Nostos Salon 02
A monthly gathering of good food, drinks, and conversation—where anthropology meets community in an engaging, accessible way.
Ecologies of Care with Dr Gillian Tan
Our second Nostos gathering unfolded on a bright Melbourne afternoon, where conversation and sunlight spilled out into the garden. The theme, Ecologies of Care, invited us to consider the webs of connection that sustain both human and more-than-human worlds.
Our guest speaker, Dr Gillian Tan, is a multi-species anthropologist whose work spans the grasslands of Eastern Tibet and the intersections of ecology, religiosity, and human–nonhuman relationships. Her scholarship illuminates the living networks that bind humans, nonhumans, and landscapes into intricate ecologies of care.
Gillian shared stories from her fieldwork on the Tibetan Plateau, where she collaborates with multidisciplinary teams to explore how species, environments, and communities co-create meaning and survival. Through the example of the caterpillar fungus (Ophiocordyceps sinensis), a species that holds spiritual, ecological, and economic value, Gillian revealed how multiple worlds and ways of knowing converge. This small organism is both a sacred being and a market commodity, embodying the tensions and harmonies that exist when human and nonhuman lives intertwine.
Her reflections encouraged us to see beyond the human scale, and to understand how anthropology can help unpack the moral, emotional, and relational dimensions of care. Sitting together among the trees, our conversation turned toward the ecologies of care in our own lives, how we nurture others, the quiet acts of attention that sustain us, and the ways that care, too, is reciprocal.
It was a humour-filled, dreamy, and deeply grounding afternoon, a collective reminder that to care is also to be transformed. Nostos once again became a kind of homecoming, not to a single place, but to a way of being in relationship, with each other, and with the living world around us.
Longer Reads | Documentary
‘Pastures of change contemporary adaptations and transformations among nomadic pastoralists of Eastern Tibet’ By Gillian Tan et al. (2017)
‘River’ (2021) - open access
‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’ by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
‘Multispecies Ethnography and Artful Methods’ by Andrea Petitt, Anke Tonnaer, Véronique Servais, Catrien Notermans and Natasha Fijn
‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’ by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
‘Multispecies Ethnography and Artful Methods’ by Andrea Petitt, Anke Tonnaer, Véronique Servais, Catrien Notermans and Natasha Fijn
Podcasts
In Conversation with Radhika Govindrajan (Conversations in Anthropology)
“To care is to make kin — to remember that we are bound up with one another in the thick present of the world.”
― Donna Haraway