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It seems anthropology is everywhere these days,
and that's no coincidence [horn honks]
because anthropologists are everywhere these days.
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Anthropology [dog barks] is the study of us.
Our clothes.
Our homes.
Our bodies.
How we talk and how we think.
Our past, present, and future.
It's all anthropology.
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The American Anthropological Association has created a video series
to showcase how anthropologists are tackling the world's most
pressing problems and making remarkable contributions to human understanding.
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My name is Tricia Wang.
I'm a global tech ethnographer.
I'm the co-founder of Sudden Compass.
The way we use technology actually is an expression of our identity.
Who I am when I'm in a bar versus at work or
when I'm out dancing with my friends is very different.
It's the same exact thing when we're using different apps.
The way I use Twitter the way you Snapchat or Instagram is very different or Reddit.
Human dynamics is actually that we have multiple, elastic identities, that we have different
selves, and the way I express myself on each app is different, but when you have a bunch
of engineers or product people designing an app, they're not thinking about identity.
They're just thinking about a bunch of features, and that's why corporations need to bring
in people like anthropologists to understand these big concepts.
Anthropology gives you those skill sets.
You can help companies translate their business question to a human question.
This is what I call the flip.
Let's just take one of my clients.
You know, they were trying to get more people to buy their books.
Okay, that's a great business question, but when we translate their human question, which
is like, you know, how are people even learning?
Why do people buy books?
Where do people get information?
It completely changed the way they saw their business and that was how they succeeded,
and every company needs help doing this.
When I'm really doing my best kind of anthropological fieldwork is that it's really about me.
It's that I'm learning because I'm getting close to people who seem,
at face value, so different, you know, but actually, the stuff that they're going through is so common.
I mean, people are all trying to figure out, you know, how do I do the right thing?
How do I make people I love happy?
How do I survive?
How I'm gonna get my next meal?
What do I want to be remembered for?
These are all things that people are thinking about from the mundane to the complex, and
you start to think, Oh, okay, like we're all actually super connected, but we're also dealing
with different forms of pressure in different ways.
These systems that we grow up in --- they're actually quite oppressive.
I think they can take the life out of you, IF you do not have the skill sets to question it
and to resist it and then, through that resistance, you find a way to live in a way
that actually fulfills your values.
That's why we need to have more anthropologists
because we need more anthropologists resisting systems,
and helping us realize that these systems are based off of our choices,
and that we do have a choice.
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Yeah, my name is Diego Vigil. [upbeat music]
I am an urban anthropologist. [trumpets]
The anthropology profession.
They do a lot of stuff with people trying to help them resolve problems that they have.
To me, that is the main goal of social science.
To study the world, to understand it, and to bring about some changes that are gonna be
beneficial for individuals or large groups of people, even all of humanity.
Early on, I was lucky to sort of become an observer, a watcher, a questioner,
a metiche, as we say in Mexican cultures.
I learn from people on the street what their life is like, and write about it, and report about it
and testify in court about it.
Law enforcement, district attorneys, police like to say that they have a new law.
It's been here since 1988.
It's called a gang injunction.
The gang injunction is not as pure an idea as they'd been made to be.
On the case of Chapman, you know, how do we develop?
How do we get land?
How do we, you know, get it cheap?
A geographer from USC has done a series of studies.
He looked at all the gang injunctions in LA.
The gangs that were targeted were the ones that were near areas they were gentrifying.
There's a way of getting rid of Mexicans.
Urban renewal's an old pattern.
Get rid of the Mexican neighborhoods.
That's how Dodgers got Dodger Stadium, when they got rid of [Spanish term], you know,
Chavez Ravine.
So that gang injunction went to the federal courts, and I was there because I had to testify
on behalf of the rural, social nature of that community.
Now, the guys could grow up together.
Some are gang members, some are not, but they're still friends, and the court was very quiet.
Couple of DAs from the Orange County area walked in,
and believe me, they looked like mafiosos.
Heavy.
Burly.
Mean.
I'm the law.
I'm the man.
I got up to testify, and they got up to cross-examine, and they started trying to, you know,
discredit my testimony.
The judge stopped them, on more than one occasion.
He shut them up, and they just sat there like little mafiosos with their thumb in their mouth.
We won the case.
That was the first gang injunction case that had ever been won.
From that time on, those courts in Orange County have very careful --- the DA is very
careful about how they made out a gang injunction, and I feel proud as an anthropologist
to have played a role in slowing down a draconian law.
It's not enough just to understand the world. We got to change it.
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Being surprised by what we find is something that occurs fairly regularly.
At the World Trade Center site, we were expecting to find large, timber, landfill-retaining
devices used as Manhattan built out further and further into the Hudson River.
One of my colleagues picked up a large, curved timber and was looking at it,
and she thought it might be part of a ship.
It didn't look anything like the other things we were finding.
The excavation crew helped us remove some of the thick layers of mud from around where
we thought this came from, and it --- and you very quickly saw the spines of a ---
of a ship.
[mechanical noises and voices in background] Archaeology is anthropology, or it isn't anything.
It's the study of a human --- human activity and human culture using a different suite
of methodologies and skills.
My name is Michael Pappalardo, and I'm an archaeologist.
AKRF is an environmental planning and engineering firm.
My role is, as part of the cultural resource group, is to look at
the impacts of projects on archaeological resources.
As an archaeologist, I'm not looking at the, you know, in the yards of important people,
[gate squeaks] or the sites of important historic events.
