Posts Tagged ‘anthropology’
“The solution to poverty is to abolish it directly”*…
The idea of a guaranteed flow of funds to allow anyone and everyone to meet basic needs– as we’re currently discussing it, a universal basic income– has been getting significant attention in recent decades. But as Karl Widerquist explains (in an excerpt from his recent book, Universal Basic Income). “UBI” dates back as a concept– and as a practice– many centuries…
Support for Universal Basic Income (UBI) has grown so rapidly over the past few years that people might think the idea appeared out of nowhere. In fact, the idea has roots going back hundreds or even thousands of years, and activists have been floating similar ideas with gradually increasing frequency for more than a century.
Since 1900, the concept of a basic income guarantee (BIG) has experienced three distinct waves of support, each larger than the last. The first, from 1910 to 1940, was followed by a down period in the 1940s and 1950s. A second and larger wave of support happened in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by another lull in most countries through about 2010. BIG’s third, most international, and by far largest wave of support began to take off in the early 2010s, and it has increased every year since then.
[But] We could trace the beginnings of UBI into prehistory, because many have observed that “prehistoric” (in the sense of nonliterate) societies had two ways of doing things that might be considered forms of unconditional income…
From pre-historic nomads, through ancient Athens, to Thomas Paine and then Henry George, Widerquist unspools the history of UBI, then walks through the “three waves” that began in the early 20th century, concluding with the current state of the debate: “The Deep and Enduring History of Universal Basic Income,” from @KarlWiderquist and @mitpress.
For more on the recent history of the UBI debate, see Widerquist’s essay, “Three Waves of Basic Income Support.”
And for a peak at the results of (small, incomplete, but encouraging) experiments in this direction, see: “Places across the U.S. are testing no-strings cash as part of the social safety net,” from @NPR.
* Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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As we ponder poverty, we might send thoughtful birthday greeting to James Tobin; he was born on this date in 1918. An economist who contributed to the development of key ideas in the Keynesian economics of his generation, he made pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy, and financial markets– for which he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1981.
Outside academia, Tobin is probably best known for his suggestion of a tax on foreign exchange transactions, now known as the “Tobin tax,” designed to reduce speculation in the international currency markets, which he saw as dangerous and unproductive.
And relevantly to the piece above, Tobin, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith and another 1,200 economists signed a document in 1968 calling for the U. S. Congress to introduce that year a system of income guarantees and supplements– a UBI.
“Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.”*…
Kurt Vonnegut took an early interest in what he considered the fundamental “shapes” of stories…
Stories have very simple shapes, ones that computers can understand.
This was the basic idea behind the master’s thesis that Kurt Vonnegut submitted to the anthropology department at the University of Chicago. It was rejected, however, “because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Vonnegut said…
“Kurt Vonnegut on the 8 ‘shapes’ of stories“
He never abandoned the idea. Years later, in a 2004 lecture at Case Western University, he shared his theory– a recording of which has washed around the internet ever sense…
Now, a group of academics have used AI to analyze hundreds of published stories, and have confirmed Vonnegut’s contention (sort of: he argued for 8 “shapes”; they found 6), as they explain in the abstract of their paper…
Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study a culture’s evolution through its texts using a ‘big data’ lens. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories and forming patterns that are meaningful to us. Here, by classifying the emotional arcs for a filtered subset of 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection, we find a set of six core emotional arcs which form the essential building blocks of complex emotional trajectories. We strengthen our findings by separately applying matrix decomposition, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning. For each of these six core emotional arcs, we examine the closest characteristic stories in publication today and find that particular emotional arcs enjoy greater success, as measured by downloads…
“The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes” (where you can read/download the full paper).
* Kurt Vonnegut
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As we agnize archetypes, we might spare a thought for a master of the entertaining tale, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (or as he’s better known by his stage name, Molière); he died on this date in 1673. A playwright, actor, and poet, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in world history, and possibly the greatest writer in French history. His extant works include comedies, farces, tragicomedies, comédie-ballets, and more. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed at the Comédie-Française more often than those of any other playwright today. His influence is such that the French language is often referred to as the “language of Molière.”
“Nations, as well as men, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years.”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post: assumptions in the developed West were that, as economic development progressed around the world, rising countries would become more liberal– just like us (or, at least just like the expert’s image of “us”). Similarly, there was an expectation by many that, as the U.S. and Europe continued to develop, their cultures and politics might become more homogenous. Alice Evans has a theory as to why that hasn’t happened…
In the West economic development spawned individualism and the spirit of ‘68. Modernisation theorists predicted that growth would deliver liberalism worldwide. Inglehart and Welzel argued that post-industrial societies would champion self-expression. But in fact, this has not transpired. Many prosperous places – like Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and South Korea – remain quite conservative. India’s economic growth has not delivered secularism, but Hindu nationalism.
