anthrodish transcripts: danielle gendron

why is farting (and gassy foods) so taboo in anthropology?

This month’s AnthroDish Transcript is with Danielle Gendron, an anthropologist and PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her research weaves together scholarly interrogations of settler colonialism with a personal exploration into her Métis ancestry to question “Canadian heritage” and the ways that it is leveraged by the state. In this episode, we discuss parts of her Master’s thesis, where she traced the cultural life of seaweed with Gitxaała First Nation. She goes beyond the ocean-to-fork economy and digs into the ocean-to-fart chain, unpacking why we leave out farts from our general anthropological explorations.

The episode first aired on November 4, 2019. The following is an abridged transcript of the show, lightly edited for clarity. If you want to listen instead, you can check out the audio link below, or on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

“I felt silly. Do I really talk about farts in my Master's thesis? It seemed like a missed opportunity to not. Because even if it was very silly, it was legitimate. It wasn't like it was just out of nowhere… I had this internal dilemma, do I talk about this? Which says a lot about this social idea of farts in itself. Is that a personal thing? I think if it was someone else's farts that I was talking about, maybe I wouldn't have written about it, but I was talking about my own. So it felt ethically okay to me to out myself as a farter."

- Danielle Gendron, PhD Candidate at UBC Anthropology