This Anthro Life

Dr. Meena Kaushik takes us through her story from the revolutionary idea in the late 1970s of applying semiotics to brand and market research to founding Quantum, which today is a global enterprise research organization in seven countries, through how they have digitally adapted insights research in the face of COVID.
Meena Kaushik started her journey as an academic studying the symbolism of death rituals in Hinduism. She conducted extensive fieldwork amongst the Doms of Varanasi, a low caste community working in the city’s cremation grounds, for her Ph.D. in Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics.
She ventured into qualitative market research by accident and fell in love. Her training in ethnography deepened how consumer behaviour, consumer culture and consumer psyche were being understood in India in the mid to late 1980s.
A consulting stint with the Indian Market Research Bureau soon became a full fledged position and she helped found the qualitative division at MARG as a Director of Qualitative Research. Kaushik adapted anthropological methods, semiotics, and social psychology to qualitative market research problems in India, giving qualitative approaches a credibility they’d never had in the past.
In 1990 she founded Quantum Consumer Solutions with Srilekha Agarwal and Meera Vasudevan, Asia’s first purely qualitative research firm. Today Quantum has operations in seven countries with 220 employees.
TAL spoke to Dr. Kaushik about the birth of this new “qualitative consciousness” in post-liberalization India, and how to create value for qualitative insights in industries that have been traditionally dominated by numbers.
We dig into:

How she brought anthropologist and qualitative insights to market research in India
Fairness and Skin Lightening Creams: How interdisciplinary social science can get a company to reframe brands around empowerment
Acknowledge privileges, like the cultural preference for lighter skin, without ignoring or pandering to it
Why we should be talking about insights research rather than qualitative research, and how her company has adapted to digital ethnography and new forms of research since COVID rocked the world
Digital ethnography methods to create a “semiosphere” > a holistic view of how people make meaning in their lives
Advice for transitioning into market research, skills agencies look for
Adapting from research as an output to design strategy, offering solutions on top of research insights
Commodities and the crisis of meaning: Why it’s essential for brands to have higher meaning and purpose in the lives of consumers

TAL Correspondent and this episode's host: Madhuri Karak is Community Engagement Lead at Rare’s Center for Behavior & the Environment, managing a virtual learning platform for practitioners blending behavioral insights with design thinking to solve our biggest environmental challenges. She is currently a Mellon - American Council of Learned Societies Public Fellow and has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology. You can find more of her work here.
Organization: https://www.quantumcs.com
Interview w/Kaushik: https://wow.outlookbusiness.com/meena-kaushik/

Credits
Production: Madhuri Karak and Adam Gamwell
Music: Zanzibar - Jones Meadow, Epidemic Sounds
Art: Adam Gamwell

---

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

About This Anthro Life:
This Anthro Life is your podcast for thought leadership at the intersection of culture, work, and storytelling. We bring you interviews and insights for business leaders, design thinkers, researchers, and anyone curious about how culture shapes our lives.

Explore more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at thisanthrolife.org and join our Substack community at thisanthrolife.substack.com.

Phil Surles is a cultural anthropologist and consultant who focuses on branding. He works with companies to change their culture for the better and focuses on integrating anthropology into industry. From art school to anthropology to industry Phil discusses how he combined all of his passions into his consulting work. Phil, Astrid, and Adam discuss what it means to be an anthropologist working in industry and ethical issues that may arise. Phil is also working on a new platform called Mindshare where businesses can tap into the expertise of human scientists for expert interviews, consulting and more.

On today’s Episode

How to study anthropology with the intention of going into industry, not academia

To intervene or not intervene-- the anthropologists ethical dilemma

How anthropologists can bring their ethics and methodology to industry and change it for the better

What is a public intellectual and how does it relate to thought leadership and activism


Where to Find Phil Surles:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Mindshare

Episode Credits
Music (Epidemic Sounds)
Intro: Embody by Ballpoint
Outro: Tried in Fire by Ballpoint
Episode art- Sara Schmieder
Production- Sara Schmieder, Elizabeth Smyth, and Adam Gamwell

---

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

About This Anthro Life:
This Anthro Life is your podcast for thought leadership at the intersection of culture, work, and storytelling. We bring you interviews and insights for business leaders, design thinkers, researchers, and anyone curious about how culture shapes our lives.

Explore more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at thisanthrolife.org and join our Substack community at thisanthrolife.substack.com.

