 And so people came in, they split the lands up even more, they started selling more, and that's how, you know, what was once a protected indigenous community ends up no longer being that way and ends up being an urban center because of its proximity to work and to resources that people need to survive. By the time I'm in there doing my research in the 1990s, and I took a team of graduate student researchers in there and we tested the kilns and we tested all of it. You're looking at 60, 65% lead in these glazes and you're looking at kilns that only reach 400, 460 degrees Celsius, which means they're not sealing in that lead in the way in which they did. And so the community is now suffering from massive health repercussions from lead poisoning, which is how I ended up getting into nutrition because once lead is in your body, really there's nothing we can do about it. But it's more than just the cooking because women's identity is ceramic production. It's what gave them political and economic autonomy. It was the reason for the first time that women became independent economic earners. So now I'm the one going to the women and saying, your ceramic is harming you and it's harming your children. No, no, no, no, no. It is not. We've been making this ceramic for, you know, hundreds of years kind of thing. But now you ask women to give up the very thing that gave them that empowerment and that defines them as viable people that that community is known for its ceramic. If they stop producing ceramic, they're not that community anymore. There's something else. They're an urban anonymous entity. So the way in which their identity is tied to it, the way in which women have to make decisions about what do I do? Do I give up this ability to be autonomous plus? This is potentially happening all around the world. All around the world, yes. Because cottage craft is helping small marginalized populations survive so that the states don't have to invest in it. Wow. There's so much beauty actually. There's so much trauma. There's so much beauty and I think the greatest beauty is looking into the eyes of a stranger and receiving a smile. That goes back to, yeah, we're all one. 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? What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. We are onsite at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada. This is our second partnership with them. We are now going to be speaking with Dr. Ramona Perez. Hi, Ramona. Hi. It's very nice to be here. Thank you for inviting me. We're so grateful to have you on the program. I'm so pumped for our conversations. Aren't you getting me pumped? Thank you. Thank you. I think it's a thank you, yeah. Ramona was just elected, the president-elect-slash-vice president in 2019 and 2021, and she's going to assume the office of president of the American Anthropological Association in 2021. Right. It will run me all the way to 2023. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I love the foresight with how you have this two-year kind of like incubation period. Yes. And then I love that. And then you have an exit period as well of staying with it from 2023 until 2020. No, after 2023, you basically step down, but what inevitably happens is they capture you and ask you to take on some kind of task force or some kind of working group because you've got all this vast knowledge, right? Yes, yes. So it's been a long time since I've seen a AAA president actually roll off and get to have their life back. Yeah. Well, this is such a cool and multidisciplinary field of anthropology, so it's like you gain so much knowledge about the world by being deeply involved in this organization. Ramona is also a professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Latin American Studies at San Diego State University, amongst a myriad of other credentials. Ramona, I really want to start with the big questions that we love asking on the show. Are we really all one? You know, I wish there was a single answer for that. Are we all one? We are one human species. We are one people that we take many different forms and we respond and react and create different cultural reactions to our environments. But ultimately, yeah, we are one human entity. We're all the same. And also in combination with all of the other millions of species on the planet, all evolving whether you call it a big bang or whether you call it God or creation or source or all that is or whatever word you want to use to describe it, it all comes from one. Yeah. You're talking to anthropologists, right? You're talking to anthropologists who believe in the evolutionary process and the understanding of there was something out there that just brought us forward and we have evolved since then into the multiple ways in which life exists on this planet. Yes. Would you say that the most upstream issue that we face is the feelings of separation, the lack of interconnectedness, and that's causing the downstream issues? You know, again, I'm not going to give you a super straight forward answer on that because for as long as we can tell, human beings have understood difference. Animals understand difference. And we also understand that survival is a key part of who we are. And so territory tends to come into play and being able to protect and being able to create ways in which we survive. So a lack of interconnectedness, I think we are more connected at this moment in global history than we ever have been in terms of recognizing the interconnectedness. Now whether or not we choose to accept that interconnectedness as positive is something very different. But I think some of these downstream issues, and I think what I'm interpreting from your question about downstream issues are some of the problems that we're having in caring for each other, in respecting each other, and in honoring the many ways in which we all need to express ourselves and live. It's not just survival, it's about equality of life. And we're having a really hard time maintaining that kind of honor and respect for the multiple ways in which human beings can create a positive quality of life for themselves. That I think is no different than it might have been at any other time in terms of saying how is this impacting me and how is this impacting me in terms of my ability to survive. What's different is what we decide we need to survive. And we don't need all the things that we're laying claim to and that have come to have great importance to us, whether that is a socioeconomic status that we're trying to protect and we believe we're being invaded by somebody who might come along and somehow jeopardize that, or the way in which we want our children and our families to think and believe and worship and exist. We are not honoring the multiple ways in which that could happen because we feel threatened. Most of the hate and the bigotry I would personally say derives from a sense of fear of loss. A fear that somehow or another I can't maintain a positive way of life or I can't reach that goal that I see out there that will give me that positive life because something's in my way. When you brought forth this recognition that we are more interconnected now and there was this sort of, there was this connection between maybe the head or the brain of this interconnectedness and maybe that in itself has some of those root issues of being so deeply in our own heads all the time, where in our hearts lies the real feeling of complete interconnectedness and not only with other humans, but every inhale I take is phytoplankton and trees breathing out. Every bite of an apple I take is the sun and soil powering that apple. If children aren't passed along that initial first principled wisdom of reality, then things downstream, there's issues that happen. Okay. I'm going to go along with that. Okay. Okay. Okay. Cool. He's just like... So I'm listening to you and I'm appreciating and I'm totally engaged with it. At the same time I'm recognizing that the very technology that we're employing right now has a negative impact on the globe. The way in which we have taken mineral resources and turned them into transformers that allow us to sit here and have this conversation and then project it out does not have a positive impact on the future of the globe environmentally, sustainably. What it does do is it further links us in this interconnectedness that you're talking about and gives us the opportunity to share maybe the way in which we're thinking about something that might help somebody else take a more broad or a deeper look at something that they might be resisting or fighting against. It has a positive but it has an environmentally negative impact too. Those are the kinds of issues that we constantly have to weigh. What is the value of that and how is that going to impact us? And I'm not sure we can always make straightforward decisions about that. Yeah. When we take the interconnected feelings of what is at the core of indigeneity and then we look at modernity and we look at the light pollution, we look at the exchanging sheet of paper for the apple, we look at the technological devices and driving excellence in many ways and driving disconnection and others. The embedding of many of the first principle values of indigeneity into the future of where modernity goes seems to be one of the most critical things to be aware of. So tell me what you mean by indigeneity. This is a very good question. Yeah. Yeah. And I think what I was referencing earlier about the understanding of the interconnectedness through the breaths of air and through the bites of food and through inclusive fitness is another big one. So you're referring back to a time and a moment that exists now as well as it did in the past about their understanding and appreciation that our physical environment gives us life and that for everything that we take from the physical environment, we somehow or another have to give it back. And if we do that right, it will be a positive cycle of life. But that got interrupted, right? Because it's no longer about a way in which we can positively give back to the earth without somehow or another advancing the way in which we see ourselves living. So I think that's kind of what you're asking, you know, where you're going with this. I mean, yes, we all need to really understand what our footprint is as everybody likes to refer to it. You know, just what kind of impact are we making on the earth every day with every decision that we make? But we also don't live lives that are so intimately bound to our immediate environment that we understand the repercussions of that. We don't live next to the landfill. Well, many of us don't live next to the landfill. Others live their lives off the landfill. It is from our waste that they get life, which is a trauma in and of itself for many of us that have worked alongside the men, women, and children who forage through vast dumps in order to eke out a living. Yeah. Ramona, I'm wondering, overall, is what we're talking about right now and the sheer complexity of the evolution of life from its origins until this point of 8 billion human civilization plus 100 million species that have been here and 10 million that are here now with us, all figuring out how to behave as a biosphere and progress moving forward and mostly humans figuring out how to handle it. Would you say that this in itself, the complexity of this experience that we're all a part of this reality? Would you say that that is the purpose of it being made? Of what being made? Of this reality being made was for us to all experience the beauty and complexity of what we're all going through right now. I have no idea. I have no idea how to determine whether or not there is something up there, as you're saying, that somehow or another guided us to this point in order for us to learn from it and somehow or another begin to undo. Can't answer that question. I don't think any of us can. That's something that we each have to try and wrestle with inside ourselves, but we have to slow down long enough to do that. We have to slow down and really ask those questions and there aren't a whole lot of people that are willing to ask those questions and then to make the decisions that might go along with that if they recognize that the many things that we do have this kind of negative impact. But you also didn't talk about artificial intelligence and the way in which artificial intelligence has begun to make decisions for us. It is the first time at the conference that someone else has brought it up before me, so that's great. The artificial intelligence? Yeah. I've been trying to move some of the anthropologists that we've had on the program and outside just to give us their thoughts on artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, biotech, neurotech, the future of augmenting humans, the future of work as what humans can do that's better than artificial intelligence is slowly and slowly that area is closing or making artificial general intelligence as a super intelligence as a really biological bootloader for building that as the next step. How do you feel about that? There are so many ethical and future questions that you're asking me right now and I can't answer all of them. Artificial intelligence is here. Artificial intelligence has been here for quite some time. We've recognized the import and the power that it would have back from the original sci-fi movies from the 1950s and 60s. I think human beings have been wrestling with how far are we going to let this go and where are we going to take it and should we have a respectable fear for it. But there is no denying that it's a significant part of every one of our lives. And let's face it, artificial intelligence that makes our lives easier makes it super simple for us to simply accept it passively. So we are complicit in the growth of artificial intelligence with every smartphone that we have, with every laptop we have, with the desire to be able to control our lights and our thermostat and everything else from a phone, you are talking about ways in which we are asking non-humans to do things that have always had a human intervention in them. Now we just get to go like that and it gets done for us. You bring up this great point of it, the advance of artificial intelligence making it more so that we have less involvement in some of the things that end up coming up in our lives used to be we had a lot of say and now so with much of what we do we no longer necessarily get to say lots is driven by algorithms and the interests of governments and large corporations and billionaires and we don't necessarily know if you made a hierarchy of people by wealth this very classic way that people look at a hierarchy. We don't know how many of the 1500 billionaires on the planet have ever felt feelings of interconnectedness or unconditional love and if you make a hierarchy based on spiritual enlightenment and you put the Dalai Lama and other people at the top, why wouldn't we focus on what they are preaching? Why wouldn't we focus on building our future civilization based on that style of a hierarchy? I would much rather have that and I hope thing messages like that can resonate with other people. I have many other questions yet. But you haven't given me a glass of wine so I'm not going to engage. I know the secret now is having the glass of wine prepared and you'll give me more concrete answers. Well, to make me kind of sit back and be able to provoke you a little bit more in terms of what you're asking me. We're so obsessed with the big picture questions and it's even great to hit the ball back a little bit on them but in terms of more concrete research on your end and what's actually led you here, these topics are so vast, Aztec culture and education, global health, women's studies transnational, Mexican and Central American migrant youth, ethnic marginalization, political economy of tourism in Oaxaca, immigration expert witness testimony, child detention. Where can you take us from this like macro, I know. Listen, you know, every day I get up and I go, who am I today? Listen, you know, it's one of these things that I think really gets at what we do in anthropology and that's a beautiful thing about this discipline and I'm sure you've heard this over and over again. There isn't a question that's off limits from us, which makes it a fascinating discipline to be able to dive into because we approach it from so many different angles, right? We really try to understand how does a biological body play into the kinds of things that are happening over here and, you know, when we communicate how is this communication really capturing or not capturing what our intended meaning is and are we conveying and is it being received in the way in which we imagine, you know, all the way down to how do we make sense out of our world and create cultural processes and practices that allow us to interact. So, you know, having these kind of broad research topics are, I think, a result of the way in which our minds never stop running. And some of us are driven, some of us are driven by outside questions that come to us and others of us are driven by the questions that the very people that we're working with, the communities that we're working with, are asking us. So I think we do, some of us do a little bit of both and that's certainly what, you know, happened with me. This is my second career. So I'm an ex-corporate banker who gave it all up and just decided, you know, 29 years old, you know what, I don't want to be a corporate banker. I don't want to do this anymore. So I'm going to go put a backpack on and I'm going to go to college. So going through that and deciding anthropology was the discipline that was going to allow me to have that next life and that next world was really important. I come from a very traditional family, very traditional Mexican family. My father's Mexican, my mother's United Statesian. He ended up having this propensity for languages so he spoke 13 languages so I didn't really grow up in the U.S. Paulie Glott. Yes, he was absolutely a Paulie Glott which meant he was part of the intelligence service which means that I was six months old when I left the U.S. and I was basically an adolescent when we came back. That's the world I grew up in. Germany and