A strategy to increase cooperation in the volunteer's dilemma: reducing vigilance improves alarm calls

One of the most common examples of cooperation in animal societies is giving the alarm in the presence of a predator. A reduction in individual vigilance against predators when group size increases (the "group size effect") is one of the most frequently reported relationships in the study of animal behavior, and is thought to be due to relaxed selection, either because more individuals can detect the predator more easily (the "many eyes" effect) or because the risk of predator attack is diluted on more individuals (the "selfish herd" effect). I show that these hypotheses are not theoretically grounded: because everybody relies on someone else to raise the alarm, the probability that at least one raises the alarm declines with group size; therefore increasing group size does not lead to relaxed selection. Game theory shows, instead, that increasing the risk that the predator is not reported (by reducing vigilance) induces everybody to give the alarm more often. The group size effect, therefore, can be due to strategic behavior to improve the production of a public good. This shows how a selfish behavior can lead to a benefit for the group, and suggests a way to solve social dilemmas in the absence of relatedness and repeated interactions.     

Catching the pulse: money and circulation in a Sri Lankan marketplace

This article traces the movement, management, and generation of money in a Sri Lankan wholesale vegetable market, pulling into focus certain local economic and moral logics. What traders do with cash is revealing. I argue that how traders use money – the way it is handled, risked, spent, and lent – exhibits skill, implies hierarchy, and cultivates social connections. Exploring idioms of economic activity such as ‘catching the pulse’ and ‘rolling the money’, the article examines relations between different kinds of trader. Moving money through businesses permits participation in the complex communication network of the market. This is central to existing in the social world of the trader. I argue that following money notes – rather than commodities – as they travel around the marketplace and between the hands of transactors renders ethnographically observable the formations of personhood and long‐term relations that take place in the market.     

Wild justice and fair play: cooperation,forgiveness, and morality in animals

In this paper I argue that we can learn much about ‘wild justice’ and the evolutionary origins of social morality – behaving fairly – by studying social play behavior in group-living animals, and that interdisciplinary cooperation will help immensely. In our efforts to learn more about the evolution of morality we need to broaden our comparative research to include animals other than non-human primates. If one is a good Darwinian, it is premature to claim that only humans can be empathic and moral beings. By asking the question ‘What is it like to be another animal?’ we can discover rules of engagement that guide animals in their social encounters. When I study dogs, for example, I try to be a ‘dogocentrist’ and practice ‘dogomorphism.’ My major arguments center on the following ‘big’ questions: Can animals be moral beings or do they merely act as if they are? What are the evolutionary roots of cooperation, fairness, trust, forgiveness, and morality? What do animals do when they engage in social play? How do animals negotiate agreements to cooperate, to forgive, to behave fairly, to develop trust? Can animals forgive? Why cooperate and play fairly? Why did play evolve as it has? Does ‘being fair’ mean being more fit – do individual variations in play influence an individual's reproductive fitness, are more virtuous individuals more fit than less virtuous individuals? What is the taxonomic distribution of cognitive skills and emotional capacities necessary for individuals to be able to behave fairly, to empathize, to behave morally? Can we use information about moral behavior in animals to help us understand ourselves? I conclude that there is strong selection for cooperative fair play in which individuals establish and maintain a social contract to play because there are mutual benefits when individuals adopt this strategy and group stability may be also be fostered. Numerous mechanisms have evolved to facilitate the initiation and maintenance of social play to keep others engaged, so that agreeing to play fairly and the resulting benefits of doing so can be readily achieved. I also claim that the ability to make accurate predictions about what an individual is likely to do in a given social situation is a useful litmus test for explaining what might be happening in an individual's brain during social encounters, and that intentional or representational explanations are often important for making these predictions.     

One family: defining kinship in the neighbourhoods of Kumasi,Ghana

This article investigates how the concept that ‘people from one place are one family’ creates an a priori category of relatedness among otherwise unrelated neighbours in Kumasi, Ghana. A connection between spatial and kinship relations is indicated in the common saying, but unlike similar connections elaborated in other locales, residents often do not share activities such as cooking or cultivating prior to making claims to being ‘one family’. Through interviews and the resolution of a neighbourhood dispute, I show that the assumption that co‐residents are family can precede – and instantiate – the practices that indicate shared family. I argue that the equivalence between place and family is a fundamentally ethical equivalence that renders the actions of selves and others evaluable according to a common understanding of what is good for communities.     

