Listen to Anthro.MP3
What is Cultural Anthropology? Featuring UMass Amherst Professor Dr. Nicholas Caverly
In this episode, we introduce one of the 4 fields of Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology! We will hear from Dr. Caverly as he goes a little more in depth about the field and his research!
Sources:
Anthropology Magazine. “What is Cultural Anthropology?” by Devin Proctor
https://culturalanthropology.duke.edu/undergraduate/what-is-cultural-anthro
Other:
https://www.umass.edu/anthro/nicholas-caverly-0
https://www.umass.edu/anthro/news/caverly-awarded-hunt-postdoc-grant
Transcripts:
Claire: Hello, friends, and welcome back to Anthro.mp3. So we’re a group of University of Massachusetts-Amherst students who are passionate about anthropology and want to share this love with as great an audience as possible. Hence, this podcast. This podcast is part of a larger intercollegiate collaboration for outreach and education in anthropology. AnthroHub is a website full of all things Anthro but in fun and creative formats. Make sure to check it out to look at some incredible blog posts and creative works made by students from not just UMass-Amherst but Sage Russell University and SUNY Albany as well. My name is Claire, and I’ll be one of your hosts for today’s episode, joined by our other host, Amber.
Amber: In today’s episode, we will be talking about cultural anthropology, and we will be interviewing a very special guest, Dr Nicholas Caverly, a professor here at UMass-Amherst who does research on important questions in cultural anthropology, such as power, justice, racism, techno-politics and socio-economics.
Claire: So cultural anthropology is actually a personal favorite subfield of mine. I really love learning about the interactions between people and what we, as humans have created over time. It is a bit different from archeology since the latter focuses on researching material remains and oral histories to learn about the culture and life of past societies, while cultural anthropology is more focused on modern-day society.
Amber: This field is super diverse in terms of research and methods. Anthropologists often conduct ethnographic research. To do this, they will live alongside people share their everyday life for months or even years. This isn’t just observation from a distance but full-on immersion. Ethnographers and cultural anthropologists conduct interviews, both casual chats and more structured ones. They also send out surveys and even collect precious things like local myths, stories and family histories. They’re always jotting down notes, recording conversations and basically trying to capture the essence of the culture they’re studying.
Claire: The really cool thing about this approach is that it helps to break down ethnocentric bias. So ethnocentric bias is basically just ‘in-group’ versus ‘out-group.’ And the idea that one’s culture is the “proper” or “normal” one. So what seems bizarre or unfamiliar at first can become totally normal after you’ve been around it for a while, and this information from people who were originally the out-group really helps to break down this bias. So it’s all about that in between space where you’re not a total outsider, but not exactly an insider, either. That exactly is where a lot of the magic happens in understanding different cultures.
Amber: And the range of topics these anthropologists study is huge, everything from religion and art to gender, magic and how people interact with their environment, racial dynamics, family structures, scientific practices, the impacts of colonialism, languages, national politics, the list goes on. Cultural Anthropology really opens up a window into the vast diversity of human experiences in societies. It’s all about exploring the richness and complexity of what it means to be human in different settings.
Claire: So with that introduction out of the way, let’s go ahead and hear more about the field of cultural anthropology from a professional. Here’s an interview with Dr Nicholas Caverly.
Amber: Hello, welcome back to our podcast. You’re here with your host Amber, and our special guest, Professor Caverly. Before we start, how would you like to be referred to?
Dr. Caverly: Thanks. Thanks for having me, Amber. You can call me Nick Caverly. He/Him pronouns are good, but They/Them also works.
Amber: Thank you so much. So, first of all, how did you get into the field of anthropology?
