 Consumer culture is seductive, but it also brings rewards. It feels good. It's interesting. You know, there's a lot of things that we really love about it. Electricity. Yeah. You know, I love technology. I'm an early adopter of everything. So the question then becomes, you know, how do you engage with consumer culture without losing your culture, without losing control of your culture? So there's possibilities that globalization creates to create and protect localities. And you know, my wife and I have been really involved in Belize, which is trying to get indigenous people some rights over the ruins of their ancestors, so that they're not just being exploited by tourists to enrich tour guides and cruise companies. And then they invited her to the village and took her out and showed her this ruin that they had been protecting for the last 150 years with the last unlooted pyramid in Belize. And they said, you know, we want you to come here and work with the community to develop this as a tourist site in our wild biosanctuary so that it will be a continuing source of knowledge and income for the community. And in the process, we want you to train our people to be archaeologists and to be tour guides. So if you want to keep things local and you want to keep them in control, you really have to be careful about, you know, being drawn out into turning it into a commodity. You know, I think in every civilization, food has become part of class, it's become part of how people differentiate different classes from each other, and it's also become a form of entertainment. But lately, you know, they've excavated some that were destroyed by earthquakes, and it turns out almost all the rooms were used to store the pottery used to serve feasts. And really what these things were, were places where large groups of people came together and ate together. So you know, we can tell what people ate, we can tell how much seafood they were getting in their diet from looking at different isotope signatures in the bone. We can now get residue from the edges of stone tools so we can tell what they were cutting with it. That's crazy, right? Because like the fat from an animal actually bonds with the silica in the tool. And I think as archaeology progresses, we're going to find out that there's a close relationship between politics and hunger. I think what archaeology is going to be able to show us is what kinds of things produce such a radical kind of inequality that some people are willing to stand around eating while other people in front of them are dying of starvation. Yeah. Someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Alan? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? Five, four, three, two. What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakyun. We are still on site at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia. This is our second partnership with them. We are now going to be talking about consumer culture, food archaeology, and so much more. We have Dr. Richard Wilk joining us on the show. Hi, Rick. Hi. Thanks for inviting me. Thanks for coming on the program. It was a great synergy that this ended up coming together. Yeah. It was kind of accidental, but sometimes accidents lead in the best directions. Yes. Yes. As this reality likes to piece things together and for reasons that are yet to be discovered. I know. I know. I'm so excited for this episode. Rich's background is so interesting. He spent 31 years professing at the University of Indiana. He's the director of the Open Anthropology Institute. I really want to jump into things, Rick. We love talking about these very first principle questions to start. Do you think that we're really all one? I think we're one in the sense that we own the planet in common, and all of the resources belong to all of us. I think it's kind of a failure of our spirituality, nationalism, and other kinds of identity that keeps us from recognizing that. That goes right to the issue of climate change, because some people are using up a lot more oxygen and emitting a lot more carbon dioxide than other people. If you think about the atmosphere as common property, something that belongs to all of us equally, you've got to recognize that we need to control who gets to pollute, basically. Right now, it seems to be based on how much money you've got. I'm working with some investigative journalists right now. We're trying to put together the carbon footprint of billionaires to get a sense of just how much more of the earth's common resources are going to individuals who have like nine yachts and fleets of airplanes. That's right. It's kind of hard to tell someone that they have to change their diet and eat less meat in order to save the climate when you've got someone who's gallivanting around the world in a private helicopter and private jet. I really like this way that you took it, which is that we are one. We have this planet with the other 10 million species on it. We have to wake up and enlighten ourselves to that realization that we are all interconnected. Then we do analyses of when you put it into a hierarchy of wealth. You have these 1,500 billionaires at the top. How many of them have ever felt any sort of enlightenment of unconditional love before? Then furthermore, where are the resources that are being allocated to these additional boats, planes, cars, materialistic possessions or to aim to be uplifting those 50% of people that earn less than $2.50 a day so that their gifts can be actualized? These are our brothers and sisters, not others. These are one. This is one. I like the analysis there. Also, if you look at a hierarchy in a different way in terms of those that are spiritually enlightened at the top, like the Dalai Lama and stuff like that, why can't we take their most first principles and apply them to the world rather than have the top of the wealthy be plutocrats governing the planet? I really like that point there. I want to ask the next question, which is, do you think that the root of all of the symptoms, the downstream symptoms, is that we have these feelings of you being separate and us not feeling the dear interconnectedness with ourselves and all the other species in the environment? I agree. To some extent, wealth enables the rich to live separately and to act as if there are different species. I always remember that scene where George Bush goes to the grocery store and he's never seen a scanner before because he's never been in a grocery store because he's always had people shopping for him. It tells you just how incredibly separate their world has become. You like to think that it's nationalism, but actually, they're super rich people in every country. The poorest countries have some of the richest people. I think it's lack of visibility. We can't see each other. We can't hear each other. We can't understand each other's motives and ideas. That means we can't empathize and we can't put ourselves in the place of another person, which is one reason I value anthropology so tremendously as a career and as a way of thinking about the world because it requires you to put yourself in somebody else's place and to really strive to understand the world as that person sees it. I've met amazing people who are electricians, plumbers, farmers, tour guides, people who if I was just hanging around with people like me at a university, I would never meet these people. I would never know what their lives are like. Just having that experience, I wish all of our students at universities could just go live in a poor family for a few months and learn what it's like. This is also a really profound point, which is this very multidisciplinary study of anthropology forces you to get behind the true, deepest, empathetic, visceral