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John Mathias, "Uncommon Cause: Living for Environmental Justice in Kerala" (U California Press, 2024)
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Marshall Po
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Elena Sobrino
Hello, everyone. Welcome to New Books in Anthropology. My name is Elena Sobrino. I'm a host on this channel and today I'm talking to John Matthias. And John is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor in the College of Social Work at Florida State University. He teaches on activism, community organizing and social theory. And today we're talking about his book, Uncommon Living for Environmental justice in Kerala. And this came out in 2024 from University of California Press. And it's about environmental justice activists in Kerala. And I was really eager to talk to you, John, today, about this work you did, because I myself have done anthropological fieldwork around environmental justice. I have done a lot of work in Flint and understanding the. The kind of politics and the questions not only of toxicity and water that were obviously the center of the Flint water crisis. But so many questions come up too, of identity and belonging. And in Flint in particular, there were a lot of issues around democracy and local leadership versus external leaders imposing certain basically austerity measures on Flint. So your book really goes this. You know, it's a very different setting and, you know, different stakes, different kinds of communities and ideas about ethics and belonging. But I thought it was just so fascinating and wonderful the kind of ethnographic detail you brought to these things that I also felt were quite important to people dealing in a community and trying to sort of establish a sense of solidarity and also communicate, you know, that there's a certain autonomy to their activism. So I thought it'd be really interesting to have a conversation about how you wrote this book, what is in the book, how it talks about identity and belonging in the context of environmental justice. So thank you for being here. Welcome to the show.
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John Matthias
Yeah, thanks so much for inviting me. And yeah, I'm, you know, I'm from Michigan originally, so I'm really interested in learning more about your work as well in Flint. And I have some colleagues that I've collaborated with and other things that have worked there as well done scholarship about those issues. Flint water crisis and whatnot. So, yeah, I think. I do think there's a lot of intersections that could be found between the kinds of things that I've been seeing in Kerala and that issue and other environmental justice campaigns that I've connected with at times in Michigan.
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Elena Sobrino
Yeah, totally, totally. So maybe to start us off, can you say a bit about how you came to anthropology?
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John Matthias
Yeah. So actually, in thinking about this question, I actually would frame it more as coming to anthropology and social work because I was in a joint program in anthropology and social work at University of Michigan, A kind of unique program that really fit well with what I was looking for when I decided to go to grad school, kind of reluctantly because I wanted to kind of be out in the world doing things, making a difference. And I wasn't totally sure if I wanted to kind of go back to the place where people talk about things. And I, as an undergrad, who was involved in some student activism, had felt very eager to kind of get out beyond the university and kind of get involved in issues more. So coming to the anthropology and social work program, it was partly this kind of desire to make the world a better place. And things that people in social work talk about a lot, things that maybe even from an anthropology. The anthropology departments are located right across the street from social work. So I think about them as one side of the street, the other side of the street. Social work. Yeah, it was like, okay, here are people that are really interested in kind of making a difference, helping people, things like that. And in anthropology, in the department that I was in, it was much more focused on understanding people and not really on intervention and applied anthropology at the time, but it was a place where I could really explore another part of what I love, which is just the power of stories to help people understand people different from themselves. And so that was kind of what I was looking to combine. And I think the program really did help me with that. But even as a part of that coming to anthropology, not to go on at too much length, but I was really interested in what was going on in anthropology at the time, around combining activism in anthropology, and immediately found some people in the anthropology department who had that similar interest. And we started this group ethnography as activism. And I came into anthropology very much with this ideal of, oh, I'm going to kind of seamlessly integrate activism into anthropology, and drawing even on some solidarity work that I had done with the Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, which was the site of a gas spill in 1984 that was connected to the Dow Chemical Corporation in Michigan. So that previous activism was somewhat the basis for my field work in Kerala as well. Not that it was directly connected to Kerala, but the network of activists I knew were people who were able to help me connect with others in Kerala. And that kind of got me connected with environmental justice work in Kerala.
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Elena Sobrino
Yeah. And how did you come to. So this book was the result of that connection forming. And then what sort of led you to pursue this to be.
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John Matthias
Yeah.
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Elena Sobrino
Project.
