The Wealth of Networks

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks

 

The Wealth of Networks

Original 1st edition cover
Author	Yochai Benkler
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Social and economic impact of networked information technology, the cultural commons...
Publisher	Yale University Press
Publication date	2006
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	515
ISBN	978-0-300-12577-1

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006. The book has been recognized as one of the most influential works of its time concerning the rise and impact of the Internet on the society, particularly in the sphere of economics. It also helped popularize the term Benkler coined few years earlier, the commons-based peer production (CBPP).

A PDF of the book is downloadable under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license. Benkler has said that his editable online book is "an experiment of how books might be in the future", demonstrating how authors and readers might connect instantly or even collaborate.

Summary

Part 1: The Networked Information Economy

Benkler describes the current epoch as a "moment of opportunity" due to the emergence of what he terms the Networked Information Economy (NIE), a "technological-economic feasibility space" that is the result of the means of producing media becoming more socially accessible. Benkler states that his methodology in the text is to look at social relations using economics, liberal political theory, and focuses on individual actions in nonmarket relations.

Benkler sees communication and information as the most important cultural and economic outputs of advanced economies. He traces the emergence and development of various communications (radio, newspapers, television) through the 19th and 20th centuries as functions of increasingly centralized control due to the high cost factor of production, and believes that media was thus produced on an industrial scale. Benkler's term for this is the Industrial information economy.

With the emergence of computers, networks, and increasingly affordable media production outlets, Benkler introduces the concept of the NIE, which sees media access as a form of power, and recognizes decentralized individual actions in said media as a result of the removal of physical and economic constraints to the creation of media. To Benkler, this is due to a new feasibility space: lowered costs of access via digital production and radical decentralization rather than centralized messaging ("coordinate coexistence", 30).

This results in emerging productions of information that use non-proprietary strategies (such as GNU licences and collaborative production formats).

Goods

The forms of cultural productions — music is an example Benkler uses frequently — are either rival or nonrival. Rival products decrease as they are used (e.g. pounds of flour), the use of nonrival products (e.g. listening to a song) does not decrease their availability for further use.

Static vs. dynamic efficiency: one premise of exclusive rights has always been that only financial incentives can facilitate participation in information production. Benkler argues that in an age where computers reduce the cost of production, that the equation of innovation-to-rights shifts as well.

The declining cost of communication means that in the networked society there are fewer barriers for individual cultural production that are "meaningful" to other users. Thus, in network economy, "human capacity becomes primary scarce resource".

Peer production

To close this section, Benkler argues that the networked environment makes possible a new modality of organizing production: that of commons-based peer production. He discusses the parameters of the commons and gives the example of Free/Libre/Open Source Software. He discusses shared acts of communication (utterances, reviews, distribution of information) and goods (like server space). Lastly, he draws a contrast to the regulation and rival resource of radio spectrum bandwidth and the sharability of space in a digital commons.

The economics of social production

Benkler argues here that the networked society allows for the emergence of non-hierarchical groups that are committed to information production. Open software is one of the ways we can view the emergence of this new form of information production. "Commons-based" peer production eschews traditional rational choice models offered by economists. Benkler details some of the key components of this new economy based not on financial remuneration but on user-involvement, accreditation, and tools that promote collaboration between individuals.

In order to understand why people engage in production aside from financial incentives, Benkler argues that we can distinguish two types of motivation:

1. Extrinsic motivation: motivation that comes from outside in the form of financial reward, punishment, etc.
2. Intrinsic motivation: motivation that derives from within ourselves, such as the pleasure involved in completing a task.

Part 2: The Political Economy of Property and Commons

In this section, Benkler examines the relationship of individual access to participation in the dissemination and creation of information via communication systems, building on his earlier ideas of commons-based peer production.

He examines the historical emergence of the mass media, looking at the relationship between print and radio and ever-broadening, industrial broadcast models of production which became supported by advertising. The criticisms of mass media which Benkler brings up include:

• its commercialism, because he sees that as supporting the development of programs that appeal to large audiences rather than specific interests, in the name of mass broadcasting;
• limited intake of information, due to the relatively small number of people gathering information;
• too much power assigned to too few people.

Benkler moves from this overview and criticism to exploring what this text describes as the potential for networked communications to do:

"Better access to knowledge and the emergence of less capital-dependent forms of productive social organization offer the possibility that the emergence of the networked information economy will offer up opportunities for improvement in economic justice, on scales both global and local."

From passive to active

For Benkler, another key component of the network society is that individuals are more active in producing their education and cultural production. Online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia allow for users to create rather than just consume knowledge and information.

Part 3: Policies of Freedom at a Moment of Transformation

Benkler begins chapter 10 stating two early views on the anticipated social impact the internet would have on the users and their community:

Firstly, the internet removed the user from society and allowed the individual to lead a life that was no longer molded by the interactions and experiences of a physical tangible civilisation with others. The second view was that using the internet would widen the field of a user's community by providing a novel system of communication and interaction.

He observes that users show enhanced relationships with their close contacts while increasing the numbers of less close contacts with relationships maintained through internet mediated interaction. He believes this latter change stems from the shift from the one-to-many model of media distribution to a many-to-many model where it is more user centered and controlled.

Benkler remarks that the early views were made on the premise that internet communication would replace real world forms communication rather than co-exist alongside it. He introduces the idea of the networked-individual who govern their own interactions and microcommunity roles in both real and virtual space and dynamically switch between when needed, eventually concluding that the early views were nostalgic and somewhat fatuous.

A definition is offered whereby cultural freedom occupies a position that relates to both political and individual autonomy, but is synonymous with neither. Benkler then goes on to add that culture is significant because that is the context within which we exist – these are our shared understandings, frameworks, meanings and references.

Reception

2011-08 Haifa Wikimania Yochai Benkler DSCF6547

Blogs

When Benkler's The Wealth of Networks was released in 2006, Lawrence Lessig announced the release of the book on his blog, stating: “This is—by far—the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years. If there is one book you read this year, it should be this.” The Wealth of Networks has been reviewed by many other blogs in addition to the Lessig blog, including Rough Type, Dreams in Digital, denoer, and Reading Media Under The Tree. Less than a month after its release in 2006, The Wealth of Networks became the focus of an intense read and review seminar on the political blog Crooked Timber. After reading the book, six scholars (several of them founding members of crookedtimbre.org) posted their reactions to the book, and at the end of the seminar, Yochai Benkler was given the opportunity to respond to the comments.

Mass media

Book reviews of The Wealth of Networks have also been featured by several news publications, including Financial Times, The Times, and the New Statesmen.

Academic journals

The book has been also reviewed in academic journals such as Global Media and Communication, Information Economics and Policy, Information Processing & Management, International Journal of Technology, Knowledge, and Society, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Media Economics,Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Scandinavian Journal of Management, Social Science Computer Review, Rue Descartes, The Communication Review, The German Law Journal, The Independent Review, The University of Chicago Law Review, The Yale Law Journal, and Theory, Culture & Society. 

