Culture Episodes

Daughter of “Cosmos” co-writer Ann Druyan and astronomer Carl Sagan, Sasha talks with host Adam Gamwell about the power of ritual for making meaning across life, death, nature, and more. She also shares how she learned to ask questions, the value of finding awe in the most mundane of rituals, and h…

Indigenous cultures around the world have a trickster god or figure in their mythos. For example, the Pacific Northwest Native Americans have the Raven, a selfish, hungry, and mischievous figure who transforms the world. Stories tell how the Raven...

What makes the human mind unique? How do we know there’s a future, and how do we recall the past? In this episode of This Anthro Life, Byron Reese, serial entrepreneur, technologist, and author of “Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think: How Humans Learned to See the Future--and Shape It,” discusses t…

Ashley Meredith serves as the National Cultural Anthropologist and Deputy National Historic Preservation Officer for the Federated States of Micronesia. Micronesia is a sovereign island country in Oceania situated northeast of Australia and Papua New Guinea and consists of 600 islands covering a ma…

Charles Henry is the president of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), a nonprofit that works with libraries, cultural institutions, and higher learning communities to improve research, teaching, and learning environments. Charles shares how creating new digital technologies aro…

When we think about social science and social scientists working out in the world, we tend to jump to the science part, you know jobs that focus on research - consumer research, user experience research, or qualitative studies for non-profits. But if...

Today we're diving into world building, the process of creating realized worlds for (mostly) fictional stories and how anthropology could literally change the game. Michael Kilman and Kyra Wellstrom stop by to discuss to their new book on anthropology for game design, fiction writing and filmmaking.

Charles Foster set out to answer one of the most perplexing questions of all - what sort of creatures are we humans? - in one of the most unique ways possible: immersing himself in experiences that evoke three central epochs in the development of consciousness - the upper Paleolithic, around 40k ye…

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 se...

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 c...

In today’s episode Adam 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 Horse...

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 Gran...

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 despera...

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 ...

Do you have a sense of how much time you spend each day on social media and smartphone? Whether you can live with them or you can't live with them, we know for most of us, these are ingrained parts of our everyday lives. In t...

When most people think of forensics or forensic anthropology the first thing that comes to mind are TV shows like CSI or Bones, or maybe in Six Feet Under. This may sound overly obvious, but people die every day. And this mea...

A happy New Years! Enjoy this mini-episode with Adam and Dr. Ryan Collins exploring happiness and the good life according the Aztecs. New Years is a great time to reflect on where we've been, where we're going, and what's it ...

“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 wo...

Will Emojis be the death of writing? Are emojis modern day hieroglyphs? Is the increased use of emojis in textual conversations a sign of the end of language as we know it? Join us for one of our most popular conversations re...

Today we dive into the world of food! Come hungry as we introduce the world of food studies and explore the changing roles and meaning food has had over the millennia, and how we can explore ways to fight local hunger and global food insecurity, all...