Turkey and Spain. So cool. Yeah. And then I come back into the U.S. and I'm still being raised. I still have this very traditional Mexican background and so my father wouldn't let me go to college. So, right. Right, so this is part of my women's studies. This is where you see me getting into research on gender and gender roles and how that plays out. And so I basically accomplished my role. I was a senior vice president for an American Express Subsidiary when I quit and decided to go to school for the first time at 29 and get my undergraduate degree and all the way up through my doctorate. But my question that drove me to anthropology is so what is it about Mexican culture in particular that maintains these very structured gender roles even though we're not in the same environments that we were when our parents grew up? Why do they continue to have these very strict gender roles? Why couldn't I go to college? Why was it so important to him that I get married at 19? What was it about this? So anthropology really allowed me to think about that from all kinds of different perspectives. And so that's what I actually originally sought out to understand. I started in Oaxaca in the 1990s because migration was fairly recent in terms of having a big impact on that state. So that would mean that mothers and fathers are having to make decisions that my parents were making when I was younger so I could go and really watch that unfold. I could be a part of it and engage with women as they are trying to make a decision. How am I going to raise my daughter? How am I going to raise my son because my world is changing? I'm not just living off the land. I'm no longer bound only to agriculture. We've started migrating. Tourism is coming in. And so that's how I started out. You know, my doctoral research was originally looking at the impact of the commodification of women's bodies through tourism. When the Oaxacan state decided that it was women's craft that was going to take them into the next tourist market they selected various communities where craft was driven by women and they created an entire program around that. Well, I got to be in a ceramic producing community eight kilometers outside the capital city of Oaxaca City and work inside a community just as it was opening up. Artisan's Market was built and installed in that community in 1993. I moved there in 1994. And then I moved there for my long-term research in 1995 and did about 18 months of field research there. I still work in that community. I'm on my fourth generation of women understanding that impact of how they're negotiating across time and across the integration of a once dominant rural community into a community now. It was 5,200 people including all the people in the small ranches on the outside. Today that same community is almost 60,000 people. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. 1995 it was at 5,200 people. In 2019 and the 2020 census will tell us even more we're probably closer to 60,000. It has to do with a whole lot of things but it has to do with the fact that they are eight kilometers outside the capital city and as rural to urban migration occurs they were impacted along with all the other small communities. So they had not only tourism that was coming in they also had all these people coming from all over. They had people from the city looking for a more suburban lifestyle but they also had people from the rural countryside coming in and trying to find land where they could live close enough to the city to get work. Yeah. So it's been a unique privilege to experience that and work with the women alongside that. That's kind of how you see me as graduate faculty in women's studies as well as in anthropology but also the director of the Center for Latin American Studies. Yes. Whoa. Okay. So interesting that you dropped banking to pursue anthropology. That's so interesting. And hopefully can inspire other people to make shifts in their career like that. Right. Yes. Because look at what happened is you went on you've given us this really interesting visual where you have a city, you have Oaxaca. You said eight kilometers away from Mexico City. No, from Oaxaca City, from the capital of Oaxaca City. Okay. So Oaxaca is a smaller... Oaxaca City is the capital city of the state of Oaxaca. Oaxaca City is the capital city of the state of Oaxaca. Oaxaca. And then there are smaller cities that you were... Santa Maria Zompa is the community that I work in which started out. So it's Zompa which is eight kilometers outside of... Santa Maria... At Zompa. At Zompa. ATZ. ATZ. OMPA. At Zompa. At Zompa. Santa Maria at Zompa. So Santa Maria at Zompa had fifty-two hundred people eight kilometers away from Oaxaca City. And then there was over the last twenty-five years it's now getting closer to sixty thousand people because as the population has grown of the city of Oaxaca City and of Mexico in general people are starting to want to live further out of the complex metropolis closer to nature let's say and then they pick Santa Maria at Zompa. At Zompa. At Zompa. And then also... Well most cities grow not from internal population. It's not internal population that causes cities to grow. Cities grow because people come in from other places. From rural for economic opportunity. Absolutely. You know, the companies move in and they hire people and people move there in order to be part of it. I mean across time cities from their point of origin from the original early cities they grow not from internal population growth but from external populations moving closer to whatever resources that city has to offer. And so you see the same thing here. At Zompa used to be this peripheral rural community but it didn't take very long because of its proximity and then once they put that bridge and that highway in over the river you know before they were... All the way up through the 1980s they didn't even get electricity until the 1970s so all the way through the 1980s they were still wading through a river in order to cross over to get into the city. Wow. When I moved there in the 1990s there were many