Search Results

A Dispersed Society: Place Ownership and the Crossing of Spatial Margins

Rupert Stasch

in Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place

This chapter investigates the Korowai social landscape as a field of otherness. It discusses landownership as a major medium through which Korowai live out a basic social problematic of autonomy, ... More

This chapter investigates the Korowai social landscape as a field of otherness. It discusses landownership as a major medium through which Korowai live out a basic social problematic of autonomy, separation, and boundary-traversing relatedness. The Korowai landownership world is a world of connections that people make across boundaries of strangeness, drawing the familiar and strange together. Korowai understandings emphasize that people demonstrate ownership of land through action on it and through mixing their labor with it. Interaction between hosts and guests illustrates how Korowai systematically join together qualities of otherness and close involvement as the positive substance of social bonds. It shows that the relations between Korowai and other Korowai take place on “beaches” in Greg Dening's sense. In forest space alone, Korowai society is located in people's motions across a heterogeneous landscape and their disparities of position on that landscape.Less

Social Landscapes and Ancient Environments

Mick Atha and Kennis Yip

in Piecing Together Sha Po: Archaeological Investigations and Landscape Reconstruction

Chapter 3 begins by exploring the making of Hong Kong’s present cultural landscape and then works back through its earlier forms, firstly into the age of rice farming where the long-term sustainable ... More

Chapter 3 begins by exploring the making of Hong Kong’s present cultural landscape and then works back through its earlier forms, firstly into the age of rice farming where the long-term sustainable management of that particular socio-economic lifeway created highly distinctive cultural landscapes stretching back from the Qing dynasty to as early as the Northern Song in some areas. Then from the Tang dynasty moving backwards, we enter an era where, on the face of it, human impacts beyond the intensively industrialised backbeach areas seem to have been relatively slight. That said, the coastal focus seemingly exhibited by early historical populations was even more intensively expressed in prehistory when, once sea-levels had stabilised at more or less their present position, the resource-rich landscape of the New Territories and Pearl River estuary coastline and offshore archipelagos then took shape.Less

Conclusion

Jon Hall

in Politeness and Politics in Cicero's Letters

The Conclusion asks the question: what are we to conclude about Cicero's epistolary use of politeness? The chapter attempts to provide an answer this multifaceted issue and draws together the ... More

The Conclusion asks the question: what are we to conclude about Cicero's epistolary use of politeness? The chapter attempts to provide an answer this multifaceted issue and draws together the various features of artistocratic politeness such as conventionalized expressions, the use of affiliative strategies, and the relationship between politeness and politics as observed in Rome's unique political and social landscape.Less

Rethinking Proximate Causation and Development in Religious Evolution

Harvey Whitehouse

in Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language, and Religion

Efforts to understand cultural evolution, and its articulation with biological evolution, have tended to focus on problems of ultimate rather than proximate causation; that is on issues of function ... More

Efforts to understand cultural evolution, and its articulation with biological evolution, have tended to focus on problems of ultimate rather than proximate causation; that is on issues of function and selection rather than issues of mechanism and development. Although we now have sophisticated models of multilevel selection (Wilson 2002) and gene–culture coevolution (Boyd and Richerson 1985), we lack a similarly sophisticated account of the various levels at which proximate explanation needs to be understood. This chapter attempts to sketch out a more sophisticated framework for proximate explanation in religious evolution, inspired by C. H. Waddington’s notion of the “epigenetic landscape.” Building on this idea, three kinds of landscapes are disambiguated: epigenetic, cognitive-developmental, and social-historical. The discussion here focuses on religious phenotypes, but the general approach would be applicable to cultural practices more generally. The aim is to bring greater conceptual clarity and integration to a somewhat complex and messy cluster of research areas and, at the same time, open up new hypotheses ripe for investigation. Published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.Less

Introduction: Emerging Approaches to the Landscapes of the Early and Middle Woodland Southeast

Alice P. Wright and Edward R. Henry

in Early and Middle Woodland Landscapes of the Southeast

The concept of social landscapes provides an integrative and innovative framework for archaeological research in the Early and Middle Woodland Southeast. Landscape archaeology has a diverse ... More

The concept of social landscapes provides an integrative and innovative framework for archaeological research in the Early and Middle Woodland Southeast. Landscape archaeology has a diverse intellectual history and presents certain analytical challenges, but new methodologies and technologies are enabling researchers to tackle questions about interactions among people and their natural and cultural surroundings. As demonstrated by the chapters in this volume (summarized in the introduction), the landscapes of the Early and Middle Woodland periods in the Southeast–long defined by novel and wide-reaching developments in technology, subsistence, interaction, and monumentality–are particularly amenable to such approaches.Less

