Hasil untuk "Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology"

Jonathan Shepard

Pouya Shaeri, Yasaman Mohammadpour, Alimohammad Beigi et al.

Extreme weather events driven by climate change, such as wildfires, floods, and heatwaves, prompt significant public reactions on social media platforms. Analyzing the sentiment expressed in these online discussions can offer valuable insights into public perception, inform policy decisions, and enhance emergency responses. Although sentiment analysis has been widely studied in various fields, its specific application to climate-induced events, particularly in real-time, high-impact situations like the 2025 Los Angeles forest fires, remains underexplored. In this survey, we thoroughly examine the methods, datasets, challenges, and ethical considerations related to sentiment analysis of social media content concerning weather and climate change events. We present a detailed taxonomy of approaches, ranging from lexicon-based and machine learning models to the latest strategies driven by large language models (LLMs). Additionally, we discuss data collection and annotation techniques, including weak supervision and real-time event tracking. Finally, we highlight several open problems, such as misinformation detection, multimodal sentiment extraction, and model alignment with human values. Our goal is to guide researchers and practitioners in effectively understanding sentiment during the climate crisis era.

Natálya Cristiana Pereira Pinheiro

Este artigo tem como objetivo aprofundar a análise das referências históricas compreendidas entre os séculos XVIII e XIX, explorando as espécies botânicas e práticas agroecológicas dos povos indígenas na região do Alto Rio Tapajós. Busca-se estabelecer um diálogo entre a etnohistória, etnobotânica e arqueologia, visando contribuir para a compreensão da construção de florestas culturais ao longo do rio Tapajós. Utilizando como base exemplos de povos do Tronco Tupi (Apiaká, Kaiabi, Munduruku e Sateré-Mawé), este estudo se propõe a examinar as complexas relações entre comunidades indígenas e a agrobiodiversidade, evidenciando a riqueza cultural e os sistemas de manejo antigo na região.

Kamila Biały, Piotr F. Piasek

The narrative biographical interview is a research tool that has been successfully used to study the reproductions of the overall constellations of social life that occur within an individual life. The entire methodological proposal as well as the issue of reproduction are based on a dichotomous epistemology. In the presented article, we analyse this issue of reproduction as it appears in Fritz Schütze’s work. Next, we describe a proposal for an alternative narrative interview – interview about the present based on a non-dichotomous epistemology. In our opinion, this epistemological perspective addresses the issue of reproduction in a completely different way. And, more importantly it introduces in the field of sociology an issue of emergence. To illustrate this non-dichotomous logics, we are using the material from one of the interviews from the research data collection.

Verónica Vázquez García, Mayra Denisse Valdez-Rodríguez

Este artículo analiza los motivos de las mujeres de Tlamanca, Puebla, para movilizarse en contra de la mina La Lupe, así como las formas que tomó su participación en la lucha. Los datos fueron obtenidos a través de entrevistas, un taller y una encuesta. Destacan dos hallazgos. Primero, el interés de las mujeres de involucrarse en la defensa del territorio emanó de su necesidad de tener agua para labores agrícolas y de cuidado. Segundo, las mujeres están poco representadas en espacios de toma de decisiones; su participación se concentra en asambleas y marchas. Se concluye resaltando la importancia de promover formas más incluyentes de organización en todos los aspectos de la vida comunitaria para avanzar en la defensa del territorio en condiciones de igualdad de género.

Serina Chang, Alicja Chaszczewicz, Emma Wang et al.

Generating social networks is essential for many applications, such as epidemic modeling and social simulations. The emergence of generative AI, especially large language models (LLMs), offers new possibilities for social network generation: LLMs can generate networks without additional training or need to define network parameters, and users can flexibly define individuals in the network using natural language. However, this potential raises two critical questions: 1) are the social networks generated by LLMs realistic, and 2) what are risks of bias, given the importance of demographics in forming social ties? To answer these questions, we develop three prompting methods for network generation and compare the generated networks to a suite of real social networks. We find that more realistic networks are generated with "local" methods, where the LLM constructs relations for one persona at a time, compared to "global" methods that construct the entire network at once. We also find that the generated networks match real networks on many characteristics, including density, clustering, connectivity, and degree distribution. However, we find that LLMs emphasize political homophily over all other types of homophily and significantly overestimate political homophily compared to real social networks.