people who'd never been to the city. Yeah. Eight kilometers away. There were many people who'd never been to the city but life has changed so much. It's now just this major... It used to be what we would call peri-urban space. It's very much an urban space now. Peri-urban. Peri-urban. Yeah. P-E-R-Y. P-E-R-I. P-E-R-I. Peri-urban. So it's roughly 35,000 or less people. Oh. Yeah, no, now it's just urban. Do they still farm? Absolutely. They do, yeah. Absolutely. It's still very much a part of their identity. So if we basically took a satellite that is constantly... with a camera that's constantly scanning the population increase and the movement of people to metropolises over time, we could then observe, like, you know, click in 1990 and then drag over to, you know, 2020 and we could watch as people that are birthed in Mexico begin to move to Oaxaca City and the nearby Atzomba and then you can just literally observe the city go from 5,200 up. And this is happening basically across the entire planet with metropolises because people are moving to metropolises. So it's interesting then, so maybe one of the core theses here is that just that as urbanization has happened that we've had these smaller Peri-urban cities that were initially maybe a little bit more 5,000 people or whatnot see themselves jump up in 25 years to completely different cultural dynamics due to the immigration of other people for economic opportunity. Absolutely. One of the things to understand is that was prompted by NAFTA and by reforms to the Mexican Constitution in 1992 that took effect in 1993 where indigenous lands that were held in a kind of HEDA system which basically means that all of their agricultural lands were held in common. And so even though you had had that land in your family for a very long time, you didn't own it so you couldn't sell it because it belonged to the community it belonged to our ability to survive as a community. But the lands that you had would always be yours and you could send them down to your children and their children, but that was the problem. So you may have started out with enough land to have fed a large family but then you have to split it up with your children in order for them to have land and for them to have their families and then they have to split it up among their children so that land begins to feed fewer and fewer and fewer people and you couldn't sell it because it was communally owned lands and the community only has so much land to distribute out, right? So this is one of the reasons that people started leaving as the land itself couldn't sustain them but this is also where some of the original Spanish who decided to get on ships and come across the sea they were second and third sons who didn't qualify for the inheritance of their family's properties and Europe only had so much land, right? So you go in search of additional lands in order for the species to survive in order for people to figure out how to survive and go on to the next phase of their life which is why when they encounter somebody that seems to be an obstacle to their survival that oneness becomes a challenge that we originally started talking about, right? So I mean it's the same thing, so these communities so the reforms to Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution basically said that communities could now change that land designation and turn it into fee simple. The community had to vote on it all the land odors under the Hilo system had to vote on it but for many communities it was like what choice do we have? Many of them, like at SOMPA, started out by saying you know what, this land over here are dry lands we don't have irrigation let's start with those lands, let's sell those lands and then our children will be able to have an inheritance from the money that we're able to get from them but they had no control over who got to buy those lands and so people came in, they split the lands up even more they started selling more and that's how what was once a protected indigenous community ends up no longer being that way and ends up being an urban center because of its proximity to work and to resources that people need to survive. Wow, the untold stories of urbanization. Right? Oh they're told. They're told. We teach it in our classrooms all the time, right? And now you're telling again and hopefully reaching even more people these are really, wow, just... But we're wrestling that with our homeless, right? We only have so much land and so much space so unless we're willing to start chopping up all the land that we own individually and start selling that off in order for other housing to be constructed where are we going to go? There comes a point, right? We're making the exact same kinds of decisions. Will we make the right decisions? I don't know. What's up with this whole thing with governments getting involved with indigenous like they did? I mean this is a very difficult relationship to figure out how to interplay the dynamics of because you have indigenous from around the world that are now inside of these borders of countries that then have rules and then they may find themselves at just being stewards of a piece of land over hundreds of years and then all of a sudden that changes where they have to follow something else. So that whole thing is crazy that they even have to think about this division of land and selling things off because of the urbanization but I want to ask you another question because you brought this up and this is something that I don't want us to forget about. You specifically also did women's studies there and you said it was the pottery. Pottery was the main and you've watched, you said four generations of women. Yes, I'm on my fourth generation of women in terms of who I'm working with and understanding how they're understanding themselves and the choices that they make as women to be able to fulfill their dreams. And it's a ceramic producing community. They produce an amazingly beautiful emerald green, almost the color of your shirt, emerald green ceramic. It's what we call utilitarian ceramic because it is a