Between Monoculture and Cultural Polarization: Agent-based Models of the Interplay of Social Influence and Cultural Diversity

Social influence is one of the most important processes in human social interaction. Very often in human social interaction, influence is assimilative in that individuals become more similar to others they interact with. Nevertheless, cultural differences continue to remain in many realms of human life, for example, in the form of technological boundaries. Research on social influence points to a range of possible reasons for persistent cultural diversity, but there is much less clarity about the interplay of various factors and conditions for cultural influence with fundamental processes of social interaction at the micro-level. In this article, I show how agent-based computational modeling can be used as an approach for unraveling the complex interplay between simple first principles of interpersonal social interaction and emergent societal outcomes. I give a brief overview illustrating some of the main approaches agent-based modelers have developed in recent decades to understand conditions and processes of the emergence of cultural diversity. Models will be discussed that generate mainly cultural consensus as long-term behavior, but also models that generate clustering of cultural attitudes in geographical or social space, and models that imply cultural polarization with sharp cultural boundaries between emergent factions. It will be discussed how model dynamics depend on further assumptions, for example about random events, or the scaling of cultural attitudes, and what are further developments in the literature, possible future directions and challenges for the application of computational agent-based modeling in archeological research on cultural boundaries.     

Boundary making in anti-corruption policy: behaviour,responses and institutions

Boundaries are an increasing focus for academics and practitioners seeking to understand public policy dynamics. In anti-corruption policy how these boundaries are established and by whom has far-reaching implications for public trust. Drawing on interview data, this paper explores the enduring tensions and administrative conflicts at play in three key aspects of the anti-corruption boundary making process: behaviour, responses and institutions. The evidence presented demonstrates that these boundaries are unstable and unresolved. While some tensions, such as those between morality and the law, are enduring, many of the administrative conflicts indicate a sensible and purposeful balance between the important considerations of accountability and responsiveness on the one hand, and efficiency and effectiveness on the other, is yet to be achieved.     

Urine trouble: a social history of bedwetting and its regulation

Bedwetting has confounded the presumed boundaries of the human body, existing in a fluid space, between the normal and pathological, its treatment has demanded the application of a wide array of different technologies, each based on a distinct conception of the relationship between the body and personality, human organs and personal conduct. In tracing the social history of bedwetting and its regulation, this article examines the ontological assumptions underpinning the treatment of bedwetting and how they have changed over the past two centuries. Through the analysis of medical journals, newspaper articles and magazine advertisements, different topologies are identified which redefine the boundaries of the human body and its capacities. From 16th-century naturalism, in which the human body is subordinated to a cosmic totality, to the circumscribed space of 19th-century paediatrics and the expansive circuits of behavioural psychology and modern psychoanalysis, the body has become multiplied, differently enacted through the application of diverse technologies. It was be shown how coordinating the messy and divergent conceptions of the human body has posed an endemic problem for the human sciences, and how the enduring tension between object enactment and subject constitution is an expression of modern "baroque" subjectivity.     

Confronting modernization: rethinking Changsha’s rice riot of 1910

By analyzing the role of urban commoners who participated in Changsha’s rice riot of April 1910, we can better understand how the city’s folk traditions and unique urban culture contributed to the intense climate that characterized state/society relations during the late Qing dynasty. Oral history interviews conducted by Liu Duping during the 1970s mainly describe the attack on the government yamen, an attack carried out and led by local carpenters. After reading some of these accounts we can also appreciate how the rioters were not simply an unruly mob incited by local gentry. By attacking a specific government compound and symbols of state authority, in some ways local carpenters expressed their own justification for rioting. While the role of Ye Dehui and other gentry in helping lead the rioters should not be discounted, such characters also need to be understood not simply as conservative hardliners, but within the broader context of late Qing intellectuals.     

Black Sailors on Red Clydeside: Rioting, Reactionary Trade Unionism and Conflicting Notions of 'Britishness' Following the First World War

The riot at Glasgow harbour in January 1919 was the first ina wave of rioting around Britain's ports in 1919. Violence wastriggered by increased job competition in the merchant navyat the end of the war. Seamen's unions fuelled animosity betweencompeting groups as they sought to protect white British accessto jobs by imposing a ‘colour’ bar on sailors fromracialized ethnic minorities. Many of the seamen targeted inthis way were British colonial subjects from Africa and theCaribbean. Black colonial sailors in Glasgow resisted attacksby white rioters and asserted their rights to employment asBritish subjects. The riot was connected to wider industrialunrest on Clydeside as leaders of the union campaign for a reducedworking week (to maintain full employment following demobilization)brought unskilled labour, including merchant seamen, into ageneral strike alongside skilled workers. Strike leaders, includingShinwell and Gallacher, linked the 40-hours movement to theseamen's unions’ protests against overseas labour by stressingthe common interests of both in preserving the job prospectsof (white) labour. The campaigns proved unsuccessful in theface of government fears over the revolutionary potential ofthe general strike and as the merchant shipping industry slidin to depression.     

