Sosna, Daniel

'Workshop of the Society for Anthropological Sciences'
September 22-44, 2010, American Center, Pilsen, Czech Republic
Organizers: Daniel Sosna (University of West Bohemia), Stephen Lyon and David Henig (Durham University)

The first European workshop of the Society for Anthropological Sciences (SASci) was aimed at the promotion of rigorous approaches to the study of human sociocultural and biological variability. The primary goal of the workshop was the advancement of formal scientific approaches in anthropology. The last thirty years have witnessed the development
of a critical anthropology fostering the view that anthropology has been a literary project where rhetorical sophistication prevailed. SASci has grown out of the activities of anthropologists who prefer holistic and scientifically rigorous views of anthropology. The second goal of the workshop was to investigate the overlaps and tensions among subdisciplines
of anthropology through interdisciplinary design. The organizers assumed that the crucial predisposition for participation in the workshop was not the topic of research but the point of view. Formal approaches were applied to various anthropological topics including kinship terminologies, evolution of language and material culture, cognition and mortuary practices. The discussions demonstrated that formal methods can accommodate various kinds of anthropological data and expand to new spheres of interest.