If Dr. Hellen Fisher isn’t a household name in your house (yet), her work certainly is. Helen is a biological anthropologist and basically the reason you can date online. She’s an expert on romantic love, gender differences, the evolution of human emotions and attraction. She has also been the Chief Scientific Advisor for Match.com and was instrumental in their offshoot, Chemistry.com. She has explored how love patterns are actually deeply coded in our physiology and neuropsychology. We talk about how to understand sex, love, and dating across human behavior, patterns in courtship, and the evolution of bonding.
But beyond this, Helen is a wildly popular author, TED speaker and public intellectual. To this end brings to the table a wealth of insight into how to translate anthropological insights in ways that feel meaningful to people today.
Hellen discusses her career path, how she strayed from the field of academia, became an accredited author and eventually an advisor to Match.com We discuss how to handle media attention, the tactics of public speaking, and how to connect to your audiences.
In this episode we focus on:

Fisher’s formula for making anthropology matter in the mainstream

The biological anthropology of how we find love and who we are attracted to

The ways in which we can apply/sell anthropology in a context outside of academia

Effective tactics of public speaking and audience engagement


Guest Bio: Helen Fisher is a biological anthropologist who studies human behavior, love, and attraction. She has been the Chief Scientific Advisor for Match.com for ten years and was instrumental in their offshoot, Chemistry.com. Additionally Fisher is known for her TedTalks and is even a Ted All-Star but not only is she popular on the TedTalk circuit she also has appeared in several YouTube videos and has written books about love and relationships. Some of her books include Anatomy of Love (2016), Why We Love (2004), and Why Him Why Her? (2009).
Where to Find Helen Fisher:
helenfisher.com
Pew Research on online dating
Music: Epidemic Sounds

Girl Like You (Instrumental Version) - Flux Vortex

Sweet Talk (Instrumental Version) - Tyra Chantey


Episode Art: Sara Schmieder
Episode Production: Elizabeth Smyth, Sara Schmieder, Sarah McDonough, Adam Gamwell
Leave a Review for our Book Give Away! (We've got one copy of Ghost Work with your name on it! - Leave us a review at one of the sites below and email a screen shot to [email protected] so we know it's you).
This Anthro Life - Anthropology Podcast | Podchaser
‎This Anthro Life on Apple Podcasts

---

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

About This Anthro Life:
This Anthro Life is your podcast for thought leadership at the intersection of culture, work, and storytelling. We bring you interviews and insights for business leaders, design thinkers, researchers, and anyone curious about how culture shapes our lives.

Explore more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at thisanthrolife.org and join our Substack community at thisanthrolife.substack.com.

TAL Correspondent Sara Schmieder brings us an all new interview about the power of cemetery restoration, race in the American South, and bringing legacy to light.
Dr. Ryan Smith is a professor of religious history, material culture, and historic preservation at Virginia Commonwealth University. His latest book Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries (2020) explores the history and reclamation of sacred cemeteries through the lens of race. By working with friends groups from various Richmond cemeteries he charts their evolution over time and how abandoned cemeteries have been reborn. Dr. Smith also authored Robert Morris’s Folly: The Architectural and Financial Failures of an American Founder (2014) and Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti-Catholicism and American Church Designs in the Nineteenth Century (2006).

In this episode we discuss:
· What it means to be a friend of a cemetery
· How cemeteries are being revived and protected
· Segregation and cemeteries
· The importance of sacred spaces for Black, Jewish, and other marginalized communities

Links:
https://www.richmondcemeteries.org/
https://friendsofeastend.com/
https://shockoehillcemetery.org/

Episode Art: Sara Schmieder
Producers: Sara Schmieder, Adam Gamwell
Music: Epidemic Sounds
Bam Bam – Yomoti
Shades of Purple – Gregory David

---

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

About This Anthro Life:
This Anthro Life is your podcast for thought leadership at the intersection of culture, work, and storytelling. We bring you interviews and insights for business leaders, design thinkers, researchers, and anyone curious about how culture shapes our lives.

Explore more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at thisanthrolife.org and join our Substack community at thisanthrolife.substack.com.

In today’s episode Adam Gamwell and Astrid Countee are joined by multispecies anthropologist John Hartigan jr. John is an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In his latest work, Shaving the Beasts: Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain, John studies the social lives of wild horses in Spain and Catalonia and the Spanish ritual dating back to the 1500s of “Rapa das Bestas”- in which villagers heard wild horses together into public ceremonial rings and shave their manes and tails. Why is an anthropologist studying horses you ask? John’s work dives into the complex social lives of these horses, what happens with human ritual causes violence and social breakdown - in this case amongst horses - and asks the question of how we can learn about human culture from other species?
In this episode we focus on:

What studying nonhuman species like plants and horses tells us about being human

How to do rapid ethnographic fieldwork

How the sociality of humans shapes and is shaped by other species

Why ecology needs anthropology and vice versa


Where to Find John Hartigan:
John Hartigan Jr. is an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who focuses on multispecies ethnography, media, and race. He has done fieldwork in Spain, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Detroit, Michigan. Hartigan’s latest book is Shaving The Beast: Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain, in which he explores the ritual of rapa das bestas in Galicia, Spain where villagers heard wild horses together to shave their manes and tails. Through multispecies ethnography, Hartigan tells the story of this ritual through the horses’ eyes, experiencing the traumatic event as he tells the story of the horses and their society. Hartigan has also authored Care of the Species: Cultivating Biodiversity in Mexico and Spain (2017), Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (1999), Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (2005), What Can You Say? America’s National Conversation on Race (2010), and Aesop’s Anthropology: A Multispecies Approach.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/aesopsanthro

