Hasil untuk "Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology"

Radu Calinescu, Ana Cavalcanti, Marsha Chechik et al.

As AI agents are increasingly used in high-stakes domains like healthcare and law enforcement, aligning their behaviour with social, legal, ethical, empathetic, and cultural (SLEEC) norms has become a critical engineering challenge. While international frameworks have established high-level normative principles for AI, a significant gap remains in translating these abstract principles into concrete, verifiable requirements. To address this gap, we propose a systematic SLEEC-norm operationalisation process for determining, validating, implementing, and verifying normative requirements. Furthermore, we survey the landscape of methods and tools supporting this process, and identify key remaining challenges and research avenues for addressing them. We thus establish a framework - and define a research and policy agenda - for developing AI agents that are not only functionally useful but also demonstrably aligned with human norms and values.

Benjamin White, Anastasia Shimorina

Understanding and predicting user behavior on social media platforms is crucial for content recommendation and platform design. While existing approaches focus primarily on common actions like retweeting and liking, the prediction of rare but significant behaviors remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a hybrid methodology for social media user behavior prediction that addresses both frequent and infrequent actions across a diverse action vocabulary. We evaluate our approach on a large-scale Bluesky dataset containing 6.4 million conversation threads spanning 12 distinct user actions across 25 persona clusters. Our methodology combines four complementary approaches: (i) a lookup database system based on historical response patterns; (ii) persona-specific LightGBM models with engineered temporal and semantic features for common actions; (iii) a specialized hybrid neural architecture fusing textual and temporal representations for rare action classification; and (iv) generation of text replies. Our persona-specific models achieve an average macro F1-score of 0.64 for common action prediction, while our rare action classifier achieves 0.56 macro F1-score across 10 rare actions. These results demonstrate that effective social media behavior prediction requires tailored modeling strategies recognizing fundamental differences between action types. Our approach achieved first place in the SocialSim: Social-Media Based Personas challenge organized at the Social Simulation with LLMs workshop at COLM 2025.

Edson Dias Ferreira, Manoel da Silva Santana (Dhemmys)<, Ronaldo dos Santos da Paixão et al.

Pensar na discussão acerca das linguagens visuais e cultura é abrir um leque de possibilidades discursivas e vivenciais que circundam este campo do conhecimento humano. O nosso interesse aqui é mostrar a partir de relatos de ações desenvolvidas neste campo como provocações acerca do tema produziu diferentes resultados. Elencamos três experiências realizadas no campo das pesquisas com as Linguagens Visuais cujo resultado expressa essa diversidade de possibilidades de lidar com o tema. Os trabalhos de Manoel Santana, Robson Amorim e Ronaldo da Paixão refletem isto e emolduram com seus exemplos um quadro de possibilidades, resultado das orientações ao longo desses mais de trinta anos de experiência com ações direcionadas à pesquisa e a aplicação vivenciada acerca das Linguagens Visuais no campo da cultura.

Bjørn Olav Utvik

Å forstå islamismen er sentralt for den som vil forstå den politiske, ideologiske og religiøse utviklingen i Midtøsten og Nord-Afrika (MØNA). Det dreier seg ikke bare om en intellektuell øvelse. I sine politiske konsekvenser innvirker denne forståelsen på spørsmål som angår liv og død for hundretusener av mennesker i MØNA-regionen, og på vilkårene i kampen om frihet og demokrati for folkene der. Men når en forsker gir seg i kast med dette spørsmålet, og ikke minst når hen presenterer sine resultater, oppdager hen raskt at forskningen foregår i et felt preget av sterke interesser og sterke forhåndsoppfatninger både blant politikere, meningsbærere og folk flest. Hvordan forskeren skal navigere i dette farvannet er temaet for denne artikkelen. Kjernespørsmålene som stilles er: Hvilke utfordringer kan polariseringen rundt forståelsen av islamismen stille forskeren overfor i valget av forskningsspørsmål og forskningsmetoder og i formidlingen av resultatene? Hvilket ansvar har forskeren overfor offentligheten og overfor de menneskene som utgjør studieobjektet, og i så fall hvordan håndtere det uten å gå på kompromiss med forpliktelsen til vitenskapelighet?

