Anthropology Colloquium Fall Series with Phillip Endicott

December 11, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
Mānoa Campus, Crawford Hall 115

The Anthropology Department's final talk of 2025, featuring Dr. Phillip Endicott. "Kinship and Archaeology: New Approaches to Social Structure in the Past". In pre-literate, non-state society, kinship pervades every aspect of life and death, structuring social relations, socio-economic dynamics, political economies, settlement patterns, and burial contexts. Taking a Durkheimian perspective, the resulting social structure provides the inspiration and the model for the classification of any aspect of the natural world and cosmos, contributes the cadres, framework and dividing lines, in which semantic domains are connected paradigmatically without reference to Linnean taxonomy. Consequently, the study of social structure has been a long-held desiderata for archaeology but seemingly beyond reach because of the social component. Whilst immaterial and ideational aspects of kinship remain a challenge some of the biological ones are within reach using state of the art population genetics, provided that interpretation is aided by a sound knowledge of anthropological theory. Prior to recent disruptions, caused by colonialism and capitalism, oral, non-state societies did follow normative rules of behaviour, which are much less flexible than those governing recruitment to social categories. These rules produce patterns not only on the ground but in the genomes of the people involved, which together with isotopes of mobility and diet can provide insights into the biological aspects of kinship. This has been attempted for the Neolithic in Europe but with mixed results. The Austronesian speaking world is more amenable to the study of social structure because (1) settlement was comparatively recent, (2) historical records exist of land division during the early phases of contact with European voyagers, (3) pan Austronesian studies of kinship provide a framework with which to help decode the past. These can profitably be combined with data from archaeology and population genetics for a more nuanced approach to the past. Endicott will discuss the inference of post-marital residence patterns in the late Iron Age of southern Britain, and the use of anthropological theory to interpret settlement patterns in North America, before providing an overview of what 20th century ethnography across the Malayo-Polynesian speaking world might tell us about social structure in the past prior to the settlement of Oceania. Finally, Endicott will look at descriptions of land division in early contact eastern Polynesia as a potential additional source of information and suggest what an inter-disciplinary project with archaeology might look like and what it could achieve. Dr. Philip Endicott entered University at the tender age of 41 years young after a diverse experience of work and travel. He graduated from Magdalen College Oxford 11 years later with a BA in Anthropology and Archaeology, an MSc in Biological Anthropology and a D.Phil. focused on ancient DNA and the population genetics of Southeast Asia. In between, he spent a year at the University of East Anglia graduating with an MA in the Arts of Africa, the Americas and Oceania, writing a thesis on voyaging in the Pacific. From 2008 to 2023 he worked at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris and since then at the University of Tartu in Estonia. His publications cover a wider range of topics from methods development in ancient DNA to phylogenetic modelling rates and evolution for human mitochondrial DNA, to the population genetics of eastern Polynesia and Island Southeast Asia. Currently, Dr. Endicott is preparing articles on the genetic structure of the Philippines and Y-chromosomal DNA insights into early human radiations in Island Southeast Asia. He is also a collaborating author on two forthcoming publications on the population genetics of the Pacific. He has long held an interest in the potential of combining data from different disciplines into meaningful joint statistical analyses and is working on this goal for the Austronesian speaking world using genetics and language.


Event Sponsor
Anthropology, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Marti Kerton, 808-956-7153, anthprog@hawaii.edu,

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