This Anthro Life

It's a common truism that history is often written by the victors, but it is equally true that the actual story is more complicated. One of the most poignant examples of this is the "discovery" of the new world by Christopher Columbus.So today I am super excited to have author Andrew Rowen back on the podcast. Andrew caught our attention back in 2017 for his book encounters, "Unforeseen 1492 Retold", which rather than another single sided story is a bicultural retelling that portrays the life stories of both Columbus and the Taíno chieftains from their youth to their encounters during the invasions of 1492.Andrew is back to talk about the sequel "Columbus and Caonabó 1493 to 1498 Retold". In this episode, we explore Andrew's rationale for producing a bicultural series of novels and choosing historical fiction over historical nonfiction in order to bring to life the context thought processes and perspectives of people present at the time in the 15th century.This also meant writing in a way that doesn't prescri

Have you wondered why fantasy stories mostly are just copies of Medieval Europe? Why pop culture has been so obsessed with zombies? Or why Black Panther and the Falcon and the Winter Soldier seemed to hit the right chord at the right time for American conversations on race? To answer these questions, we're diving into world building, the process of creating realized worlds for (mostly) fictional stories and how anthropology could literally change the game.On this episode Astrid Countee joins Adam Gamwell to co-host a conversation with the very dynamic duo of biological anthropologist/archaeologist Kyra Wellstrom and cultural anthropologist Michael Kilman. Kyra and Michael are educators and authors, and their latest book caught our attention because it does two things at once. First, it serves as an introductory textbook for anthropology students, digging into key ideas like culture, ritual, food, power and death. But second, it’s premised around how to use anthropology for building better world for game desig

Charles Foster set out to answer one of the most perplexing questions of all - what sort of creatures are we humans? - in one of the most unique ways possible: immersing himself in experiences that evoke three central epochs in the development of consciousness - the upper Paleolithic, around 40k years ago, the neolithic, around 10k years ago when humans invented/stumbled upon and couldn’t get out of agriculture, and the Enlightenment, which ushered in the scientific revolution in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.Interested in checking out Charles' new book Being a Human: Adventures in 40,000 years of Consciousness? We've got copies to give away!Music: Epidemic SoundsIntro - Jazz Bars - Dusty DecksOutro - Up & Down - Toby TranterEditing: Craig StantonResearch: Kiera MylesProduction: Adam GamwellThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5168968/advertisement

This Anthro Life turned 8 years old in October 2021. That's a long time for a podcast. When recently invited to share what I've been working on for a newsletter, TAL's 8th birthday got me thinking about what I've learned working between anthropology and podcasting for almost a decade. I've fancied myself a public anthropologist for a while, but it has been podcasting, and working in an unusual medium (for anthropology) that has taught me some of the most important lessons for what public anthropology actually is.Music - Epidemic SoundsLenzer - A Fork FightYomoti - Fansi PanThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5168968/advertisement

It's not everyday I get to talk with other anthropology podcasters, and even more infrequently that I get to talk with undergraduate anthropology podcasters. I'm joined on the show today by Gabriella Campbell, Gabriella is a senior at University of California Santa Barbara where she focuses on forensic anthropology, both contemporary and ancient. She's also the creator and host of That Anthro Podcast, a weekly interview show that explores the world of bioarchaeology, bones, forensics and more. Gabriella and I dig into what it's like to work in forensics while learning the trade. This includes some crucial and fascinating forensic recovery work she’s doing in response to the Monteceto mudslides.We dig into:- Applying forensic anthropology to the Montecito mudslides- Contemporary forensics vs ancient forensics- How to teach anthro earlier in kids' education, early education projects- On podcasting, creativity and learning to trust our instincts- Advice for undergrads - from an undergradCheck out:That Anthro Pod