perspective of other people's moment-to-moment existence. If you do things like get young children to pass weeks or months living in places in the world of lower socioeconomic status, less access to electricity, healthcare, education, et cetera, there is that deeper, true experiential wisdom that then kicks in of, oh my goodness, it is so important for us to actualize all of our gifts. I like that a lot. What we're talking about right now regarding the sheer complexity of this reality at this exact moment where we have to rise to this challenge to figure out how to best move forward, is that the purpose of this all being made? Wow. I think that one's beyond my competence in the sense that the search for purpose is also a search inside yourself, and it always is. I think radical doubt is probably the best that we can manage at any time, and that is admitting what we don't know and don't understand, and coming from a humble position that recognizes that the complexity of the world in the universe is so great, and it's so vast, the size of the universe is so great, that we have to recognize that in time our era is going to end up being like an inch thick. Our entire world today will be gone someday, and just getting to the moon, the closest body is just an incredibly difficult thing for us. Recognizing how small you are and how limited our ability to understand the world is, I guess I was naive when I went into anthropology thinking that by this time in my life I would have a better understanding of the way the world works. I think I understand more, but I also understand more about what I don't know, and I'm constantly finding the world mysterious in strange and different ways. In fact, I find my own country, the United States, much harder to understand than a lot of other places where I've been and where I've worked, where as an outsider I have a different perspective, and when I can compare that to what insiders are thinking and saying, it gives you what in vision studies is called parallax. Exactly. It's like the ability to see depth because you can see it from two different directions at the same time. That's why I think it's really urgently important to get foreign anthropologists and sociologists to come and study us here in the United States. I love this point. Because these are the people who can give us that parallax and can give us another point of view so that we can start thinking about things in a different way rather than just kind of following the same ruts. Interesting. There's a little marketing that I want to do, which is that the Open Anthropology Foundation, which is a 501-C3 non-profit, our goal is to raise enough money to endow a country that has a better understanding of what's going on and what's going on in the country. And I think that's a really important point of view. I think that's a really important point of view. I think that's a really important point of view. As a non-profit, our goal is to raise enough money to endow a grant that will bring a foreign scholar to study the United States for a year. That's excellent. That's just $100,000 or so. Well, actually, we're working with the Winter Grand Foundation for Anthropological Research, which has been giving research grants for years and years to anthropologists and archaeologists. And they funded my fieldwork twice. And in order to fund an annual grant, the endowment needs to be half a million dollars. Half a million for one scholar each year. Each year, yeah. Right. So in perpetuity. Yeah. To be a multi-year project. Yeah. Yeah. My wife and I, she's also an anthropologist and piperon, we've decided to basically, our daughter is doing fine. So we basically agreed that most of our wealth when we die is going to go into this foundation. Yeah. But we're also kind of actively raising money. And we want to build it as fast as we can. I love it. We have an Anthropology Foundation, which has the Open Anthropology Institute within, yeah. Yeah. 501c3. The link's in the bio below to that, to those that may be interested in funding this because this is brilliant. If we can get anthropologists to come and study us for us to better understand us, that's huge. Yeah. I love that. I sure have trouble. I need another point of view because I'm baffled most of the time. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, this is a big insight out in Silicon Valley as well as we have leaders saying things like, if I'm starting a company, the one rule of the CEO of that company is that they have never worked in the industry before. Yeah. And I think that's a really profound statement. It's like, no, I don't want someone that's worked in biotech for 20 years to be the biotech CEO. I want someone that's never worked in industry. And so that style of an outsider's perspective is critical in many ways. So this is a really cool idea. And we might get to a little bit more of the Open Anthropology Foundation Institute stuff in a bit, but this is a good start on it. So 31 years professing at the University of Indiana, I mean, there's been so much research that has happened, but you kind of gave me this first one on your focus on consumer culture, which I thought was so interesting. So is this kind of like as urbanization and globalization has happened, more wealth has accrued people have decided to move further away from like farming and agrarian style habits to urban environments where houses are bought, cars are bought, et cetera, stuff like this. Yeah. Yeah. After a short career in archeology, I went to Southern Belize in 1976. And there are two indigenous Mayan groups that live in Southern Belize. I ended up spending a year living in three different villages, learning as much of the language as I could. And it was just at this moment when young people were starting to think that, you know, farming was not really a way of life that was going to support them into the future. You know, they were growing rice and getting 15 cents a pound for it. And it just, their parents couldn't afford school and couldn't afford clothes and couldn't afford medical care. And so young people were starting to do something that had previously been unthinkable, leave the community and get a paying job and give up kind of all of the great things that come with belonging to a community. And I've been kind of working on and off with that group of people ever since. And it's turned into a struggle for control of their own land. So for the last 20 years, I've been an expert witness in court and trying to kind of not wanting to run anything or take authority or act in a kind of guiding way, but to find out what people want and do the best I can to facilitate it happening when it comes to things like affidavits and court cases. And I think the happiest moment I've had and most rewarding moment in my career was being invited by the Maya Leaders Alliance to a meeting where they wanted me and other anthropologists to advise them. And it's, you know, after a lifetime of going places and trying to convince people to talk to you, to have them in the driver's seat and it was like the fulfillment of the way I thought anthropology should be from the very beginning. Oh, wow, that's such a mutually beautiful relationship. It's the words here sometimes are mentioned like information extraction, which is not the way you want to do it. Rather this, may we please come and become completely immersed in your beautiful culture and rituals and practices and learn from you. And then as we do that, can we somehow provide you with any help that you may need? And then like you said, getting invited back. This is, that is a beautiful way to do it. That was the deal that we made when I started doing research in 1976 and then living there in 78. They