Hasil untuk "Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology"

Bart Paul Vanspauwen

A combinação de contributos dos estudos pós-coloniais, de património e de mobilidade constitui um prisma privilegiado para análise das metáforas de viagem e encontro. Tal como Paul Gilroy (1993) considerou os navios coloniais unidades culturais e políticas que navegavam nas várias partes do mundo atlântico, também é possível considerar, no presente pós-colonial, que os aviões transatlânticos servem de mediadores nas dimensões culturais e políticas das viagens. Sem dúvida, e durante os seus quase 80 anos de existência, a companhia aérea de bandeira TAP Air Portugal tem vindo a desempenhar um papel fundamental na conexão das comunidades de língua portuguesa dispersas geograficamente, mas ligadas política, económica, cultural e afetivamente. Após os importantes eventos institucionais, e relativamente recentes, como a fundação da Comunidade de Países de Língua Oficial Portuguesa, em 1996, e a Exposição Mundial de Lisboa de 1998, as relações pós-coloniais lusófonas ficaram mais visíveis, tanto internacionalmente quanto internamente. E nas representações de elementos da cultura expressos pela TAP, o Brasil tem tido um papel dominante. Enquadrando o meu trabalho em debates sobre a promoção de memórias sociais e patrimónios culturais, pretendo compreender a maneira como as relações luso-brasileiras têm vindo a ser representadas pela TAP. A nível metodológico, realizo uma análise do discurso, que incide sobre as noções usadas pela TAP (tais como “abraço”, “amizade” e “hospitalidade”); teoricamente, problematizo entendimentos sobre os conceitos de “portugalidade” e “brasilidade” como elementos-chave da ideia de “lusofonia”.

Masanori Takano, Kenji Yokotani, Takahiro Kato et al.

Online communication via avatars provides a richer online social experience than text communication. This reinforces the importance of online social support. Online social support is effective for people who lack social resources because of the anonymity of online communities. We aimed to understand online social support via avatars and their social relationships to provide better social support to avatar users. Therefore, we administered a questionnaire to three avatar communication service users (Second Life, ZEPETO, and Pigg Party) and three text communication service users (Facebook, X, and Instagram) (N=8,947). There was no duplication of users for each service. By comparing avatar and text communication users, we examined the amount of online social support, stability of online relationships, and the relationships between online social support and offline social resources (e.g., offline social support). We observed that avatar communication service users received more online social support, had more stable relationships, and had fewer offline social resources than text communication service users. However, the positive association between online and offline social support for avatar communication users was more substantial than for text communication users. These findings highlight the significance of realistic online communication experiences through avatars, including nonverbal and real-time interactions with co-presence. The findings also highlighted avatar communication service users' problems in the physical world, such as the lack of offline social resources. This study suggests that enhancing online social support through avatars can address these issues. This could help resolve social resource problems, both online and offline in future metaverse societies.

Tian Wu

A. Kakama, Ambrose Atuheire, D. Kahyana

In southwestern Uganda, a custom of health and social support has been managed through collective organizations known as engozi for centuries. Subscribers advanced help for those who were not able to provide for themselves and their households. Participants pooled financial and food resources, offered emotional assistance, and aided in transporting patients to hospitals. The institution of “free government health amenities” caused the decline of the engozi custom. However, with an insufficient annual health sector budget allocation, the state health services cannot satisfactorily meet the needs. The Kisiizi neighborhood, while depending on the engozi practice, arrived at a CHI system in 1996 as a self-help innovation to eliminate financial obstacles and enhance access to quality health amenities. Numerous studies on CHI have examined the structure, registration and memberships, health-related advantages, and monetary-related benefits, but little has been documented on how cultural beliefs and customs have affected its application. This study aimed to identify the role of culture and customs in tackling healthcare disparities via a CHI strategy. This study adopted a case study methodology and qualitative methods. The study utilizes Woolcock’s social capital theory and Cultural competence theory as the analytical framework. It identifies Brotherhood, Solidarity, Belonging, Cooperation, Volunteering, Reciprocity, and Respect for Authority and Leaders as key values upheld by the engozi tradition, strengthening social capital and laying a solid foundation for successful CHI. This study also identified that societal values and traditions have significantly impacted the implementation of the Kisiizi CHI scheme, as evidenced by the influence on CHI leadership and governance, collecting premium fees from subscribers, mobilization and registration of participants, and information dissemination. Lastly, the study identified that CHI has positively affected healthcare challenges within the community, evidenced by increased utilization of healthcare services, improved access to antenatal care, health promotion and disease prevention initiatives, and improved quality of services due to user feedback.

