Recent imbs_socdyn items

BACK TO KINSHIP III: A GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Back to Kinship III is the third Special Issue of the e-journal, Structure and Dynamics sponsored by the group, Kinship Circle. Each issue is dedicated to current kinship research.There are 5 articles in this Special Issue, covering a wide range of kinship research questions and topics The first two articles, by William Young and Warren Shapiro, respectively, employ ethnographic evidence as the reason for revising previous kinship ideas. The next two articles, by Robert Parkin and Dwight Read, respectively, focus on kinship terminology and revisit theoretical issues. The last article, by Alain Matthey de l’Etang, discusses theorizing by Dwight Read challenging the “received view” of kin terms being derived through a genealogical framework and proposing, in its place, that kin terms are structurally organized through a generative logic for the terminology

RETHINKING NAVAJO SOCIAL THEORY

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hal Scheffler, in arguing that native concepts about procreation provide the basis for kin reckoning universally, presented considerable evidence for his argument, in addition to the extension rules for which he is best known, This essay applies this evidence to the Navajo materials and shows that a Schefflerian analysis is correct. By contrast, the analysis of Nava-jo kinship by Gary Witherspoon, indebted to David Schneider’s ideas, is shown to be wide of the mark. Scheffler also argued, in much the same logical vein, that gender classification around the world is bipartite, that claims of a “third sex” are without merit. The argument is applied to “third sex” claims by Wesley Thomas, which claims are shown to be baseless.

WHY CAN HUNTER-GATHERER GROUPS BE ORGANIZED SIMLARLY FOR RESOURCE PROCUREMENT, BUT THEIR KINSHIP TERMINOLOGIES ARE STRIKINGLY DISSIMILAR: A CHALLENGE FOR FUTURE CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH

Mon, 2 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Cross-cultural research involves explanatory arguments framed at the meta-level of a cohort of societies, each with its own historical development as an internally structured and organized system. Historically, cross-cultural research on hunter-gatherer groups initially was in accord with the general anthropological interest in determining the ideational basis for differences in systems of social organization, but more recent work has shifted emphasis to the phenomenal level of factors affecting the mode of adaptation to an external environment. This has left a major lacuna in our understanding of the reasons for cross-cultural differences among ideational systems such as kinship terminologies in hunter-gatherer societies. I address this lacuna in this article through cross-cultural comparison of hunter-gatherer kinship terminologies at an ideational, qualitative level. The means for so doing is first worked out using the kinship terminology of the Hadza, an East African hunter-gather...

KINSHIP AND HISTORY: TRIBES, GENEALOGIES, AND SOCIAL CHANGE AMONG THE BEDOUIN OF THE EASTERN ARAB WORLD

Sat, 30 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Most scholars of tribal organization among the Bedouin of the eastern Arab world utilize a two-dimensional, hierarchical model of Bedouin kinship that represents only relations of descent and affinity. This model resembles a genealogy and shows how small descent units are enclosed by larger ones. It implies that tribes grow in size only through biological reproduction. Such a representation of the Bedouin tribe fails to distinguish politically central lineages from politically peripheral lineages and also ignores the processes through which foreign lineages become “attached” as clients to politically powerful, central lineages. To correct and supplement this genealogical model, the author presents a concentric model of Bedouin tribes that adds a “central/peripheral” distinction. This model also includes relations of political “attachment” that can affect the internal morphology and growth of Bedouin tribes in ways that are comparable to the effects of affinal and suckling kinship...

SUBSTITUTABILITY OF KIN AND THE CROW-OMAHA PROBLEM

Thu, 28 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The reasons for the existence of Crow-Omaha terminologies have long been debated because of difficulties in associating them with specific features of social organization or practice. However, by going back to the theories of earlier authorities like Josef Kohler, Radcliffe-Brown and Lévi-Strauss and using them to interpret some key ethnographies, it is possible to suggest why they exist. That is, from ego’s perspective, the vertical equations that define Crow-Omaha terminologies unite descent lines whose members in each generation can substitute for one another in relations with ego’s descent line, as marriage and other ties between those lines work themselves out over a time scale of, very often, several decades. Ultimately this can be linked to the long claimed links between Crow-Omaha terminologies and the prohibition of certain kin types in marriage, which typically act to delay the repetition of previous marriage alliances for one or more generations. It is suggested that...

CHAPTER 8: DWIGHT READ: TOWARDS A NEW PARADIGM: FOLLOWED BY A DISCUSSION BETWEEN THE AUTHOR AND DWIGHT READ

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Here I report on Dwight Read’s theory for a paradigm change in kinship anthropology which entails kinship terminologies being interpreted as symbolic computational systems based on kin-term products. I also report on how Read argues that different conceptualizations of sibling, either sibling resulting by descent from parent, or sibling viewed in terms of shared parentage, two cultural conceptions that are rendered – here exemplifying the masculine side – by the kin-term products, S o F = B [son of father = brother] or F o B = F [father of brother = father), lead to respectively building up a descriptive or a classificatory terminology. The chapter also deals with how Dwight Read accounts for the relationship between genealogical tracing and the working out of kin terms using kin-term products and how the logic of kin-term products is consistent with the extension of kin terms to kin-type...

No Easy Talk about the Weather: Eliciting “Cultural Models of Nature” among Hai//om

Sat, 13 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Nambian Hai//om case study helps to develop a wider notion of culture as “cultivation”: Cultivation in this sense clearly not only applies to the land (things, materials) or to challenges provided by external natural changes such as climate change. Rather, cultivation – in the sense of creating, maintaining and altering cultural categories and the cultural ways of dealing with causalities – seamlessly involves social relationships and man-made conditions. The Hai//om notion of “environment” prototypically includes elements of the man-made environment and seamlessly merges with elements that in elsewhere are considered to be part of the natural environment. For Hai//om there is no reason for separating two categorical domains from the start in that they are intervowen. Cultural models not only differ in their internal categorizations but also in the way in which any cultural model can be expected to be able to structure and shape the world.

Like a Bonsai Tree: Models of Food Production and Nature in the Northern Kanto Plain of Japan

Sat, 13 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The initial phase of this project attempted to discover cultural models of nature underlying discourses of food production in central Japan. The results show a pattern calling for human intervention for successful farming. Furthermore, the need for human intervention appears to be underscored by a cultural model that raw nature must be ‘humanized’ on relational terms to be cognizant in the local context.

Fishermen’s Concepts of Environmental and Climate Change in Batangas, Philippines

Sat, 13 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This work is based on six weeks of field research at two separate field sites in Batangas, Philippines from March to April, 2014. The primary goal was to investigate cultural model(s) of nature held by full-time and subsistence fishermen in Batangas, Philippines in a very important marine ecological zone, the Verde Island Passage. Questions driving the research included (a) how do fishermen understand human relationships to various elements in the natural environment including weather, climate, fish, animals, and the supernatural, (b) how and why are the climate and natural environment changing (if they are changing) and (c) how and why is food production (fishing) changing.

People in both communities noted many changes in the natural environment and the weather. Many of these changes have had a direct and devastating impact on their livelihood as fishers and cultivators, especially for full-time fishermen who operate larger fishing vessels. While informants...

It Was like Velvet: Cultural Nature in Vinigo (Dolomites)

Sat, 13 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Analyzing the relevant issues concerning contemporary Alpine spaces, Vinigo, Italy could be considered one of such intermediate spaces. Vinigo is a mountain village with an elevation of 1,025 m situated in the Belluno province of the Veneto Region, Italy. It is one of the oldest settlements in the Ladin area in the Dolomites, which have been included in the Unesco World Heritage List in 2009. Local Cultural Models include ‘Causal Model of Nature 2’ although it is difficult to locate the place that animals have in this causal model. Not only today families no longer have active stables but our interlocutors, when asked about the activities connected to taking the animals to the higher fields in the past, focused more around moments of sociality with the elderly or with peers or around the heavy work required by collecting hay (to feed the animals once they were taken back in the village) than about narratives centered on the animals.

