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Archive for culture

Episode 28 Housing, Advocacy, and Anthropology with Christin Reeder Young

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 28 Housing, Advocacy, and Anthropology with Christin Reeder Young
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Applied Anthropologist Christin Reeder Young

Applied Anthropologist Christin Reeder Young

Christin Reeder Young has a Master’s degree in Applied Anthropology, focusing on medical and urban anthropology, and works as a Senior Research and Evaluation Manager for Habitat for Humanity. Her work focuses on two main topics, the impact of affordable homeownership for lower-income, first-time homebuyers and the impact of critical home repairs and accessibility modification for older homeowning adults in Memphis, TN. As an anthropologist, however, her view of these issues extends beyond the individual or family to the consequences that extend into neighborhoods, the city, and the health systems that provide services to homebuyers.

Ms. Young’s ability to perform qualitative ethnographic fieldwork allows her to assess the homes of elderly clients and to provide recommendations for critical repairs and accessibility modifications that allow them to stay longer in their homes place rather than moving prematurely to a nursing home. Additionally, her larger view on culture and social institutions makes her exceptionally qualified to influence policy change, as aging trajectories show a boom in elderly populations. Through conferences, trainings, and through visits to Congress, Ms. Young shares her data, recommending concrete ways American human services can evolve to assist people in aging in place healthily and independently in their homes and communities.

*NEW* Transcript available below!

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Episode 27 Politics of Greek Cooking with Dr. David Sutton

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 27 Politics of Greek Cooking with Dr. David Sutton
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Dr. David Sutton hiking in Kalymnos, Greece

Dr. David Sutton collecting wild herbs in Kalymnos, Greece

Dr. David Sutton returns to AOTS, this time to talk about his long career’s work on the anthropology of food. Dr. Sutton explores the politics of food and commensality, or eating together, on the Greek island of Kalymnos at a time when international debt has increased outside pressures on Greece to transform their economics and culture to better suit neoliberal capitalism. For folks in Kalymnos, food and cooking are ways to connect the present to the past, whether it’s through telling stories of food eaten 40 years ago, eating foods today to evoke memories, or cooking using specific techniques and tool choices that emphasize cultural and kinship connections.
As people eat together, Dr. Sutton explains, there is an intimacy and materiality to food that correlates to social relations, the senses, and the political. Food becomes a metaphor for criticizing some of the more abstract elements of neoliberalism, such as the conscious use of food in discourse that opposes concreteness and intimacy of eating with abstract coldness of money and rational economics.

*NEW* Transcript available below!

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Episode 26 Anthropology in Action with Dr. Dana Powell

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 26 Anthropology in Action with Dr. Dana Powell
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Dana PowellDr. Dana Powell has spent the last twenty years working to transform anthropology from its original purpose, of primarily European scholars studying the Other, non-European cultural groups, toward building anthropology as a critical perspective and a toolkit of methods that help us tackle social problems. Rather than entering marginalized spaces and making decisions for informants, she agrees that anthropologists should share their unique skill set to assist in problem-solving projects that have already been identified at a grassroots or local level.

From her work with Diné (Navajo) energy activists to her field research assisting African-American environmental justice activists, Dr. Powell has collaborated with indigenous-led project leaders, offering her skills as an ethnographer to provide data and insight. A decolonized action anthropology has so much potential to become relevant in a new way, she argues, as anthropologists are deep listeners, contributing creative critical thinking to define and resolve social problems.

*NEW* Transcript available below!

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Episode 20 American Mosques with Dr. Jacqueline Fewkes

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 20 American Mosques with Dr. Jacqueline Fewkes
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Dr. Jacqueline Fewkes (photo courtesy of Dr. Fewkes)

As an anthropologist of religion, it’s hard for Dr. Jacqueline Fewkes to pin down her research focus to just one element of life. Rather, her expertise in anthropology allows her to see how religion is lived and practiced, how material goods transform us as much as we transform them, and how spaces reflect our lives while helping to craft them.

Tying these elements together, Dr. Fewkes latest project is a focus on the sometimes surprising, always interesting history and architecture of mosques in America.

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Episode 19 The Culture of Teeth with Dr. Julia Boughner

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 19 The Culture of Teeth with Dr. Julia Boughner
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Dr. Julia Boughner (photo by and included with permission from Dr. Boughner)

What do cultural practices have to do with how our teeth and jaws develop? Biological Anthropologist Dr. Julia Boughner works with dentists and oral surgeons to answer the question: why do modern humans in industrialized nations face dental problems that don’t affect primates, modern hunter-gatherers, and previous generations of humans? The key may be in what we eat and how we prepare it.

Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, our jaws have become smaller and weaker as our preferred foods became softer as humans (and our hominid ancestors) used hands, fire, and tools to do the work jaws used to do. Dr. Boughner explores evolution (and its misperceptions), science journalism, and how anthropology can be integral in developing safer and more effective dentistry.
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Episode 18 Language, Time, and the Anthropology of Arrival with Dr. David Sutton

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 18 Language, Time, and the Anthropology of Arrival with Dr. David Sutton
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Dr. David Sutton has written about the anthropology of movies before, but the film Arrival, he says, is something special. Arrival debuted in 2016, starring Amy Adams as a linguist who was tasked with making first contact with an alien species. Like an anthropologist in a foreign culture, she has to orient herself to an entirely different way of being and communicating. The film is science fiction, but draws in sociolinguistic theory and cultural concepts of time, all while it illustrates the emotional rushes and pitfalls of trying to understand someone who doesn’t share your perceptions of how the world works

Most successful movies and television shows are popular because they connect with some cultural elements in their audiences, which makes them rich material for anthropologists striving to understand how communities think about everything from family to gift-giving to social class. But Arrival goes further, not only representing cultural elements but also showing what many cultural and linguistic anthropologists actually do.

