![]() So I study Protestant fundamentalism mostly in Scotland. I think it's a conscious decision insofar as the phenomena that I'm interested in happens to be closer to home. So when we talk to Joe, earlier this year, we started by asking why he chosen to stay a little bit closer to home, and whether that was an ethical, conscious decision for him. Yep, so that's pretty different from the stereotype of anthropology, which you might think of as people going far away to study cockfights in Bali, sexuality in Samoa, the supposedly exotic if you like. ![]() And for his latest work, he stayed in Scotland and studied quite a different group, the Orange Order, which is Scotland's largest Protestant only fraternity. Yes, so Joe's first book was based on his time spent with a devout fishing community in northern Scotland. More broadly, he studies the rather less trendy subject of Protestantism, how it's actually lived, sometimes in what we might call rather extreme forms. So he wrote about people who believe they're living in the end times a very fashionable phrase in 2020, long before the recent rash of books on bunkering and prepping that we've seen this year, especially. I think sometimes journalists are guilty of that also, he's interested in things like apocalypse. He really takes their world seriously, which I think is something that often researchers anthropologists might claim to do, but don't always fully do. I think there's a real humanity to his descriptions of the people that he studies. And what I like about his writing really is that it refuses to bow to cliche or sensationalism. And as I see it, Joe looks at faith and religion in the real world in practice. But today, we're meeting an anthropologist of religion. And Kate Devlin, an expert in sex robots who sifts the facts from the moral panic on the subject. Our guests this series include people like the feminist Minna Salami, who celebrates sensuous ways of knowing in her new book, responding to Euro-patriarchal knowledge. We're concerned with questions of reason and unreason, religion and secularism, rational debate and ideas. In this series, we're meeting writers and academics whose work prompts questions like: How should we listen to people whose ideas differ from our own? What happens when we cast a critical eye over dominant notions of knowledge? And what could the future of everything from work to relationships look like in this time of massive technological change? It's the place where you'll find intelligent thinking in turbulent times. This is the podcast from New Humanist magazine and the Rationalist Association, the podcast where you can find radical, exciting and sometimes surprising research and ideas from thinkers who deserve to be heard. Hello, and welcome to with reason with me, Alice Bloch. Head to /subscribe and enter the code WITHREASON ![]() Podcast listeners can get a year's subscription to New Humanist magazine for just £13.50.
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