Hasil untuk "Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology"

Lara Davidović

Zdi se mi, da se je narava mojih notranjih monologov, ki me včasih vodijo do razumevanja določenih vsakodnevnih situacij, precej spremenila, odkar sem se zaradi nadaljevanja študija preselila v Slovenijo. Prejšnji konec tedna sem preživela na poti, tik zunaj te države – ali bi bila morda beseda izlet ustreznejši izraz za moje sobotne aktivnosti? Tako kot večina Balkancev, ki živijo na obrobjih nekdanje Jugoslavije in težko iznajdejo inovativne načrte za netipičen ali vsaj manj dolgočasen konec tedna, sem dan preživela v Trstu. V Trstu sem se imela približno tako, kot sem pričakovala, toda ko sem se vkrcala na svoj double-decker Flixbus za povratek v Ljubljano, svoje trenutno prebivališče, sem doživela nenavadno situacijo, ki se je izkazala za ustrezno snov za hkrati komičen in ilustrativen razmislek.

Lucas Gautheron, Raja Marjieh, Dalton C. Conley et al.

Real-world creative processes ranging from art to science rely on social feedback-loops between selection and creation. Yet, the effects of popularity feedback on collective creativity remain poorly understood. We investigate how popularity ratings influence cultural dynamics in a large-scale online experiment where participants ($N = 1\,008$) iteratively \textit{select} images from evolving markets and \textit{produce} their own modifications. Results show that exposing the popularity of images reduces cultural diversity and slows innovation, delaying aesthetic improvements. These findings are mediated by alterations of both selection and creation. During selection, popularity information triggers cumulative advantage, with participants preferentially building upon popular images, reducing diversity. During creation, participants make less disruptive changes, and are more likely to expand existing visual patterns. Feedback loops in cultural markets thus not only shape selection, but also, directly or indirectly, the form and direction of cultural innovation.

Joonatan Laato, Veera Schroderus, Jenna Kanerva et al.

Digitized historical archives make it possible to study everyday social life on a large scale, but the information extracted directly from text often does not directly allow one to answer the research questions posed by historians or sociologists in a quantitative manner. We address this problem in a large collection of Finnish World War II Karelian evacuee family interviews. Prior work extracted more than 350K mentions of leisure time activities and organizational memberships from these interviews, yielding 71K unique activity and organization names -- far too many to analyze directly. We develop a categorization framework that captures key aspects of participation (the kind of activity/organization, how social it typically is, how regularly it happens, and how physically demanding it is). We annotate a gold-standard set to allow for a reliable evaluation, and then test whether large language models can apply the same schema at scale. Using a simple voting approach across multiple model runs, we find that an open-weight LLM can closely match expert judgments. Finally, we apply the method to label the 350K entities, producing a structured resource for downstream studies of social integration and related outcomes.

Harold David Galíndez Pérez

Este artículo examina el alcance jurídico, institucional y político del reconocimiento constitucional de la cultura y el patrimonio en Colombia, situando como eje la transformación normativa y el rediseño institucional que siguieron a la Constitución de 1991. A partir de una metodología basada en revisión documental y análisis jurídico-constitucional, el estudio reconstruye los principales desarrollos normativos y examina cómo los principios constitucionales del ámbito cultural se han materializado —o tensionado— en los instrumentos de política pública. Los hallazgos revelan avances significativos, pero también disputas interpretativas y desafíos persistentes en la implementación de la Ley 397 de 1997 y en el rol que asumen los gobiernos locales en la gestión del patrimonio. Más allá del diagnóstico, el artículo propone la necesidad de fortalecer políticas culturales que integren mecanismos efectivos de participación ciudadana y enfoques territoriales sensibles a la diversidad sociocultural del país.

Grzegorz Adamiak

Artykuł prezentuje postać i posługę misyjną ks. Mariana Batogowskiego. Był on pierwszym kapłanem diecezji płockiej, który wyjechał na misje po zakończeniu Soboru Watykańskiego II. Prowadził działalność ewangelizacyjną w Indiach w latach 1968–1973. Po powrocie do kraju pracował w centrali krajowej Papieskich Dzieł Misyjnych, odpowiedzialnej za animację misyjną Kościoła w Polsce. Od 1975 r. był zaangażowany także w duszpasterstwo parafialne. Przez cały czas włączał się w animację misyjną publikacjami na łamach „Tygodnika Powszechnego” i „Biblioteki Kaznodziejskiej”. Jest przykładem kapłana zaangażowanego w dzieło misji ad gentes poprzez pracę na terenach misyjnych i animację misyjną w kraju.