Reconstructing Sha Po’s Landscapes and Lifeways

Mick Atha and Kennis Yip

in Piecing Together Sha Po: Archaeological Investigations and Landscape Reconstruction

In Chapter 8 all the strands of evidence are drawn together within an overarching synthetic analysis of patterns of human activity through time, which are then interpreted in terms of the ... More

In Chapter 8 all the strands of evidence are drawn together within an overarching synthetic analysis of patterns of human activity through time, which are then interpreted in terms of the development, use, and past experience of Sha Po’s multi-period cultural landscape. The shifting patterns of human activity during the 6,500-year span of the study also permit the changing backbeach landform to be modelled as it expanded westward through time. Social landscape reconstructions, aided by artist’s impression drawings, focus in particular on activities evidenced during the Bronze Age, Six-Dynasties-Tang period, and Qing to early twentieth century.Less

Cityscapes: Panoramas and the Mobile Gaze

in Film, Mobility and Urban Space: A Cinematic Geography of Liverpool

This chapter examines archive footage of Liverpool waterfront shot by tourists and other visitors to the city in the 1920s and 1930s. It suggests that archival film practices provide a means to ... More

This chapter examines archive footage of Liverpool waterfront shot by tourists and other visitors to the city in the 1920s and 1930s. It suggests that archival film practices provide a means to explore and ‘navigate’ the dialectical processes which inform the social and cultural production of space in the city, and that that cityscape panorama represents a powerful form of urban spatial expression which has come to define an increasingly contradictory image of the city. The chapter also contends that juxtaposing contemporary representations of the waterfront with these earlier images shows the shifting cinematic geographies of a post-industrial landscape which has become increasingly virtualized and disembedded from everyday social and material landscapes.Less

Infant Cartographers: Mapping the Social Terrain

Karen Wynn

in Navigating the Social World: What Infants, Children, and Other Species Can Teach Us

Humans are a highly social species that are deeply interested in and focused upon mapping their local social terrain—accurately placing the new individuals they encounter within that landscape, as ... More

Humans are a highly social species that are deeply interested in and focused upon mapping their local social terrain—accurately placing the new individuals they encounter within that landscape, as well as continually updating the changing topography of the relationships between individuals. Interestingly, this mapping of the social landscape is not the sole province of adults. This chapter first highlights some aspects of the social world that young humans are busily mapping, even before their first birthday. It then considers how gossip among mature humans can inform the study of developmental social cognition.Less

Prologue

Steven Mullaney

in The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare

The Prologue opens with an emblematic moment in 1549, when Lord Protector Somerset ordered the Ossuary at St. Paul’s emptied and the bones of four hundred years of loved ones, ancestors, and ... More

The Prologue opens with an emblematic moment in 1549, when Lord Protector Somerset ordered the Ossuary at St. Paul’s emptied and the bones of four hundred years of loved ones, ancestors, and neighbors dumped in a marsh. Radical protestants sought to dissociate the present from the past in extreme, traumatic, and not-always theologically driven ways. Such “rage[s] against the dead” sought to erase a deep and affective form of historical memory. Post-Reformation England used a wide range of affective media and technologies in its efforts to understand the gaps that had opened up in the social and affective landscape. Early modern amphitheater drama, a melding of available media, was one of the more telling responses. It was a key component in the period’s “equipment for living,” in Kenneth Burke’s phrase—providing a public place where audiences could experience, investigate, dig into, or salve the cognitive and affective conditions of their own possibility.Less

Social Reconstruction and Social Recovery

Miriam Boeri

in Hurt: Chronicles of the Drug War Generation

This chapter discusses how political decisions made by baby boomers in powerful special interest groups destroyed the lives of those with less power. Guided by ignorance, fear, apathy, or a quest for ... More

This chapter discusses how political decisions made by baby boomers in powerful special interest groups destroyed the lives of those with less power. Guided by ignorance, fear, apathy, or a quest for power, baby boomers developed the systemic social structures of a drug war that left a bleak social landscape of desolate communities, broken families, and ruined lives. They transformed the American Dream into an American nightmare for many. They sucked the humanity out of medical, health, and social services that were created to relieve the suffering of vulnerable lives. The War on Drugs spread to become omnipresent in every facet of social life, corrupting the fabric of society and the social contract with authority. Not all baby boomers supported it, but their silence was interpreted as consent. This chapter argues that it is their war. It is their legacy. It is up to them to end the war and begin social reconstruction of a devastated society and social recovery for those who are hurting.Less

Slaveholding across Time and Space

Damian Alan Pargas

in The Quarters and the Fields: Slave Families in the Non-Cotton South

This chapter broadly examines nineteenth-century evolution of slaveholdings on the grain farms of Fairfax County, the rice plantations of Georgetown District, and the sugar plantations of St. James ... More