On fun and freedom: young women's moral learning in Indonesian Islamic boarding schools

This article analyses the role of fun and freedom in the moral learning of young women students in two Indonesian Islamic boarding schools. Recent debates about Islam and ethical subject formation have centred on the assumed tension between Islam and freedom. I examine decisions about television viewing and dress to illustrate both the flexibility and fixity of moral values and evaluation in girls’ lives. I argue that anthropologists of morality and Islam should take seriously moments of fun as important instances for ‘moral ludus’ or ‘moral play’ – the testing, shifting, and reshaping of the boundaries of moral behaviours that involve balancing the demands of various social fields and the larger ethical community in which a person is embedded. I suggest that these moments be viewed not as ruptures or instances of hypocrisy but as everyday occurrences of embedded agency in the lives of piety-minded individuals.     

Property as sovereignty in micro: the state/property nexus and the Cyprus Problem

This article shows that landed property can be an exercise of state sovereignty in micro. I argue that property tightly relates to statehood and that the concept of ‘community’ offers us a lens with which to investigate that relation. Property's ‘communal’ character in Cyprus often transcends individual rights to ownership. A house belongs not to an individual, but to persons in their capacity as members of either the Greek-Cypriot or Turkish-Cypriot constitutional communities of the Republic. Focusing on the moral and political claims that ensue from this premise, I show how refugee Cypriots encounter and rearticulate the state in a variety of institutions as they lay claims to property (periousia) – their own or others’. Consequently, I argue that thinking through ‘community’ contributes to understandings of the linkage between property and statecraft (what I call the state/property nexus). In turn, this allows us to better comprehend statehood in post-conflict domains.     

Everyone Will Be Jealous For That Mutika

In this paper I describe a phenomenon I refer to by its Aboriginal English name — ‘humbugging’ — in a western Arnhem Land Aboriginal settlement. By discussing the focal object in this phenomenon — the ‘mutika’ (car)¹ — I argue that a most interesting process of de-commoditization is occurring in this settlement. I use examples of humbugging to illustrate how the car in this community has tremendous symbolic as well as practical significance. I use. in particular, the work of Douglas and Isherwood (1979) and Appadurai et al. (1986), and argue that their ‘social life of things’ theoretical framework is appropriate for interpreting the importance of the ‘mutika’. I also suggest, however, that this framework needs to be re-thought in order to incorporate the challenge which de-commoditization presents to it.     

‘Hip to be Irish’: ethnicity and Bourdieu's ‘Forms of Capital’

A ‘new Irish’ American ethnicity surfaced in the 1980s – according to a number of scholars and journalists – and is comprised of what some consider to be more ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ Irish cultural attributes. Defining authentic and traditional Irishness is complicated, however, by the recent influx and highly visible forms of economic capital and media attention stemming from the Celtic Tiger – the surge of economic prosperity that began in Ireland in the 1990s – and the commercializing of Irish music and dance – such as Riverdance. In this paper, I propose, through my study involving Irish language enthusiasts, that this ‘new’ form of Irish ethnicity is more the result of rather than the reason for this surge in popularity. I use Pierre Bourdieu's ‘Forms of Capital’ in questioning the ‘new Irish’ American ethnicity, arguing instead that a deeply seated, less-visible reservoir of cultural and social capital form the basis for this perceived contemporary ethnicity.     

Migration in migration-related diversity? The nexus between superdiversity and migration studies

This article argues that the notion of ‘superdiversity’ implies an investigation of diversity that goes well beyond the nature of migration origins and trajectories. To probe the academic value of superdiversity, I situate it within broader academic debates, suggesting that it is necessary to distinguish between superdiversity as a malleable social science concept – a set of variables that researchers conjunctively investigate – and superdiversity as a context in which these variables play out in complex social patterns. I argue that complexity is an integral aspect of superdiversity, before explaining how innovative research methods were used to investigate superdiversity in a dual-site project in London and Toronto in order to explore its relevance for global comparative research.     

The Importance of Being Serious: Subjectivity and Adulthood in Kenya

While anthropological scholarship on the life course transitions of young people has aimed to contribute to theories of structure and agency, social reproduction and change, it has done so relatively independently from the anthropological literature on subject formation. This paper explores how subjectivity – how people feel, think, and experience – is implicated in grappling with life course transitions. It addresses how ‘being serious’ is considered a critical adult competency and its achievement delineates a key life transition that young women in western Kenya variously resent and value, resist and seek. The analysis illuminates ways in which people grapple with their own subjectivity as a problem as well as a project, and how such problems and projects of subjectivity are problems and projects of social reproduction. I argue that taking account of such subjective transformations can augment political economy analysis of meanings and modes of life.     

