El parentesco: textos fundamentales

En el conjunto de trabajos compilados se encuentran todos los problemas empíricos y teóricos capitales de los estudios del parentesco: su relación con la organización social (Tylor, Durkheim, Rivers); el análisis de las terminologías (Kroeber, Lounsbury); la relación de las mismas con las formas sociales (Kroeber, Rivers); la teoría extensionista (Evans-Pritchard); la del linaje (Goody) y la de la alianza (Lévi-Strauss, Needham), son los más importantes. Asimismo, están representadas la mayoría de las regiones del planeta: Oceanía (Durkheim, Needham), Asia (Dumont, Radcliffe-Brown), África (EvansPritchard, Goody) y las Américas (Kroeber, Eggan, Radcliffe-Brown, LéviStrauss, Lounsbury)

Sociotechnical Systems and Ethics in the Large

Advances in AI techniques and computing platforms have triggered a lively and expanding discourse on ethical decision-making by autonomous agents. Much recent work in AI concentrates on the challenges of moral decision making from a decision-theoretic perspective, and especially the representation of various ethical dilemmas. Such approaches may be useful but in general are not productive because moral decision making is as context-driven as other forms of decision making, if not more. In contrast, we consider ethics not from the standpoint of an individual agent but of the wider sociotechnical systems (STS) in which the agent operates. Our contribution in this paper is the conception of ethical STS founded on governance that takes into account stakeholder values, normative constraints on agents, and outcomes (states of the STS) that obtain due to actions taken by agents. An important element of our conception is accountability, which is necessary for adequate consideration of outcomes that prima facie appear ethical or unethical. Focusing on STSs avoids the difficult problems of ethics as the norms of the STS give an operational basis for agent decision making

RITUAL, TIME, AND ENTERNITY

It is argued here that the construction of time and eternity are among ritual's entailments. In dividing continuous duration into distinct periods ritual distinguishes two temporal conditions: (1) that prevailing in mundane periods and (2) that prevailing during the intervals between them. Differences in the frequency, length, and relationship among the rituals constituting different liturgical orders are considered, as are differences between mundane periods and ritual's intervals with respect to social relations, cognitive modes, meaningfulness, and typical interactive frequencies. Periods, it is observed, relate to intervals as everchanging to never-changing, and close relationships of never changing to eternity, eternity to sanctity, and sanctity to truth are proposed. In the argument that ritual's “times out of time” really are outside mundane time, similarities to the operations of digital computers and Herbert Simon's discussion of interaction frequencies in the organization of matter are noted.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72989/1/j.1467-9744.1992.tb00996.x.pd

The Andaman islanders; a study in anthropology (Anthony Wilkin studentship research, 1906)

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