Morana Jarec

Infrastructure projects, encompassing the construction of roads, railways, power facilities, and other structures, have a tangible impact on the physical landscape. When implemented within or through a settlement, these projects also influence cultural and social aspects of life. Despite their intention to enhance citizens' well-being as part of modernization endeavours, infrastructure initiatives often produce uneven effects on different social groups. This study focuses on the transformative processes that unfolded in the village of Mrzla Vodica, located in Gorski Kotar, Croatia, following the construction of a road in the early 19th century and a dam in the mid-20th century, up to the present day. Employing a classic ethnographic approach and a literature review, this research aims to demonstrate how infrastructure can generate both prosperity and significant disruptions to space, potentially leading to the decline or even disappearance of a community. By shedding light on the inequality produced by infrastructural development, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of modernization processes in rural area.

Olga Briukhovetska

У статті запропоновано нескептичний погляд на проліферацію (розростання, збільшення кількості, розширення) поворотів у гуманітарних і соціальних науках. Доповнюючи картографування культурних поворотів, здійснене німецькою антропологинею Доріс Бахманн-Медік, авторка статті виокремлює важливий патерн, який організовує те, що на перший погляд може здатися хаотичним роїнням поворотів. Цей патерн можна описати як маятникоподібний рух від лінгвістичної моделі, яка лежить в основі культурного повороту як розширення лінгвістичного повороту, до реабілітації присутності (для позначення цієї нової тенденції авторка дещо провокативно використовує жупел часів постмодернізму «метафізика присутності»). Цей патерн продемонстровано на прикладі візуального повороту, який кардинально змінив спосіб говорити про зображення, відмовившись від гегемонії лінгвістичної моделі. Однак тенденція реабілітації присутності є значно ширшою, що дає змогу стверджувати про цілу серію «антилінгвістичних» поворотів.

Ognjen Tošović

In his multi-layered and complex work, Herodotus of Halicarnassus mentions a large number of remains of material culture of various kinds. As a rule, certain isolated stories from the past are tied to these materialities, which the father of history fits into his narrative and finds a place and purpose for them in his work as a whole. Given that these materials and the stories related to them appear in different social and cultural contexts, this paper points out their political and ideological implications for the society that preserves and transmits them. However, Herodotus himself was not free from cultural and ideological frameworks and perspectives, particularly evident in his description of other peoples – the Egyptians, Scythians, and Persians – whom he tried to bring closer to his Hellenic audience and their cultural-ideological framework. Consequently, in the second part of the paper, we will point out the sign and role of material culture in the context of Herodotus’ depiction of the Other. The first part of the paper analyzes three examples of materialized memory that relate to the Greek past and are located in the Greek social and cultural context. The first two examples, which refer to votive offerings and parts of the landscape at Delphi, indicate how narratives are created and attached to material objects to convey a certain political message through them. The third example refers to a bronze statue representing a man riding a dolphin to which the story of the singer Arion is related. In connection with that story, it is pointed out that the local community’s positive memory of its ruler has been preserved in its elements. The second part of the paper analyzes how the connection between materiality and memory is presented in Herodotus’ accounts of the Others – the Egyptians and the Scythians.

