scholarly journals Ritual explained: interdisciplinary answers to Tinbergen's four questions

2020 ◽  
Vol 375 (1805) ◽  
pp. 20190419
Author(s):  
Cristine H. Legare ◽  
Mark Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Life Threatening ◽  
Cognition And Culture ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Key Questions

Convergent developments across social scientific disciplines provide evidence that rituals are a psychologically prepared and culturally inherited behavioural hallmark of our species. The dramatic diversity of ritual practices ranges from simple greetings to elaborate religious ceremonies, from the benign to life-threatening. Yet our scientific understanding of this core human trait remains limited. Explaining the universality, functionality and diversity of ritual requires insight from multiple disciplines. This special issue integrates research from anthropology, archaeology, biology, primatology, cognitive science, psychology, religious studies and demography to build an interdisciplinary account of ritual. The objective is to contribute to an integrative explanation of ritual by addressing Tinbergen's four key questions. These include answering ultimate questions about the (i) phylogeny and (ii) adaptive functions of ritual; and proximate questions about the (iii) mechanisms and (iv) ontogeny of ritual. The intersection of these four complementary lines of inquiry yields new avenues for theory and research into this fundamental aspect of the human condition, and in so doing, into the coevolution of cognition and culture. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours’.

Socially constructing safety

2009 ◽  
Vol 62 (9) ◽  
pp. 1259-1266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Turner ◽  
Garry C. Gray
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Behavior ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Occupational Safety ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Organizational Conditions ◽  
Cultural Considerations ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Social Scientific

Social scientific perspectives on occupational safety largely characterize it as a disembodied, tangible, and easily quantifiable phenomenon. Recent research efforts have focused on exploring organizational conditions that predict occupational safety outcomes, resulting in top-down, often de-contextualized prescriptions about how to control safety in the workplace (e.g. ‘management should promote a culture of safety’). There is growing interest in how social processes of organizing, wider socio-cultural considerations, and the situated production of safety can contribute to the appreciation of the ‘lived experience’ of life and death at work. This Special Issue focuses on the socially constructed nature of occupational safety and the insight it provides in understanding broader social and organizational processes. In this article, we first describe how various social scientific disciplines share an interest in occupational safety and organizational behavior, yet rarely speak to another. We provide an overview of the five articles that comprise the Special Issue, and briefly highlight some ways forward for studying safety in organizations.

Cognition, Culture, and Social Simulation

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 451-461
Author(s):  
Justin E. Lane ◽  
F. LeRon Shults
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Massively Multiplayer Online Games ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Multiplayer Online Games ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cognition And Culture ◽  
Social Scientific

AbstractThe use of modeling and simulation (M&S) methodologies is growing rapidly across the psychological and social sciences. After a brief introduction to the relevance of computational methods for research on human cognition and culture, we describe the sense in which computer models and simulations can be understood, respectively, as “theories” and “predictions.” Most readers of JoCC are interested in integrating micro- and macro-level theories and in pursuing empirical research that informs scientific predictions, and we argue that M&S provides a powerful new set of tools for pursuing these interests. We also point out the way in which M&S can help scholars of cognition and culture address four key desiderata for social scientific research related to the themes of clarity, falsifiability, dynamicity, and complexity. Finally, we provide an introduction to the other papers that comprise this special issue, which includes contributions on topics such as the role of M&S in interdisciplinary debates, shamanism, early Christian ritual practices, the emergence of the Axial age, and the social scientific appropriation of algorithms from massively multiplayer online games.

Perspectives by Incongruity

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 93-107
Author(s):  
Stephan Palmié
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Anthropology Of Religion ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Conceptual Clarification ◽  
The Social

Aside from discussing the three articles in this special issue of Nova Religio on Religion and the Transnational Imagination, these brief comments aim to make a critical plea for conceptual clarification when it comes to what exactly the relatively novel, and arguably under-theorized term “transnational” might possibly mean when yoked to the historically old, but arguably equally problematic category, “religion.” My main argument is, if for different (though ultimately not altogether unrelated) reasons, both terms—at least as currently operationalized in much of the anthropology of religion, and religious studies more generally—not only fail to capture the social realities reported in the essays in this special issue, but also unhelpfully shore up a set of ideologies about the supposedly “novel” nature of our “globalized” human condition, that we might better rethink.