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John Matthias
Yeah. So actually, the project was, you know, I. I knew that Kerala. I knew from visiting other parts of India and talking to activists from other parts of India that Kerala had this kind of reputation as a place where social movements had just been very powerful. And there was just a strong history and tradition of social movement activism. And that to some extent, this carried forward in environmental justice activism in Kerala at the time. And so I was interested in kind of seeing what that looked like, really. I hadn't been to Kerala before I started grad school, but I had this idea that maybe that would be a good place to go. And, you know, like I said, I had this kind of a deal of doing activist research. But pretty quickly, when I got to Kerala and started working with environmental justice activists and, well, I should say, or maybe just more following them Around I realized that that wasn't going to be. It wasn't really going to be an activist project, that partly for legal reasons, I wasn't going to be able to, as a non citizen, be involved in kind of that much kind of solidarity work with. With the campaigns that were going on. But also that's not really what the activists were kind of looking for from me. They were asking actually really early on. Some of them were just kind of like, we want a kind of critical perspective from you on our work. Like, we want you to come and kind of study us and, and, and learn about what we're doing and dialogue with us and give us thoughts about how you see what we're doing. And that was really kind of. I mean, in some ways it was very ideal for the anthropologist side of me.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And it's like, oh, people that actually would want someone to come and hang around and try to understand what they're doing. And so I leaned into that kind of aspect of anthropology and again, the kind of how can these activist stories speak to other people beyond Kerala and help people to think about what it is to pursue a cause, to fight for a cause and for environmental justice specifically. And so that's kind of how the book then came to be about those topics.
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Elena Sobrino
Yeah, no, definitely. That does sound like an ideal situation to be interacting in. And yeah, in terms of your findings, which I do think, as I said earlier, there's a lot of interesting resonances with other parts of the world and other environmental justice work, but you kind of hone in. You have this distinction, living for and living from. So the first two chapters are about this and laying out these sort of different stances or ways of being an activist. Do you want to just say for people listening, just briefly, of course, there's so much more detail in the book that we can't get into in this format. But what is this distinction? Living for? Living from? What's going on with that?
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John Matthias
Yeah, so fundamentally, I think the central notion is living for in the book, and that's why it's called Living for Environmental justice in Carolina. Thinking about activists as people who fight for a cause.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And who have kind of intensively pursued a particular purpose that their lives are then kind of organized by. And that was something that I saw to be common among the different people who were deeply involved in environmental justice movements in Kerala. But that could be done a lot of different ways.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And so it doesn't always really look the same. And one of the key kind of vectors of differentiation or Ways in which it could be different in Kerala specifically was that had to do with kind of the relationship between that pursuit of a cause and one's communities, that one belong to, one's social relationships, one's social embeddedness, and how those things were either seen as aligning and feeding into each other or whether they were seen as kind of actually bumping up and conflicting with each other. And so the living for and living from. I mean, living for is just having a purpose, right? Like something that's really fundamental to all human beings. And living from is similarly, you know, something that's basic to humanity. We all come from something. We all belong to certain groups. So this distinction is not one of kind of, oh, some people have living for and some people live having from, have living from. But. But it's a distinction between people who find these things to be harmonious and kind of building each other, and people who find these things to be in conflict or are opposed to each other. And so the book kind of follows up on this kind of difference in how people sometimes experience these things. And it follows a lot of different activists who have a lot of different stories and deal with these tensions in very different ways. But there are kind of two broad camps that falls into people who kind of are mainly focused on aligning them versus people who are kind of really thinking about opposing them.
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Elena Sobrino
Yeah, yeah. And that really comes through, I think, exactly, that there's these different figures or storylines almost, that you follow, and people are sort of navigating this tension between belonging or kind of differentiating themselves and having an alternative lifestyle. And. Yeah, for those who get a chance to pick up the book and read it, there's just. It really does show this distinction through people's lives and the sociality around it. And actually, on that point, I wanted to ask a bit about. So in chapter three, kind of moving through the book. Yeah, I loved reading this chapter. And there were so many interesting little stories or examples that you picked up on. So there were these kinds of micro practices people were doing and these small habits like drinking tea or soda or using air conditioning or using plastic bags for a variety of reasons, these could be seen as quite unethical, I guess, or controversial. So as someone who. Maybe I've seen this phenomenon in my own life, but in terms of your field site and the kind of dynamics, the social dynamics there, I wonder if you could say a bit, give us a bit of context for what made these practices a big deal. How did these moments become a big deal?