The Moon Makes Yams Grow: Tongans (Polynesians) and Nature

Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Local populations perceive a number of changes in their environment due to climate change and explain them using the knowledge they have and the beliefs they hold about their world; a Cultural Model (CM) of Nature. This CM is a major component of local knowledge and it plays a fundamental role in the perception and interpretation of any phenomena related to changes in the environment, including climate change. This work is about the preliminary results from the analyses conducted on data collected in the Kingdom of Tonga, Polynesia, in search of a Tongan CM of Nature. Tongan communities are deeply affected by changes in the climate such as weather unpredictability (including increasing number of typhoons and length and occurrence of dry and wet seasons), the raising level of the ocean waters, and the variability of fish supplies.

Categories and Cultural Models of Nature in Northern Punjab, Pakistan

Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The most widespread model of the natural world by Northern Punjabi farmers appears to leverage a powerful supernatural domain, which includes Allah, as a sole God, plus, various non-human spirits or jinn, who can be both benign and malicious, and a bewildering array of spiritually powerful saints, or pir-fakir, to whom individuals can pray and seek some form of intervention. These pir-fakir do not themselves perform miracles, typically, but they are beloved by Allah and are somehow in a position to sway His actions in some people’s favor. For Barlevi Sunni Muslims, this influence continues even after death, which means that the gravesite of powerful pir-fakir themselves become sites of religious worship and devotion. The remainder of the 'natural' world, including non-human animals, plants, weather and so forth, appear to be part of the benevolent offering from God. There is no evidence to suggest widespread animist models of such...

Lithuanian Farmers, Nature and the Ties that Bind

Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Three questions that should be answered in order to understand the reason for writing and the potential importance of this and other studies in this special issue of World Cultures are: What is a cultural model? Why is it important to understand farmer’s cultural models of nature? Are there cultural models of nature particular to farmers? This paper attempts answers with emphasis to view cultural model of nature in terms of a functional relationship between nature and farmer. I regard this perspective as an important one because cultural models must be used in real life and studied as such if they are supposed to be anything but butterfly collections for academic discussion. I hope to show that in using their cultural models, farmers draw upon other cultural models that exist at different levels of abstraction and as part of social identities and particular contexts.

Care for the Soil and Live Respectfully: A Cultural Model of Environmental Change in Andean Northern Ecuador

Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This paper proposes a hypothesis for a cultural model in Cotacachi, Ecuador that contains both 1) causality that occurs in nature, and 2) dimensionality of the essence of life. At the foundation of this research—of exploring humans, plants, animals, the supernatural, weather, and features of the landscape/environment—the question was: In the minds of our informants, of what does Nature’s core consist when considering the six domains we chose. In this case, preliminary results suggest that Nature can exist without cities as part of the core, and Nature can exist without the Christian God at its core. This splitting of the spirit world between Christian spirits and Mother Nature (and other spirits), as well as the splitting of humans into urbanites and rural dwellers undoubtedly creates some cognitive dissonance, and may partially be influenced by the common Christian and Western/urban dualisms. However, these differentiations between kinds of spirit worlds and kinds of human...

Introduction: Primary Food Producers, Climate Change, and Cultural Models of Nature

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Climate change is one of the most challenging issues we collectively face insofar as it threatens the survival of our species. Before long, extensive action will have to be implemented worldwide to minimize its potential and disastrous effects (such actions have already been initiated in the last two decades). The populations keenly aware of and most at risk from the effects of climate change are obviously those whose livelihood depends on daily contact with the changing physical environment. Primary food producers best represent these populations: farmers, fishermen, herders, and hunter-gatherers. Of course all humans are at risk and we will eventually be obliged to change our behavior to make our presence on the planet sustainable (see Moran, 2006, 2010). However, primary food producers’ daily and close contact with the environment makes them most directly affected by climate change. Besides, they will likely be asked to implement whatever new and/or radical remedial policies...

The Gift and the Centipede

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This paper addresses the similarity between behavioural economics and social anthropology with respect to approaches on repeated reciprocity. The case at hand is the application of the Centipede game to Marcel Mauss's concept of the Gift. In a Centipede game players interact in an alternating sequence of decisions to take or to pass an endowment. Mauss describes sequences of reciprocal giving in potlatch cultures, in which strict obligations determine choice options. The paper shows that models developed in behavioural economics, such as the Centipede game, can also be applied to prominent contexts in economic anthropology.

GLOBAL ECONOMIC DYNAMICS OF THE FORTHCOMING YEARS: A FORECAST

Sun, 1 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The paper analyzes the current state of the world economy and offers a short-term forecast of its development. Our analysis of log-periodic oscillations in the DJIA dynamics suggests that in the second half of 2017 the United States and other more developed countries could experience a new recession, due to the third phase of the global financial crisis. The economies of developing countries will continue their slowdown due to lower prices of raw commodities and the increased pressure of dollar debt load. The bottom of the slowdown in global economic growth is likely to be achieved in 2017-2018. Then we expect the start of a new acceleration of global economic growth at the upswing phase of the 6th Kondratieff cycle (2018-2050). A speedy and steady withdrawal from the third phase of the global financial crisis requires cooperative action between developed and developing countries within G20 to stimulate global demand, world trade and a fair solution of the debt problem of developing...

On Brothers and Sisters: South Asian and Japanese Idea Systems and their Consequences

Sun, 1 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The role expectations of cross siblings varies across culture. Such expectations, while not rigidly prescribing actual behaviors nevertheless influences relations between brothers and sisters in observable ways. In South Asia, a cultural rhetoric of sororal sacrifice and support coupled with fraternal protection are commonplace. While such noble sibling roles are regularly transgressed they remain powerful idioms of the relationship and transgressions require appropriate cultural justification. In contrast, Japanese rhetorical roles lack such explicit sacrifice-protection expectations between cross sibling interactions and instead include more competitive and conflictual idealized models of cross sibling behaviors. Looking at narrative accounts of cross siblings in ancient texts in South Asia and Japan as well as contemporary rituals and observed sibling interactions, this paper argues that the cross sibling relationship must be understood as part of an assemblage of cultural...

Group marriage: Morgan was not wrong

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It is argued that the commonly asserted non-existence of group marriage arises solely from an abandonment of Morgan’s (1877) definition of marriage and that the commonly accepted alternative to that definition lacks ethnographic generality. As defined by Morgan group marriage has been practiced by over one-third of the hunter-gatherers listed in Murdock (1971).

The Study of Kinship Systems and Terminologies in Russia and the Soviet Union

Mon, 5 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The paper traces the origin of kinship studies as a subdiscipline of ethnography in Russia and the former Soviet Union. It identifies three long-term trends in the study of kinship (typological, ethnosociological and ethnocultural) in the region and highlights the importance of evolutionary thinking and the conceptual distinction between content and manifestation in the study of kin terminological systems. It presents several illustrative studies that demonstrate how Russian and Soviet scholars have tackled these trends and conceptual principles in practice.

The Nexus Between Kinship and Ritual

Mon, 5 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Not only ritual, but also kinship, can be understood as self-generative and in fact mutually self-generative social phenomena. They are in this sense foils for each other’s production of social values, transformations, causes, and effects. Because this model of cultural agency is nonlinear rather than linear, it works on the transformation of social wholes rather than categorical divisions, and thus can be applied to medieval as well as contemporary socio-ritual contingencies.

