Raymond B. Hames
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
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Primary Section: 51, Anthropology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2020)
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Biosketch
I received my doctorate in anthropology from the University of California-Santa Barbara in 1978. Most of my research is on native peoples of the Venezuelan Amazon (Yanomamö & Ye'kwana) with funding from the NSF, LSB Leakey Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. My research interests are in behavioral ecology, food & labor exchange, human ecology, marriage, parental investment, and Amazonia. I regularly teach courses on social organization, contentious issues in anthropology, warfare, and introductory cultural anthropology. I am also past-president of the Evolutionary Anthropology Society of the American Anthropological Association and a consulting editor for Human Nature and other journals.
Research Interests
His field research focusses on native peoples (Yanomamö and Ye'kwana) of the southern Venezuela with funding from the NSF and LSB Leakey Foundations. His initial field research interest was in human ecology with an emphasis on quantitative descriptions of resource extraction, conservation, food and labor exchanges, and time allocation to economic as well as social activities. In subsequent field seasons he turned his attention to marriage, kinship, and parental investment from a behavioral ecological perspective. At the same time, his research is rather eclectic with comparative work on warfare, human sexuality, behavioral methods, and skin color variation. His major research findings reveal that parental care of infants and children is widely distributed among kin who serve as alloparents; from a cross-cultural perspective, polyandrous marriages are much more frequent than commonly believed; resource conservation in small scale societies is side-effect of low demand made on local resources, and; biological kinship is a strong predictor of cooperative behavior.
