Catie Gressier

The Paleo diet’s vast popularity, replete with impassioned celebrity endorsements and deep commitment among adherents, has been matched by an equal measure of media mockery and condemnation from health authorities. But beyond the hype, who are the people taking up the diet, and why are they drawn to its restrictive regime? Based on ethnographic research in Melbourne and Sydney, Gressier recounts the compelling narratives of individuals struggling with illness and obesity in order to argue that going Paleo provides a sense of agency, and means of resistance, to the politico-economic structures fuelling the prevalence of lifestyle diseases. From its nostalgic appeal to an idyllic past, to the rise of health populism globally—where a sense of crisis, anti-elite sentiments, and new forms of media are fuelling a lucrative alternative health industry—this book explores the promise and pitfalls of the Paleo diet in Australia.

An ethnographic portrayal of the lives of white citizens of the Okavango Delta, Botswana, this book examines their relationships with the natural and social environments of the region. In response to the insecurity of their position as a European-descended minority in a postcolonial African state, Gressier argues that white Batswana have developed cultural values and practices that have allowed them to attain high levels of belonging. Adventure is common for this frontier community, and the book follows their safari lifestyles as they construct and perform localized identities in their interactions with dangerous wildlife, the broader African community, and the global elite via their work in the nature-tourism industry.

Since settlement, colonial values of productivity and improvement have transformed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Country into a site of agricultural extraction. We examine the nascent peasantisation movement in Australia driven by small-scale farmers rejecting colonial capitalist agriculture within an agroecological transition. Our case studies explore how new peasants seek guidance from First Peoples and peasants in developing a politics and practice of custodianship, while fostering degrowth economies. Custodianship, we argue, offers a theoretical and practical framework for the agroecological transition in settler contexts through foregrounding social and ecological reparations across scales from the farm to global food sovereignty activism.

Research codes and contracts have been developed to protect Indigenous and marginalized peoples from exploitation and to promote inclusion, so that research will become more beneficial to them. We highlight three important but often overlooked challenges for such instruments, drawing on examples from the San of southern Africa.

As we grapple with climate change and myriad ecological crises, conceptual tools from other disciplines offer opportunities for new analytical frameworks. In this issue, we bring a multispecies anthropological approach into dialogue with biological understandings of the relationships involved in domestication. We examine mutualism as a series of interspecies social interactions that, despite some costs, benefit each partner species on balance.

For millennia, humans and cattle have lived interdependently. In return for shelter, feed and care, cattle have provided people with milk, meat, labor, and hides. Since the 1940s, the goal of animal husbandry has shifted to increasing performance for economic gain. Cattle have been divided into dairy or beef breeds, and selectively bred for milk volume or rapid growth and muscling, respectively. Production increases have been extraordinary, yet have come at a cost to animal welfare, the environment, and genetic diversity. Recognizing the deep entanglements of humans and livestock, human-environment geographers Jody Emel, Connie L. Johnston, and Elisabeth Stoddard ask whether we can “practice a respectful, more just form of farming” with “more fulfilled, farmed animals that have lengthier and higher quality lives?” To this end, Australian heritage breed cattle farmers offer an alternative to the productivist model, as breeders make holistic selection decisions that reflect interspecies reciprocity developed over generations of cohabitation.

Tourists to Africa covet close encounters with dangerous wildlife,
revelling in the simulation of the primal risks of the savannah, and
yet they expect to be kept safe. Similarly, many tourists wish to
engage with exotic local people, but in ways that ensure they feel
comfortable socially and physically. Safari guides in the Okavango
Delta fulfil these desires by facilitating close encounters with
wildlife during luxury camping safaris, while becoming objects of
fascination themselves as they perform the role of the ecologically
noble savage. The exoticness of a number of these Botswana
citizens is, however, rendered familiar and comfortable for tourists
through the fact of their whiteness. In this paper, I explore the
paradoxes evident within Okavango Delta tourism, with a focus
on the ‘familiar exotics’ guiding tourists through landscapes
constructed around notions of ‘safe danger’. In making sense of
this paradigm, I argue that mimesis is at play within white citizens’
embodiment and commodification of cultural values and practices
normatively associated with indigenous peoples. This case
demonstrates that within the tourism nexus, the ecologically
noble savage trope evident in romanticised global imaginaries of
indigeneity has largely failed to empower Botswana’s indigenous
Bushmen communities, while perpetuating white privilege.

This paper explores the social reproduction of precarity among white South African migrants in Australia. Building on Griffiths and Prozesky's elucidation of the white South African imaginary and its role in triggering emigration, we draw on ethnographic data on white South Africans living in Melbourne to argue that our informants reproduce what Hage terms a 'white nation fantasy'. In documenting the ways our informants' migration experiences can be read as a function of a threatened social imaginary, we suggest that their 'successful' resettlement in Australia points to the congruence of their ontological grounding with the white nation fantasy predominating in Australia. Ultimately, however, we argue that the sense of precarity our informants experience in Australia is intrinsically embedded in their reproduction of the white nation fantasy. Our case study therefore serves as a cautionary tale to inflexible constructions of whiteness globally.