Racial discrimination: How not to do it

The UNESCO Statements on Race of the early 1950s are understood to have marked a consensus amongst natural scientists and social scientists that ‘race’ is a social construct. Human biological diversity was shown to be predominantly clinal, or gradual, not discreet, and clustered, as racial naturalism implied. From the seventies social constructionists added that the vast majority of human genetic diversity resides within any given racialised group. While social constructionism about race became the majority consensus view on the topic, social constructionism has always had its critics. Sesardic (2010) has compiled these criticisms into one of the strongest defences of racial naturalism in recent times. In this paper I argue that Sesardic equivocates between two versions of racial naturalism: a weak version and a strong version. As I shall argue, the strong version is not supported by the relevant science. The weak version, on the other hand, does not contrast properly with what social constructionists think about ‘race’. By leaning on this weak view Sesardic’s racial naturalism intermittently gains an appearance of plausibility, but this view is too weak to revive racial naturalism. As Sesardic demonstrates, there are new arguments for racial naturalism post-Human Genome Diversity Project. The positive message behind my critique is how to be a social constructionist about race in the post-genomic era.     

‘The Mind of Christ’: Financial Success,Born-again Personhood,and the Anthropology of Christianity

In this article, I contribute to the emerging project of the anthropology of Christianity by exploring the subject of born-again personhood. As a nascent field of inquiry, the anthropology of Christianity must delimit what theoretical opportunities exist for comparative research. I argue that a focus on personhood offers a promising series of questions toward this end. To illustrate this claim, I use the case study of one Evangelical Sunday school teacher – Rick Betcher – and his life as a ‘Christian businessman.’ Anthropologists and other scholars have shown great interest in how matters of money figure in the culture of Protestantism. Using Rick's self-designed Sunday school class, The Mind of Christ, I argue that conceptions of personal financial success among born-again Christians are structured by the prevailing model of born-again personhood – the New Mind.     

Why is the world green? The interactions of top–down and bottom–up processes in terrestrial vegetation ecology

A classic question in plant ecology is “why is the world green?” That is, if plants are food for animals why do not animals eat all the available food – changing a ‘green world’ into a ‘brown world’. We first reviewed this question in 2009 and now revisit our arguments in the light of new data and new thinking. Here we argue that (1) the top–down bottom–up dichotomy is probably too simple for understanding a complex system – such as vegetation – rich in feedback processes. (2) Nevertheless it appears that bottom–up processes are generally more important for maintaining the presence of some sort of vegetation while top–down control process are generally more important in determining the type of vegetation at a site. (3) Although this review mainly takes a qualitative and experimental approach to the question, we also argue that simple well-known mathematical models from population ecology can be very informative in thinking about the types of explanations for the green world phenomenon, and demonstrating that it is rarely a simple choice between one form of control or another.     

Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good

In the 1980s, anthropology set aside a focus on societies defined as radically ‘other’ to the anthropologists' own. There was little consensus at the time, however, about who might replace the other as the primary object of anthropological attention. In important respects, I argue, its replacement has been the suffering subject. Tracing this change, I consider how it addressed key problems of the anthropology of the other, but I also suggest that some strengths of earlier work – particularly some of its unique critical capacities – were lost in the transition. The conclusion considers how recent trends in anthropology might coalesce in a further shift, this one toward an anthropology of the good capable of recovering some of the critical force of an earlier anthropology without taking on its weaknesses.     

Spencerism and the Causal Theory of Reference

Spencer’s heritage, while almost a forgotten chapter in the history of biology, lives on in psychology and the philosophy of mind. I particularly discuss externalist views of meaning, on which meaning crucially depends on a notion of reference, and ask whether reference should be thought of as cause or effect. Is the meaning of a word explained by what it refers to, or should we say that what we use a word to refer to is explained by what concept it expresses? I argue for the latter view, which I call ‘Darwinian’, and against the former, ‘Spencerian’ one, assuming conceptual structures in humans to be an instance of adaptive structures, and adaptive relations to an environment to be the effect rather than the cause of evolutionary novelties. I conclude with the deficiency – both empirically and methodologically – of a functionalist study of human concepts and the languages they are embedded in, as it would be undertaken in a paradigm that identifies meaning with reference or that gives reference an explanatory role to play for what concepts we have.     

