Fall for This Anthro Life: Back in Action, New Content, and our Patreon Campaign

09/27/17 • 26 min

Hey Listeners! Adam and Ryan are back from their brief summer hiatus (a time filled with fieldwork, dissertation writing, and travels abound) with new content, a fresh Patreon campaign, lined up interviews, an upcoming limited series on diversity in the university setting and much more! Support our new campaign on Patreon! Go ahead a click that nice image to visit our new page, to read about what we want to do, and how you can give securely. Just a dollar a month makes a huge difference for us!
Kicking off the new season, Adam and Ryan dive into a new FreeThink episode, in the style and length of our Conversations. In this episode, they continue to make the case for why the world needs anthropology and social science thinking more than ever. They also speak in favor of interventionist anthropology in recognition of the plethora of social issues, subaltern experiences, cultural miscommunications, and civil tensions which are in the media’s focus more than ever.
With This Anthro Life’s new season we really want to emphasize the importance of our Patreon campaign. Through Patreon, Adam and Ryan will engage listeners more directly through new content, special episodes, video, and more. For the last 5 years, TAL has been almost entirely self-funded (though a huge thanks to the few folks who have so generously contributed to the cause) and this reality makes it difficult to produce the quality content you, our listeners, have come to expect. But, we’re dedicated to persevering and continuing because we believe in the anthropological focuses we discuss, the content we produce, and in you, our listeners. We’re incredibly humbled by the fact that we are soon to celebrate our 30,000th subscriber and that our community continues to grow. We want to celebrate this with you. Please take a moment to view our Patreon page and choose which bracket is best suited for you. With any donation you make, know that you are directly contributing to TAL and your support means the world to us. TAL could not be produced without you and it will continue to grow because of you.
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Previous Episode

The Happiness Fetish Revisited

In response to several surveys that attempt to quantify happiness, Ryan, Adam, and Aneil spend this episode of This Anthro Life exploring happiness through the lens of fetishism. They discuss Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, the film Happy, and more! They seek to answer the following questions: What kinds of things make us happy? How does happiness inhere in objects and how do we use objects to display our happiness? They end on a positive note by concluding that we have control over our happiness and suggesting a happy community may be a key part of being happy.
In the episode we use the term fetish, made famous by Sigmund Freud, to mean something that points to something else. It masks what is there (I.e. a statue of a deity that seems to be what people are worshipping, but it is just a material thing that is pointing to the deity). It can be any material type of the thing that points towards an abstract idea.
3 Ways Our Imagination Fails to Guide Us to Happiness
Our imagination tends to add and remove details people might not recognize that key details are fabricated or missing from their imagined scenarios.
Imagined futures and pasts are more like the present than they actually will be. The future is not some far off thing. You are living the future.
Imagination fails to realize that things will feel different once they actually happen. We adjust to things.
Read more on thisanthrolife.com
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Next Episode

The Yin and Yang of Design Anthropology with Dr. Elizabeth Dori Tunstall

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 worries. Adam, Matt, and Dr. Tunstall have it covered and describe the five iterations of design anthropology using examples of their use in the field. Over the course of the episode Adam, Matt, and Dr. Tunstall briefly cover issues of ethics within design anthropology as well as a touching upon how to find jobs in design.
Adam, Matt, and Dr. Tunstall also make time to get into the topics of whether:
the IRS is really as bad as popular culture makes them out to be.
How can we avoid cultural misappropriation?
And finally, how do value systems get expressed in design?
“The goal of design anthropology is to create conditions of compassion among human beings and conditions of harmony as it relates to the natural world and all of the things that are within it” – Dr. Tunstall
Read more on thisanthrolife.com
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