Hasil untuk "Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology"

Fredrik Jansson

Culture is not just traits but a dynamic system of interdependent beliefs, practices and artefacts embedded in cognitive, social and material structures. Culture evolves as these entities interact, generating path dependence, attractor states and tension, with long-term stability punctuated by rapid systemic transformations. Cultural learning and creativity is modelled as coherence-seeking information processing: individuals filter, transform and recombine input in light of prior acquisitions and dissonance reduction, thereby creating increasingly structured worldviews. Higher-order traits such as goals, skills, norms and cognitive gadgets act as emergent metafilters that regulate subsequent selection by defining what counts as coherent. Together, these filtering processes self-organise into epistemic niches, echo chambers, polarised groups and institutions that channel information flows and constrain future evolution. In this view, LLMs and recommender algorithms are products of cultural embeddings that now act back on cultural systems by automated filtering and recombination of information, reshaping future dynamics of cultural systems.

Fredrik Jansson

Formal modelling provides a toolkit for understanding cultural dynamics, from individual decisions to recurring patterns of change. This chapter explains what models are and why they matter. Using a precise, shared language, they aid thinking and communication by turning fuzzy assumptions into clear, comparable, testable claims. The chapter describes the modelling process, trading explanatory clarity against predictive specificity. Four families of models are surveyed, from the micro-level with optimising agents to macro-level dynamics with heuristic or even implicit agents, covering reasoning (Bayesian inference, game theory), adaptive updating (reinforcement learning, evolutionary games), mean-field approaches (compartmental models, population dynamics), and complex systems (agent-based models, social networks). Building on these, a general template for modelling cultural evolution is outlined that connects system states, cognitive processes, behaviour, and macro-level outcomes in dynamic loops, linking individuals, groups, institutions, and their environments. Taken together, these tools support a pluralist but coherent understanding of cultural change.

Uršula Lipovec Čebron, Jelena Kupsjak, Pia Krampl

The special issue before you is a product of decades of fragmented yet deeply collaborative work among scholars across the ex-Yugoslav space, the Balkans, and beyond. The texts gathered here represent only a small glimpse into the exciting, diverse, and growing field of medical anthropology in the region, one that has long been shaped by the historical legacies of social medicine, post-socialist transformations, and the ongoing negotiation of local and global health paradigms. This issue builds on the foundations laid by the international symposium Medical Anthropology From the Region of the Former Yugoslavia, held in Ljubljana on 28–29 November 2024, co-organised by the Departments of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Ljubljana and the University of Zagreb.

Halyna Bondarenko

The cultural and anthropological analysis of the town of Zhmerynka as a local sociocultural space is carried out in the article. The relevance of the study is caused by the insufficient scholarly attention paid to small towns in Ukrainian cultural anthropology and ethnology, despite the fact that a significant part of Ukraine’s population lives in such settlements. The choice of Zhmerynka is motivated by its representation in the Ukrainian cultural and informational space as a typical provincial town. The article is aimed at detecting transformations in livelihood strategies, cultural practices and forms of local identity among Zhmerynka’s residents in the context of contemporary social challenges. The methodological framework of the research is based on an interdisciplinary approach combining cultural anthropology, ethnology and urban studies. The methods of field ethnography (participant observation and semi-structured interviews), analysis of oral narratives, visual and material sources, as well as local historical materials are used. The peculiarities of the town’s symbolic space are considered in the study, including the processes of decommunization, local memorialization practices, urban legends and the mythologization of the railway as a core element of urban identity. Particular attention is paid to the town’s polyethnic composition, transformations of religious life and the preservation of elements of intangible cultural heritage. The role of migration in shaping new social ties, economic strategies and patterns of everyday life is analysed. The changes in the town’s population life in the conditions of the full-scale war are also considered. The scientific novelty of the study consists in introducing contemporary ethnographic materials on Zhmerynka as a sample of a town with a distinct historical memory and multicultural heritage into academic circulation. It is concluded that a town appears not as a peripheral space, but as a dynamic sociocultural organism in which traditional practices, global influences and local modes of adaptation to contemporary challenges are combined.

