Embodied Worlds: Announcing our Podcast on Embodied Practices and Materials
In April 2024, we published the first episode of our inaugural season of Embodied Worlds, a podcast dealing with belief, material culture, and embodiment, and how worlds-in-motion are made and circulated. Embodied Worlds is The Jugaad Project’s newest educational and programming initiative, and extends our rich platform and process to those who enjoy the immediacy and aurality of conversation. After five years of hosting free public events and workshops, producing a critically well-received book, and publishing numerous online issues, The Jugaad Project has become a model for what a small, generous cohort can achieve through dialog and innovation. More importantly, it has created real pathways for ideas and images to circulate between spaces that were previously siloed through the sharing of material culture studies across disciplinary boundaries. Following this approach, each episode of Embodied Worlds explores and connects worlds, small or big, ranging from those made by anthropologists to artisans and community facilitators.
Our first podcast episode Dancer or Grasshopper? The World of the Anthropologist was both a way to introduce the French anthropologist Jean-Pierre Warnier to our audience and, for those who might be less familiar, discuss fundamental ideas behind our platform such as bodily-and-material interactions. This is a thread that runs through our journal issues and publications.
Dancer or Grasshopper? is also based on the importance of what it is to practice something and what practice does to a person. Specifically, one can look at an anthropologist's life biography in terms of their research projects, their programs, their paradigms and field settings, but one can also look at it in terms of all the encounters that the person has made all along and the relationships and experiences that have opened up new avenues for connection, exchange and innovation. It is this relational aspect of practicing anthropology as well as conducting ethnography that is difficult to grasp, situated somewhere between the acumen acquired by training, educational degrees, and belonging to professional groups, and the alchemy of being in a particular time, place and circumstance. it is only in hindsight that the pieces of the puzzle seem to come together.
For this episode’s bonus content, see and hear as Warnier discusses archival photos from Cameroon.
Embodied Worlds explores and connects worlds of experience and perception, big or small, by discussing practices of doing and making. Embodied Worlds often dives deeper into the stories or themes highlighted in TJP’s open-access issues as well as producing stand-alone content. Join hosts Emma Cieslik and Urmila Mohan for each 30 min episode produced monthly and featuring guests who create and circulate unique worlds of various kinds.
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