Susanna Barnes

In this paper, I reflect on the significance of ritual activity directed towards COVID-19 in Timor-Leste. What, if anything, it tells us about East Timorese beliefs and attitudes regarding infectious disease and why understanding the cultural dimensions of infectious disease is critical to public health responses. Timor-Leste recorded its first COVID-19 case on March 21st, 2020. Over the course of the following weeks elders held ritual ceremonies across the country to mobilise the ancestors and ask for their assistance to keep COVID-19 at bay. These ceremonies circulated widely on social media within Timor-Leste and among the East Timorese diaspora. In parallel to this initial flourishing of ritual activity the government swiftly enacted legislation to declare a state of emergency, closing international borders and establishing quarantine centres across the country. In many ways the health authorities’ response to COVID-19 has been exemplary, with low case numbers and 0 deaths throughout 2020. However, since February 2021 COVID-19 cases have increased exponentially, exposing social cleavages based on education, language and socio-economic position. With limited resources, the health authorities, and in particular the Centre for Integrated Crisis Management, have focused on prevention, contact tracing and testing, adhering to WHO guidelines and emphasising ‘best practices. Yet, the response has been criticized for being top-down and heavy handed. For example, certain public health measures, such as mandatory testing and burial protocols, have been poorly communicated to the broader community. The use of bio-medical language and introduction of new terms and concepts has been excessively didactic and lacks local contextualization. For the majority of the population of Timor-Leste, especially those living in rural areas, lived experiences of illness and disease are interpreted primarily through and by customary beliefs and practices. The rituals directed towards COVID-19 demonstrate a clear understanding of the nature of infection, contamination, disease, models of causality and fears around infection. They also reveal local capacities to contain epidemics and the ability to learn with the bio-medical response. The levels of participation observed in COVID-19 rituals online and local support for these initiatives expressed on social media suggests at the very least that health authorities should engage with local communities in a two-way dialogue to discuss beliefs and existing prevention strategies that can assist and support public health objectives and measures.

A. W. Weber

Middle Holocene hunter-gatherers (HG) of the Cis-Baikal, Eastern Siberia, display substantial spatiotemporal variation in adaptive strategies highlighted by several cultural transitions. These transitions are examined focusing on the role of the following factors: (1) changes in the distribution of the boreal forest; (2) technological innovations; (3) intensification of fishing; and (4) their combined impacts on subsistence and social structure. The expansion and retreat of boreal forest was important because it directly affected the distribution and abundance of large and medium terrestrial game, the core of subsistence for all Middle Holocene HG in the region. All other things being equal, expanding forests meant less game while shrinking forest meant more game and more living space for HG. The bow was crucial not only due to its technological superiority over the spear and atlatl as a game hunting weapon but also because its flexibility allowed it to work equally well for groups of any size and in any environment – forest or steppe. The much higher return rates associated with bow hunting freed enough labour to be allocated to other activities such as the intensification of fishing. Fishing and fisheries were important because they worked as a differentiating force: the more intensive the fishing, the more limited its spatial distribution and the greater the micro-regional differences between cultural patterns. Intensive fishing and game hunting pulled the adaptive strategies in two opposing directions: fishing towards differences and hunting towards similarities between groups and micro-regions. Social relations were important because they fine-tuned the social fabric to optimize the general strategy. Together, these factors account for all cultural transitions and variation documented for the Middle Holocene HG of Cis-Baikal: Transition 1 – formation of the Late Mesolithic cultural pattern with incipient formal cemeteries ~8630 cal BP; Transition 2 – replacement of the Late Mesolithic system on the Angara and in Southwest Baikal, but not in the Little Sea or on the Upper Lena, by the Early Neolithic Kitoi pattern with its very large cemeteries ~7560 cal BP; Transition 3 – collapse of the Kitoi by ~6660 cal BP followed by the formation of the Middle Neolithic pattern with no cemeteries; Transition 4 – reappearance of cemeteries ~6060 cal BP and the establishment of the Late Neolithic pattern; Transition 5 – formation of the Early Bronze Age system ~4970 cal BP; and lastly, Transition 6 – the end of the Early Bronze Age socio-economic pattern by ~3470 cal BP.

