#65 Hans Lucht: Ethnographic Poetry & Migration

In this episode, we are in company with Hans Lucht to talk about ethnographic poetry. Hans is a senior researcher, and the head of migration research at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) in Copenhagen. He has worked with migration for 20 years, with a special focus on undocumented labour-related migration from West Africa to Europe. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Ghana, Niger, Libya, Italy, and Greece, and his prize-winning monograph ‘Darkness before Daybreak’ chronicles the lives of a group of migrants who travels from Ghana to Italy in search of work.Apart from his numerous academic contributions of articles and policy reports, Lucht is a writer, and poet, I should say. He has published two novels titled Onko-Mus and Lysene på den anden side and two collections of poems, all in his mother-tongue Danish. The first poetry collection, called Feltarbejde (Fieldwork) from 2022 is a poetic reflection on both the experiences of his interlocutors and the experience as a fieldworker. The second, Vores liv ryster (Our lives are shaking), came out in 2024 and consists of what Hans has called documentary poems. This means that all text of the poems is direct quotes from conversations and interviews with his interlocutors that Hans has then curated by following a few self-imposed dogmas.In the podcast, Hans will read out loud five poems from this collection, all titled with a name of the one speaking and where the conversation took place. In between the readings, we ask Hans about what impressions inspired the poems, the dynamic of working between anthropology and art, and how each domain can inform and expand the insights of the other. We discuss the concept of ‘existential reciprocity’ in relation to his work, and how doing fieldwork engenders impressions and transformations that exceed academic analysis and extend into the lives of both interlocutors and fieldworkers. The episode is part of Regnfang’s series of co-publications of the Anthropology on Air podcast. A podcast created and published in collaboration with the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. The podcast was recorded in February 2025, when Hans visited Bergen to give a presentation at the Bergen Social Anthropology Seminars (BSAS) series.Resources:-       Hans Lucht’s academic profile-       Feltarbejde (2022)-       Vores liv ryster (2024)