Facing the crowd: intruder pressure, within-group competition, and the resolution of conflicts over group-membership

Abstract: Recent theory in social evolution has been mainly concerned with competition and cooperation within social groups of animals and their impact on the stability of those groups. Much less attention has been paid to conflicts arising as a result of solitary floaters (outsiders) attempting to join groups of established residents (insiders). We model such conflicts over group-membership using a demographically explicit approach in which the rates of births and deaths in a population determine the availability of group-vacancies and the number of floaters competing over these vacancies. We find that the outcome of within-group competition, reflected in the partitioning of reproduction among group members, exerts surprisingly little influence on the resolution of insider-outsider conflict.

The outcome of such conflict is also largely unaffected by differences in resource holding potential between insiders and outsiders. By contrast, whether or not groups form is mainly determined by demographic factors (variation in vital rates such as fecundity and mortality) and the resulting population dynamics. In particular, at high floater densities territory defense becomes too costly, and groups form because insiders give in to the intruder pressure imposed on them by outsiders. We emphasize the importance of insider-outsider conflicts in social evolution theory and highlight avenues for future research.

A Sense of Place shortlink: http://wp.me/pISTJ-hi

Full Article:  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.533/pdf

Port, M     Johnstone, R A  Facing the crowd: intruder pressure, within-group competition, and the resolution of conflicts over group-membership
Ecology and Evolution
Volume 3, Issue 5, pages 1209–1218, May 2013

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Tropes of Fear: the Impact of Globalization on Batek Religious Landscapes

Abstract: The Batek are a forest and forest-fringe dwelling population numbering around 1,500 located in Peninsular Malaysia. Most Batek groups were mobile forest-dwelling foragers and collectors until the recent past. The Batek imbue the forest with religious significance that they inscribe onto the landscape through movement, everyday activities, storytelling, trancing and shamanic journeying. However, as processes of globalization transform Malaysian landscapes, many Batek groups have been deterritorialized and relocated to the forest fringes where they are often pressured into converting to world religions, particularly Islam. Batek religious beliefs and practices have been re-shaped by their increasing encounters with global flows of ideologies, technologies, objects, capital and people, as landscapes are opened up to development.

This article analyzes the ways these encounters are incorporated into the fabric of the Batek’s religious world and how new objects and ideas have been figuratively and literally assimilated into their taboo systems and cosmology. Particular attention is paid to the impacts of globalization as expressed through tropes of fear.

A Sense of Place short link:  http://wp.me/pISTJ-h8

Full Text: http://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/4/2/240

Tacey, Ivan. 2013. “Tropes of Fear: the Impact of Globalization on Batek Religious Landscapes.” Religions 4, no. 2: 240-266.

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Open Yale Courses

Overview: Open Yale Courses (OYC) provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the Internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.

• Registration is not required.
• No course credit, degree, or certificate is available.

The online courses are designed for a wide range of people around the world, among them self-directed and life-long learners, educators, and high school and college students. The integrated, highly flexible web interface allows users, in effect, to audit Yale undergraduate courses if they wish to. It also gives the user a wide variety of other options for structuring the learning process, for example downloading, redistributing, and remixing course materials.

Each course includes a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video accompanied by such other course materials as syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets. The lectures are available as downloadable videos, and an audio-only version is also offered. In addition, searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided.

A Sense of Place Shortlink: http://wp.me/pISTJ-gL

Full Course: http://oyc.yale.edu/courses

Open Yale Courses

Yale University

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Introduction to Siberia

Overview: Few parts of the world are so consistently ignored, at least in the English-language media, which  almost always focuses on the western, or European, parts of Russia, particularly Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the troubled North Caucasus. Thus, in most people’s imagination, in the West and even in Russia itself, Siberia looks like an iceberg: big, cold, mostly hidden from view, and inherently dangerous. In this series of posts, GeoCurrents aims to shed new light on this vast and significant place. If Siberia were independent, it would have the largest area of any country in the world—by a significant margin.

A Sense of Place Shortlink: http://wp.me/pISTJ-gE

Lewis, M.W.. March 21, 2012.  Introduction to Siberia, GeoCurrents

Full Text: http://geocurrents.info/place/russia-ukraine-and-caucasus/siberia/introduction-to-siberia

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Stigmatized Property, Clams, and Community in Coastal Ecuador

Abstract: San Felipe is a village on the coast of Ecuador known for collecting clams from mangroves. Being a clam collector is a highly marginalized occupation in the region, and as such the concheros of San Felipe are socially stigmatized. Based on an analysis of the interplay of ecological and social conditions, we describe a form of property and means of controlling rights to natural resources which we call stigmatized property.

Access to stigmatized property is maintained not through active management within a social group but by the stigma associated with the use of the resource imposed by outsiders. Drawing on Eric Wolf’s concept of the Closed Corporate Peasant Community, we analyze the social characteristics of a stigmatized property system. By documenting the connections among individual identities, gender and kinship relations, community institutions and the regional political economy, we show the historical development of a stigmatized property system and the advantages and vulnerabilities it entails.

The recent development of shrimp farms in the area destroyed most of the mangroves, but the social dynamics of stigmatized property persist. Although the concheros of San Felipe are becoming less closed, corporate, and community-oriented now that they no longer collect clams, they are still heavily stigmatized and largely invisible to the Ecuadorean state. We conclude that resource management analyses and policies should recognize how stigma can shape property rights systems.

A Sense of Place shortlink: http://wp.me/pISTJ-eS

Full Article: http://eea.anthro.uga.edu/index.php/eea/article/view/78/68

Kuhl, L., & Sheridan, M. (2010). Stigmatized Property, Clams, and Community in Coastal Ecuador. Ecological And Environmental     Anthropology, 5(1).