This chapter broadly examines nineteenth-century evolution of slaveholdings on the grain farms of Fairfax County, the rice plantations of Georgetown District, and the sugar plantations of St. James Parish. What was the spatial distribution and sexual composition of enslaved populations in different regions of the non-cotton South, and how did they change over time? The aim of this chapter is to provide a basis from which to further explore enslaved people's experiences with family formation and stability by first establishing the social landscapes of slave populations in each region.Less

El Alto Manhattan: The Setting and Research Context

Ana Aparicio

in Dominican-Americans and the Politics of Empowerment

This chapter provides an overview of the physical and social landscape of the Dominica-American neighborhood in Washington Heights in New York City. It describes the history of Washington Heights, ... More

This chapter provides an overview of the physical and social landscape of the Dominica-American neighborhood in Washington Heights in New York City. It describes the history of Washington Heights, its resources, and its contemporary demographics where local Dominican activists operate. It suggests that Dominican activists have clear agendas and developed organizations in Washington Heights during particular moments in the history of New York and the U.S. and they consistently interact with local neighborhood and other communities.Less

Sensual Knowledge

Pablo F. Gómez

in Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic

This chapter proposes a novel approach to our understanding of sensing and being in the early modern Atlantic world. Early modern black Caribbean ritual practitioners intensely fashioned new “forms ... More

This chapter proposes a novel approach to our understanding of sensing and being in the early modern Atlantic world. Early modern black Caribbean ritual practitioners intensely fashioned new “forms of being in the world.” There exist, after all, multiple manners of sensing and shaping an apparently stubborn reality. The chapter shows how black Mohanes fundamentally fashioned novel ways of sensing the early modern Caribbean world. In the absence of common linguistic and cultural grounds, the chapter shows, black Caribbean ritual practitioners became involved in a new sensorial imbrication of Atlantic threads of all origins. It was through this essential process that Caribbean Mohanes fashioned routes for making perceivable the spiritual and social landscapes of their new land. These paths and ways of sensing were fundamental for the modeling of the experiential revolution of the seventeenth-century Caribbean.Less

Diamonds and Performance

Susan Falls

in Clarity, Cut, and Culture: The Many Meanings of Diamonds

This chapter explores how diamonds, like linguistic utterances, are both “in and of the world” and as such, are used performatively. Wearing a diamond can be partly a performative action meant to ... More

This chapter explores how diamonds, like linguistic utterances, are both “in and of the world” and as such, are used performatively. Wearing a diamond can be partly a performative action meant to change the world in some observable way—diamonds do things. These performances take place in a social landscape, but their insertion is varied because agency and creativity loom large. The presence of performative elements in the narratives collected suggests that a focus on the individual—who is embedded in a social group, discursive universe, and commodity chain—clarifies how diamonds are used in the everyday making of life. Combining John Langshaw Austin's How to Do Things with Words (1962) with the growing attention to idiosyncrasy in linguistics, the chapter examines how diamonds are wielded. Consumers reported that they use diamonds in ways that suggest “performance,” but they do so contextually, with intended outcomes shifting over time and place.Less

The Emergence of the Medieval Jewish Physician

John M. Efron

in Medicine and the German Jews: A History

This chapter explains why the medical profession was popular among the Jews—physician-rabbis were highly visible figures on the Jewish social landscape from the medieval period until the eighteenth ... More

This chapter explains why the medical profession was popular among the Jews—physician-rabbis were highly visible figures on the Jewish social landscape from the medieval period until the eighteenth century. This had a decided effect on the culture and value system of the Jews, bolstering the prestige of medicine, securing its image as a noble undertaking, validating its compatibility with traditional Judaism, and helping its more illustrious practitioners become beloved within their communities. In other words, from early on, doctors became role models for Jews. Moreover, for both Jews and Gentiles, the cognitive and cultural association of Jews with medicine, which persists down to our own time, was also formed during the Middle Ages. This is somewhat ironic because although Judaism wholeheartedly sanctions and encourages medicine, there has never been a field designated “Jewish medicine.”Less

Tyranny in the UK

Dan Dinello

in Children of Men

This chapter discusses Alfonso Cuarón's method of layering richly detailed background information that serves as exposition of the Children of Men's totalitarian and xenophobic social landscape as ... More

This chapter discusses Alfonso Cuarón's method of layering richly detailed background information that serves as exposition of the Children of Men's totalitarian and xenophobic social landscape as well as articulation of its political and technological critique. It details how Children of Men compels the viewer to recognize how a tyrannical system dehumanizes and ostracizes people. It also analyses Children of Men's connection of the rise of British fascism to nationalism, xenophobia, and the public's complacency. The chapter explores the biological apocalypse that provokes geopolitical fracturing in Children of Men. It describes the Middle East wars and European immigration crisis portrayed in Children of Men.Less