Atlantic networks,antagonisms and the formation of subaltern political identities

This paper engages with historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's account of the connections and circulations which they argue constituted a multi-ethnic Atlantic working class in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Linebaugh and Rediker , ). Their stories of the mobile, networked insurgencies that traversed the early modern Atlantic challenge accounts of the geographies of resistance and labour which treat ethnicities as given and sealed, view subaltern movements as trapped in place and privilege the boundaries between spatial scales. This paper sketches some preliminary aspects of an agenda for thinking spatially the political identities constituted through Atlantic resistances. The paper foregrounds the multiple antagonisms constituted through Atlantic subaltern resistances to explore three aspects of the formation of subaltern political identities in the early-modern Atlantic. Firstly, how the spatial relations of Atlantic networks were brought into contestation through subaltern struggles. Secondly, the plural and mobile character of antagonisms between and within subaltern groups. Finally, the paper explores how subaltern agency and identities were formed in relation to the materialities of Atlantic networks. These arguments are developed through discussion of subaltern resistances in and between Ireland, Newfoundland, the West Coast of Africa, the Virgin Isles and London in the eighteenth century.     

Vanuatu in Australia–China–Taiwan relations

Vanuatu became a major issue in Australia–China–Taiwan relations during Serge Vohor's turbulent prime ministership in 2004. Already engaged in a struggle with Australia over ‘good governance’, Vohor signed an agreement diplomatically recognising Taiwan. Chinese and Australian pressure led to Vohor's ouster, and a diplomatic setback for Taiwan. Although Australia and Taiwan viewed each other as side issues in this episode, with Australia focused on Vohor and Taiwan on China, their interests were directly opposed during the episode. As became evident in the aftermath of the post-election riot in Solomon Islands in April 2006, these divergent positions have had a lasting negative impact on each country's perception of the other. The key events of 2004 are examined here to demonstrate how this episode has affected the wider landscape of Australia–China–Taiwan relations.     

Gender and Environmental Justice in Louisiana: Blurring the boundaries of public and private spheres

Many scholars have examined the implications and effects of a putative dichotomy between public-as-masculine and private-as-feminine spheres on community activism, and suggest that women's community activism blurs this ideological divide in numerous ways. This article draws on a case study of a siting conflict in St. James Parish, Louisiana, to examine how, in the process of blurring boundaries between gendered spheres of interest and activity, predominantly women environmental justice activists contended with differently gendered contexts. Concepts of performance and performativity shed light on how gendered hierarchies of public and private sphere activism both constrained and enabled the protest group's political practice.     

A Theory of Ethnic Group Boundaries

Abstract. Despite widespread agreement that ethnic boundaries are malleable rather than fixed, theories of ethnicity and collective action have been unable to adequately explain why individuals choose to mobilise collectively within particular boundaries rather than others. The boundaries of groups engaging in ethnic collective action are always taken for granted at some level rather than problematised. This leads to an undesirable reification of ethnic groups as actors. The theory presented in this article integrates a social psychological view of motivation with a rational choice view of action to provide a systematic way of predicting the boundary location of ethnic groups that begin to mobilise in societies undergoing modernising structural change. It first focuses on the link between cooperation and altruism in small communities. It then predicts how altruistic preferences, in conjunction with structural factors and rational behaviour, will generate boundaries for larger-scale ethnic collective action that transcends yet incorporates such communities. The theory's predictions are then applied to explain the location of group boundaries in four very prominent cases of ethnicity ‘creation’ and collective action in this century.     

Communal Discourses,Marriage, and the Politics of Gendered Social Boundaries among South Asian Immigrants in Tanzania

Focusing on communal discourses among South Asian groups in Tanzania, the author highlights the manner in which discourses around religion, caste and race shape gendered patterns of migration and marriage and the everyday politics of social boundaries in an immigrant community. The article demonstrates how discursive processes operating at the community level mediate between the household and the broader political economic processes. It also illustrates that although discourses, boundaries and social relations are easily modified in response to changing circumstances, new narratives and ideologies frequently emerge to ensure that the predominant balance of power in a community is not disturbed significantly.     

