When I joined This Anthro Life it was my first year of my Master’s degree. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic I was still at my parent’s house and trying to balance the stress of graduate school with the stress of an ongoing global health crisis. Needless to say, death was floating around my brain quite a lot. From listening to the news to watching the movie Contagion (2011) one too many times as a strange coping mechanism disease and death felt like an ever-looming presence.
This is why editing this episode where Adam discusses the intersection of forensic anthropology and cultural anthropology with Lily White felt so timely. Lily got her Ph.D. from the University of Montana in 2019 and currently owns and operates Bones and Stone Anthroscience with her husband. She is a forensic anthropologist who focuses on the cultural side of forensics, especially on the lives of coroners and medical examiners and the best ways to handle death notifications.
The main takeaways from this episode are:
- Digging into the unseen/secret life of coroners (from a cultural perspective)
- Death notice work as essential but emotionally difficult plus a struggle keeping coroners in the practice
- The challenges of scientific training and having to deliver the worst possible news; the mix of scientific and social knowledge
Looking back on my early days of working with This Anthro Life “Death Work” was an incredibly important to my understanding of podcasting. I learnt about editing using Descript, timing in story telling, creating transcriptions, and how to make cover art that is eyecatching. Plus this was the first episode I posted about on This Anthro Life’s Instagram page which got me started in my role as the Social Media Manager. I owe a lot of my understanding of professional podcasting to this episode and I encourage everyone to give it a listen!
Sara Schmieder 