KV(Ŋ)KV -Kinship Terms in the Australian Aboriginal Languages:First Part:Kaka 'Mother's Brother'

Mon, 5 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Here, I report the pervasive distribution in numerous Aboriginal language groups all over Australia, of kinship terms with similar phonetic shapes and meanings, such as kaka MB, FZH, EF. It is argued that this distribution is consistent with the antiquity of this term in the language families in which it is found. Further, its pervasive presence in non-Pama-Nyungan (non-PNy) as well as in Pama-Nyungan (PNy) languages, is consistent with inheritance from a higher taxonomic level, possibly Proto-Australian, and beyond, and even possibly from the proto-language spoken by the first modern men who colonized Sahul, while the grounded idea of a primordial Kariera-like at the start of higher nodes in the Australian language phylum is consistent with the claim that the Proto-Australian kinship system was Kariera-like.

New Simulation Techniques in Kinship Network Analysis

Mon, 5 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to new conceptual and computational tools, the analysis of kinship and marriage networks has advanced considerably over the past twenty-five years. While in the past, the discussion of empirical marriage practices was often restricted to a casual observation of salient network features, it is now easy to produce a complete census of matrimonial circuits, both between individuals and between groups. However, the abundance of structural features which have thus become accessible raises a new question: to what extent can they be taken as indicators of sociological phenomena (such as marriage preferences or avoidances), rather than as effects of chance or of observer bias?

This paper presents a series of recently developed simulation techniques that deal with this issue. Starting from a new approach to “classical” agent-based modeling of kinship and alliance (group) networks (Section 2), we then present an automatic model discovery technique which,...

The Evolutionary Origins of Kinship Structures

Mon, 5 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Patrilineal kinship structures are among the most complex manifestations of the impact of kinship on human social life. Despite the fact that such structures take highly diverse forms across cultures, that they are absent in many human societies and, moreover, that they are not observed in other primate species, a comparative analysis of human and nonhuman primate societies reveals that human kinship structures have deep evolutionary roots and clear biological underpinnings. I argue here that the first patrilineal kinship structures came into being as the emergent products of the combination, in the course of human evolution, of ten biologically grounded components, seven of which are observed in our closest relative, the chimpanzee, the remaining three being consequences of the evolution of pair-bonding in humans. This indicates that contemporary patrilineal kinship structures are not cultural creations, but cultural constructs that built upon, and diversified from...

Why Marriage?

Mon, 5 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Marriage is not founded straightforwardly upon procreation. Rather, marriage is universally — not withstanding groups such as the Mosuo of China lacking institutionalized marriage — a contractua l relationship legitimating a woman’s childbearing and giving her offspring social identity. While a child-bearing woman may simply take on the motherhood role, the same is not true for fatherhood. Rather, marriage defines a male conceptually as father for social purposes, regardless of his biological status. From a conceptual perspective, this, in conjunction with the introduction during hominin evolution of the cognitive ability to recognize a relation of a relation as a relation, enabled the formation, by our ancestors, of genealogical tracing as a recursive process connecting pairs of individuals through parent/child links. But genealogical tracing becomes problematic, both with regard to accurate transmission of genealogical...

Ties That Bind:Marital Networks and Politics in Punjab, Pakistan

Mon, 5 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Pakistani politics are characterised by strong corporate social links through kinship and caste that impose reciprocal obligations and rights. Marital maps enable allow for accurate prediction of allegiances and decision making and contribute to a transparent assessment of political processes in the country. While much of the focus on reciprocal relations has understandably been on descent relations (dynasties), the complex network of marital alliances that cut across lineage and sectarian divides helps explain notable levels of stability despite the fragility of the state and other public institutions. Using the example of one of the most successful political dynasties in post independence Pakistan, we show the extent of cross lineage, region and even party alliances that shape this political kinship network.

Beyond Fitness and Nurture: The Kinship Paradox

Mon, 5 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This paper builds on earlier analyses of primary data on kinship in Qatar. Its conceptualization centers kinship as a highly structured universal human phenomenon in the study of humankind. As lived practices, kinship forms a bounded, identifiable domain that is distinguishable from other societal relations. Going beyond reducing kinship to fitness (biology) or nurture (culture study), analysis of primary ethnographic data gathered as part of a grant-funded field research project on kinship practices in Qatar, including suckling practices along with kinship by birth and by marriage, is presented to demonstrate how complex anomalies emerging at the level of kinship experience reveal in analysis properties of kinship as a transformational triadic structure, here proposed as a universal feature of kinship and a dynamic aspect of its structure.

Back to Kinship II: A General Introduction

Mon, 5 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The two failed orientations to kinship, nurture and fitness, are transcended as this collection of original kinship work moves forward, building on the rich theoretical and ethnographic past of kinship study to a reinvigorated future of new data, reconceptualization of paradigms, fresh debates and new theory. Using kinship to anthropomorphize nonhuman primates is rejected. Contributions from 18 distinguished scholars of kinship cover the four-field, cross-cultural science of anthropology. Issues in kinship study are explored through marriage, kin terms, space, incorporation, ritual, primate studies, and contributions from Russia. This collection carries kinship study into the future.

Ethnological Problems and the Production of Archaeological Kinship Research

Mon, 5 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Ethnology traditionally guides most research on kinship practices. However, diachronic hypotheses are inadequately tested when using synchronic and normative information from limited periods of ethnological observations. Archaeological kinship analysis on residence, descent, and marriage, using middle-range factual correspondences between social practice and material remains, enable plausible inferences on variation and change in kinship practices over long periods of time. Therefore, archaeology is ideal for independently evaluating diachronic hypotheses. Taíno, Maya, and Hohokam case studies are presented and the results obtained from archaeological kinship analyses are summarized. These analyses show that variation and change are prevalent, thereby defying normative characterizations. Several long-standing functionalist hypotheses on the emergence of residence and descent practices are evaluated, and several of these find little support from long-term diachronic archaeological...

Dualism and Pluralism in Pueblo Kinship and Ritual Systems

Mon, 5 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

How do kinship and ritual systems articulate with patterns of social organization? Among the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona, social organization has been described as conforming to two opposing patterns. Among the Eastern Pueblos of the Rio Grande, especially the Tanoan-speaking towns north of Santa Fe, kinship is held to play a structurally insignificant role; social organization there, rather, pivots on ritual sodalities.” In the Western Pueblos (especially Hopi and Zuni), named matrilineal descent groups (“clans” and lineages), associated with Crow kinship terminology, are treated as the main articulating features of the social system. How is it that notwithstanding major cultural similarities in other respects, the Pueblos came to exhibit such different structuring principles for social life? This paper argues for greater similarities in the kinship and ritual systems of Eastern and Western Pueblos than has previously been ascribed to them, and suggests that dual...

Why Schneiderian Kinship Studies Have It All Wrong

Mon, 5 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Followers of David Schneider regularly claim that kinship in one or another community is not based upon native procreative notions. This claim has been shown to be wrong in several cases. But early childhood adoption might be thought to pose a special challenge to these correctives, because, unlike kinship notions established later in life, it draws upon the decided tendency of the very young to attach themselves to adult caretakers regardless of the presence or absence of a procreative connexion. Analysis of three well-known ethnographic cases suggests, however, that even here native ideas concerning procreation are semantically primary.

Frames of Reference and Kinship Terminology Systems

Mon, 5 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The content of the spatial relationships module has been extensively studied and a fundamental part of such content is the concept of frame of reference; that is, a set of coordinates that generates an oriented space within which relationships between objects are established. There are three major types (and six subtypes) of frames of reference: the relative, the intrinsic, and the absolute. The content of the spatial relationships module has been proposed as being foundational to the development of both language and cognition. In this work I explore the possibility that the various types of frame of reference participate in the construction of the basic patterns of the kinship terminology systems: descriptive-Sudanese, bifurcate merging-Iroquois (also Crow and Omaha), classificatory and/or generational-Hawaiian (also classificatory-Dravidian), and lineal-Eskimo.

