Faculty Research Interests

Faculty Research Interests 2007-2008 Department Of Anthropology, UC Santa Barbara

Professor Aswani's research and applied interests lie at the intersection between human ecology, anthropology, and marine science. Prof. Aswani follows a research agenda focusing on the human and cultural ecology of coastal groups, property rights and common-property resources, and marine indigenous ecological knowledge of populations in Melanesia and the Insular Pacific in general. 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 and he is deeply involved in applied conservation and development projects, which combine anthropological research with marine biological research to study different maritime practices and their linkages in the Western Solomon Islands. With funding from the Packard and McArthur Foundations, NSF, the Pew Charitable Trust, Conservation International, the National Geographic Society and others, Prof. Aswani and his team have created, expanded, and consolidated the largest network of community-based marine protected areas (MPAs) in the Solomon Islands. The MPA system under Aswani’s program consists of 28 MPAs covering over 5,000 hectares of diverse marine habitats, including mangroves, sea grasses, and coral reefs with various ecological characteristics. The “no-take” MPAs and spatio-temporal refugia protect critical habitats and species and, in particular, the prime habitats of flagship species that include vulnerable or endangered bumphead parrotfish, Maori wrasse, coconut crabs, green and hawksbill turtles, and dugongs, among others. The program has also fostered environmental education locally, established the institutional and legal infrastructure to sustain the MPAs, conducted baseline marine and social science research, and developed an innovative MPA research and implementation framework that integrates marine and social science research. This strategy is designed to render a more integrated approach to social and natural science research and to protect marine biodiversity while supporting the traditional beliefs and cultures of the peoples of the Western Pacific. 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. In sum, Prof Aswani’s research and applied work offer prospective students ample opportunities to get involved in research and hands-on conservation in theregion.

Professor Gaulin is an evolutionary psychologist. This field integrates evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and behavioral ecology to formulate and test hypotheses about the adaptive architecture of the human mind. The cognitive underpinnings of human behavior are presumably shaped by natural (and sexual) selection to the same degree that our anatomy and physiology are. Why are some mental tasks much easier than others? Why do we have the preferences we do? Why are our cultural institutions so limited in their forms? Why do we experience emotions like love and disgust? All of these questions interest in many facets of evolutionary psychology through his textbook writing, Professor Gaulin has a special interest in cognitive adaptations that differ between the sexes. This has led him to focus his research on two domains: spatial cognition and mate choice.

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 focuses his research in two principal areas: human social behavior and life history evolution. He has studied how members of small-scale societies organize inter-personal relations to solve salient, recurrent economic problems. This includes the sharing of food and labor among foragers and horticulturalists, which can help reduce the chance of daily food shortages as well as signal important information about a donor's status or intentions. He has extensively investigated these and related topics concerning risk and 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 reveals important aspects of social change as population’s transition from foragers to agriculturalists.

He currently directs the Tsimane Life History and Health Project, which aims to investigate aspects of demography, sociality, growth, development and senescence, in an attempt to better understand the evolution of our distinctly human life history traits, including long post-reproductive lifespan, extended development and delayed maturation, a highly encephalized brain, and widespread cooperation. This includes systematic revisions of age-related changes across the lifespan in morbidity and mortality, immunity and repair mechanisms, physiological development and decline, and both economic and social skills development, Professor Gurven emphasizes observational, experimental, and ethnographic-based methodologies.

Other interests include variable social norms of fairness and trust in small communities, intra-household allocation of labor, conflicts between the sexes in fertility preferences, population dynamics in transitional communities and the decision processes underlying changes in fertility, and the study of anonymous giving in modern societies.

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 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.

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 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).

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.

TOOBY, JOHN

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 VanDerwarker’s research interests are broad in scope, focusing geographically on Mesoamerica and the southeastern United States, and thematically on general foodways studies, including the origins and maintenance of agricultural systems and the overlap between gender and food-related activities. Methodologically, she is interested in integrating both zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical data to achieve a fuller understanding of past subsistence practices. It is her belief that subsistence studies need to incorporate a more complementary approach through the dual consideration of both plant and animal data. She is currently conducting survey and excavation research with her colleague Dr. Philip Arnold (supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation) at the Classic-period site of Teotepec, located in the Sierra de los Tuxtlas, southern Veracruz, Mexico. This ambitious field project will document the role of Teotepec in the broader Mesoamerican exchange system that is a hallmark of the Classic period.

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.

Professor Walsh's research falls into two general areas. The first is the anthropological political economy of the Mexico-US borderlands. For the past ten years he has studied the ways in which water, land and labor have been organized to produce commodities in areas marked by aridity, especially northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. This work took the form of a socioeconomic and cultural history of irrigated cotton agriculture in the borderlands, and in particular, northeastern Mexico. The book that resulted, Building the Borderlands, tells this story of cotton, water, colonization and migration. The other major thrust of his research concerns the history of anthropological thought. Professor Walsh is particularly interested in perspectives that have developed outside of Europe and North America, and has dedicated a good deal of energy to tracing the histories of different traditions within Latin American Anthropology, and the ways in which anthropological thought has been applied to development.

Professor Wilson’s research interests focus on the emergence and collapse of political hierarchies in middle-range societies. Recently, his research efforts have been directed towards investigating the scale and intensity of warfare among late Prehistoric Native American societies in the Midwestern and southeastern United States, particularly the impact of chronic warfare on daily life. He investigates these issues through a household archaeological approach that entails the analysis of large-scale artifactual and architectural data sets from domestic contexts. This research is also facilitated by the use of Geographic Information Systems.