Discourse-Centered Approach to Language and Culture

The Sapir- Whorf hypothesis, as usually formulated, searches for isomorphisms between grammar and culture and views language as either providing the means for thought and perception, or, in its stronger form, conditioning thought, perception, and world view. In this article I consider discourse to be the concrete expression of language-culture relationships. It is discourse that creates, recreates, focuses, modifies, and transmits both culture and language and their intersection, and it is especially in verbally artistic and playful discourse, such as poetry, magic, verbal dueling, and political rhetoric, that the resources provided by grammar, as well as cultural meanings and symbols, are activated to their fullest potential and the essence of language-culture relationships becomes salient.     

Perverse Frictions: Pride,Dignity, and the Budapest LGBT March

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) marches are critical and contentious events throughout post-socialist Europe: key sites of emerging sexual politics, shifting tensions between national and transnational meanings, and competing visions of citizenship. Since 1997 a ‘Pride March’, in 2008 Budapest's LGBT march was renamed the ‘Dignity March’. Taking this change as its focus, this paper explores debates within and outside Hungary's LGBT community about the meanings of ‘Pride’, ‘Dignity’, and sexuality. I argue these debates reveal competing efforts to negotiate the perilous boundaries between national and transnational discourses of identity, politics, and belonging. Situating them within Hungary's shifting political context, including recent violent attacks on the March, I suggest the move from the politics of Pride to the politics of Dignity has failed to escape the frictions of intersecting global and local discourses, instead invoking new cultural–political tensions, exclusionary boundaries, and dilemmas of identity, belonging, and politics for Hungarian LGBT people and activism.     

Ecological communities: conceptual problems and definitions

Three major problems with respect to ecological communities are tackled. The first is the problem of ambiguity, i.e. the fact that the term “community” is being used for various kinds of objects at different levels of organisation. We argue that this problem can be resolved by restricting use of the term “community” to sets of co-occurring organisms belonging to a single taxonomic phylum or class (plants, birds, insects, etc.) and by using the term “biocoenosis” for sets of organisms belonging to multiple phyla or classes and comprising the biotic components of ecosystems. We also argue that interaction between organisms is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for community membership, or, in other words, that communities may consist of both interacting and non-interacting organisms. The second and third problems are the boundary problem and the problem of heterogeneity, i.e. the fact that communities, as currently defined, most often do not have discrete boundaries and are quite heterogeneous with respect to species composition. We argue that both problems result from the fact that communities are seen as groups of co-occurring populations of species, whereas actually populations of different species rarely if ever co-occur in exactly the same area. These problems can be resolved by redefining communities as particular sets of individuals occurring in the intersection of the areas occupied by different populations of species. In the final section we defend our definition against some potential objections, viz. (1) that it would lead to an excessive number of small communities, especially in species-rich situations, and (2) that, because population boundaries may change all the time, such communities would be very unstable.     

Contested Knowledge, Contingent Classification: Animals in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

New Guinea highlanders appear to conceive of animal taxonomy in a way that is simultaneously familiar to a scientist, yet different. This is often attributed to interaction between natural ecology, which constrains content, and cultural context, which conditions the structure of any taxonomy. The evidence presented here confirms this view, although the considerable, and initially disconcerting, disagreements between persons over taxonomic issues raise the question: To what extent is Wola classification of natural phenomena analogous to Western hierarchical classification? The stateless political environment conditions the Wola constantly to challenge hierarchy, obfuscate boundaries, and think in terms of "fuzzy sets," confounding the assumption of agreed classes and threatening intellectual anarchy. However, their taxonomic regime offsets this, facilitating discourse in the absence of authorities to adjudicate in disputes. No formal classificatory scheme devised so far can adequately represent such an oral tradition's ever negotiated ordering of animals; whatever framework we adopt will somewhat distort it. [Keywords: Papua New Guinea, ethnozoology, taxonomy]     

Monuments, power and personhood in the British Neolithic

Recent research on British Neolithic monuments describes how the ordering of space within these sites contributed to the production and maintenance of dominant discourses. This article argues that aspects of this work are implicitly built on conceptions of personhood specific to post-Enlightenment thought, resulting in a somewhat static and one-dimensional conception of power relations during the period. One way out of this problem is provided by anthropological and feminist literature in which an alternative characterization of the self as inherently fluid and relational has been outlined. This facilitates a shifting and contextual conception of power relations which can be reconciled more easily with the evidence from Neolithic monuments for the continuous creation and reinterpretation of spatial meanings.     

