Animal behavior is subject to the action of natural selection, favoring individuals that behave in ways that maximize their fitness by promoting individual survival and reproductive success. Cultural evolution plays an important role, with behavioral traits of surprising complexity spreading rapidly through a population. Behavioral ecologists measure the costs and benefits of alternative types of behavior to gain an understanding of basic behavioral processes such as territory defense, foraging, and mating. This cost–benefit approach allows quantitative predictions of behavior tightly tied to fitness, such as how long to guard a mate, or how long to forage at a particular location before moving on. Both physiological factors, such as the need to keep eggs warm, and ecological factors, such as the spatial distribution of resources, can influence the evolution of mating systems. In many species, individuals cooperate with each other in procuring food or defending against predators. Hamilton’s model of indirect selection is one possible explanation for the evolution of behavior favoring relatives, including the astounding degree of cooperation in eusocial animals. But in some species, cooperation is common even among unrelated individuals; in these cases game theory models may help explain the evolution of cooperation.

Humans are complexly social and exceptionally cooperative. Human behavioral ecology has been successful by explaining small-scale dyadic cooperative interactions like food sharing using standard theoretical perspectives of kin selection and reciprocity. Such models have been enhanced with additional ideas including mutualism, partner choice, costly signaling, competitive altruism, and biological market theory. Concepts such as stake, interdependence, and need-based support have provided additional predictive power. While these tools have been effective at explaining face-to-face cooperative relationships, their inability to explain the large, complex social groupings typical of human societies has led researchers to look to new models of multilevel and cultural group selection theory for solutions. Culture plays a key role in structuring human sociality and facilitating group selection by reducing behavioral variation within groups while increasing variation among groups. Gene-culture coevolution can favor psychological propensities like conformist bias that assort people into symbolically marked groups of trusted partners with shared identities and normative ways of organizing cooperative life. Societies whose cumulative culture maintain institutions that encourage magnanimity and coordination between members achieve collective action benefits unobtainable otherwise and outcompete other groups whose institutions fail to organize their members in ways that lead to cooperative outcomes at scale.

Some aspects of the well-described planet- and satellite-like framework of, respectively, mixed herds and bachelor groups of buffalo recently were challenged. Associations of female buffalo are now considered more fluid than the initial idea of a stable mixed herd defined by a home range. Within mixed herds, adult female associations are unstable and transient despite using largely overlapping home ranges. Mixed herds in most instances do not seem to overlap much in space. Between mixed herds exchanges exist, apparently dominated by juvenile females (but almost no information exists on juvenile males). The dynamics of fusion–fission events within mixed herds are largely driven by habitat heterogeneity, the quality and quantity of grazing and surface water, and the influence of predation, parasitism and fires. The influence of the human/buffalo interface on these dynamics is not yet well understood. Future studies will benefit from more advances in telemetry and new technologies, new information sources (e.g. sound recorders) and non-invasive genetic studies to enhance our knowledge of buffalo social dynamics. Knowledge of buffalo social dynamics would also benefit from studies more representative of the African distribution of the species and across its subspecies.

This chapter investigates how both direct and structural violence unfold in concrete situations. Analyzing examples from Palestine, I show how structural violence is enacted in concrete situations of domination and, building on empirical research from the Arab Uprisings, I develop a micro-sociological model for direct violence. The chapter shows how violence is difficult because it goes against the human tendency to become attuned and fall into each other’s bodily rhythms. Hence, violence usually happens from afar or when a victim is dominated. Once violence is initiated, however, it attains its own rhythm and momentum, making it difficult not to respond to an attack with another attack. The chapter further discusses how violent situations are not only shaped by inter-bodily dynamics but also by embodied habitus, emotional energy, and material availability. Coupling this with insights regarding micro-interactions of violence, I develop a micro-sociological model of violent situations.

This chapter introduces the logics, assumptions, and theoretical underpinnings of micro-sociology in the context of Peace and Conflict Research. In the chapter, I present and discuss how macro-phenomena comprise and yet are more than the sum of micro-interactions. I then proceed to introduce key concepts and elements of the micro-sociological framework developed in this book, including interaction rituals, emotional energy, social bonds, micro-sociality, and socioemotional credit and discredit. Moreover, the chapter conceptualizes four forms of interaction that shape peace, and conflict: friendly interaction, conflictual interaction, dominant interaction, and low-intensity interaction. These modes of interaction can be analyzed to understand concrete situations and grasp larger patterns of peace and conflict. The chapter discusses how modes of interaction can be changed and challenged, how interactions are also shaped by practices and material circumstances, and how intergroup conflicts and peace may imply different forms of interaction.

The chapter traces how anthropologists reconfigured theorizing the social through gender-sensitive ethnographic work, which led to a turning away from the “society thinking” rooted in liberalist humanism, to a greater emphasis on process and on notions of sociality and the person. An appreciation of Marilyn Strathern’s contributions to this reconfiguration, at distinct moments of its history, structures the discussion, which is elaborated with reference to ethnographic analysis. Thus, the central section of the chapter considers ethnography of Indigenous Amazonian peoples, to discuss the relationship between naming, practices of the person (rather than personhood as a state), and lived sociality. This leads to a reappraisal of Mauss’s foundational essay on the person. In the penultimate section, the chapter sets out current debates on the “dividual” or “partible person” with respect to distinctions between “relationalist” and “individualist” conceptual fields of personhood. Finally, it explores how anthropology has come to investigate power and difference as part of the constitution of historically emergent personhood.

Media and communication influence, shape, and change our societies. Therefore, this first chapter aims to explain the implications of digital communication for our societies and the relationship between media, technology, and society. The chapter introduces the concept of society from a sociological perspective and explains how societies change because of the effects technological developments have on them, and vice versa. It illustrates this interplay with the example of digital divides.