Other

In addition to book reviews, interviews with Yochai Benkler about The Wealth of Networks have been conducted and published by openDemocracy.net, openBusiness.cc, and Public Knowledge, and Benkler was invited to give a lecture based on The Wealth of Networks at the Center for American Progress on May 31, 2006.

Criticism

Writing style

In terms of Benkler's writing style, criticism on Crooked Timber targeted two main points: 1) that the book is written in a style that is too dense for the average reader, and 2) that it attempts to cover too many topics. As Dan Hunter points out in his review titled “A General Theory of Information Policy”, The Wealth of Networks is an attempt to articulate an underlying, grander “whole” that ties together the myriad issues involved in information policy and the internet. Hunter states: "Benkler provides something close to a General Theory of Information Policy for the networked age that begins to explain how we should think about topics as different as spectrum policy, copyright, user-generated content, network neutrality…well, the list pretty much encompasses all questions within internet law and policy." Hunter's main criticism of the book is that it is too academically dense for the average reader, and too reliant on assuming the reader is familiar with several internet organizations and websites, such as Wikipedia, PayPal, and Slashdot. As Hunter later states:

"I’m worried that too many of the peer-producers—the blog writers, the open source software gurus, the amateurs who create for the love of it; in short the people who this book is written about—will pick up this work in the hope of understanding how their creativity fits into the grand scheme of innovation, and what their role will be in the amateur production sphere that promises to change the way that we view information goods within society. And they may not get past the introduction."

Physical hardware and infrastructure

Another criticism of Benkler's theory is that so much focus is given to the potential of peer-production and innovation in the networked information economy, but little to no attention spent addressing issues related to the physical hardware required to keep the network that Benkler's theories rely on up and running. In a review of the book by Siva Vaidhyanathan, Benkler's “soft technological determinism” is brought under fire. Vaidhyanathan states:

"This one issue remains underwritten in the text: the story of the technology itself. Throughout the text, there seems to be an almost givenness about the technology. TCP/IP is just there. Even Cisco’s notorious discriminating servers, the source of so much tension over the end of network neutrality, just appear…. We get a sense that particular technologies are malleable, adaptable, contingent, and socially shaped. We get no account of developer’s wishes or users’ adaptions. We only get cursory accounts of the conflicts over the future of these technologies that have unleashed (to choose a loaded term) so much creativity."

Benkler addressed this criticism in his response to Vaidhyanathan's review, conceding that perhaps more attention to the physical elements of the networked information economy could have been given:

"His [Vaidhyanathan’s] complaint ... is that I wrote a book about how the dynamics of technology, society, economy, and law intersect to fundamentally alter how information, knowledge, and culture are produced, rather than a book about the dynamics of how the technology component itself got to be as it is, and how it may or may not change given present pressures ... not every book can be about everything. Perhaps Vaidhyanathan is correct that a book that offers as broad a canvass as this on the networked information environment needs a chapter on the technology itself: where it originates and what are the dynamics and pressures, historically and today, that led to its past and that affect its future."

In a review of the book by Ben Peters, a similar sentiment to Vaidhyanathan's criticism is expressed: “It may also do very well to account for massive information infrastructure costs, the fiber optic cables, the wifi, and the laptops that the Benkler's optimism depends upon in the international development scene.” In The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy, Peter G. Klein stated:

"Although information itself cannot be “owned,” the tangible media in which information is embedded and transmitted are scarce economic goods. Information may yearn to be “free,” but cables, switches, routers, disk drives, microprocessors, and the like yearn to be owned. Such innovations do not spring from nowhere; they are the creations of profit-seeking entrepreneurs that consumers or other entrepreneurs purchase to use as they see fit."

Optimism

Derek Belt, who reviewed the book on his blog titled “Dreaming in Digital”, targeted Benkler's optimism as his main point of criticism, suggesting that Benkler's optimism was too rooted in what was possible in the future, neglecting to take into consideration the position in which we as a society find ourselves in at the present time in relation to information policy. He states:

"His unwavering belief in the greater good offers hope for the future but fails to adequately address the present, leaving readers to wonder what he would have said about the prospects of another decade in which the industrial information economy, backed by powerful lobbyists and defiant legislative activity, holds all of the cards. Would our future look so cheery then?"

In contrast to these attacks on Benkler's optimism, a review by Debora Halbert suggested that:

"Although he is generally pro-technology, especially regarding the Internet, Benkler is not a techno-utopianist. He argues that techno-utopianists who see the Internet as a perfect public platform are incorrect, but so are the technophobes who believe the Internet simply leads to increasing fragmentation and alienation. He seeks to strike a middle ground, arguing that the industrial media model of central control over mass communication fits nicely with authoritarian structures."

Jack Balkin, a participant on in the Crooked Timber read and review took a similar stance in his interpretation of Benkler's optimism, stating:

"Benkler’s book wavers between an optimistic description of what the digitally networked economy has produced and will produce and a warning that these bounties will be squandered if the legal regime goes in the wrong direction…as much as Benkler might wish that features of the digitally networked environment and information economics will lead us inevitably toward a blessed world of peer production, he well understands that the political economy of information production has repeatedly pushed the law along a different path. Benkler shows us a vibrant world that we are moving toward and might yet achieve; but it is up to us to realize it."

The Wealth of Networks has been criticized for technological determinism. David M. Berry contends that Benkler's work builds on "a rather shaky binary distinction between proprietary industrial forms of economic and technological structure and non-proprietary peer-production models". Berry challenges Benkler's assumptions that network fosters non-proprietary models and that the latter are sounder and ethically preferable to the former model. According to Berry, Benkler fails to recognize that should network forms of organization happen to be wealth generating, "they will be co-opted into mainstream ‘industrial’ ways of production. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, the corporate world may soon provide peer-production for the rest of us." Johan Söderberg links Benkler's optimism towards networked modes of production to a larger current of thought generated by the hacker community. Drawing on Serge Proulx' work, Söderberg asserts that such a narrative, neoliberal in origin, recomposes the discussion on information society in a problematic way: "The fantasy of a frictionless market in information is transformed into a vision of an information-sharing society".

Praise

The future of information policy and network development

Although The Wealth of Networks has been the target of pointed criticism, the vast majority of published reviews are very emphatic about the fact that despite certain criticisms, The Wealth of Networks is an incredibly important book, and brings to the table many issues that are pertinent to the future of information policy and network development. Benkler is credited with bringing forth new perspectives related to social production, the role of the commons, how society is using and interacting with the internet, and how the internet is transforming the way people interact, create, and exchange goods and information. As Siva Vaidhyanathan stated in the opening of his review, “there is no better place to turn for an account of the processes of creativity and commerce relating to digital networks and the work that people do with them.” More specifically, The Wealth of Networks is also hailed as an incredibly important piece of writing for those advocating for greater protection of the cultural commons and open access models on the Internet. For the German Law Review, James Brink wrote:

"The Wealth of Networks is a worthwhile outward- and forward-looking manifesto for an information infrastructure that has come of age. At the same time, internet advocates would do well to take Benkler’s lessons in the history of the industrial information economy to heart, and to work hard to fulfill his vision of a true commons-based and nonproprietary ecology within the networked information economy."

