Stephen M. Lyon

CULTURE AND INFORMATION: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL EXAMINATION OF COMMUNICATION IN CULTURAL DOMAINS IN PAKISTAN

ABSTRACT Humans societies have adapted mechanisms for dealing with large amounts of information, some of which has hitherto not been encountered by members of the societies. Theories of communication, which posit that the medium upon which a message is transmitted is itself an integral part of the communication process, clarify the analytical utility of the culture concept in ways that account for empirical data. Using ethnographic cases of role relations learned in one sociocultural context that serve as a kind of cultural template for other sociocultural contexts, it is possible to identify the processes of information processing that lie at the level of culture, as well as individual, agency.

Networks and Kinship: Formal Models of Alliance, Descent, and Inheritance in a Pakistani Punjabi Village

Pakistani Punjabi landlords use marriage both strategically as well as affectively. That is to say, they seek maximal political advantage and minimal household disruption with marriage arrangements. Using a set of formal networks analyses tools, this article examines two hundred years of marriage decisions for one Punjabi landlord family. The radical shift in marriage decisions beginning from the 1920s is the result of an earlier shift in inheritance rules. The resulting change in marriage decisions has impacted not only on household dynamics, but has disrupted longstanding factional associations within the village.

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.

Kinship, Computing, and Anthropology:

This article proposes two important points about genealogical software: (a) Not all such software need necessarily be complicated or address high level theoretical issues, and (b) diversity of data, processing, and infrastructure means that it is particularly desirable that scholars begin to understand software tools as utilities that should have flexibility, including platform independence built into the design from the outset. Following a discussion of high performance packages used by White and Houseman to analyze social networks from marital data, the authors present examples from their research that suggest that even apparently trivial, nonanalytic tasks that form part of the process of preparing data for higher end analyses may yield exciting and productive results. The authors conclude with a statement on the nature of e-science in anthropology and the implications for the types of software that will be most useful.

MODELING CONTEXT IN PUNJABI CONFLICT RESOLUTION: SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS AS CONTEXT AGENTS

This paper suggests that multiagent model design can be a useful device for researchers in the social sciences. Focusing on the pluralistic competing venues and strategies for conflict resolution in Punjab, Pakistan, I argue that the social context must be rendered more dynamic and interactive in our analytical models. By representing social context as agents in the formal description of particular cases of conflict resolution, certain recursive properties of different social contexts become apparent. In modification to my argument in an earlier paper (Cybernetics and Systems Research, vol. 1, pp. 383–388, 2002), I argue that the complexity of agents representing social context may usefully be reduced by creating libraries of core social contexts from which instantiations, such as those discussed here, inherit all the common attributes.

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

Motivation and Justification from Dreams: Muslim Decision‐Making Strategies in Punjab, Pakistan

Dreams may serve to justify or motivate decisions. This paper examines two dream incidents in Pakistan which have implications for the study of decision making processes. In the first incident, the centrality of the dream is questionable in the decision making process, while the second incident suggests that dreams may be more than justificatory props that enable people to do what they had already decided. If dreams play a motivational role in the decision making process then models of decision making may benefit from explicit recognition of the role unconscious, uncontrolled experiences though the narrative may be conscious and controlled.

Impossible Citizens: Dubai's Indian Diaspora

Citizenship is a broad and varying concept. There are apparently simple rules for inclusion laid out by states, which allow some people to be categorized as citizen or non-citizen. There are common...

Paper as a serious method of concern

Comment on Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press.