Sex is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary
August 29, 2025 at 2 p.m. (Central)
In this lively and provocative talk, based on his recent book of the same name, Fuentes traces the origin and complexity of sex, describing the many ways in the animal kingdom of being female, male, or both. Turning to humans, he presents compelling evidence that when it comes to variation within the sexes, binary thinking is just bad science. Hear the case that ideas about what a man or woman “should look like” are the often product of culture, not just a static biology. Indeed, traits that we think are inherently male or female – body hair, breast tissue – are not limited to one sex. And a close focus on hormones doesn’t always tell the full story either. Fuentes tackles hot-button debates around sports and medicine, explaining why we can acknowledge that females and males are not the same while also embracing a biocultural reality where none of us fits neatly into only one of two categories. Bringing clarity and reason to a contentious issue, Sex Is a Spectrum shares a scientist’s perspective on why a binary view of sex and gender is not only misguided but harmful, and why there are multitudes of ways of being human.
Archaeology and the Return of Nationalism
October 17, 2025 at 2 p.m. (Central)
Nationalism has been the object of much scrutiny in archaeology, as the discipline was crucial in providing historical legitimacy to the nation-state during the 19th century and to ethno-nationalist claims during the 20th. However, during the 21st century interest in nationalism has declined, both because of the weakening of the nation-state under the neoliberal order and because archaeologists are less frequently involved in the task of nation-building. However, the rise of reactionary populism and different forms of extreme right movements since the 2010s have put nationalism back on the political and cultural agenda. History has thus become both crucial and contentious. However, unlike in other periods, archaeologists and professional historians have become largely irrelevant in the crafting of new national narratives. In this talk, I will be the challenges of the discipline in a context of massive manipulation of the past and of scientific negationism.
Naturekind: Language, Culture and Power Beyond the Human
November 14, 2025 at 3 p.m. (Central)
The era in which culture and language can be presumed uniquely human is finally over. Biologists are showing that cultures extend to chimpanzees, but do not stop with primates or mammals, extending too to insects, plants and fungi. The arbitrary meanings of signs and their ordering – languages with symbolism and grammars - are learned by whales, but are also demonstrated right down the phyla. And if language and culture extend beyond the human, so does society itself, so anthropology and other social sciences can no longer peddle human exceptionalism but must reconfigure to embrace interspecies social worlds. Biologists are constrained, however, by the mechanistic ways communication is understood. Drawing on a just-published book (Melissa Leach and James Fairhead, Naturekind, Princeton University Press) this talk explores how this impasse can be addressed by extending insights from structural linguistics, social semiotics, anthropology and Indigenous theorization into wider life, integrating them with new biological findings to develop a novel ‘structural biosemiotics’ paradigm. Illustrations from people’s communicative encounters with both non-human companions and assemblages of living and nonliving entities – focusing here on horses, bats and soils – suggest both a unified theory of meaning-making across all of nature, or “naturekind”, and a set of powerful insights and implications for living well with wider life on a shared planet.
For questions about the speaker series, please reach out to the anthropology speaker series coordinator, Dr. Angela K. VandenBroek.