The psychosocial impacts of disasters are profound. In recent years, there have been too many reminders of these impacts and the dire needs of the people involved. The purpose of this article is to present the following themes from the psychosocial literature on disasters and emergency management: (1) differential impacts of disasters according to gender and age; (2) prevention efforts to reduc...

The paper describes the concept of Culture Profiles to facilitate globally distributed work groups. The concept describes a representation for cultural characteristics for groups and individuals and relates this concept to existing standards. Hence, it is embedded in the landscape of learning technology standards. A sample implementation for social communities – Culture Clouds – shows the feasi...

Introduction Cross-cultural comparison of medical setting around the world led to the formulation of general models of the relationships between the various medical traditions within single settings. The study of human confrontation with disease and illness, and of the adaptive arrangements made by human groups for dealing with ever-present danger has come to be a special branch of anthropology...

Ethnographic methodologies developed in social anthropology and sociology hold considerable promise for addressing practical, problem-based research concerned with the construction site. The extended researcher-engagement characteristic of ethnography reveals rich insights, yet is infrequently used to understand how work-place realities are lived out on construction sites. Moreover studies that...

Inside Chapter There is an increasing interest and effort in preserving and documenting endangered languages. Language data are valuable only when they are well-cataloged, indexed and searchable. Many language data, particularly those of lesser-spoken languages, are collected as audio and video recordings. While multimedia data provide more channels and dimensions to describe a language's funct...

“Social disciplining” is the name that has been given to attempts by the authorities throughout early modern Europe to regulate people’s private lives. In explicit contrast to “social control,” the informal mechanisms by which people have always sought to put pressure on one another in traditional societies, “social disciplining” was a set of formal, legislative strategies through which the eme...

Humans spatialize time. This occurs within individual minds and also in larger, shared cultural systems like language. Understanding the origins of space-time mappings requires analyses at multiple levels, from initial individual biases to cultural evolution. Here we present a laboratory experiment that simulates the cultural emergence of space-time mappings. Dyads had to communicate about temp...

An integrated anthropological and linguistic analysis of Creek oratory shows oratory to be part of a ritual cycle which recreates both the fundamental Creek cultural system and the Creek towns, the basic political units of Creek society. 1 Creek individual and group identities are thus defined and integrated into the Creek political system. This paper describes the performative effectiveness of...

Flying Message Service (FMS) is a design project promoting community-based messaging in public spaces in the city. We have built a system that enables people to attach electronic messages to pigeons. From input stations located in public plazas, pigeons would transmit text messages to be displayed on large public screens at plazas throughout the city. The project evolved through ethnographic an...

The concept of a European Digital Library cannot only be based on a technical framework enabling access to digital goods-there is also a need to introduce new ways of cooperation between different stakeholders (Cultural Organisations, Industries, Administrations, etc.) as well as to "re-engineer" traditional business processes in the light of globalisation and world wide markets. The main activ...