Paolo Macrì Antkiewicz

Татьяна Александровна Гаврилина

Погребальный обряд является одним из важнейших маркеров, позволяющих наиболее точно и достоверно охарактеризовать особенности мировоззрения представителей древних сообществ. В статье предпринята попытка выявить специфику погребального обряда прибрежных культур южноамериканского континента – пайхан (12800–9600 л.н.) и лас-вегас (10800–6600 л.н.), а также очертить возможные перспективы его изучения. Автор дает характеристику современного подхода к изучению погребений: для работы с костными останками активно привлекаются специалисты в области антропологии, генетики, проводятся исследования для определения характера повреждения костей, идентификации по гендерному признаку, диагностики патологий и т.д.

Li Zhou, Lutong Yu, Dongchu Xie et al.

Culture is a rich and dynamic domain that evolves across both geography and time. However, existing studies on cultural understanding with vision-language models (VLMs) primarily emphasize geographic diversity, often overlooking the critical temporal dimensions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Hanfu-Bench, a novel, expert-curated multimodal dataset. Hanfu, a traditional garment spanning ancient Chinese dynasties, serves as a representative cultural heritage that reflects the profound temporal aspects of Chinese culture while remaining highly popular in Chinese contemporary society. Hanfu-Bench comprises two core tasks: cultural visual understanding and cultural image transcreation. The former task examines temporal-cultural feature recognition based on single- or multi-image inputs through multiple-choice visual question answering, while the latter focuses on transforming traditional attire into modern designs through cultural element inheritance and modern context adaptation. Our evaluation shows that closed VLMs perform comparably to non-experts on visual cutural understanding but fall short by 10% to human experts, while open VLMs lags further behind non-experts. For the transcreation task, multi-faceted human evaluation indicates that the best-performing model achieves a success rate of only 42%. Our benchmark provides an essential testbed, revealing significant challenges in this new direction of temporal cultural understanding and creative adaptation.

Tim Donkers, Jürgen Ziegler

The rise of social media has fundamentally transformed how people engage in public discourse and form opinions. While these platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for democratic engagement, they have been implicated in increasing social polarization and the formation of ideological echo chambers. Previous research has primarily relied on observational studies of social media data or theoretical modeling approaches, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of how individuals respond to and are influenced by polarized online environments. Here we present a novel experimental framework for investigating polarization dynamics that allows human users to interact with LLM-based artificial agents in a controlled social network simulation. Through a user study with 122 participants, we demonstrate that this approach can successfully reproduce key characteristics of polarized online discourse while enabling precise manipulation of environmental factors. Our results provide empirical validation of theoretical predictions about online polarization, showing that polarized environments significantly increase perceived emotionality and group identity salience while reducing expressed uncertainty. These findings extend previous observational and theoretical work by providing causal evidence for how specific features of online environments influence user perceptions and behaviors. More broadly, this research introduces a powerful new methodology for studying social media dynamics, offering researchers unprecedented control over experimental conditions while maintaining ecological validity.

