Da se v zadnjih letih krepi premislek o mnoštvu načinov raziskovanj in (re)prezentacij na polju etnologije ter socialne in kulturne antropologije, pravzaprav ni presenetljivo. Gre namreč za vedo, ki je tako v epistemološkem kot vsebinskem smislu zavezana prožnosti. Da je disciplina, katere osnovni gradnik je človeška izkušnja, nujno vsaj do določene mere spremenljiva in prilagodljiva, je zato domala neizpodbitno, kar nakazujejo tudi tendence po nenehnem preizpraševanju njenih temeljnih epistemoloških predpostavk, učinkov in načinov predstavljanja raziskovalnih uvidov. Večnačinskost soudeleženemu v interpretaciji ali produkciji raziskave pogosto ponudi manj konvencionalno pot in drugačno izkušnjo.
Attribution theory explains how individuals interpret and attribute others' behavior in a social context by employing personal (dispositional) and impersonal (situational) causality. Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on human-generated corpora, may implicitly mimic this social attribution process in social contexts. However, the extent to which LLMs utilize these causal attributions in their reasoning remains underexplored. Although using reasoning paradigms, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), has shown promising results in various tasks, ignoring social attribution in reasoning could lead to biased responses by LLMs in social contexts. In this study, we investigate the impact of incorporating a user's goal as knowledge to infer dispositional causality and message context to infer situational causality on LLM performance. To this end, we introduce a scalable method to mitigate such biases by enriching the instruction prompts for LLMs with two prompt aids using social-attribution knowledge, based on the context and goal of a social media message. This method improves the model performance while reducing the social-attribution bias of the LLM in the reasoning on zero-shot classification tasks for behavior analytics applications. We empirically show the benefits of our method across two tasks-intent detection and theme detection on social media in the disaster domain-when considering the variability of disaster types and multiple languages of social media. Our experiments highlight the biases of three open-source LLMs: Llama3, Mistral, and Gemma, toward social attribution, and show the effectiveness of our mitigation strategies.
Theofanis P. Raptis, Chiara Boldrini, Marco Conti
et al.
The Metaverse is redefining digital interactions by merging physical, virtual, and social dimensions, yet its effects on social networking remain largely unexplored. This work examines the role of independent avatars (autonomous digital entities capable of managing social interactions on behalf of users), to optimize social time allocation and reshape Metaverse-based Online Social Networks. We propose a novel computational model that integrates a quantitative and realistic representation of user social life, grounded in evolutionary anthropology, with a framework for avatar-mediated interactions. Our model quantifies the effectiveness of a partial replacement of in-person interactions with independent avatar interactions. Additionally, it accounts for social conflicts and specific socialization constraints. We leverage our model to explore the benefits and trade-offs of an avatar-augmented social life in the Metaverse. Since the exact problem formulation leads to an NP-hard optimization problem when incorporating avatars into the social network, we tackle this challenge by introducing a heuristic solution. Through simulations, we compare avatar-mediated and non-avatar-mediated social networking, demonstrating the potential of independent avatars to enhance social connectivity and efficiency. Our findings provide a foundation for optimizing Metaverse-based social interactions, as well as useful insights for future digital social network design.
Cet article questionne la gestion des effets des témoignages de violences sur les chercheur·euse·s en anthropologie. Bien que travaillant dans le cadre d’interactions avec des êtres humains, les anthropologues discutent très peu des conséquences que peuvent provoquer ces rencontres sur leur équilibre mental. Des concepts, tels que le traumatisme vicariant et la fatigue compassionnelle, développés dans la littérature sur le milieu médical et le travail social permettent toutefois de saisir les conséquences de l’exposition aux récits difficiles. En se basant sur ses notes de recherche sur la culture du cacao au Pérou, l’autrice croise son vécu avec celui d’autres chercheur·euse·s. Cet article propose de considérer ces effets déstabilisants de la recherche empirique comme faisant partie intégrante du processus de recherche, quel que soit le thème abordé par la recherche, tout en remettant le bien-être des chercheur·euse·s au centre de la méthodologie.
Nur Shazwani Kamarudin, Ghazaleh Beigi, Lydia Manikonda
et al.
