 Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Saki and we are on site in San Jose at the Convention Center at the American Anthropological Association. Their AAA is having their annual meeting and we are getting to sit down with some of their anthropologists that are professors, they're in academia, they are researchers, they are studying biology or they are studying archaeology or linguistics or cultural anthropology. There's so much to apply to anthropology, it's so fascinating and I'm like I'm a kid in a knowledge haven right now. It's so amazing and we are our first guest as we sit down. We have Dr. Elise Waterston joining us on the show. Elise was the vice president of the AAA in 2013 and 2015. She was the president of the AAA from 2015 to 2017. So that's already like four major years of AAA involvement. It's a lot of work. It's a big organization. There's like almost 6,000 people here. Yes. Yeah, that's a huge organization and she's a cultural anthropologist and professor of anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York with a focus on how systemic violence and inequality influence society. She's a six-time author. She has an ethnographic book called My Father's Wars which we'll talk about and we will also talk about her upcoming book called Light in Dark Times, The Human Search for Meaning. So, wow, Elise, what a cool background. Thank you so much, Alan. You are so cool. This is gonna be super fun. So, how does one like you tell us about your story about how you got into anthropology? Okay, well first of all, I really enjoy the way you described your excitement about anthropology and all of its different aspects and it's what's so true. You really hit on something really very true about the discipline which is, you know, students have an introduction to anthropology learn. It's a holistic discipline and it sounds, you know, almost trite after a while but it is so true because most other disciplines take a slice of reality and take a look at it whether it's economics or whether it's religion or some other aspect of life, social life or biological life or whatever and examine it, which is a good thing. But anthropologists start with the big picture. It's holistic and it says, okay, here we have the big picture and how do we understand all the different parts and how they're connected with one another and that's what I love about anthropology. So, without giving you a long-winded description of how I got into it, I will tell you that I started out in my 20s as a school teacher in Brooklyn and started to do research in my own community. It was a very poor community and my big question, I didn't study anthropology as an undergraduate, but my big question as a person living in the world and living in a very poor neighborhood working with children who were really struggling with sort of structural vulnerabilities, I wanted to understand more deeply how could in the wealthiest nation in the world and this is the 1970s, there'd be so much poverty and when I went to figure out, I need to study this and I couldn't go on, there was no internet to go Google disciplines. I had majored in psychology as an undergraduate so I went to the library and I studied different of the social sciences to see and I landed on anthropology and once I landed on anthropology and read up on it, I knew it would never ever go away and it hasn't. Your interest wouldn't end. It would not end, it's really endless. So cool. You're speaking about it from such a multidisciplinary perspective which is what our show is all about and so it's very awesome that anthropology is a huge, the study of humans is such a huge multidisciplinary field. So when you see the inequalities and when you see you ask yourself what is the root of this? How can we get to the roots? Not solving them from a aesthetic perspective but solving them from a roots systemic perspective. Well the thing is anthropologists often say and then people glaze their eyes over when they hear anthropologists say it's complicated but it is complicated and so one of the things that I discovered when I was in graduate school trying to understand the world was what those different aspects are that are forces that shape what human lives are and become and so that's why you mentioned biological anthropology and archaeology, historical and language and linguistics and cultural so you know if we're going to understand something like poverty you can't have a simple simplistic or simple one-liner answer to it but you do have to look at the ways in which the interplay of power and politics and economics and the economic organization of a society and its political structures and its political ideology all play into creating the field within which people live out their lives and so often we refer to that field in a society like ours as a structurally unequal field and so that doesn't mean to say that human beings living within that or on that field are just you know complete and total victims you know of the structures it means that we have to look at the ways in which human beings interact with the systems in place the institution the social institutions of society everything from the family which is a social institution to you know you know when you're dealing with issues around poverty for example the marketplace the money as well money of course the value between people well yes and that has to do with the economic organization of society and then but although other institutions like you know the market place is an institution but you know when you think about poverty and you see how poverty is criminalized so you have to look at things like the criminal justice institution if you're going to talk about you're going to when you think about poverty when you think about poverty you think you have to think about what how human beings satisfy their basic needs food so we know we have food insecurity shelter we know we have issues around housing and homelessness but these are not just separate segmented aspects it all comes together to a big picture of that to help us understand how human beings navigate on this unequal field and to also to navigate it for sustenance and survival but also navigate it to enjoy life yeah to to to to to to have love in their lives and to have joy in their lives even amidst hardship and difficulty yes and that's