Kailadbou Daimai

This paper is an attempt to highlight the significance of youth dormitory system of the Liangmai Naga of Manipur. This traditional institution played a vital role in imparting value education and maintaining the social fabric among the pre-literate Liangmai community. In the past, it serves as the cultural center, where young boys and girls are molded to become responsible adult members of the community. However, this highly developed institution of the Liangmai Naga has now disintegrated. Change in religious belief and the advent of modern education has been attributed for the decline of khangchiu . The paper reflexively analyzes the origin and decline of this traditional institution as well as the roles and functions it played in the traditional Liangmai society. The main objective of the paper is to document the systematic operation of the youth dormitory system so as to bring better understanding of this traditional institution to the younger generations.

Fadwa El Guindi

This article describes the natural phenomenon of the virus labelled COVID-19 and how its spread shook up the social, cultural and business world of humans. In my analysis, I first describe the devastating effect of the sudden onslaught on human lives and the global market, after it became classified by the WHO-UN as a pandemic, and conclude with identifying some patterns commonly overlooked in existing discussions but which embody some lessons learned. Far from a romanticized view of nature, this global crisis shows how nature can become ugly and even win in a battle with humans, yet simultaneously shows how the cognitive capacity unique to humans can counter the innate transmissibility of nature by an innate flexibility of culture. An unintended consequence of the pandemic is an increased attention to science.  This article attempts to shed light on what science is and is not, particularly as relevant to the pandemic. In lieu of vague, abstract notions such as human security, global governance, multilateralism and so on, this analysis approaches the pandemic as a concrete phenomenon penetrating human lives which has led to a re-aligning of parameters in a way that redefines globalization.

Nayereh Hassanvand, Hassan Sattari Sarbanqoli

The cultural rituals of any society are the birth certificates of that society’s culture, history, religion, and ethics. These rites and rituals are an important factor in fostering cohesion and unity among the people of a society who gather together in various ceremonies. Mourning ceremonies and rituals vary in different provinces, cities, and villages across the country, particularly during the first decade of Muharram. Iran is considered one of the inheritors of world culture due to its diverse and rich cultural rituals. The purpose of this research is to do a comparative and documented study of Muharram rituals in these two provinces so that by revealing the manifestations of cultural rituals and their differences and similarities, we can reach the deep and rich layers of the culture of these two provinces. This research intends to investigate the differences and similarities between the rituals of the first decade of Muharram and their cultural differences in the two provinces of East Azarbaijan and Khuzestan, using a descriptive-comparative study method. These two provinces have a deep cultural and religious background and an ancient civilization. The results of this research show that despite the great similarity in the performance of Muharram rituals in the two provinces in question, the diversity of mourning rituals is also visible in these two provinces. The varieties and differences are closely related to cultural, climatic, and linguistic differences in these two provinces. These two provinces’ people have chosen to mourn in accordance with their religion, vegetation, culture, and language. The results of this research show that, in addition to these differences, the common points of this cultural ritual in the two provinces are the love of the Prophet’s family and devotion to Ashura culture.