Comparison of different methods for diversity ordering

Abstract. The measurement of diversity, one of the most important concepts in present-day ecology, can be improved by methods of diversity ordering which have recently been developed. This ordering is achieved by a D(α) diversity index family. Indices of this family show varying sensitivities to the rare and abundant species as the scale parameter, α, changes. The aim of this paper is to review and assess 12 methods of diversity ordering and discuss their relationships in detail. Two of the methods are new to the ecological literature. The diversity ordering methods are compared as to their effectiveness in graphically displaying the differences of community structure and demonstrating the (non-)comparability of communities. Small, medium and large data sets were used to evaluate the methods. A small artificial data set (five to seven species) and a large semi-artificial data set (31 — 141 species) are used in this paper. The results suggest that Rényi's diversity index family and Logarithmic dominance ordering are the most useful methods for diversity ordering of communities of all sizes. Right-tailsum diversity ordering performs well for small communities.     

Quantum computing: a new paradigm for ecology

A global technology arms race is underway to build evermore powerful and precise quantum computers. Quantum computers have the potential to tackle certain quantitative problems quicker than classical computers. The current focus of quantum computing is on pushing the boundaries of fundamental quantum information and commercial applications in industrial sectors, financial services, and other profit-led sectors, particularly where improvements in optimisation and sampling can improve increased economic return. We believe that ecologists could exploit the computational power of quantum computers because the statistical approaches commonly used in ecology already have proven pathways on quantum computers. Moreover, quantum computing could ultimately leapfrog our understanding of complex ecological systems, if the hardware, opportunity, and creativity of quantitative ecologists all align.     

The Nature of Shifting Cultivation: Stories of Harmony, Degradation, and Redemption

Shifting cultivation is identified as a major cause of tropical deforestation. Sources that recount such impacts routinely employ an Eden-lost narrative structure that represents shifting cultivators as having their relatively harmonious human-environment relationships disrupted by various forces. While such disruptions lead to land degradation, official development institutions via research into alternatives to such agriculture offer redemption, or the return to relative ecological harmony. This Edenic narrative vehicle allows shifting cultivators to be represented as primitives in need of modernization, yet it also more commonly allows a sympathetic representation as holders of valuable, albeit threatened, indigenous knowledge that can be applied to the development of solutions. However, embedded within both hostile and sympathetic accounts from both scientific and policy sources are cultural images that persist as a legacy of colonialist assumptions of social evolution and cultural hierarchy.     

Shape Similarity,Better than Semantic Membership,Accounts for the Structure of Visual Object Representations in a Population of Monkey Inferotemporal Neurons

The anterior inferotemporal cortex (IT) is the highest stage along the hierarchy of visual areas that, in primates, processes visual objects. Although several lines of evidence suggest that IT primarily represents visual shape information, some recent studies have argued that neuronal ensembles in IT code the semantic membership of visual objects (i.e., represent conceptual classes such as animate and inanimate objects). In this study, we investigated to what extent semantic, rather than purely visual information, is represented in IT by performing a multivariate analysis of IT responses to a set of visual objects. By relying on a variety of machine-learning approaches (including a cutting-edge clustering algorithm that has been recently developed in the domain of statistical physics), we found that, in most instances, IT representation of visual objects is accounted for by their similarity at the level of shape or, more surprisingly, low-level visual properties. Only in a few cases we observed IT representations of semantic classes that were not explainable by the visual similarity of their members. Overall, these findings reassert the primary function of IT as a conveyor of explicit visual shape information, and reveal that low-level visual properties are represented in IT to a greater extent than previously appreciated. In addition, our work demonstrates how combining a variety of state-of-the-art multivariate approaches, and carefully estimating the contribution of shape similarity to the representation of object categories, can substantially advance our understanding of neuronal coding of visual objects in cortex.     

The Politics Of Resemblance: Ethnicity, Trademarks, Head-Hunting

This article questions the assumption that shared culture, or affiliation to shared cultural symbols, is necessarily a source of social cohesion, and that ethnic divisions are associated specifically with perceptions or attributions of difference. I argue that shared cultural symbolism can give rise to competition over its ownership or use, and that this competition can play an important role in defining ethnic boundaries, by creating what might be called relationships of conflictual resemblance between the two sides. Such conflicts are analogous in a number of respects to disputes over the ownership and use of commercial trademarks, and reveal the same underlying conceptions of 'proprietary' identity.     

