This Anthro Life

Welcome to CultureMade: Heritage Enterprise in a World on the Move, an audio collaboration between the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the American Anthropological Association, and This Anthro Life Podcast. 
In this fifth and final episode, Adam Gamwell, Leslie Walker, and Ryan Collins focus on cultural survival, a complex subject framed by migration, misconceptions over language and identity, as well as by resilience of the human spirit across borders. With a subject like cultural survival, the question comes to mind, what factors threaten shared heritage, tradition, and disband communities? Here we are joined by Alejandro Santiago González (Ixil), and Mercedes M. Say Chaclan (K’iche) representatives of Washington, DC-based Mayan League, an organization working to sustain Maya culture, communities, and lands. Alejandro and Mercedes share their experiences and give insight into the ongoing struggles Maya peoples face today, including issues of language, translation, and communication for indigenous immigrants who are currently in the United States. Helping to elucidate this subject, we are joined by Ph.D. Folklorist Emily Socolov, a frequent collaborator with the Smithsonian Institution’s Division of Folklife and Cultural Heritage and an Executive Director of the Non-Profit Mano a Mano: Mexican Culture Without Borders, serving the Mexican immigrant community in New York. 

---

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 the pop culture imagination, perceptions of robots and AI occupy a space of mystery and intrigue that gravitates between harbingers of impending societal collapse and bringers of mythical salvation. However, where does contemporary science and technology stand? Moreover, how do the social experiences of the past and in the present color our understandings of emerging technological realities? On this episode, hosts Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins are joined by Emma Backe to discuss these questions and more. In Part I of Making Robots Human our conversation embraces the humor of pop culture AI while making room to address that our fears and hopes of robotic futures are revealing of our complex social concerns today. 

---

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.

Welcome to CultureMade: Heritage Enterprise in a World on the Move, an audio collaboration from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the American Anthropological Association, and This Anthro Life Podcast. In this episode, Adam Gamwell, Leslie Walker, and Ryan Collins dive into the topic of curation. What does it mean to put on a festival or put on a museum exhibit? How can we understand culture on display and introduce outsiders to other social realms? Sharing their narratives and experiences with different forms of curation are Diana Baird N’Diaye, Cultural Specialist and Curator at the Smithsonian Center for Culture and Folklife, Arman Atoyan, CEO and Founder of the (AR) and virtual reality (VR) app and game development company Arloopa, and Pablo Girona, a researcher from Tucuman, Argentina who studies cultural heritage in Catalonia and Quebec. To learn more about Diana Baird N’Diaye’s work visit: https://folklife.si.edu/authors/diana-n-diaye. And, to learn more about Arman Atoyan and Arloopa, visit: http://arloopa.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.

On this episode of This Anthro Life, hosts Adam Gamwell and Matt Artz are joined by assistant professor and musicologist Nate Sloan and music journalist and songwriter Charlie Harding, the hosts of Switched on Pop, a podcast about the making and meaning of popular music. On Switched on Pop, Charlie and Nate break down pop songs to figure out what makes a hit and what is its place in culture. They also help listeners find "a-ha" moments in the music, make you laugh, dance, and dig deeper into the world of pop music. Here Nate and Charlie speak with TAL on the study of popular music, the appropriation of musical elements, what defines “pop” and how that is changing. This episode focuses on Nate and Charlie’s choice to use podcasting as the narrative venue to house their storytelling and dives into the value of deep listening. Tune in to hear more. To learn more about Switched on Pop check out: www.switchedonopop.com and
http://gideonandhubcap.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.

Welcome to CultureMade: Heritage Enterprise in a World on the Move , an audio collaboration from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the American Anthropological Association and This Anthro Life Podcast

In the US, fashion has been relegated to large impersonal retail spaces and increasingly online stores. Fashion in the US, as many know all too well, is transactional. The sense of community one has through clothing is often expressed through style though it is exceedingly rare for truly deep relationships to develop between the designer and the purchaser, even if an article of clothing is commissioned. But, community and fashion can be much more integrated.

With this episode, we invite you into the conversations we had with participants in the Crafts of African Fashion program at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 2018. We speak with Soumana Saley a Nigerian leather worker and designer, Cynthia Sands and her mentee Tomara Watkins, also known as Tam, two fashion designers who work between the United States and the African continent, and the program’s curator Diana Baird N’Diaye. This episode was broken into three underlying themes of African fashion, and craft production focused on: the local marketplace, transnational and international fashion trends, and the relationships between consumers and producers within a community.

