Education and Acculturation on Malaita: An Ethnography of Intraethnic and Interethnic Affinities

One of the central issues in educational anthropology is the changing nature of intraethnic and interethnic conflict and relationships. Conventional modernization theory suggests that the acculturation process will tend to diminish traditional allegiances and affinities. There are, however, indications that the opposite may occur. This essay reports on research into this issue undertaken on Malaita, in the Solomon Islands. The research method was sociometric and involved examination of the ethnic identity and affinities of individuals within the Malaitan language-groups, namely, the AreAre, Baegu, Baelelea, Dorio, Fataleka, Kwai Island, Kwaio, Kwara’ae, Langalanga, Lau, Sa’a and To’abaita language-groups. From this, I draw some conclusions on the acculturation process on Malaita, as well as what individuals in mass societies might learn from such language-group societies

The Emergence of Norms via Contextual Agreements in Open Societies

This paper explores the emergence of norms in agents' societies when agents play multiple -even incompatible- roles in their social contexts simultaneously, and have limited interaction ranges. Specifically, this article proposes two reinforcement learning methods for agents to compute agreements on strategies for using common resources to perform joint tasks. The computation of norms by considering agents' playing multiple roles in their social contexts has not been studied before. To make the problem even more realistic for open societies, we do not assume that agents share knowledge on their common resources. So, they have to compute semantic agreements towards performing their joint actions. %The paper reports on an empirical study of whether and how efficiently societies of agents converge to norms, exploring the proposed social learning processes w.r.t. different society sizes, and the ways agents are connected. The results reported are very encouraging, regarding the speed of the learning process as well as the convergence rate, even in quite complex settings

Social Preferences in Small‐Scale Societies

This volume reports on a cross‐cultural investigation of social preferences in 15 small‐scale, non‐Western societies. Participants from all 15 groups played the ultimatum game with members of their own culture; subjects from a subset also played dictator and voluntary contribution to public goods games. The bulk of the book (Chapters 4 through 14) consists of reports by the field workers (mostly anthropologists). Each chapter includes ethnographic information, a description of how members of the group make their living, details on the experimental protocols and results, and some discussion. Although none of the results are consistent with the predictions of the standard rational choice model (as has been true in earlier work), group average offers and rejection frequencies in these experiments display more variation than has been observed in experiments using university students from developed Westernized societies. The editors report that little of this variation can be accounted for by individual economic or demographic variables, such as gender, age, education, or wealth. On the other hand, group dummies account for quite a lot, and social preferences seem to be stronger in groups experiencing greater market integration or whose economic mode offers greater opportunities for gains from cooperative enterprise

Innovating Pedagogy 2017: Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers. Open University Innovation Report 6

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This sixth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE). Themes: • Big-data inquiry: thinking with data • Learners making science • Navigating post-truth societies • Immersive learning • Learning with internal values • Student-led analytics • Intergroup empathy • Humanistic knowledge-building communities • Open Textbooks • Spaced Learnin

Who Are Herodotus\u27 Persians?

In analyzing how Herodotus\u27 descriptions of foreign societies reflect Greek assumptions and prejudices, we have sometimes failed to recognize the extent to which he reports persuasive and historically valid information. This is particularly true of the Persians for whom Herodotus appears to have had access to very good sources, especially perhaps among Medes and Persians living in Asia Minor. This paper argues that Herodotus\u27 representation of Persian character and customs and his understanding of the relationship between the king and his subjects is based on genuine native traditions that reflect an internal debate within Persian elites in the aftermath of their war against Greece

Post-conflict justice and sustainable peace

No systematic study has examined the effect of post-conflict justice on the duration of peace on a global basis. This paper attempts to fill that void by building on a newly constructed dataset (Binningsbo, Elster, and Gates 2005), which reports the presence of various forms of post-conflict justice efforts (trials, purges, reparation to victims, and truth commissions) as well as processes associated with abstaining from post-conflict justice (amnesty and exile). It investigates the long-term effects of post-conflict justice on the duration of peace after conflict. It uses a Cox proportional hazard model to analyze the influence of the various types of post-conflict justice on the length of the peace period before the recurrence of violent conflict. Post-conflict trials as well as other types of justice do lead to a more durable peace in democratic as well as non-democratic societies, but the results are weak and are therefore difficult to generalize. Forms of non-retributive justice (that is, reparations to victims and truth commissions), however, are strongly associated with the duration of peace in democratic societies, but are not significant for non-democratic societies. Amnesty tends to be destabilizing and generally associated with shorter peace duration, but exile tends to lead to a more durable peace.Social Conflict and Violence,Post Conflict Reintegration,Peace & Peacekeeping,Corruption & Anitcorruption Law,Education and Society