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The Mbwaa story recounts the singular adventure of the Ngaa, “ancestors” of the Meru, who flee Mbwaa to escape the bullying of the Nguontuune. The story can be broken down into three episodes: the bullying, the escape across an expanse of water that parts, and the arrival in a new land. The story has been recorded since the beginning of the colonial conquest, generating interpretations quickly insofar as they were considered obvious. In the flight episode, the missionaries did not fail to rec...

A particularly difficult element of Tigania-Igembe society to reconstruct involves the organization of women’s sets and powers. Far from being a secondary, or peripheral, issue, the positions occupied by women according to age grade led to a crisis in the 1930s and 40s, when the colonial powers clashed, and surprisingly in some instances colluded, with various customary and neo-traditional indigenous authorities whose roles had increased after the conquest. The female circumcision controversy...

The biological and social process that shapes an individual from birth to the last days of life is universally recognized, and every society on earth distinguishes between childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age. At first glance, this common measure of mankind appears too banal to deserve much attention, but it actually conceals a wide diversity of arrangements. The many transformations of the human body over its lifetime, combined with other ways of appraising the passage of time, provide s...

“How do the whites people manage to have so many children?— ... But they don’t have many children!— Yes, they do—and without many wives.”Old man from the Ithalie set. Neither contemporary demographic growth in Africa nor the models built to account for it give any real indication of the complex history of the people of these regions. As my research into the generation sets progressed, the informants—women and men alike, of their own full accord and in their own manner—described practices of l...

Before their radical transformation during the colonial period, the age-sets of the Tigania-Igembe were clearly evident to observers. All the travelers to the area remarked, when they did not suffer the misfortune of experiencing it directly, the difference between the warriors, who often displayed a threatening attitude, and the elders, more inclined to conciliation, with whom “blood brotherhood” relationships were forged. The first colonial administrators drew the same conclusions and made ...

In a social organization with collective rule that involves not just a handful of individuals but the entire population of the Nyambene Hills, understanding their modes of coordination is essential, as no territorial section or individual has particular dominion over the others. Another way to approach the matter is to study the principles and workings of sovereignty. For want of a history (forever lost) of the origin of institutions, one could assume, parallel to the hypothesis of an intrins...

1. The vocabulary of kinship: terms and attitudes Some remarkable features can be observed in the vocabulary of kinship, not least of which its heterogeneous appearance. The generations marked by an identical logic to that of the set system are combined, at the level of Ego and adjacent generations, with designations that differentiate between blood relations. A distinction made between maternal and paternal relatives, on the one hand, and between parallel and cross cousins on the other, resu...

Throughout his study on the family and social organization of the peoples of the Central Province, the administrator H.E. Lambert (1945, tapus.) relates episodes of a story about the first events of life in society that he entitled The Meru Myth. Although this myth was adversely affected by the reputation acquired by the Mbwaa story (see Ch. 9), the author, referring to the 1930s, claims it was still being widely told throughout the Meru group and, in a form more or less complete, was known b...

A traveler still under the influence of the geographical codes of his/her homeland is constantly disorientated, in the Nyambene Hills, by the fact that although the region is densely occupied, it is difficult to understand where people actually live. When climbing towards the high hills, the vistas obtained at turns in the roads provide glimpses of numerous large, thatched huts from which the smoke of home-fires rises early in the morning, scattered over hillsides where the scars of erosion b...

Born of the encounter of Europeans with worlds they never knew existed, ethnology and anthropology seek to reconstruct and arrange the variety of responses contributed by humans to the common questions they ask themselves. One of the most important of these questions concerns the way societies are formed and come apart, and how their powers are organized. The range of modes of sociation observed by ethnologists and sociologists or reconstituted by historians is impressive; such is the multipl...

We have examined the gaaru cycle and the recruitment of warriors, the transmission of the kaaria and the organizing structures for women. There remains a final component of the generational polity, as system of power and authority, to be considered. The Fathers of the country constitute a set of rulers in charge of public affairs and act primarily at the territorial-section level; in all matters the section remains the main point of reference, but at the level of the Fathers of the country mo...

Itagunmodi is very small: 0.7 kilometers long and 0.5 kilometers wide (figure 2). There are four main quarters/wards: Isogan, Ijoka, Oke Ode and Odo Ode. The whole area of the town is completely built-up, and the survey revealed the following figures for the number of houses in the wards: Isogan 210 Ijoka 170 Oke Ode 110 Odo Ode 95 Total 585 Most of the 585 buildings are single storey. The wards, in cardinal order, are – Isogan in the east, Ijoka in the west, Oke Ode in the north and Odo Ode...

