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Archive for politics

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 23 Psychiatric Culture Clashes with Dr. Beatriz Reyes-Foster

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
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.

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Episode 14 Political Divisiveness & the Encouragement of Violence with Dr. Jennie Burnet

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 14 Political Divisiveness & the Encouragement of Violence with Dr. Jennie Burnet
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Dr. Jennie Burnet (Photo courtesy of World Affairs Council of Atlanta, 2016)

When multicultural societies begin dividing into factions based on ethnic identities, assigning blame to the “other” and emphasizing the differences among us rather than the similarities, the stage is set for political violence… or worse.

Dr. Jennie Burnet researches the causes and consequences of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, two ethnic groups, the Hutus and Tutsis, lived side-by-side as neighbors and friends, until policies implemented under European colonization redefined the ethnic identities and shifted the power dynamics between them. After independence, the legacy of those changes created bitter divides that widened under political leadership.

Dr. Burnet is a Professor of Global Studies and Anthropology at Georgia State University, and the Associate Director of the Global Studies Institute. In her research she examines the causes of the genocide, how people pieced the country together afterwards, and what lessons can be learned about the role political leadership plays in preventing, or triggering, violence.
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Episode 11 Prison Labor, Fighting Wildfires, & Crafting New Identities with Lindsey Raisa Feldman

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 11 Prison Labor, Fighting Wildfires, & Crafting New Identities with Lindsey Raisa Feldman
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Anthropology Doctoral Candidate Lindsey Raisa Feldman (Photo courtesy of Ms. Feldman)

The United States has faced an astonishing number of wildfires in the fall of 2017, but who is on the front line combating them? It turns out there are a number of state, community, and federal agencies battling the flames, but one group we don’t often hear about is men and women serving time in prison, released temporarily to fight fires on the frontlines.

Lindsey Feldman is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of Arizona, and she has spent the last few years photographing, interviewing, and fighting fires alongside members of the prison wildland firefighters in Arizona. While Feldman, and many others, maintain that the use of prisoners for underpaid and dangerous labor presents deep ethical problems, Feldman’s on-the-ground ethnographic research provides a different, coexisting perspective. For prisoners able to join the firefighting teams, the experience can be extremely meaningful, allowing them to forge new relationships, new identities, and new promises for life after prison.
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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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Episode 5 God, Politics, and Anthropology – with Rev. Dr. Miranda Hassett

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 5 God, Politics, and Anthropology - with Rev. Dr. Miranda Hassett
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Rev. Dr. Miranda Hassett (photo courtesy of Rev. Hassett)

Rev. Dr. Miranda Hassett received her Ph.D. in anthropology before becoming an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church. In her book, Anglican Communion in Crisis: How Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies are Reshaping Anglicanism, she explores how political polarization drove a global wedge in the Anglican church, driving some conservative white American Episcopalians to break from the broader American church, instead allying with conservative African congregations. Rev. Hassett continues using anthropological methods today to better understand her congregants at St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Madison, Wisconsin, and discusses how anthropology can help people foster more meaning in their lives.
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