their profits.
While corporate donations likely comprise most of the food distributed through
Canadian food banks, donations from individuals account for about 25 per cent of all
charitable food distribution in major metropolitan areas (Tarasuk and Eakin 2005:178),
and likely more than that in smaller centres (ibid.:180). There’s evidently a lot of charit-
able activity going on but what do we know about the views of those who donate, and
the views of those who receive these donations? We may know how many donations are
made, and by and to whom, but we know far less about the social dimensions of donating,
and how one party imagines and regards the other. In 2009, Rock and colleagues published
a paper that presented the results of their comparison of the perceptions of food-secure
Canadians with the perceptions of Canadians who were food insecure –through the
different meanings that they each ascribe to Kraft Dinner (aka Mac and Cheese).
In 2009, Rock and colleagues didn’t assume that ‘food security’ was something they
could take for granted. They drew on a definition proffered by Davis and Tarasuk (1994)
and it’s quite a complex one.They suggested that food insecurity is, ‘the inability to obtain
sufficient, nutritious, personally acceptable food through normal food channels or the
uncertainty that one will be able to do so’ (ibid.:51). By extension, food-secure people
have the ability to obtain nutritious, personally acceptable food through normal food
channels, and do not fear losing this ability. There’s a few things worth noting about this;
207

the first regarding temporality. Food insecurity can loom in the future as a spectre –it’s
not necessarily simply and only a present condition. It can be cyclic and chronic, arising
in relation to things like rent or mortgages, and bills. It might span a much broader range
of socio-economic circumstances than you might think, impacting high-income earners
under mortgage stress, for instance.
The second thing we’d pull out is the idea of ‘personally acceptable’. This is about
recognising the difference between nutritional and meaningful qualities of food, and is
really important for several reasons. The first one is that a person could eat food that
might meet basic nutritional needs, but this wouldn’t get them out of food insecurity.
Imagine yourself in this situation. Perhaps you have some few basic ingredients; but can
you imagine eating the same food or the same cheap takeout each and every meal for an
extended period because you can’t afford anything else? This might not make you feel
very secure. This means you have something that you bring to this scenario that means
that not every food is acceptable to you. This means that nutritional values aren’t as
important as the meaningful values that the food contains. We could eat a much broader
range of foods than we do –but not all foods are acceptable to us. All you have to do to
see that is to consider what you could eat, but would not. Meat? What kind of animals
could validly be meat, which could never be, for you? Is meat off the table altogether, like
it is for Simone?
There’s been some interesting work on how food gains its status as meaningful. The
anthropology of migration and movement, and the anthropology of memory literatures,
provide explanations that involve bodily experience, rather than simply historical associ-
ation with symbolically meaningful food. David Sutton’s (2001) Remembrance of Repasts:An
Anthropology of Food and Memory specifically links food and memory across five chapters
that examine how both ritual and routine organise how people eat, and how they recall
what they have eaten. For instance, routine daily and seasonal patterns of shopping for
food, preparing it for consumption and eating it at particular times of the day –assem-
bling a day around anticipation of the next meal and with whom it will be shared –lends
a foundational structure to life in Kalymnos, where Sutton carried out his fieldwork.
Particular feasts –for funerals, Lenten, and so on –provide another kind of structure, by
which people can anticipate and look back on life. Some foods serve simultaneously as
mundane staples and highly meaningful symbolic materials in the Orthodox Christian
tradition, tying the two together. Sutton argues that food exchanges between people
create the grounds for situating people relative to one another, as generous, as parsimo-
nious and so on. It’s not the food itself, but rather the generous or stingy ways that people
gave it, that provide the people of Kalymnos with key memories around which stories are
crafted, told and retold.Thus, a reputation for generosity or parsimony with food becomes
a central and defining element of personal and group identity. Sutton contrasts a dearly
held and highly valued remembered past of community generosity with what they see
as the disconnection of memory from the foreign foods that globalisation has brought
to them.
Sutton talks about how an almost unbearable longing for particular foods from home –
such as figs, fish and olive oil –afflicts expatriates living far from the homeland. He
proposes that this longing isn’t related to knowing the narratives of home, but arises
instead because eating is an embodied experience.The sensations of taste and smell gather
up other kinds of sensory experience into a synaesthetic knot through the act of eating,
meaning that it is capable of evoking an entire experience of homeland. That’s much
more powerful than remembering a story in an abstract way.
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A diversion into smelly oranges and moist tongues

Other theoreticians of the senses, such as Serematakis (1994), Classen (1993), Stoller
(1989) and Borthwick (2000), have tried to theorise the involvement of the senses in
memory by suggesting that taste blurs the separability of subject body and object food,
through the processes of dissolvability and breakdown. Borthwick, for example, argues
that those things that are smelled and tasted can only be sensed because they break down.
For an orange to be olfactorily detected, smell must waft out from the orange; that means
the orange itself must lose its integrity and wholeness and start to emit molecules of itself,
that we can smell. It’s breaking apart for us to smell it, drifting over to us, and becoming
part of us as it enters our noses. Similarly, for that orange to be tasted, it must break down
on the tongue. In this way, smell and taste differ from sight; when you see an orange, it
remains whole. In Western philosophies of the senses, sight is privileged as a result of this
integrity. How does this work?
Light mediates between the object and the retina, and permits an object to be seen;
the thing need not break down in order to be visually detected. In contrast, particles must
loosen themselves from the object and come into contact with the olfactory apparatus
in order for smell to be detected (Borthwick, 2000:129). This means that smelled things
and tasted things necessarily become part of the body in order to be sensed at all, while
sighted (and heard) things normally retain their integrity and effectively stand outside the
body. Their status outside the body lends them their objective status, since no ‘feelingful’
experience is necessary for their reality to be confirmed.Thus, the ‘eye witness’ is included
in our legal apparatus in a way that olfactory witnesses are not. The relationship between
food and smell and taste makes food especially replete with possibilities for memory
making; as the taste and smell of food penetrates the boundaries of the body, it bears
memories involving all the other senses deep into the experience of the body, and recalls
them in experience of those same tastes and smells later in time.
Without an embodied basis that explains how memories and food are knit together,
foodstuffs appear as replete with meaning before they come anywhere near a person.This is
something that Megan Warin, with Simone, thought that Paul Ricoeur had done in respect
of memory (Warin and Dennis, 2005). Where Ricoeur (2004) argues for a notion of for-
getting that precedes and contextualises the historical conditions for remembering, Megan
and Simone preferred an explanation that involved food, body, meaning and memory
in inextricable intertwinement (Warin and Dennis, 2005). Without that, anthropological
investigation of food would be interested in the pre-swallowing world, assigning sym-
bolic value to food before it came anywhere near the body. That’s the opposite of what
a nutritionist is interested in, which is the post-swallowing world. That is, a nutritionist
is interested in the effects of food after it’s been swallowed –a purely symbolic anthro-
pologist would be interested in the effects of food prior to ingestion. What’s wrong with
focusing on the pre-swallowing world? For one thing, the pre-swallowing, purely symbolic
take on things would mean that the anthropologist would have to insist on the meaning
of something well ahead of an encounter with the person. It’s like saying ‘a wedding cake
is meaningful because it symbolises the union itself, the intention to have kids … ’, and so
on. Wedding cakes might now mean the chance to demonstrate one’s good taste, and how
they look might be more important than what they used to stand for. But that approach
would miss the tongue itself. That is, we think it’s a little curious that the intimacies and
details of tasting are absent in both pre-and post-swallowing approaches. What does food
do – beyond taste like something – when i’s on the tongue? More than you reckon, as we
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shall see. Missing the tongue could make it a bit hard to understand things like how power
gets into bodies, for example –that’s the sort of stuff that purely symbolic approaches
might not be so good at (for a full discussion of this idea, see Dennis 2020 –Simone’s most
evocative and grossly titled work ever, ‘Intimate Tonguing’. That’s what you can do when
you’re a professor, kids!) We’re all bodies, in the end –and how we encounter the world as
such is probably pretty important to think about. Try not to one day –you might find it
hard to continue to exist, and you might just disappear up your own bottom –if you had
one! See, it’s actually super-hard to absent the flesh –and why would we?
What we’re saying here might make a bit more sense if we see the tongue as Aristotle
did. According to Aristotle, the tongue must be in a mean1 (that is, middle) condition,
between the dry and the moist, in order to be capable of tasting; this is a point he made
while explaining his concept of practical wisdom (see Long, 2015:84). Practical wisdom
is a cultivated ability to discern what is good and bad in a given context, and the person
with practical wisdom must be well disposed toward the mean –that is, between vices at
the extremes. The person with practical wisdom is very much like someone with a healthy,
well-functioning capacity to taste. As Long (2015) notes, for Aristotle, practical wisdom at
first emerges from the sense of taste. Taste, then, is the sense of wisdom, a sense founded on
capacity to savour or consider (see ibid.:84).The tongue can savour or consider the qualities
of food beyond their symbolic meanings: how about when you’re on a low-calorie diet,
and you’re avoiding foods that have a high-calorie profile? Those foods come symbolically
prefigured as unhealthy, or bad, or off limits, but it’s only when a piece of illicit chocolate
melts onto the tongue that you get that embodied sense of its badness. Conversely, when
you slurp down your kale and spinach health shake, you can taste the health advice, taste it
doing you good. Neither the cake nor the kale are separate from power –their arrangement
into good and bad categories is what it means to bring health knowledge into the body or
invite the government to the table. Cake can actually taste decadent, illicit, naughty.A tongue
that detects it is well-versed in the politics of its day –ask a vegan how utterly dreadful it
would be to have a piece of veal resting on the tongue. This reminds Simone of the time
she ate a bite of whale meat at a conference in Svalbaard, just to try it. The vegan option
had just been described to her as ‘salmon’, so before her plate of brown, unflavoured lentils
came out from the kitchen (pushed into the shape of a salmon, mind you), she took the
double-dare made by a fellow diner and tasted the whale. While she could absolutely agree
that the whale tasted like fishy cow, all Simone could taste was guilt and immense sadness.
A bit more of a diversion into distinction

If a tongue can taste politics, was there ever a time when it couldn’t, in your life, given
that it never had access to every kind of food –only that food made available from your
already politicised family? And does it mean that the foods you like are just down to your
personal preferences? Pierre Bourdieu (1984) would say no, and he would say that taste
with a small ‘t’ (the experience of food on the tongue) is and always was merged with
Taste with a big ‘T’ –your capacity to understand and operationalise good taste.
For Bourdieu, taste, the preference for one type of food –and other things, too, like
watching the footy, or having brunch, or going to a craft market or to see a play, or having
your nails done, or gardening, or going shooting, or reading –is not a freely chosen or
discovered penchant. For Bourdieu, it is ‘a virtue made of necessity which continuously
transforms necessity into virtue by inducing “choices” which correspond to the condi-
tion of which it is the product’ (ibid.:175). Yikes, what a sentence! But what it means is
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that ‘Tastes’ are the ‘practical affirmation of an inevitable difference; they are asserted by
the refusal of other Tastes’; aversion to different lifestyles is perhaps one of the strongest
barriers between the classes, according to Bourdieu (ibid.:56). He calls this social force
distinction. His work on taste was based on a large survey carried out in 1963 and between
1967–68, with 1,217 subjects. In this survey, people were asked to specify their preferences
on a broad range of things: everything from music and art to interior design and decor-
ating, from leisure pursuits to literature, from clothes to food. These found everyday form
in activities like choosing food from menus, picking out something to wear, going clothes
shopping, selecting furniture, planning a meal for friends, setting the table, arranging a
room, and so on . People make choices all the time, between things they find pleasing or
ugly, tacky, trendy, stylish, and so on.The yield of all this detailed work was the finding that
those in power define aesthetic concepts such as ‘taste’. Social class tends to determine
a person’s likes and interests, and distinctions based on social class are reinforced in daily
life. This narrows down infinite choice and even the idea that you could choose from
every available choice; you do indeed make a choice, but it is ‘a forced choice, produced
by conditions of existence which rule out all alternatives as mere daydreams and leave no
choice but the taste for the necessary’. Tastes are understood in this view as ‘manifested
preferences’ (ibid.:178). This means that Bourdieu finds a whole world of social meaning
in the decision to obtain and maintain a thin body, wear a linen suit in the latest shade of
oyster, select a eggshell paint finish (Simone thinks this is still where it’s at for bedrooms
and living rooms), buy cheap food from a chain store –everything. The social world, he
argues, functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system
in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgement. In expressing
a preference for a particular food, style of dress, or type of music, we are expressing an
entirely culturally learned system of values.
In Western society, ‘good taste ‘ is seen to be the domain of the upper classes. In other
words, the symbols appropriated by the economically and socially successful are the ones
that are ascribed the most worth. This definitely includes food, and the ways in which it
is acquired, prepared and served. Do you love competition food shows? They are about
T(t)aste –knowing which tastes are the coolest, most valued, the next thing happening.
They’re about style, presentation, class, drama. The arbiters are masters of those domains.
We all know how to feed ourselves, but this offers something aspirational. Then, you
can have a chance to participate by buying the ingredients, the equipment, in the super-
market. On sale is the chance to climb the class ladder, but only for those who know the
worth of doing so in the first place. Some will make embarrassing attempts, and their class
position will give them away when they serve food on the wrong plate, aren’t sufficiently
deft in their presentation, or only imitate perfectly instead of knowing that flair and style
and individuality are what distinguish, what make for distinction.
This isn’t a new notion; in the mid-1970s, Sahlins (1976) argued that the value which
American society gives to steak cannot simply be explained by the practical rationality of
appropriating scarce resources. It is symbolic logic that organises demand for a particular cut.
Sahlins pointed out that, in terms of nutrition, steak is not superior to cheaper cuts such as
tripe and tongue, so our hankering for steak wasn’t the manifestation of a deep desire for
its superior nutritional quality. He also said that because there is more steak available from
a cow, logically speaking, it should be cheaper. But it’s not! Steak is relatively expensive
because it represents a set of values that are perceived to be socially superior.
That set of values is operationalised across the entire range of foodstuffs and their acqui-
sition, preparation and consumption.The ability and willingness to eat an expanding array
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of foods is indicative of class position, for instance; the educated eater, ‘the foodie’, has an
expansive palette and craves expansion of menu and methods of preparation. Imagine the
magazines and websites that would go out of business if there wasn’t a market in how to
innovate in consumption! We could of course survive without another food programme
or even an entire channel, but how would we know about the newest, coolest way to
serve a particular food? Or about the hippest new place to acquire it? How, when and
where we eat is just as important in the operations of distinction: do you have a luscious
table setting? Does your culinary creation look as good as it tastes? Do you own the latest
essential gadget? Do you have an easy, masterful way with implements and cutlery? Do
you know which restaurants are worth visiting? Do you eat your homemade whatever-is-
trendy-this-week breakfast from an irregularly shaped hand-thrown ceramic bowl made
by whomever is so hot right now in the pottery world? Or do you have 14 cigarettes and
a coffee for breakfast, like Andy does, and don’t need a bowl? Or do you eat whatever is
left from last night’s dinner as long as that can be eaten in the car on the way to work?
Simone has been known to eat pasta from the baking dish while highway driving because
time is not her friend. And what about when you eat? Remember that eating times coin-
cide with the dominant rhythms of the West’s capitalist complex, pushing out dinnertime
in accordance with the demands of the globally integrated white-collar world –no pri-
mary producer or blue-collar worker could eat dinner at 9 or 10 p.m. and keep up with
the physical demands of work. Thus patterns of hunger might not be as ‘natural’ as we
think, just as a hankering for particular foodstuffs might say as much about our class
positions as it does about the constitution of our tastebuds. Here’s how student Emma
Hudson thinks about Bourdieu’s ideas and the idea of ‘natural’:
Consumer attention on deceptive natural flavours demands more

‘real’ in our foods, but our ideas of real may not be as natural as
we imagine.
By Emma Hudson
Keywords: flavour, class, taste, industrial food

Many people are aware that ‘natural flavours’ ubiquitous in commercial food
products are technological interpretations of what is ‘real’. This knowledge has
provoked consumers’ demands for unadulterated flavour in their food that reflects
a living and organic reality. But have you ever wondered how natural our ideas of
real food are? French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu theorises that taste is inseparable
from class, and that a method to differentiate class is to recognise the ways each
group relate to realities and fictions based on their different distances of necessity.
For Bourdieu, the upper class establishes the legitimate taste of society, typically
ascribing more worth to a life of luxury and convenience, which is conducive to
further distancing of necessity, and often in aversion to the taste of lower classes.
With this in mind, Bourdieu cautions that believing our taste and preferences are
personal and biologically defined by our senses masks the reality that our favourite
foods are shaped by upper-class sensibilities of how life should be styled, including
what life should taste like.The flavour industry has enabled these ideological fictions
to turn into a reality that is defined by form over function and manner over matter,
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driving lower classes closer to necessity and disabling them from participating
or benefiting from the conditions of power. The story of Coca-Cola epitomises
this reality. This consistently sweet, evenly coloured, always available and cheap-
to-produce beverage obscures class differences by selling the same product with
superficial changes to aesthetics and genre. The flavour concentrate is distributed
in a franchise model where the bottlers add sweetener, bubbly water, and culturally
specific packaging to enchant.The result is mass production and mass consumption,
and the flavour industry’s austere secrecy remains subtle and omnipresent. There is
something sinister about flavours being one of the few ingredients that are allowed
to be generically identified on packaged ingredient lists as ‘flavour’. In response to
this, the discerning palate of the upper class has redefined ‘real’ through a fiction
of truly ‘natural flavour’. A preference that expresses the consumer is sufficiently
equipped to value food that is produced under the principles of being ‘artisanal,
‘sustainable and ‘organic’, in a world that is still trapped in the coordinates of indus-
trial capitalism. In this paradigm, products along the lines of Cube-Cola emerge.
Cube-Cola is a flavour concentrate attempting to wild-craft and reverse-engineer
the original Coca-Cola. The product’s aim is to inverse the industrial process by
using organic ingredients to create a flavour that is not hidden from the public
eye. It’s an antithetical process to industrialisation with the ambition to maintain
the pleasure of its savours in a domestic setting. The recipe includes the oil extracts
of plants, fruits and spices: orange, lime, lemon, cassia, nutmeg, coriander, lavender
and neroli. The result is a small and concentrated bottle of truly natural ingredients
constituting a Coca-Cola flavour that tastes like the real thing. This paradox can
be untangled using Bourdieu’s theory of upper-class aversion to lower-class taste.
In an increasingly denatured world, food that is farthest from industrial interven-
tion has established a vogue for organic ingredients and flavour. But as the above
case study shows, a mass cultural beverage like Coca-Cola that had declassifying
effects on class taste has been transfigured using high-quality ingredients, which
re-establishes class disparities using the same school of thought that caused the
world to be denatured in the first place. The upper class are not willing to break
the spell of Coca-Cola’s flavour, but they are enabled by their status to recreate it
using high-grade organic ingredients to create a fictional reconnection with the
living world. The cheap imitations and real Coca-Cola –along with all the health
and environmental consequences that they produce –remain a problem for lower
classes. Flavour reveals an enigmatic force that is encoded with upper-class values
and fantasies of natural taste as part of the organisation of late capitalism.This reveals
that an appreciation of real flavour is not just a personal desire to return our taste
to a biological reality, but a social onstruct of Taste, destined by class and capacity.
In this worldview, ‘natural taste’ and ‘artificial taste’ are designed in the same shop.
We love how Emma alerts us to the idea that planet-saving notions of valuing and cele-
brating the ‘natural world’ might be classed acts, at the same time as she’s trying to get us
to think about the production of Taste and taste. This sort of thinking can be scaled and
applied to different kinds of problems and ideas, just the sort of thing that Bourdieu was
known for. As exciting as it is for us to think about the implications of Emma’s piece, its
focus on how things should taste return us to Melanie Rock’s work, on charitable food
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donation, because she focuses on the different ways that people understand the most
commonly donated foodstuff, Kraft Dinner.
The taste of food insecurity

You might love Kraft Dinner (aka Mac and Cheese, as noted earlier, and depending on
which country you’re in), but you may love it because it’s a one-off comforting snack
that feels cuddly and warm and nice. It might fit beautifully into your otherwise usually
prepared from scratch meals –one can imagine Nigella Lawson fitting Kraft Dinner into
her lusciously gourmet standards every now and again, maybe embellishing it with extra
shards of golden, cheesy meltingness, and studding it with the verdant green of fresh
parsley and the sharpness of cracked pink peppercorns. But what if you had to eat it all
the time? Would you actually be able to taste your class position? Would it taste like pov-
erty? Charity? Judgement? Melanie Rock’s informants thought so. This is an extension
of Bourdieu’s ideas –he was talking about the class-determined preferences we mistake
for free choices –as we’ve said, these determinations are sufficient to render the tastebuds
socially, and not principally physiologically, oriented to prefer certain foods. But Melanie
is talking about how people can taste the judgements that other people make of them
in the food that they donate. We need a bit of background info here to help situate how
people come to think of Kraft Dinner as conveying the judgement of others.
Despite the gravity of the food insecurity problem (affecting 9 per cent or so of the
population), the Canadian government isn’t the principal party dealing with it. In fact,
it’s food banks –charity programmes. There were almost seven hundred of these when
Melanie was writing, back in 2009 (Rock et al., 2009). They collected food locally and
redistributed it locally.The thing they received (and therefore distributed) most frequently
was Kraft Dinner. Why did people like to donate that above other products, Melanie
wondered? She and her co-authors set about finding out. She found that food-secure
people could donate a lot of Kraft Dinner without parting with a lot of money. They
considered it palatable, especially for kids. It was good that it was in a box and not a can –
a can might feel uncaring or brutal. It was considered a complete meal that was easy to
prepare. The preparation part was considered important by food-secure donators because,
even though it was in a box, you still had to ‘make’ a meal, with all the homely caring
and love that goes with it. This was specifically linked by donors to being a good parent.
Kraft Dinner is easy to store over a long period, and if you have a lot of it, it can convey
a feeling of repleteness and bounty, like you always have something in the cupboard that
you could make yourself, for your kids.
These feelings and ideas that accompany donated Kraft Dinner stand in stark contrast
with the perspectives of those who receive it. Instead of being ‘palatable’, Kraft Dinner
was more like a hunger killer of last resort consumed chiefly at the end of the month
when money is tight. It tasted a bit like failure, reminding people of their dire situation.2
Donees did not feel as though they’d been given ‘a complete meal’ –milk is required to
prepare Kraft Dinner. Additional commodities are needed, including the electricity or gas
needed to cook the noodles, and margarine to thicken the sauce. In many food-insecure
households, these items and services are rationed or absent. As some parents explained to
Melanie, it was best to give it to the children as a drink, and prepare the Kraft Dinner with
water, which made for a less delicious, but equally filling meal. Parents also explained that
they and their children dreaded the feeling of monotony that accompanied eating food
that had the same taste, colour and texture all the time; the colour of the food insecure
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diet comprised principally tertiary hues: the brown of French fries, the beige of Kraft
Dinner, the dark brown of caffeinated soft drink, the creamy colour of soft white bread. In
its monotony, its requirements for extra inputs, its taste of poverty, Kraft Dinner smelled,
tasted and looked different to donees than it did to donors. Food-insecure donees could
effectively taste the difference between what Kraft Dinner was to the food secure, and
what it was to them; but donors could only taste what they considered it to be: good
parenting, gratifyingly full cupboards, a complete meal.
You might have noticed that there’s a bit of gendered stuff going on in Rock and
colleagues’ work; they revealed, for example, that single mums were expected by donors
to use food to operationalise and demonstrate their care and love to their kids. Women
appear to be more frequently associated with the provision of this kind of care than are
men –even now. Have you noticed this? The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic saw
women quit their jobs or reduce their working hours to take care of kids in greater
numbers than men, and more women did a greater share of the domestic labour when
both parties were required to work from home during periods of lockdown. The retreat
from the labour market was often down to the fact that a (hetero) household would be
better off if the man kept his job, than the woman did; that’s all about the gendered wage
gap, where women earn less than men for doing the same job, or earn less because they
can’t break into male dominated areas of the labour market. But there’s a kind of ongoing
expectation, isn’t there, that women are a bit more naturally disposed to caring for kids and
fixing the meals and tending the domestic labour.
This might be a good time for you to do a bit of experimenting on the question
of food and gender. Anna Norden did, when she considered gender, food and kinship
together in her considerations of recipe books, and, indeed, how food gives us an insight
into how you could make sense of the vastness of the disciplinary terrain of anthropology.
Anchoring anthropology in food

By Anna Norden
The most difficult aspect of understanding how food and processes of consuming
it fit into anthropology was trying to visualise how it could fit into other ways of
thinking anthropologically.When thinking about food as an isolated object of study,
I could see how it revealed layers of uncommon knowledge and ask important
questions about everyday food practices. What makes a meal a meal? What sort of
people do we eat with, and why? These questions made sense to look at and sort
through by themselves, but I wondered how this could fit into bigger structures and
understandings of anthropology.
For my final assessment in class, I looked into my own family’s kinship relations
to dive deeper into thinking about how food interacts with other anthropological
spaces. One interesting space I uncovered through this deep dive was looking at
how food can have a role in understanding experiences of migration. By looking
at my own family’s genealogy, I started to think about how food can have a role in
filling spaces of belonging for migrant families. In this way, food can act as a bridge
between traditional experiences of life back home, with the processes of finding
belonging in a new environment. Factors such as ingredient availability often mean
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traditional recipes are adapted to fit with local ingredients. Whether it’s substituting
entire ingredients due to lack of availability, or simply adapting to use local varieties
of fruit and vegetables, migrant families mixing traditional with local ingredients
creates foods that exist between traditional heritage and a new cultural environ-
ment. This is an interesting piece of uncommon knowledge, as it demonstrates how
foods can reflect the experiences of migrant families and how they adapt to life in
new places by making a place to exist between their traditional culture and new
environment.
Thinking about how looking at food anthropologically can reveal complexities
and uncommon knowledge of the migrant experience made me consider how I can
look even further into different experiences of migration. One of these experiences
I considered was how food interacts with different gendered aspects of migration.
Looking again to my own genealogy, I considered how food might empower women
by giving them control of one aspect of adapting to life after migration. While men
were traditionally tasked with control over economic and institutionally structured
aspects of adaptation, women conforming to traditionally held gender norms of
control over the domestic space allowed them control over experiences with migra-
tion within this domestic space. Having access to traditional family recipes allows
women control over how food is perceived and created in their household as an
aspect of cultural connection. Particularly in a migrant family, handing down recipes
through women gives them power to determine if food was to be altered to fit a
specific new cultural setting and, if so, to what degree. This gives women power to
determine the role and meaning of food as an evocation of belonging and negoti-
ation between identities in migrant families. Men can be excluded from this space as
they are not given access to the recipes or the process of food creation, meaning this
is a space reserved exclusively for women. Particularly for those who lived in a time
where the power of women beyond the domestic sphere was limited, having access
to power in negotiating these relationships between food and culture gave women
the power to participate in the belonging of her family in their new environment.
By thinking about the important and meaning of food in the migrant experience,
I could see how looking at food anthropologically reveals uncommon knowledge
about broader societal and anthropological spaces. While thinking about food as an
isolated aspect of anthropology is useful to understanding it as a single area of study,
looking at how food interacts with other parts of anthropology can be just as useful
in understanding how food gives meaning to other parts of the discipline.
Exercise 1: Boy flesh eaters, girl vegans?

Go to a restaurant with a member of the opposite sex and order a black coffee and a
hot chocolate, or a chai, or a green tea. Have one person make the order for both of
you. See what happens when your order arrives –any assumptions on the part of the
server as to which beverage belongs to whom? No surprises when the male gets the
black coffee and the woman is served the cappuccino. Scale it up –order a rare steak
with chips and a delicate salad, maybe with some steamed fish or chicken, or make it
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vegetarian or vegan. Who gets what? Would you proffer a symbolic explanation, in
which white meat and vegetables serve as symbolic markers of gender? Would you
follow Carole Adams (1990) who proposes that meat gives us insight into gender
relations? She argues two things in her book The Sexual Politics of Meat: first, that
women often give men meat during times of shortage, and second, that sexual vio-
lence is directly tied to the way that humans treat other species, with the result that
the consumption of animals is equivalent with the consumption of women, who
become available for abuse, just as animals do. Think about how women can be
called, infantalisingly, ‘chicks’, bunnies’, ‘birds’, ‘kittens’ or, even more derogatorily,
‘cows’. ‘dogs’, ‘bitches’. This depends on the association of men with power, and
the capacity to wield it over ‘inferior’ bodies. In 1974, Sherry Ortner attempted to
explain this association. Given to wonder about an apparently natural association of
women with ‘nature’, she mounted an argument based in Lévi-Straussian structur-
alism.Women and men were binary opposites, but they were not equally, but instead
hierarchically, arranged relative to one another. She suggested that women create in
nature in and through their ability to give birth. Being unable to create in nature,
men create in the realm of culture. Culture trumps nature –it exists to clean up,
modify, restrict, the mess of nature. Consider sanitary products, for example; even
the name suggests that messy female bodies that naturally leak and ooze and drip
in accordance with natural ‘cycles’ must be cleaned up and rendered hygienic by
recourse to cultural products like tampons and pads. For Ortner, this is an enduring
classificatory arrangement that takes form in many different domains –including in
the realm of food and eating.You might just get an inkling of the division if you do
this exercise –and it might even be more evident if you try the next one.
Exercise 2: More meaty men

Get together a group of friends/family/people you know and some butcher paper
or white board. Get the assembled group to shout out their favourite foods –write
them all down. Now ask them to see if they could arrange them into three groups –
foods associated with men, foods associated with women, foods with neither or
both.This is always very interesting. People might be slow to start and ask you what
the hell you’re talking about. But if someone has yelled out ‘steak!’, that usually is a
good one to start with. Debates might break out –super-interesting. Someone might
say,‘Why should steak be associated with men???’ Listen carefully to that debate –it’s
all data. What you’ll get is some info about what people think should be in which
categories, and maybe a bit of explication and debate as to why, but that’s going to
be a bit different to your job, which is to make uncommon sense of the data that
you now have in hand. See if there’s themes and ideas that start organising the lists
you have. When Simone does this in her Anthropology of Food class, foods that are
light, sweet, fluffy, fancy, or resemble female body parts (oysters almost always get
a mention, which makes Simone wonder if she shouldn’t offer an anatomy class
alongside her Food class) always wind up on the female side of the list. The soft and
fluffy food isn’t just symbolic –it’s penetrable, desirable, decorative and is sometimes
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described as something that has to be resisted. Sound familiar? This exercise always
frightens Simone. What did you get? How will you start making uncommon sense
of your data? Don’t just fall back on ‘men have greater caloric needs and that’s
evolutionary’; remember, if that explanation is being operationalised, it’s being
operationalised within the cultural coordinates of the current world –and quite a
bit of that world would have to be ignored for this explanation to get very far.
Food distribution: eating with the plumber

Rock et al.’s 2009 work on food insecurity –the one we began with in this chapter –
addresses a really fascinating part of food distribution. But it begs a background question,
concerning what we think is at the root cause of uneven food distribution. Mary Douglas
begins her book Food in the Social Order with this:
The idea is still widely held that the proper, the most direct, and indeed the only true
way to prevent famine and hunger is to increase food production. The emphasis on
the physical shortage of food materials has guided economic planning and dominated
debates about global population and resources. It will be a difficult notion to correct,
sustained as it is by convenient fictions and anchored in shared prejudices. But gradually
a reaction is being expressed. Food policy is not merely concerned with production,
storage, and conveyance to the kitchens of the people. The worst horrors of famines
could be diminished and many famines even be averted if understanding the social,
legal, and economic aspects of food problems was given priority. Amartya Sen (1981),
in his study of the four great famines in Bangladesh, Bengal, Sahel, and Ethiopia [Poverty
and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation], demonstrates that famines cannot
be explained by food shortages: famines are liable to occur even with good harvests and
even in prosperity. People die of starvation in front of food-filled shops. The causes are
complex shifts in the legal entitlements which determine individuals’ access to food.
(Douglas, 1984:1)
This means that the really important questions about food and eating are moral and social.
That’s because, as Rock and colleagues’ work indicates, being food secure isn’t just about
calories; we don’t hunger for a pill with the requisite amount of those within it. Food is who
we are –even in famine. Not everything is food to everyone. Who counts what as food is
powerful –and powerfully exclusionary. Check out Figure 7.1.This is Mary Douglas’s ‘Social
Universe’ diagram, from her 1972 article ‘Deciphering A Meal’. She was big on writing and
being present in the home and luckily for you, she turned her attention to meals.
Social Universe (a) Share-drinks (b) share-food-too

(Douglas, 1972:67).
Think about this. With whom do you share drinks in the home?
Simone, who is always renovating her house because she is very indecisive, answers, first
of all, ‘tradies’. Anyone who is working in the house gets coffee, tea, water, or, if it’s at
218
Figure 7.1 Mary Douglas’s Social Universe diagram.
the end of the day and she’s trying to secure a discount, beer. Other people in category
(a) who definitely get a drink at Simone’s place are family members, people who have
dropped by, strangers who are thirsty, anyone dying of thirst, and the people who live next
door. When thinking about category (b), Simone reports that she has only ever offered
one tradesperson a meal; that was a plumber whose wife had just had a new baby and he’d
come to do a plumbing job to get away from said baby. His wife had gone on a health
kick, as some people do when they have a baby, and would no longer permit hot chips
in the house. The plumber begged Simone to cook him some hot chips and let him have
a half-hour nap on the sofa, in return for which he would do the plumbing job for free.
This was a good deal; Simone now has a top-notch hot water pump and she didn’t even
have to provide ketchup or a blanket. More regular consumers of meals at Simone’s house
would include family members, close friends and people whom she’d like to have as close
friends. Also in category (b) would be people she is trying desperately to impress (see
previous remarks regarding Bourdieu –that’s when the good cutlery comes out, and the
really cool and dramatic dried seed pods (flowers are so passe now) and the charmingly
mismatched tableware that makes it look oh-so-effortlessly chic (even though it takes
about four hours to set the table, with the help of a Real Living magazine and a florist).
Drinks are for strangers, acquaintances, tradespeople and family. Meals are for family, close
friends, honoured guests. Andy is so lovely and inviting, that many more people than
Simone would let into her house are in category (b) of Douglas’s diagram, but the idea
still holds; there are some people who probably can’t enter.
Notice how the divider in Douglas’s diagram is the line between intimacy and distance.
Those we know at meals we also know at drinks. The meal expresses close friendship, or
the desire for it. Those we only know at drinks we know less intimately. For as long as
that boundary matters, there will be a distinction between drinks and meals at Simone’s
place, and maybe your place, too. It’s not as simple as this particular diagram depicts: there’s
meals, and then there’s meals. What time is this meal? Is it lunch, or dinner? Breakfast???
Think about this in terms of a date to clarify it in your own mind.You’ve met someone.
You might ask them to go for a drink before you ask them to go out to dinner with you.
219

