In this episode, Mythily talks to Anne Galloway and Laura McLauchlan. Anne is a former academic and current farm witch who, in both roles, has spent a weird amount of time getting to know sheep. Laura is a multispecies anthropologist at the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW and lectures with the UNSW Environment and Society group. Anne and Laura are also, it must be said, dear friends. As they speak of friendship, policy, care, death, and killing, anthropology emerges as a way into practices and relations that could maybe (we hope) inform a ‘better world’. Anne and Laura are both deeply invested—through their entanglements with sheep and farmers (Anne), hedgehogs and ecological conservation workers (Laura)—in understanding what sophisticated practices of love, kindness and friendship look like. So we talk through the sticky and unruly nature of lived ethics; of what it means to dislike with respect. Or, to kill with love. And also, of choosing to walk away from academia.

This episode was produced by Mythily Meher, with editing and production support from Tim Neale and Matt Barlow. Mythily lives and works in Aotearoa New Zealand, and we recognise Māori in Aotearoa as tangata whenua (people born of the whenua [land/placenta]), whose right to sovereignty here is inalienable.

Conversations in Anthropology is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and with support from the Australian Anthropological Society.

Works mentioned:
‘Lively Collaborations: Feminist Reading Group Erotics for Liveable Futures’ by Laura McLauchlan (in Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy)

‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’ by Anna Tsing

‘Power in the Helping Professions’ by Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig

Also, more generally, the expansive works of Deb Bird Rose, and Maria La Puig Bellacasa