said, you know, well, if we're helping you get your doctorate degree and you're going to write a book about us, you're taking all these pictures. We want you to give something back and we don't know what that's going to be, but in the future we're going to call on you and we're going to expect you to help us. And I took that really seriously and that's always been like my number one priority Yeah. So like I was in Kazakhstan and they told me I had to be testifying in the Supreme Court the next day early in the morning. So basically I flew for 26 hours and kind of ran down the street and into the courtroom to testify. Oh my goodness. But you know, that's, I think that's how serious when you make a commitment to people, that's, you know, that's what you're going to do. Yeah. Wow. This is a, that's a real, that's heart right there. Yeah. Well, okay. So was the study of this, the transition to the consumer cultures observing kind of what was going on in Belize and in different places? Yeah. Yeah. So what was that? The interesting thing was that there was no anthropology of consumer culture until the 1980s. You know, because anthropologists had always been trying to get to the real stuff, the way it used to be before people started, you know, wearing modern clothes or learning English or going to college. And by the time I started working in Belize there were, there was at least one Belizean anthropologist. Yeah. There were a lot of very well educated Belizeans. And the, there was no way to pretend that I was going to be studying the way it once was as if that was like the true culture frozen in time to go into an encyclopedia somewhere, you know, as the Kekchi Maya, the Mopang Maya. No, you know, these people have always been changing and the kind of change that they were going through at the time is something that we've seen all over the planet. And that is consumer culture is seductive, but it also brings rewards. It feels good. It's interesting. You know, there's a lot of things that we really love about it. Electricity. Yeah. You know, I love technology. I'm an early adopter of everything. I'm driving an electric car. You know, it's endlessly entertaining and amusing. And so to go somewhere else and say, oh, you guys, you should stay the way you are so that I can study you while I'm kind of jetting back and forth and using my phone to access the internet. So the question then becomes, you know, how do you engage with consumer culture without losing your culture, without losing control of your culture? And at the time I started doing this research, thinking of yourself as an ethnic group in a multi-ethnic country was really the way that you created and protected something of your own. And it gave you kind of the power to approach technology and education and all these institutions from a situation of where you had some strength rather than where you're just a victim, victim, and Belizeans crafted their own version of consumer culture. And I was just really lucky to be there in the country in the early 80s when television came to the country. I was working there at the time for the U.S. Agency for International Development. I was there when the whole country became Chicago Cubs fans, and I was there for the opening of the first Belizean restaurant in Belize, at a time when the whole country was wrapped up in the Miss Belize pageant and Miss Garifuna pageant and Miss Panamericana. And like every town and every village and every ethnic group was having a beauty pageant. And at first, you know, I thought this was just, you know, sexist stuff I didn't really want to go to. But when I started to listen to what people were telling me, it turned out that this is where people were really working out what being Belizean was, or what being Garifuna, or what being Hispanic Maya, or Yucateco, where, you know, what our clothes were, what kinds of music are important for us to conserve, what kinds of performances. So it was kind of a stage for thinking about the nation and locality and all of the other segments of society. So I kind of reluctantly got dragged into studying beauty pageants, but at the same time they were also inventing Belizean food. And this was happening in Chicago mostly, initially, among Belizean migrants to Chicago who found themselves like everybody thinking they were Jamaicans and they don't like to be thought of as Jamaicans. So there was a Belizean restaurant, a Belizean bar in New York, and those people were moving back and forth. And then, you know, in the 90s we had this flood of tourism as well, and food became part of the tourist industry and the tourist experience. So that I found that was just really an interesting time to be there, and I was lucky to be there to see a lot of it happen. Well, I really appreciated how you gave us this trajectory of the slow but steady technology becoming more and more a part of people's cultures, and then also doing things like having a beauty pageant that seems like it's something around appreciating the aesthetics of beauty. But to see it as something where different cultures can express themselves, and we can see those distinct expressions, viewing it in that light is really nice. And it's also like you were giving this example, just when you urbanize, you move, you know, there's being able to like go to Chicago or, you know, and see these like kind of like populations migrating, starting businesses in those areas. I mean, this is becoming more of a melting pot and becoming more open to what a Belizean even is, and that's in a sense that's very important. You kind of started leading us a little bit into, I think you said, like, you know, how do you do the process of enjoying what technology enables with creativity, with health and wellness education? What you're trying to do right here. Exactly, yeah. How do we do this, but then how do we not, yeah, have it like the business plans of the attention economy, right, and mental health issues. So right, so there's always this dichotomous finding what we believe is the best and taking that forth and dropping the archaic things that are not so great, and the way that technology actually affects the indigenous cultures as well, and tourism, how that affects it. And you know, it's, victimology is easy, you know, it's always easy to say, well, you know, it's social media destroying the culture, ruining the experience of childhood or whatever. You know, they said the same thing about television in the 1980s, you know, both the right and the left were really concerned that TV was going to destroy local culture, and instead, you know, they developed indigenous television, you know, and there's fabulous video made in Belize about the country, and you can watch the news every night, and, you know, they kind of turned it in a direction where it really creates community by bringing people in Chicago and Los Angeles into the same setting that the, that their Belizean family is in. So there's possibilities that globalization creates to create and protect locality is, and you know, as you know, these things are tools, the technology doesn't determine completely what you do with it, and it's always possible to turn things around and kind of subvert the dominant paradigm, or to take the tools of the powerful and turn them around and find other ways to use them. So the diaspora of a culture can tune in via the television programming and observe how its culture is evolving from afar, and keep a stronger community tie, thanks to that globalization, urbanization, which is quite interesting, yeah, technologification. Yeah, for me, the real turning point, the way I thought about things was in 1976, the AAA meetings were in LA, and LA has a huge Belizean community, and there was a Belizean