 I've been involved in infectious disease anthropology for over 25 years now and throughout all of that work really I think the question that continues to inspire me and to motivate me is how do particular cultural categories of motherhood, of childhood, of womanhood, of gender, of sexuality, of difference, how are those categories connected to life in the context of a particular epidemic and that speaks not only to the genesis of that epidemic but also how that epidemic unfolds in real people's lives every single day. And where I work in Saskatchewan the primary means of transmission of HIV is through heterosexual contact and through injection drug use so again it's a very different epidemiological profile than that which unfolds elsewhere. Now of course in pre-colonial times and in indigenous communities that were less affected by colonialism for more years than others. You see indigenous motherhood being the site of tremendous power of great reverence but it was colonialism that disrupted that. I think that colonialism was driven right from the 17th century on where colonialism was driven by an ethos of empire expansion and by an ethos of a requirement for homogeneity and perspective and in population. So we see here of course the seeds of white supremacy, of virulent racism, of a sense of entitlement often justified through all kinds of doctrines and that ethos perpetuates itself. There are of course counter-forces to that. There are forces for pluralism, there are forces for diversity, equity, rights, all of these kinds of initiatives have also developed. So it has not been colonialism for the win but it certainly has been and is an ongoing fight. That's why I'm particularly proud of the work that anthropologists in Canada do towards decolonization towards moving away from that singular ethos. What's up everyone, welcome to Simulation, I'm your host Alan Sacian. We're onsite 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 medical anthropology and much more. We have Dr. Pamela down joining us on the show. Hi Pam. Hi, thank you very much. Thanks for coming on the program. My pleasure. I'm super excited. Pam's background is really fascinating. She's been studying infectious diseases, HIV-AIDS community-based engagement research, motherhood, maternal care, maternal health, policy analysis, the cultural basis of reproductive decision-making. I'm really excited to get into all of this. I also associate professor and faculty member in archaeology and anthropology at the University of Saskatchewan and doing women and gender studies as well as transferring now to archaeology and anthropology, serving as the department head for five years in 2010-2015. This is a great background to do medical anthropology, especially because we were talking about this a little bit earlier also, and this will be interesting to hear thoughts about this, because Douglas Cardinal brought it up, and he knows his focus on like indigeneity. Yes. Yes. And he goes, men have to go into the sweat lodges because they don't have the reproductive cycle, the monthly cycle that ties women to the deep force of nature and interconnectedness and the moon, and like men don't have that, and so we don't. I'm actually really curious to kind of start things off with that feeling of oneness that feels like this main upstream issue of our world is that we feel separate instead of interconnected. How do you feel about that? I think that's a very interesting question. I think that too often we posit interconnectedness and difference as if they're opposite things, and I think they're in fact not. I think that we find that interconnectedness and what we share is a sense of difference. It's how we mobilize and operationalize that difference that matters. Do we operationalize it in a way that privileges our global humanity? Do we operationalize it in a way that divides us and creates divisive categories of people where we create thin boundaries such that we don't want to interact when we create difference through the establishment of thick boundaries, of blurred boundaries. That's where you get far more interconnections and interactions. So it's an interesting question for me because I don't see it as dichotomous. I don't see divisive difference or interconnectedness as being either or. I think we are both, and I think in human history we have always been both. Yes, it's this two sides of the same coin. One is the deep interconnectedness and the other one is this kind of like individuality that we all get to uniquely express our own gifts into the world. So it's like the marriage of those two things is paramount, like kind of like the collective interconnectedness and also the individual expression. Yep, and within that individual expression I would say then individuals also aggregate in collectives. And so then you have obviously my own idiosyncratic, highly individual experience way of looking at the world, way of navigating the world, but that doesn't come out of a vacuum. That is in part born of my collective identity, how my community works, how I'm told my place in the community, how I claim my place in the community. So it's interesting because then on that one side of the coin you get individual differences, you get group differences, collective differences. And then on the other hand, on the other side of the coin you get a real sense of interconnectedness. So it is a constant circle where we're moving from one level, one scale to another. Yes. How can we best marry the two sides of the coin? I think by continuing to talk across those different scales or levels. So when we speak of someone's individual experience, in my research speaking about someone's individual health experience for example, living with a long-term chronic infectious disease, when we think about that individual experience, we have to honor that and honor those individuated understandings and behaviors. But at the same time know that there's a community that, through which those behaviors and experience resonate and that have in many ways enabled those experiences. So we talk about it at all the different levels. And then we can also talk about how those experiences and behaviors are then shared by others. What are those