It may be a bit forward to ask them as soon as you sight them to have breakfast with
you –that may have some connotations (and of course we remind you that it would be a
very bad idea to take romantic advice from us). And then, it’s probably significant where
you go and what you have for this dinner you’re having together –is it out to an intimate
restaurant? Is it pizza on the beach? Is it a fast food place where you eat next to each
other rather than sitting across from one another? And what’s the big deal about eating
together early on in the potential romance? Are you trying to figure out if his manners are
so disgusting that he’d be an embarrassment to introduce to anyone else? Are you seeing if
she’s got dreadful politics that don’t square up with your vegan-based ones? Maybe –you
can get a lot of info from what and how someone eats. Mary Douglas thought that food
(and eating it, when and where and by what means it was eaten, and with whom) was
part of a code. She remarked:
If food is treated as a code, the messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of
social relations being expressed. The message is about different degrees of hierarchy,
inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across the boundaries. Like sex,
the taking of food has a social component, as well as a biological one.
(Douglas, 1972:61)
Who do you feed at your table? Not everyone.Who do you exclude, include? With whom
do you eat, and what, and how, and what times of the day? Understanding all of this, in
the terms of getting to the undergirding rules for in and exclusion in foodways is hugely
more important than producing more food. Think of it this way: we already have suffi-
cient food –it depends on what you think food is. And, who you count as someone with
whom you’d share food –a fellow eater. We tend to eat exclusively –not with everyone,
and not the same food.You can’t start before these things –before religion, morals, sociality.
Rather, you must start with them, looking into the patterns they yield among particular
kinds of eaters, and then discovering what underlying rules make food, food. More on this
shortly, when we look at pigs as we turn now to consider the animal side of this equation;
but first let’s take a look at what Xinlei Qi has to say about this. During her anthropology
course with Simone, Xinlei became interested in what she called ‘the worrying rising
statistics of eating alone’. She found a number of organisations that had popped up to
‘restore collective family dining moments through sharing and volunteer programs’:
Eating together?
By Xineli Qi
Such programs include sharing out extra portions of food to neighbours who can’t
cook, thus bringing people together.Through such initiatives, people can familiarise
themselves with new and hitherto untasted foodstuffs, bringing them together in
conversation as much as sustenance. For instance, the London casserole club takes
care of those who can’t cook for themselves by volunteering extra bites of home-
cooked food to people who would not normally show up at the familial table.
Additionally, South African ‘jams’ pair members of the public previously unknown
to one another to prepare meals together. While such initiatives bring people into
20
eating concert, the fact that they are ‘initiatives’ and appear as unusual and rare
practices of commensality indicates the accuracy of Mary Douglas’s sense that
eating together has particular and enduring boundaries.
Animals and a potted history of anthropological thought: the

super-short and snappy version
Animals are really good to think with, as Lévi-Strauss once said. Well, he kind of said this;
there is some controversy over it. Here’s what he actually said in Totemism (1963):
We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are “good to
eat” but because they are “good to think”.
(Levi-Strauss. 1963:89)
In any case, what we can say is that animals permit us to exercise an analytic imagination.
Wait until you see the array of insights that result from our attendance to them. Because
anthropologists have done so much work using animals to think with, you could just use
animals as the theme by which to make a potted history of the discipline. We’re going to
do that, a bit, below –and we’re definitely going to go all over the place, quite unapolo-
getically, to do so. This is probably quite a nice way to familiarise yourself with anthropo-
logical theory –it’s like a wandering story, rather than a compartmentalised history. Look
deeper into the things we cover, taking note of what you’re attracted to, and anything you
feel about why that might be the case.
From the 19th century onward, anthropology’s interest in nonhuman animals
… ran along one or both of two very broad thematic axes. One asked about the
role of animals as material, economic, and political resources for humans in society.
Another investigated the role of animals in human cultural, symbolic, and conceptual
schemes. The opposition between the two was famously cast by Claude Lévi-Strauss,
a prominent proponent of the second line of enquiry, as one between seeing animals
as ‘good to eat’ and seeing them as ‘good to think’ with (Lévi-Strauss, 1963:89). The
oscillation between the two approaches and their recombination can be seen by
briefly scanning the role of animals in successive anthropological paradigms.
(White and Candea, 2018:n.p.)
In the 19th century, totemism and animism were understood to prefigure modern reli-
gious organisation. In respect of totemism, James Frazer thought that the practice of ven-
erating particular animals and plants as gods was a precursor to religion (see, for example,
Frazer, 1887). Certain species were associated with particular human groups (like clans);
Edward B. Tylor was quick to suggest that if different groups could be emblematically
distinguished from the generalised society by their association with a particular animal,
then this compartmentalising structure could serve to regulate relations between the
various totemic groups (see Tylor, 1871).
Animism was much more generally configured as the tendency of nonwhite people to
interpret nonhuman objects, plants and animals as endowed with souls (see, cf. McLennan,
1869–70; Bird-David, 1999). This was of course understood as a failure of nonwhite
21

humans to understand that humans were exceptional and should be demonstrating
dominion over animals; this allowed Europeans (who definitely did know that humans
were exceptional and should be lording it over animals) to very firmly place nonwhite
people in the ‘primitive’ stage of a ‘singular progressive historical path leading to the
‘advanced’ or ‘modern’ societies of Europe’ (see White and Candea, 2018:n.p.; see also
Kuper, 2005).
We bet you latched hold of that description of totemism –and the idea that animals
(and plants) could form a basis for distinguishing between groups, and managing groups.
Durkheim (1915) certainly picked up on this. Where Tylor had declared animism a
window onto the primitive and childlike sensibility and capacity of the non-Western
human, Durkheim rejected the notion that animal totems or gods derived their power
from some mystical capacity. He proposed instead that the social groups for which those
animals stood as totems held the real power (see Bird-David, 1999). The trick was to see
beyond and behind the totemic animal itself to appreciate that beneath and beyond it lay
the power of social solidarity. As White and Candea observe:
… members of a clan would unite around their totemic emblem through collective
rituals which created a powerful sense of togetherness. This grounded Durkheim’s
broader functionalist theory of religion. In worshiping god(s), Durkheim suggested,
people unknowingly worshipped and maintained the structure of society itself:
totems reflected and maintained the sub-divided structure of clan-based societies,
just as monotheistic gods became a single focus for a broader, undivided church.
This is sounding pretty functionalist; it won’t surprise you at all to learn that Malinowski said:
In totemism we see not the result of early man’s speculations about mysterious phe-
nomena, but a blend of a utilitarian anxiety about the most necessary objects of his
surroundings, with some preoccupation in those which strike his imagination and
attract his attention, such as beautiful birds, reptiles and dangerous animals.
(Malinowski 1925:4)
But it wasn’t just the functionalists who got excited about the practical management
of the world that a focus on animals let them see. Marvin Harris’s ideas about cultural
materialism, which we’ll look at a bit more closely shortly, proposed that all the mys-
terious and deeply symbolic assignations people gave to animals in religion were actually
just covering up sensible responses to the ecological conditions under which people lived.
For instance, Harris wanted no truck with the idea that cows were sacred in Hinduism;
he instead proposed that the ecological circumstances under which people lived dictated
that cows were worth far more alive –as labour and ongoing sources of dairy food –than
they were dead. To remind people to preserve this essentially utilitarian bovine purpose,
superstructural prohibitions emerged (see Harris, 1968).
Lévi-Strauss remained unimpressed by all of this utilitarian guff; his now (rightly or
wrongly) cliched line –that ‘animals are good to think with’ –was issued as a direct assault
on functionalist thinking, proffered in eminently quotable shorthand. His view was that
animals were part of a structure of human thinking that was common across all societies.
It was levelled at functionalists on the basis that their insights were reducible to simple
utilitarianism.
2

While there is absolutely no doubt at all that structural-functionalists such as Radcliffe-
Brown were super-duper interested in apportioning explanatory weight to the material
and economic bases of social arrangements, none of the functionalists was really all that
interested in explaining cultural phenomena exclusively (or even principally) through any
singular utilitarian analysis (as some might accuse Harris’s profoundly and unapologet-
ically materialist theories of doing; see Harris, 1968; he was definitely interested in doing
singular utilitarian analysis). So, as we’ll say in more detail in a moment, even though
Evans-Pritchard’s classic ethnography The Nuer (1940) notes at the outset that cows are
absolutely the economic foundation of Nuer life, they are also and equally the foundation
of every other part of life, too.
Mary Douglas (1966a) shared Lévi-Strauss’s worries about utilitarian tendencies. She
disputed the medical, economic and ecological explication of food prohibitions –in her
best-known example, in the book of Leviticus –to argue that
behind the seemingly random list of prohibited animals –the pig, but also the camel,
shellfish, and so on –Douglas detected (or devised) a logical structure according to
which excluded animals were each in their own way being singled out as anomalies
from a broader type or rule … The master logic of the entire system was one of
categorization and perfection –a setting apart of the perfect from imperfect, which
echoed the setting apart of the chosen people to whom Leviticus was addressed, from
the other people surrounding them.
As you might well imagine, this sort of thinking put Douglas in direct conflict with
Harris, founding what’s now known as the great ‘Sacred Cow Controversy’ (have a wee
look at Harris, 1966, to get a sense of how this all started; his opening paragraph says ‘I
have written this paper because I believe the irrational non-economic and exotic aspects
of the Indian cattle complex are greatly overemphasized at the expense of rational, eco-
nomic and mundane interpretations’ (ibid.:261), and it all heated up dramatically from
there (see, for example, Harris, 1978). Another anthropologist diametrically opposed to
utilitarianism was Clifford Geertz, who produced an unapologetically messy account of
the Balinese cockfight. In it, Geertz showed how the purpose of a cockfight was not to
function to assuage social passions, or bring them into existence, but to show them (see
Geertz, 1973:443–444). His attendance to the animal brought meaning and emotion into
the interpretive frame. However, Geertz was interested in picking out those public inter-
pretations that the Balinese people themselves would pick out. This was pretty different
from the structuralists’ take on things (like Lévi-Strauss); they were interested in revealing
the hidden patterns that people could not see. Simone has this to say on the topic:
The endurance of functionalist analyses and their appearance in ostensibly very

different streams of anthropological theory notwithstanding, all the proponents of
‘Good to Think With’ shared in common a concern not with actual flesh-and-blood
animals, but with mythical, symbolic, or ritual animals, rather than participants in
social interactions with humans. Cassidy (2007) concludes that this anthropological
posture mirrored zoological thinking, which emphasized human control over plants,
animals and “primitive” peoples and incorporated them to the “civilized” world
for purposes of exploitation (Segata and Lewgoy, 2016:27). However, as Segata
and Lewgoy (2016:27) note, these criticisms are not new, existing in seed forms in
23

Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, edited by Talal Asad (1973) and Woman,
Culture and Society, edited by Michele Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (1974). These
were crucially important in destabilizing the ethnocentric and androcentric premises
upon which anthropology was founded, and appear coincident with Singer’s Animal
Liberation, in 1975. The reformulation of the ethical and political horizon of the
problem of animals in the West in the late twentieth century, the rising post-colonial
feminist (continuing) struggles, and the (continuing) erasure of white privilege have
leached into the ways in which anthropologists have approached nonhuman animals
over time, making it hard to identify a hard break between multispecies ethnog-
raphy and that which preceded it. Despite the pressure building in related anthropo-
logical fault lines that indubitably produced critical disciplinary reworking of the
relations between human and nonhumans, an intention to think beyond the concep-
tual engagement of nonhuman others was indeed taken at the turn of the twenty-
first century (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010:552; White and Candea, 2018). Arising
from the intersection of environmental studies, science and technology studies and
animal studies, multispecies ethnography sought to simultaneously take inspiration
and play truant from all three, taking its initial cues from the possibilities arising from
“living organisms, artifacts from the biological sciences, and surprising biopolitical
interventions” (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010:575), all of which were present at the
founding art exhibition, the Multispecies Salon.
(Dennis, 2022:17)
Before you get too excited, the emergence of multispecies ethnography has to be set
in contrast with the possibility of combining materialist and conceptual analytic strands
together. In 1999, Molly Mullin wrote ‘Mirrors and Windows’ for the Annual Review of
Anthropology (see also Shanklin, 1985). She recognised how aggressively opposed to one
another the ‘materialists’ and ‘idealists’ were, but she also thought this vigour disguised
their complementary potential.3 At the heart of the two approaches’ failure to ever really
come together was the endurance of the dualism between nature and culture; it really
oriented anthropological work. A new approach –multispecies ethnography –would be
needed to get to the entanglements of humans and animals that were never really reducible
to dualisms of this kind. And, it would turn out to be an urgently needed approach: the
nature–culture dualism lies behind contemporary environmental catastrophes, as well as
the brutalities of the ‘animal industrial complex’, because culture emerges triumphant
from the dualism to make binary into hierarchy.
Some anthropologists, like Tim Ingold, argue that there really isn’t anything new about
multispecies ethnography; he reckons its main effect has been to obscure that fact that
animals have been taken seriously as actors in human social systems for decades (and at
least since the 1970s, when his own research on reindeer and their herders in Finland was
published; see Ingold, 1974). There are other kinds of criticisms, too; Simone has recently
harshly criticised multispecies ethnography on just these grounds:
A 2021 special issue of The Australian Journal of Anthropology edited by Fijn and Kavesh
“strives to extend beyond human embodiment to engage with the senses beyond
the human” (2021:10) and seeks to examine human-animal relations “beyond lan-
guage” (2021:13).Yet, some of the claims made therein might be open to accusations
of retaining a commitment to the human as the central figure in the enterprise. One
of the editors of the volume, Fijnn, notes that her own contribution to including
24

animals as agents rather than actors in the Anthropocene, has employed multispecies
storytelling through observational filmmaking (see for example Fijn, 2015, 2019):“By
using a GoPro camera that was strapped to the helmet of horse riders, Fijn’s footage
compares the extreme climates of the Khangai Mountains of Mongolia with the
drought-stricken landscape of New South Wales in Australia, while riding through
both landscapes on horseback.The viewer in adjacent film segments experiences how
both horses and humans encounter a whitened, snowstorm landscape in Mongolia
… in comparison with a blackened, fire-ravaged landscape in Australia” (Fijn and
Kavesh, 2021:17). [But] one might say that the relationship between the horse and
the rider is not so much a collaboration as a continuation of a power relationship in a
new politico-environmental atmosphere … the GoPro is strapped to the head of the
rider, not the horse and thus cannot capture the perspective of the horse, rather only
that of the horse rider. Indeed, one might argue that even if it were to be strapped
to the horse, a GoPro would still be unable to feel, smell, see, taste, hear that which
came to greet the horse’s sensory receptors. Notwithstanding the notion that horse
and rider might become a single entity –something that is phenomenologically
required for competent horse-riding –the horse encounters the ground, the rider
does not; the horse encounters the climate under investigation in the films through
hair-covered skin, and through eyes, ears, mouth and nostrils oriented to the world
in different ways from the human rider. Recognition of these things might lead to
the further critique, that the visual method employed has not been examined for its
political import in these and potentially other ways.
(Dennis, 2022:22)
That’s nothing compared to Helena Kopnina’s (2017) criticism of multispecies eth-

nography. She asks, why don’t multispecies ethnographers do anything to address the
actual conditions under which (particular kinds of) animals suffer the most? It certainly
isn’t horses; what about the commonest meat and laboratory experimental animals?
Kopnina’s question immediately indicates that only certain kinds of nonhuman being
have thus far been explored under the multispecies hand: mushrooms, dogs, bird, horses
and insects abound; pigs, sheep and cows, rats and mice are far less present. Her critique
draws attention to the stunning absence of millions of sheep, chicken, pigs, cows and
rodent research animals whose unwilling entailment in the industrial coordinates of
egg, meat, milk, pelt and experimental production and consumption do not come up
during horseback rides. The self-restriction of multispecies ethnographers to ‘comfort-
able intellectual spaces’, their addressing of local political issues, and their consequent
failure to be with most animals suggests that multispecies ethnographers have remained
firmly in conceptual terrain. It is in this sense that the accusation Kopnina makes is
very serious.
Animals and a potted history of anthropological thinking: the much

longer and meandering version
You already know how important functionalist analyses were to the development of
kinship in anthropology, and, from our short version of anthropological thinking as set out
above, you now you have an animal connection into that. You can see how functionalist
analyses understood animals as ‘compartmentalisers’ and regulators. But, as we also said in
that section, it wasn’t all utilitarianism. Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer is a great example of
25

the centrality of the animal –in this case, the cow –to his analysis of a society he thought
ran on ‘a bovine idiom’ (1940:19). The division of chapters in the book is as follows:
I. Interest in Cattle
II. Oecology (human ecology)
III. Time and Space
IV. The Political System
V. The Lineage System
VI. The Age-Set System
Cows are in it the whole way through. Evans-Pritchard noticed their centrality in every
aspect of life, and understood how important it was to understand the symbolic, religious,
political and economic of cattle to the Nuer if you wanted to understand kinship –and
marriage in particular. Nevertheless, the approach proved unsatisfactory to structuralists,
especially Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Structuralism, which began to emerge in the 1940s, is principally associated with
Claude Lévi-Strauss (see, for example, 1949 (1969); 1955 (1963); 1958; 1962 (1966); 1964
(1969); Jakobsen was an important influence here too (see, for example, Jakobsen, 1971
and Jakobsen and Waugh, 1979). Lévi-Strauss lived until he was 100 years old; he died on
3 November . When he passed away, it was reported in a way that reflected just how sig-
nificant his contributions had been, and just how valued he was as a thinker:
(Reuters) –French intellectual Claude Lévi- Strauss, the founder of structural

anthropology, has died at the age of 100, his publishing house Plon said on Tuesday.
Lévi-Strauss, who was known to a wider public thanks to his 1955 memoir and
masterpiece, “Tristes Tropiques,” died on Saturday. He would have turned 101 on
November 28. “He was France’s greatest scientist,” said writer Jean d’Ormesson,
fellow member of the Academie Francaise which brings together the elite of the
country’s intellectual establishment. A brilliant student who excelled at geology, law
and philosophy, Lévi-Strauss was posted to Brazil as a professor in 1935. It was there
that he found his vocation for anthropology. He conducted several expeditions into
remote areas of the Amazon rainforest and the Mato Grosso to study the customs of
local tribes, starting to develop theories and methods that would later have a pro-
found impact on his field. He returned to France and was drafted into the French
army at the start of World War Two. After the defeat of France by the Nazis, he
realized that being Jewish had now become dangerous and he moved to the United
States until 1944. Over the following years, he held a number of prestigious scien-
tific posts in Paris and New York and started to churn out his influential scientific
volumes.
(Shirbon, 2009)
Lévi-Strauss did not really do ethnography, and is famous for remarking, in his Tristes
Tropiques (1955 (1963), ‘I HATE VOYAGES’. This is super important for you to under-
stand. In one sense, you could say that we’ve banged on a bit about the importance of eth-
nography as the principal way in which you get your data. But you will also have noticed,
perhaps, that we’ve privileged above and beyond that the importance of seeing things in
anthropological terms –the making of uncommon sense of the world.You don’t need to
carry out ethnography to make uncommon sense of the world.
26

The particular way in which Lévi-Strauss made uncommon sense of the world was by
analysing tribal customs and myths, to show that human behaviour is based on systems.
These might vary from society to society, but Lévi-Strauss proposed that all of them were
undergirded by a universal structure. In part, this explains why Lévi-Strauss’s death made
it into the papers in such a big way (besides the fact that France treats its intellectuals a bit
more reverently than Australia does). It’s important to appreciate the magnitude of Lévi-
Strauss’s ideas; essentially, he was saying that there was a universal structure to the human
mind. It’s hard to distinguish between us when we’re all essentially the same at this fun-
damental level, so the theory is consequential. One of the results of thinking universally is
that it proposes that humans are more essentially similar than they are essentially different.
The basis of the colonialist projects that were still unfolding in the 20th century concur-
rent with Lévi-Strauss’s work were propelled by the idea that Western European culture
was unique and superior. The proposal that a universal system sat beneath only a surface
difference resonated with opponents of colonialism, and Lévi-Strauss gained a following
beyond his fellow anthropologists.
You might recall some other theoreticians who have turned anthropological ideas
against colonialist agendas. While some of the structural functionalists provided
understandings of kinship to colonial masters, Malinowski, psychological functionalist,
was interested in understanding how societies provided their members with essentially
the same psychological comforts and needs. If this was the basis of understanding, then
people’s behaviours could be understood as rational in whatever specific cultural context
they took shape. And Franz Boas espoused cultural relativism, which insisted that cultures
be understood in and on their own unique terms (see Boas, 1940). This is really different
from the proposition of a universal structure undergirding all human societies, but the two
approaches share an intention to decolonise understandings of ‘others’ based on Western
notions of exceptionalism and superiority.You may have heard of Boas’s famous student,
Margaret Mead (1928), who wrote Coming of Age in Samoa. If you haven’t, your Mum or
your Nan has –go ask her. This book really exemplified Boasian ideas. At the tender age
of 23, Mead went off to Samoa to prove, really, that coming of age –that is, approaching
sexual maturity –in the West was a truly tumultuous time, filled with angst and rebel-
lion and trouble. But, that all depended on how much of a big deal was made of it in the
culture in question. Culture shaped this transition that we in the West had presumed was
a universal period of difficult transition. Mead came back convinced that Boas had been
right –theirs was a version of cultural determinism. And, since cultures profoundly shaped
people, they could be changed to make better people. Mead was very popular among uni-
versity students and, later (in the 1960s and 1970s) the television viewing public, because
she thought that cultural change could deliver positive change in women’s rights, make
for better adjusted and less stressed kids, produce better race relations, fix environmental
pollution and solve world hunger.
ANU’s own Derek Freeman, who died in 2001, strenuously objected to Boasian cul-
tural determinism and mounted a long and sturdy campaign to prove it wrong. In his
Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Freeman,
1983) and The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of her Samoan Research
(Freeman, 1999), he prosecuted the argument that Mead had very much wanted to find
as she did, and so, did. Given Mead’s popularity (there was even a stamp issued in the US
bearing her image– see https://about.usps.com/who/profiile/history/women-stamp-
subjects.htm) this was quite the kerfuffle, and Freeman is often cast as the baddie in the
situation. But, as you already know, the questioning of anthropological insights is crucial
27

to the production of the discipline’s knowledge and methodologies. If you’re interested
in this controversy, have a look at one of the numerous videos –this one features a
Samoan informant: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOCYhmnx6o8. Freeman’s disputa-
tion of Mead’s work was ultimately a disputation of Boasian cultural determinism –and
an important one at that. In historical turn, Boas’s position was important, combating the
evolutionist views that had hitherto dominated. Getting the sense that reflexivity isn’t just
a personal introspection? Hold that thought –we’ll revisit it shortly, in our final chapter,
via some Bourdieusian ideas.
Alongside Mead’s supervisor Franz Boas, Lévi- Strauss and Malinowski had also
experienced being understood as the ‘other’ themselves; Lévi-Strauss was a Jew, hence his
flight from Paris when Germany invaded. Malinowski found himself in a tricky situation
at the outbreak of the First World War I –although ethnically Polish, he was a subject
of Austria-Hungary, making him an enemy of the United Kingdom; not great when
you’re carrying out fieldwork in Australia. Franz Boas came from a Jewish family –his
grandparents still observed the faith, but Boas lived in an Enlightenment household dis-
approving of any kind of dogma. He said of it:
The background of my early thinking was a German home in which the ideals of
the revolution of 1848 were a living force. My father, liberal, but not active in public
affairs; my mother, idealistic, with a lively interest in public matters; the founder
about 1854 of the kindergarten in my hometown, devoted to science. My parents
had broken through the shackles of dogma. My father had retained an emotional
affection for the ceremonial of his parental home, without allowing it to influence
his intellectual freedom.
(Boas, 1938:201)
It was on this experiential foundation that Boas built opposition to the then-popular
ideologies of scientific racism (the theory that race is a biological concept and that human
behaviour is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics). Boas
opposed this in a very, very clever way –in and through his understanding of skeletal
anatomy. Using it, he demonstrated that cranial shape and size varied hugely, relative to
environmental factors such as health and nutrition. It wasn’t stable, as the theory had it.
The same sort of idea held for the behavioural side of things; behaviours weren’t innate
either; they arose as a result of cultural differences acquired through social learning, not as
outgrowths of biology. Franz Boas taught at Columbia University on New York’s Upper
West Side when Lévi-Strauss came to the US. In fact, in 1942, while having dinner at
the Faculty House at Columbia, Boas died of a heart attack right in front of Lévi-Strauss.
Remember we said that Lévi-Strauss didn’t much care for ethnography? His one and
only attempt at it almost won him a prize (though for literature, not for ethnography).
The book Tristes Tropiques, appeared in 1955, and described, in the form of a travel novel,
his experiences as a French expatriate throughout the 1930s (Lévi-Strauss, 1955 [1963]).
It’s stunning. The prose is gorgeous, it’s got philosophical musings in it, and it’s even got
ethnographic work of Amazonian peoples. He couldn’t win the Prix Goncourt in the
end, though, because it wasn’t really a work of fiction, which it would have needed to be
to qualify.You should still read it anyway: it’s brilliant.
Myth was a central area of structuralist investigation. The structuralist’s job is to look
closely at the rules that organise the relationships between such things as the elements
of myth. The structuralist divides the myth into parts and looks closely at the binary
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contrasts between the parts of the myth. This sort of approach yields the structural core,
and reveals the essential elements of human thought that organised the myth. In The Raw
and the Cooked (Lévi-Strauss, 1964 [1969]), he explains that the structures of myths pro-
vide basic structures for understanding cultural relations. For example, ‘raw’ is opposed to
that which is cooked, but ‘raw’ is also natural, while cooked is cultural.These oppositions
form the foundation structure not only for a myth involving them, but for ideas and
concepts in culture more broadly. According to Lévi-Strauss, ‘mythical thought always
progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution’ (1958:224). What
does this mean? It means that myths consist of elements that oppose or contradict each
other, and other elements that resolve, those oppositions. Guess what? Animals are super-
important here.
For example, Lévi-Strauss considered the ‘Trickster’ of many Native American myth-
ologies as a ‘mediator’. His argument here hinges on two facts about the Native American
trickster: 1) the trickster has a contradictory and unpredictable personality, and 2) the
trickster is almost always a crow/raven or a coyote. Lévi-Strauss argues that the raven and
coyote mediate the opposition between life and death. The relationship between agri-
culture and hunting is analogous to the opposition between life and death. Agriculture
is solely concerned with producing life; hunting is concerned with producing death.
The relationship between herbivores and beasts of prey is equivalent to the relationship
between agriculture and hunting: like agriculture, herbivores are concerned with plants;
like hunting, beasts of prey are concerned with catching meat. Lévi-Strauss points out that
the raven and coyote eat carrion and are therefore halfway between herbivores and beasts
of prey: like beasts of prey, they eat meat; like herbivores, they don’t catch their food.They
mediate distinctly opposite domains, therefore.
You might be getting strong Mary Douglas vibes here. If you are, that’s right! These
animals are between categories. We know what that means!
Mary Douglas attempted to analyse universal patterns of symbolism. She focused on
beliefs about pollution and hygiene, as these beliefs are expressed in religion, as in Purity
and Danger (Douglas,1966b). It’s indubitably one of the most important anthropological
works of the 20th century. In the world-changing department, it’s had very significant
impact outside of the discipline, yielding insights into everything from architecture to
consumer behaviour, from humour to hunger, from urban design to the Holocaust. In
all of those arenas, its peculiar worth has been founded in revealing taxonomic thinking
and its importance to world-making. And, the work contributes too to the dismantling
of Western and non-Western difference we were just talking about, often presented as
European and ‘primitive’ thinking at the time of her writing. Where Malinowski eroded
that difference in and through the establishment of universal rationality, Douglas eroded
it by recourse to notion that modern Western conceptions of dirt, and responses to it,
though naturalised and presented as rational, paralleled the superstitious practices attached
to primitive religious rituals. In the late 1960s, this was a most uncomfortable and unset-
tling idea.
Purity and Danger is indeed an influential work, but it wasn’t always so. Well into the
late 1970s, the exploration of social and cultural systems and their exclusions, prohibitions
and margins was somewhat ironically initially considered pretty marginal to anthropology
itself, something that reportedly caused Douglas significant discontent. The conditions
of its production are not insignificant to how and why the work wound up having the
clout that it eventually did have, well beyond the disciplinary bounds –as we’ll see in just
a moment.
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Purity and Danger is an analysis of the concepts of ritual purity and pollution in different
societies at different times.The local contexts vary, but the underlying idea is the same: dirt
is ambiguous and anomalous, causing anxiety by disrupting classification systems and
the ‘normal’ ordered relations through which one understands the world, whatever that
world happens to be in local context. There’s a few important things here, including that
universally, people ‘feel’ kind of ‘naturally’ that something is wrong and thus register dirt
feelingfully and in the body. Also present is the notion that dirt is not something in itself,
but is instead the result of the failure of things, persons, ideas, practices, to fit into classi-
ficatory system. That is, dirt is ‘a kind of compendium category for all events which blur,
smudge, contradict, or otherwise confuse accepted classifications. The underlying feeling
is that a system of values which is habitually expressed in a given arrangement of things
has been violated’ (Douglas, 1975:51). Douglas details four kinds of violations to classifi-
cation systems. The first one concerns that pollution that arises around external bound-
aries, which people manage with rules about the circumstances under which things can
come into and exit from the social and physical body.
The second violation concerns transgression of the internal lines of the system. People
classify social life into two opposing categories: what is acceptable and what is unaccept-
able. It is this classification system that provides societies with their moral or ethical order.
Transgressions might occur on that internal line that separates acceptable from unaccept-
able and to deal with it; people can develop secular and or religious rituals to make sure
they stay both physically and morally pure. It is for instance unacceptable to eat food that
has fallen to the floor and we generally do not consume it, but perhaps you invoke the 5-
second rule –or the 10-second rule –or longer –to keep you safe, to prevent pollution,
when you retrieve your delicious cake from the rug where the dog has been. Perhaps you
wipe your bench down before food preparation, but you probably do not let the product
stand for the half-hour that would guarantee a germ-free surface. That’s right –if you
read the label on your surface cleaner, you might find it has some conditions on its germ-
killing claims. Lucky for you, the rules Douglas is talking about are not to do with simply
guaranteeing hygiene; instead, they are best understood as moral symbols firmly based in
the concepts people have developed about impurity.
The third danger arises as boundary pollution, and permits us to hierarchise the
dangers that emerge at the margins. Many things emerge from the body, but some things
are worse than others. It’s hard to think of why, really, snot is so much worse than tears,
and why it never had a place in poetic renderings of heartbreak. Imagine if your lover
wrote you a poem about snot! That would be hilarious, but probably not romantic. Maybe
you can write one to someone you (don’t?) like, and let us know how it goes. This is
important because different cultures rank marginal material differently, and in accordance
with broader social concerns but, universally, the worst pollutants are the ones having
to do with the profoundly social practices of sex and eating (poo is a result of eating,
remember –Simone thinks that the no swimming for half an hour after eating rule is
a very good rule, but that it should be extended to, say, somewhere around four hours).
The fourth and final one deals with internal contradiction and describes the kind of
pollution that threatens really strict purity systems. Strict purity is really hard to live up
to, and people often fail, accidents happen, or things in the world just don’t fit neatly into
the categories and remain anomalous. Stuff like that presents a terrible threat because
contradictions and hypocrisy could bring down the whole system. People could deal
with that by nominating someone –like a priest or a virgin –to be pure on the behalf
of everyone else. Another option is to pretend to be pure, like Chagga men who, post
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initiation, pretend that their anuses are permanently blocked. The basic idea is that things
that don’t fit have to be taken care of ideologically in case they pollute the entire classi-
ficatory system.
With all of that under our belts, it’s easy to apply some of this to real-world examples.
You can see from the four descriptions of how pollution rises up to threaten classifica-
tion systems that borders and boundaries are important to Douglas. She describes work
that people must do to maintain the integrity of systems as a kind of vocabulary of spatial
limits and physical and verbal signals to hedge around vulnerable relations. In eliminating
dirt of all kinds, Douglas argues, we are involved in a perpetual spatial and visual process
of arranging and rearranging the environment, busily ‘making the world conform to an
idea’. It’s really easy to apply Douglas’s ideas in spatial and visual terms. For example, we
can see that spaces we’re familiar with make our classificatory systems visible. Spaces or
infrastructures specifically identified as ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’ include strategies for dealing with
contaminated materiality, or unwanted or polluting matter, such as bathrooms, dumps,
sewers and cemeteries. We know when things have leached out and begin to threaten
spatial order; we can see them in the interstitial zones between commercial and public
buildings: the vacant lots replete with the peripheral and marginal persons and detritus,
like mattresses that have been ejected from their proper indoor locations. Reclamation
of marginal spaces happens, too; for example,when once-polluting graffiti becomes a
tourist-attracting art form.The spatialised discussion of prohibition, transgression, punish-
ment and reform provides a platform for exploring the role of the built fabric as a reflec-
tion of, and an instrument in, the production of classificatory systems.
But Douglas’s legacy extends beyond the visual and the spatial. Moving beyond those
parameters lets us understand things really differently than we could before. Take the case
of anorexia, always thought of as a spectacularly visual disorder based on the key classifi-
catory work of dividing up fattening from nonfattening foods to produce the thin body.
But if we closely examine the work of anorexia, we might discover that the worst foods
are those capable of changing their forms, from the solid form of butter to the liquid form
of oil. Anorexic people interviewed by anthropologist Megan Warin lost control of where
such slippery things went in the body, took them to be polluting, and instead of fattening
and nonfattening inputs, they spoke of clean and dirty foods. The dirty ones were neither
solid nor liquid and could change form, slipping out of classificatory organisation. This
classification could only be made on the basis of understanding how oily food felt on the
lips and inside the mouth; one could certainly not know it by looking at the thin body
itself (see Warrin 2010:17). The same sort of idea applies to spaces, which may be under-
stood to be interstitial not so much on how they look as on how they smell; cigarette
smoke is a dead giveaway of the status of a space and of its literal and metaphoric status
as polluted.
Maybe you could bring this to life using an ordinary object in your house. Consider,
for example, the white modern air conditioner, whose sleek design has arisen from par-
ticular Western ideas about dirt and cleanliness to yield the very image of exaggerated
hygiene. Housing the magical equipment not only to regulate the too hot or too cold
air out there into the interior of the home, but also to purify it fit for inhalation into
the physical body within the optimally temperatured home, the air conditioner has also
produced new understandings and perceptions of pollution. It permits us to know, as
typical air-conditioner advertisement reminds us, that the air is in need of purifying and
perfecting; it is filled with things that ought not be permitted inside our bodies. Not doing
so interferes with other domains, too, so the advertising material tells us: like, for instance,
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sleep, mental performance, physical and emotional health, and the stability of the relations
of people in the family. Some (rather intemperate) advertising claims that the dust in the
air wafts invisibly to enter the lungs to impact breathing, cloud thinking, and affect the
familial relationships. The cleansing air conditioner is itself only one of the many pieces
of equipment dedicated to the safe dispensation of a threat to all of these kinds of order.
Assuring the purity of the air and all it protects requires systematic boundary mainten-
ance. One of the most obvious ways in which this is done is by preventing the air from
revealing that it has a past (that it has picked up dust and pollutants from outside before it
gets to your front door). That’s what air conditioners do for us: they cleanse the air’s past.
Unlike water, the air takes pollution away from our present and our presence. Pollution
blows away from us, dissipates, leaving the impression that the air is infinite and bears no
trace of the past. But those who dwell in places where pollution refuses to leave know
the air not as infinite but as profoundly finite, present, and laden down with what it has
experienced. The very notion of conditioning the air involves removing all evidence of
what the air has picked up before it arrived for us to breathe in, and all traces of its past.
In some way, this is a profoundly middle-class example of hygiene reform or, at the very
least, a key enactment of modern classed social life.
Air conditioners obviously –and principally –regulate the temperature of the air.
Extremes of heat and cold might be understood as dangerous pollutants not only to the
personal body, but to the social order. Douglas’s work permits us to tracks how meta-
phoric indices of heat and cold produce current social, material and economic order
itself. Central to that undertaking is the insidious power of temperature that operates most
prominently in the range of neutrality, a range in which neither heat nor cold disrupts the
protectorate of the moderate. In common with the middle-class preference for scent-free
atmospheres (see Dennis, 2016), temperature hides its power behind an apparent neutrality
that masks its inextricable entwinement with the production of late capitalist coordinates.
The power of this neutrality is itself recognised in the root itself: temperatus, past participle
of temperare: ‘to mix in due proportion, modify, blend; and restrain oneself ’ (see: www.
etymonline.com/word/temperature). The relevance of hot metaphoric temperatures –
boiling rage, overheated debates, cold responses –as a pollution to things like the national
temper or the order of political and class moderates, and the threat of movements to come
out of control isn’t restricted just to the idea of neutrality and the production of a rational
mean condition. It’s all too real. That is, it is indisputably the case that heat and its regula-
tion is never benign. Seasonal temperature highs that are too hot to bear everywhere, but
which create urban heat islands more than 10 degrees hotter than their greener surrounds,
impact bodies, genders, economies, socialities, infrastructural networks and built and nat-
ural environs brutally unevenly. Ashley Dawson has drawn attention to this in his work
on how the extensive use of asphalt and concrete in construction, and the lack of green
space create an urban heat-island effect that can add as much as 12°C to average recorded
temperatures in high population density and heavily built-up urban areas (see Dawson,
2017). And, Alex Nading has recently named such processes as the thermal politics of life
and death, or a ‘thermal necropolitics’ (see Nading, 2016). We can already identify who is
necroavailable to the heat in the unbearable overlap of climate change and COVID: the
plants, animals and humans who live within the most vulnerable of those combined
coordinates. Those realities are never undone from cool-headed political decisions about
whether or not to get out of coal, or what will win elections, or any of the concerns of
the neutral middle class. Douglas’s work permits us to see the intemperateness of real and
metaphoric origins as deadly pollutants to systems as they are.
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People can be seen as pollutants to systems, too. Zygmunt Bauman (2000) developed
a theme originally explored by Mary Douglas and Jean-Paul Sartre that contrasted the
liberating ‘fluidity’ of today with the cloying stickiness of the past, to proffer new insights
into the occurrence of the Holocaust. Unlike the vast majority of commentators, Bauman
did not view hateful antisemitism as ‘the cause’ of the Holocaust. He instead privileged
the idea that Nazis, along with the French, Ukrainian, Latvian and other police who
helped round people up in their respective jurisdictions, were ‘simply following orders’ –
to the extent that rational self-preservation and bureaucracy supported Nazi mass murder
more than hatred ever could. Bauman said it like this: ‘When God wanted to destroy
someone, He did not make him mad. He made him rational’ (2000:142).
Bauman’s reassessment of the Holocaust relies on Weber’s exposition of modern bur-
eaucracy and rationality. Where just about every scholarly authority stresses the ‘irration-
ality’ of the Nazis, Bauman suggests that at no point did the Holocaust come in conflict
with the principles of rationality. So what was the rational concern? Baumann suggested
that the Holocaust was part of the solid modern era. It was the concrete, sticky, cloying,
inescapable and defining notions of modernity (blood and soil, nation, state and terri-
tory) that made the Holocaust possible and, he reckoned, inevitable. This solid world,
manifest in its sticky-isms –communism, socialism and fascism –sought to stick people
to ‘fixed’, well-determined ideologies. Solid systems like these are vulnerable to their
inherent logical contradictions. The imposition of any and all ordering designs neces-
sarily requires the identification of that which is disordered and threatens the design itself,
requiring the elimination of whatever that is (see Bauman, 1989).Whatever is beyond the
system represents the temporary failure of the system itself.The real affront that Jewishness
presented was to solidity, and the response solidity made was the rational elimination of
that which threatened its integrity. That’s why Baumann describes the Holocaust as a
rational response to pollution, rather than irrational hatred of persons per se, and why he
described it as inevitable; solidities must always confront their threats.
Things get worse, not better, in what Bauman called ‘liquid modernity’, where
beyond-ness is presumed to be endemic, irreparable and inevitable. Beyond-ness does not,
therefore, constitute the threat of failure. Again drawing on Douglas, Bauman described
those who stand beyond in metaphoric terms.Yesterday, in the era of solid modernity, the
Jews were the paradigmatic weeds. Today, in our liquid-modern times, single mothers,
college drop-outs, drug-takers, asylum seekers are weed-like. Those metaphors are really
important because they tell us so much about the conditions of power and unbelonging
and alienness that come to vest themselves in real, suffering bodies at the margins.
They were critically important in Douglas’s work too that so inspired Bauman. Purity
and Danger relies upon observations she made in her 16 months of fieldwork with the Lele
as part of her first ethnographic endeavour and those made of lives in the West, including
her own. Douglas reminded people that when she wrote Purity and Danger, she was stuck
at home with the mumps and two whingey kids. In that situation, she could not help but
notice the worth of domestic metaphors that linked the personal body with the social
and natural world. It was that use of metaphor that revealed just how similar modern
‘scientific’ rational explanations of health and hygiene were to non-Western ‘primitive’
ideas about magic and superstition. All of them were founded in ideas about the integ-
rity of bodies and worlds, and concerned with guarding against that which arose at their
margins to threaten and pollute them via ritual corrective, like the 5-second rule (or the
50-second rule, depending on how hungry you are and the deliciousness of the snack you
just dropped –as well as its stickiness). Any hair on that cake you dropped on the floor?
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The power of metaphors to reveal universal patterns like this is part of Douglas’s
profoundly domestic, mumpy, probably-dropping-cake-on-the-floor kid-laden cir-
cumstance as she wrote Purity and Danger –something that makes us think about
the conditions under which women, particularly, labour today as they write their
own masterpieces while home schooling and tending to all manner of pollutions that
emit, seemingly especially, from young bodies. Her use of ordinary metaphors born
of domestic circumstance set out the attendance one must simultaneously make to
body and world, if one is to understand anything at all, including COVID. Her use
of these ordinary metaphors was initially unfavourably regarded –this was no grand
theory, and it was savaged as such. Like so much of the yield of Purity and Danger, its
value was to come to pass later. The notion of an ordinary metaphor wasn’t lost on
Michael Jackson. In his paper, ‘Thinking through the Body: An Essay on Understanding
Metaphor’, Michael Jackson (1983) drew upon poetic and philosophical material that
concerned the correspondences between humans and nature, including the philosoph-
ical insight made by the Roman statesman Seneca, who observed in the first century
AD that watercourses were as veins of the body, and earthquakes were like bodily
convulsions. This correlation of body with world pervades all human societies. In his
own work among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, Jackson observed that metaphor is not
simply a reflection of the landscape, but a much more complex process in which there
is dialectical unity. Metaphors, in his view, presuppose continuity between language,
knowledge and bodily practice, and so mediate relationships between conceptual and
physical domains of the being. The ‘discovery’ of connections between the world and
our own bodies is not a process that occurs at the level of self-conscious attention, how-
ever. Indeed, as Jackson points out, imagining a mouth at the same time one uses the
turn of phrase, ‘the mouth of the river’ would be regarded as very odd. This oddness is
at the heart of Jackson’s argument that metaphors do not serve to say something in the
terms of some other thing, nor to make a rhetorical synthesis of two otherwise unre-
lated terms. Metaphor, in his view, ‘reveals not the thisness of “that” rather this is that’
(Jackson 1983:132). Here, metaphors refer simultaneously to the self and the world, by
means of reciprocal anthropomorphism. Metaphors express this dialectical movement
between personal body and world because they refer to the body on the one hand
and to social and natural environments on the other, synthesising and mediating them.
It is in this way that Jackson worked out that Kuranko people understood that when
they walked along paths to the cooking yard, the grasses moved one way. When they
returned on the path, the grasses went another, as though air was being drawn in and
out of the land’s lungs. People and place each lived and breathed.4
Jackson has argued that any disruption of normal natural and ⁄ or social patterns –like
COVID –are very often the catalyst that causes connections between personal, social and
natural bodies to be fully realised. For example, waves emerged as the key intuitive con-
nector between personal social and natural bodies during COVID. Peaks of illness burden
were described in the terms of first, second, third and fourth waves. Dreaded, fearsome
and initially unstoppable by human hand, these waves engulfed health systems, indiscrim-
inately washed over whomever was in their way. They took the breath from those they
overwhelmed. We could hold later back the tide with vaccines. And, we could persist,
resist, in protective neighbourhood bubbles.
Such ready metaphors as powerful oceanic waves served to render the invisible –
indeed wholly insensible –virus appreciable to us; they let us make the alien dimensions
of COVID intelligible. One of the problems with the virus is that it is too small to see;
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the work of the metaphor must at first, then, accomplish an equilibrium of personal and
world scales; it must render the virus something in our world, so that ‘natural and personal
worlds’ correspond evenly. We sometimes do the opposite with miniature villages, pulling
the hugeness of that which we cannot see from any vantage in the actual city into a scale
of correspondence with human sensibility.
Metaphors have profound effects, especially when they scale world and personal bodies
inappropriately. In June 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued critical
remarks about the use of wave metaphors, asking for politicians to stop talking in par-
ticular of successions of waves, precisely because they played down the role of human
behaviour in controlling the spread of the virus, rendering the virus bigger than us, and
able to produce seemingly innumerable waves (see Semino, 2021). That did not, however,
stop UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson from saying in March 2021: ‘On the continent
right now you can see, sadly, there is a third wave under way. And people in this country
should be under no illusions that previous experience has taught us that when a wave
hits our friends, I’m afraid it washes up on our shores as well’ (in Semino, 2021:n.p.). In
doing so, he exploited the uncontrollability of literal waves to blame what was happening
in other countries for a resurgence of the pandemic in the UK; another reason for why
the WHO did not want to see its continued use, preferring the activity of wall building
on a human scale. Understanding the interconnection that metaphor reveals between
person and world is crucial, then, rather than simply poetically speculative. This is part of
Douglas’s legacy by which we know that shared symbols create a unity in experience, and
that purity and pollution symbols denote beliefs about social order. We cannot afford to
ignore attitudes towards pollution and purity, given that their effects concern class, gender,
climate change, COVID and the ‘other’, that is, the weeds who lie beyond and suffer the
passions of living beyond classification.5
But hold up; where’s the promised animals in all this? Let’s revisit Douglas’s Danger
2: danger from transgressing the internal lines of the system. By defining what is polluted,
people can come to classify social life into two opposing categories: what is acceptable and
what is clearly not acceptable. It is this classification system that provides societies with
their moral or ethical order. From here, people can develop secular and or religious rituals
to make sure they stay both physically and morally pure. Doing this enforces the symbolic
system and ensures that order is maintained in the society. Here, you might get rituals
surrounding food, sexual practice, and so on. These rules protect the people from those
things which are understood to be polluting. Usually things that do not fit anomalies must
be taken care of ideologically, lest they pollute the entire classificatory system. If this is not
done, anomalies can threaten the order of society. There has to be order in nature, just as
there is order in society. The best-known anomaly covered by Douglas is from her Lele
ethnography and centrally involves the pangolin: a real boundary breacher. Go and look
up a picture of a pangolin if you have never seen one. We’ll wait.
The pangolin is a mammal, and gives birth to one or two live young, like a human
does. But the pangolin has scales like a fish! The Lele people have great number of rules
and prohibitions around the pangolin. Under very special circumstances, it can be eaten,
but usually people avoid them like the plague. Involving them in very specific rituals can
serve to affirm the life force in Lele society, but under ordinary circumstances, the pro-
hibition holds. The pangolin contains within it several different elements, so it cannot be
classified and so is an anomaly that inspires fear.
Ruby Kleeman got into this idea, especially when she considered her pet rabbit, Jessica,
and where Jessica fit in a taxonomy:
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Who is Jessica Rabbit?