Narrating Society: Enacting ‘Immigrant’ Characters through Negotiating, Naturalization, and Forgetting

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanne Boersma
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Work ◽  
Immigrant Integration ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Global Perspectives ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Scientific Institutions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Media And Communication

This article scrutinizes how ‘immigrant’ characters of perpetual arrival are enacted in the social scientific work of immigrant integration monitoring. Immigrant integration research produces narratives in which characters—classified in highly specific, contingent ways as ‘immigrants’—are portrayed as arriving and never as having arrived. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork at social scientific institutions and networks in four Western European countries, this article analyzes three practices that enact the characters of arrival narratives: negotiating, naturalizing, and forgetting. First, it shows how negotiating constitutes objects of research while at the same time a process of hybridization is observed among negotiating scientific and governmental actors. Second, a naturalization process is analyzed in which slippery categories become fixed and self-evident. Third, the practice of forgetting involves the fading away of contingent and historical circumstances of the research and specifically a dispensation of ‘native’ or ‘autochthonous’ populations. Consequently, the article states how some people are considered rightful occupants of ‘society’ and others are enacted to travel an infinite road toward an occupied societal space. Moreover, it shows how enactments of arriving ‘immigrant’ characters have performative effects in racially differentiating national populations and hence in narrating society. This article is part of the Global Perspectives, Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
New Religions ◽  
New Age Movement ◽  
Book Award ◽  
The Status ◽  
Social Scientific

The first edition ofThe Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movementsappeared in early 2004. At the time, it was a much-needed overview of a rapidly-expanding area of study; it received recognition in the form of aChoicebook award. The second edition brings this task up to date. In addition to updating most of the original topics, the new edition takes in more topics by expanding the volume from 22 to 32 chapters, and enlarges the scope of the book by doubling the number of contributors from outside of North America. Following an introductory section devoted to social-scientific approaches to New Religious Movements (NRMs), the second section focuses on what has been uppermost in the minds of the general public, namely the controversies that have surrounded these groups. The third section examines certain themes in the study of NRMs, such as the status of children and women in such movements. The fourth section presents religious studies approaches by looking at NRM mythologies, rituals and the like. The final section covers the subfields that have grown out of NRM studies and become specializations in their own right, from the study of modern Paganism to the study of the New Age Movement. Finally, the present volume has a thematic focus; readers interested in specific NRMs are advised to consult the second edition of James R. Lewis and Jesper Aa. Petersen’s edited volume,Controversial New Religions(Oxford University Press 2014).

scholarly journals Editorial for Special Issue “Historical Mineral Pigments”

Minerals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 237
Author(s):  
Carolina Cardell ◽  
Jose Santiago Pozo-Antonio
Keyword(s):  
Chemical Characterization ◽  
Glass Enamel ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Physical Chemical ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Natural And Synthetic

The physical–chemical characterization of natural and synthetic historical inorganic and mineral pigments, which may be found embedded in paintings (real or mock-ups), glass, enamel, ceramics, beads, tesserae, etc., as well as their alteration under different decay scenarios, is a demanding line of investigation. This field of research is now both well established and dynamic, as revealed by the numerous publications in high-quality journals of varied scientific disciplines. [...]

scholarly journals mRNA therapy restores euglycemia and prevents liver tumors in murine model of glycogen storage disease

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingsong Cao ◽  
Minjung Choi ◽  
Eleonora Guadagnin ◽  
Maud Soty ◽  
Marine Silva ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Glycogen Storage Disease ◽  
Murine Model ◽  
Storage Disease ◽  
Liver Tumors ◽  
Glycogen Storage ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Efficacy And Safety ◽  
Current Standard ◽  
Enzyme Replacement ◽  
Life Threatening

