Introduction Archaeological findings witness the anthropological roots of dance, while psychological, medical, cultural and aesthetic studies shed light on health promoting capacities and curative factors inhering in symbolic and expressive body movement. Since dance therapy became a multifaceted discipline in the middle of the 20th century, increasing evidence of beneficial effects has advocated the use of dance therapy in a broad spectrum of clinical and public health areas such as psychiatry, oncology, neurology, cardiology and geriatrics. Psychological and neurophysiological studies elucidated key mechanisms underlying dance therapeutic dynamics, and ethnological studies highlighted the wealth of indigenous dances alongside their impact on holistic well-being, hence the term ‘ethno-dance therapy’, which also relates to dance traditions of ethnic groups in China. Methods Narrative/descriptive ethnological research provided detailed insights into dance traditions of the 55 officially recognized ethnic groups in China such as the Uyghur, Miao and Wa. Considering dance ontological perspectives, a triad of Tujia dances was chosen for this article. On this basis as well as own field studies, cultural-anthropological, psychological, physiological and neurophysiological knowledge was used to construct hypotheses about health-relevant features and factors. In terms of meta-methodology, such inferential reasoning brings about multi-disciplinary meta-syntheses, which differ considerably from the conventional understanding of this genre. Results Our analysis of Tujia dances suggests nine distinct therapeutic principles and benefits regarding (i) cardiovascular health, (ii) musculoskeletal health, (iii) neuroplasticity and network connectivity, (iv) self-exploration and self-expression, (v) self-actualization and ontological anchoring, (vi) hypnotherapeutic dynamics and altered states of consciousness, (vii) symbolic interaction and ritualized social roles, (viii) therapeutically advantageous changes of attitudes, (ix) aesthetic immersion and the dance-self. Discussion The broad spectrum of beneficial effects of Tujia dances may improve dance therapy in various medical areas and enhance culturally sensitive public health systems. Further research should focus on underlying mechanisms, involve dances from further ethnic groups, explore cross-cultural transferability to more precisely differentiate archetypal/anthropological and culture-dependent factors, and to clearly identify dance therapeutic functions within complex medical and psychological treatment plans.
Nancy Lamenza Sholl da Silva, Maria Tavares Cavalcanti, Emiliano de Camargo David
et al.
Esse trabalho pretende apresentar reflexões sobre uma experiência educacional na pós-graduação no campo da atenção psicossocial a partir de três questões: Quais existências se erguem e que corpos carregamos quando conjugamos o verbo aquilombar? Quais existências se erguem e que corpos carregamos quando reforçamos ou desconstruímos a branquitude? Quais existências se erguem e que corpos carregamos quando produzimos e legitimamos saberes decoloniais/contracoloniais? Essas questões surgem do desafio de constituir uma prática educacional decolonial antirracista. As aulas se transformaram numa experiência de coletivo que vem funcionando há um ano e meio, sua composição inclui relações intergeracionais, interraciais, interprofissionais, trabalhadores do “front” da saúde e da educação e ouvintes. Aquelas/es que trazem as marcas e traumas do colonialismo e da colonialidade têm que assentar-se em experiências de despedaçamentos e refazimentos de si. Essa é a mais visceral prática educacional à qual somos condenados. A principal característica de uma educação antirracista contracolonial/decolonial é aquela que forma e cultiva ouvintes e ouvidos.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Human settlements. Communities
The image of Steppe Ukraine as a historical region has mainly been constructed based on narratives originating from urban centres that are often perceived as alien to this territory and people. Being one of the most industrial and urbanised parts of Ukraine during the period of the Soviet Union, the region witnessed a significant alteration in its peasant culture. Collectivisation, Holodomor, and the Second World War are the leading causes of the alteration in the social composition of Steppe Ukraine’s rural populations. The article deals with the complex question of identity formation among the villagers of Steppe Ukraine. There is particularly focus on the strategies of narrating feelings of belonging and otherness used by local villagers based on their understanding of the history of the places they inhabit. The article also looks at the inhabitants’ relationships with the people with whom they used to coexist in the same space, although these peoples were often wiped out amid the changing circumstances of the region.
Filippo Zimmaro, Jacopo Grilli, Mirta Galesic
et al.
