This Anthro Life

Think you could eat a cricket? What about a spider? In this episode of TAL Adam Gamwell and guest host Andrea Eller are chatting with Julie Lesnik about her new book, Edible Insects and Human Evolution. Listen in as they discuss why Americans tend to be so grossed out by bugs, and if it’s always been that way. Edible Insects, part 2 We know many of you are educators, and some are already using TAL...

Edible Insects part 1. Will crickets ever catch on as an alternative source of protein in the United States? How about cockroach “milk”? Why do people in so many parts of the world NOT eat insects? Where does that disgust for or against eating certain things come from? Adam is joined once again by guest host and biological anthropologist Andrea Eller to dig into edible insects, what just might be...

Part 2 of The Social Life of Robots, with Emma Backe. In this episode hosts Adam Gamwell, Ryan Collins and Emma Backe tackle sex and gender norms underlying digital voice assistants like Siri, Cortana and Alexa, the history and gendering of science and technology studies (STS) and what this means in an era of AI and robots, and third, theories of rights such as the right to work, the right to sex...

Welcome to CultureMade: Heritage Enterprise in a World on the Move, an audio collaboration between the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the American Anthropological Association, and This Anthro Life Podcast.  In this fifth and final episode, Adam Gamwell, Leslie Walker, and Ryan Collins focus on cultural survival, a complex subject framed by migration, misconceptions over language and identity, as w...

In the pop culture imagination, perceptions of robots and AI occupy a space of mystery and intrigue that gravitates between harbingers of impending societal collapse and bringers of mythical salvation. However, where does contemporary science and technology stand? Moreover, how do the social experiences of the past and in the present color our understandings of emerging technological realities? On...

Welcome to CultureMade: Heritage Enterprise in a World on the Move, an audio collaboration from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the American Anthropological Association, and This Anthro Life Podcast. In this episode, Adam Gamwell, Leslie Walker, and Ryan Collins dive into the topic of curation. What does it mean to put on a festival or put on a museum exhibit? How can we understand culture on d...

On this episode of This Anthro Life, hosts Adam Gamwell and Matt Artz are joined by assistant professor and musicologist Nate Sloan and music journalist and songwriter Charlie Harding, the hosts of Switched on Pop, a podcast about the making and meaning of popular music. On Switched on Pop, Charlie and Nate break down pop songs to figure out what makes a hit and what is its place in culture. They...

Welcome to CultureMade: Heritage Enterprise in a World on the Move , an audio collaboration from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the American Anthropological Association and This Anthro Life Podcast In the US, fashion has been relegated to large impersonal retail spaces and increasingly online stores. Fashion in the US, as many know all too well, is transactional. The sense of community one has...

“I hope that more people will listen to more music outside of their own little comfort zone. I think that we enrich ourselves, we are better human beings when you open up your heart to other cultures, other music, to other worlds to other points of view. Because ultimately, as I said in the very beginning, we’re all the same. We’re all humans, and we all can connect in different ways with the thin...

Welcome to CultureMade: Heritage Enterprise in a World on the Move, an audio collaboration series from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the American Anthropological Association and This Anthro Life Podcast. Join hosts Adam Gamwell, Leslie Walker and Ryan Collins as they explore what it means to craft, form, and make culture in a world defined by movement, migration, and changing borders. Step in...

This Anthro Life is opening the conversation with EPIC (the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community) on the theme of Evidence. Taking center stage at this year's Annual EPIC Conference. “Evidence” is a subject of increasing social importance in today’s political climate. What constitutes evidence and when it is found to be credible all have far-reaching consequences. Because of this, practicing...

Andrea Eller is a biological anthropologist driven by a question of how do our bodies continue to react to things today? In other words, how does evolution continue to impact us and why is this important? To address this, Andrea Eller looks at how bodies respond and adapt to circumstances of chronic stresses. The stresses that Eller looks at, however, are both physiological and social. Not only do...

When TAL first interviewed Hamilton Morris, it was shortly after he and his production team had finished season 1 of Hamilton’s Pharmacopoeia. Now, Morris has completed two seasons of his critically acclaimed show on VICE. This time on TAL, Morris has a more reflective tone. With Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins, Morris shares his experiences as a filmmaker in traditional and counter-culture environm...

