FACULTY RESEARCH INTERESTS 2005
DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY, UC SANTA BARBARA
Professor Aswani's research interests are focused on the foraging strategies of horticultural-fisher peoples, property rights and common property resources, and indigenous ecological knowledge in the Solomon Islands and Melanesia at large. He is also interested in the ethnohistory, prehistoric exchange, and social stratification of Oceanic peoples in general. Since 1992 Prof. Aswani has conducted research in the Solomon Islands focusing on the application of behavioral ecology to the study of human-marine environmental interactions. Another focus has been the historical, cultural, political, demographic, and socio-economic context of indigenous common property regimes as well as the impact of local and global economic transformations on these institutions.
Professor Aswani has also been involved in the project "Adaptation and Human Diversity: The Prehistory of Human Settlement in Roviana Lagoon, South New Georgia, Solomon Islands" in conjunction with the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has documented Roviana oral history on regional pre- and post-European contact settlement patterns, exchange systems, and politico-religious organization to explain the development of regional socio-political complexity. In addition, he has worked with archaeological team to determine the age of human occupation in the area and the age of taro and sweet potato agriculture, establish a chronology for the construction of fortifications and shrines in pre-historic and historic periods, and the dating of old village settlements.
His latest projects funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur and David and Lucile Packard Foundations are entitled "The Roviana and Vonavona Lagoons Marine Resource Management Project" (2000/2003) and "Establishing Marine Protected Areas and Spatio-temporal Refugia in the Roviana and Vonavona Lagoons, Solomon Islands" (2002/2004). These projects combine anthropological research with marine biological research to study different maritime practices and their linkages in the Roviana and Vonavona Lagoons, Solomon Islands. This dual strategy is designed to render a more integrated approach to social and natural science research and to the implementation of regimes for resource co-management. These projects also seek to economically empower rural communities by establishing several long-term horizon cash enterprises and infrastructural initiatives, while simultaneously promoting resource management and conservation. These projects offer prospective students ample opportunities to get involved in fieldwork in the region.
Professor Emerita Bray’s most recent book is a study of technology in the formation of gender ideology, entitled Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 1997; SMC Publishing, Taipei, 1997), awarded the Dexter Prize for the History of Technology in 1999. Her research interests are: technology and politics in the global economy; cultures of science; agricultural systems; food; gender; Chinese medicine; and the history of science, technology and medicine in East Asia. Recent publications include articles on agricultural sustainability, on medicine in China today, and on the politics of genetically modified crops. Her current research project looks at everyday technologies of production and consumption, communication and waste-disposal "The Tomato, Toilet and Telephone," in the construction of modern Californian society and how it is embedded in the global economy. Currently Dr. Bray is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Professor Gaulin's research concerns the evolution of behavioral adaptations, particularly with respect to sexual differences, and it draws upon evolutionary theory, behavioral ecology, and psychology. He has carried out fieldwork in the US, Panama, and Colombia.
Professor Glassow is investigating cultural responses to environmental changes occurring between 7000 and 4000 ago in the Santa Barbara Channel region of California. He has been undertaking fieldwork at sites along the coastal mainland and on Santa Cruz Island dating to this time interval and is currently involved with processing and analyzing collections from these sites.
Professor Gurven is interested in how individuals in small-scale societies organize inter-personal relations to solve salient, recurrent ‘economic’ problems. He has studied how the sharing of food among foragers and horticulturalists can help reduce the chance of daily food shortages, and how it may signal important information about a donor’s status. He has investigated these topics among two Amazonian populations, the Ache of Paraguay and the Tsimane of Bolivia. Among the Ache, studying differences in behavior when switching from a nomadic foraging to a sedentary horticultural context can reveal important aspects of social change as populations transition from foragers to agriculturalists. He is currently planning an extensive project with the Tsimane, to investigate aspects of demography, sociality, growth and development, in an attempt to better understand the evolution of our distinctly human life history traits. His other interests include the age and sex division of labor, using economics games to measure social norms of fairness and cooperative behavior, using social network analysis as a means of measuring social capital, the study of anonymous giving in modern societies, and conflicts between the sexes in fertility preferences.