ceramic that you cook with. So if you go anywhere in Mexico, you will see this utilitarian ceramic in the back kitchens. It's normally kind of that rust color on the inside or it may be green on the inside too and then this beautiful green glaze. This green glaze seals it and makes it waterproof. It makes it durable in heat. But what makes it green? Lead. So the ability for these communities to create a glaze that is going to stand up to cooking over a long period of time means that they need some kind of fluxing agent with the color that will allow it to come in, penetrate through the natural clay and make it impermeable. And so it takes a very high temperature kiln to be able to seal that sufficiently that you aren't going to have negative repercussions from lead leaching into the foods that you're preparing. It might have been fine at one time, but then you have deforestation and you have the cost of lumber going up, which means these communities who are producing a base utilitarian ceramic can no longer access the thick heavy wood that would have allowed for higher temperature kilns to occur. So as the quality of the wood goes down, that means that the temperature in the kilns goes down, which means they need more and more of this fluxing agent in order for it to liquefy and be able to create this glaze that seals the ceramic. So if you look at lead content from the 1950s, 60s, you're basically looking at an 18 to maybe 22% lead content in the glaze, but they still had kilns that were probably closer to 800 to 850 degrees Celsius. By the time I'm in there doing my research in the 1990s, and I took a team of graduate student researchers in there, and we tested the kilns and we tested all of it. You're looking at 60, 65% lead in these glazes, and you're looking at kilns that only reach 400, 460 degrees Celsius, which means they're not sealing in that lead in the way in which they did. And so the community is now suffering from massive health repercussions from lead poisoning, which is how I ended up getting into nutrition because once lead is in your body, really there's nothing we can do about it because your body thinks lead is calcium. So it places lead everywhere it would have placed calcium. And because it's a metal, it bonds with iron, which means all the iron that you're receiving to prevent anemia is bonding to the lead, right, the lead molecule, which your body thinks is calcium, so you're urinating it out. So at the same time your body is putting lead where calcium ought to go, you're also getting iron deficiency. So the health maladies which, you know, they're massive. They're deafness, kidney failure. There's children being born with learning disabilities. So in testing they basically say that for every 10 micrograms per deciliter of lead in your blood, you're going to have a loss in your intelligence quotient of about, you know, 6 points. Well, if the average is 100, when we tested many of these children, they were between 40 and 50 micrograms per deciliter. So 6 times 40, you know, that's 24. 24 from 100, 75 places you at that point of mental, I don't want to say disability, but it prohibits a kind of learning that we need. So you're running around with people who can't learn to read, and that's the number one thing that we found out. They could do mathematics wonderfully, but we couldn't teach them to read. We couldn't get them to remember how to make a signature. So everything from learning disabilities, you know, into complete kidney failure, deafness, it was really tough. So since I can't change your body, the only thing I can do is fight the outcomes of it through nutrition, which means upping your calcium, upping your protein, right? And then making sure that I have the other vitamins in there so that it's sufficiently bonds. But it's a fight inside your body and everybody absorbs differently. And then, well, it's crazy that that entire economic equation that happened with the lumber and then making the actual pottery with the lead and then having that also have over time more of the lead that then gets into the body then causes the ailments due to, again, something like an urbanization is just this is an insane butterfly effect that's happening. And then just this other point is, is it then transitioning away? Yeah, this is like a symptoms are these issues you're listing and then the nutrition is a solution. Yet the main root, though, is the actual cooking. But it's more than just the cooking because women's identity is ceramic production. It's what gave them political and economic autonomy. It was the reason for the first time that women became independent economic earners. So now I'm the one going to the women and saying your ceramic is harming you and it's harming your children. No, no, no, no, no. It is not. We've been making this ceramic for, you know, hundreds of years kind of thing. And many of the outcomes of lead poisoning, mirror malnutrition, anemia, right? Headaches, other bodily issues, you know, kidney failure. That all mirrors malnutrition in many ways. So for them it is a pattern of health malady that has followed them across time. So even though they're wealthier now, and that's a relative term, right? Women are politically autonomous, which means that they are empowered inside the household. And it took, you know, my work is basically looked at how long it took for women to actually have that autonomy where men respected them. But now you ask women to give up the very thing that gave them that empowerment and that defines them as viable people that that community is known for its ceramic. If they stop producing ceramic, they're not that community anymore. There's something else. They're an urban anonymous entity. So the way in which their identity is tied to it, the way in which women have to make decisions about what do I do? Do I give up this ability to be autonomous? And so, you know, the women that I'm working with, children who didn't have learning disabilities were invested in and sent to school. Children with learning disabilities were taught the ceramic trade. So they were always balancing it. But