anthropologist, Joe Palacio, living in LA at the time, and we decided we were going to have a session at the AAA where we would invite the Belizean community to come in and tell anthropologists what they wanted to know about their country, and to kind of give us some direction about what they saw as the most interesting and important issues. And there were like 200 people there, several with video cameras, because they planned to send the record of this conversation back to their relatives in Belize. So it kind of instantly made me aware that even if we think of ourselves as being isolated in an ivory tower, we're not in any way, we're connected in lots of different ways. And the personal is political, and for my generation, having any egalitarian marriage was an act of radical imagination, and really difficult practice, you know, because you've got to unlearn everything that you learned from your parents about gender roles, and it can be full of conflict, and sometimes you need some tough lessons to learn some important things. It's kind of like this young consciousness that's moving with millennials and Gen Z into awareness of the biosphere and all the other species, and the way that the Anthropocene is actually affecting biodiversity, and just sustainability, ecology in general, younger consciousness also is so literate with technology, and in many ways it's interesting thinking about how to have older consciousness sort of let go of their grip on the economic machinery and let the young ones come and architect the next world, yeah. I get the anti-boomer message, even though I'm kind of a tail-in boomer myself, I can't really say that my generation has done a particularly good job of running things. On the other hand, you know, I think some of us really, we're trying to make radical change from the time when we were teenagers. You can look at how in the 1960s psychedelics consciousness movement just got squashed. Yeah. Well, it got turned into consumer culture, you know, it got turned into fashion items, held out in pants and fringes, and you know, for those of us who really felt like we wanted to see a radical change in the world, it was like, you know, seeing your sacred place turned into a tourist attraction, and that's something that my wife and I have been really involved in in Belize, which is trying to get indigenous people some rights over the ruins of their ancestors, so that they're not just being exploited by tourists to enrich tour guides and cruise companies. Yeah, to get the indigenous the rights of the land, yeah, versus only profiteering on the tourism, yeah, that's so interesting. So that's actually probably a macro level phenomenon that's happening with indigenous lands around the world. Yeah. And in museums, you know, and even anthropology departments, when I became department chair in 1980, I found that we had thousands of Native American skeletons in boxes in our building and elsewhere on campus that were being used for studies, but not studies that were in any way connected to the concerns of the indigenous people who descended from those bones. So finally, over the last 10 years, the university has kind of stepped up, and now the university has been, has pretty good relations with more than 30 Native American tribes, and we've been working out ways of repatriating and giving those ancestors back in a way that is honorable and respectful. And I see that, I don't think the people who wrote the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act in the 1970s knew what it really was going to do, but what it did was to empower Native people in a way that they really needed, and that is to control the artifacts of their culture. Yes. You know, your soul enters important objects, and that's something I learned in studying consumer culture, that people develop, like, love relationships with their things. 150 times a day is when we're grabbing the device. Yeah. And you know, put it away for a day, and you find out just how much a part of your body it has become. And so, you know, if we're going to really respect people, that means given the Elgin marbles back to the Greeks, and emptying out a lot of treasure from Western museums. And it's not like indigenous people just want to bury it. Now that they have control, they can come to scientists and tell scientists what they want to know. And it can be a harmonious, love-based relationship rather than an extractive one, where it becomes a scientist, anthropologist working more closely together with different cultures around the world. Yeah, that's a really good point where they can actually start helping guide anthropologists and scientists towards the specific ways of understanding their lineages. Exactly. That's so interesting. I was doing field work in a Creole village in central Belize in 1990. And I told them my wife was an archeologist, and we were living not too far away. She was commuting out to her site every day because we had a one-year-old baby. And the village, it turned out, went to, the village chairman went to the library in the capital city and looked up her name and learned something about her, and then they invited her to the village and took her out and showed her this ruin that they had been protecting for the last 150 years with the last unlooted pyramid in Belize. And they said, you know, we want you to come here and work with the community to develop this as a tourist site in our wildlife sanctuary so that it will be a continuing source of knowledge and income for the community. But in the process, we want you to train our people to be archeologists and to be tour guides. And she spent the next 15 years pretty much working at that site. We couldn't get the Belize government to ever pay for a watchman or somebody to keep the place intact because the village kind of voted the wrong way in a couple of national elections. So we paid for a watchman to stay out at the site ourselves for years and years. But it kind of turned her whole idea of what archeology was around. So now Anne has been around the world promoting community-based archeology where people are people want to know about the past. They want to know about their ancestors. They're just not interested in having foreigners come and take it away. The community-based, the harmonic style of anthropology. You mentioned your next study being like beauty pageants a little bit earlier. Is there more there that can kind of awaken us? Yeah, what else can awaken us to what exactly is this beauty pageant? Well, you know, I think what we've seen is in beauty pageants, even at the level of a place like Belize, a lot of organizations start as volunteerism, you know, they come out of community efforts. They get organized as volunteer groups. I like to use the example in this country of double-dutch jump rope, which was something kids played on the playground, mostly African-American kids played on the playground. But just the same way that beauty pageants over time became more and more structured. And all these kind of arbitrary divisions started to appear like if you were under 17, you were Miss Belize, and then there was over 25 from Mrs. Belize. And even though the Belizeans wanted it to be about much more than physical beauty, if you wanted to get into Miss Panamari Kana, you had to have a giant national costume. You had to hire someone from Texas who's a professional advisor of beauty pageant contestants. Same thing happened with double-dutch. Two leagues formed, volunteerism by parents in inner-city neighborhoods trying to get their kids interested in something that would occupy them and competitive, but also expressive and artistic and fun. Well, you know, 10 years later you've got professional double-dutch coaches. You have