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?     

Witchcraft and the limits of mass mediation in Malawi

This article explores what the study of witchcraft in an African setting can contribute to current efforts to theorize mass mediation and the imagination it fosters. Recent ethnographies of witchcraft discourses in Africa have continued to associate them with the formation of small-scale groups, but evidence from Malawi shows how they enable subjects to imagine sociality on an indeterminate scale. The article deploys the concept of mediation to theorize how in this imagination witches mediate sociality as the unrecognized third parties who give rise to recognized social relationships of varying scale. The ethnography of witchcraft discourses in radio broadcasting and an impoverished peri-urban area demonstrates not only their relevance to apparently disparate contexts but also their potential to exceed the impact of the mass media. The case of a violent conflict involving Pentecostal Christians, South Asian entrepreneurs, Muslims, and members of a secret society provides an example of how arguments about witchcraft had a greater impact on the popular imagination than a mass-mediated report of the same conflict. The article concludes by arguing that witchcraft discourses should be accorded weight equal to the mass media in theorizing the imagination.     

The Ethnographic Use of Facebook in Everyday Life

New social media have become indispensable to people all over the world as platforms for communication, with Facebook being the most popular. Hence, platforms such as Facebook are also becoming crucial tools for ethnographers because much social life now exists ‘online’. What types of field relations stem from such social media-driven ethnography? And what kinds of data do these relations present to the ethnographer? These questions must be considered in order to understand the challenges Facebook and other social media pose to ethnographic methodology. This article focuses on how Facebook may play an important role even in ethnographic work concerned with questions other than how Facebook works as a social medium. Most importantly it allows the ethnographer to keep up-to-date with the field. I argue that ethnography is already in possession of the methodological tools critically to assess the validity and value of data gathered or produced via Facebook including issues such as authenticity which are also pertinent to digital ethnography.     

Phylogeography of the socially polymorphic sweat bee Halictus rubicundus (Hymenoptera: Halictidae)

The evolution of sociality in insects holds a central place in evolutionary theory. By examining the phylogenetic patterns of solitary and social behavior and how they correlate with ecological variables, we may identify factors important in the evolution of sociality. In this study, we investigated historical and biogeographical patterns of sociality in a socially polymorphic bee species (one that demonstrates both social and solitary nesting behavior). This unique system allows for a more powerful examination of evolutionary transitions in sociality than interspecific studies of obligately social and solitary species. We conducted a phylogenetic analysis among populations of the halictine bee Halictus rubicundus and then identified relationships among mitochondrial DNA sequence data, sociality, environmental conditions at the nesting site, and geographic location of populations of this species. Within North America, populations of H. rubicundus expressing social and solitary behavior belong to different genetic lineages. Sociality is also correlated with at least one environmental variable used in this study. Taken together, the results support the predictions for genetic control of sociality, but they are still consistent with social behavior at some level being determined by the environmental conditions at the nesting site.     

Asocial memories, ‘poisonous knowledge’, and haunting in Mongolia

This article argues that memories that come from contexts that are adversarial, and that are not always based on communication and sociality, should be better integrated within the existing theories of social memory. Shamans in postsocialist Mongolia claim that previously suppressed origin spirits demand that their descendants become initiated as shamans in exchange for ceasing to harass them for forgetting and abandonment. Some clients refuse to become initiated as shamans and thus choose to sever their relationship with their past. In this article I explore one such refusal, which led to a disintegration of existing social ties, while also yielding unexpected memories. These memories are different from the shared memories that emerge in the context of organized shamanic rituals. Circulated through rumour and supposition instead of positive sociality and sharing, these ‘asocial’ memories also act as a particular kind of ‘poisonous knowledge’, prompting each individual to withdraw from the network as a way of avoiding the alleged harm from unattended spirits. Owing to divergent subject positioning, where one person's remembering is another's forgetting, the haunting by unwanted memories continues, as resolution through unifying communal ritual is not possible.     

