UCLA Department of Anthropology

IAC Fall Forum
2021-11-09 15:00 - 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
You are invited to the UCLA Institute of American Cultures (IAC) annual Fall Forum, featuring the 2021–22 IAC visiting researchers and scholars, graduate and predoctoral fellows, and research grant awardees at UCLA’s four ethnic studies centers. Featured speakers will be interviewed by faculty experts, followed by a Q&A.
Fall Forum Registration link: https://uclaea.zoom.us/webinar/register/5816343257350/WN_k2pSc104RciBB2KmU1jaJw
Click here to view the IAC Fall Forum 2021 flyer

2021 Lemelson Anthropological Undergraduate Honors Conference
2021-06-04 10:00 - 12:00
RSVP: https://forms.gle/R4ftwUtz5fsALfuJA
Student Scholars profiles, project titles, and videos (coming soon): https://lemelson.anthro.ucla.edu/student-scholars/

Politics of Black Transnational Solidarity in North Africa and the Middle East: A Conversation
2021-05-26 14:00 - 16:00
Part 5 of the Race, Racism, Policing and State Violence series
Noura Erakat, Rutgers University
Darryl Li, University of Chicago
Jemima Pierre, UCLA

Spring Symposium: Centering the Black Legacies in Anthropological and Academic Creativity
2021-05-19 14:00 - 16:00

Legacies of Political Detention and the Burmese Democracy Movement
2021-05-14
This panel is part of a series of teach-ins on the Burmese Democracy Movement, organized with the goal of disseminating knowledge about violence perpetrated against political activist communities in Burma. This event was sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asia Studies, UC Berkeley and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA. It was co-sponsored by UCLA’s Department of Anthropology.
The recording of the panel can be viewed on the UC Berkeley CSEAS YouTube channel.
Panelists:
Andrew M. Jefferson (Senior Researcher, Danish Institute Against Torture)
Tomas Martin, (Senior Researcher, Danish Institute Against Torture)
Liv Gaborit (Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Sociology, Lund University)
Nay Tin Myint (former political prisoner; Chairman, National League for Democracy Supporting Organization in the U.S.)
Moderator: Seinenu Thein Lemelson (Lecturer in Anthropology, UCLA)
Translator: Kenneth Wong (Lecturer in Burmese, South & Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley)
The panel begins with testimony from Nay Tin Myint, former political prisoner and Chairman, National League for Democracy Supporting Organization (NLDOS) in the U.S. This discussion continues with observations on political detention in Burma by three researchers involved in the Legacies of Detention project at DIGNITY – The Danish Institute Against Torture. DIGNITY has been conducting a project in Burmese prisons for the past several years. The panel also reflects on the issue of political detention and how it is connected now with the current Civil Disobedience Movement in the country.
For more information:
DIGNITY, https://www.dignity.dk/en/
Legacies of Detention project, https://legacies-of-detention.org/

BEC - Kim TallBear - Indigenous STS, Governance, and Decolonization
2021-05-13 12:15 - 13:45
BEC is pleased to co-sponsor the following event with The American Indian Studies Center, the Institute for Society and Genetics, and the Culture, Power, and Social Change Group.
Note special day and time and Zoom link: Thursday, May 13, 12:15 to 1:45 PST – https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97160150930

Kim TallBear
Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment
Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation Fellow
Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta
Like traditional Science and Technology Studies, the new field of Indigenous STS studies the cultures, politics, and histories of non-Indigenous science and technology efforts. In addition, it studies Indigenous-led science and technology, including knowledges classified as “traditional.” Indigenous STS refuses the purported divide between scientific and Indigenous knowledges, yet it does not conflate knowledge traditions. It understands them as potentially sharing methods while deriving in practice from different worldviews. Indigenous STS—comprised of mostly Indigenous thinkers trained and working in a variety of disciplines and applied fields—also focuses on science and technology knowledge production for social change (since technoscience has long been integral to colonialism). Indigenous STS works with scientists and those in technology fields to change fields from within. Some Indigenous STS scholars are practicing scientists. After discussing Indigenous STS foundations and goals, this talk showcases the Summer internship for INdigenous peoples in Genomics (SING), a training program founded in 2011 in the US. SING has since expanded to Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, and Australia in conjunction with Indigenous STS efforts to support global Indigenous governance via science and technology.
Co-sponsored by BEC, The American Indian Studies Center, the Institute for Society and Genetics, and the Culture, Power, and Social Change Group

Unless otherwise noted, all talks will be posted and publicly viewable on our UCLABEC channel on YouTube.
Sponsors of the BEC Speaker Series are listed at https://bec.ucla.edu/support/

Bathumi Ayul Abwol Dak - Policing and State Violence: Scholars in Conversation with Activists and Artists
2021-04-21 14:00 - 16:00
Part 4 of the Race, Racism, Policing and State Violence series
Bathumi Ayul Abwol Dak, Research Coordinator, Diversity for Strategic Studies.
Editor in Chief, Wajuma News
Teatro do Oprimado (Theatre of the Oppressed)

Chaired by Zachary Modesire and Abdullah Puckett

MMAC - Anna I. Corwin - Celebrating the upcoming publication of Embracing Age: How Cathplic Nuns Become Models of Aging Well
2021-04-05 15:00 - 16:50
Anna I. Corwin is a linguistic and psychological anthropologist. She received her PhD from UCLA and is an assistant professor of anthropology at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her research and teaching interests span the fields of linguistic anthropology, psychological anthropology, the anthropology of religion, aging, and well-being. Corwin is a recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for her research on aging and well-being.

