Category: English

In an information society, where overload has become a problem, might anthropology’s comparative method find a new lease of life? This Lecture sets out to test the hunch that it might. A field ever more densely populated with information is that of org…

Two kinds of formal models need to be distinguished: data models derived from patterned observations and theory models derived from theories about processes that produce the patterned observations. These correspond to the difference between the phenom…

Formalization is typically associated by both supporters and detractors of formal methods with an emphasis on form over content or meaning. However well founded, this association fails to capture why we employ (or not) formal descriptions of what we ar…

Marriage payments: a fundamental reconsiderationAbstract This paper is a constructive critique of the well-known book by Jack Goody and Stanley Tambiah (1973), Bridewealth and Dowry. Given the general acceptance of Goody’s framework in contemporary stu…

Introduction to the Special Issue on “Formalization as a tool for empirical research: what it buys us and what it doesn’t.”

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…

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…

Models of theoretically generated relations among analytic entities have formal properties which enable them to accurately represent some desired relationships, but not necessarily all imaginable relationships. One important part of the modeling task i…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…