Evolving communicative complexity: insights from rodents and beyond

Social living goes hand in hand with communication, but the details of this relationship are rarely simple. Complex communication may be described by attributes as diverse as a species' entire repertoire, signallers' individualistic signatures, or complex acoustic phenomena within single calls. Similarly, attributes of social complexity are diverse and may include group size, social role diversity, or networks of interactions and relationships. How these different attributes of social and communicative complexity co-evolve is an active question in behavioural ecology. Sciurid rodents (ground squirrels, prairie dogs and marmots) provide an excellent model system for studying these questions. Sciurid studies have found that demographic role complexity predicts alarm call repertoire size, while social group size predicts alarm call individuality. Along with other taxa, sciurids reveal an important insight: different attributes of sociality are linked to different attributes of communication. By breaking social and communicative complexity down to different attributes, focused studies can better untangle the underlying evolutionary relationships and move us closer to a comprehensive theory of how sociality and communication evolve.     

How Japanese Women Talk about Hot Flushes: Implications for Menopause Research

An unanticipated onomatopoeic expression emerged during ethnographic interviews with Japanese women about menopausal symptoms. At the same time, a newly coined term for hot flush, derived from English, started appearing in Japanese media. These two independent linguistic phenomena led me to speculate on what linguistic expression of physical sensations may reveal about social forces in a given society. This report examines the complexities involved in studying physiological symptoms. The multiple and intertwined variables--including economics, politics, social organization, and language--involved in translating physiological symptoms cross-culturally have been well recognized. But how to study these variables remains a challenge. This article offers a case study of what careful attention to verbal expression may tell us. My argument underscores the social fact that the expressions people choose to use vary according to their reasons for communicating and that their motivations for verbalizing symptoms (hot flush, in this case) depend on the priorities and sanctions of the society in which they live. These factors must be given due consideration when assessing any symptoms of the individual body.     

Balancing contest competition,scramble competition,and social tolerance at feeding sites in wild common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus)

Models of primate sociality focus on the costs and benefits of group living and how factors such as rank, feeding competition, alliance formation, and cooperative behavior shape within‐group social relationships. We conducted a series of controlled field experiments designed to investigate how resource distribution (one or three of four reward platforms) and amount of food on a reward platform affected foraging strategies and individual feeding success in four groups of wild common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) living in the Caatinga of northeastern Brazil. At our field site, common marmoset groups are characterized by a single breeding female who can produce twin litters twice per year, strong social cohesion, and cooperative infant care provided principally by several adult male helpers. We found that except for the dominant breeding female, rank (based on aggression) was not a strong predictor of feeding success. Although the breeding female in each group occupied the highest rank position and obtained the greatest daily feeding success, all other group members, including adults and juveniles experienced relatively equal feeding success across most experimental conditions. This was accomplished using a balance of behavioral strategies related to contest competition, scramble competition (associated with a finder's advantage), and social tolerance (sharing the same feeding platform). Based on these results, the social structure of common marmosets is best described as “single female dominance,” with the breeding female maximizing food intake needed to offset the energetic costs associated with reproductive twinning and the ability to produce two litters per year. Cooperative infant caregiving, in which the number of helpers is positively correlated with offspring survivorship, requires a set of behavioral strategies that serve to reduce contest competition and promote prosocial behaviors at feeding sites.     

“Doing a Lynndie”: Iconography of a Gesture

In the fall of 2003, Lynndie England gave thumbs-up with one hand and lock-and-load with the other to a group of naked Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, when facing a camera. Soon after the Abu Ghraib tortures became public knowledge, and Lynndie England became an iconic “Hillbilly” who tortures for fun, hundreds of people around the world, prompted by a British blog named Bad Gas, took up Lynndie's gesture and transformed it into a humorous everyday practice. This article attempts to illuminate the processes that transform iconic images into embodied commonsense cultural practices by tracing the life of Lynndie's gesture across a varied and complex media landscape. It poses questions about the role that popular media played in providing mainstream discursive frameworks about the Abu Ghraib tortures and about the role of social media in transforming these discourses into humorous practices.     