Darkness in Academia: Cultural Models of How Anthropologists and Journalists Write About Controversy

Sun, 31 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000
The aim of this paper is to systematically explore a large collection of documents pertaining to the allegations made in Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (2002) for lexical patterns that indicate how key terms were used to analyze and report the allegations, thus forming cultural models of the Darkness in El Dorado controversy. The purpose of this paper is not an analysis of the validity of the allegations in Tierney’s book or to take sides with any of the stakeholders in the controversy. Rather, by conducting a systematic analysis of terms used to write about the controversy, the variation in the cultural models of various actors (e.g., journalists and anthropologists) is described and compared.

CONCEPTUALIZING ‘FRONT’ AND ‘BACK’: FRAMES OF REFERENCE AND TAUMAKO REPRESENTATIONS OF SPACE

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The study of navigation involves questions about the conceptualization of space and ways in which people share their spatial understandings with others. This article focuses on one aspect of spatial cognition, a phenomenon commonly known as “frames of reference” (FoRs). It explores the myriad ways in which Taumako islanders in the southeastern Solomons talk about spatial relations that English speakers term ‘front’ and ‘back.’ I examine how Taumako notions of ‘front’ and ‘back’ articulate with FoRs that are well established in the anthropological literature, and I explore the challenge of applying commonly-accepted FoR typologies to actual Taumako usage. In some contexts, there was little disagreement among my interlocutors as to proper use of the salient terms. In others, there was considerable divergence; and in certain instances even the same person appeared to be inconsistent from one occasion to the next. I will attempt to identify those areas in which I found widespread...

CONCLUSIONS: A CROSS-DISCIPLINARY JOURNEY THROUGH SPATIAL ORIENTATION

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Multiple disciplines offer diverse intellectual tool-kits that can be brought to bear on studies in any one. In this concluding article, I use elements of physics and cognitive psychology to analyze the material reported in this collection. In the case of the articles on navigation at sea (Genz, Feinberg and Pyrek), the physics of ocean waves, climate, and the motion of stars can illuminate the reports of interlocutors. The sensitivity of long wavelength swells to the presence of land seems widespread and is in accordance with known wave behavior and reports. In addition, wave phenomena may be related to local bathymetry and point to further lines of inquiry. Likewise, wind-compass and star directions can be directly compared with climate data and known star motions. The four articles on language and spatial orientation predominantly on land (Montague, Feinberg, Schneider and Van Der Ryn), are examined via the question: Does social cognition follow spatial cognition? As has...

SPACE AND PERSON IN THE TROBRIANDS: THE SELF AS LIVING AND DEAD

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The Trobriand language contains two spatial markers, o and wa, which designate types of space, space of the living and space of the dead. All geographic space in the Trobriand world is assigned into one or the other of these two categories. This essay delves into the hows and whys of this and illustrates why such a seemingly simple topic as space has proven to be so ethnographically and linguistically challenging

RESOLVING AMBIVALENCE IN MARSHALLESE NAVIGATION:RELEARNING, REINTERPRETING, AND REVIVING THE “STICK CHART” WAVE MODELS

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Marshallese wave navigation remains one of the least understood systems of traditional spatial orientation in Oceania. A sharp decline in voyaging during the historic era and continuing reluctance to share the surviving family-based knowledge of the waves has led to ambiguous and sometimes contradictory interpretations, encompassing both local and anthropological ambivalence. In this article, I examine the navigational concepts of two acknowledged experts from different navigation schools in the Marshall Islands who modeled their ideas of the dynamic flow of ocean waves in wooden instructional devices, commonly referred to as “stick charts.” Of central importance is how a navigator worked toward resolving his ambivalence of these concepts by relearning, reinterpreting, and reviving the stick chart wave models. Theoretically, the selectivity of abstract models during practical engagement in the oceanic environment adds to an already powerful dynamic in the complementarity of...

WHICH WAY IS FRONT?: SPATIAL ORIENTATION COMPLICATIONS IN CONTEMPORARY SAMOAN VILLAGES

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Drawing on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in Samoan villages examining Samoan village architecture and spatial uses, I illuminate the culturalization of space in Samoan villages in terms of the front–back axis, deemed a key orientation in contemporary Samoan social life. The Samoan term for space is vā, defined as the interval or “between-ness” of entities in physical, social, spiritual, ideational and temporal landscapes. I highlight how perceptions of, and actions on, the vā in Samoa are the modus operandi by which relationships, boundaries and balances in Samoa are negotiated and determined, and how the front-back axis informs binary, mutually complementary and inter-dependent sets of socio-spatial relationships in that system. Central to understanding vā and the front–back axis is its Samoan articulation at different scales—from the architecture of the individual house, to household and whole layouts. This article builds on previous theoretical and ethnographic literature...

THE VAEAKAU-TAUMAKO WIND COMPASS AS PART OF A “NAVIGATIONAL TOOLKIT”

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Different voyaging communities in the Pacific use a variety of non-instrument navigational techniques for way-finding across long distances. The use of a star compass has been well documented for several groups. Wind compasses are less well documented and appear to be less utilized throughout the region. This article seeks to understand the Vaeakau-Taumako wind compass as it compares to other wind compasses, as well as how wind and star compasses and other navigational techniques compare to each other as cognitive frameworks for navigation.

ABOVE AND BELOW AMONG MAINLANDERS AND SALTWATER PEOPLE IN BUKA, BOUGAINVILLE

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This article draws on ethnographic field research in Buka, Bougainville, in order to address the question of multiple models in spatial orientation and the factors that constrain their relative salience. With respect to different Polynesian settings (Tonga and Samoa), Bradd Shore has suggested that a preference for allocentric models may be linked to pronounced social hierarchies. However, findings from other settings (Taumako) indicate that matters may be more complicated. Within the Buka area, I suggest that the relative salience of allocentric and egocentric radiality is connected to people’s relative position in local hierarchies. “Mainlanders,” who are located “above” in terms of local social hierarchies, rely more strongly on allocentric models, compared to “saltwater people” who are located further “below” and prefer to use egocentric models. I link this finding to the contrast between “mainland” and “saltwater” subsistence activities and show how “mainlanders” adopt...

Introduction: Navigating Spatial Relationships in Oceania

Wed, 20 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Recent decades have seen a revival of interest in traditional voyaging equipment and techniques among Pacific Islanders. At key points, the Oceanic voyaging revival came together with anthropological interests in cognition. This special issue explores that intersection as it is expressed in cognitive models of space, both at sea and on land. These include techniques for “wave piloting” in the Marshall Islands, wind compasses and their utilization as part of an inclusive navigational tool kit in the Vaeakau-Taumako region of the Solomon Islands; notions of ‘front’ and ‘back’ on Taumako and in Samoa, ideas of ‘above’ and ‘below’ in the Bougainville region of Papua New Guinea, spaces associated with the living and the dead in the Trobriand Islands, and the understanding of navigation in terms of neuroscience and physics.

Methodological Individualism and Generosity

Sun, 20 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Today a convergence between the fields of anthropology and economics has re-emerged after decades during which the dictates of methodological individualism, as strikingly elucidated by Kenneth Arrow, had seriously limited and hampered effective scholarship in studies of economic and social development in developing countries. A new generation of development economists represented by Spolaori and Wacziarg (2013) and (Spolaori 2016) has reopened the possibility of fruitful cross-disciplinary interaction, enabling economists and anthropologists to investigate those many social structures wherein resources are jointly held and wherein social goals are the product of interests held by groups, rather than exclusively by pairs of individuals stripped of a context of ethics.
The continually expanding data of Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (Murdock and White 1969) provide a wide range of variables that make it possible to test theories regarding development and causality in human...

