Anthropology

Portuguese Discoveries and Erasure's theme "Ship of Fouls", navigating in an age of loneliness and excelera

Anthropology in Social Sciences

Cognitive Sciences, Misc in Cognitive Sciences

Neuroscience in Cognitive Sciences

Philosophy, General Works

Political Science in Social Sciences

Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in Cognitive Sciences

Psychology in Cognitive Sciences

Sociology in Social Sciences

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Body and Soul, the infinite dualism of existenz.

the study of ants and insects com understand human behaviour and discourse, his politics and ways do keep alive some dreams that can come true.

Between medieval sapienza and the duty of silence...because it can be harmfull for other, takes care to transmit and inform in a cultural way.

An essay on the role of the philosopher in society nowadays.

Society or individuals? WHat must be saved? There's any hope to social and virtual violence or It is Just the way It Is?

The Loss of Criteria: essay on the pathological reverie of non-being and not-willing to know. Pathological essay on Being and Not Being Universal Dualism about Contextualism.

This paper introduces the "Status Loss Theory of Humor," as detailed in "How Humor Works" and "How Humor Works, Part II," in a single page. This theory has the potential to fully, clearly, and naturally explain the human humor instinct, and has made predictions that are being confirmed by other studies.

This paper takes the Status Loss Theory (introduced and explained in the first "How Humor Works" paper), and applies it to 40 real-world examples, including memes, radio and TV shows, movie and comic book tropes, song parodies, humor sayings, stand-up comedy cliches, known psychological quirks of humor, and more, to demonstrate the theory's potential to function as the first clear, complete, logical, and simple basis for defining, studying, and understanding humor in all of its forms.

This article advances a function-first account of social and individual consciousness as the engine of cumulative cultural evolution. At the social level, joint attention (a We-mode) objectifies shared scenes and compels coordination; at the individual level, consciousness is modeled as an internalized listener that selectively admits thoughts bearing familiarity/affiliative markers. This selection compresses the meaning space and steers learning toward culturally alignable content, enabling rapid acquisition of language and shared meanings in children and scalable coordination in pre-linguistic populations. Together, these (...) mechanisms convert cheap, noisy variation—random thoughts, gestures, proto-utterances—into high-fidelity, transmissible representations, powering cultural accumulation across distance and time. The account yields testable predictions: (i) conversational asymmetries that privilege listener selectivity across cultures; (ii) developmental universals in early joint attention and fast learning under sparse input; and (iii) unconscious-to-conscious latency signatures consistent with filtering dynamics. By treating consciousness primarily as a selection-and-alignment device for human-relevant meanings, the view reframes qualia as the felt aftermath of acceptance by the internal listener and explains how social and individual consciousness jointly function as a cultural-evolution engine rather than as mere by-products. (shrink)

Slavery is among the most morally charged subjects in the study of premodern societies, and discussions of slavery in early Islam often suffer from anachronism, selective evidence, or polemical treatment. This article offers an interdisciplinary analysis of slavery in the early Islamic community through the combined lenses of game theory, comparative anthropology, non-ideal ethics, and historical context. Drawing on models of cooperation and deterrence in stateless societies, the paper reconstructs the incentive structures governing war captivity, population management, and alliance maintenance (...) in seventh-century Arabia. It argues that the Prophet Muhammad’s policies toward slavery are best understood not as expressions of ideal theory—imagining moral action unconstrained by social and institutional limitations—but as interventions within a highly restricted feasible set. Within these constraints, Islam functioned as a harm-reduction institution: restricting sources of enslavement, encouraging emancipation, improving treatment standards, and introducing legal mechanisms that eroded the practice over time. By situating early Islamic reforms alongside Greco-Roman, Jewish, Near Eastern, and African slavery systems, the study demonstrates that Islam represented a significant upward moral shift relative to regional norms. The article concludes by examining how these reforms influenced long-term transformations in Islamic societies, ultimately contributing to the gradual abolition of slavery in the modern era. The aim is neither apologetic nor condemnatory, but to reconstruct the moral and strategic logic of slavery in a world where institutional alternatives did not exist and survival hinged on the navigation of severe constraints. (shrink)

