Anthropology at the Odessa Kitchen is a new podcast series created to introduce anthropology to Ukraine at a moment when its insights are most urgently needed. Modern socio-cultural anthropology does not exist in Ukraine on an institutional level. Yet the discipline’s methods—patient observation, attention to everyday life, and an ear for voices often drowned out—are a vital intellectual resource for contemporary Ukraine.
War turns the world black and white, it radicalises, polarises, and pits people against one another. Anthropology resists that flattening. It insists on nuance, ambiguity and the human detail, offering a way to comprehend rather than condemn, to ask how people live and why they act as they do, even in times of extremity.
Hosted by historian-anthropologist Vladislav Vod’ko and anthropologist Anastasia Piliavsky, Anthropology at the Odessa Kitchen brings this intellectual practice to a Ukrainian audience in a form that is intimate, accessible, and fun. In its informal table-talk atmosphere, rooted in the city’s tradition of kitchen-table debates, we ask hard questions with curiosity, irony and warmth. Episodes will be short, and as lively and conversational as they will be intellectually serious.
Through a series of dialogues, the hosts will bring anthropological perspectives to bear on the most pressing issues Ukrainians face today: nationhood, ethnicity and identity, the challenge of state-building, the persistence of corruption, and social survival under conditions of total war.
The episodes will feature guests, including some of the world’s most interesting anthropologists, to engage in dialogue with Ukraine. By placing these voices around the Odessa kitchen table, we aim to connect Ukraine’s public to a broader world of ideas, and to bring the discipline of anthropology—long absent from Ukrainian universities—into the country’s intellectual life.
Anthropology at the Odessa Kitchen is at once a public introduction to anthropology, a forum for thinking through Ukraine’s challenges, and a small act of cultural bridge-building. Its goal is to cultivate comprehension where conflict demands simplicity, and to enrich the national conversation with a method and a spirit that refuses easy answers.