Catie Gressier

Catie Gressier
University of Western Australia | UWA · Department of Anthropology and Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy (anthropology)

About

25
Publications
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159
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Introduction
Catie is an ARC DECRA Fellow in Anthropology and Sociology at UWA. Through the first nationwide qualitative study of rare breed farmers, her research aims to advance knowledge of livestock breed extinctions and domestication in the climate change era. See here for further information: https://www.uwa.edu.au/projects/raising-rare-breeds Catie's previous research in Botswana and Australia has spanned identities and belonging, tourism, health and illness and dietary practices.

Publications

Publications (25)
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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 stu...
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Research among hunter-gatherers has often been exploitative, based on neo-colonial and/or contemporary socio-economic power imbalances. Consequently, research codes and contracts have been created with the important goal of empowering them; such instruments seem to be on the rise globally. In this article, we focus on this phenomenon among the San...
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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.
Article
For millennia, humans and domesticated animals have lived interdependently. In return for shelter, feed and care, animals have provided people with diverse material and symbolic resources within high‐stakes mutualistic relationships. However, mutualisms are always susceptible to ‘cheaters’, where one partner enjoys the benefits without providing ad...
Article
Dietary regimes are frequently likened to religious movements on account of the fervor of advocates’ adherence, and their enthusiastic proselytizing. Yet, beyond this somewhat pejorative use of the metaphor, analysis of the quasi-religious nature of diets can provide a valuable window into the subjective experiences of individuals undertaking strin...
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University students frequently use campus Facebook Confessions pages to engage with their peers about their university experiences. This article explores the utility of Confessions pages in providing novel data to aid the development of student services generally, and academic skills support in particular. Through a qualitative thematic analysis of...
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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 vo...
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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 t...
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This is the editorial to the part-special issue in the Journal of Southern African Studies.
Chapter
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The Paleo diet’s foundational premise is that our bodies have not significantly evolved since the Palaeolithic era, resulting in a fundamental incongruity between post-industrial diets and our genetic inheritance. Imaginaries of idealised Palaeolithic ancestors and contemporary indigenous peoples play a key role in the diet’s promotion. In this cha...
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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 bein...
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Trajectories of illness and obesity are consistently recounted by Paleo dieters as having been arrested by the uptake of Paleo principles and practices. In this chapter, I explore the re-authoring of identity narratives among Paleo dieters in order to suggest that their dietary practices serve as a form of resistance. This is to the neoliberal poli...
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In this final chapter, I explore the promise and pitfalls of Paleo from the perspective of the diet’s adherents, and its detractors. Pursuing Paleo can result in substantial positive changes for some, including weight loss, improved health and participation in supportive communities. However, not all have positive experiences, and I explore the pro...
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This book explores the cultural and economic conditions fuelling the popularity of the polarizing Paleo diet in Australia. Based on ethnographic research in Melbourne and Sydney, Catie Gressier recounts the compelling narratives of individuals struggling with illness and weight issues. She argues that ‘going Paleo’ provides a sense of agency and me...
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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 Ha...
Book
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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...
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Feral animals are commonly constructed as the scourge of the Australian landscape. The transgressive 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 fri...
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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...
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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 que...
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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 Motswa...

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