A. E. Granados

This article describes sound ethnography, a procedure for gathering and analyzing data that explores the sound and musical dimensions of collective action, concretely protest marches. This research methodology seeks to an-swer the question, “How does sound contribute to the political and cultural objectives of marches?” Sound ethnology for this purpose was developed in fieldwork carried out in mass marches in Mexico City between 2014 and 2020, most aligned with the political left. This approach, which is part of the sensorial turn of sociology and anthropology, aims to contribute to restoring the sensorial, emotional, and corporeal dimensions of sociocultural proces-ses, long ignored by the social sciences.

The article mentions the ritual of “Serge bosgoqu“ (putting up hitching post) that has been handed down from the Bronze Age among the nomadic tribes. The ancient Mongolian word “serge“ has been abandoned and forgotten by many Mongolian tribes, but it is still actively used in Shinekheen buriyad and has cultural meaning, ritual symbols, and social roles. Based on this, it is concluded that the Autumn Feast, as one of the Chinggis Khan’s four-season ritual, is “Nogt sergiin khurim”, where people put up a hitching post that unites mares and foals, rather than “Nogt shurgiin khurim“ to separates mares and foals with the fork.

This article aims to clarify the differences in sexual attitudes within cultural contexts by comparing the influence of traditional culture on sexual attitudes using the examples of the Han Chinese and Inner Mongolians in China. Researchers in China have an extensive history of studying the sexual attitude of the Han nationality, ranging from textual research to social science research. However, in this study, there is very little research on the sexual attitudes of Inner Mongolians, and to be specific, there have only been attempts to indirectly examine these attitudes through the study of literary characters. In this study, hypothesized that “traditional culture” not only influences sexual attitudes but also that over time, traditional sexual attitudes intertwine with contemporary attitudes and even influence the sexual attitudes of other cultures. To achieve this, we analyzed previous studies, source documents, specific examples of sexual attitudes among Han Chinese and Inner Mongolians, and real-life cases.

A. A. Mušović

Carmilla (1872) is a cult Gothic work, an unorthodox example of Victorian prose written by the distinguished Irish ghost story writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873). In this novella, the author uses the archetypal motif of female vampirism that opposes the patriarchal concept of logic and meaning. A seemingly unusual set of circumstances in the life of the young heroine, Laura, will bring her to the very edge of a silent and imperceptible death, while the events that follow lead her to recount her experience many years later, telling a story much older than herself, both eerie and timeless. In Carmilla, the author confronts us with actions driven by passionate love, the echo of which will stretch through time, alongside the heroine’s unusual dreams and nightmares, but also with elegant social conventions and settings, such as balls, where danger takes its most seductive form.   At the level of psychoanalytic, gender and cultural premises, and in the context of predator–victim dynamics, the paper aims to present the psychology of manipulation in contemporary culture. Thus, we place Carmilla within the broader framework of cultural studies through the interpretation of emotional/energetic manipulation, a phenomenon that continues to shape the modern dynamics of interpersonal relations. In this timeless story, the latent theme of homosexuality (specifically, female) further enriches Le Fanu’s idea, inviting a multi-layered new interpretation. The seductive and omnipresent vampire Carmilla becomes a fantastic allegory of the modern condition, where the ending’s final ambivalence paves the way for perpetual renewal—because manipulation never dies. There is something Gothic in the modern paradigm of manipulation, i.e. of what contemporary psychoanalysis defines as Cluster B personality disorders. They involve narcissistic and antisocial, as well as histrionic and borderline personality disorders. What all these disorders have in common are manipulative patterns of behavior (dramatization). As a ubiquitous phenomenon and a rising tendency, manipulation is becoming a distinctive feature of the modern era. In this paper, we look at the phenomenon through the metaphor of the predator-victim relationship. The controversial theme and ambiguity of Carmilla’s interpretation provide a compelling example of the overlap among the mentioned disorders, providing deeper insight into the complexity of human nature and ambiguity of identity. The past as a frame of reference, combined with Gothic premises, paradoxically sharpens our understanding of manipulation as a contemporary phenomenon, making it more real and more tragic at the same time. Where will the predatory ways of our age lead us? The past placed in a causal relation with the present acquires a wider frame of reference and imposes the question of boundaries. Literary boundaries – Is Carmilla a Victorian classic or a postmodern feminist Gothic? And the wider, cultural ones – Where do the boundaries of contemporary identity lie?