Anupama Bharti

Leszek Hensel

Laughter Closed up in Horror: The Case of the Hungarian Ballad about a Walled-up Woman The paper is dedicated to a paradox. By approaching the topic of violence, I am actually trying to answer the question of whether and how it is possible to combine it with laughter. I was inspired to adopt this perspective by research on the different types of humorous recycling of one of the most popular works of Hungarian folk literature, the ballad Kőmives Kelemenné [Kelemen Mason’s Wife], which is a story of men’s violence against a woman: the walling-up of the master mason’s wife so that the husband and his team could build a durable castle and receive the agreed payment for their work. The article is based on a rich material base, including both short lexical jokes and longer satires and humorous sketches that have been produced in Hungary since the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to written texts, it refers to humorous drawings published in newspapers and magazines and to versions of the ballad that are present in the internet space. Based on theoretical works by, among others, S. Freud, V. Raskin, R. A. Martin, it seeks an answer to the question of the image of Hungarian society that the analysed materials reflect.   Humor zamknięty w horrorze. Przypadek węgierskiej ballady o zamurowanej kobiecie Artykuł poświęcony jest pewnemu paradoksowi. Podejmując temat przemocy, w istocie próbuje odpowiedzieć na pytanie, czy i jaki sposób jest możliwe jej połączenie ze śmiechem. Do przyjęcia takiej perspektywy skłaniają badania nad różnymi rodzajami humorystycznego recyklingu jednego z najpopularniejszych utworów węgierskiej literatury ludowej – ballady Kőmives Kelemenné [Żona Kelemena Murarza]. Ballada opowiada o zamurowaniu żony mistrza murarskiego, aby mąż i jego współpracownicy mogli zbudować trwały zamek i otrzymać wysoką zapłatę za swoją pracę. Artykuł opiera się na bogatej bazie materiałowej, obejmującej zarówno krótkie żarty leksykalne, jak i dłuższe satyry i humorystyczne skecze, które powstawały na Węgrzech od początku XX wieku do czasów współczesnych. Oprócz tekstów pisanych odwołuje się do humorystycznych rysunków publikowanych w gazetach i czasopismach oraz do wersji ballady obecnych w przestrzeni internetowej. Biorąc za podstawę prace teoretyczne m.in. S. Freuda, V. Raskina, R. A. Martina, autor poszukuje odpowiedzi na pytanie o obraz społeczeństwa węgierskiego, jaki odzwierciedlają analizowane materiały.

David Stefanelly

Research Framework: A Legitimist representative under the Second Republic (1848-1852), Paul de Dieuleveult (1799-1867) embodied the traditional Western notable in the mid-19th century. His privileged social position marks the culmination of a social ascent begun by his father, François-Marie, in Tréguier, Côtes-du-Nord.Objectives: To examine the importance of family heritage in the Legitimist commitment of Paul de Dieuleveult and his fellow Legislative deputies.Methodology: To achieve this, we will draw on the work of our thesis (Stefanelly, 2013) and on the biographical notes of parliamentarians.Results: Paul de Dieuleveult’s commitment to the Legitimist cause was determined by his family background. His father rose socially through his medical activities, his two successive marriages, his attainment of a noble title and the exercise of local responsibilities under the Restoration. Paul belongs to this lineage. Thanks to him, he has considerable material and land assets. His marriage enables him to complete alliances with the region’s prominent families. His entry into politics in the final years of the Restoration period gave concrete expression to his legitimist commitment. The July Monarchy marked a political break, but he returned to the forefront of local political life in 1848 and became a member of parliament. During his term of office, he endeavored to build on his political base by preserving community unanimity.Conclusion: Many of his fellow Legitimists in the West, birthplace of Legitimism, are part of a family heritage. A minority of them have less marked family antecedents and have emerged socially thanks to their abilities.Contributions: The family dimension is essential to understanding the political commitment of a legitimist representative under the Second Republic, even if this is not true in all cases, and the individual psychological dimension is a factor to be taken into account.

Kefyalew Tessema Semu

Dissertation abstract.

Horațiu Silviu Ilea

The article presents the traditional costume of the shepherds from the Eastern Carpathians, from an historical perspective, using narrative, bibliographic, iconographic, folklore, and archival sources. The muruite [smeared] shirts treated with soot become regional and occupational signs in the mountain area of ​​Bistrița, Maramureș, and Bucovina regions.

Li Zhou, Taelin Karidi, Wanlong Liu et al.

Recent studies have highlighted the presence of cultural biases in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet often lack a robust methodology to dissect these phenomena comprehensively. Our work aims to bridge this gap by delving into the Food domain, a universally relevant yet culturally diverse aspect of human life. We introduce FmLAMA, a multilingual dataset centered on food-related cultural facts and variations in food practices. We analyze LLMs across various architectures and configurations, evaluating their performance in both monolingual and multilingual settings. By leveraging templates in six different languages, we investigate how LLMs interact with language-specific and cultural knowledge. Our findings reveal that (1) LLMs demonstrate a pronounced bias towards food knowledge prevalent in the United States; (2) Incorporating relevant cultural context significantly improves LLMs' ability to access cultural knowledge; (3) The efficacy of LLMs in capturing cultural nuances is highly dependent on the interplay between the probing language, the specific model architecture, and the cultural context in question. This research underscores the complexity of integrating cultural understanding into LLMs and emphasizes the importance of culturally diverse datasets to mitigate biases and enhance model performance across different cultural domains.