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John Matthias
This has something to do I think with something specific to environmentalist activism, not unique to environmentalism, but something that I think becomes really prominent among environmentalists who are often thinking a lot about how details of everyday life have implications for the planet.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
For these much broader scale. And they're making these kind of cross scalar moves between the relationship between my body and my physical environment. And like the environment as something that I'm working to protect.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And it's not exclusively the environment. It also is related to things like, you know, how. How does eating this particular cookie or something implicate me in global capitalism, Right. And the exploitation of humans as a part of that. Because this cookie is produced by one of these giant food conglomerates or whatever. Right. So. So one of the things that was very common among the activists who were kind of thinking about separating living for and living from. And these are people who were kind of traveling around supporting different environmental justice movements throughout the state of Kerala, but they connected that kind of solidarity work oftentimes with a kind of work on themselves and a kind of an effort to live a certain environmentalist way of life that distinguished them oftentimes from a lot of the people around them.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And so one of the stories that I tell is just one time going to a movie theater, kind of spur of the moment decision to go to a movie theater with a couple of the activists that I lived with, with Faiza and Adarsh as well as with another couple and getting there is a theater that they hadn't gone to commonly and it's a little bit bigger and a little bit more fancy, I guess. Thank you. Than what they're used to and is all air conditioned.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And immediately kind of the kind of discomfort they felt in the air conditioning as people who both kind of like don't frequent air conditioned places, but also maybe are a little bit uncomfortable with the environmental impacts of it, you know, are not frequenting air conditioned places because they're avoiding them, you know, in some sense. And finding that like the concession stand only sells Coca Cola and it doesn't sell tea.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
Which is something that would be more environmentally friendly to drink and less corporate.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And. And a whole series of these kind of things that might seem small to pretty much everyone else at the movie theater, but feel really big to these folks.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And. And one of the things that makes them feel big is that they're so ubiquitous.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
So one of the things that I had actually both in kind of peer reviews of the book and in this article that I wrote that bears on this subject as well that focuses on this interaction and kind of disagreement surrounding cookie eating is that people are like, oh, well, kind of, as you were suggesting, like, oh, aren't these, like, kind of small things? Like, why are there such big stakes in these things? Why should your audience, why should your reader care about this? But these things are kind of a part of the scaffolding of everyday life. Like one of the big debates in and kind of controversies in the chapter you're talking about is like drinking tea, right? Well, people drink tea quite frequently in India.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
It's a part of social life. It's kind of this scaffolding of social life that people don't focus on as a moral matter of whether you should or shouldn't drink tea. And when you start making it, injecting it with that kind of, like, moral weight, then it starts to get pretty heavy pretty quickly because it's so much a part of everyday life. It actually is a really difficult thing to change. And it makes you bump up against all these other people who are drinking tea all the time.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
Pretty frequently.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
So the little things then pretty quickly become huge things, in part because they are so little.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
There's so much ubiquitous things that are just a part of the background of social life.
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Elena Sobrino
Right. And can you just briefly say too, because this is kind of unfamiliar to me and maybe other listeners. So is there a critique of tea or certain kinds of tea like you just mentioned? Like, oh, it might be healthier than Coca Cola or soda? Yeah. Could you just talk me through what would the issue with tb or is it sort of seen as something good in certain cases?
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John Matthias
So there are multiple potential, like, issues with tea. But yes, compared to Coca Cola.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
It might be seen as better, a better thing to drink, but the. It also does involve, like, monoculture, these giant plantations that are destructive of the ecology of India's mountainous regions and employ certain kind of plantation labor that can be very exploitative. Right. So there's this concern that tea is kind of caught up both in environmental destruction and in exploitation of human beings. And for the activists that I was studying, there was another drink called Jopy, which was a kind of like, coffee is kind of similar, seen as having problems tea. There's another drink called Joppy, which was kind of an herbal thing that wasn't corporate and people would kind of make it themselves. And it was. Or it was made kind of by local smaller, you know, things. And. And it was made of kind of these herbs and stuff and kind of mimicked to some extent Tea and coffee, but was seen as a better thing to drink.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
So there were, you know, this was talked about as kind of or like alternative culture.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And it was, the idea was that it was finding alternatives to these kind of practices that get you caught up in the broader issues that you're trying to change basically and trying to find a way to live without perpetuating global capitalism, without perpetuating environmental destruction and so on.
