Essays
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Adaptation for Culture - Church, Jill M.
The evolutionary study of human behavior has expanded into a broad spectrum of theories and models seeking to explain how genetic evolution enables the development of human culture, how cultural evolution influences biological and psychological evolution, and investigating the ways these processes interact. While natural selection and other genetic mechanisms determined the human ability to create culture, cultural practices can also affect the human genome. Researchers in a variety of social science disciplines are also investigating the root causes of behavioral traits in order to more effectively guide future adaptation to the current global environment. This essay briefly outlines the foundational research on the development of sociobiological disciplines and outlines the application of evolutionary research to current social problems from adapting to climate change and other environmental stressors to altering maladaptive behaviors such as bullying or obesity. It also proposes key issues for future research, highlighting the need for rigorous empirical study and using interdisciplinary teams to create a more robust understanding of the influence culture has on our genes, and vice versa. Collaborative research by a multidisciplinary team of geneticists, behavioral psychologists, anthropologists, and biologists would provide a robust theoretical framework with multiple avenues for study to understand why and how behavioral traits exist. This knowledge can then be used to establish more effective policies to improve health and safety. -
Agency as an Explanatory Key: Theoretical Issues - Biernacki, Richard
In philosophy agency designates the inalienable ability of individuals to make choices about their conduct that are not determined by the environment. In empirical social science, however, agency designates not autonomous free will but the launching of patterned action that surpasses constraints in the setting and that directs the course of institutional change. Many social scientists have limited the explanatory task they take on to show that agency is an indispensable part of ongoing social life. They have also reasoned that portrayals of institutional structures alone or even of the cultural resources that accompany them, such as shared scripts for social interaction, are inadequate for explaining important changes. It is typical therefore to feature agency as a logically necessary contributor. Study of agency can be improved by specifying affirmatively when and how action is in decisive ways organized independently of the constraints in the setting and this sense transcends them. This sharper requirement for positive demonstration of how agency brought about change is satisfied by reconstructing the actors' independent invention of a new master problem that guides their conduct. This promising approach to explaining transformative action has disseminated from study of artistic and scientific innovation to that of institutional change. -
An Emerging Trend: Is Big Data the End of Theory? - Macy, Michael W.
“Big data” from online communities opens up unprecedented opportunities for social scientists to track human behavior and social interaction in real time and on the individual level yet on a global scale. Will the empirical windfall make theory unnecessary by allowing scientists to search for whatever pattern is “out there,” expected or otherwise? This essay argues that the deluge of relational data promises a new beginning for causal explanation, for two reasons. First, these new sources of data—from friends, peers, neighbors, colleagues, and coworkers—avoid the atomistic theoretical bias imposed by a half century of reliance on surveys administered to stratified random samples. Second, the growing ability to conduct online experiments with randomized trials makes it possible to test theories about the causal processes that underlie observed patterns. -
Business Anthropology - Moeran, Brian
This essay outlines the overall scope and location of business anthropology within the overall field of the discipline. It outlines its foundations as an applied form of anthropology in early developments in the United States (in particular, in Western Electric's Hawthorne Project and the Human Relations School at Harvard University), as well as in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, before turning to five areas of research and practice: academic ethnographies of business practices, regional studies, case studies developed by practitioners, theoretical applications, and methods. The essay then asks what a future program for business anthropology might look like and suggests four areas for theoretical development against a background of education, engagement, and comparative work. These are an examination of structures of power in, between, and dependent on business organizations of all kinds; cross‐cultural comparison of work cultures; attention to the materials, technologies, and goods with which business people engage and which afford their organizational forms; and explicit attention to cutting‐edge fieldwork methods. -
Complexity: An Emerging Trend in Social Sciences - Lansing, J. Stephen
The social sciences have had a good run with linear models, in which effects are proportionate to their causes. Nearly all of our theoretical models, in fields as diverse as microeconomics and evolutionary game theory, are equilibrium theories, which examine the properties of various fixed points and analyze the conditions under which they are selected. In contrast, “complexity” uses different mathematical tools to investigate nonlinear processes. But linear models have the advantages of simplicity and power. Is there a real need to import the theoretical apparatus of “complexity” into the social sciences? Or might it be merely the latest example of Fashionable Nonsense? -
From Individual Rationality to Socially Embedded Self‐Regulation - Lindenberg, Siegwart
The emerging trend is that we let go of the idea that humans are naturally endowed with “rationality” (especially in the sense of consistency and utility maximization, as in microeconomic) in favor of an evolutionary view in which the brain evolved together with the affordances and problems offered by living in larger groups. Rather than seeing humans as having evolved to pursue their self‐interest in a utility maximizing way, what is emerging is to see humans as having evolved to draw adaptive advantage from living in larger groups by a set of self‐regulatory abilities (some of which are more or less automatic and can be overridden by less automatic capabilities). The self‐regulatory abilities, in turn, can vary and are much dependent on the social environment. For example, having significant others is vital for one's self‐regulatory ability, as is the capacity to change one's environment in order to strengthen one's self‐regulatory capacity. The sociologically interesting part of all this is exactly this social dependence of self‐regulatory capacity. Rationality, if that term would still be used, is thus thoroughly a matter of person by environment interaction. This has fundamental consequences for how social science is done. -
Heterarchy - Crumley, Carole L.
Heterarchy addresses the diversity of relationships among elements in a system and offers a way to think about change in spatial, temporal, and cognitive dimensions. Definitions of heterarchy are remarkably consistent across a variety of disciplines and while the work they do is extraordinarily diverse, taken together they permit a concise definition. A general‐purpose definition that suits a variety of contexts is the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked, or when they possess the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways, depending on systemic requirements. Heterarchy does not stand alone but is in a dialectical relationship with hierarchy (where elements are ranked). The concept of heterarchy offers an arena for examining the potential of a system, organization, or structure for diversity and change. In general, heterarchical relationships are sources of difference and dynamism, and they may be spatial, temporal, or cognitive. This essay outlines the convergent origins of the concept, examines the evidence for the ubiquity of heterarchy in human societies and in mathematical and biophysical contexts, explores its application in the social sciences, and advances understanding of how heterarchical thinking can help envision the human future. -
History and Epistemology of Anthropology - Appadurai, Arjun
This essay describes the field of social and cultural anthropology. The central concern of this subfield of anthropology is the study of human variations as a defining feature of the evolution of human societies and cultures. It stands in contrast to the development of other social and behavioral science disciplines that are based on evolutionism and has a stronger affinity to the humanities than these other disciplines. The present status of theory and research in social and cultural anthropology is described and promising courses of development going forward are identified. -
Queer Theory - Manalansan, Martin F.
Queer theory and ethnography have a productive relationship. Queer theory has questioned the stability of nonnormative sex and gender based identities particularly gay and lesbian. Emerging out of late twentieth century debates on the historicity and contextual nature of sex and gender, queer theory claims that important of power relationships in shaping normative meanings, practices and institutions around sex and gender. Ethnographic studies provide culturally particular illustrations of how nonnormative sex and gender identities are negotiated, evaluated, practiced, and transformed. Ethnographic studies on queer immigrants, uses of the internet and new media, queer activism and the role of race in sex and gender identities have enabled new cutting edge discussions that extend and complicate ideas from queer theory. More ethnographic research is needed to look into the roles of labor and class in sex and gender identities, and how new identity categories such as transgender circulate transnationally and cross‐culturally.