sNAPAshots: Rosalie Post

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Transcript

Interviewer 0:06
Welcome to sNAPAshots conversations with professional practicing and applied anthropologists.

0:12
[On screen text] Rosalie Post, Design Anthropologist, Co-Founder of NAMLA

Rosalie Post 0:19
Hi. My name is Rosalie Post. I am a design anthropologist based in Amsterdam. I’m also from the Netherlands originally, and I started my anthropology journey, I would say, around 15 years ago

Interviewer 0:19
[On screen text] How did you get into anthropology?

Rosalie Post 0:36
I started studying cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, and I got interested in that because I was always really into languages as a child, as a teenager, and eventually I realized that what fascinated me about languages was how people use them much more than The grammatical structures of them. I really wanted to understand, “why does this word in this language sound like this?”, or “why does this meaning encompass that?” And so it turned out that what I wanted to know about languages was much more about anthropology, actually, how our culture is formed. What do people do in cultures, and how do they shape meaning together. I started developing courses for people who are graduating from anthropology today and who are looking for ways to go out of academia or inside into applied anthropology. And so today, I actually full time facilitate, host, teach workshops and courses about applied anthropology in my company that I co founded, called NAMLA. Namla is the Arabic word for ant, female ant. We were really looking for a name for what we wanted to do. And we were going around with like “anthropologists who act “or who go out and do things, and we couldn’t think of any acronym that had not been used or anything like that. And so eventually we started talking about animals that we like, and we like ants because they just go out and they don’t sit and think they just go, they walk around on the sidewalk, and then they build really big structures together by just working together with 1000s of ants. And so that image really spoke to us for what kind of anthropology we want to do in the world. And then we just asked all of our friends, like, what is the word for ant in your language, and we picked the one that we thought was prettiest. And so NAMLA is an organization where we the tagline that we gave it is “teaching fast ethnography for real world impact.”

Interviewer 2:53
[On screen text] Rapid ethnography uses classic methodes in quick and effective ways to study in short period.

Rosalie Post 2:57
And we use rapid ethnography, rapid analysis methodologies, and then combine them with design thinking methodologies, most of the time, sometimes appreciative inquiry or other related stuff. I don’t want to be too negative, but like we don’t want to sit and just criticize the world. And this is also because I worked in, you know, for the Dutch government and in semi government for seven years, and I did not meet a single person with bad intentions in all that time. These people are hard working, and they care about the citizens, and they want to do the things. And so for me to write an analysis and then say the government should solve this problem. It’s it can be true, but if the government knew how to solve the problem, I really believe they would have done it already. Because governments really care, and most people in society really, really care and want a good society and a nice one. And so I think the issue is not that, you know, the issue is not awareness. It’s not that people just don’t care about your issue. I think the problem is more that every situation is extremely unique and complex and a wicked problem needs a local and co-created solution that we cannot build in one day, and governments and industry have a limited amount of time and energy, just like everybody else. And so I think we want to motivate anthropologists, but also others, journalists and other people who come to our courses to start being part of the solution by helping develop these very complex and nuanced and maybe highly localized solutions for problems.

Interviewer 4:52
[On screen text] How has the Anthropological mindset enhanced you contribution to you workplace?

Rosalie Post 5:01
I think the anthropological mindset that I learned from quite a young age, I started studying anthropology when I was 17, so I think it almost became synonymous with part of my personality, because I shaped and got shaped by anthropology in my teens and 20s, but it infuses I would say everything I do, because I’m always thinking about groups of people and how they work together, and how they operate together, and what are the relationships between the people in the collective and so I use this, for example, when I facilitate trainings where I have teams do an assignment together, then I’m thinking about that team, how are they relating to each other? How are they understanding each other?

Interviewer 5:56
[On screen text] Do you remember the moment that changed the way you practice anthropology?

Rosalie Post 5:56
One comes to mind, in particular, I had a teacher at the University of Amsterdam called Franzio Guadalupe, and he comes from the Caribbean, part of the Netherlands, and he was always making this statement that “Globalization is not a new phenomenon, because at least in the Caribbean, it’s been happening for 400 years.” And I learned this when I was 20 years old as a theoretical idea. And then when I was in my master’s research, doing my thesis research, I went to the city Kampala in Uganda for a few months. And I think only when I really got there I understood stood what he was talking about Uganda has a lot of food that I would identify as Indian, like chapatis that you can buy on the roadside. They have, you know, Coca Cola ads like you would maybe expect in the US. They have large presence of international aid workers and UN workers and US AID workers and so on. And then there’s also like 40 different local cultures in one country with their own language and their own traditions and ways they like to do things. And I saw all of that kind of melting together in one capital city. And I was only, you know, researching such a tiny pirate. I was talking to people in in high school about what they wanted to do after high school and their future dreams. But even in the high schools, all these different backgrounds, even of the pupils blended together into a mix where I thought, “Yes, globalization has been happening for a really long time,” and that can actually be harder to see from Europe, where sometimes we can live relatively close to where we were born, or where our grandparents, or great great great grandparents were born. And it became visible for me when I Yeah, got to travel outside and learn more.

Interviewer 6:09
[On screen text] What advice would you give to future anthropologists seeking roles in professional, practicing, and applied fields?

Rosalie Post 6:30
The first and foremost thing would be, you are not alone. I meet many young anthropologists who are quite lost in their job search and feel dejected by the stuff that’s happening around them, and they Google “anthropology” on a job site and find no positions open to them. And this is a struggle that we ourselves, we ourselves went through as well, which is, you know, partially why we built a course to make it a bit easier to figure out, what do you want to do for the people who come after us? But I think we need to start from the premise you are not alone. Finding your place in the world of work. As an anthropologist, is a bit tricky. Our discipline is a bit misunderstood in the general public, and that’s okay. We can keep working on that. We can change that together, but it requires, sometimes a bit of creativity and a bit of searching before you have found the place where you can really shine, and that’s okay, and just I know that that is very hard when you’re in the middle of that lost confusion, but it will work out one way or the other, and the search in itself, yeah, is going to grant you great results, even if it’s really hard to go through.

Rosalie Post 9:54
PRODUCED BY Niel Tashima Cathleen Crain Joshua Liggett DIRECTED BY Reshama Damle EDITED BY Whitney Margaritis MUSIC VIA PIXABAY: “FAT CHILLIN” by LAZY CHILL ZONE, “LOFI HIPHOP BACKGROUND MUSIC SUNDAY MORNING” by LVD RECORDS, “GOOG NIGHT LOFI COZY CHILL MUSIC” by FASSOUNDS ADDITIONAL FOOTAGE VIA PEXELS BY: NONE

Interviewer 9:58
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10:07
[On Screen Text] Many Thanks to NAPA’s Governing Council for supporting sNAPAshots. NAPA is a section of the Anthropological Association.

Volunteer Plug 10:16
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AAP Plug 9:58
[On Screen Text] Stay connected with 40 Years of The Annals of Anthropological Practice. [On Screen Image] AAP Cover Page. [On Screen Text] https://practicinganthropology.org/communicate/submit-to-the-annals/

Interviewer 10:07
sNAPAshots

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