Professor Fiona Jordan
BA(Auck.), BSc Hons (Auck.), PhD(Lond.)
Expertise
Current positions
Professor of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology
Contact
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Biography
I am an evolutionary and linguistic anthropologist and have been on the faculty of the Department of Anthropology & Archaeology since 2012. Prior to that I worked at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, and at the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London.
Like most anthropologists, I want to understand cultural diversity. There are two parts to that inquiry: Why do humans–a single species–have so much variation in behaviour and culture? But: Why don’t human societies vary more? My work seeks to do cross-cultural research in new and innovative ways by combining methods, data, and theory from biology, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. I have a background, either through formal training or long-term collaborative practice, in all these fields. My core subfield is cultural phylogenetics: understanding cultural diversity using the same statistical tools that biologists use to investigate evolutionary and diversity processes in other species.
My current projects focus on:
* The cultural evolution of kinship diversity, from child acquisition to social norms
* The roles of social learning biases in the transmission of narratives
* Natural resource use, particularly the cultural uses of plants in the Viking and Pacific worlds
* Enabling cultural macroevolution through databases (KinBank, D-PLACE, Numeralbank)
Interdisciplinarity is critical to understanding human cultural diversity, and so I like to use my ability to translate between fields to bring people and ideas together. Researchers and students in my group involve phylogenetic modelling, fieldwork and participant observation, elicitation experiments, transmission chains, interviews, corpus linguistics, and more.
Research interests
I am an evolutionary and linguistic anthropologist who studies cultural evolution. Like most anthropologists, I want to understand cultural diversity. There are two parts to that inquiry: Why do humans–a single species–have so much variation in behaviour and culture? But: Why don’t human societies vary more? My work seeks to do cross-cultural research in new and innovative ways by combining methods, data, and theory from biology, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. My core subfield is cultural phylogenetics: understanding cultural diversity using the same statistical tools that biologists use to investigate evolutionary and diversity processes in other species. I am particularly interested in kinship and language, and my primary region of interest is the Austronesian-speaking world. My published work has ranged widely: demonstrating the use of phylogenetic techniques to study Pacific prehistory and language dispersal; biocultural adaptation in the human sex ratio; cultural transmission of craft techniques; inferring past aspects of kinship and family structures; the evolution of semantic systems conceptualising colours and body parts; and modelling land tenure evolution. I also have broad interests in a number of evolutionary approaches to human behaviour, as well as the intersections of language, culture, and society.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Title: Migrating Rocks: Intercultural Research and Exchange around the Use and Repatriation of Rock Samples (based on a case study in Aotearoa New Zealand)
Principal Investigator
Role
Principal Investigator
Description
Black Life Matters and the fall of the Colston Statue in Bristol have rekindled discussions about colonial legacies in museums, collections, educational and scientific institutions and foregrounded questions about cultural…Managing organisational unit
School of Earth SciencesDates
03/01/2024 to 31/10/2024
Causal approaches to investigating language evolution
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of Anthropology and ArchaeologyDates
01/09/2021 to 31/08/2025
QUANTA
Principal Investigator
Description
Exact quantification, including the ability to count, depends on both conceptual breakthroughs and cognitive tools such as numeral systems. These tools appear in striking diversity across cultures and manifest in…Managing organisational unit
Department of Anthropology and ArchaeologyDates
01/09/2021 to 31/08/2027
The ‘symbolic annihilation of women’ in primary school literature.
Principal Investigator
Role
Co-Investigator
Description
This project examines the prevalence of male and female characters in primary school books.Managing organisational unit
School of Sociology, Politics and International StudiesDates
01/02/2021 to 31/05/2022
Difficult duets – musicians, machines, and performance on the edge
Principal Investigator
Role
Co-Investigator
Description
This project is about the experience of humans interacting with new technology. More particularly, it investigates the experience of complex, real-time, intellectually and emotionally demanding interactions, where the technology seems…Managing organisational unit
Department of MusicDates
11/03/2019 to 31/07/2021
Thesis supervisions
Publications
Recent publications
24/05/2023Kinbank
PLoS ONE
Kin Term Borrowings in the World’s Languages
Journal of Language Contact
Multiproxy analysis of Upper Palaeolithic lustrous gravels supports their anthropogenic use
PLoS ONE
Historical, archaeological and linguistic evidence test the phylogenetic inference of Viking-Age plant use
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Kin against kin: Internal co-selection and the coherence of kinship typologies.
Biological Theory
Teaching
I have taught across the four fields of anthropology and have previous experience teaching in psychology. At Bristol I specialise in linguistic and evolutionary anthropology and offer units and lectures which take a multidisciplinary, mixed-method approach. I frequently deliver summer schools and short courses on my specialty research methods in cultural phylogenetics.
In the last three years I have taught:
Evolution & Human Behaviour, a 2nd year unit introducing students to the study of human behaviour and culture through an evolutionary lens. I explore culture in non-human animals, the ways in which social learning and cultural transmission add a new dimension to human evolution, and how we can use phylogenies to trace human cultural ancestry. This unit is co-taught with Prof Mhairi Gibson.
Culture & Mind, a 3rd year unit exploring how culture shapes thoughts, feelings, perceptions and beliefs. We examine whether human cognitive abilities are different in kind to other species, or shared by other animals, how our enculturated minds have evolved, and how cognition might be variable across human communities.
Sociolinguistic Anthropology: Language, Culture & Society. In this 3rd-year cross-School unit, co-taught with Dr James Hawkey & Dr Damien Mooney from Modern Languages, our students explore the social meanings of language variation. We consider how language norms are constructed with respect to gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity, and how language ideologies are about speakers, not language. We also examine language diversity and endangerment, and students conduct a empirical project examining their own conversations.