Dr. Caverly: Well, so I remember, I know some people have heard of anthropology before they get to university. I had not, and I kind of traveled through a lot of different things before I ended up in anthropology. So I was…I came into university, and I think, like a lot of people, I imagined that I was going to do a health profession, and so I did the whole kind of trajectory of courses around pre-med things. I completed all of them, but they were, like, highly boring and not things that I really wanted to be doing. And so for a little while, I thought, okay, maybe I will go to architecture school, and maybe I will, maybe I’ll go do that. And that also, you know, it wasn’t, it was some stuff that was interesting to me, but I didn’t really feel like I was able to ask the questions that I wanted to ask. And so I had taken an, I had taken, been taking a series of anthropology courses because they were interesting. I took the equivalent of what is ANTHRO 104 at UMass. And it’s like, this is a thing, you know this. This anthropology thing really helps me kind of connect from across the different domains that I’m interested in, to think about how landscape and place shape well being. And so I, you know, I ended up majoring in anthropology, and I graduated from university, and I got, you know, I ended up in a, like, working at a university that had an anthropology department as well as a big design program, and that was a place where I saw, you know, kind of design and the social sciences coming together and really producing kind of transdisciplinary work that would take, you know, social science knowledge things that are, you know, whether that’s from anthropology or sociology or history, and using that to inform, like, very real world things and so that kind of, you know, that was a moment when I was like: “Oh, well, you know, anthropology isn’t just this thing that I’ve done in, you know, university, and then I’m going to go do something else, like, maybe I could keep doing this.” And that was, it was kind of through that process that I ended up in, like, basically becoming a person who is now, like, I am an anthropologist.
Amber: That’s amazing. It’s funny because I know a few people who, also including myself, who started off with the pre-med and then somehow found anthropology, and for me, I realized you can do medical anthropology, and then I I was like: “wow, this is a discipline that really ties in, like the science and the cultural aspects and all of these different topics that I’m interested in.” So it’s I find it interesting that you also started off on the medical route and then switched to anthropology, because I did the same thing. And how did you get into cultural anthropology? Specifically.
Dr. Caverly: Well, I will say I didn’t actually know. They couldn’t have told you the difference between cultural anthropology and other kinds of anthropology. When I was a university student, I was at a university where we had a four field department, much like we do here, and the major was a four field major. And so this was something where I, you know, I took archeology and I took linguistic, you know, we had a really big Linguistic Anthropology program. I took courses in Biological Anthropology. And what I really enjoyed about anthropology was it allowed me to, you know, universities are all about dividing knowledge into very, very, very small boxes. Right? To say: “Well, if you’re interested in the economy, you sit over here. If you’re interested in the body, you sit over here. If you’re interested in in, you know, arts and literature, you sit over here.” And anthropology, we kind of, we don’t. That’s not what our field is about. It’s about saying, like, actually, to understand how the world works, we need to, we need to realize that these boxes are not as useful as we’d hoped they would be. And so I think, as a, I am a cultural anthropologist, in that, I study living humans—I study people today. I use a lot of, you know method, you know, ethnographic methods, but I think across our field, where what makes us special is our ability to or our kind of, our ability to combine lots of different kinds of methods and knowledge bases. And so that’s, I am a cultural anthropologist, but I am, I’m also a lot of other things.
Amber: Why would you say makes cultural anthropology important today in the modern world?
Dr. Caverly: I mean, I’m going to say this about cultural anthropology, but I think this is, this is something that I have to say about the humanities and about the social sciences in general. The humanities and the social sciences, especially anthropology, are so important today we have whatever kind of, you know, big, messy problem we can think about climate change, structural inequity…How to, you know, what is democracy? These are all human questions. They are all questions that will not be solved simply by technical solutions. They will not be solved simply by, you know, can we, you know, it will require things like technology. It will require apps. It will require, you know, thinking about medical practices, but you know, we know we have a lot of knowledge about this particular thing, like we know that medical science will not solve health disparities, for instance, that is a social…that requires social solutions. And to do that, we need, we need to take the knowledge bases of the social sciences and the humanities really seriously to ask, you know: “why do people make particular decisions under particular…?” And it’s because of structural conditions. It’s about because of social life. And so I think now more than ever, you know, we need to ask, “how do we mobilize the knowledge of the social sciences and the humanities in dialogue with our colleagues who sit in departments like computer science or, you know, mechanical engineering or the life sciences?” Because it’s really only going to be by working together and realizing, you know, how important and complementary all of our knowledge is, that we’re going to be able to address these big problems.
