Archive for Race

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 10 Racism, Educational Anthropology, & Everyday Terror with Dr. Jeanine Staples

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 10 Racism, Educational Anthropology, & Everyday Terror with Dr. Jeanine Staples
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Dr. Jeanine Staples (photo courtesy of Dr. Staples)

The effects of racism are tangible and physical. They are carried in the bodies of their victims. But how does racism work? Why can it be hard to see? How do we combat racist messages that are woven into the very fabric of our social institutions?

Dr. Jeanine Staples works at the intersection of race, gender, identity, and education. By examining the subtle messages that devalue blackness, Afrocentric styles and fashions, Ebonics, and other cultural elements associated with African Americans, as well as the complex messages all girls receive about their sexuality and social worth, Dr. Staples reveals how African American girls internalize the simple message that they are not, and never will be, good enough.

Equally disconcerting is the way social institutions like schools, often thought of as neutral, act as places where cultural messages of value (and devaluation) are loudest. Far beyond teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, schools are a primary site where cultural values like competition, gender biases, and individualism are taught to the next generation. When those values include subconscious race discrimination, where black folks are coded as lazy or criminal or where black hairstyles are viewed as socially problematic, the broader messages about race affect everyone in society.

Dr. Staples discusses how we can make these messages more visible, why we need to take them seriously, and what we can do about them.
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Episode 6 “Bharat Babies” Books & Business Anthropology with Sailaja Joshi

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 6 "Bharat Babies" Books & Business Anthropology with Sailaja Joshi
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Bharat Babies C.E.O. Sailaja Ganti Joshi (photo courtesy of Sailaja Joshi)

Sailaja Joshi is the CEO and founder of Bharat Babies, an independent publishing house that “designs and produces developmentally appropriate books for young children that tell stories about India’s Heritage.” She was inspired to launch her business when she struggled to find books for her young daughter that would represent the unique hybrid nature of growing up American with Indian or Pakistani heritage.

Bharat Babies’ books cover Hinduism, Islam, and a myriad of South Asian subcultural identities, and readers have responded with gratitude. For CEO Sailaja Joshi, it has been affirming, not only of the need for multiple voices in literature, but of the need for more anthropology in the business world
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Episode 3 Digging for Truth on a Cherokee Plantation – with Dr. Lance Greene

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 3 Digging for Truth on a Cherokee Plantation - with Dr. Lance Greene
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Dr. Lance Greene (photo courtesy of Lance Greene)

Looking at a complex moment in American history, when Cherokee were being forced off their land by President Andrew Jackson, Dr. Lance Greene’s research brings to life a nineteenth century plantation in North Carolina, where Cherokees, whites, and enslaved Africans lived and worked together. Dr. Greene pieces together life on a Cherokee/Euro-American plantation through archaeological digs and historical documents, providing insight into both how Cherokee were changing to attempt to fit in to European-American culture and the ways they were resisting it. Dr. Greene walks us through what archaeology on a plantation site can reveal, and how the process of writing fictional stories of everyday life actually helps him fill in the gaps in his research.
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