Successful collective action on issues from climate change to the maintenance of democracy depends on societal properties such as cultural tightness and social cohesion. How these properties evolve is not well understood because they emerge from a complex interplay between beliefs and behaviors that are usually modeled separately. Here we address this challenge by developing a game-theoretical framework incorporating norm-utility models to study the coevolutionary dynamics of cooperative action, expressed belief, and norm-utility preferences. We show that the introduction of evolving beliefs and preferences into the Snowdrift game and Prisoner's Dilemma leads to a proliferation of evolutionary stable equilibria, each with different societal properties. In particular, we find that a declining material environment can simultaneously be associated with increased cultural tightness (defined as the degree to which individuals behave in accordance with widely held beliefs) and reduced social cohesion (defined as the degree of social homogeneity i.e. the extent to which individuals belong to a single well-defined group). Loss of social homogeneity occurs via a process of evolutionary branching, in which a population fragments into two distinct social groups with strikingly different characteristics. The groups that emerge differ not only in their willingness to cooperate, but also in their beliefs about cooperation and in their preferences for conformity and coherence of their actions and beliefs. These results have implications for our understanding of the resilience of cooperation and collective action in times of crisis.
Maxence Morin, Baptiste Hemery, Fabrice Jeanne
et al.
Social network analysis is pivotal for organizations aiming to leverage the vast amounts of data generated from user interactions on social media and other digital platforms. These interactions often reveal complex social structures, such as tightly-knit groups based on common interests, which are crucial for enhancing service personalization or fraud detection. Traditional methods like community detection and graph matching, while useful, often fall short of accurately identifying specific groups of users. This paper introduces a novel framework specifically designed to identify groups of users within transactional graphs by focusing on the contextual and structural nuances that define these groups.
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models achieve impressive photorealism by training on large-scale web data, but models inherit cultural biases and fail to depict underrepresented regions faithfully. Existing cultural benchmarks focus mainly on object-centric categories (e.g., food, attire, and architecture), overlooking the social and daily activities that more clearly reflect cultural norms. Few metrics exist for measuring cultural faithfulness. We introduce CULTIVate, a benchmark for evaluating T2I models on cross-cultural activities (e.g., greetings, dining, games, traditional dances, and cultural celebrations). CULTIVate spans 16 countries with 576 prompts and more than 19,000 images, and provides an explainable descriptor-based evaluation framework across multiple cultural dimensions, including background, attire, objects, and interactions. We propose four metrics to measure cultural alignment, hallucination, exaggerated elements, and diversity. Our findings reveal systematic disparities: models perform better for global north countries than for the global south, with distinct failure modes across T2I systems. Human studies confirm that our metrics correlate more strongly with human judgments than existing text-image metrics.
This study aims to clarify the origin context, historical evolution and core differences and connections of ethnology and anthropology, so as to make up for the lack of systematic comparative research on the origin stage of the two disciplines. The research adopts the methods of literature research, historical analysis and comparative research. It sorts out the social background and academic motivation of the emergence of ethnology and anthropology, traces the core disciplinary founders and landmark theoretical achievements in their initial stage, and conducts in-depth comparative analysis on the two disciplines from the dimensions of research objects, core paradigms and academic objectives. The results show that ethnology and anthropology share the same historical origin of exploring human culture and society, but form distinct disciplinary characteristics in the process of development. Ethnology focuses more on the systematic investigation and analysis of specific ethnic groups and their cultures, while anthropology has a more extensive research scope covering physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, archaeology and linguistics. The research reveals the homologous and divergent development track of the two disciplines, which provides a theoretical basis for the cross-integration of the two disciplines in subsequent academic research.
The article covers the history of the University Department of Ethnology over the last four decades. It has been a time of radical transformations in both the socio-political and academic life of the country. The stability and healthy conservatism of the university science allowed the Department of Ethnology not only to successfully pass the period of sociopolitical, cultural, and ideological turbulence but also to significantly expand and update the concept of ethnological education, turning it towards modernity. At the turn of the first and second decades of the 21st century, the Department faced new challenges related to the “anthropologization” of ethnology, the blurring of its subject definition, and the transformation of professional identity. The current situation at the department gives grounds for professional optimism. The department’s imperatives are not to oppose, but to combine traditional ethnographic (ethnological) approaches with the conceptualizations and tools of sociocultural anthropology, interdisciplinarity, the preservation of intergenerational continuity, and the successful transmission of tradition. The traditions of the department include maintaining interest in the history of the discipline, careful preservation of the memory of teachers and predecessors, and openness to the new. Collective memory, collective experience, and collective ethos — these are the components of the 85-year collective academic biography of the University Department of Ethnography (Ethnology) and, at the same time, the source of social and intellectual optimism for its members.
