What comes to mind when you picture an anthropologist? Kellie Cavagnaro is a doctoral student in anthropology and comparative media analysis and practice (CMAP) at Vanderbilt, and she’s preparing to launch a new public anthropology podcast called Dispatches from the Field. The podcast will explore intersections between Kellie’s fieldwork in an Andean highland community of Peru and a mysterious 70-year-old ethnography produced by a Harvard anthropologist who claimed to have been bewitched. In the 1940s, Harry Tschopik, Jr., studied shamanism among indigenous people 14,000 feet above sea level along the shores of Lake Titicaca in Peru. In her new podcast, Kellie will revisit Tschopik’s work and connect it to today through conversations with the grandchildren of community members who participated in his research. Kellie told me that these cross-generational conversations will explore the adventurous but also problematic past of anthropology, while also demonstrating contemporary approaches to navigating and understanding cultural differences.
Here on VandyVox, we’re happy to share Kellie’s pilot episode, “What Pachamama Can Teach Us about #Feminism.”
For more on Kellie’s work, visit her website or follow @KellieCavagnaro on Twitter. For future episodes of her podcast, bookmark the Dispatches from the Field website. Kellie is producing her podcast with Adam Gamwell of Missing Link Studios, which produces the long-running public anthropology podcast, This Anthro Life. And for more about Vanderbilt’s comparative media analysis and practice (CMAP) program, visit the CMAP website.