D-PLACE crew in Fort Collins

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I’m at the winter meeting of the D-PLACE team this week! We’re in Fort Collins, Colorado, being hosted by Mike Gavin, one of the PIs on the database project. D-PLACE is the Database of Places, Language, Culture, and Ecology. It brings together cultural data with linguistic phylogenies and environmental data so that scholars interested in explaining human cultural diversity can take … Read more

Funding opportunities to work in excd.lab

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There are two upcoming calls for funding schemes that would allow postdoctoral researchers to come work with us at Bristol. The first is the British Academy’s International Partnership and Mobility Scheme. These three-year and one-year awards are for research partnerships between scholars in the UK and scholars in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, … Read more

the old and the new

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Posts earlier than this one are from my old “Culture Evolves!” blog (evolutionaryanthropology.wordpress.com). I’ve ported them here for longevity and archiving as they contain nine years worth of blogging activity, give or take the last three years of dormancy! At the very least they will give new members of my research group something to giggle over from the … Read more

[scrapbook] Tinbergen on differences and similarities

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The amount of times I have read this paper … I should be able to quote it chapter and verse by now. “The naturalist who studies animals in their natural surroundings must resort to other methods. His main source of inspiration is comparison. Through comparison he notices both similarities between species and differences between them. … Read more

Phyloseminar: Testing hypotheses about cultural evolution

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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

New academic year, new job

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This week I started my new position as a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Bristol. I’m in the Department of Archaeology & Anthropology (which is quite a mouthful when you’re introducing yourself!). Very happy to be here, “here” being the UK, Bristol, and in a department not too dissimilar to the one where … Read more

[scrapbook] On generalizing from case studies

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Köbben (1970 and in other papers) was concerned with the folly of making general statements based on case studies. In his study of the Siriono of Bolivia, Holmberg (1950) concluded that hunting and gathering tribes tended to be underfed and obsessed by food. From his celebrated study of Western European nations during the 1880s and 1890s, … Read more

[scrapbook] the fundamental and the freakish

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From Adam Kuper’s Huxley lecture: Kuper, A. 2008. “Changing the Subject About Cousin Marriage, Among Other Things.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14, 717-735. Malinowski never delivered a Huxley lecture, but I will give him the last word in mine. In a note for a never completed textbook he remarked that when he … Read more

[scrapbook] On the value of comparative anthropology

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From: Burton, M, C Moore, J Whiting, A Romney. 1996. “Regions Based on Social Structure.” Current Anthropology 37 (1) (February 1): 87–123. I often go back to this paper. The analyses themselves are interesting (bottom-up culture regions based on the data rather than geography) but problematic (correspondence analysis on non-phylogenetically-controlled data). But the remarks in the … Read more