like a whole structure that's built so that now we have two national leagues. They have a season. They have finals. They have championships. And it's kind of fallen into a format that we're all pretty much familiar with, which takes it out of the community, takes it out of popular control, and freezes it with a set of rules so it becomes a professional kind of enterprise. This happens with volunteer groups, it happens with co-ops. It happens with drama groups. It happens over and over again. And you really have to struggle to keep organizations. You want an outside grant when you've got a writer proposal. You have to have membership. You have to count your members. So if you want to keep things local and you want to keep them in control, you really have to be careful about being drawn out into turning it into a commodity. And basically now there's like training camps and there's double-dutch parents who do nothing but travel around all around the country to different, you know, so. It's as though that these in these early days of some sort of a sport or activity that people find interesting is practiced and developed locally. There's maybe more of like, there's more creative combinatorial processes and spirit. But then when it tries to go up a spread onto like a national and international level, it becomes rules and then, which creates another consumeristic kind of culture around it as well. A little bit of discipline, yeah. But that's interesting as long as it also, I guess, also enables though people to try and add and creatively augment what those infrastructures are. We're to keep something like, you know, Cub Scouts alive as a local or, you know, junior local leagues, Little League. I was in Little League when I was a kid. There was no discipline. We had no uniforms. You know, I'm sure now it's become a lot more formalized. But it's like a Little League World Series. Yeah. Yeah. Now it's become like part of this hierarchy. Yeah. And we don't really need to do that to all of our popular forms of entertainment. It can be more like an, there can be like the amateuristic, just for fun level. Exactly. You know, and it's the same thing with food, you know, which is that everybody, you know, in the community, there's great cooks. There's all kinds of creativity going on. Most of that never gets captured in a cookbook. Yeah. Because as soon as you start writing a cookbook, you've got to figure quantities and you've got to figure out a list of ingredients. But if you're really a cook rather than a chef, you know, well, we don't have any green bananas. I'll use unmarinated apples instead, you know, and see if that works. Yeah, yeah. It's improvisation. Improvisation, intuition, flow. Yeah. You taste as you go. It's, yeah, that's interesting. But, you know, some of my graduate students have been studying the way that governments set culinary policy. You know, now you can nominate your national cuisine for UNESCO recognition as intangible cultural property. Wow. And that means like you have to pick something. So my Korean student, Chihun Kim, now Dr. Chihun Kim, studied the way the Korean government had to decide what bibimbap was going to be the official bibimbap. Yeah. Wow, what a hard choice given all the variations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every, you know, town and village has its own, you know, way of doing things. So what is, but, you know, what's great about studying cuisine is that the creativity is never completely suppressed. Yeah. You know, there's always pressure to kind of figure out something new that might appeal to people. Given all the food fads, too. So this is, OK, now we're adventuring into food history and food archaeology, which is such an interesting field. Been in here the last about 10, 15 years doing this field. You were telling me about this as well, which I'll just tie in real quick. Just the idea that, you know, food fads, especially now given your talk about the consumeristic culture, you know, low sugar, no sugar, low fat, reduced fat. Hockey bowls. Yeah, yeah. Then there's gluten freeze. There's the vegans, the carnivorous. Paleo. Paleos. I mean, it's, yeah, that area is never ending of where things are going in terms of food fads. We do this, you know, anywhere now, you know, this is three times a day. Some people intermittently fast and only once a day. Some people fast for five days to try and challenge themselves being ascetic. There's all different, like, interesting variations of this. We actually really recently heard about a breatharians, which is... I lived in Santa Cruz when Wiley Brooks was giving breatharian seminars. I had a couple of students who were breatharians at the time. So stuff like this where it's no water, no food, just the breath sunlight, et cetera. Some people, there's a breatharian congress where there's people... Yeah, yeah, there's a... Stable. And there's one of my, one of our friends was telling a story. Yeah, I didn't eat for 41 days. And I was like, okay, this is getting really interesting. People haven't ate or drank for, I think, 15 years or something. Okay. But besides that, yes, all these fads, and then you're giving this idea of that given a specific region, having to pick a food, a specific country, having to pick a food, but given all their regions and cities have different variations on that food, how do they pick it? Yeah, and this is very complex grocery stores you were teaching me about as well. And they have, what was it, 20,000 new products every year in grocery stores? 98% of which don't last more than a year. And then they go into, like, a food history museum. Yes. This is so interesting. Green ketchup, you were telling me was one of those things. Yeah, there's... Or for a while they were trying to sell soda water in bottles with the tapioca pearls. Oh, yeah. In the, like, in bubble tea. Yeah, yeah. One of my students just told me bubble tea has now made it to Japan, and they see it as an American product. What? Because it didn't come from Taiwan to Japan. It went from Taiwan to the U.S. and then to Japan. So they say, oh, yeah, this is an American fad that we're kind of getting into now. Interesting. So these things circulate globally now. And some of them, you know, some of them are pretty wild. I saw Turkish-Mexican food in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Turkish-Mexican, that's a pretty interesting combo. I think there's a whole chain of them now selling Turkish-Mexican food. Which, you know, if you were Turkish or Mexican, you would probably find pretty disturbing. Or interesting. Or interesting. You know, it depends on whether you're defensive or whether you're experimental. And I think we all have some of both. And that's why at the same time we have this incredible turnover. We also have, like, legacy foods and we have, like, Cheerios have been with us forever. Butterfingers bars, baby Ruth, you know, just looking at the universe of candy, there's always, you know, new pop rocks and sour this or glowing that. But there's also this kind of slower pace of things that have been around forever and ever. Bread. Water. Exactly. Yeah. Which now goes in all different types of flavor variations on waters and bottles from different locations on the planet. There was a funny mention that my most cited paper is about bottled water. And that's what a panel I was listening to here was talking about, that, yeah, what was that, the most cited paper on it? Give us a little bit on that. Well, you know, part of my interest in anthropology has always been that there's parts of the world that are fascinating that nobody studies. Yes. And, you know, we all have a tendency to follow the leader, you know, so for a while every student I had wanted to study