A job search strategy is essential, but what if you don’t even know what to look for or what you want to do? A career plan is something you can do before job searching to define the kind of work you want to do and how to engage with like minded people, so you’ve got opportunities and pathways to work you’ll find fulfilling and meaningful, regardless of industry.While some old-school academics might see creating a career plan as selling out, Career Coach and Strategist Amy Santee and Design + Business Anthropologist Adam Gamwell, say you’re selling yourself short if you don’t. In this seminar we’ll share stories from our experiences and walk you through creating your own plan across defining your values, mapping your journey, finding your people and trying your voice.Whether you’re a student and looking for your first job, a mid career professor or industry insider and curious about what else is out there, a career plan is relevant for anyone.We’ll dig into defining your values as a starting point, mapping a v

Dr. Meena Kaushik takes us through her story from the revolutionary idea in the late 1970s of applying semiotics to brand and market research to founding Quantum, which today is a global enterprise research organization in seven countries, through how they have digitally adapted insights research in the face of COVID.Meena Kaushik started her journey as an academic studying the symbolism of death rituals in Hinduism. She conducted extensive fieldwork amongst the Doms of Varanasi, a low caste community working in the city’s cremation grounds, for her Ph.D. in Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics.She ventured into qualitative market research by accident and fell in love. Her training in ethnography deepened how consumer behaviour, consumer culture and consumer psyche were being understood in India in the mid to late 1980s.A consulting stint with the Indian Market Research Bureau soon became a full fledged position and she helped found the qualitative division at MARG as a Director of Qualitative Research.

Phil Surles is a cultural anthropologist and consultant who focuses on branding. He works with companies to change their culture for the better and focuses on integrating anthropology into industry. From art school to anthropology to industry Phil discusses how he combined all of his passions into his consulting work. Phil, Astrid, and Adam discuss what it means to be an anthropologist working in industry and ethical issues that may arise. Phil is also working on a new platform called Mindshare where businesses can tap into the expertise of human scientists for expert interviews, consulting and more.On today’s EpisodeHow to study anthropology with the intention of going into industry, not academiaTo intervene or not intervene-- the anthropologists ethical dilemmaHow anthropologists can bring their ethics and methodology to industry and change it for the betterWhat is a public intellectual and how does it relate to thought leadership and activismWhere to Find Phil Surles:TwitterLinkedInMindshareEpisode Credits

If Dr. Hellen Fisher isn’t a household name in your house (yet), her work certainly is. Helen is a biological anthropologist and basically the reason you can date online. She’s an expert on romantic love, gender differences, the evolution of human emotions and attraction. She has also been the Chief Scientific Advisor for Match.com and was instrumental in their offshoot, Chemistry.com. She has explored how love patterns are actually deeply coded in our physiology and neuropsychology. We talk about how to understand sex, love, and dating across human behavior, patterns in courtship, and the evolution of bonding.But beyond this, Helen is a wildly popular author, TED speaker and public intellectual. To this end brings to the table a wealth of insight into how to translate anthropological insights in ways that feel meaningful to people today.Hellen discusses her career path, how she strayed from the field of academia, became an accredited author and eventually an advisor to Match.com We discuss how to handle medi

TAL Correspondent Sara Schmieder brings us an all new interview about the power of cemetery restoration, race in the American South, and bringing legacy to light.Dr. Ryan Smith is a professor of religious history, material culture, and historic preservation at Virginia Commonwealth University. His latest book Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries (2020) explores the history and reclamation of sacred cemeteries through the lens of race. By working with friends groups from various Richmond cemeteries he charts their evolution over time and how abandoned cemeteries have been reborn. Dr. Smith also authored Robert Morris’s Folly: The Architectural and Financial Failures of an American Founder (2014) and Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti-Catholicism and American Church Designs in the Nineteenth Century (2006).In this episode we discuss:· What it means to be a friend of a cemetery· How cemeteries are being revived and protected· Segregation and cemeteries· The importance of sacred sp