Beginning of human personhood

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beginning_of_human_personhood

Human embryo at 8-cell stage

The beginning of human personhood is the moment when a human is first recognized as a person. There are differences of opinion as to the precise time when human personhood begins and the nature of that status. The issue arises in a number of fields including science, religion, philosophy, and law, and is most acute in debates relating to abortion, stem cell research, reproductive rights, and fetal rights.

Traditionally, the concept of personhood has entailed the concept of soul, a metaphysical concept referring to a non-corporeal or extra-corporeal dimension of human being. In modernity, the concepts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, personhood, mind, and self have come to encompass a number of aspects of human being previously considered to be characteristics of the soul. With regard to the beginning of human personhood, one historical question has been when the soul enter the body. In modern terms, the question could be put instead at what point the developing individual develop personhood or selfhood.

Related issues attached to the question of the beginning of human personhood include both the legal status, bodily integrity, and subjectivity of mothers, as well as the philosophical concept of "natality", i.e. "the distinctively human capacity to initiate a new beginning", which a new human life embodies.

Biological markers

Fertilization

Fertilization is the fusing of the gametes, that is a sperm cell and an ovum (egg cell), to form a zygote. At this point, the zygote is genetically distinct from either of its parents.

Fertilization was not understood in ancient times. Hippocrates believed that the embryo was the product of male semen and a female factor. But Aristotle held that only male semen gave rise to an embryo, while the female only provided a place for the embryo to develop, (a concept he acquired from the preformationist Pythagoras). William Harvey refuted Aristotle's idea that menstrual blood could be involved in the formation of a fetus, asserting that eggs from the female were somehow caused to become a fetus as a result of sexual intercourse. Sperm cells were discovered in 1677 by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who believed that Aristotle had been proven correct. Some observers believed they could see an entirely pre-formed little human body in the head of a sperm. The human ova was first observed in 1827 by Karl Ernst von Baer. Only in 1876 did Oscar Hertwig prove that fertilization is due to fusion of an egg and sperm cell.

Fertilization is a process lasting around 24 hours, after which more than a third of zygotes are lost in the first few days. Many fail to implant into the uterine wall, sloughing off with the endometrial lining during menstruation. Of those which implant, around 50% are miscarried, usually without the woman knowing anything has happened. A zygote that is not lost will sometimes split into two zygotes. Separately, two individually fertilized zygotes will sometimes fuse into one zygote.

A single-cell embryonic human zygote can be described as a "whole living human being" in contrast to sperm or egg cells, which are also human life but are only parts of other human beings and are not genetically unique. Even then, the twinning process occurring after fertilization "weakens the possibility of seeing individuality as something irreversibly resolved" after fertilization.

Some members of the medical community accept fertilization as the point at which life begins. Dr. Bradley M. Patten from the University of Michigan wrote in Human Embryology that the union of the sperm and the ovum "initiates the life of a new individual" beginning "a new individual life history." In the standard college text book Psychology and Life, Dr. Floyd L. Ruch wrote "At the time of conception, two living germ cells—the sperm from the father and the egg, or ovum, from the mother—unite to produce a new individual." Dr. Herbert Ratner wrote that "It is now of unquestionable certainty that a human being comes into existence precisely at the moment when the sperm combines with the egg." This certain knowledge, Ratner says, comes from the study of genetics. At fertilization, all of the genetic characteristics, such as the color of the eyes, "are laid down determinatively." James C. G. Conniff noted the prevalence of the above views in a study published by The New York Times Magazine in which he wrote, "At that moment conception takes place and, scientists generally agree, a new life begins—silent, secret, unknown."

The view that life begins at fertilization reached acceptance from mainstream sources at one point. In 1967, New York City school officials launched a large sex education program. The fifth grade textbook stated "Human life begins when the sperm cells of the father and the egg cells of the mother unite. This union is referred to as fertilization. For fertilization to take place and a baby to begin growing, the sperm cell must come in direct contact with the egg cell." Similarly, a textbook used in Evanston, Illinois stated: "Life begins when a sperm cell and an ovum (egg cell) unite." Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft goes so far as to say "This is widely accepted still today and has been verified by the scientific community".

That a human individual's existence begins at fertilization is the accepted position of the Roman Catholic Church, whose Pontifical Academy for Life declared: "The moment that marks the beginning of the existence of a new 'human being' is constituted by the penetration of sperm into the oocyte. Fertilization promotes a series of linked events and transforms the egg cell into a 'zygote'." The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith also has stated and reaffirmed: "From the time that the ovum is fertilized, a new life is begun which is neither that of the father nor of the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with his own growth." Eastern Orthodox churches and most of the more conservative Protestant denominations also teach this view of life.

Implantation

In his book Aborting America, Bernard Nathanson argued that implantation should be considered the point at which life begins.

Biochemically, this is when alpha announces its presence as part of the human community by means of its hormonal messages, which we now have the technology to receive. We also know biochemically that it is an independent organism distinct from the mother. [Note: in writing the book, "alpha" was Nathanson's term for any human before birth.]

In their book, When Does Human Life Begin?, John L. Merritt, MD and his son J. Lawrence Meritt II, MD, present the idea that if "the breath of life" (Genesis 2:7) is oxygen, then a blastocyst starts taking in the breath of life from the mother's blood the moment it successfully implants in her womb, which is about a week after fertilization. If the end-point to human life is the moment the body stops using oxygen, then it may follow that the corresponding starting-point is the moment the body starts using oxygen.

Segmentation

Non-conjoined monozygotic twins form up to day 14 of embryonic development, but when twinning occurs after 14 days, the twins will likely be conjoined. Some argue that an early embryo cannot be a person because "If every person is an individual, one cannot be divided from oneself."

However, Fr. Norman Ford stated that "the evidence would seem to indicate not that there is no individual at conception, but that there is at least one and possibly more." He went on to support the idea that, similar to processes found in other species, one twin could be the parent of the other asexually. Theodore Hall agreed with the plausibility of this explanation saying, "We wonder if the biological process in twinning isn't simply another example of how nature reproduces from other individuals without destroying that person's or persons' individuality."

Brain function (brain birth)

In the years since the designation of brain death as a new criterion for death, attention has been directed towards the central role of the nervous system in a number of areas of ethical decision-making. The notion that there exists a neurological end-point to human life has led to efforts at defining a corresponding neurological starting-point. This latter quest has led to the concept of brain birth (or brain life), signifying the converse of brain death. The quest for a neurological marker of the beginning of human personhood owes its impetus to the perceived symmetry between processes at the beginning and end of life, thus if brain function is a criterion used to determine the medical death of a person, it should also be the criterion for its beginning.

Just as there are two types of brain death - whole brain death (which refers to the irreversible cessation of function of both the brain stem and higher parts of the brain) and higher brain death (destruction of the cerebral hemispheres alone, with possible retention of brain stem function), there are two types of brain birth (based on their reversal) - brain stem birth at the first appearance of brain waves in lower brain (brain stem) at 6–8 weeks of gestation, and higher brain birth, at the first appearance of brain waves in higher brain (cerebral cortex) at 22–24 weeks of gestation.

