What makes you … you? And who tells what stories and why? In the SAPIENS podcast, listeners will hear a range of human stories: from the origins of the chili pepper to how prosecutors decide someone is a criminal to stolen skulls from Iceland. Join SAPIENS on our latest journey to explore what it means to be human.
Thayer Hastings, a Ph.D. candidate, analyzes the repression of social justice struggles within universities by comparing CUNY student movements from the 1990s and 2024, questioning when institutional narratives embrace or reject activism in this interview episode.
27 May 2025TRANSCRIPT
The Purification of Gold—and the Racialization of Miners
Anthropologist Giselle Figueroa de la Ossa discusses the evolving perception of artisanal and small-scale mining in the gold industry and its unexpected social and ethical implications in an interview with Eshe Lewis.
20 May 2025TRANSCRIPT
Milpa for the Future
Milpa is an ancestral way of farming in Mexico and other regions of Mesoamerica that involves growing an assortment of different crops in a single area without synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. This provides people in the region with a wide variety of foods and a balance of nutrients. In recent years, with the introduction of farming based on synthetic herbicides, milpa has changed, and land is used to grow just a single crop. This change in agriculture has led to the rise of ultra-processed foods in these rural areas, which is impacting the nutritional health of the people. This change in agriculture, together with the rise of ultra-processed foods in these rural areas, is affecting the nutritional health of the people.
In this episode, bioanthropologist Anahí Ruderman shares her experiences working with a milpa growing community in Veracruz, Mexico, that is resisting the food of globalization as it tries to cook up a healthier future.
Anahí Ruderman is an Argentinean biological anthropologist with a Ph.D. in biological sciences from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. She is currently an associate researcher at the Instituto Patagónico de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas of Argentina. Anahí is interested in processes related to the nutritional status and diet of contemporary populations in Latin America in the context of globalization and food transitions. She uses analytical tools from different disciplines that range from human evolutionary biology, population genetics, and human ecology to history and sociopolitics.
Check out these related resources:
Mano Vuelta Project YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=inecol+mano+vuelta)
La Milpa: Government of Mexico Website (https://www.biodiversidad.gob.mx/diversidad/sistemas-productivos/milpa)
“Asociación entre seguridad alimentaria, indicadores de estado nutricional y de salud en poblaciones de Latinoamérica: una revisión de la literatura 2011–2021 (http://revistascientificas.filo.uba.ar/index.php/runa/article/view/10675)” (“Association between Food Security, Nutritional Status, and Health Indicators in Latin American Populations: A Literature Review (2011–2021)”)
Repository of Scientific Publications of the Project (https://repositorio-socioecologia.conahcyt.mx/jspui/handle/1000/130)
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SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is produced by Written In Air. The executive producers are Dennis Funk and Chip Colwell. This season’s host is Eshe Lewis, who is also the director of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program. Production and mix support are provided by Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weeber is the copy editor.
SAPIENS is an editorially independent magazine of the Wenner-Gren Foundation (http://www.wennergren.org) and the University of Chicago Press (https://press.uchicago.edu). SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library (https://americananthro.org/news-advocacy/podcast-library/).
This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program (http://www.sapiens.org/templeton), which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship, funded with the support of a three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation (https://www.templeton.org/).
Inside a recent episode
Protest and the Public University
Published 3 Jun 2025 · Transcript excerpt
[…] And what does that look like? Of course, that looks like the one access point we have to a better life, which is education, at that moment, right? And so they're now cracking down on education and the idea of students fighting back was like a light at the end of the time. I think that that's what attracted a lot of students to that. And when we talk about educational apartheid, it's like, how do we limit access to the things that can make people's lives better, right? And when we have a university system that has, at that time, an affordable tuition for many New Yorkers, and that system is now under attack programs and that system that reached the most vulnerable, there was, you know, a big threat to remedial education and for your colleges. […]
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