[upbeat music]
It seems anthropology is everywhere these days, and that's no coincidence [horn honks]
because anthropologists are everywhere these days.
[upbeat drumming]
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.
[music increases]
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.
[music fades out]
[guitar strumming]
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.