Our Story ─ How Cultures Shaped People to Get Things Done

Our Story explores the relationship between the individual and the many cultures to which he or she belongs simultaneously?cultures that make it possible for people to act as teams with a shared moral vision of what they can and should accomplish.

W. Penn Handwerker, a professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut trained as a general anthropologist with an emphasis on the intersection of biological and cultural anthropology, has published in all five fields of anthropology (applied, archaeological, biological, cultural, and linguistic). He has done field research in West Africa, the West Indies, the Russia, and various regions of the United States. He developed new methods for studying cultures while doing research on human fertility, entrepreneurship, corruption, and both inter- and intra-generational power differences. His current research focuses on the possibility that the most effective collective action for community sustainability must be consistent with the cultural assumption that each person knows what's best for him or herself.