February 25 – Anthropology Colloquium – Alessandro Duranti “Creativity Under Pressure: Jazz Socialization Across Settings”

Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Dean of Social Sciences at UCLA. He is an expert on political discourse, human greetings, verbal and musical improvisation, human agency, intentionality, and intersubjectivity. He has carried out fieldwork in (Western) Samoa and the United States. His books include From Grammar to Politics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Western Samoan Village (Univ. of California Press, 1994), Linguistic Anthropology (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), and A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (Blackwell, 2004). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of various awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the UCLA Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award, and the American Anthropological Association/Mayfield Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.