Which of the following scenarios exemplifies the idea of ecological imperialism?

Dependency theory is a school of thought in contemporary social science which seeks to contribute to an understanding of underdevelopment, an analysis of its causes, and to a lesser extent, paths toward overcoming it. It arose in Latin America in the 1960s, became influential in academic circles and at regional organizations, spread rapidly to North America, Europe, and Africa, and continues to be relevant to contemporary debate. This article examines the history of its chief concept, describes its evolution over time, analyzes its influence, and evaluates its validity and prospects for social science in the future.

6.6 Concept dependency theory

In 1972 R. C. Schank proposed the concept of dependency theory[23], serving as a representation of the meaning of phrases and sentences. The theory also provides a common reasoning knowledge for the computer, and thus the automatic understanding of language can be realized. The basic principles of concept dependence theory are as follows:

For any two sentences with identical meaning, regardless of language, there is only one concept dependence representation.

The meaning of this concept dependence representation is composed of a very small semantic meaning, which includes the meta-motion and the original state (the value of the property).

Any information in the implicit sentence must be represented by an explicit representation of the meaning of the sentence.

The concept dependence theory has three aspects:

The concept dependence→action elements, including:

The basic action physical world={GRASP, MOVE, TRANS, GO, PROPEL, INGEST, HIT}.

The basic movement of the spirit world={MTRANS, CONCEPTUALIZE, MBUILD}.

Basic movements of means or tools={SMELL, LOOK-AT, LISTEN-TO, SPEAK}.

The script→description of common scenes in a number of basic fixed set of movements (by the action of the basic elements)

Plan→each step is composed by the script.

Here, we introduce the concept dependence theory, and it is divided into the following categories:

PP: A concept term that is used only for physical objects and is also called the image generator. For example, people, objects, etc. are PP, it also includes the natural wind and rain, lightning, and thinking of the human brain (the brain as a generative system).

PA: Physical objects’ properties, together with its values can be used to describe the physical objects.

ACT: The action performed from a physical object to another physical object, it may be a physical object of its own actions, including physical action and mental action (such as criticism).

LOC: An absolute position (determined by the cosmic coordinates) or a relative position (relative to a physical object).

TIME: A time point or time slice, also divided into two kinds of absolute or relative time.

AA: An action (ACT) attribute.

VAL: Value of various attributes.

R. C. Schank formed a new concept by the following method (conceptualization):

An actor (active physical object), plus an action (ACT).

The following modification of the preceding concept:

An object (if ACT is a physical action, then it is a physical object; if ACT is a mental action, then it is another concept).

A place or a receiver (if ACT occurs between two physical objects, it indicates that a physical object or concept is passed to another physical object. If ACT occurs between two sites, it denotes the new location of the object).

A means (which in itself is a concept).

An object with a value of a property that is added to the object.

A combination of concepts in some way, forming new concepts, for example, in combination with a causal relationship.

Originally, R. C. Schank's goal was to atomize all concepts, but in fact, he only atomized action (ACT). He divided ACT into 11 kinds:

PROPEL: Application of physical forces for an object, including push, pull, play, kick, etc.

GRASP: An actor grabs a physical object.

MOVE: The body part of the actor transforms a space position, such as lifting, kicking, standing up, sitting down, etc.

PTRANS: Transformation of the physical objects, such as entering, leaving, going upstairs, diving, and so on.

ATRANS: Changes in abstract relationships, such as (holding relationship changes), to give up (all of the relationship changes), the revolution (rule of change), etc.

ATTEND: Use a sense organ to obtain information, such as the use of an eye search, use of ears to hear, and so on.

INGEST: The actor wants to bring a thing into it, such as eating, drinking, taking medicine, and so on.

EXPEL: The actor puts something out, such as vomiting, tears, urine, spitting, and so on.

SPEAK: A voice, including singing, music, screaming, wailing, crying, and so on.

MTRANS: The transfer of information, such as conversation, discussion, calls, etc.

MBUILD: The formation of new information from old information, such as anger from the heart.

Based on these 11 definitions of atomic action, R. C. Schank had a basic idea that these atomic concepts are designed not mainly for representing the action itself but that the result of the action is of the essence. Therefore, it can be considered concept reasoning. For example, “X transfer Y from W go to Z by ATRANS” indicates the conclusions of the following reasoning:

Y in the W at first.

Y is now in the Z (no longer in the W).

A certain purpose of X is achieved by ATRANS.

