Small-scale Traditional Societies Research Articles

Intersectionality, Rural Criminology, and Re-imaging the Boundaries of Critical Criminology

One of the significant shortcomings of the criminological canon, including its critical strands—feminist, cultural and green—has been its urbancentric bias. In this theoretical model, rural communities are idealised as conforming to the typical small-scale traditional societies based on cohesive organic forms of solidarity and close density acquaintance networks. This article challenges the myth that rural communities are relatively crime free places of ‘moral virtue’ with no need for a closer scrutiny of rural context, rural places, and rural peoples about crime and other social problems. This challenge is likewise woven into the conceptual and empirical narratives of the other articles in this Special Edition, which we argue constitute an important body of innovative work, not just for reinvigorating debates in rural criminology, but also critical criminology. For without a critical perspective of place, the realities of context are too easily overlooked. A new criminology of crime and place will help keep both critical criminology and rural criminology firmly anchored in both the sociological and the criminological imagination. We argue that intersectionality, a framework that resists privileging any particular social structural category of analysis, but is cognisant of the power effects of colonialism, class, race and gender, can provide the theoretical scaffolding to further develop such a project.

Attachment and Cooperation in Religious Groups

Weingarten and Chisholm (2009) are to be congratulated on a fascinating and stimulating article. However, it suffers from a lack of any real definition of “religion.” This might not matter, except for three things. First, most (if not all) of the evolution-of-religion literature that Weingarten and Chisholm are addressing shares this lack of definition. Second, “religion” is a Western concept, and most societies worldwide (especially the small-scale, traditional societies) do not have an equivalent word or concept. Third, there are major problems with most of the working definitions that seem to be implied in the literature. If religion is “belief in supernaturals,” we have not only the well-known problem of belief in Santa Claus, ghosts, Mickey Mouse, and other dubious divinities (see Atran 2002; Winkelman and Baker 2008) but also the problem that social scientists believe in and routinely attribute agency to unreal or undemonstrable entities such as neoliberalism, the elite class, the modernist program, the colonial mentality, and, for that matter, Society itself. Is social science a religion? Conversely, most societies worship the spirits or life force of perfectly real things: mountains, trees, bears. We may not agree that a bear spirit does all the things that the worshipers say it does, but we cannot deny that bears are alive and real. What, then, is a “supernatural”? Is it anything more than something you believe in and I don’t? If religion is defined as deeply held but unprovable foundational beliefs, we have a similar problem. How do we separate religion from communism, microeconomic theory, human rights, or moral philosophy? In fact, atheism would be a religion, being a thoroughly unprovable set of beliefs about the divine. If religion is intense personal experience of mysticism, awe, reverence, and the like, we have to deal with the singular lack of such exalted emotion in the average congregation member; much religious practice is merely boring, as much to the devout as to anthropological observers. William James (1903) long ago pointed out that even within very small homogeneous groups there are enormous variations in “religious” emotionality, and Radin (1957) confirmed this for small-scale traditional societies. We are left with Durkheim’s (1995 [1912]) definition of religion as a collective representation of community that holds a group together through engaging emotion and then motivates people to follow their social codes. This, again, could apply to communism, or high school spirit, or political partisanship, or nationalist fervor (cf. Anderson 1991). So can other definitions of religion as social practice or social bonding. Different experts highlight different aspects of religion as foundational and thus wind up talking past each other. It seems that the only way to define religion is to say it is an occasionally institutionalized set of social conventions that unite all the above in various combinations. If religion is indeed that complex, looking for “the God gene” (Hamer 2005), or any simple evolutionary explanation, is hopeless. We have to explain how each component evolved and then how they have come to be assembled in the various ways ethnographers have documented. In the thousands of smallscale traditional societies that lack a concept of religion or any differentiation of “supernatural” from “natural” beings, we will have to consider all these various things separately and make no assumptions about their being united in one institution set over against other cultural institutions. I am duly convinced by Weingarten and Chisholm (2009) that attachment theory is one place to begin understanding religion. But we need a great deal more in order to explain the origins of awe, or fear of ghost poison, or mysticism, or the Storm God.

Therapeutic Processes and Perceived Helpfulness of Dang-Ki (Chinese Shamanism) from the Symbolic Healing Perspective

This study focuses on the therapeutic process and perceived helpfulness of dang-ki, a form of Chinese shamanistic healing, in Singapore. It aims to understand the healing symbols employed in dang-ki, whether or not patients find them helpful and whether their perceived helpfulness can be explained by the symbolic healing model (Dow, Am Anthropol 88(1):56-69, 1986; Levi-Strauss, Structural anthropology. Basic Books, New York, 1963). Although many researchers have applied this model to explain the efficacy of shamanistic healings, they did not directly provide empirical support. Furthermore, the therapeutic process of a shared clinical reality as proposed by the model may be achievable in small-scale traditional societies that are culturally more homogeneous than in contemporary societies that are culturally more diversified due to globalization and immigration. Patients may hold multidimensional health belief systems, as biomedicine and alternative healing systems coexist. Thus, it would be interesting to see the relevance and applicability of the symbolic healing model to shamanistic healing in contemporary societies. In this study, ethnographic interviews were conducted with 21 patients over three stages: immediately before and after the healing and approximately 1 month later. The dang-ki healing symbols were identified by observing the healing sessions with video recording. Results show that dang-kis normally applied more than one method to treat a given problem. These methods included words, talismans and physical manipulations. Overall, 11 patients perceived their consultations as helpful, 4 perceived their consultations as helpful but were unable to follow all recommendations, 5 were not sure of the outcome because they had yet to see any concrete results and only 1 patient considered his consultation unhelpful. Although the symbolic healing model provides a useful framework to understand perceived helpfulness, processes such as enactment of a common meaning system and symbolic transformation are complex and dynamic, and may be carried over several healing sessions.

