Séminaire – Alan Page FISKE

The Warm Heart, Goosebumps, and Joyful Tears of Kama Muta
My research aims to understand what enables humans to coordinate in often cooperative, complex, culturally and historically varying systems of social relations. I study social and moral cognition, motives and emotion; relationship-constitutive actions, experiences, and communications; motivations for violence; interpretations of misfortune and death; and links between psychopathology and social relationships. My current reserach focuses on the emotion often called being moved or touched; see our Kama muta lab.  My methods integrate participant observation ethnography, broad ethnological and historical comparison, systematic sampling of behavior, and experimentation. But I am fundamentally a theorist, inducatively exploring the ontology and epistemology of social phenomena through systematic ethnological and historical comparision.

Alan Page FISKE (University of California, Los Angeles, USA) is a psychological anthropologist studying how natural selection, neurobiology, ontogeny, psychology, and culture jointly shape human sociality.