Female gregariousness is a hallmark of elephants and many social mammals. This chapter examines the ecological and evolutionary explanations for sociality among elephants. Social life comes with costs (competition, subordination) and benefits (protection, knowledge) that differ across ecological contexts. The fundamental selective pressures and trade-offs represented by varied resource distributions and predation or hunting risks are discussed, taking pains to differentiate between species and populations. The influence of seasonality on resource availability, and in turn on fission-fusion dynamics and dominance interactions, provides a rich space of possible social interactions at multiple levels of organization and complexity. Disruptions to elephant societies, either because of deaths or management interventions, provide insights into both the fragilities and resilience of their social systems.

While most accounts see worshippers of Saturn as indigenous Africans or rural peasants, this chapter argues that stele-dedicants used stelae to articulate positions for themselves within the frameworks of the wider empire. Unlike earlier stelae, which worked to imagine stele-dedicants as a horizontal community of equals, stelae dedicated from the first century BCE onward became billboards that asserted the prestige of dedicants in the deeply localized but also vertically structured world of the Roman Empire. This can be seen in the adoption of new anthropocentric iconographies that adapt a koine of imagery, the composition of stelae, and new titles for worshippers like sacerdos that are borrowed from a civic sphere.

Chapter 3 makes the case that education systems are almost universally situated in the public sector, and their role is profoundly shaped by economic and social power relations as reflected in the political structures of the nation-State. The chapter argues that the way power relations are reflected in the State provides the framework for a political theory of education The chapter lays out such a State theory and suggests how it helps explain the nature of conflicts over how much to spend on education, who gets the resources, and how they are used in schools. The theory further helps define the structure in which individuals from different social classes, races, ethnicities, and gender make decisions (exercise agency) regarding education. It also helps define the economic opportunities facing different groups and how the State in market economies defines educational norms, standards, and access to education. The chapter’s final sections discuss how economics of education debates – for example, on the efficiency of the public sector in providing education – are influenced by political ideology, and describe the politics of nation-States’ developing social capital to enhance the efficiency of education, often at the cost of individual rights.

In Chapter 2, Chen takes his readers to the roots of Chinese face and politeness: the social structure of hierarchy and the social value of harmony. Both features are traced to Confucianism, a codification of a society in which every member knows the rung they are at on the ladder of the social hierarchy and is expected to behave accordingly. To keep such a society stable, the notion of harmony is championed by Chinese philosophers, most notably Confucius. To promote harmony, Chen demonstrates, Confucius prescribes an elaborate system of behavioral rules for people of all walks of life. The monarch and the ruling class should be benevolent, subordinates loyal; parents should be caring; children filial; husbands should be responsible, wife faithful. Finally, every member of the society should strive for ren, which includes all that is good, and treat others with deference and respect. Lastly, Chen argues that the notions of hierarchy and harmony have been remarkably stable across the ages and appear to be present in contemporary Chinese-speaking societies outside mainland China: Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Patronage is present in the Asian countries examined in this collection. Several factors influence the extent and type of patronage. More institutionalised or stable party systems may be more effective in organising patronage on a partisan basis. If social structure is a strong influencing factor on patronage, then one would expect to see country studies identifying loyalty to clan, tribe or ethnic group. In fact, few countries claimed social structure as the dominant mode of patronage. We anticipated that political regime types were important in explaining patronage. The evidence across Asian countries is somewhat nuanced. Appointees in highly developed countries are more likely to be chosen for their public policy expertise than political loyalty. The evidence of the link between path dependency and political patronage is mixed. These studies of patronage in a range of Asian countries demonstrate both similarities and differences in how these appointments are used within governments. Although some countries attempt to disguise the existence of patronage, it does exist in some form. Despite its ubiquity, patronage manifests itself in different forms, and to differing degrees.

The primary aim of social network analysis is building and evaluating theories of social structure – that is, enduring patterns of human interaction and ways of thinking about and organizing human groups. The sheer complexity of social structure prevents encapsulation in any single model, and this complexity is compounded as we incorporate cultural beliefs and social expectations in addition to interactions. Networks link actors to one another in systems, raising tricky questions about the locus of control and activity, particularly regarding the extent to which people are active agents or passive puppets (to put it bluntly) of social structure. While acknowledging deep and ultimately unsettled issues in the field, we provide readers with an overarching though still evolving theoretical account of social structure that can guide both inductive and deductive social network research and allow plug-in points for different perspectives on agency, culture, and constraint.

The chapter sums up the discussion in the previous three chapters, addressing the question of where we are now in the transition process between CAPE and modernity. Was the transition short, as the material side of the story might suggest, or longer, as the social side of the story suggests? Are we now in modernity proper, or are we still in the transition? The chapter proceeds by looking for significant clusters of events, both material and social, that can give guidance as to how these questions might be answered. It argues that the unfolding contradiction between unrestrained development and the limits of planetary carrying capacity is emerging as the key dialectic for the future of humankind.

