Anthropology

This re-evaluation of existing data on board games from the Near Eastern Bronze Age demonstrates their function as social lubricants in cross- cultural interaction. Board games are situated theoretically as liminoid practices, which lie outside the bounds of normative social behaviour and allow for interaction across social boundaries. Utilizing double-sided game boards, with an indigenous game on one side and a newly introduced game on the other, the games of senet, mehen and twenty squares provide evidence for social interactions. Cypriots had adopted Egyptian mehen and senet by the third millennium BC, and indigenized the games. This lies in contrast to the game of twenty squares, which had a particular role among elites in the Late Bronze Age interaction sphere. This anthropological discussion of evidence relating to gaming seeks to inspire further research on the role of board games in society.

This study frames research on board games within a body of anthropological theory and method to examine the long-term social changes that effect play and mechanisms through which play may influence societal change. Drawing from ethnographic literature focusing on the performative nature of games and their effectiveness at providing a method for strengthening social bonds through grounding, I examine changes in the places in which people engaged in play over the course of the Bronze Age on Cyprus (circa 2500¬–1050 BCE), a period of increasing social complexity. The purpose of this research is to examine how the changes in social boundaries concomitant with emergent complexity were counteracted or strengthened through the use of games as tools of interaction.
Bronze Age sites on Cyprus have produced the largest dataset of game boards belonging to any ancient culture. Weight and morphological data were gathered from these artifacts to determine the likelihood of their portability and to identify what type of game was present. The presence of fixed and likely immobile games, as well as the presence of clusters of portable games, was used to identify spaces in which games were played. Counts of other types of artifacts found in the same spaces as games were tabulated, and Correspondence Analysis (CA) was performed in order to determine differences in the types of activities present in the same spaces as play.
The results of the CA showed that during the Prehistoric Bronze Age, which has fewer indicators of social complexity, gaming spaces were associated with artifacts related to consumption or specialty, heirloom and imported ceramics, and rarely played in public spaces. During the Protohistoric Bronze Age, when Cyprus was more socially complex, games were more commonly played in public spaces and associated with 
artifacts related to consumption. These changes suggest a changing emphasis through time, where the initiation and strengthening of social bonds through the grounding process afforded by play is more highly valued in small-scale society, whereas the social mobility that is enabled by performance during play is exploited more commonly during periods of complexity.

actual board has yet been excavated in Greece. The senet board with a recumbent lion, exhibited in the National Archaeological Museum at Athens and published here for the first time, was in fact collected in Egypt. Instead this object provides a rare example of an Egyptian board featuring an ornamental animal on the edge of the board. Stylistic comparisons between this board and other decorated examples suggest that senet boards—documented in the Levant, Cyprus, and Nubia—have inspired other versions of race games beyond these regions, possibly including a series of Neo-Assyrian games of fifty-eight holes with animals on their flat end.

Social complexity requires people to create new ways of interacting with one another to counteract new social boundaries. Board games provide one avenue by which archaeologists may examine the ways in which people interacted. The act of play is liminoid, allowing for people to more easily overcome social boundaries to in- teraction, while also creating a shared experience for the process of grounding. Thus, games provide an op- portunity for people to build relationships and also to negotiate their identity. This research counters previous assertions that only complex societies play strategy games. In Bronze Age Cyprus, middle-range society became increasingly complex with the development of urbanism and differential access to wealth, while also producing a particularly large corpus of ancient board games. Determining where games were played, and then analyzing the social context of games in those spaces using multiple correspondence analysis, it was found that people were more likely to be playing in public during periods of greater complexity. This is likely due to the performative aspects of play, allowing for the communication of status in different ways when games are played in public spaces. The pattern found shows the variation in the ways people incorporated games into their social strategies during periods of different types of complexity.

Egyptian senet boards follow a very consistent morphology that varies in small but notable ways throughout the 2000-year history of the game. A previously unpublished board, in the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose, California, may provide new insight into the evolution of the game in the early New Kingdom. A game table with markings distinctive of the Thutmoside Period, but oriented like Middle Kingdom and Seventeenth Dynasty boards, it is probably a transitional style. It likely dates to the Eighteenth Dynasty before the reign of Hatshepsut, a period to which no other games have previously been securely dated.