Making Sense of Male-Female & Husband-Wife Equalities & Inequalities

Sun, 8 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000
The three sections of this article illustrate why cross-cultural research has not worked for some key social science questions and has worked for others. The three sections involve interpretation of causality from correlations, causality not based on correlations, and maps pertinent to understanding aspects of male-female and husband-wife equalities and inequalities.

Evaluating Settlement Structures in the Ancient Near East using Spatial Interaction Entropy Maximization

Fri, 24 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000
We explore settlement structures and hierarchy found in different archaeological periods in northern, specifically the Khabur Triangle (KT), and southern Mesopotamia (SM) using a spatial interaction entropy maximization (SIEM) modeling and simulation method. Regional settlement patterns are investigated in order to understand what feedback levels for settlement benefits, or incentives, and abilities to move or disperse between sites in a landscape and period could have enabled observed settlement structures to emerge or be maintained. Archaeological and historical data are then used to interpret the best results. We suggest that in the Late Chalcolithic (LC) and first half of the Early Bronze Age (EBA), the KT and SM appear to have comparable urban patterns and development, where settlement advantage feedbacks and movement are similarly shaping the two regions for those periods. Within period variations, such as restrictions to population diffusion or movement in the EBA, are...

Monogamy

Fri, 26 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract
Monogamy is ethnographically peculiar as an ethical ideal and emerged in the Early Middle Ages as a form of sexual repression imposed by the Church and employed by secular authorities to decompose powerful elite lineages. In its continued modern form, the independent and isolated monogamous household has been advanced as socially optimal by economists and as essential to civilization by anthropologists. Although marriage, as a rightful claim on the sexuality of a woman, is a nearly universal institution, recent legislation and judicial opinion in both Europe and the United States have abrogated this basic marital right with the new crime of “marital rape”, thereby undermining the essential and defining characteristic of marriage. It is argued herein that these changes reflect the loss of relevance and significance of the domestic household to contemporary systems of capital accumulation; and it is in this new context that same-sex...

Persistent Cultures: Miskitu Kinship Terminological Fluidity

Sat, 2 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Kinship is understood dynamically and processually but kinship terminologies are remarkably stable idea systems. They provide cultural continuity over time and are more resistant to modification than many types of cultural instantiations. Miskitu speakers in Nicaragua, however, have adopted new kin terms that appear to have fundamentally changed the idea system used to generate their kin terms historically. The shape of the changes that have occurred in Miskitu kin terminologies over time are the result of powerful economic, political and social forces introduced, in part, as a consequence of the geography of Mosquito Coast economies, migrations and political processes. We argue that the current use of kin terms is atypically hybrid and is not the result of a single, algebraically derivable idea system. Rather than negating the validity of mathematical approaches to kinship terminologies, the case of Miskitu kinship terminology suggests that core idea systems, although subject...

Asymmetry in In-Degree and Out-Degree Distributions of Large-Scale Industrial Networks

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Many natural, physical and social networks commonly exhibit power-law degree distributions. In this paper, we discover previously unreported asymmetrical patterns in the degree distributions of incoming and outgoing links in the investigation of large-scale industrial networks, and provide interpretations. In industrial networks, nodes are firms and links are directed supplier-customer relationships. While both in- and out-degree distributions have “power law” regimes, out-degree distribution decays faster than in-degree distribution and crosses it at a consistent nodal degree. It implies that, as link degree increases, the constraints to the capacity for designing, producing and transmitting artifacts out to others grow faster than and surpasses those for acquiring, absorbing and synthesizing artifacts provided from others. We further discover that this asymmetry in decaying rates of in-degree and out-degree distributions is smaller in networks that process and transmit more...

On the emergence of large-scale human social integration and its antecedents in primates

Sun, 21 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One of the universal features of human sociality is the fact that our social networks are highly integrated – human societies exhibit several nested social layers including families, bands and communities. Several factors have been identified as creating disincentives for hostile intergroup relations, including economic interdependence (trade), intermarriage (exogamy), cooperative defence against external adversaries (warfare), and lack of patrilocal residential groups (absence of patrilocality with external war). We provide a preliminary test of hypotheses relating to the correlates of amicable relations between communities (i.e. absence of internal war) using the standard cross-cultural sample (SCCS) database. Intermarriage did not have any explanatory power, there is a nearly significant effect of trade on the establishment of intergroup tolerance, and the evidential basis for cooperative defence and patrilocal residence are strong when combed into a multiplicative effect....

COMBINING DIVERSE DATA SOURCES FOR CEDSS, AN AGENT-BASED MODEL OF DOMESTIC ENERGY DEMAND

Wed, 1 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000
CEDSS (Community Energy Demand Social Simulator) is an empirical agent-based model designed and built as part of a multi-method social science project investigating the determinants of domestic energy demand. Ideally, empirical modellers, within and beyond social simulation, would prefer to work from an integrated dataset, gathered for the purposes of developing the model. In practice, many have to work with less than ideal data, often including processed data from multiple sources external to the project. Moreover, what data will be required may not be clear at the start of the project. This paper describes the approach to dealing with these factors taken in developing CEDSS, and presents the completed model together with an outline of the calibration and validation procedure used. The discussion section draws together the most distinctive features of empirical data collection, processing and use for and in CEDSS, and argues that the approach taken is sufficiently...

Reconceptualizing the Dynamics of Religion as a Macro-Institutional Domain

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000
Macro-institutional analysis was once central to sociological inquiry, such that Durkheim saw it as synonymous with sociology. With the failure of Parsonsian grand macro theory, sociology shifted its lens to the organization, or meso-level of analysis. While producing key insights into the dynamics of corporate units, the macro-environment has become ambiguously theorized. In the paper below, the emergent properties and dynamics of the religious institution—an important sphere of human action central to classical sociology and currently a vibrant subfield—are elucidated. It is argued an analysis at the macro-institution can produce a more robust understanding of social organization and action, which supplements the important meso-level models by more precisely defining and delineating the contours of the macro-level. The paper below achieves this goal by (a) explicating the generic qualities of all religious institutions and (b) positing the key intra- and inter-institutional...

Cross Cultural Comparison of Attitides towards Aging and Physical Activity

Mon, 26 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000
An online cross-sectional survey was used to examine 475 adults (239 men and 236 women) on physical activity level, barriers to physical activity participation, and attitudes towards personal aging. Participants were grouped, by citizenship and residence, as Indians in India, Indians in the United States, or Americans in the United States. Cross-cultural differences were observed on self-rated general health, occurrence of preventive examinations, and several barriers to physical activity. Physical activity level was positively correlated with self-rated general health, and with optimism regarding aging, suggesting that enhanced physical activity may hold the key to a higher evaluation of personal health, and more positive expectations of aging.

A measure of technological level for the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000
Technology differs from other features of culture in that the Boasian stance of cultural relativism seems less binding: one can argue that the technology of one society is superior or inferior to the technology of another. This comparison is possible because technological change—as described by S.C. Gilfillan, Clarence Ayres, and Jane Jacobs—operates through the process of combining existing elements of technology to create new elements. Technology is therefore cumulative, so that a more advanced technology contains more elements than a less advanced. We exploit this cumulative nature of technology to create a measure of technological level for the 186 ethnographically known societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample.

