symbolic distance
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Knowledge of transitive relationships between items can contribute to learning the order of a set of stimuli from pairwise comparisons. However, cognitive mechanisms of transitive inferences based on rank order remain unclear, as are contributions of reward magnitude and rule-based inference. To explore these issues, we created a conflict between rule- and reward-based learning during a serial ordering task. Rhesus macaques learned two lists, each containing five stimuli, that were trained exclusively with adjacent pairs. Selection of the higher-ranked item resulted in rewards. "Small reward" lists yielded 2 drops of fluid reward, while "large reward" lists yielded 5 drops. Following training of adjacent pairs, monkeys were tested on novels pairs. One item was selected from each list, such that a ranking rule could conflict with preferences for large rewards. Differences in associated reward magnitude had a strong influence on accuracy, but we also observed a symbolic distance effect. That provided evidence of a rule-based influence on decisions. Reaction time comparisons suggested a conflict between rule and reward-based processes. We conclude that performance reflects the contributions of two strategies, and that a model-based strategy is employed in the face of a strong countervailing reward incentive.

The article explores the infamous photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison that circulated and were made public in 2004. It specifically looks at how the sense of togetherness was enacted by the U.S. military personnel stationed in the site, and the way cameras were instrumental in this process. It argues that the resultant photographs can be seen as tou- rist-like in several respects. A notable aspect of the photographic images is that the soldiers who took them repeatedly appear in the frame themselves. Appearing in and photographing the abusive acts was not only a form of structuring and reinforcing power relations at the prison, but also an attempt to portray a fun-having personnel group. The visual signifiers – thumbs up, smiles, pointed fingers – authenticate the images, lending them some of the qualities of tourist photography. At Abu Ghraib, the soldiers’ photographic practice also partly served as a sense-making mechanism, allowing a symbolic distance between the camera-wielder and unforeseen emergent events. It promised a wishful alternative to the grim realities of the prison: an overcrowded and undersupplied facility with a lack of on-site leadership. The scars of resultant violence – and the notorious photographs that document it – remain relevant, and continue to resurface in recent so- cial and political contexts.

Chapter 1 sets up general themes: individual versus collective identities and survival; power and tragic, compelled agency; and change versus reproduction of practices and relations. After a brief discussion of historiography, the chapter developed its theoretical framework, building on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and fields. First, perception and sensation are the foundation of social fields, which are structured signals of practice and authority. Second, fields have topographies of social and symbolic distance that shape perceptions and practices. Empathy is particularly important. Third, a crucial facet of fields is anchors, entities of symbolic and emotional valence that link individuals to fields through personal and symbolic meanings. Finally, groups of fields and actors crystalize into “economies” of contexts and rules of worth. The chapter closes with a discussion of power and compelled, tragic agency, and with a discussion of data: Blockade diaries, state and Party records (NKVD and police reports, Party documents, etc.), and interviews (during the Blockade, in the late 1970s, after 1991).

Suffering provokes theodicy, the search for meaning and dignity. Blockade theodicies had two key logics: causation and community of suffering. Social and symbolic distance shaped both. The Germans were the prime cause, but the Allies were viewed with suspicion. Party and state officials were closer and more visible; civilians could read into them incompetence and coldness, but also some humanity, leaving a fuzzy picture. Leningraders also asked how Soviet culture and human nature, closest to home, could cause suffering. For the suffering community, the city was a key anchor that bred contradictions. Civilians knew soldiers suffered, suggesting a broad national community. Yet this created status competition: Leningraders as the superior soviets. Competition emerged inside the city in politics of authenticity. Dystrophics were possibly shirking duties, and for some, Jews were inauthentic sufferers deserving exclusion. Blockade theodicies grounded identities in the city experience, in which USSR and Red Army had status, but Stalin and Moscow less.

Starvation impacted not only political authority. It also severely shocked intimate relations and fields of meaning. In such duress, stealing food and other innovations and violations of norms became growing temptations—yet whether one carried out such strategies depended in part on social distance and empathy vis-à-vis those who might benefit and might suffer. Theft from organizations was easier than stealing from strangers, which was easier than stealing from an acquaintance. Symbolic distance also shaped survival practices, especially as Leningraders were forced to reclassify “food.” Proximity of nontraditional to traditional forms of food shaped culinary innovations. Inanimate objects (e.g., glue) were easier to reclassify as food than animals, and Leningraders ate horses more easily than cats. The most problematic innovation was cannibalism, a recurring narrative touchstone. Paradoxically, cannibalism could corrode and support norms: its appearance created dread of a new unhuman normality, but it also invoked condemnation and reinforced the importance of “civilization.”

