In this volume, the authors present an original ethnographic study of five llama herding communities in Ayacucho, Peru. Data on herd dynamics are subjected to computer modeling in an effort to evaluate the roles of biology, symbolic and ritual behavior, ecological adaptation, and practical reason. The book contains the most detailed study of the waytakuy llama marking ceremony yet available. The role of this ceremony in preventing herds from going to extinction is evaluated against anthropological and sociobiological theory. This is an interdisciplinary book will appeal to professional archaeologists, prehistorians, cultural anthropologists, Andeanists, theoretical biologists, evolutionary biologists, and zoologists interested in animal domestication.

In this volume, the authors present an original ethnographic study of five llama herding communities in Ayacucho, Peru. Data on herd dynamics are subjected to computer modeling in an effort to evaluate the roles of biology, symbolic and ritual behavior, ecological adaptation, and practical reason. The book contains the most detailed study of the waytakuy llama marking ceremony yet available. The role of this ceremony in preventing herds from going to extinction is evaluated against anthropological and sociobiological theory. This is an interdisciplinary book will appeal to professional archaeologists, prehistorians, cultural anthropologists, Andeanists, theoretical biologists, evolutionary biologists, and zoologists interested in animal domestication.

A path-breaking analysis of the relationship between economic institutions and values.

Throughout Latin America and the rest of the Third World, profound social problems are growing in response to burgeoning populations and unstable economic and political systems. In Peru, terrorist acts by the Shining Path guerilla movement are the most visible manifestation of social discontent, but rapid economic and religious changes have touched the lives of almost everyone, radically altering traditional lifeways. In this twenty-year study of the community of Quinua in the Department of Ayacucho, William Mitchell looks at changes provoked by population growth within a severely limited ecological and economic setting, including increasing conversion to a cash economy and out-migration, the decline of the Catholic fiesta system and the rise of Protestantism, and growing poverty and revolution. When Mitchell first began his field studies in Quinua in 1966, farming was still the Quinueños' principal means of livelihood. But while the population was increasing rapidly, the amount of arable land in the community remained the same, creating increased food shortfalls. At the same time, government controls on food prices and subsidies of cheap food imports drove down the value of rural farm production. These ecological and economic factors forced many people to enter the nonfarm economy to feed themselves. Using a materialist approach, Mitchell charts the new economic strategies that Quinueños use to confront the harsh pressures of their lives, including ceramic production, wage labor, petty commerce, and migration to cash work on the coat and in the eastern tropical forests. In addition, he shows how the growing conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism is also an economic strategy, since Protestant ideology offers acceptable reasons for redirecting the money that used to be spent on elaborate religious festivals to household needs and education. The twenty-year span of this study makes it especially valuable for students of social change. Mitchell's unique, interdisciplinary approach, considering ecological, economic, and population factors simultaneously, offers a model that can be widely applied in many Third World areas. Additionally, the inclusion of an entire chapter of family histories reveals how economic and ecological forces are played out at the individual level.

The most exciting and productive areas of academic inquiry are often where the interests of two disciplines meet. This is certainly the case for the subject of this book, originally published in 1994, which explores the contribution that computer-based modelling and artificial intelligence can make to understanding fundamental issues in social science. Simulating Societies shows how computer simulations can help to clarify theoretical approaches, contribute to the evaluation of alternative theories, and illuminate one of the major issues of the social sciences: how social phenomena can "emerge" from individual action. The authors discuss how simulation models can be constructed using recently developed artificial intelligence techniques and they consider the methodological issues involved in using such models for theory development, testing and experiment. The introductory chapters situate the book within social science, and suggest why the time was ripe for significant progress, before defining basic terminology, showing how simulation has been used to theorize about organizations, and indicating through examples some of the fundamental issues involved in simulation. The main body of the text provides case studies drawn from economics, anthropology, archaeology, planning, social psychology and sociology. The appeal of this path-breaking book was twofold. It offered an essential introduction to simulation for social scientists and it provided case study applications for computer scientists interested in the latest advances in the burgeoning area of distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) at the time.

A world list of books in the English language.