A Century of Feasting Studies Hayden, Brian; Villeneuve, Suzanne
Annual review of anthropology,
01/2011, Volume:
40, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The study of feasting has gradually emerged from early descriptions and bewilderment to more sophisticated attempts to understand the logic and reasons behind the often lavish displays. We chart the ...various models that have been, and still are, used by anthropologists and archaeologists to explain this unique human behavior. Acquiring prestige is a popular explanation used by ethnographers, while coping with social conflicts is commonly invoked by archaeologists. However, more practical benefits behind feasts have also been proposed, as well as experiential motivations. Whichever explanation is endorsed, there is widespread agreement that feasts play important roles in establishing social identities and memories, creating political power and inequalities, gender identities, accomplishing work, and developing prestige technologies, possibly including domesticates.
Using cross-cultural laboratory and field studies with samples of leaders, employees, and students from the United States and the People's Republic of China, we examined how team-level stimuli, ...including empowering leadership and relationship conflict, combine to influence individual members' motivational states of psychological empowerment and affective commitment. As predicted, we found that these motivational states are individually and jointly influenced by teams' level of empowering leadership and relationship conflict and that these motivational states mediate the relationships between team stimuli and team members' innovative and teamwork behaviors and turnover intentions. In addition, results held despite controlling for team members' nationality and collectivism. We discuss contributions of our study to the team motivation, conflict, and stress literatures.
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Vulnerability assessments have suggested that many coastal cities are prone to the impacts of flooding induced by sea level rise. This paper aims to understand the dynamics of flood adaptation in Ho ...Chi Minh City, which has been dealing with such issues for years due to its topography and ongoing urbanization-induced land subsidence. The results suggest that adaptation is reactive to the flooding – creating inconvenience to people's lives and focusing on a hard measures approach. Despite the high exposure to increased risks in the future, a large proportion of the population surveyed is unaware of sea-level rise and land subsidence in the area. Social conflicts regarding the interaction between formal and informal adaptation suggest the decoupling of the process at different levels and a lack of communication between the government and local communities. This case study, showing examples of reactive and decoupled formal and informal adaptation, can provide insights and lessons for vulnerable coastal cities elsewhere on the planet on how to adapt to sea level rise.
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•Current adaptation in Ho Chi Minh City is reactive to flooding and decoupled at different levels.•Despite the high exposure, a large portion of the vulnerable communities are unaware of future flood risk.•Social conflicts happened in the adaptation process suggest a lack of effective communication between stakeholders.
The Brazilian scientific community and non-governmental groups have been working to establish forest restoration programs, compensating for deforestation and mitigating losses from biodiversity and ...ecosystem services. In contrast, the previous Brazilian government moved in an opposite direction, revoking legal acts and providing scope for the rural producers to sustain non-compliance activities according to the legal regulations. Among rural producers, there is a recognized conflict between agricultural production and forest restoration programs, which results in a chaotic condition where the implementation of the environmental laws is impaired. In this context, restoration projects are often practiced without effective integrated territorial planning. This scenario challenges the success of large-scale restoration programs. The Brazilian government needs to effectively adopt sound guidelines already suggested to promote a genuine state of governance, fostering restoration programs, and moving the country's development towards an ecologically planned environment.
•Landowners hamper forest restoration programs instituted by the Brazilian Government.•Forest restoration is not voluntarily practiced in Brazil.•Restoration initiatives have been practiced without effective territorial planning.•By relaxing the environmental laws the previous government fostered non-compliance.•Bringing science and society together is crucial to ensure effective policy outcomes.
Consultancy is a phenomenon frequently referred to in the accounting literature. However, few studies have more intensively dealt with what consultancy activities and reports may mean in terms of ...stabilising accounting systems. In this article we provide detailed processual descriptions and characterizations of how consultancy outputs participate in the co-production of larger accounting systems in the public sector. From two case studies we demonstrate how consultancy companies become hired by change proponents to purify, i.e. how consultants can work to provide ‘faith’ to accounting systems and to settle controversies with sceptical and resisting groups that threaten to destabilize the innovations. By using Actor-Network Theory we demonstrate how consultancy outputs like consultancy project reports, seminars, briefings and the like are part of practices to cultivate social conflict. The article explains the forms of purification, their conditions and consequences and how they can be successful to stabilize accounting technologies.
Inclusive victim beliefs (i.e., perceived similarity with other victim groups worldwide) can have positive effects on intergroup relations. However, there may be limitations to these seemingly ...constructive construals. We investigated in the Northern Irish context whether inclusive victimhood might sometimes also act as an obstacle to intergroup reconciliation. In Study 1, we found that inclusive victimhood can go along with either high or low competitive victimhood and, in turn, with lesser versus greater willingness for reconciliation, respectively. In Study 2, we asked participants which groups they thought about when responding to inclusive victimhood items, coding whether answers suggested a universal or a selective inclusivity. This type of inclusivity moderated the relationships between inclusive victimhood and readiness for reconciliation: Inclusive victimhood correlated positively with intergroup forgiveness when based on a universal notion of inclusivity, and tended to correlate positively with competitive victimhood when based on a selective notion of inclusivity. These results extend the emerging literature on collective victim beliefs and suggest that expressing shared victimization with other groups may be used strategically to strengthen the ingroup's position in an intergroup conflict, which might act as an obstacle to intergroup reconciliation.
