Lisa Meekison is an anthropologist, writer and mother. Since completing her PhD in anthropology from Oxford University, she’s spent over a decade in applied anthropology. Her focus has been on revealing social and cultural drivers and patterns of behavior for Fortune 500 clients to fuel business and marketing strategies.  She has worked extensively in healthcare, studying first-hand how cultural factors shape health, illness and overall well-being. In this capacity, she’s logged hundreds of hours speaking to people from all walks of life, and has studied their behavior, motivations, aspirations and experiences. This knowledge and experience enables Lisa to speak about the relationship between how we live and our health and well-being with insight, authority and compassion. 

Lisa’s writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications. These include Scope, Meanjin and well as numerous journals and edited academic volumes including Anthropology News the Ethnography in Praxis Annual Conference Proceedings (2010, 2008, 2006), the Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture (2001), Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World (2000) and The Olympics at the Millennium (2000).  She’s been blogging about redefining the good life for nearly two years.

Lisa herself is committed to the principles she discusses in Riches. Two years ago, she quit her full-time job, as Director of Social Sciences at a marketing consultancy, in order to focus on the research for this book. Since then, she’s extensively studied the anthropology and psychology of well-being, and spoken to experts in psychiatry, longevity, health parenting and the family, cooking, creativity and the effects of “nature deficit disorder”. She’s experimented on and in her own family, attempting to cultivate play, music, cooking, being outside and eating together, and has learned firsthand about the constraints of doing so – but also the incredible rewards.