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Elena Sobrino
Totally. Yeah. I mean that really resonates. I can think of a lot of maybe commodities or food items or a lot of items in sort of my world, my daily life here in the US and North America where a sort of similar discourse or maybe similar alternatives start to be discussed. And, and that, but yeah, that's, it's just interesting to see. I think tea is not one of them for me, you know, in my daily life. So it's just very, it's really helpful. I appreciate you kind of digging into the details for me and laying that out for us.
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John Matthias
Well, I was just say that one of the challenges of this for the activists themselves is that there are so many of these things. Right. So it's not, it's not just tea.
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Elena Sobrino
Yeah.
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John Matthias
Yeah, and to some extent you don't know when a person is going to start kind of pointing at one of them and saying this is right. Living a totally kind of all alternative, all the time life very difficult and people were, some people were trying to do that but, but you didn't necessarily know when someone was going to kind of point out one of these things as being like problematic and when they did it could create A kind of pressure on others, of course, to kind of treat that as an ethically fraught and an important thing.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And so one of the things I explore is the really ways in which something that is an activism is often understood as being kind of liberating.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
A kind of move towards moral freedom, because it's often seen as understood as it's kind of transgressing the status quo, pushing back, trying to redefine what should count as good or bad.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And. And there's a kind of experimentation and a freeing aspect of that. And activists involved in this kind of stuff were oftentimes talked about their lives in that way. But it could also have a very kind of pressured feel to it being around activists where it was like, wow, like, you know, the, the move to kind of say, like, okay, we shouldn't be drinking tea at this seminar in that, in the story that that comes from is one in that kind of makes a lot of people uncomfortable and people kind of try to laugh it off. But there's kind of like a, oh man, like I don't know if we want to go there kind of a thing. They recognize the issues. And one activist that I talk about months later is still thinking about it.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And still thinking about, I wish I could, you know, deal with this teeth thing. So it can be something that is very. Provokes being among activists can. Can kind of provoke a lot of anxiety too. It doesn't always feel very freeing. Is. And that's. How does that work? Why does that happen as part of what that chapter is about?
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Elena Sobrino
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I do. I want to ask a bit later about some of that discomfort and yeah, I think that comes up again in the conclusion, in some ways, the slightest uneasiness that can come from deciding what kind of activist and how much, how little. But yeah, before we get to that, because that's kind of the end as you're bringing all this together. But I do want to talk about chapter four, because you talk a lot about activist research and activist kind of a difficult relationship to using science to create evidence for. So if I'm understanding right, there's a gelatin factory and this is polluting kind of the land, the water. I think there's a smell that's associated with it. And yeah, so there's this very place based kind of problem. And yeah. Do you want to just say a bit about what that movement or what that activism was about around this particular factory and just what. What you saw play out like in terms of the strategies and Techniques that ended up working or not working.
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John Matthias
Yeah, sure. Well, to start, we talked about this living for and living from thing, right? Which is very kind of abstract terms, but in the book, in kind of a more concrete way, I look at this through the stories of activists who are fighting this gelatin factory. And for them, their cause is really closely tied to. They're belonging to a local community of people who are affected by the gelatin factory. And earlier in the book, I kind of show that, well, it's not just about whether you live in the place where the factory is, right. There's a whole kind of way in which local belonging as a basis for an activist cause is produced and sustained. But then chapter four kind of picks up on that and asks, okay, so if your activism is based on kind of fighting for our people, our village, and local belonging, how do you persuade people who are not a part of your village? Right? Because ultimately, in order to make that campaign successful, these activists really saw that they needed to try to win broader public support for their cause.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And evidence is really broadly speaking how they try to do that. But I look at different kind of modes of evidence making, and one of them is scientific research to kind of understand how they go about this and. And where they run into challenges with it. So one of the stories that I start out with in that chapter, you might recall, is this one in which a government scientist comes to test the water. And this is something that has already happened a bunch of times. The local activists there are kind of skeptical of this because there have been a bunch of studies. Oftentimes there, the pattern of the campaign has become one in which there's some kind of crisis and there's attention from the media and from the broader public on this issue, and they feel like some change is going to happen. And then the government says, well, what we need is another study, right? And there's already been a bunch of studies, right? So there, when this researcher comes, already kind of not really that excited about the researcher coming to do this, right, to test the water again. And as she's there testing the water, gathering these samples, basically people are on the shore kind of talking to her about, look, this is, you know, this is the suffering that we've had. You know, these people had to move away. My child has this, like, coughing all the time because of this air pollution, the smell that we're dealing with. We're getting sick. There are higher cancer rates here. See all these different ways that this is affecting our lives. And she kind of quietly is taking her samples, taking her samples, not paying a whole lot of attention. And that also kind of seems to make people there kind of get more riled up, more vocal about, hey, you know, this is serious and we want you to hear our stories. And before she gets in the car, she turns to them and says, well, that's all just what you say.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And basically as much to say that here I'm here to take my samples and my samples are going to tell me whether there's a problem here, nothing you can really say about what's going on here is going to persuade me at all or change kind of how this works.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And so there she's presenting this notion of kind of scientific evidence that I think must be pretty familiar from you with working in the Flint crisis. Yeah. And this notion that kind of what it comes down to is whether researchers can find this kind of causal logic of, like, this thing causes this thing in our sample when we test it to show that there is actually pollution there. And that's going to determine whether this is a problem or not a problem, whether this is an issue of injustice or not an issue of injustice.