The Crafts of African Fashion is an initiative promoting the continuity of heritage arts in Africa, exploring the vital role of cultural enterprises in sustaining communities and connecting generations on the continent and throughout the diaspora. The activities for this portion of the Festival took place in the Folklife Festival Marketplace.

About our Speakers:

Diana N’Diaye is a Cultural Specialist and Curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She holds a PhD in anthropology and visual studies from The Union Institute.

Soumana Saley is a leather craft artisan from the West African country of Niger. He currently lives in Millersburg, Pennsylvania running his own business. You can learn more about Soumana and see his products on his online store accessible at https://www.facebook.com/pg/soumanasaleyonline/ and you can learn more about Soumana’s school at https://www.ngodima.org/.

Cynthia Sands is an African American textile artist and businesswoman in Washington, DC. Sands’ art career includes experimenting and blending contemporary and original African artistic methods, materials, and dying techniques. She also works closely with African artisans to sustain the use of indigenous art and craft making tradition for social development, income generation, skills-transfer, and art education. You can learn more about Cynthia and her work at the website: www.entuma.com.

Tomara (Tam) Watkins, is a mentee of Cynthia Sands and is the founder of Loza Tam, a hair accessory line created in collaboration Ghanaian women artisans and entrepreneurs. Visit Tam’s online store at www.Lozatam.com.

Adam Gamwell is the co-host and executive producer of the This Anthro Life (TAL). He is the founder and director of Missing Link Studios www.missinglink.studio a new media collective dedicated to producing creative media for social impact. Adam holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brandeis University.

Ryan Collins is the co-host and editor of This Anthro Life (TAL). Ryan holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brandeis University.

Leslie Walker is the project manager of the Public Education Initiative at the AAA. He served as a special guest host, collecting stories during the Folklife Festival the forthcoming podcast series with This Anthro Life.

Contact Us

Contact Adam and Ryan at thisanthrolife -at - gmail.com or individually at adam -at- thisanthrolife.com or ryan -at- thisanthrolife.com
Find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram @thisanthrolife.

All of our content can be found on thisanthrolife.com. Be sure to leave us a review, let us know if you like the show. We love to hear from you.

---

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.

“I hope that more people will listen to more music outside of their own little comfort zone. I think that we enrich ourselves, we are better human beings when you open up your heart to other cultures, other music, to other worlds to other points of view. Because ultimately, as I said in the very beginning, we’re all the same. We’re all humans, and we all can connect in different ways with the things that we like. But, when we see it through the eyes of a different person. Then we better ourselves. We enrich ourselves.”

Welcome to CultureMade: Heritage Enterprise in a World on the Move , an audio collaboration from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the American Anthropological Association and This Anthro Life Podcast.

The above quote comes from Betto Arcos, music journalist and host of NPR’s The Cosmic Bario. Music, whether you create it or are an avid listener, pulls you in a deep sensory allure. The connection humans make with music is so deep that it can impact us physically and serve as a key point of return for our memories. As our guests from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival can attest, as much as it conjures deep feelings and memories, we learn something through the experience of music. Joining the distinct artists together in their views on music is a central theme, that music can help us overcome social difference. For Betto, this recognition is central to his desire to create music. Betto Arcos, in his own words:

“I think that’s ultimately why I do it [create music]. I feel like there is a responsibility. There is a sense of a higher reason, why I do this. But deep down it’s also because I love music. Because I’m passionate about it and I feel like we can only do better as a human race, as people, if we know about each other a little more.”

About our Speakers

Betto Arcos is a music journalist based in Los Angeles, host of The Cosmic Barrio, a reporter for NPR, and regular reporter for PRI. You can learn more about Betto at: http://bettoarcos.com/

Or follow him on Twitter @ArcosBetto

Amy Horowitz is an activist, promoter, feminist scholar, Roadwork team putting women artists and musicians on the road, the first multiracial, multicultural coalition. You can learn more about Amy Horowitz at: https://amyhorowitz.org/

And read about RoadWork https://www.roadworkcenter.org/

Arpan Thakur Chakraborty, Rabi Das Baul, Girish Khyapa and Mamoni Chitrakar are the Baul performers, mystic minstrels from the Indian state of Bengal. The Bauls are known for devotional songs that honor the divine within. Additionally, Mamoni Chitrakar is a traditional Indian patachitra singer and painter from West Bengal. You can learn more about their causes at: www.banglanatak.com

The purpose of this series is to create narratives linking the diverse peoples, perspectives, and activities across the Festival from a series of micro ethnographies like those above. The open format interview style allowed participants to define in their own words the relationships between their artisanship, musical ability, or experiences and how migration and movement shape their lives. Conversations with curators and other researchers supplemented the interviews with Festival participants and helped us to identify the research involved in selecting participants and the presentation of cultural heritage for the Festival. This approach allows us to foreground a central or thematic conversation and narrate events and activities at the Festival that listeners can paint in their minds as if they had been there to experience it.

