UCLA Department of Anthropology

MMAC - Elizabeth Fein - Living on the Spectrum: Autism and Youth in Community
2021-02-08 15:00 - 16:50 (America/Los_Angeles)
MMAC is pleased to be hosting Elizabeth Fein to discuss her book Living on the Spectrum: Autism and Youth in Community (NYU Press, 2020), a two year, multi-sited ethnographic study of how young people on the autism spectrum negotiate the meanings of their contested condition in their everyday lives, in places where they live, learn, work, play, and love.

What do autism spectrum diagnoses do? How do they aggregate people around particular sets of tendencies and proclivities, and what are the consequences of that process? What happens when diagnoses such as Asperger’s Syndrome expand the terrain of neurodevelopmental disorder into new areas, then constrict back into familiar, medicalized forms? How do patterns of cognitive, social, interpretive, affective, and sensory difference shape our shared social worlds? And how do the demands of those worlds shape the set of developmental outcomes which we have come to call “autism”.

BEC - Dorsa Amir – The development of decision-making across diverse cultural contexts
2021-02-08 12:00 - 13:30
Dorsa Amir, Boston College Department of Psychology
The human behavioral repertoire is uniquely diverse, with an unmatched flexibility that has allowed our species to flourish in every ecology on the planet. Despite its importance, the roots of this behavioral diversity — and how it manifests across development and contexts — remain largely unexplored. I argue that a full account of human behavior requires a cross-cultural, developmental approach that systematically examines how environmental variability shapes behavioral processes. In this talk, I use the development of decision-making across diverse contexts as a window into the relationship between the socioecological environment and behavior. First, I present the results of a cross-cultural investigation of risk and time preferences among children in India, Argentina, the United States, and the Ecuadorian Amazon, suggesting that market integration and related socioecological shifts lead to the development of more risk-seeking and future-oriented preferences. Second, I present the early results of a five-culture investigation into the ontogeny of social preferences — namely, trustworthiness, forgiveness, and fairness. Taken together, these studies help elucidate the developmental origins of behavioral diversity across cultural contexts, and underscore the utility of interdisciplinary research for explaining human behavior.
The BEC Speaker Series hosts presentations by renowned scholars from across the social, behavioral, and biological sciences whose work sheds light on human evolution, including issues of cultural transmission, behavioral ecology, affect, cognition, and health.

BEC - Michael Tomasello – Becoming human: A theory of ontogeny
2021-02-01 12:00 - 13:30
Michael Tomasello, Duke University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Humans are biologically adapted for cultural life in ways that other primates are not. Humans have unique motivations and cognitive skills for sharing emotions, experience, and collaborative actions (shared intentionality). These motivations and skills first emerge in human ontogeny at around one year of age, as infants begin to participate with other persons in various kinds of collaborative and joint attentional activities, including linguistic communication. Our nearest primate relatives understand important aspects of intentional action – especially in competitive situations – but they do not seem to have the motivations and cognitive skills necessary to engage in activities involving collaboration, shared intentionality, and, in general, things cultural.
The BEC Speaker Series hosts presentations by renowned scholars from across the social, behavioral, and biological sciences whose work sheds light on human evolution, including issues of cultural transmission, behavioral ecology, affect, cognition, and health.

From Ethnography to Ethno-Graphic: Representing the Work of the Police
2021-01-29 10:00 - 11:40
Black Lives Matter: Global Perspectives Webinar Series with Dider Fassin
Organizers: UCLA International Institute; UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies; Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy

Co-sponsors: Center for Social Medicine and the Humanities (Semel Institute), David Geffen School of Medicine; Global Health Program, David Geffen School of Medicine; UCLA Department of Anthropology

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During the 15 months between the death of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore and subsequent unrest in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois in 2005, and the deaths of the adolescents Moushin and Laramy and subsequent uprising in another Paris suburb, Villiers-le-Bel, in 2007, Dider Fassin conducted research on police work in poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Paris. His research focused on the everyday life of the dreaded anti-crime squads, ordinary racial discrimination and the banality of violence.
This research was initially translated into a book (“Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing,” Polity, 2013), as can be expected from an ethnography, and more recently, into comics that comprise an ethno-graphic (“La force de l’ordre. Une enquête ethno-graphique,” Seuil/Delcourt, 2020).
Fassin’s lecture will reflect on the variations in representation of this research as it related to the chosen form, and on their echoes in the public sphere as events involving police abuses unfold.
Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, and Annual Chair in Public Health, Collège de France, is an anthropologist and a sociologist who has conducted fieldwork in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa and France. Trained as a physician in internal medicine and public health, he dedicated his early research to medical anthropology, focusing on the AIDS epidemic and health inequalities. He later developed the field of critical moral anthropology, which explores the historical, social, and political signification of moral forms involved in everyday judgment and action, as well as in the making of national policies and international relations.
Fassin has also carried out an ethnography of the state, through a study of urban policing and the prison system. His recent work is on the theory of punishment, the politics of life and the public presence of the social sciences, which he presented for the Tanner Lectures, the Adorno Lectures and at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, respectively. A recipient of the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award, he is currently involved in a global program on crises, examining in particular the cases of migrants and refugees. For his course at the Collège de France, he explores contemporary stakes in public health, with special reference to the coronavirus pandemic.
He regularly contributes to newspapers such as Le Monde and magazines such as the London Review of Books. His recent books include “Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present” (2011), “Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing” (2013), “At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions” (2015), “Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition” (2016), “The Will to Punish” (2018), “Life: A Critical User’s Manual” (2018), and “Death of a Traveller: A Counter Investigation” (forthcoming 2021).
DISCUSSANTS
Aslı Ü. Bâli is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and Faculty Director of the UCLA Law Promise Institute for Human Rights. Her principal scholarly interests lie in two areas: public international law—including human rights law and the law of the international security order—and comparative constitutional law, with a focus on the Middle East.
Aomar Boum is Associate Professor at UCLA Department of Anthropology. He is a socio-cultural anthropologist with a historical bent concerned with the social and cultural representation of and political discourse about religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East and North Africa.

MMAC - Roy Richard Grinker - Nobody’s Normal
2021-01-25 15:00 - 16:50
Mind, Medicine, and Culture (MMAC) is pleased to be hosting Roy Richard Grinker to discuss his upcoming book Nobody’s Normal. In preparation we will read his recent article in Current Anthropology “Autism, “Stigma,” Disability: A Shifting Historical Terrain” (2020).
In this presentation on his new book Nobody’s Normal (W.W. Norton; release date Jan. 26, 2021), Roy R. Grinker argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill.
Grinker infuses his work with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his own research on neurodiversity.
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