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Interviewer/Host
Right.
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John Matthias
And so it kind of short circuits the whole kind of. In some ways, the whole kind of thing that we were talking about with regard to the previous chapter in terms of the ways that people's own evaluations of things influence each other and says your evaluations, what you have to say about this is not going to influence that at all. It's going to be a matter of this kind of causal logic of scientific evidence. So I explore kind of how that works and why it's challenging for the activists locally to actually wield that scientific process themselves. And then I explore other ways in which they attempt to make use of other kinds of similar logics of evidence to, well, actually very different logics of evidence, but that fundamentally have the same kind of notion of a causal logic that substitutes for this kind of social process of evaluation in some sense.
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Elena Sobrino
And did you have a sense of, like, what was the result of some of these kind of experiments with, like, did it work well to kind of change something, you know, about the. Yeah, the pollution and the exposure.
- [31:17]
John Matthias
So. Okay, yes, this is a great question. Thank you. So I, in the chapter, explore ways in which it worked, and I argue that you can see how it was powerful. In particular, I contrast what these activists are up to in this mode of what's called people's protest that's kind of these locally organized and not aligned with any political party kind of protest movements. And the logic that they pursue politically to try to make change as opposed to kind of the broader political scene in Kerala, which is dominated by party politics and has to do less with these kind of questions of evidence and a lot more to do with organizing large groups of people to kind of demonstrate a kind of, a large, kind of powerful moral subject, collective subject in some sense. So I kind of contrast those things. But what I show in a story where the, a politician, basically a famous politician with the Communist party, which is one of the major parties in Kerala, comes one day to the village and he comes not actually to visit the action council that I've been following, this kind of non aligned people's protest campaign, but he comes to visit another movement against the gelatin factory, another protest against the gelatin factory that's being organized at that point specifically by the Communist party. And it's to some extent seen by the people that I've been studying as hijacking the issue and they're concerned about it. And it's down the street, it's like they've got a big, each of these have their like tents at the side of the road and they've got this big tent down the street and they've got a ton of people, right? And, and the, this famous politician comes, there's this huge crowd around him and he's walking towards the site. There's so many people on the street that you can't just drive right up to the tent. He gets down from the car, he's walking there and along the way some of the people from the ashen council come to him and they say, hey, you know, we've come here to our tent. We've got this people's protest, this non aligned thing that's, that's representative of the people of this village. And he's actually swayed by that. And he actually kind of starts to walk toward the tent. It's not totally clear at first that he recognizes that it's not the tent that he was supposed to be coming to, right? And then his party, you know, the other politicians in his party kind of start leading him, no, no, no, no, don't go to that tent. Our tent is over here, right? And try to lead him down to the communist protest tent, right? And so he starts walking there, but then he stops before he enters that tent and he says, you know what? This tent does not seem like it's aligned with the people, this party tent. And so I'm not going to get into this tent either. I'm going to Stay where I am. I'm not going to. And so that becomes, actually the story in the media is that this communist politician, out of a desire to ally with the people, is not going to enter this tent. And that has to do with the ways in which these various practices of evidence are successful in kind of positioning the tent, you know, the action Council tent and their group as speaking for the people, as the people, basically. And you know that it's a little bit. So it's a little bit much to get into here. But basically that's very closely tied to this notion of the people as an alternative mode of evidence making, where they themselves make their own bodies, the evidence of the pollution, in a kind of similar, different, but also a causal logic that kind of claims to kind of circumvent the question of kind of he said, she said, or this is just your opinion, or that's just what you say that I was talking about before. So you can see the power of that politics in that moment when the politician doesn't come to their tent. But at the same time, within the book, I don't have a kind of like, unfortunately, oh, and then the protests succeeded in shutting down the gelatin factory and everything. Everyone lived happily ever after. The campaign is still there. When I finished, it was still there. And I reflect a little bit in that chapter about the difficulty of writing endings oftentimes for this kind of activism, because things go on and on. And I'm sure you're familiar with that influence.
