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Anthro 179A Culture and Evolution 60247

Winter 2007 T/Th 9:30-10:50 SST 155 Cap 50 Office Hours 11-12 Tues, Thurs http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/AnthroSci/Cul_and_Evol2007.html
Lab Assistant 155 SST 824 1865

Synopsis. We will look in this class not as idealized representations of cultures as evolving in independent but similar stages but as social formations that are reactive to larger scale, interactive and changing political, economic and religious contexts. The human complexity sciences constitute the theoretical framework.

Assignments

Class notes, comments, thoughts, questions, proposals

Be prepared each class session to do a spontaneous discussion/report on the readings identified for the day from the previous class

When doing a powerpoint presentation, please use the Edward Tufte approach described in this ($7) reading, the only thing I urge you buy besides a Strunk and White or its equivalent (you can buy at the bookstore)

1. Report on one of the articles (required or recommended) or book chapters (Grade: 10%) Reports Days

2. Working with one of the datasets (cities, states, cultures and civilizational networks) in

  • excel (Instructions), e.g.,
    right click to copy city data, sort by period, rank
    right click to copy city data, sort by empire, period, rank
  • ArcGis (Instructions), Tony Soeller notes See Andrew Sherratt ArchAtlas Urban supply routes Sherratt
  • World Cultures comparative ethnography (Instructions), codebook v713koro.sav corrected religion code
  • Network/Pajek world-system analysis, etc.) (Instructions) datafiles also labeled by chapters, should be copied to separate subdirectores 2-world system 3-cohesion 4-sentiments and friendship 5-affiliations 6-center/periphery 7-brokers and bridges 9-prestige-ranking 11-geneaologies and citations (12-roles and 8-diffusion are more complicated)
    e.g., Hiromi's Royalties database- England and Japan kinship networks EXE files

    report on a project design (Grade: 10%), present a term project (Grade: 15%) and turn in a term project report (Grade: 55%), plus class participation/discussion (Grade: 10%)

    Useful Web Sites and Text

    Megacities

    streaming video Bridging World Histories Annenberg
    streaming video 9. Connections Across Land Annenberg
    streaming video 10. Connections Across Water Annenberg
    streaming video Bridging World Histories Annenberg x

    Maps from Le Monde Diplomatique

    Papers of the The Institute for Research on World-Systems

    Anthro Source Search -- all major journal in Anthro, on-line, from campus

    Evolutionary World Politics Modelski Homepage Globalization Power law behavior and world system evolution Modelski

    Thomas D. Hall (ed.) 2000. A World-Systems Reader: new perspectives on gender, urbanism, cultures, indigenous peoples, and ecology. Lanham, MD.: Rowman and Littlefield.

    Miniature Earth Donatella Meadows

    some of my ppts for class

    Chase-Dunn's Evolutionary Sociology (more readings!)

    google earth for home installation

    Google Earth (use links to this page to bookmark)

    Required Text

    Peter Turchin. 2006. Book reports can be done by chapters War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations $18, used for $10. This required reading is the best education in historical dynamics and contemporary issues, emphasizing culture and cooperation, that you will ever get, and it summarizes in a nontechnical way the principles of Turchin's published theories and analysis of culture and historical evolution. A short quiz the last day of class will test your grasp of the basic principles, but read this engaging text early on as it will enable you to define different questions and frameworks for your projects and presentations in class.

    the following student ppt presentations now in pdf format on the course website: they may contain comments by DRW that can lead to updating the powerpoint for study purposes:

  • Review of Chapters 1-3 by Sayaka Page, Factors of Imperiogenesis that Explain the Rise of Empires - [1] Mongols on the Russian Frontier [Ermak's Conquoring Cossaks]; [2] Euroamericans on the Amerindian Frontier [The Transformation of Russia -- and America]; [3] Germans on the Roman Frontier [Slaughter at the 'Limites' of the Empire]
  • Review of Chapters 4-6 by Walkiria Quiroga: [4] Discovery of Collective Cohesion as a key to Historical Dynamics ["Asabiya in the Desert"]; [5] Theory of Rational Choice vs. the Science of cooperation ["The Myty of Self-Interest"]; [6] Testing the theory that imperial nations arise on metaethnic frontiers ["The Origins of Rome"]
  • Review of Chapters 13-14 by Nadia Fraga: [13] Asabiya as the root of governmental performance ["The Bowling Alley of History"], and [14] Do the insights of Historical Dynamics have relevance to International Politics today ["The End of Empire?]