By Ruby Kleeman
During the anthropology course, we explored the human tendency to taxonomise

our surroundings.While we may not notice these taxonomies, they are all around us
and guide us within our everyday life.When these taxonomies are mixed or altered,
we often feel incredibly uncomfortable and at times disgusted with the results. This
is true of animals as we comfortably love and nurture the animals that we label as
pets, all the while eating the animals that we label as food. People are horrified to
think of their pets as meat, distinguishing their animals from the ones that they
are happy to eat. But in the end, what really distinguishes a pet animal and a food
animal, or, say, a dog from a cow?
When considering farm and food animals, we tend to distance ourselves from the
idea of them as animals and living, feeling creatures, no different to the other animals
that we care for in our lives. Agriculture animals are able to form connections, feel
emotion and pain and yet this is the last thing that we want to think about when
we sit down and eat them. To distance ourselves further from the reality that meat
was originally a living breathing animal, we label them differently. The cow in the
field is an animal, but the beef on my plate is food. Changing the way we talk about
animals allows us to disassociate how we treat and use them.
We form such strong connections with our pets and many of us consider them
to be our family. However, we still distinguish animals from humans. I have a dog
named Patch that we got when I was two years old. Growing up with him, I con-
sider him a part of the family to the point that I almost think of him as a little
brother. The bonds we create with animals can extend beyond the typical idea of
animal/human interactions. However, there is a reason that we generally form such
strong connections with particular animals (such as cats and dogs), yet fail to do so
with other animals. The idea of reciprocity within animal/human relationships is
integral to the love and bonds that we form with them. Animals that are more able
to reciprocate human connection and closeness are often the animals that humans
care for and love more. Dogs are oftentimes incredibly affectionate and as such we
gain something from our relationship with them. People often find it harder to
form connections with animals such as fish and bugs, as people are not often able to
get the affection from them that they can receive from other domesticated animals.
This is not to say that people cannot form strong connections with their pet fish,
but rather that people tend to love and care for animals that they can anthropo-
morphise easily and receive clear affection from, like dogs and cats.
I have a pet rabbit named Jessica. While I do not have the relationship with her
that I do with my dog, I still love and deeply care for her. However, in a nature
reserve that I walk in, they signpost on entrance that they are currently poisoning
the rabbit population to reduce numbers. Despite owning and having an intimate
relationship with a rabbit, the poisoning of wild rabbits does not disturb or distress
me to the degree that it would if I was told that my rabbit was to be poisoned.
I make the distinction between my rabbit and the wild ones. Upon closer inspec-
tion, I subconsciously separate my rabbit from wild ones. My rabbit has a personality,
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she loves banana and kale, and once you gain her trust, she loves little pats on her
head and nose. These wild rabbits, however, are not like that –they are not like my
rabbit. Or so I tell myself. To admit otherwise would be to admit that truly there is
no real distinction between my rabbit and the ones that are being poisoned in the
wild. By categorising Jessica and the wild ones differently, I am able to ignore and
feel okay about the poisoning of rabbits, despite owning one myself.
Animals and our relationships with them are incredibly complex. There are so
many more ways to think about animals other than those I have mentioned. We
as humans are not isolated from other life on Earth. We form connections, ideas,
behaviours and taxonomies around animals as we attempt to navigate our relation-
ship and our ingrained views of them.While it is easy to accept the world around us
as uncomplicated, thinking critically and past the surface-level details surrounding
these topics provides immense value and insight into the way that humans construct
ideas and reality.
Ruby’s piece made Simone remember one she wrote a little while ago, about how
thinking about COVID might remake human-animal taxonomies. Now this next bit is
a touch complicated. It might be hard to follow – you shouldn’t worry if it is. The main
point is that multispecies ethnographers have been a bit romantic with their explorations
of nonhumans, Simone reckons. She tries to get around that by pointing out how we
need to consider how plants, animals and humans are all connected, so that we can’t just
pick and choose the ones we like. She uses ‘the cuticle’ to show that, and to point out
some things she reckons we have missed in our analysis of the more than human world,
and the consequences of becoming alienated from the plants and animals of the world
for human health. Just see if you can extract that argument out of what follows – it is
written in the way Simone published it; it’s good for you to encounter different ways of
writing anthropology. Remember the multispecies ethnography Simone was critiquing
earlier in this chapter? Its point of departure is that animals are good to be with (not just to
think with), a proposal that seeks to destabilise human primacy and reveal new orders of
human-nonhuman relations and becomings. It arose in response to the ways that animals
serve, even in theory, to illuminate the human condition –something that’s dangerous
to continue in light of the condition of the planet. Simone’s work on this topic explores
the possibilities and limitations of the idea that animals are ‘good to live with’. Close
examination of how the undergirding theoretical principles informing multispecies eth-
nography have been operationalised reveals a somewhat romanticised research imaginary.
This has manifested in the exploration of a limited and localised range of nonhuman
life that does not include those animals who have become necroavailable to humans on
an industrial scale: the sheep, the pigs, the cows that we eat, and the mice and rats we
kill in the course of laboratory research on human diseases. While there is pressure for
multispecies ethnographers to take up animal rights agendas for the (meat and labora-
tory) animals that have the most to gain from decentring the human, there are quieter
potentials that might be realiszed by multispecies ethnographers. These potentials might
be attained if ethnographers recognised how the most unlikely of environments offer
opportunity to trouble the ontological distinctions that they attempt to destabilise. These
include those between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, and other binaries that
compartmentalise messily entangled human and nonhuman lives. Simone rehearses the
possibilities that come available for realising the potentials of multispecies ethnography
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in the laboratory, but especially she deals with something called the ‘cuticle’. The cuticle
envelopes plant, animal, and human beings (see Dennis, 2022).
Application of multispecies ethnographic principles and techniques can be applied
to the cuticle and, when they are, the value of thinking beyond the human –and the
possibility of being collectively entailed in survival –is revealed. The cuticle is any of
a variety of tough but flexible, nonmineral outer coverings of an organism, be it dog,
human, insect, or mushroom. Dogs, humans, insects and mushrooms have all been enthu-
siastically explored in a multispecies-al frame. The dog and the human are references
to feminist philosopher of science and technology Donna Haraway (2008), who used
the relationship between herself and her dog to think about the ways in which humans
and animals are mutually shaped by interactions across species boundaries. The insect on
the list references Raffles’ 2010 Insectopedia, which implores readers to make the explicit
connections of insects to human culture. Insects are not categories, Raffles asserts, and
cannot be approached as though they were ‘merely the opportunity for culture’; they are
instead, ‘its co-authors’ (ibid.:100). The mushroom, is in reference to Anna Tsing’s 2015
The Mushroom at the End of the World. Tsing uses the mushroom and its dependence on
human-disturbed environments to describe the multispecies ‘assemblages’ that permit the
matsutake mushroom to thrive under pines:
… one could say that pines, matsutake, and humans all cultivate each other unin-
tentionally. They make each other’s world-making projects possible. This idiom has
allowed me to consider how landscapes more generally are products of uninten-
tional design, that is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human
and not human. The design is clear in the landscape’s ecosystem. But none of the
agents have planned this effect. Humans join others in making landscapes of uninten-
tional design. As sites for more-than-human dramas, landscapes are radical tools for
decentering human hubris. Landscapes are not backdrops for historical action: they
are themselves active. Watching landscapes in formation shows humans joining other
living beings in shaping worlds.
(Tsing, 2015:152)
There is no doubt that each of these cases permits reconceptualisation of the place of the
nonhuman in and through the various pokings and proddings delivered to the line that
would otherwise sit between dog, insect, or mushroom, and human. But, as we said earlier
in this chapter, the focus on (among some few others) dogs, fungi, insects is remarkable
because, as vulnerable as they are to human decisions and their consequences, they are
simply not the beings who suffer the worst of human passions. But more than a simple
refocusing appears to be required. Where Kopnina (2017) argues for a rights-oriented
multispecies ethnography that makes its applications wherever they are most urgently
needed, precisely as interventions, it is far more intellectually robust and antidotally
effective to make an expansive embrace of life –wherever it is to be found. So doing
ensures a broad diversity of experiences are included, and equally guards against the descent
of multispecies ethnography into the political and conceptual abstraction against which
it initially railed, and of which it presently stands accused (for example, Kopnina, 2017;
see also Smart, 2014). A simpler way of saying this is, as anthropologist Kopnina bluntly
put it, why don’t multispecies ethnographers ever go to slaughterhouses and science labs
and look at the effects of human exceptionalism in there? Hmmm. When Simone was
thinking about how to expand the remit of multispecies ethnography –from beyond
forests of mushrooms, cultured insects and perfectly nice dogs, and even beyond the lab
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and the abattoir –she thought about something called the cuticle. That, she reckoned,
could include everything, so that we could start to think about how humans and animals
and plants are all actors together in the world –if uneven and differentially powerfully.
The cuticle stretches to encompass life in teeming expansiveness, because the cuticle
appears everywhere, skinning up pigs, sheep, chickens, gum trees, peaches, cats, sparrows –
as well as the much-favoured horses, fungi, dogs and insects. The cuticle offers up the
potential of flattening not the distinctive differences between species that are so crucial to
conviviality and multispecies ethnography, but rather, human biases and preferences (see
Smart, 2014). Here though, the cuticle is engaged to demonstrate the consequences of
maintaining borders that separate humans from nonhuman actants. These consequences
are especially dire for the humans in the equation.
The cuticle is a lively membrane. Simone likes it better than the more prosaic ‘skin’,
because of its capacity to encompass a broader diversity of nonhuman and human
bodies. Where skin is a bit hard to imagine on a plant, the cuticle covers everything
from arthropod exoskeletons to the human epidermis, from hydrophobic leaves to a
mushroom’s basidiocarp. The cuticles of mushrooms, spiders, sheep, humans, horses, cows
and plants confound such stark divisions of the world into ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, operating
instead in a way akin to breathing. Just as breathing is cyclic rather than divisible into
discrete acts of inhalation and exhalation, the cuticle simultaneously protects against and
extracts from the worlds in which plants, animals, fungi dwell.
In humans, for instance, the cuticle appears as several different structures, including
the superficial layer of overlapping and dead cells covering the hair shaft (cuticula pili)
that locks the hair into its follicle (see James et al., 2006). Most people would be familiar
with the term as it is applied it to the thickened layer of skin surrounding fingernails and
toenails (called the eponychium), but it is much more generalised than that; the cuticle
is that outer layer of an organism that comes in contact with the environment. In most
invertebrates, the dead, noncellular cuticle is secreted by the epidermis (see, for example,
Page and Johnstone, 2007). In simple biological terms, in humans the cuticle is the epi-
dermis, the very outer layer of the human skin that at first encounters the world.
A more rigid cuticle, composed chiefly of chitin, encircles arthropods, and epicuticular
wax covers hydrophobic leaves in plants that benefit from the way water, which rolls off
the leaf, carries away harmful pollutants and dust. In the mycological world, the pileipellis,
Latin for ‘skin’ of a ‘cap’, protects the trama, the inner fleshy tissue of a mushroom from the
brutality of the world, and equally from its own spore-bearing tissue layer, the hymenium
(see Jaeger, 1959).
The cuticle is common to life on earth, and is comparable among mammals. Humans
are now, however, unique among mammals when it comes to the types and diversity of
microorganisms present on the skin. Professor of biology Joshua Nuefeld, leader of a 2020
study examining the mammalian microbiome –the collection of microorganisms such as
bacteria, fungi, and viruses that naturally occur on our skin –registered his surprise at its
results. They revealed ‘just how distinct we humans are from almost all other mammals, at
least in terms of the skin microbes’ (see Ross et al., 2018). The study, the most compre-
hensive survey of mammals to date, found that the human microbiome was impoverished
compared with other mammalian examples. It revealed too that the human skin tracks
and traces the retreat that humans have made from the broadest manifestations of the
world and the way we keep to domestic and work circles. Far from being simply meta-
phorical statements of loss and impoverishment, microbiomic penury serves as an index
of our distance from a range of nonhuman and nonhuman-made companions. And, it is
highly consequential.
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Microbiomes are shaped by a combination of biological and genetic factors. They are
postnatally transferred from mother to baby during the birth process to encircle the infant
cuticle with a share of protective maternally derived microbial defenders. After that, they
are impacted by the encounters the individual cuticle has with food, drink, air, water,
hand sanitiser, clothes, shampoo, pets, pollution, forests, other humans –everything. The
microbiome is a ceaseless registrar, recording each encounter in the lives and deaths of
individual cuticle dwellers: the human microbiota. Our traversals and our meetings are all
highly impactory on the microbiota, which have en masse registered that Western-dwelling
humans generally live in homes made of a pretty narrow range of manufactured materials,
wear a limited range of manufactured clothes, circulate between a limited number of
manufactured places (like other homes, work) and bathe more than is strictly necessary.
These narrow participations in the world have caused compositional shifts (‘dysbiosis’)
in microbiomes that are consequentially linked to changes in human disease states; the
cuticular and gut microbiome exhibit distinct composition and diversity patterns in disease
states ranging from diabetes and gastrointestinal disorders, to autism and psoriasis, and simi-
larly exhibit distinctive patterns in healthy human subjects (see Ross et al., 2018).
The point is that restricting ourselves to the human-manufactured worlds of the home,
the office, the gym, and so on result in poor health outcomes for humans (as well as their
silent and invisible phylosymbiotic bacterial, viral and fungal partners).
Antidotal advisements have been issued by biologists that include broadening our
circulations to include a greater diversity of nonhuman-made environments and nonhuman
companions, including those that might be found in soil, on the family dog –who really
might serve to improve health, as has long been anecdotally suggested. Not suggested are
the tree that grows a great distance away from the home, the fauna that live with it, or the
lamb, cow, or pig prior to its appearance in the home on a plate.Those beings are very likely
not suggested because they are inconveniently geographically and otherwise distanced from
humans, which rather confirms the problem of the impoverished human cuticle. That is,
health-conferring gut and skin microbial communities can be transferred between people
and environments, and other beings when we interact with them.The inverse is also true; a
paucity of commingling opportunities and encounters makes for poor health.
It is possible, then, to suggest that ‘health’ cannot be conceived of exclusively or
even principally in the sociological compartment called ‘the human world’. Indeed, the
consequences of not interacting with other beings and environments would be nothing
short of fatal. It is in this sense that it is crucial we recognise the sharedness of the permeable,
absorptive and transmitting cuticle: we all depend on picking up the living material that
looses itself to travel outbound from the one being to the impoverished skin of the other.
The consequences of bearing an impoverished skin are of course readily apparent in the
time of COVID-19, which forces us to even more tightly contain ourselves to the home and
the zoom screen, to refuse relations with others bearing microbial gifts, and to kill benign and
maleficent cuticle dwellers alike. The registrations of even tighter constraints on movements
and encounters with nonhuman others will be made on the cuticle, that stretchy membrane
that unites us all in our difference. But only one cuticle, the human skin, registers a level of
alienation from other life that might be fatal. Multispecies ethnographic engagement with
the cuticle permits full rehearsal of the benefits of being with nonhuman others.
Considerations of the cuticle really mess with taxonomies, but let’s return to some
basics and think about another theoretician who thought very differently from Mary
Douglas about how to explain food taboos. We’ve mentioned him before: Marvin Harris.
Marvin Harris, a cultural materialist, argued that all taboos could be explained by causal
factors behind food taboos. He argued, for instance, that Hindu avoidance of cows as food
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has everything to do with the greater use of cows in other areas of life (which means it
would be counterproductive to eat them) and nothing to do with the sacredness of the
cow itself. This stands in stark contrast with those symbolic and structuralist explanations,
which give quite different explanations for food avoidances. Mary Douglas, for instance,
argued that pig avoidance in many religions has to do with the liminal status of the
animal –a pig isn’t the same as a sheep or a goat or a cow; it has different feet, it eats
different food, it does not fit the requirements for inclusion in existing categories, and so
is liminal and dangerous, and to be avoided.
Cultural materialism is a kind of ecological materialism. In other words, it states that
the conditions of ecology are the main determinants in human social organisation. By the
mid-20th century, two approaches to materialism were very popular and powerful: these
were ecological materialism and neo-Marxist approaches. Ecological materialists were
very heavily influenced by the development of a science of ecology, and by general systems
theory. They took what is often called a ‘thermostatic’, or homeostatic approach. That is,
they made an assumption that cultural institutions worked like feedback mechanisms to
strike and maintain a balance between energy production and energy output and the pro-
ductive capacity of the environment. So they would do things like analyse culture systems
as equilibrium models, where things like food production and caloric needs of humans
were measured. Broadly, the ecological materialists were trying to go beyond the idea that
the environment was a varying backdrop to human life, and instead espoused the notion
that people were fundamentally interconnected with environment, and that the environ-
mental conditions that people lived under invariably shaped their lives, and the kinds of
lives they had. There are two strands of ecological materialism.
The first one is best represented by Morton Fried, and is referred to as ‘neoevolutionism’
(see Fried, 1967). The neoevolutionists were interested in how resources were distributed
in societies, as a consequence of their environmental conditions, to create various kinds of
social stratification. So, say you have a group that, owing to the environmental conditions of
life, is able to produce a surplus. Surplus food requires storage and it requires distribution;
this in turn requires someone to take charge of it to do the storing and the distribution.
Fried argues for a series of evolutionary stages, which include egalitarian (where no surplus
is produced), ranked, stratified, and state societies. So, here, the environmental conditions
which dictate what is possible to produce and how much can be produced to a large extent
give us an explanation for the differently organised social forms that operate in them.
‘Neofunctionalism’ is the name given to the other strand of ecological materialism.
This strand, as you can probably imagine given its name, argues that culture and social
organisation were actually functional adaptations that allowed people to manipulate and
exploit their environments to their best advantage without going over the carrying cap-
acity of the ecological resources available to them. The most important and influential
strand of neofunctionalism is Marvin Harris’s cultural materialism. Harris was convinced
that the key to understanding societies and cultures was an understanding of systems of
production and reproduction.
Harris’s work was influenced by Marxist thought, and more particularly by the way
in which Leslie White reworked it, as a kind of antidote to Boasian thought (see White,
1949; 1959). White liked unilineal evolutionary theory. He thought that all societies
went through stages to reach a kind of pinnacle of evolution. Lots of other theoreticians
thought this too, but White thought that most theoreticians did not have access to suffi-
cient data to give life to their theoretical positions. He thought what the unilineal evolu-
tionary perspective needed was some real quantifiable measurements to make it sound. So,
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he developed some. He argued that the control of energy was linked to cultural evolution,
and that you could use this connection as a measure evolutionary progress. White argued
that culture ‘advances’ in line with the increase in energy harnessed per year. Technical
advances are important in the harnessing of energy sources, and White worked these into
his theoretical position. He used Marx’s theoretical position as a kind of foundation for
talking about culture. He divided culture into technological, sociological and ideological
sections. For White, the technological end of things was the most important. Changes in
the technology end would also change societal values and institutions. White dropped
the whole Marxist dialectics thing, and left them out of his analysis of cultures, like a lot
of other theoreticians using Marxian ideas. His passion lay in his idea that the primary
function of culture, and the function that determines its level of advancement, is its ability
to harness and control energy. For White, that began with the use of human muscles and
reached a peak in the harnessing of nuclear energy.
Harris was certainly deeply influenced by Marxist ideas, but it’s not just a version of
Marxism; like White before him, he abandoned the Marxist dialectic. Harris argued that
production and reproduction (the infrastructure) were primary, and that they determined
cultural behaviour and belief. All humans, in other words, were subject to the universal laws
of acquiring energy to sustain life, and of reproducing themselves. Dependent on this was the
shape and form of the structure, comprising domestic and political economic structures, and
then the superstructure, where you’d find ideas and belief systems, rituals, ideology, religion.
Harris thought that it is only after basic human needs, such as food acquisition and
reproduction, are met, that people can become concerned with social organisation and
ideology. This position is known as infrastructural determinism. The conditions of the
infrastructure determine the structure, and the conditions of the structure determine
the superstructure. Harris stopped just shy of claiming causality. He said that the flow of
deterministic relationships could operate in the reverse direction, so from superstructure
to infrastructure, but maintained that this happens with less frequency and is therefore less
significant. He named his position as ‘probabilistic determinism’.
Harris thought the infrastructure was so important because it directly relates to human
survival and physical well-being.You might have noticed that Leslie White called his 1949
book The Science of Culture; Harris insisted that anthropology was a science. One of his
best known works –and the one that really clearly explicates his theoretical position –is
1979’s Cultural Materialism: the Struggle for a Science of Culture (Harris, 1979). And a struggle
it was: this was a time when postmodern ideas were emerging, when the notion that there
was more to culture than the outcome of infrastructural conditions and ecology, was really
on the rise. Simone trained in anthropology in the 1990s under Lawrence Crissman,
who was firmly opposed to Harris’s position –so of course Simone wrote her Honours
thesis on Indonesian rice economies and how well cultural materialism could account for
innovations like high-yield variety grains and the social and political complex to which
they would apparently give rise. Doing that really revealed the pressure points in Harris’s
theory, which was important because Harris was a truly compelling writer. His scholarly
works are very well cited –like his Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, of
1975.The reason it sold so well was because it operationalised cultural materialism’s speci-
ality: providing answers to the perplexing ways in which people behave (like Hindus wor-
shipping cows, Jews and Moslems refusing to eat pork). In fact, the back jacket of the book
says: ‘Marvin Harris answers these and other perplexing questions about human behavior,
showing that no matter how bizarre a people’s behavior may seem, it always stems from
identifiable and intelligble sources’ (see Harris, 1975). Harris was an extremely popular
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author among the reading public for a long period. In 1989, he penned Our Kind:Who We
Are,Where We Came From (Harris, 1989). This explained why people like hamburgers, big
boobs and all manner of other stuff by recourse to cultural materialism –and people liked
it because it gave firm answers for things that seem otherwise inexplicable.
Even back when she was an Honours student, Simone was worried about this because
human social life might be more complex than this, but also it’s probably not all that easy
to be sure you’ve picked out the right causal (or ‘probabilistic’) factor to explain whatever
baffling thing needs explaining. In fact, Simone still thinks that this is the main issue with
how current problems are conceptualised by politicians –they’re too simply diagnosed,
without due regard for the complexity that people bring to any situation.
Harris of course proposed that since science is based on laws, anthropology should
focus on infrastructures because they are governed by laws. So, what kinds of things
does this perspective try to explain? For Harris, the production and reproduction factors
are organised in relationship to the environment. The environment can be manipulated
with technology. Aspects of the superstructure can be explained using the structure, and
the ultimate primacy of infrastructure. Harris was interested in how members of a cul-
ture explained things such as prohibitions. Take the place of cows in Hindu doctrine, for
example (see Harris, 1974). He was not convinced by religious or ‘cultural’, or ‘idealistic’,
or ‘symbolic’ explanations. He thought they belonged to the realm of the superstructure,
and that ordinary people did not analytically link the infrastructure and its determining
properties with the superstructure. He also thought the explanations were unscientific.
For Harris, the truth of the matter with the cow-killing prohibition is a matter of produc-
tion, and that the religious prohibition is not the explanation for the prohibition, but is a
feature, and a functional one, of the production cause of the prohibition. In other words,
cows are worth more as butter, milk and labour in fields than they are as steaks. For Harris,
only an outsider can cut through the superstructural explanations so often favoured by
insiders to get through to what he calls the actual infrastructural causes.
Etic knowledge –what Harris regarded as not only outsider but also objective know-
ledge, since it does not fall into the trap of subjectively privileging superstructural
explanations –was the only scientific knowledge. Harris sees the anthropological project
as concerned with a science of culture, and moreover, an objective science of culture. His
project was one that is universal and measurable; all societies are subject to particular eco-
logical constraints, and their success can be measured according to the developments of
technology made in the mode of production. So, in his view, this objectivity and science is
ultimately down to a privileging of the etic, objective anthropologist, and a deprivileging
of emic explanations, which are ultimately subjective.
We have a bit of a problem with Harris’s position as the ‘objective’ anthropologist,
most especially as reflexivity became an important defining principle in anthropology. Is
it possible to ever be objective? We don’t think so; we prefer to be reflexive, considering
that a much more practical and realistic position. Critiques relating to the character of
anthropology as a human science have impacted on the relevance of cultural materialist
theories, and that studying people involves a recognition that people, unlike inanimate
objects, can talk back and can and do have a sense of their own practices and how they
are to be explained. How is it possible to justify a position in which such explanations are
cast aside as too subjective for consideration?
Harris responded very passionately indeed to these kinds of claims during his life,
which ended in 2001. He believed very deeply that a positivist objective scientific anthro-
pology was fundamentally necessary to explain culture, and that all other theoretical
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positions which failed to do so fell into the emic trap. To this end, he wrote an essay
entitled ‘Cultural Materialism is Alive and well and Won’t Go Away Until Something
Better Comes Along’ (Harris,1994). Something better never did come along in Harris’s
view. He was particularly vehement in his criticism of those theoretical positions which
privileged meaning and symbolism, and argued that these were the most subjective and
prone to fundamentally misrecognising emic positions as valid. Universalist positions like
Harris’s have broadly come into disfavour in anthropology in postmodernity because it
has been recognised that anthropologists, as primary tools in research, are only ever cap-
able of producing partial accounts.
Clifford Geertz’s kind of anthropology was conducted in pretty stark opposition to
Harris’s. Where Harris essentially believed that symbolic systems of meaning essentially
existed to remind people not to do stuff like slaughter cows or pigs in response to the
prevailing infrastructural conditions, Geertz focused on how symbols have an impact
and an affect on the ways that people think about their social worlds, and saw them as
‘vehicles of culture’.This is really evident in his work on the Balinese cockfight, in which
he tries to kind of decode the symbolic meanings embedded in the sport, according
to the Balinese who participate in it and then how these meanings influence people
in the course of social life. In ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, in his The
Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz, 1973), he develops his idea of reading cultural practices
as ‘texts’. Examining the cockfight as text enables Geertz to bring out an aspect of it
that might otherwise go unnoticed: ‘its use of emotion for cognitive ends’ (ibid.:449).
Going to cockfights is an emotional education for Balinese –it teaches and reinforces the
emotions and reactions of Balinese culture in an external text: ‘The culture of a people is
an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over
the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong’ (ibid.:452).
Have a read of this saucy extract from ‘Deep Play’:
The intimacy of men with their cocks is more than metaphorical. Balinese men …
spend an enormous amount of time with their favorites, grooming them, feeding
them, discussing them, trying them out against one another, or just gazing at them
with a mixture of rapt admiration and dreamy self-absorption.
(Ibid.:180)
He notes that there is a nature-culture dichotomy at work, and that animals and humans,
good and evil, creation and destruction, are organised along this dichotomy, but that
the two spheres of existence meet at the cockfight. There is no main match, and no
connection between individual matches. When a fight ends, men slip into the ring with
a cock and try to find a logical opponent for it. When a match is made, the spurs are
attached. The cocks fly at one another. One of them manages to land a blow to the other.
The cock who landed the blow is picked up by its handler, so it won’t get a return blow. If
it did, it’s likely both birds would die as they hacked each other to bits. The cock landing
the blow has to show it’s ok, so the handler lets it strut around.The injured bird is worked
upon frantically by its handler to get it to be in a fit condition to fight. The bird who
expires first loses. Geertz describes two types of betting that go on in a cockfight:
• The main bet that happens between principals who own the fighting cocks
(centre bets),
• Peripheral or side bets that occur between members of the audience.
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Centre bets are very large collective wagers that involve coalitions of bettors. These
are arranged with the umpire, who is located at the centre of the ring. Side bets are small,
and are organised on the sport between individuals who call out to one another across
the ring.
Ideally, the match is as unpredictable as possible: these are called ‘deep matches’.
Matches that do not have these characteristics are called ‘shallow matches’. The more
evenly matched the cocks, the higher the centre bet. If you have a large centre bet,
you will also have very frenzied side betting. These large ones are most interesting to
people because men are betting a lot of money, and more importantly –a lot of social
prestige, and valuable cocks. Engaging in a centre bet in a deep match is something
that is high risk and will cost a lot of money. It is in a shallow game that you are more
likely to make material gain. Geertz argued that the explanation for what might seem
totally irrational is in that the money is less a measure of utility than it is a symbol of
moral import. Honour, esteem, dignity and respect are at stake. In betting on the deep
games, you are putting your public self, metaphorically through the medium of the
cock, on the line.
The village in which Geertz carried out his fieldwork was dominated by four patri-
lineal descent groups (you of course know exactly what these are, now!). He noticed that
they were constantly vying against each other, as they formed the major factions in the
village. Occasionally, two got together against the other two, and other times they acted
independently.They had sub-factions as well. Geertz argued that the cockfight is a drama-
tisation of status concerns, and that the following things were very important:
A man never bets against a cock owned by a member of his own kin group. The
closer the kin tie, the more he bets, and the deeper the fight.
If your kin group is not involved, you’ll be for the allied one.
If an outsider cock is fighting, you will bet for the one from your village.
Cocks which come from some distance are favourites, since the man would not bother
to bring it all that way if it wasn’t brilliant. Home villagers are obliged to find the best
cocks to fight and will have to bet on them heavily to show they are not a cheapskate
village. These games tend to repair relationships at home in the village and unite people
while home games deepen divisions between descent groups.You don’t get two outsider
cocks fighting, or two with no particular alignment with a group. Therefore, all matches
are sociologically relevant.You don’t get two from the same group, either –same principle
as above.
The centre bet is always made up by structural allies; no outside money is involved. No
outside money is mixed in with the main bet.The centre bet is the most direct expression
of social opposition. To summarise, then:
The more a match is between near-status equals or personal enemies.