Pastoralist Mobility and Social Controls In Inner Asia: Experiments Using Agent-Based Modeling

Fri, 26 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Archaeological, historical, and ethnographic sources on the pastoralism of Inner Asia provide evidence for a resilient, but highly volatile steppe adaptation that developed several thousand years ago. This study explores some fundamental aspects of pastoralist settlement and social systems as they developed following the Bronze Age. The analysis uses the agent-based computational model, HouseholdsWorld, to simulate aspects of mobility, population density, kinship structures, and herd dynamics relating to emerging social territories and the implications for sustainable landscape use. Comparisons with archaeological data show the potential impacts of social controls on habitation distributions and mobility. When overarching social controls were in place distinctive territorial differences emerged. When social controls were less centralized individual households became wealthier. In regions with dense populations, expanding the scope of landscape knowledge allowed micro-mobility...

The validity of partition as a solution to ethnic conflict

Thu, 9 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the effectiveness of partition in ceasing violence during ethnic conflict. Wigmore-Shepherd’s 2012 study argued that ethnic conflict is often due to the congruence between ethnic and political identity, allowing political conflicts to become ‘ethnicised’ and ethnic conflict to eclipse the original political dispute. Therefore this paper hypothesises that ethnic homogenisation via partition can allow the original political conflict to re-emerge in a potentially violent manner. The hypothesis is tested by an agent based model adapted from the model used in the 2012 study. The model finds that in the instances where there is not a perfect congruence between ethnic and political identity, politically motivated violence does persist in the ethnic enclaves. It was found that a lower level of congruence would result in a higher level of post-partition violence. Furthermore the act of migration itself can encourage spikes of ethnically...

Transformationality and Dynamicality of Kinship Structure

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Building on data systematically gathered during a field study in Qatar, it is found that kinship structure is characterized by a property combining transformationality and dynamicality, certainly in Qatari kinship, and proposed here as a feature of the universal human phenomenon of kinship.

Talk Is Not Cheap: Kinship Terminologies and the Origins of Language

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Kinship terminology is a human universal, a kind of cultural knowledge circulated through language. In this paper I explore the possibility that the need for social rules prompted the development of fully syntactic language via kinship terminologies. In other words, kinship terms are at the core of modern language. They require uniquely human cognitive features such as symbolic reference and recursiveness, which in turn require a cognitive capacity beyond that of non-human primates. The conceptualization of kinship types was crucial in the transition from non-human primate to human social organization and the ‘invention’ of kinship terms facilitated this transition. The heuristics used in kin classification could have provided the decisive cognitive leap that introduced the essential tools for organizing and expanding social relationships and increasing the chances for survival. Thus kinship terms could have been the original nucleus of human language.

We, the Taumako: Kinship Among Polynesians in the Santa Cruz Islands

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Raymond Firth’s We, The Tikopia, first published in 1936, still sets the standard for detailed, nuanced, sensitive ethnography. As Malinowski’s student, Firth—who died in 2002 at the age of 100—was a hard-headed functionalist, whose forte was careful examination of cultural “institutions” and their effects on individuals as well as on other institutions. Suspicious of abstruse theoretical pronouncements, he presented his analyses in plain language and always situated them in relation to the “imponderabilia” of real people’s everyday lives. We, The Tikopia has been a foundational text for generations of anthropologists, and it helped to guide my research on three Polynesian outliers over the past four decades. Since the time of Firth’s initial fieldwork, conditions in the region have changed drastically, as even the most remote communities have become enmeshed in the world market economy. In 2007-08, I studied a revival of indigenous voyaging techniques on Taumako, a Polynesian...

Implicit Formality: Keesing’s Challenge and Its Significance for European Kinship

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

During the 1960s and 1970s, students of kinship became increasingly uneasy about the gap between formal terminology-and-genealogy-based models and data on actual behaviour. This gap–sometimes described as the problem of relating ‘prescriptive’ and ‘statistical’ models–was an important factor in Schneider’s rejection of the structural and cognitive traditions, and their subsequent near abandonment by Anglo-American anthropology. However, these developments did not resolve the problem so much as simply refuse to address it. The need for a better understanding of the relation between terminology and behaviour is still there, nowhere more so than in Europe, where quantitative historians and sociologists have revealed major macro-regional differences in kinship practices, which are associated with distinct patterns of kinship terminology.

This is where Keesing comes in. In his contribution to a 1972 volume celebrating the centenary of Morgan’s “Systems”, he, too criticized...

Back to Kinship: A General Introduction

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In this collection, we retrace some of the historical development of the anthropological study of kinship and go back to the concepts and ideas that we, as anthropologists, had previously been circulating about kinship knowledge. We address issues that have been raised about the study of kinship, the place of kinship in anthropological knowledge and what constitutes kinship on the basis of local knowledge.

The Place of Kinship in the Social System: A Formal-and-Functional Consideration With an Appendix on Descent and Alliance

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This papers examines the recent controversy as to whether there is any universally defined domain of kinship in sociocultural systems from the point of view of the philosophy of science, in particular, the classical positivism (e.g., of Radcliffe-Brown and of Murdock) that I show to have motivated the question. It also examines the American version of the controversy, as with Schneider, and shows that, again, the question arises because of essentially the radical empiricism of cultural particularism and its methodological focus. It then proceeds to evaluate the question from a cognitive-cum-formalist perspective, and goes on the argue that Lounsbury’s approach is not only also positivist-behaviorist in its foundations but also unwilling or unable to consider kinship as a domain having regard to its function within the whole social system and therewith in fact inadequately formalist, having regard to genealogical organization. I proceed to take especial not of the fact that,...

The Descent of Morgan in Australia: Kinship Representation from the Australian Colonies

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Morgan had two extraordinary disciples in Lorimer Fison and Alfred Howitt in Australia. They were inspired by Morgan’s kinship schedule and were profoundly engaged in the method and theory of the collection of kinship data and its interpretation. Fison began using the schedule in Fiji in 1869. Soon after his first contact with Howitt, in 1873, they changed the method of collection of kinship terminologies. This paper traces the shift from tabulated kinship lists to family trees and the use of sticks to represent relationships (nearly twenty years before Rivers’ celebrated ‘genealogical method’), as well as efforts to find new means of representing kinship through experimentation with ‘ graphic formulae’ inspired by chemical equations. These innovations first occurred through the gathering of kinship data about the Kŭnai of Gippsland, Victoria, and crucially involved close collaboration between Howitt and his Kŭnai consultant Tulaba. What was revealed in this process was...

From Consanguinity to Consubstantiality: Julian Pitt-Rivers’ ‘The Kith and the Kin’

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In 1973, Julian Pitt-Rivers published a chapter in Goody’s The Character of Kinship that, although rather infrequently used and quoted, suggested a work-around to the major criticisms that were expressed towards kinship studies in the 1970s. Reintroducing the notion of “consubstantiality”, Pitt-Rivers suggested a bringing together of emic and etic approaches to kinship classification and ontology. As straightforward as it may appear, the concept, when combined with Burke’s use of the notion in relation to that of “context”, crystallizes a methodology for embedding structural and formal approaches of kinship within the social domains of relatedness and action. While discussing Pitt-Rivers’ proposition, this paper illustrates the application of consubstantiality as an explanatory model of the extension of self in the Australian Western Desert through two examples: the diversity of marriage scenarios and their consequences and the “unusual” usage of some terminological classes...

The Legacy of Radcliffe-Brown's Typology of Australian Aboriginal Kinship Systems

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I review A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s approach to the classification of Australian Aboriginal kinship terminologies and marriage systems, including revisions by A. P. Elkin. I contrast Radcliffe-Brown’s approach to typology with those of Lévi-Strauss and Scheffler, and I trace the way in which certain of Radcliffe-Brown’s categories have become standardised in the anthropological literature. Following a discussion of approaches to classification, I propose a new classification of Australian systems and examine the frequency and spatial distribution of the proposed types.

