This Anthro Life

Show Notes Building a New Labor Market for Global Design Talent with Fredrik Thomassen More and more businesses are switching to remote work amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But one startup was ahead of the curve, having been 100% remote since its inception in 2016. That startup is Superside, a fully distributed design operations platform that seeks to support a global remote workforce. By introducing...

The vast majority of published scientific literature and new research is hidden behind paywalls. Worse, what few accessible papers available online are oftentimes written in jargon, i.e., specialist language that can alienate non-expert readers. Combined, these two issues make it difficult for researchers, scientists, and even entrepreneurs to build on new discoveries and for members of the public...

What makes the human mind unique? How do we know there’s a future, and how do we recall the past? In this episode of This Anthro Life, Byron Reese, serial entrepreneur, technologist, and author of “Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think: How Humans Learned to See the Future--and Shape It,” discusses these questions and more with host Adam Gamwell. Together, Byron and Adam explore the three leaps in h...

Ashley Meredith serves as the National Cultural Anthropologist and Deputy National Historic Preservation Officer for the Federated States of Micronesia. Micronesia is a sovereign island country in Oceania situated northeast of Australia and Papua New Guinea and consists of 600 islands covering a massive area of around 1 million square miles. There are 18 languages spoken across the islands. Echoin...

Interdependence is the idea that the wellbeing of our world and for our physical and emotional selves depends on those around us, yet when we find ourselves up against a challenge bigger than ourselves, our sense of interdependence becomes stronger. When we move that scale even larger (i.e. a global climate crisis), interdependence becomes paramount. Climate change not only affects our everyday li...

When we think about social science and social scientists working out in the world, we tend to jump to the science part, you know jobs that focus on research - consumer research, user experience research, or qualitative studies for non-profits. But if you have any experience with therapy, whether as a patient or therapist, worked with a career or life coach, or anything to do with conflict mediatio...

If you’re alive in 2022 you’ve probably heard of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Whether you’re an active trader, just dabble, or think you’d never touch the stuff, cryptocurrency raises a fascinating challenge to the question of what is money? And how can technology fundamentally reshape how we engage in finance and social life? Is crypto a revolution? If you're listening to this episode in early 202...

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 Reto...

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 s...

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...

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 med...

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 Podc...

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 mig...

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...

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...

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 exp...

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...

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 whi...

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...

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...

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...

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, o...

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. Farewel...

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...

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...