Fetal viability

"Until the fetus is viable, any rights granted to it may come at the expense of the pregnant woman, simply because the fetus cannot survive except within the woman's body. Upon viability, the pregnancy can be terminated, as by a c-section or induced labor, with the fetus surviving to become a newborn infant. Several groups believe that abortion before viability is acceptable, but is unacceptable after" is the perspective of Planned Parenthood, a major abortion provider. In some countries, early abortions are legal in all circumstances, but late-term abortions are limited to circumstances where there is a clear medical need. While there is no sharp limit of development, gestational age, or weight at which a human fetus automatically becomes viable, a 2013 study found that "While only a small proportion of births occur before 24 completed weeks of gestation (about 1 per 1000), survival is rare and most of them are either fetal deaths or live births followed by a neonatal death."

Birth

While, at one end of the ideological spectrum, some believe human personhood begins at fertilization, at the other end of the spectrum others believe that as long as the fetus is still inside the body of the woman (whether it is viable or not), it does not have any rights of its own.

Other markers

There are also other ideas of when personhood is achieved:

• at ensoulment
• at "formation" – an early concept of bodily development (see Preformationism).
• at the emergence of consciousness
• at the emergence of rationality (see Kant)

Human personhood may also be seen as a work-in-progress, with the beginning being a continuum rather than a strict point in time.

Individuation

Philosophers such as Aquinas use the concept of individuation. In regard to the abortion debate, they argue that abortion is not permissible from the point at which individual human identity is realised. Anthony Kenny argues that this can be derived from everyday beliefs and language and one can legitimately say "if my mother had an abortion six months into her pregnancy, she would have killed me" then one can reasonably infer that at six months the "me" in question would have been an existing person with a valid claim to life. Since division of the zygote into twins through the process of monozygotic twinning can occur until the fourteenth day of pregnancy, Kenny argues that individual identity is obtained at this point and thus abortion is not permissible after two weeks.

Philosophical and religious perspectives

Answers to the question of when human life begins and when personhood begins have varied among social contexts, and have changed with shifts in ethical and religious beliefs, sometimes as a result of advances in scientific knowledge; in general they have developed in parallel with attitudes to abortion and to the use of infanticide as a means of reproductive control.

Since the zygote is genetically identical to the embryo, the fully formed fetus, and the baby, questioning the beginning of personhood could lead to an instance of the Sorites paradox, also known as the paradox of the heap.

Neil Postman has written that in pre-modern societies, the lives of children were not regarded as unique or valuable in the same way they are in modern societies, in part as a result of high infant mortality. However, when childhood began to develop its own distinctive features (including graded schools to teach reading, children's stories, games, etc.) this view changed. According to Postman, "the custom of celebrating a child's birthday did not exist in America throughout most of the eighteenth century, and, in fact, the precise marking of a child's age in any way is a relatively recent cultural habit, no more than two hundred years old."

Ancient writers held diverse views on the subject of the beginning of personhood, understood as the soul's entry or development in the human body. In Panpsychism in the West, David Skrbina noted the various kinds of soul envisioned by the early Greeks.

Generally, the question of the ensoulment of the fetus revolved around the question of when the rational soul entered the body, whether it was an integral part of the bodily form and substance, or whether it was pre-existent and subject to reincarnation or pre-existence.

Aristotle developed a theory of progressive ensoulment. In On the Generation of Animals, he declared that the soul develops first a vegetative soul, then animal, and finally human, adding that abortions were permissible early in pregnancy, before certain biological processes began. He believed that the female substance was passive, the male active, and that it required time for the male substance to "animate" the whole.

Hippocrates and the Pythagoreans stated that fertilization marked the beginning of a human life, and that the human soul was created at the time of fertilization.

According to Hinduism Today, Vedic literature states that the soul enters the body at conception.

Concepts of pre-existence are found in various forms in Platonism, Judaism, and Islam.

The Jewish Talmud holds that all life is precious but that a fetus is not a person, in the sense of termination of pregnancy being considered murder. If a woman's life is endangered by a pregnancy, an abortion is permitted. However, if the "greater part" of the fetus has emerged from the womb, then its life may not be taken even to save the woman's, "because you cannot choose between one human life and another".

Some medieval Christian theologians held that ensoulment occurs when an infant takes its first breath of air. They cite, among other passages, Genesis 2:7, which reads: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

The Early Church held various views on the subject, primarily either the ensoulment at conception or delayed hominization. Tertullian held a view, traducianism, which was later condemned as heresy. This view held that the soul was derived from the parents and generated in parallel with the generation of the physical body. This viewpoint was deemed unsatisfactory by St. Augustine, as it did not account for original sin. Basing himself on the Septuagint version of Exodus 21:22, he affirmed the Aristotelian view of delayed hominization.

St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine of Hippo held the view that fetuses were "animated" (using Aristotle's term for ensoulment) near the 40th day after conception. However, both held that abortion was always gravely wrong, because it involves the medical termination of a human PID (person-in-development).

In general, the soul was viewed as some kind of animating principle; and the human variety was referred to as the "rational soul".

Some, but not all, followers of Jainism have promoted the idea that sperm cells contain life or jivas and thus harming them goes against the principle of non-violence (ahimsa). Celibacy or abstinence from sex (bramacharya) can be practiced as a way to avoid releasing sperm, but is unrelated to the broader practice of celibacy in Jainism.

Ethical perspectives

The distinction in ethical value between existing persons and potential future persons has been questioned. Subsequently, it has been argued that contraception and even the decision not to procreate at all could be regarded as immoral on a similar basis as abortion. Subsequently, any marker of the beginning of human personhood doesn't necessarily mark where it is ethically right or wrong to assist or intervene. In a consequentialistic point of view, an assisting or intervening action may be regarded as basically equivalent whether it is performed before, during or after the creation of a human being, because the end result would basically be the same, that is, the existence or non-existence of that human being. In a view holding value in bringing potential persons into existence, it has been argued to be justified to perform abortion of an unintended pregnancy in favor for conceiving a new child later in better conditions.

Personhood in law

Ecclesiastical courts

Following the decline of the Western Roman Empire and the adoption of Christianity as the Roman state religion, ecclesiastical courts held wide jurisdiction throughout Europe. According to Donald DeMarco, PhD, the Church treated the killing of an unformed or "unanimated" fetus as a matter of "anticipated homicide", with a corresponding lesser penance required. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the following statement regarding the beginning of human life and personhood is provided:

Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person - among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life.

Common law

Although abortion in the United Kingdom was traditionally dealt with in the ecclesiastical courts, English common law addressed the issue from 1115 on, beginning with first mention in Leges Henrici Primi. In this treatise, abortion, even of a "formed" fetus, was a "quasi-homicide", carrying a penalty of 10 years' penance. This was a much lesser penalty than would accrue to full homicide. With the exception of Bracton, later writers insisted that killing a fetus was "great misprision, and no murder", as formulated by Sir Edward Coke in his Institutes of the Lawes of England. Coke noted that the murder victim must have been "a reasonable creature in rerum natura", in accordance with the standards of murder in English law. This formulation was repeated by Sir William Blackstone in England and in Bouvier's Law Dictionary in the United States.

