This Anthro Life

Welcome listeners to the first installment of our Diversity and Inclusion crossover series, bringing together This Anthro Life with Brandeis University. For those of you who are new to the show, This Anthro Life (TAL) was launched as a scholar-practitioner program designed to bring anthropological and social science research and thinking to interdisciplinary and public audiences. The original idea behind the podcast was to use our skill sets and toolkits  as anthropologists to translate and socialize data, cultural patterns, and research into accessible open format dialogues and conversations that provided solutions for social impact and actionable insight.With the Diversity and Inclusion  Series, we are opening a semester long podcast series about diversity  and inclusion in higher education and beyond. Here, our inspiration  comes from anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s  claim that anthropology’s job is to make the world a safe place for  human differences. One small step in doing so is to have conversations  o

In this Conversations episode, This  Anthro Life hosts Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins are joined by author  Andrew Rowen to discuss his new novel, Encounters Unforeseen: 1492 Retold. Coming in the months trailing the 525th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s  (or Cristobal Colon’s) voyage to the America’s, Rowen’s novel seeks to  add some much needed depth to the modern myths on the subject.  Encounters Unforeseen doesn’t start at the (in)famous voyage, or even in  Europe. Instead, The drama alternates among three Taíno  chieftains—Caonabó, Guacanagarí, and Guarionex—and Bakoko, a Taíno youth  seized by Columbus, Spain’s Queen Isabella I of Castile, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Columbus. Some text from the Press Release:  After 525 years, the traditional literature recounting the history of  Columbus’s epic voyage and first encounters with Native Americans  remains Eurocentric, focused principally—whether pro- or  anti-Columbus—on Columbus and the European perspective. A historical  novel, Encounters Unfo

In this Conversations episode of This  Anthro Life, Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins explore the subject of  sensory ethnography –  a focus in anthropology that tends to deemphasize  the written word to explore visual, acoustic, and other sensory  perceptions. Today, researchers explore senses increasing in the media  through virtual simulations, visual and auditory stimuli that cause  different reactions (fostering disorientation or meditative states), and  of course art. But, how we perceive the world around us can also be  influenced by culture and our surroundings, from music, to dance, to  collective effervescence. After all, viral examples in recent years  (like the infamous dress),  demonstrate that human perception varies visually from person to person  (often in the recognition of more or less recognized colors in the  light spectrum). Individual distinctions aside, as humans we’re limited  in our generally ability to sense and see the world around (infrared and  ultraviolet light are imperceptible to u

Will Emojis be the death of writing? Are emojis modern day hieroglyphs? Is the increased use of emojis in textual conversations a sign of the end of language as we know it? Join us for one of our most popular conversations revisited! Your trusty hosts Ryan and Adam discuss the origin of emojis as well as the importance of actively seeking to understand the hidden biases of language.What is an Emoji? The term emoji originates from the japanese kanjis of “picture word”. Shigetaka Kurita  created the emoji in order to develop a way to send pictorial texts  using less data. Japanese phone users were sending pictures to convey  messages, but their phones were unable to handle the large amounts of  data involved in sending pictures, so Kurita created the emoji keyboard  that allowed for standard pictorial characters to be sent for the same  amount of data as a letter.Read more on thisanthrolife.com--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

In this Conversations episode of This Anthro Life, Adam Gamwell and guest host/TAL correspondent Matt Artz  explore the world of Design Anthropology with the help of Dr. Elizabeth  “Dori” Tunstall. Design Anthropology is a subject near and dear to our  hosts, who have been excited to devote an entire episode to the subject.  But, what is Design Anthropology? If you’re scratching your head, no  worries. Adam, Matt, and Dr. Tunstall have it covered and describe the  five iterations of design anthropology using examples of their use in  the field. Over the course of the episode Adam, Matt, and Dr. Tunstall  briefly cover issues of ethics within design anthropology as well as a  touching upon how to find jobs in design.   Adam, Matt, and Dr. Tunstall also make time to get into the topics of whether: the IRS is really as bad as popular culture makes them out to be. How can we avoid cultural misappropriation? And finally, how do value systems get expressed in design? “The goal of design anthropology is to create co

Hey Listeners! Adam and Ryan are back from their brief summer hiatus (a time filled with fieldwork, dissertation writing, and travels abound) with new content, a fresh Patreon campaign, lined up interviews, an upcoming limited series on diversity in the university setting and much more! Support our new campaign on Patreon! Go ahead a click that nice image to visit our new page, to read about what we want to do, and how you can give securely. Just a dollar a month makes a huge difference for us!  Kicking off the new season, Adam and Ryan dive into a new FreeThink  episode, in the style and length of our Conversations. In this episode,  they continue to make the case for why the world needs anthropology and  social science thinking more than ever. They also speak in favor of  interventionist anthropology in recognition of the plethora of social  issues, subaltern experiences, cultural miscommunications, and civil  tensions which are in the media’s focus more than ever.With This Anthro Life’s new season we reall

