Complex Societies Research Articles

Textiles and Staple Finance in the Near East and the Southern Levant

Textiles have long been recognized as a key feature in the economic and social development of early complex societies. Many comparative dimensions, however, remain unexplored, including within the ancient Near East. Unlike contemporary societies in Syria and Mesopotamia, wool was not used as a staple finance good in the Early Bronze Age southern Levant (c. 3700–2000 bce) since the landscape could not permit adequately scaled production. In larger cultural regions wool was produced at vast scales and helped underpin royal institutions. But without a non-perishable, high-volume and high-value commodity like wool, staple finance in the southern Levant was restricted to seasonally produced grain, wine and oil, primarily used in exchange for local labour. Moreover, without wool there was little need in the southern Levant for the administrative and security technologies used elsewhere, namely seals and sealing, and later, writing. This limited the development of complex institutions and cognitive abilities.

Examining the Influence of Demographic Factors on Problem-Solving Ability: A Study of Gender, Family Structure, and School Characteristics

Problem-solving involves overcoming obstacles that hinder goal attainment and finding optimal solutions to issues. This ability empowers learners to address challenges they encounter effectively. Consequently, problem-solving has become one of the most crucial 21st-century skills for better future adjustment in a complex society. This paper examines gender, family type, school type, and locality as correlates of problem-solving ability. The researchers conducted descriptive research with 1,200 secondary school students from the Thoubal district of Manipur. They used the Problem-solving Ability Test (PSAT), which they constructed based on five dimensions of problem-solving ability, to collect data. The findings reveal that male students significantly outperformed female students in the PSAT. Although students from joint families performed slightly better than those from nuclear families, the difference was insignificant. Additionally, students in private schools significantly outperformed those in government schools. Moreover, students from urban schools substantially outperformed those in rural schools on the PSAT.

From the Village to the City: The Rise of Urban Folklore Studies in China

Abstract: The rise of Chinese folklore study was an academic response to the Modern Chinese Enlightenment Movement. The shift in perspective of Chinese folklore studies from the rural field to urban society is the symbol self-reflective turns and innovations. The shift from rural to urban folklore requires an adjustment of research perspectives and methods, not only to adapt to the urbanized social environment, but also to cope with the more complex modern society. Cities are fast-paced, mobile societies, where peoples general and instinctive rejection of strangers and the highly compressed and fragmented nature of their leisure time make fieldwork more difficult. Human behavior is not homogeneous, but diverse, the study of urban folklore can draw on personal life history methods to take a microscopic look at urban society. The rise of Chinese urban folklore is a new area of Chinese folklore studies, and its research theory, methodology and subjects still need to be further explored and supplemented by scholars.

Measuring Epistemic Trust: Towards a New Lens for Democratic Legitimacy, Misinformation, and Echo Chambers

Trust is crucial for the functioning of complex societies, and an important concern for CSCW. Our purpose is to use research from philosophy, social science, and CSCW to provide a novel account of trust in the 'post-truth' era. Testimony, from one speaker to another, underlies many social systems. Epistemic trust, or testimonial credibility, is the likelihood to accept a speaker's claim due to beliefs about their competence or sincerity. Epistemic trust is closely related to several 'pathological epistemic phenomena': democratic (il)legitimacy, the spread of misinformation, and echo chambers. To the best of our knowledge, this theoretical contribution is novel in the field of social computing. We further argue that epistemic trust is no philosophical novelty: it is measurable. Weakly supervised text classification approaches achieve F_1 scores of around 80 to 85 per cent on detecting epistemic distrust. This is also, to the best of our knowledge, a novel task in natural language processing. We measure expressions of epistemic distrust across 954 political communities on Reddit. We find that expressions of epistemic distrust are relatively rare, although there are substantial differences between communities. Conspiratorial communities and those focused on controversial political topics tend to express more distrust. Communities with strong epistemic norms enforced by moderation are likely to express low levels. While we find users to be an important potential source of contagion of epistemic distrust, community norms appear to dominate. It is likely that epistemic trust is more useful as an aggregated risk factor. Finally, we argue that policymakers should be aware of epistemic trust considering their reliance on legitimacy underwritten by testimony.