If Y is a good thing, it means that things are going to be in favor of Z, which is not conducive to the direction of W; otherwise it is not.

If Y is a good thing, it means that X does this action for the benefit of Z; otherwise it is the opposite.

One important sentence is the causal chain. R. C. Schank and some of his colleagues have designed a set of rules on the concept dependency theory. The following are five important rules:

The action may cause a change in the state.

The state can start actions.

The state can eliminate actions.

State (or action) can activate the mental event.

Mental events may be the cause of action.

This is the basic part of world knowledge. Concept dependency includes each (as well as combinations) shorthand for causal connection. In the concept dependency theory, any information in the implicit sentence must be a clear representation of its explicit meaning. For example, the concept dependency of the sentence “John eats the ice cream with a spoon” is explained in Fig. 6.4. Vectors D and I are expressed to explain direction and the dependence, respectively. Note that in this case, the mouth is part of the concept, even though it does not appear in the original sentence. This is the basic difference between concept dependency and parse tree.

2.2 Dependency

Modernization theory emphasized internal factors while making an exception of science. Dependency theory and its close relative, world system theory, emphasized the role of external relationships in the developmental process. Relationships with developed countries and particularly with multinational corporations were viewed as barriers. Economic growth was controlled by forces outside the national economy. Dependency theory focused on individual nations, their role as suppliers of raw materials, cheap labor, and markets for expensive manufactured goods from industrialized countries. The unequal exchange relationship between developed and developing countries was viewed as contributing to poor economic growth. World system theory took a larger perspective, examining the wider network of relationships between the industrialized ‘core’ countries, impoverished ‘peripheral’ countries, and a group of ‘semiperipheral’ countries in order to show how some are disadvantaged by their position in the global system. Because of their overspecialization in a small number of commodities for export, the unchecked economic influence of external organizations, and political power wielded by local agents of capital, countries on the periphery of the global capitalist system continue to be characterized by high levels of economic inequality, low levels of democracy, and stunted economic growth.

What is important about the dependency account is that science is not viewed in benign terms, but rather as one of a group of institutional processes that contribute to underdevelopment. As indicated above, research is highly concentrated in industrialized countries. Dependency theory adds to this the notion that most research is also conducted for their benefit, with problems and technological applications selected to advance the interests of the core. The literature on technology transfer is also viewed in a different light. The development of new technology for profit is associated with the introduction and diffusion of manufactured products that are often unsuited to local needs and conditions, serving to draw scarce resources away from more important developmental projects. The condition of dependency renders technological choice moot.

This concern with choice, associated with the argument that technology from abroad is often imposed on developing countries rather than selected by them, has resurfaced in many forms. In the 1970s it was behind the movement known as ‘intermediate’ technology, based on the work of E. F. Schumacher, which promoted the use of small-scale, labor-intensive technologies that were produced locally rather than of complex, imported, manufactured goods. These ‘appropriate’ technologies might be imported from abroad, but would be older, simpler, less mechanized, and designed with local needs in mind. What these viewpoints had in common was a critical approach to the adoption of technology from abroad.

By the late 1980s and 1990s even more radical positions began to surface, viewing Western science as a mechanism of domination. These arguments were more closely related to ecological and feminist thought than to the Marxist orientation of dependency theory. Writers such as Vandana Shiva proposed that Western science was reductionist and patriarchal in orientation, leading to ‘epistemic violence’ through the separation of subject and object in the process of observation and experimentation (1991). ‘Indigenous knowledge’ and ‘non-Western science’ were proposed as holistic and sustainable alternatives to scientific institutions and knowledge claims. Such views had an organizational base in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which received an increasing share of development aid during this period, owing to donor distrust of repressive and authoritarian governments in developing areas. NGOs have been active supporters of local communities in health, community development, and women's employment, even engaging in research in alternative agriculture (Farrington and Bebbington 1993).

5.2 Dependency and Neo-Marxist Theories

The newly critical perspective towards the postcolonial state, as well as modernization theory, found potent expression in a family of conceptual approaches drawing in one way or another on Marxism. Dependency theory, which enjoyed virtual ascendancy for an extended period in Latin America, crossed the Atlantic and achieved broad influence in Africa, not only amongst scholars and intellectuals but also in ruling circles. From the dependency perspective, the issue was less the authoritarian character of the state than the class dynamics and international capitalist system which made it so. The extroverted nature of African economies, the control of the international exchanges by capital in the imperial centers, and the subordination of the domestic ruling class to the requirements of international capitalism led ineluctably to an authoritarian state to repress and control popular forces. In dependency theory's most sophisticated formulation, Leys (1974) employed a dependency perspective to question the character of development in Kenya, then still viewed as a narrative of success.

Beyond dependency theory, various currents of Marxism enjoyed intellectual influence, particularly amongst the African intellectual community in French-speaking Africa. An important revival of Western Marxism in the 1960s transcended the doctrinaire rigidities of Marxism–Leninism, and shaped an unfolding quest to resolve the riddle of the nature of class relations in Africa, a prerequisite to grasping the character of the state. Particularly interesting, though ultimately abandoned as unproductive, was the search for a ‘lineage mode of production,’ which could deduce class dynamics from the descent-based small-scale structures of rural society. Other hands sought to employ the ornate abstractions of the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas. In the end, the schema supplied by dependency theory and neo-Marxism lost ground over the course of the 1980s. The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a shattering blow in Africa as elsewhere to the credibility of Marxism, whether as regime doctrine or analytical instrument.

See also:

American Revolution, The Bureaucracy and Bureaucratization; Civil Liberties and Human Rights; Civil Society, Concept and History of; Conservatism: Historical Aspects; Conservatism: Theory and Contemporary Political Ideology; Constitutionalism; Dependency Theory; Freedom: Political; French Revolution, The; Individualism versus Collectivism: Philosophical Aspects; Liberalism; Liberalism and War; Liberalism: Historical Aspects; Mill, John Stuart (1806–73); Modernity; Modernity: Anthropological Aspects; Modernity: History of the Concept; Smith, Adam (1723–90); Tolerance; Traditions in Sociology

2 World-systems Theory

Political economy's engagement with geography extended to the origins and structure of the world-system, including colonialism and imperialism, the geopolitics of nation-states, multinational corporations, and the possibilities of socio-economic development. Widespread dissatisfaction with modernization theory led dependency theorists to reject neoclassical views of the international division of labor (see Development Theory in Geography). Third World poverty—indeed, the construction of the developing world itself—did not, in this view, simply ‘happen,’ but was the product of centuries of colonialism and continued neocolonial exploitation through transnational corporations, i.e., the development of underdevelopment. Dependency theory represented the first application of Marxist geographical thought on a global scale, locating the cause of poverty in the materialist, external workings of the world economy, not the ideological, internal order of societies, as did modernization theory. Dependency theory rejected the promise that imitation of the West would bring prosperity and liberty to developing nations. Rather, it argued, development and underdevelopment constitute two sides of global capital accumulation, i.e., the wealth of the developed world was, and is, derived from the extraction of surplus value from underdeveloped places. Every moment in the penetration of commodity relations into non-capitalist social formations, therefore, was viewed as inevitably an act of exploitation.

Wallerstein (1979) advanced understanding of the political economy of global geographies with world-systems theory. The capitalist world-system, in contrast to earlier world empires dominated by a single political structure, consists of numerous, independent nation-states, which collectively exert no effective control over the global market. The political geography of capitalism is the interstate system, not the nation-state per se. World-systems views divide nations into three broad categories, the core, i.e., the world's leading powers (typically dominated by a single hegemon); the periphery, which comprises large numbers of weak, impoverished states; and the semiperiphery, consisting of wealthier members of the developing world and less developed members of the West. Unlike dependency theory, which takes the nation-state as its unit of analysis, world-systems theory insists upon viewing the entire planet as an indivisible totality, overcoming the dualism between the global and the local. The possibilities of economic development are seen as more open-ended than in dependency theory. The success of the East Asian Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) since World War II boosted the appeal of world-systems views considerably.

Political geography witnessed sophisticated interpretations of hegemony and territoriality at several spatial scales (see Political Geography). Agnew and Corbridge (1995), for example, dissect the ‘power container’ of the nation-state and its mounting ‘leakages’ to and from the world-system. O'Tuathail (1996) offers a poststructuralist critical geopolitics, that emphasizes the social origins of statecraft, foreign policy, and geographical knowledge.

II.C.3. “Strong” Slot-and-Filler Structures

The slot-and-filler structures described above (semantic nets and frames) place few, if any restrictions on the meaning of objects and links modeled using the formalism; hence they are sometimes referred to as “weak” (in the sense of “knowledge-poor”). Consequently, they are applicable to a wide range of problem domains as long as the programmer takes the responsibility for matching the semantics of the problem to the structure of the knowledge representation system. In contrast to semantic nets and frames that impose few restrictions on their content, there exist a class of representations that embody specific notions about the primitive objects and relations to be modeled. Such slot-and-filler structures are said to be “strong” (i.e., “knowledge-rich”) in that they constrain the semantics of the knowledge represented in addition to its structure. Two examples of such knowledge representation systems are conceptual dependency (CD) theory from Schank in 1975, and scripts from Schank and Abelson in 1977.

Conceptual dependency theory specifies a set of primitive actions to describe the interaction among entities. If the problem domain can be satisfactorily expressed using the limited set of primitives provided, inference is significantly accelerated (relative to content-free, general-purpose representational structures). Of course, only a small number of problem domains (such as natural language understanding and simple analyses of social interactions) have been shown to be amenable to modeling with conceptual dependency theory.

Scripts are structures that describe generic templates of events in a particular context (such as eating at a restaurant). Particular events, once mapped into these generic structures, can be expressed as instantiations of these scripts (with the variable elements of the script bound to specific values for the particular event). The structure inherent in a script (how different elements relate to one another) enables inference about the particular event even if some aspects of the event are not explicitly recorded. For instance, a restaurant script can tell us that we must pay for the food we buy, even if the description of a particular visit to a restaurant contains no specific mention of payment.

Many of the key ideas of frame-based systems and semantic networks have been captured in description logics, a family of knowledge representation languages that combine a high degree of expressiveness with nice computational properties. Description logics have been successfully applied to knowledge representation tasks in the areas of database management, conceptual modeling, and configuration problems.

3 Economic Development, Global Change, and The Future of Peasants

Applied anthropology in the Redfield and Foster tradition sees peasant social organization, conservative culture, and world view as barriers to the acceptance of the social and cultural traits of modernity that are essential to economic development. Foster argues that the economic realities that peasants face dispose them to be skeptical and fatalistic about possibilities for personal and especially cooperative efforts to overcome their poverty. According to this analysis, the role of applied anthropology is to understand these social and cultural dynamics of peasant communities and demonstrate alternatives to them. In contrast, applied anthropology in the Marxist tradition, as exemplified by the work of Wolf and Meillassoux, and also by dependency theory and world system theory, pays more attention to structural conditions that keep peasants in politically and economically subordinate positions so that surplus can be extracted from them and transferred to other sectors of the national and world economy, thus maintaining peasants in conditions of de-development. Accordingly, applied anthropology for peasant communities in this tradition is concerned with ending such unequal exchange so that de-developed nations and their peasant communities can retain more of their wealth for their own development.

Currently, increased migration between rural communities and cities and across national borders, and the social networks and complex livelihoods that result from it, have largely obliterated the cultural, social, and economic distinctions between rural and urban areas upon which the persistence of peasants depend. Also, as the rates increase at which supposed peasants migrate in and out of a variety of economic niches—ranging from subsistence farming, to wage labor, to the informal economy, etc.—so do the volume, velocity, and diversity of commodities and information that they consume also increase. These demographic, occupational, and cultural trends towards increased mobility and differentiation thus call into question the geographic, economic, social, and cultural basis of contemporary peasant society and culture (see Kearney 1996). Indeed, peasant societies that, until recently, were the most populous type in world history seem to be rapidly disappearing.

Example

We can see the relative contributions of lag variables and static variables in modeling voluntary attrition (disenrollment) among customers of a large insurance company (see Nisbet, 2004). These events were modeled separately with each of two variable sets: one using lag variables and one set without them. The lag variables were created by taking quarterly snapshots of policy records for a given household. The snapshots represent temporal objects in a temporal database (Jensen et al., 1996). The lag variables represent keys of this derived temporal database in which the temporal tuples are the response quarter and a given quarter prior to the response. These snapshot lag variables follow snapshot dependency theory as extended by Wijsen et al. (1993) and formalized by Wijsen (2001), and they represent keys for a sequence of snapshot relations in the household insurance policy history indexed in reference to the response quarter.

Sir R.A. Fisher designed his statistical tools for use in the medical world to permit different researchers to analyze the same data and get the same results. Previous (Bayesian) statistical methods with their subjective “priors” did not lend themselves well to that end. To make these methods work, scientists had to perform controlled experiments, holding all variables constant and varying the treatment of one variable at a time. Results were compared with a “control” group with no treatments. Laboratory conditions of temperature, light, moisture, etc. often had to be held constant because the physics of variable response might be affected by the environment. These highly controlled conditions are almost never found outside a laboratory, but business analysts used these methods anyway.

Machine-learning technology (particularly, neural nets) developed in the AI community was not based on calculation of “parameters” like standard deviation. Modern neural nets do not depend on data drawn from a distribution of any particular kind (e.g., normal distribution). Patterns in data sets can be modeled directly in the form of weights assigned to each input variable.

The tool chosen for the analysis of the insurance disenrollment event was an automated back-propagation neural net in a prior version of SPSS Clementine (version 5.1). Clementine was acquired by SPSS in 2000, which was in turn acquired by IBM in 2006, and the tool is named IBM SPSS Modeler. Data preparation of the temporal abstraction variables was done with a C program outside the data mining tool (at that time, no data mining tool could do that). A Clementine stream was designed to input data, train the neural net, and score the holdout data set with the trained model (Fig. 14.2).

A second Clementine stream was used to aggregate and decile the scored list and to create the lift curves (Fig. 14.3).

3 Third World as an Analytical Concept

Since World War II and the invention of the term, the conditions of Third World, and the relationship among the First, Second, and Third Worlds, have been the focus of theory, intensive research, and extensive documentation, aimed at understanding the origin and nature of poverty in the Third World, and of policy concerned with strategies for development and poverty alleviation. The leading theories of Third World development include ‘modernization theory,’ ‘dependency theory,’ and ‘world-system theory.’ Some Marxist scholars have rejected the term ‘Third World’ as a false concept, masking the contradictions of capitalist development in the former colonies. Third World countries often see themselves as old societies ‘lagging behind’ economically and even politically and thus trying to ‘catch up’ with the more advanced industrialized countries of the First and Second Worlds.

The rise and spread of capitalism globally were intimately linked to the growth of large powerful oppressive and exploitative European colonial empires, inspired by the prevailing mercantilist philosophy of the early modern period dedicated to the unbridled pursuit of economic power and wealth of states.

Because of its vast natural resources, which were largely untapped, its considerable potential commercial value, and the importance of some areas to White settlement and occupation, the Third World has been for over five centuries a principal focus of European territorial ambition and rivalry. Most of the states and territories of the Third World took their present form in the nineteenth and early twentieth century when large parts of Asia and Africa were colonized by European imperial powers. By the 1880s the world had been carved up among a handful of European industrial powers. By 1914 European economic and political control covered most of the global land surface, claiming nearly the entire non-European world. Japan successfully resisted European colonization, and China was never formally colonized but for the highly lucrative treaty ports along the coasts, e.g. Hong Kong following the Opium Wars of the 1830s. Latin America, conquered, colonized, and settled by the Portuguese and Spanish crowns three centuries before Asian and African colonization, was transformed into independent republics, along with formerly French Haiti in the Caribbean, in early nineteenth century, after long, bloody and bitter nationalist struggles. Likewise, anticolonial protests and revolts, often violent and bloody, led to the decolonization of Asian, African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries in the late 1940s and after. But in both cases political freedom did not end foreign—mostly European—economic control and ownership, or bring about rapid industrialization and better living standards for most of the new states.

The European metropolitan powers made colonies a principal source of raw materials destined for European industries and consumer markets while suppressing the development of manufacturing industries in the colonies to avoid competition as they provided markets for European manufactured goods. Arguably the affluence of industrial Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.

Colonialism which followed the transatlantic slave trade in Africa, during which an estimated 10 million or more Africans were exported to provide unpaid labor for European plantations and mines of the Americas, did incalculable damage to black Africa, notwithstanding some lasting beneficial by-products: Christianity, schools, hospitals, and the start of modern administration. The colonial borders which were drawn across Africa divided African peoples and cultures, and along with the authoritarian and repressive colonial political tradition are largely responsible for much of the chronic poverty, cultural identity crisis, and political instability of independent African countries. Despite wide differences in local cultures, historical traditions, and responses to colonialism, colonies came to share several common features: political control from Europe; unchecked economic exploitation; and particularly in the black world, the construction and reproduction of a racist social order of which apartheid of South Africa was the most notorious recent example.

One enduring legacy of European colonial empires is a global economic order with an asymmetrical North–South division between a rich industrial North of mostly former imperial powers and poor, less industrialized South of former colonies. The North–South divide is exacerbated by neocolonialist attempts to influence or exercise de facto control over the policies of the South through formal and informal alliances and agreements calculated to ensure the perpetuation of the hegemonic economic power of the North.