Humanities (Audio)

This presentation will briefly trace 70,000 years of cultural evolution from the ancient crossing from Sunda to Sahul, via the swift continental colonization during the Ice Age, through the severe impacts on survival during the Last Glacial Maximum, and the socio-territorial reconfigurations during Holocene sea-level rise. The Australian Aboriginal world had become characterized by low environmental impact habitation, complex social organization systems anchored within constructed sacred origin histories, the persistence of relatively simple dwelling types situated within complex settlement sociospatial structures, and a high quality of life for most, with institutional dispute resolution mechanisms to contain conflicts. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 40162]

Troubled interactions are moments when communication breaks down in subtle, often unnoticed ways. In this program, Waverly Duck, an urban ethnographer and professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara, discusses these breakdowns, revealing surprising aspects of how we create meaning and self-identity. Through video and audio recordings, Duck shows how misunderstandings lead people to assign motives to each other, creating conflict. Examples from Duck's research include neighborhood poverty, food inequality, and autism assessments. These cases highlight hidden social rules and practices, demonstrating how studying these troubles can help us understand everyday interactions better. Series: "GRIT Talks" [Humanities] [Show ID: 40131]

The transition from Neolithic villages to early cities marked the greatest social transformation faced by our species before the Industrial Revolution. Our ancestors had to learn how to live in new settlements that had more people, higher densities, and more activities than had been known previously. The new adaptations to urban life involved changes in society and social processes, not just individual learning. Some changes came about through social interactions in a process called energized crowding; these include innovations in housing and the use of space, and the establishment of neighborhoods in cities. Other changes were driven by powerful new institutions, including formal governments and social classes. Do ancient cities—and they ways they responded to shocks—might hold useful insights for the development of urban adaptations to climate change today? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 40165]

Pragmatism is a “philosophy” in two senses of the term. It is a general outlook on life and an academic theory of the universe and our place in it. In this program, Aaron Zimmerman, professor and chair of the Philosophy Department at UC, Santa Barbara, discusses the nature of America's pragmatism. The axiom of pragmatism is Alexander Bain’s (1865) theory of belief, which was subsequently developed by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. Despite its Scottish origins, pragmatism is distinctively American, as philosophers, like Dewey and Rawls (in his later work), adapted American’s founding creed to the changes wrought by the Darwinian revolution in biology, offering a pragmatic rationale for natural rights originally grounded in creationist biology. Series: "GRIT Talks" [Humanities] [Show ID: 40130]

Humans construct their physical worlds in part by designing and constructing new tools, habitations, and in due course diverse buildings and, in some cases, towns and cities and construct their symbolic worlds by putting words together to tell stories, articulate plans, tell lies, seek truth, and much more. This talk offers hypotheses that address a key question for anthropogeny: How did biological evolution yield humans with the “construction-ready brains” and bodies that made us capable of the cultural evolution that created the diversity of our mental and physical constructs that we know today? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 40161]

This talk provides a deep time perspective for assessing the behavioural implications of the creation of the earliest known structure and the technologies used in its making. Evidence for the earliest structure appears relatively late, about 500,000 years ago in Zambia, and before the evolution of Homo sapiens. The next oldest structures were made by Neanderthals in Europe, 176,000 years ago. The site in Zambia preserves rare evidence for the shaping and fitting together of two tree trunks to make a stable framework. The process of combining parts to make a whole reflects a conceptually new approach to technology, one which remains central to everything we make as humans, including structures. Did the invention of combinatorial technology require the use of language to discuss and evaluate diverse ways to form new constructs and constructions? This question arises from the extended planning and expertise needed in the making of combinatorial tools.    Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 40160]

Director Don Hertzfeldt joins moderator Miguel Penabella (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a discussion of his films ME and It’s Such a Beautiful Day. They discuss his time as a UCSB student and his early interest in animation, as well as the development of his new film. Hertzfeldt also shares insights into his influences from silent cinema, and his thematic interests in deep time and memory across his work. Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 40070]

As distinct from the buildings of termites (interesting though these are), bird nests offer a more apropos point of comparison for human buildings – they are conducted by single vertebrate (or a few) and can be adapted to varied circumstances, with even a small effect of social learning. However, the basic Bauplan remains species-specific, unlike the creativity of the human architect. Since nonhuman primates lack interesting building skills, and so we suggest that bird nest construction may come to play a similar comparative role for architectural design. The static Bauplan of birds can be compared to the near-stasis of human tool use until the end of the Paleolithic, challenging us to assess the changes in human practice that unlocked an increasingly rapid process of cultural evolution. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 40159]

At a global level, Homo sapiens have reshaped the planet Earth to such an extent that we now talk of a new geological age, the Anthropocene. But each of us shapes our own worlds, physically, symbolically, and in the worlds of imagination. This symposium focuses especially on one form of construction, the construction of buildings, while stressing that such construction is ever shaped by diverse factors from landscape to culture and the construction of history embodied in it - and more. After a brief look at birds building their nests as an example of variation on a species-specific Bauplan, we sample a broad sweep of cultural evolution and niche construction from the earliest stone tools of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens through the Neolithic and the rise of cities to the formal and informal architecture of the present day. Finally, we explore the ways artificial intelligence may further change how humans construct their mental and physical worlds. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 40169]

Step into the historic Chicago Cafe in Woodland, California, a culinary landmark that could potentially be the oldest Chinese restaurant in the U.S. Anchored by the Fong family for over a century, their resilience echoes through the decades of the Chinese Exclusion Act and societal adversity. The cafe offers more than traditional Chinese food. It's a living chapter of Chinese-American history and a beacon of cultural endurance. Series: "UC Davis News" [Humanities] [Show ID: 40176]