Michael Peter Hoffmann, Jan Fillies, Adrian Paschke

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 have shown remarkable abilities in a wide range of tasks such as summarizing texts and assisting in coding. Scientific research has demonstrated that these models can also play text-adventure games. This study aims to explore whether LLMs can autonomously create text-based games based on anthropological classics, evaluating also their effectiveness in communicating knowledge. To achieve this, the study engaged anthropologists in discussions to gather their expectations and design inputs for an anthropologically themed game. Through iterative processes following the established HCI principle of 'design thinking', the prompts and the conceptual framework for crafting these games were refined. Leveraging GPT3.5, the study created three prototypes of games centered around the seminal anthropological work of the social anthropologist's Bronislaw Malinowski's "Argonauts of the Western Pacific" (1922). Subsequently, evaluations were conducted by inviting senior anthropologists to playtest these games, and based on their inputs, the game designs were refined. The tests revealed promising outcomes but also highlighted key challenges: the models encountered difficulties in providing in-depth thematic understandings, showed suspectibility to misinformation, tended towards monotonic responses after an extended period of play, and struggled to offer detailed biographical information. Despite these limitations, the study's findings open up new research avenues at the crossroads of artificial intelligence, machine learning, LLMs, ethnography, anthropology and human-computer interaction.

Jianpeng Yao, Xiaopan Zhang, Yu Xia et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) enables social robots to generate trajectories without relying on human-designed rules or interventions, making it generally more effective than rule-based systems in adapting to complex, dynamic real-world scenarios. However, social navigation is a safety-critical task that requires robots to avoid collisions with pedestrians, whereas existing RL-based solutions often fall short of ensuring safety in complex environments. In this paper, we propose SoNIC, which to the best of our knowledge is the first algorithm that integrates adaptive conformal inference (ACI) with constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) to enable safe policy learning for social navigation. Specifically, our method not only augments RL observations with ACI-generated nonconformity scores, which inform the agent of the quantified uncertainty but also employs these uncertainty estimates to effectively guide the behaviors of RL agents by using constrained reinforcement learning. This integration regulates the behaviors of RL agents and enables them to handle safety-critical situations. On the standard CrowdNav benchmark, our method achieves a success rate of 96.93%, which is 11.67% higher than the previous state-of-the-art RL method and results in 4.5 times fewer collisions and 2.8 times fewer intrusions to ground-truth human future trajectories as well as enhanced robustness in out-of-distribution scenarios. To further validate our approach, we deploy our algorithm on a real robot by developing a ROS2-based navigation system. Our experiments demonstrate that the system can generate robust and socially polite decision-making when interacting with both sparse and dense crowds. The video demos can be found on our project website: https://sonic-social-nav.github.io/.

Ingrid Slavec Gradišnik

“Anthropologists don’t study villages; they study in villages.” This insightful statement by Clifford Geertz (1973) encapsulates the essence of the role of place and space in ethnological terms. It underscores the importance of researchers to focus more on people than the place itself. This approach provides a deeper understanding of the culture and stimulates discussions on the relationship between geographical and ethnological/anthropological research problems and methodology, addressing disciplinary priorities. Since the second half of the 18th century, geography and the ethno and anthropo disciplines have coexisted, reflecting the centuries-long tradition of documenting cultural differences between different peoples. Explaining differences was inconceivable without spatial mapping, a practice that can be traced back to antiquity when it was common to explain cultural differences in terms of proto-geographical determinism. The first part of our discussion will shed light on the history of the relationship between geography and delineations of ethnological/anthropological activities. These relations, which have evolved, mirror the successive differentiation and specialization of scientific disciplines that can be traced back to the 18th century. Then, the first ideas emerged to emancipate ethnographic issues, which were then part of the historical-geographical observation of the world. This period was characterized by a close bond between history and geography, with the two disciplines often referred to as “ancient/medieval/new history/geography” to mark their focus in the pre-Enlightenment. Even in the 20th century, some remnants of the original roots were preserved, particularly in anthropogeography. The dynamics of the spatial foci will be illustrated through research examples from Slovenia. Since the second half of the 20th century, Slovenian social scientists and humanities scholars witnessed several postmodern “turns,” including the “spatial turn.” This term refers to a shift in focus in various disciplines, including ethnology and anthropology, towards studying space and place as fundamental dimensions of human experience, social organization, and symbolic universe. It is instructive to see how ethnologists and anthropologists have reflected on space and place, given that space is one of the fundamental research dimensions (and thus a taken-for-granted category); yet, it must be subject to continuous reflection.