Gerelmaa Erdenechuluun

A ritual is a social model intertwined with human life, practices, and customs, creating a framework for human actions that have shaped cultural heritage through ancient rituals. These rituals have been a central focus of research across various social sciences and humanities, including cultural studies, psychology, religious studies, ethnology, anthropology, and sociology.Traditional rituals specifically related to children form a significant part of Mongolian customs, passed down through centuries. They embody profound symbolic meanings, such as safeguarding children from potential dangers, illnesses, and hardships while bestowing blessings for health and longevity. This article explores the symbolic aspects of rituals associated with children, with a focus on the ritual of purifying, using ethnographic field research to examine the nature of affliction embedded in these symbolic actions.In ritual studies, concepts like “affliction”, introduced by researcher such as V.Gennep, V.Turner, and C.Bell, involve analyzing actions undertaken in response to fear, suffering, conflict, or struggle. This concept helps deepen our understanding of social and cultural transformations, people’s mentality, and the main characteristics of rituals in a given community Хүүхэд ширгэлэх зан үйлийн бэлгэдэл дэх аффликяцийн утгыг шинжлэх нь Хураангуй: Зан үйл (ritual) нь хүний аж амьдралтай уялдан хэвшиж тогтсон заншил, түүнтэй холбогдох аливаа хүмүүний үйл, нийгмийн загвар бөгөөд эртний олон зан үйл хүн төрөлхтний соёлын өвийг бүрдүүлж байна. Зан үйл нь соёл судлал, сэтгэл судлал, шашин судлал, угсаатны зүй, антропологи, социологи зэрэг нийгэм, хүмүүнлэгийн шинжлэх ухааны судалгааны анхаарлын төвд байсаар ирсэн. Ялангуяа хүүхдэд холбогдох уламжлалт зан үйл нь монгол зан заншлын томоохон хэсэг бөгөөд хүүхдийг аливаа аюул, өвчин зовлонгоос хамгаалах, эрүүл энх, урт удаан наслахыг ерөөсөн гүн утга бэлгэдлийг өөртөө шингээсэн байдаг. Бид энэхүү өгүүлэлд хүүхдэд холбогдох зан үйл тэр дундаа хүүхэд ширгэлэх зан үйлийн бэлгэдлийг угсаатны зүйн хээрийн судалгааны эх хэрэглэгдэхүүнд тулгуурлан судалж, түүний бэлгэдэл дэх аффликяцийн мөн чанарыг судлан тодруулахыг оролдлоо. Зан үйл судлалд В.Женнеп, В.Түрнер, К.Белл зэрэг эрдэмтдийн дэвшүүлсэн аффликяци хэмээх ойлголт буюу хүний оршихуй дахь аливаа айдас, зовлон зүдгүүр, зөрчил, тэмцлийн үед хийж буй үйлдлийн мөн чанарыг шинжлэх нь нийгэм, соёлын өөрчлөлт, ард түмний оюун санаа, зан үйлийн онцлогийг гүн гүнзгий ойлгоход дөхөм болно гэж үзэж байна. Түлхүүр үгс: зан үйл судлал, аффликяци, уламжлал, бэлгэдэл, ширгийн хэрэглэгдэхүүн, лиминал, зан үйлийн мөн чанар

Ksenia P. Trofimova

This ethnographic essay explores the social work of local narratives of djinn and possession in the Sufi communities of North Macedonia and Serbia. Addressing the “neighbourhood” relations between djinn and humans, as well as situations of possession in everyday conversations, allows for a better understanding of the socio- cultural contexts and intrinsic processes that shape the ongoing transformations of Sufi traditions in this part of the world. The fragmentation of the religious field, the coexistence, and the clash of diverse Islamic discourses within it are discussed in this context. This essay covers two case studies that illustrate the dynamics of Sufi religiosity, such as revising religious knowledge and practice, as well as the growing complexity of the sacred landscape. Published in accordance with the research plan of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The author declares no conflict of interests.

