Examining the interconnections between genes and culture is crucial for a more complete understanding of psychological processes. Genetic predispositions may predict different outcomes depending on one's cultural context, and culture may predict different outcomes depending on genetic predispositions - that is, genes and culture interact. Less is understood, however, about how genes and culture interact, or the psychological mechanisms through which gene–culture interactions occur. In this Element, Joni Y. Sasaki and Heewon Kwon review key findings and theories in gene–culture (...) interaction research. They then go on to discuss current issues and future directions in gene–culture research that may illuminate the path toward an explanatory framework. (shrink)

Kant limits cosmopolitan right to a universal right of hospitality, condemning European imperial practices towards indigenous peoples, while allowing a right to visit foreign countries for the purpose of offering to engage in commerce. I argue that attempts by contemporary theorists such as Jeremy Waldron to expand and update Kant’s juridical category of cosmopolitan right would blunt or erase Kant’s own anti-colonial doctrine. Waldron’s use of Kant’s category of cosmopolitan right to criticize contemporary identity politics relies on premises that upset (...) Kant’s balanced right to hospitality. An over-extensive right to visit can invoke “Kantian” principles that Kant himself could not have consistently held, without weakening his condemnation of European settlement. I construct an alternative spirit of cosmopolitan right more favorable to the contemporary claims of indigenous peoples. Kant’s analysis suggests there are circumstances when indigenous peoples may choose whether to engage in extensive cultural interaction, and reasonably refuse the risks of subjecting their claims to debate in democratic politics in a unitary public. Cosmopolitan right accorded respect to peoples; any “domestic” adaptation of cosmopolitan right should respect indigenous peoples as peoples, absent a serious public explanation by a democratic state for why it has now become appropriate to treat indigenous peoples merely as individual citizens. (shrink)

Many obscure aspects of the growth of civilization in its early phase are illuminated when the traditional Iranian lore contained in the Zend-Avesta and the Pahlavi texts is analysed side by side with the Vedas and Brahmanical literature. Simultaneous study of the tradition of the two branches of the Aryans fills many gaps that would inevitably remain if we were to confine ourselves only to the Indian tradition.

The paper is an exploration for a conceptual framework for cross-cultural interfacing. The roots of this exploration lie in my personal, functional, social and cultural experiences, and cross-cultural encounters. These encounters in many ways reflect the networking journey of AI & Society, promoting and stimulating the human-centred debate in cross-cultural settings. As a ‘cross-cultural holon’, AI & Society has been questioning the given orthodoxy of the ‘one best way’ and the culture of the ‘exact language’ (...) since its inception 21 years ago. My observation is that even though we now live in a world of multimodal interactive media technologies, some how the interface design has not moved much beyond the functional (observed reality) worldview of our interactions. Even at the functional level, the design perspective remains bounded by the observed reality. It is thus no surprise that when it comes to designing interaction technologies for social and cultural domains such as health care, work, employment, life long learning, the design mainly hovers around the functional skill training, mechanical feedback and objectified evaluation. When we move beyond the functional worldview, and explore our interactions within social and cultural domains, we encounter both the reality (objectified world) and actuality (experienced world) of interactions. At this level, the challenge of the interface is not just coping with the interaction spaces of reality and actuality but also with the ‘in-between’ space of actuality–reality gaps. We explore how the concept of symbiosis enables the interaction in the gaps between actuality and reality, how the concept of the ‘culture of the artificial enables the sharing and pooling experiences, how the concept of valorisation’ enables to find a coherence (commonality) between interactions, and how the concept of cultural holon is used to conceptualise the network architecture of cross-cultural interactions. It is proposed that the way forward to designing cross-cultural interfaces is to first seek a conceptual framework for cross-cultural interaction spaces, and then use this framework to design interfacing systems and tools. (shrink)