Autoethnographical Research on the Experience of Identity Change as an Artist, Teacher and Teaching Artist

AbstractAn autoethnographic exploration of identity formation raises the question of how individuals inhabit, negotiate, accommodate and resist the social groups to which they belong, continually coming to terms with who and what they are. This paper discusses, through this researcher's autobiographical exploration, the ways in which pedagogical discourse and practice produce identities that are constructed within the broader sociocultural context of arts education. As an art educator who has been learning and teaching in the Korean sociocultural context since the 1970s, I have experienced the struggle between my identity as an artist and my identity as a teacher amidst the changes in educational ideology reflected in the Korean national curriculum, which is a set of pedagogical discourses and practices that are constructed within a particular sociocultural context. It can be said that my autobiographical narration has important implications for the practice of art education in connecting individuals and society in an ambiguous and complex future society by enhancing theoretical understanding of wider social phenomena. In this paper, the narrative interpretation of my changing identity as an artist, an art teacher and a teaching artist provides a timely insight into identity shifts in how the artwork we encounter and our perceptions of art are shaped and transformed by our own cultural experiences and recollections of our own personal experiences within the interconnectedness of art and education across time.

Diversity of Late Yangshao Agricultural Practices at Xishanping, NW China

ABSTRACT Previous work at the Xishanping site, located in the upper Wei River basin in eastern Gansu Province, NW China, has identified the earliest archaeological evidence for agricultural diversification for the period 5200–4300 cal. yr BP. This study presents the first integrated archaeobotanical and isotopic research on charred crop remains at Xishanping site. Our essay suggests that late Yangshao populations at Xishanping not only implemented a wider mixed-crop millet-based agricultural regime, but to some extent intensified cultivation from around 5200–4800 cal. yr BP. This study enriches current understandings of the spatial and temporal changes in agricultural practices in the late Neolithic Wei River Basin at the dawn of complex society in northern China.

The Princely Burials of the Central Balkans in Context

Despite a consensus that the Late Hallstatt ‘princely’ burials heralded the emergence of the earliest complex societies in the central Balkans, there is room for nuance. In this article, the ‘princely’ burial horizon is examined in light of the opposition between group-oriented and individualizing societies, while accepting that burials are as much an ideological statement as a reflection of social structure. On this theoretical basis, the author presents a study of two groups of ‘princely’ burials in North Macedonia and Bosnia in relation to contemporary and later burials, and with reference to settlement size in the Late Hallstatt and Classical–Hellenistic period. His analysis reveals that the inequality in burial assemblages of the Late Hallstatt ‘princely’ burial horizon decreases in the mortuary record of the fifth–fourth century bc, whereas the settlement size in the Classical–Early Hellenistic suggests emerging differentiation.

Genomic and phenotypic imprints of microbial domestication on cheese starter cultures

Domestication – the artificial selection of wild species to obtain variants with traits of human interest – was integral to the rise of complex societies. The oversupply of food was probably associated with the formalization of food preservation strategies through microbial fermentation. While considerable literature exists on the antiquity of fermented food, only few eukaryotic microbes have been studied so far for signs of domestication, less is known for bacteria. Here, we tested if cheese starter cultures harbour typical hallmarks of domestication by characterising over 100 community samples and over 100 individual strains isolated from historical and modern traditional Swiss cheese starter cultures. We find that cheese starter cultures have low genetic diversity both at the species and strain-level and maintained stable phenotypic traits. Molecular clock dating further suggests that the evolutionary origin of the bacteria approximately coincided with the first archaeological records of cheese making. Finally, we find evidence for ongoing genome decay and pseudogenization via transposon insertion related to a reduction of their niche breadth. Future work documenting the prevalence of these hallmarks across diverse fermented food systems and geographic regions will be key to unveiling the joint history of humanity with fermented food microbes.

EPISTEMOLOGY AND INSTRUMENTALIZATION OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES: AN ITINERARY ON SCIENCE, METHODOLOGY AND FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE IN RESEARCH

The positivist and Cartesian influence on what we know today as science determines a compartmentalization of knowledge that can be an obstacle to studies of complex society. In this sense, interdisciplinary work is an option for the construction of knowledge that not only reflects reality, but also serves to build a better society. Interdisciplinarity, however, needs to be connected to a methodological rigor that guarantees the scientific nature of the knowledge constructed. In this sense, this article aims to outline a hypothetical-deductive theoretical itinerary regarding the multiple possibilities of interdisciplinary work, which involve overcoming the compartmentalization of knowledge constructed from an obsolete epistemology, towards a science with an objective perspective, which is illustrated by feminist studies.