An Experimental Test of Predator Detection Rates Using Groups of Free-living Emus

Abstract Improved predator detection is often stated to be one of the principal benefits of social foraging. However, actual field evidence supporting this assumption is scarce. This may be the result of the fact that most observations are conducted on social animals acting in the absence of an acute predation threat, yet the benefits of grouping come to the fore in that brief moment when an individual's life is at risk. As predation attempts are typically rare in nature, experimental manipulations are necessary to further explore the costs and benefits of social foraging. This study utilizes simple predator simulations (by humans) to experimentally test the predator‐detecting abilities and escape strategies of groups of free‐living emus Dromaius novaehollandiae. Emus in larger groups spent less time in vigilance and more time foraging. Nonetheless, the combined vigilance of group members ensured that emus detected the ‘simulated predator’ sooner as group size increased. After detecting the ‘predator’, larger groups waited longer until opting to flee, and then spent less time and energy doing so. Thus, the results of this study provide experimental evidence that emus benefit from grouping in terms of both the ‘many‐eyes effect’ and the ‘dilution effect’.     

Postcoloniality,National Identity,Globalisation and the Simulacra of the Real

The focus of this paper is a famous boys' boarding school in the North Indian city of Dehra Dun. The Doon School was founded in 1935 and was soon hailed by a wide cross section of post-colonial Indian intelligentsia as the site for the production of the ‘modern’ Indian citizen. The discussion below suggests that contemporary social analysis needs to focus on specific sites of the production of the discourses of the nation and citizenship rather than simply announce their dissolution as an ‘inevitable’ by-product of ‘globalisation’; this seems to be the stand taken by certain strands of theorisation in the so-called globalisation debate and in particular versions of cultural studies. I argue that rather than having simply dissolved, the ‘national’ emotion, at least in the Indian context, may have been transformed into the production of ‘post-coloniality’ as a differentiating category to distinguish the ‘progressive’ populations of the nation-state from its ‘backward’ counterparts. I employ Baudrillard's concept of the ‘real’ in order to argue for situated analyses of the contemporary global condition where analyses of the relationship between nation-states and of the asymmetries within them continue to be important political tasks.     

Contemporary Urban Buddhist ‘Cults’ and the Socio-Political Order in Thailand

This paper is concerned with the ongoing intense interest in Thailand of two controversial urban Buddhist movements which have appeared since the beginning of the seventies, Santi Asok and Thammakaai. Essentially, I view both as a resonance of the perceived need for ‘change’ among an articulate aspiring new middle class. I also argue that both Santi Asok and Thammakaai in their expressions — Thammakaai the specious discursive function of capital, Santi Asok by confrontation and spurning what they consider an ‘amoralistic’ establishment — are predicating a radical critique of the Thai social order, a call for collective ‘inner-worldly activism’ and ‘individualistic’ reflexive response to convention.     

From connection to contagion

This essay proposes that we ‘think data’ with a complex legacy of work, once disavowed and now resurgent in social theory, on crowd formations. I propose this move because social media platforms’ mobilization of data – the extractions, ever-shifting reaggregations, and micro-targeting, on the one hand, and our engagements, re-tweets, acts of sharing, and production of virality, on the other – has fuelled such anxious concern about the very things that animated much crowd theory in the first place. Key among these concerns are the force of emotional contagion and the threat of social dissolution; the composition of ‘the social’ by elements that well exceed the human; and pressing questions about the media through which energetic forces travel, often with lightning speed. What questions might be enabled by attending to the resonance between crowd theory's ‘anti-liberal’ preoccupations and contemporary concerns over how social media platforms crowd us?     

The multiple dimensions of racial mixture in Rio de Janeiro,Brazil: from whitening to Brazilian negritude

Abstract

The notion that racial mixture is a central feature of Latin American societies has been interpreted in different, if not strictly opposite, ways. On the one hand, scholars have presented it as evidence of weaker racial boundaries. On the other, it has been denounced as an expression of the illusion of harmonic racial relations. Relying on 160 interviews with black Brazilians, we argue that the valorization of racial mixture is an important response to stigmatization, but one that has multiple dimensions and different consequences for the maintenance of racial boundaries. We map out these different dimensions – namely, ‘whitening’, ‘Brazilian negritude’, ‘national identification’ and ‘non-essentialist racialism’ – and discuss how these dimensions are combined in different ways by our interviewees according to various circumstances. Exploring these multiple dimensions, we question any simplistic understanding of racial mixture as the blessing or the curse of Latin American racial dynamics.