Sociocultural Worlds Research Articles

Thinglhang Lou: Linkages Between Swidden, Culture, and Ecology in Manipur, Northeast India

Emerging human ecological discussions bring forth literature and studies from marginalised groups and indigenous communities whose knowledge about nature and subsistence livelihood practices have long been seen as ‘non-scientific’ and, therefore, unworthy of serious research. As a result, perceptions of swidden cultivation as ‘destructive’ to ecosystems are changing, and studies now focus on the interlinkages of swidden farmers with land, animals, identity, and livelihoods. In this paper, we argue that swidden should be considered as a farming practice that goes beyond subsistence and overlaps with people's belief systems and social and eco-cultural lifeways. Using the notion of thinglhang lou, the swidden practice of Manipur's Kuki, we show the interlinkages between land, humans, and spirits and the important role they play in their socio-cultural worlds. Through ethnographic exploration involving participant observation, interviews, and focus group discussions among the Kuki, this study shows how and in what ways swidden farming helps in understanding cultural linkages with ecological sustainability. With modern developments radically altering the habitat and eroding cultural heritage, we argue that Kuki's notion of thinglhang lou can be a powerful contribution to our understanding of the environment and knowledge systems.

Containing the Multitudes

A growing body of scholarship has examined different aspects of the international student experience in higher education institutions, yet few studies have critically interrogated the very concept of the “international student” itself. In this article, we consider the different ways in which politico-legal practices of boundary-making have produced categorization schemes that demarcate the boundary between the national “Self” and the international “Other.” These legal categories of the “domestic” and “international” student serve as the discursive grid through which student populations are rendered legible by university administrators, student affairs practitioners, and scholars. We argue that the socio-cultural worlds of international students are not reducible to the homogenizing logics of politico-legal and institutional categorization, and that they should be reimagined through a pluriversal lens – where multiple worlds of difference can co-exist in spite of persistent efforts to contain the multitudes within the rigid, fixed, and mutually exclusive categories of the nation-state.

The landscapes of lives I: An action landscape approach to practices and the interface of individual and society

AbstractPractices occupy the intersection of human behavior with its personal and societal dimensions, operating in social theory as bridges between high‐order cultural features and on‐the‐ground dynamics that reciprocally shape the conditions of everyday life and animate human experience. Yet precisely how this bridging occurs remains underspecified. We address that gap in this and a companion article (Worthman, Cummings, and Lende 2023). This article situates practices in dynamic action space, while the second details how those dynamics work and applies them to questions of inequity, resilience, and contemplative practice. We trace a spectrum of practices from mundane activities to formal rituals and self‐transformational pursuits. We then situate them within a socioecological framework, drawing on the visual metaphor of Charles Waddington's epigenetic landscape to represent fields of possible practices or action landscapes that are contingent, situated, and dynamically configured to constitute the middle ground bridging social actors and lived experience with sociocultural worlds.

Language and culture internalization for human-like autotelic AI

Building autonomous agents able to grow open-ended repertoires of skills across their lives is a fundamental goal of artificial intelligence (AI). A promising developmental approach recommends the design of intrinsically motivated agents that learn new skills by generating and pursuing their own goals - autotelic agents. But despite recent progress, existing algorithms still show serious limitations in terms of goal diversity, exploration, generalisation or skill composition. This perspective calls for the immersion of autotelic agents into rich socio-cultural worlds, an immensely important attribute of our environment that shapes human cognition but is mostly omitted in modern AI. Inspired by the seminal work of Vygotsky, we propose Vygotskian autotelic agents - agents able to internalise their interactions with others and turn them into cognitive tools. We focus on language and show how its structure and informational content may support the development of new cognitive functions in artificial agents as it does in humans. We justify the approach by uncovering several examples of new artificial cognitive functions emerging from interactions between language and embodiment in recent works at the intersection of deep reinforcement learning and natural language processing. Looking forward, we highlight future opportunities and challenges for Vygotskian Autotelic AI research, including the use of language models as cultural models supporting artificial cognitive development.

