Humans invest a substantial amount of time in the creation of artworks. For generations, humans around the world have learned and shared their knowledge and skills on artistic traditions. Albeit large experimental settings or online databases have brought considerable insights on the evolutionary role and trajectory of art, why humans invest in art, what information artworks carry and how art functions within the community still remain elusive. To address these unresolved questions, this present thesis integrates ethnographic accounts with data governance and statistical approaches to systematically investigate a large corpus of art. This thesis specifically focuses on a large corpus of Tamil kolam art from South India to provide an exemplary case study of artistic traditions. The foundation for the projects presented in this thesis was the design and construction of a robust data infrastructure that enabled the synthesis of raw data from various sources into one database for systematic analyses. The data infrastructure on the kolam artistic system enabled the development of complex statistical methods to explore the substantial investments and information complexity in art. In the first chapter, I examine artists’ strategic decisions in the creation of kolam art and how they strive to optimize the complexity of their artworks under constraints using evolutionary signaling theory and theoretically guided statistical methods. Results revealed that artists strive to maintain a stable and invariant complexity measured as Shannon information entropy, regardless of the size of the artwork. In order to achieve an optimal artistic complexity “sweet spot”, artists trade-off two standard measures of biological diversity in ecology: evenness and richness. Additionally, results showed that although kolam art arises in a highly stratified and multi-ethnic society, artistic complexity is strategically optimized across the population and not constrained by group boundaries. Instead, the trade-off can most likely be explained by aesthetic preferences or cognitive limitations. While artistic complexity in kolam art can be strategically optimized across the population, distinct styles and patterns can still be employed by artists. Thus, in the second chapter, I focus on how artistic styles in kolam art covary along cultural boundaries. I employ a novel statistical method to measure the mapping between styles onto group boundaries on a large corpus of kolam art by decomposing the system into sequential drawing decisions. In line with Chapter 1, results demonstrate limited group-level variation. Distinct styles or patterns in kolam art can only be weakly mapped to caste boundaries, neighborhoods or previous migration. Both chapters strongly suggest that kolam art is primarily a sphere where artists differentiate themselves from others by displaying their unique skill set and knowledge. Thus, variability in kolam art is largely dominated by individual-level variation and not reflective of group boundaries or narrow socialization channels. This thesis contributes to an emergent understanding of how artists conceptualize what they are doing and how art functions within the community. Taken together, this thesis serves as an example approach that demonstrates an optimized workflow and novel approaches for the evolutionary study of a large corpus of artistic traditions.

The aim of this thesis is to describe surname patterns and changes of surname among the Sami of Sweden. It presents the results of three studies. The first is a survey of the present-day stock of surnames (family names) among the Sami community, based on the 2005 electoral register for the Swedish Sami Parliament. It investigates the proportions of names deriving from different languages, and the commonest names in each group. The same study was carried out for different areas, showing that the northernmost parts of Sweden have a Sami name stock significantly different from that of the majority population. Further south, the stock of names is less marked, but no area is without Sami elements. The second study, based on archival material, concerns changes of name by Swedish Sami to newly formed surnames, over the period 1920–2004. It examines not only the names adopted, but also the ones replaced; how the name stock has been affected by different patterns of name change; and, as far as possible, who the name changers were. The study shows that, for a long time, names derived from Sami and Finnish were replaced with names formed from Swedish. This may be largely because of the stigma once attached to Sami ethnicity. More recently, Sami-language names seem to have been retained to a greater extent, possibly owing to the improved status of the culture. The third study looks at name changes in favour of names marked as Sami in character. The data consist in part of archive materials, but above all of interviews with three Sami informants who have themselves adopted Sami-language surnames. This study presents the informants’ thoughts on ethnicity and changes of name. In addition to the author’s own studies, the thesis includes a review of earlier research on Sami surnames, hereditary and non-hereditary, and a list of individual surnames with literature references regarding their origins and meanings. In the thesis, name changes are studied as a single, overall process, with an emphasis on the role of names in society, in particular as ethnic markers.

This study aims at exploring the social, affective and cognitive variables that would be related to the use of the address form usted in Chilean Spanish. Specifically, we refer to the use that can be observed in interactions between Chileans residing in Sweden. A particular aspect of this situation is that, while the majority group almost exclusively use the form that is commonly associated with solidarity (in this case the Swedish pronoun du), the minority group referred to maintains the pronoun that normally is associated with power, distance, formality and politeness: usted. In other words, while the equivalent in Swedish of usted (ni) is seldom used in majority language, the opposite is observed in the minority language object of study. We believe that the motives for the use of usted in this minority context are more complex than they appear to be. Consequently, an alternative hypothesis has been worked out with reference to theories within the area of Social Psychology. On this basis the following main hypothesis was formulated: Individuals representing the minority group in ethnic contact situations tend to increase their identification with the minority group in order to be admitted by and adhere to this group, if they feel that they are rejected by the majority group. The form usted is not the result of a fortuitous situation, nor can it be explained by the fact that it is the normal usage in the native country, but that it fulfils a strategic objective: to mark the affiliation with the minority group. The method has consisted in grouping together and correlating factors pertaining to the environment, the agent and the guest according to the Ecological Triad, the interaction of which contributes to the appearance of the observed behaviour that underlies this study. The statistical analysis enabled us to verify what was put forward in the hypothesis.