connecting threads? I think we have to be careful with the different ways in which we talk about it and not reduce it or expand it only, but to do both at the same time. Could it be that this most upstream issue of facing our society, in many ways indigeneity holds as their central pillar of existence, their understanding of the complete interconnectedness that they are one with their environments with each other and that that first principle that they carry is completely flipped on its head in the metropolises. And the metropolises is not like interconnected feeling whatsoever. And could that be then caring, like going back caring about that first principle, about when a child's born that they're taught that the breath of air actually comes from phytoplankton or trees, that the bite of apple comes from the sunpowering it? That could that understanding be what heals so many of the other issues? I would like to think so. Certainly the principle or the value of interconnectedness, the value of those connections I think has to be manifest and has to be woven throughout how we raise our children, how we understand ourselves. I become a little bit concerned when we want to say that there's one indigenous philosophy or ideas about certain things. Absolutely. Because of course there's so many different indigenous ideas. But very often they are in conflict with the neoliberal philosophies that are driving many of the major world economies and societies today. So there is a difference there. Again, it's how we mobilize or operationalize that difference. That to me is a really important question and in relation to human health or maternal care. What would be an optimal way to mobilize a difference towards communing with the one and expressing individuality at the same time? How would we mobilize that difference optimally? I think that understanding that difference is going to occur between individuals among communities and between communities. So the idea would be to nourish difference and understand it as a value. Great and wonderful human things have happened when we have cultivated diverse perspectives. When we have engaged in that, the power of the friction that occurs when different perspectives come together, either in collision or in cooperation. There's been wonderful human innovation, understanding, compassion, human rights that come about from that. So actually enabling it. I worry that right now there's a broad global and political discourse that wants homogeneity in perspective and in approach. And I think that is going to tip the scale in very, very uncomfortable ways. Yeah, the memetic parallax, if you will, on ideas, kind of like the games of tennis that go back and forth between people in their dialectic of trying to progress ideas, find more multivariability, find more nuance, construct an ideal future. That way is so crucial. But people have to be in a sense trained in the art of great conversation because otherwise cognitive biases, falling into the binary trap. There's all these different tribalism. There's all these different things that come up that prevent people from having great discourse. And so that being trained in knowing how to do that, I think debate's a really great way to do that. Like a coin flip and you have to know how to represent pro or con on that given art. Yeah, exactly. I try to use that in my classroom a lot. And often I'll ask students to take the position that is contrary to the one that they are most wedded to at any particular moment. Because A, it gives you greater understanding of the opposing arguments and logic. And it can also be a motivator for understanding, not necessarily empathy, but understanding someone else's collective and individual experiences. Let's talk about what, especially on like a cultural level, I'm so interested about what is actually happening with this field of study, again, is what's the big word for the way that disease is spread through a civilization? Epidemics. Epidemiology. Epidemiology, that's a study of epidemics. Yes, exactly. I'm fascinated with epidemiology because it seems as though there's some sort of like a pattern for the prevention, again, getting to what could be like a root of even before the epidemics happen of a disease spreading that could prevent it from suffering, creating suffering on so many people. What have you been seeing with epidemics, with what you're doing with HIV and AIDS? I've been involved in infectious disease anthropology for over 25 years now. And throughout all of that work, really, I think the question that continues to inspire me and to motivate me is how do particular cultural categories of motherhood, of childhood, of womanhood, of gender, of sexuality, of difference, how are those categories connected to life in the context of a particular epidemic? And that speaks not only to the genesis of that epidemic, but also how that epidemic unfolds in real people's lives every single day. And so when we track how disease moves through around the world, through a population, for me, one of the greatest and most important questions is what does that do with the categories around which and through which people organize their lives? And sometimes you see that those categories remain completely intact, that they aren't really affected by them, but more often than not. You see that those categories explode and they become renegotiated all of the time. So motherhood in the context of HIV, AIDS completely depends on where that epidemic is unfolding. My work in Central Northern Prairie Canada shows that motherhood is experienced very differently, whereas so many women are concerned with the vertical spread of HIV from the mum to the fetus or to the infant through breastfeeding. The majority of women with HIV actually become infected postpartum. So it's not that their children are at risk for HIV, but rather the mothers are living with HIV and trying to navigate maternal care with this infection. So it's a different kind of narrative than one that you see in a lot of epidemiological literature, especially that coming out of sub-Saharan Africa, which bears the majority of the global burden of HIV. So I'm interested in that. I'm interested in how disease unfolds