The thesis introduced in this lectio praecursoria explores the everyday work, ideals and values of the Latvian organic food movement known as tiešā pirkšana (‘direct purchasing’), an initiative which aims to shorten the physical and symbolic distance between producers and consumers; producers, market and regulating policies; and consumers and food. Drawing on the empirical material obtained through long-term ethnographic fieldwork, and theoretical discussions in social and food research, the concept of ‘reconnection’ was chosen to analyse the process of shortening the distance between the different actors involved in one small-scale food provisioning system. By focusing on the notion that there is a link between the reconnection process and the ethics and practice of care, the thesis analyses different forms of care in the various stages of food provisioning in the TP movement. Keywords: mall-scale food provisioning, care and food, spatiotemporalities of care, everyday food practices

This chapter examines how African-Guyanese-Americans police the boundaries of “Guyanese food” at Come to My Kwe-Kwe to “remember,” to articulate Blackness, and to facilitate rediasporization. It also demonstrates the delicate balance established between the desires of the attendees and the financial goals of vendors who provide Come to My Kwe-Kwe meals. Diverse cuisines are sold at Come to My Kwe-Kwe, but attendees who are accustomed to eating Guyanese food, or are familiar with the traditional kweh-kweh, often attend the ritual expecting to consume African-influenced Guyanese cuisines, like cookup rice, metemgee, and conkee. This chapter also explores how migration and the changing needs and desires of the African-Guyanese community simultaneously facilitate destruction and innovations of Guyanese cuisines. Ultimately, this chapter articulates Come to My Kwe-Kwe foods simultaneously to diminish the symbolic distance between diasporas and homelands and establish new distances through cost, culinary innovations, and a changing African-Guyanese community.

In the case of Bijnor, the symbolic distance of the qasbah from the city allowed it first to promote League–Congress collaboration in terms of benefit to localities outside large cities. The qasbah timescape was significant in its distance from the city, but more importantly its proximity to the units of community that mattered, communities crystallized by language, geography, and culture. Madīnah’s politics in the 1920s and 1930s were a mix of opposition to the Muslim League, support for Congress, suspicion of Westernization, and justified cooperation with Hindus, all in Islamic terms. The case study of the 1937 Bijnor by-elections demonstrates that conversations in one qasbah both exposed fault lines in Muslim identity and instituted a separation from the national matrix of Congress–Muslim League alignment. In the process, the paper sought to accommodate and report on a vast array of conversations relevant to Muslims, many of which have not received attention in historiography of media prior to 1947 previously.

The implied order of a ranked set of visual images can be learned by transitive inference, without reliance on stimulus features that explicitly signal their order. Such learning is difficult to explain by associative mechanisms but can be accounted for by cognitive representations and processes such as transitive inference. Our study seeks to determine if those representations may be applied to categories of images without explicit verbal instruction. Specifically, we asked whether participants can (a) infer that images being presented belonged to familiar categories, even when every image presented during every trial is unique, and (b) perform transitive inferences about the ordering of those categories. To address these questions, we compared the performance of humans during a standard TI task, which used the same set of images throughout the session, to performance in a category TI tasks, which drew images from a set of categories. Each of the images used in the category TI task was only presented once, limiting the extent to which stimulus-outcome associations could be learned. Participants were able to learn the order of the categories based on transitive inference. However, participants in the category TI condition did not produce a symbolic distance effect. These findings collectively suggest that differing cognitive processes may underpin serial learning when learning about specific stimuli versus stimulus categories.

Drawing mainly upon the thinking of Kenneth Burke, this essay overviews a few psychological functions performed within dramatic works of art. It shows how dramatic works of art (e.g. novels, plays, films, and even TV shows) operate as subtle modes of applied psychology: they offer different types of therapeutic benefits for those who produce such works and also for those who read them and/or audience members who witness them. I try to bring out how modes of catharsis as well as means of transcendence are afforded by dramatic form within art. Even more specifically stated, I review some of Burke’s ruminations upon his own semiautobiographical novel, Towards a Better Life, and I outline how dramatic works of art provide adequate symbolic distance for sizing up one’s life situations and for facing various challenges that can otherwise be too difficult to face head-on. Through symbolic and artistic maneuvers, which enable kinds of identification, authors and audience members learn to face their demons and gain new psychological resolves and/or vistas of self-understanding.