Yuu Jinnai

Alignment of the language model with human preferences is a common approach to making a language model useful to end users. However, most alignment work is done in English, and human preference datasets are dominated by English, reflecting only the preferences of English-speaking annotators. Nevertheless, it is common practice to use the English preference data, either directly or by translating it into the target language, when aligning a multilingual language model. The question is whether such an alignment strategy marginalizes the preference of non-English speaking users. To this end, we investigate the effect of aligning Japanese language models with (mostly) English resources. In particular, we focus on evaluating whether the commonsense morality of the resulting fine-tuned models is aligned with Japanese culture using the JCommonsenseMorality (JCM) and ETHICS datasets. The experimental results show that the fine-tuned model outperforms the SFT model. However, it does not demonstrate the same level of improvement as a model fine-tuned using the JCM, suggesting that while some aspects of commonsense morality are transferable, others may not be.

Renxue Wan

Aesthetic labor refers to the process in which workers’ appearances make the core of employability. After two decades of development, the theory has yielded outstanding theoretical and empirical achievements. The review briefly investigates the trajectory of the construction, the debates, and the unfinished agenda of aesthetic labor. Introduced at the dawn of the 21st century, aesthetic labor ambitiously re-conceptualizes the emotional labor paradigm by accentuating the role “looking good and sounding right” plays in the new economy. It challenges the analytic frame of emotional labor by foregrounding the importance of corporeal attributes and the embodied dispositions of workers during service encounters. However, the theory is also challenged for its dominating feminist scope and the one-sided accentuation of the dysfunctions of society. A growing volume of research has diverted the attention on the experiences of male workers in aesthetic labor, and some, at the same time, are attempting to justify the prevalence of aesthetic labor by examining the agency of workers during the labor process. Comparative case studies, as well as the scope of cultural approach, are considered two promising research methodologies for aesthetic labor studies. Although the pursuit of beauty has always accompanied human development, the value of a “good look” has never been more prominent in our age. The booming of beauty industries such as make-up, modeling, and fashion has witnessed how a desirable physical appearance helps countless men and women ascend the social ladder from almost the bottom to the top. An increasing volume of literature focuses on the phenomenon, among which the term “aesthetic labor” stands out as one of the most influential theories that capture the characteristic of occupations based on the never-ending polishment of physical appearance. After two decades of development, the theory of aesthetic labor has stimulated volumes of research examining the role of the body and physical beauty in interactive service work. The review essay aims to sketch the breakthroughs that the theory have made, the debates centered on the theory and the future directions that might fill the gap

B. Sarker

There are 50 indigenous or minority ethnic groups scattered across different regions of Bangladesh, of which the Mandas are a community. The Munda community has been living in the areas adjacent to the Sundarbans of Khulna and Satkhira districts for hundreds of years. Originally, their forefathers were the ones who cut down the forest and made the land suitable for cultivation without caring about the roar of the tiger and the snake. The ancestors of the Munda’s played a major role in cutting down the forests in the area surrounding the present Sundarbans and making them suitable for human settlement. The number of Munda’s scattered in the Sundarbans and its surrounding areas is decreasing day by day due to various types of adverse environment. On the other hand, the Munda’s own culture is also under threat due to the influence of Bengali culture. The main aim of this research is how to develop sustainable development of the Munda community from their current socio- economic structure in view of the current condition of the Munda community. The study is mainly quantitative in nature. Koira and Dumuria upazila of Khulna district and Shyamnagar, Debhata and Tala upazila of Satkhira district were selected through convenient sampling technique for the purpose of collecting primary data, because a large part of Munda community lives in these areas. Structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 250 respondents from five preselected areas. The respondents were selected using simple random sampling technique. Data was analyzed in terms of statistical indicators of frequency and percentage. The results of the study show that social indicators, Economic indicators and Cultural factors are very weak among the Munda community. Among the social indicators, Munda women and men have very little interest in following hygiene rules (Sanitation, Birth Control). Economic indicators show Income Source, Jobs Opportunity Munda community is facing many challenges recently. Many educated boys and girls of the Munda community spend their days in agony due to lack of suitable jobs which has a negative impact on everyone in the community. Cultural factor shows that the Munda community, which is plagued by poverty, can celebrate its cultural events in a grand manner, so that other communities or ethnic groups do not get any idea about their culture. This research will be of great help to those who work with the indigenous communities of Bangladesh, especially the various ministries of the government, NGOs, policy makers, government and private research organizations will be benefited

