00:00:01:09 - 00:00:32:04 George Paul Meiu We relate to each other by reading each other's bodies. But I think it is important to to ask ourselves, why is this just something natural, or is it something historically constituted? The discourse, a language of sexuality only emerged in the Western world in the at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, with the rise of industrialism, with the rise of capitalism, with the rise of something that we call modernity. 00:00:32:06 - 00:00:53:13 George Paul Meiu The presumption here is that what one does for sexual pleasure defines who you are at your innermost core. That is a historically specific form of understanding, personal subjectivity. 00:00:53:15 - 00:01:15:18 Catherine Weyer Hi, and welcome to Unisonar, the podcast of the University of Basel. This season we're diving into research fields related to gender, and we've got experts from the University of Basel to help us explore various aspects of this topic. Let's start with a question that's rarely asked by strangers, but that plays a huge role in our society. Are you a man, a woman or do you identify outside the binary gender spectrum? Sexuality shapes many aspects or our social lives. But why is that? Is this the case in all societies? And how are Christopher Columbus and his descendants involved? Today I'll be discussing this with George Paul Meiu, professor of anthropology. His research focuses on sexuality, gender, and the commodification of ethnic sexuality. Welcome, George Paul Meiu. 00:01:45:11 - 00:01:47:05 George Paul Meiu Hello, and thank you for having me. 00:01:47:07 - 00:02:00:03 Catherine Weyer My name is Catherine Weyer, and on Unisonar, we take a deep dive into the research of experts from the University of Basel. George Paul Meiu, why are we so obsessed with sex? 00:02:00:05 - 00:02:32:04 George Paul Meiu This is an interesting question, and I like the word obsessed, has an interesting ring to it. We live indeed in a society that is obsessed with sex. And when I say society, I'm not referring to a particular part of the world. I'm not referring necessarily to Europe, where we are right now, I'm referring to a global order, a global order that everywhere is now obsessed, to use your word, with sex, with sexuality. 00:02:32:06 - 00:03:24:15 George Paul Meiu What is that obsession all about? Well, we see it from the very idea that, the way we think about ourselves as modern human subjects, as having a sexuality within ourselves, that the deepest truth of who we are, who we can be, is somewhere, in us, in this thing we call sex or sexuality. The fact that some of the biggest political battles we are witnessing across the world, these days, are playing out in the name of, among other things, sexuality, whether it is fights for, the traditional family or against so-called gender ideology, or, on the contrary, the idea that, our deepest freedom can be expressed primarily in terms of who 00:03:24:15 - 00:03:53:02 George Paul Meiu we are and what we can do, sexually. But also if you look at consumption, right, sex sells, our advertising, our commodities are veiled in the cloth of erotics, of sexuality, of seduction. If we look at religion and spirituality, where sex and sexuality, whether in the positive or negative ways, becomes central to the discourse of how we are to, relate to divinity, to God, and so on. 00:03:53:04 - 00:04:15:22 George Paul Meiu Sex is everywhere. So indeed, the word that you use is quite pertinent. We are a society, we are a global world order at this historical juncture, that is obsessed with sex, obsessed with sexuality and, you know, as social scientists, as scholars, as students. We might want to ask ourselves why? 00:04:16:00 - 00:04:21:12 Catherine Weyer And you said we are now obsessed with sex. So was there a time when that wasn't the case? 00:04:45:12 - 00:05:11:03 George Paul Meiu Absolutely. So I think this is an important thing to remember. It's very easy to say, well, of course we're obsessed with sex and so. Isn't sexuality natural? Shouldn't we express it rather than repress it? Shouldn't we affirm it rather than, be ashamed of the fact that, you know, we have something called, sex or sexual feelings? 