anthropology

#757 Quentin Atkinson: Comparing Cultures, Climate Change, and Religion

Mar 17, 2023

Dr. Quentin Atkinson is a Professor in Psychology at the University of Auckland, where he runs the Language, Cognition and Culture Lab, and co-Director of the University of Auckland Behavioural Insights Exchange (UoABIX). He uses lab and field experiments, computer modelling and evolutionary theory to shed light on the evolution of human culture and cognition. This work answers questions including the origins of linguistic diversity, the function of religion, the psychology of climate change, how evolved cognitive biases shape our social behavior and why political systems vary the way they do around the globe. More»
#755 Alexandra Kalev - Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn't

Mar 13, 2023

Dr. Alexandra Kalev is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. She is developing an evidence-based approach to managing diversity in corporations and universities. She is the author, together with Frank Dobbin, of Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn't. More»
#751 Leslie Sponsel - Yanomami in the Amazon: Toward a more Ethical Anthropology beyond Othering

Mar 3, 2023

NOTE: All of the royalties from Dr. Sponsel's book are donated to Survival International on behalf of their continuing vital help with the Yanomami. More»
#734 Helena Miton: Cognitive Science, Cultural Transmission, and Tacit Knowledge

Jan 23, 2023

Dr. Helena Miton is Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. Dr. Miton’s research agenda approaches culture as an emergent effect of human everyday life. It aims to understand how individuals interact to produce, organize and transmit cultural systems. Aiming to redefine how we study culture, her research program includes both theoretical advances and empirical case studies. She studies cultural evolution using data from human and social sciences, with a strong emphasis on cognitive science. She plans on investigating how characteristics of small-scale interactions can impact cultural productions at larger scales, in the context of both technical knowledge and economic practices. More»
#729 Gregory Forth - Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid

Jan 12, 2023

Dr. Gregory Forth received his doctorate at Oxford and was a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta for more than three decades. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and is the author of more than one hundred scholarly papers and several academic books. His latest book is Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid. More»
#726 Cristina Moya: Ethnic Categories, and Social Effects on Reproduction

Jan 5, 2023

Dr. Cristina Moya is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is an evolutionary anthropologist interested in how humans respond adaptively to culturally structured social worlds. Two main foci of her research are: intergroup interactions and social cognition; and cross-cultural variation in social effects on reproduction. More»
#725 Sarah Mathew: Human Sociality, Cooperation, Reciprocity, and Warfare

Jan 2, 2023

Dr. Sarah Mathew is Associate Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. She studies the evolution of human ultra-sociality and the role of culture in enabling it. She is especially interested in how humans evolved the capacity to cooperate with millions of genetically unrelated individuals, and how this links to the origins of moral sentiments, prosocial behavior, norms, and large-scale warfare. To address these issues, she directs a theoretically-informed field research program among the Turkana, a subsistence pastoral society in Kenya who cooperate at a large scale, including in lethal interethnic raids, without formal centralized political institutions. More»
#722 Martin Lang: Rituals, Synchrony, Moralizing Gods, and the Study of Religion

Dec 26, 2022

Dr. Martin Lang is an Assistant Professor at Masaryk University investigating the evolution of ritual behavior and the relationship between anxiety and rituals. More»
#719 Dimitris Xygalatas - Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

Dec 19, 2022

Dr. Dimitris Xygalatas is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Psychological Sciences and head of the Experimental Anthropology Lab at the University of Connecticut. He has also served as President of the International Association for the Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion. His interests include ritual, sports, cooperation, the interaction between cognition and culture, and the impact of cultural practices on psychophysiological wellbeing. He is the author of The Burning Saints: Cognition and Culture in the Fire-walking Rituals of the Anastenaria, and, more recently, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. More»
#716 Azar Gat - Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today’s Culture Wars

Dec 12, 2022

Dr. Azar Gat is the Ezer Weizman Professor of National Security at Tel Aviv University, in Israel. He is the founder and head of the University's International Program in Security and Diplomacy Executive Master’s Program in Diplomacy and Security. He’s also the author of books like A History of Military Thought, War in Human Civilization, and Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. His most recent book is Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today’s Culture Wars. More»