Luzia Wilma Santana da Silva

Trata da história de vida da Professora e Enfermeira Maria José dos Santos, afetuosamente chamada Zezé, no protagonismo da Enfermagem na região sudoeste da Bahia, na Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia (UESB). Historiza a personagem na vida profissional como gestora e educadora-cuidadora na formação de profissionais da Enfermagem. A trajetória ao desvelamento se fez por meio de narrativas originárias de momentos de encontros e edificação da inter-relação entre a professora e a autora deste estudo e de seus arquivos de coleção pessoal, de ação dialógica com pessoas conhecedoras de Zezé, bem como de documentos e fontes online. Busca contar a história em cerzimento com a licença poética de implicação a mulher, enfermeira de história, alteridade e força que se faz nela. Considera oportuna a temática desse dossiê para difundir essa personalidade da Enfermagem que dedicou trinta e cinco anos de sua vida ao exercício da enfermagem no interior da Bahia de repercussão a Enfermagem brasileira.

Petr Skalník

According to Gellner the raison d’être of nationalism is the (nation) state. This has been gradually achieved in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania through the disintegration of colonial and multi-national empires. The nation-building process was accompanied and enabled by national languages. Many colonial languages remained (the Americas, most of Africa, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa before and after apartheid, and post-independence English imposed on Namibia). Ironically, English is now the main language of the EU while UK is no more a member. Iran reacted to speedy westernisation by Islamic revolution. Arab „revolutions“ are reactions to secular regimes of capitalist or socialist kinds. Basically the nation state, though many declare its demise, is a very successful invention. The present neo-nationalism is the reaction to supranational integration imposed by economic globalisation or late imperial ideological interests. The Soviet Union fell apart for various reasons but neo-nationalist states such as Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic states or even the autonomous Tatarstan are now thriving2 . China still keeps its empire together but may eventually face nationalist explosions on its margins. The European Union is under threat of late because various neo-nationalist elites find unbearable the super-state trends and economic neoliberalism of bureaucratic cosmopolites. Nationalism is a populist doctrine by definition that was framed by democratic polities. Neo-nationalism, however, uses populism as a substitute for liberal democracy3 . The result could be closed national societies that (once again) become prone to military solutions of their differences.

Наталья Леонидовна Мамаева

В марте 2023 г. исполнилось 125 лет со дня рождения Чжоу Эньлая, одного из самых ярких и влиятельных деятелей в истории Китая XX в., определявших направления революционной борьбы в стране до 1949 г. и содержание социалистической модернизации после образования КНР. Статья посвящена уточнению содержания и результатов функционирования единого фронта в Китае 1930-х – 1940-х гг. и конкретизации роли Чжоу Эньлая в этом процессе.

Joanna Szczepanik

Czy w obrębie polskiego systemu szkolnictwa wyższego sztuka jest nauką? Choć w oficjalnych dokumentach mowa o „poziomie artystycznym prowadzonej działalności naukowej”, kluczowa instytucja narodowa promująca badania naukowe nie finansuje działalności artystycznej. Rodzi się zatem pytanie o obecność sztuki i kryteria jej ewaluacji nie tylko w ramach dyscyplin artystycznych, lecz również nauk humanistycznych i społecznych. Mowa tu o praktykach opartych na sztuce (Art Based Research), przekraczających konwencje zarówno sztuki, jak i badań naukowych. Włączenie sztuki w obszar nauki jest bowiem równoznaczne z wyborem sposobu, poprzez który świat ma być opisywany i doświadczany, wpływa na dobór tematów i pytań badawczych. Wzbudzając emocje, kwestionuje dominującą rolę słowa, podważa pozytywistyczną dychotomię fakt–fikcja, racjonalne–emocjonalne. Jednocześnie otwiera się na otoczenie społeczne, dążąc ku generowaniu wiedzy społecznie i politycznie zaangażowanej. Nowe formy przedstawienia wymagają nie tylko wypracowania przez badaczy nowych kompetencji, lecz również ustalenia nowych kryteriów oceny badań naukowych, a być może również redefinicji podstawowych pojęć, takich jak nauka, wiedza czy badanie. Ustalenie i wdrożenie tych kryteriów jest zależne od decyzji państwowego systemu szkolnictwa, od władzy ewaluacyjnej kształtującej również sektor nauki.