Professor Hancock is a cultural anthropologist, with interests in public memory, nationalism, globalization, cultural studies, and postcolonial and feminist theory. She has done fieldwork in Southern India and in the U.S. Her book, Womanhood in the Making: Domestic Ritual and Public Culture in Urban South India deals with the relation of Hindu religious practice to socio-cultural and political constructions of caste, gender and nation in post-colonial India.
Her ongoing research focuses on contemporary cultural debates about national and regional pasts in India and the U.S. One project addresses the ways that public memory is expressed and contested in India’s globalizing cities; asking how new modes of class formation and cultural/religious nationalisms intersect in debates around the representation of local pasts. Another project explores the U.S. heritage industry, via a case study of interpretation at Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum in New England.
Professor Emeritus Hatch has two primary research interests, the first of which is the history and theory of anthropology. His most recent work on this topic is the philosophical underpinnings of cultural constructivism and interpretive theory. Second is the study of small communities in modern, Western societies. He has conducted field research in small, rural communities in both California and New Zealand, and currently he is doing fieldwork in the mountains of North Carolina. His North Carolina research is an ethnographic study of the "shape" or characteristics of the moral and political beliefs of a politically conservative county.
Professor Jochim's research focuses on land use and subsistence change in the European Palaeo-, Meso- and Neolithic, exploring the role of both environmental change and processes of social interaction. To explore these issues he is presently conducting regional surveys and test excavations in southern Germany and Southern France, using GIS to facilitate data integration and analyses.
Professor Emeritus Mines’ research takes self awareness and the narratives people tell about themselves and others as its starting point. His ultimate interest is an anthropology that focuses on the existential, on individuals as agents and the individual’s own understanding of his or her situation and motivation. This perspective is designed to reclaim the individual as an essential creative agent in social history and in anthropological explanation (cf., the Obeyesekere/Sahlins debate). Concomitant with this goal is the view that to understand human agency and so also social history–the processes of self and society–it is necessary to pay attention to what individuals consider their motivations and to use methods that reveal how individuals explain themselves and take responsibility for their lives. Prof. Mines’’ area specialty is South Asia, with a particular interest in south India where he has conducted four major research projects to date. He writes about the agents of change in south Indian social history, pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial.
There are two research foci to Professor Palerm's current research:
1. Agribusiness and the formation of Chicano/Mexican enclaves in rural California, 1960-present. This is a study about the intensification of farming and the expansion of agricultural labor markets, immigration and rural poverty.
2. A binational system of agricultural production: the case of California agribusiness and the Mexican Bajio, 1936-present. This research is on the internationalization of agricultural labor markets, peasant household economies, sojourn migrant workers and capitalist agriculture.
Both programs offer graduate students the opportunity to pursue doctoral research and/or to receive field research training in California and Mexico.
Professor Emeritus Robertson is interested in economic and political processes, with particular reference to family life and patterns of historical development. He has done field research in many parts of Africa, and is currently working on inter-generational relations in Catalonia (Spain). Robertson's 2001 book GREED: Gut Feelings, Growth, and History is concerned with closing the gap between biological and cultural approaches in Anthropology. The convergence of feeling and meaning in human lives is also explored in a study of middle-aged women who collect porcelain dolls, in Life Like Dolls: The Collector Doll Phenomenon, and the Lives of the Women who Love Them, published 2004. Currently Dr. Robertson is Honorary Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Professor Schreiber's research is focused on prehistoric imperialism in Andean South America, on which she based her book entitled Wari Imperialism in Middle Horizon Peru (Anthropological Papers, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, 1992). In Peru she has completed a multi-year program of survey and excavation in the Nasca region of the south coast, looking at the development of large-scale irrigation systems, the evolution of the Nasca civilization, and Wari imperial conquest.
Professor Smith’s research interests include imperialism and culture contact between ancient Egypt and Nubia, legitimization and ideology, funerary practice and the social and economic dynamics of ancient Egypt. His methodological focus is on the study of ancient pottery, including the scientific analysis of absorbed residues. His book Askut in Nubia (Kegan Paul, London, 1995) examines the nature of Egyptian imperialism in Nubia. Continuing analysis by Smith of the collection from the Egyptian fortress of Askut addresses household archaeology and the cultural dynamics of colonial situations. Smith has worked on five archeological expeditions to Egypt, including the Nile Delta, Middle Egypt and Luxor’s Theban Necropolis. His Dongola Reach Expedition in Sudan investigates Nubian-Egyptian interactions, exploring the rise of Kerman complexity (2000-1500 BC), its conquest by the Egyptian New Kingdom (1500 BC), and the rise of the Napatan Kingdom of Kush, who turned the tables on their conquerors and became Pharaohs of Egypt’s 25th Dynasty (1050-750 BC).
