Episode 25 Product Design Ethnography with Dr. Amy Goldmacher
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Dr. Amy Goldmacher (photo courtesy of Dr. Goldmacher)
Business anthropologist Dr. Amy Goldmacher works with product and software designers to empower them to understand their users and customers. Using ethnographic research, she helps design new and improved products, software and experiences that better meet people’s needs.
Working both independently and as an ethnography consultant at The Understanding Group, Dr. Goldmacher applies anthropological methodologies to help companies organize and manage complex information, clarify purpose, create better products, and more effectively reach customers.
Episode 24 Pubic Hair Grooming as Cultural Practice with Lyndsey Craig
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Lyndsey Craig (photo courtesy of Ms. Craig)
Anthropology graduate student Lyndsey Craig examines pubic hair removal practices across 72 societies, and how the practices are tied to cultural concerns about hygiene and sexual activity.
Whereas most literature on public hair removal practices focus primarily on Western cultures, in particular how women are included in and affected by marketing, pornography, and pop culture, Craig and biological anthropologist Dr. Peter Gray performed historical, cross-cultural research across dozens of non-Western societies. They found that whether and how pubic hair was removed depended on a diverse array of cultural messages about hygiene, fertility, sexuality and beauty.
Episode 23 Psychiatric Culture Clashes with Dr. Beatriz Reyes-Foster
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Dr. Beatriz Reyes-Foster (photo courtesy of Dr. Reyes-Foster)
Medical Anthropologist Dr. Beatriz Reyes-Foster returns, this time to discuss her experiences researching a psychiatric hospital in Mexico, looking at how culture shapes the diagnoses, care, and outcomes of mental illness.
How is mental illness cultural? Medical Anthropologists have long demonstrated how a phenomenon categorized as a disorder, like schizophrenia, is understood and experienced very differently from culture to culture. How the illness is viewed in society, what support structures are available, and which ideologies dominate, such as individuality or the importance of family, all play roles in how a person with illness is treated. When these circumstances are situated in a location where the history of colonialism continues to dominate the lives and identities of indigenous patients, what is often narrowly defined as mental health becomes an issue of national economic, race, and identity systems.
Dr. Reyes-Foster documents how staff at a mental hospital in the Yucatan in Mexico struggle to be human in inhumane conditions, which are set from on high at a governmental level, the results of contemporary politics and the long-standing impacts of colonialism.