Amber: Definitely, I think that sometimes we see people more in the STEM fields looking a little bit down on the humanities, but I really do think that we need both of them combined in order to make actual structural change—like you were saying. On your website, you wrote that your work focuses on answering three important questions: 1.) why do structural inequities persist? 2.) how do the material conditions of inequity shape bodies, places and technical systems, and 3.) how do people tend to respond? Would you like to give us some of the answers you have been finding to these questions in your work?
Dr. Caverly: Absolutely, I think that, you know, when I think about these questions, I think about the first one, right? Because, like, this is, I’m not the first person to ask this question. I don’t ask this question alone. And so when we think about, you know, why do inequities like racism or sexism or class inequity or coloniality continue? You know, our kind of and, you know, we’re in the social sciences and the humanities and so our kind of, the thing that we go to first is usually like, well,”how is it that the structure of people’s thoughts or the structure of institutions reproduce things like racism or sexism or capital?” And that’s all important. And I you know, so I’m not saying, I’m not saying, let’s set that to the side. Instead, what I’m finding, though, is like when you look at how things like environmental racism happen, which is to say, you know, in the United States, for instance, we know that—-we’ve known for a very long time—that people who deal with environmental pollution, so things like, whether that’s from a power plant or from a chemical factory or even something like or like a landfill, right, we know that people who live with those things in their lives are most likely to be poor, they’re most likely to be people of color, they’re most likely to be immigrants, they’re most likely to speak primary languages that aren’t English. So we know all of that stuff. We’ve known that for a very long time, and we and yet, like those conditions are still the same. And it’s not because people don’t know about these conditions. It’s not because we don’t have data about them. We’ve even built whole institutions like the EPA that are supposed to address these conditions. And so why are they still around? And part of what I found and you know, I talk to people who live with things, with live with environmental injustice, and I hang out with people who are trying to fix it. And what, what I’m finding is that environmental injustice is reproduced by things like soil, right? It’s reproduced by the environment. It’s reproduced by the toxic conditions that are created by polluting industries. And so to address inequity, you know, and people think about this in all sorts of ways, right? Like people who live you know, people know full well that their neighborhoods are hazardous, and they also know that, like this is the you know, maybe it’s the neighborhood where they can afford to live, or maybe this neighborhood is important to them for a variety of reasons. Maybe they’d really like to leave, but they’ve been prevented from leaving for whatever reasons. People create forms of activism. They create forms of imagination, of what they want the world to be. But those forms of imagination tend to, you know, really collide with the physical world. They collide with things like lead in the soil. They collide with, you know, chemicals that are in the atmosphere. And so if we want to address environmental inequity, for instance, we have to think about the physical environment. We have to think about, what are we going to do with all of these contaminants that, you know, we and I keep saying ‘we’ as if, like we’re all doing this equally—we’re not, right—but that the systems that we’re all implicated in, our energy systems, our, you know, petrochemical systems that that support lives unevenly, we got to think about what we’re going to do with them. And not just, you know, if we shut down a coal power plant, then we fixed it, what are we going to do about the persistent contamination that people will be dealing with for decades, and where are those contaminants going to go? And so part of what I found in my work is really like how people are thinking really intentionally about the physical world and about the landscape as both a vehicle of inequity, but also the means that they want to use to build up a more equal world.
Amber: That makes a lot of sense, especially like in this modern world, where we’re seeing more and more pollution environmental crises, and a lot of the time we do hear that about the racial inequities that are linked to these environmental problems. How do you think that the material conditions of inequity shape bodies, places and technical systems?