Music: Epidemic Sounds
Tilden Parc - The Weekend (Instrumental Version)
Nebulas [ocean jams]
Episode Art: Sara Schmieder
Leave a Review for our Book Give Away!
This Anthro Life - Anthropology Podcast | Podchaser
‎This Anthro Life on Apple Podcasts

---

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

About This Anthro Life:
This Anthro Life is your podcast for thought leadership at the intersection of culture, work, and storytelling. We bring you interviews and insights for business leaders, design thinkers, researchers, and anyone curious about how culture shapes our lives.

Explore more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at thisanthrolife.org and join our Substack community at thisanthrolife.substack.com.

BOOK GIVEAWAY!! Leave a Review of This Anthro Life for a chance to win a copy of Ghost Work! Leave us a written review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser by May 8, 2021, and email us a screenshot (so we know it's you) at [email protected].
We'll randomly pick four winners out of the group from anyone who submits a review by May 8th, 2021. Now just a heads up: We're only counting serious reviews where you write something thoughtful. We'll take five stars of course if you want to just help out, but please no writing "I'm just doing this to get a free book." Feel free to share what you love about the podcast, why you find it valuable, How long you been listening or what keeps you listening? Remember, reviews help others discover the show and help us shape the content based on what you find valuable, so thanks for participating, we can't wait to hear from you!
Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/this-anthro-life-216403
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id871241283
Mary Gray is an anthropologist whose work explores how technology informs work, a sense of identity, and human rights. Gray applies these concepts as the Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and as the Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Additionally she remains in a faculty position at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. Gray has also authored books such as In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth and Out In the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America but her most recent book, coauthored with Siddharth Suri Ghostwork: How to Stop Silicon Valleyfrom Building a New Global Underclass focuses on how task based work is being utilized by bigger businesses and how this represents a change in the way we conceptualize work.
In this episode we focus on:

What is Ghost Work?
The gap between what a person can do and what a computer can do
Algorithmic cruelty
The future of work and what that means for contract labor
Tech not as devices, but as conduits for social connection
How to bring empathy into the workplace


Where to Find Mary Gray:
Website:https://marylgray.org/
Twitter:https://twitter.com/marylgray
Linkedin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/marylgraymsr/
Music: Epidemic Sounds

Dylan Sitts - Ice Cold Beverage

91 Nova - Lushwork

Blue Steel - Up Here


Episode Art: Adam Gamwell
Photograph in Episode Art: Adrianne Mathiowetz
Episode Production: Elizabeth Smyth, Sarah McDonough, Adam Gamwell

---

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

About This Anthro Life:
This Anthro Life is your podcast for thought leadership at the intersection of culture, work, and storytelling. We bring you interviews and insights for business leaders, design thinkers, researchers, and anyone curious about how culture shapes our lives.

Explore more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at thisanthrolife.org and join our Substack community at thisanthrolife.substack.com.

Oscar Barrera is a Business Anthropologist based out of Veracruz, Mexico who brings a global mindset to helping businesses turn hurdles into opportunities for positive change. He is an expert in innovation, change management, and strategy. In this episode in partnership with Experience By Design podcast cohosts Adam Gamwell and Gary David dig into Oscar's story to learn the steps he took in moving from academia to business. We also dig into

follow along case stories of how Oscar used the social sciences to help businesses see and solve organizational problems, find new marketing opportunities, and help people craft new narratives that empower them to be the heroes of their own stories
why we believe it is not only ethical to bring the social sciences into business, but why it is fundamentally necessary to do so
how to get started learning the world of business

This episode is jam packed with great stories and advice!
Connect with Oscar on LinkedIn
Oscar's website (Spanish): Antropología Corporativa

---

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

About This Anthro Life:
This Anthro Life is your podcast for thought leadership at the intersection of culture, work, and storytelling. We bring you interviews and insights for business leaders, design thinkers, researchers, and anyone curious about how culture shapes our lives.

Explore more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at thisanthrolife.org and join our Substack community at thisanthrolife.substack.com.

