Histories of evolutionary thought are dominated by organic evolution. The colossus in our midst that is evolutionary biology casts its shadow over history, making it appear that what is so widespread and important today was always the primary subject of evolutionary speculation. Thus many histories assume that the core meaning of evolution is the change of organic life and that other forms of e...

Although Max Schmidt’s thesis focuses on the expansion of Arawak cultures, language consistently looms in the background of Schmidt’s work as an important marker of cultural affinity and symptom of cultural influence. As a consequence, linguistics -and linguistic classification in particular -plays an important role in Schmidt’s thesis. In this chapter I discuss the role played by linguistics i...

The warp ikat method of making decorated textiles is one of the most geographically widespread in southeast Asia, being used by Austronesian peoples in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, and Daic peoples on the Asian mainland. In this study a dataset consisting of the decorative characters of 36 of these warp ikat weaving traditions is investigated using Bayesian and Neighbornet technique...

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Several authors have argued that a range of phenomena calls for a relativisation of propositional truth to contexts of assessment or, more generally, perspectives. I want to defend the more orthodox view that whether a proposition is true depends only on whether the represented states of affairs obtain. I offer an alternative account of the relativity suggested by the data, factual relativism, ...

Part of the Archaeological Anthropology Commons, Civic and Community Engagement Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Folklore Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Human Geography Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Latin American Studies Commons, Linguistic Anthropology Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, Public Policy Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropo...

Language is systematically structured at all levels of description, arguably setting it apart from all other instances of communication in nature. In this article, I survey work over the last 20 years that emphasises the contributions of individual learning, cultural transmission, and biological evolution to explaining the structural design features of language. These 3 complex adaptive systems...