    Supplementary Text

    World System History: The Social Science of Long-Term Change edited by Robert Allen Denemark, George Modelski, Barry K Gills, Jonathan Friedman

    Required readings - for reports

    for some of the on-line but off-campus access to readings please click here to configure your proxy server (or install the VPN campus tunnel)

    To accompany the 2006 book: Dynamical maps of evolution of the state system and metaethnic frontiers in Europe during the two millenia CE. These are PDFs made from slides presented at the Santa Fe Institute working group on Analyzing Civilizations as Dynamic Networks (Complex Macrosystems). C. Nussli, 2002. Periodical Historical Atlas of Europe is the source of the new states/ethnogenesis maps.

    0 Dilemma of the U.S. today

    1 Population Dynamics and Internal Warfare: preprint Turchin and Korotayev; Addendum; Supplementary
    2 on the relation between internal and external war see World-system and regional linkages as causally implicated in local level conflicts at the ethnographic horizon 1990 Douglas R. White Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie 115: 111-134.

    3 Dynamical Feedbacks between Population Growth and Sociopolitical Instability in Agrarian States
    (ppt)Dynamical Analysis of Socio-Economic Oscillations: England, 1100-1900

    (background) Turchin's Cliodynamics site

    (anthropological)

    4 The Original Affluent Society--Against Expectations: Marshall Sahlins

    5 How a Society is Organized Roberts

    6 How activities produce change Goodenough

    7 Boehm, Christopher. 1993. Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy Current Anthropology, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 227-254. See also (for blood feud as self-regulation) Exposing the Moral Self in Montenegro: The Use of Natural Definitions to Keep Ethnography Descriptive Christopher Boehm American Ethnologist, Vol. 7, No. 1. (Feb., 1980), pp. 1-26.

    8 Boehm, Christopher. 2000. "Conflict and the Evolution of Social Control," In Journal of Consciousness Studies 7:79-183, Special Issue on Evolutionary Origins of Morality; Leonard Katz, guest editor. see also Variance Reduction and the Evolution of Social Control

    9 How metaphor shapes the issues George Lakoff, Linguistics, UC Berkeley e.g., "conservatives use language to dominate politics"

    10a The Vanishing (Collapse - get the book!), Jared Diamond review by Malcolm Gladwell (see: Ecology&Art

    10b Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq Thomas E. Ricks

    10c Carlota Perez, Honorary Research Fellow, SPRU Science and Technology Policy Research, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow,University of Sussex, UK, Since 2006, Perez is Professor of Technology and Socio-Economic Development at Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia. streaming video lecture. "Acclaimed for the further development, together with her close colleague Chris Freeman, of Schumpeter‘s concepts of the entrepeneur and that of economic cycles or surges, something Business 2.0 has termed the Schumpeter-Perez-Freeman thesis." Her book on this issue, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages came out in 2003.

    11 Guns, Germs and Steel (- get the book!), Jared Diamond review by Malcolm Gladwell (see: Ecology&Art

    War Cycles

    (background & books) Overview William H. McNeill, David Christian ("The Biological Basis of Human History" available on request)

    12 Evolution of the World Economy Modelski
    (background & books) Modelski's statement of universal Darwinism - and global social change
    (background) Modelski's Long-cycles in Global Politics relevant book: Leading Sectors and World Powers

    12.5 Power law behavior and world system evolution: A millennial learning process Modelski and Devezas

    13 Kondratieff waves and table by Modelski, Evolutionary World Politics

    13.5 The four dimensions of Globalization Modelski

    14 (there are many other articles to report on at Modelski's web site above )

    15 (first cities) Guillermo Algaze. 2005. The Sumerian Takeoff Structure and Dynamics 1#1:1-74. eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences
    16 (first cities) Initial Social Complexity in Southwestern Asia: The Mesopotamian Advantage 2001. Current Anthropology 42(2):199-233. Discussion by Marcella Frangipane U.S. military destruction at Babylon catastrophic destruction

    16.5 (contains 16 links to other articles) Douglas R. White, Artemy Malkov and Andrey Korotayev. 2005. World Populations power point
    Kremer World Pop Data also for China, India, Europe
    Kremer-Kapitza
    Kremer-singularity
    Kremer World Pop Data also China, India, Europe
    Kremer World Pop Data Set up For Power-Law Growth Analysis also China, India, Europe WorldPopKremer.xls
    Analysis of City and Empire Size (xls database)
    17 The Periodic Theory of Elements for World Population for submission to Science and Structure and Dynamics
    for Von Foerster and other references see santa fe site

    17.5 Introduction to Social Macrodynamics: Compact Macromodels of the World System Growth. Korotayev A., Malkov A., Khaltourina D. (English). 128 pp.