In this episode, Dr. Sutton breaks down why fictional films and television shows can be important in revealing implicit cultural models, and discusses what Arrival tells us about language, time, and anthropology.

*WARNING: Spoilers abound in this episode, so listeners beware!*

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Episode 17 The Folklore of International Adoption with Dr. Patricia Sawin

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 17 The Folklore of International Adoption with Dr. Patricia Sawin
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Anthropologist, folklorist, and professor of American Studies, Dr. Patricia Sawin pays close attention to the stories we tell. Focusing on international adoption, Dr. Sawin examines how these stories weave together new families while sometimes over-simplifying difficult issues of race, privilege, and the power and limits of love.

Adoption is a culturally and historically complicated process that we like to envision as purely altruistic, yet usually involves moving children from less- to more-advantaged communities. Dr. Sawin discusses how international adoptive parents, who are usually white and financially secure, navigate the complicated emotional and social terrain of integrating children into their families who have been given by less powerful communities of color. Language plays a critical role in refashioning ideas about family, downplaying guilt about possible exploitation and others’ losses, strengthening bonds in the new families, and increasing comfort in a sense of larger purpose and design.

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Episode 15 Steampunk Archaeology & the Anthropology of Science Fiction with Gail Carriger

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 15 Steampunk Archaeology & the Anthropology of Science Fiction with Gail Carriger
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Gail Carriger by photographer Vanessa Applegate (Photo courtesy of www.gailcarriger.com)

Gail Carriger is a remarkable example of an anthropologist whose training informed a creative career shift. A former archaeologist (who still occasionally gets called to the field), Carriger’s expertise in ceramic analysis and technological transitions means that she can determine how a piece of pottery was designed and produced, simply by looking at a small fragment of it. From that tiny piece of material culture, she can read how populations were coming together and sharing technological styles, and how knowledge moved across the ancient landscape.

On the cusp of completing her dissertation in archaeology, Carriger’s life took an interesting turn as she was awarded a book contract for her steampunk fantasy novel, Soulless. Now she is a much awarded, best-selling author whose books mix “comedies of manners” with paranormal romance. But this shift into literature is still greatly informed by her training in, and critiques of, anthropology and archaeology. The world of steampunk Victorian England allows her to explore the role material culture plays in everyday life, as well as how and why technologies arise or fade thanks to their unintended consequences. Her careful research into elements of the past, such as the cuisine of each particular time and place, brings to life the material experience of worlds that live in the historical and fantastical past. In addition, Carriger’s multiple series explore the remarkable diversity of past cultures, which, ironically, are often depicted in nonfiction as far more homogenous than they actually were.

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Episode 12 Friendship Beyond Dementia – the Anthropology of Aging with Dr. Janelle Taylor

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 12 Friendship Beyond Dementia - the Anthropology of Aging with Dr. Janelle Taylor
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Dr. Janelle Taylor (Photo courtesy of Dr. Taylor)

Dementia changes not only memory but identity and social roles, as well. As the fabric of who we are changes shape, our culturally-inscribed ideas about aging, personhood, and health can influence whether we experience aging as crisis or whether we develop new aspects of ourselves.

Medical Anthropologist Dr. Janelle Taylor, a professor of anthropology at University of Washington, explores aging as a cultural phenomenon, made easier or harder depending on our expectations of friends and families and our beliefs about what makes us a person. In particular, Dr. Taylor researches how successful friendships adapt in the face of dementia and why those relationships are crucial to patients and their family caregivers.
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Episode 9 The River is a Goddess: Environmental Anthropology with Dr. Georgina Drew

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 9 The River is a Goddess: Environmental Anthropology with Dr. Georgina Drew
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Dr. Georgina Drew (Photo courtesy of Dr. Drew)

The Ganga River in India is a goddess, who has a long history of protecting and caring for her followers. But as a source of water, how do followers balance their respect for the goddess amid the various ways they are supported by her? The practical needs of the surrounding population, like fresh water, electricity, and industrial development, meet the spiritual needs of absolution through water burial, redemption through bathing in her free flowing waters, and the broader desire to protect the goddess who provides for so many.

Hydroelectric dam redirects flow out of the riverbed in the Garhwal Mountains (Photo courtesy of Dr. Drew)

Environmental Anthropologist Dr. Georgina Drew explains how a river is many things to its surrounding inhabitants—they have religious concerns, economic concerns, and ecological concerns—but different people prioritize them differently. There’s no one perspective on how to use the river. Dr. Drew discusses how our cultural ideas, practices, and beliefs about the earth are central to how we impact it. Taking a humanistic, anthropological approach means viewing the partnership between the environment and ourselves, and how each impacts the other.
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