The House That Morgan Built

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

L.H. Morgan’s kinship work began and ended with the Iroquois longhouse, and the Iroquois kinship system that it shaped and by which it was shaped. Kinship became a house for anthropology, shaping and being shaped by the emerging discipline. Much of the house that Morgan built for anthropology still stands, including the last book, on houses and house-life, which seems to anticipate the current literature on houses and house-societies.

The Recognition of Kinship Terminologies As Formal Systems

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We now know what kinship terminologies are and what their function is in kinship systems, even though this knowledge is not yet widespread. Every social system consists of a set of organizations built up interactively by the use of specific idea systems: governmental systems are systems of organizations built up by the use of governmental ideas, military systems by the use of military ideas, economic systems by the use of economic ideas, and so on, including kinship systems by the use of kinship ideas. These social idea systems are not preeminently nomenclatures per se, but are associated with distinctive nomenclatures, just in the way that geometry is not a nomenclature but is associated with a nomenclature. For kinship, the core of the nomenclature has mainly been encountered and studied under the heading of “kinship terminologies.” The ideas associated with them are the ideas that make up their definitions. These are highly systematic and form powerfully generative ...

A New Approach to Forming a Typology of Kinship Terminology Systems: From Morgan and Murdock to the Present

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This paper addresses typological relationships among kinship terminologies determined from structural differences in the way kin terms are organized as systems of concepts. Viewing a terminology as a system of concepts makes evident the generative logic of a terminology that starts with properties shared across several terminologies and eventually includes properties specific to a single terminology. These structural properties lead to a typology in which structural differences between terminologies form the branch points. The typology highlights two primary dimensions along which terminologies may be distinguished: (1) structural differences between terminologies and (2) variation in the morphology of the lexemic form of kin terms. Variation in the former relates to change constrained in the cultural domain and change in the latter relates to change constrained in the linguistic domain.

Sleep and risk-taking propensity in life history and evolutionary perspectives

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Tradeoffs between time allocated to sleeping versus waking result from variations in local ecologies and should correlate to alterations in behavioral life history strategies. It was predicted that firefighters who sleep less, with lower overall sleep quality, would exhibit greater motivation for risk-taking, an important component of fast life histories. Firefighters completed evolutionarily relevant questionnaires on five domains of risk-taking propensity that were correlated to sleep quantity and quality variables. Multiple linear regression analysis indicated that self-reported measures of sleep quantity, sleep latency, and psychological and physical sleep quality were occasionally and variably related to within-group competition, between-group competition, reproduction, environmental challenge, and mating and resource allocation for mate attraction risk domains in predicted directions.

The Standard Sample: Introduction

Wed, 2 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This article introduces the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample.

STDS00.COD

Wed, 2 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000
This is the Annotated Cumulative Codebook: Standard Cross-Cultural Sample.

VOLUME1#1: 2013 INTRODUCTION

Wed, 2 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000
This article discusses the web version of the first issue of World Cultures.

Robust Intelligence (RI) under uncertainty: Mathematical foundations of autonomous hybrid (human-machine-robot) teams, organizations and systems

Tue, 1 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

To develop a theory of Robust Intelligence (RI), we continue to advance our theory of interdependence on the efficient and effective control of systems of autonomous hybrid teams composed of robots, machines and humans working interchangeably. As is the case with humans, we believe that RI is less likely to be achieved by individual computational agents; instead, we propose that a better path to RI is with interdependent agents. However, unlike conventional computational models where agents act independently of neighbors, where, for example, a predator mathematically consumes its prey or not as a function of a random interaction process, dynamic interdependence means that agents dynamically respond to the bi-directional signals of actual or potential presence of other agents (e.g., in states poised to fight or flight), a significant increase over conventional modeling complexity. That this problem is unsolved, mathematically and conceptually, precludes hybrid teams from processing...

The Interplay of Multiple Identities of Individuals Across Multiple Domains

Tue, 1 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The current study explores multiple identities of individuals, particularly youth, and the importance as well as interrelations of those identities in particular social domains in Sri Lankan society. Participants consisted of 96 Sri Lankans live in Sri Lanka. Participants completed seven self-statements (who am I), and closed ended questions, regarding five major identities: nationality, religion, ethnicity, caste, and occupation (university student). Explanations of the self-statements, analyzed by using a fourfold coding scheme, indicated that university student status is the most common social attribute among other social attributes in self-interpretations of individuals. Religion and nationality were second and third most common social attributes whereas caste was the least common. This is consistent with results of the importance of social identities. The importance of each social identity was different when it associated with different social domains, depending on how...

Instrument selection for a study of sub cultural differences in Peru

Tue, 1 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The interest and appreciation of the differences in cultural values between sub groups within countries is becoming relevant for Latin America due to rising urbanization, social tension and the effects of foreign investments and industrialization. However, few studies have sought to differentiate sub cultural values within Latin American countries, with industry and business academia largely relying on studies that use national measures based on mean scores. This paper, through reviewing the extant cross cultural business literature and Peru’s social history, determines the factors necessary for high quality cross cultural research and the issues will be required to be addressed when selecting or developing a suitable research instrument for sub-cultural studies within a nation state. These issues include defining the sub cultures, instrument sensitivity within a national cultural emic, responsiveness to subject’s response styles and an ability to measure the dimensional constructs...

STDS08.COD: Climate Data from Weather Stations

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This file describes codes for variables v179-v199 of the SCCS data set. They are from previously unpublished codes done by John W. M. Whiting, originally referenced in "Winter temperature as a constraint to the migration of preindustrial peoples" Whiting et al. American Anthropologist 84:279-298 (1982). The weather data are cited as coming from Walter, H., and H. Leith (1964) Klimadiagramm-Weltatlas, Jena: Gustav Fischer.

STDS07.COD: Sexual Attitudes and Practices

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This file describes codes for variables v159-v178 of the SCCS data set. These codes are from Gwen Broude and Sarah J. Greene. 1976. Cross-Cultural Codes on Twenty Sexual Attitudes and Practices. Ethnology 15:409-429.

STDS06.COD: Cultural Complexity

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This file describes codes for variables v149-v158 of the SCCS data set. These codes are from George P. Murdock and Caterina Provost. 1971. Measurement of Cultural Complexity. Ethnology 12:379-392.

STDS05.COD: Division of Labor

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This file describes codes for variables v99-v148 of the SCCS data set. These codes are from George P. Murdock and Caterina Provost. 1973. Factors in the Division of Labor by Sex: A Cross Cultural Analysis. ETHNOLOGY 12:203-225.

STDS04.COD: Political Organization

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000
This file describes codes for variables v81-v98 of the SCCS data set. These codes are from Arthur Tuden and Catherine Marshall. 1972. Political Organization: Cross Cultural Codes 4. ETHNOLOGY 11:436-464.

STDS03.COD: Settlement Patterns and Community Organization

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000
This file describes codes for variables v61-v80 of the SCCS data set. These codes are from George P. Murdock and Suzanne F. Wilson. 1972. Settlement Patterns and Community Organization: Cross Cultural Codes 3. ETHNOLOGY 11:254-295.

Contents1#1

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This file contains the table of contents for volume 1, issue 1, 1986.

STDS01.COD: Subsistence Economy and Supportive Practices

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000
This file describes codes for variables v1-v22 of the SCCS data set. These codes are from George P. Murdock and Diana O. Morrow. 1970. Subsistence Economy and Supportive Practices: Cross-Cultural Codes 1. Ethnology 9:302-330.

Future1#1

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000
This article identifies future data files to be published in World Cultures.

STDS02.COD: Infancy and Early Childhood

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000
This file describes codes for variables v23-v60 of the SCCS data set. These codes are from Herbert Barry, III and Leonora M. Paxson. 1971 Infancy and Early Childhood: Cross-Cultural Codes 2. Ethnology 10: 466-508.

