Sneak Peek: Nick Spitzer Podcast

Nick Spitzer: Well, I'm trained as a folklorist from an anthropological point of view, but I also grew up through radio ever since college days, and I've continued to do radio. I see the sound recordings of people's personal narratives and conversations about culture as part of the way we exchange understanding of cultural difference and similarities, and a way to take deep understandings of culture, and with the addition of music and various environmental sounds and conversation, reach a really wide and diverse audience. So you could say I'm a public scholar, an engaged scholar, a public folklorist. I guess I'm a lot of different things, but most of the time I just see myself as somebody having a cultural conversation with somebody about the past and cultural continuity into the present, and what the possibility is for the future of culture's traditions in a creative sense and in a sense of maintaining continuities from the past to the future.