News

October 12: Intradisciplinary Discussions: "Development" with Casey Walsh and David Lawson

Instruction Begins

Instruction Begins for Fall Quarter 2018. Welcome to all New Students and Welcome Back to those continuing their studies!

Tiger-charming, ritual healing and mental illness in the Sundarbans region of deltaic Bengal

Presentation by Annu Jalais, PhD (National University of Singapore)

Mental illness and suicides are very widespread in deltaic Bengal – especially in the Sundarbans region. One of the ways in which mental illness is triggered amongst the islanders of the region is through the purported “fear” one “catches” after having seen or been in some sort of “interaction” with nonhuman entities. Following those who have worked on various forms of human-animal environments, I choose the word “nonhuman” (which includes animals, spirits, certain trees, gusts of wind) as it better allows me to talk of the natural world from the Sundarbans islanders’ point of view. When someone “catches fear”, that person is seen as needing prompt intervention lest it ends up disturbing the victim’s mental well-being and potentially even causing death. A ritual healer, customarily a person who works in the forest as a “tiger-charmer”, usually provides the “cure”. Research suggests that ritual healing may actually be therapeutically effective. However, for one to be able to explain how it works, one needs to take into account a particular cosmological worldview where humans and nonhumans are part of a common world. This is gaining importance in the domain of ecopsychiatry and this presentation offers an ethnographic contribution towards a greater understanding of it in the Sundarbans.

Commencement Tea 2018 Photos

Photos from our 2018 Commencement Tea and Award Ceremony. Congratulations to our award recipients and to all of our graduates!

Professor Amy Boddy Featured in The Current

Professor Amy Boddy's research on cancer has recently been featured on The Current. Her research takes on cancer from an evolutionary and ecological perspective. In a larger context, her research and UC Santa Barbara as a whole are part of the Arizona Cancer and Evolution Center which focuses on understanding cancer in new and innovative ways.

Be sure to read more about it here: http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2018/019059/ace-ing-cancer-research

Maurice Block, "Shared Imagination in the Morning Greetings of Villagers"

Maurice Bloch, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, is a cultural anthropologist, who has written extensively on religion, and prominent advocate for rebuilding the links between the cognitive sciences and anthropology. He carried out fieldwork in Madagascar and other parts of the world, including Japan, with a particular interest in topics such as imagination, ritual, cultural transmission, and the nature of the social among humans and other animals. He is the author of numerous books and articles including Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience (Cambridge 1991); Essays on Cultural Transmission (Berg, 2005); and most recently, Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge (Cambridge, 2012) and In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theory of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social (Paradigm, 2012).  He has taught in the US, France, and Sweden and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Maurice Bloch’s visit is co-sponsored by the Religion, Experience, and Mind Lab Group, the Department of Religious Studies, the Capps Center for Ethics and Public Life, and the Department of Anthropology.

Here are details regarding the different events.

June 4th, 4pm, Public Lecture, IHC McCune Conference Room.

Shared imagination in the morning greetings of villagers: the implications for human evolution

The lecture will argue the great potential size of human societies, in contrast to those of other primates, is due to a kind of shared imagination. This imagination consists of time transcendent systems of fixed roles and groups of which kinship and religion are important examples. Such a conclusion raises the difficult question of how it is possible for imagination to have practical social effects. The answer proposed will be that the shared imaginary emerges in normal life at certain moments yet is still governed by the potential of imagination. The lecture will be illustrated by Bloch’s experience of an isolated village in Madagascar.

June 5th, 6:00-9:00pm, Graduate Seminar with Maurice Bloch, Digital Arts and Humanities Commons. This seminar is part of INT 200C, a workshop on Cognitive Science and the Humanities: Bridging the Divide.   This workshop is focused on recent work in cognitive anthropology that offers a potential theoretical and methodological bridge between the cognitive sciences and the humanities (and humanistic social sciences).  Interest faculty and students are welcome to sit in on this and other meetings of the workshop. 

For more information, contact Ann Taves (anntaves@ucsb.edu). 

Maurice Block, "Shared Imagination in the Morning Greetings of Villagers"

Maurice Bloch, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, is a cultural anthropologist, who has written extensively on religion, and prominent advocate for rebuilding the links between the cognitive sciences and anthropology. He carried out fieldwork in Madagascar and other parts of the world, including Japan, with a particular interest in topics such as imagination, ritual, cultural transmission, and the nature of the social among humans and other animals. He is the author of numerous books and articles including Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience (Cambridge 1991); Essays on Cultural Transmission (Berg, 2005); and most recently, Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge (Cambridge, 2012) and In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theory of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social (Paradigm, 2012).  He has taught in the US, France, and Sweden and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Maurice Bloch’s visit is co-sponsored by the Religion, Experience, and Mind Lab Group, the Department of Religious Studies, the Capps Center for Ethics and Public Life, and the Department of Anthropology.

Here are details regarding the different events.

June 4th, 4pm, Public Lecture, IHC McCune Conference Room.

Shared imagination in the morning greetings of villagers: the implications for human evolution

The lecture will argue the great potential size of human societies, in contrast to those of other primates, is due to a kind of shared imagination. This imagination consists of time transcendent systems of fixed roles and groups of which kinship and religion are important examples. Such a conclusion raises the difficult question of how it is possible for imagination to have practical social effects. The answer proposed will be that the shared imaginary emerges in normal life at certain moments yet is still governed by the potential of imagination. The lecture will be illustrated by Bloch’s experience of an isolated village in Madagascar.

June 5th, 6:00-9:00pm, Graduate Seminar with Maurice Bloch, Digital Arts and Humanities Commons. This seminar is part of INT 200C, a workshop on Cognitive Science and the Humanities: Bridging the Divide.   This workshop is focused on recent work in cognitive anthropology that offers a potential theoretical and methodological bridge between the cognitive sciences and the humanities (and humanistic social sciences).  Interest faculty and students are welcome to sit in on this and other meetings of the workshop. 

For more information, contact Ann Taves (anntaves@ucsb.edu). 

Grad Student Kudos

We would like to take the time to congratulate and highlight the great work that our graduate students do. 2018 has been a year of awards and accomplishments and is showing no sign of slowing down. Check out what's been happening in Anthropology!