John Harvy Arcia Grajales

El presente estudio realiza una lectura histórico - crítica al consumo de sustancias psicoactivas en contextos indígenas. Se hace un recorte de realidad - con autoridades, docentes, estudiantes y cuidadores - acerca de los saberes, relaciones y prácticas situadas en Sipirra sobre sustancias psicoactivas. A través del mapeo colectivo se relatan las acciones comunitarias, aprendizajes colaborativos e interculturales en el territorio. Emergen relatos acerca de plantas maestras o enteógenos que curan. La medicina tradicional con plantas como tabaco, coca, cannabis, amapola, floripondio, yagé, entre otras, surge en las voces de quienes colaboran al mapear sobre el consumo de sustancias psicoactivas. En los relatos de la comunidad educativa Sipirra se encuentran tensiones al significar los saberes, las prácticas y las relaciones entre plantas medicinales y drogas. También se pone en tensión el discurso gubernamental al identificar contradicción entre propiciar en la política pública estudios interculturales que propendan por la autonomía y la salvaguarda de la identidad cultural en los pueblos originarios y, en oposición promueva desde la Encuesta Nacional del Consumo de Sustancias Psicoactivas (2020) la idea de que el yagé es una sustancia psicoactiva ilegal, desconociéndola como planta maestra en territorios ancestrales. Surge como iniciativa del resguardo de Cañamomo Lomaprieta sembrar y cuidar una «huerta escolar de enteógenos» en la institución educativa como «espacio pedagógico» para significar desde los saberes ancestrales de la comunidad, las relaciones con las plantas y contribuir en la atención y en la prevención con prácticas ancestrales, a las problemáticas contemporáneas de consumo en contextos urbanos.

Ylenia Olibet

Dominik Ukolov

The photogrammetric and reconstructive modeling of cultural heritage sites is mostly focused on visually perceivable aspects, but if their intended purpose is the performance of cultural acts with a sonic emphasis, it is important to consider the preservation of their acoustical behaviour to make them audible in an authentic way. This applies in particular to sacral and concert environments as popular objects for photogrammetric models, which contain geometrical and textural information that can be used to locate and classify acoustically relevant surface properties. With the advancing conversion or destruction of historical acoustical spaces, it becomes even more important to preserve their unique sonic characters, while three-dimensional auralizations become widely applicable. The proposed study presents the current state of a new methodological approach to acoustical modeling using photogrammetric data and introduces a parameterizable pipeline that will be accessible as an open-source software with a graphical user interface.

Aarav Patel, Peter Gloor

Environmental Social Governance (ESG) is a widely used metric that measures the sustainability of a company practices. Currently, ESG is determined using self-reported corporate filings, which allows companies to portray themselves in an artificially positive light. As a result, ESG evaluation is subjective and inconsistent across raters, giving executives mixed signals on what to improve. This project aims to create a data-driven ESG evaluation system that can provide better guidance and more systemized scores by incorporating social sentiment. Social sentiment allows for more balanced perspectives which directly highlight public opinion, helping companies create more focused and impactful initiatives. To build this, Python web scrapers were developed to collect data from Wikipedia, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google News for the S&P 500 companies. Data was then cleaned and passed through NLP algorithms to obtain sentiment scores for ESG subcategories. Using these features, machine-learning algorithms were trained and calibrated to S&P Global ESG Ratings to test their predictive capabilities. The Random-Forest model was the strongest model with a mean absolute error of 13.4% and a correlation of 26.1% (p-value 0.0372), showing encouraging results. Overall, measuring ESG social sentiment across sub-categories can help executives focus efforts on areas people care about most. Furthermore, this data-driven methodology can provide ratings for companies without coverage, allowing more socially responsible firms to thrive.

Ruijie Xi, Munindar P. Singh

Moral reasoning reflects how people acquire and apply moral rules in particular situations. With increasingly social interactions happening online, social media data provides an unprecedented opportunity to assess in-the-wild moral reasoning. We investigate the commonsense aspects of morality in ordinary matters empirically. To this end, we examine data from a Reddit subcommunity (i.e., a subreddit) where an author may describe their behavior in a situation to seek comments about whether that behavior was appropriate. Other users comment to provide judgments and reasoning. We focus on the novel problem of understanding the moral reasoning implicit in user comments about the propriety of an author's behavior. Especially, we explore associations between the common elements of the indicated reasoning and the extractable social factors. Our results suggest the reasoning depends on the author's gender and the topic of a post, such as when expressing anger emotion and using sensible words (e.g., f-ck, hell, and damn) in work-related situations. Moreover, we find that the commonly expressed semantics also depends on commenters' interests.

Amar Khelloufi, Huansheng Ning, Abdenacer Naouri et al.

