Author: Camilla Power
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Human evolution: some recent discoveries and their implications
On Tuesday Nov 21, we have a talk from Prof Chris Stringer (Natural History Museum) who is widely known as one of the foremost experts of hominin fossils in the world, and famous as author of the Recent African Origin model. He will be updating us on recent developments in human evolution, looking at fossils…
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‘This land is our land’: Exploring New Travellers’ alternative worldmaking and activism
On Nov 14, 18:30 GMT London time, we welcome Freya Hope, a Ph.D candidate anthropology at the University of Oxford, whose work explores human possibilities through the ‘alternative worldmaking’ of New Travellers. She engages with topics such as the anthropologies of anarchy, freedom, endurance and nomadism. New Travellers formed their group as an alternative to…
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Egalitarianism is Hierarchy, Autonomy is Mutuality
Natalia Buitron (Cambridge) and Hans Steinmuller (LSE) will be talking both LIVE @UCLAnthropology Dept and on ZOOM on Tues Nov 7 about their research in political anthropology. They write: Egalitarianism and hierarchy usually hang together, as both are based on commensuration and scale. As such, they contrast with autonomy and mutuality, which require a level…
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The science of mythology: ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ and other tales
Chris Knight will be speaking on Tues Oct 31, 18:30 pm London time LIVE @UCLAnthropology and on ZOOM. Hallowe’en costumes appreciated! The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was the first to discover that the world’s magical myths and fairy tales all express the same underlying logic. Across all six continents, they are ultimately a single anonymous…
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On the ‘Human Revolution’
Camilla Power and Ian Watts will be talking on Tues Oct 24, 18:30 London time LIVE @UCLAnthropology and on ZOOM They will speak about the history and meaning of the “Human Revolution’, an idea fundamentally developed in association with the Recent African Origins model in the late 1980s, and the entry of modern humans into…
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A Return to Action: A discussion revisiting the values of Action Anthropology
Toyin Agbetu, Lecturer in Political and Social Anthropology at UCL, will be speaking LIVE @UCLAnthropology and on ZOOM on Tues Oct 17, 6:30pm. He writes, Although anthropology is centred around the study of humanity, in its applied and military guises, it is not necessarily egalitarian, equitable or activist. Historically, these forms of the discipline have…
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The expressive chimpanzees of Fongoli
On Tues Oct 10, 6:30pm, Kirsty Graham (St Andrews) will be talking about her recent work on primate gesture with chimpanzees at Fongoli and bonobos at Wamba:“As someone who has spent 10 years studying primate gesture, I was (pleasantly) shocked by my research trip to Fongoli, Senegal. Here was a small cohesive group of Western…
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Mature human nature: The evolved nest
On Tues Oct 3, 6:30pm London time, Prof Darcia Narvaez will speak @UCLAnthropology on The Evolved Nest: “There is something even more than WEIRDness that separates the west from the rest of the world—a mismatch of its modernist-hegemonic-industrialized culture with human species normality. Species normality involves deep nestedness, a factor that affects child raising and…
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The sex-strike theory of human origins
The first Word was spoken by a woman. It was ‘No’. Acted out in sounds and gestures and exploding into a chorus of laughter, it was a signal to the male sex that their behaviour needed to stop. Chris Knight and Camilla Power will explain how menstrual bleeding was constructed as the world’s earliest taboo…
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Can Indigenous and Western Perspectives see Eye to Eye? The value of two-eyed seeing
On Sept 19, 6:30pm, Chris Knight will be talking on perspectivism in anthropology: Across Amazonia, myths hold that in early times it was the jaguars, parrots, tapirs and other animals who first invented bows and arrows, cooking fire, ceremonial buildings, religious ceremonies and other complex cultural accomplishments. Then humans stole these things from the animals,…