Dr. Caverly: Yeah, and that’s a great question, and that is, that is one of the, yeah… So what does that mean? So we can think about, let’s think about lead in the United States, if you have over a certain amount of lead in your blood, you’re considered lead poisoned. So you go to your health professional, you do a blood draw, and it goes to a lab, and in the lab, they test your blood, and they say: “Hey, you know, you’ve got a certain percentage of lead in your blood.” And this is something that in the United States, most children’s health insurance require lead tests because lead poisoning can be exceptionally dangerous for children. It has kind of acute health consequences with children having kind of difficulty being just in the world, and it can have long term health consequences. So in terms of developmental difficulties, in terms of other kinds of behavioral difficulties, in terms of organ all kinds of organ-related problems. I’m trying to say bad things, but not just say bad things, but anyway, so we know this, right? We have lots of information about lead poisoning and why it’s bad for especially bad for children (it’s bad for adults, too). But our standards for lead poisoning are all based on adults. So you know, if a certain percentage of lead and blood is bad for an adult, we just kind of like take that same because we have evidence of that, right? We have evidence of that from people who are lead poisoned in factories, and we know that it’s bad, we just take that and move it right down, and we say, well, that same percentage is probably bad for children too. And, in fact, it’s worse for children. And so we can see just how the you know, that’s not a, you know, that’s how age, something like age, even gets written into our regulatory systems, and then it kind of shakes out in ways that negatively affect one group of people more than the other. And we can see that, you know, we see that lead we know that lead poisoning is also something that is racialized. It’s broken down by class. It occurs at the intersections of race and class. And so that means that we have, you know, that is how with something like lead poisoning, we’re not just seeing that inequity is, you know, who gets an opportunity and who doesn’t? It’s actually, you know, who has to deal with the acute and long term health consequences of things like lead? And so that’s how, you know, you can think about how like place—so lead poisoning usually happens from your home, right? If you have lead lead paint, which is in a lot of older housing in the United States, lead paint dust gets into the air of your home. Say your landlord doesn’t want to repaint your house. That’s how a lot of children get lead poisoned. This is something that, you know, we can see the kind of structural conditions, the housing system becoming part of people’s bodies. And so that’s the kind of interplay between, when I’m thinking about how material conditions of inequity become part of bodies through place. That’s the kind of stuff that I’m…I’m researching with people.
Amber: Wow. This is really interesting, because lead is a really big problem in older houses. And I, I imagine a lot of the lower income houses probably are those houses that are contaminated by the lead. How do people respond to these racial inequities linked to lead poisoning?
Dr. Caverly: Yeah, I think that’s probably that is the part of my research that is most sustaining. I guess, you know, I think that part of what you know, we have so much data on environmental injustice and environmental racism, especially in the United States, but also globally. So like most aspects of my work, I feel like I’m just repeating things that other people have already said. But what I think is important is to see how people in their communities are, you know, people don’t just live with environmental injustice and say: “Okay, this is the way it should be.” People find ways, both small and large, of building a different kind of world. And so, you know, we see different kinds of worlds in terms of environmental organizing. This isn’t an aspect of my research, but it’s an example from around where we live, in Springfield, Massachusetts, there was a biomass energy plant that was proposed a couple years ago. A biomass plant is effectively burning waste, and so it contributes massively to local—it doesn’t produce carbon emissions, so it doesn’t contribute to climate change in that way—but it produces really, really terrible local emissions. So it exacerbates asthma, it contributes to childhood breathing difficulties, and Springfield is has one of the highest concentrations of childhood asthma in the United States. And people organize they, you know, people in Springfield, especially, you know, Latina and black folks and working class…working class white folks in Springfield organized and said, stop dumping on us. You know, do not approve this permit for this biomass plant. And they, you know, they it wasn’t just like they, they stood outside and asked anybody passing on the street. They, they got involved. They, targeted the permitting process for this plant, and they managed to get the plant canceled. And so, you know, these kinds of big, spectacular things that people do like, that’s one way that people organize, but people also organize in a small way. So you can think about, we were just talking about lead in housing. People develop practices like basically washing every surface of their home, because that helps reduce the lead dust, and that is a really small scale way of making the world just a little bit more habitable. And so part of what I’m interested in is how people move, move from this sort of small scale things to to big scale things.
Amber: You know, you were talking about the asthma rates in Springfield, and that reminded me of Roxbury, Massachusetts, which also has some of the highest rates of asthma. And I remember everyone I would meet who was from there, would tell me that they have asthma. And then I did some research about it, and it turned out the reason why is suspected to be that there is the bus terminal, Nubian Square Station, bus terminal there. And I was, I was kind of shocked, because I never really thought about how transportation and like infrastructure decisions can affect populations, and in Roxbury, it is one of the more…more diverse places in the Boston area that have you know, less White people than the other neighborhoods of Boston, and it has more like Black and Latino and other races living there, and it has a lot of like lower income people living there. And do you ever, do you ever look at that aspect of how these decisions that have to do with transportation or with infrastructure, are linked with racism.