I'm looking more at the day-to-day of remains of people that might not ---
[car and street noises] there might not be books written about them at all.
Gives us an opportunity to understand what communities were like.
So there's a former bus depot that's an entire city block in East Harlem.
This site was the location of a --- of a cemetery that was established in the late 1600s,
and the cemetery was abandoned and destroyed and then they rebuilt the site over time.
So the city --- in planning to reuse this block --- they hired us to do an archaeological
survey of the site.
Is there a cemetery still there?
Are there any human remains?
What's --- what's the sensitivity of it, archaeologically?
During the course of the work, we did find human remains in one of the trenches, and
that kind of changed everything.
Now we know that we had remains the human remains.
The human remains turned out to be disarticulated.
There wasn't a --- an actual burial situation where you, you know, position --- picture
a body in a cemetery.
The task force visited the site within the hour after finding a human skull, and it was
an incredibly emotional experience for them because this task force had been kind of in
existence for almost ten years at that point, trying to steer redevelopment of the site
in a sensitive manner given its important and long history.
So finding it kind of made it --- made us feel part of that process.
It tied us in more with the important and emotional feeling that they were having uh,
you know, seeing the the actual remains in place.
Through gaining a better understanding of our past,
it brings a better integration of communities today.
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You're at a party, and you can take a step back and look at two people having an interaction.
If you can you tell when they're fighting, if you can tell when they're flirting,
if you can tell when they've just met each other for the first time, that's anthropology.
My name is Mackenzie Price, and I'm a sociolinguist.
A sociolinguist is a social scientist who's interested in the relationship between language
and social life and social behavior.
Frameworks Institute is a non-profit, communications think-tank.
We work with non-profit organizations to pay attention to the language that they use when
they're explaining their work and advocating for the pieces of policy that they want to see in place.
When they are going out and talking to people about their work, when they are testifying
on the hill, when they are making communications campaigns that try to build public support.
So for example, let's say you're an advocate who wants more kids to go to pre-K because
you know the years before age 5 happen to be a time that the human brain is developing.
It's growing really, really fast, but you also know that there's a lot of other people
who say, kids under 5 aren't ready for school. They're just absorbing things.
We've got a communications problem.
How are we going to present pre-K --- some type of
educational experience that happens in that 0 to 5 range --- as something that's an important
support for healthy brain development, something that young people or children are ready for,
something that they are prepared for, that they are in fact even able to learn in this period?
How do you explain all of that?
Frameworks would be interested in talking to those scientists who know what's happening
with the brain between 0 to 5 and figuring out how to talk about brain development
in a way that more people can engage with, and we also work with that advocate,
who wants to talk about pre-K, who wants to talk about why it matters for brain development,
but needs some strategies for explaining brain development to somebody at the post office
or at a town hall meeting.
We can shift away from, "Kids just absorb things" to
"There's a lot of brain development happening between 0 & 5."
Really, you can do anything you want to do and be a linguist.
Every field has a piece of it somewhere that's interested in social relationships
and society, and thinking about language --- how people interact with one another ---
is a part of that, and that's a skill that you can take with you different places.
Yeah. [music picks up] Anthropology, just like linguistics, can take you anywhere you want to go.
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Death doesn't happen 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. It happens all the time.
A lot of the times, the phone will ring, and I'm dead asleep.
They'll tell me, you know, "It's a 35-year-old with a single gunshot wound to the head, and
there's a note on the seat, and so it's probably a suicide."
I'm a death investigator and a forensic anthropologist.
Forensics is anything relating the law and science together, so when we apply the law
to anthropology, that basically means we're using our knowledge of human osteology
and kind of applying that to the law.
[car driving by] The purpose of a medical examiner's office is
to determine cause and manner of death.
It's my job when I go out to the scene, and when I'm asking questions on the phone to ---
of family members, doctors, law enforcement, it's basically to rule out everything else,
and I do that with the specific questions that I ask.
And this is where kind of the anthropology training comes into play.
So I'm going to ask cops specific questions and look for specific answers,
whereas with the families --- they just lost a loved one, you know, so you have to kind of --- you have
to change your tone,
you have to change the language that you're using when you're speaking to them.
I've always wanted to do more of the forensic science side then be a professor in anthropology
or work kind of in a traditional anthropology role.
I was a researcher for the World War II Directorate in that we went back and recreated the last-known
whereabouts and the circumstances of the loss of folks from World War II service personnel.
At one of the very first Battle of the Bulge fights, they took some shots from the German
soldiers, the boat went down, they couldn't positively identify this gentlemen.
Uh, his name is Private Bayne.
So they buried him as an unknown, and there he stayed for 60 years.
Being trained in forensic anthropology, I went back in his records and was able to
kind of recreate everything, and they had made a mistake.
His dental report said that he was missing one of his molars, but the original --- when
he first entered the army, they had said that he was missing a different molar.
Doing that identification with Bayne was kind of just a touch and a taste of
using what I know to provide closure to a family, and I knew that's what I wanted to do.
[background voices] The good thing about an anthropology degree ---
it provides you with kind of this broad overview of human beings.
People are scared of death.
In the United States, we are so reverent --- a lot of the times, we ignore it.
And that's a very American thing to do, right?
Just ignore it, and it'll go away.
But everyone dies, and I think it's important to find out why and what happened.
It's respectful to the person and to their the family so they know.
I do this job because it's the worst day of people's lives, and I can do it.
Somebody has to help these families and figure out why their loved one is deceased.
I'm glad to do it, and it encompasses all the things that I love to do.
[car driving away]
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