Modern debates about early marriage in Islamic history frequently collapse into moral anachronism, projecting contemporary psychological, legal, and institutional categories onto a premodern world structured by radically different conditions. This article develops a framework of contextual moral realism to explain why early adolescent marriage was morally intelligible—and often perceived as protective—in seventh-century Arabia, while being morally impermissible under modern conditions. Drawing on anthropology, moral philosophy, Islamic legal theory, historical demography, and comparative civilizational analysis, the study reconstructs the social ecology that (...) shaped premodern moral reasoning: extended kinship households, absence of state protection, high mortality, early economic integration, and collective guardianship. The article argues that Islamic law neither invented nor idealized early marriage, nor grounded its permissibility in individual autonomy or self-authorship. Rather, it regulated an inherited practice in accordance with enduring moral aims internal to the Sharīʿa—protection of the vulnerable, harm minimization, preservation of bodily integrity and lineage, and maintenance of social stability—applied within severe structural constraints. By tracing consistent patterns across domains such as marriage, slavery reform, and political crisis management, the study shows that Prophetic ethics exhibit remarkable coherence under non-ideal conditions. When modern institutions transform vulnerability, knowledge, and responsibility, the same Islamic moral principles require different applications. The resulting shift represents continuity of moral purpose rather than ethical contradiction, and does not depend on liberal conceptions of autonomy as the basis of moral judgment. (shrink)

This study develops a critical framework for evaluating ad hoc inflation in Qur’anic borrowing theories—explanations that multiply hypothetical intermediaries, lost sources, or selective adaptations in order to sustain the claim that the Qur’an derives its narratives from Jewish or Christian precedent. By systematically comparing the Qur’anic portrayals of Moses, Pharaoh, Joseph, Mary, Jesus, Lot, and Solomon with the spectrum of Late Antique traditions, archaeological evidence, linguistic data, and ancient Near Eastern cultural contexts, the analysis identifies domains where the Qur’anic material (...) diverges sharply from known Christian, Jewish, Gnostic, and folkloric accounts while exhibiting internal coherence and historically resonant detail. These divergences occur precisely in places where borrowing models would predict dependence or replication. The study argues that, methodologically, each additional layer of hypothetical transmission required to explain such divergences increases model complexity without increasing explanatory power. A more disciplined comparative approach reveals that the Qur’anic narratives often preserve structural, legal, linguistic, and geographical patterns unattested in the alleged source traditions, while avoiding their contradictions, anachronisms, and theological motivations. The proposed framework provides a clearer set of criteria for distinguishing genuine literary dependence from conjectural reconstruction, thereby offering a more rigorous basis for future work in Qur’anic historiography and Late Antique textual interactions. (shrink)

This paper offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the Banu Qurayza affair by integrating game theory, moral philosophy, anthropological insights into tribal societies, and historical scholarship on early Islamic Medina. Rather than defending or condemning any historical actor, the study seeks to explain how decision-making unfolds under existential threat and institutional scarcity. The incident is interpreted as the collapse of a repeated-cooperation system into a one-shot existential game following the near-annihilation threat posed by the Confederate forces during the Battle of the (...) Trench (627 CE). Within this game-theoretic framework, the Banu Qurayza’s negotiations with the besieging coalition are modeled as a rational—though probabilistically mistaken—attempt to defect when Muslim survival appeared unlikely. The Prophet’s subsequent acceptance of an arbitrated ruling, delivered by Saʿd ibn Muʿādh and grounded in the tribe’s own legal tradition, is examined in light of tribal arbitration norms, incentive structures, and the absence of state institutions such as prisons, centralized courts, or police. The study argues that ethical judgments in premodern, stateless societies cannot be evaluated using modern institutional assumptions; moral responsibility operates under constraints shaped by feasibility, survival imperatives, and normative expectations internal to the culture. The Prophet’s prior record of leniency toward other treaty violators is analyzed as part of a broader ethical pattern in which mercy predominates until it threatens the community’s survival. Drawing on analogies from modern political ethics—including the behavior of Scandinavian politicians who operate within highly institutionalized moral landscapes—the paper emphasizes that moral agency is always conditioned by available structures. It further contends that the Qurayza ruling—although severe by contemporary standards—was viewed by contemporaries as legitimate, consistent with Near Eastern norms for wartime treason, and effective in restoring a stable equilibrium that prevented future covenant collapses. By situating the affair within rational-choice theory, tribal legal anthropology, and contextual ethics, the paper demonstrates how strategic rationality and moral responsibility can converge during crises. The analysis challenges simplistic portrayals that project either modern humanitarian frameworks or polemical narratives onto ancient contexts. Instead, it proposes a nuanced reconstruction in which the Prophet’s overriding obligation—the preservation of a vulnerable community under existential threat—shaped a decision that was simultaneously strategic, culturally coherent, and ethically intelligible within its historical world. The goal of the paper is explanatory, not prescriptive: to clarify how leaders in stateless societies navigate treason, survival imperatives, and moral constraints when institutional alternatives are unavailable . (shrink)