The object of the study is the university quarter as a socio-cultural phenomenon. The subject of the study is the forms of cultural interaction between the university quarter and the city. The use of comparative and typological methods made it possible to identify and describe four forms of university presence in the city space, grouped around two basic directions. The first direction assumes the priority of the university in relation to the city, which gives rise to such (...) a form of their interaction as a "university city". In this case, university activity, in fact, fulfills the role of the economic basis of urban life. The second direction, which is characterized by the leading role of the city, is represented by the student quarter, campus, university quarter. And in this case, we can talk about the "growing" of the university into the urban space, which has both its positive and negative sides. Special attention is paid to the university quarter, the need for which is associated with the expansion of the university's interaction with the urban community. Combining the project nature, openness, flexible targeting, it demonstrates greater potential compared to traditional options. In turn, the university quarter project can be represented by various complementary options. The analysis of the Samara experience of its design revealed two promising forms of its implementation: building a citywide university space and updating the historical past on the basis of available university resources. (shrink)

The concept of civilization is intrinsic to the English School’s understanding of international society. At the same time, engagement with discourses of civilization has been an important site of c...

A persistent tradition existed in antiquity linking Caria with the island of Crete. This central theme of regional history is mirrored in the civic mythologies, cults and toponyms of southwestern Anatolia. This book explains why by approaching this diverse body of material with a broad chronological view, taking into account both the origins of this regional narrative and its endurance. It considers the mythologies in the light of archaeologically attested contacts during the Bronze Age, exploring whether such interaction could (...) have left a residuum in later traditions. The continued relevance of this aspect of Carian history is then considered in the light of contacts during the Classical and Hellenistic periods, with analysis of how, and in which contexts, traditions survived. The Carians were an Anatolian people; however, their integration into the mythological framework of the Greek world reveals that interaction with the Aegean was a fundamental aspect of their history. (shrink)

This book paints a comprehensive portrait of Mexico’s system of assisted reproduction first from a historical perspective, then from a more contemporary viewpoint. Based on a detailed analysis of books and articles published between the 1950s and 1980s, the first section tells the story of how the epistemic, normative, and material infrastructure of the assisted reproduction system was built. It traces the professionalization process of assisted reproduction as a medical field and the establishment of its professional association. Drawing on ethnographic (...) material, the second part looks at how this system developed and flourished from the 1980s up to 2010, its commercialization process, how the expansion of reproductive services took place, and the messages regarding reproductive technologies that circulated within a wide discursive landscape. Given its scope and methods, this book will appeal to scholars interested in science and technology studies, reproduction studies, history of medicine, medical anthropology, and sociology. (shrink)

An Islamic coffin discovered in the church of Maria Spilaiotissa near the old Seljuk capital of Konya in central Anatolia bears the following Greek inscription: “Here lies the descendant of men born in the purple, Michael Amiraslan, the grandson of the great-grandson of the blessed emperor born in the purple, Kyr John Komnenos Maurozomes, the son of the humble John Komnenos.”.

Every year, the Vietnamese people reportedly burned about 50,000 tons of joss papers, which took the form of not only bank notes, but iPhones, cars, clothes, even housekeepers, in hope of pleasing the dead. The practice was mistakenly attributed to traditional Buddhist teachings but originated in fact from China, which most Vietnamese were not aware of. In other aspects of life, there were many similar examples of Vietnamese so ready and comfortable with adding new norms, values, and beliefs, even contradictory (...) ones, to their culture. This phenomenon, dubbed “cultural additivity”, prompted us to study the co-existence, interaction, and influences among core values and norms of the Three Teachings –Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism–as shown through Vietnamese folktales. By applying Bayesian logistic regression, we evaluated the possibility of whether the key message of a story was dominated by a religion (dependent variables), as affected by the appearance of values and anti-values pertaining to the Three Teachings in the story (independent variables). Our main findings included the existence of the cultural additivity of Confucian and Taoist values. More specifically, empirical results showed that the interaction or addition of the values of Taoism and Confucianism in folktales together helped predict whether the key message of a story was about Confucianism, β{VT ⋅ VC} = 0.86. Meanwhile, there was no such statistical tendency for Buddhism. The results lead to a number of important implications. First, this showed the dominance of Confucianism because the fact that Confucian and Taoist values appeared together in a story led to the story’s key message dominated by Confucianism. Thus, it presented the evidence of Confucian dominance and against liberal interpretations of the concept of the Common Roots of Three Religions (“tam giáo đồng nguyên”) as religious unification or unicity. Second, the concept of “cultural additivity” could help explain many interesting socio-cultural phenomena, namely the absence of religious intolerance and extremism in the Vietnamese society, outrageous cases of sophistry in education, the low productivity in creative endeavors like science and technology, the misleading branding strategy in business. We are aware that our results are only preliminary and more studies, both theoretical and empirical, must be carried out to give a full account of the explanatory reach of “cultural additivity”. (shrink)

