Prof. Shaila Seshia Galvin (Graduate Institute of International Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland) discusses with Renee Manderville, Philip Gooding, and Archisman Chaudhuri (all IOWC) her anthropological and sociological work on organic Basmati rice farming in the Doon Valley, Uttarakhand,  India. She explores how a locally produced commodity acquires new meanings through organic certification procedures, as well as the socio-economic and cultural implications of such agrarian practices for sustainable trade and development.

For more information about Prof. Galvin’s work, please see:

• Her forthcoming book – Becoming Organic: Nature and Agriculture in the Indian Himalaya (Yale UP, 2021)
• And two journal articles mentioned in the podcast – ‘The farming of trust: Organic certification and the limits of transparency in Uttarakhand, India,’ American Ethnologist, 45, 4 (2018); and ‘Chains of Meaning: Crops, commodities, and the ‘in-between’ spaces of trade,’ World Development, 135 (2020; co-authored with Sarah Osterhoudt, Dana Graef, Alder Keleman Saxena and Michael R. Dove).

Meera Muralidharan, a doctoral researcher at the School of History, Victoria University, Wellington, discusses her paper, ‘Hortus Malabaricus: Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Production of Natural History Knowledge in Malabar (1678-1693),’ which won the Research Excellence Award at the Victoria University Awards in 2019 and is a part of her doctoral research. Key themes include global transfers of knowledge, human migration, colonial science, and modern environmental history.

For more on Meera’s work, see her profile at: https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/nziri/fellows/associate-fellows/meera-g-muralidharan

Also, see her recent publication:

‘Cross-Cultural Interactions and Missionary Writings in the Context of the Dutch East India Company, c. 1600–72’ in Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region, eds. Mahmood Kooria and M.N. Pearson (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Dr. Anna Winterbottom (McGill) discusses with Renee Manderville, Archisman Chaudhuri, and Philip Gooding her forthcoming journal article, ‘”Becoming traditional”: A transnational history of neem and biopiracy discourses,’ which is due to be published in 2021 in Osiris. The article is part of a special issue entitled ‘Global medical cultures, properties and laws,’ and explores the shifting uses and cultural meanings of neem, a tree of the mahogany family native to South and Southeast Asia, over time and space. Specifically, the article and the podcast discussion examine how neem became associated with the idea of ‘traditional’ Indian medicine as Western medical companies sought patents on neem derivatives in the 1990s.

For more on the special issue from which the article is taken, see: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/osiris/forthcoming

For more on Dr. Winterbottom’s work, see her IOWC profile.

Also, please check out Dr. Winterbottom’s seminal monograph, Hybrid Knowledge in the early East India Company world (London: Palgrave 2016).

Prof. Thomas Kuehn (Simon Fraser University) discusses with Renee Manderville, Archisman Chaudhuri, and Philip Gooding his forthcoming chapter, ‘Managing the hazards of Yemen’s natural environment. Nature and imperial governance in Ottoman South West Arabia, 1872-1914.’ Key themes include imperial governance, human-environment interaction in the context of ‘challenging’ environments, and knowledge production in the late Ottoman Empire.

Prof. Kuehn is also the author or several publications related to the topics related to this podcast. See, for example:

Thomas Kuehn, Empire, Islam and Politics of Difference. Ottoman Rule in Yemen, 1849-1919 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2019).

“‘We Know Nothing About Yemen!’ Ottoman Imperial Governance in Southwest Arabia and the Politics of Knowledge Production, 1871–1914”, Journal of Arabian Studies, 8, 1 (2018), pp. 5-24.

“Translators of Empire: Colonial Cosmopolitanism, Ottoman Bureaucrats and the Struggle over the Governance of Yemen, 1898-1914”, in Cosmopolitanisms in Muslim Contexts, eds. Derryl N. Maclean and Sikeena Karmali Ahmed (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 51-67.

“Shaping and Re-Shaping Colonial Ottomanism: Contesting Boundaries of Difference and Integration in Ottoman Yemen, 1872-1919”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 27, 2 (August 2007), pp. 315-331.