    18 see Chaps 8 and 9 - Human Civilization Complexity and a Complex Transition, in Dynamics of Complex Systems, by Yaneer Bar-Yam,

    19 (book: used for $2) Janet Abu-Lughod. 1993. The World System in the Thirteenth Century: Dead-End or Precursor? $6

    20 Spatial Synchrony Among and Within World- Systems: Insights From Theoretical Ecology Peter Turchin and Thomas D. Hall

    21 (book) Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Thomas D. Hall. 1997. Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems. Paperback - $39. Barnes & Noble HarperCollins. New Perspectives in Sociology. Hardback - Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
    22 Globalization: A World-Systems Perspective

    23 Arrighi, Giovanni and Beverly J. Silver. 2001. Capitalism and World (Dis)order Review of International Studies 27:257-279.

    24 Artemiy S. Malkov The Silk Roads -- Eurasian Integration through Trade: Ancient, Islamic and 13th Century. See also the ECAI Silk Road online project

    24.5 Jack A. Goldstone: Chapter 4, State Breakdown in Early Modern Asia:
    The Ottoman Crisis and the Ming-Qing Transition (66 pages) - also his Structural Demography article

    24.6 Rethinking the Hobbesian Metaphor for International Politics - Comparing Ancient China and Early Modern Europe
    Hui Tin-bor: 

    24.7 White and Spufford: From Medieval to Modern (4 pages), with slides, GIS and SVG network images

    24.8 John F. Padgett, Christopher K. Ansell, Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434 American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 98, No. 6. (May, 1993), pp. 1259-1319.

    24.9 John F. Padget and Paul D. McLean. Organizational Invention and Elite Transformation: The Birth of Partnership Systems in Renaissance Florence (2005)

    25 (middle east) Evolution and Institutional Foundation of the Hawala Financial System Matthias Schramm and Markus Taube

    26 (ppt and data for analysis) Civilizations as Dynamic Networks - New PPT Jan25
    White, Douglas. "Hegemonic Change and Long Inflationary Cycles: Do independent observations (Fischer and Arrighi) establish some links?" html 193 Medieval city data for viewing only 205zip Medieval city data new 222zip city data the civilizations project (background)

    27 Douglas R. White, Natasa Kejzar, Constantino Tsallis and Celine Rozenblat. City-size hierarchies, 250 BCE -- 2005: Generative models toward a long-term geopolitical theory Figure 4 WorldCities.pdf summary..

    27 Rein Taagepera, 1997 JStor PDF of Expansion and Contraction Patterns of Large Polities: Context for Russia? International Studies Quarterly 41: 482-504.

    28 Korotayev, Andrey. 2004. World Religions as a factor of Social Evolution of the Old World Oikumene: A Cross-Cultural Comparison. See very end of this web page for more on religion, and for project materials.

    28.5 Johnson, Dominic (2005) God's Punishment and Public Goods: A test of the supernatural punishment hypothesis in 186 world cultures. Human Nature 16 (4): 410-446.

    29 George P. Murdock and Douglas R. White, Standard Cross-Cultural Sample: on-line. 2002 [1969] Reprinted with annotations from Ethnology 8:329-369 World cultures database
    (right click and save then run for data) ethno-atlas and religion

    30 Douglas R. White, Michael L. Burton, and Lilyan A. Brudner Entailment Theory and Method: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Sexual Division of Labor. 1977 Behavior Science Research 12:1-249. download data from
    (right click and save then open in SPSS for data) spss
    (right click and save then run ine excel for data) excel