About Our Hosts

Adam Gamwell is the co-host and executive producer of the This Anthro Life (TAL). Adam holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brandeis University. He founded and produces narrative media out of Missing Link Studios.

Ryan Collins is the co-host and editor of This Anthro Life (TAL). Ryan holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brandeis University.

Leslie Walker is the project manager of the Public Education Initiative at the AAA

---

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.

Welcome to CultureMade: Heritage Enterprise in a World on the Move, an audio collaboration series from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the American Anthropological Association and This Anthro Life Podcast.

Join hosts Adam Gamwell, Leslie Walker and Ryan Collins as they explore what it means to craft, form, and make culture in a world defined by movement, migration, and changing borders. Step into behind the scenes conversations and candid interviews from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Hear from artists, fashion designers, dancers, weavers, and craftsmen who give life to heritage and shape the many worlds of traditional culture in a planet on the move.

"Art is a Movement" How does art help contribute to political protest? Should art never be sold for money? How can dance unify a community? How are traditions like calligraphy and traditional dances passed on between generations?

In this episode, we overview the subject of art as informed by representatives from The Armenian program and the Catalonia program of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The above ideas on art put forth by Ruben Malayan encompasses the complex feelings, ideas, and understandings that art not only evokes within society but also those of who seek to understand art from a more holistic perspective.

Art is complex. Though what counts as art within a society is often recognizable to insiders, the rationale as to why is often much more difficult to discern. Anthropology, at its best, can help us explore the complexities of art. Through critical dialogue, anthropologists can ask what it means to experience art from the vantage point of different cultures and explore the messages that the artist intended to convey.

The purpose of this series is to create narratives linking the diverse peoples, perspectives, and activities across the Festival from a series of micro ethnographies like those above. The open format interview style allowed participants to define in their own words the relationships between their artisanship, musical ability, or experiences and the ways in which migration and movement shape their lives. Conversations with curators and other researchers supplemented the interviews with Festival participants and helped us to identify the research involved in selecting participants and the presentation of cultural heritage for the Festival. This approach allows us to foreground a central or thematic conversation and to narrate events and activities at the Festival that listeners can paint in their minds as if they had been there to experience it.

Read more and see photos here: https://www.thisanthrolife.com/art-is-a-movement/

---

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.

“Money

cannot be the reason why you make art. Artwork can be sold and should be sold

because artists need to make a living. But they should not, and should never,

make art to make money. That kind of

defies the entire purpose of making art. I said, I always say this and probably

it’s important to take note of, it is that art is a mirror of the society [that

produced it]. You want to understand the society, look at the art its

producing. If it’s confused, if it is disoriented, if it is an art that is not representative

of all ideas or of how people feel that it lacks substance. Then it is nothing.

It’s wallpaper. We need to know that skill plays a crucial place in an

inability to produce art which is what should be collectible which should be

sold for money and on the wall. So not everything is worthy to be to be called art. And we need to understand that.”

Welcome to CultureMade: Heritage Enterprise in a World on the Move , an audio collaboration from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the American Anthropological Association and This Anthro Life Podcast

The above quote comes from Ruben Malayan, who shared with us his sincere and thought-provoking ideas of art, resistance, and remembrance. In this episode, we overview the subject of art as informed by representatives from The Armenian program and the Catalonia program of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The above ideas on art put forth by Ruben Malayan encompasses the complex feelings, ideas, and understandings that art not only evokes within society but also those of who seek to understand art from a more holistic perspective. Yet, defining art is a complex task that anthropologists continue to debate and bring nuance to.

Calligrapher and Artist Ruben Malayan

Anthropology

and Art: A Brief Introduction

According to Stuart Plattner,

anthropologists were initially interested in studying art to produce taxonomies

of artifacts, that is systems of classification, usually for museums and

university collections. However, this view of art as object wasn’t without its critics. The decontextualization of art

and artifacts tended to remove objects from the societies that produced,

eschewing social relations that were otherwise entangled in the final

product. 