To give and to give not: The behavioral ecology of human food transfers

The transfer of food among group members is a ubiquitous feature of small-scale forager and forager-agricultural populations. The uniqueness of pervasive sharing among humans, especially among unrelated individuals, has led researchers to evaluate numerous hypotheses about the adaptive functions and patterns of sharing in different ecologies. This article attempts to organize available cross-cultural evidence pertaining to several contentious evolutionary models: kin selection, reciprocal altruism, tolerated scrounging, and costly signaling. Debates about the relevance of these models focus primarily on the extent to which individuals exert control over the distribution of foods they acquire, and the extent to which donors receive food or other fitness-enhancing benefits in return for shares given away. Each model can explain some of the variance in sharing patterns within groups, and so generalizations that ignore or deny the importance of any one model may be misleading. Careful multivariate analyses and cross-cultural comparisons of food transfer patterns are therefore necessary tools for assessing aspects of the sexual division of labor, human life history evolution, and the evolution of the family. This article also introduces a framework for better understanding variation in sharing behavior across small-scale traditional societies. I discuss the importance of resource ecology and the degree of coordination in acquisition activities as a key feature that influences sharing behavior.

Violence, Spatiality and <I>Other</I> Rurals

Occidentalism, which treats the other as the same, can be detected in both the criminological and rural sociological treatment of violence in the sociospatial sites of rural countrysides. Criminology tends to mistakenly assume that violence in the modern world is primarily an urban phenomenon (Baldwin & Bottoms, 1976, p. 1; Braithwaite, 1989, p. 47). If violence in rural settings is encountered it tends to be treated as a smaller scale version of the urban problem, or the importation of an otherwise urban problem - as the corrupting influence of the gesellschaft within the gemeinschaft. Within much rural sociology violence is rendered invisible by the assumption that rural communities conform to the idealised conception of the typical gemeinschaft society, small-scale traditional societies based on strong cohesiveness, intimacy and organic forms of solidarity. What these bonds conceal, rather than reveal - violence within the family - remains invisible to the public gaze. The visibility of violence within Aboriginal families and communities presents a major exception to the spatially ordered social relations which render so much white family violence hidden. The need to take into account the complexity and diversity of these sociospatial relations is concretely highlighted in our research which has taken us out of the urban context and confronted us not only with the phenomenon of the violence of other rurals, but also with fundamentally competing claims on, and conceptions of, space and place in the context of a racially divided Australian interior. This article represents the second installment of conceptual reflections on this research, with the first having been published in this journal in 1998.

Violence, Spatiality and Other Rurals

Occidentalism, which treats the other as the same, can be detected in both the criminological and rural sociological treatment of violence in the sociospatial sites of rural countrysides. Criminology tends to mistakenly assume that violence in the modern world is primarily an urban phenomenon (Baldwin & Bottoms, 1976, p. 1; Braithwaite, 1989, p. 47). If violence in rural settings is encountered it tends to be treated as a smaller scale version of the urban problem, or the importation of an otherwise urban problem - as the corrupting influence of the gesellschaft within the gemeinschaft. Within much rural sociology violence is rendered invisible by the assumption that rural communities conform to the idealised conception of the typical gemeinschaft society, small-scale traditional societies based on strong cohesiveness, intimacy and organic forms of solidarity. What these bonds conceal, rather than reveal - violence within the family - remains invisible to the public gaze. The visibility of violence within Aboriginal families and communities presents a major exception to the spatially ordered social relations which render so much white family violence hidden. The need to take into account the complexity and diversity of these sociospatial relations is concretely highlighted in our research which has taken us out of the urban context and confronted us not only with the phenomenon of the violence of other rurals1, but also with fundamentally competing claims on, and conceptions of, space and place in the context of a racially divided Australian interior. This article represents the second installment of conceptual reflections on this research, with the first having been published in this journal in 1998.

Testing Evolutionary Hypotheses with Demographic Data

An ecological evolutionary viewpoint offers new perspectives on contemporary demographic problems in general and on population–environment issues in particular. In turn, rich and detailed human demographic data can help solve problems of interest in evolutionary theory. Such data have been analyzed in greatest detail in studies of traditional and historical societies. Evolutionary approaches using historical data go beyond small‐sample anthropological studies to the application of the evolutionary approach to large datasets, and illuminate important similarities between small‐scale traditional societies and large modern populations living in evolutionarily novel environments. This article provides a concise update of the breadth of questions and hypotheses of likely interest to demographers and others that evolutionary theorists address using a variety of traditional and historical datasets. It suggests opportunities for additional collaborative work between evolutionary theorists and historical demographers and highlights topics relevant to modern demography.