Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Focusing on the examples of Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Zaire, this text demonstrates how African rulers hold on to power while severed from foreign aid and subjected to collapsing economies and disappearing bureaucracies.

Warlord Politics and African States

Publisher Summary This chapter describes a series of arguments and counterarguments through which the ambivalence about analogy noted by recent commentators took definite shape. The chapter focuses on an increasingly acute concern that analogy seems to be both indispensible to interpretation and always potentially misleading. At a more fundamental level, these debates can be seen to express a fundamental dilemma that archaeologists confront whenever they seriously undertake to use their data as evidence of the cultural past, namely, that any such broadening of the horizons of inquiry seems to be accomplished only at the cost of compromising actual or potential methodological rigor. Each of the critical reactions against analogy and each of the ameliorating responses represent an attempt to come to grips with this dilemma. Each either endorses one of the methodological options it defines, accepting that research is unavoidably limited or unavoidably speculative, or rejects these options and attempts to show how one or another of the premises yielding the dilemma may be amended and the dilemma itself escaped.

The reaction against analogy

Social Stratification in Polynesia

1 Peer Learning with Computers.- Collaborative problem solving with HyperCard: The influence of peer interaction on planning and information handling strategies.- Small group collaborative discovery learning from hypertext.- Peer interaction and writing: The process of revision.- Computer support for the collaborative learning of physics concepts.- The construction of shared knowledge in collaborative problem solving.- 2 Computer Support for Distance Learning.- Learning network design: Coordinating group interactions in formal learning environments over time and distance.- Computer-supported collaborative learning in a multi-media distance education environment.- Distance learning and computer-mediated communication: Interactive, quasiinteractive or monologue?.- 3 The Social and Organisational Context.- Educational practice within two local computer networks.- Technology's role in restructuring for collaborative learning.- 4 Models of Collaboration.- The negotiation of dialogue focus: An investigation of dialogue processes in joint planning in a computer based task.- Computational modelling of constructive interaction: Relaxing the mutuality hypothesis.- Designing human-computer collaborative learning.- 5 Design Issues.- Issues in computer supported collaborative learning.- Designing computer support for collaborative learning.

Computer supported collaborative learning

Investigations of the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation and collective action provide productive venues for theorizing social complexity, yet this multidisciplinary scholarship contains analytical and epistemological tensions that require reconciliation. We propose a course for integration of this diverse literature to investigate the emergence and developmental trajectories of complex societies. Greater attention to collective action problems, cultural mechanisms that promote cooperation, differentiation of human interests, and multiscalar research designs provide firmer conceptual underpinnings for a theoretically grounded cultural evolutionary framework. The case of agricultural intensification in pre-Hispanic highland Mexico is used to illustrate major points of the paper.

Cooperation and Collective Action in the Cultural Evolution of Complex Societies

Small-scale society furnishes the bread and butter of archeological research. Yet our understanding of what these communities did and how they achieved their purpose is still rudimentary. Using the ethnography of contact-era New Guinea, this paper presents a “social signaling” model of small-scale social systems that archeologists may find useful for contextualizing and interpreting the material record of these societies. It proposes that the organization of small-scale society was oriented, among other goals, towards biological and social reproduction, subsistence optimization, and military defense. To advance these multiple collective interests, however, these communities had to deal with three problems: an optimality problem, a conflict-of-interest problem, and a free-rider problem. The optimality problem was solved with a modular (or segmented) social structure, the conflict-of-interest problem by a process of social signaling, and these two solutions together operated to resolve the free-rider problems they created. In addition to explaining the structure and function of small-scale societies, the model provides a unified framework that can account for the ceremonial behaviors, core cultural conceptions, and leadership forms that these societies generated.

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Social Signaling and the Organization of Small-Scale Society: The Case of Contact-Era New Guinea

L'A. s'attache a demontrer la valeur d'une theorie de la pratique dans l'etude ethnologique de l'evolution politique et notamment de la centralisation politique, c'est-a-dire de la concentration du pouvoir. L'A. demontre qu'une approche basee sur la pratique des acteurs est plus plausible que les modeles materialiste, fonctionnel ou evolutioniste. Une etude de cas des populations des iles Niue et Tongatapu a permis de tester cette theorie.

Practice and Political Centralisation: A New Approach to Political Evolution [and Comments and Reply]

Advances in primatological research have recently led to a hypothesis that lethal coalitionary raiding in chimpanzees is the product of an evolutionarily adaptive “dominance drive” that disposes adult males to seek out low-cost opportunities for conspecific killing. This conclusion has been extended into a claim that human warfare and other forms of coalitional killing are outcomes of a hardwired, “demonic male” complex. Reversing this evidential approach, I argue from data on conspecific killing in humans that humans and chimpanzees have an aversion to killing conspecifics. Their lethal violence, I propose, is more parsimoniously explained as the result of a developed intelligence capable of envisioning the future and, when necessary, of disabling this aversion to achieve desired goals.

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Intelligence, Coalitional Killing, and the Antecedents of War

Increasingly, archaeologists are recognizing cultural anthropological work in New Guinea as an important source of ethnographic analogy for understanding the initial stages of cultural evolution. This article critically reviews the literature on leadership in contact-era New Guinea. It is intended as an introduction both to different theoretical interpretations of leadership, as these have developed from Marshal Sahlins's Big-man archetype to the present, and to the primary literature on the topic. It points to several implications for archaeological theory, identifies a number of problems in the ethnography and theory of contact-era New Guinea leadership, and concludes with a brief guide to deploying the ethnographic and theoretical literature.

Paul Roscoe

Papers

Cooperation and Collective Action in the Cultural Evolution of Complex Societies

Social Signaling and the Organization of Small-Scale Society: The Case of Contact-Era New Guinea

Practice and Political Centralisation: A New Approach to Political Evolution [and Comments and Reply]

Intelligence, Coalitional Killing, and the Antecedents of War

New Guinea Leadership as Ethnographic Analogy: A Critical Review