Voices from the Kibbutz: Four Mothers,New Profile,and Women in Black

If there is any social organization that has provided a powerful illustration of the permeable boundaries between social politics—defined by Stephen M. Buechler as “forms of collective action that challenge power relations without an explicit focus on the state”—and social movements, and the role of collective identity in transforming either, as defined for women by Betty Friedan—it would be the Israeli kibbutz movement. The research presented here on grassroots Israeli women activists, a significant proportion of whom had grown up or had lived in a kibbutz, suggests that the social politics of everyday life on a kibbutz facilitated women's participation in larger social movements for peace, but also placed constraints on their activism. Many of these women had left or were in the process of leaving the kibbutz between 1989 and 1999, when this research was conducted. Those who had already left, and anchor women who organized urban demonstrations, saw the kibbutz as a conservative anti-woman force. Nonetheless, evidence gathered from qualitative interviewing with them suggests that the kibbutzim supported women who were politically active on national issues. Several women-led social protest movements illustrate how the kibbutz geared its members to think about the interplay of the moral and social orders in the small spaces of everyday life.     

Artificial states? On the enduring geographical myth of natural borders

Alberto Alesina, William Easterly and Janina Matuszeski's paper Artificial States, published as a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper in June 2006, suggests a theory linking the nature of country borders to the economic success of countries (Alesina, Easterly, & Matuszeski, 2006). This paper critically examines this suggestion that natural boundaries and ethnic homogeneity are desirable for economic reasons. It takes issue with the understanding of artificial and natural boundaries that they develop, arguing that this ignores two centuries of critical and quantitative geographical scholarship that has mapped, documented and critiqued the obsession of a link between topography and the appropriate shape of states and boundaries. It explores how their argument is linked to a defence of ethnically homogeneous states. The focus is on their teleological and paradoxically ahistorical vision that naturalizes politics by appealing to spatial myths of homogeneity and geometric destiny, grounded in a reactionary understanding of space as container. In so doing, I am mindful of the strong links between such proposals and calls for post-conflict partition, and the corresponding discourses of ethnic and cultural homogenization on which they rely. Instead of thinking of boundaries as geometric objects, squiggly or not, I consider boundaries through the simultaneous processes of reification, naturalization, and fetishization.     

Producing North and South: a political geography of hydro development in Québec

Since the 1970s, the tapping of James Bay's hydroelectric potential has been synonymous with the tapping of divergent national imaginaries for native and non-native people in Québec. Exploitation of natural resources in the region has activated different narratives of political identity for each community. I explore this evolving political context by examining how, for each group, water has emerged simultaneously as a physical entity possessing economic value and a social artefact supporting the consolidation of national boundaries. I do so by analysing three phases of changing relationships around resource management, namely: hydroelectric development on the La Grande river in the 1970s; the Cree opposition to Great Whale in the 1990s; and the recent agreement concerning a new relationship between the two parties. In each of these phases, nature has been both the symbolic and material tie that binds different national identities and materialises their boundaries. While these are not boundaries in the traditional geopolitical understanding of the term, the forging of an equitable framework of development in the region depends on the recognition of nature as a historical and political formation that answers to different sets of national preoccupations.     

Brewarrina: An Australian Story

This short paper discusses Barry Morris's account of the ‘riot’ at Brewarrina, New South Wales, in 1987 and its legal aftermath, which continued for some years. An iconic event in Australian race relations, much can be learnt from its various dimensions, a fact that Morris amply demonstrates. Notwithstanding, this discussion questions a related narrative in his book, which interprets capitalism's impact on self‐determination simply in terms of neoliberalism's ‘political effects’. The paper seeks to broaden the discussion of the relations between the state and self‐determination, and between capitalism and race.     

Songs of Sisterhood: Feminist Political Practice between Empire and Internationalism 1910–20

This article seeks to understand how feminist thought and practice in the early twentieth century intersected with emergent movements against British imperialism. By tracing relations between Indian, Irish and British feminists, it delineates the diverse ways in which women, across imperial spaces, adopted emergent languages of internationalism and female fraternity to further their political ambitions. This article moves beyond the geographical boundaries of colony and metropole to uncover a much wider circulation of ideas, practices and solidarities amongst feminist networks in the early twentieth century. Collectively, the stories presented in this article convey multiple feminist political imaginaries in an era defined at once by imperial crisis and the rise of internationalism. They show that women's choices of political association in the autumn of empire were determined by their ideological affinity, political practice and social class rather than their country of origin or ethnic identity alone.     