In today’s episode Adam Gamwell and Astrid Countee are joined by multispecies anthropologist John Hartigan jr. John is an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In his latest work, Shaving the Beasts: Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain, John studies the social lives of wild horses in Spain and Catalonia and the Spanish ritual dating back to the 1500s of “Rapa das Bestas”- in which villagers heard wild horses together into public ceremonial rings and shave their manes and tails. Why is an anthropologist studying horses you ask? John’s work dives into the complex social lives of these horses, what happens with human ritual causes violence and social breakdown - in this case amongst horses - and asks the question of how we can learn about human culture from other species?In this episode we focus on:What studying nonhuman species like plants and horses tells us about being humanHow to do rapid ethnographic fieldworkHow the sociality of humans shapes and is shaped by other speciesWhy ecology nee

BOOK GIVEAWAY!! Leave a Review of This Anthro Life for a chance to win a copy of Ghost Work! Leave us a written review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser by May 8, 2021, and email us a screenshot (so we know it's you) at thisanthrolife@gmail.com.We'll randomly pick four winners out of the group from anyone who submits a review by May 8th, 2021. Now just a heads up: We're only counting serious reviews where you write something thoughtful. We'll take five stars of course if you want to just help out, but please no writing "I'm just doing this to get a free book." Feel free to share what you love about the podcast, why you find it valuable, How long you been listening or what keeps you listening? Remember, reviews help others discover the show and help us shape the content based on what you find valuable, so thanks for participating, we can't wait to hear from you!Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/this-anthro-life-216403Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id871241283Mary Gray is an ant

Oscar Barrera is a Business Anthropologist based out of Veracruz, Mexico who brings a global mindset to helping businesses turn hurdles into opportunities for positive change. He is an expert in innovation, change management, and strategy. In this episode in partnership with Experience By Design podcast cohosts Adam Gamwell and Gary David dig into Oscar's story to learn the steps he took in moving from academia to business. We also dig intofollow along case stories of how Oscar used the social sciences to help businesses see and solve organizational problems, find new marketing opportunities, and help people craft new narratives that empower them to be the heroes of their own storieswhy we believe it is not only ethical to bring the social sciences into business, but why it is fundamentally necessary to do sohow to get started learning the world of businessThis episode is jam packed with great stories and advice!Connect with Oscar on LinkedInOscar's website (Spanish): Antropología Corporativa--- Send in a voi

Take a walk with anthropologist and consultant Grant McCracken and host Adam Gamwell, as they discuss Grant's new book The New Honor Code: A Simple Plan for Raising Our Standards and Restoring Our Good Names and dig into Grant's uncanny ability to excavate and weave together (American) culture, media, and storytelling, and pull out provocative insights like the need to get more anthropologists and cultural experts into the C-Suite, how we might re-invent honor in the contemporary world, and how setting anthropology free from the academy can reshape it and make the field better for it.In The New Honor Code, Grant draws together ideas from Elizabethan England, insights found while hanging out in people's living rooms interviewing them about their television watching habits for Netflix, the rise of celebrity culture as the closest thing we have to honor today - and why that's a problem - and the seemingly uncrossable gap between American boomers and millennials/GenZ. In mixing all these ideas together, he asks

In January 2021 armed rioters stormed the US Capitol in a harrowing and politically fomented insurrection. It was an apex of years of divisive and condemnable rhetoric and fear-mongering used to stoke insecurities and desperate action. How do we ensure this never happens again? Or how do we dismantle the social structures that feed hate, fear, and contempt? What this event, and on the flip side, our celebration of Martin Luther King jr. Day (when we recorded this episode 1/18/21), reveal is that understanding what leads to social conflict and how to manage and resolve conflict is more essential than ever. Today Adam Gamwell and Astrid Countee talk with conflict management expert and author Jeremy Pollack about healing a divided nation by learning to talk with our neighbors more. We dig into:Why humans need help managing conflictCognitive and perceptual biases that prevent us from communicating clearly with one anotherHow to communicate clearly around fears and intentions to find common groundHow to understand