in different places and what that means for the cultural categories around which we organize our lives. Yeah, even just this perspective about a motherhood with an infectious disease and needing to navigate that is something that's really not mentioned much in at least my understanding of epidemiology. We don't kind of immerse ourselves in what it'd be like to be a mother and have an infectious disease. It's mostly about prevention of an infectious disease through sexually transmitted diseases. Exactly, exactly. And where I work in Saskatchewan, the primary means of transmission of HIV is through heterosexual contact and through injection drug use. So again, it's a very different epidemiological profile than that which unfolds elsewhere. And the opioid epidemic is very much a syndemic, which is a coexisting epidemic where one exacerbates the other. It's where health conditions occur and rather than simply being additive, it's actually multiplicative so that one condition becomes ever increasingly worse with its interaction with the other. We see that in Saskatchewan with addiction and HIV. And we see that the people most affected or who carry the greatest burden of this are Indigenous peoples of our province. And that also then is rooted in long-standing colonial uprootedness, racism and ongoing marginalization. So the picture becomes very, very large when you start looking at it. And then you have women navigating child care. And because they're Indigenous women who have a history of incredible exploitation and oppression, they've had their children removed from them. The history of Indigenous motherhood in Canada is a history of child apprehension, of alienation, of degradation. And the women are living with intergenerational trauma as a result of this. Many Indigenous women are very hesitant to then seek out medical care in fear of what they view as retribution, having extra surveillance over their own motherhood. And that's all the colonial context through which that governed all of that. Now, of course, in pre-colonial times and in Indigenous communities that were less affected by colonialism for more years than others, you see Indigenous motherhood being the site of tremendous power of great reverence. But it was colonialism that disrupted that. So there's a whole history to colonialism affecting indigeneity that has to do with the way that was even at the level of affecting the way that the mother's children were taken from them. Yes. Walk us through some of the history of the maternal relations of Indigenous with colonialization. Sure. It's certainly in Canada, and again, this is where I work. I think there's very, very parallel histories in the United States. But in Canada, the Indian Act that was established in the late 19th century was imposed upon Indigenous communities largely because of colonial powers that wanted to seize Indigenous and traditional lands. And in doing that, the colonizing state tried to say that all Indigenous people should assimilate to British Euro society. And they thought that one of the best ways to do this was through tremendous violence and it was to apprehend children from Indigenous communities and force them to attend residential schools. These were schools that were very often located in far away from their home communities and the children could not speak their Indigenous language. They spoke English or French. These were often church-run schools. And the children were apprehended from those home communities. It was something that reverberates through Indigenous communities to this day, though the last residential school was closed in the mid-1990s. We see that the effects, the psychological, the social effects of residential school manifesting itself not only in the former students of those schools, but also in their children as well. And then in the 1960s, a foster care system was expanding in Canada and again what's known as the 60s scoop where Indigenous children were removed from Indigenous families and put up for adoption. Many of them adopted throughout the world and they lost contact with their home communities. Indigenous author Maria Campbell calls that the time of the black car. So those in the Indigenous communities would know that the Indian Affairs Agent, as they were known at the time, would come in in a black car and take children away. Fast forward to 2008 to 2013 when I did my research in partnership with Aids Saskatoon in Saskatchewan and the women have mothers and grandmothers who lived through this history and they do not want to seek out health resources because they say, I fear and fear is huge in these communities. They fear that the surveillance will continue and their children will be taken from them. Yeah, the intergenerational trauma that can happen from an apprehension of a child and from colonization and also it's almost as though what is the force that is being, why is that force, why is colonialization, the force coming through that, trying to apprehend a way like why does it want to indoctrinate into its own system versus enabling a pluralism and then causing all the downstream issues where now for maternal health it feels like they can't go and partake. Right. I think that colonialism was driven right from the 17th century on where colonialism was driven driven by an ethos of empire expansion and by an ethos of a requirement for homogeneity and perspective and in population. So we see here of course the seeds of white supremacy, of virulent racism, of a sense of entitlement, often justified through all kinds of doctrines and that ethos perpetuates itself. There are of course counter forces to that. There are forces for pluralism, there are forces for diversity, equity, rights, all of these kinds of initiatives have also developed so it has not been colonialism for the win but it certainly has been and is an ongoing fight. That's why I'm particularly proud of the work that anthropologists in Canada do towards decolonization, towards moving away from that singular ethos. Yeah. It was actually really interesting your role, it's the CAS, the CASCA, Canadian Anthropology Society. Yeah, Canadian Anthropology Society. What is the last CA? Because we're a bilingual country and a