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Kashima underlines the importance of considering religion as a major contemporary cultural source of intergroup conflict around the world. In this commentary, I first examine theory and psychological ...research either discrediting or crediting religion per se, including fundamentalism, as being a cultural cause of intergroup conflict and violence. The evidence is in favor of the latter. Second, I propose a model of cultural psychological diversity of religious fundamentalism, across monotheistic religions and denominations. I finally argue, following Kashima’s global perspective on the person-culture-nature interactions, that cultural differences in religious fundamentalism may be understood as reflections of longtime interactions between natural and cultural environments and human animals, which, by creating religious (sub)cultures, rebuild, even if frequently with negative consequences, their ecological niches.
Since the liberalisation of its investment regime in the 1990s, Argentina has seen a rise in foreign direct investment into large-scale exploration and exploitation of mineral resources. However, ...many social groups (local communities, grassroots movement and the church) often strongly oppose new mining projects on the grounds of environmental, ethical and economic concerns. In a situation marked by widespread conflict, mining companies continue operating and develop Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives which are often promoted as a means of contributing to the sustainability and development of the nation. The paper develops a framework to highlight how the principles of stakeholder theory could be used as conceptual and practical guidance for conflict-resolution oriented CSR policies. The framework is further used to analyse two case studies of conflictive mining projects in Argentina. The paper explores how key stakeholders perceive contribution of CSR to welfare and the socio-economic development of mining communities and sustainable development of the nation. It demonstrates that institutional and social stakeholder networks often strongly oppose the idea of voluntary self-regulation implied by CSR in situations characterised by weak governance. Even though the CSR of companies could be improved in areas of corporate communication, transparency, stakeholder engagement and dialogue, it is not seen as a panacea for the social conflicts in the sector.
► CSR policies are not effective in reducing conflict in the Argentine mining sector. ► The study reveals three types of CSR policies: ethical, developmental and distributional. ► Developmental CSR brings a positive element of competition in welfare distribution. ► Social stakeholders assess motivation, implementation and performance of CSR activities. ► For social stakeholders, companies are responsible for the environment and community welfare.
Intellectual humility (IH) is often conceived as the recognition of, and appropriate response to, your own intellectual limitations. As far as we are aware, only a handful of studies look at ...interventions to increase IH – e.g. through journalling – and no study so far explores the extent to which having high or low IH can be predicted. This paper uses machine learning and natural language processing techniques to develop a predictive model for IH and identify top terms and features that indicate degrees of IH. We trained our classifier on the dataset from an existing psychological study on IH, where participants were asked to journal their experiences with handling social conflicts over 30 days. We used Logistic Regression (LR) to train a classifier and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionaries for feature selection, picking out a range of word categories relevant to interpersonal relationships. Our results show that people who differ on IH do in fact systematically express themselves in different ways, including through expression of emotions (i.e., positive, negative, and specifically anger, anxiety, sadness, as well as the use of swear words), use of pronouns (i.e., first person, second person, and third person) and time orientation (i.e., past, present, and future tenses). We discuss the importance of these findings for IH and the value of using such techniques for similar psychological studies, as well as some ethical concerns and limitations with the use of such semi-automated classifications.
•An Intellectual Humility (IH) classifier can be trained based on expert coding.•Computerized analysis of IH can be validated by domain experts.•A machine learning classifier corroborates findings in IH literature.•Negative emotions correlate with low IH and writing in past tense with high IH.•A machine learning classifier can highlight new features for further research on IH.
The state of Pará in the Brazilian Amazon is recognized both nationally and internationally for its land conflicts throughout history. Agricultural modernization and the expansion of the agricultural ...frontier, especially with regard to soybean production, did not significantly alter Pará’s record of conflict and violence. Instead, new actors involved in agro-strategies and the Amazonian agribusiness economy have experienced new land disputes, new forms of land concentration, and conflicts with indigenous tribes, Maroon communities and peasants’ groups in the Santarém region, the most important urban and rural centre of Western Pará, in the heartland of Brazilian Amazon. This article examines relations between the arrival and expansion of soybean plantations, particularly in post-2001, as part of regional agro-strategies that have perpetuated and deepened long-standing conflicts over land in the state of Pará. It also highlights the emergence of new territorial disputes, which have created additional obstacles, increasing the demand for land and raising land prices while impacting processes by which land and territorial rights are secured in the state of Pará.
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