00:05:11:05 - 00:05:40:00 George Paul Meiu The very category, that discursive category in language of sex and sexuality did not exist in every place and at all times. And this is something that anthropology, for example, my field is very interested in. And it's something important to remember. But probably the most classic book that one can refer to is Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality. That tells us that a discourse, a language of sexuality, only emerged in the Western world in the at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, with the rise of industrialism, with the rise of capitalism, and with the rise of something that we call modernity, meaning therefore, that in other place and and other times, those things that we now classify together as sex or sexuality might not have been classified together. 00:05:40:00 - 00:06:12:01 George Paul Meiu Some might have had things to do with, divinity, experiencing spirituality, some might have had something to do with ritual, other things might have had something to do with reproduction. But this bringing them together and classifying them as a thing. And furthermore, remember placing that thing as something that is our deepest, truest sort of self or or layer of personhood, that is something that is historically specific, although now it is something that is globalized. 00:06:12:06 - 00:06:25:09 George Paul Meiu You encounter it in commodity markets, in medicine, in law. Whether we're talking about India or Brazil, whether we're talking about, you know, Bulgaria or Canada, all across the world. 00:06:25:11 - 00:06:27:08 Catherine Weyer How did that happen? 00:06:27:10 - 00:06:54:00 George Paul Meiu That happened first and foremost with the kind of globalization of certain forms of governance and the globalization of a particular kind of market with colonialism and with this idea of modernity, modernity, that is something, you know, imagine modernity like, like, a straight path. Have you become a bit more modern or are you still in your traditional. 00:06:54:00 - 00:07:21:03 George Paul Meiu Right. And you can be somewhere more or less, on that path. But we do think of the world once we inhabit this kind of modern modernist, let's say, ontology way of being in the world. We kind of tend to think of of things in that way. And again, this is not just it emerged in the American world, but it is something now that you encounter globally. 00:07:21:05 - 00:07:23:23 Catherine Weyer How do you explain that success? 00:07:24:01 - 00:07:48:14 George Paul Meiu That's a difficult question, because and that is success quote unquote, in the sense of how did it manage to be so effective? And that has to do with the, the, the violence of colonialism, the imposition of particular worldviews alongside the expansion of particular extractive markets. The expansion of particular kinds of worldview. 00:07:48:14 - 00:08:10:10 George Paul Meiu So I think of Christianization, missionization went hand in hand with the inculcation of particular gender and sexual orders. It's not just, you become saved and you become a Christian, so you're no longer into your pagan, sort of rituals and beliefs. But it is very much about how do you clean your house, how do you relate to your spouse? 00:08:10:12 - 00:08:44:20 George Paul Meiu Do you raise your children properly? Are you speaking when you're supposed to speak? All these kinds of things that come with a particular vision of the individual that is always already gendered in particular ways, that relates to their sexuality, in particular ways. So it is effective to the extent that it became a part and parcel of the reformist work of colonialism, especially, since the 19th century, where investment in this reform of body intimacy and so on has been, has been powerful. 00:08:44:20 - 00:09:10:06 George Paul Meiu If but then I wanted to just come back to this successful and yet not successful, because oftentimes the pretenses of this reformist work that now you see continuing in some areas of development, some areas of humanitarianism, and so on, is never totalizing. When you do a research like I do in different parts of the world. I work in Kenya, I work in Romania. 00:09:10:08 - 00:09:39:00 George Paul Meiu You come to see that so many of, these imposition, this kind of reform, sometimes picked up quite, voluntarily in the sense that they promise some sort of participation in a global community. They're never absolute. They always go hand in hand with a combination of some older traditional things, beliefs that come to be reformed and, and reinterpreted and so on, so successful or not successful, even if we use the quotation marks around around the word maybe. 00:09:39:00 - 00:09:50:14 Catherine Weyer Let's take a step back and have a look at some terms. And we talked about sex. We talked about sexuality. We talked about gender. Can you quickly explain the difference between these terms? 