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The Institutionalisation of Informal Politics Beyond the State: The Case of UNITA-MPLA Conflict in Angola

Abstract: Using the sociological approach to international relations, this article considers the institutionalisation of informal politics beyond the state in Angola’s postcolonial history. It is argued that war can become an alternative form of societal order to the extent that actors lose interest in bringing the conflict to an end through peaceful means.

The article illustrates how promoting political disorder has become politically convenient for involved political elites, whether in government or in opposition, given that the continuous state of emergency dominates the debate on the legitimacy of their cause.

Under such conditions, informal political regulation, considered as a pattern of behaviour not being officially recognised or controlled, might become particularly salient. Following the weakening of formal state structures, the MPLA and UNITA have accommodated violence and disorder through informal political strategies, aimed at the private extraction of Angola’s natural resources and the coordination of informal and transnational international relations.

Ultimately, informal political regulations have been more convenient for both movements in war, and today continue to be so in peacetime for the MPLA.

A Sense of Place Permalink: http://wp.me/pISTJ-ek

Full Text: http://www.benthamscience.com/open/toarsj/articles/V004/SI0014TOARSJ/62TOARSJ.pdf

 The Institutionalisation of Informal Politics Beyond the State: The Case of UNITA-MPLA Conflict in Angola.
Mathieu Petithomm. The Open Area Studies Journal, 2011, 4, 62-72
DOI: 10.2174/1874914301104010062

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Climate related sea-level variations over the past two millennia

Abstract:  We present new sea-level reconstructions for the past 2100 y based on salt-marsh sedimentary sequences from the US Atlantic coast. The data from North Carolina reveal four phases of persistent sea-level change after correction for glacial isostatic adjustment. Sea level was stable from at least BC 100 until AD 950. Sea level then increased for 400 y at a rate of 0.6 mm/y, followed by a further period of stable, or slightly falling, sea level that persisted until the late 19th century. Since then, sea level has risen at an average rate of 2.1 mm/y, representing the steepest century-scale increase of the past two millennia. This rate was initiated between AD 1865 and 1892. Using an extended semiempirical modeling approach, we show that these sea-level changes are consistent with global temperature for at least the past millennium.

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Full Text: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/27/11017.full

Climate related sea-level variations over the past two millennia

Andrew C. Kemp, Benjamin P. Horton, Jeffrey P. Donnelly, Michael E. Mann, Martin Vermeer, Stefan Rahmstorf
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
National Academy of Sciences
June 20, 2011

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The Geological Anti-Narrative

Abstract:  Geology has often been treated by literary critics as the producer narratives of earth history which were appropriated or resisted by novelists and poets. This paper will problematise this tradition by considering a widespread problematisation of plot as a mode of rational enquiry in the nineteenth century, and which underpinned much literary and geological discourse.

Rooting itself in elite, fashionable literary culture, geology often resisted plot as a means of unravelling and describing earth history. Briefly considering the reading and the writings of geologists including Adam Sedgwick, William Buckland and Charles Lyell, this essay demonstrates that geology is a much different case in ‘science and literature’ than the evolutionary sciences explored by Gillian Beer and George Levine

—

A Sense of Place permalink: http://wp.me/pISTJ-bw

Full Text: http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/article/view/578/641#fn16

—

Adelene Buckland

Losing the Plot: the Geological Anti-Narrative

19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

No 11 (2010)

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Traditional and Non-Traditional Security Threats in Central Asia: Connecting the Old and the New

Precis: This article analyzes how traditional and non-traditional threats in  Central Asia interact and reinforce each other. It argues that analysts  need to overcome the intellectual separation between “hard” and “soft”  threats and to better understand how “hard” and “soft” security issues  overlap and in many ways reinforce each other.

The weakness of Central  Asian states seriously impairs their capacity to deal with security threats,  especially non-traditional ones (including environmental threats). The  result is that security problems in the region tend to multiply. The  combination of weak states with old and new security threats in Central  Asia weakens government structures even more and  creates  a vicious  cycle.

Full Text: http://www.chinaeurasia.org/images/stories/isdp-cefq/CEFQ201005/cefq8.2ns35-51.pdf

A Sense of Place permalink:   http://wp.me/pISTJ-br

Niklas Swanstro

Traditional and Non-Traditional Security Threats in Central Asia: Connecting the Old and the New

China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly, Volume 8, No. 2 (2010) pp. 35 – 51

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‘Balance of Terror’ Amongst Nigerian Rivals

Precis:  Militias and vigilantes that assume public authority by fighting crime reject the laws of the state, yet they have no other set of rules to regulate their activities. Many of them claim to be accountable to their ethnic or religious community on whose behalf they operate.  But their communities have found no means to institutionalise control over them. Moreover, there are no institutions to settle conflicts between different militias and vigilantes.

On a local level, rival groups have reached informal arrangements.  However, these compromises are unstable, as they reflect fragile alliances and shifting balances of power. Leaders of militias and other ‘self-determination groups’ have suggested organising a conference of all ethnic nationalities in Nigeria in order to design a new constitution that would give militias and vigilantes a legal role and define their authority.  But the groups compared in this article – Oodua People’s Congress, Sharia Vigilantes, Bakassi Boys, MASSOB, and Niger Delta militias – pursue very divergent interests, and they are far from reaching a consensus on how to contain violence between them.

A Sense of Place permalink:  http://wp.me/pISTJ-a6

Full Text: http://www.afrikanistik-online.de/archiv/2008/1756

‘Balance of Terror’ — Rival Militias and Vigilantes in Nigeria

Johannes Harnischfeger

Afrikanistik Online

2008

urn:nbn:de:0009-10-17569

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