bilingual organization then it's the Society for Canadian Anthropology in French. So it's yeah. Oh, okay. Oh, I see CASCA. Oh, I see. I see how it works. Okay, cool, cool. Okay and then you are one of the, there's three total like co- In CASCA itself we have three presidential positions, the incoming president, currently that's Marielle in Mulholland, we have a current president that's Sabrina Doya and then a past president that's me and so when the collaboration between the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society began for this conference here in Vancouver I was the president of CASCA and so I serve as co-chair of the programs committee along with the former CASCA president Martha Radice and Nicole Peterson from the AAA. Excellent. Okay, so that's the breakdown. Got it. And then is that also two-year as well for you guys two years? So you were in for two years? No, ours is only one-year terms. So you do one year as incoming president, one year as president, one year as past president. So my year as past president will come to an end in May. Okay, cool, cool, cool. And then so now I'm, you know, this is probably like one of the newest things for me that I got to experience being here with you guys in Canada is that when you have, you had an intro with an Indigenous elder from the Salish. He's from the Musqueam territory. And Musqueam's one of the Salish? Yes. Okay, okay. And it was so interesting just because he as well as many of the other leaders that go up on the stage, they basically begin everything they say with we are on the unceded territories, which I think is very fascinating because it would be like, you know, if the call it like we're just discussing when the colonization comes, and then the Indigenous people just completely decline and do not want to partake, just please just have the pluralism happen if you want, but don't, you know, take our life ways away. Yes, yes. And that now that it did literally happen and that the colonization is right here in the British Columbia coast and throughout all these other places in the U.S. and around the world, you start with that phrase to remind so it's like the ethos you were talking about, at least there is a way to bring about, it would be like if you like started a presentation with wanting to mention to people about like the interconnectedness of all in the unity instead of just jump into the presentation, you start the presentation by reminding people about how one we actually are. And so I like starting the presentations by saying we're on the unceded territories. It reminds us that there is colonization that happened on the land that we're on now. Yes, exactly. I think that land acknowledgments are incredibly important because it fosters or intends to foster a sense of cultural humility that we are not, there is no entitlement here among in settler Canada that we should be here, but rather we are here and it is as a result of being welcomed by in this case a representative of the Musqueam nation who was also authorized to speak on behalf of the Slewa tooth and the Squamish nations as well. So hopefully it fosters that sense of cultural humility that is desperately needed in the world. And you called it a land acknowledgement. That's so interesting, a land acknowledgement fostering cultural humility. Yeah, I like that a lot. It's actually super insightful. I would actually recommend those viewing to like go and dive into the context of the land that you're currently on and the indigenaity of that land and then try and figure out as far back as you can go who were the initial habitants of that land and then try and do something at an event, one of the local events that we are on the unceded territories of, try and invite someone from them to speak. Absolutely and welcome you to the territory and establish a plane for dialogue and to reaffirm our relationships with each other. Yeah, that's again it's just such a fresh unique thing that it would be so interesting to see something like that in at corporations. I mean you have like we are our org is based in Silicon Valley and so to know when you know the Googles or the Facebooks or all these big companies are starting up there could they say something like that? Could one of the biggest companies say something like that that we're on the unceded territories here in Mountain View, California? Yeah, that would be really interesting. And it would be really helpful for the further awakening and for people. I'm actually still really curious about your thoughts on this specific thing which is there's like a relationship right now between we were talking about the one between indigeneity and kind of like the like the metropolis life and how there's in a sense there's like and that's like modernity and then the indigeneity and there needs to be some sort of a understanding of the first principles of indigeneity in the metropolis is so that way we don't we have a higher chance of of prosperity and not of continuing processes that lead to additional suffering. I mean this was one of them this idea of land acknowledgments is at least one of them. What are some of those other principles and how do you think we can bring them into modernity and like where we're going? I think that in Canada we've had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission looking into the effects and ongoing traumas related to residential schools and there are action items that have been established by that commission and I think drawing on some of those action items things such as continuing land acknowledgments, understanding why they are used for indigenous people who find themselves in urban environments ensure that there is adequate and safe transportation for them to return to home communities. Really to be thinking more about the environmental impact of large urban living really to be respecting the environment. In many ways it is a theme of this conference is changing climates and thinking about what it is we do what it is we produce what it is we're what it is we're throwing out and keeping and you know when you throw something away it never goes away right it could just go somewhere else and landfill that's right to the landfill or to indigenous