Aesthetically Appreciating Animals: On The Abundant Herds

This is an essay in appreciation of The Abundant Herds, a study of the amaZulu’s naming practices for their Nguni cattle. The book reveals an aesthetic vision in which contemplative and practical attention are intertwined and a complex classificatory system does not undermine an appreciation of the individuality of the cattle. The book and the practices it celebrates permit a richer account of the beauty of farm animals to the standard functionalist approach.

Three Questions of Methodology

Wight composed this note to make clear three caveats about his exposition of three main traditions of thinking about international politics in Western societies since the sixteenth century (Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionism). First, the sources considered include not only works by theorists and international lawyers, but also statements and policies of politicians. Second, it is imperative to avoid ‘the hypostatization of categories’—that is, ‘taking a classificatory system too seriously and too concretely’ and attributing objective reality to intellectual concepts. The views of specific thinkers are more valuable than generalizations about shared opinions in categories or claims of progress in philosophical understanding over the centuries. Third, the scholar’s role concerning value judgements in this effort to elucidate the three traditions consists of ‘exposition and comparison, not criticism in any sense of propounding theory’ for the critical assessment of the ideas expressed in these traditions.

Cultural Issues Related to ICD-11 Mental, Behavioural and Neurodevelopmental Disorders

The challenge of producing a classificatory system that is truly representative of different regions and cultural variations is difficult. This can be conceptualized as an ongoing process, achievable by constant commitment in this regard from various stakeholders over successive generations of the classificatory systems. The objective of this article is to conduct a qualitative review of the process and outcome of the efforts that resulted in the ICD-11 classification of mental, behavioural and neurodevelopmental disorders becoming a global classification. The ICD-11 represents an important, albeit iterative, advance in the classification of mental, behavioural and neurodevelopmental disorders. Significant changes have been incorporated in this regard, such as the introduction of new, culturally-relevant categories, modifications of the diagnostic guidelines, based on culturally informed data and the incorporation of culture-related features for specific disorders. Notwithstanding, there are still certain significant shortcomings and areas for further improvement and research. Some of the key limitations of ICD-11 relate to the paucity of research on the role of culture in the pathogenesis of illnesses. To ensure a classificatory system that is fair, reliable and culturally useful, there is a need to generate empirical evidence on diversity in the form of illnesses, as well as mechanisms that explain these in all the regions of the world. In this review, we try to delineate the various cultural challenges and their influences in the formulation of ICD-11, along with potential shortcomings and areas in need of more improvement and research in this regard.

Is Domestication Speciation? The Implications of a Messy Domestication Model in the Holocene

Domestication is one of the fundamental process that has shaped our world in the last 12,000 years. Changes in the morphology, genetics, and behavior of plants and animals have redefined our interactions with our environments and ourselves. However, while great strides have been made towards understanding the mechanics, timing, and localities of domestication, a fundamental question remains at the heart of archaeological and scientific modelling of this process—how does domestication fit into a framework of evolution and natural selection? At the core of this is the ontological problem of what is a species? In this paper, the complicated concepts and constructs underlying ‘species’ and how this can be applied to the process of domestication are explored. The case studies of soybean and proto-indica rice are used to illustrate that our choice of ‘species’ definitions carries with it ramifications for our interpretations, and that care needs to be made when handling this challenging classificatory system.

Sociomorphing, Not Anthropomorphizing: Towards a Typology of Experienced Sociality

Social robotics and HRI are in need of a unified and differentiated theoretical framework where, relative to interaction context, robotic properties can be related to types of human experiences and interactive dispositions. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this task by providing new descriptive tools. In social robotics and HRI it is commonly assumed that social interactions with robots are due to ‘anthropomorphizing’. We challenge this assumption and argue, on conceptual and empirical grounds, that social interactions with robots are not always the result of anthropomorphizing, i.e., the projection of imaginary or fictional human social capacities, but of sociomorphing, i.e., the perception of actual non-human social capacities. Sociomorphing can take many forms which phenomenally manifest themselves in various types of experienced sociality. We very briefly sketch core elements of the descriptive framework OASIS (the Ontology of Asymmetric Social Interactions) in order to show how one might develop a classificatory system for types of experienced sociality.

Centering Black Catholic Religio-Racial Identity, Revealing White Catholicism

In New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, Judith Weisenfeld presents numerous instances when members of religio-racial movements contested the racial classificatory system provided by the federal government and confronted state administrators with their own alternative religio-racial identities. For Weisenfeld, these sorts of exchanges highlight, first and foremost, Black agency in religio-race making. But, as she indicates, they also make visible the contours of religio-racial whiteness as state administrators struggled to defend the status quo. In this article, I focus on how Black contestation and confrontation with racial hierarchy can reveal the racial whiteness operating beneath the surface of normative “religion.” This article draws on sources ranging from a police surveillance report to angry letters from white Catholics in order to argue that Black Catholics interrupted the presumed normativity of white Catholic religious life and, in so doing, revealed white Catholicism as a racial formation.

Decolonizing the Civil Sphere: The Politics of Difference, Imperial Erasures, and Theorizing from History

This article rethinks sociological approaches to difference and inclusion. It argues that civil sphere theory replicates colonial dynamics through abstracting civil codes from their role in colonial governance. Through a case study of French colonial Algeria, the article illuminates the historical co-constitution of the French Republic and the colonial subject. This imperial history explains how civil codes came about through the same social process as the domination of the colonial other. Given these entangled histories, building solidarity requires we move beyond a process of civil repair that rests on incorporation to one of civil construction, which takes account of historical wrongs and the colonial layer of meaning embedded in categories of civil discourse. Theorizing from suppressed histories allows us to question the content of the civil sphere’s classificatory system and turn our attention to a resignification of the core group in the wake of colonial histories.

The Body

This chapter focuses on Oneirocritica Book 1, which is largely dedicated to the human body and body-symbolism, and examines the ways in which Artemidorus’ conception of the body and its functions might be historically and culturally distinctive. Artemidorus offers us a remarkably detailed and coherent ‘tour’ of the symbolic meanings of the constituent parts of the male and female body, based around a series of polarities (upper and lower, right and left, front and back), which reflect three different dimensions of the social order (status, age, gender). The ways in which bodies are gendered (firmness, dryness, vigour) in Artemidorus’ body-symbolism are discussed in detail, and the extraordinary over-signification of the male penis and under-signification of the female vagina in Artemidorus’ classificatory system are highlighted. The chapter concludes with an extended discussion of the presentation of physical and mental disability in the Oneirocritica.

Manioc-stem transects: vital flows, technical processes and transformations

This article studies human-plant relations as technical phenomena in the context of the pluriethnic communities of the border between Brazil and Guyana. It proposes that we consider a technogenesis of the social at the intersection of technical processes and vital flows of manioc stems - the overground part of the plant that produces manioc (Manihot esculenta). Its starting point is a Wapichana agriculturalist’s collection of stem segments. The onomastics of this set provides an idea of the diversity of these plants in the region. However, the article argues that, rather than being referents in a closed classificatory system, names are histories, indexes of ways of knowing and processes of individuation of people and varieties. By emphasising processes of stem manipulation, the article discusses some of the methodological challenges of the ethnography of technique and reflects on contemporary social transformations in dialogue with Indigenous analyses.