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Professor Gamble to be Editor
Lynn Gamble has been chosen as the editor of American Antiquity by the Society for American Archaeology at their annual meeting in Vancouver. She will be helping the current editor during fall quarter 2017, then taking over all responsibilities in January 2018. Congratulations!
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Pursuing Peace and Life in the Korean Demilitarized Zone
With the discovery of rare and endangered species in areas around the Korean Demilitarized Zone, and inspired by the paradoxical flourishing of nonhuman nature in the context of unending war, a wide network of scientists, bureaucrats, journalists, natural scientists, citizen ecologists, and others have become captured by a utopian vision in which nature, peace, and life constitute a tightly-wound bundle of naturalized associations. Especially since the late 1990s, in the context of increasingly dire planetary futures presented by global climate change and mass extinction, as well as with the deteriorating prospects of national reunification or reconciliation between the two Koreas, the DMZ’s nature has offered the conceptual ground for mainstream and marginal imaginaries of peace in South Korea and beyond. While it would be easy to dismiss these hopeful discourses as naive and romanticizing, this paper seeks to take them seriously as empirically-grounded logics in which the existence of biodiversity of the DMZ offers potentially alternatives to the present political impasse. How is the DMZ’s nature temporally operationalized as transhistorical and universal, connecting a pre-division, yet national, space to a “context yet to come” of a post-division Korea? What imaginative possibilities does it offer beyond state-centric and nationalist frameworks for unification?
Eleana Kim is a sociocultural anthropologist and Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine. Her research and teaching focuses on kinship, nationalism, political ecology, and posthumanism. Her current research on the Korean DMZ has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the ACLS. Her first book, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging, received the 2012 James B. Palais Prize from the Association of Asian Studies and the 2012 Association of Asian American Studies Social Science book award.
This is an East Asia Center event, cosponsored by the departments of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, History, and East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies as well as the Reinventing Japan Research Focus Group and the Center for Cold War Studies.
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Staff Members, Dennis and Marin, Receive Awards
Ms. Louisa Dennis received a 2017 Staff Citation of Excellence award. Louisa has been working with us in Anthropology for many years. She has distinguished herself as an amazing resource with vast knowledge of how the UC works, excellent editorial and time management skills, and a high capacity for leadership when called upon to serve. She will be honored in an official ceremony during Staff Celebration Week in May.
Ms.
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Professor Gurven and Grad Student Garcia in the News
Study finds 80-year-olds in central Bolivian forager-farming population have the same arterial age as Americans in their mid-50s.
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Professors VanDerwarker and Gaulin in Teaching and Learning Excellence Series (TALES) Podcasts
Steve Gaulin appears in the first video at the top and Amber VanDerwarker is in the second at the bottom.
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VanDerwarker & Grad Students Present Research
UCSB scholars organize a symposium that will examine mentorship and sexual harassment in academic and private archaeology.
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VanDerwarker & Grad Students Present Research
UCSB scholars organize a symposium that will examine mentorship and sexual harassment in academic and private archaeology.
Continue Reading VanDerwarker & Grad Students Present Research
Spring Proseminar: Cristine Legare
The Evolution and Ontogeny of Cultural Learning
CRISTINE H. LEGARE, Department of 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 systematic program of mixed-methodological, comparative, and cross-cultural research, I study the human capacities to learn, create, and transmit culture, to shed light on the cognitive and cultural evolution of our species. The propensity for social learning provides the foundation for cumulative culture, and is both early developing and universal. Selective social learning mechanisms also afford the capacity to flexibly respond to diverse ontogenetic contexts and cultural ecologies. I describe the global diversity in childrearing practices, and present evidence for continuity and variability in the psychological capacities that enable cultural learning.