Hasil untuk "Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology"

Shiori Furukawa, Sho Tsugawa

Although beneficial information abounds on social media, the dissemination of harmful information such as so-called ``fake news'' has become a serious issue. Therefore, many researchers have devoted considerable effort to limiting the diffusion of harmful information. A promising approach to limiting diffusion of such information is link deletion methods in social networks. Link deletion methods have been shown to be effective in reducing the size of information diffusion cascades generated by synthetic models on a given social network. In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of link deletion methods by using actual logs of retweet cascades, rather than by using synthetic diffusion models. Our results show that even after deleting 10\%--50\% of links from a social network, the size of cascades after link deletion is estimated to be only 50\% the original size under the optimistic estimation, which suggests that the effectiveness of the link deletion strategy for suppressing information diffusion is limited. Moreover, our results also show that there is a considerable number of cascades with many seed users, which renders link deletion methods inefficient.

Piotr J. Wróbel

General Lucjan Żeligowski’s dilemmas regarding his national identity reflect the difficult choices faced by millions of people living in the borderlands between Russia and various East-Central European nations over the past several centuries. Born and raised in a Polish-patriotic family in 1865 in the heart of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was controlled by Tsarist Russia, he joined the Russian Army out of poverty and became almost entirely Russified. Seeking a compromise between his Polish and Russian identities, he became interested in Slavophile ideology. By the end of World War I, his Polish identity had prevailed over his Lithuanian and Russian sentiments, and he contributed to the rebirth of Poland. However, he noticed a distinction between Poles from central Poland and himself, a “Polish” or “Slavic Lithuanian”. He was very critical of Warsaw’s policies towards the regions of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania and endeavoured to preserve their separate character. In 1939, he escaped from Poland and joined the Polish émigré authorities. In the West, he returned to Pan-Slavic ideology, hoping it would help bridge the Polish-Soviet chasm. Also, his political views shifted. In interwar Poland, he became an agrarian, but he was moving to the left, dreaming of a “People’s Poland”. This allowed him to stay connected with the Soviets during World War II and later to decide on his return to communist-controlled Poland. He had never found peace of mind and paid a steep price for his numerous identity crises. He was not alone; millions traversed similar mental paths, impacting the entire history of Eastern and East Central Europe.

Sho Tsugawa, Hiroyuki Ohsaki

In this paper, we address the challenge of discovering hidden nodes in unknown social networks, formulating three types of hidden-node discovery problems, namely, Sybil-node discovery, peripheral-node discovery, and influencer discovery. We tackle these problems by employing a graph exploration framework grounded in machine learning. Leveraging the structure of the subgraph gradually obtained from graph exploration, we construct prediction models to identify target hidden nodes in unknown social graphs. Through empirical investigations of real social graphs, we investigate the efficiency of graph exploration strategies in uncovering hidden nodes. Our results show that our graph exploration strategies discover hidden nodes with an efficiency comparable to that when the graph structure is known. Specifically, the query cost of discovering 10% of the hidden nodes is at most only 1.2 times that when the topology is known, and the query-cost multiplier for discovering 90% of the hidden nodes is at most only 1.4. Furthermore, our results suggest that using node embeddings, which are low-dimensional vector representations of nodes, for hidden-node discovery is a double-edged sword: it is effective in certain scenarios but sometimes degrades the efficiency of node discovery. Guided by this observation, we examine the effectiveness of using a bandit algorithm to combine the prediction models that use node embeddings with those that do not, and our analysis shows that the bandit-based graph exploration strategy achieves efficient node discovery across a wide array of settings.