1. Unraveling complex societies in fish from the perspective of “Cognitive Evolutionary Ecology”

1. Unraveling complex societies in fish from the perspective of “Cognitive Evolutionary Ecology”

FORMOR project: analysis of the formation of complex societies in Early Medieval Moravia

FORMOR project: analysis of the formation of complex societies in Early Medieval Moravia

Use of Proteomics for Dietary Reconstruction: A Case Study Using Animal Teeth from Ancient Mesopotamia.

This research examines animal teeth from Early Dynastic (2900-2350 BCE) Mesopotamia (Southern Iraq) to assess animal management practices and identify consumption patterns in animal diets. The objective to answer larger questions about food management and environmental resilience in ancient early complex societies in the Near East was achieved by the use of mass spectrometry-based proteomics for dietary reconstruction. Dietary MS, a revolutionary new methodology applying proteomics techniques to archeological sample sets to reconstruct ancient animal diet. A developed protein extraction technique followed by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry allowed for the identification of the specific plant species consumed in order to highlight variable herd management strategies, resource optimization, for each taxon over time. It also provided information about overall health and indications of disease. This is the first study to apply a full suite of analyses to the region and provides the foundations of a necessary long-term view of human interaction within an environment, through both time and space.

Commodities of Work Positions become Monopoly Behavior

The article aims to systematize buying and selling labor power under the condition of money as a measure, showing that job positions are just commodities bought, resold, and traded like any other commodity, making monopoly behavior popular. The article's content is approached from human and social philosophy to achieve the above purpose while simultaneously combining qualitative methods and synthetic analysis. The result is to clarify that all human attributes have the survival value of species; they become different commodities in production and business, measured by standards and money. Throughout the article, the natural world is diverse, with many species, and each species has unique survival characteristics. While animals live mainly in nature, humans create and live on the products of labor. The division of labor has created a complex society with many different occupations and social positions. Money, a tool of exchange, gradually becomes a measure of the value of everything, from labor and products to people. When money becomes the goal of life, people can lose higher spiritual values. This raises questions about the nature of happiness and the meaning of life in a society where money plays a significant role.

Human Resource Management and Mosque Performance: A SMART-PLS

Along with the development of times and problems in an increasingly complex society, demanding the mosque must improve its performance and role concretely. Youth has a very important role in improving the performance of a mosque. The purpose of this study is to analyze the variable Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) and sharia financial literacy on mosque performance at the Al-Lathiif mosque in Bandung. This study used a sample of 82 respondents from the Hijrah youth community (Shift) drawn based on a purposive sampling technique. The analytical method in this study uses Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The results showed that the value of R2 in the dependent construct in this study showed a value of 0.462 which means that the latent variable of mosque performance can be influenced by strategic human resource management simultaneously and sharia financial literacy by 46.2%, while the rest is influenced by other variables not examined in this research model. Meanwhile, SHRM with a value of 2.128 and a coefficient value of 0.012 has no significant effect because this research found that the Al lathiif mosque has not implemented SHRM formally and thoroughly. Likewise, Islamic financial literacy is influential but not significant to mosque performance.

Oued Beht, Morocco: a complex early farming society in north-west Africa and its implications for western Mediterranean interaction during later prehistory

The Maghreb (north-west Africa) played an important role during the Palaeolithic and later in connecting the western Mediterranean from the Phoenician to Islamic periods. Yet, knowledge of its later prehistory is limited, particularly between c. 4000 and 1000 BC. Here, the authors present the first results of investigations at Oued Beht, Morocco, revealing a hitherto unknown farming society dated to c. 3400–2900 BC. This is currently the earliest and largest agricultural complex in Africa beyond the Nile corridor. Pottery and lithics, together with numerous pits, point to a community that brings the Maghreb into dialogue with contemporaneous wider western Mediterranean developments.

Mencintai Karena Allah dalam Perspektif Hadits

. In today's increasingly complex and diverse modern society, it is improtant to understand the role and meaning of love for god in the context of social, cultural, and everyday life. This study aims to discuss love for Allah in the perspective of hadith. This research uses a qualitative approach by applying the tematic method of hadith. The object of discussion in this study is the ethics and virtue of loving because of Allah which has been formulated based on the theme of hadith. The results. of research on this theme prove that the theme of hadith can be formulated within the framework of the theory of loving because of Allah in the perspective of hadith. In the discussion section, the researcher explains how the ethics of loving because of Allah and the virtue of loving because Allah of Allah take the essence of the sarah of the hadith. The conclusion of this study is that people who love everything because Allah yull get a great reward from Allah on the day of judgment and make a cause for getting.

