Why People Don't Die 'Naturally' any More: Changing Relations Between 'The Individual' and 'The State' in Post-Socialist Bulgaria

This article explores the theme of death as a means of illuminating the changing relationship between 'the individual' and 'the state' in the context of post-socialist Bulgaria. Previous research carried out on rituals and socialist society indicates a close connection between state ideology and the socially constructed 'natural' order – an order partly reproduced through engagement in state-sponsored life-cycle rituals, such as funerals. By focusing on the way in which funerals are presently carried out, and more specifically on the way in which villagers talk about death, I suggest that new discourse reveals important changes: a reordering of the relationship between 'the individual' and the socially constructed 'natural' order. The state is no longer such a strong mediating force in this relationship. Post-socialist reform, therefore, involves more than 'just' political and economic change; it represents a more general breakdown in the total set of relations that constituted the socialist world.     

Classic Maya Bloodletting and the Cultural Evolution of Religious Rituals: Quantifying Patterns of Variation in Hieroglyphic Texts

Religious rituals that are painful or highly stressful are hypothesized to be costly signs of commitment essential for the evolution of complex society. Yet few studies have investigated how such extreme ritual practices were culturally transmitted in past societies. Here, we report the first study to analyze temporal and spatial variation in bloodletting rituals recorded in Classic Maya (ca. 250–900 CE) hieroglyphic texts. We also identify the sociopolitical contexts most closely associated with these ancient recorded rituals. Sampling an extensive record of 2,480 hieroglyphic texts, this study identifies every recorded instance of the logographic sign for the word ch’ahb’ that is associated with ritual bloodletting. We show that documented rituals exhibit low frequency whose occurrence cannot be predicted by spatial location. Conversely, network ties better capture the distribution of bloodletting rituals across the southern Maya region. Our results indicate that bloodletting rituals by Maya nobles were not uniformly recorded, but were typically documented in association with antagonistic statements and may have signaled royal commitments among connected polities.

No longer can evolutionists dismiss such works [of ritual sacrifice] as scholarly, but irrelevant, esoterica–explorations of the bizarre but insignificant elements of Precolumbian culture…we must address this ideological data base with the same interest that we would give to studies of settlement patterns, subsistence systems, or political institutions [1].

     

The consumption of ritual and the changing values of filial piety in ancestor worship

Ancestor worship is regarded as the key element of the Han people's belief system across most of China. However, the rituals pertaining to death, such as in funerals and annual ancestor worship, vary from place to place. For decades, the state has made tremendous efforts to reform and standardise funerals consistent with its path to modernization by insisting on more socialist practices rather than those that are perceived as ‘superstitious’ and ‘irrational’, such as burning paper and incense or performing rituals. I argue that despite regulating the use of funeral materials or memorial types, the state has failed to reform the essence of death rituals, that is, the duty of filial piety and people's conception of the afterlife. In addition, funerals and other rituals related to death contribute to individual's social reputation.     

Clearcutting Maine: Implications for the Theory of Common Property Resources

One of the basic tenets of the theory of common property resources is that private property rights work to conserve natural resources. There is growing evidence, however, that some large forest owners in Maine are cutting their forests heavily, using poor-quality silviculture techniques. This overexploitation is being done by paper companies, forest contractors, and some private land owners, who are being motivated by very different sets of factors. This article explores the reasons that private owners of forest resources are overexploiting their own lands and the implications of this for the theory of common property resources. Secure private property rights alone will not be enough to conserve resources and do away with externalities when the owners are operating in a system demanding constant short-term profits, where they are producing undifferentiated commodities in a highly competitive market, where the future value of slow-growing resources is very low, and where harvesting has so many ramifying biological and social effects.     

Mustering Fortune: Attraction and Multiplication in the Echoes of the Boom

Since the end of the socialist period, Mongolia has experienced economic instabilities, growing inequalities, and increasing urbanisation. Prosperity (dallaga) rituals, once predominantly carried out by nomadic herders at specific times of the year, are now also held regularly within Ulaanbaatar’s Buddhist temples. In these ceremonies, Buddhist lamas and lay participants attempt to ‘call’ or ‘pull’ wealth to the household. In this urban context, prosperity rituals are overtly about money, combining nomadic notions of wealth, sedentary ideas of growth and multiplication, and contemporary anxieties regarding growing corruption and inequality. Following from nomadic ideas that link prosperity with movement, dallaga rituals attempt to influence the ways that money travels around the economy. As money has seed like qualities, one must be careful to ensure that the right kind of money is attracted to the household so that it does not multiply the misfortunes that are thought to characterise money made through ill-gotten means.     

