Unstable Hierarchies Research Articles

Methodological reflections on curating an artistic event with African youth in a Norwegian city

In this article, we remember experiences of our participation in an artistic event for youth of African descent in a Norwegian city to reflect on the potential of arts-based methods for exploring migrant and diasporic youth identities. Reflecting on the process of curating an event titled Afrikanske Dager in Drammen (African days in Drammen) involving young Africans in a Norwegian city, we demonstrate the methodological potential photography making, exhibition and dance performance. We show how processes of collaborative photography making provide spaces for participants to negotiate and think through identity and self-representation. We tease out the potential of dance choreography and performance as avenues for participants to embody and retell old histories from the archive of African presence in Norway. We discuss how the event making process was the site of unstable hierarchies where roles and positions constantly changed and highlight the power relations involved in the collaborative production of knowledge from artistic practice.

Social instability influences rank-specific patterns of oxidative stress in a cichlid fish.

In many animal societies, dominant individuals have priority access to resources. However, defending high rank can be costly, especially in unstable social hierarchies where there is more intense competition. Oxidative stress has been proposed as a potential cost of social dominance, but few studies have examined this cost in relation to social stability. We studied the cost of social dominance in the cichlid fish Astatotilapia burtoni by manipulating social stability among males in replicate naturalistic communities for 22 weeks. We found that our social stability treatment influenced status-specific patterns in 3 out of 6 measurements of oxidative stress. Specifically, dominant males experienced increased plasma oxidative damage (measured as reactive oxygen metabolites, ROMs) compared with subordinate males in stable hierarchies only. Subordinate males in unstable hierarchies had higher ROMs than their stable community counterparts, but we found no effect of social stability treatment for dominant males. However, dominant males tended to have reduced total antioxidant capacity (TAC) in the liver when compared with subordinate males in unstable hierarchies, suggesting that the cost of social dominance is higher in unstable hierarchies. There were no effects of status and treatment on gonad TAC, muscle TAC or oxidative DNA damage. We conclude that the stability of the social environment influences the relative cost of social dominance in a tissue- and marker-specific manner.

Aggression, glucocorticoids, and the chronic costs of status competition for wild male chimpanzees

Across vertebrates, high social status affords preferential access to resources, and is expected to correlate positively with health and longevity. Increasing evidence, however, suggests that although dominant females generally enjoy reduced exposure to physiological and psychosocial stressors, dominant males do not. Here we test the hypothesis that costly mating competition by high-ranking males results in chronic, potentially harmful elevations in glucocorticoid production. We examined urinary glucocorticoids (n = 8029 samples) in a 20-year longitudinal study of wild male chimpanzees (n = 20 adults) in the Kanyawara community of Kibale National Park, Uganda. We tested whether glucocorticoid production was associated with dominance rank in the long term, and with mating competition and dominance instability in the short term. Using mixed models, we found that both male aggression and glucocorticoid excretion increased when the dominance hierarchy was unstable, and when parous females were sexually available. Glucocorticoid excretion was positively associated with male rank in stable and unstable hierarchies, and in mating and non-mating contexts. Glucorticoids increased with both giving and receiving aggression, but giving aggression was the primary mechanism linking elevated glucocorticoids with high rank. Glucocorticoids also increased with age. Together these results show that investment in male-male competition increases cumulative exposure to glucocorticoids, suggesting a long-term tradeoff with health that may constrain the ability to maintain high status across the life course. Our data suggest that the relationship between social rank and glucocorticoid production often differs in males and females owing to sex differences in the operation of sexual selection.

A Changing and Multi-scalar EU Borderscape: The Expansion of Asylum and the Normalisation of the Deportation of EU and EFTA Citizens

The sorting of individuals is one critical function performed by migration law. These legal regulations are based on dichotomies, such as separating irregular migrants from regular migrants. However, through the multi-scalar management of human mobility, the conflicting coexistence of national and supranational interests decentres these legal binaries. Therefore, migration law devices sort newcomers in a more complex way, giving shape to multilayered and unstable hierarchies of otherness. Using Spain as a case study on migration control changes, this paper addresses the role that migration law enforcement institutions play in cementing and eroding these legal categories. First, it analyses the consequences of the so-called ‘migration crisis’ in enlarging a European asylum system that, until recently, seemingly rests on few countries. Second, it examines the increasing normalisation of the forced return of European Union (EU) (and European Free Trade Association [EFTA]) nationals, which undermine a critical prerogative of the EU citizenship status.