Aboriginal educators at the intersection: Intimations of greater nuance in both-ways education

The Whole of Community Engagement (WCE) initiative sought to identify barriers and enablers in Aboriginal students’ pathways to post-compulsory education, in six remote communities in Arnhem Land and central Australia. It identified known factors like colonial history, low English literacy, job prospects and cultural difference. Responses often focus on “both-ways” curriculum and pedagogy, and teachers’ cultural competence. Another factor found was interculturality, the fact of living and working at the intersections of Aboriginal and other socio-cultural worlds. The initiative found that students’ engagement with school and with pathways into further education were troubled by both cultural difference and intersection. The Aboriginal researchers involved in the initiative, living at the intersections in their own lives, exemplified the challenges of, and the capabilities needed to negotiate, cultural intersection. The authors propose an intercultural perspective as a refinement to the both-ways approach to remote education.

Accuracy and reconstruction in autobiographical memory: (Re)consolidating neuroscience and sociocultural developmental approaches.

Autobiographical memories are never isolated episodes; they are embedded in a network that is continually updated and prediction driven. We present autobiographical memory as a meaning-driven process that includes both veridical traces and reconstructive schemas. Our developmental approach delineates how autobiographical memory develops across childhood and throughout adulthood, and our sociocultural approach examines the ways in which autobiographical memories are shaped by everyday social interactions embedded within cultural worldviews. These approaches are enhanced by a focus on autobiographical memory functions, namely self-coherence, social embeddedness, and directing future behaviors. Neuroscience models of memory outlined in multiple trace and trace transformation theories and perceptual principles of predictive processing establish mechanisms and frameworks into which autobiographical memory processes are incorporated. Rather than conceptualizing autobiographical and episodic memories as accurate versus error-prone, we frame memory as a dynamic process that is continuously updated to create coherent meaning for individuals living in complex sociocultural worlds. Autobiographical memory is a process of both accuracy and error, an intricate weaving of specific episodic details, inferences and confusions among similar experiences; it incorporates post-event information through reminiscing and conversations, in the service of creating more meaningful coherent memories that define self, others, and the world. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Memory.

The metaphor of border and the heuristics of borderline experiences and their significance for pedagogical thought and activity

The main thesis of this text is expressed in the statement that man is a “borderline being” – who lives within specific boundaries, and his adaptation and development are based on the dialectics of the borderline experience of various specific worlds and their regularities. A metaphor as such always possesses a certain “epistemological surplus” in the layer of its meanings, which may reveal the nature and specificity of that which is complex or ambiguous in its forms of existence. Therefore, the metaphor of border should be considered one of the most important clues in an attempt to bring human existence closer together. A border is something that separates, closes or opens a specific horizon of human experience. In this sense, reaching a border means approaching a particular end - where something can no longer have a simple continuation. Therefore, the objective existence of certain borders and their subjective impression give people an identity or induce them to commit acts of transgression (both constructive and destructive) that constitute an element of their ontological allocation in the surrounding material and natural, and socio-cultural worlds around them. Preserving or transcending specific borders is always experienced by man as something that brings both possibilities and threats to pedagogical impact and related human development.

Preservice teachers’ struggles in finding culturally sustaining spaces in standardized teaching contexts

ABSTRACT Policymakers’ neoliberal reforms have negatively altered early childhood teaching and teacher education. In doing so, these policies make it difficult for preservice teachers to learn how to engage in pedagogical practices that sustain their students’ sociocultural worlds. To address this issue, we utilized case study methodology to examine how a sample of preservice teachers (n = 5) struggled with making sense of how to engage in culturally sustaining practices across their professional training program. Findings from our investigation demonstrate how these preservice teachers appeared to possess both a conceptual and pedagogical understanding of culturally sustaining practices. Yet, they stated that they struggled to find the space required to implement such practices in their field placements, which made them question the landscape of public education while seeking out spaces that might allow them to engage in such practices as classroom teachers. Analyzing these findings illuminate at least three opportunities for teacher educators to support preservice teachers in identifying spaces within their teaching for engaging in culturally sustaining practices in their field placements and future classrooms.