Chapter 3 summarizes recent and current theories of how language and conversation may have evolved and the nature of language.Chapter 3 includes discussion of animal signaling and the role of complex social organization, collaboration, imitation, and play in language evolution.It summarizes and critiques the contributions of meme theory to the social evolution account of language development, and closes with a discussion of how language extends and contributes to individual and group homeostasis.

In 1684, Lourenço da Silva de Mendonça from the kingdom of Kongo in the Indies ‘arrived in Rome to take up an important role for Black peoples’. That role was to bring an ethical and criminal kufunda (case) before the Vatican court, which accused the nations involved in Atlantic slavery, including the Vatican, Italy, Spain and Portugal, of committing crimes against humanity. It detailed the ‘tyrannical sale of human beings … the diabolic abuse of this kind of slavery … which they committed against any Divine or Human law’. Mendonça was a member of the Ndongo royal family, rulers of Pedras (Stones) of Pungo-Andongo, situated in what is now modern Angola. He carried with him the hopes of enslaved Africans and other oppressed groups in what was a remarkable moment that, I would argue, challenges the established interpretation of the history of abolition.

Colobines display an array of different types of social organization. In some Asian colobines (most prominently the snub-nosed monkeys, Rhinopithecus spp.) and one subspecies of African colobine, social organization is multilevel, i.e. social units are characterized by a complete absence of exclusive territories, occupy wholly shared ranges and are nested within a larger, bounded social matrix. This chapter reviews and discusses the composition and social dynamics of colobine multilevel societies as well as the causes and consequences of living in such a complex social setting.

Homophily is the higher probability of connection between similar as opposed to dissimilar entities. It is a property of social systems. It is not a synonym for “similarity” or “interpersonal liking for similar others.” In this chapter, we review the steady growth in the homophily literature citing “Birds of a Feather Flock Together“ (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001). We argue that homophily has law-like properties spanning empirical domains, allowing its incorporation into a wide array of research streams across and even outside the social sciences. While we are encouraged to see an important sociological concept gain wide acceptance, we urge researchers to return to its social structural roots. Homophily is fundamentally a concept created to better understand structuration processes at various level of analysis, from interactions to organizations and beyond. We advocate a research agenda we hope will integrate homophily research through a dynamic view of social structure. We point to how new data sources and methods are poised to help bring greater integration to the enormous flock of homophily researchers.

By responding to information gained through observing or interacting with other individuals, fish can learn about important aspects of their environment, including where to forage, how to recognize and avoid predators, and who to mate with. Social learning processes are often closely intertwined with the social environment; whether individuals engage in social learning, who they learn from, and what they learn frequently depend on complex, nonrandom patterns of social interaction. Social network analysis provides a sophisticated toolset for quantifying such elements of social structure. In this chapter, we discuss how integrating social network approaches with investigations into social learning have provided novel and important insights regarding the ways in which fish acquire and use social information in realistic social contexts.

Different types of language evolve in situations of human social contact depending on the nature of the social contact, social structure and the speakers' attitudes towards the societies in contact. Three socially defined language types, each forming a continuum, are useful for classifying contact languages: esoteric languages, used for communication within a speech community; exoteric languages, used for communication between different speech communities; and neogenic languages, used when speech communities merge to form a new society. Lingua francas serve two different types of function in this sociolinguistic typology, and move from one function to the other. On the exoteric language continuum, lingua francas are used in long-distance contact involving at least one large-scale, stratified society. On the neogenic language continuum, the dominant language in the new society (a nation-state or empire) serves as a lingua franca until subpopulations speaking other languages shift to the dominant language.

Emotions are deeply embedded into the social contexts in which they occur. Emotional responses differ largely among various cultures, but also among various social subgroups and individuals. At the same time emotions typically include crossculturally stable bodily and behavioral features and have homologs in other animals like the facial expression in anger or the release of adrenaline in fear. This article will focus on the interplay of bodily responses and social structure that brings about emotions, habits, and skills and their interrelations. Emotions are constituted by a complex pattern of bodily responses that prepare one for action. The relevant bodily responses are tied together through a complex process of socialization in a way that produces typical emotional reactions in certain types of social scenarios that are of relevance for the individual. These social scenarios can be described as affordances that together make up a social structure to which individuals habitually respond.

All of these analyses raise the question of the inclusion of networks in society: do networks reproduce inequalities, do they possibly reinforce them, or do they still offer small spaces for "play" among social constraints and divisions? Do they constitute for the social sciences an intermediate level of observation, or a relatively autonomous dimension of social life, bearing its own logic and its own dynamics? We have tried here to shed light on some of these dynamics, as part of the implementation of the principles of a relational sociology.

To explain the occurrence of this form of high-risk collective action, this chapter shows that shipboard grievances were the principal cause of mutiny. However, not all grievances are equal in this respect. We distinguish between structural grievances that flow from incumbency in a subordinate social position and incidental grievances that incumbents have no expectation of suffering. Based on a case-control analysis of incidents of mutiny compared with controls drawn from a unique database of Royal Navy voyages from 1740 to 1820, in addition to a wealth of qualitative evidence, we find that mutiny was most likely to occur when structural grievances were combined with incidental ones.