ecotourism, you know, but, and I would always say, well, look, but there's so many other things. And water is fascinating because it's the same stuff. The U.S. imports water and we export water. We import water from India, if you can imagine. Not a place known for its purest and cleanest water. We import water from Mexico. We sell water to Mexico. So we have this global trade of, and, you know, water is mostly free. And we pay more for it than we pay for gasoline, which is supposedly a valuable thing. Taste tests. People can't tell the difference between tap water and bottled water. And, you know, as far as health goes, you're probably better off with tap water in most parts of the world than you are with drinking bottled water because there's no standards that the bottled water has to live up to. And there's also a lot of injustice in, you know, bottling companies taking water away from communities and putting it in bottles. And it's ecologically kind of a catastrophe as well. So I guess it was back in the 90s, I just looked at the water bottle one day and kind of felt like if you're going to understand consumer culture, you have to understand how pure branding works, you know, because the product is not differentiated. It just comes in different colored bottles and different shaped bottles. And there's almost always a reference to nature, mountain streams, and there's also an assurance about technology on the back, you know, it's purified, it's been supervised. And I think that kind of alternation between nature and technology is just so common in consumer culture. Think about mountain biking. It's a high tech object and it's supposed to take you into nature so you can experience nature. So there's always this kind of paradoxical one is behind the other. So, you know, when water is pure, you also want to be, through technology, you, I mean, we're suspicious of the machine and of technology, you know, what could they be putting in there? We're not from residues, we're from the plastic. So we then go to nature and say, oh, but it comes from the mountains or glaciers or a spring. The most expensive bottled water comes from 6,000 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean. It's brought up and then they have to take the salt out. But that stuff sells for like $24 for a 20 ounce bottle. What is that brand called? I forget the name of it now, I'm afraid. It's Japanese. Japanese, interesting. And they even sell it as a concentrate. So it's concentrated water that you can pour into your water to make your water more watery. And I figured, you know, if they can sell that, basically they can sell anything. But it has to connect in some way to, you know, it's not always an evil thing. For a lot of people drinking water is an alternative to drinking coke, which is probably much worse for you. Oh yeah. Oh yes. So food archeology also incorporates water archeology, I mean, that's a huge unthought about field as well. You listed so many variables there. So what's the deal with looking at food from like a macro historical perspective? I mean, immediate return hunter gathering had a very interconnected feeling with nature and our environments. And then agrarian society moved into really just putting the humans in a specific area and growing the food next to the humans. And then there are so many other interesting phenomenons that happen with the microbiome and our dental in that period of time. And then this, again, you give this all the way up to today where you can like drink a soda product versus a water or there's all these 20,000 products coming into grocery stores every single year. And so many of them disappearing afterward, the amount of money that's being spent on like R&D for that, this is no longer like mom, right? A mom would give you food because she loves you and she wants you to be healthy. There's inclusive fitness stakeholder here, but now big food doesn't give a shh about you. They want to make money. And so then there's no inclusive stakeholder there. And so this is a completely different culture. And they want to give you the optimum combination of fat, sugar, and salt, you know, because those things are cheap and it turns out people love them. Well, they're, you know, at one time in our evolution, the taste for salt, the taste for fat, and the taste for sweet were important. They were, yeah. You know, and to some extent what advertising and consumer culture does is it parasitizes on our bodies, takes the potentials that we have, and commodifies them and turns them into a hot button. But there's also like evolutionarily we're designed to try new stuff. We're always trying new stuff. That's how we learn to eat things like rhubarb, which, you know, if you ate raw rhubarb would not be good for you. You know, the same thing with cassava. We have engaged with nature to transform all these things that are inedible into things that are edible. And in the process, you know, I think in every civilization, food has become part of class, has become part of how people differentiate different classes from each other, and it's also become a form of entertainment. Yeah, that's so interesting. Keep going on this point. Yeah. Well, the more I gave a paper yesterday about how we can't really understand modern food unless we think of it as part of the entertainment industry. This is cool. Keep going. You know, because if you go back to, like, some of the earliest records of humans eating, you find evidence of feasts. You know, getting together and eating does something to our group that brings us together in a kind of magical way and creates ties with other people through a form of magic. That's all I can call it because our brains basically run on magic rather than logic. I firmly believe. So, you know, breaking bread with others. Exactly. Exactly. And sharing sharing. You get the hunt or the gather and you share the best places to store the extra food is in my brother's or sister's stomach. Exactly. Yeah. You know, for years, archaeologists were digging up these what they call palaces in Crete as part of, you know, centered on this Minoan civilization and the giant palace at Nosos. And they were thinking, you know, this is where the the lords lived. But lately, you know, they've excavated some that were destroyed by earthquakes, and it turns out almost all the rooms were used to store the pottery used to serve feasts. Wow. And that really what these things were, were places where large groups of people came together and ate together. Yep. And socialized. Exactly. That's the huge thing. You know, when you when you want to punctuate time, when you want to create a sense of growth in the life, you know, your birth and your death and lots of moments, your marriage, your even your divorce. Kids. Kids. These things are all marked by foods that we eat. And the same thing like on the on the rhythm of the year. We have Valentine's Day and we have Halloween and we have Thanksgiving coming up Thanksgiving. And all of these events are, you know, on some on some level, yeah, they're marketing to us and they're selling us all kinds of often hideously unhealthy foods. But what we're doing with it is building community and building social ties and it's a very human thing to do and really important because without it, you know, we wouldn't have social identities. We would be and we wouldn't have a moral sense of our duty to feed other people. Yeah. Yeah. I like how you inextricably link food with entertainment and socialization. I it's kind of like, yeah, food, socialization, entertainment. They're inextricably linked and there's a weird fad now with when you're like in such a productivity rush in the economic machinery where, you know, the robot or drone delivers you this stuff and then you just eat and get back to, you know, working by yourself. Yeah. Like gamer grub, which is stuff in a pouch that you can just, you know, you don't have to take your hand off the off the controller. Soilent. