I'm an anthropologist. I am a particular
kind of anthropologist that we sometimes
call a biological anthropologist. I'm
interested in everything about the human:
our deep past -- let's say the last 2
million years, our contemporary present --
how we behave, how we live, what our
bodies do, what hormones and health and
lifestyles are like, and trying to think
about how we can reconstruct the ways
our ancestors interacted with the world
based on their bones, based on the tools
they left behind, and based on that
incredible brain that they have. Humans
have this incredible capacity to look at
the world around them, to see how it is,
to imagine something completely
different, and to try to make that
reality. That capacity comes from our
neural biologies, our endocrine or
hormone systems, our deep evolutionary
histories, our ways of living and getting
together, and by mixing all of that, along
with cultural and linguistic diversity,
we get an answer to why we can do that.
So I think understanding the way our brain
works, the way our bodies work, what our
history looks like, help us think about
how we make those things matter for the
future, for a better future, for all
humans, and for everything else that we
share the planet with. What really
surprises me is how long and how deep
our history is of working together, of
imagining and creating. 100,000 years ago,
they were making beads and these
incredible carvings. 200,000 years ago,
they were using ochre to paint their
bodies. 300 thousand years ago, our deep
ancestors were building structures
inside of caves. That's what got us here
and it's what, I hope, is gonna make us
stay here well into the future.
Technology has opened a whole bunch of
new windows so we get more data. What
technology hasn't given us are the
skills to think about that data, and that
comes not from the new technology, but
from the deep investment in traditional
scholarly learning. That's why philosophy
and the humanities are critical to the
sciences and the social sciences. We need
to remember that we have to reflect on
things, we have to critique things, we
have to engage with things, and so it's
this integration of a deep tradition of
learning, of understanding, of scholarship,
mixed with new technologies that's
really going to change the future. Notre Dame encourages and fosters
interdisciplinary scholar
engagement. I work with theologians, with
biologists, with other social scientists,
and folks from the humanities. We think
together in a space that's not
constrained by some of the traditional
notions of, well, the humanities go here,
the sciences go here. To ask good
questions about anything, like health for
example, to understand human health, you
have to understand human biology, right?
You have to understand a health system,
that's sociology and anthropology and
ethnography. You have to be able to talk
to a bunch of people, to collaborate with
a bunch of people who have different
trainings, different backgrounds,
different vocabularies. You have to be
ready to be wrong, you have to be ready
to learn, and you have to be ready to
work with others, but the payoff is
enormous.