lands somewhere that have been appropriated by state authorities to put garbage dumps there. So really thinking beyond the boundaries of any given urban space and thinking more environmentally. Yeah there's the seventh generation principles a very interesting one of indigeneity where you're never thinking about just the effects on your own decisions on your own lifetime but you're thinking about it seven generations ahead. Yeah that gives a tremendous amounts of foresight to like how can we actually design that social fabric that will make it so that when children are born that it's a most highly conducive towards actualization and interconnectedness and another question that I need to ask is that now is a very interesting time between the yin and yang of the male and female and it's as though that remembering our roles with each other in the most loving and compassionate and harmonic way possible is the only way that is the best way and at times it feels like we became disconnected and separate from that. There are incredible aspects of female intuition with nurture and of justation of a child and like which men obviously have no idea they don't go through that and then you know men have creativity in building and they want to go and tinker and make things and so there's like this beautiful I think marriage and I'm curious of your thoughts about you know the current state of the of where that is that harmonic love and how we can make it where we want it to be. I certainly think there is balance in many indigenous philosophies there's a balance between feminine and masculine sometimes the metaphor of an eagle or two eagles wings is used for that to give flight and sustenance and purpose to to the bird. I shy away from making stereotypes about masculine and femininity there are women who are strong and build things and go into combat and do that and there are men who are incredibly nurturing there are transgender men who carry children there so I think we there should be care taken when we're talking about about that I think that we might want to redirect the conversation to think about gender not again as a binary between masculine and feminine but something that is a huge continuum and what values are situated along that continuum how is nurturance exhibited for example when I talk about motherhood among the indigenous women affected by HIV, AIDS and Saskatchewan I thought this would be a study of motherhood and it's amazing how many men said well what about us we care for our children let's talk about fatherhood right along with that let's talk about parenthood and so the project then actually expanded to be something about the value of nurturance and of care and how gender situates itself in all kinds of ways throughout that value yeah I like that so it may be that a majority fit into this classic yin and yang and then there is a lot of other variation that is that has also beautiful values that can then be understood and brought into our perspective and how we can kind of harmonize the different values that we have on nurture and on building and all these different ways across I also really like the the two wings the side that's really nice as well it's as though I mean in a sense the United States and China being to the largest most flourishing by metrics let's say of GDP and stuff the economies of the planet also in a sense need needing to act like wings on a bird and working together to ensure harmony peace prosperity for all and not monkey politics yeah this is another one of those big ones like men and women China and the United States it seems like actually there's there's a ridiculous amount of these we talked about at the very beginning the interconnectedness and the individualism there's like just these two sides that you know sometimes it's like flying yeah yeah there certainly are imbalances there for sure and and I think again maybe one way to think of it it would be something like a like a sphere of some kind so that we're seeing how things interact and and connect with one or the other rather than it really being that sort of one side or another side I'm just trying to think of different metaphors we can use to think about how forces and multiplicity can be represented in ways outside of a A or B coin yeah yeah yeah yeah this is interesting I like the sphere yeah there's yeah yeah yeah and it may work it may work for ones like interconnectedness and individualism it may work there's those are pretty I guess more clear in ways than it well maybe not so clear I think it's messy too it's messy I think an anthropologist's job is to see complexity and so when you say individual we can ask well what do you mean by that do you mean you as an individual or Pam as an individual or do you mean an individual community it's hard to think of oneself without thinking of the people with whom we relate every day so there's layers to that there's layers to that and even within how do we connect even with other individuals and non-human individuals so there's a notion of our interconnection with all of the animals with the microorganisms with the plants so I mean we could reduce it down to the singular cell but even there I think a cellular biologist would say I can see I can see the effects of a broader environment on this one individual cell so even there I see complexities on that individual side of the coin all the way from the plank volume to the universe yeah there yeah yeah yeah I see I see in humans in the middle that's right yeah yeah yeah I see this is this is another really good way of visualizing it is the taking it more as like a sphere and looking at the layers of complexity on these sides that we're we're talking about they may have so much of like our maybe most first principled understandings but then it is also just so it's like it's just always trying to figure out what is an optimal path forward and bringing it just seems like it's it just seems like it is that one where it feels like indigeneity has so many first principles that have been choked out by the economic machinery and I and it just seems much more in favor to moving forward to bring a ridiculous amount of the indigenous wisdoms and principles into modernity than it is