Fazendo referência à uma produção bibliográfica arqueológica, histórica e antropológica sobre histórias e oralidades indígenas, pretendo reforçar, neste texto, a importância das histórias indígenas na práxis arqueológica. Ao mesmo tempo, quero defender a necessidade de uma arqueologia do colonialismo, do presente e do mundo contemporâneo, na Amazônia. Abordarei essas questões a partir de minha experiência de pesquisa colaborativa com o povo Asurini do Xingu.
Archaeology, Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology
Auwalu Abdullahi Umar, Muneer Ahmad, Dr M Sadik Batcha
The significance of libraries in preserving and maintaining history and traditional culture cannot be overlooked. It is from this purpose that libraries are to envisage in their programmes cultural activities which must be collected, documented and preserved for posterity. The usefulness of preserved information lies in the fact that the generation to come will be able to establish their identity. This will also assist them with a foundation to build from. This study focus on the growth and development of Library and Culture research in forms of publications reflected in Web of Science database, during the span of 2010-2019. A total 890 publications were found and the highest 124 (13.93%) publications published in 2019.The analysis maps comprehensively the parameters of total output, growth of output, authorship, institution wise and country-level collaboration patterns, major contributors (individuals, top publication sources, institutions, and countries). It exposed that the most prolific author is Lo P secured first place by contributing 4 (0.45%) publications, followed by Bressan V 3 (0.34%) publications in Library and Culture literature. Journal of Academic Librarianship produced the highest number of records 29 (3.26%) followed by Australian Library Journal having contributed 21 (2.36%).It is identified the domination of Wuhan University; School Information Management had contributed 6 (0.67%) of total research output. Authors from USA published the highest number of publications with a total of 244 (27.42%), followed by UK and Australia with 118 (13.26%) and 76 (8.54%) publications were produced respectively.
Elisabetta Biondi, Chiara Boldrini, Andrea Passarella
et al.
Online social networks (OSNs) have transformed the way individuals fulfill their social needs and consume information. As OSNs become increasingly prominent sources for news dissemination, individuals often encounter content that influences their opinions through both direct interactions and broader network dynamics. In this paper, we propose the Friedkin-Johnsen on Cascade (FJC) model, which is, to the best of our knowledge, is the first attempt to integrate information cascades and opinion dynamics, specifically using the very popular Friedkin-Johnsen model. Our model, validated over real social cascades, highlights how the convergence of socialization and sharing news on these platforms can disrupt opinion evolution dynamics typically observed in offline settings. Our findings demonstrate that these cascades can amplify the influence of central opinion leaders, making them more resistant to divergent viewpoints, even when challenged by a critical mass of dissenting opinions. This research underscores the importance of understanding the interplay between social dynamics and information flow in shaping public discourse in the digital age.
The remarkable ecological success of humans is often attributed to our ability to develop complex cultural artefacts that enable us to cope with environmental challenges. The evolution of complex culture (cumulative cultural evolution) is usually modelled as a collective process in which individuals invent new artefacts (innovation) and copy information from others (social learning). This classic picture overlooks the growing role of intelligent algorithms in the digital age (e.g. search engines, recommender systems and large language models) in mediating information between humans, with potential consequences for cumulative cultural evolution. Building on a previous model, we investigate the combined effects of network-based social learning and a simplistic version of algorithmic mediation on cultural accumulation. We find that algorithmic mediation significantly impacts cultural accumulation and that this impact grows as social networks become less densely connected. Cultural accumulation is most effective when social learning and algorithmic mediation are combined, and the optimal ratio depends on the network's density. This work is an initial step towards formalizing the impact of intelligent algorithms on cumulative cultural evolution within an established framework. Models like ours provide insights into mechanisms of human-machine interaction in cultural contexts, guiding hypotheses for future experimental testing.
Fatemeh Tahmasbi, Aakarsha Chug, Barry Bradlyn
et al.
The increasing frequency of mass shootings in the United States has, unfortunately, become a norm. While the issue of gun control in the US involves complex legal concerns, there are also societal issues at play. One such social issue is so-called "gun culture," i.e., a general set of beliefs and actions related to gun ownership. However relatively little is known about gun culture, and even less is known when it comes to fringe online communities. This is especially worrying considering the aforementioned rise in mass shootings and numerous instances of shooters being radicalized online. To address this gap, we explore gun culture on /k/, 4chan's weapons board. More specifically, using a variety of quantitative techniques, we examine over 4M posts on /k/ and position their discussion within the larger body of theoretical understanding of gun culture. Among other things, our findings suggest that gun culture on /k/ covers a relatively diverse set of topics (with a particular focus on legal discussion), some of which are signals of fetishism.