In response to several surveys that attempt to quantify happiness, Ryan, Adam, and Aneil spend this episode of This Anthro Life exploring happiness through the lens of fetishism. They discuss Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, the film Happy, and more! They seek to answer the following questions: What kinds of things make us happy? How does happiness inhere in objects and how do we use objects to display our happiness? They end on a positive note by concluding that we have control over our happiness and suggesting a happy community may be a key part of being happy.  In the episode we use the term fetish, made famous by Sigmund Freud, to mean something that points to something else.  It masks what is there (I.e. a statue of a deity that seems to be what  people are worshipping, but it is just a material thing that is pointing  to the deity). It can be any material type of the thing that points towards an abstract idea.3 Ways Our Imagination Fails to Guide Us to Happiness Our  imagination tends to add and

This episode is a little different from our normal content. In it we feature a presentation Adam gave for Pivotal Labs in which he explores This Anthro Life’s (and his own) developing philosophy about conversations and podcasting as social technologies and what the worlds of anthropology and podcasting can do. Some topics Adam touches on include: what anthropology does in the world, conversation as “little social laboratories”, mapping the contemporary podcast ‘cosmos’, podcasters as cultural brokers, and the kinds of stories we well as Charismatic Data. During this pseudo-episode (think of it like a Conversation meets a FreeThink) Adam asks the questions: What makes conversation a social technology? And how can data be charismatic?During this pseudo-episode (think of  it like a Conversation meets a FreeThink) Adam asks the questions: What  makes conversation a social technology? And how can data be charismatic?As Adam mentions, the audio recording during the talk got messed up,  so today we’re presenting you

This Anthro Life has teamed up with Savage Minds to bring you a special 5-part podcast and blog crossover series. While thinking together as two anthropological productions that exist for multiple kinds of audiences and publics, we became inspired to have a series of conversations about why anthropology matters today. In this series we’re sitting down with some of the folks behind Savage Minds, SAPIENS, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology to bring you conversations on anthropological thinking and its relevance through an innovative blend of audio and text.In our fourth episode of the TAL + SM  collaboration Ryan and Adam chat with Dr. Kristina Killgrove about her  strategies for engaging popular audiences through writing. We start  by discussing interdisciplinary collaboration and its role in improving  writing. Then we explore Kristina’s strategies for choosing content to  cover in her blog, Powered by Osteons. We end by considering some ways anthropology has cha

This Anthro Life has teamed up with Savage Minds to bring you a special 5-part podcast and blog crossover series. While thinking together as two anthropological productions that exist for multiple kinds of audiences and publics, we became inspired to have a series of conversations about why anthropology matters today. We’re sitting down with some of the folks behind Savage Minds, SAPIENS, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology to bring you conversations on anthropological thinking and its relevance through an innovative blend of audio and text.In our third episode of the TAL + SM crossover series (blog post here),  we explored SAPIENS’ approach to producing anthropological content for  popular audiences. Ryan and Adam were joined by the digital editor of  SAPIENS, Daniel Salas, to discuss the implications of using anthropology  to engage the public through journalism. The episode focused on the  questions How do you reconcile scientific and anthropological writing,  

In the second conversation of the TAL + SM crossover series, Ryan and Adam were joined by AAA Executive Director Ed Liebow and Program Manager for Educational Outreach Leslie Walker. They explored the work of the AAA, the changing natures of work and research today, and critically assessed anthropology in terms of scope and impact.Read the article here--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

This Anthro Life has teamed up with Savage Minds to bring you a special 5-part podcast and blog crossover series. While thinking together as two anthropological productions that exist for multiple kinds of audiences and publics, we became inspired to have a series of conversations about why anthropology matters today. For this series we’re sitting down with some of the folks behind Savage Minds, SAPIENS, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology to bring you conversations on anthropological thinking and its relevance through an innovative blend of audio and text.Read the article here--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

We like to bring you some of our favorite conversations from our catalogue as we think about new ways to explore the topic. This week we’re bringing you our Visual Anthropology conversation split into two, digestible parts, so here’s part 2. Plus we (still) miss Aneil and wanted to hear his voice again. We hope you enjoy the conversation revisited with us! Join us for an ‘enlightening’ trip as we ‘shed some light’ on the world of sight, seeing, and visual anthropology. In this episode we explore the deep impact of visual culture across the globe and time from ancient Greece to the invention of photography to metaphors of knowledge, to genotypes and phenotypes, arrangement of food, and more!If you like TAL, please drop us a 5-star review on iTunes or Stitcher or however you enjoy the podcast. If you are able, dropping us a couple of bucks makes a huge difference in making the show sustainable!--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