Levin Brinkmann, Fabian Baumann, Jean-François Bonnefon et al.

The ability of humans to create and disseminate culture is often credited as the single most important factor of our success as a species. In this Perspective, we explore the notion of machine culture, culture mediated or generated by machines. We argue that intelligent machines simultaneously transform the cultural evolutionary processes of variation, transmission, and selection. Recommender algorithms are altering social learning dynamics. Chatbots are forming a new mode of cultural transmission, serving as cultural models. Furthermore, intelligent machines are evolving as contributors in generating cultural traits--from game strategies and visual art to scientific results. We provide a conceptual framework for studying the present and anticipated future impact of machines on cultural evolution, and present a research agenda for the study of machine culture.

Wojciech Stankiewicz

Nation and Ethnic Conflict Review of: Małgorzata Budyta-Budzyńska, Socjologia narodu i konfliktów etnicznych [The Sociology of Nation and Ethnic Conflict], Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN 2010.   Naród i konflikt etniczny Recenzja: Małgorzata Budyta-Budzyńska, Socjologia narodu i konfliktów etnicznych, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN 2010.

فرنوش مخلص, دلارام سبکرو, مهربان عثمان مصطفی et al.

مفهوم شهر، شناختی به‌عنوان یک موجود مستقل، غیرقابل تقسیم و در تعاملی دائمی با اندام‌های مختلف تشکیل‌دهندۀ خود است. وجهی از مفهوم اجتماعی است که شهر را در یک نظم سیستمی با حفظ استقلال اجزاء، به هم پیوند می‌دهد. تعریف اجزاء و نوع پیوند آنها به فاکتورهای اجتماعی، طبیعی، فرهنگی، سیاسی، اقتصادی، کارکردی و فیزیکی وابسته است که در یک رابطۀ سیستمی، توسعه و حیات شهر را در طول تاریخی توضیح می‌دهند. در شهرهای سمنان و دامغان، بنیان شکل‌گیری شهر آب بوده است. سازمان فضایی شهر و تعریف عناصر شهری و رویدادها و مراسم شهر در ارتباط با آب شکل می‌گرفته است. در کنار دلایل و انباشت‌های عینی و ذهنی جاری در شهر که معنای کلیت آن را خوانش می‌کنند، در شهرهای مذکور، عنصر طبیعی آب به‌عنوان مهمترین عامل در تعریف عناصر سازمان شهر است. با حضور درخت در فضای شهر، رابطه‌ای تکاملی و معنادار دارد و در انطباق با مفاهیم و سایر اندام‌های عینی شهر به خوانش منظر شهری از طریق عناصر سازمان فضایی کمک خواهد کرد. بنابراین این مقاله با هدف شناسایی و رابطۀ سازمانی عناصر منظر شهری، از طریق مطالعات و مشاهدات میدانی به دنبال پاسخ به این سؤال است: چگونه عناصر منظر شهری سمنان و دامغان بر اساس عناصر سازمان فضایی شهر خوانش می‌شوند؟ در راستای پاسخ به این سؤال، با دیدگاهی کل‌نگر، براساس منابع کتابخانه‌ای و انطباق آنها با مشاهدات میدانی، مصادیقی از شهر خوانش شدند که بتوانند مفاهیم عناصر سازمان فضایی را روایت کنند. علاوه بر مصداق‌های فیزیکی و کارکردی در تعریف عناصر سازمان فضایی شهر -مرکز، قلمرو، کل‌های کوچک و ساختار، زیرساخت آبی و درخت به‌عنوان عناصر طبیعی، در تکمیل و خوانایی عناصر سازمانی شهر، از وجوه متمایز و مهم سازمانی سمنان و دامغان با سایر شهرهای ایرانی هستند.

