Your Local Anthropologist is an independent essay and podcast project. Each season looks at power - how it operates, how it sustains itself, how it might be challenged and negotiated with. Each time operating with different lenses - first the workplace, now learning.
i'm Elina, writing as Cyramatique. i came to this work through anthropology and more than a decade inside the tech and games industries; two worlds that between them taught me a lot about how systems reproduce themselves, and how people survive inside them anyway.
Currently S2: Practice of Freedom
i am in my second season which is about education - not schools specifically, but the deeper question of what learning does to us. How institutions shape what we believe is possible for ourselves. How we internalise limits we were never explicitly taught. And what it looks like to learn outside those limits - through the body, through language, through practices that institutions haven't yet found a way to monetise.
Previously S1: Utopia of Play
Perhaps you found me through my series, Utopia of Play: an anthropological lens on the modern workplace. This series was inspired by my own experience working in the tech and video games industries and examines how such desirable jobs can become so unrewarding and how, by rethinking play, work, and design, we might imagine more livable futures.
Ten essays on labour, play, cooperation, and the enclosure of the commons, available in full in the archive, and as a complete podcast series. Including 2 BONUS episodes on union busting and the games industry.
For anyone who's ever felt slightly out of step with the world's rhythm and wondered if that's a place worth pursuing.
How to show support
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Find me out in the wild
Both Practice of Freedom and Utopia of Play series are available to listen to on the following services.