The reasonableness of the creature is of some considerable weight in the legal conception of personhood. Children are not considered full persons under the law until they reach the age of majority.

Nonetheless, children have been treated as persons with respect to bodily offences, beginning with Offences against the Person Act 1828, although this protection did not prevent children from being sold by their parents, as in the Eliza Armstrong case, long after the slave trade had been abolished in England.

In addition, "a child en ventre sa mere" (in utero) was regarded by common law as "in being," or "as born" when ensuring that wills and trusts do not run afoul of the rule against perpetuities; nine (or sometimes ten) months of gestation were allotted for this purpose.

Legal perspectives

Ireland

Main articles: Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland and Abortion in the Republic of Ireland

The 1983 Eighth Amendment granted the full right to life, and personhood, to any "unborn". As such, abortion was banned in nearly all cases, except to save the life of the mother. This was repealed on 25 May 2018 by a 66% voting margin, with abortion becoming legal on 1 January 2019.

United States

In its 1885 decision McArthur v. Scott, the US Supreme Court affirmed the common law principle that a child in its mother's womb can be regarded as "in being" for the purpose of resolving a dispute about wills and trusts.

In 1973, Harry Blackmun wrote the court opinion for Roe v. Wade, saying "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate."

In 2002, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act was enacted, which ensures that the legal concepts of person, baby, infant, and child include those which have been born alive in the course of a miscarriage or abortion, regardless of development, gestational age, or whether the placenta and umbilical cord are still attached. This law makes no comment on personhood in utero but ensures that no person after birth is characterized as not a person.

In 2003, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was enacted, which prohibits an abortion if "either the entire baby's head is outside the body of the mother, or any part of the baby's trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother."

In 2004, President George W. Bush signed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act into law. The law effectively extends personhood status to a "child in utero at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb" if they are targeted, injured or killed during the commission of any of over 60 listed violent crimes. The law also prohibits the prosecutions of "any person for conduct relating" to a legally consented to abortion.

Today, 38 U.S. States legally recognize a human fetus or "unborn child" as a crime victim, at least for the purpose of homicide or feticide laws. According to progressive media watchdog Media Matters for America, "Further, a prenatal personhood measure might subject a woman who suffers a pregnancy-related complication or a miscarriage to criminal investigations and possibly jail time for homicide, manslaughter or reckless endangerment. And because so many laws use the terms "persons" or "people," a prenatal personhood measure could affect large numbers of a state's laws, changing the application of thousands of laws and resulting in unforeseeable, unintended, and absurd consequences."

In the United States, the 1992 United States Supreme Court case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey held that a law cannot place legal restrictions imposing an undue burden for "the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus." This standard was also upheld in the Supreme Court case of Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt (2016) in which several Texas restrictions were struck down.

Cognitive map

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_map

Information mapping
Topics and fields
Business decision mapping Data visualization Graphic communication Infographics Information design Knowledge visualization Mental model Morphological analysis Schema (psychology) Visual analytics Visual language
Node–link approaches
Argument map Cladistics Cognitive map Concept lattice Concept map Conceptual graph Decision tree Dendrogram Graph drawing Hyperbolic tree Hypertext Issue map Issue tree Layered graph drawing Mind map Object-role modeling Ontology (information science) Organizational chart Radial tree Semantic network Sociogram Timeline Topic map Tree structure
See also
Design rationale Diagrammatic reasoning Entity–relationship model Geovisualization List of concept- and mind-mapping software Olog Ontology Problem structuring methods Semantic Web Treemapping Wicked problem

A cognitive map is a type of mental representation which serves an individual to acquire, code, store, recall, and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday or metaphorical spatial environment. The concept was introduced by Edward Tolman in 1948. He tried to explain the behavior of rats that appeared to learn the spatial layout of a maze, and subsequently the concept was applied to other animals, including humans. The term was later generalized by some researchers, especially in the field of operations research, to refer to a kind of semantic network representing an individual's personal knowledge or schemas.

Overview

Cognitive maps have been studied in various fields, such as psychology, education, archaeology, planning, geography, cartography, architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, management and history. Because of the broad use and study of cognitive maps, it has become a colloquialism for just about any mental representation or model. As a consequence, these mental models are often referred to, variously, as cognitive maps, mental maps, scripts, schemata, and frame of reference.

Cognitive maps are a function of the working brain that humans and animals use to move in a new environment. They help us recognizing places, computing directions, distances and critical-thinking on shortcuts and supporting us in wayfinding in an environment.

Cognitive maps serve the construction and accumulation of spatial knowledge, allowing the "mind's eye" to visualize images in order to reduce cognitive load, enhance recall and learning of information. This type of spatial thinking can also be used as a metaphor for non-spatial tasks, where people performing non-spatial tasks involving memory and imaging use spatial knowledge to aid in processing the task. They include information about the spatial relations that objects have among each other in an environment and they help us in orienting and moving in a setting and in space.

They are internal representation, they are not a fixed image, instead they are a schema, dynamic and flexible, with a degree of personal level. A spatial map needs to be acquired according to a frame of reference. Because of it is independent from the observer’s point of view, it is based on an allocentric reference system, with an object-to-object relation. It codes configurational information, using a world-centred coding system.

The neural correlates of a cognitive map have been speculated to be the place cell system in the hippocampus and the recently discovered grid cells in the entorhinal cortex.

History

The idea of a cognitive map was first developed by Edward C. Tolman. Tolman, one of the early cognitive psychologists, introduced this idea when doing an experiment involving rats and mazes. In Tolman's experiment, a rat was placed in a cross shaped maze and allowed to explore it. After this initial exploration, the rat was placed at one arm of the cross and food was placed at the next arm to the immediate right. The rat was conditioned to this layout and learned to turn right at the intersection in order to get to the food. When placed at different arms of the cross maze however, the rat still went in the correct direction to obtain the food because of the initial cognitive map it had created of the maze. Rather than just deciding to turn right at the intersection no matter what, the rat was able to determine the correct way to the food no matter where in the maze it was placed.

Unfortunately, further research was slowed due to the behaviorist point of view prevalent in the field of psychology at the time. In later years, O'Keefe and Nadel attributed Tolman’s research to the hippocampus, stating that it was the key to the rat's mental representation of its surroundings. This observation furthered research in this area and consequently much of hippocampus activity is explained through cognitive map making.

As time went on, the cognitive map was researched in other prospective fields that found it useful, therefore leading to broader and differentiating definitions and applications. A very prominent researcher, Colin Eden, has specifically mentioned his application of cognitive mapping simply as any representation of thinking models.

Mental map distinction

A cognitive map is a spatial representation of the outside world that is kept within the mind, until an actual manifestation (usually, a drawing) of this perceived knowledge is generated, a mental map. Cognitive mapping is the implicit, mental mapping the explicit part of the same process. In most cases, a cognitive map exists independently of a mental map, an article covering just cognitive maps would remain limited to theoretical considerations.

Mental mapping is typically associated with landmarks, locations, and geography when demonstrated. Creating mental maps depends on the individual and their perceptions whether they are influenced by media, real-life, or other sources. Because of their factual storage mental maps can be useful when giving directions and navigating. As stated previously this distinction is hard to identify when posed with almost identical definitions, nevertheless there is a distinction.