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. This is in this compare that process we're talking about to when you plan to go and source food from a farm and bring it to your home and have your friends come and prepare a feast and invite other friends who also bring things that they've made be prepared. And you guys sit down and have a multi hour night long conversation and feast and dancing and games and play and music and drinking and all those other good things that we recognize. It kind of scares me sometimes that I think we're we can lose that because social media is a type of interaction that never has that material tie. So we don't feel the same sense of responsibility towards our Facebook friends or, you know, the people we communicate with electronically. Unless we have some basis with them of breaking bread, as you said, you know, the what is the most basic human relationship with with our mothers when we're born is that she feeds us, you know, and and it comes from her body. We come from her body, you know, and what could be a better illustration of how essential food is to any kind of social relationship. So it's taken a long time, I have to say, archaeology. I started my career as an archaeologist and married an archaeologist. But I've always had this kind of love, hate relationship with them because instead of thinking about food, they were like thinking about artifacts and diet. So when you work, work on an archaeological project, this is the way it was when I was doing it. The stone tools go to one person, the ground stone, like the manos and matates, that goes to another person. The pottery goes to the pottery specialist. The pollen person does the pollen analysis, you know, your ethnobotanist or paleobotanist does the the little remains of seeds and stems and things that you get from from the ground. And your zoo person takes all the animal bones and your human skeletal person takes all the skeletons. And all of those things are centrally related to the production and consumption of food, the tools, the cooking, all those activities. But by taking all the artifacts and sending them off to separate specialists who do their own little thing, you're getting lots of information back. But it wasn't information about food and cooking and social life. It was like a list of the things that people that appeared in people's diets and maybe some indication of how it was produced. But, you know, I remember digging up a bowl that had been smashed in a garbage pit and it was full of empty snail shells. Well, the snails went to one person to be analyzed and the pot went to the ceramics person and they're interested in, you know, how the pottery was traded and only in the last 20 years have they been interested in what it was used for. Yeah. So it was always the focus was on the pot. It's like, you know, understanding American culture by looking at containers without ever paying attention to the stuff that's in the containers. Soup, you know, tamales, tortillas. So many different variations. And we're like seeing this absolute revolution in archaeology as people start to recognize that it's important, you know, the way that people use the food. I just saw a paper this afternoon that was really about the distribution of the clay comals, which is what people in Mesoamerica used to make tortillas. Yes. Tortillas weren't invented until like the 11th or 12th century A.D. And it turns out that they were closely associated with one neighborhood at a particular archaeological site. So some people were eating tortillas every day. And other people living there were probably eating mush or, you know, making tamales or something else. That suggests that there was some real two different groups of people living there. And it doesn't look like it was a class issue. It looks more like it was cultural identity. You know, these this group of people living in one neighborhood and another group of people living in another neighborhood. And the technology has just taken off. So we can now look at like trace elements and bones and tell where the person was born. So you can look at skeletons in graveyards and you can say, all the women were born somewhere else and all the men were born here, which means that they were marrying people from other communities and exogamy. That tells you something about their culture, which probably meant that the mothers in law and the and the daughters in law were, you know, from ethnographic information, we know that's what happens when there's exogamy in the kitchen and there's a kitchen. So, you know, we can tell what people ate. We can tell how much seafood they were getting in their diet from looking at different isotope signatures in the bone. Wow. We can now get residue from the edges of stone tools so we can tell what they were cutting with it. Yeah, that's crazy. Right. Because like the fat from an animal actually bonds with the silica in the in the tool. And we now can get residue out of pots. And we can say, oh, they were drinking cow out of these pots. So now when we see a particular shape of pot, we can say, yeah, that's a cow drinking vessel. Yeah. And they're that shape because it was foamy and they didn't want it to overflow. They liked the foam on top. Yeah. So, you know, suddenly we're they're turning the tools around and using these incredible new techniques to get so much more information than we ever had before. And to think about how people created social life. Yes. You know, wow, this is so important. This was one of the earliest and most important interventions were these tools that we used to do things like carry with like a bowl of sorts, whether it be like a water like liquid or food around on our head or however to the next. I mean, this is to be able to analyze that or like these tools, like you said, like a knife. And what was that knife cutting? But were those sharp edges cutting? You know, what were they actually? How can we analyze these artifacts to know what the food and the liquids were that were being used? Because that's going to give us a super better understanding of the culture. And like, I mean, we were just talking about the importance of food in today's world. Well, food, when you didn't have computers and all these other technological devices, food was, you know, you would spend so much more time on food and the sourcing and the preparation and the socialization. I think it also, you know, I've taught a couple of courses on famine and poverty. And I think as archaeology progresses, we're going to find out that there's a close relationship between politics and hunger. Yeah. And this is something Amartya Sen, Indian economist said years ago, and that is that, you know, you don't get famine until you have states and capitalism. And because, you know, if it's a lack of money that makes people hungry, not a lack of food. So if you watch TV, listen to people talking about famine and hunger and solving the problem of poor people, so we can, we'll grow more food, right? That's not the problem. The problem is that they don't have the money to buy the food and they can't produce it themselves. So I think what archaeology is going to be able to show us is what kinds of things produce such a radical kind of inequality that some people are willing to stand around eating while other people in front of them are dying of starvation. Yeah. And that's a kind of, you know, knowledge that we really, really, really need because we've had some really horrific examples in the last century, you know, 50 million maybe