How Cultural Anthropology Helps Us Understand Language, Media, and Business, with Adam Gamwell
Applying anthropology to business means asking the big questions. How does communication influence culture? How does language continue to evolve? And what are the hidden assumptions that shape our consumer behavior and attitudes towards food?
These are the questions that Design Anthropologist Adam Gamwell explores on a daily basis. They are also among the many questions he explores on his popular podcast, This Anthro Life. We recently spoke with Adam about the anthropological perspective, food science, and the keys to a successful podcast.
The media landscape continues to shift, becoming more and more fragmented. Compared to previous eras, people now have a much wider range of sources for news, information, and content - all of which shape their worldview. How do you think changing the media landscape is influencing culture? Is it a problem that we’re increasingly getting our “news” from different, oftentimes niche sources?
The changing media landscape is a double-edged sword. As you noted, we have unprecedented access to more sources of information, ideas, and commentaries on current events. However, more options don’t mean we’re each reading more or more diverse sources. In this sense, culture is fragmenting. It is becoming more complex as we generate new and more diverse meanings. There are more niche groups that can become increasingly insulated from others. And within each of our bubbles, we tend to seek out information and ideas that reinforce our own.
Our worldviews are increasingly shaped by niche and different news and content sources. This creates a challenge for building consensus because there isn’t an agreed-upon source of truth.
As an anthropologist, I like to think about culture as a guidebook for how to make sense of the world. It’s a guidebook that gets read to us as kids, that we then interpret and write for ourselves and then pass on to our kids. Culture is how we tell stories. It’s storytelling design. The trick is culture is often like water is to a fish. It’s invisible and difficult to detect without something to contrast it, like air. And even when a fish is in the air, they may not realize it, they just don’t feel good.
In the same way, we may see a news story or source or perspective and not like it, yet we can’t necessarily articulate why. And that’s how different meanings end up becoming more visible to us. Culture helps us decode why we don’t agree on news or information sources. The media landscape does influence culture. But culture also influences how we react to the media landscape.
It’s amazing how specialized, and community-specific language can be - especially when we examine how online communities speak to each other. Each platform and the online community seems to have its own unique communication style - rich with emojis, gifs, cultural references, and slang which “outsiders'' aren't privy to. How do you see the connection between language (broadly defined) and online culture/subcultures?
Language is a tool for assigning, referencing, and expressing meaning. Creating insider-only language builds community and fosters intergroup cohesion. It’s really no different from any offline community, except members don’t have to be colocalized. Expressing oneself with emojis and memes is just a way to represent belonging to a group.
Why I love emojis, gifs, and memes, in particular, is because they’re kind of like the digital equivalent to pictography, a form of writing that uses representational, pictorial drawings (think stop signs), and hieroglyphics, a form of writing that uses drawings as phonetic (pronounceable) letters. Memes by and large are used for humorous commentary. Emojis to add more expressiveness to text. I hope the success and global adoption of these forms of communication help us realize that alphabetic writing is just one of the many creative ways humans express themselves.
The same words – or symbols – can mean radically different things to different groups. And those meanings will change over time too. Emojis were invented in Japan as a way to cut down on bandwidth issues from people sending photos on their mobile phones (sounds ironic today, right?). But they’ve inspired people all over the world and are now accessible on every smartphone. They provide another way to express ourselves beyond letters or characters. What I love about them is that they are intentionally open to interpretation.
And that interpretability is precisely what seems to be annoying so many Gen-Zers about Millennials, who supposedly have ruined emojis and use them wrong. This gets to a fundamental anthropological question – who gets to decide what is the “correct” way to use a language or system of expression and why? The answer directly highlights how we use language to draw boundaries around who belongs in a group and who doesn’t.
It seems that our attitudes towards the foods we eat are based on cultural views, assumptions, and taboos. Since you have a background in cultural anthropology, sustainability, and food, I’m curious about how to see the connection between these? For example - insects may provide a perfectly nutritious, sustainable source of protein, but the (perhaps unexamined) attitudes towards them may prevent their widespread adoption. How do you see this playing out and are these hindrances things that can be overcome?
What we commonly eat is largely dictated by culture. Insects and sustainability provide an interesting question into how and why people change their minds about what they will and won’t eat. You may ask someone why they eat what they do, and they’ll tell you they try to eat healthily, and are mildly aware or feel society should eat more sustainably. But then ask them if they would ever eat insects – given that they are a healthy and sustainable source of protein – and most people will likely say no thanks. Or, sure I’d at least try it. As anthropologist Margaret Mead put it, what people say, what people do, and what people say they do are entirely different things.
