William James Hall B1, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge MA, 02138
This is a personal account of the author's service as a member of President Obama's Cultural Property Advisory Committee. It reflects upon the purpose of the committee, its composition and the nature of its work, as well as the wider impact of the United States government's efforts to contribute to cultural-heritage preservation worldwide.
There will be a reception follow in the Tozzer Anthropology Building Atrium (21 Divinity Ave).
Haller Hall, Geological Museum Room 102, 24 Oxford Street
Dieter Lukas, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge
A central aim of research in social evolution is to explain differences in the complexity of societies. Various measures have been developed to describe social complexity, but we still lack a full understanding of why societies differ in complexity and how these differences influence evolutionary processes. I draw on comparative studies of mammals to show that...
Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge MA 02138
Race, Representation, and Museums Lecture Series
Lee D. Baker, Dean of Academic Affairs for Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Mrs. A. Hehmeyer Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University
Frederic Ward Putnam, one of the Peabody Museum’s earliest directors, played a key role in establishing anthropology as a scholarly field. He was also a driving force behind the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he aimed to present authentic exhibits about Indigenous cultures. His...
Haller Hall, Room 102, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Cristine Legare, Associate Professor, Psychology, University of Texas at Austin
Humans display a wide repertoire of socially acquired and transmitted behaviors that vary substantially across populations. Information is accumulated and transferred within and across generations through the process of cumulative culture. What are the evolved psychological mechanisms that underlie cultural learning and how do they develop over the course of ontogeny? In a...
Rasmus Nielsen Center for Theoretical Evolutionary Genomics, University of California, Berkeley
Abstract: Adaptive introgression is the transfer of beneficial alleles from one species to another through interbreeding. It is increasingly being recognized as an important process in evolutionary biology. I will discuss methods and theory relating to the identification of introgression, in particular the length distribution of introgressed fragments and...
Geological Lecutre Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge MA 02138
Race, Representation, and Museums Lecture Series
J. Lorand Matory, Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director, Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project, Duke University
Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, the term “fetish” has invoked African gods as a metaphor for what European social critics believe to be disorders in European thought. Yet African gods have a social logic of their own that is no less reasonable than the different, but equally socially positioned,...