Introduction

Sport as a global phenomenon is gaining a cultural and social centrality within countries in different ways and varying pace. Allen Guttmann (1978) defines modern sports as reflecting secularism, equality of opportunity, bureaucratic organization, specialization of roles, rationalization, quantification, and a quest for records. Sports may also be defined in more invested terms of what it does to a society, culture, politics, and economy and how it impacts social relations and economic landscape. Sports has an emancipatory potential that is realized in various ways. A multidimensional perspective on sports allows us to understand in microcosm the operation of embedded forces of patriarchy and capitalism, and of power and resistance in society....

Coordination and consensus: the role of compromisers in Tibetan macaques

Coordination and consensus in collective behavior have attracted a lot of research interest. Although previous studies have investigated the role of compromisers in group consensus, they provide little insight into why compromisers would allow such social arrangements to persist. In this study, the potential relationship between group movements and conflict management in Tibetan macaques in Anhui province, China, was investigated using hierarchical cluster analyses. Some members with higher social centrality or social rank often formed a front-runner cluster during group movements. They had higher leadership success than individuals outside the front-runner cluster. Other members with lower social centrality or social rank often followed the group movements initiated by the front-runner cluster, and thus formed the compromiser cluster. Compromisers’ proximity relations with front-runners increased with their following scores to front-runners. Compromisers had fewer events of being attacked when they followed group movements initiated by the front-runners. The compromising process made compromisers lose the choice of direction preference, but it could increase their individual safeties. This trade-off suggests that compromisers play a role of decision-maker in coordination and consensus scenarios among social animals.

Tibetan Macaques with Higher Social Centrality and More Relatives Emit More Frequent Visual Communication in Collective Decision-Making

Animals on the move often communicate with each other through some specific postures. Previous studies have shown that social interaction plays a role in communication process. However, it is not clear whether the affinity of group members can affect visual communication. We studied a group of free-ranging Tibetan macaques (Macaca thibetana) at Huangshan Mountain, China, and answered whether and how social centrality or relatives matter in visual signals during group movement using Tobit regression modeling. All individuals emitted the signals of back-glances and pauses in collective movement. The emission of two signals decreased with the number of participants increased. The back-glance and pause signals emitted by the participating individuals were stronger as the position moved backward in the group. Sex, age, and rank had no significant influence on back-glance and pause signals. Individuals with higher social centrality would emit more pause signals, but social centrality had no effect on the back-glance signal. Individuals with more relatives in the group had more back-glance signals, but this had no effect on the pause signal. This study verifies that social centrality and the number of relatives have effects on visual signals in Tibetan macaques. We provide insights into the relationship between communication behaviors and group cooperation in social animals.

The Modern Touch

This chapter chronicles the gradual decline of the sense of touch as humanity enters the modern age. The sense of touch was gradually displaced from its social centrality during the later Middle Ages, giving way to a more eye-minded culture of modernity. The chapter recounts the many developments which contributed to the changing relevance of the tactile sense. However, rather than fade entirely from the modern purview, tactile experiences simply persisted in a variety of niches: physical therapies, the culture of comfort, the philosophy of sensation, and so on. The chapter also rounds out the decline of tactile authority and the rise of modernity in two key anecdotes: Petrarch's 1336 climb up Mont Ventoux in Provence and the smashing of the sainte ampoule in Reims in 1793.