Snežana Kecojević Miljević

If we observe group analysis as a figure in the social field, many changes in society undoubtedly shape it both as a theory, a therapeutic method and a form of training. That is how it was and will be. This shaping is slow, discreet but an active process of constant acculturation of both group analysis and group analysts. Wars, migrations, emigrations, cultural diversities create a need for a more flexible and culturally attuned profile of group analysts, who are not only capable of working with diversity, but also within diversity—actively reflecting on their own identity and experience even under the pressure and tormented by problems of preserving their own tent canvas. This is one possible future for group analysis, in the ever-increasing intertwining and cross-fertilization between human sciences such as sociology, history, anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, communicology, art, with no fear of diversity that threatens identity, with openness of new generation of group analysts to heteroglossia.

Wentao Xu, Kazutoshi Sasahara

Social divide and polarization have become significant societal issues. To understand the mechanisms behind these phenomena, social media analysis offers research opportunities in computational social science, where developing effective user embedding methods is essential for subsequent analysis. Traditionally, researchers have used predefined network-based user features (e.g., network size, degree, and centrality measures). However, because such measures may not capture the complex characteristics of social media users, in our study we developed a method for embedding users based on a URL domain co-occurrence network. This approach effectively represents social media users involved in competing events such as political campaigns and public health crises. We assessed the method's performance using binary classification tasks and datasets that covered topics associated with the COVID-19 infodemic, such as QAnon, Biden, and Ivermectin, among Twitter users. Our results revealed that user embeddings generated directly from the retweet network and/or based on language performed below expectations, whereas our domain-based embeddings outperformed those methods while reducing computation time. Therefore, domain-based embedding offers an accessible and effective method for characterizing social media users in competing events.

Thomas Louf, Bruno Gonçalves, Jose J. Ramasco et al.

Cultural areas represent a useful concept that cross-fertilizes diverse fields in social sciences. Knowledge of how humans organize and relate their ideas and behavior within a society helps to understand their actions and attitudes towards different issues. However, the selection of common traits that shape a cultural area is somewhat arbitrary. What is needed is a method that can leverage the massive amounts of data coming online, especially through social media, to identify cultural regions without ad-hoc assumptions, biases or prejudices. This work takes a crucial step in this direction by introducing a method to infer cultural regions based on the automatic analysis of large datasets from microblogging posts. The approach presented here is based on the principle that cultural affiliation can be inferred from the topics that people discuss among themselves. Specifically, regional variations in written discourse are measured in American social media. From the frequency distributions of content words in geotagged Tweets, the regional hotspots of words' usage are found, and from there, principal components of regional variation are derived. Through a hierarchical clustering of the data in this lower-dimensional space, this method yields clear cultural areas and the topics of discussion that define them. It uncovers a manifest North-South separation, which is primarily influenced by the African American culture, and further contiguous (East-West) and non-contiguous divisions that provide a comprehensive picture of today's cultural areas in the US.

