I am delighted to share our latest piece of research:
‘A global cross-cultural analysis of string figures reveals evidence of deep transmission and innovation’.
This was long in the works and is by far the largest project I’ve led to date.
A thread:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2024.0673
‘A global cross-cultural analysis of string figures reveals evidence of deep transmission and innovation’.
This was long in the works and is by far the largest project I’ve led to date.
A thread:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2024.0673
Comments
Games in general are good candidates for cultural evolutionary (and even phylogenetic) analyses. Because they have structured features and rules.
I don’t know enough on Mancala to elaborate, unfortunately. But the answer is: probably, yes!
I hope your work inspires a resurgence of interest in these games!
To Anglophones, it'd be called cat’s cradle; in Japan, ayatori; to Māori, whai.
Playing with a string loop, you’d make string figures—alone, or with a friend.
But did you know this is one most commonly shared traditional games worldwide?
Franz Boas, Julia Averkieva, Alfred C. Haddon, Knud Rasmussen, Willowdean Handy... Name an early ethnologist and chances are they too studied string figures.
Let’s let Alfred Russel Wallace do the talking:
And try they did—but they lacked the tools, and interest waned.
Fortunately, the good people at the International String Figure Association kept at it.
We also have access to computational power that early anthropologists could only dream of.
This means we can finally put those early ideas to the test.
We analysed a sample of 826 string figures from 92 cultures. We found 83 string figure designs that occur cross-culturally. Some are found only within specific cultural regions; others display a global distribution.
Different prime knots would correspond to atoms.
The simplest knot (unknot) would represent hydrogen.
String figures are unknots, so if Kelvin were right, string figures would be everywhere! Alas he wasn’t.
Unfortunately, string theory can’t (to my knowledge) redeem string figures as the fundamental units of everything, since in string theory strings are one-dimensional. String figures need three dimensions—or at least two if plotted on a knot diagram.
But in most places, there aren’t obvious connections between string figured and other string/yarn tasks.
But equally, they could be used today to teach such manual dexterity and cognitive skills.