Your continued feedback and telling me I’m doing the coolest stuff you’ve ever conceived of is the best thing!
But! If you are willing and able, please consider financially supporting Everyday Anthropology, because I can’t continue to grow and make awesome content without the help of the people who love it. As of August 2, 2020, Everyday Anthropology is a registered non-profit in Rhode Island, with 501c3 status pending! That means that (by the time it matters) all of your contributions are 100% tax deductible and go directly towards funding all the awesome content and networking we’ve come to be known for.
You can support Anthrospin in three ways:
With Recurring Monthly Contributions (Through Patreon)
Or a One-Time Pledge in Any Amount (Through PayPal)
Or Just Buying Goodies (Through my BigCartel Web Store)
My Patreon Page is set up with donation tiers specifically reflective of monthly contributions.
One time contributions through PayPal are rewarded as follows:
Any amount– Collectively credited on film projects.
$5 or more– Specific (individual) credit on current film projects.
$25 or more– Specific (individual) credit on current film projects plus an Anthrospin Skull and Crankset logo sticker with personalized thank you letter.
$50 or more– Specific film credits (at this level, business name can be included**), logo sticker with personalized thank you letter, and an 8×10 production photo. The available photos change regularly and you can see the current ones on the Patreon page.
$150 or more– Specific film credits, logo sticker with personalized thank you letter, 8×10 photo, and a copy of my current major film project on DVD with content exclusive to supporters of Anthrospin. This stuff wont be available anywhere else unless you and all your friends pool money and share it, like a Netflix account.
Also new for 2019, commercial spots are available in limited quantities for all of Anthrospin’s film projects.
Each film has a maximum of 4 spots at approximately 3 seconds during the opening of a film, as well as during the credit roll AND on the project’s home page on this site (including linked logos).
These spots start at $75 for small businesses and don’t include the other incentive goodies. They will involve us hashing out the content for the spot as well as you (+ your organization) giving the final approval of what and how it will appear in the film.
But it will be sort of like:
“Everyday Anthropology Presents…
…With Generous Support from You because You are the Generousest!”
And then the film title.
Later on the same (or similar) billboard will creep by during the credit roll. Your logo with linked logos will permanently appear on the home page for the film project.
About Everyday Anthropology
Everyday Anthropology is multimedia-based educational project dedicated to making science and academia more accessible while bringing profound travel experiences to a local level.
The idea began developing in maybe 2003 or 2004, when I stopped by a book store that was closing while on a trip to New York. They had the book, Gorgon, by Peter D. Ward on clearance for something like $2. It was the first book on science I had ever read that was written from the perspective of a human. It had a lot of academic goodies in it, but the personality of Dr. Ward really came through. He talked about his field work and research, but also about his research team. About going swimming and a girl he used to have a crush on.
It was the first of many books I would come across that helped me realize that these scientists were people just like me. It was this book that directly influenced me to go back to school and get my degree in anthropology. It was this book that helped inspire me to branch out and work as a paleontologist in the Connecticut River Valley and as a photography assistant to paleontologist Sebastian Dalman while he worked on his master’s thesis at the Yale Peabody museum, and the same trajectory that led me to work in Kenya, in the Great Rift Valley, getting my first official field experience at the Koobi Fora Field School.
And during that field school, in the midst of everything I had ever dreamed of experiencing, there were some Ethiopian students for whom this was nothing new. It was their back yard. The plants and animals and heat and sunrises and the entire Milky Way visible at night. They had grown up there. They’d seen it all before.
But we keep in touch still. And when I got home, they asked me to send them pictures of snow. They’d never seen it before. I sent them a picture of my dog playing in it and they couldn’t believe it. They wanted to know what it felt like. I sent them pictures from a bike ride–a route I do all the time–and it made them dream of visiting. They still do.
And that’s where this came from. The destinations are relative. If you live in sight of the Great Pyramid, it probably isn’t your dream destination. If a few pictures from the East Bay Bike Path are profound to Temesgen over in Ethiopia…what other amazing things am I overlooking? What awesome stuff are we all surrounded by that we completely take for granted?
That’s what this project is about. I want to explore the deep cultural connections and destinations that are part of everyday life, I want to meet the people in (for now) my area who are researching the archaeology and history going on right here and talk to them about what it is they’re doing.
And I want to present it all in a way that shows it to be something that you could do, too.
About Me:
I bill myself as a “Researcher and Anthropological Educator,” which might tell you a bit about what I do, but it tells you little about why anyone should take me seriously when doing it. So with that in mind, here’s a bit on my educational and field work background.
I have a degree in anthropology from Rhode Island College. I graduated summa cum laude and with additional departmental honors for research I did on variation in modern primates and how it relates to the fossil record.
I’ve participated in research in Africa’s Great Rift Valley in the Turkana region of Kenya, where I worked to help recreate the environments and diets of our earliest ancestors.
Rhode Island College provides a Four Fields education in anthropology. What this means is that the overarching field of anthropology is split into four primary sub disciplines–archaeology, cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and biological anthropology. Not all schools have a four-fields approach, and the four-fields approach isn’t necessarily any better. But it did give me the opportunity to learn a lot more about researching a variety of different subjects from an anthropological perspective, and as such it has shaped the way I approach my work today.
While my research and primary focus throughout my undergrad, and my ultimate career intentions are within paleoanthropolgy (a subfield of biological), I have also done considerable research in cultural anthropology. The majority of what I am now doing is within the realm of sociocultural anthropology, with a visual format.
Before going to school for anthropology, I worked for a few years as a dinosaur paleontologist, during which time I documented thousands of dinosaur tracks throughout the Connecticut River Valley in Massachusetts, co-discovered and helped describe the oldest evidence of sauropod dinosaurs in the northeastern United States, helped reclassify an allosaurid fossil, and photographed hundreds of specimens for paleontologist Sebastian Dalman’s masters thesis.
Everyday Anthropology 