Timeframe: Date_magnify Date Calendar_view_month Calendar_view_week Calendar_view_day Featured: Star Star-blue1 Icon_article

Radical Anthropology Group Talk

November 01, 2011 18:30

Date Star-blue1 Published: August 15, 2011 15:35 by Chris Knight

This event is part of a series of repeating events. To see all the events, click here.

Tagged as: culture environmentalism gender

From Evolution to Revolution!

Researchers into the origins of human language, mythic narrative and ritual have made exciting discoveries. Symbolic culture emerged in Africa 100,000 years ago, in a social revolution whose echoes can still be heard in myths and rituals from around the world. 

Places:

 

An Introduction to Anthropology:

From Evolution to Revolution

Autumn Term Syllabus 2011

Tuesdays

Sep 20            Myth, magic and folklore: decoding fairy tales               Chris Knight

Sep 27            The origins of culture and society                               Chris Knight

Oct 4              Totem and taboo                                                    Chris Knight

Oct 11             Early human kinship was matrilineal                           Chris Knight

Oct 18             The myth of a primitive matriarchy                            Chris Knight

Oct 25            Noam Chomsky’s politics and linguistics                        Chris Knight

Nov 1              Apes Like Us: Confessions of a primatologist                 Volker Sommer       

Nov 8             The evolutionary emergence of language                       Chris Knight

Nov 15             The origin of our species                                          Chris Stringer

Nov 22             ‘Woman’s biggest husband is the Moon’                       Jerome Lewis

Nov 29             How women initiated the French and Russian revolutions                                                                                                                                    Mark Kosman        

Dec 1             The origins of language                                             Chris Knight

Dec 6             Neanderthals and the symbolic revolution                      Camilla Power

Dec 13            A Christmas  fairy tale: The Shoes that were Danced to Pieces

  Chris Knight    

All lectures are held at the St Martin?s Community Centre, 43 Carol St, London NW1 0HT (2 minutes from Camden Town tube)

Tuesday evenings, 6.15–9.00 pm.

radicalanthropologygroup.org

Topics in this evening class will include:

  • Is there such a thing as ‘human nature', or does it all depend on the culture we live in?
  • Are children born with a ‘language instinct'? Can chimpanzees be taught to speak? How and why did language first evolve?
  • Is sexual jealousy natural and inevitable? Why do traditional carnivals so often become rituals of license?
  • Why did the Neanderthals of Ice Age Europe become extinct?
  • Is the nuclear family universal? Does a Navaho child have just one mother - or many?
  • The lifestyle of Native American long-house dwellers has been termed "communism in living". Might such values hold lessons for humanity today?
  • Why do women in Amazonia believe that sleeping with multiple partners helps ensure a successful pregnancy?
  • Is biology woman's destiny? Is the human male a "naked ape"?
  • Are traditional healing techniques effective? Why do myths about the origin of death so frequently implicate the moon?
  • How do hunter-gatherers maintain their egalitarianism?
  • Who built Stonehenge - and why?