Zhengyu Li

Ivana Lučić Todosić

This paper explores the development of veterinary anthropology as a subfield of anthropology that focuses on issues of animal health and disease within human societies and cultures. Emerging in the late 1970s in the United States, initially through ethnoveterinary research and development, it was supported by programs such as the Small Ruminant Collaborative Research Support Program (SR-CRSP) and the Niger Range and Livestock Project (NRL). It arose from the need to integrate the perspectives and expertise of anthropologists and veterinarians in the study of local practices, technologies, resources, and belief systems related to the cultural and social contexts in which animal healthcare occurs within livestock production systems. The term veterinary anthropology was first proposed by Solod and Knight in the early 1980s and was further developed by Constance McCorkle, who introduced a holistic approach within the existing framework of ethnoveterinary research and development. This included the application of theory and practical knowledge to improve livestock health and productivity in developing countries. The emergence of new infectious diseases such as Ebola, SARS, H5N1, and BSE, along with the ensuing public health crises, stimulated renewed collaboration between anthropologists and veterinarians. This led to the formulation of a new research field initially labeled the anthropology of zoonoses (2015), which, by 2016, was reintegrated into the broader scope of veterinary anthropology through engagement with the concept of One Health, marking the formal rebirth of this subdiscipline. Beyond interdisciplinary collaboration between veterinarians and anthropologists, this subdiscipline examines the social implications of animal diseases and health perspectives through contemporary anthropological approaches, including structuralism, ontology in human-animal relations studies, and multispecies ethnography. Research perspectives have become increasingly globalized, with fieldwork conducted in disease outbreak centers such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Donbas. As the field expanded, veterinary anthropology has undergone repeated re-evaluation and reflection. Building on existing ethnographic studies of animal-borne diseases and fostering interdisciplinary dialogue, the concept of veterinary humanities was introduced in Vienna in 2020 as an expanded field of inquiry, bringing together scholars from animal studies, animal welfare, veterinary science, multispecies anthropology, medical anthropology, and the anthropology of ethics. The most recent framework positions veterinary anthropology as a philosophical reflection on human–animal relations, developed in collaboration with veterinarians while simultaneously interrogating their roles in those relationships. In less than half a century, veterinary anthropology has transformed from an applied discipline into a science field that challenges established norms and veterinary practices in search of new responses and innovative solutions that account for the well-being of both animals and humans.

Michal Uhrin

The cognitive and evolutionary approach to the research of religion in cultural and social anthropology has been systematically developing since the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. At the end of the 1990s, cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion began to be applied in the research of religion by a narrow group of ethnologists, religionists, and anthropologists in Slovakia. This paper aims to provide a basic overview of the fundamental concepts of cognitive and evolutionary anthropology of religion. It focuses on selected scholars whose works and ideas are considered pivotal in the development of this field. The second objective is to outline how cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion have been reflected in ethnology and sociocultural anthropology in Slovakia.

Zachary Sheldon, Peeyush Kumar

This paper explores the intersection of economic anthropology and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). It examines how large language models (LLMs) can simulate human decision-making and the inductive biases present in AI research. The study introduces two AI models: C.A.L.L.O.N. (Conventionally Average Late Liberal ONtology) and M.A.U.S.S. (More Accurate Understanding of Society and its Symbols). The former is trained on standard data, while the latter is adapted with anthropological knowledge. The research highlights how anthropological training can enhance LLMs' ability to recognize diverse economic systems and concepts. The findings suggest that integrating economic anthropology with AI can provide a more pluralistic understanding of economics and improve the sustainability of non-market economic systems.

Ori Swed, Sachith Dassanayaka, Dimitri Volchenkov

In 2016, a network of social media accounts animated by Russian operatives attempted to divert political discourse within the American public around the presidential elections. This was a coordinated effort, part of a Russian-led complex information operation. Utilizing the anonymity and outreach of social media platforms Russian operatives created an online astroturf that is in direct contact with regular Americans, promoting Russian agenda and goals. The elusiveness of this type of adversarial approach rendered security agencies helpless, stressing the unique challenges this type of intervention presents. Building on existing scholarship on the functions within influence networks on social media, we suggest a new approach to map those types of operations. We argue that pretending to be legitimate social actors obliges the network to adhere to social expectations, leaving a social footprint. To test the robustness of this social footprint we train artificial intelligence to identify it and create a predictive model. We use Twitter data identified as part of the Russian influence network for training the artificial intelligence and to test the prediction. Our model attains 88% prediction accuracy for the test set. Testing our prediction on two additional models results in 90.7% and 90.5% accuracy, validating our model. The predictive and validation results suggest that building a machine learning model around social functions within the Russian influence network can be used to map its actors and functions.