AbstractGlycogen Storage Disease 1a (GSD1a) is a rare, inherited metabolic disorder caused by deficiency of glucose 6-phosphatase (G6Pase-α). G6Pase-α is critical for maintaining interprandial euglycemia. GSD1a patients exhibit life-threatening hypoglycemia and long-term liver complications including hepatocellular adenomas (HCAs) and carcinomas (HCCs). There is no treatment for GSD1a and the current standard-of-care for managing hypoglycemia (Glycosade®/modified cornstarch) fails to prevent HCA/HCC risk. Therapeutic modalities such as enzyme replacement therapy and gene therapy are not ideal options for patients due to challenges in drug-delivery, efficacy, and safety. To develop a new treatment for GSD1a capable of addressing both the life-threatening hypoglycemia and HCA/HCC risk, we encapsulated engineered mRNAs encoding human G6Pase-α in lipid nanoparticles. We demonstrate the efficacy and safety of our approach in a preclinical murine model that phenotypically resembles the human condition, thus presenting a potential therapy that could have a significant therapeutic impact on the treatment of GSD1a.

scholarly journals Governing artificial intelligence: ethical, legal and technical opportunities and challenges

2018 ◽  
Vol 376 (2133) ◽  
pp. 20180080 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corinne Cath
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Machine Learning ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Urban Infrastructure ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Ethical Frameworks ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Risk Areas

This paper is the introduction to the special issue entitled: ‘Governing artificial intelligence: ethical, legal and technical opportunities and challenges'. Artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly permeates every aspect of our society, from the critical, like urban infrastructure, law enforcement, banking, healthcare and humanitarian aid, to the mundane like dating. AI, including embodied AI in robotics and techniques like machine learning, can improve economic, social welfare and the exercise of human rights. Owing to the proliferation of AI in high-risk areas, the pressure is mounting to design and govern AI to be accountable, fair and transparent. How can this be achieved and through which frameworks? This is one of the central questions addressed in this special issue, in which eight authors present in-depth analyses of the ethical, legal-regulatory and technical challenges posed by developing governance regimes for AI systems. It also gives a brief overview of recent developments in AI governance, how much of the agenda for defining AI regulation, ethical frameworks and technical approaches is set, as well as providing some concrete suggestions to further the debate on AI governance. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Governing artificial intelligence: ethical, legal, and technical opportunities and challenges’.

scholarly journals The coevolutionary biology of brood parasitism: a call for integration

2019 ◽  
Vol 374 (1769) ◽  
pp. 20180190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rose Thorogood ◽  
Claire N. Spottiswoode ◽  
Steven J. Portugal ◽  
Ros Gloag
Keyword(s):  
Parental Care ◽  
Brood Parasitism ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Brood Parasites ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Illuminating System

Obligate brood-parasitic cheats have fascinated natural historians since ancient times. Passing on the costs of parental care to others occurs widely in birds, insects and fish, and often exerts selection pressure on hosts that in turn evolve defences. Brood parasites have therefore provided an illuminating system for researching coevolution. Nevertheless, much remains unknown about how ecology and evolutionary history constrain or facilitate brood parasitism, or the mechanisms that shape or respond to selection. In this special issue, we bring together examples from across the animal kingdom to illustrate the diverse ways in which recent research is addressing these gaps. This special issue also considers how research on brood parasitism may benefit from, and in turn inform, related fields such as social evolution and immunity. Here, we argue that progress in our understanding of coevolution would benefit from the increased integration of ideas across taxonomic boundaries and across Tinbergen’s Four Questions: mechanism, ontogeny, function and phylogeny of brood parasitism. We also encourage renewed vigour in uncovering the natural history of the majority of the world's brood parasites that remain little-known. Indeed, it seems very likely that some of nature’s brood parasites remain entirely unknown, because otherwise we are left with a puzzle: if parental care is so costly, why is brood parasitism not more common?This article is part of the theme issue ‘The coevolutionary biology of brood parasitism: from mechanism to pattern’.

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