They're not Binging TV, they're Feasting: Rethinking Media, Honor and American Culture with Grant McCracken

Take a walk with anthropologist and consultant Grant McCracken and host Adam Gamwell, as they discuss Grant's new book The New Honor Code: A Simple Plan for Raising Our Standards and Restoring Our Good Names and dig into Grant's uncanny ability to excavate and weave together (American) culture, media, and storytelling, and pull out provocative insights like the need to get more anthropologists and cultural experts into the C-Suite, how we might re-invent honor in the contemporary world, and how setting anthropology free from the academy can reshape it and make the field better for it.

In The New Honor Code, Grant draws together ideas from Elizabethan England, insights found while hanging out in people's living rooms interviewing them about their television watching habits for Netflix, the rise of celebrity culture as the closest thing we have to honor today - and why that's a problem - and the seemingly uncrossable gap between American boomers and millennials/GenZ. In mixing all these ideas together, he asks what is honor, why did it seem to disappear from our culture and what would it look like to create a system of honor in contemporary United States that would dissuade people from acting badly with impunity.

We dig into all these topics in this episode and Grant has some great advice for any social scientist looking to go into consulting or business or if you're in business, how we can be more savvy and practical about infusing anthropological mindsets and thinking into organizations without hitting people over the head with it, especially if they find the idea of culture confusing.

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