Anthropology

The original pinpointing sheets, 2/3rds prepared by Murdock and 1/3rd by White, are printed here in the same font as they were originally typescript, with only minor spelling corrections. Only the first 113 pinpointing sheets were published in 1988 (World Cultures 4#4).

In inaugurating the Structure and Dynamics journal, we offer a conduit for refereed electronic publication, debate, and editorial communication in the domain of anthropology and human sciences. We as editors dedicate our effort to facilitating and disseminating interdisciplinary discussion and research in anthropology and related sciences. We invite you—as a subscribed reader at no cost—to contribute and to participate in raising the aspirations of the human sciences today.

We institute here a policy of occasionally publishing noteworthy PhD dissertations that advance anthropology or related sciences. Such publications are to be copy edited by the dissertation author, nominated by the author's PhD committee, and must receive unqualified support in our review process of at least two assigned referees, as well as by the editors of Structure and Dynamics.

Given data on supplier chains in a Tokyo industrial district, we show how network structures such as monopsony (uniqueness of buyers) may affect noncompetitive pricing. To address the distribution of these biases we show how two types of emergent roles in hierarchically organized production chains affect noncompetitive price diffusion both horizontally and vertically in the industrial hierarchy. More concretely our model addresses such questions as how it is that, as in the case of this specific industrial hierarchy, processing activities and parts and components manufacturing organized by the “elite” buyers for the top manufacturers, while executed by numerous smaller enterprises lower in Ohta hierarchy, leave so many low-level suppliers subject to monopsony. Monopsony and monopoly (and to a lesser extent, duopoly and duopsony) are structures that may severely reduce profit margins. We use two complementary frameworks to pose and address such questions. One is network economics where monopsony and duopsony and their potential effects on pricing are well defined, like those of monopoly and duopoly. The other is network sociology, where we can define more fundamental concepts of the network construction of social and economic processes and institutions and the effects of network structure in transactional situations. We regard both frameworks as necessary to modeling elements of global and regional economies.

This review presents studies in various world regions. Each uses network analysis software designed explicitly for kinship studies with explicit network measures of cohesion. It presents evidence of fundamental differences in the forms of marital cohesion that show profoundly different effects over a wide range of social phenomena, regional scales, and diverse cultures. Social cohesion is the basis of mutuality, cooperation and well-being in human societies (Council of Europe, 2009). It includes the modes by which people are assimilated into societies, how groups hold power, stratify social relations, and manage the flow of resources. Kinship networks in the civil societies of nation-states, in contrast to smaller-scale societies, are far too rarely studied as a basis of social cohesion. Networks, the social tissues of our lives, are only partially visible to us; thus we fail to see how these are wrapped and embedded in larger networks. Thus the importance, as emphasized here, of an explicit science of social network analysis for kinship studies both at local and larger scales. The analyses of cohesive subsets show how constructions of social class, ethnicity, migration, inheritance, social movements, and other large- as well as small-scale social phenomena are implicated in kinship networks.

The Structure and Dynamics eJournal offers a conduit for refereed electronic publication, debate, and editorial communication in the domain of anthropology and human sciences. We invite you—as an open access reader at no cost, an author at no cost, or a volunteer, to submit book reviews or commentary—to contribute and to participate in raising the aspirations of the human sciences today. To submit an article, follow the link to “Submission guidelines.” To submit a review simply click Submit a “Reader's Comment” at the article site.

We comment here on the contents and success of the first two issues. Full-text downloads of the eJournal articles numbered 5,313 in the 11 months since September 23, 2005, now averaging 16-17 a day. This reflects positively on quality of the articles, made possible in turn by the high quality and incisiveness of reviews, the number and diversity of reviewers who have responded, and selection for quality in article acceptance and reviewers (and we thank our reviewers for their efforts at timely review).

