Curriculum Vitae short bio
Francisco's Investigative Journalism
You have been lied to...
Investigative
journalist is my fourth identity. I work to expose what US foreign policy really
is, how the media works, and what the best interpretation of certain
specific ethnic conflicts may be, given our best curently available
data. This is naturally an extension of my broad interest in ethnic conflict
generally.
My work focuses primarily on -- but is not limited to -- the civil Wars in Yugoslavia, racism against black people, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. To read my historical and investigative work, please visit my new website:
I am equal parts ethnographer, evolutionary anthropologist, and psychologist. I conduct fieldwork in Western Mongolia with Torguud Mongol and Kazakh nomadic pastoralists and villagers. Very nice guy.
Research and Interests:
I am interested broadly in the evolution of the psychological mechanisms that make social learning possible and which are involved in cultural transmission processes.
Specifically:
1)
Ethnicity: Why do we feel and think
about ethnic groups the way we do? Are some aspects of our cognition of
ethnicity part of the innate architecture of the human
brain? Connection to cultural
transmission:
Conformism in the acquisition of ideas leads members of an ethnic group
to share many important interactional norms. This sets in motion
emergent
phenomena that can explain why human brains have evolved to erroneously
essentialize ethnic groups as 'natural' categories. The imperative is
better coordination.
Click
here for my papers on Ethnicity
2)
Prestige: Why do human have social
asymmetries of freely-conferred deference? Why is this form of
hierarchy
absent in other social animals, which have dominance but never
prestige? Connection
to cultural transmission: The uniquely human capacity for
direct
social learning has resulted in selection pressures to choose models
who
are above-average in skills/knowledge and to buy access to them through
deference in order to learn better. Prestige processes result from the
operation of these biases.
Click
here for my papers on Prestige
3)
Memes: What are the units
of social learning? What are the boundaries of the
packets
of information that we acquire from each other? Connection
to cultural transmission: In order to understand specific
historical
phenomena, we need to grasp how the brain parses information for
storage
and retrieval. This may be different for different domains, but this
sort
of knowledge is indispensable to seeing what is cultural transmission
'noise'
and what isn't.
Click
here for my papers on Memes
The lighter side
Francisco Gil-White's publications
Papers on ethnicity
Gil-White, F. J. (1999) How thick is blood? The plot thickens...: If ethnic actors are primordialists, what remains of the circumstantialist/primordialist controversy? Ethnic and Racial Studies 22(5): 789-820.
Gil-White, F. J. (2001) Are ethnic groups biological 'species' to the human brain?: Essentialism in our cognition of some social categories. Current Anthropology 42(4): 515-554
Gil-White, F. J. (2001) Sorting is not categorization: A critique of the claim that Brazilians have fuzzy racial categories. Cognition and culture, 1(3):219-249
Gil-White, F. J. (2002) The cognition of ethnicity: Native category systems under the field-experimental microscope. Field methods 14(2):170-198.
Gil-White, F. J. (2003) Gil-White, F. J. 2003. "Ultimatum game with an ethnicity manipulation: Results from Khovdiin Bulgan Sum, Mongolia," in Foundations of Human Sociality: Ethnography and Experiments in 15 small-scale societies. Edited by J. Henrich, R. Boyd, S. Bowles, H. Gintis, E. Fehr, and C. Camerer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gil-White, F.J. (2004) Ultimatum Game with ethnicity manipulation: Problems faced doing field economic experiments, and their solutions. Field Methods 16:157-183.
Gil-White, F.J. (2005) Is ethnocentrism adaptive?: An ethnographic analysis. Unpublished manuscript
Gil-White, F.J. (2006) The Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism Needs Better Categories: Clearing up the Confusions that Result from Blurring Analytic and Lay Concepts. Journal of bioeconomics 7:239-270. Journal of bioeconomics 7:239-270.
Gil-White,
F.J. (2005) How conformism creates ethnicity creates
conformism (and why this matters to lots of things)
The Monist, vol. 88,
no.2 (pp.189-237)
read as pdf
BOOK:
Resurrecting Racism: The current attack on black people using phony
science. Historical and Investigative Research. 2004.
http://www.hirhome.com/rr/rrcontents.htm
Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001) The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred status as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and human behavior 22:165-196.
Gil-White, F.J. How prestige hierarchies led to arbitrary reference, the first step in the evolution of language. Unpublished manuscript
Gil-White, F. J. (2001) L'evolution culturelle a-t-elle des règles? La rechérche Hors-Série No. 5(Avril): 92-97.
Gil-White, F.J. ( 2005) Common misunderstandings of memes (and genes): The promise and the limits of the genetic analogy to cultural transmission processes. in S. Hurley and N. Chater, Perspectives on Imitation: From Mirror Neurons to Memes, MIT Press.
Gil-White, F. J. I killed a one-eyed marmot: Why some narrative memes spread better than others, and how they maintain beliefs. Unpublished manuscript.
Gil-White, F. J., and P. J. Richerson (2003) "Large scale human cooperation and conflict," in Encyclopedia of cognitive science. Edited by L. Nadel. London: Nature Publishing/MacMillan.
Henrich, J., R. Boyd, S. Bowles, H. Gintis, E. Fehr, C. Camerer, R. McElreath, M. Gurven, K. Hill, A. Barr, J. Ensminger, D. Tracer, F. Marlow, J. Patton, M. Alvard, F. Gil-White and N. Henrich (2005) 'Economic Man' in Cross-cultural Perspective: Economic Experiments in 15 Small Scale Societes, Behavioral & Brain Sciences. 28:795-855
Gil-White, F.J. (2004). "The postmodern biologist (cum psychologist)." Review of Susan Oyama's "Evolution's Eye" Theory and psychology 14(1): 134-137