The paper first discusses early work that predated internet art and that was concerned with active audience participation in electronic art and describes the path of development of the first author’s artworks that have looked at human to human communication through electronic (computer) systems from 1970 until today. The fundamental concept has been to make artworks that explore human communica...

Research testing evolutionary models of religious morality shows that supernatural beliefs in moralizing gods positively affect prosociality. However, the effects related to local agents have not been extensively explored. Drawing from a Mauritian Hindu sample, we investigated and practices two different types (spirits deceased unconcerned with morality) on preferential resources allocation rec...

In this article, I explore what a critical environmental perspective would look like in Melanesia, where the distinction between nature and culture, and the expectation that science interprets the former in terms of the latter, may not apply. I consider changes in scientific knowledge production and the shift from cultural ecology to political ecology in Melanesian anthropology, including the a...

In recent years, a criticism of “indigenous knowledge” has been that this idea makes sense only in terms of acquaintance (or familiarity) type and practical (or skills-type) knowledge (knowledge-how). Understood in terms of theoretical knowledge (or knowledge-that), however, it faces the arguably insurmountable problems of relativism and superstition. The educational implications of this would ...

This paper discusses the place of pigs in mountains Papua New Guinea, particularly Was valley Southern Highlands Province. After a brief introduction to region and their herding arrangements, it gives an ethnographic account use various rites, notably those that feature curing, sorcery cult activities. They prompt consideration relevance concepts used understand these ritual activities, whether...

To understand kuru and solve the problems of its cause and transmission required the integration of knowledge from both anthropological and medical research. Anthropological studies elucidated the origin and spread of kuru, the local mortuary practices of endocannibalism, the social effects of kuru, the life of women and child-rearing practices, the kinship system of the Fore and their willingn...

These photographs were mostly taken during the early days of my time in Okapa and our research on kuru, from March 1957. They are organized in sections, which show aspects of our research work, kuru patients, the care taken of patients by their families, kuru and other sorcery, and social aspects of the Fore people, including their housing, dress and ritual. Figure 1. Dr Carleton Gajdusek (left...

Copyright is held by the author. Golan Levin’s Interactive Art and Computational Design class. Spring 2012, Carnegie Mellon University. Abstract We present “Gesture of In-Kindness,” an interactive art project comprising four household devices that respond in-kind to observers’ gestures. These devices include a fan that blows air at the observer only when the observer is actively blowing his or ...

Early human society believed that disease states resulted from sorcery, demonic possession, negative astral influences, and “the will of the gods” [17]. No record exists establishing the date when plants were first used for medicinal purposes, but it is known that herbalism was practiced in the prehistoric world. Modern medicine began in the 19 century with revolutionary advances in the fields ...