Camthropod

Opened in 2014, Hiddo Dhawr is Somaliland’s first and only live music venue to operate since the 1988 civil war, which decimated the capital Hargeysa, and displaced the artistic community. In this episode, social anthropology PhD candidate Christina Woolner visits Hiddo Dhawr – which specializes in the performance of acoustic music popular before the war – to explore what it means to sing, and particularly about love, in contemporary Hargeysa. Conversations with the venue’s founder Sahra Halgan, reflections from some young patrons, and an evening taking in the music reveal the many meanings of love songs, and offer insight into the social and political climate of life in a post-war, unrecognized state.

Anna Tsing visited our department to give the Marilyn Strathern lecture for CUSAS in 2015. Corinna Howland took the opportunity to sit down with her to discuss her classic book Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, and to find out a bit more about her thinking on issues of globalization, scale, environmental politics, and capitalism.

Since the liberalisation of the Indian economy in the early 1990s, an entire industry of commercial English language training centres has emerged, offering spoken English classes for adults. In this episode, Sazana Jayadeva speaks with Prakruthi Banwasi, the founder of one of the first English training centres in Bangalore, India, about why it has become so important to know English in this city today.

Patrick O’Hare is a PhD student in social anthropology researching waste-pickers, the landfill economy and the recycling industry in Montevideo, Uruguay. In this podcast he visits Save the Date in London, a Dalston café which forms part of the ‘Real Junk Food Network’ dedicated to diverting food from landfill and transforming it into wholesome, affordable meals. With its founders James and Ruth, Patrick explores why so much edible waste makes it into the trash and how food activists like them are challenging wasteful practices and people’s perceptions about what is good to eat.

Gogo Breeze, a popular radio personality in Zambia's Eastern Province, styles himself as his listeners' grandfather and attends to them through a variety of radio programmes. In this podcast, Cambridge anthropologist Harri Englund introduces the key means by which Gogo Breeze pursues kinship over the airwaves. Examples of broadcasts bring to life the radio grandfather's multivocal approach to his vocation.

Camthropod, the Cambridge Anthropology Podcast. Camthropod is produced by a collective of staff and students from the Cambridge Division of Social Anthropology. We aim to broadcast it fortnightly during term time. Camthropod will include interviews with visiting speakers and with members of the department about their work, as well as audio pieces presenting aspects of our research or just things that interest us about daily life. We welcome all kinds of contributions, and invite you to get in touch with us at camthropod@gmail.com