Bao-yu: A Mental Disorder or a Cultural Icon?

The embodied human subject is dynamically connected to his or her historico-sociocultural context, the soil from which a person’s psyche is nourished as multiplex meanings are absorbed and enable personal development. In each culture certain towering artistic works embody this perspective. The Dream of the Red Chamber introduces Jia Bao-yu—a scion of the prestigious Jia family—and his relationships with a large cast of characters. Bao-yu is controversial but, at the time of the family’s tragic collapse, he can be seen as embodying a spiritual struggle in which his instinct, nature, sensitivity, and creativity are grounded in his transcendent relationship with a fragment of the world stone, an eternal source of energy and creativity. We are invited to draw on a metaphysical level of thought to consider his struggles with man-made hierarchies and a situated historico-sociocultural order in such a way as to live out his spiritual being. As such, the novel is closely relevant to questions of spirituality in bioethics. Through personal experiences, passions, creativity, and relationships with others, the body is inscribed, forming the soul, which may be misconstrued (for instance, through a medical or Cartesian reformulation of events) but which can be seen as the site of ethical and spiritual thought.     

Discrimination ability of prediction models for ordinal outcomes: Relationships between existing measures and a new measure

In this paper, we focus on measures to evaluate discrimination of prediction models for ordinal outcomes. We review existing extensions of the dichotomous c‐index—which is equivalent to the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve—suggest a new measure, and study their relationships. The volume under the ROC surface (VUS) scores sets of cases including one case from each outcome category. VUS considers sets as either correctly or incorrectly ordered by the model. All other existing measures assess pairs of cases. We propose an ordinal c‐index (ORC) that is set‐based but, contrary to VUS, scores sets more gradually by indicating the closeness of the model‐based ordering to the perfect ordering. As a result, the ORC does not decrease rapidly as the number of outcome categories increases. It turns out that the ORC can be rewritten as the average of pairwise c‐indexes. Hence, the ORC has both a set‐ and pair‐based interpretation. There are several relationships between the existing measures, leading to only two types of existing measures: a prevalence‐weighted average of pairwise c‐indexes and the VUS. Our suggested measure ORC positions itself in between as it is set‐based but turns out to equal an unweighted average of pairwise c‐indexes. The measures are demonstrated through a case study on the prediction of six‐month outcome after traumatic brain injury. In conclusion, the set‐based nature and graded scoring system make the ORC an attractive measure with a simple interpretation, together with its prevalence‐independence that is a natural property of a discrimination measure.     

Waitangi Day,Okains Bay: Contest,Co-operation and the Construction of Place in a Local Commemoration of Nation in New Zealand

Local commemorations of nation, while indexing and taking place within the framework of a national imaginary, need to be understood within their own contexts and sets of relationships as these operate in specific places. This paper examines one such case, that of an annual Waitangi Day event at Okains Bay, a small rural settlement in New Zealand's South Island. Here, although the annual public ritual to mark Waitangi Day follows closely the model of the national commemoration at Waitangi itself, it has certain distinctive features and takes place within a context that gives it a specific meaning that is in some ways at odds with the meanings created at the national level. This has to do with the particular history of Okains and with the various relationships and interests associated with it, which the Waitangi Day event draws upon and enacts.     

A model of subjective report and objective discrimination as categorical decisions in a vast representational space

Subliminal perception studies have shown that one can objectively discriminate a stimulus without subjectively perceiving it. We show how a minimalist framework based on Signal Detection Theory and Bayesian inference can account for this dissociation, by describing subjective and objective tasks with similar decision-theoretic mechanisms. Each of these tasks relies on distinct response classes, and therefore distinct priors and decision boundaries. As a result, they may reach different conclusions. By formalizing, within the same framework, forced-choice discrimination responses, subjective visibility reports and confidence ratings, we show that this decision model suffices to account for several classical characteristics of conscious and unconscious perception. Furthermore, the model provides a set of original predictions on the nonlinear profiles of discrimination performance obtained at various levels of visibility. We successfully test one such prediction in a novel experiment: when varying continuously the degree of perceptual ambiguity between two visual symbols presented at perceptual threshold, identification performance varies quasi-linearly when the stimulus is unseen and in an ‘all-or-none’ manner when it is seen. The present model highlights how conscious and non-conscious decisions may correspond to distinct categorizations of the same stimulus encoded by a high-dimensional neuronal population vector.     