What explains this global cultural divergence?
I have a theory:
- Cultural change occurs when bold rebels stick their necks out, champion some radical alternative, and successfully encourage wider defiance.
- In close-knit, collectivist societies, people care intensely about wider social approval, and tend to follow the herd. This suppresses individualism.
- Cultural tightness is much higher in societies where:
- Agriculture was extremely labour-intensive and required strong inter-dependence (e.g. rice or Andean potatoes), and/or
- Intensive kinship meant that commerce, cooperation and marriages were all rooted in a close-knit, endogamous community (tribe, clan or jati);
- Authoritarian governance represses dissent and reinforces despondency.
- In culturally tight societies (with labour-intensive agriculture or strong kinship intensity), then even as families grow richer, they still care for social approval. This suppresses individual resistance.
…
If you walk outside and do something weird, will anyone mind? India’s panchayats would certainly express disapproval and punish deviation. Such cultures are ‘tight’. The rules are known, conformity is widespread and subversion is abhorred. But head to São Paulo and no one will care. ‘Loose’ cultures like these are relatively tolerant and open-minded. There’s plenty of scope for self-expression.
Professor Michele Gelfand and co-authors’ international survey (spanning 33 countries across 5 continents) reveals a spectrum of ‘tight and loose cultures. People in tight cultures show greater self-control, conscientiousness, less littering, lower crime, more synchrony, stronger prejudice against outsiders, low immigration, low ethnic diversity, and more restrictions on public speech. Loose cultures are typically more open, tolerant, creative and over-weight.
Neither extreme is superior, these are just descriptively different cultures.
Within the US, there’s great cultural heterogeneity. Southern states have far higher rates of corporal punishment, executions and alcohol restrictions. In Texas in 2011, 28,000 school students were paddled or spanked. Alabama still criminalises the sale of sex toys. Tight states like these strongly opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.
Norm adherence isn’t just a function of self-regulation. Gelfand also emphasises institutions. Tight cultures tend to have more police per capita and security personnel. In Singapore, there are harsh punishments for littering, drug possession and even importing chewing gum. In some Chinese classrooms, webcams broadcast children’s behaviour, relaying footage to parents and school officials.
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Our ancestors used to farm a rich variety of crops. Some were very labour intensive, requiring neighbourly cooperation.
A phenomenal new paper by Martin Fiszbein, Yeonha Jung and Dietrich Vollrath finds that in U.S. counties with labour-intensive crops, parents were more likely to give their children names that were common. This may indicate a desire for conformity. By contrast, in areas where farmers could be more self-sufficient, they chose names that were more individualistic. And when exogenous shifts propelled farmers into economic autonomy, they became even more self-expressive… Crops in the U.S. South were exceptionally labour intensive.
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Economic interdependence seems to breed cultural conformity and collectivism. These are both examples of what Michele Gelfand calls ‘cultural tightness’. People in tight cultures show more synchrony, stronger prejudice against outsiders and more restrictions on public speech. Outraged by deviants, they tend to impose harsh punishments…
Fiszbein et al do not consider cultural tightness, but it does seem correlated with 19th century labour intensity [as one can see in comparing this map to the one above].
Globally, cultural tightness seems more common in places where farming was once extremely labour intensive and necessarily interdependent. Wet paddy rice required immense coordination. Thomas Talhelm argues that this encouraged East Asian collectivism. Students from rice-growing regions contribute more to public goods and harshly punish free-riders.
I was initially sceptical of the rice theory of culture. What about Confucianism and institutions? Fiszbein et al’s paper enables us to disentangle the two. Even under totally different, American institutions, agrarian interdependence nurtures conformity.
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Strong kinship intensity keeps commerce and cooperation rooted around the family. This enables strong social policing and concern for wider approval.
Arabs continue to rely on wasta. Social connections are necessary to access jobs, secure permits, avoid trickery, and resolve conflicts. Even middle-class, professional Jordanians acquire social insurance from kin. Loyalty is also culturally esteemed: girls are encouraged to put family first, above narrow self-interest.
Caste remains imperative in India. Cities (especially the smaller ones) are rife with caste-based residential segregation. People remain dependent on close-knit networks, which maintain strict surveillance (messaging via Whatsapp)…
…
My theory can be tested empirically!