Dr. Caverly: So, yes and no. I don’t study transportation. Not that I wouldn’t. I just haven’t, but there, but there are lots of great people who are working on transportation, and I’m happy to you know kind of point you in their direction. There’s actually a really wonderful a woman, a professor named Dorceta Taylor, who is at Yale, who has studied she’s an environmental justice scholar. And she’s worked for decades on all kinds of environmental inequities, including how transportation planning becomes a vehicle of of environmental racism. And there’s this really wonderful scholar at believe she is in…her name is Nadia Kim. But she writes up from Los Angeles about how specific women of color organizing, so, especially like kind of solidarities among black, Asian, Latinx women in Los Angeles were key to making pollution emissions legible. Automotive—so transportation pollution, like you were just talking about—legible, so that, you know, expressways and big warehouses where you have a lot of, you know, heavy-good vehicles going through, you know, shipping terminals, right? And so they there are a lot of really wonderful people who’ve thought about transportation, and have thought about how the kind of geographies of racism that we see across the United States are often written into our transportation planning systems. And this is something I think about. I think about infrastructure, you know, infrastructure and different kinds of infrastructure. I think about how I’ve done research on housing infrastructure, and thinking about building as infrastructure, which is not the same as transportation, but it’s related. And then I really think about energy infrastructures, and that incorporates transportation, and it also incorporates things like the, you know, what is…what are the energy sources that are being that are dumping onto our grid? So…what are where fossil fuel emissions happening? Where are things like biomass plants being permitted?
Amber: How would you define racial capitalism? And how would you define techno-politics?
Dr. Caverly: Yeah, I’m going to start with racial capitalism. And so racial capitalism is a term that comes to us from a political science or political theorist named Cedric Robinson, who was in conversation with anti apartheid activists in South Africa who and it was anti-apartheid activists who actually coined this term racial capitalism. And it was Cedric Robinson, who was at the University of California-Santa Barbara for a while, who kind of helped bring it into the kind of North Atlantic Academy, such as it is. But so racial…so this isn’t me defining it, this is them. And Cedric Robinson, drawing on anti-apartheid activists pointed out that capitalism relies on racism that in order to create capital, you have to have racialized inequities. Is what he was, what anti-apartheid activists were pointing out in South Africa, and what Cedric Robinson helped the rest of us see. And that was really important, because actually in Economics and also in Economic Anthropology. For a long time, people had argued, well, capitalism produces other kinds of inequities. So they had argued, capitalism produces racism, it produces sexism, it produces coloniality. And Cedric Robinson helped show that actually we had it backwards, that in order to dismantle…to have economic systems that are not capitalism, we have to focus on ending racism. We have to focus on ending the kinds of inequities that make capitalism possible. And so that’s what racial capitalism is. And then techno-politics is actually a little easier. That comes to us from historian of technology named Gabrielle Hecht, who studied, you know, she studied large infrastructure systems and the kind of planning around them. And part of which you pointed out is: “Hey, you know, we usually think about technical, technical systems as these inert things and administrative processes as, you know, kind of benign or neutral. But actually, technology planning is all about politics.” It’s the way that politics is happening. And so you can think about something like transportation planning like you brought up, you know, it’s not an accident that expressways ran through low income communities, especially low income communities of color. And it wasn’t just that, you know, they didn’t show up to, like, resist the expressway. It was because planners said: “Oh, well, you know, these neighborhoods, they’re low value. Let’s, you know, we need to build the expressway, let’s build it through them.” And with this idea of techno-politics helps us see, is that to understand how technology works, we have to know that technology is always political.
Amber: In what ways does political science intertwine with anthropology?
