Notions of family and kin terms vary in complexity and structure, so to what extent does linguistic and cultural variation affect the acquisition of kinship knowledge? While kinship provides the major framework for social organisation in many societies, we still know very little about how children learn to categorise different kinds of kin. The ‘Children’s … Read more
The past few weeks the lab has hosted Dr Joe Blythe as Benjamin Meaker Visiting Fellow from the University of Bristol’s Institute for Advanced Studies (thanks IAS!). Joe’s final event is this evening, and we’re delighted to be hosting his public lecture: Conversation across languages and cultures: Cross-linguistic perspectives on taking turns to talk. Details: … Read more
I’m giving a Phyloseminar next Tuesday at 17:00 GMT. “Testing hypotheses about cultural evolution” Anthropologists had a name for the non-independence-of-species-problem way back in the 1880s. Solving “Galton’s Problem”, and the promise of comparative methods for testing hypotheses about cultural adaptation and correlated evolution was a major catalyst for the field of cultural phylogenetics. In … Read more
I’m giving a talk tomorrow (Tues 21 Feb) at the University of Bath, for the AI folk in the computer sciences department. My thanks to Joanna Bryson for being adventurous and inviting an anthropologist to speak to CompSci folk! Counting coconuts for the chief: coevolution in language and culture Across the world, languages vary in … Read more
I’ll be giving the following talk in the Bristol Archaeology and Anthropology Research Seminar on February 8th 2012. To the Manor Born? The cultural evolution of land tenure, residence and labour in Austronesian societies. Cross-cultural differences in norms of land tenure may reflect both individual and population-level adaptations to ecological and social factors. A complex … Read more