yuni ratnasari, Tria Fadilla, Suwaib Amiruddin

Public behavior of open defecation free (ODF) is an unhealthy condition. The program through ownership of healthy latrines is presented as a means of educating the public about healthy living. The research aims to determine the social structures in achieving ODF (Open Defecation Free) villages. This study uses qualitative methods with the aim of seeing the location first hand and conducting interviews for the individuals and groups involved. The results of the study show that the ODF program involves several components including the company, government and community. The function of the community is to form groups for sanitation socialization, while the company participates in building both latrines and clean water facilities. Meanwhile, Pekon Teba also provides facilities, in accordance with government programs that have been planned, both in terms of budget and additional facilities. The facilities and infrastructure provided to the community include repairing waterways by establishing a Clean Water Facilities Management Agency (BPSAB) together with YKWS and PT. Tirta Investama while from a budget perspective it is fully supported by CSR PT. Tirta Investama and policies in the form of sanctions limit access to public services for residents who are reluctant or refuse to build healthy latrines in their respective homes.

Reykel Diniz de Araujo

Durante a graduação em arqueologia na Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, em uma atividade avaliativa da disciplina “Prática de Campo I”, nos preocupamos em buscar compreender quais eram os processos formativos de uma faixa de deposição fluvial em São João del-Rei/MG que estava tomada de lixo. Na atividade investigamos o lugar utilizando princípios pioneiros de Michael Brian Schiffer para exercitar ferramentas da pesquisa arqueológica. Porém, essa narrativa percorre um caminho distinto neste trabalho. Seguindo ideias de William L. Rathje sobre pensar o lixo contemporâneo como fértil fonte de estudo para arqueologia e aproveitando o registro fenomenológico produzido no lugar que chamamos de “praia-lixão”, este artigo propõe discutir sobre o potencial pedagógico do lixo para cursos de formação em arqueologia e explorar a noção de vida das coisas de Tim Ingold em fruição com o lixo contemporâneo.

Marcos Aurélio Felipe

Qual é o mundo histórico (re)elaborado pelas cinematografias indígenas à contrapelo aos regimes de visualidade constitutivos da colonialidade do ver sobre os povos originários de Abya Yala? Analisamos a (des)construção imagética do Outro, a partir dos estudos pós-coloniais, antropológicos e de cinema. Focamos nas formas visuais da iconografia, da fotografia e do filme, tensionadas pelo cinema indígena por um processo de reversão formal que enseja outras variáveis históricas. Concluímos que o cinema originário se apresenta em contraposição às perspectivas antropométricas da pintura, da fotografia e do filme etnográfico, com operações de contracolonialidade identificadas em obras de Vincent Carelli, Ana Vaz e Paloma Rocha e Luis Abramo; de Takumã Kuikuro (Alto Xingu), Luis Tróchez Tunubalá (Misak), Francisco Huichaqueo (Mapuche), Álvaro e Diego Sarmiento (Quéchua) e do Coletivo Guajajara (Jocy e Milson).

Erwan Le Merrer, Gilles Tredan, Ali Yesilkanat

Numerous discussions have advocated the presence of a so called rabbit-hole (RH) phenomenon on social media, interested in advanced personalization to their users. This phenomenon is loosely understood as a collapse of mainstream recommendations, in favor of ultra personalized ones that lock users into narrow and specialized feeds. Yet quantitative studies are often ignoring personalization, are of limited scale, and rely on manual tagging to track this collapse. This precludes a precise understanding of the phenomenon based on reproducible observations, and thus the continuous audits of platforms. In this paper, we first tackle the scale issue by proposing a user-sided bot-centric approach that enables large scale data collection, through autoplay walks on recommendations. We then propose a simple theory that explains the appearance of these RHs. While this theory is a simplifying viewpoint on a complex and planet-wide phenomenon, it carries multiple advantages: it can be analytically modeled, and provides a general yet rigorous definition of RHs. We define them as an interplay between i) user interaction with personalization and ii) the attraction strength of certain video categories, which cause users to quickly step apart of mainstream recommendations made to fresh user profiles. We illustrate these concepts by highlighting some RHs found after collecting more than 16 million personalized recommendations on YouTube. A final validation step compares our automatically-identified RHs against manually-identified RHs from a previous research work. Together, those results pave the way for large scale and automated audits of the RH effect in recommendation systems.