in human search for meaning is you know in in the upcoming book that you're writing about so you know the the way that you know you're describing it's so beautiful humans want to have the basic necessities they want to have the the the highest emotions and feelings that one can feel during their lives as well so how does how did you go from being becoming fascinated with anthropology to becoming a professor writing books being a leader a head leadership of AAA so these are great questions and I have to think through the short version of a long life history so let me try to to answer your question that so as I said once I discovered anthropology I knew I was never going to go away I didn't start graduate school until I was 29 or 30 years old and and I got through that and then ultimately but I've been in New York and so my field my research my field work was in New York I have a couple of books out about urban poverty in the U.S. so one book is on women in homelessness in New York City and I have another book about the street drug scene in New York during the 1980s so these are all issues around poverty so it is an urban poverty sort of subfield within the field of cultural anthropology and I I came to John Jay College in 2003 and it was it was wonderful to be part of that department and the Institute and the institution of higher education there because I was very much nurtured to fulfill my own potential in what I wanted to do with my work one of the reasons I love working at CUNY and at John Jay is that it's a public university and I believe in the public a public education so I'm thrilled to work in a in that kind of institution and I think we need to support our public institutions which are not getting enough support but our students are primarily working class working poor students of of color and new immigrants and many of most are first-generation college students and I love working with our students because they are there because they want to be there they are there because they they want to find they're they're aspirational and they really are very dedicated to really at my school trying to participate in the world to make it a better place so you know the university the college has a tagline educating for justice and when you walk into the building of of my university of my college at John Jay there's a big wall of words next to justice and so it's you know criminal justice and there's social justice and there's economic justice climate justice gender justice racial justice and poetic justice they actually have justice on the wall and it's and it's it's it's you know it's true it's it's a place where we explore the idea of justice from multiple angles and working with our students has just been a great honor and my greatest pleasure well so many variances of justice that's yeah that are wow um will you just give us a quick one-sentencer on on justice well to me justice has to do with fairness I mean and of course we can interpret justice in many ways as I just said but so what we do in our department is really focus on social justice and even that we can unpack that those two words but basically it's about for me it is about understanding the those multiple obstacles to providing opportunity for people to fulfill their own potential and where there is injustice means that there are forces in place there are structures in place and then there are four there there is um there are powerful forces that inhibit the ability for every individual to fulfill that potential and we call that structural violence okay so that's a good way to put it so then there's this actualization potential of every human and then the obstacles that are in the way that are socially constructed um are social violence that's a form of violence and it's invisible yeah because you don't see it it's not like if I punched you in the nose yeah you would see it but structural violence is more invisible so it's very difficult to even talk about it because it's an abstraction but you can and you can take it apart and and look at all those different structures and systems and see the ways they work and at the same time not reduce human beings to uh you know simply uh the victims of such structures and systems they are we all are we are also actors though in the world too and we find spaces in between to actualize as as much as possible it doesn't mean everybody can fulfill that potential because if they if they if it's if the playing field is uneven then you're you know it's difficult to find social justice but I didn't answer your question about how I got to AAA yeah let's get there should I should I go there let's do there so um you know you you mentioned earlier that there are 6 000 people here at the conference and it's very intimidating especially for a junior scholar when you first come in and it's like oh my god everybody knows everybody else and I don't know anybody and oh my god and who's that and who's this and people are looking at my name tag you know they're looking at my mates see if I'm anybody important and I'm really not important and it's very intimidating and I was very intimidated um but it was for me it was the AAA that actually enabled the as the organization that enabled me to really um uh it helped me um develop a wonderful network of friends and colleagues around the world and uh to really find my own sense of my anthropological self yeah and so I met people and then I was invited you always need somebody to bring you in I think so I was invited by Maria Vespiri to um write something for a publication through the AAA that she was involved in um and um that invitation opened the door for me and and then I submitted the piece the written piece and she liked it and then she asked me to serve as an editor for something and I did that and then from there it just grew and then I volunteered um in various capacities through the association and um the more I I did that the more people came to me and asked me to participate in other things and do this committee and that entity and the other thing and so eventually it got to the point where um you know I became an elected member of the I was on various committees related to the transition to electronic publishing for example that was earlier and on the long range planning committee things like that and then I was elected to the