Graham M. Jones, Shai Satran, Arvind Satyanarayan

This article proposes a new integration of linguistic anthropology and machine learning (ML) around convergent interests in both the underpinnings of language and making language technologies more socially responsible. While linguistic anthropology focuses on interpreting the cultural basis for human language use, the ML field of interpretability is concerned with uncovering the patterns that Large Language Models (LLMs) learn from human verbal behavior. Through the analysis of a conversation between a human user and an LLM-powered chatbot, we demonstrate the theoretical feasibility of a new, conjoint field of inquiry, cultural interpretability (CI). By focusing attention on the communicative competence involved in the way human users and AI chatbots co-produce meaning in the articulatory interface of human-computer interaction, CI emphasizes how the dynamic relationship between language and culture makes contextually sensitive, open-ended conversation possible. We suggest that, by examining how LLMs internally "represent" relationships between language and culture, CI can: (1) provide insight into long-standing linguistic anthropological questions about the patterning of those relationships; and (2) aid model developers and interface designers in improving value alignment between language models and stylistically diverse speakers and culturally diverse speech communities. Our discussion proposes three critical research axes: relativity, variation, and indexicality.

Marina Mandić

The well-known narrative of zombies, the reanimated monsters of contemporary popular culture, can be traced back to the late 1960s, or more specifically to the release of the film Night of the Living Dead (1968) by American director George A. Romero. However, at the time of the film's inception the term zombie was already widely present in American popular culture: the cinematography of voodoo zombie, created in Haiti through magic and psychoactive substances, appeared in America in 1932, with the release of the film White Zombie, based on the travelogue The Magic Island (1929), by American missionary William Seabrooke. The paper initially points to the social and historical circumstances that led to the spread of zombies in Haiti: as the first independent nation of the Western Hemisphere, Haiti at the beginning of the twentieth century became the subject of American imperialist strategies and a threat to the maintenance of hegemony, therefore in the texts of colonial travel writers it was described as a nation of savagery, black magic, powerful voodoo cults, and the reanimated dead. Cultural and racist stereotypes that were transmitted to the United States justified the American "civilizing" mission, i.e. political and economic interventions. The role of zombies in Haiti was that of a slave, a profitable workforce, used by local urban elites, voodoo sorcerers, and colonial regimes since the eighteenth century.  In this regard, my analysis highlights the ways in which White Zombie reproduces the established image of Haiti as an exotic place filled with mystery and dangers, adopts the dominant American viewpoints marked by discrimination and racism, and sets cultural norms of distinguishing between the civilized and the barbaric, whereby the white color of the skin reflects the norm of the civilized. To this end, the dialectic of slavery is emphasized in the film by the zombification of a young white woman, thus manifesting the tensions that existed between the imperialist powers and their "subjects" of enslavement, and emphasizing the unequal power relations between subordinate Haitian slaves and Westerners in high positions. Finally, the changes that have taken place over the decades of the zombie monster's development are highlighted: the zombie moves away from Haiti and approaches the modern world, and becomes a reanimated, highly infectious, cannibalistic monster of consumer society, that is, a monster of the global capitalist system.

B. Žikić

The expression "wasting time" is a colloquial label for periods of time spent waiting to receive services in various social situations in which people find themselves in state or private institutions, such as the Ministry of Internal Affairs or health institutions, banks and technical inspections of vehicles, etc. In this way, the superiority of social or cultural time over individual time is manifested. Cultural use of time represents the tendency to manage linear time by repeating events anchored in certain time segments, such as rituals, music festivals, sports events, or national holidays. Individuals perceive time based on cultural learning, understanding sociocultural time as a framework for organizing their personal time. This means that when they are not engaged in activities arising from collective time, individuals tend to organize their time according to their personal needs and intentions - as much as possible.Wasting time is therefore perceived as time not spent on activities related to work or free time that are the consequence of personal choice or existential necessity. The term most often refers to the waiting periods, which are apparently not regarded as integral to completing a task, such as a medical examination or obtaining personal documents. The concept of wasting time emerges as an uncreative, imposed, wasted time spent on completing tasks that could be organized differently. It is an empty time, devoid of important events and which is contrasted with periods of activity. The idea of ​​wasting time corresponds to the personal experience of time. The given expression is a consequence of evaluating whether or not a certain period of time was spent usefully, viewed from a personal perspective. Everyone's experience suggests that time seems to pass more slowly when we can do nothing but wait. The networking of such experiences, arising from a multitude of social situations that impose prolonged waiting as a procedural part to obtain what is considered useful or necessary for individuals, can be characterised as a cultural practice. The contributors to this practice include all social institutions that provide services to users through direct contact and hold a societal monopoly of performing their activities.