This paper takes its cue from two art objects that can be considered in themselves as nontextual experiments in ethnographic research. The series Museum Photographs by Thomas Struth, as Guggenheim Museum curators put it, " captures anonymous individuals and crowds looking at iconic works of Western art in the world's most popular museums. " More than the aesthetic value of the artwork and its meaning, Struth's refl ection emphasizes the audience's reaction to the art object, evidencing his concern with the social potential of artworks in the art world. In a similar way, Christoph Büchel puts the public at the center of his installation Simply Botiful by soliciting affective responses to hyperrealistic and emotionally loaded issues. This paper purports to look at Büchel's installation with Struth's conceptual lens as a methodological tool to disentangle the complex web of relations between people and things that gravitate around the art world. Ultimately, it poses the question: if art objects are mediators of and commentaries on reality, under which conditions can artistic practices serve the purpose of exploring new avenues of ethnographic inquiry? In the syllabus-informed institutional frameworks that parse the academic disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences, art and anthropology are commonly held to be two separate domains, where the latter explains the former so as to produce an understanding of art that departs essentially from it. Despite recent theoretical and methodological reconceptualizations, 1 the analytic fl ow is traditionally held to be one-1 Most notably the expographic experiments of Latour and Weibel (2005) and the experimental modes of anthropological research through art collected in Schneider and Wright (2006). Arnd Schneider (2008) in particular is an advocate of the role of the visual art in anthropological representation and research. Beyond the realm of visual art, Max Liboiron prompts interesting ethnographic performances through his interactive art installations: the public engage with traditional anthropological themes such as exchange, consumption, regimes of value, the ecology of the landscape, trash-based social economies, and so on (see http://emedia.art.sunysb.edu/maxliboiron/webpages).

Although cognitive science was multidisciplinary from the start, an under-emphasis on anthropology has left the field with limited research in small scale, indigenous societies. Neglecting the anthropological perspective is risky, given that once-canonical cognitive science findings have often been shown to be artifacts of enculturation rather than cognitive universals. This imbalance has become more problematic as the increased use of Western theory-driven approaches, many of which assume human uniformity (" universality "), confronts the absence of a robust descriptive base that might provide clarifying or even contrary evidence. We highlight the need for remedies to such shortcomings by suggesting a twofold methodological shift. First, studies conducted in indigenous societies can benefit by relying on multidisciplinary research groups to diminish ethnocentrism and enhance the quality of the data. Second, studies devised for Western societies can readily be adapted to the changing settings encountered in the field. Here, we provide examples, drawn from the areas of emotion and facial expressions, to illustrate potential solutions to recurrent problems in enhancing the quality of data collection, hypothesis testing, and the interpretation of results.

We report 2 studies on how residents of Papua New Guinea interpret facial expressions produced spontaneously by other residents of Papua New Guinea. Members of a small-scale indigenous society, Trobrianders (Milne Bay Province; N 32, 14 to 17 years) were shown 5 facial expressions spontaneously produced by members of another small-scale indigenous society, Fore (Eastern Highlands Province) that Ekman had photographed, labeled, and published in The Face of Man (1980), each as an expression of a basic emotion: happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, and disgust. Trobrianders were asked to use any word they wanted to describe how each person shown felt and to provide valence and arousal ratings. Other Trobrianders (N 24, 12 to 14 years) were shown the same photographs but asked to choose their response from a short list. In both studies, agreement with Ekman's predicted labels was low: 0% to 16% and 13% to 38% of observers, respectively.

Mimesis is a powerful tool for apprehending and comprehending alterity. This chapter examines how carvers in the Trobriand Islands appropriate images from outsiders to expand their relational networks. It argues that the creative inventiveness of Trobrianders allows them to imitate foreign forms in their carvings while keeping them intrinsically “Trobriand.” Mimesis reveals ways in which carvings display difference and similarity at the same time, highlighting how for Trobrianders innovation is tradition.