I predict that economic growth will foster more cultural liberalisation in societies
- historically reliant on crops with low labour intensity
- with weak kinship intensity.
Data-wise, I would recommend using the World Values Survey composite score of emancipative values over the past 15 years…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Why are some Rich Societies Conservative?” from @_alice_evans.
{Image at top: source]
* Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (in which he also relevantly observed: “I know of only two methods of establishing equality in the political world; every citizen must be put in possession of his rights, or rights must be granted to no one.”)
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As we contemplate culture, we might recall that it was on this date in 1890 that journalist Nellie Bly completed her 72-day trip around the world.
In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, with two days’ notice, she boarded the steamer Augusta Victoria, and began her 24,899-mile journey.
She brought with her the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several changes of underwear, and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry essentials. She carried most of her money (£200 in English bank notes and gold, as well as some American currency) in a bag tied around her neck.
Bly traveled through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. Just over seventy-two days after her departure from Hoboken, having used steamships and existing railway lines, Bly was back in New York; she beat Phileas Fogg’s time by almost 8 days.
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it”*…
Scholars now argue that early nomadic empires were the architects of modernity. But, Manvir Singh asks, do we have the right measure of their success?…
[Last] September, Pope Francis became the first leader of the Catholic Church ever to visit Mongolia. It must have been a humbling stopover. The country has fewer than fifteen hundred Catholics. The welcoming ceremony, in Ulaanbaatar’s main square, attracted a few hundred spectators—a crowd less than a thousandth the size of one that had gathered to see him in Lisbon a month earlier. One of the attendees had come out to do his morning Tai Chi and unknowingly ended up at the event…
Not everyone understood why the Pontiff was there. A caterer at a banquet for the Vatican entourage asked a Times reporter, “What are Catholics again?” But the Pope came prepared. Speaking to diplomats, cultural leaders, and the Mongolian President, he celebrated the religious freedom protected under the Mongol Empire during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—“the remarkable ability of your ancestors to acknowledge the outstanding qualities of the peoples present in its immense territory and to put those qualities at the service of a common development.” He also celebrated “the Pax Mongolica,” the period of Mongol-enforced stability across Eurasia, citing its “absence of conflicts” and respect “of international laws.”
Many earlier Christians would have been staggered by Francis’s words…
[Singh recounts the long Christian– and Muslim– tradition of seeing the “Mogol Horde” as blood-thirsty savages…]
But Pope Francis was far from alone in challenging the old tropes. “We have too readily accepted the stereotype of supremely violent Mongols who conquered much of Eurasia with stunning ease,” Marie Favereau writes in “The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World” (Harvard). Her work joins other recent volumes—Kenneth W. Harl’s “Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization” (Hanover Square), Anthony Sattin’s “Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World” (Norton), and Nicholas Morton’s “The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East” (Basic)—in a decades-long effort to overhaul narratives about the barbarity of the nomad, and especially Mongols. These works advance a kind of steppe restoration. Instead of blood-drunk man-beasts, we meet crafty administrators who supported debate, commerce, and religious freedom. Yes, they overran cities, but state formation often demanded it. And, yes, they enslaved, but so did lots of societies, and many were much crueler.
The steppe restoration typifies what historians call the global turn, a larger project of shifting histories away from nation-states and colonialist defamation and toward the peoples and processes that have knotted us together. It’s a survey of shadows, a tracing of negative space. It focusses on peoples who, in Sattin’s words, “have long been confined to the anecdotes and afterthoughts of our writers and histories.” These are some of the most maligned groups in historical chronicles: the uncivilized; the barbarians at the gate; the tribes who seem to appear from some demonic portal, destroy everything in sight, and then recede back into darkness. The steppe restoration repositions them. It treats them as subjects in their own right—as peoples who have their own histories, who formed societies no less complex than the sedentary states they confronted, and who helped craft the world we inhabit.
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The idea that the Mongols were the architects of modernity is a mainstay of the new scholarship. Sattin presents an argument similar to Harl’s, adding the compass to the list of innovations sent westward, although he acknowledges that other nomads, such as the Arabs, helped deliver them to Europeans. Both authors are able to draw upon such earlier work as the anthropologist Jack Weatherford’s “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World” (2004), a charming, poetic, and laudatory introduction to the Mongols that, more than any other book, helped advance the steppe restoration.
All these chroniclers tell a similar story of the Mongols’ ascent. A modest, resourceful, and sometimes ruthless hunter-nomad named Temujin, having been abandoned by his clan as a nine-year-old, united the tribes of the eastern steppes for the first time in four centuries. In 1206, at a gathering of steppe leaders, he was bequeathed the title Chinggis Khan, which means something like “fierce” or “oceanic” ruler. (The English “Genghis” comes from translations of Persian sources.) In the next two decades, he and his followers became the first to bring under one dominion the lands between the Caspian Sea and the Pacific Ocean, an area nearly as wide as the steppe itself.