One plus one makes three (for social networks)

Members of social network platforms often choose to reveal private information, and thus sacrifice some of their privacy, in exchange for the manifold opportunities and amenities offered by such platforms. In this article, we show that the seemingly innocuous combination of knowledge of confirmed contacts between members on the one hand and their email contacts to non-members on the other hand provides enough information to deduce a substantial proportion of relationships between non-members. Using machine learning we achieve an area under the (receiver operating characteristic) curve (AUC) of at least 0.85 for predicting whether two non-members known by the same member are connected or not, even for conservative estimates of the overall proportion of members, and the proportion of members disclosing their contacts.     

Visualizing Different Kinds of Writing: Auto-ethnography,Social Science

Studies of indigeneity can prove particularly important if they focus on how history writes and produces the “indigenous” in multiple ways and at multiple sites. Modes and styles of writing appropriate for communicating the multiple effects and the complex and contradictory forces and assumptions at work in the study of indigeneity are yet to be fully answered. The anthology, Writing in the San/d: Auto-ethnographic Explorations amongst Indigenous South Africans, (Keyan Tomaselli, ed. [2007]), presents specific applications of auto-ethnographic methods, drawing attention to problems about methods that are often an anathema to literary studies or to social science. This article traces the evolution of specific reflexive methods developed by the researchers in partnership with the researched, namely, indigenous communities across Southern Africa. The article argues for closer collaboration between social science on the one hand and new ways of documenting, visualizing and expressing field research experiences and encounters on the other. This research journey examines tensions that have arisen between auto-ethnographic and more conventional styles of academic and technical writing. The usual criticism leveled at auto-ethnography, culturalism and other forms of writing and imaging within the orthodox social science/development studies/social anthropology genre is that these methods have no policy relevance. This article is a response to these concerns.     

The functions of societies and the evolution of group living: spider societies as a test case

Many models have been advanced to suggest how different expressions of sociality have evolved and are maintained. However these models ignore the function of groups for the particular species in question. Here we present a new perspective on sociality where the function of the group takes a central role. We argue that sociality may have primarily a reproductive, protective, or foraging function, depending on whether it enhances the reproductive, protective or foraging aspect of the animal's life (sociality may serve a mixture of these functions). Different functions can potentially cause the development of the same social behaviour. By identifying which function influences a particular social behaviour we can determine how that social behaviour will change with changing conditions, and which models are most pertinent. To test our approach we examined spider sociality, which has often been seen as the poor cousin to insect sociality. By using our approach we found that the group characteristics of eusocial insects is largely governed by the reproductive function of their groups, while the group characteristics of social spiders is largely governed by the foraging function of the group. This means that models relevant to insects may not be relevant to spiders. It also explains why eusocial insects have developed a strict caste system while spider societies are more egalitarian. We also used our approach to explain the differences between different types of spider groups. For example, differences in the characteristics of colonial and kleptoparasitic groups can be explained by differences in foraging methods, while differences between colonial and cooperative spiders can be explained by the role of the reproductive function in the formation of cooperative spider groups. Although the interactions within cooperative spider colonies are largely those of a foraging society, demographic traits and colony dynamics are strongly influenced by the reproductive function. We argue that functional explanations help to understand the social structure of spider groups and therefore the evolutionary potential for speciation in social spiders.     