Larisa E. Ilyina, Lidiya Vladimirovna Romasenko

The development of anthropology and ethnology in Europe of the late 18th century was facilitated by accumulation of practical material which provided grounds to study the human and human communities at various angles. Studies of folk art (folklore) remain relevant at present; globalization, the development of technology, mass media and communications have become factors to promote modern folklore. The works of folk art and modern folklore reflect the mentality, culture and traditions of the people, the development of language and literature, changes in social structures and values of society. The scientific basis for the study of folk art is anthropology and ethnology. The purpose of this article is to draw attention of researchers to the works of French scientists and show the range of anthropological studies concerning socio-cultural context of emergence and existence of folklore. The article presents the stages anthropology development with examples from the works of French scientists, many of which are little known in Russia. Finally, it is concluded that anthropological and ethnological approaches make it possible to study folklore and its role in the dynamics of culture and history.

Loukas Ilias, Dimitris Askounis

Stress and depression are prevalent nowadays across people of all ages due to the quick paces of life. People use social media to express their feelings. Thus, social media constitute a valuable form of information for the early detection of stress and depression. Although many research works have been introduced targeting the early recognition of stress and depression, there are still limitations. There have been proposed multi-task learning settings, which use depression and emotion (or figurative language) as the primary and auxiliary tasks respectively. However, although stress is inextricably linked with depression, researchers face these two tasks as two separate tasks. To address these limitations, we present the first study, which exploits two different datasets collected under different conditions, and introduce two multitask learning frameworks, which use depression and stress as the main and auxiliary tasks respectively. Specifically, we use a depression dataset and a stressful dataset including stressful posts from ten subreddits of five domains. In terms of the first approach, each post passes through a shared BERT layer, which is updated by both tasks. Next, two separate BERT encoder layers are exploited, which are updated by each task separately. Regarding the second approach, it consists of shared and task-specific layers weighted by attention fusion networks. We conduct a series of experiments and compare our approaches with existing research initiatives, single-task learning, and transfer learning. Experiments show multiple advantages of our approaches over state-of-the-art ones.

Marcelo Sartori Locatelli, Pedro Calais, Matheus Prado Miranda et al.

Politicization is a social phenomenon studied by political science characterized by the extent to which ideas and facts are given a political tone. A range of topics, such as climate change, religion and vaccines has been subject to increasing politicization in the media and social media platforms. In this work, we propose a computational method for assessing politicization in online conversations based on topic shifts, i.e., the degree to which people switch topics in online conversations. The intuition is that topic shifts from a non-political topic to politics are a direct measure of politicization -- making something political, and that the more people switch conversations to politics, the more they perceive politics as playing a vital role in their daily lives. A fundamental challenge that must be addressed when one studies politicization in social media is that, a priori, any topic may be politicized. Hence, any keyword-based method or even machine learning approaches that rely on topic labels to classify topics are expensive to run and potentially ineffective. Instead, we learn from a seed of political keywords and use Positive-Unlabeled (PU) Learning to detect political comments in reaction to non-political news articles posted on Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok during the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections. Our findings indicate that all platforms show evidence of politicization as discussion around topics adjacent to politics such as economy, crime and drugs tend to shift to politics. Even the least politicized topics had the rate in which their topics shift to politics increased in the lead up to the elections and after other political events in Brazil -- an evidence of politicization.

Luz Niyereth Vásquez Acevedo, Dora Inés Arroyave Giraldo

La pandemia ocasionada por el Covid-19 representó para la escuela cambios importantes en la forma de plantear y conducir su propuesta pedagógica, lo cual hizo necesaria la reflexión sobre los aprendizajes para la vida y la construcción de nuevas ciudadanías. La metodología es resultado de un análisis, interpretación y síntesis documental de textos producidos durante la pandemia y que aportan a la comprensión de los retos que se generan en la postpandemia. Se plantea la escuela como escenario que trasciende la transmisión del conocimiento hacia una ciudadanía que aprende para la vida, en el contexto.  Se resalta la importancia de reconocer los procesos sociales gestados alrededor de la escuela como una oportunidad para fortalecer las relaciones con la comunidad y desde allí, configurar una propuesta educativa que mejore las condiciones del contexto en el que realiza su acción pedagógica.   Finalmente, se enfatiza en la importancia del acto educativo en el emprendimiento de una transformación ciudadana orientada en los principios de equidad y justicia social, como aporte a la construcción de ciudadanías críticas, democráticas y participativas, corresponsables con las comunidades y abiertos a la alteridad.

