Michael D. Fischer

Applications in Computing for Social Anthropologists

As increasing numbers of social anthropologists use a computer for wordprocessing, interest in other applications inevitably follows, Computer Applications in Social Anthropology covers research activities shared by all social anthropologists and introduces new methods for organizing and interpreting data. Lucidly written, and sympathetic to the particular needs of social anthropologists, it will be of immense value to researchers and professionals in anthropology, development studies and sociology.

CULTURE AND INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS: EMERGENT ORDER AND THE INTERNAL REGULATION OF SHARED SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS

ABSTRACT I explore the relationship between culture, knowledge and behaviour in a context of change, comparing scientific with cultural knowledge. I argue that applications (or instantiations) of scientific knowledge are not the same as science, and undergo a process that has properties not unlike those described by Ellen and Harris for ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ (IK). This process uses knowledge that is not derived from the system represented, but nevertheless is necessary for the system to operate in a contingent world even though this knowledge was not in the original subset of knowledge being applied. This consideration of knowledge about what contexts must be instantiated to enable domain knowledge to be instantiated builds on Ellens concept of prehension, which in part includes the anticipatory knowledge a subject brings to a situation. I suggest the operative principles in IK have similar properties.

Pervasive Computing in Time and Space: The Culture and Context of 'Place' Integration

We consider some possible broad changes that may impact society as a whole as a result of widespread integration of full-spectrum deployed pervasive computing technologies. Our approach considers design challenges for successfully developing and integrating pervasive technologies into culture and society. This is particularly challenging, since pervasive technologies as services are most successful when transparent, invisible, overlooked, unacknowledged and seemingly forgotten by the very groups that embrace their usage and development. We suggest a heuristic for understanding pervasive technology from an anthropological/social perspective, along with a reminder that humans create, shape and use the technologies that affect them. In particular, we look at the impact on social relations in a poly-social world where people must develop means to blend their own realities with those of of others. In conclusion, we remind those developing these technologies, that although we will eventually become wedded and intertwined as cyborgs within this new environment, it may have a positive outcome, creating new social group models for human interaction.

Watching Me, Watching You. (Process surveillance and agency in the workplace)

The notion that computers are somehow separate from our lives is misleading and ignores the level of integration that has emerged. Most of the processes that dispense, load, and deliver the supplies that sustain cosmopolitan life are impacted by some form of computer in one way or another. The systems created when networks of computers intersect with networks of people are shaping our current cultural environment and the way that we exist in the world. This phenomena has created multiple types of interactions that are hybrids between humans and machines and at present, the balance of human behavior towards other humans is impacted by processes in business and elsewhere that have an over arching governance based on machines. This limits human agency and impacts understanding, service and privacy rights for humans. Further, these processes increasingly depend on greater and greater quantities of what had previously been considered personal information, often scraped from online processes people do not anticipate, yielding an often revealing portrait of themselves. Also, a poorly configured paradigm has created a culture where, when systems are required for big business, people more often alter their behavior to suit machines and work with them, rather than the other way around, and that this has eroded conceptions of agency. We explore the use of Thing-theory to implement a partial means of implementing mutual surveillance between management and workers to increase human agency while developing more adaptive and efficient business processes.

INTEGRATING ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF CULTURE: THE “HARD” AND THE “SOFT”

Much anthropological interest in methods derived from the natural sciences has been motivated by a search for tools with which to describe ethnographic settings in more “rigorous” terms. These have generally failed, and these failures are due to implicit conventions in anthropology regarding what to observe and how. I suggest that natural science methods were developed as a result of a process that aimed to solve problems that are generally different from those that social scientists pursue and that social scientists need to take the underlying ideas and rebuild them for their own purposes if they want to import them. Likewise, most qualitative anthropologists are also guilty of inappropriate borrowing, in particular in their importation of postmodern philosophy from literary criticism rather than adapting these ideas from the source in a manner more suited to the discipline. I examine some the conditions that would be necessary to integrate the various fractions of the anthropological community within a flexible but common framework. I conclude that anthropology must include a major qualitative perspective and, in response to this, suggest that if we are to formalize our study we must adopt some new conventions. These include a broadening of analysis beyond causality to include interpretive reasoning within a common framework, the addition of deontic operators to our basic formal framework, and an emphasis on declarative semantics over procedural semantics. We end by briefly describing some speculative work using Information Theory as a basis for quantitatively evaluating qualitative descriptions, models, and analysis.