The role of the microbiome in the neurobiology of social behaviour

Microbes colonise all multicellular life, and the gut microbiome has been shown to influence a range of host physiological and behavioural phenotypes. One of the most intriguing and least understood of these influences lies in the domain of the microbiome's interactions with host social behaviour, with new evidence revealing that the gut microbiome makes important contributions to animal sociality. However, little is known about the biological processes through which the microbiome might influence host social behaviour. Here, we synthesise evidence of the gut microbiome's interactions with various aspects of host sociality, including sociability, social cognition, social stress, and autism. We discuss evidence of microbial associations with the most likely physiological mediators of animal social interaction. These include the structure and function of regions of the ‘social' brain (the amygdala, the prefrontal cortex, and the hippocampus) and the regulation of ‘social’ signalling molecules (glucocorticoids including corticosterone and cortisol, sex hormones including testosterone, oestrogens, and progestogens, neuropeptide hormones such as oxytocin and arginine vasopressin, and monoamine neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine). We also discuss microbiome‐associated host genetic and epigenetic processes relevant to social behaviour. We then review research on microbial interactions with olfaction in insects and mammals, which contribute to social signalling and communication. Following these discussions, we examine evidence of microbial associations with emotion and social behaviour in humans, focussing on psychobiotic studies, microbe–depression correlations, early human development, autism, and issues of statistical power, replication, and causality. We analyse how the putative physiological mediators of the microbiome–sociality connection may be investigated, and discuss issues relating to the interpretation of results. We also suggest that other candidate molecules should be studied, insofar as they exert effects on social behaviour and are known to interact with the microbiome. Finally, we consider different models of the sequence of microbial effects on host physiological development, and how these may contribute to host social behaviour.     

Opting out of the city: lifestyle migrations,alternative education,and the pursuit of happiness among Chinese middle-class families

This article responds to calls among anthropologists to attend to the aspirational qualities of life pursuits by respecting idealized life visions and acknowledging the suggestiveness of living otherwise. It follows a cohort of formerly urban middle-class Chinese families that have chosen to ‘opt out’ of their successful city lives to pursue alternative lifestyles and education for their children in China's rural southwest. Drawing on literatures about voluntary lifestyle migrations and alternative parenting and education, I show how these families construct meaningful social worlds through class histories, family ideals, and presentist temporalities that deviate from Western class formation and neoliberal constructions of self defined by individualistic identity pursuits. Through analysing a configuration of self and sociality that emphasizes the family and routes parental self-aspirations through children, the article deepens our understanding of child-centredness as a key feature of Chinese lifestyle migrations. It shows how quests for ‘the good life’ take shape through diverse sociohistorical and familial contexts with their own temporal orientations and life politics.     

Mediated speculations in the genomics futures markets

This article examines the interactions between the media and genomics, with particular reference to the case of deCODE Genetics in Iceland. It focuses on the role of "forward-looking statements" and other forms of speculation as they operate in the science of genomics, in the social relations that happen around genomics, and in the commercial genomics economy. The article discusses how these fundamentally anticipatory speech acts uttered or written by genomic corporate executives, journalists, or social scientists are simultaneously volatile, exceeding any formal practices of accounting or analysis, and demanding to be accounted for, analysed, or valued. The article discusses four speculative events or cases in the genomics economy: the March 2000 bursting out of the genomics bubble, prompted in part by remarks by President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair to the media concerning gene patenting; the new disclosure requirements of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding "forward-looking statements" as they appear in genomics press releases; deCODE Genetics' registration statement with the SEC that discloses a settlement of a dispute over the ownership of a fragment of DNA; and the entanglement between the author's ethnographic fieldwork and the breaking news story of reported payoffs from deCODE to the Icelandic political parties.     

The aesthetics of ‘time reckoning’: a Guna chromatic history★

This is a study of time and aesthetics through an ethnographic analysis of an indigenous visual system. Looking at historical changes in women's clothing and village patterns among Guna people (Panama), the article shows that images and artefacts are key to shedding light on indigenous historicities. Core visual and material processes encapsulate and manifest biographical and group time. By the same token, such processes provide a privileged perspective to consider how present-day social relations are the product of long-term historical transformations. The analysis draws on the relatively overlooked notion of ‘chromatism’ developed by Lévi-Strauss and subsequently elaborated by Lima as ‘chromatic sociality’. It proposes that ‘chromatism’ is an indigenous category that allows for reckoning with the passing of time and the shifting circumstances of history.     