The Social Internet of Things (SIoT), is revolutionizing how we interact with our everyday lives. By adding the social dimension to connecting devices, the SIoT has the potential to drastically change the way we interact with smart devices. This connected infrastructure allows for unprecedented levels of convenience, automation, and access to information, allowing us to do more with less effort. However, this revolutionary new technology also brings an eager need for service recommendation systems. As the SIoT grows in scope and complexity, it becomes increasingly important for businesses and individuals, and SIoT objects alike to have reliable sources for products, services, and information that are tailored to their specific needs. Few works have been proposed to provide service recommendations for SIoT environments. However, these efforts have been confined to only focusing on modeling user-item interactions using contextual information, devices' SIoT relationships, and correlation social groups but these schemes do not account for latent semantic item-item structures underlying the sparse multi-modal contents in SIoT environment. In this paper, we propose a latent-based SIoT recommendation system that learns item-item structures and aggregates multiple modalities to obtain latent item graphs which are then used in graph convolutions to inject high-order affinities into item representations. Experiments showed that the proposed recommendation system outperformed state-of-the-art SIoT recommendation methods and validated its efficacy at mining latent relationships from multi-modal features.

E. V. Chaikina

The paper summarizes the key concepts, analytical approaches and conceptual apparatus of research by Russian and foreign authors in the problematic field of tourism development in places of traditional residence of indigenous peoples. A review (more than 30 years in depth) of studies of indigenous tourism in the areas of geography, ethnography (ethnology), social and cultural anthropology, setting the standard for an interdisciplinary approach, is presented. The general characteristic of the prevailing language of the description of indigenous tourism, its basic concepts and operational definitions is given. Based on the generalization of the materials presented in the research literature, the possible advantages and risks for the development of tourism in the places of traditional residence of indigenous peoples are considered. The review may be of interest from a practical point of view when designing and promoting local ethnotouristic brands and products in the regions of the Russian Federation and, in particular, in the territories of national republics, autonomous regions, certain areas of compact residence of indigenous, including small peoples.

Сүлд Номынбаясгалан

The article is named as the “Anthropology of law” and its content is conducted within legal issues on the translation of legal terminology. Anthropology is an empirically-grounded discipline. Its material is observed in the real world, typically through long-term, focused participant observation. The anthropologist studies social forms as they exist in all their variety, including ideas as well as physical activities, and what may be regarded as archaic or marginal. “Anthropology of law” is the first branch of anthropology to emerge from mid–nineteenth century. The field studies different social and cultural differences in terms of social, cultural and legal relations. In this context, it is possible to study how the concept of human rights is developed in Mongolia and how it is related to traditional culture, way of life, customs and beliefs.

Bogdan Neagota

In this article we seek to describe the methodology that gives shape to the various components of the documentation of the book and identifies the different fields to which the issues discussed belong: art history (iconography, religious art), late antique and medieval literature (apocryphal texts), ethno-anthropology (with ramifications in visual anthropology, ethnology, folklore studies) and the history of mentalities (where research into witchcraft takes place chiefly within historical anthropology). The aspects discussed in this reading note: the social and cultural contextualisation of iconography, through an exploration of its social, cultural and mentality-related forms of expression, which connect it at a profound level to traditional peasant/pastoral societies; eschatological iconography concerned with witchcraft in Romania, seen as an eschatological replacement, with preventative and punitive functions, for the punitive institutions of Central and Eastern Europe that were responsible for eradicating the phenomenon of witchcraft; a comparative treatment of eschatological themes in Romanian iconography, in the regional context of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, through a comparison between them and those of the region south of the Danube (Bulgaria) and of the northern Slav area (Ruthenia); the absence from iconography of the distinction between the morphological classes of magic, based on their trans-human magical agents, that we find in oral narrative traditions; a systematic handling of local eschatological iconography and oral narrative repertoires; the issue of cultural transmission and the structure and composition of mechanisms of transmission, whose orality consists not only of words but also of images; discussion of the linguistic and iconographic typologies advanced by the book’s authors.