Report from the Presidents

Dear Evolutionary Anthropology Society members,

Happy 2018! For those of you not able to make the 2017 meetings in Washington, DC, we had a great series of sessions, a mixer on Thursday night and the annual EAS party on Saturday night at a local pub—where we also rescheduled one of our sessions!

Business Meeting Update

Discussion in the board meeting and business meeting focused on working to solve some annual meeting scheduling concerns, and concerns about low student membership (we used to have very high student membership but this has fallen in recent years); the consensus was that the cost of the annual meetings was a deterrent to student membership. We are also planning a survey of our membership about their reasons for being EAS and AAA members, and their thoughts on what we should be doing as a section to keep them engaged as well as bring more students and colleagues to meetings. We will also be surveying previous members and those who are like-minded but not AAA members to get their perspectives.

See below for our 2018 call for abstracts for the 2018 AAA meetings in San Jose!

The EAS Presidents

Mary Shenk (President), Brooke Scelza (President-Elect), and Pete Richerson (Past President)

2018 AAA Meetings — Call for Abstracts and Session Proposals

It’s time to begin thinking about our next EAS meeting at the AAA’s, which will be held this year in San Jose, California. The theme for this year’s meeting is Change in the Anthropological Imagination: Resistance, Resilience, and Adaptation.

We are scheduled to receive guaranteed slots for two invited paper sessions and one poster session. In the recent past we have also been able to sponsor two to three volunteered sessions composed of individual abstracts the program committee organized into sessions or from session proposals. We depend upon members both to craft proposals for these sessions and to volunteer to make presentations and posters. Last year’s sessions had excellent contributions and were well attended. Please help us make this year’s sessions equally exciting!

The AAA deadline this year for the submission of both Invited and Volunteered sessions as well as individual paper and poster presentations at the Annual Meeting in San Jose is April 16th. Those of you who are planning to submit a session proposal or contribute a paper should send it to Brooke (bscelza@gmail.com) (Chair of the 2018 EAS Program Committee) by March 15th. This will allow us to get a head start on the process and ensure that we can maximize everyone’s opportunity to make a presentation.

• If you are submitting a session proposal, please submit a session abstract of no more than 500 words, keywords, length of session (normally 105 minutes for 6-7 papers), anticipated attendance, presenter names and roles. You should also include as many of the paper abstracts as you can.

• If you are submitting a paper abstract, please submit a title and 250 word abstract along with a few key words.

After our review, all sessions, volunteered papers, and poster proposals must be officially submitted by organizers and presenters through the official AAA portal by Monday, April 16th at 3 pm EDT (no new submissions may be started after 2 pm EDT). The official call for papers can be found here: http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm.

Thanks,

The EAS Program Committee: Brooke Scelza, Mary Shenk, Chris von Rueden & Sarah Alami

Upcoming Dates & Points of Action

C-WESS call for abstracts is up! This year it will take place May 4th- 6th in Santa Barbara. Submit via Dropbox by February 16th 2018.

Click here to apply for a Geography of Philosophy Post-Doc with H. Clark Barrett at UCLA, a Templeton Foundation-funded project.

Sunbelt Social Networks Conference will be held in Utrecht June 26-July 1 2018. Click here for more information about attending.

A workshop on Future Directions on the Evolution of Rituals, Beliefs, and Religious Minds is happening May 9-14 2018 in Erice, Sicily, Italy.

Eco Health Alliance is now hiring for a field veterinarian and field technician to join their Indian global health team. These positions are for short-term and will be based at SGPGIMS, Lucknow. Candidates those have experience with wildlife will be preferred. Fluency in Hindi and English is required. Interested candidates, please email chakraborty@ecohealthalliance.org with a short (2-page) CV.

Some Recent Member Publications

Evidence for energetic tradeoffs between physical activity and childhood growth across the nutritional transition Samuel S. Urlacher and Karen L. Kramer

Why Wage Earners Hunt: Food Sharing, Social Structure, and Influence in an Arctic Mixed Economy Elspeth Ready and Eleanor A. Power

Partner preferences in the context of concurrency: What Himba want in formal and informal partners Brooke A. Scelza and Sean P. Prall

Hunter-gatherer health and development policy: How the promotion of sedentism worsens the Agta’s health outcomes Abigail E. Page, Tessa Minter, Sylvain Viguier, and Andrea Bamburg Migliano

Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling Daniel Smith, Philip Schlaepfer, Katie Major, Mark Dyble, Abigail E. Page, Nikhil Chaudhary, Gul Deniz Salali, Ruth Mace, Leonora Astete, Marilyn Ngales, Lucio Vinicius, and Andrea Bamburg Migliano