Cultural Contagion Research Articles

The Critical Contagion: Gender and Critical Race Theories

Queer theory or critical gender studies are close relatives of critical race theory. The original critical race theorists stressed that their worldview also encapsulated radical theories on “gender.” The term “gender” is ambiguous. Humans are born male or female--designed to produce either sperm or eggs, even in cases of individuals with biological abnormalities. Individuals, including young children, can be confused about their biological sex, now a cultural contagion leading young people to make irreversible changes to their bodies. Culturally, a society should show empathy and offer to help young people through counseling and guidance, but we do not help children when we affirm his or her choice to assume a gender that conflicts with their biology.

VIRAL MUSICKING: AESTHETICS AND ITERATIONS IN ONLINE CONTAGION

Cats at keyboards. Dancing hamsters. A photo of a dress, and videos set to “Harlem Shake.” The above are recognizable as “viral” phenomena—artifacts of the early twenty-first century whose production and dissemination were facilitated by the internet, proliferating social media platforms, and ubiquitous digital devices. In this paper, I argue that participation in such phenomena (producing, consuming, circulating, or “sharing” them) constitutes a significant site of twenty-first-century musical practice: viral musicking, to borrow and adapt Christopher Small’s foundational 1998 coinage. In this paper I analyze instances of viral musicking from the 2000s through the 2010s, tracking viral circulation as heterogeneous, capacious, and contradictory—a dynamic, relational assemblage of both “new” and “old” media and practices. The notion of virus as a metaphor for cultural spread is often credited to computer science and science fiction, with subsequent co-option into marketing and media; such formulations run adjacent to the popularization of "virus" in philosophical models for globalization and pervasive capitalism across the late twentieth century, from Derrida to Baudrillard and Deleuze. In this paper, I seek to braid these lineages with the work of scholars reading cultural contagion through lenses of alterity and difference, situating music as a particularly felicitous vector for viral contagion, exceeding and preceding Internet circulation. Ultimately, I argue that viral musicking activates utopian promises of digital advocates, through the cooperative social operation of “sharing,” even as it resonates through histories and presents of racialization, miscegenation, appropriation, and the realities of porous, breachable borders, cultures, and bodies.

Epistasis between cultural traits causes paradigm shifts in cultural evolution.

Every now and then the cultural paradigm of a society changes. While current models of cultural shifts usually require a major exogenous or endogenous change, we propose that the mechanism underlying many paradigm shifts may just be an emergent feature of the inherent congruence among different cultural traits. We implement this idea through a population dynamics model in which individuals are defined by a vector of cultural traits that changes mainly through cultural contagion, biased by a ‘cultural fitness’ landscape, between contemporary individuals. Cultural traits reinforce or hinder each other (through a form of cultural epistasis) to prevent cognitive dissonance. Our main result is that abrupt paradigm shifts occur, in response to weak changes in the landscape, only in the presence of epistasis between cultural traits, and regardless of whether horizontal transmission is biased by homophily. A relevant consequence of this dynamics is the irreversible nature of paradigm shifts: the old paradigm cannot be restored even if the external changes are undone. Our model puts the phenomenon of paradigm shifts in cultural evolution in the same category as catastrophic shifts in ecology or phase transitions in physics, where minute causes lead to major collective changes.

Natural Scales in Geographical Patterns

Human mobility is known to be distributed across several orders of magnitude of physical distances, which makes it generally difficult to endogenously find or define typical and meaningful scales. Relevant analyses, from movements to geographical partitions, seem to be relative to some ad-hoc scale, or no scale at all. Relying on geotagged data collected from photo-sharing social media, we apply community detection to movement networks constrained by increasing percentiles of the distance distribution. Using a simple parameter-free discontinuity detection algorithm, we discover clear phase transitions in the community partition space. The detection of these phases constitutes the first objective method of characterising endogenous, natural scales of human movement. Our study covers nine regions, ranging from cities to countries of various sizes and a transnational area. For all regions, the number of natural scales is remarkably low (2 or 3). Further, our results hint at scale-related behaviours rather than scale-related users. The partitions of the natural scales allow us to draw discrete multi-scale geographical boundaries, potentially capable of providing key insights in fields such as epidemiology or cultural contagion where the introduction of spatial boundaries is pivotal.

Into an Age of Cultural Contagion: Vampiric Globalisation in Mudrooroo’s Master of the Ghost Dreaming Series

This article revisit’s the work of Mudrooroo in a new and timely framework of globalisation. I argue that Mudrooroo’s Master of the Ghost Dreaming series comprises a globalisation narrative. The series performs a transmutation of the conventional postcolonial narrative in which the forces of colonialism are made known and subverted. It identifies a novel power within the Australian landscape. This new power, personified by the vampire Amelia Fraser, is more dangerous even than the white colonisers. Whereas colonial forces operate through bounded Orientalist discourses of self/other, civilised/uncivilised, white/black, Amelia’s vampiric domination operates through, and is sustained by, a practice of uncontainability. Mudrooroo’s vampire has previously been read as a metaphor for white predatorial colonialism. However, I propose that Mudrooroo’s vampire Amelia is more adequately understood as the epitome of boundless cultural contagion. I consider that when thus reassessed within a global rather than a postcolonial framework, the Master of the Ghost Dreaming series provides an imaginative account of Australia’s emergence as a space of (cultural) contamination. This space corrupts and collapses discourses of authenticity and purity, thereby engendering radically new visions of being-in-the-world as informed by multivalent experiential entanglements. Through a fusion of fantastic genres that interweaves maban, mythic, and European gothic modes, the series explores the Australian landscape as a site defined by (cultural) contagion.