And between high status individuals, the deeper the match.
The deeper the match, the closer the identification of cock and man (i.e., he’ll use
his best one, the best loved one).
The finer the cocks and the more exactly matched, the greater the emotion
involved.
The higher the bets centre and side, the shorter the outside bet odds will be, and
there will be more betting overall.
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All of that means we need to take a less economic and the more social, emotional, mean-
ingful view of the cockfight to see how it all makes uncommon sense. Geertz thought
that attending a cockfight and participating in one is, for the Balinese, a kind of senti-
mental education:
What he learns there is what his culture’s ethos and his private sensibility look like
when spelled out in an externally collective text; that the two are near enough alike
to be articulated in symbolics of a single such text; and that the text in which this
revelation is accomplished consists of a chicken hacking another mindlessly to bits
… Every people … loves its own form of violence. The cockfight is the Balinese
reflection on theirs; on its look, its uses, its force, its fascination. Drawing on every
level of Balinese experience, it brings together themes –animal savagery, male nar-
cissism, opponent gambling, status rivalry, mass excitement, blood sacrifice –whose
main connection is their involvement with rage and the fear of rage, and, binding
them into a set of rules which at once contains them and allows them to play, builds
a symbolic structure in which, over and over again, the reality of their inner affili-
ation can be intelligibly felt … Balinese go to cockfights to find out what a man,
usually composed, aloof, almost obsessively self-absorbed, a kind of moral autocosm,
feels like, when, attacked, tormented, challenged, insulted, and driven in result to the
extremes of fury, he has totally triumphed or been brought totally low.
(All quotes from Geertz, 1973:199)
Aha! So this is where you learn to be a man. All of the rage, shame, all of those dirty and
low animal feelings you get arising from attack, torment, insult –all the feelings from
winning or losing –those are felt, surging, as the animals, an extension of the man, hack
one another to bits in the ring. People don’t do it, but they feel it, control it. Can you
apply this to football? What would you say are your people’s forms of violence, those
loved spectacles that we watch and in which we participate, indulging all the violences,
hatreds, aggressions, fears and triumphs that our social lives may not permit us?
What a way to finish a taster-plate of anthropological theory, by ruining your capacity
to watch sports. Let us continue ruining your television watching by now taking a good,
hard look at wildlife documentaries.
You know when you watch wildlife doccos, and all the animals are mating, or they
live in family groups with sex-specific roles? You may be surprised to learn that same-
sex relations in the animal world are not as unusual or rare as TV might have led you
to believe. Indeed, same-sex behaviour is a nearly universal phenomenon in the animal
kingdom, common across species. Check this out:
Same-Sex Behavior Seen In Nearly All Animals, Review Finds

ScienceDaily (June 17, 2009) —Same-sex behavior is a nearly universal phe-
nomenon in the animal kingdom, common across species, from worms to frogs to
birds, concludes a new review of existing research. “It’s clear that same-sex sexual
behavior extends far beyond the well-known examples that dominate both the scien-
tific and popular literature: for example, bonobos, dolphins, penguins and fruit flies,”
said Nathan Bailey, the first author of the review paper and a postdoctoral researcher
in the Department of Biology at UC Riverside. For example, male fruit flies may
court other males because they are lacking a gene that enables them to discrim-
inate between the sexes,” Bailey said. “But that is very different from male bottlenose
246

dolphins, who engage in same-sex interactions to facilitate group bonding, or female
Laysan Albatross that can remain pair-bonded for life and cooperatively rear young.”
“We have estimates, for example, of the heritability of sexual orientation in humans,
but none that I know of in other animals,” he said. “Scientists have also targeted
locations on the human genome that may contribute to sexual orientation, but aside
from the fruit fly, we have no such detailed knowledge of the genetic architecture of
same-sex behavior in other animals.”
(University of California –Riverside, 2009:n.p.; see also Bailey and Zuk, 2009)
This review wasn’t the first of its kind. Canadian biologist and linguist Bruce Bagemihl
authored the book Biological Exuberance:Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity back in
1999, noting therein that the animal kingdom is characterised by far greater sexual diver-
sity —including homosexual, bisexual and nonreproductive sex —than the scientific
community and society at large have previously been willing to accept (Bagemihl, 1999).
Biological Exuberance cites numerous studies on more than 450 species, demonstrating
that homosexual and bisexual behaviours are common –ordinary –among animals.
Reproduction, argues Bagemihl, is but one of the functions of sex; other include group
cohesion, young-rearing, tension and stress reduction, even pleasure. Bagemihl’s research
wasn’t about documenting the frequency of same-sex activity as much as it was about
the ways in which such behaviours were classified by scientific observers, and the service
into which an apparently prominent animal heterosexuality has been pressed. Citing such
studies as Leuthold’s (1977) African Ungulates: A Comparative Review of Their Ethology and
Behavioural Ecology –pertaining to giraffes –Bagemihl argued that a very great deal of
homosexual behaviour is never classified as such, despite its frequency. It is common for
two male giraffes to caress and court each other, and thereafter to mount and climax and
they do that more frequently than they practice heterosexual coupling –something in the
order of 94 per cent of observed mounting incidents took place between two males in
one study, and around 75 per cent of the time in another (see Bagemihl, 1999: 391–393).
Bagemihl notes in particular that:
Every male that sniffed a female was reported as sex, while anal intercourse with
orgasm between males was only “revolving around” dominance, competition or
greetings.
(Ibid.:391)
As social anthropologists, we reckon we’ve got a pretty good understanding of ‘greetings’;

if you’re being greeted this way, we strongly recommend you have a talk with the person
who is saying ‘hi’ by way of any kind of intercourse, unless of course it’s entirely consen-
sual and that’s just your jam. We’re not judging.
You can see already that the implications for humans of homosexual behaviour across
the animal kingdom are enormous, especially in the sense that only ostensibly exclusively
heterosexual animal behaviour supports the claim that homosexuality is peccatum contra
naturam: a sin against nature. When you read about Geertz’s cockfight a little bit earlier,
you can see the effort to create a distinction between animal and human worlds at play –
but you can also see immediately the connection. The animal world is often referenced –
everything from serving as a counter to ideal human behaviour (as an aggressive bloody
violence or brutishness or lack of refinement to be avoided) right through to providing a
model for the application of natural laws. On that one, we can say that Bagemihl’s work
247

was cited by the American Psychiatric Association and other groups in their amici curiae
brief to the United States Supreme Court in the case of Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558
(2003). This was a landmark decision in which the Court ruled that sanctions of criminal
punishment for those who commit sodomy are unconstitutional. The Supreme Court
struck down the sodomy law in Texas in a 6–3 decision and, by extension, invalidated
sodomy laws in 13 other states, making same-sex sexual activity legal in every single
US state and territory. You can read about this case here if you want to know all of the
details: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/558/.
This is an interesting case for us to consider, given the ways in which animals are
represented in absolutely enormously popular documentaries. We think it might be sig-
nificant that evidently common, everyday homosexual behaviour isn’t represented in what
we see on TV.We think that references to ‘nature’ remain powerful for, as much as humans
seek to distinguish themselves from animals –as Geertz’s work demonstrates –references
to a natural order often undergird exclusionary claims. How long will it be before sexual
expressions beyond heterosexuality make it into your favourite animal docco? It feels to
us like that’s a long way off –and we want you to remember that next time you think
things might be evening up –perhaps much, much more needs to be done. When we see
doccos with lots of giraffe anal sex, we’ll know that things are starting to move in the right
direction, and when the viewing public regards that as part of giraffe life in the same way
that heterosexual mating is accepted as prime time viewing –and even educational –then
we’ll know for sure that the world is getting to be a more representational and safer place.

If you’re having a bit of trouble grasping this anthropology business, then the next chapter
is for you. Why do we say this? Because the next chapter is all about things –we feel
sure you’ll be able to hold your relationships with the material world in anthropological
scrutiny a bit more easily than some of the other topics we’ve covered. We think so
because we’ve chosen really ordinary examples and easy ways to compare common and
uncommon sense-making. Get ready to see your material life anew!
Notes
1 Yes, we all know people with mean tongues. If you know someone who has one, tell them,You
have a mean tongue.’ When they are insulted, tell them you were actually referring to Aristotle
and it’s a compliment. Then walk away smugly.
2 It’s worth noting that Kraft dinner has an historical association with failure and attempts at alle-
viating hunger; the product entered the market after the Great Depression on the basis of its
claim that it could feed a family of four for 19 cents. The interested reader can consult www.
mashed.com/123963/untold-truth-kraft-macaroni-cheese/, but it’s perhaps the case that Kraft
dinner was registered on the tongues of those families as the taste of failure, the taste of survival,
and probably both.
3 There’s a few good contenders for braiding different approaches together. A case in point is
Palsson’s exploration of Icelandic fish, which explores the water dwellers in structuralist as well
as economic and practice terms (see Pálsson and Helgason, 1995). Another is Michael Stewart’s
1997 complex account of the equally important economic and symbolic roles of horses in the
lives of Hungarian Roma. There are, besides, many others (see, for example, Descola, 1992;
Brightman, 1993) –certainly sufficient to make the claim that the last days of the 20th century
were dedicated to fusing what had once appeared untraversable theoretical division. Productive
248

as this work was, animals remained in the positions of hierarchical difference they had always
occupied relative to humans in the discipline.
4 It’s also how Simone was able to understand what the people of Christmas Island, in the Indian
Ocean, meant when they said that the red crabs who live on the island moved along arterial
pathways that the islanders had to unblock.The crabs were as blood, moving around the island –
just as blood moves around the human body (see Dennis, 2009a; Dennis, 2009b). That blood
took on different shades as the crabs moved from the parts of the island covered in phosphate
dust, which made the red crabs light coloured, to the lush interior and ocean, where water made
the crabs’ carapaces brightly rubicund. The Yellow Crazy Ants that had arrived as stowaways on
boats ‘infected’ the crab blood.They sprayed formic acid into the crabs’ eyes and mouths, leaving
them blind and starving.The blood could not flow properly, killing the island. It was no surprise
to Simone when asylum seekers who came to Christmas Island by boat were treated and talked
about just like the ants were –as a cancerous infection on the island and a direct threat to its life-
blood. This wasn’t an abstract idea; the illness was felt, was painful, for island and personal body.
Lifebloods of all kinds –physical, emotional, financial, were threatened. The infectious status of
foreign bodies could get into water, disrupting purity and threatening life and livelihood.This
idea of Jackon’s takes Douglas’s founding notion a little farther, but it was her work that made
Simone intuitively realise that Australian residents of Christmas Island described yellow crazy
ants and asylum seekers, both of whom had arrived by boat without permission, were killing the
crabs, and killing people –they both brought diseases, cancer, that could kill. Body and world
were as one.
5 One more thing. Douglas has already impacted you. She’s indirectly responsible for Simone’s
teaching technique, of cutting her hair into ice cream. We know that students recoil in repul-
sion. There’s nothing dirty about my hair, nothing dirty either, about the ice cream, but they
belong in different taxonomic domains. The dirt arises as a result of their coincidence. We know
students won’t eat the proffered ice cream; they all protect the bounds of the body by refusing
it admittance. We’re in Douglas territory now, and it’s only ten minutes in to the first lecture.
It’s the best way I know to show the students the difference between common knowledge (the
YUCK! Reaction), and the uncommon knowledge so characteristic of anthropological explor-
ation of the world: what organises the reaction we all know to be the right one to yell out? What
else does classification, taxonomication render polluting? It isn’’t long before we are talking
about Australian racism, the design of the lecture theatre, knowledge itself, the way we have so
far in this book. Mary Douglas isn’t abstract to you, is she?
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25
8 Space, consumption and the

anthropology of things

So you thought you manipulated things and spaces? So you thought giving things to
others, like presents at Christmas and on birthdays, was just you being nice? Guess again!
This chapter is going to propose some uncommon-sense explications of things like ‘gen-
erosity’, mastery over things, and our only apparent consummate manipulation of physical
space that will make you rethink your mastery over the world (and maybe your gift-
giving ideas and practices). This one’s for the cynics –not very festive, we know, but very
important. Why? Because all of this stuff is tied up with the operations of power –and
it’s the subtle relations with power that often get missed, and that are highly consequen-
tial –as Simone’s work on mentoring, featured in this chapter, makes plain. It’s also for
those who love their families, as Daniel Miller’s 1998 analysis of shopping makes just
as plain. Don’t think that idea has nothing to do with power, either. In this chapter, the
supermarket comes back on our radar. Will you ever be able to shop in a common-sense
way again????

The uncommon sense to get here begins with the recognition that it’s hard to question
stuff that’s highly valued –like generosity, for instance. It’s equally difficult to question
the stuff that’s so everyday that it’s part of you –like objects and places. The idea in this
chapter is to rearrange the unidirectional thinking that usually characterises how we think
about the role of objects and space in our lives. We use objects, and space is the backdrop
against which social life plays out –but these are really common-sense ways of thinking
that conceal the humble, hidden power of objects and spaces to profoundly influence our
practices, bodies and modes of thinking.

Use this chapter to get a handle on those subtle operations of power –and your entailment
in them. Take it out beyond the university to speculate on how these operations work
elsewhere, too. It’ll make you change your thinking about how spaces are designed, how
driving works, how things circulate between us and impact our bodies and relationships
with others.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003273547-8
253
Space, consumption and the anthropology of things 253
What insight can you get into the university by thinking with space and things?
This chapter entails and occasions your consideration of the university campus and
buildings and your relationship to them. Simone’s work on mentoring is a direct demon-
stration of the insight you can get; she examiners how female academic staff are related
through acts of generosity that serve, ultimately, to undergird the relations of patriarchal
domination in universities.
Bah humbug!
This is the chapter also known as the chapter that ruins Christmas. If you happen to be
someone who celebrates Christmas, don’t read this chapter in December; it will only
make you sad. Why are we talking about Christmas in this chapter? Because Christmas
is a time when people give one another gifts. Gifts are at the very heart of anthropo-
logical thinking about how things relate us to one another and how they articulate our
relationships. Gift exchanges are usually reciprocal; if Andy gives Simone a gift for her
birthday, Andy expects Simone to give one to him on his birthday. That results in a
sequence of reciprocity; Simone gave Andy a present on his birthday last year –he now
owes her one (even if Simone does keep turning 35 every single year). So, now Andy and
Simone are in a cycle of giving, receiving and repaying gifts to one another. If one of us
breaks this obligation, the other would very likely feel rejected. So, reciprocity is a binding
instrument that helps hold social relationships together over time. As you can see, recip-
rocal exchanges work to keep things in balance –they don’t cause the redistribution of a
society’s wealth.The exchanges that do make changes are called ‘redistributive’ exchanges.
They attempt to shift wealth around to level hierarchical arrangements a bit. In the West,
progressive income tax systems do this, and so does charity. ‘Reciprocal’ exchanges (as
opposed to redistributive ones) keep up the circulation of goods and services. So, it’s a big
deal when you get it wrong. On that note, let’s talk Christmas.
If you are like Simone, then the lead-up to Christmas is the most stressful time of the
year. Simone lives in a tiny house, but that has never stopped her from pushing a gigantic
greased-up tree through the front door and into the living room. That’s stressful. Simone
has some cats, one of which hung itself from some tasteful sisal rope decorations last year,
almost resulting in its death –a decidedly unfestive sight. That’s stressful. More unfestive
was when the tree had to be denuded of all its beautiful decorations, to preserve the life
of said cat. Nothing says Christmas like a bare tree, especially when it’s by far the largest
item in the house. That’s stressful. But more stressful than any of these things is the acqui-
sition of gifts for other people.
Simone’s usual MO –ordering stuff online for timely Christmas delivery (also known
as throwing some money at the problem) –has not been operational since the onset of
the COVID-19 pandemic; she stopped doing it because of all the delays. It meant Simone
would have had to order presents in, say, March or so in order to have them arrive in
time for Christmas. It’s not how she rolls. Now, very, very close to the cut-off for on-time
delivery of interstate gifts, a sweating, swearing Simone is to be found at the shops. There,
you may observe her yelling abuse at anyone who dares get between her and the almost
suitable item that won’t cost over AU$1 million to post. Yes, there have been words. Yes,
there have been incidents.Yes, she has been politely but firmly escorted from some shops.
But not all shops. That’s the important thing.
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254 Space, consumption and the anthropology of things

Andy, on the other hand, is a beaming and benign human being who is deeply affected
by Christmas. Around September, he starts to think seriously about festive lighting and
the pros and cons of various kinds of tree. He shops thoughtfully and early, and always
with a quiet, warm inner glow that manifests on the outside as a kind of joyful, peaceable
quality that Simone knows full well is completely the wrong vibe for Christmas which,
as noted, is all about stress.
As is obvious from Andy’s (very weird) calm shopping experiences and as is some-
what less obvious from Simone’s Christmastime (perfectly understandable and fully
contextualised) rap sheet, we are both voluntarily buying gifts for people we care about.
We do it because we have feelings for people and we want to make them happy. Or so the
story goes. But is gift giving ever really just this, even when you’re giving to your nearest
and dearest? Well, let’s cover a couple of different responses to this. The first one concerns
shopping itself, and a theory of shopping as proposed by anthropologist Daniel Miller.
Sacrificial shopping for love?

Miller (1998) suggests that shopping in the Western world is typically but not exclusively
thought of as a materialistic and mostly hedonistic activity –think about how you feel
when you go out to buy whatever it is that you like most. Simone and Andy share a passion
for shoe shopping and have indulged it in many countries –we can tell you that the best
ones come from Spain, but are also available in Portugal.That’s based on some pretty hard-
core research, people. Anyway, replace ‘shoes’ here with whatever it is that you are fond of.
Now, contrast this kind of shopping with what for most people is a much more mundane
kind of shopping –buying the groceries. That’s right, we’re back in the supermarket.
Until you learned from this book that the supermarket was a veritable living labora-
tory for anthropologists, and that probably every supermarket is full of them, you prob-
ably thought grocery shopping was all about the acquisition of things for the household.
We’re not suggesting that it isn’t that; of course, there are very practical concerns that are
met by a trip to the shops. We’re suggesting it’s much more than that, too. Shopping for
glam shoes and shopping for groceries are much more than just hedonism and sustenance
respectively. And, if you’re Daniel Miller, studying shopping means offering an alternative
to the common-sense perspectives of shopping that position it within materialist, indi-
vidualist and hedonistic paradigms of consumer desire. This might be an interesting time
for you remember the accusations that went flying in the direction of the functionalists
as they formed up a theoretical perspective on the significance of animals in human
lives, and the accusations that were sent Harris’s way as he developed his theory of cul-
tural materialism. We mention these bodies of theory because there’s a bit of a pattern
to notice –namely that utilitarian-based explanations are generally regarded in anthro-
pology as essentially unsatisfactory. You will already know, of course, from reading this
book that anthropologists don’t much like them when they see them circulating ‘out
there’ in the world as explanations for human social life that is almost always more com-
plex than utilitarian explication could hope to cover. However, it’s pretty interesting to
see anthropologists having equal trouble with it within the discipline.
Miller based his uncommon-sense insights into shopping by undertaking a year-long
ethnographic study in a north London street and going shopping with people (see Miller,
1998). This is of course the point at which informants come to know that they are going
shopping with an anthropologist who is going to see what they’re doing in different terms
than the usual common-sense way.That is, people know they’re part of an anthropological
25

field –so it’s a bit different from Simone and Rowena’s lurking in the meat section
observing people’s responses to their strategically placed boxes of tampons.
Miller’s observations of and interactions with a theory of shopping challenges the
common sense of understanding consumption that regards objects as commodities and
reduces them to mere utilities. Instead, he shows how acquiring ordinary stuff for the
household is transformed into relationships –ones that are not utilitarian or materialistic.
In the end, it’s a deeply cosmological meaning of everyday shopping that he’s proposing.
Ah, Simone knew all along that shopping was where it was at!
But how does Miller propose this, and on what basis? Miller accompanied people as
they shopped for ordinary things. Adopting an uncommon-sense perspective that refused
to accept that all people were doing was acquiring things for utilitarian purposes allowed
Miller to see shopping as more than an end in itself. He saw shopping instead as practices,
which, when closely observed, reveal a lot about people and their relationships. Get a
hold of this straight away for yourself by thinking about how you shop for groceries. If
you shop for others as well as yourself, you’ll know that those others are present with
you even when you shop alone. Perhaps you select things for them you know they’ll like;
maybe you temper your selections, too, to guide them gently, for example, into a healthier
eating regime. Shopping could be seen as an expression of practical, everyday love that
you operationalise in and through the mundanity of selecting everyday objects for others.
Miller certainly noticed that the medium of selecting goods permitted an avenue for
people to develop and imagine the social relationships most important to them. The act
of provisioning is not simply expressive of, but harmonious, congruent with, the proper-
ties of modern relationships. Miller wasn’t just talking about interpersonal relationships,
either. He had a much bigger theory going: namely that shopping is a means by which we
mediate between the sacred and the profane worlds. Bet you hadn’t thought of that while
shopping for tampons or ice cream.
What does this mean? Here’s the deal: Miller understood shopping through the prism
of sacrifice. He noticed how late capitalism is often thought to represent a fatal triumph
of excess –one we can only resist by sacrificing consumption. That’s a view advanced
particularly by Bataille (who had a Hegelian view of sacrifice: a view that acknowledges
the centrality of death in the self-creation of the human spirit. Depressing –and it’s some-
thing you’ll find in all the world religions). At other points of history, the fundamental
need for sacrifice has been satisfied in other ways –shopping can be understood as a sat-
isfaction of this need in late capitalism. But Miller isn’t taken with Bataille’s Hegelian take
on things and sought to juxtapose his insights into shopping with them. This is how Yana
Manyukhina explains it:
This to Bataille is ultimate freedom; sacrifice is a gateway to ecstatic experience

that reveals and confirms our fundamental continuity by temporarily transporting
our attention away from our awareness of discontinuity. In and through it, people
negate the logic of cumulative consumption; sacrifice is a profitless act of spending,
a destruction of what could otherwise be used with utility. For Miller, however, sac-
rifice is anything but profitless, and [the] supposedly destructive act of consumption
serves a much higher goal –it becomes an activity through which relationships with
the divine are built and maintained. In many societies, sacrifice symbolises the end of
the production stage and defines the moment when consumption begins. Such ritual
is necessary to avoid the immediate consumption of products of labour which would
reduce them to basic subsistence and lock in the logic of pragmatism. Instead, the
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first and most perfect produce is used to constitute and sustain spiritual relationships
–“the very best of what the society has produced is effectively and efficiently spent to
obtain not merely mundane provisioning but the benefits of a relationship of love and
devotion to a divine force” (Miller, 1998, p. 83). By dedicating the most important
spending to the deity, people make the rest of the yield open to human consumption.
This is when the final stage of the ritual begins –that which denotes the return of
attention from the spiritual and the divine back to the real world. At this stage, a very
specific and strictly prescribed way of distributing and consuming the sacrificial meal
serves to recognize, confirm, and reify existent social relations –hierarchies, castes,
and other forms of social divisions and difference.
(Manyukhina, 2014:n.p.)
In his ethnographic data, Miller noticed especially the concepts of ‘the treat’, and the
centrality of thrift among his participants. These seem to Miller to indicate counter-
sacrifice. For instance, he found that the housewives in his study shopped for them-
selves only in the context of ‘treating’ themselves –something done far less usually and
routinely than the business of provisioning the home which, by contrast, was all about
idealised notions of love and devotion to others in the housewives’ family and network.
Indeed, these shops could be understood as planned acts of devotion, embedded in the
ritualised ‘shop’ through which the women not only expressed love, but converted it into
material reality.
You might be getting a feminist rash at this point; Simone always does when she thinks
of this theory, but you have to admit that feminist takes on shopping may have prefigured
the field to the extent that we can only ever make narrowly constituted insights into
shopping as labour in a particularly constituted economic field –and those would be
doomed right from the start. It’s extremely important that we continue to do those kinds
of analysis, but they might miss how at least some housewives –especially those in Miller’s
study –understand shopping as love. Even so, Simone still has that testy rash. She likes to
quote the journalist Will Self on the topic, who reviewed Miller’s A Theory of Shopping for
the Financial Review when it was first released in 1998:
Miller sees recent changes in gender relations and the concomitant division of
labour as relatively unimportant in terms of an overall theory of shopping. Let
me tell him, speaking as the man in aisle seven, feverishly comparing the price of
Sainsbury’s own-brand corned beef with Prince’s, while my five-year-old chomps
a “browsed” carrot, that I experience all of the states of mind he adduces to female
shoppers, and I have a penis. It’s not that large a penis, but it’s certainly as big as a
frankfurter.
(Self, 1998:n.p.)
Now that’s journalism!

You also might be wondering about this ‘treating’; what if the treating is the kind
that Simone likes best: a great big bottle of whiskey that costs several hundred dollars
and might mean, in consequence, that people in her household have to eat pasta surprise
more than two nights in a row. (The surprise is that you can make carrot-based sauce for
linguine. You shouldn’t, but you can.) That is to say, ‘treating’ might be subject to certain
limitations and definitions –and might indicate something a little less selfless than Miller
had in mind.
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Essentially, there are three stages in Miller’s theory of shopping that are important to
get your head around:
1. Just as is the case in respect of sacrifice, shopping can be interpreted as the point at
which the accumulation of resources turns into expenditure of those resources.
2. Miller argues that thrift is present in every single act of spending and that it negates
the wasteful expenditure of resources. Most shoppers he studied were on the hunt
for bargains and sales, but they couldn’t tell him what they’d use the savings for. This
happened no matter if people were rich or poor, whether they needed to save money
or whether they had enough to spend whatever they liked.That led Miller to suggest
that thrift isn’t really about saving or money management; it’s more like a ‘devotional
gift to the future’ (Miller, 1998:102), something so important and significant that it
damps down immediate and transient desires that make you want that thing, now.
So, Miller thought thrift was the manifestation of larger, loftier, more important life
goals. It’s a kind of sacrifice –one that looks pretty similar to the relationships with
the divine that people have in a sacrificial ritual, that also bypass immediate human
desires in favour of appeasing larger ones.
3. Just like in all sacrifice situations, part of the sacrificial giving returns back to the real
world where it re-establishes the social order.That’s true in shopping, too.The portion
of resources that haven’t been sacrificed as thrift come to the intended recipient in
the form of a devoted purchase that Miller does not see as an object or a commodity,
but an expression of love. At this point it’s really important to remember that most of
Miller’s informants were women who, in and through shopping, create and maintain
idealised images of a husband, a child, or any other beloved person, and materialise
those with transactions and objects that we’d normally regard in utilitarian terms.
What do you think? At the very least, we’ve made absolutely and completely sure that
you’ll never shop like a civilian again. Time to raise some different kinds of questions.
Back to bah humbug

Hold up a minute while we rain all over this love parade. Let’s ask a question about gifts –
another register in which objects and commodities are centrally involved. Is gift giving
ever really voluntary? This is one part of anthropological speculations about gift giving.
What do you think of the idea that it is obligatory to give gifts, that it is obligatory to
receive gifts, and that it is obligatory to reciprocate a gift?
When Simone teaches this idea in her first-year anthropology course, she tells a
depressing Christmas story to illustrate the point –about her parallel cousin (you know
what one of those is now) Trevor, who is her father’s brother’s son. Very sadly, Trevor
passed away in early 2022, but we’re going to stick with this example anyway. It’s better to
do this than make up a scenario (despite the things we’ve said about Swimmingpoolians),
because it’s very much in the ethnographic spirit of our discipline –making up too many
illustrative stories risks abstracting life, and we’re a bit sensitive to that. Besides, we think
Trevor would like to have his localised glory expanded to a wider reading public.
The story is basically that for many years Trevor and Simone’s families (who live next
door to one another on rural acreage) exchanged Christmas presents. The exchange was
predictable and reliable, and it meant that when Trevor became an adult, he received the
tin of biscuits and coffee cup that his older brother had already been receiving for some
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years. Simone’s mother prepared the gift the evening before Christmas, considering only
which colour coffee cup Trevor should get. Imagine the shock, horror and disbelief that
ensued when Trevor did not respond to the coffee cup and tin of biscuits combo with
his usual box of ‘Goldilocks’ chocolates (that is, the mid-price point selection–not the
cheapest ones, not the most expensive ones either). Instead, he presented Simone’s mother
with a big, beautiful basket of gourmet treats. We’re not talking about the kind of basket
that is filled with shredded paper with a few nice things on top; this was all kill, no fill. It
was heavy. Simone remembers a small muscle in her mother’s jaw twitch as she took the
basket, and that it continued to twitch for quite some time thereafter.
Now, what’s wrong with this situation? And why did Simone’s mother twitch? It wasn’t
just that Trevor’s gift to Simone’s family was worth (a considerable monetary amount)
more than one he received. It’s not only about the money, because this is a bit different
from purchasing transactions, where you pay market value for something. If Simone’s
mother had made Trevor something nice, like some of her famous tomato relish, this
would have been a more even match for the gourmet gift basket, even though the relish
would not be worth much in money terms. It would probably cost less to make than
Simone’s mother spent on the tin of biscuits and the coffee cup that she gave Trevor, but it
would have included her love and her labour, which are worth a lot. As it is, the situation
feels wrong because the obligations we owe one another manifested in very uneven terms,
and everyone knew they were meant to be equally perfunctory –the families give each
other gifts because that’s what they’ve always done, and they’re kind of token ones –and
indeed, pretty much the same ones every year. Suddenly, one turned out to be a bit more
than that.We’ll never know what possessed Trevor to do this –he was probably being nice
and maybe got a windfall of some kind, but it certainly caused a whole lot of twitching
to go on for Simone’s mother. Maybe even some itching.
Think about the absolutely dreadful feeling that rises up in a person when they didn’t
live up to a new and unexpected arrangement in exchanging gifts. Has this ever happened
to you? Even if it hasn’t, you’ll know that the party receiving the gift of more value prob-
ably doesn’t feel great because they got something of higher value than they gave. Why
not? Isn’t it good to get the better end of the deal? Maybe, if you’re not in a social rela-
tionship with the giver; but here it’s not. Let’s think about Hau to explain this. Hau is a
Maori word deployed by French sociologist Marcel Mauss, meaning ‘spirit’: you give me
a Christmas present, and with it comes Hau. If I reciprocate (and reciprocate appropri-
ately), the Hau is returned to you, just as should occur. If I don’t, that spirit will remain
with me and it will haunt me. We can see the haunting starting in the twitch in Simone’s
mother’s jaw.
One thing you can probably already see from this unfestive Christmas example is that
it’s possible for people to lord it over other people in the process of gift exchange, but
not always by being the one who got the better end of the material deal. In his book
The Gift, Mauss (1990 [1940]) used the term ‘potlatch’ to describe exchange practices in
tribal societies. A potlatch is a gift-giving feast practiced by the Indigenous peoples of the
Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States1 and it’s really important –to
the extent that structurally, it serves as the heart of their economic system and the bed-
rock of indigenous governance. It refers to what Mauss called ‘total prestations’, a system
of gift giving with religious, kinship, economic and political consequences and effects. In
the societies that Mauss describes, the competitive exchange of gifts occurs. People seek to
outdo one another for the purpose of securing dominant political, kinship and religious
roles. Here’s how Dorothy Johansen describes potlatch:
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In the potlatch, the host in effect challenged a guest chieftain to exceed him in his
‘power’ to give away or to destroy goods. If the guest did not return 100 percent on
the gifts received and destroy even more wealth in a bigger and better bonfire, he and
his people lost face and so his ‘power’ was diminished.
(Johansen, 1967:7–8)
Hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages and nations are reinforced
through the distribution (and sometimes the destruction) of wealth. The status of any
given family is raised not by who has the most resources, but by who distributes the most
resources.The hosts demonstrate their wealth and prominence through giving away goods.
Varieties of reciprocity
Marshall Sahlins (1972) describes exchanges between people in the terms of reciprocity.
You can also read about these in the work of Sally Price (1978): ‘Reciprocity and Social
Distance: A Reconsideration’. In any case, Sahlins describes three different kinds.
Generalised reciprocity
Generalised reciprocity is gift giving without the expectation of an immediate return. You
could buy someone a cup of coffee and not immediately expect that person to recip-
rocate. That would be weird, not to mention overcaffeinated. But next time you want a
coffee, the person you bought one for this time will be expected to pay. There’s lots of
occasions where it would be super-weird if the person you’d treated reciprocated imme-
diately. If they did, it would probably indicate that the person doesn’t want to be in a rela-
tionship with you where they owe you something; they needed to clear the debt straight
away so they’d not have to be in a reciprocal relationship of exchange over time with you.
This has of course never, ever happened to either Simone or Andy –they mention it here
entirely in the abstract.
You can also understand generalised reciprocity if you think about your parents. What
have they given to you? Maybe lots of stuff. But it probably wasn’t the case that a ledger
was set up for every single thing they put into you that you had to pay back immediately.
When they need something from you, like full-time care in their dotage, you probably
won’t add up every single thing they did for you, assign it a dollar value, and then give
precisely that much support in return –unless you have some very odd parents.You didn’t
pay them back right away for doing all they did for you; you’re more likely to reciprocate
your parent’s care by caring for them in return much later on.
Remember Malinowski? He described probably the most famous example of
generalised reciprocity in the discipline of anthropology –the Kula Ring. You can read
all about that in his famous book, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, of 1922; if you’re keen,
it’s part of a trilogy that comprises The Sexual Life of Savages in North Western Melanesia
(1929) and Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935). Recall that Malinowski was interested in
how individuals pursued their own goals within cultural constraints. He thought that cul-
ture worked to provide seven basic needs: reproduction, nutrition, safety, bodily comfort,
movement, growth and relaxation. His main aim was to demonstrate that cultural beliefs
and practices contributed to the smooth and harmonious functioning and continuation
of society, while at the same time providing psychological and physical benefits to indi-
viduals.You can see this in his analysis of the Kula Ring.
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The Kula Ring is a system of ceremonial exchange operational between the Trobriand
and other islands off the coast of New Guinea. The people who inhabit these places
are culturally and linguistically different from one another, but they share this common
system of ceremonial exchange.When he described it, Malinowski showed that an appar-
ently irrational activity to be totally rational. This was very important, since Trobriand
Island people were considered to be backward and irrational by Europeans. The Kula
Ring was a closed trading system in which only established senior male trading partners
from each island could participate. The trade was carried out with large outrigger sailing
canoes. Long, dangerous sea voyages were undertaken for the purpose of this trade. On
the surface, it appeared to be primarily an exchange of gift items and ceremonial feasting
organised to reinforce bonds between senior trading partners. The trade network was
essentially circular. If a trader was travelling in a clockwise direction around the circuit, he
would give long necklaces of red shells (soulava) as gifts to his trading partner. If he was
travelling in a counterclockwise direction, he would give armbands of white shells (mwali).
Each participant is linked to two partners: one to whom he gives a necklace in return for
an armband of equivalent value, and the other to whom he makes the reverse exchange
of an armband for a necklace. Necklaces move one way around exchange partners, and
armbands go the other way. Although each individual is tied to only two other partners,
each contact has an additional connection on either end of the distribution chain. This
links more than a dozen islands over a vast expanse of ocean.You can get quite informal
‘inland’ transactions, and you can get really full-on overseas ones that are chock full of
ceremony and magic. This system of exchange is crucial for the maintenance of pres-
tige and rank and status, and in the negotiation of those positions as well. The system is
very important in the terms of regional integration. It involves annual inter-island visits
between trading partners who exchange highly valued shell ornaments.
Kula partnerships have many social implications. They establish friendly relations
among the inhabitants of different islands and maintain peace, they provide the occasion
for the inter-island exchange of other utilitarian items, and they reinforce status and
authority distinctions (for example, chiefs own the most important shell valuables and
assume the responsibility for organising and directing ocean voyages).
Notice not only generalised reciprocity here; note that those reasons for exchange all
look very rational, don’t they? Malinowski thought so, and he used what he’d found to
show that other groups of persons, when understood in functionalist perspective, were
just as rational as the white European agent insisted that he was.
Balanced reciprocity
Balanced reciprocity is different from generalised reciprocity; it does entails an immediate
expectation of return. Let us return momentarily to Simone’s beloved (or behated?)
supermarket. You go in, you get some fresh dog food and the nice cream cake that is, of
course, in the same refrigerator case next to it. (Probably this is the same supermarket
where Rowena does her shopping.) You take these items to the front of the store, and you
walk out with them.You are about to experience the consequences of failing to immedi-
ately reciprocate. Don’t try this in the name of anthropological experimentation! Again,
we just don’t have bail money for you.
Another example might also serve to clarify: go back to Christmas to imagine a
(roughly) balanced reciprocity at play. If you go to the home of relatives or close friends
on Christmas and give them Christmas gifts, there is an expectation that you will receive
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gifts in return at the same time. If you don’t bring any gifts to exchange, your relatives will
probably think you don’t care about them, or they might start planning an intervention
for you (probably around New Years’ Eve, when you’ll be forced to make a very serious
resolution to change). Here’s a free life hack: get your act together –get presents in time
to exchange on Christmas Day, if you want to perform the balanced reciprocity that your
relatives expect of you.
Another scenario you can use to understand balanced reciprocity is to be found in the
pub. If you don’t go to pubs, ask someone who does what happens –it’s fascinating. One
of the things that happens in pubs is that groups of friends tend to take it in turns to buy
a round. Anyone who has ever been in this situation knows it’s not good to say something
like, ‘I’m not really keen on buying a round for you guys, but I’m very happy to accept a
drink when it’s your turn to buy, Steve.’ Everyone is meant to be equally obligated to one
another, not hierarchically arranged –this behaviour would change that.
Negative reciprocity
Negative reciprocity is probably the most interesting one of all. It happens when someone
tries to get someone else to exchange something they may not want to give up. It also
happens when there is an attempt to get for yourself a more valuable thing than you gave
for it. This is tricky and can involve some of the nastier bits of being human. Have you
ever gotten yourself a bargain on the back of someone else’s desperation? What about
when someone is moving and they still have stuff they want to get rid of, and you lowball
them? That’s you taking advantage of that person –you take much more than you would
have given in an equal exchange of balanced reciprocity.
Negative reciprocity isn’t always about taking advantage –it can actually go the other
way. Do you know someone who is loaded? Are you especially nice to that person in the
hopes that they’ll part with some of that cash? Ever wanted a promotion really badly and
laid on a charm offensive to get one? That’s all negative reciprocity.You’re getting some-
thing much more valuable in return for what you’re giving, using coercive techniques or
by taking advantage of someone’s situation. If you’re doing those things, at least you now
have some fancy names to describe them!
Is a gift ever just a gift?