This study is dedicated to the analysis of cultural perceptions of the New Wave (musical movement) within the Yugoslav context in the past decade (up to the 2020s). The observance of a particular anniversary brings forth a multitude of meanings ascribed to the event through recollections and nostalgic narratives. Inspired by Bennett and Rogers' theoretical insights in "Popular Music Scenes and Culture of Memory" (2016) regarding "memory bursts" in creating and consuming popular music, the primary objective was to explore how the narrative of the New Wave is currently constructed. Through an analysis of various events organized in the former Yugoslavia over the past decade, revolving around the New Wave, this study aims to identify cultural perceptions of this phenomenon as well as to highlight its recurring and repetitive key elements. Each analyzed event received media coverage, thus making online sources a fertile resource base for this research.
Artykuł poświęcony jest sylwetce Mikołaja Kozakiewicza, Marszałka Sejmu kontraktowego (1989–1991), którego postać, choć zasłużona, jest dziś mało znana, szczególnie młodszym pokoleniom. Celem autorów jest przybliżenie jego życia i działalności społeczno-politycznej, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem krytyki systemu edukacji w Polsce Ludowej, który Kozakiewicz analizował jako socjolog i pedagog. Kozakiewicz opowiadał się za reformami edukacyjnymi i zmianami w systemie nauczania, krytykując jego organizację i treści dydaktyczne. W artykule przedstawiono również jego działalność polityczną, zwłaszcza w kontekście przemian związanych z Okrągłym Stołem i Sejmem kontraktowym. Cytując słowa Marco Polo, Kozakiewicz podkreślał konieczność postępu i dążenia do poprawy, mimo trudnych okoliczności. Jego spuścizna obejmuje kilkadziesiąt książek i artykułów, w których podejmował kwestie oświaty, reform i praw obywatelskich. Artykuł jest próbą przypomnienia o jego wkładzie w rozwój edukacji i polityki.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Folklore
This study explores the complex conditions of cross-border marriages between Syrian refugee women and Jordanian men in Mafraq, Jordan, within the context of South-South migration. Through qualitative interviews in Mughayyir, Raba', and Zaatari, the research examines specific gendered and raced relations shaped by discourses and practices of femininity and masculinity. Racialized gendered dynamics portray the strategic mobilization of non-hegemonic and 'compensatory masculinities' among Jordanian men in response to Syrian women's perceived vulnerability. Drawing on Ken Plummer's 'intimate citizenship,' the study scrutinizes marriage decision-making entangled with political discourses, revealing the imbrication of personal lives with globalized politics, embedded within the gendered patriarchal demands of the hosting society. In contrast to studies on North-South cross-border marriages, this research focuses on the South, shedding light on non-migrant husbands' experiences and their compensatory strategies. The 'intimate citizenship' framework illuminates challenges surrounding desirable and undesirable unions within displaced Syrian women and Jordanian men, unveiling the politicization and stigma associated with cross-border marriages. By addressing societal judgments and introducing 'heterosexual capital' and 'compensatory masculinity,' the research enriches our understanding of South-South migration complexities, prompting a reevaluation of existing frameworks and fostering a more nuanced discussion.
Knjiga Tu se ne bo nikoli več šivalo: doživljanja izgube dela in propada tovarne antropologinje Nine Vodopivec (Ljubljana: Inštitut za novejšo zgodovino, 2021) opisuje čas propada največje slovenske tekstilne tovarne Mura, ki je »vrh« propadanja doživela leta 2009, ko je bilo iz tovarne odpuščenih 2600 delavk naenkrat. Monografija je neke vrste arhivski dokument postopnega propadanja tovarne Mura in antropološka študija hkrati.
Understanding human social behaviour is crucial in computer vision and robotics. Micro-level observations like individual actions fall short, necessitating a comprehensive approach that considers individual behaviour, intra-group dynamics, and social group levels for a thorough understanding. To address dataset limitations, this paper introduces JRDB-Social, an extension of JRDB. Designed to fill gaps in human understanding across diverse indoor and outdoor social contexts, JRDB-Social provides annotations at three levels: individual attributes, intra-group interactions, and social group context. This dataset aims to enhance our grasp of human social dynamics for robotic applications. Utilizing the recent cutting-edge multi-modal large language models, we evaluated our benchmark to explore their capacity to decipher social human behaviour.
Recenzja książki: Kilian Stumpf, The Acta Pekinensia or Historical Records of the Maillard de Tournon Legation: First transcribed edition and English annotated translation. Vol. I: December 1705 – August 1706. Editors Paul Rule, Claudia von Collani. Rome, Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu; Macau, Macau Ricci Institute, 2015 (Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu. Nova Series 9).
