UCLA Department of Anthropology

UCLA Department of Anthropology: Open House
2023-09-27 10:00 - 12:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Haines 352
UCLA Department of Anthropology invites you to a Open House, this Wednesday 9/27/2023, at 10am. The open house will be conduced in Haines Hall, Room 352.

Barbara Natterson-Horowitz – The 600-million-year history of human affective disorder
2023-10-02 12:00 - 13:30 | Haines 352
Fifty years ago this October, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to three animal behaviorists based on the belief that the emerging field of ethology could transform our understanding of human biobehavioral health. Unfortunately, the promise was not realized within the lifetimes of the scientists themselves. In the decades that followed, advances in biological psychiatry challenged psychoanalysis as the singular source of explanatory insights into mental illness. Regrettably, highly reductive biological approaches that lack a broader, integrated organismal and ecological context have not led to much needed transformational knowledge.
Today, broadly comparative and ecologically-informed studies of animal behavior are revealing: 1) the ancient origins of human affective systems and affective disorders in the social brain networks of early social animals, 2) the important links between brain biology promoting adaptive behavior in chronically subordinated animals and neurovegetative symptoms in depressed human beings, and 3) evidence that withdrawn behavior, anhedonia, and reduced cognitive and motoric activity in chronic subordinates increases survival in certain individuals. Recent studies connecting social defeat to severe depression point, once again, to animal behavior as a source of insights into human mental health. In fact, phylogenetic perspectives can provide much needed scaffolding on which to layer, with context, the rapidly growing body of reductive knowledge about the human brain in health and illness.
Dr Natterson-Horowitz’s lecture will first survey the historical and scientific settings in which both insights were recognized and overlooked. She will then present an up-to-date summary of insights into human affective disorders emerging at the intersection of behavioral ecology, neurobiology, psychopharmacology, and evolutionary biology.

Caleb Finch – The Gero-Exposome, a life history approach to diversity of human longevity
2023-10-16 12:00 - 13:30 | Haines 352
From egg to exit, human life history is determined by environmental interactions with our genome (GxE). The Gero-Exposome provides a framework for analyzing GxE interactions with life style, biomes, and systemic factors. Lifespans difference of 15 years across the socio-economic status (SES) have corresponding differences in the onset of cardiovascular disease and dementia. Moreover, SES influences the development of brain and vasculature, by greater gestational exposure to air pollution and cigarette smoke in low SES. Multiple postnatal phases have environmental influences throughout the lifespan. As an experimental model for these complexities, mice were gestationally exposed to air pollution. Young adults had more body fat and glucose intolerance, while brains had lower levels of hypothalamic neuropeptides and neuronal stem cells in the hippocampus. These findings are relevant to the multi-generational stability of SES differences in health and lifespan, for which the GxE basis is undefined.

Dr. Jarrett Zigon (William & Linda Porterfield Chair in Biomedical Ethics and Professor of Anthropology, University of Virginia)
2023-10-30 15:00 - 16:30 | Haines 352

Jason de León: Soldiers and Kings
2024-04-04 19:00 - 20:00 | Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E Colorado Blvd, Pasadena, CA, 91101, United States
Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. Yet the real lives and work of smugglers–or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services–are only ever reported on from a distance, using tired tropes and stereotypes, often depicted as boogie men and violent warlords. In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion dollar global industry, internationally recognized anthropologist and expert Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years.
The result of this unique and extraordinary access is SOLDIERS AND KINGS: the first ever in-depth, character-driven look at human smuggling. It is a heart-wrenching and intimate narrative that revolves around the life and death of one coyote who falls in love and tries to leave smuggling behind. In a powerful, original voice, De León expertly chronicles the lives of low-level foot soldiers breaking into the smuggling game, and morally conflicted gang leaders who oversee rag-tag crews of guides and informants along the migrant trail. SOLDIERS AND KINGS is not only a ground-breaking up-close glimpse of a difficult-to-access world, it is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction. (Viking)

Event date:

Thursday, April 4, 2024 – 7:00pm

Event address:

Vroman’s Bookstore
695 E Colorado Blvd

Pasadena, CA 91101