Language warning. We use the word sh*t a lot in this episode, since it is, in fact all about poop. To wrap up this crappy, some may even say shitty year, host Adam Gamwell and intern Elizabeth Smyth discuss the origin of the word shit, how the way we defecate is culturally constructed, what our poop reveals about us, and so much more in this New Year’s Eve mini-episode of This Anthro Life. Farewell 2020, it’s been real.In this episode we dig into:What poop tells us about culture and our biologyWhether to sit or squat?Poop’s superpower for healing gut microbiota and potential energy sourceHow poop in space might tell us if we are, in fact, extraterrestrials ourselvesAlso check our new blog Voice and Value where we dive deeper into all things human: Voice and Value – MediumArticles referenced:The History of Poop Is Really the History of TechnologyPoop Worlds: Material Culture and Copropower (or, Toward a Shitty Turn)Poop (Somatosphere)How Fossilized Poop Gives Us The Scoop on Ancient DietsWatching What We Flush

In this episode we meet Dr. Stan Thangaraj, an anthropology professor at the City College of New York whose research includes immigration in the U.S, being interviewed by Vyjayanthi Vadrevu, a business anthropologist and ethnographer. Together, the two discuss basketball, community, identity, race relations and so much more. Stay tuned with us as you learn about why race relations are so important and the answers to the following questions:What does sports and their global popularity reveal about race relations in the US?What can we learn from the merging transnational identities?How has the “Black Lives Matter” Movement impacted the nonwhite and nonblack communities?What are the politics within the diasporic communities?Why is it so important to continue research and teaching about these communities?Sponsors for this episode:Check out the world's first Neuromarketing Bootcamp and sign up today with our Affiliate link!Neuromarketing Bootcamp by Neuroscientist Matt Johnson and Marketing Director Prince GhumanU

Do you have a sense of how much time you spend each day on social media and smartphone? Whether you can live with them or you can't live with them, we know for most of us, these are ingrained parts of our everyday lives. In this episode, we will uncover the life in the age of social media and smartphones, featuring Dr. Daniel Miller and Georgiana Murariu from the University College of London. Stay tuned as you learn about the ‘Why We Post’ project, ‘Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing, and the ‘AnthroCOVID’ project. We dig into:How do people use social media differently around the world?What are some strategies for making research accessible?What is the impact of smartphones on health?What are some creative ways that people have documented lives during the pandemic?How do you get so many anthropologists to work together globally?What is some advice for researchers who want to do collaborative and comparative work?Daniel Miller is a Professor of Anthropology at University College London and directed t

This Anthro Life is based on lifting up the voices and value of anthropologists and human scientists in all fields through sharing their stories, thought leadership, struggles, and winding paths. Today we've got something special, where we turn the mic around on our host, Adam Gamwell and hear some of his story on how he is building a career as an anthropologist. TAL's Adam Gamwell recently guested on fellow business anthropologist Keith Kellersohn's new YouTube series Anthro Perspectives, where he interviews anthropologists in industry and businesses about their work. This episode has a bit of everything:whether you're an anthropology student in school looking to get your first job, an academic looking to move into industry, if you're already working somewhere out there and looking to change careers, or perhaps if you don't work anthropologists and you want to find out and understand value anthropology can bring to your business. We cover all of this and more in our conversation. One of the most helpful thin

When most people think of forensics or forensic anthropology the first thing that comes to mind are TV shows like CSI or Bones, or maybe in Six Feet Under.This may sound overly obvious, but people die every day. And this means that every day someone has to deliver dealth notifications to next of kin, especially when people live apart. Often times coroners are the ones who deliver these notifications. Coroners are elected or appointed public officials whose primary duty is to determine and certify cause of death.and while they have the scientific knowledge to do so, sometimes with the help of apps and digital tools, the social part of dealing with death, both for next of kin and the coroners themselves, is often ignored.We all experience death at some point but across 2020 more people have been directly impacted by death than ever before due to COVID-19. Meaning that more people than ever are receiving death notifications, which was a difficult conversation even before the pandemic. These notifications are cha