executive board and then somebody on the executive board watched me and wanted to nominate me for president and I said I don't think so and then she said yes so and she did and then then I became president I was elected so that's how I that was my trajectory it's one step at a time yes and it's a lot of work and dedication but you know I really believe that the association which is designed to advance um the discipline of anthropology which is a marginal discipline in the world so it's very important that we have our professional organization that can help all of us advance our discipline yes and um it it really accomplishes an enormous amount um doesn't necessarily always get credit for what it does but in my book it's it's a it's a really great strong organization that does help us as anthropologists um produce and disseminate knowledge and information which is what it's all about yes about humans and about culture about behavior about everything around us exactly and these abstractions as well are very important to understand now as you were speaking you were talking about these you know the committees and as I was walking through I was looking at all the different committee at lots some of the different committees and holy cow there's so many and yes you're working on so many different things here and you're the way that you work through it totally makes sense now um so you started professing you started professing in 2003 2003 was where I got the full-time position as a as a professor 15 years now that's a long time that's awesome yeah so maybe give us a quick bit on what have been some of your favorite learning processes as a as a professor and like your engagements with students your ability to expand their minds to new ways of thinking okay so I will give you one example I'm actually teaching a brand new course right now that I could share with you as well but but first I'm going to start with a course that I really enjoyed teaching that's because we're a school of criminal justice a lot of the a lot of the courses have names that sound that are kind of have a criminal justice or something like that hook um so there's this one course that's called culture and crime and when I would teach that course I would ask the students you know in the you know the first day of class what do you think this course is going to be about and they um invariably say well it's going to be why do you know some cultural groups commit certain crimes and why is it you know so and and and I knew that that's what they would say you know they would it was almost like demonizing cultural groups you know before we even started about you know why does why do they commit crimes and why do they commit these kinds of crimes you know so is those kinds of things that I knew they would say and I said and I always would say well actually this course is going to be very intense but it's about crimes of power war and genocide culture and crime whoa and so it's you know a tough course but you know it we really I used a lot of different kinds of interdisciplinary literature um from anthropological works to poetry to you know to have students understand war and political violence and crimes against humanity in those kinds of ways and genocide and have them produce works in multiple formats like and graphic format or you know different kinds of narratives and things like that so we I use multiple different approach writing approaches to have them articulate what they were learning and at my school um often there is the military recruiting students and our students are vulnerable to being recruited by the military because um you know they are working class working poor students and um sometimes they you know in the literatures the recruitment literature is very appealing it's you know we'll pay for your education we'll you know and um so forth and um so but I had students come up to me after this class and say you know I had the papers to join the military in my pocket but after this course there's no way I'm joining in the military and the thing is that I you know I didn't propaganda as I did say oh you know you shouldn't join it was never about that but it was about under let's study war yeah let's study specific wars let's study what philosophers have said about war let's study what anthropologists have learned by going into war zones those kinds of things and um and then that got them thinking and then they realized that this decision to enter the armed forces really requires careful deep consideration and not just an automatic I'll do it because I'll get an education for my love pay for my schooling and um so that to me is an accomplishment because we want the students to think for themselves and think critically we always say that oh we're going to teach students to think critically but then actually we don't you know because we don't really give them the tools often enough for them to think critically so that's one example I won't go into details at this course I'm teaching now but it's a writing course just quickly on the last thing that you said wow there's so many variables that go into why we have war and when we break them down at at their roots and we try and find some sort of peace love and understanding on planet there is less of a need for war and hopefully in within this century we can find some sort of world peace it's something that we care about a lot and that we talk about a lot and there's a there's a big shift towards towards heart coherence the sort of of empathy and emotional intelligence that people can carry with their with their stewardship for earth and with their care for each other that I think could get us there and I think is is starting to get us there in many ways so I'd be interested to see how much you hear at AAA also speak on on world on world peace and well okay so a couple of comments and response to what you just said number one is that there can't be a peace without justice okay so that's one thing because we can have peace and people could you know not war and people can be really immiserated if you accept that word I mean you know have lives that are very difficult because of these conditions that you know are not peaceful that invisible violence that I was talking about earlier so that's one thing I think the other thing is that we we have to look at the political