Communication and Displays of Snakes

With limitations imposed by the lack of appendages and elongatemorphology, snakes exhibit a variety of unique ritualistic behaviorsin the contexts of agonistic encounters and courtship and mating.During male combat rituals, actions involve high vertical displaystances (crotaline) to horizontal stances (colubrid) with eithermale attempting to force the other's head down. Superior positionappears to be important during these encounters. Dominant andsubordinate actions and postures are recognized. Courting snakesexhibit a variety of positions and movements, performed primarilyby the male, which appear to passify the female and induce herreceptivity. Actions involved may be chin rubbing, body jerksor caudocephalic waves, cephalocaudal waves, tail searching,pushing, nudging, biting, and tail raising. Sequences and phasesof the actions used vary with the species. Significant featuresof these behaviors are the different actions taking place separatelyor simultaneously along the elongate cylindrical snake. Visual,tactile, and olfactory communication each play a role.     

An integrated model of real estate market responses to coastal flooding

Understanding and improving how humans adapt to climate change are priorities in our research community, and coastal settlements are good places to study adaptation. Severe storm events and sea‐level rise are threatening coastal communities with increasing levels of flood damage. Because ownership of coastal assets is distributed among many private and public actors, both individual property owners and public officials must take adaptive actions. This paper introduces an integrated agent‐based and hedonic pricing modeling system to simulate coastal real estate market performance under non‐equilibrium conditions that reflect the effects of storm events. The modeling system, which is used for policy analysis, is calibrated to conditions in two towns in Monmouth County, New Jersey, USA, which were badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The key findings are that (a) coastal real estate markets capitalize flood risk into property values but this discount diminishes rapidly as time passes between storm events, and (b) there is a distinct equity versus efficiency tradeoff in designing public policies to reduce the cost to society of coastal flooding. Stringent regulation of building practices reduces flood damage but drives away poorer home buyers and owners, whereas informational and incentive‐based policies are fairer but less effective. Hands‐off, market‐based retreat from risky areas is socially costly but allows less wealthy people to remain at the shore, albeit in vulnerable situations. Managed retreat should emphasize improved recreational access to coastal amenities while discouraging people from living there.     

Reconsidering the Role of Absentee Herd Owners: A View from Mongolia

Since the privatization of livestock in 1992, rates of absentee ownership of livestock have increased sharply in Mongolia. Unlike other documented instances of absentee herding in pastoral societies, absentee herd ownership has few detrimental ecological or social impacts in Mongolia. Rather, the relationship between absentee herd owners and herders may be viewed as a revitalized institution, with links to customary patterns of urban-rural exchange, emerging to meet the needs of both herders and town-dwellers during the transition from a socialist planned economy to a free market economy. Absentee herding in Mongolia differs from absentee and contract herding accounts from Africa and the Middle East in its continuing emphasis on subsistence rather than speculative investment and accumulation. Other important distinctions include: (1) absentee owners and herders are usually kin or friends; (2) herders tend their own private herds in addition to absenteeowned animals;(3)few ethnic, caste, or class differences existbetween herders and absentee herd owners; and (4) herders from all wealth strata tend absentee-owned animals. Policies to restrict or regulate absentee livestock ownership must be carefully considered in the Mongolian context, making clear distinctions between informal, mutually beneficial subsistence-driven arrangements among kin and friends, and more formal investment-driven contracts between businesses or investors and herders.     

Interstitial but Resilient: Nomadic Shepherds in Piedmont (Northwest Italy) Amidst Spatial and Social Marginalization

Mobility, nomadic pastoralists’ main adaptive strategy, has been compromised by agricultural expansion and rangeland fragmentation, among other factors, in many pastoral contexts. Among nomads’ coping strategies, is re-shaping mobility in shrinking grazing grounds. Through semi-structured interviews, we examine adaptation and resilience to the effects of increasingly intensive land use and marginalization focusing on Alpine nomadic pastoralists in Piedmont, Northwest Italy. Our results show that Alpine nomads access a wide variety of grazing grounds through a web of social relations with multiple stakeholders, acting in the interstices of mainstream society and navigating marginal contexts: geographically, they use fallow, abandoned, and post-harvest plots; economically and socially, they interact with other marginal groups (e.g., migrants) and are stigmatized by diverse sectors of society. This use of interstitial spaces is in itself a form of adaptation that is taking place in diverse geographical contexts as nomads reconfigure their mobility and social relations to access the scattered pieces of land left unused by industrial, agricultural, and conservation land uses.     

