Anthropology

Duncan Stibbard Hawkes

Assistant Professor

Research in progress

I am an evolutionary anthropologist and conduct field research in Northern Tanzania with the Hadza, a group who traditionally lived by hunting and gathering all their food from nature. Like many hunter-gatherers, the Hadza often generously share food, have relatively little formal leadership, regularly move from place to place and have little personal property. For these reasons they have been called an “egalitarian society”.

Egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies have been used to help understand what life was like in the deep past before the advent of agriculture; but “egalitarianism” has also been the topic of much mythmaking. My research uses mixed cross-cultural and field research methods to explore the actual motivations, dynamics and processes underlying Hadza egalitarianism; and the outcomes of these processes on health, status and nutrition. I explore the ways by which people minimize inequality in both status and property, and the sometimes-self-interested reasons that people generously share food. I aim to foster a clear-eyed, empirical approach to this sometimes highly theoretical topic.

In the last few decades, life from many Hadza has changed due to climate change, within-country migration, tourism and tighter integration into cash economies. Though most Hadza continue to hunt and gather, most people now augment bush foods with cash-bought grain. Today, some Hadza grow crops and keep animals, and others participate in Tanzania’s tourism industry. Most people move around less than they did in the past. My ongoing research programme explores how people are navigating these novel challenges, and the resulting consequences for health-, property-, gender- and status-structured inequalities.

Last, I am interested in the cultural evolution of hunter-gatherer technology. My work has explored what hunter-gatherer material culture can (and cannot) tell us about the deep past. My ongoing research programme also explores how technology is adapting and changing in response to new subsistence environments.

Teaching

In school, we learn facts from textbooks. At University, we advance human knowledge. These require two very different styles of learning and thinking, and my aim as a teacher is to slowly, gradually acclimatise my students to excitement and freedom that lie at the frontiers of scholarly inquiry. To achieve this, I teach critical thinking, self-study, writing and quantitative skills; each proficiencies that are invaluable not just in academia but in any technical career.

In my teaching I focus on accessibility and aim to foster a non-judgmental and relaxed learning environment where students from any background feel they have the resources, the freedom and the support to succeed. I am myself dyslexic and, in my teaching, I try to create a level playing field which accommodates learners with different disabilities and different approaches to learning. I hope that, in return, students will overlook the occasional typo in my lecture slides!