Wydawany materiał jest efektem działań Jana Zamoyskiego jako wysłannika królewskiego w starostwie samborskim. Dzieli się na dwie części. W pierwszej, spisanej po łacinie i zaczerpniętej przez twórcę Inwentarza… zapewne z wcześniejszych, niezachowanych obecnie źródeł, opisano poszczególne typy należności (capita — kar i opłat administracyjnych) z uzasadnieniem ich pobierania (causae). Druga część, zapisana już po polsku, jest praktycznym uzupełnieniem poprzedniej: wyliczono w niej, ile w danej wsi pobrano opłat, a ile jeszcze zostało do wyegzekwowania. Informacje te wskazują na specyficzne obyczaje prawne panujące w drugiej połowie XVI w., w których odnaleźć można wątki lokalne, ale i elementy obyczajowego prawa wołoskiego, ruskiego i polskiego.
Archaeology, History (General) and history of Europe
Slamet Subiyantoro, Kristiani Kristiani, Dwi Maryono
et al.
Panji has evolved into a well-known folklore and an art form that provides a source of income for its conservationists. The purpose of this research is to examine the commodification and authenticity of Topeng Panji art in Bobung as an effort to face the era of globalization and localize the nation's cultural arts. The research was conducted in Bobung, Putat, Patuk, Gunung Kidul, Yogyakarta. This study uses a qualitative descriptive approach with a single case strategy. Data is sourced from informants, venues and documents/archives collected with in-depth interview techniques, participatory observations, and content analysis. The validity of the data is tested by source triangulation techniques and informant reviews. Data analysis is conducted with interactive analysis models with data reduction, data display, and verification procedures. The results of this study show that the Commodification of Topeng Panji is based on the increasing and complex needs of the community where the source of income from agriculture and plantations is not enough. The authenticity or art of Topeng Panji tradition in Bobung is maintained by the community by introducing it to the younger generation from an early age.
Cultural and political polarization in The United States has been a prominent topic both in social sciences and the media since the beginning of the 1990s. Whether the polarization is understood as a deep moral divide among Americans, i.e., as the culture war between liberals and conservatives, or as a superficially maintained political hostility, i.e., as party sorting between Democrats and Republicans, most scholars agree that the media sphere is deeply polarized, especially since 2016 when Donald Trump emerged as a political figure and then the U.S. president. HBO, known for its progressive cultural capital and liberal ethos, distinguishes itself in the daring narrative productions which often tackle polarizing themes of race, gender, sexuality, etc. Gothic mode or genre is among the often-employed narrative styles of its productions. American gothic, also the subject of increasing academic interest in recent decades, has been largely considered within its cultural and historical context and interpreted as a site where the nation’s historical benighted ghosts disrupt and challenge official enlightened national narratives. As HBO’s original production told in a gothic mode, Sharp Objects (2018) will be contextualized within the U.S. culture wars and analyzed as a Southern Gothic tale told from the liberal progressive perspective. The show’s narrative will be seen as a gothic journey deep into the South by a liberal heroine haunted by her conservative ghosts, who attempts to face and settle them. The paper explores the thesis that the gothic disruptive potential is of a conditional and limited impact on liberal America’s Enlightenment narrative.
Building upon the current culturological and literary didactic discourse, this paper analyses the cultural knowledge implicated in the chosen literary texts and explicitly located in students’ essays. Since the culturological research treats individuals acting as subjects, and therefore responsible for interpreting and creating their actions, the qualitative methodology is applied and the scientific design of document analysis. The sample consists of the final year students (2020/2021) academic year of the Department of German Studies of the Faculty of Philology and Arts of the University of Kragujevac. It is postulated that the students do not possess adequate cultural and culturological knowledge of the divided Germany, that their critical and self-critical social consciousness is not fully developed, and that this will impede the understanding of the literary texts. Starting from the research questions: what is the extent of the students’ command of the cultural interpretive patterns from the period of the German Democratic Republic and immediately after the German unification, and do they perform the literary, culturological, and cultural competences needed for the understanding of novels and their independent interpretation, the following aims were established: enabling the students to identify cultural knowledge in literary texts; enabling the students for independent, grounded, critical, and self-critical reading and interpretation of the texts and cultural patterns therein, as well as the development of awareness of social-political engagement and the need for social-political critique of their own and the target culture society. On the base of categorisation and sub-categorisation of cultural patterns, as well as the reflections on literary texts derived from the analysis of students’ essays, the conclusion has been reached that the suggested didactic model corresponds to the established aims, and that, since it is derived directly from the teaching practice, it can be considered as a modest contribution to its advancement.
