Detail from The New Zealander, 1872, by Gustave Doré
Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.
About Margaret Mead Reads My Tea Leaves
MMRMTL is an anthropological blog which, in this current incarnation, focuses on ethnographic writing and fieldwork. The title is both a homage to Esther Newton and a reference to my research in Britain.
Posts are sporadic, but well intentioned. Ideas are occasionally fully formed.
About me
I am from Aotearoa New Zealand and am a PhD candidate at The University of Melbourne. For the serious stuff, you can visit my academia.edu profile.
About my research
My field research is based in Yorkshire: God’s Own County, the land of Alan Bennett, parkin and flat caps, where everyone knows that roses are white. I live in an upland village in the Pennines, quite literally in a cow field. My research activities include drinking cups of tea and making tea cosies: anthropologists call this participant-observation, my interlocutors call it doing nowt.
I have a background in historical anthropology and my PhD project is partly about what happens when a historical interest collides with contemporary fieldwork. Some would say drunkenness and mass confusion and, certainly, there has been morris dancing.
I write about places and pasts; the ways that they are constructed, imagined, confronted and negotiated. I periodically geek out on alternative temporalities and landscape phenomenology. Efforts to gloss this as local history are eternally unsuccessful.
Contact
Provided that you are human, can spell and do not want to sell me something, you can contact me on niwdoog dot jb at gmail dot com.
