UCLA Department of Anthropology

Culture, Power, and Social Change - Living and Dying in Transit: Violence, Space and Gender in the North African-Mediterranean Frontier
2023-05-25 12:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Haines 352
Living and Dying in Transit: Violence, Space and Gender in the North African-Mediterranean Frontier
Tunisia is caught between a rock and a hard place. Located along the central Mediterranean migration route connecting Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe. Tunisia has recently become the main country of departure towards Italy, placing it at the centre of EU migration policy. The presentation will explore Tunisian and European border policies as well as the strategies migrants – women and men – employ to stay safe and move on in their lives.

Ahlam Chemlali is a PhD fellow at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), Department of Migration and Global Order and Aalborg University, Department of Politics and Society in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research explores the effects of European border policies in North Africa, with particular emphasis on the local and gendered effects in the Tunisian-Libyan borderlands. Prior to her PhD Chemlali worked almost a decade in a human rights organisation on issues related to migration, violence and torture. Chemlali has published in Geopolitics, Trends in Organized Crime, Forced Migration Review and Revue Tunisienne de Science Politique.

Please follow this link for the full poster and event page: Chemlali-poster May 25 CPSC

Professor Smith: "Nature Always Wins"
2023-05-25 14:00 - 17:00 | UCLA Kerckhoff Art Gallery
Nature is active in conquering us not only through the occasional earthquake or flood, but in the subtleties of vegetation that turn every settlement into an ongoing archaeological site. What do we see when we look down? Grass growing in the cracks of freeway pavements, and plants taking root in the little crevices of buildings and alleys.
Professor Monica L. Smith, an archaeologist and member of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, takes us on a photographic journey to the world of vibrant and resilient vegetation underfoot. She shows us how an artist’s eye resides within all of us, enabling us to see what we usually filter out of our perception as we traverse the streets of Los Angeles.
The exhibit coincides with the release of her edited volume, The Power of Nature, published by the University Press of Colorado and featuring a number of UCLA authors.
Note: Exhibition runs from May 22-26, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Hostile Terrain 94: The Undocumented Migration Project
2023-05-25 16:00
The Undocumented Migration Project: Hostile Terrain 94 exhibit on Thursday, May 25, 4-6 pm at The Fowler courtyard.
Please join us to honor the lives of migrants who have lost their lives crossing the Sonoran desert, featuring live music, food, community, and a chance to participate in the installation.
There will be a roundtable discussion featuring Jason De León, UCLA Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American Studies, Enrique Campos, Program Director at the UCLA Undocumented Student Program within the Bruin Resource Center, and Angela Gonzales and Carlos Rouzaud, UCLA students within the Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Anthropology departments.
Please RSVP HERE to reserve food.
We will be setting up the project all day tomorrow, Tuesday, May 23 and Wednesday, May 24 at The Fowler (inside right in front of the courtyard), so stop by if you are interested in helping or saying hello! Email me with questions. We look forward to seeing you all!
HT94 is a multi-media exhibition that records the journeys and testimonies of undocumented migrants and their families who attempt to cross the U.S.–Mexico border. The exhibition includes an array of multi-sensorial components that speak directly to the migrant experience, such as photographic narratives of border crossers, found objects left behind by migrants in the desert, videos, an interactive story-recording studio where the public may share their personal immigration stories, and a 16-foot long participatory wall map of the Arizona/Mexico border containing hand-written toe tags with QR codes that connect to online content regarding migrant issues along America’s southern border representing people who have died while crossing the border between the mid-1990s and 2022.

UCLA Department of Anthropology: Open House
2023-09-27 10:00 - 12:00 | 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
