Author: Recent imbs_socdyn_sdeas items

In this article, I present an analysis of the results of a memory task (free listing) about social relationships administered to Tongans of Polynesia. Contrary to claims by Weller and Romney (1988) and Ross (2004), the free listing activity did not yie…

Experimental economics and bounded rationality are very different from one another, but both claim to offer a more general and more empirical type of economic theory. Experimental economists, in addition, claim that their game-theoretic analyses provid…

From Darwin’s time in biology and even before Darwin in linguistics, the tree diagram has been the primary formal depiction of descent. The underlying logic of the dendrogram depends on a branching process: units fission, then diversify through time. T…

I am concerned with the distinction between data processing, modeling and actual theory formation, with the generating of empirically interpretable additional theorems, and in particular how formalization, far from abstracting away from data, makes one…

Galton’s Problem is one of identifying functional relationships in a set of observations where the observations may be related through borrowing or descent. The problem has long been recognized in the fields of anthropology and cross-cultural research,…

Tatau, tatau pé, katoa tatau ‘the same, just the same, all the same,’ is the phrase most Tongan villagers used when asked if any person within the village groups they had just mentioned was mahu’inga taha ‘most important.’ Such forceful insistence on e…

Given data on supplier chains in a Tokyo industrial district, we show how network structures such as monopsony (uniqueness of buyers) may affect noncompetitive pricing. To address the distribution of these biases we show how two types of emergent roles…

This is the second of Structure and Dynamics’ thought-provoking series on potential impacts of iconic representations in communicating and helping to implement sustainable human practices. This discussion focuses on ways to expand broad cultural dialog…

Foundational to this discussion are two papers on “identity” by George A. Akerlof and Rachel Kranton [2000, 2005]. We contribute to their development of this issue with additional factors that are arguably essential to the analysis of identity formatio…

Trust is crucial for modern organizations and in particular in cases of virtual and distributed work. In such organizations much of the communication is based on electronic media, and the collaborators often know very little about each other when they …

Insights into prehistoric region-wide political consolidation were suggested by simulation results from an agent-based model of pre-state societies. The case study was the late prehistoric period circa 2500 BC to AD 1000 in the Lake Titicaca basin of …

The empirical status of formal systems of ideas is a crucial topic in the effort to establish a fully empirical anthropology. In anthropology, the dominant view of formal analysis, and the nature of formal structure, is derived from positivistic philos…

Because they are in constant interaction with each other, human beings are often agents within emergent collective processes. Although they are then acting as particles in a field-type phenomenon, their awareness of what they are part of entails that t…

This is a simply a press release at Duke University on James Moody’s assessment (Structure and Dynamics 1#2) of impact of the U.S. wars’ casualty tolls.

The Seventh Lagoon is an eco-activist artwork conversation — with all of us — on the rise of the earths’s oceans previously exhibited and catalogued as part of the Lagoon Cycle (1985). The entire 360-foot work is now in the National Museum of Modern …

Book Review: Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems: Process Models of a Turkish Nomad Clan, by Douglas R. White and Ulla C. Johansen (Oxford, UK and Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004, Cloth / 2006, Paper, 544 pages)

This first installment of an Atlas of Chiefdoms and Early States assembles data on six clusters of elementary hierarchical polities, coded here to measure the scale of both the political-administrative aspects and the social-economic aspects of these c…

Abstract: The application of network perspectives to communities requires some appreciation of the variety of ways people are now writing about communities. Some scholars and practitioners have drifted toward the view that a community is composed ve…

This response contextualizes Christiansen and Altaweel’s paper within broader currents of human-climate interactions. It then examines some of the implications of the use of wide ranging data sources for the construction of complex models as well as so…

While we typically count the number of people directly affected by violence, war and state action with casualty reports, we often ignore how these people are embedded in larger networks. In this paper, I estimate the number of people who know somebody…

The Structure and Dynamics eJournal offers a conduit for refereed electronic publication, debate, and editorial communication in the domain of anthropology and human sciences. We invite you—as an open access reader at no cost, an author at no cost, or …

Natalia Komarova brings up a very important issue in modeling dynamical phenomena—what mathematical framework to use. I respond to her critique.

Drawing upon modern economic theorists, Guillermo Algaze emphasizes continuous, interlocking, self-reinforcing processes of growth and external trade as keys to “takeoff” toward southern Mesopotamia’s regional leadership in the fourth millennium B.C. B…

We institute here a policy of occasionally publishing noteworthy PhD dissertations that advance anthropology or related sciences. Such publications are to be copy edited by the dissertation author, nominated by the author’s PhD committee, and must rece…

The journal logo illustrates the use of dynamic visualization to complement network and statistical analysis in the study of social, political, economic and historical processes generally. In giving credit to the authors of the logo, this is an invited…