We had the second of our speakers in the winter anthropology colloquium Friday. Daniel Nettle came on Friday. Daniel's talk was co-sponsored by the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences. Daniel is a human behavioral ecologist with extremely broad interests and a penchant for using HBE as a tool for studying social inequality and human health. Somehow, we'd never met before. I'm glad that's been taken care of now. Of the dozens of things that Daniel could have talked about, he chose to talk about his ethnographic project in Newcastle on Tyne.

Given my interests in demography and epidemiology, I've seen lots of talks on social deprivation, inequality, neighborhood effects, etc., but Daniel's talk showed a refreshing creativity. A large fraction of the data he presented came from deceptively simple ethological methods. I think that there is a lot that both the methods and theory of behavioral ecology and ethology have to offer studies of social inequality and health. Of course, I'm not alone in this belief. Mhairi Gibson (my collaborator in Uganda) and David Lawson (this week's speaker!) published a terrific  book last year on the application of HBE to applied problems.

Much of the work Daniel's work in this area is published in open-access journals (e.g., here and here). I'm intrigued by the relatively new journal, PeerJ, where he has published a number of papers now, and am planning to submit something there soon.

The flyer for Daniel's talk: