Alexandra Maryanski
Biographic Data
| ID | 3660039 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexandra Maryanski |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexandra |
| FAMILY NAME | Maryanski |
| SIGNATURE | MARYANSKI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Riverside |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 43 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Biosocial Evolutionary Analysis
This authoritative book proposes a methodological and theoretical strategy for developing sociological explanations of the socio-cultural universe. Jonathan H. Turner and Alexandra Maryanski discuss the problems that persist in explaining the socio-cultural universe using only biological and psychological approaches and outline new strategies for understanding the evolution of human beings and their biological nature
An Approach to Evolutionary Sociology and its Implications for Theorizing on Socio-Cultural Evolution
A theoretical research program is outlined that seeks to use the Modern Synthesis in explaining human evolution, but also recognizes its limitations in explaining the evolution of socio-cultural systems. The universe, from a human perspective, is composed of physical, biological, and socio-cultural dimensions, each revealing unique properties and dynamics. In the case of the socio-cultural universe, modern evolutionary theory is relevant for some…
Homines Emotionales and Religion as an Evolutionary Exaptation
This article offers a critical reply to Leonardo Ambasciano’s commentary on our volume (Turner et al. 2018) available in this same issue of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography
Explaining the evolution of religion
A response to commentaries in the Book Symposium: The Emergence and Evolution of Religion: By Means of Natural Selection by Jonathan H. Turner, Alexandra Maryanski, Anders Klostergaard Petersen, and Armin W. Geertz (Routledge 2018). The commentators are Loriliai Biernacki, Daniel Cohen, Benjamin Grant Purzycki, John H. Shaver, John Teehan, and Ina Wunn
The deep origins of society
E.O. Wilson’s Genesis: The Deep Origins of Societies is one of a series of short books where the author has tried to explain human societies using ideas and concepts from biology. While Wilson is to be lauded for his recent efforts to reintroduce the notions of group selection and multilevel selection, he still sustains an emphasis on only Darwinian selection and reveals a bias toward seeing selection for groups as a result of selection on indivi…
Incest, Theoretical Perspectives on
Anthropology and sociology have long been fascinated with incest and the origin of the incest taboo. Incest refers to any illicit sexual act, whereas the incest taboo refers to a “thou shalt not” have sexual relations with offspring within the nuclear family, though in many traditional societies the taboo is extended to a broader kinship network. In the nineteenth century, theorizing about incest often began with the idea of a pre‐kinship “horde”…
Émile Durkheim and the Birth of the Gods
The Birth of the Gods is dedicated to Durkheim's effort to understand the basis of social integration. Unlike most social scientists, then and now, Durkheim concluded that humans are naturally more individualistic than collectivistic, that the primal social unit for humans is the macro-level unit ('the horde'), rather than the family, and that social cohesion is easily disrupted by human self-interest. Hence, for Durkheim, one of the "gravest" pr…
Incest
The word “incest” is derived from the Latin incestum and refers to sexual contact between close relatives. After Captain James Cook introduced the Polynesian word “taboo” into the English lexicon in 1777, the phrase “incest taboo” became the moral label for a forbidden carnal act. Why was there a need for such formal censorship
Handbook on Evolution and Society
On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection
Kinship, religion, and economy were not "natural" to humans, nor to species of apes that had to survive on the African savanna. Society from its very beginnings involved an uneasy necessity that often stood in conflict with humans' ape ancestry; these tensions only grew along with later, more complex-eventually colossal-sociocultural systems. The ape in us was not extinguished, nor obviated, by culture; indeed, our ancestry continues to place pre…
The Birth of the Gods
Emile Durkheim's ideas on religion have long served as foundational blocks for sociological theories. Yet, a mystery remains over where Durkheim's insights into religion came from and especially the event that opened his eyes to religion's importance in social life. Durkheim never supplied details on this conversion, but he did credit Robertson Smith for his new understanding. Did Smith really play the key role in Durkheim's turn to religion? Thi…
The Israeli Kibbutzim and the Westermarck Hypothesis
Incest
Emile Durkheim
The Social Cage
The Pursuit of Human Nature in Sociobiology and Evolutionary Sociology
Outside of sociology, evolutionary theory is once again commanding widespread attention in social science. Having sat out the spirited debates over sociobiology in the 1970s, most sociologists are largely unaware that the field has prospered and is now a respected, interdisciplinary science with a growing number of influential scholars within the social sciences. This article takes a critical look at sociobiology with a consideration of both its …
The Social Cage
The Offspring of Functionalism
Durkheim'sfunctional and structural sociology is examined with an eye to the two structuralist modes of inquiry that it inspired, French structuralism and British structuralism. French structuralism comes from Levi-Strauss's inverting the basic ideas of Durkheim and others in the French circle, including Marcell Mauss, Robert Hertz, and Ferdinand de Saussure. British structuralism comes from A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's adoption of Durkheimian ideas to…
A Cross-Species Application of Bott's Hypothesis on Role Segregation and Social Networks
Elizabeth Bott's hypothesis that the degree of role-segregation between husbands and wives is a function of the density in family networks is applied to a review of social relations among representative species from seven genera of Old World primates. On the whole, the hypothesis is supported. In seeking to apply Bott's ideas to primate research, her theory is formalized and stated more abstractly, with the result that its structural dynamics are…
Functionalism
Émile Durkheim and the Birth of the Gods
The Birth of the Gods is dedicated to Durkheim's effort to understand the basis of social integration. Unlike most social scientists, then and now, Durkheim concluded that humans are naturally more individualistic than collectivistic, that the primal social unit for humans is the macro-level unit ('the horde'), rather than the family, and that social cohesion is easily disrupted by human self-interest. Hence, for Durkheim, one of the "gravest" pr…
A Cross-Species Application of Bott's Hypothesis on Role Segregation and Social Networks
Elizabeth Bott's hypothesis that the degree of role-segregation between husbands and wives is a function of the density in family networks is applied to a review of social relations among representative species from seven genera of Old World primates. On the whole, the hypothesis is supported. In seeking to apply Bott's ideas to primate research, her theory is formalized and stated more abstractly, with the result that its structural dynamics are…
The Offspring of Functionalism
Durkheim'sfunctional and structural sociology is examined with an eye to the two structuralist modes of inquiry that it inspired, French structuralism and British structuralism. French structuralism comes from Levi-Strauss's inverting the basic ideas of Durkheim and others in the French circle, including Marcell Mauss, Robert Hertz, and Ferdinand de Saussure. British structuralism comes from A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's adoption of Durkheimian ideas to…
The Social Cage
The Pursuit of Human Nature in Sociobiology and Evolutionary Sociology
Outside of sociology, evolutionary theory is once again commanding widespread attention in social science. Having sat out the spirited debates over sociobiology in the 1970s, most sociologists are largely unaware that the field has prospered and is now a respected, interdisciplinary science with a growing number of influential scholars within the social sciences. This article takes a critical look at sociobiology with a consideration of both its …
The Social Cage
The Birth of the Gods
Emile Durkheim's ideas on religion have long served as foundational blocks for sociological theories. Yet, a mystery remains over where Durkheim's insights into religion came from and especially the event that opened his eyes to religion's importance in social life. Durkheim never supplied details on this conversion, but he did credit Robertson Smith for his new understanding. Did Smith really play the key role in Durkheim's turn to religion? Thi…
The Israeli Kibbutzim and the Westermarck Hypothesis
An Approach to Evolutionary Sociology and its Implications for Theorizing on Socio-Cultural Evolution
A theoretical research program is outlined that seeks to use the Modern Synthesis in explaining human evolution, but also recognizes its limitations in explaining the evolution of socio-cultural systems. The universe, from a human perspective, is composed of physical, biological, and socio-cultural dimensions, each revealing unique properties and dynamics. In the case of the socio-cultural universe, modern evolutionary theory is relevant for some…
The deep origins of society
E.O. Wilson’s Genesis: The Deep Origins of Societies is one of a series of short books where the author has tried to explain human societies using ideas and concepts from biology. While Wilson is to be lauded for his recent efforts to reintroduce the notions of group selection and multilevel selection, he still sustains an emphasis on only Darwinian selection and reveals a bias toward seeing selection for groups as a result of selection on indivi…
Functionalism
The Offspring of Functionalism
Durkheim'sfunctional and structural sociology is examined with an eye to the two structuralist modes of inquiry that it inspired, French structuralism and British structuralism. French structuralism comes from Levi-Strauss's inverting the basic ideas of Durkheim and others in the French circle, including Marcell Mauss, Robert Hertz, and Ferdinand de Saussure. British structuralism comes from A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's adoption of Durkheimian ideas to…
A Cross-Species Application of Bott's Hypothesis on Role Segregation and Social Networks
Elizabeth Bott's hypothesis that the degree of role-segregation between husbands and wives is a function of the density in family networks is applied to a review of social relations among representative species from seven genera of Old World primates. On the whole, the hypothesis is supported. In seeking to apply Bott's ideas to primate research, her theory is formalized and stated more abstractly, with the result that its structural dynamics are…
The Social Cage
The Social Cage
The Pursuit of Human Nature in Sociobiology and Evolutionary Sociology
Outside of sociology, evolutionary theory is once again commanding widespread attention in social science. Having sat out the spirited debates over sociobiology in the 1970s, most sociologists are largely unaware that the field has prospered and is now a respected, interdisciplinary science with a growing number of influential scholars within the social sciences. This article takes a critical look at sociobiology with a consideration of both its …
Emile Durkheim
Incest
The Israeli Kibbutzim and the Westermarck Hypothesis
The Birth of the Gods
Emile Durkheim's ideas on religion have long served as foundational blocks for sociological theories. Yet, a mystery remains over where Durkheim's insights into religion came from and especially the event that opened his eyes to religion's importance in social life. Durkheim never supplied details on this conversion, but he did credit Robertson Smith for his new understanding. Did Smith really play the key role in Durkheim's turn to religion? Thi…
Handbook on Evolution and Society
On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection
Kinship, religion, and economy were not "natural" to humans, nor to species of apes that had to survive on the African savanna. Society from its very beginnings involved an uneasy necessity that often stood in conflict with humans' ape ancestry; these tensions only grew along with later, more complex-eventually colossal-sociocultural systems. The ape in us was not extinguished, nor obviated, by culture; indeed, our ancestry continues to place pre…
Incest
The word “incest” is derived from the Latin incestum and refers to sexual contact between close relatives. After Captain James Cook introduced the Polynesian word “taboo” into the English lexicon in 1777, the phrase “incest taboo” became the moral label for a forbidden carnal act. Why was there a need for such formal censorship
Incest, Theoretical Perspectives on
Anthropology and sociology have long been fascinated with incest and the origin of the incest taboo. Incest refers to any illicit sexual act, whereas the incest taboo refers to a “thou shalt not” have sexual relations with offspring within the nuclear family, though in many traditional societies the taboo is extended to a broader kinship network. In the nineteenth century, theorizing about incest often began with the idea of a pre‐kinship “horde”…
Émile Durkheim and the Birth of the Gods
The Birth of the Gods is dedicated to Durkheim's effort to understand the basis of social integration. Unlike most social scientists, then and now, Durkheim concluded that humans are naturally more individualistic than collectivistic, that the primal social unit for humans is the macro-level unit ('the horde'), rather than the family, and that social cohesion is easily disrupted by human self-interest. Hence, for Durkheim, one of the "gravest" pr…
The deep origins of society
E.O. Wilson’s Genesis: The Deep Origins of Societies is one of a series of short books where the author has tried to explain human societies using ideas and concepts from biology. While Wilson is to be lauded for his recent efforts to reintroduce the notions of group selection and multilevel selection, he still sustains an emphasis on only Darwinian selection and reveals a bias toward seeing selection for groups as a result of selection on indivi…
Explaining the evolution of religion
A response to commentaries in the Book Symposium: The Emergence and Evolution of Religion: By Means of Natural Selection by Jonathan H. Turner, Alexandra Maryanski, Anders Klostergaard Petersen, and Armin W. Geertz (Routledge 2018). The commentators are Loriliai Biernacki, Daniel Cohen, Benjamin Grant Purzycki, John H. Shaver, John Teehan, and Ina Wunn
Homines Emotionales and Religion as an Evolutionary Exaptation
This article offers a critical reply to Leonardo Ambasciano’s commentary on our volume (Turner et al. 2018) available in this same issue of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography
Biosocial Evolutionary Analysis
This authoritative book proposes a methodological and theoretical strategy for developing sociological explanations of the socio-cultural universe. Jonathan H. Turner and Alexandra Maryanski discuss the problems that persist in explaining the socio-cultural universe using only biological and psychological approaches and outline new strategies for understanding the evolution of human beings and their biological nature
An Approach to Evolutionary Sociology and its Implications for Theorizing on Socio-Cultural Evolution
A theoretical research program is outlined that seeks to use the Modern Synthesis in explaining human evolution, but also recognizes its limitations in explaining the evolution of socio-cultural systems. The universe, from a human perspective, is composed of physical, biological, and socio-cultural dimensions, each revealing unique properties and dynamics. In the case of the socio-cultural universe, modern evolutionary theory is relevant for some…
Sociology (16 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · History (8 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (7 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Social science (5 works) · Anthropology (4 works) · Emile Durkheim and Sociology (4 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (4 works)