This presentation is about an evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness linked to a human specific anxiety. It is a continuation of other works (2011 Book chapter, 2014 TSC Poster). AIM: Present a scenario describing an evolutionary nature of self-consciousness that introduces a human specific anxiety which is active in our human lives. METHOD: The scenario starts with our pre-human ancestors which were capable to manage representations and to partly identify with their conspecifics (Olds 2006, DeWaal 2008). These identifications brought our ancestors (...) to merge the representations of their conspecifics with the limited auto-representation of their own entity. The result was an auto-representation becoming about an entity existing in environment. This process is proposed as having progressively generated an ancestral form of self-consciousness as object and as subject. These identifications took place also with suffering conspecifics and have imposed to our ancestors a huge anxiety increase that had to be limited. Tools developed for that limitation (caring, collaboration, empathy, ToM, ...) have linked consciousness to anxiety management while also procuring evolutionary benefits. Human minds now contain an unconscious part of that ancestral anxiety that guides many of our mental states. RESULT: An evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness is made available as linked to a specific anxiety management that characterizes human minds. Continuations are introduced, some related to mental health. CONCLUSION: The proposed evolutionary scenario presents self-consciousness and a specific human anxiety as sharing a same evolutionary nature. This new source of anxiety needs more investigations. (shrink)

rails to total abstraction, to conjure a perfect social system, between fulfilment of individual and colective will.

Long Range and short range, guns and violence, everyday life in cities and streets, between social and group identity and faith and religious belief, the vision to the "things of the world that cannot be seen" (Heróis do Mar).

Saturation, intoxication to the medias of realization and porsuit of happyness.

Vacuity, vanity, proposal of a elapsed time fadeaway, an essay in portuguese language, soon on english.

Fear. Cerimonial Fear, as the Judge could be God, wich represents, some way, the entire society, dead or alive.

Giving away of some kind of philosophy, to a new shore and horizons.

Tulisan ini bermuara pada citizenship education yang dilihat dalam perspektif kemungkinan perkembangannya di masa depan dihubungkan dengan pendidikan karakter. Istilah Pendidikan Kewarganegaraan dan Karakter (PKnK) diintrodusir penulis untuk menunjuk pada kelekatan orientatif-koherensif kedua disiplin tersebut, selain dari mengadopsi istilah CCE (Character and Citizenship Education) Singapura.

Anemia, the syntoms of a great disease in the heart of society.

recolection and the street, probably two similar ways to percieve the world and the self.

Prison, porsuing the work of Erwing Goffman, and Paul Valéry, au-delá of Victor Turner.

some literary day about philosophical topics and some anthropological items.

Debt to a friend, debt to the humaniny, there's the destiny of a young anthropology trying to succeed.

the young generation seeking for a better future.

is happyness productive? See book by Roger Scruton, "On Pessimism".

What about polite politics, even in the streets? A brief reflection about sense and violence and representational difference.

minimal toughts on a maximal world, to make a general theory of understanding a perception os social reality.

childhood and guilt, redemption and regret about a traumatic event.

someday somehow, all of our dreams can come true.

Writing for a better world, for better persons, on the street, the neighbourhood, the academy and the church.

Conversion of mind, due to some experience and knowledge, plus a lot of patience.

goin to the south, of the mind, of the southern of Europe, not Algarve, but to a place in my mind.

obedience and freedom at the same time, due to social responsability.

Rodney Needham bipolarity in a small context.

to know how to forgive, besides hollywood films.

ecology of mind and culture, due to perfeccionism of mankind in the way to the future.

tensional relations in the city, in the small village, all due to bad use of power and disrespect of singular expectations.

object subjectivity and the other, perceving otherness and troubled self, needing do praise some God or Godess.

Between Marshal Sahlins an Karl Poliany, reviewing some points on anti-utilitarism and political economy (M.A.U.S.S.).