Diasporic Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transnational Production of Black Middle‐Class Masculinity

This essay examines the relationship between two black Freemasons in the Gold Coast and New York in the 1930s. Drawing on the correspondence of D. K. Abadu Bentsi and Harry A. Williamson, this essay argues that fraternal voluntary associations operated as sites for the formation of a gendered diasporic identity. In doing so, it suggests that we need to complicate our understanding of diaspora by considering the ways in which the development of diasporic subjectivity and consciousness, as a dynamic process, is inextricably bound up in the formation of class and gender identities and the maintenance of class and gender boundaries.     

Credibility in Policy Expertise: The Function of Boundaries Between Research and Policy

As science becomes an increasingly crucial resource for addressing complex challenges in society, extensive demands are placed upon the researchers who produce it. Creating valuable expert knowledge that intervenes in policy or practice requires knowledge brokers to facilitate interactions at the boundary between research and policy. Yet, existing research lacks a compelling account of the ways in which brokerage is performed to gain credibility. Drawing on mixed‐method analysis of 12 policy research settings, I outline a novel set of strategies for attaining symbolic power, whereby policy experts position themselves and others via conceptual distances drawn between the “world of ideas” and the “world of policy and practice.” Disciplinary distance works to situate research as either disciplinary or undisciplinary, epistemic distance creates a boundary between complex specialist research and direct digestible outputs, temporal distance represents the separation of slow rigorous research and agile responsive analysis, and economic distance situates research as either pure and intrinsic or marketable and fundable. I develop a theoretical account that unpacks the boundaries between research communities and shows how these boundaries permit policy research actors to achieve various strategic aims.     

The Political Aesthetics of Middle Class Housing in (not so) Neoliberal Mozambique

This article explores the social and material repercussions of middle class aspirations in a system that is still infused by socialist aesthetics in Maputo, Mozambique. We argue the activation of “middle classness” reproduces ingrained inequalities and boundaries. This is demonstrated through two ethnographic case studies of urban housing, long central to imaginaries of prosperity. First, fearing downward mobility, members of the upper middle class seek to embody a liberal ideology of “autonomy”, while simultaneously being dependent on state structures. Second, members of the lower middle class attempt to create enclaves to experiment with forms of privatisation normally only accessible to a privileged elite. Through this examination of the ways in which a spectrum of privileged urbanites attempts to secure their position in the face of a precarious future, the article outlines middle classness under contemporary capitalist conditions and how this is shaped by the legacies of the past.     

Site and Community at Chunchucmil and Ancient Maya Urban Centers

Abstract

Classic Period lowland Maya urban centers often lack sharp boundaries due to progressive dispersal of residential settlement. This dispersal gives rise to questions about the concept of site and the notion of community affiliation. Research on settlement patterns at Chunchucmil, an urban center in NW Yucatan, Mexico, dating to the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., explores the issue of site boundaries and the social and economic implications of such boundaries. Detailed mapping, test pitting, and reconnaissance reveal that Chunchucmil had three densely occupied, concentric, contemporaneous zones of settlement covering between 20 and 25 sq km and inhabited by a population of up to 42,500. Data from both within and beyond the density thresholds marking the edge of the city imply the existence of communities whose boundaries do not always follow those of the site. A portion of the hinterland settlement close to the edge of the city shows stronger economic and social connections with the city, for example. These connections enable the delineation of Greater Chunchucmil, extending 5 km from Chunchucmil's center. The work at Chunchucmil also allows comparison with other large Maya cities that have been systematically documented. This comparison highlights considerable variability in Maya urban forms and in how these cities relate to their peripheries.     

Repertoires of national boundaries in France and Germany—within‐country cleavages and their political consequences

This article analyses how members of the majority population in France and Germany define membership in the nation and how they relate to the various civic, cultural, or ethnic visions of national belonging available in the cultural repertoires of historical models, institutional arrangements, and elite discourses. To scrutinize within‐country differences in the configurations of the symbolic boundaries of national belonging, this article applies cluster analysis techniques for each country separately using data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP). Overall, the results suggest that people choose and arrange different criteria from cultural repertoires, resulting in various configurations of national boundaries. Furthermore, the number and types of symbolic boundaries used are decisive for explaining restrictive and hostile attitudes towards immigrants. Contrary to the civic and ethnic historical models, the national boundary configurations display very similar patterns across the two countries, especially attesting to the considerable process of liberalization of citizenship regulations in Germany.