Everyday joint remembering, from family remembering around the dinner table to team remembering in the operating theatre, relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales, which we distinguish for analytic purposes so as better to study their interanimation in practice: (i) faster, lower-level coordination processes of behavioral matching and interactional synchrony occurring (...) at timescale t1; (ii) mid-range collaborative processes which re-evoke past experiences in groups, unfolding at timescale t2; (iii) cooperative processes involved in the transmission of memories over longer periods occurring at timescale t3; and (iv) cultural processes and practices operating within distributed socio-cognitive networks over evolutionary and historical timeframes, unfolding at timescale t4. In this paper we survey studies of how the processes operating across these overlapping and complementary timescales constitute joint remembering in social interactions. We describe coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture as complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which we consider as a complex phenomenon unfolding over multiple timescales (t1, t2, t3, t4). (shrink)

Interaction between humans and cats in urban environments is subject to dynamic change. Based on the frequency and quality of relations with humans, we can distinguish several populations of domestic cats : pedigree, pet, semi-feral, feral, and pseudo-wild. Bringing together theoretical perspectives of the Tartu school of biosemiotics and ethological studies of animal societies, we distinguish two basic types of cat cultures: the culture of street cats and the humano-cat culture of pets. The difference between these cultures is documented (...) on the level of zoosemiotic interactions, ecological relations, and human representations. We introduce a threefold model of human-animal interactions in urban environments which steer a careful course between the Scylla of realistic ontology and the Charybdis of social constructivism. A case study on Estonian cat shelters illustrates the significance of cultural representations and institutionalized actions in human-cat cohabitation. (shrink)

Smith gives an excellent overview on research in language evolution, in which he discusses several recent models of how linguistic systems and the cognitive capacities involved in language learning may have co‐evolved. He illustrates how combined pressures on language learning and communication/use produce compositionally structured languages. Once in place, a (culturally transmitted) communication system creates new selection pressures on the capacity for acquiring these systems.

In view of the fact that culture-inclusive psychology has been eluded or relatively ignored by mainstream psychology, the movement of indigenous psychology is destined to develop a new model of man that incorporates both causal psychology and intentional psychology as suggested by Vygotsky . Following the principle of cultural psychology: “one mind, many mentalities” , the Mandala Model of Self and Face and Favor Model were constructed to represent the universal mechanisms of self and social interaction that can (...) be applied to any culture; both models can be used as conceptual frameworks for analyzing mentalities of people in any given culture. Taking research works from Foundations of Chinese Psychology: Confucian Social Relation as exemplars , this article illustrates how to construct culture-inclusive theories of Confucianism by multiple philosophical paradigms. The mechanism of culture-inclusive theory can be applied to explain qualitative research findings on lifeworld events of people in a particular society. It can also be utilized to predict results of quantitative research conducted to verify theoretical propositions in the scientific microworld by empirical methods. (shrink)

