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Hi Everyone,
We hope you’ve been enjoying the Project Matrilineal podcast series so far. Personally, I found our last two podcasts on Khasi and Cherokee cultures to be quite enriching. I learned a lot more about these cultures from our firsthand conversations with Kong Bijoya Sawian and Professor Jaquetta Shade-Johnson. As I was thinking about who we could interview next, I had a very interesting idea. I thought it would be informative to bring an outside perspective from an anthropology expert on the topics of matrilineal cultures and the evolution of human society. I was fortunate to cross paths recently with Professor Siobhan Mattison, who is a prominent expert in the field of evolutionary anthropology. As an anthropologist and biologist with interests in evolution, behavioral ecology, kinship, reproduction, demography, health, social inequality, and quantitative and mixed methods, Professor Mattison brings a very unique perspective to the table. In addition to being an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, Professor Mattison is also the Director of the Human Family and Evolutionary Demography Lab, also known as HFED.
In the first part of this four part podcast segment, we explore Professor Mattison’s diverse background, the field of human behavioral ecology, the HFED lab, her research areas and the topic of gender dynamics in human society. Stemming from her own personal experiences, she had a keen interest in exploring the reasons for preferential treatment tied to gender. She covered gender preference in her graduate school dissertation and did her postdoctoral work in demography and anthropology, looking at issues surrounding parental investment. She ended up in the University of New Mexico in the evolutionary anthropology division, leading a lab that was focused on similar studies as her interests. In this segment she further discusses the approach of human behavioral ecology, its methodology, and key factors involved. In addition, she discusses the positive contributions of the field toward understanding the flexibility and range in human behavior. Her favorite research area is kinship, family structures, the implications of these structures on society and the interlinkages across different societies. For those of you who are interested in the field, we also discuss the HFED lab in this segment. We will cover the HFED lab and its focus in a later segment in the series so stay tuned.
We hope you enjoy this latest addition to our podcast series!
Gabby