- [36:09]
Elena Sobrino
Yeah, I mean, I think I share your kind of hesitation about, oh, and now this story has ended and do I end it on a high note or a low note? It feels much more dynamic. But it's interesting to think about the choices you can make about. How are you gonna sort of conclude something that doesn't feel like it really has a conclusion that's very real in the water crisis, for sure. So, yeah, I appreciate that. And that comes through, I think, in that chapter. You kind of very directly tell us as readers, this is something that doesn't necessarily tie together and have a clear ending. For better or for worse. Yeah.
- [36:56]
John Matthias
And that was a challenge in writing the book because, as you say, the book is very story driven. But one of the things that makes a good story is an ending. And yet this kind of activism often doesn't have any kind of tidy ending. And so just reflecting a little bit about why that is, and the challenge of that is kind of how I have to then conclude in that chapter.
- [37:21]
Elena Sobrino
That makes a lot of sense to me. And I appreciate that. And even looking at the conclusion, which I think speaking of conclusions and endings, but I did want to talk a little bit, hear a bit from you about your thoughts on. You know, this book is about all these stories and these real people who are kind of making choices. And there's big things and there's small things that capture their attention and what they care about. But there is a kind of. This is difficult. You know, I think this came up earlier, but many people seem to have a bit of, you know, there's an awkwardness almost to navigating these ethics, these environmental ethics, these communal ethics. And. Yeah, I wonder if you wanted to say anything about that. And I also was curious, however, you would want to answer this, but I was wondering if your ideas of ethics changed as a result of spending time in these communities and seeing this activism play out. Yeah, I wondered if you had any thoughts on. You know, I think we all have certain assumptions of what it means to be ethical or have integrity. I think that's something that comes out in the conclusion. Like, you sort of trouble this idea of, well, what do we mean by integrity? And, you know, being consistent, you know, morally consistent. So, yeah, I would just love to hear your thoughts on any of that. That's not a very tidy question, but.
- [39:08]
John Matthias
No, yeah, but I appreciate that. And the. Yeah, the ways and the words you're using in terms of integrity and consistency are very much kind of fit with the kind of character of the problem. And, you know, that is experienced pretty much, I think, by everyone in the book in some way, even for those who seem to kind of have pretty much bought into as kind of radical of an approach to environmentalism as I could find and feel. Seemed to feel pretty comfortable doing that. And, like, that's what they wanted to do. Still bump up against questions of kind of like, okay, do I stick with my principles here? Do I kind of try to be consistent, or do I maybe sacrifice something in the name of oftentimes kind of preserving a relationship that is in some way threatened by having to be consistent. And again, the chapter three deals with that a lot. But that was something that comes up back again in the conclusion because. Well, because Ahmed became such an important figure in the book over time and in my research over time. So I want to talk briefly about that because I think that's helpful to understand even what the conclusion and the book as a whole. I mean, I think I revisit his story a bunch of different times. And so he's someone who worked with me as A research assistant is kind of the term, although what he was in the research was in many ways much more than that. But basically what happened was as I was preparing to do my dissertation field.
- [40:46]
Interviewer/Host
Work.