Hunting and gathering, which date back to the Middle Pleistocene, are the oldest sources of sustenance. Practically, these hunting and gathering societies have gradually expanded their settlements and culture across the country. The present paper attempts a qualitative ethnographical study on the ongoing life of the Nir Sikaris which is one of the hunting and fowling tribes in the Tungabhadra Plains of Andhra Pradesh. Primarily it focuses on their settlement patterns, subsistence strategies, and living traditions. S(h)ikar means hunting; Sikari means hunter. They populate Kurnool, Anantapur (Andhra Pradesh), Bellary (Karnataka) Districts and Maharashtra. They were labelled with a social stigma of a criminal tribe under the British Raj and were also considered ex-criminal tribe and de-notified tribe in post-independence India. They are currently classified as one of the backward classes (B.C.-A) by the State Government of Andhra Pradesh. It becomes vital to shedding light on documentation of Nir Sikaris’ evolving cultural life for posterity, as they are culturally transforming due to modernization in the current globalised society.
In the last decades the rapid development of technologies and methodologies in the field of digitization and 3D modelling has led to an increasing proliferation of 3D technologies in the Cultural Heritage domain. Despite the great potential of 3D digital heritage, the "special effects" of 3D may often overwhelm its importance in research. Projects and consortia of scholars have tried to put order in the different fields of application of these technologies, providing guidelines and proposing workflows. The use of computer graphics as an effective methodology for CH research and communication highlighted the need of transparent provenance data to properly document digital assets and understand the degree of scientific quality and reliability of their outcomes. The building and release of provenance knowledge, consisting in the complete formal documentation of each phase of the process, is therefore of fundamental importance to ensure its repeatability and to guarantee the integration and interoperability of the generated metadata on the Semantic Web. This paper proposes a methodology for documenting the planning and creation of 3D models used in archaeology and Cultural Heritage, by means of an application profile based on the CIDOC CRM ecosystem and other international standards.
Susannah Kate Devitt, Tamara Rose Pearce, Alok Kumar Chowdhury
et al.
Against the backdrop of a social media reckoning, this paper seeks to demonstrate the potential of social tools to build virtuous behaviours online. We must assume that human behaviour is flawed, the truth can be elusive, and as communities we must commit to mechanisms to encourage virtuous social digital behaviours. Societies that use social platforms should be inclusive, responsive to evidence, limit punitive actions and allow productive discord and respectful disagreement. Social media success, we argue, is in the hypothesis. Documents are valuable to the degree that they are evidence in service of, or to challenge an idea for a purpose. We outline how a Bayesian social platform can facilitate virtuous behaviours to build evidence-based collective rationality. The chapter outlines the epistemic architecture of the platform's algorithms and user interface in conjunction with explicit community management to ensure psychological safety. The BetterBeliefs platform rewards users who demonstrate epistemically virtuous behaviours and exports evidence-based propositions for decision-making. A Bayesian social network can make virtuous ideas powerful.
We show the need to limit hyperspecialisation in the sciences and academic disciplines. We start from five basic demands of Kantian Sapere aude! We trace the loss of the fruitful alliance between macrophilosophy and the new mathematical-experimental science after Newton. The all-round negative consequences of this hyperspecialisation are exemplified by analysing the tripartition between sociology, social anthropology and ethnography or ethnology. It uncritically hid for decades the dogmatism that stagnantly divided the study of primitive and colonised 'Them' societies by ethnology, ethnography and social and cultural anthropology; as opposed to the 'Us' of civilised and colonising Europeans who - in contrast - were studied by sociology. We show that this discriminatory disciplinary prejudice was rendered invisible by the lack of macro-philosophical, critical and interdisciplinary analysis. We therefore claim and argue for 'macro' analyses that should rebalance the 'micro' hyperspecialisation in all sciences and disciplines.