This book gives an account of an archaeological investigation that took place between 1991 and 1992 at Itagunmodi, Osun State. The site came to light during a cultural resource survey of Ijesaland carried out between August and September 1991, sponsored by the Ijesa Cultural Foundation (Agbaje-Williams and Ogundiran 1992). Itagunmodi, apart from being famous for its gold deposits, was also revealed, during this investigation, to be an ancient settlement. Evidence of this was found in differen...

Itagunmodi is an important rural town in Atakunmosa Local Government Area of Ijesaland, about seven kilometers south of the Ife-Ilesa-Akure road (figure 1). The town lies in the gold belt of Ijesaland. This area is yet to be exploited commercially – at present only illegal miners exploit the alluvial deposits. If regulated, licensed mining operations had been established, Itagunmodi could have been the ‘Johannesburg’ of Nigeria. Itagunmodi falls directly within the rain forest belt of southwe...

Pottery amounted to 90 per cent of the cultural remains, most of which came from spit level 1 (table 2). Table 1 shows the condition of the sherds, 48.95 per cent being decorated and 40.59 per cent undecorated. The same table also shows that 89.54 per cent are bodysherds while 10.28 per cent are rimsherds. This is quite understandable as it appears that bodysherds are easier to use for pavements than rimsherds. No whole vessel was recovered in the course of the excavation. It is obvious that ...

A total of 3906 cultural remains were recovered from the excavation at Itagunmodi. Figure 9 summarizes table 1, showing the relative distribution of the major cultural remains. Pot sherds made up the overwhelming majority, with 97.9 per cent; other artefacts were not found in any significant quantity. Figure 9. Summary of cultural remains The issues addressed here include an assessment of the success and importance of the Itagunmodi excavation and the follow-up action needed. It is our inten...

This monograph looks at the evolution of potsherd pavements in southwestern Nigeria. Previous work on this subject has been largely descriptive and confined to pavements in Ile-Ife (Willett 1967), covering an area of about 12 square kilometers, which have been dated to the 14th century A. D. (Garlake 1974, 1977; and Agbaje-Williams 1991). It was thought that these pavements were unique to Ife, like the bronzes and the terracottas, until other sites with the same features were discovered in ce...

Ritualized behavior, intuitively recognizable by its stereotypy, rigidity, repetition, and apparent lack of rational motivation, is found in a variety of life conditions, customs, and everyday practices: in cultural rituals, whether religious or non-religious; in many children’s complicated routines; in the pathology of obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD); in normal adults around certain stages of the life-cycle, birthing in particular. Combining evidence from evolutionary anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroimaging, we propose an explanation of ritualized behavior in terms of an evolved Precaution System geared to the detection of and reaction to inferred threats to fitness. This system, distinct from fear-systems geared to respond to manifest danger, includes a repertoire of clues for potential danger as well as a repertoire of species-typical precautions. In OCD pathology, this system does not supply a negative feedback to the appraisal of potential threats, resulting in doubts about the proper performance of precautions, and repetition of action. Also, anxiety levels focus the attention on low-level gestural units of behavior rather than on the goal-related higher-level units normally used in parsing the action-flow. Normally automatized actions are submitted to cognitive control. This ‘swamps’ working memory, an effect of which is a temporary relief from intrusions but also their long-term strengthening. Normal activation of this Precaution System explains intrusions and ritual behaviors in normal adults. Gradual calibration of the system occurs through childhood rituals. Cultural mimicry of this system’s normal input makes cultural rituals attention-grabbing and compelling. A number of empirical predictions follow from this synthetic model.

This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present questions in anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a deliberately eclectic manner, combining results and models from evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, economics, anthropology and history. It thus constitutes a welcome contribution to a gradually emerging approach to social science based on E. O. Wilson’s concept of ‘consilience’ . Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens spans a wide range of topics, from an examination of ritual behaviour, integrating neuro-science, ethology and anthropology to explain why humans engage in ritual actions (both cultural and individual), to the motivation of conflicts between groups. As such, the collection gives readers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the applications of an evolutionary paradigm in the social sciences. This volume will be a useful resource for scholars and students in the social sciences (particularly psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology and the political sciences), as well as a general readership interested in the social sciences.

Introductory Note Relations between different ethnicities are often fraught with conflict, from mild suspicion to avoidance, discrimination or violent inter-group conflict. In many places, inter-group conflict has consequences for people’s well-being, including their health. But why is that the case? In this article, Rengin Firat, Florian van Leeuwen and I tried to propose a general model of inter-group conflict that would explain these well-documented and sometimes paradoxical public health ...