economics the political economy of war historically and in the present and you know one quickie way to kind of get a picture of it is looking at the budgets the military budgets and so we in our society in the US the military budget keeps growing 800 billion and and you know so we've got to follow the money follow the money and then follow the relationships to you know to the the like other countries the geopolitical relationship well the two but no but I'm talking about follow the money and the tools and technology of war oh yeah these are produced and reproduced and sold and you know and and how there is a market for war you know so and I'm not reducing war to that but I think it's an important piece of it that we have to really understand and billions of dollars of weapons moving around the world yeah right so you have to look at those kinds of big picture factors and then you have to look at the ideological factors the sort of the rhetoric around war and I was in a panel on Wednesday called cowardice hmm and unpacking that concept and you know one of the you know the part of the discussion in that panel was that you know there's often I hear this all the time that people say oh human beings will always be at war because they always were and they always will it's in our genes it's in our nature and you laugh but this is people say it all the time yeah you know at Thanksgiving time go ask just bring the subject up and at your own family table and you will hear people say that but if we say the word always in inevitable will never have the potential consciousness and it's also the the anthropological record the biocultural anthropological record shows that's not true because human beings have the potential to be and as you said actually it's it's a more more adaptive in many depending on the circumstance to be caring and to be cooperative and those kinds of things totally and so the concept of a coward and the hero is part of the ideological armature of of um you know this condition of militarism that um you know has I mean my students they don't want to be cowards they want to be heroes but you have to unpack them the words and understand this is where linguistic anthropology comes in as well because we take a word that we think we know what it means and we think you know we take it for granted but if you start to take it apart you start to see how powerful the word is because it evokes such powerful images and has us responding to them in a certain way what is it that we want to be how do I want to be identified we hear it every time there is a news you know terrible news tragedy or somebody does something wonderful to help other people they say you're a hero you know um and then the person says I'm not a hero I was just doing my job or whatever but they this construct of hero anyway so you get the idea that that um you know it's um um this is all part of what we have to take apart to understand humankind and and the meanings people attach to things to words to ideas and to practices yes yes and if we and to make that cultural shift we have to put these the linguistical practices all into movement in order to make these changes the geopolitical changes etc let's touch on um my father's wars okay okay so this is about your father yes so my father's wars is the full title is my father's wars migration memory and the violence of a century so you can see so much of my work and my interests are around these issues around displacement dispossession diaspora war uh violence um and structural and systemic violence as you said and it's it's effects on human lives and so um I um my father has a very interesting life history he lived across the 20th century he was born in eastern european jew in a place called yet vabne poland and um his his migration trajectory was from poland to cuba to the united states to saffron portrico and uh so he has this really interesting story that crosses cultures language groups um continents uh nation states um and wars he lived through he lived his in the course of his life he lived through two wars and a revolution and um so and my father was not a very easy person to get along with for me anyway i could speak for myself and uh and but he also had was a great storyteller and always had storyteller and always had um it was pretty open about talking about the past and i was very fascinated by his stories even as a child and then later it it won't go into all the background but it came to me that i really wanted him to be the subject of my of a study um with him as the as the base as the heart of it but edge out from his life story to a larger social history so often in scholarly work we might look at a topic like let's say war and we might even look at a war or we might look at migration and look at a pattern of migration of these folks from there to here you know like that it's circumscribed in good but what i wanted to do was look at a life and look at it across all these terrains so that um we could understand um a multiplicity of forces but also change and transformation so to give you a hint a kind of a cultural hint about the changes my father's own life embodies and you know is his name he was born menachem mendel washerstein and in cuba in a little town called manquito he became migalito because mendel is like translates to migalita mendel is the diminutive in yiddish he became migalito in havana he became miguel and then later he became michael waterston that's how i got my last name what an evolution of a name evolution of a name that suggests and then at the end of his life in portorico he was known as don migal so you can imagine and i and there are photographs of him you have a photograph of him from poland as a little boy he looks like it's poland from 19 teens you know um 1920s then you have him in havana he looks like a you know he had he has the whole aura of of this young man in havana and then as an america it's a photograph of him as an american soldier he looks like an american soldier anyways and so forth so it's really interesting because those photographs too those are artifacts that suggest meanings very anthropological very cultural these are like different lives they're different lives but it's one life but it's one life and it's a life that reflects um it's it's it's what i tried to do in telling that my description of