to also there are I guess good aspects to modernity that yeah like we wouldn't necessarily be able to if you you know broke a bone western medicine is excellent well yeah western medicine is very good at that broken bones at infectious disease many infectious diseases you know I I lived through dengue fever as thank you western medicine for for getting me through dengue fever when I was doing my doctoral research so it's it's it's very good at many things but in terms of bone setting I would easily go to an indigenous healer as quickly as I would go to go to a western medicine practitioner as well bone yeah yeah there's actually physically setting broken bones really yeah yeah actually we the archaeological evidence is really fairly strong and ethnomedical evidence is strong that there's a huge a wonderful understanding of human biology and medical treatment I'd say western medicine probably has an edge in some in curing things like cancer and again cancer's not one thing it's many things there in terms of antiretroviral medications things like that but in a lot of things the indigenous healers are far advanced I'd say than some western practitioners totally and that was a really interesting one because most people go broken bones western medicine so yeah I mean you think about it like millions of years of evolution of human prior to western medicine how did if a break happened there had to be a process of figuring out how to you wouldn't just let it you know yeah hang and you would figure out how to set it in the way that felt at least the least painful that's right and then maybe create some sort of like a wrap and and hold it there for several weeks and not exert pressure and then maybe after those months it would feel like it was at least somewhat oh absolutely and and people of of all heritages have come into contact with with human remains and skeletons and they smart people learn from that they learn from working with animals you learn from all kinds of things and pain management I'd say there are many Asian medical systems that have far better pain management than western biomedicine does it just this this the revisiting this conversation with so many of our of our guests recently on the program plus a AAA is just so important it's just it's it comes back to the same first principle there's lots of indigenous wisdom that is not in modernity and that is why we have this all these symptomatic issues that exist and again we come back like the marriage again of of whatever the sphere looks like paramount it doesn't seem like there can be anything more important right now than that modernity is just it's just what do you think we're building artificial intelligence and robotics for wow that's a leap okay it's well out of my wheelhouse but I I think that there are many different motivations for people to explore in different kinds of robotic robotic advancements I think it can be for to explore new frontiers I mean I know that some physicists for example are working on that in terms of looking at different kinds of star star formations things like that let me get more specific yeah please even more specific would be are we building the metropolises to build the artificial general intelligences and the super intelligences the digital super intelligences is that what we're building it for and then for who for what you don't see indigenous people building AI what's going on um well some do but uh I think like some indigenous people build AI oh yeah tell me more oh yeah oh yeah and well there are indigenous physicists who are involved in that yeah I mean I don't know that you know like the you know a particular indigenous nation would say this is now what we're going to do but there absolutely are our indigenous scientists who who are involved in all kinds of enterprises including those who are working on AI or robotics or or nuclear research yeah yeah interesting but yeah but yes that's great to point out it's a really important point but not at like the scale of Google or Microsoft or Baidu or whatever it's not happening at an indigenous corporation like that but does it like does it feel like the goal of these metropolises to build this super intelligence I don't know I really don't I do know that the history of technology is such that there's always going to be advancement and it's sort of advancement and moving for the sake of advancement and moving that's an ethos that drives us I'm not sure that there's a goal in sight per se I think in obviously capitalist economy the the ultimate goal would be for for many not all many would be you know further wealth greater economic achievement greater economic a proliferation of riches right but I think there may be other reasons and a lot of them would be well we're doing it because we can it's the next question that comes up it's a sense of technological advancement for the sake of advancement however one wants to define that and there will be debate around that as well just very seems like there's a fire and there's some music and there are some plants and some animals and some culture happening around in this side and then there's some people coding on quantum computers on the other side and I'm very interested to see where that leads again it's a dichotomy I think we want to be cautious with cautious with yeah yeah yeah fair fair yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um Pam this has been a lot of fun yeah it has thank you very much I really appreciate you coming on the program all right my pleasure thank you very much thanks for all your great work okay thank you thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we'd love to hear thoughts in the comments below in the episode lesson which are thanking check out the links in the bio below to Pam's work also check out the links in the bio below to American Anthropological Association go and support them you can support us you can support our show so you continue doing cool things like coming on site to great events like this and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world we love you very much thank you for tuning in we will see you soon thank you thank you so thank you that's a bunch of girls yeah you did okay I don't know