The Mafia’s long historical pedigree in Mezzogiorno, Southern Italy, has empowered the Mafioso as a notorious, uncontested, and hegemonic figure. The countercultural resistance against the mafiosi culture began to be institutionalized in the early 1990s. Today, Libera Terra is the largest civil society organization in the country that uses the lands confiscated from the Mafia as a space of cult...

Expressed mate preferences provide unique windows into the cultural evolution of values and evolved mating psychology. The current study used two research instruments—one ranking procedure and one rating procedure—to examine mate preferences in mainland China. We compared modern Chinese (n = 1060) with Chinese studied a quarter of a century earlier (N = 500). Results revealed several cultural c...

Networks are increasingly recognized as advantageous when creating and embedding cultural change within organisations. This paper seeks to explore and problematise ideas around networks for education for sustainability (EfS), specifically in relation to the implementation of the Australian Sustainable Schools Initiative (AuSSI), a national, whole-school approach to EfS. In three Australian stat...

Cover: detail from " Universal judgement " , fresco by Luca Signorelli (1499) in the Cathedral of Orvieto (Italy). 1.2 Setting the question 1.2.1 Introduction 1.2.2 The topics 1.2.3 The pessimistic view of human nature is widely accepted 1.2.4 The optimistic view of human nature is unpopular 1.2.5 The current debate on the origin of violence 2.3 Post-natal development, learning and cultural tra...

Sibudu in KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) with its rich and high-resolution archaeological sequence provides an ideal case study to examine the causes and consequences of short-term variation in the behavior of modern humans during the Middle Stone Age (MSA). We present the results from a technological analysis of 11 stratified lithic assemblages which overlie the Howiesons Poort deposits and all ...

Darwin-inspired population thinking suggests approaching culture as a population of items of different types, whose relative frequencies may change over time. Three nested subtypes of populational models can be distinguished: evolutionary, selectional and replicative. Substantial progress has been made in the study of cultural evolution by modelling it within the selectional frame. This progres...

Models of cultural evolution study how the distribution of cultural traits changes over time. The dynamics of cultural evolution strongly depends on the way these traits are transmitted between individuals by social learning. Two prominent forms of social learning are payoff-based learning (imitating others that have higher payoffs) and conformist learning (imitating locally common behaviours)....

We present a gold standard for evaluating scale membership and the order of scalar adjectives. In addition to evaluating existing methods of ordering adjectives, this knowledge will aid in studying the organization of adjectives in the lexicon. This resource is the result of two elicitation tasks conducted with informants from Amazon Mechanical Turk. The first task is notable for gathering open...

islamic and iranian cities, both, east and west, know the physical monuments of islamic culture1 based on one of the features of the islamic cities. meanwhile, other religious centers, including tkaya, hosseiniyeh and hospice is not the case to considerate, while these elements cause to shape group behavior, strengthen social ties and strengthening of cultural integration, have always played a ...