now you have women who are with university educations. Now you have women who are doctors, women who are accountants, women who are pharmacists, women who are doing all kinds of things. But it took all of that and all of that sacrifice, but it also took siblings who do have those learning disabilities because they have to maintain that identity. So when you go into these spaces, you think you're looking at one thing, but you are looking at the complex way in which we human beings make sense out of our world. And our traumas and our successes are intimately linked and tied together. So whether you're thinking about how do I deal with this particular issue of lead poisoning or you're thinking about how do I make decisions about the incorporation of artificial intelligence in my life, you are looking at these ways in which we have to think about our histories, about our contemporary moment and where we stand as a people against other peoples. Are we a marginalized population? Are we an indigenous population that has a hard time accessing anyway? What do you want me to do? You want me to give that up when for the first time I'm being incorporated into the larger state conversation? Those are the kinds of things that we wrestle with, that we try to document, that we try to understand and give that kind of human reflection on it's not that simple. First thing people always ask me is why don't they stop using it? Where I was just going with the root issue and then you go there's identity that's tied to it because they gained autonomy, women gained autonomy, so urbanization actually helped to bring potentially some of the autonomy, but then also then now it made it so that again with the complexity of having the health issues arrive, the giving up of the autonomy is... And the identity. How do you switch? What's the next best thing? Switching to another sort of safer way to make it? Absolutely, and that's the next question that people always ask me, but here's the deal. I can make a lead based ceramic pot for the kitchen that might cost 25-30 pesos, so it might cost me a couple bucks, U.S. dollar conversion. But if I have to go to a gas kiln, which is going to give me, it's going to allow me to lower the lead content or use a non-lead, use a copper based flexing agent instead, I have to get a kiln. Well, a kiln isn't going to be, I'm not going to be able to put as many items in that kiln, but the cost of the kiln is right around 10,000 U.S. The cost of the kiln, then the cost of the gas to run it, which means that ceramic pot isn't going to cost you 20-30 pesos anymore. That pot is going to cost you 200-300 pesos, and you're not going to buy a pot for 200-300 pesos, because you're a tourist and you don't carry ceramic back, it's heavy. So their actual consumers are some tourists, and actually it's more domestic tourists, it's more people in Mexico who can drive to Oaxaca, buy their household ceramic and take it back than it is you and me coming in and saying, but I'll buy your higher priced ceramic pot, because it's still a good price for me in the U.S., because that same pot in the U.S. isn't going to cost 200-300 pesos, it's going to cost 200-300 dollars because it's an indigenous pot from Oaxaca. But they don't ever see that, and they don't have the marketing capacity to be able to export it. So this is potentially happening all around the world? All around the world, yes. Because cottage craft is helping small marginalized populations survive so that the states don't have to invest in them. Well, so there's some autonomy that comes with making this cottage craft, yet then the governments don't need to invest into... They can be like, oh, you have economic autonomy already, but now you become part of the consumerism cycle, and then you join the economic machinery, which you never actually subscribe to be a part of in the first place. So I go from looking at gender and how we make decisions about what elements of our culture we will continue to perpetuate across time even as we are addressing new structures for our children to now understanding how women were empowered through the very commodification of their bodies and their craft, which ended up producing severe health, negative health outcomes, which moved me into nutrition and nutrition intervention, which moved me into understanding the symbolic significance of food. If I'm going to do recipe modification in order to increase your calcium and increase your protein consumption, your iron, I need to understand what textures are appropriate for you, what tastes are appropriate for you, because if I start substituting things out, I'm going to change that, and some things you're just not going to eat. So you have to balance that. So then you learn, you start to learn how women also identify with the food that they produce, and also how men understand that they're being cared for based on the quality of food that is being prepared for them. So if you interrupt that, you're not going to win. They're not going to maintain this recipe intervention, this nutrition intervention that you're hoping will re-empower their bodies. So you start learning about food and the symbolic significance of food and how food is tied to identity and food is tied to futures. So this is how as anthropologists I think in many ways our research just kind of grows and grows and grows and shifts and changes and becomes so many things at the same time. It's really about the same thing. Whoa, this, yeah, again at this macro level in terms of observing the planet over time from like a satellite view urbanizing and then the effects that that has on indigenous communities, the effects that that has on communities that are directly outside of urban metropolises, the way that that kind of machinery pressures people into doing things, into transitioning from potentially their interconnectedness with the ecosystem that they're a part of to now doing things like partaking in the economic machinery to the land that they were on now having more and more people living in those areas. The health issue you were talking about, autonomy, all