Ritual responses to drought: An examination of ritual expressions in Classic Maya written sources

Planting and rain-beckoning rituals are an extremely common way in which past and present human communities have confronted the risk of drought across a range of environments worldwide. In tropical environments, such ceremonies are particularly salient despite widespread assumptions that water supplies are unproblematic in such regions. We demonstrate for the first time that two common but previously under-appreciated Maya rituals are likely planting and rain-beckoning rituals preferentially performed at certain times of the year in close step with the rainy season and the Maya agricultural cycle. We also argue for considerable historical continuity between these Classic Maya ceremonies and later Maya community rituals still performed in times of uncertain weather conditions up to the present day across Guatemala, Belize, and eastern Mexico. During the Terminal Classic period (AD 800-900), the changing role played by ancient Maya drought-related rituals fits into a wider rhetorical shift observed in Maya texts away from the more characteristic focus on royal births, enthronements, marriages, and wars towards greater emphasis on the correct perpetuation of key ceremonies, and we argue that such changes are consistent with palaeoclimatic evidence for a period of diminished precipitation and recurrent drought.     

Pan thanatology

Chimpanzees' immediate responses to the death of a group-member have rarely been described. Exceptions include maternal care towards dead infants, and frenzied excitement and alarm following the sudden, traumatic deaths of older individuals [1-5]. Some wild chimpanzees die in their night nest [6], but the immediate effect this has on others is totally unknown. Here, with supporting video material, we describe the peaceful demise of an elderly female in the midst of her group. Group responses include pre-death care of the female, close inspection and testing for signs of life at the moment of death, male aggression towards the corpse, all-night attendance by the deceased's adult daughter, cleaning the corpse, and later avoidance of the place where death occurred. Without death-related symbols or rituals, chimpanzees show several behaviours that recall human responses to the death of a close relative.     

Documenting discontent: Struggles for recognition in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea

Within the context of the Purari Delta’s transforming materialities of resource extraction, and the legacy of the Tom Kabu iconoclastic modernist movement (1946–69), I examine the processes of materialisation bound up with two related but different things: heirlooms (eve uku) and documents (Incorporated Land Group (ILG) forms). Eve uku (‘hand head’) lie within a continuum of things (names, relations, totemic ancestral spirit‐beings and sites in the environment) through which ancestral actions are shown to have happened, and descent groups’ identities manifest. However, given the ambiguous status of the traditional past among the I’ai, the power of these forms is circumscribed to the village thus making them ineffectual tokens in the bid to secure royalties from resource extraction. Instead, highly coveted documents known as ILG certificates have emerged as efficacious things by which royalties can be secured. Examining these certificates as objects, I investigate how these documents help materialise anew descent groups, communities’ relations to their environment and thus their aspirations for development with its attending materialities. The problem for the I’ai, however, remains how to obtain these documents and, as with eve uku, how to control them.     

Book Reviews

Abstract

A study of the attitudes and actions of 281 dog owners towards neutering their animals is reported from New Providence, The Bahamas. Owner attitudes towards neutering are associated with different sterilization rates of dogs. While owners' gender is associated with differences in attitudes, these differences are not necessarily associated with owner behavior with respect to neutering their animals. Men, more than women, want to have animals for long-term breeding. No evidence is found to support the belief that men are less likely to neuter their dogs than women, but younger owners are less likely than older owners to neuter their dogs. A comparison with a study from Australia suggests that Bahamians are more likely to project human traits on to their animals and so appear more reluctant to have their dogs neutered.     

Name Rituals And Acts Of Feeling Among The KayapÓ (Mebengokre)

This article analyses great name rituals among the Gê-speaking Kayapó (Mebengokre) of central Brazil. Ritual organization compels a temporal and spatial co-ordination of exchanges between diverse categories of relations so that nuclear family ties are differentiated. As the fundamental site of this process of differentiation, the House undergoes various transformations in its organization during the ceremonial period and its centrality in Kayapó social thought derives from this, rather than from the attribution of an enduring corporate identity. Analysis of Kayapó ritual allows us to extend Rappaport's ideas about the relation between the invariant and variant messages in ritual, since the production of sentiment is a central task of ritual activity and such sentiments are necessary for the reproduction of formal order in ritual.     