Harmonizing Diversity: Tuning Anthropological Research to Complexity1

The contributions in this issue of Social Science Computer Review represent a range of computational approaches to theoretical and disciplinary specializations in anthropology that reflect on and expand the future orientation and practice of the formal and comparative agenda in the context of an increasing emphasis on complexity in anthropology as a discipline. Themes covered in this issue include kinship, funerary burials, urban legends, eye tracking, and looking at mode influences on online data collection. A common theme throughout the articles is examining the relationship between global emergent processes and structures and the local individual contributions to this emergence, and how the local and global contexts influence each other. We argue that unless complexity is addressed more overtly by leveraging computational approaches to data collection, analysis and theory building, anthropology and social science more generally face an existential challenge if they are to continue to pursue extended field research exercise, intersubjective productions, deep personal involvement, interaction with materiality, and engagement with people while generating research outcomes of relevance to the world beyond the narrow confines of specialist journals and conferences.

Introduction: Configuring Anthropology

The authors present examples of how anthropologists are presently using computers to advance ethnographic research in new directions while building on what has come before. All the methods, protocols, and tools created by the authors are free, open source, and available on the Internet. The contributions are the authors’ attempts to address greater complexity through greater control over the data and structures within which anthropologists work. These methods are suitable to a large number of problems, basic and applied, across the range of anthropology from its humanities axis to its science axis. Anthropology is what anthropologists make of it, and each author is attempting to make a little bit more of anthropology and to configure anthropology for addressing old problems in new ways and positioning anthropology to address new problems and new opportunities to influence others through anthropology.

The ideation and instantiation of arranging marriage within an urban community in Pakistan, 1982–2000

Abstract Using longitudinal data and marriage arrangements in urban Pakistan, this paper discusses the consequences of changes in ideational systems. Merging different theoretical approaches (or cultures) within cultural anthropology, it argues that, while symbol systems are not an analogue of an external world, nevertheless they are effective drivers for how people relate to, adapt to and modify the external relations within which they are embedded. This allows for the accommodation of analytic viewpoints that favour both the symbolic construction of reality and the behavioural relations of how this construction is enacted.

What Are Kinship Terminologies, and Why Do We Care? A Computational Approach to Analyzing Symbolic Domains

Kinship is a fundamental feature and basis of human societies. We describe a set of computational tools and services, and the logic that underlies these, developed to improve how we understand both the fundamental facts of kinship and how people use kinship as a resource in their lives. Mathematical formalism applied to cultural concepts is more than an exercise in model building, as it provides a way to represent and explore their logical consistency and implications. Not surprisingly, kinship terminologies are particularly amenable to formal representation. Researchers throughout the history of kinship studies have noted the logicality of kinship terminology systems. The logic is explored here through the kin term computations made by users of a terminology when computing the kinship relation one person has to another by referring to a third person for whom each has a kin term relationship. Kinship Algebra Modeler provides a set of tools, services, and an architecture to explore kinship terminologies and their properties in an accessible manner.

Cultural systems - Introduction

Concepts like ‘culture’ and activities like ‘ethnography’ are increasingly appearing in industrial venues, engineering projects, marketing research, HCI and other applied areas. Anywhere there is a human interaction (human–machine; human–human; human–institution) anthropologists or anthropological theory can make a unique and positive contribution. Many people admit that greater consideration of culture appears to be helpful in projects involving different cultures and conditions, but do not necessarily know why. The World Bank has required anthropologists on certain large projects for 2 decades. Why? Because there is a difference in success rates for projects with and projects without anthropologists. However, the World Bank itself did not start hiring anthropologists in large numbers for their own internal staffing until the 1990s. Anthropologists involved in development have tended do more than just provide a set of data collection tools suitable for working