Let’s get back to the question of whether or not there can be an exchange that is just
done out of the goodness of your heart, without the expectation of reciprocity. How
about when you make a charitable donation? Well, donors might get quite a lot; one thing
might be a tax advantage. Another might be a clear social conscience. Another could be an
elevation of the donor’s social status or some sort of positive recognition. Sorry everyone.
So all of this stuff indicates that gifts hold people in relations of debt and obliga-
tion. Simone has researched this in the university context –in women-only mentoring
programmes. In her recent book, Mentored to Perfection, which she wrote with her colleague
Alison Behie (see Dennis and Behie, 2022), Simone argued that women-only mentoring
programs are set up as gift exchanges. Mauss’s insights were useful to Simone and Alison;
they laid bare how the process of gift exchange is underpinned by three obligations: the
obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to reciprocate. This was
true of the gift of mentoring, that passed from senior female academics to junior ones, for
the purpose of facilitating the latter’s ascendency through institutional ranks.
26

Within this system, operational in the modern university, mentees must take up
positions as less-equipped parties who require the generosity of relatively better-equipped
mentors. Mentors occupy positions that enable them to give; mentees occupy positions
of receipt. In such exchange systems, under the cover of generosity, mentees become
indebted to mentors. Simone and Alison argued that this constitutes a kind of imitation
of the university’s patriarchal operations, chiefly because mentors are the embodiment
of success that mentees are bidden to replicate and the terms of that success are male.
In Simone and Alison’s analysis, mentoring programmes offer us a clear picture of how,
effectively, junior women are nurtured into becoming successful senior women—and
how those senior women become, in effect, honorary men. Such is the result of the
embrace they must make of male standards (also known as institutionalised ‘benchmark
masculinities’ to achieve success in the terms defined by the university and the broader
knowledge economy. The relations of patriarchal transference thus endure in this system-
atic approach, and they are obscured by generosity.
For some theorticians, like Derrida (1992), a gift is only a gift if it does not obligate
and incur debt. The gift that comes with obligation and debt becomes, instead, a com-
modity, and it is only ever possible to gift when the gift is not recognised as such. Derrida
(1992:12–14) argued that Mauss’s thesis actually remains firmly within the logic of con-
tract and exchange; the gift practically functions as a commodity. Once recognised, the
gift bestows a debt on the recipient that can be annulled only through an appropriate
form of return. It is precisely this economy of contract and exchange between self-present
individuals that makes generosity impossible. Only in invisible silence does generosity
do its work of personal and social formation.The loud proclamations of the generous
giving of mentors, the value of their gifts to mentees, and the acknowledgement of the
debt mentees owe their mentors stand in stark contrast with the idea that true giving
only takes place in invisibility or silence. The gifts that mentors give to mentees –know-
ledge, wisdom, and so on –are memorialised in things like promotion applications, and
in the form of institutional awards –women are often recognised for the work they do
in the mentoring space. Mentees are not; as senior women mentors’ contributions are
memorialised, mentees’ contributions are forgotten; their repayments are pressed into the
service of memorialising the mentor. In such terms, mentors might be said to replicate
patriarchal operations, in which women make their contributions in the terms of value
set by men. Such are the conditions of what Roslyn Diprose calls ‘virtuous giving’ (2002).
Diprose emphasises how virtuous giving memorialises only those who are in possession
of something worthy enough to give and how it equally erases or forgets those who
are in positions only to receive. Forgotten recipients include the marginalised –they
might be the landless, the unemployed, the indigenous, the immigrant –who depend
for their inclusion in dominant systems on the generous giving of donors. Donors equip
the marginalised with the skills, experiences, access and knowledge to participate in
these dominant systems, as is the case in enabling mentoring, where career development
and networks are made available to inexperienced mentees by their successful mentors.
We’ve argued at the start of this book that ‘students’ also belong in the list of forgotten
recipients, too.
The receivers of generous gifts are forgotten in very particular terms.Virtuous giving
is done unidirectionally, from donor to donee, in the service of drawing the donee into
the world of the donor. Donees are in that position precisely because they lack some-
thing that the donor is in a position to give. As that (experience, knowledge, perspective,
insight) is given by the donor, the difference between the donee and the donor is reduced.
At no time are donees obliged to value the difference of their donors from themselves;
263

it is the difference of the donor that is the trouble in the first place. It must be reduced
for the donor to succeed. In the context of mentoring, Simone and Alison argued that
the task of the mentor, really, is to produce successful women, women who are ‘just like
us’, as successful as we are, the same as us. It is the alterity of the donee, the mentee, that
for Diprose is forgotten: virtuous giving values ‘my’ experience over yours because your
difference is rendered deficient; it is the thing that must be reduced so that you can be
successful. Thus, the difference of the donee is valueless.
Simone and Andy have made the exact same argument here as it concerns students: and
we want you to resist being made the same –but do you remember why? Go back and
read our introductory chapter and remind yourself of our objection to virtuous giving,
aka maieutic relations, and our attempts to value your alterity by seeing it as new know-
ledge that can and should challenge what we know –and will grow knowledge as a result.
You should by now be able to see the yield of that by looking at what your own exercises
have produced. Take stock of that now, while we gear up to talk about another of Daniel
Miller’s theories –this time of things themselves.
Things, things, things!

Things are of course involved in our lives in much broader ways than just reciprocally.
They’re very much more broadly involved, which led Daniel Miller (2005) to wonder if
there might be developed a theory of things. One part of this would deal with things
as, well, things –artefacts, mere things; another part would deal with transcending the
dualism of subjects and objects. Think about that first part. The value of seeing things as
things is that by focusing on them, we might actually understand that their enormous
power lies in their humility. Miller draws on two sources to get us to think about things.
First comes Frame Analysis. Put very simply, this idea was advanced by the sociologist
Irving Goffman (1975), who argued that much of our behaviour is cued by expectations
determined by the frames that constitute the context of action. Probably the easiest way
of thinking about this is to imagine yourself at a play where someone is violently attacked
as part of the play.You wouldn’t get up and try to rescue the person under attack, because
you know it’s a play –that’s the frame. Miller adds to this idea of with the 1979 insights
of the art historian Ernst Gombrich (1979), from his book The Sense of Order. Essentially,
Gombrich suggested that an appropriate frame is a frame you can look past. Its main job
is to tell us what should be noticed, what we should be paying attention to. You know
when you go to an art gallery and you look at a world-famous piece of art? Imagine if
your response to it was to say, ‘Oh! I just love the frame that that ultra-famous painting is
in? I mean, stunning!’ That’d be weird. The idea is that the frame tells you what to look
past so you can look at what you’re meant to be looking at. Here’s another example. If
you want very much to be punched in the face, go up to a woman at an event and tell
her that her carefully applied make-up makes her look attractive. Let us know how that
goes, but don’t expect any sympathy: you know full well you’re supposed to look past the
make-up and say she looks beautiful. Simone thinks this now takes some effort, given the
popularity of fake eyelashes. If people are going to wear things on their eyes that give baby
giraffes a run for their money, then there’s limits on what she can say. In any case, taken
together, these ideas of Goffman and Gombrich constituted an argument for what Miller
called ‘the humility of things’:
The surprising conclusion is that objects are important, not because they are evi-
dent and physically constrain or enable, but often precisely because we do not
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‘see’ them. The less we are aware of them the more powerfully they can determine
our expectations by setting the scene and ensuring normative behaviour, without
being open to challenge. They determine what takes place to the extent that we are
unconscious of their capacity to do so. Such a perspective seems properly described
as ‘material culture’ since it implies that much of what we are, exists not through
our consciousness or body, but as an exterior environment that habituates and
prompts us.
(Miller, 2005:5)
The point being made here is that objects may slip out of our focus, yet they determine
our behaviour. Have you ever thought of objects this way?
We think the very best way for you to think about this is to go into your lecture theatre
at university for your anthropology lecture. What normally happens when you do that?
Very probably, you go in and take a seat somewhere in front of the lectern, right? There
aren’t signs in the lecture room that tell you to do that –the space kind of tells you what
to do, where to go; it would be very strange if there was anything more to it than that.
But next time you go to your lecture, go stand where the lecturer normally stands. When
your lecturer comes in, tell them we told you to do it.We want you to notice how strange
it is to stand where you’re not meant to be, knowing you’re not meant to be there –and
we want you to notice that the space, its very ‘thingness’, indicated this to you in a very
backgrounded kind of way.You might think you’re the master of space –but perhaps it’s
not so straightforward as you think. To get you inspired about, well, things, before we try
some exercises that get your hands dirty and your brain smarting, let’s take a look at Ruth
Kravis’s encounters with Miller’s ideas:
Some way, shape, or form

By Ruth Kravis
As an engineer by training, most of my work involves things in some shape or form.

Most recently, I’ve worked as a renewable energy engineer, on projects powering
small communities, and so the thing I typically deal with is energy (mostly electri-
city), as well as the technologies that generate and consume it.
After an excellent lecture introducing me to the anthropology of things, I started
thinking hard about where people enter the energy equation. I began by looking
at language, and realised that we use the word ‘energy’ to talk about heaps of things
other than the material thing –we use it to talk about food, space, people, spir-
ituality and health (Piggott et al., 2016). While these other things are often quite
immediate to us –I’m sure you know what it’s like to be ‘low on energy’ –I realised
that electricity is often invisible in our everyday lives. It gets hidden inside yet
more things –think cars, phone chargers, lightbulbs, air conditioning systems.
Anthropologist Daniel Miller speaks about the power that material things can exert
over our bodies and the spaces they inhabit, and I began to wonder whether this
might apply to energy as I knew it. Miller argues that the less aware we are of these
things, the more power they can exert over us, and the harder they are to challenge –
he calls this the ‘humility of things’.
265
For many people, everyday energy is largely invisible. These people don’t think
much about how their own bodies and the bodies of others are shaped by the way
that energy is delivered and distributed within the spaces they occupy, through
things as simple as the location of power sockets and of streetlights.They don’t think
about how this distribution might include some people and exclude others. The
only time they really notice energy is when it is unexpectedly absent.
For other people, everyday energy is more visible, because it gets used in obvious
social ways. Members of many Indigenous Australian communities in the Kimberly
region of Western Australia use pre-paid power cards to pay for their energy, and
these power cards often get shared between people and households to fulfil recip-
rocal social obligations (Riley 2021). This method of payment allows cultural
practices of reciprocity to be operationalised through energy, transforming it into a
thing that can be gifted or exchanged.
Re-examining my own profession with these ideas in mind, I saw similar notions
of energy exchange and reciprocity in the current push for community-owned and
operated energy systems. Community energy projects seek to democratise energy
by allowing members of a community to own energy-generation assets. Sharing
energy is often essential to the economic viability of these projects, but as we have
seen, sharing energy can make it socially sticky, binding people together by obliga-
tion and becoming part of the fabric of human relations within a community. This
can be a help, or a hindrance, but either way, it’s an important human part of the
equation.
Through applying this anthropological thinking, I realised that the energy infra-
structure and technologies I was so familiar with from a technical perspective could
take on different meanings for different people in different places. Far from being
just a mere physical substance, energy operates along social and cultural dimensions,
and can reinforce or be incorporated into existing social and cultural practices. As
I reflect on our current energy transition in Australia and globally, this makes me
reconsider the narrative of ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ energy technologies. I wonder whether
this framing, by reducing energy to its physical origins, loses all that important
anthropological complexity. As we continue to reshape how our energy is generated
and distributed, we should also consider how we use that energy, and particularly,
who is served and not served by the current systems.
Ruth’s speculations on energy made us speculate on the possibility of new technologies

coming into the home, and the impacts they might have on our lives. Design anthropolo-
gist Sarah Pink (2021) recently made a film documenting the installation of smart home
technologies into the households of older people –a project she led to observe how digital
devices impacted their lives during the first year of COVID-19. The documentary film,
Smart Homes for Seniors, shows how 11 of the study participants encountered the new tech-
nology in their homes in regional New South Wales, which included smart lights, smart
kettles, robotic vacuum cleaners and digital voice assistants. Pink is interested in particular
in how digital technologies become part of the home, and how home itself is the yield of
the relationships people create and encounter with things, including things like new tech-
nologies. She describes the joys that result when relationships become even more facilitated
and manifest in and through new technologies –in things like communicating in new
26

ways with loved ones, or being able to play a favourite music track to create a particular
mood, or being able to do something else with a partner instead of doing the vacuuming.
The feelings that arise as a result of these ordinary joys constitutes home itself, the feeling
of being at home in one’s own life, and relationships (see Monash Tech Talks, 2021). Of
course, as Chris Chesher and Justine Humphry (2019) argue, automated devices can haunt
the home; their work points to the alienation from homeliness that they can cause. Chesher
and Humphry point to the ‘uncanny’ dimensions of ‘smartness’ in the domestic setting;
technologies can usher in the sense that the home’s inhabitants are under surveillance or,
as occurred during COVID, make it seem like absolutely everything –work, play, leisure,
labour –all happen, relentlessly, in a single domestic site. The overwhelm and alienation
such feelings can occasion can ironically undermine the ostensible intention of smart tech-
nology, to produce an ease of life where the home rises up to meet the needs and desires
of its inhabitants. Sophie McDonald thought along similar lines when she considered the
impact of technology on elderly people during the COVID crisis, as the state depended
on mastery of things like phones to navigate a range of services:
In the COVID-19 battle, has technology further isolated our

elderly?
By Sophie McDonald
Keywords: technology, COVID-19, elderly, alienation, demographic.

Abstract
During the recent global pandemic, technology, more specifically smartphones, have
become a critical part of managing our safety in the community. However, this does
not mean everyone has the knowledge and skills to effectively navigate the latest
technology. The older generation shows signs of anxiety and uncertainty when
confronted with the use of unfamiliar digital programs. As a result, a considerable
proportion of society has become increasingly isolated, and a social and psycho-
logical divide is evident between the young and the old.
What’s the topic or problem?

To reduce community transmission of the COVID-19 virus, the ACT government
recently created the CBR COVID-19 check-in app for businesses and venues. By
patrons using the app to check in at each location they visit, authorities keep track
of community contact and respond quickly to contain any spread.
This system is heavily reliant on smartphone technology, and by implication, for
those people who don’t have a smartphone or who find operating new technology
a challenge, checking in can quickly become a difficult experience to navigate.
In previous findings, when confusion or difficulty arose surrounding the process
of checking in, some people spent time searching for staff assistance, who are not
always present or easily accessible, leading to further irritation. In more extreme
instances, where there was a sense of urgency or a great deal of frustration, some
individuals simply did not complete the process and the system was bypassed and
effectively rendered useless.
267
What can an anthropological lens on the topic reveal?

Based on my observations, I saw a trend emerge among those that had min-
imal to no success using the CBR check-in app. The large majority fell into an
age group between late-middle age and the elderly. These people either did not
have a smartphone or had significant difficulty using their smartphones with
the required app and checking in with the displayed QR code. By contrast, the
younger generational users I witnessed usually had no issues in following the
instructions, processing the information, and obtaining a rapid confirmation of
check-in.
It is disturbing to think that a whole demographic of people experiences sig-
nificant difficulty with the new contact tracing. As I have observed previously,
the elderly or those in the older middle-age category are not as technologic-
ally inclined as younger generations. We may like to think that the casual use of
portable technology, on our smartphones or watches, is a skill anyone can learn
and utilise as it continues to evolve, but this is easier said than done –people are
inevitably left behind. As we have seen during this pandemic, mobile technology
has increasingly become part of how we stay safe and is something we all require
access to. But it is not safe to assume that everyone knows how to use this tech
in the same capacity.
Historically, technology has advanced to make our lives easier. Faster trans-
port services, quicker and more reliable connection on smaller devices, speedier
dissemination of information, and in a myriad of other ways, tech has advanced
society, making it more efficient and arguably delivering a better quality of life.
As time has moved on, there has always been an older generation that has had to
keep pace with a world progressing around them. One could argue that in the
past, there was less pressure placed on the older generation to pick up the latest
technology and find a place for it in their lives. Innovation was not compulsory.
Today, carrying a smartphone is more than just handy, it has become a critical
tool for contact tracing and the circulation of information. Sufficient knowledge
about this tech is required to enter social gatherings and in personal community
interaction. If this knowledge is lacking, a physical barrier is literally established
and there is a sense that no one can go out without their smartphones and fully
function in society.
A heavier reliance on smartphones in today’s pandemic has done more to
accentuate a generational divide. As the world moves on to adapt to COVID-19
restrictions and continues to find ways to minimise transmission in a ‘quicker’ and
‘easier’ fashion, arguably the most vulnerable demographic has been excluded. On
the one hand, the response to this crisis and the technological developments could
be described as admirable. But on the other, it would seem as a result, a sector of the
population is alienated.
Why should anyone care about this?

When it comes to keeping everyone in our community safe, it is essential to
question the efficiency of the systems that are being implemented and how they
interact with our society. Relying on the use of smartphones as a leading tool in
268
managing our information has consequences for an older, perhaps less techno-
logically sophisticated, demographic. A deep divide is established between the
young and old. As the older generation is left to come to terms with the arrival of
a global pandemic, they are also faced with a mandatory learning curve, sometimes
impossible to overcome. An inability to complete the check-in process quickly,
often leads to embarrassment and pressure, exacerbating a sense of isolation and
community disconnect. A system developed for such an essential service as com-
munity health must cater to all members of society so that everyone can easily
comply and together combat the common threat: COVID-19. In a time when it
is so important to support one another, the alienation of such a vulnerable demo-
graphic needs to be considered in greater depth.
The interesting thing about Pink’s insights into the successful incorporation of new tech-
nologies into the home is that their successful incorporation isn’t about solving logistic or
technical problems; instead, the trick to integration is to ensure that the technologies are
understood in the terms of the social lives they facilitate. Others, like Bissell et al. (2018)
apply that kind of thinking to driverless cars. They try to think beyond the fairly sim-
plistic and obvious arguments proffered for the delays and hold-ups to the introduction
of driverless vehicles; Australia was meant to be well underway in incorporating them by
2020, but this still seems a long way off. They are of the view that the delays have been
interpreted as logistical and technological issues, and that the complexity of the social
relationships between cars and people is the far more important set of relationships to
understand and operationalise.
As things, cars effectively illustrate how individuals learn to become members of
society via inculcation into the general habits and dispositions of that society. People
interact with ‘society’ in and through their everyday practices with structured and
structuring objects. Cars are a omnipresent feature of life, just as the road infrastructure
that permits their movement, to the extent that it’s difficult to isolate the extent of their
influence. While our environment is to a significant degree shaped around cars in a way
that few of us would fully consider, cars –or indeed any other thing –does not pre-
cede culture and then shape it, as Marxism would insist. Neither do things acquire a set
series of functions predetermined by previous generations; they are part of the social,
and are thus open to manipulation by agents in dialectical processes –and they can also,
to a extent, manipulate us, as we described earlier. Maybe now would be a good time
to reread Katz’s (1999) insights into the ways in which drivers become ‘automobilised’.
The car must be incorporated into the driver’s own body necessarily, in order to drive
competently at all –no one could drive if they kept in conscious attention the points
at which their own bodies ended and that of the car began. Yet, it might seem on the
face of it that cars are wholly under our control, and we use them in unidirectional
relationship.
The notion that the world doesn’t precede, but is instead made in social terms, is
important for considerations of power. The humble power of things to have impact
on people can be pressed into the service of particular interests, something that five of
Simone’s students, discovered in their exploration of physical university spaces:
269
Ordinary institutional spaces, replete with gendered power

By Zixun Lin, Anna Chapman, Neve Traynor, Anna Norden and
Nitya Narasimhan
The Culture and Human Diversity class offers students the chance to look into
everyday life in anthropological terms. Students do so in practical terms, chiefly
by taking fieldnotes on an ordinary circumstance and trying to understand what
deeper cultural logics organise what appears on the surface as ‘just the way things
are’. As the class members approached this task, we (five women members of the
class) noticed that the everyday circumstances they were observing articulated a
pattern of gender hierarchy. This often unreflected-upon gendered ordering of the
world allows us a vantage point from which we can remark upon the culture of
sexual violence emerging in Parliament. The importance of this field of study lies
in the underlying presumptions and unnoticed inequities which frame both the
problem and its potential solutions.
One of the key examples articulated in the collected fieldnotes concerns how
anxieties over how ordinary institutional spaces are dealt with in and through
the installation of, for example, bright lighting, more easily surveilled pathways
between buildings, and the provision of regular transport services. While these
are very obviously important critical actions that help render spaces safe for tra-
versal, they may ironically obscure the gendered organisation of space –because,
in them, space may continue to be treated as a backdrop to the social action.
Considered more critically, space itself is revealed to be a social actor –and a
gendered one. This becomes evident in analysis of the names of buildings on uni-
versity campuses, which tend to reflect male dominance. For example, teaching
and administrative blocks are more frequently named after women, and centres of
research are often named after men, a practice that remains in the contemporary
period rather than being constrained to the past of historical institutional practice.
Highlighting the hierarchical gendered organisation of the everyday world,
including its unremarked upon and often unnoticed spatial organisation, reminds
us that our current high-profile political allegations aren’t culturally out of the
ordinary, and that some corrective actions might need to consider what undergirds
and supports gender hierarchies, often in ways that are hard to see. Looking for
them helps us to understand under what circumstances these incidents arise and the
appropriate solutions to reduce their occurrence.
Our research collective is interested in examining these and many more everyday,
ordinary circumstances in order to help make the world safe for human difference –
including gendered difference. It is one of the ways in which we intend to bring
our learning to bear on the real world, and to take up roles in operationalising our
research in ways that really matter. At present, we are at the beginning of this inten-
tion and we look forward to understanding where our orientation to learning and
research, and to gendered hierarchy, takes us.
270

Giselle also developed an interest in university space –in particular, in ‘desire pathways’:
Desire pathways
By Giselle Anderson
Figure 8.1 Giselle’s map of part of the ANU campus.
For my fieldnotes I went out onto campus and observed people as they moved
through the space. I sat at the end of University Avenue, the main street of the ANU
campus. This part of the avenue has two parallel pathways with a large leafy strip
between the two.
This part of the avenue is used mainly by residential students, students/staff of the
nearby schools as well as people who have parked nearby, all heading to the centre
of campus.
The three main observations I made while taking my field notes were:
That people overwhelmingly always followed the ‘left hand rule’;

That people preferred walking in the most efficient way, to the extent of creating
desire paths
That people almost always walked on a path.
It was interesting to observe how often these social norms were followed and which
took precedence and when.
The etiquette of walking to the left hand side of the path was almost always
followed by individual travelling by themselves, but this ‘rule’ was followed less and
less as the more people were travelling together.
Similarly, people seemingly almost always wanted to take the most efficient route,
with generations of students actually forming new pathways (desire pathways)
271
through hundreds of footsteps over large amounts of time. However while efficiency
did take precedence, the vast majority of pedestrians always walked on a pathway,
whether or not going on or off road would have led them to their destination sooner.
Another observation I made while completing my fieldwork was that when
following the left-hand rule, pedestrians were never right at the edge of the pathway,
instead staying about a foot away from the very edge. In fact, I believe that most
observers would find someone walking as close to the edge of the path as possible to
be quite odd or unusual. Once again though, the exception to this was when people
walked in groups, as to fit three in a line to the two outer walkers would have to be
very close to the edge of the path.
I have found that all of these observations have interesting connotations when
considering how we move though and act in the spaces around us. While we may
like to believe that we have free rein and can act as we please, very few actually do
so in their day-to-day lives. Much of the behaviors I observed are learnt, taught to
us both actively and passively but the spaces we travel and live in are also designed
to influence the way we behave in them.
In my brief time in anthropology, one useful trick I have found when examining
the world around me is to consider how, if you changed an aspect of a space, how it
would change the way it is viewed and interacted with. For example, the pathways
along University Avenue are brick and are designed with casual foot pedestrians
in mind, but how would pedestrian interaction with the paths change if they were
pedestrian/bike paths made from concrete with a line painted down the middle to
formalise the left-hand rule?
We think Giselle is onto something here when she raises the question of formalising the left-
hand rule –which is, at the moment, a norm rather than a rule. In 2021, a bit of a brouhaha
erupted in the South Australian capital city of Adelaide, when a city councillor, Anne Moran,
proposed that signs be put up to ‘help redirect pedestrian movement’, making sure people
stuck politely to the left-hand side of the pavement. Moran said she wanted ‘a civilized city’:
The Adelaide councilor is tired of cyclists, scooters, smartphone zombies and meanderers
ricocheting off each other, creating mayhem on the (ahem) thriving streets of her city
… Little did Moran know the next frontier of the culture wars was about to erupt on
the wide, leafy, perfectly planned streets of this metropolis (population approx. 22,000)
which takes in the central part of the South Australian capital … On the local ABC
station people talked fondly of the days when a strict, painted line divided left firmly
from right. One man harked back to the days when gentlemen bodily inserted them-
selves between their ladies and the filthy detritus and danger of the streets.“In my day,”
people cried, “there were rules!” “What about in supermarkets?” one caller wanted to
know. “Are we going to punish people?” asked the man from the pedestrian council.
“Non-enforcement of the law will encourage its disobedience!”
(Shepherd, 2021:n.p.)
Andy had quite a lot to say about this in his radio interview with the ABC in Melbourne,
during which he disputed that a lot of dreadful blunt-force traumas occurred as a result of
27

pedestrians crashing headlong into one another as a result of being on their phones. When
Andy was remarking on Moran’s proposal, he talked about a rule, rather than a norm, for
left-hand walking discriminates against people who use the pavement in other ways besides
getting most efficiently from point A to point B. Pavements aren’t only facilitators of effi-
cient movement; they are also places to be –for the homeless, for example. A left-hand rule
might discriminate against those who stay on the pavement even more than it presently
does. It might also produce negative impacts for new migrants who might not have fully
internalised the norms of movement in a new place. And, it might discriminate against the
blind, as well as others who depend for their orientation to space on the opposite or road-
side edge of the pavement, and who might move and interact with the pavement differently
than able-bodied walkers. As Andy also pointed out, left-hand walking obviates a number of
historic uses of pavements; for instance, de Decertau (2009) describes how walking unregu-
lated is one of the few ways available to us to avoid the control and human engineering
of the architectures of power, the kind that Giselle noticed when she described how desire
paths disobey the intended routes for conveying people from A to B. And, Benjamin (1983)
described the flâneur –a ‘stroller’, usually understood to be an ambivalent figure of urban
affluence and modernity, but in Benjamin’s formulation an urban investigator of the modern
city and an essential sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism who met his demise
with the triumph of consumer capitalism (see also Benjamin, 2003). Both these figures stand
importantly at odds with the obedient use of the pavement and thus represent alternatives
to a totalizing power, especially for those on the margins.
We could take this further by gendering the pavement. You might recall that one of
the supports lent to Moran’s proposal for formalisation of the left-hand walking rule
invoked a tradition of men walking betwixt their female companions and the roadside, to
shield them from the detritus of the road. Women interact with the pavements in far less
passive ways than this, but certainly conceive of and experience public space differently
from men in modern cities; as do LGBTI people, young people, elderly people, differently
abled people. In her The Invisible Flâneuse:Women and the Literature of Modernity, Janet Wolff
(1985) argued that the female figure of the flâneuse is almost wholly absented from the
literature of modernity, because public space had been thoroughly gendered, relegating
women to private space. One might argue that nightfall still has a similar effect; women
might be told that public space isn’t safe for traversal after dark. Then again, Elizabeth
Wilson (1992) shows how the modern city was equally conceived as a place of freedom,
autonomy, and pleasure. Perhaps most usefully, Linda McDowell (1999) sets homogeneity
and the fixity of space aside in favour of examining how women used particular kinds of
public spaces –like cafés and shopping malls –to experience autonomy.
Virginia Plas took her interactions with Miller to the museum. Virginia wanted to
understand the impacts of museum space in promulgating the nation’s foundational
myths, but also its limitations. Have a look at her in-depth analysis:
Myths in space
By Virginia Plas
In the National Museum of Australia (NMA) and the Australian War Memorial
(AWM), space guides visitors’ engagement with exhibitions on some of the events
273
most central to conceptualisations of Australian history: the arrival of James Cook in

the ship HMS Endeavour on the east coast of Australia in 1770, and the exploits of
Australian soldiers (often referred to as ANZACs) during the First World War, respect-
ively. I conducted fieldwork on this during my anthropology course, interested to see
how the founding myths of Australian history are conveyed and challenged within
Canberra’s national institutions, both by the space itself and the behaviour of visitors.
I found that space is not a neutral actor; its agency encourages certain types of
engagement with history and exhibitions. Equally, it is not always an effective actor.
For context and reflexivity’s sake: I am not Indigenous, nor do I have a strong
family connection to the ANZACs. The anthropology of historicisation that I dis-
cuss in here of course has a personal connection for me –I have lived here all my life
and my analysis deals with events that permeate my sense of what Australia is –but
none of my forebears were Australian and I may have written something different
if I had had a longer family history in this place to inform my perspectives on this
nation’s history.
‘The View from the Shore’ at the National Museum of Australia:

Rethinking citizenship through space
I conducted my fieldwork at the NMA’s ‘Endeavour Voyage: The Untold Stories of
Cook and the First Australians’ temporary exhibition. Upon entering the exhib-
ition, the visitor is presented with three towering and active waterspouts, as seen
by both the sailors on the Endeavour and the people from the shore. An audio track
played as visitors entered and several took photos or videos of the waterspouts. This
sensory simulation of a historical environment creates a sense of immersion in place
and time, positioning visitors as active participants rather than passive observers in
the historical narrative. The main part of the exhibition is created to mimic the
East Coast of the Australian continent, with a green bench imitating the landscape
running all along the middle. Where the coast curves further to the east, gaps in the
accompanying wall reveal art, objects, multimedia presentations. These range from
contemporary Indigenous art interpreting the cosmos to Joseph Banks’s botanical
drawings, but the focus on this side of the exhibition remained on the exhibition’s
titular ‘view from the shore’. Opposite are information and artefacts relating to
life on the Endeavour. After travelling through the shore/sea, visitors can access a
room about Cook’s further travels and his reception in Europe, largely consisting of
European paintings and objects, and a chamber leading towards the exit examining
and reinterpreting Cook’s role in modern Australian national memory.
The volume of objects and information exhibited was much larger for the ‘from
the shore’ part of the exhibition; I observed that the stories of Indigenous peoples
were presented through objects, videos and audio, whereas the Endeavour’s voyage
was presented primarily through objects with textual explanations. Between my
two visits to the field, I noticed that visitors who sat to watch one part of the ‘from
the shore’ section, the short film ‘The Message’ (about Indigenous peoples along the
coast seeing the Endeavour in the distance), were more likely to watch the whole
film. The seats provided to visitors encouraged this behaviour, the space suggesting
a way to engage with the exhibition.
274
My first visit to the field was on a weekday and most visitors were either older adults
or primary-school children on an excursion. Many of the adult visitors interacted
with the space in a way similar to an art gallery: standing back a respectful distance
from objects and information signs. In contrast, the children’s interaction with the
museum was more social, exclaiming about objects (‘wow, look at those spears!’),
or completing set activities designed to help them engage with the museum. Some
adults facilitated these school activities, likely parent helpers or teachers. Children’s
engagement appeared more physically orientated, whereas the adults not attached to
the school group did not complete physical tasks other than observation. I noticed
different engagement by family groups with the antechamber: people taking photos
of the waterspouts, a child running in circles around them.
Although the space was designed to allow flexible movement throughout, with
passageways between all different segments of the exhibition, it facilitated a circular flow
of visitors from the waterspouts, along and into the coast/Endeavour section, through the
European reception of Cook’s voyage, then reinterpretations of Cook, before reaching
a point which asked the visitor to write their own thoughts on how Cook should be
remembered and his legacy interpreted. The histories of the Endeavour’s voyage were
presented physically across from another, perhaps suggesting coexisting but different
narratives. Most visitors vaguely followed the exhibition in a clockwise direction. This
linear movement throughout the exhibition was most noticeable in the section leading
to the exit where visitors were encouraged to leave their comments.
Written comments in this section ranged wildly: from the activist slogan ‘always
was, always will be’, to sentiments with racist implications like ‘life is all about sur-
vival of the fittest’. Many echoed the exhibition’s implied plea to consider the Cook
myth from multiple perspectives, like ‘history cannot be sacrosanct’ and ‘start with
better education … so both sides of the story are represented.’ The visitor partici-
pation encouraged those at the museum to provide their own interpretations of
history, re-imagining the museum as a space not just to learn about the past but to
consider how we do, and should, teach it, and acknowledging the subjectivity of
historical perspectives, particular dominant narratives of important events.
The Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial

The Australian War Memorial (AWM) comprises a courtyard with Roll of Honour and
eternal flame, the Hall of Memory, and several galleries on different military conflicts
(the largest of which and the first visitors are likely to enter focuses on the First World
War, suggesting its particular importance in the canon of Australian history).
The centre courtyard of the AWM leads to the cathedral-like Hall of Memory,
with stained- glass windows and a Byzantine dome. Many visitors entered the
Hall during the approximately 20 minutes I sat in there, but few stayed for long.
Visitors would look first either at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier or the dome
(decorated in gold, with abstract angel-like figures). Most spent about 30 seconds
at the Tomb before either walking out of the Hall or observing the architecture.
Numerous small plastic poppies were laid on the Tomb but I only saw one visitor
add an extra one, which did not look like it had been bought at the AWM.The only
visitors who rested in the space were taking advantage of the benches in there; the
275
high visit rates on the public holiday when I visited meant it was not then a space
for quiet contemplation.
The space’s appropriation of religious imagery encourages reverence and reflec-
tion.While this may have occurred internally for visitors, the short times they spent
in the hall and prevalence of photo-taking did not suggest this through behaviour.
More visitors took photos of architecture than of the Tomb itself; this restraint may
have been a form of respect or taboo. The Tomb was a burial site and taking photos
of gravestones is unusual behaviour in Western culture, which could be interpreted
as a lack of respect for the dead that would contrast to the importance placed upon
the Unknown Soldier. However, it is difficult to draw a definite conclusion from
behaviour alone here, and this is one of the points where I wished I had more ethics
approval than a first-year anthropology course allows –it would have been very
interesting to interview visitors about their intention and use of the space.
Most visitors spoke quietly within the echoey space, perhaps a reaction to the
enhanced auditory effect of one’s voice, or a form of self-policing in deference. One
visitor winced at the noise of a camera shutter; I interpreted this as embarrassment/
shame at making noise in a quiet space. Groups and individuals in the space did
not interact with each other, nor did they provide any disapproving looks at noise,
unlike in other conventionally quiet spaces like libraries, or train carriages. While
visitors may have self-policed, there either was no clear transgression of expected
behaviour or penalty for doing so.
Space is clearly not as effective an actor here as it attempts to be. I have a number
of suspicions as to why that could be –visitors having a fictive kinship with the
Unknown Soldier rather than personal connections with the dead (as would have
been the case when the AWM was built), or simply the fact that I didn’t visit on a
day that is marked as a time of remembrance like ANZAC Day.
Museums as sites of citizenship and education