Cultural Contagion and Affect Politics in the Fever Era : “Naggomsu”, Democracy, Criticism

Cultural Contagion and Affect Politics in the Fever Era : “Naggomsu”, Democracy, Criticism

Immunize-Nation: Hollywood Contagion and the Biopolitics of the Canadian Nation-Building Project

This exploratory essay investigates the fruitfulness of thinking about the intersection of fears of contagion and the construction of national cultural boundaries in relation to cultural nationalist discourse in general and to the specific Canadian nation-building project. It begins by tracing the rise of biopolitical discourses on contagion in the 19 th century, explores how these discourses took on a moral-cultural character with the rise of fears of "moral contagion" and "moral degeneracy" and demonstrates how the latter fears were central to early formulations of the cultural policy/media literacy apparatus in the Victorian period. It then investigates how this Victorian fear of cultural contagion continues to animate contemporary Canadian cultural policy discourse and, through a reading of some of the Heritage Minutes, contemporary Canadian cultural nationalist texts.

The cultural contagion of conflict

Anecdotal evidence abounds that conflicts between two individuals can spread across networks to involve a multitude of others. We advance a cultural transmission model of intergroup conflict where conflict contagion is seen as a consequence of universal human traits (ingroup preference, outgroup hostility; i.e. parochial altruism) which give their strongest expression in particular cultural contexts. Qualitative interviews conducted in the Middle East, USA and Canada suggest that parochial altruism processes vary across cultural groups and are most likely to occur in collectivistic cultural contexts that have high ingroup loyalty. Implications for future neuroscience and computational research needed to understand the emergence of intergroup conflict are discussed.

Cultural contagion in a new key

Cultural contagion in a new key

Competitive Corruption: Factional Conflict and Political Malfeasance in Postwar Italian Christian Democracy

This article studies the relationship between cartels of politicians and systemic political corruption in a democratic setting. Some electoral systems, including open-list systems of proportional representation, encourage intraparty competition for office. The authors analyze the relationship between intraparty conflict in postwar Italy's dominant political party, the Christian Democrats, and charges of malfeasance against Christian Democratic members of the Chamber ofDeputies in the years between thefirstpostwar parliamentary elections of 1948 and the end of the XI legislature in 1994, when the electoral system was substantially modified. Suspected malfeasance is operationalized as requests by the judiciary to lift parliamentary immunity in order to proceed with an investigation of a member of the Chamber of Deputies.Results show a significant statistical relationship between intraparty conflict and alleged corruption on the part of DC deputies starting in the early 1970s. These results are interpreted to mean that the dramatic levels of political corruption observed in Italy in recent decades were in part an outgrowth of the search for campaign funds by incumbent DC members of parliament in competition with other candidates from the same party. Electoral competition with other parties did not significantly affect the extent of charges of malfeasance against DC deputies. Using maps, the authors also provide preliminary evidence that Italian corruption did not spread from south to north in a process of cultural contagion, as is commonly believed. Instead, theyfind,the determinants of corruption appear to be endogenous to institutions of the postwar political system.

Book Reviews : Cultural Contagion: The Spread of Science in the Third World—an Essay Review

Book Reviews : Cultural Contagion: The Spread of Science in the Third World—an Essay Review

Hereditary taint and cultural contagion: The social etiology of fin‐de‐siècle degeneration theory

Hereditary taint and cultural contagion: The social etiology of fin‐de‐siècle degeneration theory

Common Content in the Speech of Preschool Children

The student of child behavior recognizes that there is considerable community of ideas, as expressed in speech, among children in nursery school groups. Children tend to talk about the same things and in much the same terms, but whether or not these common verbal responses are attributable to the cultural contagion of a common environment is hard to determine in a nursery school setting. Similarity in the verbal responses of children who have not enjoyed association with their peers except through informal neighborhood play may throw some sidelights upon the extent to which the cultural background of young children is standardized even in the absence of schooling of any sort. The object of this paper, therefore, is to examine some of the responses commonly made by children between the ages of two and five, as to the frequency with which certain concepts are mentioned, the sex and age differences that obtain in the expression of them, and the function they may serve in the child's adjustment to his world. It is to be hoped that analysis will reveal which responses are common by virtue of their being expressions of common needs and wants of the child, and which are merely a product of early culturization; in other words, which are outgrowths from within the child's own body, and which are superimposed from without. The records used in this analysis are diary-type accounts of the child's all-day visit to a health center in the course of which he is subjected to a number of examinations with periods of rest, play and a meal interspaced. The record contains a verbatim account of the child's speech during a thirty to forty-five minute play period, together with briefer notes on the child's behavior upon arrival at the Center, at examinations, at meal and at rest. These records are obtained at six months' intervals on each child on the occasion of his regular visits to the Center for Research in Child Health and Development.2 Visits occur within a week of the half-yearly birth date; hence, there is no ambiguity in the age grouping of children. For the present study 336 such records of the child's day are used, 168 of each sex, distributed by ages as follows: 20 records at two years, 40 at two and one-half, 50 at three, three and one-half and four years, 60 at four and one-half and 66 at five years. No age level is entirely discrete as to personnel, however, as there are from one to four records on each child. Hence, the records of a given child may be tabulated at four successive age levels. Because of this overlapping of cases, age differences will not be emphasized in the discussion.