In some uses, mental map refers to a practice done by urban theorists by having city dwellers draw a map, from memory, of their city or the place they live. This allows the theorist to get a sense of which parts of the city or dwelling are more substantial or imaginable. This, in turn, lends itself to a decisive idea of how well urban planning has been conducted.

Acquisition of the cognitive maps

The cognitive map is generated from a number of sources, both from the visual system and elsewhere. Much of the cognitive map is created through self-generated movement cues. Inputs from senses like vision, proprioception, olfaction, and hearing are all used to deduce a person's location within their environment as they move through it. This allows for path integration, the creation of a vector that represents one's position and direction within one's environment, specifically in comparison to an earlier reference point. This resulting vector can be passed along to the hippocampal place cells where it is interpreted to provide more information about the environment and one's location within the context of the cognitive map.

Directional cues and positional landmarks are also used to create the cognitive map. Within directional cues, both explicit cues, like markings on a compass, as well as gradients, like shading or magnetic fields, are used as inputs to create the cognitive map. Directional cues can be used both statically, when a person does not move within his environment while interpreting it, and dynamically, when movement through a gradient is used to provide information about the nature of the surrounding environment. Positional landmarks provide information about the environment by comparing the relative position of specific objects, whereas directional cues give information about the shape of the environment itself. These landmarks are processed by the hippocampus together to provide a graph of the environment through relative locations.

Alex Siegel and Sheldon White (1975) proposed a model of acquisition of spatial knowledge based on different levels. The first stage of the process is said to be limited to the landmarks available in a new environment. Then, as a second stage, information about the routes that connect landmarks will be encoded, at the beginning in a non-metric representation form and consequently they will be expanded with metric properties, such as distances, durations and angular deviations. In the third and final step, the observer will be able to use a survey representation of the surroundings, using an allocentric point of view. 

All in all, the acquisition of cognitive maps is a gradual construction. This kind of knowledge is multimodal in nature and it is build up by different pieces of information coming from different sources that are integrated step by step.

Neurological basis

Cognitive mapping is believed to largely be a function of the hippocampus. The hippocampus is connected to the rest of the brain in such a way that it is ideal for integrating both spatial and nonspatial information. Connections from the postrhinal cortex and the medial entorhinal cortex provide spatial information to the hippocampus. Connections from the perirhinal cortex and lateral entorhinal cortex provide nonspatial information. The integration of this information in the hippocampus makes the hippocampus a practical location for cognitive mapping, which necessarily involves combining information about an object's location and its other features.

O'Keefe and Nadel were the first to outline a relationship between the hippocampus and cognitive mapping. Many additional studies have shown additional evidence that supports this conclusion. Specifically, pyramidal cells (place cells, boundary cells, and grid cells) have been implicated as the neuronal basis for cognitive maps within the hippocampal system.

Numerous studies by O'Keefe have implicated the involvement of place cells. Individual place cells within the hippocampus correspond to separate locations in the environment with the sum of all cells contributing to a single map of an entire environment. The strength of the connections between the cells represents the distances between them in the actual environment. The same cells can be used for constructing several environments, though individual cells' relationships to each other may differ on a map by map basis. The possible involvement of place cells in cognitive mapping has been seen in a number of mammalian species, including rats and macaque monkeys. Additionally, in a study of rats by Manns and Eichenbaum, pyramidal cells from within the hippocampus were also involved in representing object location and object identity, indicating their involvement in the creation of cognitive maps. However, there has been some dispute as to whether such studies of mammalian species indicate the presence of a cognitive map and not another, simpler method of determining one's environment.

While not located in the hippocampus, grid cells from within the medial entorhinal cortex have also been implicated in the process of path integration, actually playing the role of the path integrator while place cells display the output of the information gained through path integration. The results of path integration are then later used by the hippocampus to generate the cognitive map. The cognitive map likely exists on a circuit involving much more than just the hippocampus, even if it is primarily based there. Other than the medial entorhinal cortex, the presubiculum and parietal cortex have also been implicated in the generation of cognitive maps.

Parallel map theory

There has been some evidence for the idea that the cognitive map is represented in the hippocampus by two separate maps. The first is the bearing map, which represents the environment through self-movement cues and gradient cues. The use of these vector-based cues creates a rough, 2D map of the environment. The second map would be the sketch map that works off of positional cues. The second map integrates specific objects, or landmarks, and their relative locations to create a 2D map of the environment. The cognitive map is thus obtained by the integration of these two separate maps. This leads to an understanding that it is not just one map but three that help us create this mental process. It should be clear that parallel map theory is still growing. The sketch map has foundation in previous neurobiological processes and explanations while the bearing map has very little research to support its evidence.

Cognitive maps in animals

According to O’Keefe and Nadel (1978), not only humans require spatial abilities. Non-humans animals need them as well to find food, shelters, and others animals whether it is mates or predators. To do so, some animals establish relationships between landmarks, allowing them to make spatial inferences and detect positions. 

The first experiments on rats in a maze, conducted by Tolman, Ritchie, and Kalish (1946), showed that rats can form mental maps of spatial locations with a good comprehension of them. But these experiments, led again later by other researchers (for example by Eichenbaum, Stewart, & Morris, 1990 and by Singer et al. 2006) have not concluded with such clear results. Some authors tried to bring to light the way rats can take shortcuts. The results have demonstrated that in most cases, rats fail to use a shortcut when reaching for food unless they receive a preexposure to this shortcut route. In that case, rats use that route significantly faster and more often than those who were not preexposed. Moreover, they have difficulties making a spatial inference such as taking a novel shortcut route. 

In 1987, Chapuis and Varlet led an experiment on dogs to determine if they were able to infer shortcuts. The conclusion confirmed their hypothesis. Indeed the results demonstrated that the dogs were able to go from starting point to point A with food and then go directly to point B without returning to the starting point. But for Andrew T.D. Bennett (1996) it can simply mean that the dogs have seen some landmarks near point B such as trees or buildings and headed towards them because they associated them with the food. Later, in 1998, Cheng and Spetch did an experiment on gerbils. When looking for the hidden food (goal), gerbils were using the relationship between the goal and one landmark at a time. Instead of deducing that the food was equidistant from two landmarks, gerbils were searching it by its position from two independent landmarks. This means that even though animals use landmarks to locate positions, they do it in a certain way. 

Another experiment, including pigeons this time, showed that they also use landmarks to locate positions. The task was for the pigeons to find hidden food in an arena. A part of the testing was to make sure that they were not using their smell to locate food. These results show and confirm other evidence of links present in those animals between one or multiple landmark(s) and hidden food (Cheng and Spetch, 1998, 2001 ; Spetch and Mondloch, 1993 ; Spetch et al., 1996, 1997). 

Criticism

In a review, Andrew T.D. Bennett noted two principal definitions for the “cognitive map” term. The first one, according to Tolman, O’Keefe, and Nadel, implies the capacity to create novel short-cutting thanks to vigorous memorization of the landmarks. The second one, according to Gallistel, considers a cognitive map as “any representation of space held by an animal”.  This lack of a proper definition is also shared by Thinus-Blanc (1996) who stated that the definition is not enough clear. Therefore, this makes further experiments difficult to conclude. 