After his death, in 1227, Genghis Khan’s domain continued to swell until it covered some twenty per cent of the world’s landmass, from Syria to Korea. In the east, his son Ogedei subdued northern China. When Kublai Khan, Genghis’ grandson, overtook the south, he unified the country and founded the Yuan dynasty…
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The steppe restoration shows the strengths—and the limitations—of the resplendent new discipline of “global history.” Often said to have begun around the start of the twenty-first century, this approach emerged amid the excitement of a commerce-connected, borderless world. In 2005, Thomas Friedman published his treatise of globalization, “The World Is Flat.” The next year, three academics started The Journal of Global History. Writing in the first issue, the British historian Patrick O’Brien declared that global history aimed to leave behind “the arrogance of Rome” as well as “the scientific and technological triumphalism of the West.” Rather than building stories around the greatness of Europe (or of the Caliphate, or Confucianism), he advocated for a study of “connexions” and “comparisons” that would also spotlight “the manifold achievements of more peoples, communities, and cultures over long spans of human history.”
The emerging discipline had to overcome centuries of historiographic hubris. Writing about other peoples has long been in service of self-glorification…
[Singh traces the habit from Herodotus through colonial/imperial histories to the more modern likes of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” (1997), Niall Ferguson’s “Civilization: The West and the Rest” (2011), and Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s “Why Nations Fail” (2012), and Ian Morris’s “Why the West Rules—for Now.”]
Global history was supposed to transcend all such forms of parochialism, and this goal, at first, seems realized in the steppe restoration. The nomads, we are told, created cities, enforced peace, and guaranteed religious freedom. They encouraged trade and cultural interaction, recombining ideas, peoples, and technologies—with world-shaking consequences.
Yet a paradox runs through these books. Steppe peoples are most noteworthy, they seem to assure us, when they look like rich, settled societies. They have a role in “world history” insofar as they affect the rise and fall of sedentary, often European, polities. And so the steppe restoration ends up affirming the standards it set out to challenge.
Consider how historical significance is determined. Scholars routinely scoff at Hegel’s comment that history ended in the West, and yet the steppe restoration shows just how ingrained the notion remains…
The new global history has eagerly set out to establish that steppe nomads displayed key features of classic civilizations and liberal democracies—writing, urbanization, and apparently progressive values. But as long as these advances are considered signs of sophistication, nomads will come up short…
Global history’s professed aim of decentering world history requires a more sophisticated grasp of what sophistication looks like. In the case of nomadic societies, we need to shift our orientation from the static to the flexible, from social complexity embodied in brick and bureaucracies to something that dwells within networks: an ever-responsive capacity for large-scale collective action. What made nomads impressive, after all, is what made them unique. They lived in enormous, travelling societies. They subsumed diverse ethnic groups and could mobilize for war almost instantly. They overran the empires at their borders and ruled over them, sometimes for generations. Mongol organization reached its pinnacle in those hordes—self-sufficient, mobile units that contained as many as a hundred thousand people and that transported homes, statues, workshops, palaces, and supply lines. Through settled eyes, we might call these “moving cities,” yet the phrase misses their almost aqueous nature, their ability to restructure around births, departures, and political scuffles.
Historians have worked to show that, in Sattin’s words, “the nomad story is neither less wonderful nor less significant than ours.” But we’ll still be treating ourselves as the measure of everything unless we learn to revise our sense of significance. This may be the greatest gift a more global history offers us: greatness redefined…
The discipline of “global history,” shifting history away from nation-states toward trans-regional processes, was meant to leave behind the ethnocentrism of what had preceded it. The new steppe scholarship shows how tricky a task that is: “The Mongol Hordes: They’re Just Like Us,” from @mnvrsngh in @NewYorker.
* Oscar Wilde
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As we rethink the rudiments, we might recall that it was on this date in 27 BCE that Gaius Julius Caesar (born Gaius Octavius) was given the added honorific “Augustus” and became the first Roman Emperor.