Exogenous testosterone increases status-seeking motivation in men with unstable low social status

Testosterone is associated with status-seeking behaviors such as competition, which may depend on whether one wins or loses status, but also on the stability of one’s status. We examined (1) to what extent testosterone administration affects competition behavior in repeated social contests in men with high or low rank, and (2), whether this relationship is moderated by hierarchy stability, as predicted by the status instability hypothesis. Using a real effort-based design in healthy male participants (N = 173 males), we first found that testosterone (vs. placebo) increased motivation to compete for status, but only in individuals with an unstable low status. A second part of the experiment, tailored to directly compare stable with unstable hierarchies, indicated that exogenous testosterone again increased competitive motivation in individuals with a low unstable status, but decreased competition behavior in men with low stable status. Additionally, exogenous testosterone increased motivation in those with a stable high status. Further analysis suggested that these effects were moderated by individuals’ trait dominance, and genetic differences assessed by the androgen receptor (CAG-repeat) and dopamine transporter (DAT1) polymorphisms. Our study provides evidence that testosterone specifically boosts status-related motivation when there is an opportunity to improve one’s social status. The findings contribute to our understanding of testosterone’s causal role in status-seeking motivation in competition behavior, and indicate that testosterone adaptively increases our drive for high status in a context-dependent manner. We discuss potential neurobiological pathways through which testosterone may attain these effects on behavior.

An Analysis of Key Ideas of Deconstruction through Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis

In On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense, Friedrich Nietzsche challenged the correspondence theory of linguistic truth, suggesting that the inherently analogous nature of linguistic reason renders even the most foundational of truths to be illusory metaphors. Following in this distinctly anti-metaphysical strand of continental philosophy, Jacques Derrida formed a deconstructive method of reading where this Nietzschean approach to linguistic truth is imbued with a further ethico-political dimension. This entails undermining the ostensibly immutable and neutral character of metaphysical binaries inherent to our method of contradistinctive reason, instead presenting these binaries as rationally unstable hierarchies. This paper intends to apply such a method of reading to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, whereby methods of human reason are immediately undermined as the protagonist’s unexplained and inexplicable metamorphosis into an insect occurs in the first sentence. Most prominently, this paper aims to discuss how Kafka deconstructs the metaphysical distinction between man and animal and the hierarchical relation implicit in this distinction. This distinction is particularly pertinent to Nietzschean scepticism towards linguistic reason, given both that our language remains a fundamentally human construct and the Aristotelian-scholastic notion of man as a ‘rational animal’.

Female reproductive success in a species with an age-inversed hierarchy.

In most group-living mammals, reproductive success declines with increasing age and increases with increasing rank. Such effects have mainly been studied in matrilineal and in "age positive" hierarchies, which are stable and in which high ranking females often outperform low ranking ones. These relationships are less well-understood in age-inversed dominance hierarchies, in which a female's rank changes over time. We analyzed demographic data of 2 wild, unprovisioned groups of gray langurs (Semnopithecus schistaceus) near Ramnagar, Nepal covering periods of 5 years each. Female rank was unstable and age-inversed. We measured reproductive success via birth rates (57 births), infant survival (proportion of infants surviving to 2 years) and number of offspring surviving to 2 years of age (successful births) for 3 age and 3 rank classes. We found that old females performed significantly worse than expected (birth rate P = 0.04; successful births P = 0.03). The same was true for low ranking females (P = 0.04, and P < 0.01, respectively). Infant survival was highest for young and middle-aged as well as for high and middle ranking females. Overall, the results for these unstable hierarchies were rather similar to those for stable hierarchies of other mammals, particularly several nonhuman primates. Compared to a provisioned population of a closely related species, the wild and unprovisioned population examined (i) showed stronger age effects, while (ii) female reproductive success was equally affected by rank. Future comparative studies are needed to examine whether captive or provisioned populations deviate predictably from wild populations.

