Anne Pisor : Long-dist. social connections, collective-action problems, & climate-change adaptation
DySoC / Exeter Webinar Series
Evolution and Social Systems
The Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity and Exeter is happy to announce a series of free webinars for Fall 2021 on Evolution and Social Systems. This series is a continuation of the past semester seminars: DySoC/NIMBioS Webinar Series on Cultural Evolution and DySoC/NIMBioS Webinar Series on Human Origins and Cultural Evolution.
https://www.dysoc.org/ess_webinars
Date: 11:45 a.m. EDT Tuesday, October 26, 2021
Speaker: Anne C. Pisor (Department of Anthropology, Washington State University)
Topic: Long-distance social connections, collective-action problems, and climate-change adaptation
Abstract: Humans are group-living and find groups highly salient, so unsurprisingly much of the focus in the evolutionary human sciences has been on intergroup competition and parochialism. However, this overlooks the flexibility of human relationships that span group boundaries or span distance; when present, these can have profound effects on the structure and information transmission of social networks. In this talk, I'll provide an overview of my work on long-distance social connections and their relevance for studying two of the most pressing issues of the 21st century: sustainable resource management and climate change. First, large common-pool resources, like fisheries and forests, are difficult to manage because so many communities can access them. Can connections between communities help us predict when management will be successful? Second, humans have a long history of adaptation to climate change, and many of these climate-change adaptations were and are cultural. Studying contemporary peoples, how does cultural adaptation to climate change alter social networks, and how do these changes to networks alter the transmission of climate-change adaptations in turn? I conclude by highlighting future directions for research on long-distance connections, both in the theoretical and applied domains, and where my lab is headed next.
The seminar series is funded by grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the European Research Council.
(European Research Council (ERC) funding awarded to Thomas Currie under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (The Cultural Evolution & Ecology of Institutions, grant agreement no. 716212).)