Dr. Caverly: So that’s a good question. I mean, obviously, political science and anthropology are both social sciences. And I think that if we, you know I’m a little allergic to saying like: “oh, well, what is this discipline doing versus that discipline? And I think that what we can see is actually that we need each other, and really that for anthropologists…we have anthropologists who are political anthropologists, who are in concert, you know, they’re in good conversation with political scientists, with people in political theory, and so I see a lot of relationships. This is, you know, and I think not just in the social sciences and humanities, but actually going across our institutions, that we actually are working on a lot of the same things, just from different angles. And it’s about figuring out a way to bridge our vantage points, rather than seeing them as competing or something like that.
Amber: No, I totally see that. In what ways do racism and technology combine in our modern, digitalized world? How does this combination affect anthropological phenomena in our modern society?
Dr. Caverly: I actually think that…So, there’s this really amazing scholar at Princeton University named Ruha Benjamin, who has written all about racism and technology. She has a book called Race After Technology that I teach in my…I teach a 200-level “Science, Technology and Society” course fairly regularly, and that is a book that I think, for me, helps bring together how racism and technology always come together, but also how technology can be the vehicle that people use to create conditions of liberation. And so I would just point to Ruha.
Amber: Also, congratulations on receiving the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant. This grant was awarded to you to complete your book, Demolishing Detroit: How structural racism takes place. Could you tell us a little bit about this book? What is it about? What was the preparation like for writing it, and how have you been conducting your research for this book?
Dr. Caverly: Yeah. So this book is draws on about 10 years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research that I did in Detroit, Michigan, between 2010 and 2020, which is broadly a period that between when I was finishing university and when I was in graduate school. And, you know, in Detroit and other places like it, there are, there have been hundreds of 1000s of empty building options in the past decade. And Detroit is a place where empty buildings are the products of ongoing processes of… of white flight and of industrial contraction and capital, kind of, capital abandonment. And so I, you know, there’s a lot of hope in Detroit, whether that’s from policymakers or city residents, that demolishing empty buildings, you know, hundreds of 1000s of them, will create the conditions of financial uplift and environmental well-being for people who live in Detroit, and folks, Detroit is a majority black city. Around 80% of people identify as Black or African American. And so part of what I was interested in was, well, does this work? What happens when you demolish hundreds of 1000s of buildings? And so I conducted participant observation with people who worked on building demolition I talked to hundreds of people who live next to vacant building demolition sites. I sat down for conversations with administrators, I followed buildings through the demolition process, and I tried to figure out what happened. And what I found out was, and this is that the subject of the book was, if we look at empty buildings, which are these material products of racism, of racial capitalism, as I just talked about, demolishing them does not make racism go away. It transforms empty buildings into things like asbestos in the air and lead that ends up in the soil, and it creates conditions of precarious work for the kinds of people who are, who are, you know, typically black and brown men, who are routed into demolition employment. And so when we think about this process, it’s really reproducing conditions of injustice and inequity—it’s making them look a little different, but they’re still there. And so that my argument in the book by, you know, drawing on this information that I’ve gathered with people, is that to think about, you know, that structural racism is always something that happens, not just in place, but through place. And as we talked about a little bit earlier, that to address structural racism, we have to rebuild ‘place.’ And it’s not just about leveling things. We have to question what needs to be built up, what new systems of redistribution of care need to be brought into being in order to address centuries of anti-blackness and intersecting forms of injustice.
Amber: You know, you talk a lot about designing justice in your work and justice design, I was just wondering, what is designing justice? And is there even a universal definition for justice in anthropology?
