Thomas Kraft will present his talk The Energetics of Uniquely Human Subsistence Strategies virtually on Friday, February 4  at 2 pm as part of the 2022 Spring Anthropology Colloquia Speaker Series.  You can access the talk here.  You can obtain the passcode by emailing Dr. Ian Wallace at iwallace@unm.edu

Thomas Kraft is a behavioral ecologist interested in how interactions between social behavior, culture, and the environment shape human health and aging. His work currently focuses on the evolutionary basis of variation in contemporary human health outcomes across populations and individuals, particularly those experiencing rapid environmental and social change. Two central questions include: How do processes of environmental change, market integration, and sedentarization interact to shape health and aging in transitioning populations?, and how do changes in social behavior that accompany acculturation affect who gets sick with chronic non-communicable diseases? To address these questions, Tom engages in ethnographic fieldwork with contemporary small-scale subsistence societies (hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist) in tropical environments, utilizing tools and theory from ecology, evolutionary biology, biomedicine, and anthropology. He is also co-leader of the new Orang Asli Health and Lifeways Project in Malaysia.

Hosted by the UNM Department of Anthropology, the  Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies, and the Latin American and Iberian Institute (LAII)  the Department Colloquia Speaker Series will continue this semester.  Talks from this years series are available on our You Tube for your viewing.

 Upcoming speakers include:

February 18   Lindsay Montgomery (University of Arizona)

February 25    Stephanie Fox (UNM)

March 4         David Stuart (UNM)

March 25       Kristina Lyons (University of Pennsylvania)

April 1           Shaylih Muehlmann (University of British Columbia)

April 15          Webb Keane (University of Michigan)

April 22         Jana Valesca Meyer (UNM)

May 6           Barbara Meek (University of Michigan)