Ethnic groups are universal and unique to human societies. Such groups sometimes have norms of behavior that are adaptively linked to their social and ecological circumstances, and ethnic boundaries may function to protect that variation from erosion by interethnic interaction. However, such interaction is often frequent and voluntary, suggesting that individuals may be able to strategically reduce its costs, allowing adaptive cultural variation to persist in spite of interaction with out-groups with different norms. We examine five (...) mechanisms influencing the dynamics of ethnically distinct cultural norms, each focused on strategic individual-level choices in interethnic interaction: bargaining, interaction-frequency-biased norm adoption, assortment on norms, success-biased interethnic social learning, and childhood socialization. We use Bayesian item response models to analyze patterns of norm variation and interethnic interaction in an ethnically structured Amazonian population. We show that, among indigenous Matsigenka, interethnic education with colonial Mestizos is more strongly associated with Mestizo-typical norms than even extensive interethnic experience in commerce and wage labor is. Using ethnographic observations, we show that all five of the proposed mechanisms of norm adoption may contribute to this effect. However, of these mechanisms, we argue that changes in relative bargaining power are particularly important for ethnic minorities wishing to preserve distinctive norms while engaging in interethnic interaction in domains such as education. If this mechanism proves applicable in a range of other ethnographic contexts, it would constitute one cogent explanation for when and why ethnically structured cultural variation can either persist or erode given frequent, and often mutually beneficial, interethnic interaction. (shrink)

This article addresses keep-fit culture not as a collection of commercial images or as the product of broader cultural values, but as a set of situated body practices, that is practices taking place within specific institutions where these images and values are reinterpreted in locally prescribed ways and, to some extent, filtered. Relying on fieldwork, fitness gyms are revealed to be experienced as places with their own rules, pleasures and identity games. The ideal of the fit body is shown (...) to be filtered from its wider, typically gender- and class-specific charges, transformed into a pure instrument of training, a machine which does not bear resemblance to the organic body of the changing rooms, an objectified utility which is beyond any social role specification. Social roles and their body requirements are both important for individual clients' structural chances to join the gym and locally neutralized or reduced to tension-release mechanisms. Similarly, the cultural ideals of a fit and toned body contribute to the legitimation of the gym; yet the actual capacity to train is less the result of the direct grip of culture, than the outcome of clients' adjustment to playing a particular game of involvement with and detachment from the mechanistic and abstract exercise body. Body definitions are not simply imposed on clients, but continuously negotiated and transformed. (shrink)

Focus on the way in which cultural variants affect other variants' probabilities of transmission in modeling and empirical work can enrich Kline's conceptualization of teaching. For example, the problem of communicating complex cumulative culture is an adaptive problem; teaching methods that manage transmission so that acquisition of some cultural variants increases the probability of acquiring others, provide a partial solution.

The kinds of social interaction necessary for the existence of human cultural practices and institutions and the human ability to change and survive depended on at least four conditions: biological brain evolution, cognition/affective processes, ethnographically-based cultural beliefs and practices, and the kinds of interpersonal relations that motivate or constrain social interaction. Thus human biological and cultural evolution could not have occurred without the interaction of brain processes, cognition/affective mechanisms, language, cultural beliefs, and social (...) organization. No single one of these elements could have emerged without the others. We know little about how the four elements evolved, but can at least speculate about the necessity of each for human development. For example, the kinds of socialization experiences and skills infants acquire gradually to be called competent ‘adults,’ and how adult status begins to fade towards the end of life as adults seek to retain the properties that sustain human life. (shrink)

In this article I develop tools for analyzing the identities that emerge in qualitative material. I approach identities as historically, socially and culturally produced subject positions, as processes that are in a constant state of becoming and that receive their temporary stability and meaning in concrete contexts and circumstances. I suggest that the identities and subject positions that materialize in qualitative material can be analyzed from four different perspectives. They can be approached by focusing on (1) classifications that define the (...) boundary lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’, as (2) participant roles that refer to the temporal aspect of subject positions and outline their meaning for action, as (3) structures of viewpoint and focalization that frame meaning and order to opinions and experiences of the world, and as (4) interactive positions that articulate the roles and identities taken by the participants of communication. (shrink)

How do we refer to people in everyday conversation? No matter the language or culture, we must choose from a range of options: full name ('Robert Smith'), reduced name ('Bob'), description ('tall guy'), kin term ('my son') etc. Our choices reflect how we know that person in context, and allow us to take a particular perspective on them. This book brings together a team of leading linguists, sociologists and anthropologists to show that there is more to person reference than meets (...) the eye. Drawing on video-recorded, everyday interactions in nine languages, it examines the fascinating ways in which we exploit person reference for social and cultural purposes, and reveals the underlying principles of person reference across cultures from the Americas to Asia to the South Pacific. Combining rich ethnographic detail with cross-linguistic generalizations, it will be welcomed by researchers and graduate students interested in the relationship between language and culture. (shrink)

Animals exist as biodiverse composite organisms that include microbial residents, eukaryotic cells, and organs that collectively form a human being. Through an interdependent relationship and an inherent ability to transmit and reciprocate stimuli in a bidirectional way, a human body or the holobiont secures growth, health, and reproduction. As such, the survival of a holobiont is dependent on the maintenance of biological order including metabolic homeostasis by tight regulation of the communication between its eukaryotic and prokaryotic residents. In this review (...) an overview and perspective are provided on the bidirectional communication between microbes and their host in mutually nurturing biochemical, biological, and social interconnected relationships between the components of the holobiont. An emphasis is placed on exemplifying microbiome‐mediated effects on host functions—aiming to integrate microbiome functionality to host physiology, be it health or disease. Nutrition, immunology, and sexual dimorphism have been traversed extensively to reflect on health and mind states, social interactions, and urbanization defects/effects. Finally, examples of molecular mechanisms potentially orchestrating these complex transkingdom interactions are provided. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the role of the phenomena of ethnic diversification and identity in the social development of polyethnic countries. These phenomena are considered as complex socio-cultural constructs that are traditionally based on ethnicity, culture and social aspects of human life and the nature of their functioning depends on the specific conditions of development of a society. Based on the study of the works of domestic and foreign researchers, the contents of both phenomena are (...) clarified, and their key characteristics are presented. Attention is drawn to the fact that in their interpretations of the phenomenon of ethnic diversification, researchers start primarily from the fact that there are representatives of different peoples and cultures in one state, united in a community based on the ethnic origin of their members. This factor is largely due to the presence of many types of identities. Particular attention is paid to the influences (positive and negative) of ethnic diversification on social processes, the role of identity in social cohesion in polyethnic countries. The contexts and fields of interaction of ethnic diversification and identity in the social space of countries with ethno-cultural diversity of their population are outlined. Attention is drawn to the historical longevity of research as the essence of the phenomena themselves, as well as their interaction. The role of ethno-political management in governance the dynamics of ethnic diversification and in the process of forming identities in order to find compromises in their interaction and achieve adequate impact of the consequences of this interaction on social processes, as well as state policy on ethno-national communities and migration. It is proposed to improve research methods of ethnic diversification based on the base of the clarification of the philosophical approach to the study of ethnic and cultural groups, the identity of which together forms the ethnic diversity of a country, and emphasizes the need to adapt them to the realities of Ukrainian ethnic diversity. (shrink)

The review of current innovation policy in Russia represented in this work. Author makes stress on personal attitude of the national leaders to innovations: they are sure that focusing on full realization of one’s potential and on innovation inevitably would lead Russia to be one of technology leaders of the world before 2020. The basis of this belief lays in currently processing shift of social values in Russia. Author notes that there are just few works revealing connection between cultural (...) values and attitude to innovation and the question of the connection is still open. Nevertheless nowadays it has become obvious for the scientists all over the world that an indispensable condition of economic growth and prosperity of the country is transition of economy to an innovative phase of development. Ability to innovations in general and to innovations of a certain type is a property of the one’s mentality, their cultural specifics. Distinctions in abilities of the different nations to innovate depend on the nature of culture and on the cultural environment. (shrink)