Dr. Tricia Wang sees her work consulting as sitting at the crossroads of data and social justice. As a global tech ethnographer, Dr. Wang is obsessed with how technology and humans shape each other. In her own words, she wants to know, “How do the tools we use enable us to do more of what humans do, like socializing, emoting, and collaborating? And how do human perspectives shape the technology we...

Welcome back listeners! Adam and Ryan have taken some time away as of late to finish and defend their dissertations. Now that Ryan is done, and Adam defends in just one week (so close!), TAL is getting back into gear with new content in the development and production stages. Now, another key detail, several episodes recorded earlier this spring are also on their way. Some of these are guest interv...

Thanks to the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) for having Adam Gamwell and Matt Artz of This Anthro Life present at the annual meeting in Philadelphia. We presented as part of the New Methods, Interventions And Approaches session. Our paper title was Consulting Podcasters: Prototyping a Democratic Tool for Multiple Voices, Storytelling and Solution Finding. You can read it here.  The sessio...

On this episode of This Anthro Life, hosts Ryan Collins and Adam Gamwell are joined by TAL correspondent and guest host Astrid Countee and by a very special guest, Valorie Aquino. They joined us to talk about the 2017 March for Science. Valorie is one of the key organizing 30’s something scientists who helped make the 2017 march a reality. As she conveys in this episode, doing so was no easy task....

Welcome listeners to the second installment of our Diversity and Inclusion crossover series, bringing together This Anthro Life with Brandeis University. For those of you who are new to the show, This Anthro Life (TAL) was launched as a scholar-practitioner program designed to bring anthropological and social science research and thinking to interdisciplinary and public audiences. The original ide...

Welcome to Story Slamming Anthropology. This series features both innovative narrative and audio performance drawing on the deep toolkit and methods of anthropology.  The goal with Story Slamming Anthropology is to invoke the public  facing spirit of Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Melville Herskovits and many  others to speak to 21st century concerns from a comparative perspective  in clear language....

Design and anthropology have been  seen together with increasing frequency over the last few years, but how  do design and anthropology fit together in relation to industry? And,  how does this pairing create insight? Adam and Matt (a guest host at  This Anthro Life) are joined by Dr. Natalie Hanson to explore these questions and more. Dr. Hanson has been working at the  intersection of business s...

Welcome listeners to the first installment of our Diversity and Inclusion crossover series, bringing together This Anthro Life with Brandeis University. For those of you who are new to the show, This Anthro Life (TAL) was launched as a scholar-practitioner program designed to bring anthropological and social science research and thinking to interdisciplinary and public audiences. The original idea...

In this Conversations episode, This  Anthro Life hosts Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins are joined by author  Andrew Rowen to discuss his new novel, Encounters Unforeseen: 1492 Retold. Coming in the months trailing the 525th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s  (or Cristobal Colon’s) voyage to the America’s, Rowen’s novel seeks to  add some much needed depth to the modern myths on the subject.  Enc...

In this Conversations episode of This  Anthro Life, Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins explore the subject of  sensory ethnography –  a focus in anthropology that tends to deemphasize  the written word to explore visual, acoustic, and other sensory  perceptions. Today, researchers explore senses increasing in the media  through virtual simulations, visual and auditory stimuli that cause  different reac...

Will Emojis be the death of writing? Are emojis modern day hieroglyphs? Is the increased use of emojis in textual conversations a sign of the end of language as we know it? Join us for one of our most popular conversations revisited! Your trusty hosts Ryan and Adam discuss the origin of emojis as well as the importance of actively seeking to understand the hidden biases of language. What is an Emo...

In this Conversations episode of This Anthro Life, Adam Gamwell and guest host/TAL correspondent Matt Artz  explore the world of Design Anthropology with the help of Dr. Elizabeth  “Dori” Tunstall. Design Anthropology is a subject near and dear to our  hosts, who have been excited to devote an entire episode to the subject.  But, what is Design Anthropology? If you’re scratching your head, no  wor...