We like to bring you some of our favorite conversations from our catalogue as we think about new ways to explore the topic. This week we’re bringing you our Visual Anthropology conversation split into two, digestible parts. Plus we miss Aneil and wanted to hear his voice again. We hope you enjoy the conversation revisited with us! Join us for an ‘enlightening’ trip as we ‘shed some light’ on the world of sight, seeing, and visual anthropology. In this episode we explore the deep impact of visual culture across the globe and time from ancient Greece to the invention of photography to metaphors of knowledge, to genotypes and phenotypes, arrangement of food, and more! Read More--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

How do academics write for a variety of audiences? Is routine a necessary part of creating? How many times will Ryan mention Stephen King? In this episode of This Anthro Life, Adam and Ryan talk with Anita Hannig of Brandeis University about the writing process behind her new book, Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital.  While they are looking at writing as a craft from the perspective of anthropologists, Ryan, Adam, and Anita draw on a variety of perspectives outside of the discipline to suggest some tips for writing routine, reaching a broad audience, and writing ethnography.About Anita HannigAnita Hannig is an assistant professor at Brandeis University.Read more at thisanthrolife.com--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

FreeThink 6 – Who Are the 13,000?In this week’s Free Think, Adam and Ryan introduce a new member of our team, Matt Artz, who will be leading a new project to study and research you! We hit 13,000 subscribers in the past week which is a huge milestone for us. In order to keep This Anthro Life growing we would like to better integrate the desires of our listeners with how we market, produce, and choose our content. We want to get to know you! To do this we will be updating the What’s Your Story page with a space to submit your emails if you would like to be interviewed by one of the team. We will post more information in the coming weeks. We cannot wait to hear your thoughts on the podcast and ways we can make it better! NOTE: Since recording this episode less than a week ago, we are now over 14,100 subscri--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

On this episode, Adam and Ryan dive into the complexities of our ever  evolving human family. How we understand our ancient ancestors,  cousins, and ape family has the potential to impact our understanding of  what it means to be human and how we are still changing. The new and  exciting data we dive into this episode is all about Homo Naledi,  perhaps the most recent addition to our family. As of the day we  recorded this episode, April 25th, the first concrete date range for the  species was publicized (but stay tuned for further developments).  Rather than being very early (that is more ancient) and dating to the  time of the earliest Homo Erectus specimens as originally hypothesized  (some 2 million years ago), it now appears that Naledi was potentially a  contemporary of the earliest Homo Sapiens (that’s us) ranging from 200  to 300 thousand years ago. This means we need to re-evaluate our genus  once again and think about the complexities of dating our ancestors.Quick definitions: Species – a group of l

This episode of This Anthropological Life presents a little differently from our normal episodes. The Society for Applied Anthropology generously allowed us to release the audio from Adam’s presentation at the SFAA 2017 Annual Meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, so this episode is based entirely on this presentation. Adam discusses a quinoa gastronomy project he is working on in conjunction with Dr. Alipio Canahua Murillo and Chef José Maguiña. They are designing an agricultural-gastronomy project in the region of Puno, Peru in order to create new dishes based on endangered varieties of quinoa. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

Freethink #5: Finding Balance in the midst of BurnoutIn this week’s free think Ryan and Adam talk burning out and finding balance. They reflect on their travels to conferences for the Society for Applied Anthropology and the Society for American Archaeology and why conferences are inspirational and invigorating. Also the AMAZING fact that TAL now has over 11,000 subscribers!! Thank you so much to everyone for helping us build the tribe, let’s keep taking this to the top! Social Consciousness FTW.Links to Learn More:Sapiens and Fuente’s essay on Nature’s Most Creative Copulators

This episode focuses on a conversation between Adam and Amy about a TEDtalk titled The Power of Vulnerability presented by Brené Brown. In this video, Brown breaks down the “wholehearted individual” one who has courage, social connection, compassion, and an appreciation for his/her vulnerabilities. They were unashamed to be vulnerable. They are comfortable with saying I love you first, putting an opinion piece out regardless of potential backlash, being authentic without fear. As Brown stresses, the wholehearted have ”the willingness to do something with no guarantees”.  It’s allowing for things to fall outside of your control. To accept the controllable and the chaotic aspects of lif--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message