Anthropologist On The Street

Applied Anthropologist Chris Reeder Young employs her background in urban and medical anthropology to advocate for lower-income homebuyers and older homeowners who wish to age in place.

Dr. David Sutton returns to explore the politics of food and commensality, or eating together, on the Greek island of Kalymnos, both as a way of connecting the past and present and as a form of resistance against external cultural pressures.

Action Anthropologist Dr. Dana Powell collaborates with Navajo (Diné) energy activists and African-American environmental justice activists, using anthropological methods and perspectives to assist in defining and resolving social problems.

Business anthropologist Dr. Amy Goldmacher discusses how her ethnographic work empowers product and software designers to better understand their users and customers. Using anthropological research methods, she helps design new and improved products, software, and experiences that better meet people’s needs.

Lyndsey Craig delves into the anthropology of pubic hair grooming, discussing sexual signaling, the symbolism of pubic hair with respect to hygiene, marital status, or fertility, how body hair is tied to beauty aesthetics, and how the removal of hair is both an intimate practice and a form of identity communication.

Dr. Beatriz Reyes-Foster is a medical anthropologist whose book Psychiatric Encounters explores how culture shapes the diagnosis, care, and outcomes of mental illness in a mental hospital in Yucatan, Mexico.

Anthropologist of religion Dr. James Bielo explores the creationist theme park Ark Encounter, and how its carefully choreographed design seeks not simply to entertain, but to transform the minds of attendees.

Environmental anthropologist Dr. Jessica O’Reilly works in the least populated continent on earth by far: Antarctica. Working with an array of scientists, she turns the anthropological gaze on science itself, helping to demystify the scientific process and how scientists come to know what they know.

Researching the history and architecture of mosques in America, anthropologist Dr. Jacqueline Fewkes examines the relationship between local history, physical space, and social practice to showcase the incredible diversity of contemporary Muslim communities.

Why do modern humans in industrialized nations face dental problems that don’t affect primates, modern hunter-gatherers, and previous generations of humans? Biological Anthropologist Dr. Julia Boughner explains how cultural practices affect the development of our teeth and jaws.

Cultural anthropologist Dr. David Sutton explains why fictional films and television sitcoms can be important in revealing hidden cultural rules, and discusses what the movie Arrival gets right, and wrong, about language, time, and anthropology.

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. Folklorist and anthropologist Dr. Patricia Sawin examines how parents’ stories of international adoption help build new families, while sometimes over-simplifying difficult issues of race, privilege, and the power and limits of love.

At the intersection of business anthropology and the anthropology of food, Jesse Dart researches how and why tech companies offer their employees free food. Looking at the same company’s practices in several different countries, he draws out how patterns of eating reflect regional cultural beliefs about labor, land, and tradition, and how corporate practices both reflect and transform these ideas as well.

Gail Carriger is an archaeologist and bestselling author whose steampunk romance series reimagines the technology, social diversity, and moral rigidity of Victorian England. While her British Isles are home to werewolves, vampires, and the occasional preternatural, the fantasy elements allow her to explore historical and contemporary issues of colonialism, gender and sexuality, social class, and technological fads.

When leaders of multicultural societies emphasize ethnic division over national unity, assigning blame to the “other” and focusing on our differences rather than our similarities, the stage is set for political violence… or worse. Dr. Jennie Burnet’s research into the causes and consequences of the 1994 Rwandan genocide reveals why we should be concerned about the current political moment in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, but it also suggests ways people can come together and take action to unify. Through diverse political representation, adept leadership, and public reinforcement of unity over division, other nations can avoid the catastrophic legacy that Rwandans are still recovering from today.

By looking at the lives and changing politics of archaeologists studying New England shell middens, Dr. Kirakosian examines how meaning shifts over time, how knowledge is created, whose knowledge counts, and why responsible science means taking into account the power and perceptions of the people behind the research.

Aging is a cultural phenomenon, made easier or harder depending on our expectations of friendships and families and our beliefs about what makes us a person. Medical Anthropologist Dr. Janelle Taylor talks about her research into successful friendships with folks with dementia, how friendships can adapt in the face of dementia, and why those relationships are crucial to patients and their family caregivers.

To combat growing the wildfires in Arizona, select inmates are temporarily released from prison to battle the flames. In this episode, I talk with anthropology doctoral candidate Lindsey Raisa Feldman works alongside and photographs the complex labor politics of these men and women, whose dangerous job is both exploitative and intensely meaningful.

Dr. Jeanine Staples, Associate Professor at Penn State, researches the intersection of race, gender, education, and literature, revealing how young black girls internalize social messages about their lack of worth, how those messages threaten the girls’ health and well-being, and how schools both perpetuate the messages and offer a unique opportunity to stop them.

The Ganga River in India is a goddess – but does that mean she provides for her followers, or her followers need to protect her? Environmental Anthropologist Dr. Georgina Drew explains how a river is many things to its surrounding inhabitants, and how taking an ethnographic approach means viewing the partnership between the environment and culture, as well as how each impacts the other.

Transgender politics have been everywhere lately, from North Carolina bathrooms to Presidential tweets, and sociology doctoral candidate Brett Nava-Coulter explains why the category of transgender is both diverse and complicated, and why policy protecting transgender youth is so important.

Bioarchaeologist Dr. Sara K. Becker examines the patterns found on the skeletal remains of the Tiwanaku, a state that emerged in Peru and Bolivia 1000-1500 years ago. By understanding the life, labor, and health of the Tiwanaku people, Dr. Becker hopes to understand how such a large and ethnically diverse community lived in peaceful coexistence.

To combat misrepresentation (and lack of representation) of South Asian cultures in American children’s literature, Sailaja Joshi founded Bharat Babies, an independent publishing house that creates books for young children, telling “stories about India's Heritage.” Sailaja talks about growing up Indian American, why cultural representation matters, and why anthropology should be central in any business endeavor.

Rev. Dr. Miranda Hassett is an Episcopal priest and anthropologist who 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 and to instead look overseas, making alliances with conservative African congregations. Rev. Dr. Hassett talks culture, politics, religion, and how she uses anthropology to help her congregants find more meaning in their lives.

Filmmakers Amy Geller and Allie Humenuk talk about kinship, gender roles, and parenting in their award-winning documentary. “The Guys Next Door” features Erik and Sandro, whose friend Rachel offers to be a surrogate for their two children. I sit down in a coffee shop with Amy and Allie to discuss how their film both represents and impacts nontraditional families, and how family structures may change, but family life is often surprisingly unsurprising.

Archaeologist Dr. Lance Greene digs up life on a nineteenth century plantation in North Carolina, where Cherokees, European-Americans, and enslaved Africans lived and worked together. Dr. Greene pieces together archaeological data, historical documents, and fictional writings to provide insight into both how Cherokee were changing to attempt to fit in to European-American culture and the ways they were resisting it. Along the way we talk about indigeneity, culture, DNA, and why race is far more complicated than we think it is.

While it may be true that “breast is best”, it is not always easiest, particularly where women are struggling with overwork and lack of social support. Medical anthropologist Beatriz Reyes-Foster discusses the rising pressure on moms to breast feed, why human breast milk has become a hot commodity in the U.S., and how parents have become creative in networking among moms who have milk to spare.

From Indiana Jones to Bones to that graduate student kidnapped by pirates on Archer, there are many different representations of anthropology in pop culture, but what do real anthropologists do? In this first episode of The Anthropologist on the Street podcast, Dr. Angela Jenks explains how anthropology helps us understand what it means to be human, and how the field could help us solve some of our toughest social problems.