In just two issues, the eJournal has come a long way in attaining the goals set out for it as a publication in which scholarship and debate can be engaged in contemporary fields of research, one that provides a venue for the study of the complex interplay between dynamics and structure, and gives an outlet for methods and results which speak to the issues of simplicity in complexity and the study of structure and dynamics. It has also facilitated presentations of new forms of analysis and visualization, new forums for debate and new vehicles for the dissemination and absorption of work at the cutting edges of the human sciences.

Authors of issue 1#1 have had feedback and good reception. Peter Turchin’s findings on historical dynamics have been replicated, for example, using data covering a 700-year period from archaeological research in the Southwest. The replication study is in press in the journal Complexity. Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory, cites Turchin’s article in issue 1#1. Several of the issue 1#1 articles are now reviewed in blogs and on-line commentaries, digests, or reference lists, many with timely google citations. Links to them are starting to appear on educational sites at which students have direct access to download and on-line readership. Issue 1#1 marked our first use of high-quality color imagery and live url links. Krempel and Schnegg’s paper explained our journal’s dynamic-gif logo in their “About the Image: Diffusion Dynamics in an Historical Network,” which also allows the reader to link to the authors’ longer 1998 study and its on-line imagery. That article, “Exposure, Networks and Mobilization: The Petition Movement during the 1848/49 Revolution in a German Town,” published at http://www.mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de/~lk/netvis/exposure, provides further background and examples for the innovative use of dynamic graphics.

Summing up our current issue, 1#2, and to give readers an idea of the unusual and unique features of electronic publication, we review the advantages and evolution of our permanent, paper-quality, refereed eJournal publications. Along with our use of live url links and imagery on-line, these advantages are facilitated by our UC eScholarship publisher.

In 1#2, Sean Downey provides a fascinating study that interrogates ethnographic and historical texts with the aid of simulation. He uses his approach to analyze the ethnographic/historical theory put forward by noted author Paul Willis in Learning to Labor, secondarily to show strengths and weaknesses of contemporary social theories such as those of Tony Giddens (1984) and, finally, also to identify the descriptive lacunae that limit this genre of simulation. As an invaluable gift to students and instructors (he is himself a graduate student), he supplies on-line the code for the simulation and, as a free resource, access to the simulation software package itself.

Christiansen and Altaweel’s “Understanding Ancient Societies,” subtitled “A New Approach Using Agent-Based Holistic Modeling,” describes their Argonne National Labs holistic agent-based simulation framework that couples with incredible depth to the real-world information that can be brought into simulation and modeling from the earth sciences, satellite imagery, climate modeling, the agricultural sciences, ethnography, network analysis, and a host of other areas. Focusing on the development of their model for addressing research questions about Mesopotamia, they explain and illustrate the general-purpose simulation framework. Their work offers a productive complementarity to Algaze’s lead article in our first issue, where he poses a series of questions, hypotheses, and possible lines of evidence with which to explore the processes that lead to the first cities’ takeoff.

Wouter de Nooy’s study of the networks and the structural dynamics of folktale plots, tested as well against literary interactions through time among Dutch literary critics, uses network analysis software described in his coauthored book with the software authors (de Nooy, Batagelj, and Mrvar 2005). He gives us the first-ever published SVG image produced by Pajek network software with interactivity within the SVG image itself (now available from the Pajek freeware authors at http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek/). The SVG image is not simply static but directly accessible, thanks to live links inside our eScholarship pdfs, as an interactive graphic that the reader can explore for different views of the data.

Wilkinson and Tsirel evaluate limit cycles in Indic regional political polarities—how many polities in each ten year interval, coded from a comprehensive database—over two millennia. They begin with the simplest of models of temporal dynamics and historical limit cycles and proceed to evaluate at each step those of increasing complexity. The visual scanability of their multicolor graphical results helps to give the reader an ability to judge visually the contribution of different kinds of statistical analyses to understanding the complexity of the data and, in turn, the plausibility of different historical processes and explanations.