STONICH, SUSAN (Joint appointment with Environmental Studies)
Professor Stonich’s major research effort examines the globalization of resistance movements to industrial shrimp farming in tropical coastal zones of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. She is directing an interdisciplinary project that addresses the following major research questions: (1) Why have grassroots resistance movements emerged in response to the globalization of the shrimp farming industry? Is collective social action linked to declines in the biophysical environment, to access/equity issues, and/or to national/identity issues? (2) How have local grassroots groups and non-governmental organizations been able to transcend their locality (and diversity in terms of ethnicity, culture, nationality, etc.) to become part of a global network? (3) What are the roles of advanced information (communication and spatial) technologies in facilitating and/or hindering global integration, in providing crucial information, and in achieving shared objectives? (4) To what extent can globalization of resistance activities promote social justice and environmental conservation through strengthening civil society and contributing to alternative visions of development?
As part of her interest in coastal development more generally, she also is engaged in a project demonstrating the human and environmental consequences of tourism development in the Caribbean Basin. The goal of this project is to enhance community-based tourism and natural resource management.
Finally, she has expanded her local project on farm worker health and environmental justice to include problems emanating from conflicts at the agriculture-urban interface. One of the major goals of this project is to investigate the deployment of science in environmental debates.
For the last two decades, Professor Tooby and his collaborators have been integrating cognitive science, cultural anthropology, evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, cognitive neuroscience and hunter-gatherer studies to create the new field of evolutionary psychology. The goal of evolutionary psychology is the progressive mapping of the universal evolved cognitive and neural architecture that constitutes human nature, and provides the basis of the learning mechanisms responsible for culture. This involves using knowledge of specific adaptive problems our hunter-gatherer ancestors encountered to experimentally map the design of the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that evolved among our hominid ancestors to solve them. Prof. Tooby is co-director of UCSB’s Center for Evolutionary Psychology, where Prof. Tooby and his collaborators use cross-cultural, experimental, and neuroscience techniques to investigate specific cognitive specializations for cooperation, social exchange, threat, friendship, incest avoidance, foraging, predator-prey interactions, coalitions, group psychology, and human reasoning. Under Prof. Tooby’s direction, the Center maintains a field station in Ecuadorian Amazonia in order to conduct cross-cultural studies of psychological adaptations and human behavioral ecology. He is particularly interested in documenting how the design of these adaptations shapes cultural and social phenomena, and potentially forms the foundation for a new, more precise generation of social and cultural theories. Prof. Tooby is also working on several projects in evolutionary biology, including a book on the evolution of sexual reproduction and genetic systems that interprets their design features as a series of adaptations to parasitic infections.
Professor Emerita Voorhies specializes in the prehistory of Mesoamerica with a particular interest in early, pre-farming peoples of the Pacific coast. In particular her research has focused on why, when and how these people transformed themselves from hunter-fisher-gatherers of wild foods to farmers of a variety of crops. The majority of her work on this topic has taken place on the coast of Chiapas, but recently she has joined other colleagues in working in the vicinity of Acapulco, Guerrero. Voorhies’ research is informed by an ecological perspective.
Professor Walker is currently working a number of bioarchaeological projects involving collections of human skeletal remains from various parts of the world, including Africa, central Asia, and Europe. He is the co-director of an archaeological project in Iceland that includes the excavation of a settlement period cemetery and church. Walker is a principle investigator on a large NSF funded collaborative project entitled "A History of Health in Europe from the Late Paleolithic Era to the Present." This project involves researchers from many different European countries. Its goal is to measure and analyze the evolution of skeletal health by combining data from human remains with information gathered from sources in archaeology, climate history, geography, and history.
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Last updated: Summer, 2005 by DL