Introductory Note Why do people perform rituals? Over the world and however far we can go in the past, human groups seem to engage in what we would recognize as, well, ‘rituals’ of some kind or other, even though we may be very unclear about what that term is supposed to convey. Pierre Liénard nudged me to join forces and re-open that question, which used to be central in classical anthropology, together with the additional query, what is the connection (if any) between the collective ceremon...

The domain of ‘folk-economics’ consists in explicit beliefs about the economy held by laypeople, untrained in economics, about such topics as, for example, the causes of the wealth of nations, the benefits or drawbacks of markets and international trade, the effects of regulation, the origins of inequality, the connection between work and wages, the economic consequences of immigration, or the possible causes of unemployment. These beliefs are crucial in forming people’s political beliefs and in shaping their reception of different policies. Yet, they often conflict with elementary principles of economic theory and are often described as the consequences of ignorance, irrationality, or specific biases. As we will argue, these past perspectives fail to predict the particular contents of popular folk-economic beliefs and, as a result, there is no systematic study of the cognitive factors involved in their emergence and cultural success. Here we propose that the cultural success of particular beliefs about the economy is predictable if we consider the influence of specialized, largely automatic inference systems that evolved as adaptations to ancestral human small-scale sociality. These systems, for which there is independent evidence, include free-rider detection, fairness-based partner choice, ownership intuitions, coalitional psychology, and more. Information about modern mass-market conditions activates these specific inference systems, resulting in particular intuitions, for example, that impersonal transactions are dangerous or that international trade is a zero-sum game. These intuitions in turn make specific policy proposals more likely than others to become intuitively compelling, and, as a consequence, exert a crucial influence on political choices.

Why is it that the majority of cultural anthropology is no longer relevant? The debates within this specific field are generally absent from wider academic conversations, its scholars no longer rank amongst the most renowned and significant intellectuals of their day, and its contribution to non-academic discourse is basically nonexistent. This third aspect is even more alarming, given that the actual subject matter of cultural anthropology situates it at the core of pressing social issues. A...

Introductory Note People have views about the economy, about such things as unemployment, trade, taxation, etc. Where do these opinions come from? Explaining that would certainly count as an example of ‘useful’ anthropology or political science, considering that most political programs are based on some particular vision of the way a modern economy works, and how it could be made better. Michael Petersen and I were interested in explaining how people acquire these representations of the econo...

Introductory Note One of the most enduring and most damaging assumptions in the social sciences is the belief that it makes sense to talk about nature and culture, or to part the ‘innate’ from the ‘acquired’ in describing human behavior. Almost as misguided is the recommendation that we should describe behavior as some combination or mixture of these elements—an insipid counsel for moderation that only results in a stubborn incuriosity about what is being ‘mixed’ and how (Pinker, 2002). Again...

Contacts between people from different groups engage a variety of human competencies and motivations, from high-level representations of social categories to visceral responses when confronted with strangers, from cognitive appraisal of conflict to a desire to exclude or even attack ‘others.’ There is a correspondingly diverse set of fields and subfields in psychology and the social sciences focusing on such specific topics as racial prejudice, ingroup bias, ethnic identity, xenophobia, and n...

Most standard social science accounts only offer limited explanations of institutional design, i.e., why institutions have common features observed in many different human groups. Here, we suggest that these features are best explained as the outcome of evolved human cognition, in such domains as mating, moral judgment and social exchange. As empirical illustrations, we show how this evolved psychology makes marriage systems, legal norms and commons management systems intuitively obvious and compelling, thereby ensuring their occurrence and cultural stability. We extend this to propose under what conditions institutions can become ‘natural’, compelling and legitimate, and outline probable paths for institutional change given human cognitive dispositions. Explaining institutions in terms of these exogenous factors also suggests that a general theory of institutions as such is neither necessary nor in fact possible. What are required are domain-specific accounts of institutional design in different domains of evolved cognition.

The essays gathered in this volume were all intended as contributions to what I would like to call a useful and scientific anthropology, two words that may seem a tad presumptuous and require an explanation. First, the useful part. The essays address specific questions such as the following: Why do some social institutions seem ‘natural’ to many people across different cultures? How do people form their views of the economy? Why do human beings engage in ritual behaviors, either pathological ...

Introductory Note This essay starts with the question of why the discipline of cultural anthropology is marginal in public debates, when it should and might be central. (I provide data that may seem dated, but the trends described here have if anything become stronger.) The diagnosis is that this is a self-inflicted wound—and perhaps more interestingly, I try to describe how some kinds of social science do contribute to public discourse. But this is not intended as a series of recommendations...

