Anthropology on Air – Details, episodes & analysis

In today’s episode, we talk to Tom Bratrud about his ongoing, long-term work with city-dwellers who migrate to rural parts of Norway. This research forms the basis of Tom’s forthcoming book project, which has the working title Rurality 2.0: Redefining Urban-Rural Divides in the Mountains of Norway. Tom Bratrud is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. His research investigates social life, political dynamics, value(es), religion/worldviews, emerging technologies, environmental issues and rural-urban relations. Prior to his work in his home valley of Valdres in southern Norway, he conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Vanuatu in the South-Pacific—resulting in his first monograph Fire on the Island: Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu (Berghahn 2022). Tom is the co-convenor of European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA)’s Future Anthropologies Network. Just after we spoke, Tom was also awarded the inaugural Thomas Hylland Eriksen Memorial Prize, presented during the Norwegian Anthropological Association’s Conference in Oslo at the end of October 2025. In explaining their decision, the jury commented that Bratrud “unites global and local perspectives and shows how social anthropological approach and methodology become a key to understanding ongoing change.” Tom Bratrud is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Tom Bratrud receives the Thomas Hylland Eriksen Memorial Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we speak with Alessandro Rippa about amber – a fossilised resin that not only allow us a glimpse into prehistoric lifeforms and climatic conditions millions of years ago but also works as an entry point into understanding current political, scientific, and commercial frictions.   Alessandro is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, at the University of Oslo, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project called “Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene”. He has conducted extensive fieldwork along China’s borderlands, and more recently in his home region in the Italian Alps, and he has published on themes such as infrastructure development, borders, ‘road animism’, human-environment relations, re-wilding, hunting, and heritage.His award-winning book, titled “Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China”, came out in 2020 and explores the interplay between developmental processes, various forms of state power, and local experiences and perceptions of transboundary connections in China. Emerging from this fieldwork, the object of amber caught Alessandro’s interest, and in this podcast, we speak with him about the many aspects and actors that are part of its history and global circulation. The conversation will take us from China and Burma to Italy, Poland and Ukraine, as amber burst out in unpredictable places, and we discuss how amber links the past, present, and future in human lives, visions, and politics.    You will find links to the discussed publications and to Alessandro’s work in the show notes. The podcast was recorded in September 2025, when Alessandro visited Bergen to give a presentation as part of the BSAS seminars.     Resources:Research profile: https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/people/aca/alessrip/   Book: Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China (2020): https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463725606/borderland-infrastructures   Articles on re-wilding in the Italian Alps: -       https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00141844.2021.1939398?tab=permissions&scroll=top#abstract -       https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01426397.2024.2309310#abstract   ERC project page for Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene -       https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/projects/AMBER/index.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we speak with Martin Eggen Mogseth and Fartein Hauan Nilsen about their first edited volume, Limits of Life: Reflections on Life, Death, and the Body in the Age of Technoscience (Berghahn Books, 2024). The book explores how fundamental concepts such as life, birth, selfhood, religion, death, and ancestry are being reshaped in an era of rapid technological changes, from a transhumanist movement seeking to disrupt death, to digital avatars ‘replicating’ deceased loved ones and widely accessible DNA tests revealing hitherto unknown genetic relatives. We discuss the book’s genesis in a smoky pub in Denmark; different ways of understanding ‘life’ and ‘limits’; how advancements in artificial intelligence and genetic testing have led to a revival of interest in ancestry in Euroamerican contexts; sperm ‘superdonors’; why California is such fertile ground for exploring topics at the intersection of scientific imagination, technology, and the self; and more.   Martin Eggen Mogseth is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, where he works with the experiences of people involved with assisted conception in the US, primarily in California. His research begins with the moment a person learns that they are donor conceived, what might be called "reconception", and expands to consider the various actors somehow affected by and affecting the trajectories that thus ensue, be they temporal, "non-human", or relational. The project is concerned with topics such as identity, kinship, technology, and biology, and deals intimately with phenomena such as personal misrecognition in the mirror, familial secrecy, familial disruption and connection, and the shifting of fundamental sense-making elements.  Martin is also interested in the limits and possibilties of language in conveying ethnographic occurences, thus he tinkers as well with poetry and "the literary" and the idea that "language is technology".    Fartein Hauan Nilsen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He has previously conducted ethnographic research in Iceland for his MA where he explored the impact of modernity and technological advancements on religious revivalism, particularly pagan revivalism, in Iceland and the broader Euro-American context. Currently, Fartein is part of the RCN-funded project "Human Futures: A study of Technoscientific Immortality" led by professor Annelin Eriksen at the University of Bergen. As part of this project, Fartein has conducted 13 months of fieldwork in California focusing on how Generative Artificial Intelligence, mainly in the form of chatbots, is being used for memorial purposes. Initially, his research centered on death, but fieldwork revealed that the current AI boom is equally about life, both in representing a new form of life and in facilitating a specific way of life. Fartein's research interests span a wide range, including the Anthropology of Technology, the Anthropology of Religion, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Digital Anthropology, Artificial Intelligence, New Religious Movements, and the interplay between Science and Religion.   