Tamas David-Barrett

On one hand, kinship is a universal human phenomenon that tends to align with biological relatedness, which might suggest evolutionary foundations. On the other hand, kinship has exceptional variation across the human populations, which points to cultural foundations. Furthermore, even if its foundation was biological, kinship is often too imprecise to track genetic relatedness efficiently, while inclusive fitness theory would suggest focusing only on the closest relatives, which is not the case in most human cultures. It was the parallel validity of these contradicting arguments that led to decades of fierce debate about the definition and measurement of the phenomenon. This paper offers a new approach to kinship. First, the model demonstrates that it is possible to generate kinship networks (a) derived from the kind of basic kin connections that our species shares with other apes, but (b) driven by network rather than biological logic beyond the immediate family. Second the model demonstrates that kinship as a network heuristic works efficiently only in high fertility societies, and gives way to similarity-based friendship with demographic transition. The results explain (i) why kinship labelling is unique to our species, (ii) why kinship is universal among human cultures, (iii) why kinship terminology systems are varied across cultures, (iv) why linguistic kin assignment is imprecise, and (v) why kinship is replaced by homophily when relatives are scarce. The model offers a unifying framework to the debate between social and evolutionary anthropology concerning the concept of human kinship.

Chiyu Zhang, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, El Moatez Billah Nagoudi

With the proliferation of social media, many studies resort to social media to construct datasets for developing social meaning understanding systems. For the popular case of Twitter, most researchers distribute tweet IDs without the actual text contents due to the data distribution policy of the platform. One issue is that the posts become increasingly inaccessible over time, which leads to unfair comparisons and a temporal bias in social media research. To alleviate this challenge of data decay, we leverage a paraphrase model to propose a new persistent English Twitter dataset for social meaning (PTSM). PTSM consists of $17$ social meaning datasets in $10$ categories of tasks. We experiment with two SOTA pre-trained language models and show that our PTSM can substitute the actual tweets with paraphrases with marginal performance loss.

Alexandria Volkening

Traffic jams on roadways, echo chambers on social media, crowds of moving pedestrians, and opinion dynamics during elections are all complex social systems. These applications may seem disparate, but some of the questions that they motivate are similar from a mathematical perspective. Across these examples, researchers seek to uncover how individual agents -- whether drivers, Twitter accounts, pedestrians, or voters -- are interacting. By better understanding these interactions, mathematical modelers can make predictions about the group-level features that will emerge when agents alter their behavior. In this tutorial, which is based on the lecture that I gave at the 2021 American Mathematical Society Short Course, I introduce some of the terms, methods, and choices that arise when building such data-driven models. I discuss the differences between models that are statistical or mathematical, static or dynamic, spatial or non-spatial, discrete or continuous, and phenomenological or mechanistic. For concreteness, I also describe models of two complex systems, election dynamics and pedestrian-crowd movement, in more detail. With a conceptual approach, I broadly highlight some of the challenges that arise when building and calibrating models, choosing complexity, and working with quantitative and qualitative data.

Andres Ferraro, Gustavo Ferreira, Fernando Diaz et al.

Recommender systems have become the dominant means of curating cultural content, significantly influencing the nature of individual cultural experience. While the majority of research on recommender systems optimizes for personalized user experience, this paradigm does not capture the ways that recommender systems impact cultural experience in the aggregate, across populations of users. Although existing novelty, diversity, and fairness studies probe how systems relate to the broader social role of cultural content, they do not adequately center culture as a core concept and challenge. In this work, we introduce commonality as a new measure that reflects the degree to which recommendations familiarize a given user population with specified categories of cultural content. Our proposed commonality metric responds to a set of arguments developed through an interdisciplinary dialogue between researchers in computer science and the social sciences and humanities. With reference to principles underpinning non-profit, 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. Taking diversity in movie recommendation as a case study in enhancing pluralistic cultural experience, we empirically compare systems' performance using commonality and existing utility, diversity, and fairness metrics. Our results demonstrate that commonality captures a property of system behavior complementary to existing metrics and suggest the need for alternative, non-personalized interventions in recommender systems oriented to strengthening cultural citizenship across populations of users. In this way, commonality contributes to a growing body of scholarship developing 'public good' rationales for digital media and ML systems.