Agustín Fuentes - A master class in anthropology and a life lived among complexity

Agustín Fuentes reads a multi-million year history of our world, a student of its myriad lessons that often subvert unquestioned modern narratives and the problematic ways we've arrived at them. His is an anthropological, ecological, refreshingly unalloyed sensibility, an uncommon concoction whose life of scholarship and insight illuminate what we all might need to cultivate for the world we are walking into. 

Origins Podcast Website

Flourishing Commons Newsletter

Show Notes:

• Positionality (04:20)
• Interest in the transcendent (06:15)
• Willingness to contend with complexity (11:30)
• Awe and beautify of biology and anthropology (14:20)
• Eric Wolf '[anthropology is] the most scientific of humanities, the most humanistic of sciences' (16:20)
• Phyllis Dolhinow (18:00)
• Karl Popper and falsifiability (22:00)
• Margaret Lock and local biologies (24:00)
• Dialectic (24:30)
• Curriculum for the future (25:00)
• Myth of 'evolution as progress' (26:00)
• Teju Cole (33:00)
• Complexity: connecting the micro and macro (37:00)
• Approach to teaching and sharing knowledge (40:00)
• Cultural moment with the idea that we need to hold two truths at once (42:30)
• 'healing comes in the return' (46:40)
• Jeff Tweedy on writing (49:00)
• Lightning Round (50:00)
  • Book: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  • Passion: Travel, being on planes
  • Heart sing: Book he's writing (and his prior book Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You) 
  • Screwed up: a couple of relationships and guitar
• Find Agustín online:
  • Website
  • Princeton
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Agustín’s playlist

Logo artwork by Cristina Gonzalez

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