Well, if you think about what are the big challenges facing humanity right now, right? Climate change, inequality, the COVID-19 virus running rampant. I mean, think of all the challenges that are really pushing on us.
They're economic, they're political, they're biological. they're ecological, they're health-oriented, they're climatological or ecological. All of those things require some understanding of the human processes in the past and in the present to predict and to help us think about the future. Anthropology provides the toolkit, it provides the theoretical grounding, and it provides the kind of social justice engagement. Hi, my name is Nico Jaworski.
I'm a freshman anthropology major, and this is Dr. Augustine Fuentes from the University of Notre Dame. That's me. Yeah. To do anthropology is to care about humans, to try to understand humans.
And I think right now it's absolutely critical that we know as best as we can why things are happening. Why is the climate changing? Why are political systems the way they are? What is...
is the problem with access to healthcare and inequality. Those are issues that anthropology brings something to the table. That's why anthropology matters.
If we don't understand the past, right, we're doomed to repeat it in the future, right? And so that's really important. We, to think about where we're going as a society or societies, as a community, as groups of people, we need to understand where we come from, right?
The past helps us inform what are the opportunities, what are the possibilities, how does that work, how did it work then, how is it working now or not working, how might it work in the future. You should find out what calls to you, like what are you interested in, what kinds of classes, take a bunch of classes from a bunch of different areas and find the one that speaks to you. The great thing about anthropology is that because of its breadth, because of its depth, and because of its its sort of real serious interest in all the fantastic parts of being human, I think it calls to a lot of people.
People are going to go to do research on primates, but it's actually primates are a window into getting people to think about conservation, to think about the Anthropocene, to think about themselves, to think about sort of colonial legacies. There's all of these things we can use people's fascination with monkeys. to do some really good anthropological work. Number one, look at the actual data of income differential five years out.
You will find no difference between business majors and anthro majors, or actually all of the sort of majors in the social sciences. In fact, being an anthro major gives you probably a little edge on getting into that interview because you probably did some interesting undergraduate research, right? So.
that's one thing. Like going to business school does not guarantee you a better job in business. The second thing is business anthropology is a thing. Because like, why do people buy things, right? How do economic systems work?
Part of that is in marketing. Part of that is in economics and econometrics. But another part of that is in social theory, is in understanding ethnographic realities. How do different business models work?
What do we mean? Why are we attracted to certain kinds of ads and not others? That's anthropology.
So people who are really interested in business, you got to be able to understand that. You've got to understand humans, and to understand humans, you probably should take a class or two in anthropology. Look at where we are, take the good, recognize the bad, see all the errors that I've made, that my generation's made, that the generations before us made, be aware of them so as you go forward, you know the past, you don't repeat it, you can do stuff better. That's I think is the most important thing.
Well, thank you very much for being with us today. My pleasure.