Preface: Unsettling Blackness

The Blackness of Black

In what remains one of the central accomplishments of cognitive anthropology, Berlin and Kay (1969) demonstrated that the diversity of human color systems was built on a universal infrastructure, with black and white being the most basic colors in all systems. The analytical focus of their work is a structural system divorced from the messy tasks of actually using color terms to make relevant d...

PREFACE

Preface

PREFACE

Unsettling the Centralized Mindset

Researchers in the field of adaptive behavior are quite familiar with the idea of higher-order complex global patterns emerging from the lower-level simple local interactions of components in a distributed system. Our artificial ants form colonies and self-organized foraging expeditions; our robots and simulated birds flock and cooperate on tasks; our genetic algorithm populations form species ...