Sacred materialism: Things and relations in a US Pagan community

Ever since Marcel Mauss wrote The Gift, the notion that things exchanged as gifts take a personalised social form, and that they partake of and mediate relational sociality, has held an important place in anthropology. Examining material practices among contemporary Pagans in the Reclaiming tradition, this article shows how they seek to imbue things with personhood, exploring the sacredness of things as alive, active and participating in social relations. In doing so, these Pagans work to forge an alternative economy founded on gift exchange and generous labour, which they hope might form a basis for a different kind of sociality from the capitalist system dominant in the United States. In practice, the encounter between gift and commodity forms in this community is a source of both conflict and emergent forms of sociality, as these alternative economic practices are fashioned around the margins of mainstream economic life.     

‘Do you have a mobile?’ Mobile phone practices and the refashioning of social relationships in Port Vila Town

Mobile phones have quickly become an important part of young people's social relationships in Port Vila Vanuatu. In particular, young people embrace the new technology's capacity to broaden the breadth of their sociality. They use the mobile phone to facilitate private and secretive communication, engage in unsanctioned relationships, pre‐marital sexual relationships, and also multiple concurrent intimate relationships. Literature on mobile phone use often either takes the approach that mobile phone technology becomes purely incorporated into pre‐existing social practices, or that it dramatically reshapes social ontologies. The present article argues for an alternative view, one that takes into account the nuances between these two analytical poles. This article suggests that young people use the mobile phone in practices informed by previous models of social relationships, yet the specific materiality of the mobile phone technology is influencing the direction in which models of social relationships are changing. In demonstrating this point, I pay particular attention to two material aspects of the mobile phone technology ‐ the mobile phone as a repository of a particular kind of information ‐ ‘evidence’, and the capacity of the mobile phone to ‘disconnect’ people from their relationships by switching off the mobile. This article argues that these practices are influencing the emergence of a radically altered kinship and gender landscape in the urban context.     

Multidimensional Human Dynamics in Mobile Phone Communications

In today''s technology-assisted society, social interactions may be expressed through a variety of techno-communication channels, including online social networks, email and mobile phones (calls, text messages). Consequently, a clear grasp of human behavior through the diverse communication media is considered a key factor in understanding the formation of the today''s information society. So far, all previous research on user communication behavior has focused on a sole communication activity. In this paper we move forward another step on this research path by performing a multidimensional study of human sociality as an expression of the use of mobile phones. The paper focuses on user temporal communication behavior in the interplay between the two complementary communication media, text messages and phone calls, that represent the bi-dimensional scenario of analysis. Our study provides a theoretical framework for analyzing multidimensional bursts as the most general burst category, that includes one-dimensional bursts as the simplest case, and offers empirical evidence of their nature by following the combined phone call/text message communication patterns of approximately one million people over three-month period. This quantitative approach enables the design of a generative model rooted in the three most significant features of the multidimensional burst - the number of dimensions, prevalence and interleaving degree - able to reproduce the main media usage attitude. The other findings of the paper include a novel multidimensional burst detection algorithm and an insight analysis of the human media selection process.     

Aging 2.0: Health Information about Dementia on Twitter

Online social media is widespread, easily accessible and attracts a global audience with a widening demographic. As a large proportion of adults now seek health information online and through social media applications, communication about health has become increasingly interactive and dynamic. Online health information has the potential to significantly impact public health, especially as the population gets older and the prevalence of dementia increases. However, little is known about how information pertaining to age-associated diseases is disseminated on popular social media platforms. To fill this knowledge gap, we examined empirically: (i) who is using social media to share information about dementia, (ii) what sources of information about dementia are promoted, and (iii) which dementia themes dominate the discussion. We data-mined the microblogging platform Twitter for content containing dementia-related keywords for a period of 24 hours and retrieved over 9,200 tweets. A coding guide was developed and content analysis conducted on a random sample (10%), and on a subsample from top users’ tweets to assess impact. We found that a majority of tweets contained a link to a third party site rather than personal information, and these links redirected mainly to news sites and health information sites. As well, a large number of tweets discussed recent research findings related to the prediction and risk management of Alzheimer’s disease. The results highlight the need for the dementia research community to harness the reach of this medium and its potential as a tool for multidirectional engagement.