However, Bennett argued that there is no clear evidence for cognitive maps in non-human animals (i.e. cognitive map according to Tolman's definition). This argument is based on analyses of studies where it has been found that simpler explanations can account for experimental results. Bennett highlights three simpler alternatives that cannot be ruled out in tests of cognitive maps in non-human animals "These alternatives are (1) that the apparently novel short-cut is not truly novel; (2) that path integration is being used; and (3) that familiar landmarks are being recognised from a new angle, followed by movement towards them."  This point of view is also shared by Grieves and Dudchenko (2013) that showed with their experiment on rats (briefly presented above) that these animals are not capable of making spatial inferences using cognitive maps. 

Afrocentric education

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrocentric_education

Afrocentric education is a pedagogical system designed to empower peoples of the African diaspora with educational modes in contact and in line with the cultural assumptions common in their communities. A central premise behind it is that many Africans have been subjugated by having their awareness of themselves limited and by being indoctrinated with ideas that work against them and their cultures.

Like educational leaders of other cultures, proponents assert that what educates one group of people does not necessarily educate and empower another group, so they assert educational priorities distinctly for the Africans in a given context.

Philosophy

Afrocentric education has, as one of its tenets, the decolonization of the African mind. The central objective in decolonizing the African mind is to overthrow the authority that alien traditions may exercise.

Education

Education was understood to be a process of harnessing the inner potential, and thus it is imperative to equip the youth with an awareness of their identity.{{Citation needed|date=March 2022}} The term "miseducation" was coined by Carter G. woodson to describe the process of systematically depriving African Americans of their knowledge of self. Woodson believed that miseducation was the root of the problems of the masses of the African-American community and that if the masses of the African-American community were given the correct knowledge and education from the beginning, they would not be in the situation that they find themselves in today. Woodson argues in his book The Mis-Education of the Negro that African Americans often valorize European culture to the detriment of their own culture.

History

This has been an active area of Afrocentrism for many decades.

19th and early 20th century

Edward Wilmot Blyden, an American-Liberian educator and diplomat active in the pan-Africa movement, perceived a change in perception taking place among Europeans towards Africans in his 1908 book African Life and Customs, which originated as a series of articles in the Sierra Leone Weekly News. In it, he proposed that Africans were beginning to be seen simply as different and not as inferior, in part because of the work of English writers such as Mary Kingsley and Lady Lugard, who traveled and studied in Africa. Such an enlightened view was fundamental to refute prevailing ideas among Western peoples about African cultures and Africans.

Blyden used that standpoint to show how the traditional social, industrial, and economic life of Africans untouched by "either European or Asiatic influence", was different and complete in itself, with its own organic wholeness. In a letter responding to Blyden's original series of articles, Fante journalist and politician J. E. Casely Hayford commented, "It is easy to see the men and women who walked the banks of the Nile" passing him on the streets of Kumasi. Hayford suggested building a university to preserve African identity and instincts. In that university, the history chair would teach

Universal history, with particular reference to the part Ethiopia has played in the affairs of the world. I would lay stress upon the fact that while Ramses II was dedicating temples to 'the God of gods, and secondly to his own glory,' the God of the Hebrews had not yet appeared unto Moses in the burning bush; that Africa was the cradle of the world's systems and philosophies, and the nursing mother of its religions. In short, that Africa has nothing to be ashamed of in its place among the nations of the earth. I would make it possible for this seat of learning to be the means of revising erroneous current ideas regarding the African; of raising him in self-respect; and of making him an efficient co-worker in the uplifting of man to nobler effort.

The exchange of ideas between Blyden and Hayford embodied the fundamental concepts of Afrocentrism.

In the United States, during the early 20th century and the Harlem Renaissance, many writers and historians gathered in major cities, where they began to work on documenting achievements of Africans throughout history, in United States and Western life. They began to set up institutions to support scholarly work in African-American history and literature, such as the American Negro Academy (now the Black Academy of Letters and Arts), founded in Washington, DC, in 1874. Some men were self-taught; others rose through the academic system. Creative writers and artists claimed space for African-American perspectives.

Leaders included bibliophile Arthur Schomburg, who devoted his life to collecting literature, art, slave narratives, and other artifacts of the African diaspora. In 1911, along with John Edward Bruce, he founded the Negro Society for Historical Research in Yonkers, New York. The value of Schomburg's personal collection was recognized, and it was purchased by the New York Public Library in 1926 with the aid of a Carnegie Corporation grant. It became the basis of what is now called the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, based in Harlem, New York. Schomburg used the money from the sale of his collection for more travel and acquisition of materials.

Hubert Henry Harrison used his intellectual gifts in street lectures and political activism, influencing early generations of Black Socialists and Black Nationalists. Dr. Carter G. Woodson co-founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (as it is now called) in 1915, as well as The Journal of Negro History, so that scholars of black history could be supported and find venues for their work.

Among their topics, editors of publications such as NAACP's The Crisis and Journal of Negro History sought to include articles that countered the prevailing view that Sub-Saharan Africa had contributed little of value to human history that was not the result of incursions by Europeans and Arabs. Historians began to theorize that Ancient Egyptian civilization was the culmination of events arising from the origin of the human race in Africa. They investigated the history of Africa from that perspective.

In March 1925, Schomburg published an essay "The Negro Digs Up His Past" in an issue of the Survey Graphic devoted to Harlem's intellectual life. The article had widespread distribution and influence, as he detailed the achievements of people of African descent. Alain Locke included the essay in his collection The New Negro.

Afrocentrists claimed The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) by Carter G. Woodson, an African-American historian, as one of their foundational texts. Woodson critiqued education of African Americans as "mis-education" because he held that it denigrated the black while glorifying the white. For these early Afrocentrists, the goal was to break what they saw as a vicious cycle of the reproduction of black self-abnegation. In the words of The Crisis editor W. E. B. Du Bois, the world left African Americans with a "double consciousness," and a sense of "always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."

In his early years, W. E. B. Du Bois, researched West African cultures and attempted to construct a pan-Africanist value system based on West African traditions. In the 1950s Du Bois envisioned and received funding from Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah to produce an Encyclopedia Africana to chronicle the history and cultures of Africa. Du Bois died before being able to complete his work. Some aspects of Du Bois's approach are evident in work by Cheikh Anta Diop in the 1950s and 1960s.

Du Bois inspired a number of authors, including Drusilla Dunjee Houston. After reading his work The Negro (1915), Houston embarked upon writing her Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire (1926). The book was a compilation of evidence related to the historic origins of Cush and Ethiopia, and assessed their influences on Greece.

1960s and 1970s

The 1960s and 1970s were times of social and political ferment. In the U.S. were born new forms of Black Nationalism, Black Power and the Black Arts Movements, all began to be driven, to a degree, driven to some degree by an identification with "Mother Africa." Afrocentric scholars and Black youth also challenged Eurocentric ideas in academia.

