anthropology

#702 Eric Schniter: Skill and Knowledge Acquisition, and Trust-Based Interactions

Nov 10, 2022

Dr. Eric Schniter is a Lecturer in Anthropology at California State University, Fullerton, and a Visiting Research Associate at the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University. Dr. Schniter does research in evolutionary anthropology, behavioral economics, and evolutionary psychology. He has been examining the development of skill, knowledge, and material production across the lifespan. This work has led him to investigate relationship maintenance, which is central to fostering material and knowledge transfers over the life course. Finally, Dr. Schniter is interested in how emotions calibrate personal and interpersonal behaviors, contributing to relationship maintenance and well-being. More»
#701 Anne Pisor: How Researchers Prepare for Fieldwork

Nov 7, 2022

Dr. Anne Pisor is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University. Her research interests include long-distance relationships and resource management, long-distance relationships and the downsides of climate change, and the evolution of human sociality. More»
#700 Claudio Tennie: Tool Behaviors in Great Apes, Cultural Transmission, and Cumulative Culture

Nov 4, 2022

Dr. Claudio Tennie is a Tenured Research Group Leader (“Tools and Culture among Early Hominins”) in the Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology at the University of Tübingen. In addition, he is an adjunct scientist at the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes. His main research triangulates what (if anything) makes human cognition unique - as well as why (and relatedly, when this happened and how often). In particular, he uses various methods and pathways to study the factors and the prehistorical beginnings that enabled the typical modern human "variant of culture": cumulative culture of know-how. More»
#696 Ryutaro Uchiyama: Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability

Oct 27, 2022

Dr. Ryutaro Uchiyama is a Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests include cultural evolution, cognitive plasticity, and developmental psychobiology. More»
#694 Patrick Savage: Musicology, the Evolution of Music, and Cross-Cultural Studies

Oct 21, 2022

Dr. Patrick Savage is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies at Keio SFC, where he directs the CompMusic Lab for comparative and computational musicology. He has academic degrees in music composition (BA), psychology (MSc) and musicology (PhD), and has won national awards singing Japanese folk song. His research on the evolution of music and culture has appeared in outlets including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, The New York Times, and The Economist. More»
#691 Radu Umbreș - Living with Distrust: Morality and Cooperation in a Romanian Village

Oct 14, 2022

Dr. Radu Umbreș is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Political Science at the National School for Political Studies and Public Administration, Romania. Dr. Umbreș does research in Social Anthropology, Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology. He is the author of Living with Distrust: Morality and Cooperation in a Romanian Village. More»
#689 Michael Tomasello - The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans

Oct 10, 2022

Dr. Michael Tomasello is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and James F. Bonk Distinguished Professor at Duke University. He is considered one of today's most authoritative developmental and comparative psychologists. He’s the author of several books, including The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999), A Natural History of Human Thinking (2014), A Natural History of Human Morality (2016), and Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (2019). His most recent book is The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans. More»
#687 Kristopher Smith: Human Cooperation, Partner Choice, and Long-Distance Relationships

Oct 6, 2022

Dr. Kristopher Smith is a postdoc in the Human Sociality Lab in the Department of Anthropology at Washington State University, where he studies long-distance relationships and natural resource management in Tanzania in collaboration with Anne Pisor and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder. This project applies evolutionary anthropology to better understand how communities can work together to manage shared, open-access fisheries. He previously worked as a research associate for the Geography of Philosophy Project, led by Edouard Machery, Clark Barrett, and Stephen Stich, examining cultural variation in folk concepts of knowledge, wisdom, and reasoning. He also worked with Coren Apicella, studying how the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania maintain group cooperation and what traits they prefer in potential social partners. More»
#686 Olivier Morin: How Traditions Live and Die

Oct 3, 2022

Dr. Olivier Morin has a full-time tenured research position at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris. He is also a Research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena, with the Minds and Traditions Research Group. His work focuses on cultural transmission and touches on the relations between anthropology, psychology and the philosophy of social science. He is the author of How Traditions Live and Die. More»
#685 Kim Sterelny - The Pleistocene Social Contract: Culture and Cooperation in Human Evolution

Sep 30, 2022

Dr. Kim Sterelny is professor of philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University and Victoria University of Wellington. He is the winner of several international prizes in the philosophy of science, and was previously editor of Biology and Philosophy. He is also a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is currently the First Vice President of the Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (2020-2023). He is the author of several books, including The Pleistocene Social Contract: Culture and Cooperation in Human Evolution. More»