L. Arantes

As an anthropologist teaching at a German-speaking Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology Department (pertaining to a Humanities Faculty), it always struck me how much we know about the role embodiment plays in and for culture and how little we make use of this in teaching. For this reason, I decided to expand established Higher Education pedagogy by putting craft (as a) practice at the centre of my newly developed course entitled DIY in Times of Crisis and Beyond. As a result, my students and I developed our thinking through and while practising embroidery in class, weaving in the mandatory readings and narrations of (pandemic) crafting experiences along the way. Borrowing from the low-threshold approach to stitching in community-based creativity projects, our shared and mostly novice stitching facilitated the articulation of thoughts-in-progress, thus creating a space in which dominant views regarding social (craft) norms, quantifiable productivity as well as academic logocentrism could be temporarily suspended, giving way to embodied wisdom.

Joy Gabriella Davidsen

Offentlige debatter om religiøse ritualer preges ofte av at ulike verdier, ideologier og livssyn kolliderer. Rituell omskjæring av gutter er et religiøst ritual som har vært gjenstand for mye offentlig debatt i Norge, spesielt de siste 10 årene. I denne artikkelen undersøker jeg hva som kjennetegner den medisinske debatten om omskjæring i Tidsskrift for Den norske legeforening mellom 2012 og 2016, og hvordan den preges av normkonflikt. Debatten oppstod i kjølvannet av Helse- og omsorgsdepartementets lovforslag om rituell omskjæring av gutter i 2011. Selv om lovforslaget hovedsakelig omhandlet hvem som kunne utføre inngrepet, omhandler debatten i tidsskriftet hvorvidt ritualet i det hele tatt bør tillates i Norge og i helsevesenet. I denne artikkelen drøfter jeg hvordan et religiøst ritual blir debattert i et medisinsk tidsskrift, hvorfor debatten fremstår så polarisert og uoversiktlig, og hvordan forholdet mellom «sekularitet» og «religion» fremstilles og diskuteres i en medisinsk kontekst. Mitt hovedfunn er at debatten mangler et felles normgrunnlag for å diskutere rituell omskjæring. Dette gjør at partene snakker forbi hverandre, og i siste instans angriper hverandres standpunkter og etos. Språket preges også av et utpreget skille mellom et «sekulært oss» og et «religiøst dem», noe som vanskeliggjør mulighetene for en saklig og fruktbar debatt.

Andres Ferraro, Gustavo Ferreira, Fernando Diaz et al.

Recommender systems have become the dominant means of curating cultural content, significantly influencing individual cultural experience. Since recommender systems tend to optimize for personalized user experience, they can overlook impacts on cultural experience in the aggregate. After demonstrating that existing metrics do not center culture, we introduce a new metric, commonality, that measures the degree to which recommendations familiarize a given user population with specified categories of cultural content. We developed commonality through an interdisciplinary dialogue between researchers in computer science and the social sciences and humanities. With reference to principles underpinning public service media systems in democratic societies, we identify universality of address and content diversity in the service of strengthening cultural citizenship as particularly relevant goals for recommender systems delivering cultural content. We develop commonality as a measure of recommender system alignment with the promotion of content toward a shared cultural experience across a population of users. We empirically compare the performance of recommendation algorithms using commonality with existing metrics, demonstrating that commonality captures a novel property of system behavior complementary to existing metrics. Alongside existing fairness and diversity metrics, commonality contributes to a growing body of scholarship developing `public good' rationales for machine learning systems.