Cultural General Intelligence Team, Avishkar Bhoopchand, Bethanie Brownfield et al.

Cultural transmission is the domain-general social skill that allows agents to acquire and use information from each other in real-time with high fidelity and recall. In humans, it is the inheritance process that powers cumulative cultural evolution, expanding our skills, tools and knowledge across generations. We provide a method for generating zero-shot, high recall cultural transmission in artificially intelligent agents. Our agents succeed at real-time cultural transmission from humans in novel contexts without using any pre-collected human data. We identify a surprisingly simple set of ingredients sufficient for generating cultural transmission and develop an evaluation methodology for rigorously assessing it. This paves the way for cultural evolution as an algorithm for developing artificial general intelligence.

Lucas Skora, Helen Senefonte, Myriam Delgado et al.

A better understanding of the behavior of tourists is strategic for improving services in the competitive and important economic segment of global tourism. Critical studies in the literature often explore the issue using traditional data, such as questionnaires or interviews. Traditional approaches provide precious information; however, they impose challenges to obtaining large-scale data, making it hard to study worldwide patterns. Location-based social networks (LBSNs) can potentially mitigate such issues due to the relatively low cost of acquiring large amounts of behavioral data. Nevertheless, before using such data for studying tourists' behavior, it is necessary to verify whether the information adequately reveals the behavior measured with traditional data -- considered the ground truth. Thus, the present work investigates in which countries the global tourism network measured with an LBSN agreeably reflects the behavior estimated by the World Tourism Organization using traditional methods. Although we could find exceptions, the results suggest that, for most countries, LBSN data can satisfactorily represent the behavior studied. We have an indication that, in countries with high correlations between results obtained from both datasets, LBSN data can be used in research regarding the mobility of the tourists in the studied context.

Lucio La Cava, Andrea Tagarelli

Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) represent a growing trend in the social media landscape, as opposed to the well-known centralized peers, which are often in the spotlight due to privacy concerns and a vision typically focused on monetization through user relationships. By exploiting open-source software, DOSNs allow users to create their own servers, or instances, thus favoring the proliferation of platforms that are independent yet interconnected with each other in a transparent way. Nonetheless, the resulting cooperation model, commonly known as the Fediverse, still represents a world to be fully discovered, since existing studies have mainly focused on a limited number of structural aspects of interest in DOSNs. In this work, we aim to fill a lack of study on user relations and roles in DOSNs, by taking two main actions: understanding the impact of decentralization on how users relate to each other within their membership instance and/or across different instances, and unveiling user roles that can explain two interrelated axes of social behavioral phenomena, namely information consumption and boundary spanning. To this purpose, we build our analysis on user networks from Mastodon, since it represents the most widely used DOSN platform. We believe that the findings drawn from our study on Mastodon users' roles and information flow can pave a way for further development of fascinating research on DOSNs.

Emily Ruth Allen, Isabel Machado

This article investigates the contradictions that characterize Mobile, Alabama’s Joe Cain Day celebration. We look at the official narratives that established Mobile’s Mardi Gras origin myths and the event’s tradition invention in 1967 with a People’s Parade centered around Cain’s redface character, Chief Slacabamorinico. Then we discuss the complicated and ever-evolving symbolism surrounding the character by discussing more recent iterations of this public performance. In its inception, the Joe Cain celebration was a clear example of Lost Cause nostalgia, yet it has been adopted, adapted, and embraced by historically marginalized people who use it as a way to claim their space in the festivities. Employing both historical and ethnographic research, we show that carnival can simultaneously be a space for defiance and reaffirmation of social hierarchies and exclusionary discourses. We discuss here some of the concrete material elements that lend this public performance its white supremacist subtext, but we also want to complicate the definition of “materiality” by claiming a procession as a Confederate monument/memorial.