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“I would drive on streets that were one-way and think, ‘Why are they all honking at me?'”*…
Lachan Summers decodes the “language” of Mexico City’s streets…
Anyone who spends time in Mexico City will spend much of it in traffic. One of the most clogged cities in the world, residents will lose on average 158 hours per year to congestion on the road (Ortego et al 2021). In recent years, the city government has sought to limit the number of cars that take to the streets each day, but these efforts have largely targeted poorer people who travel from their homes in the city’s outskirts to their workplaces in the centre, rather than those who live and drive short distances in wealthy, congested regions (Guerra and Reyes 2022). So, gridlock continues apace…
Mexico City’s streets have a peculiarly large number of endemic sounds (Alba Vega and Rodríguez 2022). When I bring up street sounds with my friends, we invariably begin listing all we can, often reaching 15 or 20 unique sounds that can be heard on Mexico City’s streets on any given day. We can add to this the symphony of expressive honks that echo along the city’s brimming streets. With the thickening traffic, the sound of the street increases exponentially, each new car adding to the din while demanding auditory escalation from other motorists. Although the traffic might be stationary, its sound will still travel, overflowing the streets to amble through parks, markets, and the most buffered corners of the city’s apartments. Even if you’re not on Mexico City’s streets, you never really leave them.
Riding my bike through its traffic over the last five years, I’ve learned by force Mexico City’s wide vocabulary of horns. Being able to identify that different vehicles use different honks and toots, and knowing that these will vary according to infrastructure, conditions, weather, time of day, and part of the year, is what Steven Feld (1996) calls “acoustemology”: a portmanteau of “acoustic” and “epistemology” that names a sonic way of knowing the world. As sonic practices and expectations accumulate socially and historically, undifferentiated noise becomes differentiated sounds, and Mexico City’s streets transform from cacophony to systematic commotion. So, in the interest of systematic knowledge (and public safety), this essay tabulates the streets’ honks into a taxonomy of cláxones [horns], a “claxonomy” of Mexico City’s traffic.
Taxonomies are a peculiar form of knowledge production. Lorraine Daston (2004) shows in her history of botany that taxonomies often use holotypes, which combine the range of peculiarities a species might exhibit into an ideal specimen that has never existed. Concrete abstractions, this attention to minute detail is not only a catalogue of diversity but, as Foucault pointed out long ago, a mode of adjudicating difference that generates an overarching sense of order. By assuming the world to be rational, the taxonomic mind is deeply functionalist–famously, the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev left gaps in his 1869 Periodic Table of Elements for the yet-unknown elements a coherent world would require (Neale, Phan, and Addison 2019).
In their pursuit of the world’s universal order, taxonomists seek a universal language that avoids the problem of synonymy–multiple names for the same thing–while their critics point to the hubris of believing that the world’s multitudes could be, in G.K. Chesterton’s (1904) words, represented by a “system of grunts and squeals”…
In the spirit of classical taxonomy, this essay arbitrarily selects a series of common honks to assert an overarching system of meaning shared by people on Mexico City’s streets. While it might sound cacophonous, that residents can distinguish the meaning of each horn shows we’re far from Babel; motorists’ improvisations are a vocabulary emergent from the demands made by a megacity that is, in Dean Chahim’s (2022) memorable phrasing, “governed beyond capacity”. As residents loudly fill the void left by the state with new apparatuses of meaning and management, convention replaces rule so people can keep moving…
Complete with illustrative sounds files: “A Claxonomy of Mexico City’s Traffic,” in @allegra_lab via @TheBrowser.
* Sandra Cisneros
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As we tackle taxonomy, we might spare a thought for Errett Lobban “E. L.” Cord; he died on this date in 1974. A race car driver, mechanic, and car salesman, he was offered the opportunity to manage the dying Auburn Automobile Company in 1924. By 1928 he controlled Auburn, which by 1931 was the 13th largest seller of autos in the United States. The acquisitive Cord founded the Cord Corporation in 1929 as a holding company for over 150 companies he controlled, mostly in the field of transportation. The corporation controlled the Auburn Automobile Company, which built the Auburn and Cord automobiles; Lycoming Engines; Duesenberg Inc.; New York Shipbuilding; Checker Motors; Stinson Aircraft Company; and American Airways (later American Airlines), amongst other holdings.
After a 1937 investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into his dealings in Checker Cab stock, Cord sold the Cord Corporation to the Aviation Corporation and retired to Los Angeles… where he earned even more millions in real estate, and then in broadcasting: Cord owned several of the first radio and television stations in California and later Nevada, where he moved in the 1940s. In the call letters of his Los Angeles radio station, KFAC, the A.C. stands for Auburn Cord. In Reno, Cord established KCRL-TV and radio in the 1950s and operated it for more than 25 years. The ‘CRL’ in the station’s call letters stood for “Circle L”—a ranch Cord owned in the Nevada desert.
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