MMAC - Yael Assor - ‘Objectivity’ as a Bureaucratic Virtue
2021-03-08 15:00 - 16:50
Mind, Medicine, and Culture is pleased to welcome back one of our own recent graduates, Dr. Yael Assor. Her presentation and the reading draw on her doctoral research with a group of Israeli medical bureaucrats and is entitled “‘Objectivity’ as a Bureaucratic Virtue.” The abstract for her presentation is on the attached/embedded flyer.
**(Please follow link to RSVP: https://forms.gle/vD8ewv98SwmCbJF7A)**
***If you are already on the permanent Zoom RSVP list please do not RSVP again.
Access to the reading will be provided for those who have RSVPed.
Across bureaucratic contexts, “objectivity” is a dominant conception of appropriate conduct. But what does it mean for bureaucrats to work “objectively”? Yael Assor will present her doctoral research, in which she examined this question through fieldwork with a group of Israeli medical bureaucrats. Focusing on four central meanings these bureaucrats gave to working objectively, Assor traced how these meanings oriented their everyday work and considered its effects on policy decisions and dynamics of power between Israeli bureaucracy and its subjects.

BEC - Manvir Singh – The nature and origins of religious super-attractors
2021-03-01 12:00 - 13:30
Manvir Singh, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse
Human societies reliably develop “cultural super-attractors”, or complex practices and beliefs that exhibit striking similarities. In this talk, I will present research on the nature and origins of three religious super-attractors: shamanism, religious self-denial, and beliefs in supernatural punishment. These cultural practices appeared in the vast majority of human societies, predated doctrinal religions, and persist even when doctrinal religious authorities try to quash them. Drawing variously on cultural evolutionary theory, cross-cultural comparative projects, and studies conducted among the Mentawai people of Indonesia, I will characterize these practices, present hypotheses for why they recur, and test those hypotheses against anthropological data. The findings of these projects suggest that religious super-attractors develop as people selectively retain cultural practices evaluated as best satisfying subjective goals.

A Book Celebration with Diane C. Perlov - Driving the Samburu Bride: Fieldwork among Cattle Keepers in Kenya
2021-02-25 16:00 - 17:00
A BOOK CELEBRATION!
The Department of Anthropology cordially invites you to come celebrate
a new book by Dr. Diane C. Perlov, VP of Exhibits at the California Science Center
UCLA MA Anthropology ’79, UCLA PhD Anthropology ’87
Driving the Samburu Bride
Fieldwork among Cattle Keepers in Kenya

Through Zoom
Register by February 22, 2021 https://preview.tinyurl.com/PerlovTalk

MMAC - Robert Lemelson - Person-Centered Interviewing and Visual Psychological Anthropology: Complexities and Challenges
2021-02-22 15:00 - 17:00
MMAC will not meet on 15 February in observance of Presidents’ Day.

**(Please follow link to RSVP: https://forms.gle/vD8ewv98SwmCbJF7A)**

***If you are already on the permanent Zoom RSVP list please do not RSVP again.

Dear All,

Mind, Medicine, and Culture (MMAC) is pleased to be hosting Robert Lemelson. His presentation is entitled: “Person-Centered Interviewing and Visual Psychological Anthropology: Complexities and Challenges” (abstract is on the attached/embedded flyer). The chapter we will be reading and discussing is from a soon-to-be published book by Robert Lemelson and Annie Tucker, Widening the Frame: Visual Psychological Anthropology on Trauma, Gender-Based Violence, and Stigma (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2021).

While a reading of the chapter “Visual Anthropology in the Field” will be enhanced by watching one, two or all three of the films discussed, the films are optional as the conversation at MMAC will revolve around the chapter and the presentation. For those who wish to view the films, they are available on youtube:

Standing on the Edge of a Thorn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFmm0QT28Sc&t=1s
Bitter Honey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maPF9jVWuQM&t=2s
40 Years of Silence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLT6G8FD3E4&bpctr=1612726008

Please note that the third film has been edited to conform with youtube policies. Some images of violence have been removed from the original.

Access to the reading will be provided for those who have RSVPed.

BEC - Paul Smaldino – The evolution of covert signaling in diverse societies
2021-02-22 12:00 - 13:30
Paul Smaldino, Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced
Identity signals are common components of communication transmissions that inform receivers of the signaler’s membership (or non-membership) in a subset of individuals. Signals can be overt, broadcast to all possible receivers, or covert, encrypted so that only similar receivers are likely to perceive their identity-relevant meaning. I’ll present an instrumental theory of identity signaling as a mechanism for social assortment, formalized with both analytical and agent-based models. Covert signaling is favored when signalers are generous toward strangers, when costs of being discovered as dissimilar are high, and when the ability to assort only with preferred partners is restricted. Covert signaling should be more common among members of “invisible” minorities, who are less likely to encounter similar individuals by chance. I’ll also discuss empirical projects underway to test and extend this theoretical framework using online political communication. This work has implications for theories of signaling and cooperation, social identity, pragmatics, politics, and the maintenance of diversity.
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.

MMAC - Elizabeth Fein - Living on the Spectrum: Autism and Youth in Community
2021-02-08 15:00 - 16:50
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

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
** After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Zoom webinar. Please note, you will only be able to join the webinar at the specified time and date.
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.
**(Please follow link to RSVP: https://forms.gle/vD8ewv98SwmCbJF7A)**
***If you are already on the permanent Zoom RSVP list please do not RSVP again.
