This special issue of Northeast African Studies is an exercise in comparative ethnography and theoretical exploration. It starts with the following question: Why is there such remarkable regional diversity in the cultural traditions and modes of life in the societies of southern Ethiopia, and with what kind of theoretical and ethnographic understanding can we explain it? The question has often ...

In the age of the Internet and with the dramatic proliferation of mobile listening technologies, music has unprecedented global distribution and embeddedness in people's lives. It is a source of intense experiences of both the most intimate and solitary, and public and collective, kinds - from an individual with their smartphone and headphones, to large-scale live events and global simulcasts; ...

Core curriculum and multicultural education are two major approaches advocated in the current school reform movement. This article argues that neither of these approaches adequately addresses the problem of those minority groups who have not traditionally done well in the public school. Core curriculum advocates falsely assume that as a result of instituting a core curriculum, demanding higher ...

Yi, a young U.S.-born Hmong woman, is seriously distressed. She is having difficulty sleeping; she has lost her appetite; and she lacks interest in her studies. Yi also says that she has little energy and is having a difficult time balancing school and family obligations. Although she does not spontaneously use emotional terms to describe how she feels, when asked she agrees that she is unhappy...

Mediation is a key notion in dialectical approaches to understanding consciousness, thinking, and thought. However, the scholarly literature is replete with uses of the notion that are inconsistent with the dialectical framework within it, which has the specific function to articulate and explain the unit of a phenomenon and the corresponding unit of scientific analysis. The purpose of this pap...

When does culture persist and when does it change? We examine a determinant of extent of cultural persistence that has been put forth in the evolutionary anthropology literature: the stability of the environment. A prediction, which is standard in a variety micro-founded models, is that valuing tradition and placing greater importance on maintaining the customs of the previous generation is rel...

A fundamental question in human cognition is how people reason about space. We use a computational model to explore cross-cultural commonalities and differences in spatial cognition. Our model is based upon two hypotheses: (1) the structure-mapping model of analogy can explain the visual comparisons used in spatial reasoning; and (2) qualitative, structural representations are computed by peopl...

This paper considers the two concepts: cultural and creative ecosystem, circular economy. It explores superficial commonalities differences, as well what can be learned from this ‘cyclical’ thinking (which we later frame relational contextual thinking). We lay out common narratives of circularity in representation environmental sustainability. The aim is to move beyond comparisons understand co...