How is mental dysfunction detected? How do cultural models of mental disorder affect this process of detection? Attempts to answer these questions have not often been made in the research, as they fall between two domains: that of cross-cultural psychiatry (which looks at the dysfunction itself) and anthropological ethno-psychiatry (which looks at cultural models of sanity and insanity). In this paper, I set out a model to illustrate this ‘missing link’ between behavior and cultural models, founded on experiential evidence for intuitive psychology. Typical adult minds contain certain intuitive expectations about mental function and behavior, and these are used to perceive certain sorts of dysfunctional behavior. It appears that there is a ‘catalogue’ of potential behaviors that activate this intuition, and therefore the symptoms that are present in culturally specific folk-understandings of mental dysfunction are also restricted. It is also suggested that certain mental dysfunctions are ‘invisible’ to folk-understandings due to their lack of obvious breaches of principles of intuitive psychology. This standpoint helps us to comprehend the cultural stability and spread of certain views of mental disorder.

Introductory Note Who do we see as mad, and why? How do people decide that some person (possibly themselves) suffers from a mental disorder? History and anthropology tell us that in all human societies, people readily identify some forms of behavior as evidence for some dysfunction. In modern societies, we delegate final decisions about such matters to medical specialists. But that is of course a recent phenomenon (Porter, 2004). And, even in places with psychiatric experts, an individual mus...

The following chapter by Lai-Tze Fan is a critical and creative reflection that describes the research-creation project e-Waste Peep Show; or, on Seeing and not Wanting to be Seen (EWPS). Since research-creation as an academic practice challenges scholars to merge creative approaches in various disciplines and to apply theory to practice, it allows scholarship to address twenty-first-century issues in innovative ways. Constructed as an art installation, EWPS features original footage of an e-...

As our landscapes of digital stuff continue to expand and connect, it is imperative we devise a toolkit for thinking (and doing) that tends to the environmental pulses of our digital condition. It is time now, if it isn’t already too late, to enact a spongier digital-material form of knowledge-production, tailored to the concerns of our emerging Anthropocenic humanities, that absorbs the full force of our interconnections. A deliberate environmental intervention is not only an obvious respons...

Academics have probably been organizing conferences since at least the time of Plato. More recently, academics have brought some of their conferences online. However, the adoption of online conferences is limited. One might wonder if scholars prefer traditional conferences for their ability to provide goods that online conferences cannot. While this may be true, online conferences outshine traditional conferences in various ways, and at a significantly lower cost. By considering the costs and...

Big Tech supports social media, the stock market, insurance companies, scientific research, financial transactions, mass surveillance and monitoring, the ‘Internet of things’, ‘smart city’ sensors and grids, and mobile communications for Internet users writ large. By most industry accounts, data centres—and the cloud infrastructure that undergirds it—has become the most important sociotechnical system of our time, but also the least sustainable. Interestingly, one of the alternatives to these...

The following forum emerges from a panel called Art and/in the Anthropocene: A Debate on Sustainability and Ecology that was co-organized by Natalie Loveless and Jessie Beier for the Kule Institute for Advanced Study’s Around the World econference in May of 2018. The conference panel invited discussion by six artist-scholars in addition to the organizers—Karin Bolender, Christa Donner, Mia Feuer, Leanne Olson, Scott Smallwood and Andrew Yang. Together they discussed two pre-circulated questio...

Science, humanities and design might seem like unrelated fields. Yet, information designers, who unpack complex data involving real-world issues, can benefit from the ability to synthesize these seemingly disparate practices. To learn more integrated, humanistic approaches to data visualization, we might look to a time when science and the arts were less divided. The following chapter focuses on poet-scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Romantic-era polymath. Goethe called his scientific...

Various meanings of sustainability emerged at specific historical times shaped by different prevailing energy systems. Even though sustainability in the Anthropocene always included views that saw nature as resource and hence linked sustainable practices to profit-making (yield), there are qualitative differences in the very meaning of sustainability and the ways it related to eighteenth-century forestry practices, nineteenth- and twentieth-century conservation efforts and twentieth-century e...

The following chapter by Kristine Kowalchuk argues the need for humanities scholars to recognize the ecological crisis as a cultural issue arising from modernity’s story of human separation from, and superiority over, nature. The author urges humanities scholars to help lead the way in telling a different story, to enable genuine positive change and healing. As Kowalchuk shows, this story is not a new story, but rather an ancient one, of right relationship between humans and nature, and it ha...