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Practical Theology
We present the Multi-Modal Discussion Transformer (mDT), a novel methodfor detecting hate speech in online social networks such as Reddit discussions. In contrast to traditional comment-only methods, our approach to labelling a comment as hate speech involves a holistic analysis of text and images grounded in the discussion context. This is done by leveraging graph transformers to capture the contextual relationships in the discussion surrounding a comment and grounding the interwoven fusion layers that combine text and image embeddings instead of processing modalities separately. To evaluate our work, we present a new dataset, HatefulDiscussions, comprising complete multi-modal discussions from multiple online communities on Reddit. We compare the performance of our model to baselines that only process individual comments and conduct extensive ablation studies.
У статті розглянуто етапи та особливості створення науково обґрунтованих, так званих ситуаційних, макетів металургійних і супутніх виробництв пізньобронзової та ранньозалізної доби України задля підвищення рівня музейної атрактивності. За основу реконструкцій взято пізньобронзові, ранньоскіфські та ранньослов’янські пам’ятки, які містять металургійні горна, типові залізні речі.
Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when adaptive innovations are passed down to consecutive generations through social learning. This process has shaped human technological innovation, but also occurs in non-human species. While it is traditionally argued that cumulative culture relies on high-fidelity social transmission and advanced cognitive skills, here I show that a much simpler system suffices. Cumulative culture spontaneously emerged in artificial agents who navigate with a minimal cognitive architecture of goal-direction, social proximity, and route memory. Within each generation, naive individuals benefitted from being paired with experienced navigators because they could follow previously established routes. Crucially, experienced navigators also benefitted from the presence of naive individuals through regression to the goal. As experienced agents followed their memorised path, their naive counterparts (unhindered by route memory) were more likely to err towards than away from the goal, and thus biased the pair in that direction. This improved route efficiency within each generation. In control experiments, cumulative culture was attenuated when agents' social proximity or route memory were lesioned, whereas eliminating goal-direction only reduced efficiency. These results demonstrate that cumulative cultural evolution occurs even in the absence of sophisticated communication or thought. One interpretation of this finding is that current definitions are too loose, and should be narrowed. An alternative conclusion is that rudimentary cumulative culture is an emergent property of systems that seek social proximity and have an imprecise memory capacity, providing a flexible complement to traditional evolutionary mechanisms.
Date of birth (DOB) has historically been considered as private information and safe to use for authentication, but recent years have seen a shift towards wide public sharing. In this work we characterize how modern social media users are approaching the sharing of birthday wishes publicly online. Over 45 days, we collected over 2.8M tweets wishing happy birthday to 724K Twitter accounts. For 50K accounts, their age was likely mentioned revealing their DOB, and 10% were protected accounts. Our findings show that the majority of both public and protected accounts seem to be accepting of their birthdays and DOB being revealed online by their friends even when they do not have it listed on their profiles. We further complemented our findings through a survey to measure awareness of DOB disclosure issues and how people think about sharing different types of birthday-related information. Our analysis shows that giving birthday wishes to others online is considered a celebration and many users are quite comfortable with it. This view matches the trend also seen in security where the use of DOB in authentication process is no longer considered best practice.
While a few larger collections of objects of East Asian origin entered Slovenian museums after the deaths of their owners in the 1950s and 60s, individual items had begun finding their way there as early as the nineteenth century. Museums were faced early on with the problem not only of how to store and exhibit the objects, but also how to categorize them. Were they to be treated as “art” on account of their aesthetic value or did they belong, rather, to the field of “ethnography” or “anthropology” because they could illustrate the way of life of other peoples? Above all, in which museums were these objects to be housed? The present paper offers an in-depth analysis of these and related questions, seeking to shed light on how East Asian objects have been showcased in Slovenia (with a focus on the National Museum and the Slovene Ethnographic Museum) over the past two hundred years. In particular, it explores the values and criteria that were applied when placing these objects into individual categories. In contrast to the conceptual shift from “ethnology” to the “decorative and fine arts,” which can mostly be observed in the categorization of East Asian objects in North America and the former European colonial countries, the classification of such objects in Slovenia varied between “ethnology” and “cultural history,” with ethnology ultimately coming out on top. This ties in with the more general question of how (East) Asian cultures were understood and perceived in Slovenia, which is itself related to the historical and social development of the “peripheral” Slovenian area compared with former major imperial centres.