- [40:48]
John Matthias
I had had this kind of joint pain condition for a long time, and it started to flare up quite a bit more and was affecting my hands a lot. And I realized that, oh, wow, I've kind of got this method where I'm supposed to be writing these little notes in this little notebook all the time, right as I'm doing my participant observation. And I'm not really able to do that much writing right now. And so what am I going to do about that? And it was a real crisis for me. I mean, because I, yeah, I came up with this idea of, like, okay, maybe I could find someone who could write notes alongside me and could. And I talked to a faculty member at U of M about that idea, and they were just kind of like, that's not going to work at all. Just like, this is none. You can't do that. There's no way. You know, And I already recognized from doing preliminary fieldwork and stuff that, yeah, like, your notes, your jottings in the field are kind of pretty specific to you. It's like getting another person to do that for you. Not going to necessarily be the same. But I, you know, at the same time, I think oftentimes with ethnography, we kind of act as if everybody's doing the same thing, but really, we're always kind of adapting these kinds of things, and they shape what we do, and they make it different from what it might have been, but they have positive things that they bring. And this ended up, in many ways, being a positive thing. So what I ended up doing was through a contact with a social work faculty in Kerala, finding Hamed, who was graduating with his BSW at the time and was open to. It took me a while to find someone who was open to this, was open to kind of being hired for a year to spend a year doing this work, doing field work alongside me. And he ended up being a huge resource for the whole thing. And I told him early on, like, part of this kind of work is your own story as a researcher, is part of the story that you're telling about the research, and is that going to be okay with you? And he was like, yes. And I, you know, so from the very beginning, I was also kind of talking with him about his experience basically of doing this work. And we were basically, like, living together in this house with Adarsh and Faiza and their daughter and going out every day to kind of observe different things, hang out with different people and whatever, and coming back and having these what we call field note conversations where we talked extensively about what had happened. And so, yeah, and oftentimes I would talk to him about his own experience of this stuff.
- [43:22]
Interviewer/Host
Right.
- [43:22]
John Matthias
And I saw how. Well, basically he helped me to see this activism as a way of life kind of thing. From the edges of it, more from like someone who was not coming in as an activist and not even less than myself, kind of had. Had, you know, didn't have a lot of experience in this kind of thing. But he was drawn to a lot of the values and a lot of the things that people, you know, that he was drawn to, the causes that encountered, basically. Right. And living with Adarsh and Faiza, who were very much like, in the thick of this stuff, they were very interested also in kind of molding him to some extent. He was younger than them, and they saw him to some extent as like, oh, this guy, you know, he cares about this stuff too, and maybe he's going to be part of this new generation of activists in this issue. But as we got to the time where we were finishing the research, you know, Faiza in particular expressed to me, like, I don't really feel like I'm in this, like, gotten there. Like, I don't feel I'm kind of bummed that he doesn't. Didn't really become as an activist as much as I wanted him to be.
- [44:28]
Interviewer/Host
Right.
- [44:29]
John Matthias
And. And she felt like this was kind of a failing on his part, in part because he was still so embedded in his communities of belonging. Coming. They. They actually both came from. From a Muslim background, and he came from a kind of a rural Muslim family that he was very close to. And his religious identity and his family community were, like, deeply important to him. And he did find that some things in the values of the activists that he was with kind of bumped up against some of that and didn't kind of weren't consistent. And so he had to navigate that, and it was very difficult for him. And one thing in particular was that at a certain point, the environmental activism among these solidarity activists started focusing on Corey's as, like, the main thing that they were kind of focused on. And his uncle is a Cory operator. Cory business.
- [45:20]
Interviewer/Host
Right.
- [45:21]
John Matthias
And so it kind of follows him as he tries to sort out, like, how much am I guided by kind of my loyalty to my uncle and kind of where I am from and what he means to me and how much am I guided by these causes that I'm encountering and these concerns about Corey's that are also meaningful to me and how do I navigate that? And his way of navigating that wasn't really what Faisa wanted it to be. But in following that through, in the conclusion, I think a little bit more about, well, is everyone supposed to become an activist?
- [45:57]
Interviewer/Host
Right?
- [45:58]
John Matthias
Or are there other ways of. Of navigating this stuff that are also valid and things that we can learn from that can also be a good way of living?
- [46:09]
Interviewer/Host
Right.
- [46:09]
John Matthias
Because if ethics is kind of fundamentally about, like, what is a good way to live or something like that, then this is still a part of that conversation. And so I use that. I use Ahmed's story to kind of think through that alongside my own story, to be fair, because I also encountered, as I mentioned, being not an activist in this site, found myself kind of on the edges a lot of the time in uncomfortable ways and had to reflect about, well, should I be more of an activist? Is this a failing of mine? And how do I navigate that? And I don't have a conclusion like, okay, here's what everybody should do. But what I do is try to show that what is going on with Ahmed is like, not in some ways, a. A less kind of inherently less ethical life or something like that than what fisa, how Faiza is living.
- [47:07]
Interviewer/Host
Right.