him was to show him you know in his i wasn't going to put him up on a pedestal and i wasn't going to put him down and you know and demonize him i wanted to show him as a real live flesh and blood human being who had his strengths and his weaknesses and his faults and his assets and and and he lived through a violent century and he managed and adapted and maneuvered sometimes and um and i and it's a reflection of the human struggle and so we i call this my my colleague barbara rilko bower and i developed a term for this approach of working with one's own parent and we call it intimate ethnography because i did this study as a daughter but as an anthropologist as well so it's an anthropologist daughter or daughter anthropologist study of her own father which is not something that's usually done in our field which we need to do more of because there's not enough intimate ethnology intimate ethnography and not ethnography yeah ethnography this the study of culture well ethnography is um an approach to research but it's also the final product your book okay okay and then um ethnography customs of individuals and cultures yeah you can say it like that okay and so we i think we need more intimate ethnography because it will enable us to better document the evolution of different cultures and it's not just the evolution of cultures because um but it's because that by using that word suggests that there is a trajectory but it isn't so much a trajectory as it is um at at at particular moments in time and in place you have people who um or have organized themselves and and understand their lives and are in social relationship with one another and are in social relationship with the power structures that they find themselves in and it's in it's a dynamic it's either it's a process and a dynamic so it's not so much a an evolution which is too linear to you know often we conceptualize evolution too linear in a linear way a documentation of the variables that the person evolved within that that timeline of existence what their life was like because all of the different variables that your father went through the wars and the revolution and and changing it from you know from a soldier to and the migrations yeah the migration and the movement and the not movements and social policy because his family tried to get to the us in 1924 but the the us immigration law changed it at that time to prevent people like my father from coming in just like it's so relevant to some of the things happening now because they um didn't want the riffraff in they didn't want people from eastern europe and southern europe to come into the united states that were going to pollute the american character yeah there's there's this also this strange way that i started perceiving now intimate ethnography where i started thinking about well why not who do you choose to document who do you not choose to document because somebody that lives in a in a rural town for 80 years and they live and die in that rural town maybe in the middle of the us or in the middle of anywhere else on the planet just you know what why would it be important to document that you know that type of so i think everybody has a life history now anthropologists don't necessarily look at one individual like i did in this particular case i mean my study of women in homelessness i looked at many into many people um but um but you know um and you know anthropologists immerse themselves in a particular place and get to know people in that place and it's it's not necessarily the kind of thing that i did here um although in our discipline we do have tradition of uh doing life history research you know of individual life histories cool um you know everybody has a history everybody's family has a history and i know that my uh intimate ethnography which is a life story that's a social history because we are all social beings so there's always going to be a social history that that that's behind that surrounds that person that you just described that imaginary person in the rural area you know where do they come from like they're not an island unto themselves there's there is something there is a story there but you know i think there's more reason to document a noble laureate or someone that led a genocide is there more reason to document that well that's interesting question because one of the things about my book i think is that is a contribution is that it's an ordinary person and uh you know who's um you know life history is relevant because it provides us insight into those larger social the largest social history and the larger dynamics and the interplay of the individual within that um you know so a biography of of a biography of a you know famous person i mean that's uh that's not you know i mean there it's i there's a time and place for everything but as an anthropologist i'm interested in the ordinary people and what their experiences are and uh what that can teach us and what that can teach us and and um about humanity yes yes now the other books along the way to light and dark times were those more about justice and well so i mentioned that i have a book on women in homelessness yes and that book is called love sorrow and rage and then the subtitle is destitute women in a Manhattan residence and the other book i have is um street addicts in the political economy it's called and then i've done edited volumes most recent one is on gender in the republic of in georgia which is um the in the former soviet union and caucuses yes um culture nation in history it's a feminist perspectives on culture nation in history in the south caucuses and i have an edited volume on war and i have an edited volume on writing anthropology which is one of the things that i'm very keen on because i think it's very important for us anthropologists to um we we know so much and we need to communicate what we understand about the world better to larger audiences and put the the voices in public conversations which kind of leads me to light and dark times yeah so um if i can share that with you yes and i also want to say out out of the you know when you were first starting to teach us about about john j college and the student body that's there at this public this public college city college that this is a this is this is also one of the things that leads more conversations and