What Else besides War: Deliberate Metaphors Framing COVID-19 in Chinese Online Newspaper Editorials

ABSTRACT Through metaphor, we gain distinctive perspectives on reality and communicate in new ways, especially when we use metaphor intentionally. The COVID-19 pandemic broke out in early 2020, causing significant harm to people’s lives worldwide. This article moves the focus from the ubiquitous war metaphor used in the pandemic to other deliberate metaphors identified in five Chinese news media, i.e., China Daily, People’s Daily, Huanqiu, Cankaoxiaoxi, and Xinhuanet. 59 Chinese online newspaper editorials were collected between 22 January 2020 and 22 July 2020. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, we investigate season, disease and medicine, and homework metaphors. We contend that (a) originating from common bodily experiences in the physical environment, season metaphors have emotional valences and promoted public confidence when the epidemic was severe and urged caution when it was mitigated, (b) connecting physical and socio-cultural worlds, disease and medicine metaphors could simplify and evaluate social issues besides formulating editorials’ political stances, and (c) based on shared socio-cultural knowledge, homework metaphors call for more democratic and practical governance in disease control. This study reveals how these metaphors accomplish useful pragmatic purposes in the pandemic in particular contexts.

Virtual Socio-Cultural Worlds on Open Internet Platforms

The possibility of direct communication between a huge number of non-public people on the open Internet platform, coupled with the ability to observe this process, which is being implemented by even more people, is the catalyst for the emergence of virtual socio-cultural worlds – conditional groups that are united by a single meaning and value field. Motive-target analysis of comments and feedback on comments on the open Internet platform “Zen” showed that one of the key semantic messages, which encourages a huge number of our compatriots to respond on the Internet and thus the manifestation of the most significant, essential points of their worldview, is the leitmotif of the importance of moral values and the requirements of their conformity at all levels of social and personal life. The mass participation of our compatriots in communication interactions on open Internet platforms is a variant of civic participation in its new, modern form, in which optimal conditions for self-determination, social adaptation and socialization arise. The key to the social significance of the meanings “living” here are the key supports for a person and society associated with traditional moral values, ideas and traditions. Control by state regulatory structures over the criteria for assessing blogs that analyze socio-political events and problems seems appropriate and socially significant. The reasons for their closure (“banning”) should be understandable, reasonable and transparent for all participants in communication interactions.

“The Fishes Life”: Social and Physical Liminality in Mather’s The Fisher-mans Calling

The majority of early English settlements in America were by definition coastal, but critical attention on Puritans and the environment has largely focused on the terrestrial landscape. While recent interventions have argued for an oceanic focus, such a reorientation remains blind to the unique influences of coastal environments and the cultural conflicts that happened there. Drawing largely on Cotton Mather’s maritime sermons written between 1704 and 1726, with particular emphasis on The Fisher-mans Calling (1711), this essay argues that early New England Puritan communities had a nuanced and difficult relationship to the liminal coastal, environmental, and sociocultural worlds around them. The cultural conflict, in particular, is best represented by fishermen as a distinct subset of the local population. Unlike merchant mariners and deepwater sailors, fishermen were often local citizens who consistently bridged the gap between maritime and terrestrial worlds. They were themselves liminal figures who presented unique problems around community inclusion for civic and ecclesiastic leaders. Understanding the problems fishermen posed for Puritan community leaders offers new insights into the ways environment and culture interacted in early America.

Childhood at latitude zero: revealing Sao Tome and Principe children�s play culture

In the scope of the sociology of childhood, the aim is to present one of the diverse sociocultural worlds of African children, specifically their play culture, with the intention to reveal Sao Tome and Principe childhood�s daily life dimensions by considering those in which children are specialised and thrilled to talk about: games, play and toys. With the support of postcolonial studies, the present research points out that Santomean children from this African country, which lies at latitude zero on the equator, are literally living in between two worlds: simultaneously handling the challenge of being a child in their own society (adult-centrism) as well as defying the standardised Western childhood imposed by occidental hegemonic institutions (Eurocentrism). Nevertheless, it seems that African children�s actions, resilience, creativity, and intelligence, can be linked to cultures of subversion and resistance, in challenging social inequalities and fighting for social justice�like counter-hegemonic struggles.

The dancing trees: objects, facts and ideas in museums. In From Field to Museum—Studies from Melanesia in Honour of Robin Torrence, ed. Jim Specht, Val Attenbrow, and Jim Allen

In this paper we consider the ways that museum objects have multiple and mutable identities through a focus on three objects from the southeast coast of Papua New Guinea. Our approach is to scrutinise the materiality of these three objects to understand the ways that an object changes physically and symbolically from the point of making, to collection, through to museum acquisition and potential exchange, conservation, exhibition and research. Through this approach we show how small “fact” details about objects from museum documentation systems become entangled in ideas and notions far beyond those of the times in which the objects were created and collected. We conclude that to understand museum objects we need to recognise their roles in the socio-cultural worlds of their makers and those of the collector-museum.