00:09:50:16 - 00:10:18:09 George Paul Meiu I will, and then I will also tell you that I will hate myself for doing it. And I'll tell you why. So first of all, generally, the convention when we talk about these terms is more or less and we need to have some working definition, even though it should never be cast in stone. And I'll explain why is that sex usually refers either to the act of sexual pleasure. 00:10:18:11 - 00:10:57:17 George Paul Meiu Sex has also been used in the past, but still used in some circles now to refer to gender as described by biology. Then sexuality has typically referred to how the totality of your sexual desires, aspirations, pleasures, pains, nightmares, what have you constitute you as an individual. But you see, already, when I give you this definition, I hate myself, as I said before, because it's a very historically specific, a definition is a definition that we might want to actually question and look at its effects. 00:10:57:20 - 00:11:34:12 George Paul Meiu What does it mean? What do we create in the world when we define and think of ourselves in those terms? Right. I'm straight or I'm gay. And the presumption here is that what one does for sexual pleasure defines who you are at your innermost core. That is a historically specific form of understanding, personal subject. So, and then gender, referring then to kind of the ways in which, I think one inhabits a certain kind of matrix of gender. 00:11:34:14 - 00:12:02:19 George Paul Meiu Oftentimes this has been related to the body. How is your body gendered, whether through clothing, whether through biology, whether through, various forms of practice and so on. Within, you know, I can give examples of societies, pre-colonial societies that had nothing of the sort where social difference was constituted way more in terms of generation and seniority, juniority, and hardly ever in terms, that relate to gender. 00:12:02:23 - 00:12:26:05 George Paul Meiu So I think it's good to know what these things mean in the world. But again, what I usually tell my students is, let us not try to seek too much certainty in those definitions sometimes, you know, even when we position, when we want to act on the world, the world that's very complicated and has made these terms key battlefields. 00:12:26:07 - 00:12:49:16 George Paul Meiu And then we want to say, well, you know, your definition of gender is wrong. Your definition of sexuality is wrong. This is what they mean. I think that in that very act, there is a certain kind of arrogance already, even if that arrogance is meant for a certain kind of liberation, for a certain kind of anti-oppression work. And I say arrogance because it plays by the same kind of conceitedness of colonialism. 00:12:49:16 - 00:13:11:18 George Paul Meiu Know you over there? You know nothing. You're ignorant. Let me tell you what those things are all about. I think that instead of that, we have also an obligation to understand, and to pay attention to what these things mean in the world. These are not analytics. Sex is gender sexuality. It is not analytics that we have as social scientists, or at least not anymore. 00:13:11:20 - 00:13:20:16 George Paul Meiu They are terms that everybody in society uses in one way or another, which makes our work even more difficult. 00:13:20:18 - 00:13:31:08 Catherine Weyer Maybe to give an example, there is one in your paper, Queering Bodies. It's about a performance by the Kenyan artist Neo in Nairobi. 00:13:31:10 - 00:13:58:09 Text Neo is dressed in a white t shirt and black pants and rummages through a heap of clothes with an expression of aspiration and annoyance and selects a striped orange and white, tight fitting dress. Neo proceeds to change into the dress in a way that avoids showing more than arms and legs. Once the dress is on and the t shirt and pants are off, Neo puts on a pair of black high heels. 00:13:58:11 - 00:14:28:12 Text As a curious crowd gathers around, Neo proceeds to change clothes several times, alternating between clothes that can be read as masculine and or feminine, respectively. In the end, Neo changed into black pants, a black and white striped shirt, a waistcoat, sneakers, a tie in the hat. Neo packs the rest of the clothes on the floor into a rucksack, puts on a pair of spectacles, and walks out of the camera frame. 00:14:28:14 - 00:14:32:10 Catherine Weyer So what makes this performance stand out? 00:14:32:12 - 00:15:03:04 George Paul Meiu You know, I, I keep coming back to this performance just to tell our listeners, it refers to a queer activists from Kenya, Neo Muzangi, who organized this performance in the middle of this city, Nairobi. And I found it very powerful. I'm also my latest book has been on questions of homophobia and how these panics around homosexuality suddenly emerge, and sometimes with quite violent, violent aftermath, violent, violent effects. 