“Colonialisme” and “Yémen” in Dictionaire de l’Empire ottoman – XVe-XXe siècle, eds. François Georgeon, Nicolas Vatin, and Gilles Veinstein (Paris: Fayard, 2015).

Prof. Michael Christopher Low (Iowa State University and NYU Abu Dhabi) discusses with Renee Manderville, Philip Gooding, and Archisman Chaudhuri (all IOWC) his new book, Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). Key themes include technological change, disease, and the British and Ottoman Empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

More information about the book can be found at: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/imperial-mecca/9780231190770

More of Prof. Low’s work is available at his Iowa State profile and at his NYU Abu-Dhabi profile.

Dr. Steven Serels (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient) discusses with Renee Manderville, Philip Gooding, and Archisman Chaudhuri (all IOWC) his research into animal diseases as threats to state power in the history of the Southern Red Sea Region (SRSR). The discussion weaves around diseases to camels, horses, and cattle, and brings up key themes of human-environment interaction, military uses for animals, colonial rule, and global climatic anomalies. 

More details of Dr. Serels work can be found at: https://www.zmo.de/personen/dr-steven-serels

Please also check out especially his two monographs:

• The Impoverishment of the African Red Sea Littoral 1640-1945 (Cham, CH: Palgrave, 2018): https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319941646
• Starvation and the State: Famine, power and slavery in Sudan, 1883-1956 (Cham, CH: Palgrave, 2013): https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137383860

Akash Ondaatje, a recently graduated Masters candidate at Queens University, discusses with Renee Manderville and Philip Gooding (both IOWC) his thesis, ‘Animal Ascension: Elevation and Debasement Through Human-Animal Associations in English Satire, 1700 -1820,’ thus continuing our recent theme on animal studies, and tracing the lives of some IOW animals into European cultural frameworks.

Ondaatje is now working at KnowHistory (https://knowhistory.ca/) as a Research Associate of Indigenous genealogies. His Masters thesis can be found here: https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/handle/1974/27991

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Prof. Radhika Govindrajan (University of Washington) joins Renee Manderville, Archisman Chaudhuri, and Philip Gooding (all IOWC) to discuss her award winning book, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). Animal Intimacies explores what ­it means to live and die in relation to other animals, alongside the intimate—and intense—moments of care, kinship, violence, politics, indifference, and desire that occur between human and non-human animals.

For more on the book, see: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo28301734.html

For more on Prof. Govindrajan’s work, see her bio at: https://anthropology.washington.edu/people/radhika-govindrajan

Martha Chaiklin and Philip Gooding discuss with Archisman Chaudhuri their recently published edited volume, Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World (Cham, CH: Palgrave, 2020). As part of their discussion, they explore themes including, animals in world history, animals’ relationships to climate change and the anthropocene/capitalocene debate, methodologies for studying animal histories, and cultural symbolisms of animals resulting from trade.

The book is available in ebook and hardcover format.

Prof. Margaret Kalacska and Mr. Oliver Lucanus (both McGill) discuss with Renee Manderville, Archisman Chaudhuri, and Philip Gooding (all IOWC, McGill) their project, Fish and Forest. This interdisciplinary work uses data from historical aerial photography, satellite imagery, and new information captured by UAV and in-situ observations to investigate and document the historical changes in the habitat of threatened aquatic species. In so doing, it seeks to explain the link between the disappearance of highly endemic and specialized fishes and the loss of forest.

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For more on their project, see: http://fishandforests.geog.mcgill.ca/

For more on Prof. Kalacska’s work, see: https://www.mcgill.ca/geography/people-0/kalacska

For related publications, see:

• P.N. Reinthal and M.L.J. Stiassny, ‘The freshwater fishes of Madagascar: A study of endangered fauna with recommendations for a conservation strategy,’ Conservation Biology, 5, 2 (1991): 231-243.
• Jonathan P. Bensted et al., ‘Conserving Madagascar’s freshwater biodiversity,’ Bioscience, 53, 11 (2003): 1101-1111.