Feral animals are commonly constructed as the scourge of the Australian landscape. The trans-gressive act of introduced, domestic animals going wild elicits strong emotive responses within the community, often conceived in a kind of Freudian spectre of das unheimliche (the uncanny/ unhomely), as the once familiar becomes uncontrolled, strange and frightening. Meanwhile, exponential global growth in human populations, and the resulting strain on the environment and food security, is necessitating the rethinking of meat consumption. In Australia, while the stigma surrounding feral animals has historically inhibited their consumption, feral meat is regarded by a growing body of advocates as an environmentally favourable alternative to farmed meat, allowing not only the avoidance of animal suffering within the industrial agriculture model, but also benefitting ecosystems through the removal of damage-wreaking interlopers. This paper explores the feral turn and its contemporary manifestations as a growing food movement in Melbourne.

Safari hunters’ acute awareness of the widely held negative perceptions of their practice has led to their development of strong justifications and defensive assertions in favour of hunting. Far from being a primarily destructive practice, they claim that safari hunting in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, can be seen as an exemplary form of ecotourism, which benefits local communities, facilitates environmental conservation and provides the ultimate nature experience for participants. While research
supports their claims to an extent, the ethical quandaries evinced by hunters themselves, the complex dialectic between local and global controls, and the elite, racialised
and gendered nature of hunting speaks to a more complex and conflicted situation.

The elite safari lodges in Botswana's Okavango Delta provide an intriguing site through which to explore processes of identity construction, as people from vastly different backgrounds meet and explore ontological possibilities through and against each other. Drawing on a dinner table dispute between an African American tourist and his white Motswana guide, I explore contested notions of what constitutes African identities. The encounter shows that colonial histories and the racialization of space continue to be central to African identity politics, and I describe how white citizens' claims to belonging are challenged on these grounds. In response to such challenges, white Batswana assert a strongly nationalistic identity, distancing themselves from other southern African white populations and their colonial histories. They staunchly defend their claims to belonging through mobilising a partial view of Botswana's history and contemporary sociopolitical conditions, which has made possible a deep sense of emplacement within the social and natural environments of the Okavango.

The white Batswana of the Okavango identify as African, are strongly nationalistic and express deep senses of belonging to the social and physical environments of their birth
and upbringing. Yet, claims to belonging by white people to extra-European territories are often perceived as inauthentic at best and neocolonial at worst. This raises the
question of how the empirical realities of such connections can be analytically rendered without threatening or appropriating indigenous identities. Through making a case for the heuristic utility of the concept of experiential autochthony, I argue that emplacement and belonging can be fruitfully explored for migrant and settler groups.

The livestock industry's favouring of a small number of high-yielding commercial breeds has resulted in the extinction of almost 10 percent of domestic animal breeds globally, with at least 1,000 more at risk (IPBES 2019). On heritage breed farms, the intimacy enabled by the small scale of operations, 1 along with the risk of extinction many of these breeds face, heightens the stakes of human-animal relations. Living together, feeding, reproduction, and the sharing of substance and emotion constitute the daily relations between farmers and animals. These are also the characteristics of relatedness that Janet Carsten (2000, 34) identifies in her seminal work driving anthropology's revived interest in kinship. In this chapter, I propose extending conceptualisations of relatedness across species boundaries by exploring the complex imbrication of social relations and biogenetic substances within the enduring relationships between heritage breed animals and farmers. Economic viability is a constant challenge with these slower-growing breeds, and farmers who chose to perpetuate their bloodlines do so because of a love of their breeds, who they value for qualities beyond the economic. Small-scale farmers of commercial breeds share much in common in terms of their values and practices as I demonstrate through a description of a home kill of an Angus cow below. Yet, the extinction risk heritage breeds face, and farmers' commitment to their breeds notwithstanding their lesser productivity, renders the stakes of interspecies relationships particularly high. Heritage breed farms are thus fascinating sites in which to examine the rich potential of interspecies relatedness as an alternative configuration to the prevailing model of unidimensional commodification of livestock in pursuit of financial gain. Over the past half-century, the livestock sector has subjected farm animals to heavy selection pressure and extensive crossbreeding to maximise profitable traits, such as rapid growth and prolificacy. Performance gains have been extraordinary, yet the global dissemination of these fast-growing, high-yielding types has resulted in the extinction of numerous heritage breeds in Australia, with many more under threat (RBTA 2023). This is part of a broader global paradigm where the loss of agrobiodiversity evident in diminishing variety in seeds, breeds, and bloodlines poses a significant risk to

Half a century of unprecedented wealth and prosperity has, somewhat paradoxically, resulted in growing numbers of Australians living with chronic illness, overweight and obesity. The foregrounding of individual responsibility within the nation's healthcare ideology has resulted in those whose bodies do not conform to the healthy, slender ideal being blamed and subject to stigma. In this chapter, I explore neo-liberal constructions of the body through Paleo dieters' lived experience of illness and obesity. I argue that the popularity of the Paleo diet is the result of both the internalisation of and resistance to neoliberal values. This is insofar as Paleo is an individualist response to perceptions of a failing food system that prioritises market freedom over human health. Keywords Paleo diet · Illness experience · Obesity · Neoliberalism · Anthropology In 2009, Sharon was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). She was in her late thirties and trying for a baby, so her doctor suggested she see a dietician to assist with weight loss to ease her PCOS symptoms, and improve her chances of conception. Over a coffee in Coburg in Melbourne's northern suburbs in late 2014, Sharon laughed heartily when describing the flatulence triggered by the Optifast breakfast bars recommended by her dietician. She recounted her fear of unrelenting hunger that accompanied the portion control advice she