    other: articles and books

    (a number of articles for reports here) Santa Fe Institute Workshop on Evolution Inequality (see papers within)
    Co-Evolution of Behaviors and Institutions: The overarching objective is to understand how the complex structures of social interaction defined by markets, gift exchange, inter group bargaining, firms, foraging bands, and other forms of economic organization shape the evolution of individual preferences, norms, and other motivations, and in turn how these motivations shape the evolution of economic organization. To sharpen and discipline the model-building process we will address a few well documented empirical cases as well as the larger empirical puzzle of human sociality itself. The PDFs are inside the site:
    31 "The First Property Rights Revolution," by Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi PDF
    32 "On the History of the Institutional Foundations of Impersonal Exchange:From Communal to Individual Responsibility in Pre-modern Europe" by Avner Greif PDF
    33 "Why Corn Never Came to California," by Robert Bettinger PDF
    "The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgement," by Jonathan Haidt NO PDF
    "The Group Heuristic: A Psychological Mechanism That Creates A Self-Sustaining System of Generalized Exchanges," by Toshio Yamagishi NO PDF
    36 "Variance Reduction and the Evolution of Social Control, " by Christopher Boehm PDF
    37 "Hitchhiker's Guide to Altruism: Gene-Culture Coevolution, and the Internalization of Norms, " by Herbert Gintis PDF
    38 "Solvng the Puzzle of Prosociality, " by Herbert Gintis PDF
    39 "Learning About a New Technology: Pineapple in Ghana, " by Timothy G. Conley and Christopher R. Udry PDF
    "Hunting,Healing, and Hxaro Exchange A Long-Term Perspective on !Kung(Ju/'Hoansi) Large-Game Hunting " by Polly Wiessner [ In Evolution and Human Behavior, 23: 407-436.] NO PDF
    "The Role of Collective Solidarity in Historical Dynamics " by Peter Turchin NO PDF
    "Bibliography of Historical Dynamics " by Peter Turchin
    "The History of Human Evolution And How We Came To Be Moulded The Way We Are By Genetics and Culture " by Luca Cavalli-Sforza NO PDF

    Markets of Dispossession by Julia Elyachar. Explores central questions about value and social resources, debt and dispossession, culture and power in the contemporary market economy, through the study of the efforts of bankers, social scientists, NGO members, development workers, and state officials to turn the craftsmen and unemployed youth of Cairo into the vanguard of a new market society based on microenterprise.

    Wolf, Eric, and Sydel Silverman. 2001. Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press. ~$25 (paper) Barnes&Noble

    Pomeranz, Kenneth L. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ~$18 (paper) Barnes&Noble

    Pomeranz, Kenneth L. and Steven Topik. The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present. M. E. Sharpe: 1999. ~$20 Barnes&Noble

    Civilizations as Dynamic Networks: The goals are to stimulate significant theoretical and methodological breakthroughs in historical macrosystems research by focusing on new methods of network analysis and complex modeling focused on questions such as the interactive processes entailed in the growth and decline of cities and polities. We are doing this by bringing together world-systems and network analysts with historians, archaeologists and other social scientists concerned with the evolution of macrostructural networks is to explore the synergies than can result from the exchange and integration of datasets, the sharing of modeling and analytical tools across disciplines, and exchanges as to intellectual frameworks and problems.

    Arrighi, Giovanni and Beverly J. Silver. 1999. Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ~$23 (paper) Barnes&Noble

    Hobsbaum, Eric. 1987. "The Centenarian Revolution," Worldly changes that occurred between The 1780s and The 1880s. Chapter 1 of The Age of Empire: 1875-1914. New York, NY: Vintage Press.

    Wolf, Eric. 1982 (2nd edition). Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. ~$22 (paper) Barnes&Noble

    Chernoble: The Ethnography of a Ghost Town; and Reportage on the Ukranian elections Elena reception to 'fictionally presented' reportage

    Networks: See below, articles are on-line pdf publications
    SPSS nations database WVS (Spss 36meg) WVS (Excel1 50meg) WVS (Excel2 26meg)
    Myths&GenesMAonly
    222 West Eurasian Cities, 12-15th C     database (right click to download here) for use with Pajek
    Cities database (rite click to download here) for use with Pajek
    The IROWS (Chris Chase-Dunn, Alexis Alvarez, Dan Pasciuti, Thomas D. Hall) Cities and Empires database
    World cultures dbase files for use with GIS:
    SCCS1-239.dbf
    SCCS2-486.dbf
    SCCS3-732.dbf
    SCCS4-985.dbf
    SCCS5-1289.dbf
    SCCS6-1536.dbf
    SCCS7-1796.dbf
    SCCS8-8.dbf
    web files-uci

    GIS output from classroom lab

    Buddhism, Christianity and Islam in the Old World: Ethnographic Atlas
    World Cities: World-System project
    To make map
    left click ... Events
    click Properties
    Value Field -- scroll to variable
    click Add all Values
    click value to remove
    click Remove tab
    click value to format
    etc

