Anthropologist On The Street

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.

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 Greene pieces together archaeological data, historical documents, and fictional writings to provide insight into both how Cherokee were changing to attempt to fit in to European-American culture and the ways they were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.