Bearing Witness: Using Video Ethnography to Map Embodied Geographies of Home

ABSTRACT Bearing witness through video ethnography is a generative practice for revealing nuanced elements of non-verbal sociocultural practices that otherwise remain hidden in interview-based research methods. I share how I used this methodology to highlight the sociocultural practices and sensory worlds that constitute the assemblage forming the everyday embodied geographies of home for post-1975 Vietnamese refugee women. Intervening in discourses that portray refugee women as victims of their circumstance, I center Vietnamese refugee women’s subjecthood to show how they exercise agency and make home in the face of the on-going sociospatial displacements that punctuate their everyday lives after resettlement.

ИГРОВОЕ КИНО В ТЕХНИЧЕСКОМ ВУЗЕ

The article substantiates the relevance of the historical and culturological analysis of feature films in practical classes of the university course «Culturology» for technical specialties. Theoretical substantiations of the use of cinematography as an audiovisual source in the study of culture, as well as methodological developments of teachers of Russian universities are given. The novelty of the methodology developed by the author is shown. The description of the organization of classes, including the criteria for the selection of films, is given. Examples of practical tasks are given to consolidate the theoretical material of the university course in cultural studies in the sections of the Thematic plan – «Morphology of culture», «Culture, society, personality», «Dynamics of culture», «Socio-cultural worlds», «Culture and peoples» and topics, including: historical and spatial typology of culture; value motivations and cultural conflict; functional sign; consumer society and conspicuous consumption, «man of the mass»; elite and mass, elite and popular culture; the level of mass art and the formula model; historical and typological features of Russian culture. Examples of expected responses and results obtained are provided. The results of the five-year experience of using feature films in practice in cultural studies at a technical university are summed up: the majority of students are most successful in analyzing films of the middle level of mass art (mid-culture). The practical tasks developed by the author enable students to get acquainted with the masterpieces of Russian cinema, to some extent penetrate into the essence of the culture they represent, and also test their understanding of cultural theory. The teacher evaluates the student's ability to apply culturological theory to solve practical problems according to the level of the assignment.

Documents and the bureaucratisation of alternative dispute resolution in the United States

Documents are part of interactive sociocultural worlds in which ethnographers can analyse topics such as power relations, social struggle, violence and secrecy. While they emerge from bureaucratic administration, apparently mundane and stagnant documents represent dynamic processes of decision-making, knowledge production and exclusion. I consider ethnographic research on documents and their production as one that offers significant insights into bureaucratic violence and the tensions between formality and informality in alternative dispute resolution in Virginia and the San Francisco Bay Area. This article discusses working with documents that are simultaneously bound by law and exist extra-legally. While documents are used to gain economic support, strengthen relationships between non-profit and government bodies, and evidence ‘success’, the processes have difficulties. The data demonstrate that bureaucratisation has resulted in cumbersome processes and expensive requirements that mirror the exclusion and power asymmetries of formal law itself.

The Digitalization of Socium: Its Side Effects on the Socialization of the Young People

The digitalization of socium has traumatic consequences – affects the consciousness and behavior of the young people which is specifically manifested in their disembedding from the context of social bonds. This presupposes the departure from the historically prescribed social forms and attachments which are parts of the process of the youth’s socialization and education. On the one hand, the youth as a social group is being subjected to the process of fragmentation of society caused by the fact that the educational institutions designed to act as mediators for the interests of the young people lose touch with them leading to an increase in uncertainty in the understanding of basic values. On the other hand – this fragmentation of the society is also promoted by the “digital risk” and “digital metamorphosis of society” which, according to U. Beck, causes a “radical type of individualization”: the young people tend to get rid of institutional relations, attachments to the local cultural context and begin to depend on the consequences of their own risks. The concrete factors of these processes are as follows. The digitalization of society radically changes the socialization of the young people. They have become addicted to “googling”. They rely more not on parents and teachers but on the opinions available from their mobile computers. As a result, the young people, being exposed to the codes of signification of Good and Evil taken from “googling”, become dependent on digital realities that determine the nature of their behavior in which the values of novelty begin to prevail. At the same time, their way of thinking is especially deformed, likened to the functioning of computers. Historically, the younger generation was socially and financially dependent on the older generation which actually caused a conflict between fathers and children. However, the circumstances of life in one socio-cultural space and time settled these contradictions quite successfully. Today the socialization takes on a digital character that is not directly related to the specific socio-cultural worlds of people, their previous status and roles. If socialization usually means the transfer of the values and norms from the older generation to the younger generation that are necessary for entering the existing social and political order, making young people actually social beings, now, according to U. Beck, with socialization there is a metamorphosis: “the young generations, on the contrary, were already born as ‘digital being’. What has been packed into the magic word ‘digital’ has become part of their ‘genetic outfit’” (Beck, 2016: 189). The digitalization of socium that has come into our lives brought social and cultural changes, radically transformed the nature of society and the young people. In my view, the adoption by scientists and then politicians of the integralism of digital and humanistic turns can ensure the transition of civilizations and societies to a fundamentally different trend of development. Our optimistic forecast regarding these opportunities is based on the following assumption: the existing very deep intergenerational conflict is not eternal – it may be forecasted that in a generation it will exhaust itself in the current forms because practically the socialization of all people will assume the mastery of values and norms necessary for the management of becoming socio-techno-natural realities in the humane interests of the mankind.