There is an increasing number of virtual communities and forums available on the web. With social media, people can freely communicate and share their thoughts, ask personal questions, and seek peer-support, especially those with conditions that are highly stigmatized, without revealing personal identity. We study the state-of-the-art research methodologies and findings on mental health challenges like depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, from the pervasive use of social media data. We also discuss how these novel thinking and approaches can help to raise awareness of mental health issues in an unprecedented way. Specifically, this chapter describes linguistic, visual, and emotional indicators expressed in user disclosures. The main goal of this chapter is to show how this new source of data can be tapped to improve medical practice, provide timely support, and influence government or policymakers. In the context of social media for mental health issues, this chapter categorizes social media data used, introduces different deployed machine learning, feature engineering, natural language processing, and surveys methods and outlines directions for future research.
AI-driven chatbots are increasingly used to support community health workers (CHWs) in developing regions, yet little is known about how cultural framings in chatbot design shape trust in collectivist contexts where decisions are rarely made in isolation. This paper examines how CHWs in rural India responded to chatbots that delivered identical health content but varied in one specific cultural lever -- social norms. Through a mixed-methods study with 61 ASHAs who compared four normative framings -- neutral, descriptive, narrative identity, and injunctive authority -- we (1) analyze how framings influence preferences and trust, and (2) compare effects across low- and high-ambiguity scenarios. Results show that narrative framings were most preferred but encouraged uncritical overreliance, while authority framings were least preferred yet supported calibrated trust. We conclude with design recommendations for dynamic framing strategies that adapt to context and argue for calibrated trust -- following correct advice and resisting incorrect advice -- as a critical evaluation metric for safe, culturally-grounded AI.
Abstract In the 1980s, postmodernism posed a series of critiques against the social sciences and humanities, with anthropology being a prominent target. Although these critiques never prevented the continued development of the social sciences and humanities, the conundrum constituted by the “subject” and “subjectivity” remained unresolved. At its core, the methodological challenge facing the social sciences and humanities lies in the question of whether it is possible for a human (researcher) to study other humans living under different institutions (e.g., varying kinship institutions). Drawing on the researcher’s firsthand ethnographic fieldwork experiences, this study analyses and critiques the questions and solutions proposed by postmodernism through two key dimensions: fieldwork practice and methodology. The objective is to resolve this dilemma, thereby advancing the epistemological foundations of the social sciences and humanities.
The paper presents the results of a field study of transhumant pastoralism which was carried out in June and July 2022 on the Zelengora, Volujak and Lebršnik mountains, on the Morine plateau, i.e. in the areas of the municipalities of Ljubinje, Nevesinje, Kalinovik and Gacko (Republic of Srpska-Bosnia and Herzegovina). The goal of the research was to determine the present state and development trends of transhumant pastoralism in the areas of eastern Herzegovina at the beginning of the 21st century. The paper gives an overview of the previous (ethnological) studies of transhumant pastoralism, and then presents the methodological procedures used in this research. The ethnographic section summarizes interviews with interviewees and field guides. The observed problems, both those that were talked about by the interviewees and those that were independently observed, were jointly expressed in the separate section as development trends that describe and at the same time shape the current state of transhumant pastoralism in the studied area. The problems in question are: the transformation of pastoralism into an individual economic strategy, and in some cases a form of personal leisure; changes in the directions and manner of livestock routes; the persistence of the basic production technology, along with the modernization of its individual elements; the weakening and dissolution of elements of the traditional cultural idiom; legal changes in property rights and the method of making compensations for rights of use; multiple consequences of war; increasingly pronounced neoliberal economic relations and withdrawal of the state; strengthening of personal motivation to engage in pastoralism; growing interest in zoological, ecological and climate topics. In almost all of the aforementioned trends, it is possible to recognize adaptation to the risks that come with changes in the environment, both natural and social. These are changes in the economy, demography, social relations, climate and ecology. The interviewees found ways to more or less successfully manage the mentioned risks.
