#53 Matthew Carey - Friendship, love, and grief in the Moroccan High Atlas

Welcome to Regnfang’s co-publication of the Anthropology on Air podcast. A podcast created and published in collaboration with the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Each episode features interviews with social sciences researchers on topics related to the ways in which our human mind and life is entangled with the communities of ideas and beings with whom we live.In this episode, you will meet Matthew Carey who is associate professor at the Department of Anthropology at Copenhagen University. Matthew’s main field site is in the Moroccan High Atlas where he has done recurring fieldwork since 2002. His work here has, among other things, focused on mistrust, complicity, egalitarianism, sincerity, subjectivity, medical pluralism, and anarchism. Apart from that, Matthew has written on issues related to apocalyptic discourses, conspiracy, lying, and bureaucracy. In this conversation, we talk with Matthew about his book ‘Mistrust: An ethnographic theory’ before delving into the subject of infant mortality and parental grief among Tachelhit-Berber speaking communities in Southern Morocco. In trying to explain the radical difference here between showcase and claimed experience of grief when small compared to older children passed away, Matthew provides an anthropological analysis of different forms of emotional attachment and relational bonding. The podcast was recorded in early May 2023 when Matthew was in Bergen to give a presentation at the Bergen Social Anthropology Seminar (BSAS).Host and production: Sidsel MarieMusic: Victor Lange