Alloway was still referring to the continuum model of culture in the late 1960s which “could accommodate all forms of art, permanent and expendable, personal and collective, autographic and anonymous.” At a time when popular culture was being blamed for distracting the population from politics, Alloway was still justifying it in the sort of terms he had used in the 1950s: “Popular culture is influential as it transmits prompt and extensive news, in visual, verbal and mixed forms, about style changes that will affect the appearance of our environment…” This statement could be challenged along the lines of the “lessons in consuming” that encouraged social conformity, but the remainder of the sentence was an innovation: popular culture could also transmit information about “political and military events that will put our accepted morality under new pressures.” This claim had greater credence by the end of the 1960s: the mass media were helping to shape public opinion about domestic politics and Vietnam by reporting the grim reality of race riots and the war, thereby challenging both the supposed impartiality of the police, and the heroic war propaganda uttered through official channels.

Alloway was an unswerving apologist for popular culture, and also an early one. The pessimism of British cultural critics like Richard Hoggart was paralleled in the USA by writers such as Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White whose 1957 Mass Culture: the Popular Arts in America helped shape attitudes about popular culture. It included an essay by Dwight MacDonald whose dismissal of popular culture was unqualified: “Mass culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audience are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying. The Lords of Kitsch, in short, exploit the cultural need of the masses in order to make a profit and/or to maintain their class rule.” While those attitudes were still in evidence in the 1960s, the explosion of youth culture transformed many people's thinking about the value and virtues of popular culture. Mass culture could be creative, innovative, progressive, relevant, and exciting, but there was still the problem of how to talk about it. Edward A. Shils suggested a categorization of popular culture into “superior,” “mediocre,” and “brutal” but, for Alloway, this perpetuated hierarchical distinctions based on inappropriate criteria such as longevity.

Scotland has a strongly differentiated mass media network, which reflects and emphasises the particular characteristics of its society and its political system. It is one of the most active centres of newspaper-publishing outside London, with 6 daily morning, 6 evening, 2 Sunday, and around 100 weekly or twice-weekly newspapers. Many of these papers are independent, or are autonomous members of London publishing companies.

There is also a vigorous broadcasting output in Scotland, derived from BBC Scotland (principal studios in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen), Scottish Television (STV)(Glasgow and Edinburgh), and Grampian Television (Aberdeen). Border Television, which operates from Carlisle in England, transmits programmes to parts of the southwest of Scotland and the Borders, as well as to the extreme north-west of England and the Isle of Man. Independent local radio stations are (1983) Radio Clyde (Glasgow), Radio Forth (Edinburgh). Radio Tay (Dundee), North Sound (Aberdeen), Moray Firth Radio (Inverness), and West Sound (Ayr). Local BBC Radio is provided by Radio Highland (Inverness), Radio Nan Eilean (a Gaelic service for the Western Isles, from Stornoway), Radio Aberdeen, Radio Orkney, Radio Shetland, Radio Tweed, and Radio Solway.

All the communications media in Scotland assert varying degrees of independence from London, and they are able to achieve it to a greater extent than any other media output centres in Britain. Scots demand, and support, a separate newspaper press and separate broadcasting, and their tastes are reflected in the strongly Scottish content of the press, TV, and radio. The newspaper structure is shown in Table 25.

Community events can have several definitions depending on context. For legal definitions, the determination of a community event might have specific use of space, public or private for gathering, either public or nonprofit. This might change based on the local regulatory definitions. Other broader consideration of a community event is an event with a gathering of people, sometime defined as more than fifty for a multitude of purposes. Concert, protest, festival, graduations, street-block parties, celebrations (such as religious, weddings, marking a holiday), for fund raising, or unplanned events such as social protest (for example the many protests and marches after the death of George Floyd or in support of Ukraine after the Russian invasion). Community events have benefits to the community, social connection, support for groups and individuals for whom the event was planned and financial benefit for community-based both municipal and private business. More longitudinal benefit to the community can come from publicity about the event and the community for tourism events outside of the confines of the event days.

In a modern-day society, the means by which its members communicate with each other are a constitutive element of its make-up. The central place of communication and mass communication applies to the world of work but has also become an integral part of leisure activities. In contemporary Germany, leisure and the media of mass communication have become inseparable facets of everyday culture: 'according to recent leisure research... reading books... occupies only the tenth place of the most frequent leisure activities, after watching television (80 per cent), reading newspapers or magazines (62 per cent), listening to the radio (59 per cent), talking on the telephone (44 per cent), having a cup of coffee or a glass of beer (42 per cent), socialising with friends (37 per cent), gardening (36 per cent), sleeping late (36 per cent) and listening to records or audio cassettes (33 per cent)' Thus, much of the leisure time of Germans is taken up by interacting with and through media. Media of mass communication such as newspapers, the telephone, television and radio rank highly in contemporary society and culture.

The growth in electoral democracies presents many potential opportunities for human development. The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic expansion in political rights and civil liberties worldwide. Since the start of the “third wave” of democratization, in 1974, the proportion of states that are electoral democracies has more than doubled, and the number of democratic governments in the world has tripled (Diamond 2001). Countries as diverse as the Czech Republic, Mexico, and South Africa have experienced a radical transformation of their political systems through the establishment of more effective party competition, free and fair elections, and a more independent and pluralistic press. Many hoped that these developments would expand the voice of the disadvantaged and the accountability of governments, so that policy makers would become more responsive to human needs, and governments could be removed from power through the ballot box if citizens became dissatisfied by their performance.

Yet in practice, after the initial surge in the early 1990s, many electoral democracies in Latin America, Central Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa remain fragile and only poorly consolidated, often divided by ethnic conflict and plagued by a faltering economic performance, with excessive executive power in the hands of one predominant party and a fragmented opposition (Linz and Stephan 1996). The central danger, illustrated by the nations of the Andean region, lies in disillusionment with democracy, and even occasional reversals (Norris 1999; Pharr and Putnam 2000; Lagos 2001; Plattner and Diamond 2001).

INTRODUCTION

Understanding the processes influencing the distribution and abundance of organisms and their adaptations is a prime goal in ecology (Krebs, 1994). Although a community approach has been applied to primates for some time, most of the comparisons have been regionally restricted (Charles-Dominique, 1977; Struhsaker & Leland, 1979; Gautier-Hion, 1980; MacKinnon & MacKinnon, 1980; Mittermeier & van Roosmalen, 1981; Terborgh, 1983; Ganzhorn, 1989). A more global perspective of primate ecology was initiated in the 1980s with intercontinental comparisons of whole primate communities (Bourlière, 1985; Terborgh & van Schaik, 1987; Reed & Fleagle, 1995; Fleagle & Reed, 1996; Wright, 1997) and comparisons of primate and other mammalian radiations (Smith & Ganzhorn, 1996; Wright, 1996; Emmons, chapter 10, this volume).

In 1996, Fleagle and Reed used multivariate techniques to quantify and visualize a ten-dimensional niche space of primate species from eight different communities. The niche dimensions were based on body mass, activity cycle, locomotion and diet. According to this analysis, primate communities in the Old World show similar ecological diversity and occupy similar space in the ten-dimensional hypervolume, while the neotropical primate communities show lower overall diversity than the communities on other continents. Thus, the ecological space filled by primates in the neotropics is smaller than in other regions due to the lack of folivores, the lack of species with very large body mass, and the lack of a diverse set of nocturnal species among New World primates (Terborgh & van Schaik, 1987; Kappeler & Heymann, 1996; Wright, 1997).