The paper begins with Wolf Lepenies’ idea of sociology as a “third culture“, positioned between science and the humanities. Lepenies argues that sociology arose in the 19th century in the context of a bitter rivalry with literature, as both contestants sought to become the principal guide in helping humanity find its way in the new, modern society ushered in by political and industrial revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This competition forced sociology to seek legitimacy at the opposite side by borrowing epistemological principles from natural science, which eventually resulted in sociology’s irremediably “middle“ position, which has defined it ever since. The paper focuses on one side of the triangle only, i.e. the relation of sociology to literature, and reviews four possible ways in which the affinity between the two has been construed in sociology’s self-reflection and professional practice. 1) One is based on the recognition of similarities in contents, arguing that both speak of essentially the same subject matter – individuals, families and their destinies within society, conveyed through narrative. Here, the 19th century novel is particularly pertinent, with writers such as Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert leading the way. 2) The second form of affinity points to the similarly privileged social position of both disciplines, and the concomitant responsibility that is ascribed to each in redressing social wrongs and changing the social world for the better. Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the issue is discussed as the most fruitful. 3) Third, the category of “writing“ connects them as two different forms of textual production, with both being subject to comparable requirements of style, genre, and rhetoric. Within contemporary sociology, Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural sociology and social constructionism refracted through sociology’s methodological legacy of qualitative analysis are taken as representative in understanding of sociology as close to literary production. 4) The most abstract conceptualization of similarities locates them at the level of cognitive structures, with both literature and sociology seeking to uncover deeper truths hidden under the screen of self-evident conventions and routines of everyday life. Here, the examples are provided by Lahire’s interpretation of Kafka and Boltanski’s argument about parallels between sociology and detective and spy novels, as well as by more general discussions of literature’s stylistic devices that sometimes give it an advantage in capturing aspects of social reality. In conclusion, it is argued that sociology remains a “third culture“ and that a closer and more open-minded reflection on its affinity with literature could help revitalize its potentials in the contemporary context.
Celem artykułu jest krytyczna refleksja nad relacją pomiędzy jakościową analizą tematyczną i modelowaniem tematycznym (ang. topic modeling), jedną z bardziej popularnych odmian automatycznego przetwarzania tekstu. Na podstawie wyników jakościowej i ilościowej analizy dokumentów Konferencji Episkopatu Polski autorzy pokazują wady i zalety modelowania tematycznego. Negatywnie weryfikują tezę o zastępowalności analizy tematycznej przez modelowanie tematyczne i wskazują na niezbędność połączenia podejścia jakościowego z ilościowym w ramach metodologii metod mieszanych (ang. mixed methods). W ostatniej części opracowania przedstawiają możliwe sposoby łączenia obu metod, za pomocą których badacze jakościowi i badaczki jakościowe na podstawie paradygmatu metod mieszanych mogą skorzystać z modelowania tematycznego i – ze świadomością jego wad i zalet – wzbogacić swój warsztat, rozszerzyć zakres badań oraz usprawnić proces analizy.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Sociology (General)
Aleixandre Brian Duche-Pérez, Gonzalo Ríos-Vizcarra, Luis Enrique Calatayud-Rosado
This ethnographic study explores the rich tapestry of ritual and cultural practices in Coporaque, a peasant community in the southern Andes of Peru, highlighting the deep integration of religiosity into everyday life. Coporaque, with roots dating back to pre-Incan times, reflects a unique synergy of pre-Columbian and Catholic influences that manifest through rituals and festivities ranging from the celebration of the Day of the Dead to the festivities of San Santiago and the Cocha fiesta. The study employs an ethnographic approach consisting of participant observation and semi-structured interviews, facilitating an understanding of how faith and the veneration of natural elements, such as the Apus and cochas, contribute to community cohesion and cultural continuity. The findings highlight how the community strives to maintain its ancestral traditions while facing the challenges of modernity and emphasize the role of these practices in fostering a sense of community identity and cultural resilience.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Folklore
In recent decades, museums have been taken into a discourse where professionalism, relevance, democracy, participation, and diversity are the benchmarks for quality. Through professionalization, knowledge of local identity and culture is put into academic and scientific frames. Increased globalization affects our understanding of culture and identity, and museums must reflect society’s cultural diversity. This is expressed through political intentions and guidelines, but it is up to the museums to design their role in society. For Nord-Troms Museum, this has meant a transition from being an ecomuseum to becoming a museum of diversity. This article shows that there is no clear break between the ecomuseum and the diversity museum. The presentation of the museum facilities and the population’s expectations of the museum are in many ways the same as 30 years ago. Communication must be adapted to the changing conditions. One way is by telling multiple stories that highlight the diversity of the region’s past and connect it more closely to people in society today.