00:15:03:06 - 00:15:27:23 George Paul Meiu So Neo Muzangis performance, that can also be seen as a video sort of performance, on YouTube. Is, in a way, playing with certain kind of collective, anxieties. Part of the performance is this as, as was described, dressing and undressing, creating this kind of and playing with this ambiguity, somehow gender is not in clothes. 00:15:28:04 - 00:15:47:15 George Paul Meiu Or you're trying to read my gender from my clothes and then good luck. So it's playing with this. But then there is a third part to the performance where the artist activists go around and and ask the people in the public, a real public that just gathers in the space to watch what's going on, and they confess their confusion. 00:15:47:17 - 00:16:18:09 George Paul Meiu I don't know what's here with this. What are we dealing with? What? What is this? Who is this person? And growingly, as this confusion is being expressed, it turns into inquiries about Neo's sexuality. Who does this person actually sleep with? And then I will tell you what this person is. So the presumption here, you see, coming back to your previous question about definitions, you know, allowing them to emerge from a context like this, you suddenly end up with completely different definitions. 00:16:18:09 - 00:17:00:12 George Paul Meiu In this case, the idea was that who the person sleeps with is truly who the person is. In other words, sexuality is the deeper truth of one's gender. And actually, from my interviews with, with, gay men who are gender non-conforming, for example, and who have experienced, violence like mob violence, in urban areas in East Africa, by simply walking through the street or passing through certain bus station, which are these hubs of intense social life, and suddenly their bodies not being able to be read in particular normative ways, creating the same confusion and which can then lead to violence. 00:17:00:14 - 00:17:25:15 George Paul Meiu But what was interesting about Neo's performance, which did not lead to violence, but did lead to confusion, is to actually see how these moments of panic have a double potentiality. On the one hand, they can make us so uncomfortable, so confused that we need quick answers. We need to put our finger on what's going on there and what creates that certainty. 00:17:25:15 - 00:17:56:14 George Paul Meiu Well, violence. Yeah. And the same plays out with ethnic violence, other forms of violence. On the other hand, the confusion can be a wonderful moment. It could be a moment of learning. I don't understand what's going off on here, but perhaps gender is more complicated. And I actually say there is another reading here. What people were watching is not something for into them indeed a certain fluidization. 00:17:56:18 - 00:18:24:10 George Paul Meiu But actually if you study social life and you don't have to go to Kenya to do it, you can do it right now in Europe. When we look at the rise of a radical right, ultra radical right. It's not so much that gender fluidity, among artists such as Neo, is actually rendering something unbearable. You know, like, you have the norm that is there. 00:18:24:10 - 00:18:56:09 George Paul Meiu And then here is somebody playing with a norm to the contrary, what makes it so powerful, so uncomfortable, so, inciting in a way, of this kind of violent desire for certainty is the fact that it resonates, that oftentimes, if you look even at conservative speaking about gender, what do they say? Men can no longer be men. They can no longer fulfill the traditional obligations of, I don't know household provider because they have been emasculating by this and this and that. 00:18:56:11 - 00:19:09:00 George Paul Meiu In other words, the gender binary, so to say, has already been rendered fluid in more ways than one by the historical context, economic, political in which we live. 00:19:09:02 - 00:19:23:03 Catherine Weyer But it is interesting: that as soon as you see a person, you have like this, this instinct to decide this is a man, or this is a woman, or this is someone who is like somewhere in between, why is that? 00:19:23:05 - 00:19:52:08 George Paul Meiu This is a really important question. And I think that if we just come to ask that question that you just asked, even if sometimes you can now get answers to it, we are already beginning to do something very important, a very important work. Why is that in my answer? Mine to take on on that would be that we live when we have lived in a context that has made the gender like sexuality, an indispensable aspect of the self. 00:19:52:10 - 00:20:12:00 George Paul Meiu Furthermore, it has inscribed the gender on a certain relation to the body that is mediated through vision. They're they're wonderful philosophers writing about this. How in the Western world with enlightenment, you know, from all the senses with which we engage the world, how did vision become the primary sight? Right. We don't smell the world. We don't touch the world. 