    World Religions and Social Evolution by Andrey Korotayev is also available to students in prepublication form. It draws on the World Cultural database we use in class, and the world religion as well as other variables. From the publisher's blurbs, written by me: This "is a book of startling simplicity and depth that suggests an empirical solution to viewing the subjectivist/objectivist dilemmas in the social sciences and history. It will have a profound effect on how comparison is done in the future in anthropology, and suggests an answer to why some anthropologists, starting with Geertz, are reluctant to suggest comparison as an adequate method. The Murdockian comparative approach, up to Korotayev, had developed to the point where the nonindependence of cultures was well-recognized, and ways of taking the larger configurations of cultural systems into account had been reckoned to lie, in the latest iteration, along lines of high-order proto-linguistic communities. Korotayev demonstrates the effects of breaking what might be seen as a ritual taboo of Murdockian comparison: Thou Shalt Not Code World Religion. By doing so, Korotayev releases the Murdockian spell that lingers over the comparative approach in anthropology, and goes on to demonstrate the powerful effects of world religious communities - dating from what Jaspers calls the 'Axial Age' (400-600BC) - on the preservation and differentiation of distinctive social and political structures in Eurasia. His introduction and conclusion suggest that an objectivist natural history approach to human history, in which subjective factors are of local importance but fade out in terms of lasting effects over generations, is a valid approach to the 'pre-Axial' condition of human societies, while a subjectivist history of consciousness is a necessary complement to the 'post-Axial' condition. Korotayev succeeds in placing these two complementary approaches in context and showing their linkages in terms of how subjective and religious factors play out in human history alongside objective factors such as demography and ecology, each informing the other. He shows how it is impossible to arrive at valid inferential results from comparative approaches without an integration of the two, a situation he aptly calls 'Galton's opportunity' for those are of century-old critiques of the comparative method. The reader will be surprised at the depth of empirical comparative findings in this short book. Following Murray Leaf's Man, Mind and Science (1974) this work is a major contribution to repair of the material/ideational rift in anthropology." [see koro]

    (note that the argument here takes us back to 600-400BCE where the world religious and early philosophical traditions begin. For the 'Axial Age' in the context of a world history course, see WebChron: The WebChronology Project at NorthPark)
    (To connect with Korotayev's book, compare Korotayev's introduction which characterizes Spencer's approach to 'evolution' as just one of several types of evolution.)






    Korotayev: World Religions (40 pages)

    (see also book manuscript

    Bell: A new model of Middle Eastern Social Structures.(34 pages)

    White and Houseman: The Navigability of Strong Ties:
    Small Worlds, Tie Strength and Network Topology    ;
    Another model of Middle Eastern Social Structures.(10 pages)

    HISTORICAL POPULATION DYNAMICS: A MODEL OF PRE-INDUSTRIAL DEMOGRAPHIC CYCLE Komarova and Korotayev

    Korotayev and Komarova: A new model of Chinese dynastic cycles (40 pages)

    Wright, Henry. From Chiefdoms to Origins of States and Civilizations

    Balasz, Socialism to Capitalism in Hungary

    2005 Walter W. Powell, Douglas R. White, Kenneth W. Koput and Jason Owen-Smith. Network Dynamics and Field Evolution: The Growth of Interorganizational Collaboration in the Life Sciences. Forthcoming: American Journal of Sociology 110(4) January electronic edition Download: PDF SFI-WP2003d.pdf See link to movies at Barabasi site

    2005 Jason Owen-Smith, Walter W. Powell, and Douglas R. White. Network Growth and Consolidation: The Effects of Cohesion and Diversity on the Biotechnology Industry Network Submitted Forthcoming in Management Science , Special issue on Complex Systems Across Disciplines. Download: PDF Growth_andConsolidation.pdf

    1988 Large-Scale Network of World Economy: Social scientists use the CRAY Interview: Douglas R. White, David A. Smith. Science at the San Diego Supercomputer Center 1987: 27-28

    2004 Douglas R. White, Walter W. Powell, Jason Owen-Smith and James Moody. Networks, Fields and Organizations: Micro-Dynamics, Scale and Cohesive Embeddings. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory 10:95-117. Special issue on Mathematical Representations for the Analysis of Social Networks within and between Organizations.

    Brudner, Lilyan A., and Douglas R. White. 1997. Class, Property and Structural Endogamy: Visualizing Networked Histories Theory and Society 25:161-208.

    White, Douglas R. 2005. Ring Cohesion in Marriage and Social Networks Forthcoming: Social Networks special issue edited by Alain Degenne Mathematiques, informatique, et sciences humaines Journal of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales, Paris Download:RingCohesionMarriage.pdf

    White, Networks, Ethnography and Emergence

    Korotayev - world religions and social structure

    NSF sponsored study of Rwandan genocide/policide in space and time