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Robert K. Hitchcock - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Discontinuities in Ethnographic time: A view from Africa
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2017Co-Authors: Robert K. HitchcockAbstract:Abstract While there is evidence of discontinuities in the sequences of some archaeological sites that exhibit long-term occupation and use over time in southern Africa, there is less evidence of such discontinuity in the Ethnographic Record. Drawing on long-term interdisciplinary studies of southern African peoples in the Kalahari Desert, this paper examines the evidence of discontinuities in the historical and Ethnographic Records. Attention is focused primarily on two southern African San populations for which detailed diachronic data exist: (1) the Ju/’hoansi of northwestern Kalahari, and (2) the !Xoo San of the southwestern Kalahari region of Botswana and Namibia. From an ethnographer’s perspective it might at first appear as though there was a fair amount of continuity in the Kalahari. It is shown, however, that there have been complex changes over time in the period from 1850 to the present, which occurred as a result of a combination of factors, including short-term and long-term ecological changes, in-migration and out-migration of various groups, cycles of population growth and decline, colonization, technological shifts, and implementation of development and conservation programs. The two cases illustrate the complex ways that activities, mobility, technology, land use, and demographic patterns can change over time as a result of both internal and external forces, resulting in discontinuities in the Ethnographic Record.
Edward H. Hagen - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Leadership and prestige, mothering, sexual selection, and encephalization: The computational services model
2019Co-Authors: Edward H. Hagen, Zachary GarfieldAbstract:Long before the term Machiavellian Intelligence was coined, James Neel, a prominent geneticist, was pondering the role of 'princes' in the evolution of exceptional human intelligence. Neel discovered that in small-scale societies resembling those in which humans evolved, leaders had more wives and more children than other men. If this pattern, which is now well-established in the Ethnographic Record, characterized ancestral human societies, whatever traits predisposed men to become leaders would have experienced strong sexual selection. Neel proposed that the key trait was intelligence. Sexual selection on intelligent leaders therefore helped explain human encephalization. Many subsequent theories have attempted to explain why knowledgeable, skilled, and intelligent individuals are chosen as leaders or as mates. None, however, has adequately explained why they are chosen as both. We aim to fill this gap by operationalizing leaders as individuals who regularly make decisions that benefit most members of the group. Because human nuclear families comprise two unrelated individuals who cooperate for twenty years or more to raise their joint offspring, and because families are nested within subsistence groups, which, in turn, are nested within larger security and political groups, good decision-making skills provided large benefits to mates and families, as well as to members of one's subsistence group or larger security and political groups. We further argue that decision-making that benefits others as well as oneself can be especially computationally complex, and therefore that sexual selection and biological market forces favoring these skills favored increased brain size. Finally, because parents must make decisions for their cognitively immature offspring, decision-making that benefits others and other leadership abilities might have initially undergone strong selection in mothers, who provide most of the childcare in natural fertility populations. Decision-making that benefits others is one valuable example of what we term a computational service. Other important examples include threat and opportunity detection, gossip and information sharing, cultural transmission, story telling, medicinal knowledge, and advice and counsel. Providing computational services in exchange for a variety of benefits would have helped subsidize a large, energetically expensive brain. Individuals who provided particularly valuable services gained prestige, i.e., additional benefits from fellow group members.
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Evolutionary Models of Leadership
Human Nature, 2019Co-Authors: Zachary H. Garfield, Robert L. Hubbard, Edward H. HagenAbstract:This study tested four theoretical models of leadership with data from the Ethnographic Record. The first was a game-theoretical model of leadership in collective actions, in which followers prefer and reward a leader who monitors and sanctions free-riders as group size increases. The second was the dominance model, in which dominant leaders threaten followers with physical or social harm. The third, the prestige model, suggests leaders with valued skills and expertise are chosen by followers who strive to emulate them. The fourth proposes that in small-scale, kin-based societies, men with high neural capital are best able to achieve and maintain positions of social influence (e.g., as headmen) and thereby often become polygynous and have more offspring than other men, which positively selects for greater neural capital. Using multiple search strategies we identified more than 1000 texts relevant to leadership in the Probability Sample of 60 cultures from the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF). We operationalized the model with variables and then coded all retrieved text Records on the presence or absence of evidence for each of these 24 variables. We found mixed support for the collective action model, broad support for components of the prestige leadership style and the importance of neural capital and polygyny among leaders, but more limited support for the dominance leadership style. We found little evidence, however, of emulation of, or prestige-biased learning toward, leaders. We found that improving collective actions, having expertise, providing counsel, and being respected, having high neural capital, and being polygynous are common properties of leaders, which warrants a synthesis of the collective action, prestige, and neural capital and reproductive skew models. We sketch one such synthesis involving high-quality decision-making and other computational services.