In order to explain the significance and changes of public communication in a digital society, the chapters zooms in on the media landscape and explicates the difference between new media and old (or traditional) media. It pays particular attention to the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, as his work remains a cornerstone when studying the relationship between media, technology, and society. The chapter then outlines the discipline of media linguistics and explains how media linguistics can help to make digital media and digital communication more tangible. It focuses on three key terms crucial for understanding public digital communication: multimodality, media convergence, and mediatization.

This chapter introduces the idea of a distinctively moral form of recognition by considering J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, a work of literature that exemplifies the recognitive tensions in which Hegel is interested, showing how moral disagreement can undermine the experience of the integrity of one’s own selfhood. I then turn to presenting a general account of the issue of recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, by situating the role that the idea of the self plays in addressing that issue. I show that recognition addresses a challenge about self-knowledge, so that an adequate conception of what the self is is necessary to secure relations of recognition. After clarifying the interpretive method that I follow in the book by contrasting with my own approach to extant interpretations, I conclude with a chapter-by-chapter outline of the rest of the monograph.

I begin my interpretation of the text by situating the idea of recognition in Hegel’s account of “self-consciousness.” I argue that what is distinctive of self-consciousness is not that it is apperceptive (all forms of consciousness are apperceptive in a significant sense for Hegel), but rather that it has a specific “double-object” structure. Just as the implicit aim of any shape of consciousness is to achieve knowledge of its object, so the implicit aim of self-consciousness is to achieve knowledge of its (ultimate) object, namely itself. Instead of depending on the idea of a quasi-natural “desire for recognition,” recognition provides a novel instance of this double-object structure, which it shares with desire. I show that recognizing and being recognized by others are sources of a distinctive kind of self-knowledge, but they are not necessary for the achievement of (mere) self-consciousness. My account also shows why recognition is necessarily reciprocal, since a relation of recognition between subjects has the “double-object” structure characteristic of self-consciousness only when both individuals relate to one another in the specific mode of recognition. I conclude by demonstrating how acts of recognizing give rise to forms of sociality.

In providing a new foundation for natural law and thence political authority, Pufendorf engaged in a major and explicit reconstruction of the discipline. Scholastic natural law derived the law of nature from a prior nature held to contain norms for moral and civil conduct; for example, from a divine nature whose will imprinted the human will, or a rational nature that was supposed to guide the will, or from humanity’s supposedly sociable nature as the source of the key norm of sociality. Pufendorf’s radical intervention into this field lay in his declaration that since it had been “imposed” or instituted as a “moral entity” by God for unaccountable reasons, human nature was not itself normative, rationally or socially. Rather, as a set of given conducts and predispositions—seen most clearly humanity’s paradoxical need for co-operation in order to survive and its ineradicable proclivity to envy, malice and mutual predation—human nature supplied only the observable basis from which it was possible to deduce the natural law: that man should cultivate sociality as a disposition needed for security and social thriving. This formed the basis for political sovereignty as the unchallengeable deployment of civil power required to obtain social peace and security.

There are surprisingly few experimental studies directly comparing the cognition of primate species representing distinct phylogenetic groupings, specialized foraging ecologies, or unique social structures. Although researchers have focused on the role of foraging and social ecology in predicting cognition, they have examined social and foraging strategies in a nuanced fashion that would permit an understanding of how specific aspects of a species’ natural environment might sculpt the evolution of specific forms of cognition. In the absence of such studies, and a clear consensus as to whether cognition should best be viewed as domain-general or domain-specific suites of abilities, it is challenging to draw conclusions as to (1) cognitive differences between primate families or (2) selection pressures responsible for shaping differences. We conclude, based on paltry but accumulating evidence, that there is little utility in postulating separate physical and social domains. In addition, we see little evidence that group-living species are cognitively advantaged compared to primates that exhibit other social structures. Lastly, we advocate for greater attention to reproductive and parental strategies and individual differences in ontogenetic experiences that may color species-level comparisons.

Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) was among the preeminent theologians of his day and his two texts, De Indis and De Iure Belli, mark the start of a vitally important transition in the Christian just war tradition as it exited a medieval social imaginary and entered a modern one. Not only are there glimpses of early modernist just war thought and a revolutionary reframing of natural law thinking in these texts, but they find their starting point in one of the most acute questions in all of just war thinking: how to understand and engage an “other,” most notably indigenous persons in the Americas and West Indies. Vitoria’s surprisingly progressive answers to this question moved the tradition forward, powering its increasing political scope and moral significance. They also shaped failures – most notably in funding modern notions of race and the rise of chattel slavery while also shaping early modern conceptions of property and ownership – and caused suffering for which the tradition is at least partly accountable and lacunae that it must now overcome as it moves into the environmental age.

Rejecting the notion, endorsed by John Searle, of an “individual institution,” this chapter treats them as inherently social, and expresses no surprise that institutions have formed a central focus of sociological analysis since the discipline's founding. Engaging especially with work in the area of organizational theory and, beyond sociology, organizational and management studies, this chapter identifies an underlying dimension along which the literature can be arrayed, running from (macro, structural) scripts to (more micro, agentic) skills, as embodied in work by John Meyer and Neil Fligstein, respectively. Between these endpoints, this chapter identifies not only a similarly well-known Scandinavian institutionalism associated with March and Olsen and focusing on the microfoundation of bounded rationality, but also literature on institutional logics and institutional work emerging from business and management programs and only now starting to impact the broader social sciences. Beyond traditional strengths in explaining institutional maintenance, work in these idioms is making real progress in accounting for institutional origins and change.