Introducing Foraging: a podcast in environmental humanities

Iva Peša is assistant professor of contemporary history at the University of Groningen, and the principal investigator of the ERC Starting Grant AFREXTRACT: Environmental Histories of Resource Extraction in Africa: Understanding Cultural and Political Responses to Environmental Transformation. We discussed how to approach pollution as an historical topic, the added value of thinking about ecological disruptions from the bottom-up, the use of literary sources in environmental history, and the validity of Anthropocene as a concept.   For more information on AFREXTRACT, please visit their website: http://www.rug.nl/let/AFREXTRACT/

At the time of recording, Emelien Devos was putting the finishing touches to her PhD dissertation at the University of Ghent, titled “Self-willed Growth: A More-than-human ethnography in West Tanzania”. Her brilliant work on multispecies entanglements and their repercussion on food consumption addresses urgent global issues from the vantage point of ecosystems and human communities that seldom reach public awareness in the global North. In this episode, Emelien discusses what an anthropology “beyond the human” can mean, differing understanding of what counts as “natural” and “healthy”, as well as multispecies uses of space.

The second guest of Foraging is anthropologist Kwame Edwin Otu, associate Professor in the African Studies Program of Georgetown University. His doctoral research on the Sasso, a community of self-identified effeminate men living in the Jamestown district of Accra, served as the groundwork for his first monograph, Amphibious Subjects, published by the University of California Press in 2022. In this episode, Kwame delved on his ongoing research project, an ethnography of the pickers toiling in one of the world’s largest e-waste dumps. He also reflected on how his previous research on queerness informed and shaped his trajectory in environmental anthropology. We further discussed the notion of waste, and how to approach non-human entities in anthropology.

For the first episode of Foraging, we hosted Prof. Diogo de Carvhalo Cabral, of Trinity College Dublin. Diogo is a fascinating voice in more-than-human history. His groundbreaking research on the relations between leaf-cutting ants and human communities in 19th century Brazilian Atlantic Forest opened new avenues in multispecies history. Recently, Diogo has co-edited the excellent volume More-than-Humain Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean, published by the University of London Press. We talked about this recent publication, his encounter with environmental history and more-than-human approaches, as well as the new frontiers of environmental humanities.