Rituals of Gender: A Study of Etiquette, Public Symbols, and Cognition

The purposes of this article are embodied in three questions central to the development of symbolic anthropology. How does one identify the alleged symbolic message in public rituals, and does this meaning have some sort of empirically demonstrable analogue in the minds of the actors, or consequences for their behavior? Second, can these questions be answered by a method of interpreting symbols that is empirical and that utilizes clearly specified and replicable procedures? Finally, is it legitimate to attribute symbolic meanings to behavior if the participants themselves are not aware of such meanings? If nonconscious meaning exists, does it have any effect on attitudes and motivation for behavior? Analysis of data, derived from responses to Osgood's Semantic Differential relating to concepts of gender and manners between the sexes, provides affirmative answers to the questions raised above.     

The evolution of theory of mind on welfare tradeoff ratios

People seem to attribute beliefs and desires to another person when interacting with them. Such a “theory of mind” capacity is essential for complex and uniquely human behavior such as language, but its evolutionary origin remains elusive. Using the formal tools of evolutionary game theory, we asked what environmental properties are necessary to select for a basic form of theory of mind—the ability to infer the prosociality, quantified by the welfare tradeoff ratio, of another person toward oneself. We found that none of the environments studied in classical or evolutionary game theory give an advantage to this form of theory of mind capacities; theory of mind is advantageous only in a new class of environments with stable opponents and variable payoff structures. In two behavioral experiments (n = 91) we verified that people can, and do use theory of mind in such an environment. These results suggest that some features of early humans’ social environment that were previously neglected in evolutionary game theory may be responsible for the evolution of people’s complex social capacities.     

Governing anticipatory technology practices. Forensic DNA phenotyping and the forensic genetics community in Europe

Forensic geneticists have attempted to make the case for continued investment in forensic genetics research, despite its seemingly consolidated evidentiary role in criminal justice, by shifting the focus to technologies that can provide intelligence. Forensic DNA phenotyping (FDP) is one such emerging set of techniques, promising to infer external appearance and ancestry of an unknown person. On this example, I consider the repertoire of anticipatory practices deployed by scientists, expanding the concept to not only focus on promissory but also include epistemic and operational aspects of anticipatory work in science. I explore these practices further as part of anticipatory self-governance efforts, attending to the European forensic genetics community and its construction of FDP as a reliable and legitimate technology field for use in delivering public goods around security and justice. In this context, I consider three types of ordering devices that translate anticipatory practices into anticipatory self-governance.     

Line-of-descent and genealogical processes,and their applications in population genetics models

A variety of results for genealogical and line-of-descent processes that arise in connection with the theory of some classical selectively neutral population genetics models are reviewed. While some new results and derivations are included, the principle aim is to demonstrate the central importance and simplicity of genealogical Markov chains in this theory. Considerable attention is given to “diffusion time scale” approximations of such genealogical processes. A wide variety of results pertinent to (diffusion approximations of) the classical multiallele single-locus Wright-Fisher model and its relatives are simplified and unified by this approach. Other examples where such genealogical processes play an explicit role, such as the infinite sites and infinite alleles models, are discussed.     

Reordering hierarchical tree based on bilateral symmetric distance

Background

In microarray data analysis, hierarchical clustering (HC) is often used to group samples or genes according to their gene expression profiles to study their associations. In a typical HC, nested clustering structures can be quickly identified in a tree. The relationship between objects is lost, however, because clusters rather than individual objects are compared. This results in a tree that is hard to interpret.

Methodology/Principal Findings

This study proposes an ordering method, HC-SYM, which minimizes bilateral symmetric distance of two adjacent clusters in a tree so that similar objects in the clusters are located in the cluster boundaries. The performance of HC-SYM was evaluated by both supervised and unsupervised approaches and compared favourably with other ordering methods.

Conclusions/Significance

The intuitive relationship between objects and flexibility of the HC-SYM method can be very helpful in the exploratory analysis of not only microarray data but also similar high-dimensional data.