The National Museum of Australia Act 1980, which established the NMA, mandates
that there must be a gallery on Indigenous history; the role of the museum is expli-
citly as a space to explore Indigenous perspectives. As a national institution, it also
has an equal role in shaping citizenry. Its questioning of a pro-colonial narrative
of the Endeavour’s landings, an Australian founding myth, made me wonder if the
Endeavour exhibition was a space to question the purported basis of Australian-ness
and how we as a nation define ourselves based on history. The ways in which the
space encouraged engagement with nondominant historical narratives shifted the
role of the museum from providing authoritative information to one which guides
a re-imagining of history.
Both in the NMA, where adults were present with school groups to guide chil-
dren through the exhibition, and in the AWM’s Hall of Memory, where some
groups of adults with children took the children to look closer at the Tomb of the
Unknown Soldier, adults take on the role of educator rather than educatee to ensure
that the museum is a space of learning for the less knowledgeable children. The
museum becomes a space in which the public may assume the role of educator and
superimpose their knowledge over that presented.
276
The AWM was built to commemorate, and deals largely with, military service in
the First World War. It is filled with the symbol of the poppy, drawn from the Western
Front, and recalls ideas about Australian military engagement in that conflict as a
‘baptism by fire’: a starting point (founding myth) for the history of a federated
Australia. This demonstrates an alternative approach to founding myths: the AWM
does not explicitly attempt to re-imagine its narrative, although the ways in which
visitors engage with a conflict no longer in living memory are likely very different
to at the time of the Memorial’s inception. The inclusion of a second national
institution in my ethnography provides broader perspective on the engagement of
citizens with institutions which aim to shape citizenry: how do presumed purposes
of education and reflection mix with the perhaps less intentional function of cheap
family entertainment? This question was one of many that arose from my fieldwork,
but I was unable to fully research within the bounds of the assignment.
Conclusion
Following the interest I had in museums during this fieldwork, I took a course on
museum and heritage studies in my second semester. Some of what I learnt there,
including the suggestion that museums are not spaces of effective education, but rather
places people go to confirm pre-existing beliefs, enriched my understanding of the
fieldwork I did. The questions of space’s agency in national institutions link to larger
questions of what, how and why societies choose to remember, which are more uni-
versal than the Australian examples I have explored here. My fieldwork brought up
more questions than it answered for me, but I still consider it one of the most impactful
intellectual experiences of my first year of university: one that pushed me to learn more.
Finally, here is Yoko’s piece, that cleverly puts together liminality with space, and with the
spirit of Esther Black’s notions of ‘waiting’ that she found in the doctor waiting room in her
fieldnote piece in Chapter 1. You’ll remember that Esther discovered that ‘waiting’ was a
replete social category, not just the empty time between activities. Similarly,Yoko found that
the apparently interstitial space of the hospital foyer was pretty important, and that it could
not be regarded as simply a backdrop –it might even have potential therapeutic effects:
Journeying through the hospital –an exploration of liminality

By Yoko Asakawa
I work as a doctor in a big, modern, hospital. Perhaps this conjures up images of

patients identifiable by their wrist bands and the flimsy, oversized and immodest
hospital gowns that envelope their naked bodies; bodies that are attached to intra-
venous lines and monitoring leads; bodies in beds in small rooms that are clinical in
their aesthetic. These rooms could be lined up one after the other down corridors
or perhaps encircle a central clinical staff station for optimal surveillance of critically
27
ill patients. These rooms make up wards filled with hospital staff busy assessing,
reviewing and treating their patients.
I work as a paediatrician in a children’s hospital where the building was purpose
built ten years ago following design principles attuned to a more holistic approach
to health: consideration for natural light, green outlooks from patient rooms and a
colourful child-friendly aesthetic. There are plenty of features not directly related to
health or medicine that have been included in the design of the hospital. There are a
few different cafés as well as a mini-food court that includes a McDonald’s.There are
retail options that include a gift shop, florist, toy shop, convenience store, small super-
market, and a private pharmacy. Entertainment options include an interactive screen,
a two-storey fish tank, a meerkat enclosure, a games and activities room, the Family
Hub with its own beanbag cinema and access to gardens and playgrounds. All of these
facilities are accessed by staff and patients and their families and are connected to the
inner workings of the hospital through the common space of the hospital foyer.
The foyer is the official entrance and exit for the hospital and a space I take very
much for granted and thus became the space I chose to conduct my fieldnotes
exercise. It welcomes the general public into the microcosm of the archetypal bio-
medical institution. However, it also functions to keep them at a distance from the
somewhat elusive and complex inner workings of where all the biomedical work
happens. It is a threshold space that displays hints of the working parts of the hos-
pital in amongst features familiar to the ordinary outside world. In my field work,
there was one television screen in my direct line of vision at the entrance to the
outpatient department that listed the location of the different clinics for the day, but
besides this, clues pointing to this space being a hospital were discrete. The general
architecture and interior design felt like it could belong to any modern building
in the city and instead, the space was dedicated to showcasing different retail and
dining options that were similar to establishments found in ordinary day-to-day
external life. The blend of hospital and outside features found in the foyer created
a liminal space –not quite hospital, not quite ordinary life –where the transition
from one state to another could begin and end.
Liminal spaces
Despite the foyer being a welcoming open space filled with natural light and
offering comfortable seating with a range of food and beverages available for pur-
chase, the people in this space were clearly transitting through, on their way some-
where else stopping only briefly, if necessary. The materiality of the foyer didn’t
place it firmly in the category of a general public space or hospital. On entering
the foyer, the ambiguity drives you to move through the space, either back to the
ward to reassume your role within a clinical space, or out the front door to assume
a new status in ordinary society. Perhaps the function of the foyer is to act as the
liminal space, the threshold between the outside world and the machinery of the
biomedical institution, a passage for connecting the wards to the main entrance, a
space for transition from one state to another.The loss of a stable state precludes the
person within the space from any clearly defined expectations and obligations that
come with having a recognised position within a structured society (Turner 1967).
278
The patient journey

The theme of passage and transience led me to think of the healthcare concept of
the ‘patient journey’: the movement of patients around different parts of the hospital
as they undertake various diagnostic and therapeutic interventions as part of their
hospital stay (Chesher and Humphry, 2019).The complexity of the multidisciplinary
nature of hospital patient care requires a communication tool that allows all care
team members to be clear about the other care teams involved, at what times and on
what days the patient needs to be transported for appointments with these different
care teams, and an estimation of when the patient will be ready for discharge back
into the community so that all investigations and interventions are booked within
the admission period and timely discharge planning can take place. This tool is the
patient journey board and it is a nursing responsibility to record on the journey
board the parts of the patient admission that contribute directly to diagnosis and
treatment. In a well-resourced children’s hospital like mine, we’re fortunate enough
to include music, or art therapy, or enrolling the long-term patients into school
through our own onsite education institute in recognition of the broader context
of health that includes contributions to well-being; what we don’t include is what
patients do in their own time, between these scheduled and organised diagnostic/
therapeutic activities; what they do outside the official treatment and therapeutic
spaces of the hospital.
The therapeutic effect of the foyer

The foyer, not belonging wholly to the outside world, but also not included in the
working machinery of a hospital, is not easily defined in terms of its function. In
the hospital setting, wards, consultation rooms, operating theatres, meeting rooms
are spaces that have a clearly defined purpose and are governed by highly structured
social rules and obligations that direct the behaviour and identity of the people that
feature within them (Goffman, 1959; Iedema et al., 2005; Pigott, Hargreaves and
Power, 2016). Clinicians perform in a role that includes obedience to hierarchies,
expectations of knowledge and skill level, and adherence to endless procedures and
protocols that govern all aspects of patient care. And patients act as the sick and vul-
nerable, accepting interventions done to their body in the name of their health.The
liminality of the foyer produces an unsettling ambiguity.
But what if it is precisely this ambiguity that both clinicians and patients seek
in visiting the hospital foyer? After leaving the ward, patients are no longer under
the omnipresent surveillance of the nursing station. They are free of the machines
and monitors that display and digitise their private bodily functions. They escape
the daily interrogation of clinicians. The liminality of this space strips the patient
of the sick-role they play in hospital by providing them an opportunity to reclaim
other identities: of being a child and playing in a playground, watching a movie,
and playing games in the Starlight Express room; of being a daughter or a son
and having your parent buy you a delicious treat; of being carefree and being able
to delight in picking a new toy to play with. And for clinicians, the foyer also
contributes to well-being in a number of ways. Most obviously, it provides sus-
tenance through the variety of food and caffeine options on offer. However, and
279
perhaps more importantly, it also allows them a space to step away from the per-
formance of being a doctor –the scrutiny of the senior staff testing their medical
knowledge, the unrelenting demands of nursing staff, patients, parents, alarming
monitors –for respite and retreat.The foyer may not immediately contribute to the
work of biomedical hospital care, but I argue it contributes indirectly by fostering
patient and clinician well-being.
Conclusion
The patient journey, through various diagnostic and therapeutic procedures during
a hospital admission, can be a confronting and emotional experience. The hos-
pital environment itself is often unfamiliar, sterile and dehumanising. Modern
hospital design attempts to address this through incorporating natural light and
outlooks onto natural greenery, spaces for recreation, and interior design principles
that imbue warmth and welcome. However, more should be done in this area, as
there is social science literature to support the therapeutic role of liminal spaces
within hospitals. These liminal spaces often go unrecognised in the patient journey,
but the very nature of their liminality provides an opportunity for freedom to
escape the constraints of the identity of being the patient, thereby indirectly con-
tributing to patient well-being. They also dissipate the socially constructed and
highly hierarchical rules of engagement between clinicians and allow a more open
and honest flow of information that contributes to better patient care coordin-
ation. There is a potential to harness this therapeutic potential of liminal spaces by
deliberately incorporating design interventions that promote a more humanised
and personalised hospital experience. The foyer, as a major liminal space within
a hospital, is an under-appreciated resource, ripe with potential to make valuable
contributions to patient outcomes.
Exercise: In space!
OK, over to you. Really think about things, and spaces, to consider all the things you’ve
encountered in this chapter. If it’s space you’re into, go to your university campus or
grab a map of the space online. What can you ascertain? Are the disciplines randomly
arrayed? Or could there be a pattern of power underneath it all? Can you see what it
might be? Where’s law? Where’s medicine? Where’s anthropology? Do the buildings
have names? Are they male, female, admin, research, education buildings? Are they just
the backdrop against which the social action occurs, or are they part of it? How?
Can’t get out and about? Let’s map your living space.Then, mark on it where you
spend the most time cleaning. What rooms or spaces get the most attention? Why?
Have a read of Mary Douglas’s work on purity and pollution –could it be that
where the boundaries of the body are breached (such as when you eat, or go to the
bathroom) are the most rigorously cleaned?
If you live with others of different genders, perhaps you might be interested in
thinking about how the space repels and attracts different gendered activity.
280
If you want to focus on things, consider going full Miller. In his The Comfort of
Things (2008), Daniel Miller visited with 30 residents of a South London street,
which was full of people from diverse backgrounds who mingled together. But what
were the lives of these 30 people like within their private dwellings, beyond the char-
acter of the street? This takes us back a bit to the concern we expressed in Chapter 2,
about how a focus on a group of people with ideas and practices in common would
never, ever permit us to get to the individuals whose experiences make up the world.
Miller’s take was to refuse any kind of preconceived categorisation of the people he
studied –his book doesn’t give a whole lot of insight about the socio-economic or
other circumstances of residents –in favour of focusing on the things that the people
he visited thought mattered the most to them.These often turned out to be material
things, including spaces, the heard and impermanent things –like music, animated
things –like pets, and a variety of other things, from decorative items to art pieces.
These animated people’s lives in ways that revealed things we could never discover, if
we just focused on patterns yielded by groups of people.
You could try this kind of approach –how has your stuff been involved in making
you (not just in representing you)? Would they reveal the sadness of life and the com-
fort of things, as they did in Miller’s study, or another kind of story? See what you get.

Keep in mind that Miller’s ideas have some important consequences. He notes that every-
thing that we create, has ‘by virtue of that act, the potential, both to appear, and to become,
alien to us. We may not recognise them as the creation of history or ourselves’ (Miller,
2005:8). Consider this carefully. We might experience a social order, a hierarchy, as simply
the way things have always been. We might feel oppressed by that social order, to the
extent that it doesn’t even seem to have been created by people –it’s just the shape of the
world. But,
once we appreciate that these things are created in history or in imaginations we can
start to understand the very process which accounts for our own specificity, and this
understanding changes us into a new kind of person, one who can potentially act
upon that understanding.
(Miller 2005:10)
That might give us a bit of hope –especially as we consider the next chapter. In it,
we want to get you to think about the way that the institution of the university (and
institutions in general) might be shaping you, and what they might extract from you –
what we might extract from you as students.
Note
1 Potlatches are also a common feature of the peoples of the Interior and of the Subarctic areas
adjoining the Northwest Coast.
281

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9 Power, institutions and the university

A motivating conclusion

These are the kinds of questions we want to get to in this chapter: what’s the relationship
between structure and agency? What kind of power is exerted upon you, as a student,
from this university structure? What does it mean for the production of knowledge and
what learning and teaching mean in university context these days?
What’s the uncommon sense to get from this chapter?

We want you to notice how we’re reframing your participation in the university in this
chapter, and what your participation might mean in the terms of power. All of you high
achievers out there who are top of the class –this might make you feel a bit less smug, if
you were feeling smug! You’re probably not going to like this reframing, but don’t worry;
our questions about the power of the systems and structures in which you’re involved as
a participant in your very own domination are leavened a bit by some questions we raise
about agency at the end of this chapter. Be prepared to be a bit down though, at least
for a bit.

You can use this chapter to nuance your thinking about power and domination –there
are important subtleties to get your head around in this area of human social life. It’s really
good for you to know this, because as a university student you’re involved and partici-
pating in a site of great privilege. We think it’s the responsibility of everyone involved in
such a situation to reflect, and reflect deeply, on what your participation means for your-
self and for others. If you feel like a bit of an impostor in the university, then this chapter
is equally important for you to understand and think about –how does that get brought
to bear on you? And how did you get there? On whose conditions? Really think about
these questions –they relate directly to what kind of world you’re helping to bring about
by going to university.
What insight can you get into the university by thinking about power?
This is probably the chapter you can apply most directly to your own position as a stu-
dent at the university. As we’ve suggested, it’s a bit of an uncomfortable set of insights to
discover –but it’s very important. Brace yourselves! Here we go.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003273547-9
284
284 Power, institutions and the university – a motivating conclusion
Some key thinkers

There’s a couple of theoreticians whose work really does help illuminate the subtle
operations of power that you might not even notice as you turn up to the university
every day. One of these is Michel Foucault. He was a post-structuralist theoretician who
was interested in how power works and how it has changed over time. His conception
of power was nuanced, and not imposed from top down. This was a big deal at the time
Foucault (1977) set it out, most particularly in his book, Discipline and Punish. This book
was about a history of the way humans in the West have punished and continue to punish
people for transgressions of the law, but it is also and equally about the ways in which ideas
and thoughts about and practices relating to the human body itself have changed over
time. This idea in particular is contained in the chapter ‘Docile Bodies’.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault considers the history of the prison as well as other
forms of punishment. The main aim of this book was to put forth a new way of thinking
about discipline and punishment, and particularly the prison system itself. It addresses the
question of why the penal system developed into the system that we recognise today, and
how it works to control people. Here’s the rub for us, in our considerations of the univer-
sity: Foucault argued that the character of the penal system is shared by other social institutions that
take responsibility for controlling people. These institutions would include medical, educational
and psychological institutions, as well as those that conduct varieties of ‘social welfare’.
Particular techniques are used to produce docile bodies in these institutions. Aha! We bet
that this isn’t the first time you’ve thought of school as akin to a prison. Probably everyone
has thought this; among Simone’s many, many detentions at high school was one applied
for referring to her Domestic Arts teacher as ‘the Warden’. This largely reflects Simone’s
much greater preference for Manual Arts, especially word working, and her total lack of
skill in something called Blanket Stitch.While it was only one of the dozens of detentions
Simone got from the Warden, usually served out in the hard labour of scrubbing pots in
the Domestic Arts kitchen, it was regarded as one of her worst offences –second only to
the time she set fire to one of her classmate’s Victoria sponge cakes. Anyway, the point is
that Simone and everyone else who has ever thought that prisons and schools are pretty
much the same was on to something. But, not perhaps in the ways you might immedi-
ately think. If you think that school didn’t have some kind of salutary training effect on
Simone, guess again; she didn’t get to be a professor at a leading university by spending all
of her time setting fires and smoking Alpine Lights cigarettes behind the girls’ toilets, you
know.You’ll see –read on …
Discipline and Punish starts off with an absolutely horrible description of the torture
of a prisoner, Damiens, who had been found guilty of a crime against the king in 1757.
If you’re having breakfast, just stop here and finish your oatmeal before you carry on
reading –this is beyond terrible (trigger warning, people). Here it comes.
Parts of the prisoner’s body were plucked out with metal implements, and the wounds
were filled with hot oil. He was subjected to all kinds of other torture, and was eventually
hung, drawn and quartered.The horses had trouble ripping the body apart, and it eventu-
ally had to be cut with knives so that it could be ripped, literally, limb from limb. Foucault
contrasts this kind of punishment with the method of punishment that was common only
80 years later, in the House of Young Prisoners in Paris. This type of punishment looks a
lot different. Torture and public punishment is not a feature; no drawing and quartering,
nothing of the sort. Here, Foucault shows just how much the system of punishment
changed in such a short period of time.There were many differences not only in the type
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Power, institutions and the university – a motivating conclusion 285

of punishment, but in how it was understood. In the case of torture, in the 1750s, crimes
were not understood as crimes against other people in society, but instead as crimes dir-
ectly against the authority of the king. He had the right to respond to these crimes, as
they were a personal affront to him.The quite over-the-top and very public punishments,
according to Foucault, were an opportunity for the king to publicly reaffirm his power
and authority, especially as these events were very well attended by the public. The events
had a structure to them, and the prisoner was usually given an option to admit to the
crime and to express regret for committing it. Sometimes, Foucault writes, the prisoner
used this opportunity to criticise the king and this could inspire the crowd to riot; in
some cases, the execution would have to be halted because of the crowd’s disruption.
At the end of the 1700s, a new form of punishment began to emerge, which was much
more concerned with the idea and the practice of taking away freedom.This reflected the
idea that freedom was in the possession of every individual, and that committing crimes
took away a person’s freedom. There is an idea in this that crimes are against people and
not so much against the king as an individual, but it is not simply the case that prisons are
places in which people are locked up and deprived of their freedom.There are agendas set
in prison for the repatriation of people into society, so that they can become useful and
productive citizens when they are released. Hold onto the ideas of ‘useful’ and ‘productive’
here –as well as the idea that such an agenda requires both discipline and surveillance.1
Discipline is a key term in Foucault’s work. It reflects the idea that there is reward for
achievement and punishment for the lack of it. Discipline is also about conforming to
normality, another of Foucault’s important terms. He describes institutions such as the
police, and medical, educational and other kinds of institutions as guardians and monitors
and generators of the normal. These institutions are also the ones responsible for pro-
ducing disciplined persons. In a prison situation, you can force inmates to work under
strict guidelines to instil discipline in them. You can do this in an educational setting as
well; think about all the ways in which your body becomes disciplined; you line up, you
learn a quietness of voice and demeanour in classroom interactions (which, by the way,
is very gendered); you learn how to express yourself in certain modes and traditions and
paradigms, and various bodies of validated knowledge discipline you –remember how
your hand became increasingly disciplined as you mastered the particular penmanship
favoured by your school (in Tasmania, Australia when Simone went to school, this was
cord cursive, a curly, fancy script that replaced the earlier copperplate. Students had to
practice it, one letter at a time, perfecting each one.They started off with fat crayons, then
2B pencils –and then they could earn the coveted pen licence. People were not allowed
to write with pens until they had their licence; so doing was punishable by something
called ‘the cuts’ –usually six stokes of a rattan cane across the hands (ironically making it
even harder to perfect students’handwriting). When a pen licence was granted, students
received a blue Bic biro –the kind that has sharp corners. These corners pressed into the
fingers and made dents, and teachers used that function of the pen to further improve the
cursive writing technique. If it hurt in particular places on the gripping fingers, you were
doing it right. As Campbell notes:
The way we hold a pen is crucial to handwriting comfort and ability. In high school
I had permanent calluses on the top knuckle of my middle finger and in my palm
from my fingernails digging in. After perusing popular coaching websites including
the US-based Handwriting Without Tears and the New Zealand-based Pen Skills, I
realised I have what’s called a tripod grip –three fingers touching the pen. In the
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quadrupod grip, the pen rests on the ring finger, and apparently it’s a total no-no to
rest your thumb on your index finger –the so-called “cross-thumb grip”.
(Campbell, 2014:n.p.)
One reason that cursive replaced copperplate writing was that it was quicker and more
efficient. As Campbell (2014) also notes:
In 1959, the Australian Women’s Weekly reported Tasmanian state schools were trial-
ling an American handwriting style called Cord Cursive. Students praised it as “fun”
and “less tiring”; more importantly, its speed “amazed” parents. A 144-word writing
sample took 12 minutes to complete in the new cursive, but 20 minutes in the old
copperplate … Based on the Australian national curriculum standards for English,
the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS) for handwriting specify that by
year three students should: “Write using joined letters that are clearly formed and
consistent in size”. By the time they reach secondary school, they should possess “a
personal handwriting style that is legible, fluent and automatic and supports writing
for extended periods”.
(Campbell, 2014: n.p.)
Now, before you start thinking that Simone and Andy are bemoaning the dying art of
penmanship, lamenting all these dreadful screens and trying to bring back an era before
television when we marked only handwritten assignments with a red pen, guess again; we
depend on Netflix for our sanity just as much as the next person. We’re trying to suggest
to you that writing is one of the forms of discipline that governs your bodily demeanour
and bearing in school; it’s kept under surveillance, even licenced in some schools, and
related to producing text far more efficiently. Even in an era when we’d not even accept
your handwritten assignment, there are still claims made for the importance and value of
handwriting, and they’re not related to some weird idea about the romance of another
time, or about evil computers. Instead, handwriting is still important because people still
write faster by hand, and tend to be better at remembering what they wrote because the
physical movements of writing help activate neural pathways.What’s significant about that
is that both things are super-valuable to capitalist systems of production; efficiency and
recall are important to its operations.
Processes of discipline, as you can plainly see, require surveillance. This surveillance
must be constant. The importance of surveillance is reflected not only in teachers
scrutinising groups of unhappy children producing row after row of the cord cursive
letter S. Surveillance is constant in the sense that it persists in the very manifestation, the
physicality, of the institution itself. Jeremy Bentham’s prison design is called the ‘panop-
ticon’, and it consists of cells with windows facing onto a tower in the centre from which
the prison guards could see out of, but the prisoners could not see into. Hospitals might
also have this design, and classrooms might be set up in such a way that the teacher can
see all of the students. Go back to the lecture theatre we talked about in the last chapter.
How is it designed with the principle and the practice of surveillance in mind? Some are
pretty obvious about their intentions. In some older buildings, to which Simone is some-
times relegated if she’s failed to submit her timetabling requests on time (timetabling and
parking are the real power brokers of the university, for sure), the lecturer stands at the
bottom in the centre of the space, and the students are in seats rising up almost vertically
in front of her. In that configuration, not only can all the students see Simone; Simone
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can see everyone. She can see into the back row. This used to work really well, before
the Internet was a thing. Now Simone can’t tell if people are writing down notes about
every single gem of wisdom she’s dropping, or checking their Instagram. But the point is
that even if you were doing that, you’d have to still turn in a pretty good performance of
not looking like you were doing that. That’s because you can never be sure if Simone is
actually looking at you or not; if you’re part of an hilarious online exchange, you probably
still have to keep a lid on your laughter, just in case she is looking at you. Same principle
applies in the public street. Are all those cameras actually on? Can they see the bit of the
street where you are, perhaps outside a nightclub when you desperately need a pee in the
public pot plants? Maybe they can –and you know it’s safest to presume they’re looking
right at you.That tends to put people on their best behaviour, and so in concert with dis-
cipline, produces docile bodies.
In his chapter of the same name, Foucault says that ‘A body is docile that may be
subjected, used, transformed and improved’ (1977:138). It was in the 18th century that
what he calls ‘projects of docility’ prominently emerged. He argues that it was certainly
not the first time that the body was understood as a target of power and authority, but
that it was the first time that the scale of seeing and treating the body this way had been
so individualised. He meant to suggest that the exercise of power could occur ‘at the level
of the mechanism itself –movements, gestures, attitudes and rapidity’ (ibid.:137). Foucault
said that another difference in the way the body was treated in the 18th century was
that the object of control had changed. The language of the body was not what had to
be controlled, but instead the efficiency of its movements. He also said that the mode of
enacting control also changed: what was involved, he argued, was constant uninterrupted
coercion and the supervision of the process more than its outcome. Foucault argues that
these kinds of things enabled the control of the body and ‘imposed upon them a relation
of docility-utility’.These methods could be called ‘disciplines’.There is a strong sense here
of the utility of the body that results from the disciplining of the body. Now, that’s how
you get a pen licence!
This was very different from other kinds of body control and relationships between the
powerful and the powerless. It was not like slavery, because it did not involve the appropri-
ation of bodies. It was not like being in service, because this involved total domination at
the will of the master. It was different to vassalage, which involves loyalty to the master. It
was different from monastic discipline, because the result of this is mastery over one’s own
body. Projects of docility were concerned with the idea that the mechanism (individual
body) itself makes itself more obedient as it becomes more and more useful. Foucault has
this to say:
… what was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a
calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour. The human body
was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it
… a mechanics of power was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over
other’s bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so they may operate
as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines.
Thus, discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile bodies’.
(Foucault, 1977:138–139)
Foucault also argued that by making the body more productive as a result of discipline
and surveillance, its capacity to be useful is increased, while its capacity to use energy in
28

such things as revolution or dissent is simultaneously decreased. Foucault’s chapter on
docile bodies starts off with a description of the soldier, and how you could recognise one
in the 17th century. He talks about the language of that body, and the signs it would have
that would let you recognise it: natural signs of strength,
a lively alert manner, an erect head, a taut stomach, broad shoulders, long arms and
strong fingers, a small belly, thick thighs, slender legs and dry feet because a man of
such a figure could not fail to be agile and strong.
(Foucault, 1977:135)
This is still what Simone looks for in a fellow –she particularly values dry feet –but if
she was looking any time before the latter part of the 18th century, she’d be looking for
blokes who were born with those features; natural-born soldiers had to learn to deploy
their attributes in the heat of battle. By the late 18th century, the soldier was being made
by the processes of discipline and surveillance, by constantly practicing to master the body,
learning how to correct the posture, how to make it ready and proper for fighting. Now,
the military is a pretty obvious place to see the docile body being made, with all the sur-
veillance and senior officers yelling at you to do 20 more push-ups and dry your feet and
all of that, but it is probably obvious that prisons and the military are certainly not the
only places that the docile body is produced through discipline and surveillance. We’ve
covered getting your pen licence, but it’s time to apply this idea more broadly –and then
particularly, to your performance at university.
Remember how we said that Foucault argues that this kind of practice is conducted in
schools, the military, the medical professions, and in institutions that provide social wel-
fare? In schools, you are constantly under surveillance.You are taught to gradually master
certain bodily movements, like writing, sitting properly, standing in assembly, speaking,
relating to others, dressing, and to use these things and the knowledges involved in edu-
cation to become a productive person in society. If you are collecting social welfare
payments, you are constantly under surveillance by the state.You are asked to account for
your time and your effort in finding a job, and you are asked to complete courses that
will increase your skills in the job market and your chances of finding a job so that you
will be useful and productive. When you go to the doctor, your body is placed under sur-
veillance, and it is broken down into bits that can be fixed, so you can return to a normal
state of productivity –and a doctor can even supply you with paperwork to excuse you
from being a productive body for a period of illness and recuperation –with a medical
certificate.
Let’s return to getting your pen licence for a minute. Do you have any idea how
coveted a pen licence was when Simone was trying to get hers? Everyone around her got
one, even the boy who ate his plastic plate and cutlery at the third-grade school picnic.
Every Friday, an opportunity came for students to be assessed for a pen licence. Simone
remembers vividly self-selecting for this each and every Friday, hopefully approaching her
teacher’s desk after a week of practice, only to be informed that her letters weren’t all the
same size and they took up too much space. At no time did Simone just not bother with it
and resign herself to using a pencil for the rest of her life. Every single person in her class
willingly disciplined their bodies and hurt their fingers just to get a nasty blue biro. They
all, in other words, participated in the conditions of their own domination.
When you master a valued skill, you become increasingly useful, productive. Ever
flipped burgers, worked in a factory, and gotten better and quicker at your job over time?
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Ever disciplined your body to be fit and well? Ever striven to do well at school? Then
you’ve produced your own docility, participated in the conditions of your own domin-
ation. And, you’re still doing it now. Aren’t you trying to figure out how to write a great
essay, and aren’t you trying to do that in the most efficient way possible –maybe you’re
even learning about the seven most important study habits, or listening to the tips that
academic skills specialists give you for producing what it is that is valuable here at uni-
versity . Go check out some study skills advice –it’ll invariably ask you to discipline
yourself, by way of being efficient, reducing procrastination, doing time management,
learning skills for researching and writing, being organised, even advice about sleep and
the importance of eating right will be included in a holistic treatment of the person for
success –in a particular kind of world, where particular kinds of practices and skills are
valued and useful. Why are you participating in this kind of domination? Because there’s
something for you in it –that job, that body, that pen licence, that uni degree, that pay
check, those grades, that kudos. And, if you don’t, you’ll be even more subject to the
conditions of domination and you might not even get to participate in them much at all.
This kind of power is so diffuse that it seems not to come from anywhere at all –‘the
system’, or ‘capitalism’ might be vaguely thrown around as sources. This rather affirms
Foucault’s argument, that modern power is diffuse. It isn’t centralised or held in the same
way as it used to be by monarchs. No one really possesses it in that kind of a way anymore,
but bodies continue to be disciplined. Even if they are not in jail, they are still brought
under control and are funnelled into certain valuable shapes and productivities.
This tells you that, somehow, those parameters into which we are striving to fit are
developed, and that they normalise and regulate the range of practices and utilities that
are desirable and that we seek to refine and master them. As Foucault said, this happens
in schools, hospitals and other institutions. All these things try to produce normal bodies
normalised in accordance with prevailing knowledge –like what kind of body is ‘healthy’,
what kinds of education are most effective and valuable, what kinds of rehabilitation are
best, and so on. This knowledge is a construction. In other words, it is not ‘true’ in the
sense that it is factual, but it is based on claims to truth. So what Foucault tried to do was to
analyse discursive practices –serious, expert speech acts that give knowledge its claims to
truth. What the heck is discourse? Discourse is different from ordinary knowledge in that
it lays a claim to truth. For instance, look out the window and comment on the weather.
You’ll probably say things like, ‘It’s cold today’, or ‘ I reckon it’s no more than 10 degrees
out there.’ A discursive practice would be one made from the perspective of the meteor-
ologist, who has at her disposal a scientific system that allows for certain predictions to
be made. That’s specialist knowledge coming from a recognised source. It is powerful, and
lays a compelling claim to truth that others believe. OK –so no one believes the weather
forecasts. But you know what we mean! In other words, discourse is knowledge accepted
as truth. It is in discourse that knowledge and power are conjoined.
This is because not everyone can produce discourse. Unless you are a doctor, you
cannot produce medical discourse. Unless you are a lawyer, you can’t produce legal dis-
course. These domains of expertise produce knowledge. What Foucault wanted to do
was to show that there was a history of claims to truth (not truth itself) This he called an
‘archaeology of knowledge’.You could reveal these claims to truth by looking at the dom-
inant discourse of the day. He wasn’t trying to establish whether or not claims were true;
he was trying to reveal a history of claims to truth. What he found was that the devel-
opment of knowledge, based on truth claims, was bound up with mechanisms of power
(he was different from Marx, then, who did have an underlying belief in the truth, or the
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structure). Unlike Marx, Foucault had no underlying belief in a deep underlying truth or
structure; he believed that there was no objective viewpoint from which one could ana-
lyse discourse or society.
The next thing that Foucault argued was that these expert truths become normalised.
How do this happen? Well, the truths that are constructed to create knowledge are
maintained, perpetuated and reinforced through social interactions within professional
exchanges (such as those between medical practitioners, lawyers, teachers, and so on).
Their discourse is distributed in the form of the published word (for example, in medical
and legal and scholarly journals) and scientific reports. These then trickle down into the
Internet, into mainstream press and talkback radio. People read of these truths, hear of
them, internalise them –they become naturalised. This does not mean that people don’t
question any claims, but many of them are accepted as common sense. Once a naturalised
truth is established, it can become the basis for normality. What we then get is people
comparing themselves with normal, as normal is presented in expert discourse. If they
depart from normal, expert assistance is required to bring them back to normal.Then the
person must be re-tested. Cast your mind back to grade school and high school again.
Did your parents ever receive the advice that you should take remedial math, so you could
catch up to the rest of your class, or that psychological intervention might be needed to
stop you from setting fires in Domestic Arts class? Simone never needed any help with
math, but her teachers may well have thought a propensity to oven fires transgressed the
bounds of psychological normality.
Deviance away from normal –psychological, physical, or otherwise –is problematised,
and often conjoined to other kinds of deviance. Consider Sarah Pilgrim’s experience of
this as a very young woman, and her retrospective thoughts about it later, as an anthro-
pology student in her twenties:
Being normalised at the doctor surgery –and beyond