Annika SH Isfeldt, Thyge Enggaard, A. Blok et al.

In this study, we build on a recent social data scientific mapping of Danish environmentalist organizations and activists during the COVID-19 lockdown in order to sketch a distinct genre of digital social research that we dub a quali-quantitative micro-history of ideas in real-time. We define and exemplify this genre by tracing and tracking the single political idea and activist slogan of grøn genstart (‘green restart’) across Twitter and other public–political domains. Specifically, we achieve our micro-history through an iterative and mutual attuning between computational and netnographic registers and techniques, in ways that contribute to the nascent field of computational anthropology. By documenting the serial ways in and different steps through which our inquiry was continually fed and enhanced by crossing over from (n)ethnographic observation to computational exploration, and vice versa, we offer up our grøn genstart case account as exemplary of wider possibilities in this line of inquiry. In particular, we position the genre of micro-history of ideas in real-time within the increasingly wide and heterogeneous space of digital social research writ large, including its established concerns with ‘big and broad’ social data, the repurposing of computational ‘interface’ techniques for socio-cultural research, as well as diverse aspirations for deploying digital data within novel combinations of qualitative and quantitative methods.

Vladimir Ilic

This paper deals with the general question of what a segment of sociocultural reality in the capital of Tasmania looked like over the time span from the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in China up to Australia's lockdown in mid-March 2020, or more specifically, what took place in direct, daily contacts between people, in the meeting or clash of coexisting incongruous behavioral norms – the “old” (habitual up until then) and the “new” (modified due to the crisis) patterns of interpersonal behavior. In this period of health and social crises, which is here termed liminal, shame was generated. It arose as an emotional reaction to the discrepancy between the thinking, feeling and behavior of interviewees and the thinking, feeling and behavior of members of their social environment, a discrepancy that became apparent in the course of their mutual interactions and whose object was a different emotion – fear. The fieldwork was conducted in mid-2020 in Hobart, in the form of semi-structured interviews with several immigrants from the states of the former Yugoslavia. As it was aimed at studying their fear, and only in second place their feeling of shame, in this paper I have limited myself to a narrative interpretation of the origins and object of shame, with the intention of, on the one hand, highlighting the principal factors in the construction of shame and, on the other, examining what it was in connection with fear that aroused shame in the given context. It was noted that, among other things, shame was culturally generated in the given interactions which occurred within secondary relationships and specific environmental contexts and, still more broadly, as part of the crisis caused by the general spread of the virus, and that, as the object of shame, fear emerged as an inappropriate emotion, initially in the sense of the disproportion between the intensity of fear and its object (i.e. the threat posed by the virus).

Gunvor Guttorm

Duodji is a task where the craftsperson uses the knowledge that s/he has acquired as well as experiences from prior work on and use of duodji. Considering how duodji is understood among the Sami people, these activities will to some extent shape their understanding of aesthetics. In this article I discuss how duddjon activities, experiences, and movements affect our understanding of aesthetics in duodji. In the Sami language, there are terms that convey an understanding of what this means through concepts like vuogas (pleasant), and the expressions cieggat varrii (enter into the veins) and gamus dovdan (instinctive feeling). When we talk about duodji, it is part of people’s everyday life, not a separate activity. Deep memory resides in the body, and we make duodji to improve our possessions and our way of life. As human beings, we move through a multitude of experiences, both in mind and body. This is also true for duodji. In the article I elaborate how we use our body while creating duodji, and how this experience affects the craftsperson. Firstly, I look at duddjon (the act of creation) in an everyday context, and then I address the aesthetic understanding one can find within duodji, and how this in turn can be understood in a wider indigenous context. I present examples from my own and others’ experiences of duddjon practices. By using a pragmatic and somatic aesthetic approach, I discuss how the creative process and the movements of the body affect both the duddjon and the duojár (the creator of duodji).

Federico Vazquez

This opening editorial aims to interest researchers and encourage novel research in the closely related fields of sociophysics and computational social science. We briefly discuss challenges and possible research directions in the study of social phenomena, with a particular focus on opinion dynamics. The aim of this special issue is to allow physicists, mathematicians, engineers and social scientists to show their current research interests in social dynamics, as well as to collect recent advances and new techniques in the analysis of social systems.