Jianyue Chen

Abstract The founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) established and consolidated a new type of socialist ethnic relations, and the people of all ethnic groups in China have embarked on a socialist road since then. This “had never occurred in thousands of years” in the history of China’s ethnic relations and was based on the correct path for solving ethnic issues with Chinese characteristics pioneered by the Communist Party of China (CPC), the institutional core of which is the system of regional ethnic autonomy. So to speak, the system of regional ethnic autonomy, as a fundamental political system of the country, is the reconstruction of the important content and system of ethnic relations and the reconstruction of the governance system of a unified multi-ethnic country. Around the year of 1949, the Chinese communists planned the system of regional ethnic autonomy in a systematical and comprehensive manner, and established a basic discourse guiding the ethnic work, ethnic policies and ethnic studies in the PRC. On the basis of historical literature, this paper arranges and sorts out the ethic policies and thinking context at the early stage of the governance by the CPC.

Budimansyah Budimansyah, Nina Herlina Lubis, Miftahul Falah

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menguak tata ruang Galuh Pakwan sebagai ibukota terakhir Kerajaan Galuh, sejauhmana pola ruang kota tersebut berkaitan dengan nilai-nilai kelokalan sebagaimana tergambar dalam historiografi tradisional. Dalam penelitian ini metode sejarah akan dipergunakan sebagai fitur utama agar menghasilkan suatu hasil kajian yang komprehensif, dan menggunakan teori tata kota, serta metode deskriptif-kualitatif. Minimnya sumber terkait sejarah Galuh Pakwan, wawancara secara mendalam kepada para narasumber diharapkan bisa menjadi suatu bahan analisis historis. Berdasarkan fakta di lapangan, Galuh Pakwan sebagai ibukota kerajaan berawal dari sebuah kabuyutan. Pada masa pemerintahan Niskalawastu Kancana, kabuyutan tersebut dijadikan pusat politik dengan tetap menjalankan fungsi kabuyutannya. Seiring waktu, Galuh Pakwan menjelma menjadi sebuah kota yang tata ruangnya menunjukkan representasi dan implementasi konsep kosmologi Sunda. Galuh Pakwan terbentuk oleh pola radial-konsentris menerus, sebagai gambaran kosmologi Sunda sebagaimana terungkap dalam naskah-naksah Sunda kuna. The research is not only aimed at uncovering the spatial layout of Galuh Pakwan as the last capital of Galuh Kingdom, but also at exploring how well the relationship between the urban spatial patterns and the local values as depicted in the traditional historiography. Beside having the historical methods as the main feature to produce a comprehensive study result, the study also uses the urban planning theory, as well as the descriptive qualitative methods. The historical sources related to the history of the Galuh Pakuan are very limited. As a result, the in-depth interviews with the resource persons are expected to be appropriate as the observation material for historical analysis. Based on the facts found in the field, the Galuh Pakwan as the capital of the kingdom originated from a Kabuyutan. During the reign of Niskalawastu Kancana, Kabuyutan served as a political center while maintaining its original function as Kabuyutan. As the time passed, the Galuh Pakwan was transformed into a city whose spatial layout represented and implemented the Sundanese cosmological concept. The Galuh Pakwan was formed by a continuous radial-concentric pattern, as a description of Sundanese cosmology in the ancient Sundanese manuscript.

Igor Rolemberg

Eija Stark, Kati Mikkola, Pia Olsson

The article analyzes the logic behind the archival policies concerning language and ethnic minorities in Finland, drawing examples from three minority groups: the Sámi, the Finnish Roma (the Kaale), and the Finland-Swedes. We base our discussion on the documented descriptions, manuscripts, questionnaires, and fieldwork activities dealing with language and ethnic minority groups archived by the Finnish Literature Society (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, SKS) and the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, SLS) from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the early twenty-first century. Viewed from a historical perspective, the establishment of archives in Finland was inextricably connected to the societal power enjoyed by certain ethnic and language groups seeking to preserve their heritage.