By Sarah Pilgrim
When I was around 15, I went to see a doctor as I was experiencing abnormal
period pain. The doctor was male and had a good professional reputation. When
I told him about the pain I was experiencing, he asked me if I had tried medications
like paracetamol and ibuprofen. When I told him I had and they were not effective
in managing the pain, he told me, verbatim, that I may just need to ‘suck it up’. At
the time, I felt uncomfortable and was taken aback that my pain wasn’t being taken
seriously. It was hard for me to make sense of this experience. Now, as an anthro-
pology student, I’ve been equipped with theoretical tools that help me understand
this interaction. I can see that this exchange is an example of the ways healthcare
systems function as institutions which operationalise broader social hierarchies.
Further, I can identify how healthcare systems create ‘docile bodies’ by imposing
strict regulations on how bodies should function and are treated as a result. Michel
Foucault describes a docile body as one that ‘may be subjected, used, transformed
and improved’ . Docile bodies are constructed in line with broader societal hier-
archies of gender, race and class, among others.
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My experience with this doctor, while seemingly casual, can be understood

within the broader context of a Western gender order which creates strong social
links between motherhood, femininity and assigned female-at-birth bodies. I will
note that while as a woman I experience healthcare in specific ways because of
social perceptions of my assigned female-at-birth body, as a heterosexual, white,
cisgender, middle-class woman, I have never felt that it was not safe for me to seek
healthcare, nor was it inaccessible to me. This is not the case for many people who
have been marginalised based on their race, class, sexuality, ability, or other aspects
of their identity. For these people, their lives may be at risk if they choose to access
mainstream healthcare services. I think this is important to keep in mind when
I consider my personal experiences with healthcare and how privileged I am to be
able to access these services.
Western culture has historically conflated women’s biological and sociological
roles, constructing motherhood and maternal ‘instinct’ as central to women’s social
identity. One only has to consider the disproportionate number of young girls
pushing around baby dolls in prams compared to boys (and both girls’ and boys’
mimicry of established gender dynamics when playing house), to understand that
those assigned female at birth are raised with the expectation that their primary
function is to care for others and produce children to care for. This rhetoric shapes
females’ whole lives, from childhood to adulthood. Constructing this inextricable
link between motherhood and being biologically female creates a means to exert
control over and discipline women’s bodies. When all women are constructed with
the expectation that they will at some point become mothers, all women are then
expected to cultivate docile bodies in line with many societies’ notions of accept-
able motherhood.
Anthropologically, this can help us to contextualise social perceptions of women’s
behaviour. For example, married women are often asked when they will start trying
for children or, if they haven’t conceived after a few years, why they haven’t yet
had children. Childbirth is seen to necessarily follow heterosexual relationships,
and a deviation from this path is often looked upon with confusion, scorn, or dis-
trust. Motherhood is seen as an inevitable identity that all women will eventually
take up. Further, as the role of mother becomes entwined with the gender identity
of woman, female reproductive systems become an integral site of control in the
creation of docile bodies. This is evident within healthcare systems where often
functional reproductive organs in straight, white, cisgender, middle-class women
are celebrated, while those who experience reproductive health issues are often
dismissed and do not receive adequate care. It’s possible that this is because the latter
are seen as lacking capacity to fulfil their social role of motherhood which accom-
panies their assigned female-at-birth gender identity.
When the doctor told me to ‘suck it up’, perhaps he was subtly communicating
to me that my ‘abnormal’ female body was not worthy of attention or care when
it failed to properly fulfil its reproductive functions. He was, likely unknowingly,
operationalising an established Western gender order which conflates the social role
of mother with the gender identity of woman. I was struck on reflection by how
this experience is such a clear example of how societies create docile bodies through
institutions like hospitals, schools and prisons. There are many other examples
29
of this, which speak to the ways healthcare systems not only enforce a particular
gender order, but also particular class, race and sexual hierarchies, among others. An
intersectional approach helps us understand the ways in which these hierarchies do
not exist in isolation but rather interact. As outlined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (2017),
intersectionality describes the way multiple forms of discrimination intersect across
the experiences of marginalised individuals or groups to compound and exacerbate
the injustices they face.
The concept of intersectionality has helped me understand how those who do not
fit the white, heterosexual, cisgender norm experience interacting with institutions
in radically different ways. For example, one of the things that stood out for me is
that there seems to be a fear of the maternal body when it does not conform to
these aforementioned norms. Indeed, there are attempts to regulate maternal bodies
when they become disconnected from the conflated identity of woman/mother.
This certainly occurs for people who don’t identify as women but possess repro-
ductive organs typically seen as female, such as transgender men. For example, trans-
gender healthcare generally rests on a preference for non-intervention, with surgical
procedures viewed by healthcare institutions as a last resort . However, in the UK,
for example, hysterectomies for transgender men have significantly deviated from
this understanding, with the sterilisation procedure becoming a preferred option for
trans masculine people.This popularity of hysterectomies for trans masculine patients
is based on weak evidence of risk prevention for endometrial thickening leading
to cancer, secondary to testosterone therapy. This understanding is in contrast to
the Standards of Care issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender
Health www.wpath.org/media/cms/Documents/SOC%2v7/SOC%20V7_English.
pdf, which states that, regarding the risk of endometrial hyperplasia and subsequent
cancers secondary to testosterone therapy, there is ‘no increased risk or inconclusive’
risk and further literature indicates that there is a very low risk of such outcomes.
The disproportionate rate of hysterectomies in transgender men and the legitim-
isation of this surgical procedure through weak scientific ‘evidence’ presents itself
as a mechanism of regulating reproduction, when it challenges the socio-cultural
norms which create essential links between the roles of mother and woman. Here,
the womb as a gendered organ becomes a site of regulation when it doesn’t adhere
to imposed norms. Docile bodies are created by removing this organ when the
owner does not conform to the gender identity they are expected to assume based
on their reproductive organs.This is not to delegitimise the dysphoria that may lead
some trans masculine people to seek a hysterectomy and the use of surgery in their
transition. Rather, I’d like to draw attention to the way the womb becomes a site
of control and a means of essentialising gender. In this case, the healthcare system
as an institution functions to create docile bodies which uphold established gender
practices.
All this is to say that interacting with healthcare systems which function to create
docile bodies and reinforce social hierarchies can be incredibly disempowering.
This is certainly the case for many people who experience injustices within the
healthcare system based on their gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, and other
factors. And it was certainly the case for me when I tried to seek care for my pain
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and was dismissed. However, now, as an anthropology student, I feel empowered to

explore the ways healthcare systems and the actors within them reinforce socio-
cultural norms in order to create docile bodies. The theoretical tools I’ve learnt in
my anthropology courses not only allow me to analyse these structures but also,
I hope, to go into society and challenge instances where this occurs, in order to
transform institutions so that they better serve us all.
There are many contexts in which you, like Sarah, can get a handle on systems that govern
bodies. Think about being overweight for a minute; if you’re overweight, you might have
been accused once or twice of being lazy –in other words, deviate from a norm of hard
work, a norm of health, and even a norm of morality. How do you know you’re over-
weight? Expert discourse, of course! Ever heard of the Body Mass Index, the BMI? On
the input of some simple stats drawn from your own body and the application of expert
health assessment –sometimes inputted already into your own set of bathroom scales,
or otherwise a simple chart on the Internet, your distance from, or membership in, the
category ‘normal’ can be ascertained.You might look at the category where you’ve been
placed and seek to return yourself to a condition of normal, if you’re not assessed to be
in that category. You might do so because you feel the force of deviant categorisation
press down on you. As we said, overweight is negatively sanctioned, and underweight can
be too; it might be connected with speculations about your psychological or emotional
distance from ‘normal’, or other expert discourse might be applied to you. Institutions
have, sometimes, a direct interest in getting us to go along with certain types of discourse.
Diabetes, and weight-related illnesses cost governments a heap every year, so specific
medical discourse is brought to public advertising campaigns on the telly. We can check
ourselves against the measures, and see if we fit the stardard of ‘normal’ –and act to set
things ‘right’ if we’re not.
Of course, the BMI might sound a bit dated now. What’s the next, much better, more
nuanced and more reliable bit of expert discourse we can use to measure our deviance?
Simone and Andy don’t need to know, what with their perfect bodies and all, and their
resultant lack of need to check their own perfection. But for other less perfect beings,
what are the best diets and food advice to set things straight? All of that presumes that
knowledge is progressive, that it gets better and better all the time. Remember what
Foucault had to say about claims to truth, rather than truth itself at this point, but also
keep in mind that more, better and increasingly nuanced knowledge might draw us fur-
ther and further into the conditions of our own domination, rather than setting us free.
Foucault’s remarks about the history of sexuality are Simone’s Foucault Faves. Yes,
she is a Foucault nerd. In his History of Sexuality (1990), Foucault asks us to consider the
idea that liberation results in more knowledge when he asks us to compare the sexual
freedoms of Victorians with our own. We tend to associate Victorian prudishness with a
lack of sexual freedom. But before you do, too, open up a magazine for women –Andy
loves Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire, because he is a well-adjusted fellow. Any given issue
will offer women some new sex moves, or how to give a great blow job. Simone saved
an article from one of these mags for use in her first-year class, to make a very important
point –which is why she has not yet been fired. The article used a banana to stand in for
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a penis, and then gave a pretty explicit guide (Simone really wants to say blow-by-blow
guide) of what, exactly, to do to provide your fellow with the perfect oral-sex experience.
Now that sounds pretty liberated! We can talk about this stuff in the pages of a mag you
can buy in the supermarket. Simone can take it into a lecture theatre –also fine. Pretty
tempting to say this is liberated to the max. But, it also means that sex has become more
and more scrutinised and surveilled in modern times than it ever was in Victorian times
and, since sex is so subject to various sorts of gazes, it is more controlled, more subject
to rules, more subject to being categorised, regulated, controlled –and done right. That
diminishes the range of ‘normal’ very significantly, to the extent that we might worry if
our sexual practice is normal, our bits are normal, our techniques correct. The more we
subject something like sexual practice to scrutiny, the more we place parameters around
it.The Victorians, who practiced sex behind much more firmly closed doors, were able to
indulge in much freer sex lives despite the ostensible facts of their repression.
Foucault’s insights might be giving you some insights into how you might be par-
ticipating in the conditions of your domination in every mastery you make of univer-
sity. Your increasing docile utility –represented in your increasing capacity to efficiently
produce the learning outcomes we require, and our capacity to surveil and assess that
capacity –might make you rethink your participation here.
But we’re not done yet –we want you to think with Bourdieu, too, about this sort of
thing.There’s a few key concepts to get your head around –a kind of basic Bourdieu tool
box, if you will –and it’s important to know from the outset that none of these things
make sense without the rest, so you need to define them relationally. These are drawn
from Bourdieu’s 1977 work, Outline of a Theory of Practice.
1) Field: Within a field of interest, all action, conscious or unconscious, is interested

action and all goods, material or symbolic, presented as rare, are worthy of being
sought after. A structured state of relations of force between players. Examples
might include a field of sport, field of politics, field of religion, field of higher
education.
2) Players/actors: Interested people and institutions in a field of interest are players –or
actors.
3) Interest: The interest of players indicates they recognise the game and its stakes are
worth struggling for.
4) Illusio: Emotional investment in the game. Illusio is the fact of being caught up in and
by the game, of believing the game is ‘worth the candle’.
5) Game: Individuals and institutions are always more or less involved in one of the
games offered to us by the various social fields.
6) Habitus: One’s historically acquired structure of the personality. A set of relatively per-
manent and largely unconscious ideas about one’s chances of success and how society
works that are common to members of a social class or status group. Dispositions lead
individuals to act in such a way as to reproduce the prevailing structure of life chances
and status distinctions.
7) Capital: Capital must exist within a field for the field to have meaning. The form
and volume of capital determines the relative position of players in a field of interest.
There are various forms of capital, for example:
Economic capital –The dominant and most negotiable form of capital
Cultural capital –Non-economic goods such as credentials, experience
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Symbolic capital –Accumulated recognition, prestige, honour
Social capital –Various kinds of valued relations with significant others.
Capital enables a person to both exercise and resist domination in social relations –or,
to put it slightly differently, to maintain their position in a status hierarchy. Everyone has
a composition of capitals that include the aforelisted (and other) capitals. Cultural cap-
ital is a really interesting one. It describes your capacity to have an easy familiarity with
the legitimate culture within a society –the capacity to know literature and art, what’s
tasteful, what’s trite, how and what to converse about in the fields of literature and art
and theatre, how to know what to prefer. You know those families who know that it’s
important to take their kids to the art gallery, the museum? That’s a family that has high
cultural capital and is in the very act of passing it on.
This sounds a bit dated, right? Maybe it’s helpful to think about it in a slightly updated
way, as Richard Peterson (1992) does; he talks about the ‘cultural omnivore’: someone who
mixes interests in a wide range of forms of culture, both those seen as historically legitimate
by society, and those that are emerging forms, like, for example, cool new styles of music,
cutting-edge art, the next new thing in fashion. Even more than knowing about cool
new stuff, the cultural omnivore knows how to deploy the right knowledge and emphasis
in any given situation, from the job interview to chatting with the neighbour (see also
Peterson and Kern, 1996). They have a wide range –they have a feel for every situation, it
seems.You won’t have any trouble visualising this person –they’re the annoying one who
has this irritating comfortability and poise, in any situation.Yup. That’s the one.
Bourdieu generally talked about three kinds of cultural capital: objective, embodied and
institutionalised. In the objective category, you’d find books, works of art, stuff like that.
The embodied category includes language, mannerisms, preferences –you know that nat-
ural, easy way some people have with the world? That sort of thing. In the institutionalised
category belong qualifications and particularly education credentials –you know, the kind
you’re acquiring right this minute. There’s heaps more too, like technical capital that
permits an adeptness with the modern world of computers, for example; as well as things
like emotional capital –that depth and range of affect that makes a person empathetic
(now a desirable form of capital in all sorts of management roles). And what about the
national capital that Bennett and colleagues describe? This sort of capital ‘operates on the
assumption of the existence of traditions, in both high and popular culture, which gen-
erate and justify a sense of belonging and an occupancy of a governing national position’
(Bennett et al., 2009:258). You can likely think of many other kinds –and you might
think of yourself as acquiring capital as you play the university game.
Cultural capital is passed on in families –that easy ability doesn’t come out of
nowhere. And guess what? The education system values the knowledge and ways of
thinking developed by acquiring cultural capital. As adults, cultural capital undergirds an
individual’s ability to network with other adults who have a similar body of knowledge
and experiences, and who in turn control access to high-paying professions and presti-
gious leadership roles –for example, in government. You’re acquiring it right now, by
participating in a system of privilege, and keeping it in a limited number of hands. That’s
why it’s super-hard to crack into universities if you come from beyond the parameters of
valued cultural capital. That’s why the university might feel alien to you, if you’re a first-
in-family, from the regions, from outside the middle classes. It’s a system of reproduction,
and it’s hard to change, because cultural capital can be turned into educational and eco-
nomic success –that’s a protected pool.
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Although cultural capital and economic capital constitute the principal axes of subor-
dination within capitalist society, the other capitals play an important part. For example,
social capital describes the connections a person needs to mobilise that cultural or scho-
lastic capital that you’ve gained: who are you using for your referees when you graduate
to get that job? Simone and Andy get asked to do this a lot –what they’re doing is
loaning you their cred so you can operationalise your newly acquired capital until it’s
better established –at which point you’ll be able to do the same for someone else. And
what about body capital, that is partially inherited and partially acquired through socially
approved diet and exercise regimes? Body capital can constitute a resource that permits
leverage in certain kinds of arenas. And what about political capital, that permits a person’s
standing and influence in the political world and confers the ability to command votes?
Another very important element to consider in this mix is symbolic violence: when
domination hides itself by being thought of as simply ‘the way things are’. A group can
be said to dominate to the extent that they can manage to impose their uncertainties on
others. They dominate completely when those uncertainties become an unchallenged part
of society’s common sense. This means we’ve got to talk about reflexivity. For Bourdieu,
the researcher must conduct their research with conscious and considered attention to the
effects of their own position, including and especially their own set of internalised structures,
and how these are likely to distort or prejudice their findings –they have to do a ‘soci-
ology of sociology’, or an ‘anthropology of anthropology’, that allows them to investigate
what they’ve internalised about the paradigm in which they work and how it might influ-
ence their approach and findings. But it’s more than this: a researcher has to know their
own social positions within a field and appreciate the conditions that give rise to certain
discourses and theories, that precede and structure their observations (see Bourdieu, 1980).
See how the researcher’s field factors in here –they must know their position in it, and
render explicit the conditions and structures of understanding that are implicitly imbued in
both their practices within those fields and the contribution of the entire sociological field.
Let’s return to the players for a sec.The good player has a feel for the game –they know
intuitively how to play. It’s not equally shared out, this ‘feel’; again, think of your classes at
university.Who has a seemingly natural ability to know what and how to produce the sorts
of things we want to see? We know it, too; not everyone’s going to get high distinctions
across the range of subjects they take. And it does seem more than just cramming and rote
learning –the person with the really good feel for a game in any given field is the person
for whom there isn’t really a gap between deciding what to do and doing it –it’s not
mechanical and in obedience to rules, but more of a practical sense, or a feel –you know,
like a great sportsperson has.2 And, like a talented sportsperson, good students believe in
the game they’re playing, and that it’s worth all that studying and cramming and not going
out, understanding and getting into that enticing feeling of research, making insights,
finally understanding the theory that makes what you’ve been thinking about make sense.
They get into it, they believe in it.
Of course, students who get into it –who have interest and illusion –tend to be those
who have the right mix of cultural capital behind them to know it’s worth it in the first
place. Remember, as Bourdieu said, this tends to be reproduced in families –families who
already know that university is the right kind of thing to appear on the horizon of one’s
life chances.
So, let’s face it then: universities are sites of privilege. They’re not for everyone, as we
suggested at the very beginning of this book. If you’re there, you’ve very likely been in
a position to regard it as valuable in the first place. This privilege isn’t evenly distributed.
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We’ve already talked about how university appears on one’s horizon, how it recedes for
some, how it requires you to accrue the capital on offer, and translate it into the employ-
ment capital, and the hard capital, that perhaps drove you to come to university in the first
place. Before we get to thinking fulsomely about what else you might do besides accrue
transferable cultural capital, we have to think a bit more deeply about this place you’ve
come to.What’s the role of the university these days? This begs a question about what they
were for in the first place. If you thought that Australian universities were just another
British importation transplanted to the colonies, you’d be very much mistaken. The first
ones –in Sydney and Melbourne –certainly look that way in their physical forms; the
architects meant it, too. Read what Hannah Forsyth, who wrote a really good history of
Australian universities, says about this:
By 1911, each of the six states had a university. They were all tiny. There were around
3000 university students in Australia in total, with more than two-thirds of them
enrolled at the two oldest universities in Melbourne and Sydney. Many people
imagine these first universities as little replicas of the medieval British institutions
at Oxford and Cambridge. It is an understandable mistake, for the architects of the
university buildings and institutional frameworks were trying to create that impres-
sion. Sydney University’s old Latin motto adds to it. Translated, it reads ‘though the
constellations change, the mind is universal’ –or, in student-speak, ‘new latitude, same
attitude’. Linking new institutions to those with far older traditional gave colonial
universities legitimacy and authority.We should not be fooled by the Oxbridge simi-
larities, however. The designers of Australia’s first higher education institutions were
very happy to shop around for ideas.
(Forsyth, 2014:7)
These ideas have been influential –but not in the ways you might think. As Forsyth
notes, one set of ideas were evangelical, and promulgated the view that literacy was a
core plank in converting heathens. This wasn’t vocational training –it was moral training
(see Forsyth, 2014:8). This linked to the broader project of civilising –both Indigenous
Australians and the children of convicts (as well as the privileged who would be charged
with governing them). There were other ideas, too:
Concern over the morally ubiquitous effects of the industrial revolution led well-
meaning members of the middle class to promote education for workers in both
Britain and the Colonies. The types of institution that sprang from this impulse were
many, but most noticeable in Australia were the Mechanics’ Institutes and the Schools
of Arts … Among the subjects promoting morality and wellbeing there were also
courses that were directly useful to work, including gold mining … when the uni-
versity of Melbourne was created, mining and mineralogy were the trendy topics of
the time, putting practical knowledge on the agenda from the beginning. Not so in
Sydney, where the tradition of liberal education had a firmer footing, with the pur-
pose of the university … focused on producing the elite who would be needed to
govern the colony.
(Forsyth, 2014:10)
The universities were all pretty practical, including, over time, for people who didn’t
produce things, like gold, or governance –the professionals (the lawyers, the doctors).
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The university credentialled the professionals, distinguishing quacks –who could carry
out procedures by claiming they could –from educated doctors. After the First World
War, universities became a bit more open to everyone; ‘people felt able to try new kinds
of activities and work. Class boundaries were shortly re-erected after the war, but the
notion that people should do what they were good at, rather than what their fathers
did, began to inform education, especially for boys’ (Forsyth, 2014:10). It meant if you
did well in school, even if you lived outside a city, you could potentially go to university.
However, that all fell away during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when that idea was
put paid by the brute facts of affordability. Notice that, initially, universities didn’t do or
value research. That idea arose after the First World War, when it became clear that signifi-
cant innovations could be made into everything, from food to weaponry, as a result of
research. After the Second World War, huge changes came in, in the name of what Forsyth
calls the universities’ ‘grab for power’, which involved ‘propping up the White Australia
Policy, planning for nuclear weapons and legitimising colonial rule and economic domin-
ance in the Asia-Pacific region’ (ibid.:45). Those things involved establishing relationships
with government. The government didn’t control universities, but they sure did produce
students who were thinking about the relationship between universities and the state.
It wasn’t hard to see, for instance, that the university’s alignment with the state wasn’t
neutral. It impacted people. It impacted women. It promulgated some ideas that directly
hampered the interests of various groups –like women. How could they miss that uni-
versities were dominated by, run by, men? A lot of change has occurred between now and
then –you can go and read Hannah Forsyth’s book if you want a good, clear-eyed view of
the history of Australian universities, but the differential valuing of persons in accordance
with the gender, their social standing, and the ways in which their knowledge aligns with
or departs from the paradigmatic is still, still here.
We think, frankly, that this sucks. Look around you. More people at the university
sound and look the same than don’t. There’s still more men in continuing positions.
There’s still more buildings named after men. People are still excluded. Universities are still
aligned with state agendas, even now that the social sciences and humanities are under fire
from (at time of writing) an conservative Australian government that is busy making the
most obvious attempt to instrumentalise universities since their early days, when civilising
projects were afoot.We say universities are still part of this because we don’t radicalise our-
selves sufficiently when it comes to teaching. One of the most important distinctions you’ll
see at a university is between you and your lecturers. The knowledge the former hold is
often presented to you so you can replicate it, so you can belong in the canon, so you can
enter our ranks, promulgate the field, convert your capital into a good job. (Which, by the
way, we’ll count in our statistics of success –it’s a key part of university metrics to show
the destinations of our students –we won’t count you if you’re a barista, though –see
what we mean?) We’ve talked to you in ways we hope are direct, in ways we hope reduce
the distance –but not stylistically, we hope, as much as substantively. That is, we hope we
have prickled you to use your difference from us to think about your unique contribution
to the world, and how anthropology can facilitate it.
So think about this, because it’s also the case that you have to be reflexive about it,
too. You know when your Mum or, by now, perhaps your Nan, went to uni in the ’60s,
and she sits down with you when you first enrol and tells you how radical it all was,
how she protested, did a sit-in on the campus, because universities were entailed in war,
gender, class and race discrimination? And you probably imagine her in a tie-dyed shirt –
and then she becomes a cliché. As Hannah Forsyth says, clichés can never, ever, ever be
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lightning rods for radicalisation; but maybe you should rethink ditching your Nan. Don’t
go out and buy tie-dyed things (these belong in the same group as G-strings, underwire
bras and almost everything from the ’90s) but do listen to her –she’s got a point. Back
then, the university’s agenda was pretty obvious. Now, the way it operationalises power
might be a hidden curriculum. What kind of citizen are you being made into? We’ve got
it all stitched up –you perform to our standards, and we reward you with the kind of
capital you can translate into real capital, with that job you want, and everything that goes
with it. But perhaps you don’t want to be just a client of the university, to get credentialed
for a job that is valued in the current economy –at least according to the State. Maybe
you want more than that –if so, then you must understand what you’re involved in, and
become a part of making it a bit less dreadful. That is, you (and we) need to take respon-
sibility for cultivating ideas and practices that are less racist, classist and gendered because
we (and hopefully you) don’t want to live in a sexist, racist and horribly exclusive world.
Universities are involved in bringing about those worlds –and you may well have noticed
how that happens when you did the exercises we set out for you.
It’s all well and good for us to say that; we earn professorial salaries. True. But we also
redistribute them in all kinds of ways in the service of what we believe in, starting with
reinvesting our research money in people who wouldn’t ordinarily get it, doing research
that actively involves people who might benefit from it, and writing textbooks with, and
not for, our students. It’s something. Similarly, we want you to do something small, too.
Here it is.
Perhaps you’re trying your best to get good results from your classes. Maybe your eyes
have become like focused laser beams as you read late into the night, absorbing as much
of the relevant information as you can. Maybe you’ve become so good at regurgitating
this information that you can hardly wait for an examination. Maybe you have a line on
your future and you’re reeling it in –you’ll definitely make more money than Simone and
Andy if this is what you’re doing. That’s a version of university experience and qualifica-
tion, for sure, but you probably haven’t made it this far into this book if that’s what you’re
doing. But, maybe, you’re someone who feels the pressure of expectation. Maybe your
parents want to know what kind of job you’re going to get from all this anthropologising.
Maybe you’re feeling the pressure of trying to turn into a leader of some sort, trying your
best to position yourself to accrue as much educational (cultural) capital as you can –that
can be converted into employment, hard, capital later on. OK, do that! Get ahead! Be a
future leader! Go for it! But wouldn’t it be refreshing to think about how you could put
what you’re learning to someone else’s service for a change? We guarantee that, not long
after you finish it, you won’t remember exactly what was in week 6 of your course, no
matter how diligently you memorised it for that exam. So, how about considering how
you could use your anthropology course for something outside of focusing on how you’re
going to present week 6’s information in an exam paper?
You can still convert your education capital into employment capital, and you can
probably do it even better by thinking about what use anthropology might be to others,
than if you just focused on the course as, well, the course. Imagine if you rocked up to
an employer and you could demonstrate you’d applied your knowledge to a real-world
case. Maybe this looks like thinking about a problem and thinking about how it might
be addressed in a new way. We call that novel, innovative thinking –repuzzling a wicked
or intractable problem with a new approach. Imagine if that repuzzling and innovation
could be even more focused in on something that someone else experiences as an issue
or problem. We’re both big fans of involving employers, community groups, schools, in
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the research enterprise. Think about the school you came from (if you came right from
school to embark on your university career). What uncommon sense would you have
liked to have before you came here? How would your anthropological knowledge give
you an insight into the university, and would this be useful for orienting information to
someone else? How is it an insightful and useful piece of uncommon sense for someone
coming to university for the first time to see this place like a culture, as you have all the
way through this book? Would it be? What would? If you’re a mature-age student, how
would anthropological knowledge, uncommon knowledge, be pressed into the service of
a better and more welcoming experience for you?
More importantly, we hope that you’ll get involved in coming towards some of the
futures you think are particularly urgent –perhaps a less racist, classed and gendered
world might strike you as being urgent. Those are the sorts of futures that can’t wait. So,
now we want to know what matters to you, and how anthropology might be involved in
operationalising, mobilising, articulating an urgency you see in the world.
For Beth Weaver, this concerns the university experience itself:
Privileged comforts
By Beth Weaver
Being a university student comes with assumptions that there is privilege required
to comfortably attend and enjoy its commitments. An institution like the university
is often built for a set person who has experience with other types of institutions.
This might include a school that is more targeted at preparing students for higher
education, or a family who is aware of the challenges their child may face when
starting. I have an increased awareness of this as I am the first person in my imme-
diate family to attend university. Families are seen as a type of institution that signifi-
cantly interplays with life outcomes. Being the first in my family has meant that I do
not have an immediate person that I can reach out to for student-specified support.
This is contrasted to university being catered for students that have these resources
accessible to them. Therefore, they can better embrace their education. Having this
less available to me had meant that I spent more time navigating my new routine.
Consequentially, I struggled to engage with the work, culture and finding my ‘niche’.
From a young age, we are given clearcut guides on how to perform tasks and
are expected to comply for a chance at achieving optimal results. An example is
to be found in the acronym of TEEL (Topic, Explanation, Evidence and Link),
commonly found in a high school curriculum from the beginning of one’s enrol-
ment. Typically, this is a structured and digestible framework on how to write an
essay. While such scaffolds provide guidance and a more empirical way to measure
cohort achievement, there is the risk that people may become caught in following
a protocol for that next high grade. Hence, this becomes a type of motivation that
may rob a student from the experience of writing, problem solving and learning for
the sake of engagement and skill development.
What Beth is saying here goes directly to the ways in which sameness is made of diffe-
rence –Beth herself negotiated clever ways to meet learning outcomes but permit her
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unique take on things to shine through in Simone’s class; but she also recognised that this
may be very hard in a context that values the production of particular kinds and forms of
knowledge and assessment.
Evie Haultain expands on Beth’s ideas. Knowing that the university has a history of
producing something –workers for the nation, practical knowledge, research –Evie asks,
‘How does the institution of the university affect us –our view of self, others, success, and
the world we inhabit?’
In what do I participate?
By Evie Haultain
It’s safe to say that the word ‘institution’ gets thrown around a lot these days.Whether
it be news stories of institutional betrayal, or activists blaming the institution of cap-
italism for our climate woes, the word seems to be omnipresent –lurking in all
corners of society. But what do we mean by institution? How do we pin it down?
Michel Foucault’s theories surrounding institution is a helpful start. Foucault
states that one of the main facets of institution is the power to discipline, punish, or
reward.
Take the university; where we are taught to think within set academic traditions
and sometimes punished for colouring outside the lines. It falls into line with the
way many of us feel we need to go about our lives successfully. Doing well in
school, finding a career, earning money –fitting into the box of man and woman.
Doubting, ridiculing and correcting ourselves when we fall out of line.
It’s easy to feel disillusioned in the institution. Yet, many of our passions or even
career goals are tied up in them. Thinking about them anthropologically provides
us with a deepened insight which can help us both navigate, and hopefully, improve
them for the better.
Some of our students went beyond the institution to consider these questions. Noah
Tolmie has put the argument that we can’t wait for a future where genitals dictate iden-
tity –too much harm is done to people in the meantime.
Colour-coding your infants so strangers know what their genitals

look like
By Noah Tolmie
Keywords: gender, trans, nonbinary, genitals, performance

The contemporary Western world has a habit of portraying ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ as
inseparable measures of identity. Fortunately, generations of intense sociological
research have developed a foolproof method of illustrating children’s genitals
to strangers in the park. Blue is for penises, pink is for vaginas, and compulsory
expressions of gender conformity are for everyone. So, what happens to people that
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exist outside of the recognised binary? For the most part, they expose the fragile
Western perception of gender in order to deliberately exploit social cues. Beyond
that, they also demonstrate the power of masculinity in social status, revealing often
overlooked consequences of misogyny.
It is only in recent years that it has become popular in the Western world to accept
gender-nonconforming people as people. It is now possible to publicly acknow-
ledge that ‘gender’ can be viewed as a five-point model, a spectrum, something one
can be all of and none at once. However, there remains certain consequences for
pushing the boundaries of traditionally perceived gender. Both trans and nonbinary
people’s interactions with people and place prove there is still progress to be made
from ‘cupcake or stud muffin’ reveal cakes.
In the West, gender is performed through the adherence to various social cues
designated on the basis of sex. It functions as commitment to social order, ensuring
that everyone is at all times accountable to constructs of femininity or masculinity.
The division is through the genitals one is assigned at birth, and then developed
through childhood. People with penises are designed to be aggressive, powerful,
competent, and dominant through associated male gender roles, while the opposite
behaviours are assigned to those who own uteruses via female gender roles. Such
norms are enforced by parents and other social systems to the extent that deviation
requires punishment or reformation.
It is because the cis-normative ‘rules’ of gender are so rigid, that trans and
nonbinary people can exploit them. As society tends to experience these rules, a
certain gender is ‘achieved’ when it is visually accepted by others. For trans people,
this allows for the deployment of traditionally masculine or feminine social cues
in order to reaffirm their experience. This is even more obvious in the manipula-
tion of semiotics by nonbinary people to express their inability to be categorised.
The ‘mullet’ has seen a resurgence through gender-nonconforming people, as the
style combines masculine short hair with longer lengths associated with femininity.
To further obfuscate, the hair is often dyed unnatural colours, embracing noncon-
formity as an identity tool.
This is then replicated in clothing, some people adding skirts or heels to trad-
itionally masculine outfits, manipulating visual gender cues until they become
meaningless. Symbols of femininity such as make-up socially imply one gender,
while facial hair, oversized clothing, or dark, earthy tones confuse that perceived
gender. For other subgroups of gender-nonconforming people, like gender fluid,
flux, or fuck, these social symbols also allow for gender mobility. The deploy-
ment of visual and symbolic languages –including aesthetic, movement and tone –
create space to present as feminine one day and masculine the next. Strategically
navigating the gender arena is necessary for trans and nonbinary people because
of how invested Western society is in labels, proving the fragility of binary gender.
Femininity and masculinity are not inherent opposites if one does not insist on
enforcing stereotypes.
However, the rigidity of gender norms and associated genitals do have significant
negative aspects, most experienced in gendered social spaces. Genderqueer author
Jace Valcore (2019) writes of how perceived gender is a measurement of social status.
When presenting as masculine, they noted women walking around them employing
30
self-defence strategies, as if threatened. Having the body of a man, they gained the
privilege and power of one.
Transwomen are frequently denied access to ‘women only’ spaces because of the
‘potential to endanger women’ in places designed to be safe. If this was truly the case,
then surely people would also be worried that transmen entering male designated
spaces would endanger men. The root of the issue, as with the case of Valcore, is the
potential threat of genitals. Specifically, women have been conditioned to constantly
fear sexual assault to the extent that the idea of a penis somewhere it doesn’t ‘belong’
is instantly menacing.
However, it is not genitalia that is responsible for rape. Nor, in fact, are genitals
to blame for the perpetuation of sexism, misogyny, or toxic masculinity. The actual
issue is the social constructs imbued in gender that give symbolic meanings to body
parts. Conceptions of gender currently serve to protect social order, subconsciously
reinforcing patriarchal dominance. Transwomen are not valued by society because
they do not come with childbearing ability, which misogyny has established as a
women’s function in society. Femininity is established as equivalent to motherhood,
implying it only exists to serve masculinity.
Suggesting that sex and gender are interchangeable denies the existence of
gender-nonconforming people, forcing them to negotiate a gender identity within
a system that excludes them. Reducing trans people to their genitals similarly erases
their concept of identity while perpetuating stereotypes about people’s roles in
society. While trans and nonbinary people can manipulate the borders of visual
gender expression through social symbols, they are consistently punished for doing
so. As it stands, the gender binary and its associated gender roles serves the patri-
archy, keeping men in power while undermining everyone else, discouraging the
validity of people’s existence. The system is constructed deliberately, and it isn’t to
celebrate diversity.
Maddie Constable used her piece to make thoughtful insights into fatness. She notes
that fat bodies have recently become apparently less alienated, but that some, like
pop sensation Lizzo, smell a rat –and argue the contrary. Lizzo says that the ‘Body
Positivity’ movement –created for ‘big women of colour’ –has been dangerously co-
opted. Maddie argues for a renegotiation of fatness: ‘a look at the fat body in terms of
how it is lived, and how it is valued by those who live in it’. Maddie begins her writing
with this:
On the topic of ’Fatness’ versus ‘obesity’: Here I am consciously omitting ‘obesity’.

Through this text I aim to establish ‘obesity’ as a discursive term, situated within a
damaging public health discourse. Fatness is used to foster autonomy. Think: body
neutrality, body sovereignty and fat acceptance. With what I think is an inappro-
priately heavy emphasis on health policy and lifestyle choices, fatness has been
established as a marginal experience. And, we have blindly accepted the instru-
mentality of these claims –we have assumed the importance of health promotion,
and we have seen the ‘Body Positivity’ movement as an objective chance for fat
liberation.
304
Lived corpulence
By Maddie Constable
Fatness is complicated. It is widely and overtly scrutinised like no other aspect of

public health. Fatness has been seen as the result of a series of individual lifestyle
choices –as a failure of impulse control, as a product of greed (see, for example,
Zivkovic et al., 2018). This discourse has fostered the ‘thin ideal’, harmful dietary
norms and the widespread commodification of corporeality and health. Most not-
ably, fatness has been powerfully positioned as an illness –the so-called ‘obesity
epidemic’ (see Gard, 2011). Michael Hobbes, writing for the Huffington Post, says
that ‘actually, weight and health are not perfect synonyms’ (Hobbes, 2018). In fact,
the discursive process of demonising and othering the fat body has worked to fur-
ther silence fat voices and conceal their autonomy (Gracia-Ariaz, 2010). This has
positioned the fat body as liminal (see Kyrölä and Harjunen, 2017). This notion
is exacerbated in online spaces, where fat subjects are increasingly susceptible to
influence from otherwise obscured onlookers, and those with quasi-qualifications.
Even fat celebrity representatives, like Lizzo, have only been marginally successful
in reducing stigma. So, instead of revising our biases –‘maybe your fat isn’t my
problem’ –we see prominent minorities as isolated exceptions.
Anthropological lens: Fatness is culturally constructed.

Through her ethnographic work, Mabel Gracis-Araiz (2010) established that weight
is a direct product of medicalisation, individualisation and commodification –fatness
is much more than a discussion about ill-health. As such, fatness must be established
as a product of larger social forces, and anthropology is uniquely positioned to do
so. And addressing fatness requires addressing intersectionality –something public
health discourse has failed to do.
So, media rhetoric, theory, and we as peers, have spent too little time engaging in
critical comparative work. At the risk of glossing over a diverse and vast literature,
I look to the feminist critique to substantiate my ideological scepticism of fatness
in its current definition. Feminist scholarship –specifically postmodern feminism –
works to directly dismantle the fantasy of objectivity. From this perspective, the
marginalising and medicalising of fatness works to serve capitalist, sexist, classist and
often racist politics for many fat subjects.
But what if fatness wasn’t situated in this way?

Being more critical of normative health measures and popular rhetoric reveals a
different truth: if we aren’t to reimage fatness, fat bodies will continue to be condemned
to the margins. And the ‘proper’ boundaries of the body will continue to be moulded
in very material ways. This is visible both tangibly, and in the online sense. Think: the
blurred boundary between ‘Body Positivity’ content and pro-disordered eating content
on Instagram. From this we see that, when we are engaging online in ‘Body Positivity’,
or we are addressing weight at all, what we are doing is established fatness and corpor-
eality as an abstraction from the self. In other words, who are we to say that one body
305
is less worthy, when there are people –very normal people –that occupy these bodies?
An anthropology of weight, and a critical public health perspective, allows us to aim
for a mindful inspection of fatness as an experience, as well as a culturally constructed
ideology with corporeal consequences.The fat body is therefore animate.
This is in line with feminist scholarship, where we see fatness for what it really
is, and we can interrogate society’s management of corporeality more broadly. And,
most notably, we as social subjects can understand the instrumentality of individual
narratives of fatness. This abstraction of power fosters the rejection of stigma.
Re-imagined public health: So what?

I have established that there is an apparent disjuncture between aims to address
weight stigma and conceptualisations of what weight really is. But can we visualise
a space where weight will not always be the elephant in the room? Can we address
fatness without contributing to the systematic marginalising of the fat subject?
An anthropological lens allows us to focus on fat stigma, rather than fat itself. We
come to understand how this impairs individuals’ emotional, physical and functional
health. As such, I argue that weight per se is not the issue, but rather the represen-
tational marginalisation of fatness across society. Even within a rhetoric of ‘Body
Positivity’, we see fatness as something that must be justified.
Michael Hobbes argues that, what works is ‘the revolutionary act of being fat
and happy in a world that tells you that’s impossible’. Drawing on the scholarship
of fat activists, I suggest that coming out as fat enables fat subjects to sculpt spaces
of resistance. In doing so, we find that justifying why we are fat is not nearly as
powerful as accepting our fatness, and recognising that it’s no one else’s business.
Then these conversations about health and fatness are refused the salience they were
once afforded –this is institutional change; this is re-imagined fatness.
Read more
Brewis et al., 2016; Gard, 2011; Gracia-Araz, 2010; Kyrölä and Harjunen, 2017;
Zivkovic et al., 2018.
Manuela Salazar also focused sharply in on public health narratives and practices in her
piece, on the relationship between mental health, racism and women:
Modern hysteria: how women of colour are failed by public health

By Manuela Salazar
Keywords: systemic racism, mental health, women’s health, misdiagnosis

Abstract
While for many, seeking treatment for a persisting health problem seems entirely
straightforward, women of colour consistently find themselves following a much
306
longer pathway, one that countless times leads to misdiagnoses, or no answers. A pri-
marily white and male-centric medical field is responsible for racial discrimination
in public health, an issue that often sees the health of women of colour entirely
trivialised, predominantly in the area of mental health.
What’s the topic or problem?

In the late 1800s, women who displayed emotionally charged behaviour were
habitually diagnosed with hysteria, a blanket term that often covered medical
conditions from anxiety, to dissociative disorders, to epilepsy. In general, the con-
dition of hysteria was often diagnosed in women who seemed excessive, and out
of control.
While the condition was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980, and the term no longer exists in Western medicine,
many women, primarily women of colour, continue to be considered excessive by
medical professionals when seeking help for their health concerns.
It’s palpable that systemic racism, prejudice and a dismissal of trauma experienced
by racialised women are clear factors that evidence this.
What can an anthropological lens on the topic reveal?

