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Maurice Block, "Shared Imagination in the Morning Greetings of Villagers"

Maurice Bloch, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, is a cultural anthropologist, who has written extensively on religion, and prominent advocate for rebuilding the links between the cognitive sciences and anthropology. He carried out fieldwork in Madagascar and other parts of the world, including Japan, with a particular interest in topics such as imagination, ritual, cultural transmission, and the nature of the social among humans and other animals. He is the author of numerous books and articles including Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience (Cambridge 1991); Essays on Cultural Transmission (Berg, 2005); and most recently, Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge (Cambridge, 2012) and In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theory of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social (Paradigm, 2012).  He has taught in the US, France, and Sweden and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Maurice Bloch’s visit is co-sponsored by the Religion, Experience, and Mind Lab Group, the Department of Religious Studies, the Capps Center for Ethics and Public Life, and the Department of Anthropology.

Here are details regarding the different events.

June 4th, 4pm, Public Lecture, IHC McCune Conference Room.

Shared imagination in the morning greetings of villagers: the implications for human evolution

The lecture will argue the great potential size of human societies, in contrast to those of other primates, is due to a kind of shared imagination. This imagination consists of time transcendent systems of fixed roles and groups of which kinship and religion are important examples. Such a conclusion raises the difficult question of how it is possible for imagination to have practical social effects. The answer proposed will be that the shared imaginary emerges in normal life at certain moments yet is still governed by the potential of imagination. The lecture will be illustrated by Bloch’s experience of an isolated village in Madagascar.

June 5th, 6:00-9:00pm, Graduate Seminar with Maurice Bloch, Digital Arts and Humanities Commons. This seminar is part of INT 200C, a workshop on Cognitive Science and the Humanities: Bridging the Divide.   This workshop is focused on recent work in cognitive anthropology that offers a potential theoretical and methodological bridge between the cognitive sciences and the humanities (and humanistic social sciences).  Interest faculty and students are welcome to sit in on this and other meetings of the workshop. 

For more information, contact Ann Taves (anntaves@ucsb.edu). 

Grad Student Kudos

We would like to take the time to congratulate and highlight the great work that our graduate students do. 2018 has been a year of awards and accomplishments and is showing no sign of slowing down. Check out what's been happening in Anthropology!

Exploring the Egyptian Revolution and Health Politics Through Comics

Exploring the Egyptian Revolution and Health Politics Through Comics: the making of "Lissa": an ethnoGRAPHIC story

 

Sherine Hamdy will discuss her move from medical anthropological research to working on creating a graphic novel, featuring women from extraordinarily different circumstances each facing a medical decision the other can't understand. Lissa, which takes place against the backdrop of Egypt's popular uprisings, is informed by Hamdy’s ethnographic research in Egypt on the vulnerabilities that expose people to kidney and liver disease, and the difficulties of accessing proper treatment. The work also draws on Coleman Nye’s research in the U.S. on the social and political calculus of managing genetic risk for breast and ovarian cancer within a commercial healthcare system. This graphic work of “ethnofiction” tells the story of an unlikely friendship between Anna, the daughter of an America oil company executive living in Cairo, who has a family history of breast cancer and Layla, the daughter of the bawab of Anna’s apartment building, who grows to become a resolute physician struggling for better public health justice and rights in Egypt. Following the women as they grow up together and grapple with difficult medical decisions, the project explores how different people come to terms with illness and mortality against the backdrop of political, economic, and environmental crises. 

 

Sherine Hamdy is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, where she joined the faculty in the Fall of 2017, after being a professor for eleven years at Brown University. She received her Ph.D. in 2006 from New York University Department of Anthropology. Her first book Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt (University of California, 2012) received Honorable Mention from the 2013 Clifford Geertz Prize from the American Anthropological Association's Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Her book project Doctors of the Revolution, co-authored with Soha Bayoumi (Harvard) critically engages with physicians' roles in the recent political upheavals in the Arab world. She is also the Series Editor for University of Toronto Press' ethnoGRAPHIC series, of which Lissa (co-authored by Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye) is the debut graphic novel.?

This Film and Media Studies Colloquium event is co-sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Anthropology.

Brown Bag Talk: Not Just Dots On a Map

Dr. Michael Jochim, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Anthropology Department, UC Santa Barbara

Spring 2017 Brown Bag Talk

Not Just Dots On a Map: 35 Years of Archaeological Research on the Last Hunter-Gatherers of Central Europe

Undergrad Chris Turner Wins NSF Award for Graduate Studies

Chris was born and raised in Scotland. He immigrated to the United States at the age of 19, working in a summer camp for disabled children in Connecticut. At the age of 26, Chris joined the military as a US Army Medic and Paratrooper deploying twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan. On his first deployment to Iraq, he was awarded the Purple Heart and Army Commendation medal with Valor after his vehicle was ambushed. After spending 10 years in the United States Army Chris went back to school and found anthropology at Antelope Valley Community College.

UCSB Give Day 2018

Dr. Kristin Hoppa Gets Dream Job as Channel Islands Archaeologist

Dr. Kristin Hoppa (PhD 2017), former student of Amber VanDerwarker and Michael Glassow, just accepted a position as the Channel Islands National Park Archaeologist with the National Park Service. This is her dream job and her dissertation was on "Understanding the Role of Interior Sites and Terrestial Resources During the Middle Holocene on Santa Cruz Island". Congratulations Kristin!

Professor Casey Walsh publishes new book, Virtuous Waters