Another issue with understanding at comes in the form of fundamentally different perspectives on its purpose. For example, while Western perspectives on art tend to emphasize the achievements of a producer, non-Western perspectives tend to emphasize community. The weight of this difference is most visible in the exchange of art. In this way, the commoditization of art is not universally desirable, at least not in achieving similar monetary ends or individual prestige.

The divide between Western and non-Western art is problematized further, notably by Alfred Gell who recognized “art” as an inherently Western category holding a position of privilege. That is, not every object gets to be considered “art” and, critically, what gets to be “art” is typically decided upon by Western society. In this way, terms like “primitive art” represent diminutive categories that infantilize non-Western cultures past and present. This perspective results from an inherent misunderstanding where the Western viewer of art fails to recognize, and often appreciate, the work, skill, and context of the cultures which generated it.

Art

as a Movement

Art, as many have been made aware by the

recent intended destruction of an original Banksy  (by way of the artist) at auction, is intimately

connected to performance. The performativity of art is not something which is

intrinsically meant to shock or dismay an audience, but it is meant to move

them in some way. Recognizing this,

This Anthro Life is opening the conversation with EPIC (the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community) on the theme of Evidence. Taking center stage at this year's Annual EPIC Conference. “Evidence” is a subject of increasing social importance in today’s political climate. What constitutes evidence and when it is found to be credible all have far-reaching consequences. Because of this, practicing anthropologists are exploring concerns of and around evidence through experimentation, new methodologies, and research innovations that speak to contemporary ethnographic practice.

Joining TAL to open the conversation on evidence is Dawn Nafus and Tye Rattenbury, two of the EPIC 2018 Conference organizers. Our discussion with Dawn and Tye focused on the relationship of evidence in their work as ethnographic and data research scientists. Dawn and Tye work at the intersection of computational and ethnographic approaches.

Dig in Deeper Here: https://www.thisanthrolife.com/epic-evidence/

---

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.

Exploring Evidence

This Anthro Life is opening the conversation with EPIC (the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community) on the theme of Evidence. Taking center stage at this year’s Annual EPIC  Conference (in Honolulu, Hawaii from October 9th through the 12th) “Evidence” is a subject of increasing social importance in today’s political climate. What constitutes evidence and when it is found to be credible all have far-reaching consequences. Because of this, practicing anthropologists are exploring concerns of and around evidence through experimentation, new methodologies, and research innovations that speak to contemporary ethnographic practice.

EPIC Goes to Hawaii

As EPIC puts it, their goal in Hawaii is to explore “What kinds of evidence scratch a research itch? Create value for stakeholders? Make a connection with others? We will discuss ways of mobilizing evidence in humanistic exploration, in decision-making, and in everyday life. We’ll also share our strategies for creating value through evidence in an increasingly tricky social environment.” In other words, evidence is central to how we find meaning and make major decisions. When evidence based foundations are questioned, we need to make space to discuss why and for what reasons.

Learn more about EPIC and Evidence

Joining TAL to open the conversation on evidence is Dawn Nafus and Tye Rattenbury, two of the EPIC 2018 Conference organizers. Our discussion with Dawn and Tye focused on the relationship of evidence in their work as ethnographic and data research scientists. Dawn and Tye work at the intersection of computational and ethnographic approaches. Their goals are in part to find more sophisticated ways of asking what data is and what gets to count. In turn, this methodological questioning is directed towards evidence: how is it gathered? Is it diagnostic? And how is ethnographic evidence helpful for interpreting big data?

Finding

where “the traces of human life are.” (9:40)

It’s no surprise that Big Data’s vastness makes it difficult to access. But, with time, as Dawn recognizes, one can find the trace elements of the human experience. These traces of human experience which find their way into big data can reveal a lot about social life. For Dawn, finding these traces in big data is no different than an archaeologist searching for the residues of ancient life in a current rain forest. In both cases the traces are there. And following them can lead to big revelations. For Dawn, the revelations come in the form of “alternative stories.’ For Tye, the revelations are most intriguing when the social narrative conflicts with that of the data.

Learn

more about the Common Ground

between Data Science and Ethnography

According to Tye, “We regularly see data science and ethnography conceptualized as polar ends of a research spectrum. One as a crunching of colossal data sets, the other as a slow simmer of experiential immersion” While both data science and ethnographic practice have a core set of expectations, they have to extend beyond their principal expectations to address data about social life. Data science and ethnography work together to help the researchers understand data, where outliers arise, how to establish provenance, and recognize limitations and biases. This is incredibly important because big data is used to interpret and forecast sociological trends.