Among the diversity of perspectives for studying the nexus of evolution and human behavior, human behavioral ecology (HBE) emerged as the study of the adaptive nature of behavior as a function of socioecological context. This volume explores the history and diversification of HBE, a field which has grown considerably in the decades since its emergence in the 1970s. At its core, the principles of HBE have remained a clear and cogent way to derive predictions about the adaptive function of behavior, even as the questions and methods of the discipline have evolved to be more interdisciplinary and more synergistic with other fields in the evolutionary social sciences. This introductory chapter covers core concepts, including methodological individualism, conditional strategies, and optimization. The chapter then provides an overview of the state of the field, including a summary of current research topics, areas, and methods. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the integral role that human behavioral ecology continues to play in deepening scholarly understandings of human behavior.

This chapter traces the concept of an “Irish race” as it appeared and developed in historical writing. It opens with a brief survey of the legacy of medieval and early-modern tropes of otherness in English descriptions of the Irish population, as well as in vernacular Gaelic poetry that responded to colonization, and in antiquarian writings about national origins. It then charts the influences of enlightenment discourse on racial differences and the formulation of nineteenth century anthropological concepts of race. Distinctions between Anglo-Saxons and Celts, championed by eminent English historians, were inverted in popular Irish histories, in which ahistorical notions of a distinct “Irish race” were a marker for innate national uniqueness. Whereas racial prejudice was prevalent in Victorian political writing, Irish nationalist histories showed a fluid approach to race, which was used to forward claims for a distinguished ancient pedigree worthy of sovereignty and to foster a transnational bond with diaspora communities worldwide. Having played a prominent role in the Irish Revival through to the early years of independence, the language of race was practically expunged from Irish historiography in the mid-twentieth century, and yet the appeal of racial distinctiveness has not entirely vanished.

This chapter details and expands current research on Messiaen’s response to, engagement with, and inculcation of Surrealism in his music. In particular it examines the poetic and ethnological context of Messiaen’s work, and also introduces a discussion of the occult and psychoanalytical trauma as Surrealist contexts for Messiaen’s work in the late 1940s.

This chapter explores the depictions of the barbarians, and indeed the very concept barbaros, in Plutarch’s works. It reviews Plutarch’s rhetoric dealing with non-Greeks, which was circumscribed on the one hand by the Roman imperial political reality and on the other by memories of the old Hellenic valor, which was filtered only through texts and oratory. The chapter examines Plutarch’s play with the established stereotypes in a way that shows ethnic labeling to be elusive. It studies Plutarch’s ethnic taxonomic schemes (i.e. a twofold arrangement of barbarians vs. Greeks/Romans and a threefold scheme of Greeks vs. Romans vs. barbarians), and the subtle moral and political implications thereof. It also looks into the literary significance of the use of barbarians in the narrative and of the mismatch between Greek and barbarian practices as presented mostly in the Lives.

This chapter explores whether it is possible to talk meaningfully of an African brand of crime fiction. It seeks broad trends in localized examples but, in so doing, it privileges those texts that have resonated beyond national and indeed continental borders. Following a survey of the role played by the Parisian publishing industry in the global dissemination of African crime fiction, the focus turns inwards, examining how authors including Benin’s Florent Couao-Zotti and South Africa’s Margie Orford and Deon Meyer stage the continent’s social realities, typically in the wake of independence. Crucial here is the appropriation of the city. On the other hand, authors including Mali’s Aïda Mady Diallo and Moussa Konaté and Ghana’s Kwei Quartey and Nii Ayikwei Parkes use their work to subvert the literary myths of rural Africa. The chapter argues that Sub-Saharan African crime fiction has an important anthropological function, adapting the genre’s urban DNA in order to map the tensions between the traditions of rural Africa and life in its modern cities.

The debate over the definition and dispersal of species was intertwined with how the nineteenth century was grappling with the definition of racial difference. This chapter focuses on how the African American physician James McCune Smith reinterpreted racial uplift through the scientific discourses of biogeography and ethnology. Crucially, for McCune Smith, African and Pacific Islander diasporas overlap in the figure of the coral insect, the tiny sea zoophyte that slowly and tenaciously builds the reefs and islands improbably dotting the oceans. The chapter explores how he links the coral insect to African and Pacific Islander experiences of encounter with Euro-American settler cultures and its narratives of racial tutelage and reform. Placing this bizarre cross-species kinship in the context of the nineteenth century’s cultural and scientific imagination, the chapter discusses how McCune Smith’s sketches “Heads of the Colored People” perform the coral insect’s creative biological and geological agency and microscopically figure and transfigure the human-to-nature order. His diasporic view was informed by Charles Lyell’s and Charles Darwin’s biogeographical theories of coral reef formation, as well as the corpus of research on corals by American scientist James Dwight Dana from his time on the Wilkes Expedition.

Dr Thomas Hodgkin was a physician and medical researcher as well as a humanitarian campaigner. Hodgkin’s science was informed by his social conscience and his affiliation to the Society of Friends, while his philanthropy rested on the presentation of systematically organized and scientifically derived evidence. This chapter discusses Hodgkin’s medical research and career, and then his significant contribution to the emerging disciplines of ethnology and geography. Hodgkin and his peers within newly emerging scientific disciplines established and used scientific societies to not only stake disciplinary claims, but also promote political and humanitarian objects. Exploring the myriad overlaps in personnel, ideas and approach between the different areas and organizations with which Hodgkin was involved, this chapter addresses the underappreciated connection between science and humanitarian activity in mid-century London, and the impact of that relationship on our reading of indigenous protection.

This essay explores Frederick Douglass’s lifelong engagement with science and technology. In line with other historians, it argues that while Douglass mounted a decades-long critique of scientific racism, he often reified negative racial stereotypes when repurposing racial science for integrationist ends. The essay also highlights Douglass’s emphasis on the liberatory potential of new technologies like steamboats, the telegraph, and photography. In an age enthralled with science and technology, Douglass framed technology’s emancipatory potential as an antidote to antiblack scientific racism. In doing so, he refused to allow scientific knowledge, vis-à-vis scientific racism, to be viewed primarily as a tool for black oppression and instead cast science as a source of black liberation.

Chapter 5 shows just how influential Tulloch’s work was by analysing its effect on the American School of ethnologists. Debates about the origins of man, and specifically about the unity of the human species, had been ongoing since the middle of the eighteenth century, but crystallised in the 1840s and 1850s into a debate between monogenists and polygenists. In their attempt to prove that black and white people were fundamentally and innately different, the polygenists turned to the publications of British military surgeons and particularly to those of Alexander Tulloch. His work proved, they thought, that races could not become assimilated to different climates and that black people had been made for the African climate, not shaped by it. As a publication of the British army, American polygenists asserted that Tulloch’s work offered vital and impartial support for their claim that Africans and Caucasians were of different species.

Moving from politics in the early Republic to the academy, Chapter 3 argues that the emergence of the intertwined fields of folksong studies, dialectology, and ethnography after the 1919 May Fourth movement each suggested a distinct role for fangyan in China’s national invention - of, respectively, a medium to express authentic emotion, of subsidiaries to the national language, and as representative of a Han ethnicity. Folksong collectors sought to immortalize the oral culture of China’s countryside, thereby designating fangyan the nation’s culture authentically rendered. Linguists inspired by Western comparative linguistics sought to organize China’s languages into hierarchical taxonomies. Ethnographers juxtaposed fangyan surveys with research on Chinese ethnic minorities, in order to draw strict boundaries between the Han and China’s other ethnic groups. Together, these three disciplines set the terms for debate over the cultural and social roles of fangyan in policy, education, and art.