00:20:12:01 - 00:20:35:06 George Paul Meiu We do so at a lesser extent. Those are the vulgar senses. We see the world through objective scientists who look at the world and in a way, the foregrounding of this vision and the body as the object of vision has been part and parcel of a certain kind of ontology, a way of being in the world, in Western modernity and now a globalized Western modernity. 00:20:35:08 - 00:20:55:19 George Paul Meiu So the incitement comes partially, I would say, from there. Right. My ability to relate to you is seeing or reading. There's a beautiful way in Kenya, people say: I will read your body, but it means something else I can read you for social status. Let's see how much money you have. How can I relate to you? 00:20:55:19 - 00:21:21:20 George Paul Meiu But it's this idea of reading the body. And we relate to each other by reading each other's bodies. But I think it is important to to ask ourselves, why is this just something natural, or is it something historically constituted? And if not, and if it is indeed historically constituted in other, other ways in which we can relate to each other? 00:21:21:22 - 00:21:41:04 Catherine Weyer There is another example in your work, and I think it's interesting because there it isn't about, is this a man or is this a woman? But I think in the end, the judgments may be the same. It's about the Samburu. 00:21:41:06 - 00:22:17:04 Text When I began doing fieldwork in northern Kenya in 2005, I was quickly struck by a phenomenon that until then I had known nothing about. My interlocutors told me numerous stories about local young men who became rich by engaging in transactional sex orlong term, long distance relationships with women from Western Europe. What generated this miraculous wealth was their ability to perform a particular idiom of ethnic sexuality for tourist consumption. 00:22:17:06 - 00:22:53:12 Text Tourist recognized Maasai or Samburu, so-called morans or warriors, by their traditional outfits of a red loincloth, beards, long braided hair, a spear and a club. Indeed, the image of the Maasai speaking moran had become a best selling brand of Kenya as a tourist destination and to the embarrassment of Kenya's leaders and its middle class, it also opened informal possibilities for Samburu to benefit from the commodification of their sexuality. 00:22:53:14 - 00:23:29:12 Text An unintended counter effect of such stretch. This was inter-ethnic violence in conversations with Samburu and coastal residents, but also through archival research. I documented several instances of violence against Samburu male migrants on the coast. In most cases, vigilante groups of coastal young men attacked and killed Samburu men. I was surprised at first to learn that coastal residents saw Samburu, another wise, marginalized group in Kenya, as stealing others opportunities. 00:23:29:13 - 00:23:42:16 Text More dominant ethnic groups from upcountry now owned land, hotels and other real estate at the coast and monopolized job markets. Samburu did neither. 00:23:42:18 - 00:23:46:04 Catherine Weyer So why are they a threat to the Kenyan men? 00:23:46:06 - 00:24:24:13 George Paul Meiu A few years ago I purchased a postcard in Kenya. One of those postcards that you can buy, you know, in tourist shops, at airports and so on that that has spilled out on it, African warrior. And that had the young Samburu men dressed in traditional kind of clothes with beads and a spear and so on. And because I was for a long time doing research in Samburu, I tried to figure out who this person was, and see how his image turned into this kind of a brand of, a particular, niche of tourism. 00:24:24:15 - 00:25:01:07 George Paul Meiu And what I found out in the Samburu villages up north where I do fieldwork was that this young man had died in 1997, in inter-ethnic violence at the coast, to the Indian Ocean while engaging in tourist performances, going to dance for tourists, you know, trying to find relationships with white women and so on. And this made me think, how is it possible that some, some form of an ethnic sexuality has become such a powerful, seductive brand commodity brand of tourism in Kenya? 