Testosterone across successive competitions: evidence for a 'winner effect' in humans?

In many species testosterone fluctuates in concert with outcome-dependent changes in social status, such that winning a competition leads to an increase in circulating testosterone (i.e., competition effect). Although this phenomenon has been well studied in humans, the cumulative endocrine impact of multiple successive competitions is poorly understood. Moreover, although changes in testosterone after a competition seem to predict immediate aggressive behavior, competitive motivation, risk-taking, and affiliation, whether this endocrine response also has long-term behavioral effects, as suggested by studies in non-human animals, has not been examined. In this study, salivary testosterone was collected from pairs of male participants engaging, on two consecutive days, in head-to-head competitions on a previously validated laboratory task. We found that testosterone reactivity on the first day, which was congruent with the competition effect (i.e., net testosterone increase in randomly assigned winners), predicted the task performance on the second day. Further, when looking at testosterone reactivity on the second day, those individuals that lost both competitions experienced the steepest decline in testosterone compared to those individuals who lost on the second day but won on the first day. Testosterone fluctuations on the second day were also analyzed considering the type of status hierarchy (stable vs. unstable) that emerged as a result of the combined outcomes of the two competitions. In accordance with the challenge hypothesis, men in unstable hierarchies (first day winners/second day losers and first day losers/second day winners) experienced an increase in testosterone compared to men in the stable hierarchies (double winners and double losers). Results are discussed within a comparative perspective, drawing parallels with the winner effect and the challenge hypothesis observed in non-human animals.

Effects of age, reproductive state, and the number of competitors on the dominance dynamics of wild female Hanuman langurs

Female dominance hierarchies form as a result of individual differences in resource holding potential, social processes such as winner-loser effects or coalitions, and ecological conditions that favor contest competition. Contest competition is assumed to result in despotic, nepotistic, and stable hierarchies. However, female Hanuman langurs are exceptions to this pattern, with data from provisioned populations indicating despotic, yet individualistic (age-inversed) and unstable hierarchies despite strong within-group contest. We present data on hierarchical linearity, stability, and the determinants of female rank and rank change in a population of unprovisioned, wild Hanuman langurs (Ramnagar, Nepal). Based on 12 490 dyadic displacement interactions collected over 5 years from a medium-sized group (P group, mean = 6.9 adult females) and a large group (O group, mean = 13.6 adult females), stable periods (P group, ; O group, ) were identified and dominance hierarchies constructed with the program MatMan. In both groups, dominance hierarchies were linear (), with high directional consistency within dyads. Rank was negatively related with age, while the presence of maternal kin had no effect. Reproductive state affected dominance rank in the larger group, with females ascending the hierarchy prior to conception, and dropping in rank after birth. Ranks were unstable, with group size and the number of juvenile females driving the effect (GLMM, ). These results match earlier findings for provisioned populations. In female Hanuman langurs, competition seems most intense around conception and during gestation, creating rank instability, which is further exacerbated by the number of adult as well as maturing females.

Charting cartographies of resistance: lines of flight in women artists’ narratives

In this paper I chart lines of flight in women artist’s narratives. In focusing on the complex interrelations between the social milieus of education and art, what I suggest is that they should be analysed as an assemblage where power relations and forces of desire are constantly at play in creating conditions of possibility for women to resist, imagine themselves becoming other and for new possibilities in their lives to be actualised. As a novel approach to social ontology the theory of assemblages offers an analytics of social complexity that accounts for open configurations, continuous connections and unstable hierarchies, structures and axes of difference. In reconsidering resistance as immanent in dispositifs of power and assemblages of desire, what I finally argue is that women artists’ narratives contribute to the constitution of minor knowledges and create archives of radical futurity.

A pheromone associated with social dominance among male rats

Forty male rats, living in 10 groups (N = 4 per group), with stable dominance hierarchies preferred the odor from submissive strange males over that from dominant strange males (p <.05). The response to the two odors was not significantly related to Ss’ rank in their hierarchy. Fourteen males from four unstable hierarchies (N = 3–4 per group) preferred neither odor. The data suggest the existence of a releaser pheromone associated with social dominance in rats.