If we’re trying to change behavior, i.e., getting people to focus more on health and sustainability around food, we have to understand not just cultural attitudes today, but also what historical particularisms, as Franz Boas called them, what unique events in history shaped those attitudes. Take quinoa. The golden grain has joined the pantheon of so-called superfoods, nutrient-dense foods that carry with them connotations of health, longevity, naturalness, and maybe the environment. It turns out historically quinoa went from being one of the sacred crops to Andean South American peoples for thousands of years, to being banned and shunned by Spanish colonists, and then associated as food for the rural poor. In other words, middle-class and wealthier urban Andeans came to see the food as essentially backward, low class, and socially inferior – the same characteristics they assigned to rural and poor farmers. Food tends to take on the qualities people associate with other groups.
Food is social. Over the past half-century, following cultural trends in healthier eating, sustainable and organic farming, and desires for authenticity and connectedness, quinoa (and many Andean crops that had been deemed inferior) underwent a tremendous amount of cultural reworking. Now it is the poster child of the Peruvian Gastronomy movement, darling of superfoodies, a point of cultural pride for rural farming communities, and one of the most important and robust crops for mitigating the effects of a changing climate. This tells us that perceptions, attitudes, and even taboos can change.
So what’s a food sustainability entrepreneur to do? Understand cultural taboos. In the case of eating insects, you can change people’s behaviors if you can successfully nudge people’s associations by 1. Removing the visible ick factor and 2. Aligning with positive cultural notions of food – sustainability, high protein, nutritious, comfort, etc. You don’t even need to go all the way to insects to see how this works. As consumers became warier of sugar in sodas, and thus became less likely to drink soda, bottling companies started selling diet and sugar-free versions that align with (and influence) changing consumer perceptions of what is good to drink. People could continue to drink their soda without the feelings of guilt or associations of being unhealthy. They’re making the taboo acceptable by changing their form.
You have a prolific podcast, This Anthro Life, which has been delivering incredible episodes for now over 8 years! How has podcasting changed in the time you’ve been involved? Is there anything you know now that you wish you would have known when you first started?
I started This Anthro Life in the fall of 2013 before podcasting was a household word. Around that time Serial from This American Life came out. Podcasting had – and to some extent still has – an indie, DIY element. Anyone can make one and put it out to the world. But there’s also been this incredible flourishing professionalization of the medium, which has upped the game of many shows. This also has made it increasingly hard to compete without editorial or financial backing. First came large public radio companies like NPR and PRX converting some of their most popular radio shows for the on-demand format of podcasting. Then they started creating podcast-first content. As podcasting has become ever more popular, celebrities and Hollywood have gotten into the game, bringing in ever larger audiences and interest from advertisers. Today podcasting is on track to become a billion-dollar industry within the next year.
I wish I knew just how rich, sophisticated, and lively the podcast industry would become. The opportunities, avenues, and infrastructures for professional podcasting available today didn’t really exist 8 years ago. So, while we have more tools and services at our disposal today, you’re also competing with a lot more noise. Podcasting for me has always been a mix of occupational therapy, professional exploration, an exercise in making anthropology mainstream, and personal branding.
From the standpoint of market research, what would you say is unique about the anthropological/ethnographic approach? What is it able to deliver that other methodologies don’t?
Traditionally, market research puts consumers into segments like Millennial moms who want to stay fit or climate-forward spend-thrift, Gen-Z students. This entails grafting industry perspectives and terminology onto people, rather than meeting people where they are at. Anthropology is intensely curious about how people label themselves, others, and their world. Market labels say more about marketers than they do about consumers, while anthropology aims to understand the world from the consumer’s cultural perspective.
Consumer segments may not reflect reality because culture is porous and organic. Younger people influence older people and vice versa, as the emoji debate or “OK Boomer” memes show us. Anthropology aims to capture this porousness by studying people on their own terms and by continually moving between the forest (culture) and the trees (individuals).
Photo by Stefano Girardelli on Unsplash
About Adam Gamwell
Dr. Adam Gamwell is a business and design anthropologist. He created and hosts This Anthro Life Podcast, co-founded Missing Link Studios (a social impact storytelling and human insights studio), and is a Senior Anthropologist at MotivBase. This Anthro Life has received multiple educational and media grants and brings listeners unique conversations with some of the top innovators and minds dedicated to decoding people and making our world more humane, including TED Allstars, MacArthur Geniuses, editors of global publications, documentarians, entrepreneurs, artists, scholars and more. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.