Burials and Belonging in Nigeria: Rural–Urban Relations and Social Inequality in a Contemporary African Ritual

In sub-Saharan Africa, rural–urban relationships are primary arenas in which social change is shaped, expressed, and contested. Like people in many contemporary African societies, rural–urban migrants of the Igbo ethnic group in Nigeria face powerful expectations to be buried "at home" in their ancestral villages and to perform elaborate and expensive funeral ceremonies for their dead relatives. This article argues that Igbo funerals crystallize many of the structural paradoxes associated with inequality in Nigerian society, particularly as they are manifest in kin-based patron–client relations between rural communities and their migrant kin. The tensions that coalesce around burials illustrate how rituals are not only socially integrative but also can reflect, reveal, and contribute to discontents regarding transformations in the organization and extent of social inequality.     

Recognising and Translating Knowledge: Navigating the Political,Epistemological, Legal and Ontological

What does it mean to call something ‘knowledge’ today? What does this recognition or translation require? And what does it entrain? This introduction makes a novel synthesis of contributions to the Special Issue and advances observations regarding the ‘mythic’ qualities of intellectual property law, the precipitation of ‘nature’, and the importance of attending to what is lost when things and practices are also called ‘knowledge’. The papers cohere around a timely set of observations and critiques: critiques of the way the knowledge economy makes demands and defines expectations about value; of how intellectual property law lies behind and shapes exclusions, inclusions, and inequalities; of the ‘mythic’ status of assumptions informing laws about ownership; and the implicit hierarchy contained within types of knowledge as understood through the categories of western epistemology. By taking up effect rather than veracity and certainty, contributors leave the definition of knowledge to ethnographic subjects. That is, they attend to where and how things come to be called knowledge, and for what reasons, noticing how equivalences across practices, made for the purpose of creating the possibility of exchange value (and thus of encouraging circulation) does its work at the expense of multiple aspects, values, and relations that are also discernable in social processes that produce ‘knowledge’.     

Policy measures to address bird interactions with power lines – a comparative case study of four countries

Bird mortality caused by electric power lines has been an issue in several countries for more than three decades now. Despite serious efforts by conservationists, government agencies and utility companies assisted by increasing biological and technological knowledge, only a minority of countries has made significant progress in mitigation. In the present article I argue that the policy aspects, which have not been so widely researched so far, have considerable effects on the efficiency of mitigation measures. The problem management methods of four countries—Hungary, Slovakia, South Africa and the USA—are discussed in detail to reveal success criteria. The role of contextual factors, stances and relations of different actors, plus actions and tools applied in the solution process, are demonstrated together with the resulting outcomes. To help strategic planning, I review favourable solution methods (volunteer agreements, legislative steps, mixed solutions, etc.) used in different country-specific contexts, and point out probable consequences of the strategy chosen.     

On The Theory of Soviet Group Therapy

Under the conditions provided by the socialist system, the influence of the group upon the personality is manifested to a maximum degree. The principle of collectivism corresponds to the consciousness of Soviet people, which has developed on the basis of socialist relations and comradely collaboration. At the same time, under the conditions of our society the role of the personality is especially great, and it is no accident that it is particularly in Soviet medicine that the individualized approach to the patient is realized to the greatest degree.     

In search of ritual: tradition, outer world and bad manners in the Amazon

Ritual is currently a central issue in Indian politics in the Amazon. Ritual implies tradition, and thus ethnic legitimacy. But to some groups, such as the Panoan-speaking Yaminawa, political and social looseness are handicaps to the invention of shared performances that are recognizable as rituals. Leadership is based both on an outward policy and an inward search for patterned, collective actions that can designate a gathering of kin and followers as an indigenous community. This article focuses on such ritual-making efforts, describing two otherwise informal parties held on a Brazilian Yaminawa reservation where fieldwork was carried out in 1993.     

Comparative statics of games between relatives

According to Hamilton's theory of kin selection, species tend to evolve behavior such that each organism appears to be attempting to maximize its inclusive fitness. In particular, two neighbors are likely to help each other if the cost of doing so is less than the benefit multiplied by r, their coefficient of relatedness. Since the latter is less than unity, mutual altruism benefits both neighbors. However, is it theoretically possible that acting so as to maximize the inclusive, rather than personal, fitness may harm both parties. This may occur in strategic symmetric pairwise interactions (more specifically, nxn games), in which the outcome depends on both sides' actions. In this case, the equilibrium outcome may be less favorable to the interactants' personal fitness than if each of them acted so as to maximize the latter. This paper shows, however, that such negative effect of relatedness on fitness is incompatible with evolutionary stability. If the symmetric equilibrium strategies are evolutionarily stable, a higher coefficient of relatedness can only entail higher personal fitness for the two neighbors. This suggests that negative comparative statics as above are not likely to occur in nature.