more of your research it's let it because you get to see firsthand um diverse uh women uh lower s e s mid s e s etc socioeconomic status and that surrounding yourself there it gives you a better understanding of the the the the violent uh injustices um that that are occurring in the um in humanity well um we do have a very diverse student body as you as i said and um a lot of our students i mean they um they struggle with um limited access to resources we do have students who are homeless we uh too many of them we have students who are food insecure we most of our students work and many of them work full time i mean nearly all of our students work and so they don't come from privileged backgrounds and yet they manage to accomplish enormous amounts and i'm very proud of them um so but let me tell you a little bit about light and dark times the human search for meaning um that and it's so cool that it is like i when i saw that i i got really excited because to me disseminating the complexity um to the youth is really important right so so here's the so you what you just showed your audience is um a flyer from a talk that my um collaborator charlotte holland's and i just did at my school which was a wonderful experience um the first time we brought um our collaborative work to an audience and it was great um so let me tell you a little bit about it really briefly so as as you mentioned i was president of the american anthropological association and my term ended last december and the night before your term ends you give a big address to um an audience of anthropologists so there were i don't know between 800 and a thousand people in the audience and i had my address was at that time my address was titled four stories four stories a lament and an affirmation and what it was was a talk that was an engagement with hannah arendt and bertolt brecht about the dark times of the past and bringing them into the present and i was talking to this audience of anthropologists about what i thought we need to be doing at this particular historical moment in these dark times um as anthropologists and what some things and that was my four stories the four things that i've come to say to this audience so unbeknownst to me there was an artist in the audience and her name is charlotte holland's and she was listening to my talk and um was so inspired um by the talk that she went back to her hotel room and spent the entire night drawing making a visual representation of my talk which i received the next day wow and it is the most gorgeous i felt so affirmed because she understood so much of what i was trying to convey yes in this gorgeous drawing yes so i'm not going to go through details but i will tell you that ultimately i got in touch with her and i said to her what do you think about if we work together and create a graphic book based on my talk and your illustration and that is what we've been doing since last january first by skype she's in london and then she came to new york to stay with me and we have been working together since the end of june with a little break in between where she had to go she went back home but she's i'm here in san jose and she's back in new york and um we've been we finished about um two-thirds of the book and what we have done there with in that drawing that you see there there are two little characters one in red and one in blue and i'm the character in red and she's the character in blue and we go on this search and encounter many philosophers and thinkers um and writers and anthropologists and political scientists and others who are going to help us understand the dark times of the past and the dark and the dark times of the present but the light that there's light there all the way through which is um what the search is is not for we don't we're not optimistic if you think of the word optimism as okay everything's going to work out happily ever after but we're searching for meaning like we're searching for hope in the sense that in meaning of hope um as we're going to make sense out of things and that's our so we're searching for understanding and knowledge and one of the one of the um and we're we're searching for mutual understanding on a gigantic scale that is one of what part of the search and um and uh where we can find that in part is through this rich store of anthropological knowledge about people everywhere and anywhere produced by anthropologists anywhere and everywhere and that is that is where we can lift the cotton wool of obfuscation that pulls the wool over our eyes and um and and and and and come to understanding by uh the illumination that we get through knowledge and that is our book and it's gorgeous and it's yeah visually visually incredible awesome awesome I love that so so now just tell us about this the the importance of piercing the veil and also seeing and then how that helps see the light and kind of like a little bit on that journey like how do you explain so when we're on this journey and we're you know meeting these different philosophers there were the four stories that I mentioned earlier the four things for us to think about um is that we really we need to we all need to be introspective we need to reflect on ourselves and what our assumptions are what our beliefs are what our what our presumptions are and and really be honest with ourselves about um our motivations and our attitudes and our beliefs so be introspective that's really important for all of us yeah um meditation is great for that yeah and um also we need to um think in dark times that and and actually this is where Hannah Arendt comes in and I won't go into those specifics right now but she she talks about what thinking is and it's thinking is is not reasoning for example because you know we can find reasons for all sorts of things and justify all sorts of terrible things that's not thinking so we need to think uh and be thoughtful in in these dark times in any dark times and what would you say thinking is done it's it's it's akin to introspection but it's different because it's it's it's really a silent intercourse with oneself yes um and um but it also requires um going beyond um your own opinion about something absolutely it's it's it's it's not multi-perspective synthesis that's that's one way to to put it um and then the third the third uh thing we really