Contributors1#1

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This file contains the names and affiliations of contributors to volume 1, issue 1, 1986.

The World Cultures Database

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This article discusses the construction and uses of databases in comparative research.

Purpose1#1

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000
This file describes the purpose of World Cultures.

Editor1#1

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This article introduces World Cultures.

Notes1#1

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This file contains notes on the use of World Cultures.

Letters1#1

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A letter from H. Russell Bernard.

Ethnic identity, political identity and ethnic conflict: simulating the effect of congruence between the two identities on ethnic violence and conflict

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This thesis outlines and presents an alternative hypothetical process to the emergence of ethnic conflict. Ethnic conflicts, rather than being dependent upon pre-existing ‘ancient hatreds’, are instead the result of a congruence between ethnic and political identity which grants individuals the ability to use ethnicity to identify and eliminate political threats. This hypothesis is formed by the examination of three case studies of ethnic conflict: Lebanon, Northern Ireland and Croatia. This hypothesis is then formalised and tested using an agent based simulation in which agent interactions are dependent upon ethnic and political identity and the congruence between the two. As predicted there was a strong positive correlation between how accurately ethnic identity reflected political identity and the level of ethnically motivated violence in the simulation, although the relationship was not linear. Furthermore the effect of a shift in congruence was found to be roughly comparable...

Global Inflation Dynamics: regularities & forecasts

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000
The analysis of dollar inflation performed by the authors through the approximation of empirical data for 1913–2012 with a power-law function with an accelerating log-periodic oscillation superimposed over it has made it possible to detect a quasi-singularity point around the 17^th of December, 2012. It is demonstrated that, if adequate measures are not taken, one may expect a surge of inflation around the end of this year that may also mark the start of stagflation as there are no sufficient grounds to expect the re-start of the dynamic growth of the world economy by that time. On the other hand, as the experience of the 1970s and the 1980s indicates, the stagflation consequences can only be eliminated with great difficulties and at a rather high cost, because the combination of low levels of economic growth and employment with high inflation leads to a sharp decline in consumption, aggravating the economic depression. In order to mitigate the inflationary consequences...

Farming and Fighting: An Empirical Analysis of the Ecological-Evolutionary Theory of the Incidence of Warfare

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000
Explanations of the causes of war fall roughly into two schools: those arguing for the primacy of environment and technology, and those arguing for the primacy of sociopolitical factors. We re-examine two hypotheses from the former school, viz, societies are more likely to engage in war when they have: 1) more productive subsistence technology; and 2) higher population density. Using data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, and up-to-date multivariate modeling methods, we find only qualified support for the first hypothesis and find the reverse relationship for the second: higher population densities lead to less war, not more. We show that omitted variable bias can explain the failure of previous studies to discover this relationship. Finally, we show that the two schools seem to be equally correct, in that each explains about the same proportion of the variation in frequency of external war.

Updated scripts for R in Eff and Dow (2009) Issue 3#1 art 1

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Changes in R necessitate updated R scripts for Eff, E. Anthon, & Dow, Malcolm M. (2009). How to Deal with Missing Data and Galton’s Problem in Cross-Cultural Survey Research: A Primer for R. Structure and Dynamics, 3(3). Retrieved from: http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/7cm1f10b

What Anthropologists Should Know About the New Evolutionary Synthesis

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Discoveries of modern biology are forcing a re-evaluation of even the central pillars of neo-Darwinian evolution. Anthropologists study the processes and results of biological and biocultural evolution, so they must be aware of the scope and nature of these changes in biology. We introduce these changes, comment briefly on how will influence anthropology, and suggest numerous readings to introduce anthropologists to the significance and substance of the new evolutionary synthesis.

Kinship, Class, and Community

Tue, 2 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This review presents studies in various world regions. Each uses network analysis software designed explicitly for kinship studies with explicit network measures of cohesion. It presents evidence of fundamental differences in the forms of marital cohesion that show profoundly different effects over a wide range of social phenomena, regional scales, and diverse cultures. Social cohesion is the basis of mutuality, cooperation and well-being in human societies (Council of Europe, 2009). It includes the modes by which people are assimilated into societies, how groups hold power, stratify social relations, and manage the flow of resources. Kinship networks in the civil societies of nation-states, in contrast to smaller-scale societies, are far too rarely studied as a basis of social cohesion. Networks, the social tissues of our lives, are only partially visible to us; thus we fail to see how these are wrapped and embedded in larger networks. Thus the importance, as emphasized here,...

STDS91.COD: Grief and Mourning Codes

Tue, 2 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This file describes codes for variables v1918-v2000 of the SCCS data set. These codes are from the SCCS societies in Paul C. Rosenblatt, R. Patricia Walsh, and Douglas A. Jackson. Grief and Mourning in Cross-Cultural Perspective. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files Press. 1976.

A Comparative Investigation of the Self Image and Identity of Sri Lankans

Tue, 2 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The current study explores self image and identity of Sri Lankans in different social and cultural settings. It focuses on the role of major social identities in two ethnic groups: Sinhalese (the majority) and Tamils (the minority). Participants consisted of four groups: Sri Lankan Sinhalese, Sri Lankan Tamils, Sinhalese in USA, and Tamils in Canada. Seven self statement tests, ratings of the importance of major social identities, and eight common identity items under seven social identities were used to examine self identification. Findings suggest that religious identity plays a significant role in Sinhalese, whereas ethnic identity is the most significant in Tamils. All these identity measures suggest that the role of each social identity is different when it associates with different social settings, depending on how individuals value their social identities in particular social contexts.

The Second Wave of the Global Crisis? On mathematical analyses of some dynamic series

Fri, 1 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This article continues our analysis of the gold price dynamics that was published in December 2010 and forecasted the possibility of the “burst of the gold bubble” in April –June 2011. Our recent analysis suggests the possibility of one more substantial fluctuation before the final collapse in July 2011. On the other hand, in early 2011 we detected a number of other commodity bubbles and forecasted the start of their collapse in May – June 2011. We demonstrate that this collapse has actually begun, which in conjunction with the forthcoming burst of the gold bubble suggests that the World System is entering a bifurcation zone bearing rather high risks of the second wave of the global financial-economic crisis.

Demographic Regulators in Small-Scale World-Systems

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This paper presents a simulation of world-systems theory’s iteration model of early human societies. The polities modeled are composed of sedentary foragers and/or simple horticulturalists that rely upon basic subsistence technologies and display low levels of internal differentiation. World-systems theory’s iteration model integrates several processes of demographic regulation: environmental constraints, migration, intra-polity conflict, and inter-polity warfare. Computer simulation of this model reveals that different degrees of resource richness, land area, and initial population size have important effects on the average population levels and the behavior of interacting polities. A well-known ecological phenomenon, “the paradox of enrichment,” emerges when polities interact through warfare. Variations in the size and resources of local and regional areas, along with climatic variation, provide explanations of patterns of warfare in such systems. Finally, to make the iteration...

Growing Social Structure: An Empirical Multiagent Excursion into Kinship in Rural North-West Frontier Province

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Kinship is an essential factor in human social life. Many years of research devoted to develop a better understanding of kinship bear witness to this fact. Important advances were made on conceptual, modeling and empirical grounds. Computational social science---in particular through social network analysis and social simulation---contributed its part to it. Notwithstanding, multiagent simulations of social systems rarely take into account kinship-based social interactions, especially when claiming to be empirical. We combine generative social science's basal argument "grow it!" with the concept that social structure is not reified, but a pattern emerging from interactions between individuals, and introduce a multiagent social simulation that "grows" kinship structures on the basis of socio-demographic and marriage interactions in Pakistan's Rural North-West Frontier Province. The modeling proposed has generalizable demonstrator value in that it is shown how published ethnographic...