these complex... Gender roles. Gender roles. This was nuts. This was so crazily complex. And this has been the main focus for you in the research was that. And I follow people who do choose to migrate. So as they've moved out of Oaxaca and moved into Baja California and other parts of Mexico, I look at how these Oaxacan communities reinvent community and maintain their senses of identity in these other places all the way in through the U.S. It also means that I understand the traumas and the perils that they go through. And because of my work on women's autonomy, I understand domestic violence and violence against women and children in some really profound and intimate ways since I watch it unfold. And when you do gender research, you can't talk to one. You have to be able to incorporate the multiple genders that exist. You have to be able to hear from men why they do the things that they do as well as from women why they do the things that they do. So beginning to understand how domestic violence is understood and violence against women and children is understood, how it's perpetuated, how it's not a priority for the Mexican state because it's so culturally bound. Because of all of these things, this leads me into expert witness testimony. A lot of times in the asylum courts as women and children are coming across and saying you have to save my life. You can't send me back there. So there are really intimate ways in which as an anthropologist, the very intimacy of living among communities for the length of time that we do for spending the time with them and going across time and understanding how their worlds collide with other worlds, understanding the whole global impact also requires us to be able to say that out loud to the public and to be able to stand up and say, it's not as simple as you're trying to make it. Let me take you on a journey. Let me take you all the way back through the history of these people and what is happening to them today. One of the things I always try to tell my students, you cannot understand the decisions that somebody's making today if you don't know their history. Exactly. That's why you have to ask questions and learn about people's history and culture. That's why questions are everything. The quality of your life is the quality of your questions. Do you know how to ask people questions that can give you the understanding of their history so that you're not just watching some two-minute mainstream media news clip about a certain thing, but rather you've actually done the dive into Oaxaca City and the nearby areas that then give you the understanding of what's happening. You give this profound story of a human experiencing domestic violence issues that comes and says, please let me save me. Save me. That's much different than what media portrays. Period. Media may have before portrayed stories like this, but it's so extremely rare to see an actual long-form segment about people like that that then need to have help away from domestic abuse. And like you said, the close ties that it has where there's not actually help coming into those areas to solve things like this because of the cultural associations and stuff like that. And their value according to the state, how the value decides which populations are worth their investment and which ones aren't. And you know, gendered violence is much deeper and it's much more complex than that because there are ways in which domestic violence also communicates out into larger community-based violence and how that then turns into cartel violence, how it turns into all these kinds of things. That is a whole other segment. That is a whole other conversation. All of what you were just been talking about, especially you were mentioning this a little bit ago, you said immigration, expert witness testimony, child detention, domestic violence, the complexity of all these things, but transnational migrant youth of the trauma that comes with that ethnic marginalization general. This is a great part too to explore with you and much more and maybe more on the answers to exploring and hitting back and forth around some of those initial questions that we were talking about as well. This has been super enlightening. I want to ask you just one last thought, which is what is the most beautiful about this reality? What is most beautiful? Wow, there's so much beauty actually. There's so much trauma, but there's so much beauty and I think the greatest beauty is looking into the eyes of a stranger and receiving a smile. That goes back to, yeah, we're all one. I love that. Looking at another and seeing yourself and then never inflicting harm. Seeing them, not yourself. You see them and you smile. Which is all us. You see them, which is us and you never commit a harm. But it's never just me. Yeah, yeah. We want to thank you again so much for coming on the program. You're welcome. Wow. And congrats again on the role. Thank you. Here at AAA. The association is really, really important to me. I have been involved with association leadership since I was a graduate student. Boom. Yep. Boom. All four years. That's it. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode. Let us know what you're thinking. Check out the links in the bio below to Ramona's work. Also check out the links in the bio below to the American Anthropological Association. Check them out and support them, please. Yes, please. And also support the artists, the entrepreneurs, the spiritual leaders, the organizations, the communities around the world that you believe in. Support them and help them flourish. You can find all of the links below to our show. It reminds us of PayPal, Patreon, Cryptocurrency. You can design cool merch and you can pay to all of those links in the bio below. And go and build the future, everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. Build a just social fabric. We love you very much. We'll see you soon. Peace. But not everyone's a good storyteller. Not everyone's a good synthesizer. And not everyone really truly cares at the depth of their heart. And those are probably the big differences.