In the old Montenegrin masculine patriarchal culture, having children was one of the primary motivations for marriage. Women in labour faced significant community pressure to give birth to a male child, as evidenced by various ethnographic records and confirmed by contemporary anthropological research. Montenegro exhibits one of the most unbalanced ratios of newborn male to female babies among countries. This necessitates an analysis that integrates legal and anthropological perspectives on son preference. The article explores the socio-historical circumstances and modern expressions of the cult of the male child, followed by an examination of the legal implications of selective abortions. The legal dimension of abortion encompasses a broad normative framework, with the fundamental question concerning the boundary of legal protection in this area, i.e., the limit of state intervention in the personal sphere of individuals and citizens. The legal analysis will also include a reflection on the impact of criminal legal protection on this debate, particularly through the lens of the criminal offense of unlawful termination of pregnancy as stipulated in Article 150 of the Criminal Code of Montenegro. Considering the scope of rights to life, family, and reproduction, and recognizing that pregnancy termination motivated by sex selection is generally prohibited, yet this practice is widespread, the assumption is that the formal legal means to address this issue are limited. As this is a societal phenomenon involving sensitive legal, personal, cultural, religious, political, social, and moral issues, the paper discusses approaches for combating this practice.
Research endeavors within the domain of intangible cultural heritage, conducted within the Gorani community, highlight, among various aspects, the involvement of women in creating and transmitting knowledge and skills, which are perceived by the Gorani populace as a particularly important component of the Gorani tradition. Women are ascribed a key role in preserving Gorani cultural heritage. This study examines the activities of women in the Gorani community within the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage framework. The research is focused on knowledge, skills, and practices carried out by women, which unfold continually within the Gorani community during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It primarily concerns the knowledge and skills of women manifested through the tradition of designing and wearing clothing items, especially those pieces that have become over time an indispensable part of women's ceremonial attire. The empirical data also encourages an examination of the role of women in shaping identity paradigms and symbols in the Gorani community, as well as their expression, transmission, and the assurance of the continuity of these practices. The analysis of women’s contribution to safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage of the Gorani community indicates that the preservation and protection of Gorani tradition, as understood and recognized by the participants in accordance with the UNESCO Convention defining heritage, are conditioned by the social, economic, and political circumstances shaping daily activities and everyday lives of the people in Gora, both within and beyond their native local environment. It is also obvious that Gorani’s interest in their own intangible cultural heritage is unmistakable, as demonstrated by social and cultural practices that would be impracticable without the existence of this heritage. The Gorani people's aspiration to safeguard their own cultural heritage is viewed in the context of its contribution to the preservation and continuity of the Gorani identity, namely the identity of the Gorani community, which holds minority status in the Republic of Serbia.
This paper focuses on the integration of the third and fourth generations of descendants of Serbian migrant workers residing in Vienna, Austria. This immigrant community emerged as a result of the influx of Serbian guest workers who have been moving to Austria for temporary employment since the end of World War II. The third and fourth generations consist of their (great) grandchildren. The objective of this study is to examine the current state of their integration, based on the findings of research undertaken in 2020. Somehow paradoxically, we explore the following research question: to what extent are the third and fourth generation descendants of migrants, who were born and raised in Austria, integrated into the socio-cultural and political system of Austria, given that they are still perceived as ‘persons of migrant origin’? In this study, we re-evaluate the concept of integration, which tends to essentialise national identity, and emphasise the dynamic nature of the integration process and the transnational connections of our target group. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting state of emergency, the research was conducted online using Google surveys. We employed non-probabilistic and exponentially non-discriminatory sampling, utilising the ‘snowball’ sampling approach. A total of 73 individuals participated in the survey, which comprised 12 sections with 70 open and closed questions. Of the participants, 43.8% were men, 50.68% women, and 5.47% did not declare their gender. We adopted four criteria under which to analyse the integration processes based on the collected data and the responses of our respondents: cultural, structural, social, and emotional. The cultural factor refers to the acquisition of knowledge and skills, such as language proficiency and understanding of social norms. Structural integration involves the positioning and participation of migrants in key aspects of the host society, particularly the job market. Social integration encompasses interactions and connections with the local community and other groups, including marriage, friendships, and interactions beyond one’s own ethnic group. Lastly, emotional integration relates to elements of identification, a sense of belonging, and the various ways in which immigrants maintain connections with their own cultural group. We view integration as a dynamic and interactive phenomenon influenced by three parties: the country of origin (Serbia), the immigrants themselves, and their descendants. Thus, we investigate all three factors, while frequently highlighting intergenerational disparities in the integration process. In addition to the concept of integration, we incorporate contemporary interpretations of transnationality in this study, demonstrating that even members of the third and fourth generations of Serbian labour migrants maintain strong cultural ties and utilise cultural elements from both their ancestors’ country of origin (Serbia) and the country in which they were born and raised (Austria). Ultimately, we conclude that they are equally integrated into both the Serbian immigrant population in Austria and the society of their origin country, while maintaining significant transnational and emotional connections with Serbia.
