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.

Anthropologist On The Street

E25 Product Design Ethnography with Dr. Amy Goldmacher

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.

E24 Pubic Hair Grooming as Cultural Practice with Lyndsey Craig

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.

E23 Psychiatric Culture Clashes with Dr. Beatriz Reyes-Foster

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.

E22 Converting Belief at a Creationist Theme Park with Dr. James Bielo

 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.

E21 Antarctic Anthropology with Dr. Jessica O’Reilly

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.

E20 American Mosques with Jacqueline Fewkes

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.

E19 The Culture of Teeth with Dr. Julia Boughner

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.

E18 Language, Time, and the Anthropology of Arrival with Dr. David Sutton

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.

E17 The Folklore of International Adoption with Dr. Patricia Sawin

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.

E16 Free Food in the Corporate World with Jesse Dart

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.

E15 Steampunk Archaeology & the Anthropology of Science Fiction with Gail Carriger

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.

E14 Political Divisiveness & the Encouragement of Violence with Dr. Jennie Burnet

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.

E13 The Shifting Tides & Interpersonal Politics of Archaeology with Dr. Katie Kirakosian

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.

E12 Friendship Beyond Dementia - The Anthropology of Aging with Dr. Janelle Taylor

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.

E11 Prison Labor, Fighting Wildfires, & Crafting New Identities with Lindsey Raisa Feldman

How many ways are there to be human? Each week Anthropologist on the Street Dr. Carie Little Hersh invites different cultural experts to illuminate the hidden ideas, practices, and power dynamics that make our lives both familiar and strange.

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Anthropologist On The Street

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