00:25:01:09 - 00:25:22:08 George Paul Meiu And on the other hand, at the same time, it became such a lethal brand, a brand that kills, and here we come back to this idea of the body, of reading the body. And now it's claimed. I mean, oftentimes I would talk to Samburu men and I'd say, well, this is a really colonial sort of thing. 00:25:22:08 - 00:25:44:00 George Paul Meiu No, this is our culture, right? Because in a way, it became their collective capital. That capital, that ethnic sexuality that I have is in my body. But in order for them to to market such a capital, they had to migrate. Now it's almost like, it used to be a two days drive from Northern Kenya to the coast, where the tourists actually were. 00:25:44:00 - 00:26:12:01 George Paul Meiu Nobody was going to northern Kenya and at the coast already since the 1980s, you had all kinds of so-called Beach Boys who were walking the beaches and trying to sell different kinds of souvenirs to the, to the tourists. And suddenly these young men come and they have success and they become suddenly very wealthy. Some of them, not all of them by marrying European women, is probably a very well known, a memoir written by a Swiss author. 00:26:12:01 - 00:26:32:14 George Paul Meiu Die weisse Maasai, that is, based on her relationship to a Samburu man. And that then produces all kinds of speculations. What is it truly that you have among young men? Right? What is it truly that you have in your body that I don't have, that gets you that kind of wealth and not to me. 00:26:32:15 - 00:27:01:02 George Paul Meiu What is it really that you're using? That you're seducing these white women that I can't, use, myself. And in a context in which, under the president, Daniel arap Moi, his authoritarian regime, there was, extreme, poverty. Competition over land had become very intense. Access to tourist resorts has become very contested. 00:27:01:04 - 00:27:25:20 George Paul Meiu Suddenly in this movement, xenophobic movements, the the the foreigners should go back home, you know, this kind of logic. So if you're Samburu, you don't belong to the coast, go back home, sort of thing. They were targeted. Lots of these young men in 1997 were targeted, by violence. And the idea there, I'm talking about the macabre spectacle of violence where limbs are cuts. 00:27:25:20 - 00:27:46:21 George Paul Meiu And it's a quite macabre point, but violence itself has a certain kind of logic that an anthropologist one tries to understand. And the idea here is that one creates this certainty in a context of ambiguity. How do you get that money? And I don't I want an answer. I want certainty, violence often becomes the means to that answer. 00:27:47:00 - 00:28:23:04 George Paul Meiu It's something in your body. Therefore, your body, gets killed, butchered, right? So here you have it. This young man had been killed in that violence in horrific ways. And yet that man, if you go nowadays to Kenya, still figures as a brand of ethnic sexuality on this, on these postcards. And I think it's important to think these, these things together with what you see in them is, again, this idea that there is something in our bodies that is called sexuality that, as I said, originated in a particular time in the West, is everywhere now. 00:28:23:04 - 00:28:32:02 George Paul Meiu And it's also shaping the ways in which people understand their cultures as capital, as a possibility to make a future. And so on. 00:28:32:04 - 00:28:50:05 Catherine Weyer I found it interesting. Sex workers usually work like in the dark, or at least in Europe. We know that this is something that you don't see in broad daylight. Is there something different with the Samburu men? And,the way they express their work in Kenya? 00:28:50:09 - 00:29:23:12 George Paul Meiu So here you have the male privilege that where my interlocutors in this case would actually say they would refuse to be called sex workers. Their idea is more that they have girlfriends, although they can also mean have one night stands, right, paid one night stands, and when other Kenyans refer to them as and derogatory ways of sex workers, it is perceived as highly emasculating. 00:29:23:14 - 00:29:25:13 Catherine Weyer So we are back with definitions. 00:29:25:14 - 00:29:27:08 George Paul Meiu Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. 