Dr. Caverly: Well, designing justice comes to us. There are a number of really great people who work in technology and in engineering and in architecture, who compose a field of design justice. So I can’t remember any of their names. I’m blanking on their names. I can see their faces, but this is an audio medium, and I can’t think of their names offhand. But one of them has a book called Design Justice, where they work through a lot of this in detail. And what I like about that book is how it points out that there isn’t one definition of justice at the same time. You know, when we look to the community scale, we can find definitions of justice we can find how people think about what they understand to be right. And part of what I think is important is to build from that. And so something I like to you know, one of the chapters in this book, I follow people who are taking lead-contaminated soil from lots in their neighborhood in Detroit, and they are exchanging it with soil from that is not contaminated from parks that are in Detroit’s northern suburbs. And this is the way you know this, to them, they talk about this as a form of justice, as a form of, you know, removing something from their community and moving it into a community that is that hasn’t had to deal with this kind of contamination. And I think, you know, so part of what I do in my work is think about, how do people understand justice on the ground? Because, on the one hand, justice is, you know, is an abstract concept about saying, how do we have a fair world? What is and like our colleagues in philosophy, have, you know, they’ve thought about this for centuries. But we can also see how people who are not, you know, credentialed philosophers are also always thinking about, you know, what do they think is right? What do they think is just? And as an anthropologist, I think it’s important for us to think about those. Think about what they’re thinking too.
Amber: You also study a lot of anti-blackness and white power in North American cities, like you were saying. Could you tell us a little bit about how the political history has shaped North American cities in terms of anti-blackness and white power?
Dr. Caverly: Yeah, I can. The entire history of the United States, which is to say the entire history of every city in the United States, every city on this continent, is one that is steeped in ongoing colonial occupation, and in the United States, it’s braided with anti-black displacement, and
those kind of two threads of colonial occupation and anti-black displacement are, those are the threads that make white supremacy possible. You know, not just white supremacy in the kind of active sense of people who, you know, dress up in pointy white hats, but supremacy in the structural sense, in the sense of how questions of political… “who owns what and gets to live where?” Which works, you know, explicitly coded into law. And you know, up through the middle of the 20th century in the United States, though, you know, it’s no longer legal to do that, but we still have those things coded into the fabric of our landscape. And so I, you know, that’s part of how when we think about racial capitalism. So the, you know, the knowledge, the reality that capital, this is Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who’s a geographer. She says, you know: “capitalism requires inequity, and racism enshrines it.” So if capitalism requires, you know, in the context of the American city, you know, our question our real estate systems are, how our housing systems are predicated on real estate systems. And for, because our real estate systems are predicated in capitalism, they are also predicated in racism. And so that…that’s kind of one, one ground-level connection, but we can also follow it back to that question of colonial occupation. And this is something I’ve done in kind of dialog with people who live in Detroit. You can follow property records all the way back to the start of private property, which was a, you know, the start of French colonial occupation in the place that we currently have as Detroit. And so what I think is important is to think historically in this regard, and to see how the kinds of systems that we see at present, and we ask, How can this injustice…why do we have this injustice? That is always a historical question as much as it is a contemporary question, and we can follow those, those systems, back in time, not just to see how they work, but to see maybe, what are their…what are their weak spots? What are, where are their points of leverage? Or how even can property systems be kind of turned inward against themselves? So for instance, in Detroit there, and I just wrote an article about this, this is why it’s on my mind. But like, there are people who live in Detroit who do a lot of gardening on land that they do not technically own. And they use property law, which requires going to these property archives that have documents going all the way back to French colonial occupation. And they say: “Hey, under this statute, this particular statute, called Adverse… Adverse Possession Statute. We’ve gardened here for 10 years, and so this land is actually ours now.” And they file petitions in, in a local court in order to gain nominal ownership of land. And so we can see by following this out by asking, How does inequity work? We can also find the ways, the strategies that people sometimes use in order to make unequal systems work just a little bit differently and so, and I think that’s important, because rather than falling into kind of despair of the world is unequal, it has been been unequal for a very, very long time, we can see those ways that people are moving the world to work a little bit differently, and I think that’s really important.
Amber: Do you think that people are becoming more educated about these different ways to maybe use laws in their favor?
Dr. Caverly: I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think people have, you know, when we look to what oppression has looked like in a global context people have always been trying to find to push loopholes as much as they can. And I think that that’s something that is really important for scholars to attend to, especially people who think about injustice, to see the ways that people try to build justice at the same time, you know, I think we should also be wary, because we don’t want to be, you know, kind of talking up people’s strategies in ways that are going to make those strategies go away. And so it’s just about, you know, thinking intentionally and ethically with the people who we, you know, we hold relationships with that make our research possible to see what is it that they want, because sometimes people want, they’re like: “hey, share this strategy with as many people as possible.” And sometimes they say: “Please, don’t share this strategy, because we don’t want people to know. We don’t want the kinds of people that we are using this strategy. You know, we’re trying to maneuver… out maneuver…we don’t want them to know that, that we’re we’re coming.”
