Mark Sheskin - 2014/01/31

Date: Friday 31st January

Time: 11:30 am

Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm

Speaker: Mark Sheskin (IJN)

Title: “The Origins of Fairness: Experiments with Children and Monkeys”

Abstract: Recent research has argued that surprisingly advanced fairness judgments can be found early in childhood development and even in some nonhuman primates. I present new experiments showing the opposite: situations in which monkeys do not care about fairness and young children show spiteful preferences against fairness. Which set of research should you believe? Both, of course! In a review including both sets of research, I will discuss the similarities and differences in the fairness of these populations. The interesting question becomes about which aspects of adult fairness can be found in these other populations, and how the initial state matures into the adult one.

Workshop on the anthropology of psychological essentialism - Charles Stépanoff & Denis Regnier - 2014/01/24

Next session of JNEI will consist of a workshop entirely dedicated to the anthropology of psychological essentialism. Our two speakers will be Charles Stépanoff (EPHE) and Denis Regnier (IJN):

Anthropology of psychological essentialism

Date: Friday 24rd January

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Time: 11:30 – 12:45
Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm
Speaker: Charles Stépanoff (EPHE)

Title: “Understanding individuality: About individual essences and categories”

Abstract: Why do we essentialize social categories? Why do people consider belonging of individuals to certain categories as innate, inalterable and giving a lot of information about them (about their character, their vices, or their skills)? Social essentialism has been interpreted as the result of a transfer from folkbiology to social groups (Atran, Boyer, Gil-White): we essentialize social categories because we mistakenly treat them as biological species. This hypothesis, called “analogical transfer”, is based on the theory of the modularity of the mind. Other students interpret essentialism as a domain-general mode of understanding that permits interpreting causality in many domains independently from biology (Gelman, Hirschfeld). Ethnography can help to untangle empirically these questions. Among Tuvans (Southern Siberia), belonging to the category of shamans is innate and inalterable. However, their category is not conceptualized as a biological species, for shamans are supposed to eat each other. I advocate for the hypothesis of individual essentialism that helps to understand essentialization of high ranked categories (e.g. aristocracy), and leads to discard the “analogical transfer” hypothesis.

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Time: 12:45  – 14:00
Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm
Speaker: Denis Regnier (IJN)

Title: “Clean people, unclean people: History, cognition and the essentialization of  ‘slaves’ among the Betsileo”

Abstract: In the southern highlands of Madagascar, Betsileo descendants of ‘commoners’ (olompotsy) essentialize slave descendants: they think that slave descendants have an ‘inner essence’ that makes them what they are, cannot be cleansed and will be passed on to their children, no matter what they do. This case of psychological essentialism, as strong as it is among the Betsileo, raises the questions of why, when and how such an essentialization has taken place, since there is evidence that slaves in pre-abolition times (i.e., before 1896), although deemed ‘unclean’, were not essentialized – or only weakly essentialized – by ‘clean’ and free people.  The paper will discuss Betsileo history and ethnography, as well as recent research on the essentialism of social categories to suggest an answer to these questions.