Sho Tsugawa, Kohei Watabe

Identifying influencers in a given social network has become an important research problem for various applications, including accelerating the spread of information in viral marketing and preventing the spread of fake news and rumors. The literature contains a rich body of studies on identifying influential source spreaders who can spread their own messages to many other nodes. In contrast, the identification of influential brokers who can spread other nodes' messages to many nodes has not been fully explored. Theoretical and empirical studies suggest that involvement of both influential source spreaders and brokers is a key to facilitating large-scale information diffusion cascades. Therefore, this paper explores ways to identify influential brokers from a given social network. By using three social media datasets, we investigate the characteristics of influential brokers by comparing them with influential source spreaders and central nodes obtained from centrality measures. Our results show that (i) most of the influential source spreaders are not influential brokers (and vice versa) and (ii) the overlap between central nodes and influential brokers is small (less than 15%) in Twitter datasets. We also tackle the problem of identifying influential brokers from centrality measures and node embeddings, and we examine the effectiveness of social network features in the broker identification task. Our results show that (iii) although a single centrality measure cannot characterize influential brokers well, prediction models using node embedding features achieve F$_1$ scores of 0.35--0.68, suggesting the effectiveness of social network features for identifying influential brokers.

Han-Sol Lee, Sergey U. Chernikov, Szabolcs Nagy et al.

This empirical study investigates the impact of the Hofstede cultural dimensions (HCD) on the Global Innovation Index (GII) scores in four different years (2007, 2009, 2019 and 2021) to compare the impacts during the pre- and post-crisis (financial and COVID-19) period by employing ordinary least square (OLS) and robust least square (Robust) analyses. The purpose of this study is to identify the impact of cultural factors on the innovation development for different income groups during the pre- and post-crisis period. We found that, in general, the same cultural properties were required for countries to enhance innovation inputs and outputs regardless of pre- and post-crisis periods and time variances. The significant cultural factors (driving forces) of the innovation performance do not change over time. However, our empirical results revealed that not the crisis itself but the income group (either developed or developing) is the factor that influences the relationship between cultural properties and innovation. It is also worth noting that cultural properties have lost much of their impact on innovation, particularly in developing countries, during recent periods. It is highly likely that in terms of innovation, no cultural development or change can significantly impact the innovation output of developing countries without the construction of the appropriate systems.

Jooyoung Lee, Sarah Rajtmajer, Eesha Srivatsavaya et al.

We investigate relationships between online self-disclosure and received social feedback during the COVID-19 crisis. We crawl a total of 2,399 posts and 29,851 associated comments from the r/COVID19_support subreddit and manually extract fine-grained personal information categories and types of social support sought from each post. We develop a BERT-based ensemble classifier to automatically identify types of support offered in users' comments. We then analyze the effect of personal information sharing and posts' topical, lexical, and sentiment markers on the acquisition of support and five interaction measures (submission scores, the number of comments, the number of unique commenters, the length and sentiments of comments). Our findings show that: 1) users were more likely to share their age, education, and location information when seeking both informational and emotional support, as opposed to pursuing either one; 2) while personal information sharing was positively correlated with receiving informational support when requested, it did not correlate with emotional support; 3) as the degree of self-disclosure increased, information support seekers obtained higher submission scores and longer comments, whereas emotional support seekers' self-disclosure resulted in lower submission scores, fewer comments, and fewer unique commenters; 4) post characteristics affecting social feedback differed significantly based on types of support sought by post authors. These results provide empirical evidence for the varying effects of self-disclosure on acquiring desired support and user involvement online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, this work can assist support seekers hoping to enhance and prioritize specific types of social feedback.

Wei Ma, Ji Chen

The occupational differentiation of the Chaoxian people (Korean Ethnic Group of China or Ethnically Korean Chinese Citizens) migrating to South Korea is an important factor leading to big differences in the social integration within this group. The marginalized characteristics of non-college educated immigrant workers in economic integration have caused them to experience difficulty in social interaction and cultural integration; the successful integration of the middle-and-high-end professional groups into South Korean society has promoted deep interaction and cultural homogeneity with South Koreans. Studying these differentiation and differences in the integration of Chaoxian immigrants into Korean society can not only show the diversity and complexity of cross-border ethnic issues. It is hoped that it will also have a certain positive guiding significance on the rational cross-border transnational migration of Chaoxian people.