Take a walk with anthropologist and consultant Grant McCracken and host Adam Gamwell, as they discuss Grant's new book The New Honor Code: A Simple Plan for Raising Our Standards and Restoring Our Good Names and dig into Grant's uncanny ability to excavate and weave together (American) culture, media, and storytelling, and pull out provocative insights like the need to get more anthropologists and cultural experts into the C-Suite, how we might re-invent honor in the contemporary world, and how setting anthropology free from the academy can reshape it and make the field better for it.
In The New Honor Code, Grant draws together ideas from Elizabethan England, insights found while hanging out in people's living rooms interviewing them about their television watching habits for Netflix, the rise of celebrity culture as the closest thing we have to honor today - and why that's a problem - and the seemingly uncrossable gap between American boomers and millennials/GenZ. In mixing all these ideas together, he asks what is honor, why did it seem to disappear from our culture and what would it look like to create a system of honor in contemporary United States that would dissuade people from acting badly with impunity.
We dig into all these topics in this episode and Grant has some great advice for any social scientist looking to go into consulting or business or if you're in business, how we can be more savvy and practical about infusing anthropological mindsets and thinking into organizations without hitting people over the head with it, especially if they find the idea of culture confusing.

---

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

About This Anthro Life:
This Anthro Life is your podcast for thought leadership at the intersection of culture, work, and storytelling. We bring you interviews and insights for business leaders, design thinkers, researchers, and anyone curious about how culture shapes our lives.

Explore more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at thisanthrolife.org and join our Substack community at thisanthrolife.substack.com.

In January 2021 armed rioters stormed the US Capitol in a harrowing and politically fomented insurrection. It was an apex of years of divisive and condemnable rhetoric and fear-mongering used to stoke insecurities and desperate action. How do we ensure this never happens again? Or how do we dismantle the social structures that feed hate, fear, and contempt? What this event, and on the flip side, our celebration of Martin Luther King jr. Day (when we recorded this episode 1/18/21), reveal is that understanding what leads to social conflict and how to manage and resolve conflict is more essential than ever. Today Adam Gamwell and Astrid Countee talk with conflict management expert and author Jeremy Pollack about healing a divided nation by learning to talk with our neighbors more. We dig into:

Why humans need help managing conflict
Cognitive and perceptual biases that prevent us from communicating clearly with one another
How to communicate clearly around fears and intentions to find common ground
How to understand and disarm Worldview defense
That we need to start talking to our neighbors more!
The importance of local leadership in modeling intergroup communication and shared goals

Jeremy Pollack is the Founder of nationwide conflict resolution consulting firm Pollack Peacebuilding Systems and author of the new book Conflict Resolution Playbook: Practical Communication Skills for Preventing, Managing, and Resolving Conflict. Jeremy is a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Conflict and Negotiation, and an expert on human conflict with an academic background in social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, negotiation, conflict resolution and peacebuilding.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremypollack1/
https://www.facebook.com/pollackpeacebuilding/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3K6m_0bO31lD7JUc0th_vQ/featured
https://pollackpeacebuilding.com/


---

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

About This Anthro Life:
This Anthro Life is your podcast for thought leadership at the intersection of culture, work, and storytelling. We bring you interviews and insights for business leaders, design thinkers, researchers, and anyone curious about how culture shapes our lives.

Explore more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at thisanthrolife.org and join our Substack community at thisanthrolife.substack.com.

Language warning. We use the word sh*t a lot in this episode, since it is, in fact all about poop.
To wrap up this crappy, some may even say shitty year, host Adam Gamwell and intern Elizabeth Smyth discuss the origin of the word shit, how the way we defecate is culturally constructed, what our poop reveals about us, and so much more in this New Year’s Eve mini-episode of This Anthro Life. Farewell 2020, it’s been real.
In this episode we dig into:

What poop tells us about culture and our biology

Whether to sit or squat?

Poop’s superpower for healing gut microbiota and potential energy source

How poop in space might tell us if we are, in fact, extraterrestrials ourselves


Also check our new blog Voice and Value where we dive deeper into all things human: Voice and Value – Medium
Articles referenced:

The History of Poop Is Really the History of Technology

Poop Worlds: Material Culture and Copropower (or, Toward a Shitty Turn)

Poop (Somatosphere)

How Fossilized Poop Gives Us The Scoop on Ancient Diets

Watching What We Flush Could Help Keep a Pandemic Under Control https://nyti.ms/2J2MJaa

Human feces from the developing world could power millions of homes


Follow this Anthro Life on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram!
Twitter: This Anthro Life Podcast (@thisanthrolife) / Twitter
Instagram: This Anthro Life Podcast (@thisanthrolife) • Instagram photos and videos
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thisanthrolife/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/this-anthro-life-podcast
Website: This Anthro Life
Music: Epidemic Sounds
No Regrets - Guy Trevino
Basmati - Farrell Wooten
Episode Art: Liz Smyth

---

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

About This Anthro Life:
This Anthro Life is your podcast for thought leadership at the intersection of culture, work, and storytelling. We bring you interviews and insights for business leaders, design thinkers, researchers, and anyone curious about how culture shapes our lives.

Explore more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at thisanthrolife.org and join our Substack community at thisanthrolife.substack.com.