Sex and Sensibility: Margaret Mead's Descriptive and Rhetorical Ethnography

Anthropologists and historians encounter similar problems of analysis when attempting to decipher situations of first contact between Europeans and Oceanians and the resulting long-term historical processes these contacts triggered. Considering intercultural contact situations in Oceania, I stress the need to integrate anthropology and history to analyze such situations effectively.     

Sequential, Bayesian Geostatistics: A Principled Method for Large Data Sets

The principled statistical application of Gaussian random field models used in geostatistics has historically been limited to data sets of a small size. This limitation is imposed by the requirement to store and invert the covariance matrix of all the samples to obtain a predictive distribution at unsampled locations, or to use likelihood-based covariance estimation. Various ad hoc approaches to solve this problem have been adopted, such as selecting a neighborhood region and/or a small number of observations to use in the kriging process, but these have no sound theoretical basis and it is unclear what information is being lost. In this article, we present a Bayesian method for estimating the posterior mean and covariance structures of a Gaussian random field using a sequential estimation algorithm. By imposing sparsity in a well-defined framework, the algorithm retains a subset of " basis vectors " that best represent the " true " posterior Gaussian random field model in the relative entropy sense. This allows a principled treatment of Gaussian random field models on very large data sets. The method is particularly appropriate when the Gaussian random field model is regarded as a latent variable model, which may be nonlinearly related to the observations. We show the application of the sequential, sparse Bayesian estimation in Gaussian random field models and discuss its merits and drawbacks.     

The Goldfields’ Sabbath: A Postsecular Analysis of Social Cohesion and Social Control on the Ballarat Goldfields, 1854

The historiography of the Sabbath reflects closely the concerns of its Sabbatarian subjects: the rise or fall in public piety and the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of evangelical moral reform and social control. In this article we step away from the question of how religious or secular goldfields society was, and instead, observe how Sunday functioned on the goldfields. In doing so we eschew a dominant narrative of religious history — secularisation — and deploy a postsecular analysis. Such an analysis reveals a remarkable degree of social cohesion: a diverse, but common, practice of rest on the Sabbath. It was only because of the universal honouring of the goldfields’ Sabbath that government troops were able to so quickly and decisively end the Eureka Stockade on Sunday, 3 December 1854.     

FACE TO FACE: Connecting proximity and Distance

'Face to face: Connecting proximity and distance', Eighth Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), Vienna, 8–12 September 2004     

Sentiment,Sensation and Sensibility: Adam Smith,Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis and Wilhelm von Humboldt

Summary

This article focuses on the analysis of sensibility in the works of three major late eighteenth-century philosophers: Smith, Cabanis and the young Wilhelm von Humboldt. It analyses to what extent Smith's concept of sympathy influenced Cabanis in France and Humboldt in Germany. It argues that modern anthropology, based on a specific theory of sensibility, assumes a strong connection between knowledge acquisition and life in society. This article reveals the strong links between the three authors which were made possible precisely because of their common philosophical background. It proves, for the first time, that Humboldt had access to Condillac's ideas before 1798, since in an early work on the state, the former makes numerous borrowings from speeches Cabanis wrote for Mirabeau, which were in turn strongly influenced by Condillac.     

Remote Runways: Air Transport and Distance in Tonga

Air transport brings areas 'closer together'. But it leaves some places relatively more isolated than when all depended on other modes of transport. Improved technology accentuates this tendency. Where traffic is low and distance long, the maintenance of links is costly. These issues are examined at both international and national scales in the case of Tonga, using several measures of distance and relative accessibility.     

Sense and Sensibility in Midwestern Archaeology and the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology,Part II

Abstract

The progression of archaeology in the midcontinent over the past 40 years has moved on a series of different but overlapping fronts: regional, governmental, institutional, disciplinary, and personal. This collection of thoughts by both longtime and relatively young practitioners of our field suggests the many ways that archaeology has changed for the good—and maybe not so good—depending on our own experiences. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology (MCJA) has changed along with these developments. Part I of this discussion centered on the need for, and foundation of, MCJA. Part II is more diverse, with the archaeologists who have participated in the field for the last 40 years reflecting on the shifts in archaeology within their regions—both in terms of practice and institutional practices. The forces of national economics and academic politics and the changing sensibilities toward our public constituencies described here are themes that continue to influence us today.     

A Case of Murderous Sensibility: James Hackman,Interiority and Masculine Agency in Late Eighteenth‐Century England

After murdering Martha Ray in April 1779, James Hackman enjoyed an improbable media celebrity that rested largely on his ability both to embody and complicate the performative conventions of the late eighteenth‐century discourse of sensibility, which tied virtue to its embodied visibility. Supporters who lauded Hackman, but wanted to conserve his and their own moral agency, disentangled his character from his crime by attributing to him an interior space in which that character resided. Thus, while spectators delighted in the way that Hackman's sensible body registered his anguish at Ray's death, they could also paradoxically insist that his true intentions were hidden inside that suffering body, uncoupled from his violent deed. Such attributions of interiority helped to conserve both Hackman's masculinity and his agency by distinguishing his body from feminine bodies whose lack of such interior space rendered them vulnerable to a disordered and hysterical sensibility. The rhetorical energy devoted to defending Hackman provides a valuable case study of the ways that reconciliation was sought in the late eighteenth century between masculinity and agency within the discourse of sensibility and suggests that the differential, gendered distribution of interiority helped assuage fears about feeling's feminising potential.     

Distance in Spatial Analysis: Measurement,Bias, and Alternatives

Distance is an important and basic concept in geography. Many theories, methods, and applications involve distance explicitly or implicitly. While measuring the distance between two locations is a straightforward task, many geographical processes involve areal units, where the distance measurement can be complicated. This research investigates distance measurement between a location (point) and an area (polygon). We find that traditional polygon-to-point distance measurements, which involve abstracting a polygon into a central or representative point, could be problematic and may lead to biased estimates in regression analysis. To solve this issue, we propose a new polygon-to-point distance metric along with two algorithms to compute the new distance metric. Simulation analysis shows the effectiveness of the new distance metric in providing unbiased estimates in linear regression.