Социально-гуманитарное знание: специфика или иноприродность?

Specificity of socio-humanitarian knowledge which by now acquires new (scientometric) di­mensions has been presented here as the problem under discussion. Recognizing due polemic overstatements, the author, nevertheless, tries to argue, that the difference between natural sciences and socio-cultural knowledge by no means could be reduced to the so-called specificity, but rather should be bestowed the name “knowledge of foreign nature” due to the principal ontological differences of natural and sociocultural worlds. In contrast to the former, he latter obviously has constitutive meaningful dimension. It has also been demonstrated, that this point of view can be clearly traced back to the European philosophi­cal traditions of XIX−XX centuries.

“I Can’t Teach You to Be Taller”: How Canadian, Collegiate-Level Coaches Construct Talent in Sport

Talent identification and development are two of the most critical, yet underexplored, areas in sport sciences. Despite its importance to a host of sport stakeholders, there is a void in our understanding of how coaches construct talent. In an effort to learn more, semistructured interviews were conducted with nine (one female and eight male) collegiate-level coaches from a single Canadian institution. Social constructionism was utilized as the theoretical framework to guide this research. Reflexive thematic analysis generated two main themes: “what talent looks like” and “how talent behaves.” For the former, two subthemes, physical and psychological attributes, were highlighted through the coaches’ experiences as qualities they believe talented athletes may present. The latter reflected opinions that talent may be multidimensional and context-specific in nature. Interestingly, the coaches suggested the context and circumstances of collegiate sport may nudge them to consider other elements (i.e., academic standing, years to degree completion) during talent identification that are unique to this context. Future work in this area could seek to study other populations of coaches to provide a deeper analysis of how talent is situated in relation to different sociocultural worlds.

ON THE SITUATED SOCIO-CULTURAL MEANING OF BENEFACTIVES IN BALINESE

This paper discusses a preliminary corpus-based study of benefactives in Balinese, from a socio-cognitive theory of situated socio-cultural meaning (cf. Langlotz 2015, Danielle and Evans 2017). It is part of larger corpus-based research on parallel texts in the international SCOPIC (Social Cognition Parallax Interview Corpus) project (http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24742). Benefactive constructions are defined as those expressing states of affairs (SoA) hold to someone’s advantage (Kittilä and Zúñiga 2010). The notion of '(someone's) advantage' in Balinese benefactive meaning is tightly embedded in Balinese cultural worlds, having complex positive social meanings in which concepts such as 'self', 'reciprocity', 'in-.out-group', and spiritual rewards are central. The socio-cultural worlds are evidently reflected the speech level system in Balinese. There are different forms with fine-grained social meanings such as three words for 'give' in Balinese depending on the relative social relations of event and/or speech participants. An incorrect choice of linguistic device would lead to incorrect social indexing; hence socially unacceptable or inappropriate, not giving rise to the intended positive benefactive meaning. Our findings show that benefactive meaning is expressible through different means (lexical, morphological, and analytical/constructional). Surprisingly, the lexical benefactive 'give' is 100% expressed through the verb baang in our Balinese SCOPIC corpus, suggesting that the corpus is rather skewed towards the common (or low) register.