died in the Great Leap Forward in China. Yeah. We didn't even know about it at the time. And they're still trying to keep it quiet. But, you know, why do we have hungry people in the most, in the richest country in the world? Yeah. It's just inexplicable. How can it still be that 50 percent of people on the planet still earn less than $2.50 a day, which is what we purchased. That's how much money we use for a cup of coffee at the store. And then how can it be that in the days of our history as well, that it was that you could have these massive, massive feasts with very specific social elites and how we would still even just like in the past, just like today, how can we still allow it that? How what is it? Is it is it the feelings going back to it? Is it the feelings of the deepest interconnectedness that we can feel as humans and as a species of deepest unconditional love that then make it so that we don't allow that? Is it the lack of those deepest principles of understanding that then make it that we allow such inequality with food and nutrition? You know, this question is something that I've been thinking about pretty much every day all my life. And, you know, I think the tragedy is that capitalism and market capitalism teaches us that it's up to us as individuals. So I remember my parents saying, you know, don't waste food. There's children starving in India. Well, there's no connection between what I was eating and, you know, starving children in India. Starving children in India was not a problem. I'm ever going to be able to solve by my own individual action. And yes, we have to be aware of the way our own consumption affects other people. But these are the kinds of problems that we solve politically, collectively. They're not things that we can solve by it's like climate change. You know, I can drive an electric car, I can bicycle, but that's not going to solve the problem. We need structural changes that make cities bikeable, for example, or that make it possible to charge your electric car without searching for two hours. And, you know, those structural changes, they ultimately have to come from people putting political pressure on governments because that's the way we run things now, you know. So it means organize. You know, don't just try to change your own. You can't change the world by changing, you know, what you eat every day. And and I know we need to be mindful. But capitalism teaches us to just buy, you know, buy the right stuff. If I could just buy the right stuff and you can't buy your way out of this, you know, it really requires action at a much larger scale. It feels like it's all it's on that. Yes. If we took a look at, again, that hierarchy of power and we aim to enlighten government leaders, corporate leaders, billionaires, et cetera, but also enlighten those at the grassroots level and try and figure out what the most optical you get had that parallax, the parallax of designing the protocols that that that create that flourishing. I mean, that being the priority, I mean, there really children and optimal education seems in many ways to be pointing towards a project based learning around some of these greatest challenges that society faces, the SDGs and much more. And just prioritizing also enlightenment, spiritual actualization, bringing your unique gifts forth, redesigning that social fabric. I mean, this has been so interesting going back and forth about consumer culture, about food. You ask great questions. You really do. Thank you. Yeah, you know, it's it's the game of tennis, you know, and we stand on the shoulders of giants before us that make it. Absolutely. Yeah. But, you know, the ability to bring ideas out and articulate them is not that common. You know, it's it's a skill and it's hard to train people to do that. But, you know, especially the art of listening is something that we have a real hard time with these days. Yeah. So thank you. Yeah, you're you're you're so welcome. I have one last question for you that we like asking on the show. What do you think is most beautiful? Oh, yeah, it's beautiful. Since I was 19 years old, I've been fascinated by Japanese woodblock print art. I got about 600 of them now. It's the only art form I know where the price has consistently gone down over the last 40 years. But there's what I what I get out of those prints is just a radically different way of seeing things. You know, they don't use the same rules of perspective. They use different conventions for faces and hands and arms and postures. But it was a very popular art form. It wasn't like high art. These were things people bought for pennies, you know, to decorate the walls in there and paste them to the walls in their houses. So, you know, to me, that's always been as far as human created art a way of understanding another culture and another time that really saw things in a radically different way. And if you can see the beauty in that, you can understand something about the way they saw the world and understood their place in it. And particularly, I collect prints that show women doing violent things with weapons, usually. Interesting. Because, again, we tend to think of Japanese society today as very rigidly sexist. But that's something that they largely adopted because that's what they thought the West was like. And, you know, before the 1850s, before Perry and his black ships, women trained with weapons and not fake weapons. Either they trained with, you know, sharp ones. And the Japanese history is filled with women who have tremendous agency and tremendous martial skills who are kind of remembered as historical figures. That said, I have always been fascinated by seeing the world from above. And satellite photos, drones, you know, understanding nature by seeing the patterns that nature forms. You can see them from the ground, but seeing them from above and from the air, I always find just fascinating, really interesting. Yeah, that's a great set of beauty. I love it. I love it. Thank you again so much for coming on the program. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode. On all these great things that Rick was teaching us, let us know your thoughts about consumer culture, beauty pageants, food history, food archaeology, all of these different fields. We'd love to hear your thoughts on them. Check out the links in the bio below. To all of Rick's books, you can find the book link there. You can also find openant.org for the Open Anthropology Foundation and Institute. You can find that there. If you can, please do support the funding of that. We would love to better understand our culture. We take PayPal. We take PayPal. I love it. The links in the bio below. And also do support the American Anthropology Association. You can find their links in the bio below. You can support them on Twitter as well. We'll follow them there. And also support the artists, the entrepreneurs, the spiritual leaders, the organizations around the world and in your communities that you believe in. Support them and help them grow. You can support Simulation R show. So you can do cool things like coming on site to great conferences and summits and interviewing their leaders. You can find our PayPal, Patreon, Cryptocurrency, Design Cool Merchant. Get paid all those links in the bio below. And go and build the future. Everyone, manifest your dreams into the world. We love you very much. Thank you for tuning in. And we will see you soon. Peace. Wow. That was intense. That was really intense. Thank you. That was really great. Yeah. It's beautiful to be able to take what is someone's spirit over decades of understanding reality and then help it shine and be unleashed. Yeah. That's a rare skill. And you got it. Thank you, my brother. Thank you.