W. Penn
Handwerker
Snail Mail: Electronic Connections:
Anthropology
Department, U-2176 Tel: 860-486-0071
I was trained as a general anthropologist with an
emphasis on the intersection of biological and cultural anthropology. I
have published in all four fields of the discipline, and have also undertaken a
number of applied research projects. My current research focuses on the
hypothesis that the shared assumptions, norms, and patterns of behavior that
constitute cultures originate unexpectedly and are subject to selective
processes that optimize a cultural participant’s ability to survive and
eat well reliably. Human imagination
produces a continuous flow of new ideas and behaviors. But specific novelties originate unexpectedly
and invariably contain imperfections. By
assigning emotional weights to the consequences of behavior for a
person’s ability to survive and eat well reliably, our brains may exert a
selective effect by identifying knowledge and reasoning imperfections, giving
precedence to one or another mode of framing choices, and thus altering the
values that apply to a set of choice alternatives. Because our lives
encompass multiple domains of thought and action that bear on our ability to
survive and eat well reliably in different ways, each person participates in
multiple cultures. Because selection favors choices framed as gains between equals
and as losses as inequalities grow, as power differences grow larger the fair
behavior that characterizes interaction between equals shifts increasingly
rapidly to increasingly exploitative and, eventually, violent behavior.
I developed and have tested this hypothesis in a series
of studies on a wide range of topics, including public sector corruption,
entrepreneurship, human fertility, the origins and evolution of intelligence,
human rights and the causes and consequences (particularly for sexual behavior)
of violence to women and children. In
the process, I developed new methods and strategies with which to study
cultures. Key publications include
articles in the American Anthropologist (1989, 1997,
2002), Current Anthropology (1997), the American
Journal of Human Biology (2001),
and Ethos (2003), a chapter
on sample design in the Encyclopedia of Social Measurement (2005), and the books Women’s
Power and Social Revolution (1989) and Quick Ethnography
(2001). I summarize the argument in a
new book, The Origin of Cultures (to
be published in 2008). The theory of
frames and violence appears in summary form in a short manuscript of
the same name, and forms the basis for a prospective multi-country (
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