The work of Cheikh Anta Diop became very influential. In the following decades, histories related to Africa and the diaspora gradually incorporated a more African perspective. Since that time, Afrocentrists have increasingly seen African peoples as the makers and shapers of their own histories.

You have all heard of the African Personality; of African democracy, of the African way to socialism, of negritude, and so on. They are all props we have fashioned at different times to help us get on our feet again. Once we are up we shan't need any of them any more. But for the moment it is in the nature of things that we may need to counter racism with what Jean-Paul Sartre has called an anti-racist racism, to announce not just that we are as good as the next man but that we are much better.
—Chinua Achebe, 1965

In this context, ethnocentric Afrocentrism was not intended to be essential or permanent, but was a consciously fashioned strategy of resistance to the Eurocentrism of the time. Afrocentric scholars adopted two approaches: a deconstructive rebuttal of what they called "the whole archive of European ideological racism" and a reconstructive act of writing new self-constructed histories.

At a 1974 UNESCO symposium in Cairo titled "The Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Decipherment of Meroitic Script", Cheikh Anta Diop brought together scholars of Egypt from around the world.

Key texts from this period include:

• The Destruction of Black Civilization (1971) by Chancellor Williams
• The African Origins of Civilization: Myth or Reality (1974) by Cheikh Anta Diop
• They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (1976) by Ivan Van Sertima

Some Afrocentric writers focused on study of indigenous African civilizations and peoples, to emphasize African history separate from European or Arab influence. Primary among them was Chancellor Williams, whose book The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. set out to determine a "purely African body of principles, value systems (and) philosophy of life".

1980s and 1990s

In the 1980s and 1990s, Afrocentrism increasingly became seen as a tool for addressing social ills and a means of grounding community efforts toward self-determination and political and economic empowerment.

In his (1992) article "Eurocentrism vs. Afrocentrism", US anthropologist Linus A. Hoskins wrote:

The vital necessity for African people to use the weapons of education and history to extricate themselves from this psychological dependency complex/syndrome as a necessary precondition for liberation. [...] If African peoples (the global majority) were to become Afrocentric (Afrocentrized), ... that would spell the ineluctable end of European global power and dominance. This is indeed the fear of Europeans. ... Afrocentrism is a state of mind, a particular subconscious mind-set that is rooted in the ancestral heritage and communal value system.

American educator Jawanza Kunjufu made the case that hip hop culture, rather than being creative expression of the culture, was the root of many social ills. For some Afrocentrists, the contemporary problems of the ghetto stemmed not from race and class inequality, but rather from a failure to inculcate Black youth with Afrocentric values.

In the West and elsewhere, the European, in the midst of other peoples, has often propounded an exclusive view of reality; the exclusivity of this view creates a fundamental human crisis. In some cases, it has created cultures arrayed against each other or even against themselves. Afrocentricity’s response certainly is not to impose its own particularity as a universal, as Eurocentricity has often done. But hearing the voice of African American culture with all of its attendant parts is one way of creating a more sane society and one model for a more humane world. –Asante, M. K. (1988)

In 1997, US cultural historian Nathan Glazer described Afrocentricity as a form of multiculturalism. He wrote that its influence ranged from sensible proposals about inclusion of more African material in school curricula to what he called senseless claims about African primacy in all major technological achievements. Glazer argued that Afrocentricity had become more important due to the failure of mainstream society to assimilate all African Americans. Anger and frustration at their continuing separation gave black Americans the impetus to reject traditions that excluded them.

2000s

Today, Afrocentricity takes many forms, including striving for a more multicultural and balanced approach to the study of history and sociology. Afrocentrists contend that race still exists as a social and political construct. They argue that for centuries in academia, Eurocentric ideas about history were dominant: ideas such as blacks having no civilizations, no written languages, no cultures, and no histories of any note before coming into contact with Europeans. Further, according to the views of some Afrocentrists, European history has commonly received more attention within the academic community than the history of sub-Saharan African cultures or those of the many Pacific Island peoples. Afrocentrists contend it is important to divorce the historical record from past racism. Molefi Kete Asante's book Afrocentricity (1988) argues that African-Americans should look to African cultures "as a critical corrective to a displaced agency among Africans." Some Afrocentrists believe that the burden of Afrocentricity is to define and develop African agency in the midst of the cultural wars debate. By doing so, Afrocentricity can support all forms of multiculturalism.

Afrocentrists argue that Afrocentricity is important for people of all ethnicities who want to understand African history and the African diaspora. For example, the Afrocentric method can be used to research African indigenous culture. Queeneth Mkabela writes in 2005 that the Afrocentric perspective provides new insights for understanding African indigenous culture, in a multicultural context. According to Mkabela and others, the Afrocentric method is a necessary part of complete scholarship and without it, the picture is incomplete, less accurate, and less objective.

Studies of African and African-diaspora cultures have shifted understanding and created a more positive acceptance of influence by African religious, linguistic and other traditions, both among scholars and the general public. For example, religious movements such as Vodou are now less likely to be characterized as "mere superstition", but understood in terms of links to African traditions.

In recent years Africana Studies or Africology departments at many major universities have grown out of the Afrocentric "Black Studies" departments formed in the 1970s. Rather than focusing on black topics in the African diaspora (often exclusively African American topics), these reformed departments aim to expand the field to encompass all of the African diaspora. They also seek to better align themselves with other University departments and find continuity and compromise between the radical Afrocentricity of the past decades and the multicultural scholarship found in many fields today.

African Centered Leadership-Fellowship (ACL-F) 2000

Dr. Uhuru Hotep, co-director of the Kwame Ture Leadership Institute, established an ethnocentric approach to leadership specifically based on the four principles of restoration of sovereignty, Sankofa, Maat restoration, and Johari Sita installation.

Restoration of sovereignty is a concept that surrounds cultural, political and economic entities of society. Sovereignty is synyonmous with self-determination. In the tradition of a self-sufficient creation of communities, seshemet (leadership) was developed to restore the Moroon tradition of kilombo construction.

Sankofa is a leadership technique of Ghana that emphasizes living in the present to learn from the past. This concept requires its followers to learn about the contributions of their ancestral leaders and to continue with their struggles. It mandates that African centered leaders reconnect with their ancestors.

Maat restoration is a collaboration of the central themes of truth, justice, order, harmony, balance, reciprocity and propriety. which is based on the teachings of ancient Kemet. This concept is characterized by the restoring of public confidence and the promotion of psychological and fiscal prosperity among the leaders and their followers.

Johari Sita is a multifaceted Afrocentric approach to leadership-followership development. It can best be described as the processes, procedures and practices of ACL-F. This model of leadership is the foundation for nationwide workshops called "Preparing African Youth for 21st Century Leadership and Service."

The internal loci of control for Africa centered leaders and followers are contrary to the political and financial dependency of followers of external loci of control of many mainstream middle class Black American leadership practices.

List of schools

Public schools

• African-Centered College Preparatory Academy (Kansas City, Missouri)
• Columbus Africentric Early College (Columbus, Ohio)

Public charter schools

• Betty Shabazz International Charter School (Chicago, Illinois)
• Imhotep Institute Charter High School (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)