need to do um is think about um and understand truth lies and trivia the danger of the trivial so much of what we well we we we know that we're living in a post-truth world if you will um and um and that it's very difficult to curate to know what's true and what's not true because it's because we're bombarded with information to parse for signal in all the noise exactly and um also and and and you know this is for anthropologists but for everybody we have to avoid the trivial and and for for scholars we have to avoid producing the trivial we have to produce really important things not just stuff to to publish or to you know so forth you need it needs to be meaningful yes it needs to be a contribution but we also have to avoid the trivial um you know in terms of you know uh we're so exposed to junk yeah and you know we have to avoid that because there's that stuff is distraction it's distracting and then we're we're and then then the darkness is is there there's a little amount of waking hours we have every day exactly only 16 of them on average per human so there's if there's only 120 billion hours of collective human attention on the planet if you direct as much of that attention towards knowledge and truth and multi perspective synthesis as possible and away from the noise then you're going to have more of a prosperous and this doesn't mean that you can't relax your mind and look at something you know totally can't be all that we do okay can't be all that we pay attention to yes so there's that and then the fourth thing is envisioning an alternative world yes what we don't do is allow ourselves the space yes to imagine a different way of organizing the world we don't do that and we have to do that we have to provide the space and if we've gone through introspection and we are thinking and you know if we are understanding what is what are lies and different kinds of lies because that's what we go through we talk about radical deception and what that is these are concepts that's a concept from you know Hannah rent also but and she also talked about radical evil by the way and radical evil is you know a system a political economic system that turns human beings into superfluous makes them superfluous yes makes them redundant makes them dehumanize dehumanize so all of these things are in this you know search human search for meaning all of this and it's all visually presented incredibly and I think then and then we get to this last piece which is creating the space and the time to envision an alternative world and how that might look and not allow you know not be not just allow ourselves to be locked into an ism or some kind of ideology but really like what is important to us and that piece in my talk and in the book is really very moving to me goes full circle back to my students because one of this one of my students brought into class the idea of for us to do this and so one of the things that we did one day in class was and this student organized this event this activity he had each student write down on a piece of paper the most important thing that he that we thought as individuals to change that needed changing for an alternative world and he put them in a jar and then we each had to pick out one person's thing which wasn't our own and read it aloud and it was the most incredible because when you mentioned earlier about caring and community everything that the students said were all about that it was all about that and it was not about making money and it wasn't about getting material objects so you know accumulating material goods it wasn't about any of those things it was all about um us becoming human beings who care about one another love and love and caring and community and together we'd be able to find the justice that we were talking about earlier yeah because with that we can then plan a new world yes that is just that is just what a cool activity on each putting in one thing that we want to see us change in the world and then to read each other's out loud that is very cool and how often do we do we stop and think well what would it be what would be the template for an alternative world exactly and I've been I've called that I guess now two words civilization design or planetary architecture these have been kind of like two phrases that I've been throwing around a little bit to feel out how people what people react to them but those phrases are exactly what slow down feel what would we want to design civilization as what would be an ideal architecture for the flow of resources to the people for flourishing on the planet so and I love how you made it so clear about the about not getting lost in what's trivial because there are plenty of people trying to capitalize on you being lost in what's trivial yes exactly and that's the thing that we're we all struggle with this we all struggle with it so that's that's where that's my that's my work in a nutshell and and where I'm at today so so when I get back to New York from the conference Charlotte and I are going to continue to work on light in dark times and we we have a sense of urgency about this book project because we feel that you know you know these are I mean listen we're here in San Jose breathing in this air amidst you know people in power who tell us there's no issues with with climate change and you know it's you know we want the world we want the world to be sustainable it's worth sustaining and human life is worth sustaining and we all want to be safe yeah wow I feel so blessed thank you Elise thanks for joining us on the show this has been this has been such a pleasure I'm just I have a lot of love for what you care about and what you're writing about what you're teaching so thank you so much I greatly appreciate you coming on thank you very very much thank you my pleasure thank you this is this again I'm a I'm a kid in a knowledge haven right now it's so fun being here thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it give us your thoughts in the comments below we'd love to hear from you check out AAA as well their links in the bio please give them a look and keep building the future go and manifest your dreams into the world everyone thank you for tuning in much love and we'll see you soon bye wow great I feel so so good that was oh great so enriched and like oh you're so wonderful thank you