More about the book, released 1 June 2024, here: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/MogsethLimits Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Anthropology on Air, we speak with Penny Harvey, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester in the UK. Penny is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the Academia Europaea. Penny is a highly influential thinker on the topic of infrastructures. She is well known for her 2015 book about highway-building in South America, Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Cornell UP), which she co-wrote with Hannah Knox. The book addresses the deceptively simple question of how roads matter to people – an interest in the social life of infrastructure projects that still broadly animates Penny’s work today. Penny’s long-term ethnographic research in Peru originally looked at Spanish/Quechua bilingualism, language, and power. It grew to include the study of civic infrastructure projects including road construction, sanitation, and waste management systems.  We talk about Penny’s current ethnographic study of nuclear decommissioning infrastructures in the UK, which includes her spending time at nuclear sites like Sellafield, which you will hear about in this conversation. She is involved in many projects relating to nuclear waste management, having co-founded the Beam network for social research on nuclear topics within the Dalton Nuclear Institute at the University of Manchester. She also serves as the Deputy Chair of the UK Government Committee on Radioactive Waste Management. We hope you enjoy the conversation. Penny Harvey - The Beam nuclear and social research network (manchester.ac.uk) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this special episode, we speak with Tomas Salem, a PhD fellow in our own department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. We do a deep dive on some of the themes covered in Tomas’s first book, Policing the Favelas in Rio de Janeiro: Cosmologies of War and the Far-Right (Palgrave Macmillian, 2024), which is released this week. Based on fieldwork Tomas conducted in 2015 when he was a Master’s student here, the book explores the links between militarized policing and far-right ideologies. We talk about the social and political conditions that preceded the rise of the man who became the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, forms of everyday violence in the favelas of Rio, masculinity and hierarchy in the police force, doing ethnography with those you might disagree with, and how Tomas’s thoughts about the political and analytical value of anthropology have evolved in the years since he carried out the original research. More broadly, Tomas’ research focuses on the intersection of inequality and the environment as the two overarching and co-constituting crises of the 21st century. He approaches these crises and their effects by zooming in on emergent social, political, cosmological and economic tensions, exploring the links between non-dualist ontologies and the re-enchantment of the world in politics and science, the material and symbolic conditions for the growth of illiberal ideologies, and technological change—particularly related to technologies of governance, datafication, and AI. Tomas has carried out ethnographic research in diverse contexts, including Rio de Janeiro's Military Police Forces, and wilderness areas in the Norwegian High-Arctic and in Southern Argentina. In his PhD project he explore romantic pursuits of happiness and the good life in the outdoors and the changing meanings of nature in the Anthropocene. We hope you enjoy the conversation.   Tomas Salem’s UiB profile: https://www.uib.no/en/persons/Tomas.SalemLink to book: https://link.springer.com/book/9783031490262 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To kick off season three of Anthropology on Air, we speak with Andrea Muehlebach. Andrea is Professor of Maritime Anthropology and Cultures of Water at the University of Bremen in Germany, where she also leads the Bremen NatureCultureLab. She was visiting Bergen to deliver a talk entitled, “Do Waves Have Rights?” The Rights of Nature movement insists that “nature has a dignity, outside and in excess of its use to humans,” Andrea explains. In this conversation, we discuss Andrea’s current research into this movement, its origins in Indigenous philosophy, and what shape it is taking in different European countries today. We also discuss the difference between privatisation and financialisation of public utilities; collective actions against such moves in Italy and beyond; how to do ethnographic work with such a “slippery substance” as water; responses to water scarcity in Europe at a time of climate change; doing multi-sited ethnographies; and much more. Andrea’s most recent book, A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe (Duke University Press, 2023) is a multi-sited ethnography with activists across Europe, specifically Italy, Ireland and Germany, as they struggle to preserve water as a commons and a public good in the face of privatisation efforts. She is also the author of The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy (Chicago University Press, 2012), which explored neoliberal welfare “reforms” and the moral authoritarianisms (and struggles, tensions, contradictions) that often accompany them. In addition to her two books, Andrea is the author of a great many articles on a variety of other subjects including poverty and race in Italy, economic despair, and the concept of citizenship. We hope you enjoy the conversation. https://www.andreamuehlebach.com/ http://naturenkulturen.de/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 Tanya Luhrmann is Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Psychology, and an elected member of the American Philosophical Society. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has conducted ethnographic work among groups such as evangelic Christians, American Santerians, Zoroastrians in India, magicians in England, and people hearing voices across cultural contexts. Apart from being the author of lots of academic articles and opinion pieces in the New York Times, her award-winning books include ‘Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft’, ‘Of Two Minds’, ‘When God talks Back’, and ‘How God Becomes Real’.   In this podcast we talk with Tanya about how people make God and Spirits real through various forms of practice and ideas. Tanya shares stories of world- and self-transformation from her fieldwork among magicians in England and evangelic Christians in the United States and unfolds some of the factors influencing such changes. We talk about the world-building effects of prayer, and how faith changes the person of faith. Finally, Tanya describes how cultural theories of mind also have an impact on the manifestation of anomalous, sensory experiences across contexts.   