00:29:27:13 - 00:29:35:03 Catherine Weyer Do we have to talk more about sex and sexuality in the open so it loses this judgment part? 00:29:35:05 - 00:29:54:23 George Paul Meiu I think, you know, somebody like Michel Foucault would tell us that we're not not talking. We are talking extensively. We love to talk. I mean, look at reality TV show, you know, we watch, we watch who slept with so-and-so. So let's see what they now say about their experience, because then we learn something about their true self. 00:29:55:00 - 00:30:22:05 George Paul Meiu It's less about how much we talk than how we talk. If we choose to simply embrace that sex and sexuality, that they constitute as something that, paradoxically, liberals and conservatives have no problem agreeing on. Then there's little we have to learn. Then there is little, one can do to imagine other forms of being other worlds and so on. 00:30:22:07 - 00:30:49:17 George Paul Meiu If we, however, acknowledge that this is a historically constituted mode of being, that, while dominant, continues to exist in parallel in myriad other forms of being, and those again, I think they're not in the places one expects them. Sometimes they're little expressions in everyday life that, I, as an anthropologist, have often been told like, are you for real? 00:30:49:17 - 00:31:12:14 George Paul Meiu Is this this kind of serious stuff that you're supposed to research? Yes. This kind of trivial, seemingly, sometimes vulgar, sometimes, undignified ways of being. I do some research with sex workers. Right. I'm interested in the way in which to understand the world in which they build the world. A world that combines violence with possibility and pleasure and so on. 00:31:12:16 - 00:31:26:07 George Paul Meiu If we pay attention to these things, we also gradually are able to experience ourselves differently. And with this, to slowly craft worlds that look differently. 00:31:26:08 - 00:31:28:22 Catherine Weyer You think you and I will see this world? 00:31:29:00 - 00:31:51:20 George Paul Meiu I think even there, it's a question of what do we look at if we want, once this kind of rapids, tomorrow is no longer like today. Often time you end up with repetition, you know you have a revolution when the whole system is changed. But we use the same, the very same terms that we used before to rebuild this world. 00:31:51:20 - 00:32:20:08 George Paul Meiu George Paul Meiu I was born, in Romania during communism. Right. And and I lived through the December 89 revolution. That then afterwards also led to the immediate collapse of the of the Soviet Union and so on. I remember the 1990s as a teen, as a time of immense possibility, and transformative promise. The future will not look like the past, period. 00:32:20:08 - 00:32:43:20 George Paul Meiu That was the kind of spirit, although the 90s were also a horrible time of poverty and other things. And what do we actually see now in the world? A return of a certain kind of the same and from other perspective is not the same, but we rebuild the world with the same terms, with the same unquestioned grammars, because we are too stubborn, too arrogant to let go of certain definitions. 00:32:43:20 - 00:33:09:09 George Paul Meiu I think that's that's a key. We imagine this world is completely different, post socialist, a post-colonial world, a and so on, but rehearse the very same terms because we insist again on the certainty that certain definitions give us. And then everything is very slow. But on the other hand, again, my profession is to look at the detail at a little toss. 00:33:09:09 - 00:33:19:21 George Paul Meiu When you do see change there, you can see promises. You can see it's just not on the same scale as how would a radically different tomorrow look like. 00:33:19:23 - 00:33:24:10 Catherine Weyer So we just have to keep our eyes open to see the little differences every day. 00:33:24:12 - 00:33:58:02 George Paul Meiu I think. Then, when, political philosopher says it beautifully, when he says that instead of, politic of activity, like, you know, if I act now and act fast, something different will be tomorrow. We need also a or in a long sighted. We need a politics of patience. See, a certain kind of like think carefully about the terms with which in your acting, you try to build the tomorrow. 00:33:58:04 - 00:33:59:23 Catherine Weyer George Paul Meiu, thank you very much. 00:34:00:01 - 00:34:03:03 George Paul Meiu Thank you. 00:34:03:05 - 00:34:24:10 Catherine Weyer That was Unisonar, the podcast of the University of Basel. In the next episode, health expert Sonja Merten will discuss the stigma surrounding menstruation, why heart attacks in women are often misdiagnosed as panic attacks, and why we need more women in leadership positions to overcome the decade old gender bias. We conducted the interview in German. See you soon.