Thomas Strong

I have been blessed with opportunities to conduct substantial fieldwork and research in very different places.  Between 1998 and 2015 I made several field trips to highland Papua New Guinea, initially focusing on ways in which the body mediates sociality and symbolism, and therefore also history and transformation, for the Dano-speakers of the upper Asaro valley.  In the course of fieldwork, I unexpectedly learned that the upper Asaro is an epicentre in a wave of witchcraft violence that has overtaken the country in the last many years. As a result, I am one of a handful of anthropologists to have witnessed a witch hunt in real time:  a fascinating and terrible thing to experience.  Analysis of the social dynamics of such outbursts of violence informs my teaching in classes such as Magic and Witchcraft, Medical Anthropology, Misfortune and Meaning, and Troubling Identities.

In a very different mode, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork on gay male sexual culture since 1996, first as a young graduate student ethnographer working with young gay men on the streets of San Francisco as a research associate with the University of California, and most recently as a middle-aged American puzzling his way through the often furtive social worlds of gay male sexuality in contemporary Ireland.  Though the watershed in conceptions of sexual morality (as well as reproductive freedom, gender equality, transgender rights, and more) Ireland has witnessed makes this an especially fascinating time to do research here, it has also afforded insight into how sentiments we thought might have been superseded continue to structure the experience of sexuality for gay men (and everyone):  above all, sex is always shadowed by shame, much as the past is ever-present.  My research on gay men, sexuality, HIV, and more informs modules I offer on topic such as:  Ireland in the World, Medical Anthropology, Troubling Identities, and (in the postgraduate programme) Privates and Counterprivates.

The Ethnographer's Magic

With a bit of cheek, I teach anthropology as a kind of wizardry, or sorcery:  Anthropology puts a spell on you.  Once the spell takes hold, the student of anthropology can't fail to feel its effect:  it elicits (or imposes) the capacity to 'think otherwise.'  The basic principle of this form of magic is deceptively simple — it is to approach one’s own way of life as strange by becoming familiar with the ways of life of others. Familiarity, however, should not be confused with comfort or indifference; in learning about the lives of others, anthropologists wish to recognise difference, to value Otherness, without making it disappear.  Making difference vanish is the trickery (the illusionism) of other disciplines built on universalist theories of the nature of human beings (as rational economic actors, or as fragile subjects fated to this or that psychodynamic anxiety).  To appreciate Otherness without making it vanish, anthropology counsels an elementary equation:  we too are an Other.  The principle adheres to a law of magic on the order of those adumbrated by Frazer in The Golden Bough.  It is the Law of the Familiarstrange.  Anthropology shows the wonders to be created when we are able to yoke the power of the familiarstrange in order to think otherwise.