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Testing the bargaining vs. inclusive fitness models of suicidal behavior against the Ethnographic Record
Evolution and Human Behavior, 2016Co-Authors: Kristen L. Syme, Zachary H. Garfield, Edward H. HagenAbstract:Abstract Suicide is responsible for more deaths than all wars and homicides combined. Despite over a century of research on this puzzling and tragic behavior, and a recent increase in the number of treatments and intervention programs, it remains a global scourge. There is abundant research on suicidality in Western populations, but research on suicide among non-Western peoples is limited. Most notably, few studies analyze suicidality within small scale, non-industrial societies. Using Ethnographic data from 53 cultures, this study tests two evolutionary theories of suicidal behavior: (1) deCatanzaro's inclusive fitness model, which proposes that successful suicide would increase the inclusive fitness of individuals with low reproductive potential who are a burden on kin, and (2) the bargaining model, which proposes that suicide attempts are a costly signal of need, with completed suicides an unfortunate byproduct. These models were operationalized into two sets of variables, which were used to code 474 textual accounts of suicide extracted from the Probability Sample of the Human Relations Area Files. Results indicate limited support for the inclusive fitness model, which might apply primarily to older adults in harsh environments, and widespread support for most elements of the bargaining model, especially among younger healthy adolescents and adults.
Bruce M. Pavlik - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Integrating Modern Vegetation and Ethnographic Data to Understand Dietary Choices in the Past: the Case of the Southern Paiute, Utah
Human Ecology, 2018Co-Authors: Lisbeth A. Louderback, Bruce M. PavlikAbstract:Ethnographic information on dietary plants can be cast into an ecological framework by using vegetation sampling techniques. Lists of ethnobotanical species become the basis of a dietary inventory that applies to a regional assemblage of vegetation types in a landscape associated with an archaeological site. But such lists are usually derived from many sources often without biogeographic or temporal reference. In effect, the dietary inventory represents potential food plants that may ultimately be found in archaeological deposits. The dietary palette, however, is composed of plant species that actually occur within the greater landscape of an archaeological site and that may or may not be known from the Ethnographic Record. Vegetation sampling provides a quantitative assessment of the dietary palette in the local ecosystem by using standard metrics, such as plant cover, basal area, density, and even productivity. By comparing vegetation data to the dietary inventory and archaeobotanical Record, general patterns of foraging behavior as predicted by behavioral ecology are verified. This study of the Southern Paiute in south-central Utah also compares the plant species composition of modern and ancient landscapes, emphasizing a lack of correspondence between the dietary inventory and the dietary palette, as well as with the archaeobotanical Record. Our example is from North Creek Shelter, a well-stratified archaeological site on the Colorado Plateau.
Dan Shapiro - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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From Ethnographic Record to system design
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 1992Co-Authors: John A. Hughes, Dave Randall, Dan ShapiroAbstract:This paper explores the issues involved in moving from Ethnographic explorations of work in context to a practical contribution to system design. It does so using the example of an interdisciplinary research project involving sociologists and computer scientists in the domain of air traffic control systems. It forms a pair with another paper (Sommerville et al., 1992) exploring these questions from the perspective of our computer science partners. We characterise ethnography as a research method, and consider the differences between undertaking it for strictly sociological or anthropological purposes by contrast with interdisciplinary and design purposes. We summarise some of our results in Ethnographic explications of the work of air traffic controllers, and the sociality which it manifests. We describe the dialogues involved in rendering these observations ‘informative’ for systems design, and the mutual translations implied in attempting to reconcile sociological with software engineering questions about supporting the work. We conclude by specifying some features of cooperative work which an engineering approach is in danger of overlooking; the ways, and limits, in which ethnographers can form a ‘bridge’ between users and designers; and some of the conflicts of interest entrained in generating technical change.
David S Whitley - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Rock Art of North America
The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art, 2017Co-Authors: David S WhitleyAbstract:North America contains a large and diverse corpus of Indigenous rock art, matched by a long history of research, and a rich Ethnographic Record. The regional patterns in the age, nature, and (in some cases) meaning of this art are briefly summarized in this overview chapter. By roughly 12,000 bp, a series of different styles and traditions had already developed across the continent, providing evidence for cultural diversity not visible in the lithic archaeological Record. At least one of these traditions continued into recent times while, in other culture areas, replacement and change is evident into the past half-millennium. The appearance of rock art traditions thus documents the changing patterns of regional North American cultural systems.
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cognitive neuroscience shamanism and the rock art of native california
Anthropology of Consciousness, 1998Co-Authors: David S WhitleyAbstract:The combination of Ethnographic and cognitive neuroscience research provides considerable insight into the origin and symbolism of Native Californian rock art. Although made by different social groups for different purposes in various parts of the state, the Ethnographic Record demonstrates that the art depicts the mental imagery and somatic hallucinations of trance, taken to represent supernatural experiences. When this art is viewed from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, it suggests that the shamanistic state of consciousness was far from primarily "ecstatic," instead often involving the generation of unpleasant emotions; and that biochemical changes during trance necessitated the making of rock art if the memory of these supernatural experiences was to be preserved.