- [47:08]
John Matthias
And, and. And I try to kind of point to the ways in which maybe, hopefully my readers can kind of see the res. See resonances maybe with decisions that in their own lives and use these kind of stories to think through what those issues as they arise in their own lives, like what they mean to them and how they want to navigate them.
- [47:28]
Elena Sobrino
Yeah, yeah. No, I think that definitely the book offers those stories as a kind of way to see. Right. What relationships am I embedded in and what values attract me or draw me in? And it's really. I think it's really powerful the way these stories give some life to those questions, those ethical questions. Yeah. So, yes, please do. You know, we're kind of reaching the end of our time. We have to talk about this book. But, you know, for those listening, it's called Uncommon Living for Environmental justice in Kerala. And there's many more stories and kind of details we didn't get to talk about here. But before we end our interview, I do want to just quickly ask you, do you have any new projects you're working on right now?
- [48:21]
John Matthias
Yes. So, of course, one always must have projects in order to employed Right. So, but I have two. So I have one set of projects that or one project that's really coming directly out of the book. And you know, the book is about kind of living for purposes, right? And like that as a kind of major part of being human and something that you can really kind of see in high relief in the lives of activists. But it's about how that also bumps up against all these other different forces in life or different kinds of things that can move us to act, whether that be social pressures or interests, logics of interest and things like that. And so it really kind of made me think about purposes as just kind of like one kind of motive force in kind of that moves us to act in certain ways among many motive forces. And I started thinking about motive as kind of an umbrella for thinking about all these things together as I was coming out of writing the book. And so I've been in a conversation with others who have kind of come to these questions of motive from other routes. And we've been working on a special issue or maybe an edited volume. We'll see what it ends up being related to that just kind of treats these questions of an anthropology of motive and arguing basically that anthropology has a lot of analysis of motion, but we haven't thought enough about how we think about the why of that motion and questions of motive. So that's one of the things I'm working on. There's an annual annual Review of Anthropology article also that I'll be submitting soon on that. And then I've got this other ethnographic project, ethnographic maybe broadly speaking, that focuses on environmental issues in Kerala, again specifically on climate change as it's affecting fishing communities, southern Kerala. And it's fundamentally about using different modes of storytelling to imagine long term futures for these fishing communities, both kind of what they hope for the future and what they're anxious about the future and trying to push back against the kind of inequality in how futures in the context of climate change get imagined. Right. Whose imagination counts. Obviously there are think tanks, there are government people, there are academics like ourselves who are kind of looking way into the future of climate change and saying, what are these worlds like? And there are speculative fiction authors as well. These fishing communities in Kerala, they're facing like major changes and effects even in their lives right now, but they're also facing serious questions about their long term futures. And this was an attempt to kind of facilitate conversations about that in a way that for me also kind of combines the humanities with a very kind of Applied attempt to make a difference for those communities. And so we've just done some work over the course of the past summer, and it was. It was really inspiring and encouraging to see that a lot of these kind of creative activities that came up with involving, like, drawing activities and storytelling activities with some different people in this one fishing village that people really like, enjoyed it and they bought in and they were like a. Saw it as valuable thing to do and which wasn't, like, assured going in, you know.
- [51:57]
Elena Sobrino
Sure. Yeah. It's not always people enjoy. Yeah. These kinds of. Yeah. Research.
- [52:03]
John Matthias
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, I, as a academic might think, like, oh, this is a great thing to do, but will people who are also kind of taking time away from actually going out and making money fishing want to, you know, draw pictures of stuff? But people really did actually get into it. And so I'm looking forward to seeing where that goes. We've got all this material from empirical material that we gathered as a part of this project and kind of this ongoing collaboration, and I'm just looking forward to seeing where it leads.
- [52:36]
Elena Sobrino
Yeah, well, that sounds fascinating. And the work on motive sounds really fascinating as well. So we'll look forward to seeing those things perhaps in the near future as they materialize. But thank you so much for talking with me and sharing about this book. I really enjoyed this conversation.
- [52:56]
John Matthias
So thanks again for inviting me to do this, Elena. I really appreciate it. And yeah, I really appreciate your thoughts on this as well. It's been great to have this conversation. And Doug, here we have the Limu.
- [53:21]
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- [53:34]
John Matthias
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [53:37]
Elena Sobrino
Cut the camera.
- [53:38]
John Matthias
They see us.
- [53:38]
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