This article analyzes the topic of leadership from an evolutionary perspective and proposes three conclusions that are not part of mainstream theory. First, leading and following are strategies that evolved for solving social coordination problems in ancestral environments, including in particular the problems of group movement, intragroup peacekeeping, and intergroup competition. Second, the r...

Many studies have revealed that conventional forms of political participation, especially among young people, women, minorities and migrants, are currently in decline (e.g., Blais & Dobrzynska, 1998; Franklin, 2002; International IDEA, 2004; Putnam, 2000). However, two different explanations have been put forward to explain this phenomenon: some authors argue that political apathy and alienatio...

Family networks are widely assumed to be a key source of support for older people in Indonesia and Southeast Asia more generally, although empirical study of their composition and functioning is in its infancy. This paper draws on ethnographic and survey data collected in longitudinal research of ageing in three rural Indonesian communities, in order to identify demographic and social factors l...

In this paper, we identify and discuss several groups of issues that arise in the design of interfaces for multiple users interacting with multiple devices. We analyze in what ways these interfaces differ from traditional single-user singledevice interfaces, and identify different characteristics of interfaces. We categorize a possible set of device types that may exist in an environment, and t...

Recent reports by ethnographic researchers and media sources suggest that many African American students view academic success as a form of "acting white," and that peer pressure reduces their level of effort and performance. This article analyzes the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 to answer three questions: (1) do blacks experience greater alienation toward school than non-Hispa...

In 2005, Carlisle suffered severe flooding and 1600 houses were affected. A qualitative research project to study the social and health impacts was undertaken. People whose homes had been flooded and workers who had supported them were interviewed. The findings showed that there was severe disruption to people's lives and severe damage to their homes, and many suffered from psychological health...

The paper attempts to contribute to the largely neglected social and anthropological discussion of technology development on the one hand, and to redirecting the emphasis in anthropology from primitive and exotic societies to problems of high relevance in contemporary era and how technology is used in everyday life. It draws upon multidimensional models of intelligence and ideal type formation....

In group conversations, not speaking is the state of affairs experienced by most people most of the time; I refer to this as ‘‘conversational latency.’’ Hypothesizing that conversational latency affects one’s discursive options, I analyze the association between latency (operationalized as the number of turns that elapsed since the current speaker last spoke) and turn-initial words (e.g., but, ...