Behavior of Dominance

Behavior of Dominance
One of interesting aspect of social behavior among some primates is the evolution of a pattern of behavior called dominance.

Many primate groups are arranged in a hierarchy similar to the “pecking order” of chickens.

In such a group there are strong divisions between dominance males of the group - usually the older, larger, and stronger ones and other members including in descending order, younger and less dominant males, adult females, younger juveniles of both sexes, and infants.

This strict hierarchy of dominance serves a double purpose: It aids on the defense of the group by allowing the strongest males to present a united front against attackers, and it keeps the younger members from straying too far from the protection of the dominant members of the group.

Patterns of dominance are maintained through submission behavior that allows one animal to reaffirm its dominance over another.

A subordinate baboon will “present itself” to a dominant one by going up to it and turning its back in a submissive, nonthreatening posture.

If it did not behave in this way, the dominant animals might take its approach as a challenge to its authority and try tom repel it.

Since the dominant hierarchy of a group is constantly changing, such challenges are part of everyday life, especially among the youngest members.
Behavior of Dominance

Circumstantial Knowledge

Circumstantial Knowledge
Social and cultural anthropology – the precise name is more of an indication of local intellectual histories than of any substantial difference, despite the fur that flew around the distinction in he 1970s – is above all an empirical discipline.

Whether it is also empiricist is a very different issue.

It is mediation between serious commitments to the evidence of pragmatic, on the spot research on the one hand, and serious engagement with critics of overweening “ethnographic authority” often level against it on the other.

In classic essay 1973 ,: “Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture,” Clifford Geertz declared that the analysis of culture – with which he equated anthropology – was “not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one on search of meaning”.

This was to ploy one of the polarities that had haunted and still haunts the discipline.

To a greater degree perhaps than any other, anthropology has straddle the divide between the social sciences and the humanities and been stretched uneasily between a broadly positivistic explanatory approach to social and cultural phenomena, and an emphatic exploration of communication and significance.

It may be hard to imagine a synthesis of “experimental” and “interpretive” science, but neither these terms nor the “laws” and “meanings” they sought respectively to reveal appear in the same way today.

Inevitably, then, anthropology must occupy a middle ground that gives the lie to those who would claim that empirical scholarship and relative critique are mutually incompatible.

It occupies a middle ground in yet another sense, and one that must be grasped in any approach to anthropological epistemologies.
Circumstantial Knowledge

Manual Work

Manual Work
In both theory and popular usage, manual work is distinguished from any other kind of work by its direct relation top physical nature.

What kind the word “direct” excludes here is the human intermediary; the tools and the machines are by no means excluded.

For instance, to till the land with a tractor driven plow is manual work; but the gentlemen farmer who merely gives orders to his farm hands is not a manual worker even though he may a worker in some sense.

The other characteristics features of manual work, which may be less familiar but are no less self-sufficient, are the following:

• Manual work is a transitive activity. While this term also means transient, fluid, nonlasting, “transitive” here designates the properties of passing from an agent into a receiver.
  
  Also in some metaphysical contexts a transitive action is defined simply as the production of an effect, and thus an action whose effect remains within the agent is still considered transitive.
  
  Here, transitive activity is understood in a restricted sense to designate only those actions whose effect is external to the agent.
  
  Hammering, shaping, melting, cutting are transitive actions in this restricted and strongest sense.
  
• Manual work is an activity by way change. It belongs to the physical type in sharp opposition to the psychological operations which do, or at least may, exist by way of rest.
  
  To work is to bring about a change in an external matter.
  
  When that change has come to an end the worker’s activity belongs to the past. Like many metaphysical simplicities, this has far-reaching implications.
  
  To make a chair is to bring about a change in the wood, the nails, the straw and the glue of which the chair is made.

Manual Work