نطنز یکی از قدیمیترین زیستگاههای کویری ایران، شهری با سازمان فضایی مبتنیبر باغشهر بوده که بهدلایل مختلفی ازجمله دورافتادن از آزادراه جدید شرق اصفهان، خشکسالی، تغییرات اقلیمی و توسعة صنعتی غیرمکانمند مبتنیبر سود اقتصادی صرف، رونق خود را از دست داده است. این پژوهش قصد دارد با روش مطالعة اسناد کتابخانهای و بهرهمندی از بازدید میدانی و مصاحبة آزاد با کارشناسان، شهروندان و مدیران شهری، دلیل ناسازگاری توسعه با بستر میزبان آن را بررسی کند. یافتة حاصل نشان میدهد در صورتی میتوان توسعة صنعتی پایدار و متوازن داشت که به تطبیق مقیاسِ توسعة صنعتی با مقیاس پتانسیلها و ظرفیتهای بستر آن، اعم از ظرفیتهای کالبدی-مادی بستر و هم ظرفیت اذهان جامعة محلی در پذیرابودن توسعه، بهعنوان یکی از ارکان اصلی توسعة مکانمند توجه ویژه شود، در غیر این صورت توسعة زیانهای جبران ناپذیری به بستر خود خواهد زد. آنچه در نطنز باعث تخریب باغات و بهتبع آن سازمان فضایی مبتنیبر ساختار باغشهری آن شد.
Economic growth, development, planning, Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology
On 23 May 2025, the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, hosted an international symposium entitled Hands-on Ethnographies: The Production and Meaning in (Contemporary) Handicrafts. For this occasion, the organisers invited four guest speakers from abroad and four Slovenian contributors to explore the political, legal, economic, social, and technological aspects of handicrafts. The event also aligned with the Faculty of Arts’ 2025 theme year, the Year of Heritage.
The scholarly monograph offers an in-depth analysis of play as a sociocultural phenomenon. Based on specific theoretical frameworks, it traces various forms of play, including bodybuilding, cosplay, milsim, and drag queen performances. The author presents a fresh perspective on social and cultural interactions, examining them through the lens of ethnology and anthropology.
The entry briefly summarises the historical development of anthropological research in the country since the 1730s. During the XXth c. Russian ethnology transformed from a geographical to the discipline belonging to social sciences and humanities. From mid-1960s to the 1990s it was characterised by debates over definitions of ethnic groups. Russian ethnology during this period was strongly influenced by conflicting ideologies: imperial stance seeking unification of the ethnically diverse population, on the one hand, and a local nationalisms ideology, on the other. The introduction of socio-cultural anthropology during the 1990s marked a new stage with the emergence of specialised sub-disciplines, the division between folklore, ethno-political, and regional comparative studies. The paper covers the history of the main anthropological institutions in the country, and traces the leading anthropological periodicals policy
Abstract This paper focuses on adapting the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West and the interaction between the game Black Myth: Wukong and the younger generation in China. Based on reception aesthetics, adaptation theory, and Cultural Empowerment Theory, the article analyzes Journey to the West’s adaptations and cultural empowerment across different periods and media from both ontological and essential research perspectives, combining diachronic and synchronic analysis. The study systematically examines Journey to the West’s adaptation process and cultural empowerment through literature research and online ethnographic methods. The research indicates that the game Black Myth: Wukong is a well-crafted adaptation of Journey to the West and has received the “Thick Empowerment” from the “Thick Power” of Journey to the West. Furthermore, Chinese youth of the new era have exerted their cultural subjectivity by actively participating in interpreting and re-creating Chinese culture in adapted works through new media platforms, demonstrating their profound identification with and cultural confidence in Chinese culture.
In this paper, I discuss Nowa Ruda and the Kłodzko region as viewed by Karol Maliszewski and represented in his poetry, from his earliest poems written in the second half of the 1980s to his latest poetry collections. My argument revolves around the key concept of a field humanist on which Maliszewski relied to define himself (and his I-speaker). This notion brings together the various social functions Maliszewski performed and the responsibilities he took as a literature scholar, a teacher, a local community member and, above all, a poet producing local verses. These challenges find a suitable generic correspondence in the leporello, an inspiring form as it resists both the writer and the reader since the whole must be first unfolded and studied before attention is eventually devoted to a small fragment the way Maliszewski does.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Arts in general
Este relato de experiência teve como objetivo abordar questões de gênero, feminismo e direitos humanos, utilizando o livro Malala, a menina que queria ir para a escola, de Adriana Carranca (2018), com alunos do 7º ano do ensino fundamental em uma escola pública. A história da ativista paquistanesa Malala Yousafzai serviu como base para leitura, fichamento, tertúlia literária, produção de cartas motivacionais e discussões sobre igualdade de gênero, acesso à educação e dos direitos humanos. A metodologia adotou uma abordagem participativa, com o uso de recursos visuais, como vídeos, para ampliar a compreensão e o engajamento dos estudantes. O referencial teórico fundamentou-se nas perspectivas de Spivak (2010) e hooks (2017, 2021), dialogando com teorias feministas e documentos internacionais. O estudo dessa obra incentivou reflexões sobre desigualdade de gênero e educação equitativa, promovendo a desconstrução de estereótipos e o fortalecimento da consciência crítica dos estudantes. A experiência também estimulou o protagonismo juvenil na defesa dos direitos humanos e na promoção da cultura da paz, reforçando o papel da educação na construção de uma sociedade mais justa e igualitária.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Human settlements. Communities
The human-centered word association test (WAT) serves as a cognitive proxy, revealing sociocultural variations through culturally shared semantic expectations and implicit linguistic patterns shaped by lived experiences. We extend this test into an LLM-adaptive, free-relation task to assess the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with cross-cultural cognition. To address culture preference, we propose CultureSteer, an innovative approach that moves beyond superficial cultural prompting by embedding cultural-specific semantic associations directly within the model's internal representation space. Experiments show that current LLMs exhibit significant bias toward Western (notably American) schemas at the word association level. In contrast, our model substantially improves cross-cultural alignment, capturing diverse semantic associations. Further validation on culture-sensitive downstream tasks confirms its efficacy in fostering cognitive alignment across cultures. This work contributes a novel methodological paradigm for enhancing cultural awareness in LLMs, advancing the development of more inclusive language technologies.
Mai AlKhamissi, Yunze Xiao, Badr AlKhamissi
et al.
Cultural evaluation of large language models has become increasingly important, yet current benchmarks often reduce culture to static facts or homogeneous values. This view conflicts with anthropological accounts that emphasize culture as dynamic, historically situated, and enacted in practice. To analyze this gap, we introduce a four-part framework that categorizes how benchmarks frame culture, such as knowledge, preference, performance, or bias. Using this lens, we qualitatively examine 20 cultural benchmarks and identify six recurring methodological issues, including treating countries as cultures, overlooking within-culture diversity, and relying on oversimplified survey formats. Drawing on established anthropological methods, we propose concrete improvements: incorporating real-world narratives and scenarios, involving cultural communities in design and validation, and evaluating models in context rather than isolation. Our aim is to guide the development of cultural benchmarks that go beyond static recall tasks and more accurately capture the responses of the models to complex cultural situations.
The article examines the personal experiences of single mothers and the surrounding public opinion and media environment, which both reflects and influences the world mothers live in. Single mothers, as a vulnerable group in society, are associated with stereotypes and prejudices in the media and in comments from relatives. It is true that until now most topics related to motherhood, fatherhood, and family structure are usually studied separately in the fields of sociology, family policy, law and psychology, but the disciplines of ethnology and cultural anthropology could provide a deeper look into being a single mother and offer a more complex analysis, showing how social, psychological, legal and communication aspects are closely interconnected and experienced in individual situations. For the research, I analyzed media content and collected personal life stories of single mothers in the form of interviews about their daily experiences and how their environment affects them. Here, I analyze excerpts from nine such interviews and my own articulated experience, delving deeper into it from the perspective of semiotic and phenomenological anthropology. The aim of the analysis is to reveal how these experiences are expressed and what personal, social and cultural aspects they may reveal, thus seeking to better understand the phenomenon of being a single mother.
Maria T. Baldassarre, Danilo Caivano, Berenice Fernandez Nieto
et al.
In recent months, the social impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained considerable public interest, driven by the emergence of Generative AI models, ChatGPT in particular. The rapid development of these models has sparked heated discussions regarding their benefits, limitations, and associated risks. Generative models hold immense promise across multiple domains, such as healthcare, finance, and education, to cite a few, presenting diverse practical applications. Nevertheless, concerns about potential adverse effects have elicited divergent perspectives, ranging from privacy risks to escalating social inequality. This paper adopts a methodology to delve into the societal implications of Generative AI tools, focusing primarily on the case of ChatGPT. It evaluates the potential impact on several social sectors and illustrates the findings of a comprehensive literature review of both positive and negative effects, emerging trends, and areas of opportunity of Generative AI models. This analysis aims to facilitate an in-depth discussion by providing insights that can inspire policy, regulation, and responsible development practices to foster a human-centered AI.
Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Saveski, Chenyan Jia
et al.
Social media plays a central role in shaping public opinion and behavior, yet performing experiments on these platforms and, in particular, on feed algorithms is becoming increasingly challenging. This guide offers practical recommendations for researchers developing and deploying field experiments focused on real-time reranking of social media feeds. The article is organized around two contributions. First, we provide an overview of an experimental method using web browser extensions that intercepts and reranks content in real time, enabling naturalistic reranking field experiments. We then describe feed interventions and measurements that this paradigm enables on participants' actual feeds, without requiring the involvement of social media platforms. Second, we offer concrete technical recommendations for intercepting and reranking social media feeds with minimal user-facing delay, and provide an open-source implementation. This document aims to summarize lessons learned in running field experiments on social media, provide concrete implementation details, and foster the ecosystem of independent social media research. Finally, we release the source code that serves as a blueprint for implementing future feed-ranking experiments.
Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly evolved as the foundation of various natural language processing (NLP) applications. Despite their wide use cases, their understanding of culturally-related concepts and reasoning remains limited. Meantime, there is a significant need to enhance these models' cultural reasoning capabilities, especially concerning underrepresented regions. This paper introduces a novel pipeline for extracting high-quality, culturally-related instruction tuning datasets from vast unstructured corpora. We utilize a self-instruction generation pipeline to identify cultural concepts and trigger instruction. By integrating with a general-purpose instruction tuning dataset, our model demonstrates enhanced capabilities in recognizing and understanding regional cultural nuances, thereby enhancing its reasoning capabilities. We conduct experiments across three regions: Singapore, the Philippines, and the United States, achieving performance improvement of up to 6%. Our research opens new avenues for extracting cultural instruction tuning sets directly from unstructured data, setting a precedent for future innovations in the field.
The community plays a crucial role in understanding user behavior and network characteristics in social networks. Some users can use multiple social networks at once for a variety of objectives. These users are called overlapping users who bridge different social networks. Detecting communities across multiple social networks is vital for interaction mining, information diffusion, and behavior migration analysis among networks. This paper presents a community detection method based on nonnegative matrix tri-factorization for multiple heterogeneous social networks, which formulates a common consensus matrix to represent the global fused community. Specifically, the proposed method involves creating adjacency matrices based on network structure and content similarity, followed by alignment matrices which distinguish overlapping users in different social networks. With the generated alignment matrices, the method could enhance the fusion degree of the global community by detecting overlapping user communities across networks. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated with new metrics on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr datasets. The results of the experiments demonstrate its superior performance in terms of community quality and community fusion.
This article investigates reasons for keeping secrets from women in real and virtual social environment of Azerbaijan through a manhood perspective. The investigation has revealed that the masculinity within the society creates the folklore patterns that prohibit the transfer of the secrets of this gender group to women and on the other hand, prohibit the connection of women with the male social environment. The attitudes supporting manhood are not expressed directly in the folklore texts, but are articulated sporadically, yet their symbolic manifestations influence all the events in the text. In general, investigating the psychosocial complexes within folklore provides extensive opportunities for the study of creative facts in a projective context. In this article, the embodiment of manhood in folklore has been analyzed based on Azerbaijani fairy-tales, jokes and proverbs. The results of the research reveal that sharing a secret to a woman is constructed as deprivation of manhood in the socio-cultural environment of Azerbaijan. In this article, the concept of the men’s keeping secrets from the women has also been investigated within the framework of the Azerbaijani-language virtual social environment. The examples from the Internet sources considering Azerbaijani folklore, which have recently become the cultural reality, have been selected and analyzed in order to explain manhood stereotypes. The results of the investigation show that unlike the traditional folklore facts, the concept of the men’s keeping secrets from the women in the virtual social environment is presented in a more ironic and comic manner. The urgency to examine manhood stereotypes in the context of humor and irony is explained through introducing the alternatives to the tradition and free attitude to the stereotypes of Internet folklore.
The focus of this research are the ways of conceptualizing the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship, which in transitional and developed capitalist societies alike, rely on cognitive models shaped by divergent cultural and socio-political contexts. To be more specific, these cognitive models emerge from different theoretical concepts of social entrepreneurship, as well as from contextually different ways of combining the invariant, structural elements of the concept, both of which are dialectically positioned within the neoliberal capitalism ideology discourse. Within the interaction among the elements constituting the structure of the concept of social entrepreneurship (such as social innovation, civic collectivism, an employment of members of marginalized social groups) and the overall neoliberal ideology discourse, which on its own behalf, operates in accordance with certain logical rules as any other discursive formation does, numerous contradictions and paradoxes emerge. The first chapter of this study critically examines the role of social entrepreneurship within the neoliberal capitalism framework through a comparative analysis with philanthropic endeavors and commercial (traditional, profit-oriented) entrepreneurship, as well as by comparing the diverse ways in which this phenomenon is defined in various socio-political contexts. The process of establishing the social entrepreneurship sector in Serbia, initiated in the post-2008 period reached its normative conclusion with the enactment of a unified law regulating this entrepreneurial activity in 2022. However, it remains incomplete both in terms of the cultural conceptualization of the phenomenon and its practical implementation perspective. This assumption is further examined in the second chapter of this paper in relation to the ideas regarding the social and political cultural heritage legacy, constructed by both policy makers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) engaged in the social protection system which, on their behalf, during the specified period assume the role of social entrepreneurship promoters and emerge as primary contributors to its development. In the third chapter of this study, an exploration of the conditions and operationalization possibilities of key elements within the social entrepreneurship concept is undertaken. This analysis is illustrated through the services provided to the elderly citizens, which provides a framework for developing the thesis on the incomplete process of establishing the social entrepreneurship sector. Subsequently, the fourth and concluding chapter contextualizes these findings within the processes of constructing social issues pertaining aging and unemployment. In addition to drawing the attention to the distinct characteristics and the potential of social entrepreneurship, this research seeks to initiate a discussion focused on exploring possibilities of overcoming the predominantly constraining conditions and factors that influence the further development of this type of entrepreneurial activity within the transitional Serbian society.
This paper examines poverty and decline of morality and social justice in Nigeria. It is a decrease in ethical behavior and the commitment to fair treatment for all members of a community, often manifested through increased social inequality, corruption, disregard for human rights, and a growing acceptance of immoral actions, leading to a sense of societal decay and a weakening of collective values. Secondary sources of data and qualitative analysis was used for the study. Economic pressures, weak governance and corruption, cultural erosion, social fragmentation and breakdown of family structures are some drivers of decline of morality and social justice. This has led to survivalist mentality. This qualitative study explores the interconnections between poverty, morality, and social justice in Nigeria, emphasizing the transformative role of education in addressing these issues. Conflict theory was used as the theoretical framework for the study. It was recommended that Strengthen social institutions, create employment opportunities and social welfare schemes that will alleviate poverty, encourage good leadership and governance. Others are government should adopt dialogue and civil society engagement with a view to promote social justice and morality and integrate moral education into school curricula to promote values such as honesty, integrity, and respect for human rights and promote civic education to raise awareness about citizens' rights and responsibilities.
During the Covid-19 epidemic, Japanese and Chinese have overwhelmingly tended to wear face masks, while Americans have not. Why? In this paper, based on ethnographic interviews with members of these three societies as well as examination of mass media and scholarly reports, I provide a preliminary interpretation of this question. I first consider social psychologists’ large-scale analyses of collectivism versus individualism; China and Japan are both considered to be collectivistic societies, whereas the United States is considered to be individualistic. I also consider ethnic belonging to one’s nation in China and Japan, as opposed to civic belonging to one’s nation in the United States. These explications have value in understanding Covid-19 policies but seem of limited use in explaining mask-wearing. For such understanding, I turn to ethnographic interviews—some twenty in each society—as well as participant-observation in public sites. My findings are these: While in Japan social pressure is paramount in leading to mask wearing, with the state mostly absent, in China state pressure is paramount, with social pressure largely absent. In the United States, with social pressure absent beyond one’s sub-group and state pressure hotly contested, mask-wearing becomes a matter of politically-based individual choice. In these three societies, there have thus been different axes as to why mask-wearing is accepted or contested. This research is of too small a scale to fully explicate these factors; but it does show how anthropological analysis is essential in combining with the findings of other disciplines such as social psychology to arrive at a fuller understanding of contemporary social phenomena.