Hana Matatov, Mor Naaman, Ofra Amir

The massive spread of visual content through the web and social media poses both challenges and opportunities. Tracking visually-similar content is an important task for studying and analyzing social phenomena related to the spread of such content. In this paper, we address this need by building a dataset of social media images and evaluating visual near-duplicates retrieval methods based on image retrieval and several advanced visual feature extraction methods. We evaluate the methods using a large-scale dataset of images we crawl from social media and their manipulated versions we generated, presenting promising results in terms of recall. We demonstrate the potential of this method in two case studies: one that shows the value of creating systems supporting manual content review, and another that demonstrates the usefulness of automatic large-scale data analysis.

M. M. Kerimova

In historiography dedicated to the First All-Russian Ethnographic Exhibition of 1867, the emphasis is usually placed on its political goals - the demonstration of the imperial ambitions of Russia rallying the foreign Slavic peoples around it. The aim of this article is to show that the primary principles of the exhibition were scientific tasks: the creation of the Dashkovo Ethnographic Museum at the Rumyantsev and Public Museums in Moscow and the Ethnographic Department of the Imperial Society of Devotees of Natural Science, Anthropology and Ethnography at Moscow University. These two events marked a new stage in the development of ethnographic science in Russia. After the exhibition ended, ethnology loudly proclaimed itself an independent science. The author relies mainly on archival sources and literature of the second half of the 19th century, using a systematic analysis of sources related to various issues raised at the exhibition. The comparative-historical method is also used, which made it possible to show the place and role of the exhibition in the structure of Russian science in the last decades of the nineteenth century, in the context of the historical, social and ideological situation in Russia and foreign Slavic countries. The author shows that the exhibition raised important problems of further expanding the comparative study of history, everyday life and customs, religion, economic development of the peoples of Russia, the Southern and Western Slavs, and expanding cultural interaction with them. The purpose of the exhibition was to stimulate interest in the study of the material and spiritual culture of different peoples, and for this it was necessary to make the exposition detailed, visual and reliable. The article discusses in detail the stages of preparation and holding of the exhibition and its results. For the first time, the author analyzes a large exposition of Western and Southern Slavs: Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Slovenes, Poles, Serbs, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Bulgarians; describes in detail scenery scenes (Russian fair, Slovenian wedding), which attracted the greatest attention of visitors. The author highlights the huge contribution to the preparation and holding of the exhibition of initiators and organizers: A.P. Bogdanov, V.A. Dashkova, N.A. Popova, M.F. Raevsky and others, and also shows the role in the organization of the exhibition of famous figures of the national revival of the Slavic countries: M. Mayar, B. Petranovich, J. Milutinovich, N. Ducic and other fighters for the freedom and independence of their peoples, who were at that time under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. The Dashkovo Ethnographic Museum was founded on the basis of the exhibits collected in different regions of Russia and in the countries where Southern and Western Slavs lived. The exhibition contributed to the founding in 1868 of the Ethnographic Department of the Imperial Society of Devotees of Natural Science, Anthropology and Ethnography at Moscow University. These events marked a new stage in the development of ethnography, anthropology, and Slavic studies.

Ioana-Roxana Fruntelată

This article sets into light the context of ideas and relevant biographical circumstances at the time when the Romanian sociologist Henri H. Stahl issued the leaflet Cultura satelor. Cum trebue înțeleasă [The Village Culture. How It Should Be Understood] (1934), in a period of crisis of the Sociological School of Bucharest, when the project of its founder, Dimitrie Gusti, to employ the results of the monographic research campaigns in order to initiate a social reform, seemed to have reached a dead point. At the same time, we pay attention to the cultural distinctions and relations (rural and urban culture, popular/ folk and literate culture) that Stahl debates in his text on village culture. Taking into account the fact that each new reading of a scientific work implicitly updates its content, we also find in the pages written by Henri H. Stahl in 1934 an interesting material for revisiting engaged anthropology, a direction of study developed in the U.S.A. in the late 1970s but rooted in an older model of addressing anthropological research which was created during the Second World War and anticipated as early as the end of the nineteenth century. Beyond different labels applied to research tendencies in social sciences or ethnological/ anthropological approaches in various epochs, we argue that the manner in which researchers influence (more or less intentional) their target-communities not only challenges professional ethics but also provokes a meaningful reflection on the values which are ‘at stake’ in any intercultural encounter.