The present work deals with the management of university curricular design in Ecuador, particularly from a multicultural, intercultural and cross-cultural perspective, the Bachelor’s Degree in Basic Education is taken and the value of the student’s professional training with the development of students is taken as a reference social sciences, under a multicultural approach that is currently being carried out in Ecuador. The methodology consisted of conducting a descriptive field study and as a tool for collecting information semi-standardized interviews were applied. The results reveal: a) The need for the development of multicultural competences, from the Basic Education degree, which is evident in the formation of a highly competent professional capable of interacting in the different multicultural scenarios; b) The curricular redesign oriented towards the subjects of history, philosophy, ethnology, ethnography, anthropology, sociology among others, applied to the teaching of this phenomenon of multiculturalism in the professional training of the Bachelor of Basic Education student. It is concluded that the curriculum redesign management process goes through a diversity of stages that demands the need for a curriculum redesign that develops competences linked to multiculturalism.
Carnival as a research object has been studied from a multiplicity of perspectives: folklore studies, European ethnology, social and cultural anthropology, history, sociology, etc. Each of these disciplines has enriched the literature by focusing on different aspects of the event, such as its participatory nature, its transformative potential (at an individual or collective level), and its political dimension broadly conceived. The present article reviews this scholarship and uses it to analyze the contemporary Parisian Carnival, which has tried to revive the nineteenth-century Promenade du Boeuf Gras tradition on a local and translocal level through its creative collaboration with the carnival of Cherbourg, Normandy. I argue that, through satire and other politicized carnival rituals, the recent protagonists of Parisian Carnival (Les Fumantes de Pantruche) have reinvented the festivities and influenced Norman Carnival, thus extending the boundaries of belonging in both cities.
The timely volume proposes a new theoretical framework for ethnographic Europeanization research informed by postcolonial theory, from the vantage point of German anthropology. The reviewer argues that this innovative program of ‘decentering Europe’ can and should be productively extended to ethnographic research in the ECE region, in dialogue with critical ECE social sciences perspectives.1 Following Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to provincialize Europe (Chakrabarty, 2000), the anthology edited by a team of scholars currently or formerly affiliated to the Institute for European Ethnology of Humboldt University, Berlin, proposes ‘a fresh view on the fragile presence of the European project in time of multiple crises, from the perspective of its currently less considered global entanglements and dependencies, linking (German) social and cultural scientific Europeanization research with postcolonial perspectives for the first time’ (cover text). The volume introduces the project of Critical Europeanization Studies (CES), as a ‘program and perspectives of an Anthropology of reflexive Europeanization,’ ‘decentering the perspective on Europe from the perspective of its margins, its global entanglements and internal omissions. This focus expands the temporal and spatial scope of the investigation far beyond the current political project of European integration: towards a long-term, relational embedding of the continent in the production of “World,” as a general context of unequal and shifting transregional relations’ (p. 8). It is the volume’s declared objective to encourage and expedite such a linking of postcolonial and anthropological approaches to the investigation of current processes of Europeanization and the production of Europe in the context of global conditions. The editing team’s co-authored introduction ‘Decentering Europe: Program and Perspectives of an Anthropology of Reflexive Europeanization,’ (pp. 7–33) presents CES as a theoretical concept and proposes analytical perspectives for
Artificial intelligence, deep learning and big data analytics are viewed as the technologies of the future, capable of delivering expert intelligence decisions, risk assessments and predictions within milliseconds. In a world of fakes, they promise to deliver ‘hard facts’ and data-driven ‘truth’, but their solutions resurrect ideologies of purity, embrace bogus science reminiscent of the likes of anthropometry, and create a deeply paranoid world where the Other is increasingly perceived either as a threat or as a potential imposter, or both. Social sorting in the age of intelligent surveillance acquires a whole new meaning. This article explores the possible effects of algorithmic governance on society through a critical analysis of the figure of the imposter in the age of intelligent surveillance. It links a critical analysis of new technologies of surveillance, policing and border control, to the extreme ethnographic example of paranoia within outlaw motorcycle clubs – organizations that are heavily targeted by new and old modes of policing and surveillance, while themselves increasingly embracing the very same logic and technologies themselves. With profound consequences. The article shows how in the quest for power, order, profit, and control, we are sacrificing critical reason and risk becoming as a society not unlike the paranoid criminal organizations.