Black women experience significantly higher rates of mental health issues than
white women, but while this may be the case, white women are more than twice as
likely to be treating or managing their mental health problems.
The root cause of this issue is, predictably, racism. The Royal College of
Psychiatrists has made it evident that experiencing racism and racial discrimination
will cause individuals’ life chances and mental health to be negatively impacted in
a significant manner.
On top of this, women in a broad spectrum are twice as likely to develop depres-
sion, as well as PTSD, in comparison to men. Other neurological conditions such
as Autism Spectrum Disorder and ADHD are entirely under-represented in med-
ical studies, thus causing women with these conditions to be undiagnosed, or
misdiagnosed.
Due to these factors, it is foreseeable that a woman of colour growing up and
existing in a male-dominated society, where systemic racism is rampant, would be
heavily impacted by a substantial amount of trauma in comparison to her white,
male counterparts.
With a foundation of statistically higher chances of developing mental health
issues, or neurological conditions expected to go unnoticed, women of colour
should be receiving more support from public health. Unfortunately, while this
is not only not the case, the process of seeking medical treatment is plagued by
prejudice and systemic racism, which makes racialised women one of the most
marginalised and assistance-deprived demographics in the area of mental health.
Flagrant racism may be slowly diminishing, but microaggressions and other
prejudice-fuelled behaviours such as racial stereotyping continue to be rampant
attitudes that many health professionals still hold.
307
The truth is, racist structures and attitudes remain in place, which in turn
strengthen adverse racial stereotypes that dehumanise women of colour.
While white women tend to be seen as vulnerable and in need of care and pro-
tection, women of colour are often dismissed, at times deemed cold or capable of
dealing with their own issues without external aid.While white women are inclined
to receive empathy when opening up about mental health issues, women of colour
are habitually met with negative and even hostile projections.
Why should anyone care about this?

Due to a lack of support, and an alarming trend of genuine medical concerns met
with aggression and scepticism, racialised women often end up with an even higher
degree of emotional distress than they started with.
Their medical experience either aids in deteriorating their mental state further,
or they simply avoid seeking treatment, which in turn, correspondingly contributes
to that deterioration.
While women of colour may be considered a minority, the truth is nobody
deserves subpar support or medical attention.
A positive change appears to be imminent in the near future with the higher
number of racialised women now entering the medical field, something that is
bound to aid in the vast imbalance of racialised medical professionals.
Though this may be the case, structures still need to be put in place to support
those most marginalised by this proliferating systemic racism; an extensive support
net that will potentially allow women of colour to feel comfortable and safe when
seeking treatment for issues that they are statistically much more likely to encounter
in their lives.
Julia Chan imagines for herself an ambitious and important research agenda, in which
she puts together her uncommon sense-making of feminism, what she has thought about
in respect of how micropolitics in and of families makes it into the world of big politics,
and how we can bring a much desired future of gender equity forward into the present:
Research proposal: why are men missing from the feminist

movement?
By Julia Chan
What is the key question, problem or issue you’re considering?

Cisgender, heterosexual men are noticeably missing from the feminist movement.
This issue is particularly important to address due to the now international Me Too
movement, in which women speak out about sexual assault.
Despite the widely accessible knowledge available from popular feminism, many
men are absent from the scene. The research I propose will explore why men either
ignore or fight feminism, and what institutions hinder their participation.
308
Why is this issue important, and to whom is it important?

Feminism is often misconceptualised as a movement led by women, for women.
In addressing the continuous oppression of women, we need to consider who the
responsibility for change should fall on. Who is the main contributor to issues of
sexual objectification and sexual violence? Not all men, but enough of them for
women to feel unsafe and unhappy in many spheres of life.
Since women make up the vast majority of sexual assault survivors compared
to men, the responsibility for educating male counterparts, friends and family falls
unfairly onto women. The issue with having mainly female voices in the feminist
discourse is the enormous pressure which women feel to be change makers, in a
society where they have little agency or power to make that change. As we can see
from the Me Too movement, it is largely men who need to make changes. By this
I am not implying that we give all voice to men, but simply that our current situ-
ation requires support from men to make our voices heard.
The participation of men in the feminist agenda is crucial to the success and
well-being of women. Feminism needs to be normalised by the hegemonic group
for significant changes to be made. Changes need to be made in all institutions,
including that of the law, the workforce, the familial realm, education and sports.
If the dominant group in society were on board, these changes would be a reality.
Women lack the position of power on all fronts to make changes. They need to be
supported and pushed up by men.
As has been frequently asserted by many feminists, feminism benefits men as
well as women. Men supporting women and femininity results in less pressure to
be toxically masculine, whereby men must be the sole breadwinners and supress
their emotions. They would experience a better quality of life in which they can
be friends with women, rather than seeing them as sexual objects, subhuman, or as
‘the second sex’, as conceptualised by Simone de Beauvoir. Gender equality should
be as important to men as it is to women. It is perhaps men’s subscription to hege-
monic masculinity which bars them from joining, as they attempt to maintain their
self-concept as a dominating man.
Importantly to women, having men involved will alleviate responsibility, and acts
of sexism will be reduced due to the normalisation of accountability. It will no
longer be acceptable to objectify women or commit crimes against them.They will
be listened to better, rather than being talked over.They will be able to occupy roles
of power, instead of just being second to men.
What do you think the impact of exploring and later on, addressing, this
problem or issue will be, and who will benefit?
My research will address the absence of men from feminism and add to the dis-
course of why men are both responsible for and vital in achieving women’s
freedoms and equality. Exploring the reasons behind men’s disinterest or outright
resistance to feminism will uncover what institutions or belief systems are hindering
their involvement. With enlightenment on the reasons to their lack of involvement,
we can begin to understand what needs to be done to make the discourse more
accessible to men. By addressing this, we can debunk the common knowledge that
309
feminism is a female movement and convey why this is a male problem. This will
encourage more men to get involved.
My research will inspire a better understanding of which institutions are most
accessible for men in supporting women. A Foucauldian lens on how power is
produced by institutions would be useful to consider in my research. Men occupy
positions of institutional power that directly influence women’s lives. In the corporal
space, men access power through roles of superiority, like those of managers and
supervisors. Family structures deem the man the head of the family, who dictates
what is and isn’t allowed in a family unit and determines their children’s education
and religious upbringing. Not only does a father determine the life of his daughter,
but a brother can hold more power than a sister, and a grandfather can hold more
power in a family than a mother. This research will benefit women and men in
progressing the larger movement towards gender equality.
What are some methods you’d use to explore the issue or problem
you’ve identified?
To explore the issue of men’s absence from feminism, we need to understand the
barriers that men face in participating. What institutions do men have the most
access to, and what makes it easier or harder for men to participate? To attempt to
understand this, I would conduct interviews with men exploring their positions of
power and their means of occupying that space. My research would explore which
institutions are most employed by men to support women and how they find them-
selves able to do so. Additionally, the interviews would look into men’s attitudes in
assuming responsibility in gender equality.The presence of ignorance, defensiveness,
or misogyny towards women would inform me what misconceptions there are
around gender in our society.
I would also consider taking genealogies of men to investigate how they use their
positions of power in the family environment. Family structures are a key institution
that can allow men to make positive changes for the women around them. The vast
majority of us experience what it is like to be within a family unit, whether it be a
parent or guardian who raised us, or a child that we raise of our own. Many of us
have cousins, aunties and uncles, grandparents, or at least friends we consider family,
as part of our human connectivity. Our subjectivity is strongly based on our family
experiences. Families are perhaps the most accessible means for men to access systems
where they can support women, as family is usually a central part of one’s life and
identity. It is often the case that men do not have meaningful relations or empathy to
women outside of those they are related to or romantically engaged with. After all,
our own prime minister was only sympathetic to alleged rape victim Brittany Higgins
after his wife enlightened him on how he would feel if it were his own daughters.
We want to end our chapter, and our book, with a piece by Hannah Nott, who, in a way,
takes us back to the beginning in her intention to see the world differently, to bring a
future into being that people cannot wait for, and that doubles down on valuing diffe-
rence. Hannah offers the following essay as an attack on virtuous generosity, which the
state (in Canada and Australia) has used to frame Indigenous child removal. The state
310

makes Indigenous bodies the recipients of generosity, including in specific languages that
value Indigenous difference. But, as Hannah points out, Indigenous difference isn’t much
valued at all –it is precisely Indigenous difference that undergirds child removal, the
rate of which hasn’t reduced for decades. As Hannah says, if Indigenous difference was
valued, then that rate would certainly have shifted. While the language used by the state
relegates child removal to ‘the past’, it still continues unabated, as does the expectation
that Indigenous bodies will replicate the standards of mothering expected by the state.
Following Diprose (see Chapter 8), Hannah has proposed that the alternative operation
of corporeal generosity, in which the alterity of the Indigenous person is valued, has the
capacity and opportunity to challenge the conditions that presently require Black bodies
to behave as white ones. Such challenges provide opportunity for hierarchical relations to
take more equitable forms, and Hannah is presently forging a career in which she intends
to bring that about. Our efforts have been in the same vein; your alterity matters. It will
grow our knowledge. Now, go out there and operationalise it.
Why anthropology matters to Hannah Nott

Anthropology has always had a complicated relationship with Indigenous people
globally, having caused a lot of harm over the years. However, anthropology can be
used to reframe and challenge contemporary Indigenous issues in a constructive
and sensitive manner. One of these issues is the current rate of Indigenous child
removal.The rate is alarmingly high in both Canada and Australia. Indigenous chil-
dren in Canada make up just 7 per cent of the child population but they represent a
huge 48 per cent of all foster children. One in six Indigenous children was involved
with child protection services in Australia between 2018 and 2019. Despite these
enduringly high numbers, in both Australia and Canada the policy language is
overwhelmingly positive. It maintains that child removal is a terrible injustice of
the past. There is, in other words, a very significant discrepancy between what the
State maintains is occurring and what is actually happening to Indigenous bodies.
One would think that the language of the state –being concerned with acknow-
ledging the past as negative, and the future as sensitive and positive –would indi-
cate a change of state practice, and a resultant real reduction in the number of
Indigenous children in out-of-home care. That isn’t the case in either Australia or
Canada. Once this anomaly becomes visible, it becomes possible to use anthropo-
logical thinking to re-puzzle this wicked problem. In doing so, we can challenge the
ways both policy makers and wider society understand Indigenous child removal in
order to reform it.
First, we can challenge the idea that an acknowledgement of past removals is suffi-
cient to ensure current children are not taken. We have to be cautious about what is
presented and look beneath the narrative.Then, ethnographic and statistical evidence
can be brought into concert to understand the shape of the problem and give clues
as to what can be done to change it. Anthropology allows this topic to be looked
at from many different angles and has the frameworks to answer these questions; in
other words, it doesn’t presume a single problem, or a single, simple response. The
problem of Indigenous child removal is a wicked, long-standing problem and without
a rigorous and reframed examination of it –which anthropology facilitates –states
31
are able to continue to produce policies full of positive language and confine the
problem to the past –but only in words, while real bodies suffer.
Anthropology provides the tools to question the taken-for-g ranted assumptions
that, when challenged, change the way problems such as Indigenous child removal
are viewed. For instance, the idea of time is a taken-for-g ranted assumption –the
past that’s gone, the future that is yet to come. However, time can be viewed in an
alternative register –one borne out in bodies rather than on clocks or calendars.
For Indigenous children and their families who have been separated, the ‘past’
that the state talks of is very much a present reality. There is a huge difference
between declarations of compartmentalised time and the temporal experience of
the flesh. This means that ‘the past’ never ends for Indigenous bodies. If we don’t
accept that time is compartmentalised, but lived, then we can see that the state
controls Indigenous bodies through time –reinstating them in the role of child
in a paternal relationship that has not changed since first contact. The persistent
infantilisation of Indigenous people perpetuates this idea of time transcending
‘past’ or ‘present’, as Indigenous bodies are trapped in the role of child by the state.
By changing the way time is conceptualised and categorised, it becomes possible
to understand why positive policy language has not in fact reduced the number
of Indigenous children in out-of-home care –this concept of the ‘past’ is not in
fact a reality.
In changing just one simple thing about the way we look at Indigenous child removal
with anthropological theories, it becomes possible to further trouble assumptions that
stem from the current view of Indigenous child removal. For example, by looking at
Indigenous children as being trapped by time, we can also take this theory and apply
it to their families and how they are infantilised by the state. This reframing of time
in turn places emphasis on the way bodies are impacted by this relationship with
the state. It has been argued that ‘the human capacity for social agency, to collect-
ively and individually contribute to the making of the social world, comes precisely
from the person’s lived experience of embodiment’ (Lyon and Barbalet, 1994:54).This
reframing highlights how different bodies experience the world and how they are
predisposed to state control and power in ways that other bodies are not. This infant-
ilisation permeates every aspect of life for Indigenous bodies and in addressing it in
the area of child removal it can be challenged, and hopefully, changed. In this one case
study, it becomes clear where anthropology tangibly impacts real lives. In academia, it
can be easy to remove problems from the people experiencing them; however, with
ethnography being such a critical basis of anthropology, it is much easier to situate
people at the centre of research. David Graeber has argued, ‘anthropological thought
has a keen awareness of human possibilities’ (2004:13). Even this limited reframing of
Indigenous child removal that reconceptualises time exemplifies this. Anthropology
can be the tool used to not only reframe pressing, contemporary issues, it can also be
used to work towards rectifying these issues.
Notes
1 At the end of Discipline and Punish, Foucault concludes that prisons do not actually work to
return people to society as productive people. Instead, they achieve another aim. He argued
312

that prisons functionsvery effectively to make sure that the upper classes can continue to have
power over the lower ones. He argued that in committing crimes, the lower classes are effect-
ively pushing for social change, and that the ruling classes use criminality to incarcerate people
so that this social change could not be completed. This produces delinquents, who can be con-
trolled by the legal system, and who are to be feared and controlled by society. This fear is often
communicated in newspapers and in other media, which helps the ruling classes to contain the
lower classes, by means of implementing the law.
2 You’ll perhaps have noticed that this is different from structuralism, where there’s a bit of an
unconscious adherence to the undergirding rules that you don’t have access to, but follow in
any case. Bourdieu sought a way to reach beyond structuralism’s static character and more
generally beyond the dualisms of structure and action, objective and subjective. He fam-
ously approached human social action as simultaneously ‘structured’ and ‘structuring’ (see
Bourdieu, 1980).
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Zivkovic, T. M. Warin,V. Moore, P. Ward and M. Jones. 2018. Fat as Productive: Enactments of Fat
in an Australian Suburb. Medical Anthropology 37 (5): 373–386.
314
Index
Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures, bold indicate tables in the text.
Aboriginal people 20, 155, 187, 199 The Australian Journal of Anthropology (Fijn and
‘The Aboriginal People of England’ (Evans) 181 Kavesh) 223
Adams, Carole 216 Australian Research Council (ARC) 188
African Ungulates: A Comparative Review of Their Australian War Memorial (AWM) 272–276
Ethology and Behavioural Ecology (Leuthold) 246
alliance theory 126–130; complex structures of Babushkina, Kat 150–154
kinship 128; cross-cousin marriage 129–130; Bagemihl, Bruce 246
cultural principles 127; elementary structures Bailey, Nathan 245
of kinship 128; marriage exchange 128; balanced reciprocity 260–261
primitive culture 128; structural linguistics Banks, Joseph 273
126–127 Barth, Frederik 178
ambilineal cognatic systems 140 Bauman, Zygmunt 232
American Anthropological Association (AAA) Beauvoir, Simone de 128, 308
193, 194, 196 Behie, Alison 261
American Psychiatric Association 247 Bell, Kirsten 185, 196, 201
Anderson, Giselle 270–271 beneficence 190–198
Animal Liberation (Singer) 223 Bentham, Jeremy 286
animism 220–221 Bentley, Emma 142–143
Annual Review of Anthropology (Mullin) 223 bilateral cognatic systems 140
anthropology: applied 1, 36–37; basics 21–24; bilateral kinship network 132–136; collateral kin
biological 1; culture of university see 136, 136; fictive kin 135; kindred diagram 134;
university culture; disobedient history see lineal kin 135–136, 136; real kin 135
food and social animals; ethical positions biological anthropology 1
see ethics; ethnography see ethnography; Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and
kinship see kinship and relatedness; linguistic Natural Diversity (Bagemihl) 246
1; motivations see power, institutions and Black, Esther 37–39, 276
university; rites/r ituals/public events see rites, Bloch, Maurice 107
rituals and public events; strategies for 39–41; Boas, Franz 29, 226, 227
taking notes see fieldnotes; of things see space, body capital 296
consumption and things body positivity movement 303–305
Anthropology in Action (journal) 84 Bourdieu, Pierre 209, 211
applied anthropology 1, 36–37 bridewealth 124, 125
archaeology 1; of knowledge 289 Burgess, Stella 61–66
Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Malinowski)
259 Calderwood, Hayley 73–74
Aristotle 209 Carsten, Janet 149
Asad, Talal 223 casual observation vs. fieldnotes 71
Asakawa,Yoko 276 Chang, Jodie 168–170
Australian Anthropological Society (AAS) 196 Chan, Julia 307–309
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Chapman, Anna 82, 84–87, 269
Islander Studies (AIATSIS) 199–200 Chesher, Chris 266
315
Index 315
cognatic systems 140–141 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Cohen, Abner 174, 179, 180 Disorders (DSM) 17, 306
collateral kin 136, 136 Dilger, Hans 185
The Comfort of Things (Miller) 280 Dimbleby, David 112
Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead) 226 Dingemans, Uma 59–61
common sense 6–11; examples 14–15, 21–22; Diprose, Rosalyn 3
fieldnotes as case study 8, 9–10; first kind of Diprose, Roslyn 262
7; knowledge 13; limitations 11, 13; second disaster nativism 160–161
kind of 7–9; uncommon sense vs. 13–21; in discipline 285
university culture 45, 50, 52, 54 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 284
communication style 88–94 docile bodies 284, 287–288, 290–293
communitas 106–107 docility-utility 287
community 160–173; consequences 166–168; Doherty, Julia 154–157, 155
consultation 164; definition of 161–163, Domestic Mandala (Gray) 145
168–169; strategies of 164; time-space d’Ormesson, Jean 225
acceleration 169 Double Ninth Festival (Chongyangjie) 118
Condominas, Georges 195 Douglas, Dame Mary 18, 19, 55, 103–105, 109,
Constable, Maddie 303–305 174, 217, 218, 219, 220, 222, 228, 232, 239,
Cook, James 273 240, 279
Coral Gardens and Their Magic (Malinowski)
259 ecological materialism 240
Cows, Pigs,Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture economic capital 296
(Harris) 241 ‘The Egg and The Sperm’ (Martin) 26
Crenshaw, Kimberlé 292 ego 131–132, 132
Crissman, Lawrence 241 The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Lévi-Strauss)
Critique of the Study of Kinship (Schneider) 143 123, 127
cross-cousin marriage 129–130, 138–139 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland 174
cross relatives chart 138 especial language 54
Crow-Omaha system 138 especial sense of time 52
Csordas, Thomas 107 especial spaces 52–54
cultural capital 295–296 ethics 185–201; beneficence 190–198;
cultural materialism 221, 240–242, 254 institutional practice 187–188; integrity
‘Cultural Materialism is Alive and well and Won’t 189–190; justice 198–200; merit 188; research
Go Away Until Something Better Comes characteristics 188; respect 200–201; risk
Along’ (Harris) 243 190–198; uncommon sense 185–186;
Cultural Materialism: the Struggle for a Science of university culture 186–187
Culture (Harris) 241 ethnicity 174–181; emic category of self
cultural relativism 29 ascription 174; qualities of 177–180; slippery
culture 25; complexifying groups 27–28; human concept 180–181; of stockbrokers 174–177;
25–26, 34 students and 180
Curtin, John 53 ethnography 24–27; common-sense definition
of 25; complexifying 25–27; dictionary-based
Dawson, Andrew (Andy) 2, 4, 6, 7, 11, 14–15, 18, definition 24–25; fieldwork 24, 29, 34–35, 196;
19, 23, 25, 28, 35, 39, 42, 46, 49, 50, 59, 74, 102, multispecies 223–224, 236–238; productive
105, 133, 137, 145, 160, 161, 170, 173–175, description of 34
179, 180, 189, 190, 211, 218, 253, 254, 259, Evans, Gillian 181
263, 271, 272, 286, 293, 296, 299 Evans-Pritchard, Edward 123, 174
Dawson, Ashley 231 Everard, Tallis 194–195
Decolonising Ethnography 40 exogamous exchange 139
Dedman, John 53 exorcism 112
Delany, Carole 27 exploration of liminality 276–279
Dennis, Simone 8, 80
Dent, Elisabetta 83, 94–97 family and community 160–173
descent theory 123–126; bridewealth 124, 125; The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical
ghost marriage 125; segmentary lineage 124; Analysis of her Samoan Research (Freeman) 226
structural functionalism 123 fatness 304
De Souza, Ruth 12 feminist movement 307–309
316
316 Index
Fergie, Deane 6, 49, 50 Graeber, David 311
fictive kin 135, 144, 148–149 Gray, John 145
fieldnotes 68–98; as aids-memoire 72–73; in
anthropology 38; basics of 69–78; book cover Hall, Jonathan 54
76; books 75, 77–79; casual observation vs. 71; Handelman, Don 110
in common sense 9–11; communication style Haraway, Donna 237
88–94; Frankston line 35–36; headnotes 74; Harris, Marvin 221, 239–243
in ice field 70–73; Kmart case study 69–70, Haultain, Evie 301
79, 81; language style 87–94; politeness 94–97; headnotes 74
scratch notes 74; self-service check-outs 86; Hefernen, Amy 82, 87–94
themes and ideas 71–72; uncommon sense 68; Higgins, Brittany 108, 309
university culture 68; using hands 82; using History of Sexuality (Foucault) 293
sound 73–74 Hobbes, Michael 304, 305
Fieldnotes (Sanjek) 73 Hochschild, Arlie Russell 83
fingernails 16, 17 Ho, Clara 204–205
First Fruits Festival (Incwala) 103 Holy Communion 101, 177
Fisser, Carys 37, 39–41 homeostatic approach 240
food and social animals 203–247; animism Hornby, Gary 55
220–221; cultural materialism 221, 240–242; Hudson, Emma 157–160, 158, 211–212
ecological materialism 240; food distribution human culture 25–26, 34
217–219; food insecurity 204–207; liquid Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs)
modernity 232; metaphors 232–234; 185–187, 196
microbiomes 238; multispecies ethnography humility of things 263–264
223–224, 236–238; natural flavours 211–212; Humphry, Justine 266
neoevolutionism 240; neofunctionalism 240; Hutchinson, Sharon 125
objective science of culture 242; practical
wisdoms 209; pre-and post-swallowing Indigenous difference 3
approaches 208–209; probabilistic determinism Indigenous people 3–4, 128, 164, 199, 258, 273,
241; smell and taste 208–209; social class 210; 310–311
Social Universe diagram 217, 218; symbolic informed consent 185, 186, 196, 200
logic 210; taste politics 209–211; thermostatic/ Insectopedia (Raffles) 237
homeostatic approach 240; totemism 220–221; institutions 285
uncommon sense 203; university culture 204 integrity 189–190
food distribution 217–219 Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz) 109
food insecurity 204–207; taste of 213–214 The Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz) 243
Food in the Social Order (Douglas) 217 intersectionality 292
Food Safety Helpline 16 The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of
Forsyth, Hannah 297, 298 Modernity (Wolff) 272
Fortes, Meyer 123, 145
Fotiadis, Michael 57 Jackson, Michael 233
Foucault, Michel 284, 301 Johansen, Dorothy 258
Fox, Kate 175, 180 Johnson, Boris 234
Frazer, James 220 justice 198–200
Freeman, James 3
Fried, Morton 240 Kapferer, Bruce 113
Fukui, Masako 12 Katz, Jack 97
Kelly, Terry 193–195
Geertz, Clifford 109, 222, 243 kinship and relatedness 120–181, 129–130,
gender-equity practices 81 134–135; alliance theory 126–130; descent
generalised exchange structure 138 theory 123–126; documenting broken ties
generalised reciprocity 259–260 150–154; ethnicity 174–181; family and
The Gift (Mauss) 258 community 160–173; fictive kinship 144,
Gluckman, Max 102, 161 148–149; milk kinship 143–144; questioning
Goffman, Irving 263 presumptions 141–160; sliced meat kinship
Gombrich, Ernst 263 157–160; systems of relatedness 130–141;
Goody, Jack 145 uncommon sense 121–122; university
Gracis-Araiz, 304 304 culture 122
317
Index 317
kinship systems of descent 136–141; cognatic merit, ethical research 188
systems 140–141; complex structures 137–138; metaphors 232–234
cross relatives chart 138; elementary structures Michotte, Sarah 197
137–138; exogamous exchange 139; microbiomes 238
generalised exchange 138; matrilineal descent milk kinship 143–144
137, 139, 140; patrilineal descent 137, 139, 139; Miller, Daniel 252, 254, 256, 263, 280
restricted exchange 137–138; semi-complex Miner, Horace 174
structures 138; unilineal systems of descent 137 Mitchell, Clyde 178
Kleeman, Ruby 235–236 model of reality 109
Kmart case study 69–70, 79, 81 Moran, Anne 271
Kolich, Augustus M. 55 Morrison, Scott 108
Kponina, Helena 224 Mullin, Molly 223
Kravis, Ruth 264–265 multiculturalism 180
Kristeva, Julia 19 multispecies ethnography 223–224, 236–238
Kroeber, A.L. 123, 141 Murdock, George Peter 123, 141
Kula Ring 259–260 The Mushroom at the End of the World (Tsing) 237
Lamphere, Louise 223 Nading, Alex 231

language style 87–94 Narasimhan, Nitya 41–42, 269
Larsen, Sidsel Saugsted 179 National Health and Medical Research Council
Lawson, Nigella 213 (NHMRC) 188
Leach, Edmund 135 National Museum of Australia (NMA) 272–273,
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 109, 123, 126, 174, 220, 225 275
Life Matters (Australian national radio show) 12 negative reciprocity 261
liminality, exploration of 276–279 neoevolutionism 240
liminal spaces 277 neofunctionalism 240
lineal kin 135–136, 136 Norden, Anna 214–215, 269
linguistic anthropology 1 normality 285
Lin, Zixun 116–118, 269 notes taking. see fieldnotes
liquid modernity 232 Nott, Hannah 3, 309–311
Long, Lachlan 35–36 Nuefeld, Joshua 238
Lowie, Robert H. 141 The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood
Lye, Kishaya 114 and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People
(Evans-Pritchard) 123, 222, 225
maieutic relations/function 2–3, 12, 263 Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with War, Money and the
Malinowski, Bronisław 23, 29, 123, 135 State (Hutchinson) 125
The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Nuer Religion (Evans-Pritchard) 123
Feeling (Hochschild) 83
Manning-Nash, David 174 Okely, Judith 178
Manyukhina,Yana 255 Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (Gluckman) 102
Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and ordinary institutional spaces 269
Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth Ortner, Sherry 216
(Freeman) 226 Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From
Marriage and Kinship among the Nuer (Harris) 242
(Evans-Pritchard) 123 Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu) 294
Martin, Emily 26
material culture 264 panopticon 286
matrilineal descent 137, 139, 140 participant observation 78
matrilineal relatives 137 patriarchal society 63–66
Mauss, Marcel 128, 258 patrilineal descent 137, 139, 139
McDonald, Sophie 166–168, 266–268 patrilineal relatives 137
McDowell, Linda 272 Penfold, Tristan 46–48
McGranahan, Carole 200 Penny, Brenda 149
McIntyre, Lynn 206 performative utterance 107
McPhee, Rowena 8 Peterson, Richard 295
Mead, Margaret 226 phatic communion (small talk) 47
Mentored to Perfection (Dennis and Behie) 261 Pickering, John 55
318
318 Index
Pilgrim, Sarah 290–293 rites, rituals and public events 100–118;
Pink, Sarah 265 communitas 106–107; Double Ninth Festival
plagiarism 54–58; badness 55–56; cheating and (Chongyangjie) 118; exorcism 112; First Fruits
stealing 57–58; instructor’s perspective 55; new Festival (Incwala) 103; funerals 116–118; Holy
teaching practices 56–57; traditional consensus Communion ritual 101; model of reality 109;
55 performative utterance 107; rites of passage
Plas,Virginia 272–276 103–105, 107, 114; ritual utterance 107; social
politeness 94–97 dramas 107–108; uncommon sense 100
Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society (Gluckman) Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa
102 (Gluckman) 102
Poppick, Laura 26 ritual utterances 107
postmodernism 30 Rock, Melanie 206, 212, 213
potlatch 258–259 Rondeau, Krista 206
Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Rosaldo, Michele 223
Deprivation (Sen) 217 Russell, Roseanne 81
power, institutions and university 283–311;
archaeology of knowledge 289; body capital Sahlins, Marshall 113, 259
296; body positivity movement 303–305; Salazar, Manuela 305–307
cultural capital 295–296; docile bodies 284, Sanjek, Roger 73
287–288, 290–293; docility-utility 287; Sartre, Jean-Paul 232
economic capital 296; fatness 304; feminist Schneider, David 143
movement 307–309; intersectionality 292; The Science of Culture (White) 241
normality 285; projects of docility 287; social scratch notes 74
capital 296; social welfare 284; transwomen The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in
303; uncommon sense 283; university culture Turkish Village Society (Delany) 27
283 segmentary lineage 124
practical wisdom 209 self-service check-outs 86
Price, David 195 Self, Will 256
Price, Sally 259 Sen, Amartya 217
primitive culture 128 The Sense of Order (Gombrich) 263
probabilistic determinism 241 The Sexual Life of Savages in North Western
projects of docility 287 Melanesia (Malinowski) 259
pseudonyms 200–201 The Sexual Politics of Meat (Adams) 216
Purity and Danger (Douglas) 18, 104, 228, 229, sex work 32
232, 233 Shahi, Teesha 69–70
Sharman, Megan 164–166
Qi, Xinlei 219–220 Skeat, Ruby 175–177, 180
sliced meat kinship 157–160
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 123 small talk 46–48; comedy role 47–48; as false
Radih, Zahra 70–73 familiarity 47; metacommentary 47–48; scene
Rapport, Nigel 103 description 46
Rapunzel syndrome 17 Smart Homes for Seniors (Pink’s documentary film)
The Raw and the Cooked (Lévi-Strauss) 228 265
real kin 135 snot/snotting 11–13, 16, 22, 229
reciprocal exchanges 253 social capital 296
reciprocity: balanced 260–261; generalised social class 210
259–260; negative 261 social dramas 107–108
‘Reciprocity and Social Distance: A Social Universe diagram 217, 218
Reconsideration’ (Price) 259 social welfare 284
redistributive exchanges 253 sociology 24, 296
reflexivity 28–30 Socratic function 3
Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food space, consumption and things 252–280;
and Memory (Sutton) 207 exploration of liminality 276–279; generosity
Ren, Hebe 21 252–253; humility of things 263–264; liminal
respect 200–201 spaces 277; material culture 264; ordinary
restricted exchange structure 137–138 institutional spaces 269; potlatch 258–259;
Ricoeur, Paul 208 reciprocal exchanges 253; reciprocity 259–261;
319
Index 319
redistributive exchanges 253; theory of cultural relatedness 121–122; mapping exercises 58–59;
materialism 254; theory of things 263; virtuous new teaching practices 56–57; plagiarism
giving 262–263 54–58; power, institutions and university 283;
Spears, Britney 148, 149 public and private issues 59–61; rites, rituals
Strathern, Marilyn 56, 144 and public events 100; stereotypical thinking
structural functionalism 123 55–56; in university culture 45, 48–50, 54–59
structuralism 109, 126, 216, 225 unilineal systems of descent 137
structural linguistics 126–127 Universities Australia (UA) 188
surveillance 285, 286 university culture 45–66; acts of generosity 253;
Sutton, David 207 common sense 45, 50, 52, 54; especial language
symbolic logic 210 54; especial sense of time 52; especial spaces
systems of relatedness 130–141; bilateral kinship 52–54; ethics 186–187; food and social animals
network 132–136; ego 131–132, 132; kinship 204; genealogical method 122; kinship and
systems of descent 136–141; symbols 130, 131 genealogies 122; mapping exercises 58–59;
patriarchal society 63–66; plagiarism 54–58;
Tame, Grace 108 power see power, institutions and university;
theory of cultural materialism 254 public and private issues 59–61; qualifying
A Theory of Shopping (Miller) 256 conditions 50; research knowledge 51–52;
theory of things 263 small talk 46–48; student/administrator/
thermostatic approach 240 academic roles 50–51; uncommon sense 45,
‘Thinking through the Body: An Essay on 48–50, 54–59; uncommon spatial sense 58–59
Understanding Metaphor’ (Jackson) 233
thirdhand smoke 171–172 Valcore, Jace 302
‘Throwing Like a Girl’ (Young) 63, 66 van Gennep, Arnold 103
time-space acceleration 169 virtuous giving 262–263
time-space compression 169
Tolmie, Noah 301–303 Warin, Megan 208, 230
Torres Strait Islander people 20, 199 Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English
totemism 220–221 Behaviour (Fox) 175
transwomen 303 Weaver, Beth 300
Traynor, Neve 269 Weiss, Erica 200
trichophagia 17 Weston, Kath 144
Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss) 225, 227 White, Leslie 240, 241
Trump, Donald 170 William, Luke 148
Tsing, Anna 237 Wilson, Elizabeth 272
Turner,Victor 102, 105, 115 Wolff, Janet 272
Tylor, Edward B. 220 Woman, Culture, and Society 223
workplace 32, 83, 102, 141
uncommon sense 6, 13; cheating and stealing World Health Organization (WHO) 234
57–58; common sense vs. 13–21; ethics
185–186; examples 14–15, 21–22; food and Young, Iris 63, 66
social animals 203; generosity 252; kinship and Young, Michael 30
320

Simone Dennis, Andrew Dawson - Doing Anthropology - A Guide by and For Students and Their Professors-Routledge (2022)

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i

Andrew Dawson is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne.

Simone Dennis and Andrew Dawson

Cover image: © Simone Dennis

List of figures  viii

2 Putting the basics together to understand the university

4 Rites, rituals, graduations and cakes  100

5 Kinship and relatedness  120

6 Ethical positions in anthropology  185

7 Food for thought and social animals: (Aka a disobedient history of

8 Space, consumption and the anthropology of things  252

9 Power, institutions and the university: a motivating conclusion  283

1.1 Fieldnotes at Coles, p. 1  9

5.1 Relationship and letter kin terms  129

Simone and Andy’s co-​authors are:

Co-​author contributions ably edited by:

• Cultural/​social/​sociocultural anthropology: (which is what this book is all

In this book, we are focusing on cultural/​social/​sociocultural anthropology (as well as

• It is not written by well-​established anthropology professors who have used their

It’s also different because:

The challenger exercises a Socratic or maieutic function, drawing out an argument

There is no teaching or learning, no production of new ideas, on such a [maieutic]

There’s another important consequence for the subsumption of difference in anthro-

How does that all work for the book, exactly?

Here’s everything in a nutshell

Using your uncommon sense

First, what is common sense?

The first kind of common sense

The second kind of common sense

A visit to Coles Supermarket

Notes written up from headnotes made on Friday, 18 March 2022,

Figure 1.1 Fieldnotes at Coles, p. 1.

Figure 1.2 Fieldnotes at Coles, p. 2.

Figure 1.3 Fieldnotes at Coles, p. 3.

Figure 1.4 Fieldnotes at Coles, p. 4.

Keep that in mind as we turn now to snot.Yes, that’s right. Snot.

Finally! What is uncommon sense?

How to tell the difference between common and uncommon sense?

Exercise: Do an ice cream haircut

Tony Bourne says

It’s dangerous to eat hair because it can’t be digested.

Weird, weird love

Exercise: Compare anthropology to sociology using course

As an anthropologist, I am intrigued by the possibility that culture shapes how bio-

Complexifying ‘cultural groups’

Ethnography on the inside

You are a [research] tool

From girl to woman

Fieldnotes on the Frankston Line

On Sunday April 4, I took fieldnotes on my train trip from an outer suburb of

Waiting to know what anthropology is

My three strategies for explaining anthropology

1) explaining the unique qualitative research methods anthropology employs, spe-

Before you read Chapter 2

Exercise: Treat this chapter as an anthropologist treats a new field

2 Putting the basics together to understand

Some orienting notes to get you started

Seeing the university like a culture

46 Understanding the university anthropologically

College small talk

Understanding the university anthropologically 47

Small talk as false familiarity

The role of comedy and metacommentary

List of figures viii

4 Rites, rituals, graduations and cakes 100

5 Kinship and relatedness 120

6 Ethical positions in anthropology 185

8 Space, consumption and the anthropology of things 252

9 Power, institutions and the university: a motivating conclusion 283

1.1 Fieldnotes at Coles, p. 1 9

5.1 Relationship and letter kin terms 129

Simone and Andy’s co-authors are:

Co-author contributions ably edited by:

• Cultural/social/sociocultural anthropology: (which is what this book is all

In this book, we are focusing on cultural/social/sociocultural anthropology (as well as

• It is not written by well-established anthropology professors who have used their

Figure 1.1 Fieldnotes at Coles, p. 1.

Figure 1.2 Fieldnotes at Coles, p. 2.

Figure 1.3 Fieldnotes at Coles, p. 3.

Figure 1.4 Fieldnotes at Coles, p. 4.

2 Putting the basics together to understand

Plagiarism –let’s make some uncommon sense

3 Taking notice, taking note

I explored my initial fieldwork through the theme of a soundscape –which refers

Figure 3.1 Fieldnote books.

Figure 3.2 Fieldnote book cover.

Figure 3.3 Page from fieldnote book 1.

Figure 3.4 Page from fieldnote book 2.

Figure 3.5 Page from fieldnote book 3.

Figure 3.6 Friends of the Police Band Newsletter, featuring Simone Dennis.