Amber: What do you love the most about your work?
Dr. Caverly: I love my writing. I think I tell people all the time I don’t have what it takes to make it as a working writer, I have friends who are working writers, I don’t understand how they work incredibly hard, and they’re to think about their writing. But I really what I love most about anthropology is that, you know, we get to use empirical information stories as data, and to use those stories as the hook that draws people into an argument, and something that we know from our colleagues in communication studies is that as much as we hope that quantitative data would help change people’s minds, it’s not the usually the thing that changes the ways that people think. It’s anecdotes and stories. And so as a qualitative researcher who uses a lot of ethnographic and historical information in my work, I really am, I appreciate the opportunity to think about narrative and to think about stories, and to think about nonfiction narrative and stories as a place to ground conceptual arguments that can ask people to see the world just, you know, maybe just a little bit differently, and to see different kinds of possibilities from the conditions where we are today.
Amber: I do think that storytelling is definitely the most powerful tool that people can use to get their messages across. And even when it comes to medical anthropology, which is the field I’m interested in, there’s a lot of progress that’s been made from sharing patient point of view. And, like, just storytelling of disease experience from the patient point of view, etc. And definitely when it comes to racism and like, environmental issues, storytelling is definitely going to make bigger impact just giving empirical data, I think, to the general population. Before we finish this interview and wrap up, I just wanted to ask if there’s anything else you want people to know about your work, your field, or you personally, like any websites or blogs outside of the UMass anthropology websites or anything like that?
Dr. Caverly: I do not have anywhere that you can find me besides the UMass website or my office, and I just thank you so much for talking to me today.
Amber: Thank you so much for talking to us, and we’re very lucky to have had you on this podcast. So thank you so much for everything.
Dr. Caverly: Yeah, thank you.
Amber: This was a really interesting interview. Claire, do you have any experience with cultural anthropology at all.
Claire: So I’ve actually taken two classes so far in Cultural Anthropology here at UMass. One was an “Introduction to the Field” with Dr. Caverly, in fact, and the other was all about economics and alternative forms of economy within various cultures, which was with Dr. Boone Shear. Both were really interesting classes and gave you a lot of great resources to further pursue knowledge about the field. This idea of intense variation between modern-day humans and learning to bridge the biases that come to exist due to this inevitable but beautiful variation. These classes have introduced me to some really incredible ways of thinking and have taught me a lot about human interconnection. So Amber, what did you like the most about talk to… talking with Dr Caverly?
Amber: I really loved hearing Dr Caverly talk about his book and the process of writing, especially because I aspired to write one day, and he did mention that writing was his favorite part of his job. So I thought that was really cool. I also liked learning about how passionate he is regarding justice and structural inequity. I think it’s really interesting how he emphasizes that past sociocultural issues have repercussions that can be observed in modern societies. Dr Caverly’s work really highlights how we can think about anthropology as holistic meaning. All subfields work together to understand the present history, culture, environment, health and socio-economic elements are all intertwined in understanding the high rates of lead poisoning in marginalized populations, which is why he was studying at some point. We are incredibly lucky to have been able to meet with Dr Caverly today to learn more about his specialized field. As we continue with this podcast, we hope to include many more examples of cultural anthropology and the fascinating work these specialized anthropologists do. We hope you enjoyed it, and thank you all for tuning in to our show today. Another thanks to our team members and our collaborators with AnthroHub, especially our tech crew. To stay connected, you can find us on Instagram @Anthro.mp3. You can also find our sources, transcripts of each episode and more in our AnthroHub show notes. I was one of your hosts today, Amber, joined by our other host, Claire, and our tech crew, Phuong, Emily, and Yueming. Make sure to tune in next time to further explore the field of anthropology with us. Again, keep an eye out on our Instagram for future updates on shows, specials and events. Catch us next time and have a great day, friends!