This week, we bring you an interview with Dr. Ashley Carruthers. Ashley is a lecturer of anthropology at the Australian National University’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology. His research interests include migration, mobilities, rural-urban relationships, networks and infrastructures, farming, organic agriculture, bicycles, and he has conducted in-depth fieldwork in Vietnam.

It’s also Familiar Stranger Clair’s first interview! We hope you enjoy it!

In this interview we talked about an organic farming community called Thang Dong. It’s located in a peri-urban region near Hoi An. We discussed what insights that WE, urban dwellers and subjects of modernization, could glean from the farmers’ organic agriculture project, which prevented them from being displaced. The project can be seen as a hybrid of multiple temporalities, where the traditional, the modern, and the postmodern are entangled in a non-linear manner. It is also an assemblage or a network of various agents, including non-human actors like the land, or the chemical fertilizers. We talked a lot about Latour’s Actor Network Theory, his book Down to Earth and We Have Never Been Modern. But don’t worry about it being too theory heavy, Ashley has tons of fun stories along the way! We also talked about the emerging culture of cycling as a leisure activity in Vietnam, and how the elites may inadvertently bring about some public good while benefiting themselves.

Head over to our website for a full list of links and citations!

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This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Shownotes by Clair Zhang
Podcast edited by Clair Zhang and Matthew Phung