‘Evolutionary foundations of human behaviour’

On March 2-6, 2015, professor of the Educational and Scientific Centre of Social Anthropology at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Head of the Cross-Cultural Psychology and Human Ethology Unit at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology (Russian Academy of Sciences) Marina L. Butovskaya will hold a workshop titled, ‘Evolutionary foundations of human behaviour’ to take place at the TSU Laboratory for Social and Anthropological Research. This subject is one of the fundamental ones among anthropological disciplines exploring human nature. At the workshop, attendees will familiarize themselves with contemporary evolutionary theories of aggression and cooperation, the choice of sexual partner, and the specificity of parental contribution in modern and traditional societies. A special emphasis will be put on the issues of evolutionary patterns of the development of human social structures.

Topics to be discussed:

Human ethology and its main research lines
Research methods in human ethology
The development of human beings and their transformations in the process of evolution
Parental behaviour and its evolution in primates
Reproductive success and mate choice in traditional and industrial society
Human aggression in the evolutionary perspective
Can we manage conflicts at intra- and inter-group levels? Differences in the mechanisms behind these processes in terms of the evolution of human society
Genes and behaviour
The human body as a text
Field research in traditional and contemporary society

Marina Lvovna Butovskaya, a renowned Russian anthropologist, has authored over 300 scholarly publications, including monographs, and is a member of the editorial boards of the journals ‘Ethnographic Review’, ‘Anthropologie’, and ‘Social Evolution and History’.

Her research interests include primatology, human and primate ethology, evolutionary anthropology (including the evolutionary background of homosexuality), the anthropology of gender, conflict studies, cultural studies, cross-cultural communication, and hunter-gatherers of East Africa. Marina Butovskaya has spent a number of field research periods among the Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania.