Social Anthropologist

Art: Anthropological Aspects

N. Graburn , in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

3.3 Sociopolitical Approaches

Social anthropologists take stressed the functions of art in maintaining the social. Turner showed how Ndembu political rites apply normative and naturalistic symbols and colors to structure the effect and foster communitas amongst the participants, and Biebuyck showed how homo and brute figurines recall proverbs, having the function of training initiates in the Lega bwami cult. Gell (1996) asserts that anthropologists focused wrongly on aesthetics, and on relationships betwixt formal style and other cultural characteristics, because (a) 'art' is not always about aesthetics; and (b) the expression of a culturally specific aesthetic system is not the function of art objects. Art is created to function in social relations to practice something, that is, it has agency. In the West, art serves class and ability interests, in gender exclusion (Nochlin) and the maintenance of bureaucracy (Bourdieu).

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Award and Shame

C. Stewart , in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

Social anthropologists working in Mediterranean societies introduced the gender-linked concepts of honor and shame in the 1960s. Men claimed honor by staking out a reputation for aggressive machismo, while women comported themselves with quiet modesty. Women's functioning of shame protected the honorable reputation of their menfolk and men's reputation for honor safeguarded their women from possible transgressions. Anthropologists assumed that this configuration was distinctively Mediterranean but subsequent enquiry has shown that its features can be found in distant societies such every bit Japan or amongst gangs in inner metropolis America. The honor and shame model has, appropriately, lost some of its analytical specificity for anthropologists who now adopt to work more than closely with electric current indigenous vocabularies. Although several Mediterranean languages possess shut equivalents to the word 'honor' these terms are infrequently resorted to in everyday speech communication. The aforementioned is true for English where the word 'honour' is practically obsolete in ordinary language use. Historians of early modern Europe and America at present appear to be the most interested in investigating honor as this was an important operative social concept at that fourth dimension underpinning the social institution of dueling.

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Global Information Systems

Magid Igbaria , ... Charlie Chien-Hung Chen , in Encyclopedia of Information Systems, 2003

V.A. Culture

Social anthropologists consider culture as the "collective programming of the mind" to distinguish ane group of people from another one. Hofstede states: "Culture is learned, non inherited. Information technology derives from one'south social environment, not from i'due south genes." According to Hofstede, culture should be separated from an individual's personality and human nature. The "ecology fallacy" problem can occur for any study without making any distinction among them. Culture should not be measured in real and absolute value because information technology cannot be compared.

Civilization manifests itself in symbols, heroes, rituals, and values. Symbols represent the almost superficial and value the deepest manifestations of civilization, with heroes and rituals in betwixt. Legacy about heroes tin exist written and told while rituals and symbols can be observed. Value, however, is intrinsic and can hardly be observed or told. I way to measure a people's value is to interpret statements about desires. In 1983, Hofstede designed questionnaires to ask IBM employees from 55 countries about how they idea the world ought to be (the desirable) versus what they want for themselves (the desired). Hofstede identified four cultural dimensions to stand for values of unlike cultures—power distance, individualism, masculinity, and dubiety abstention. Each cultural dimension is quantified with a specific indicator to illustrate each country's differences.

The Ability Altitude Indicator (PDI) stands for "the extent to which the less powerful person in a society accepts inequality in power and considers it equally normal." Malaysia (PDI = 104), Mexico (81), India (77), Singapore (74), and Brazil (69) are skilful examples of high power distance culture. In dissimilarity, the countries with lower ability distance culture include Austria (11), Israel (13), Ireland (22), Great Britain (35), Australia (36), Canada (39) and the United States (40).

The high Individualism Index (IDV) pertains to "club in which the ties between individuals are loose" while the low IDV or high collectivism refers to "society in which people from birth onward are integrated into strong, cohesive ingroups, which proceed throughout a people's lifetime and continues to protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty." Usa (IDV = 91), Australia (90), Great Britain (89), Canada (80) and Southward Africa (65) are skillful examples of loftier individualism culture. In contrast, the countries with lower individualism or high collectivism civilisation include Guatemala (6), Taiwan (17), Thailand (20), Mexico (30), Arab countries (38), and Japan (46).

Men who alive in the high Masculinity Index (MAS) society are more than "assertive, tough, and focused" and women are more "modest and tender." Part differences betwixt genders are not so distinct in the femininity gild. Japan (95), Austria (79), Italia (70), Mexico (69), and the United states (62) accept college MAS. Sweden (v), Denmark (xvi), Thailand (34), Republic of korea (39), and Taiwan (45) have lower MAS or a stronger femininity culture.

The extent to which the members of a culture experience threatened by uncertain or unknown situations, and the feelings of nervous stress, predictability, and a need for written rules are good indicators for uncertainty avoidance. Countries with high uncertainty avoidance index (UAI) include Greece (112), Japan (92), France (86), United mexican states (82), Israel (81), and Frg (65). The depression UAI countries are Singapore (8), Denmark (23), Great Britain (35) and the Usa (46).

Straub researched how civilisation can influence people's attitude toward using Information technology in achieving individual and organizational productivity gains. He found that people from low IDV countries tend to avoid using IT in supporting individual and organizational productivity. Igbaria and Anandarajan also ostend the evidence past studying computer usage in Nigeria, a country with the low IDV culture (20) in relation to the United States (91). Since low IDV people often come from a culture where indicators of PDI, MAS, and UAI are low, Straub reformulated a figurer-mediated support indicator (CMSI) to represent cultural influences to the perceived usefulness of IT and its actual use. Straub's research findings recommend considering cultural factors (e.g., CMSI) when deploying GIS.

All nationalities possess unique cultures that take to exist integrated into the design and deployment of GIS. A report by Marcus and Gould on the sensation of cultures in the global web user-interface design showed that Hofstede's cultural considerations can significantly improve the performance and the receptivity of the Web on a worldwide footing. Marcus and Gould advise that a web pattern with cultural sensitivity can attract more existent and global customers, not visitors to improve revenue of the bottom line. The above discussion suggests that civilisation influences GIS designs (symbols) and adoption (values). When deploying GIS, cultural impacts have to be advisedly assessed and well integrated into GIS.

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Household Archaeology

R. Tringham , in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

4 Modeling Household Activities in Archaeology

In modeling the economic and social role of co-resident domestic groups, participants of 'household archaeology' have followed social anthropologists in their models of the domestic mode of production (Chayanov 1966 (reprinted 1986), Netting et al. 1984, Sahlins 1972). These models characterized self-sustaining agriculturists and horticulturists who alive in permanent villages and carry out relatively modest-scale product. Such studies have emphasized the importance of the function of households every bit the organizing units of cooperative labor, production, consumption and sharing of resource, the transmission of property and rights from one generation to some other, and the cosmos and maintenance of ties and alliances with other units through wedlock and other forms of substitution. These aforementioned essential features of social reproduction became the objects of investigation of household archaeology (Ashmore and Wilk 1988, Wilk and Rathje 1982).

The study of 'what households practise' has been enriched by the Marxist focus on ideology, power and social inequality. In the domestic mode of production the design of domination and inequality between and within different households of a settlement and between unlike settlements, although temporary and flexible, is thought to contain a crucial variable in stimulating and enabling larger-scale transformations such as the intensification of production, the increase of the labor supply, and the increase in cultural complexity (Meillassoux 1978).

Inequalities certainly exist, along with innumerable variations, between households and are the result of differences in the cycles of demographic and economic evolution through which households laissez passer—cycles in which they expand, accumulating wealth, power, property, and members, and then contract. Thus, at any one time the households of a settlement will demonstrate differences in membership, the composition of the labor force, and the structure of say-so within the co-resident grouping and within the settlement as a whole. They will demonstrate differences in relations with groups outside the village, and, most importantly, differences in access to the products and processes of product. This concept of modest-calibration social inequality is the basis of a number of archaeological models that use the emerging importance of households as the unit of social reproduction to explain larger social and economical transformations (Rathje and McGuire 1982, Tringham 1990).

These differential patterns of social and economic relations reflecting social inequalities, however, take such a low archaeological visibility that these societies accept traditionally been regarded as 'egalitarian.' The difficulty in recognizing inequality in 'egalitarian' societies is due to the fact that it is ephemeral and not cumulative. An additional significant factor, nonetheless, is that inequality in such societies is not based on such criteria as the ownership of state and other material property, which are hands definable or easily recognizable in the archaeological information. Control of labor—not land, uppercase or property ownership—is the crucial variable on which inequality is based in precapitalist self-sustaining societies. Thus, those who control the circulation of labor and its products, control the social reproduction of society. At the scale of the domestic unit or household, this may exist an private within the household, or information technology may exist 'senior' households who control the labor of 'junior' households. It has been argued that inequality at this scale creates tensions in numerous spheres and is a crucial variable in the process of socioeconomic transformation that can be observed in the archaeological record (Tringham 1990, p. 608).

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Network Assay

Peter Five. Marsden , in Encyclopedia of Social Measurement, 2005

Social Network Information and Research Designs

Showtime in the 1930s, studies of the sociometric measurement of interpersonal bear on introduced quantitative methods and tools that were of import precursors to network analysis. Ethnographic fieldwork past social anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s offered a gear up of concepts, ideas, and methods that informs the study of social networks. Piece of work of both kinds continues, but nigh contemporary studies use quantitative data. The typical network study uses a nonexperimental design. Mutual approaches to data drove are surveys, questionnaires, and direct observation. Archival sources also offer rich data on the relationships amid certain social units. Designs for network studies are distinguished by whether they get together data on whole or partial networks and by the number of types (modes) of social units studied.

Whole-network studies examine interrelated units that are analyzed as a divisional social commonage; the analytical boundaries of the collective may be based on formal membership criteria, density of interactions, or involvement in a ready of events or activities. The almost common one-mode whole-network blueprint collects information on relationships linking a set of N social units of a single type. Examples are friendships among students in a school and alliances among businesses in an industry sector. 1-mode network information can be represented as a square matrix Ten  =   {10ij }, where the element tenij represents the strength of the human relationship from unit i to unit j; relationships 10ii from units to themselves are usually undefined. A data matrix for a binary relationship in a x-unit of measurement network appears in Fig. 1A. A 1 indicates that there is a tie from the row unit to the column unit, and a 0 indicates that there is no such tie. One-style designs tin be extended by observing a relationship at multiple fourth dimension points, by measuring two or more relationships (e.g., antagonisms too as friendships) linking the social units, or past obtaining measurements on a single relationship from multiple observers or sources. Each extension leads to a three-way data matrix X  =   {xijk }, where the subscript one thousand indexes time points, types of human relationship, or observers/sources.

Figure 1. (A) Data matrix and (B) directed graph for a 10-unit, one-mode network.

In a 2-mode whole-network design, basic relationships link two distinct types of units. Data are recorded in a rectangular matrix Y  =   {yij }, where the element yij refers to the relationship betwixt the ith unit of the offset blazon and the jth unit of the second type. Studies of interlocking boards of directors exemplify the 2-mode design: individuals and corporations are the two types of units, and data elements indicate whether person i is a director of corporation j.

Egocentric network studies collect data on partial networks consisting of a focal social unit i and the other units and relationships clustered in its locality. The social support network surrounding a given person is one instance. Egocentric networks are often delimited past including other units that lie within the focal unit of measurement'due south first-order zone, those units direct linked with the focal unit. Unit of measurement i's egocentric network, and then, consists of those others bearing some criterion relationship to i, and the relationships among them. In Fig. 1B, the egocentric network for unit A consists of A, B1, B2, and E. Egocentric network information measure relational properties of the social context in which the focal unit is situated. They generally are not well suited to measuring structural backdrop of collectives.

Most network studies purport to obtain data on a theoretical population of units. Inquiry on network sampling examines the inferences almost whole networks that can be drawn using different sampling designs. Node-induced samples observe data on relationships among a sample of social units drawn from a network. Egoistic data are often gathered for a sample of units from a larger population, a design known as sampling of stars.

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Craft Production, Anthropology of

E.North. Goody , in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

2.two Ethnographies in Social Anthropology

The ethnographies of this tradition took as problematic the social structure and functional integration of societies studied. Ethnographic accounts care for religion, kinship, economics, and political dynamics as all of import and related. Withal social anthropologists differed in the weighting given to each domain, every bit did the societies they studied. Significantly, those ethnographers who care for craft production as a significant feature tend to have worked in relatively complex societies. Among them, Nadel's account of the kingdom of Nupe (Nigeria) is pre-eminent for its detailed accounts of a number of craft industries, and the way these relate to the Nupe court. Each arts and crafts is discussed in terms of the access to raw materials, technical processes, the system of the division of labor within the workshop, authority and transmission of skills amidst craftsmen, pattern and fashions equally these relate to consumer need, and patronage past nobles and the court where this is relevant. Some crafts are 'open' in the sense that whatever man can learn past profitable a skilled worker (weaving, dewdrop making); others are 'airtight,' restricted to members of certain kin groups (blacksmiths, brass smiths). Arts and crafts skills are learned in informal apprenticeship. Closed crafts restrict apprenticeship to kin; this besides serves to keep ritual and secrete knowledge within the craft kindered (Nadel 1942). Miner's account of craft product in Timbuctoo in the same period is less detailed, only closely parallels that for Nupe (Miner 1965 [1953]). Slave production of food stuffs and cotton was important, especially in northern Nigeria, but does not appear to have been organized for craft product. However rural industry of the cottage craftsman kind in weaving and dyeing is documented effectually the city of Kano where certain villages were famous as centers of dyeing. The boondocks of Daboya played a similar role every bit a eye of dyeing in the precolonial textile industry of northern Ghana. (Run into as well capacity by Pokrant and past Goody, in Goody 1982.)

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Technology, Anthropology of

B. Pfaffenberger , in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

2.ane The Anthropology of Technology in France

French involvement in the anthropology of technology is attributed to Marcel Mauss'south pioneering work on the technology of the body (1973 [1935]) and, peculiarly, to the intellectual leadership and charisma of a social anthropologist, André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86). Leroi-Gourhan launched an interdisciplinary project in the 1950s to comprehend the human being technological adventure. This work has been far more influential than almost Anglophone scholars realize. In his work on the role of gesture and speech in human evolution, Leroi-Gourhan argued ( 1993 [1964]) that prehistoric tool use stems not from the 'noble fruit of our idea,' but rather from the development of the mitt. With the rima oris freed for new uses, humans developed the capacity to externalize and think what they learned in the grade of various modes of representation—including not but speech communication, which generates an externalized mythology, only besides 'gesture,' a parallel development that Leroi-Gourhan believed to be just equally expressive as speech. Speech generates mythology, while gesture, united with tools for create techniques, generates 'mythography,' externalized graphic representations with markedly different properties than the representations enabled by speech communication. By refusing to privilege voice communication, Leroi-Gourhan provided Derrida with the armament needed to launch the poststructuralist assail on 'phonocentrism,' the doctrine that speech is the source and inspiration for all forms of homo communication.

Another of Leroi-Gourhan's influential notions is the chaîne opératoire (Leroi-Gourhan 1943), a series of habitually learned steps or a 'recipe' for transforming a raw material into a finished artifact. Sketched out simply nascently in Leroi-Gourhan's work, this concept has been elaborated by French prehistorians and social anthropologists; they developed a series of powerful theoretical concepts that point to the interpenetration of the material and the social. For example, Pierre Lemonnier (1980) distinguishes betwixt the invariant components of a chaîne opératoire, those that cannot exist omitted without 'upsetting' the technical process, and the variant components; the latter represent adaptations to the underlying social system. In a wide-ranging study of chaînes opératoires in pottery, van der Leeuw (1993) asserts that the social inserts itself into material processes at the cognitive level—specifically, whether the vessel is fundamentally understood (for example) as a transformation of a sphere, cone, or cylinder. What has sometimes been lost in this literature, however, is a indicate of major significance that follows from Leroi-Gourhan'southward work on gesture and speech: if gesture is no less meaningful than speech, it follows that techniques themselves, and not just the material culture produced by techniques, are a major locus of meaning-formation in human club.

A recent feminist critique of the chaîne opératoire concept points the manner toward fulfilling the promise implicit in Leroi-Gourhan'due south piece of work. Dobres (1999) points out that androcentric biases—such as the belief that technology is virtually production, not reproduction—often lead observers to exclude activities involving women. Studies of the technical sequence involved in Iñupiat whale-hunting, for instance, depict a male-only picture, considering men and men solitary hunted whales on the open body of water. Nonetheless the Iñupiat helm will say, 'I am non the groovy hunter; my wife is.' When the chaîne opératoire is broadened sufficiently to include the pre-hunt and mail service-chase activities in which women figure prominently, one learns that the hunt's success is thought to depend on the wife's comportment before the hunt and her skill with her knife afterwards. Through these means the captain's wife calls forth the whale and makes information technology possible for the whalers to impale information technology.

Dobres' work shows that the anthropology of applied science should adopt a version of the 'principle of symmetry' in science studies. This principle holds that a sociological understanding of scientific discipline becomes possible only when explanations are no longer phrased in terms of the truth or falsity of scientific theories; 'truthful theories' and 'simulated theories' should be treated equally. In the anthropology of engineering science, the boundaries of a chaîne opératoire should non be determined past 'technicist' principles—that is, by the identifying sequences that 'really are engineering science considering they piece of work' every bit opposed to those that are 'merely symbolic.' At stake is the very possibility of an anthropological understanding of technical activity—that is, an understanding that is equally concerned with what techniques mean as with what they do.

Few studies of chaînes opératoires employ the principle of symmetry, but they strongly advise that technical activities are amid the most potent of the means past which people brand culture. What is more, they help to shed low-cal on central anthropological debates concerning how people make culture. For example, Munn's (1986) piece of work on Gawan canoe-making depicts the chaîne opératoire as a kind of moral theater in which 'good selves' and 'bad selves' are represented in such a way that people come up to empathise the 'blazon of moral disharmonize in which they are engaged.' Ridington (1999) shows how Athapaskans employ a flexible repertoire of techniques, non to conquer or control nature, but to reveal and establish bonds with a 'nature' that is understood to be filled with sentient beings. The picture of culture-making that emerges from these studies is consistent with the theory of exercise (habitus), which was originally formulated past Mauss (1973 [1935]), advanced by Leroi-Gourhan's chaînes opératoires concept, and brought to fruition by Bourdieu (1977): by engaging in the various habitual and nonconceptual skilled behaviors that are sequenced in a chaîne opératoire, people discover meanings, just merely by 'enacting them' and 'unfolding them in time' (Bourdieu 1977). Yet they practise not exercise so in a field of unbounded subjectivity.

What Munn found to exist true of Gawa, namely, that canoe-making takes place within a kind of moral theater in which it matters very much what type of people the participants become, seems to be generally true of nonmodern and modern techniques alike (Pfaffenberger 1999). Charlie Yahey puts the nonmodern Athapaskan perspective this way: 'Animals come up closer … to people who sing and trip the light fantastic together' (Ridington 1999). In modern technology, most of the significant technical innovations of personal computing—the graphical user interface, the mouse, the laser printer, and more—were inspired past Douglas Englebart'south fervent insistence that people need to deal more than finer with an increasingly complex world, and they could not do and then without graphical calculator systems capable of simulating complication on-screen. One could multiply examples ad infinitum, but it seems clear that personhood and engineering science are much more closely associated than near scholars suspect.

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Urban Ethnography

E. Anderson , in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

This article defines urban ethnography, summarizes its history, describes its methodology, and presents some of its future challenges. Urban ethnography is the close and systematic study of urban life and civilization, relying on first-hand observation and careful interviews with informants. Its roots can be traced to the early on British cultural and social anthropologists. A especially American variant emerged at the finish of the nineteenth century, nigh notably through the field piece of work of Jane Addams, W. E. B. DuBois, and Robert E. Park, who wrote in the involvement of social reform to inform the wider citizenry of the conditions of the urban poor. Such early efforts have left a rich legacy that has been preserved through the works of successive generations of urban ethnographers who, into the 20-offset century, work to understand, explain, and represent the increasingly complex urban environs.

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Principles of Contextual Inquiry

Karen Holtzblatt , Hugh Beyer , in Contextual Pattern (Second Edition), 2017

That is the basic thought, but nosotros find people are generally happy to have a little more guidance. What should yous practice at the user'south site? What should yous pay attention to? How do you run the interview? Unless you're trained as a social scientist or anthropologist, running a field interview tin be daunting. Contextual Pattern is structured so that product managers, engineers, user researchers, business analysts, and UX designers 1 —anyone on the product team—tin can exist function of collecting user data.

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The Wheel

Rex Hartson , Partha South. Pyla , in The UX Book, 2012

2.5 Meet the user interface team

Whatever you are, exist a adept one.

– Abraham Lincoln

One early stage action in all interactive software projects is building the UX squad. Someone, usually the project manager, must identify the necessary roles and match them up with bachelor individuals. Specially in pocket-sized projects, the different roles are non necessarily filled with different people; you just need to maintain the distinction and remember which office is involved in which context and discussion.

In addition to the software engineering roles, here we are mainly concerned with roles on the UX squad. Roles nosotros can envision include the post-obit:

▪

User researcher: involved with contextual inquiry and other work domain assay activities. You lot may also need other roles even more specialized, such as a social anthropologist to perform in-depth ethnographic field studies.

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Users, user representatives, customers, and subject matter experts: used as data sources in contextual inquiry and throughout the lifecycle.

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User interaction designer: involved with ideation and sketching, conceptual and detailed blueprint, and low-allegiance prototyping activities.

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UX analyst or evaluator: involved in planning and performing UX evaluations, analyzing UX problems, and suggesting redesign solutions.

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Visual/graphic designer: involved in designing look and experience and branding and helping interaction designers with visual aspects of designs.

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Technical writer: involved in documentation, help organization pattern, and language aspects of interaction designs.

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Interactive prototype programmer: involved in programming interactive loftier-fidelity UX design prototypes.

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UX manager: someone with overall responsibility for the UX process.

Some of these roles are shown with respect to the lifecycle activities in Figure 2-6.

Effigy 2-6. Example UX team roles in the context of the Wheel lifecycle template.

Ofttimes terms for team roles are used loosely and with overlap. For case, "UX engineer" or "UX practitioner" are grab-all terms for someone who does contextual analysis, blueprint, and evaluation on the UX side.

As a further consideration, in many projects, squad limerick is not static over the whole project. For example, people may come and get when their special talents are required, and it is not unusual for the team to get smaller well-nigh the end of the lifecycle. Often about the end of the version or release cycle, much of project squad gets reassigned and disappears and you lot get a possibly new and much smaller one, with a much shorter remaining lifecycle.

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