The following chapter discusses how teaching design through the process of systems thinking, as derived from the disciplines of both ecology and biology, is the best path forward to prevent the worst-case scenarios of climate change. Systems thinking is a process that can help designers to uncover the root cause of a problem and how it connects to the larger picture: people, profit and planet (and everything in between). The conditions of the Anthropocene mean that designers must be able to i...

The year 2020 started with a massive bushfire crisis in south eastern Australia, resulting in disruption to many communities, the loss of lives and businesses, an estimated loss of a billion animals and the dirtiest air on the planet in the cities of Sydney, Newcastle and Canberra. With record-high temperatures and a punishing drought lasting several years, the Australian bush was primed to explode into flames. With lightning strikes in national parks, the spontaneous eruptions of bushfire sp...

Educational institutions play an instrumental role in social and political change, and are responsible for the environmental and social ethics of their institutional practices. The essays in this volume critically examine scholarly research practices in the age of the Anthropocene, and ask what accountability educators and researchers have in ‘righting’ their relationship to the environment. The volume further calls attention to the geographical, financial, legal and political barriers that might limit scholarly dialogue by excluding researchers from participating in traditional modes of scholarly conversation. As such, Right Research is a bold invitation to the academic community to rigorous self-reflection on what their research looks like, how it is conducted, and how it might be developed so as to increase accessibility and sustainability, and decrease carbon footprint. The volume follows a three-part structure that bridges conceptual and practical concerns: the first section challenges our assumptions about how sustainability is defined, measured and practiced; the second section showcases artist-researchers whose work engages with the impact of humans on our environment; while the third section investigates how academic spaces can model eco-conscious behaviour. This timely volume responds to an increased demand for environmentally sustainable research, and is outstanding not only in its interdisciplinarity, but its embrace of non-traditional formats, spanning academic articles, creative acts, personal reflections and dialogues. Right Research will be a valuable resource for educators and researchers interested in developing and hybridizing their scholarly communication formats in the face of the current climate crisis.

Scientists question everything about the natural world. They work tirelessly in pursuit of understanding how and why the world behaves as it does. And yet, as a community, scientists rarely question their own behaviour in the lab. Equipment is often left on 24/7, protocols using hazardous chemicals remain unchanged for decades and freezers are filled with samples that haven’t been used since the turn of the century. These behaviours become habits, passed down through the generations. The foll...

Why should we refrain from doing things that, taken collectively, are environmentally destructive, if our individual acts seem almost certain to make no difference? According to the expected consequences approach, we should refrain from doing these things because our individual acts have small risks of causing great harm, which outweigh the expected benefits of performing them. Several authors have argued convincingly that this provides a plausible account of our moral reasons to do things li...

We Tweet, Facebook, Netflix and YouTube in the palm of our hand. We are aware of the amount of energy that it takes from how many times that we need to recharge our devices. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. For every joule of energy we expend locally, many more joules are spent in the backbone of the Internet. While our appetite for data has largely been insatiable over the last thirty years, the energy required to sustain this has been held in check by Moore’s Law’s driving cree...

Reading maketh a full [person], conference a ready [person], and writing an exact [person]. Francis Bacon, ‘Of Studies’, in Essays (1625) Flying is one of the most environmentally detrimental activities associated with our research practices. Until recently, even as colleges and universities took steps to green their campuses, conference-related air travel was on the rise. The COVID-19 pandemic forced academics (along with much of the world) back to the ground, but what will happen after trav...

Traditional academic conferences that require participants to physically travel between locations have a large environmental footprint. That is why a growing number of researchers believe it is imperative to seek out more sustainable alternatives. The following case study looks at the Around the World virtual conferences organized at the University of Alberta as an example of how to host sustainable research gatherings without the carbon cost of flying. The success of this online event, with ...

Terry Anderson helped pioneer econferencing with the email-based Bangkok Project event in 1992, which took place just one year after the World Wide Web went public. In the following chapter, he reflects back on the early challenges of the online conference medium and looks ahead to its future. How has the econference evolved from its origins to today? Will online gatherings always feel like a less satisfying version of their traditional, face-to-face counterpart or can they offer conference-g...

The following chapter by Ted Dawson explores the environmental entanglements of the digital humanities, considering the imbrication of digitally-driven attempts to confront environmental crisis with the contributions of digital technologies to that very crisis. The chapter centers on a case study of the InfraVU project undertaken in 2016–2017 at the Vanderbilt University Center for Digital Humanities, a project that sought to draw attention to the infrastructure supporting digital humanities ...