Film Screening, "The Anthropologist"

The Anthropologist recounts the parallel stories of two women: Margaret Mead, who popularized cultural anthropology in America; and Susie Crate, an environmental anthropologist currently studying the impact of climate change. As revealed through their daughters’ perspectives, Mead and Crate demonstrate a fascination with how societies are forced to negotiate the disruption of their traditional ways of life, whether through encounters with the outside world or the unprecedented change wrought by melting permafrost, receding glaciers and rising tides.

The documnetary is an important documentary for policy, NGO and federal agencies specifically because it is based on anthropological research, one of the critical social science disciplines that methodologically clarifies the human aspects of climate change. Of late, and especially in the context of climate research, there has been significant progress in integrating the natural and social sciences to forefront critical perceptions, understandings, and responses to climate change as it interacts in the diversity of our planet's biocultural systems.

On Wednesday, May 18, the Managing Our Planet series will screen a documentary focusing on the role of anthropology in the investigation of climate change followed by a conversation with the film maker. 

The conversation is part of the ongoing “Managing Our Planet” series, jointly developed by George Mason University and the Wilson Center’s Brazil Institute and Environmental Change and Security Program. The series, now in its fifth year, is premised on the fact that humanity’s impacts are planetary in scale and require planetary-scale solutions. 

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