The podcast was recorded in early December 2023, when Tanya was in Bergen to be a panellist of the annual Holberg Debate.   Resources: Academic Profile: https://anthropology.stanford.edu/people/tanya-marie-luhrmann Personal website: https://www.tanyaluhrmann.com -       When God talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (2012) -       Of Two Minds: An anthropologist looks at American Psychiatry (2001) -       Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (1989) -       How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (2020) -       Special issue: ‘Mind and Spirit: a Comparative Theory’ (2020) -       Article mentioned: ‘Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths’ (2021) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, you will meet professor at the University of Oxford, Harvey Whitehouse. Harvey is the director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion, he is Statutory Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Fellow of Magdalen College. Harvey has worked extensively with rituals since his first long-term fieldwork in Papua New Guinea in 1980s. His list of publications includes myriads of interdisciplinary contributions, articles, and edited volumes apart from books, with the most recent being ‘The Ritual Animal’ (from 2021). Currently, Harvey is testing and developing his theory of modes of religiosity which proposes that the frequency, transmission form and emotionality of rituals influences the scale and structure of social organisation. In recent years, his research has expanded beyond religion to examine all kinds of ritual behaviour globally and their role in binding groups together whether being in the context of football, war, or ex-convicts. Apart from that, Harvey has been occupied with questions on the evolution of social complexity, something which is also explored in his forthcoming book ‘Inheritance: the evolutionary origins of the modern world’ that will be published in June 2024.   In this podcast, we talk with Harvey about what characterises rituals, what kinds of social effects they can produce, and how they have developed throughout history and influenced social organisation. Harvey explains the modes of religiosity theory and we discuss how it can be usefully applied in relation to conflict and contexts as diverse as football fandom, violent extremism, and the environmental crisis. Finally, Harvey shares his vision of an anthropology that reaches beyond interpretive exclusivism and disciplinary silos when trying to understand cultural and social systems.   The podcast was recorded in November 2023, when Harvey visited Bergen to give the yearly Barth Memorial Lecture.   Resources: Academic profile: https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-harvey-whitehouse Personal website: https://www.harveywhitehouse.com Paper mentioned: Rethinking ritual: how rituals made our world and how they could save it (2023) Books mentioned: The Ritual Animal (2021), ‘Inheritance: the evolutionary origins of the modern world (forthcoming) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 In this episode you will meet Jennifer Hays, who is professor in social anthropology at the University of Tromsø (UiT) – the Arctic University of Norway. Jennifer has been working with hunter-gatherer San Populations in southern Africa for 25 years, as a researcher, and as a consultant for governmental bodies and local and international NGOs. She is, among other things, a founding member of the Hunter Gatherer Education Research and Advocacy Group (HG-Edu), a board member of the Kalahari Peoples’ Fund. She also works as a consultant for UN bodies on global human rights issues. A primary focus of her work has been on issues relating to education, language, and indigenous rights, including the impact of formal education on San lifeways and on their own efforts to attain educational self-determination.   In the podcast, Jennifer gives us insights into what characterises the ways of life of the approximately 10 million people worldwide who live in contemporary hunter-gatherer communities. Focusing on the Ju/’hoansi in the Nyae Nyae conservancy in Namibia, where Jennifer has conducted decades of extensive fieldwork, we discuss some of the challenges that this community face, especially in terms of education and knowledge transmission. Finally, Jennifer offers some reflections on the complex topic of how we can uphold the rights to self-determination of indigenous peoples, and some of the pitfalls that we must take caution to avoid.   We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did.   The podcast was recorded in early November 2023 when Jennifer was in Bergen to give a lecture at the Bergen Anthropology Department Seminars.     Resources: -       Read more about Jennifer’s work and find her publications here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is the second of two podcasts focusing on the longstanding partnership between Bergen and Khartoum. In the episode you will meet, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, who visited Bergen in October 2023 to give the keynote lecture at a 3-day symposium that marked the 60-year anniversary of this collaboration. An-Na’im is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory Law, associated professor in the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, and senior fellow of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion of Emory University. He is the author of several pioneering books within human rights and Islamic law, including Decolonizing Human Rights(2021); What is an American Muslim (2014); Muslims and Global Justice (2011); and Islam and the Secular State (2008).   In the podcast, professor emeritus at the Department of Social Anthropology at Bergen University, Leif Manger, interviews An-Na’im about his background and main work. An-Na’im begins by describing his defining relationship with Mahmoud Mohammed Taha and Taha’s teachings about “The Second Message of Islam”. Taking us through some of his major academic contributions, An-Na’im then reflects on his previous engagements with human rights in a cross-cultural perspective and his commitment to advocating the agency of people to protect their own rights. Finally, Leif asks for An-Na’im’s thoughts on the question that he himself posed in the title of his keynote lecture, namely: ‘Sudan’s tragedy – a repeated failure or a learning adaptation process?’    Read more about Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im’s work on his research page and on his professional website evolutionofsharia.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices