Agustín Fuentes - A master class in anthropology and a life lived among complexity
Agustín Fuentes reads a multi-million year history of our world, a student of its myriad lessons that often subvert unquestioned modern narratives and the problematic ways we've arrived at them. His is an anthropological, ecological, refreshingly unalloyed sensibility, an uncommon concoction whose life of scholarship and insight illuminate what we all might need to cultivate for the world we are walking into.
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Fuentes is an anthropologist, perhaps because it is the only field the permits asking questions of millions of years of history and irreverent of discipline. His work delves into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations. From chasing monkeys in jungles and cities, to exploring the lives of our evolutionary ancestors, to examining human health, behavior, and diversity across the globe, Professor Fuentes is interested in both the big questions and the small details of what makes humans and our close relations tick.
But he is also an activist and deep thinker, whose work moves seamlessly across science, theology, and philosophy. His work spans continents, species, and mega-anna of human history.
His current projects include exploring cooperation, creativity, and belief in human evolution, multispecies anthropologies, evolutionary theory and processes, and engaging race and racism, across each of them turning the lens on his own life in search of understanding and meaning.
Agustín is prolific--the author or editor of more than 20 books, including The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional and Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being, and author of more than 150 academic publications not to mention his output as a blogger and public scientist.
He earned his BA/BS in Anthropology and Zoology and his MA and PhD in Anthropology from UC Berkeley, served as Director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts as well as Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Notre Dame, and is now professor of anthropology at Princeton University.
Fuentes is an explorer for National Geographic, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and short horror comedy film-maker.
So, this is a conversation about how we organize and understand humanity and our cultures from the lens of a life spent examining them scientifically. But it is also about the lived experience of a researcher and human being reflexively using that scholarship to understand himself, mirroring the cultural and collective understanding in the internal and individual. It is a conversation that exists between and among the grand sweeping and the local particular with one of the lives that has embodied this crossing of scales.