Chiara Bassetti, Enrico Blanzieri, Stefano Borgo
et al.
The development of artificial agents for social interaction pushes to enrich robots with social skills and knowledge about (local) social norms. One possibility is to distinguish the expressive and the functional orders during a human-robot interaction. The overarching aim of this work is to set a framework to make the artificial agent socially-competent beyond dyadic interaction-interaction in varying multi-party social situations-and beyond individual-based user personalization, thereby enlarging the current conception of "culturally-adaptive". The core idea is to provide the artificial agent with the capability to handle different kinds of interactional disruptions, and associated recovery strategies, in microsociology. The result is obtained by classifying functional and social disruptions, and by investigating the requirements a robot's architecture should satisfy to exploit such knowledge. The paper also highlights how this level of competence is achieved by focusing on just three dimensions: (i) social capability, (ii) relational role, and (iii) proximity, leaving aside the further complexity of full-fledged human-human interactions. Without going into technical aspects, End-to-end Data-driven Architectures and Modular Architectures are discussed to evaluate the degree to which they can exploit this new set of social and cultural knowledge. Finally, a list of general requirements for such agents is proposed.
Culture shapes people's behavior, both online and offline. Surprisingly, there is sparse research on how cultural context affects network formation and content consumption on social media. We analyzed the friendship networks and dyadic relations between content producers and consumers across 73 countries through a cultural lens in a closed-network setting. Closed networks allow for intimate bonds and self-expression, providing a natural setting to study cultural differences in behavior. We studied three theoretical frameworks of culture - individualism, relational mobility, and tightness. We found that friendship networks formed across different cultures differ in egocentricity, meaning the connectedness between a user's friends. Individualism, mobility, and looseness also significantly negatively impact how tie strength affects content consumption. Our findings show how culture affects social media behavior, and we outline how researchers can incorporate this in their work. Our work has implications for content recommendations and can improve content engagement.
In this position paper, we outline our research challenges in Affective Interactive Systems, and present recent work on visualizing avatar biosignals for social VR entertainment. We highlight considerations for how biosignals animations in social VR spaces can (falsely) indicate users' availability status.
In today's fast-paced world, the rates of stress and depression present a surge. Social media provide assistance for the early detection of mental health conditions. Existing methods mainly introduce feature extraction approaches and train shallow machine learning classifiers. Other researches use deep neural networks or transformers. Despite the fact that transformer-based models achieve noticeable improvements, they cannot often capture rich factual knowledge. Although there have been proposed a number of studies aiming to enhance the pretrained transformer-based models with extra information or additional modalities, no prior work has exploited these modifications for detecting stress and depression through social media. In addition, although the reliability of a machine learning model's confidence in its predictions is critical for high-risk applications, there is no prior work taken into consideration the model calibration. To resolve the above issues, we present the first study in the task of depression and stress detection in social media, which injects extra linguistic information in transformer-based models, namely BERT and MentalBERT. Specifically, the proposed approach employs a Multimodal Adaptation Gate for creating the combined embeddings, which are given as input to a BERT (or MentalBERT) model. For taking into account the model calibration, we apply label smoothing. We test our proposed approaches in three publicly available datasets and demonstrate that the integration of linguistic features into transformer-based models presents a surge in the performance. Also, the usage of label smoothing contributes to both the improvement of the model's performance and the calibration of the model. We finally perform a linguistic analysis of the posts and show differences in language between stressful and non-stressful texts, as well as depressive and non-depressive posts.