anthropology

#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»
#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»