Seary, Richards, McKeown-Eyssen, and Baines, in their “Networks of Symptoms and Exposures,” provide an innovation that makes possible a better comprehension of statistical interactions in complex phenomena by enabling the reader to recognize linkages within complex data such as those in the field of medicine. The visual imagery of their 3-dimensional interactive “panigram” images, named from the Greek panis (“sail”), provides a generalization of simpler histograms that, by analogy, would be composed by an ordering of the one-dimensional heights of the ship’s masts. The 3-D panigrams form an analog of planar sails rotatable about masts that represent the spines of the data structure. Co-authoring with professionals in the medical field, they use these images to look at the interrelations of people, their exposures to disease, and how symptoms are jointly distributed across both.

Berkowitz, with his collaborators Woodward and Woodward, draws on his scholarship about the role of family and informal institutions in historical world economies to write of venerable and legal networks of exchange that have operated for millennia and yet that make it impossible to trace financial transactions through the modern computerized credit banking systems. His scholarship, interrupted by untimely death in 2003, is honored in this issue.

Palmer, Steadman, and Coe, in “More Kin: An Effect of the Tradition of Marriage,” utilize genealogical graphics, a mathematical model of networks and demography, and analysis of the relation between biology and culture to reopen important questions about the role of human kinship systems in human evolution, considered both in terms of networks and cognition. Their results for numbers of kin at various distances in bilateral kinship networks, depending both on demography and issues of social recognition, are cited in the article by Moody.

James Moody’s “Fighting a Hydra: A Note on the Network Embeddedness of the War on Terror,” shares in common with Berkowitz et al.’s article a concern for misunderstandings that prompted and have emerged out of the War on Terror. Moody writes of the effects of misguided policies, such as described in the recent best seller by Thomas Ricks (2006), that fail to take into account the “blowback” consequences of the killing, wounding, and arresting of civilians and the torture of suspected insurgents. He considers as well the effects of the wounding and deaths of soldiers, recruited into such wars, on those in their home communities, families and social networks. His on-line innovation is to provide students and the reader with a calculator for the network scale-up model of Killworth et al. (1998) to estimate the number of people who know somebody in an “event,” such as those killed in the war. “Since the values needed to make these estimates are rapidly changing and somewhat subjective, users can test the effect of different assumptions with this calculator,” as noted within the calculator itself. In our review, we highlight the general properties of the scale-up model, of which we shall see more in future articles.

This issue of the California Journal of Politics and Policy is produced in collaboration with the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah.Drawing on the expertise of political scientists, economists, and practitioners from 13 west-ern states, the reports summarize each state’s budget for the 2017‒2018 fiscal year. These reports delve into how the states’ financial well-being affected legislation and just as importantly how legislation affected the states’ financial well-being.While most states seem to be financially sound, if not thriving, each report highlights possi-ble threats in the coming years, whether they be political, economic, or natural concerns. One theme across this year’s budget reports is how the 2016 election of President Donald Trump has affected legislation and fiscal health of the states. A second theme in the budget papers is the need to plan for the next recession.

Introduction to a special issue on teaching migration.

One of the universal features of human sociality is the fact that our social networks are highly integrated – human societies exhibit several nested social layers including families, bands and communities. Several factors have been identified as creating disincentives for hostile intergroup relations, including economic interdependence (trade), intermarriage (exogamy), cooperative defence against external adversaries (warfare), and lack of patrilocal residential groups (absence of patrilocality with external war). We provide a preliminary test of hypotheses relating to the correlates of amicable relations between communities (i.e. absence of internal war) using the standard cross-cultural sample (SCCS) database. Intermarriage did not have any explanatory power, there is a nearly significant effect of trade on the establishment of intergroup tolerance, and the evidential basis for cooperative defence and patrilocal residence are strong when combed into a multiplicative effect. This analysis is complemented with an exploration of the evolutionary factors underlying elementary forms of meta-group organization in non-human primates.

This article discusses the construction and uses of databases in comparative research.