The nursing ethnographic research into complex societies

Introduction: Multicultural societies of the postmodern world are characterized by the complexity of their structure, organization, and operation. In such societies, there is a heterogeneous set of social players who experience a variety of phenomena in their daily lives in cities. Within this context, nursing care has developed and nurses in recent years have turned to ethnography as a tool in understanding socio-cultural reality and experience from the perspective of those living these experiences. This is a theoretical study seeking to reflect upon the application of an ethnographic approach in Brazilian nursing research in complex societies.Ethnography in Brazilian nursing research in complex societies: Brazilian nurses have appropriated the methodological tools and theories of nursing and anthropological studies to investigate the experiences and meanings attributed to health-disease process, cultural influence on health-related behaviors, as well as to evaluate and manage work processes. Further studies are emphasized to attempt to theorize and reflect upon the methodological construction of this research. This move highlights a shift in focus on nursing research and practice for a more integrative and complex view of human beings and reality. Ethnography helps us learn about a given reality and, as a result, we obtain new insights for understanding the phenomena.Reflection: It is considered that anthropological knowledge extends the nurses’ views on the subject about which they devote their practice, refining it. Being closer to the lives and experience of subjects, permits the perception of phenomena from the perspective of the players involved, offering professionals a different view on the needs and outcomes of nursing care.

Diversifying the Physical Therapist Workforce Through Holistic Hiring, Admissions, and Retention Processes.

Developing and sustaining a physical therapist workforce that reflects the communities it serves necessitates purposeful, mission-driven, and equitable strategies. These strategies aim to broaden the diversity of both faculty and student populations. Through such initiatives, we aim to foster an inclusive environment that reflects our society's richness, enabling us to better understand society's complex needs and mitigate health disparities.

Micro-botanical evidence of plant food sources and stone tool functions at the Sujiacun site from the Longshan period in southeastern Shandong Province, China

During the early and middle periods of the Longshan culture (4600–4200 cal BP), early states developed around the Liangchengzhen and Yaowangcheng sites along the coastal areas of southeastern Shandong. Intensive agriculture and the specialised production of stone tools symbolised the advanced development of Longshan society. However, previous archaeological research in this area has focused mainly on the central settlements of the Longshan culture. As small and medium-sized rural settlements have not been sufficiently explored, their subsistence economy and stone tool functions remain unclear. Starch grains and phytolith assemblages in the residues on stone tool surfaces provide direct tangible evidence of the functions of these tools and offer a new perspective on the characteristics of plant resource use at archaeological sites. The Sujiacun site in Rizhao was a Longshan-period rural settlement in coastal southeastern Shandong. This study conducted starch grain and phytolith analyses of the residues on the surfaces of 17 stone tools from the Sujiacun site. Starch grains of foxtail millet (Setaria italica), broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), rice (Oryza sativa), roots and tubers, and plants of the Hordeum genus were identified, as well as phytoliths of broomcorn millet and rice and those commonly found in grass stems and leaves. This micro-botanical data together with other archaeological evidence suggest that foxtail millet, broomcorn millet, and rice were the main plant foods and that mixed farming of millet and rice was the main subsistence economy at the Sujiacun site. Knives and sickles were mainly used for harvesting crops and sometimes for peeling, slicing, and chopping roots and tubers. The stone muller was used for grinding rather than dehusking grain, and the grinding stone was used not only for polishing stone tools but also for grinding plants. Our findings provide new insights into the methods of plant use and subsistence practices of the Longshan complex society on the east coast of China.

Research on Telling Chinese Stories in English in High School English Teaching

Against the background of globalization, cultural exchanges between different countries and regions have become increasingly frequent, and cultural diversity has become a major feature of today s society. Under such circumstances, education needs to pay more attention to cross-cultural communication and introduce multicultural elements in order to better meet the needs of globalization. The traditional training model can no longer meet the needs of the complex and changing society, and cross-cultural communication and multicultural learning experiences have become an important factor in shaping the future of education. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the current research state, its significance and strategies of telling Chinese stories in English in high school English teaching. By analyzing the current situation of high school English teaching, this paper proposes the importance of integrating Chinese stories into high school English teaching, and elaborates on how to effectively implement this teaching method in teaching practice.