>>Erik: What did your South Asian archeology
class do to inform your passion for understanding
how urban impoverished communities develop?
>>Adam: That’s a funny question because
when I was, when I was an undergrad at University
of Michigan I studied cultural anthropology,
one of the classes that I decided to take
was South Asian Archeology. I saw that the
professor was a master in her field, I read
the synopsis and said ‘I want to take that’.
Obviously my friends thought I was crazy ‘What
are you going to do with South Asian archeology?’
I said ‘You know, to be honest I really
don’t know but I have a feeling I’m going
to learn something cool’ and it turns out
what we studied was the birth of modern urban
civilizations as in the Indus Valley, in one
of the oldest, oldest inhabited cities in
the world Mohenjo-daro where for the first
time we saw human society evolve to the point
where there was a… surplus of food which
allowed the division of labor, which led to
priests, which led to a class of warriors,
which led to urban… urban planning such
as sewage systems and… a concept of a city
identity and to me this was – it was revolutionary,
I had obviously knew at some point in time
humans had evolved from this tribal hunter
and gatherer society to where we are today
but never had it become so clear, so clearly
illustrated to me through a real life example
of looking at the tools they had found and
learning how they pieced this all together.
So to me I guess I, at the same time was really
kind of piecing this all together of how history
and how culture are not dry… are not dry
fields but are actually have formed who we
are today and it allowed me to recognize that
and in doing so I was able to prove my friends
wrong and then I could ask them ‘What did
you learn in your accounting 101 class?’
you know?
