Getty Museum Review Targets Its Antiquities Collection

A commenter on FARK noted this headline on the website for KMOV St. Louis: Infant pulled from wrecked car involved in short police pursuit …adding, "No word on how far his short little legs took him before the police caught up with him." The headline was quickly edited thereafter, and it now reads: Infant pulled from car after police chase, crash Victor Steinbok, who brought this to my attention, observes that "the updated headline is only marginally better." The original headline was a classic crash blossom — complete with a crash (don't worry, the infant and other passengers are OK). As is typical of crash blossoms, there is an ambiguous reading resulting from the elliptical style of headlinese. The intended reading was: {[An] infant} [was] {pulled from {[a] wrecked car [which was] involved in [a] short police pursuit}} But it can be just as easily read as: {[An] infant [who was] pulled from [a] wrecked car} [was] {involved in [a] short police pursuit} The revised headline gets rid of the syntactic ambiguity, but some pragmatic ambiguity remains relating to the infant's involvement with the police chase and crash. Without reading the story, wherein we learn of the three adults in the car, it's still possible to imagine the infant as Babyface Finster from the old Bugs Bunny cartoon (or Baby Herman from "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"), trying to make a getaway from the cops. This infant is clearly as talented as the newborn who searched for her birth mother. Before-and-after screenshots (the first pulled from the Google cache):

Celebrating the ideological diversity of contemporary evangelicalism, Marcia Pally heralds the advent of a religious non-right. Shattering stereotypes of a monolithic conservatism, she performs a valuable service. As Pally notes in her essay, this isn’t the first time evangelicals have hoisted the banner of social reform. Recalling the activism of nineteenth-century American Protestants, she sees the “new evangelicals” as their contemporary successors. You don’t have to go back to the nineteenth century to find evangelical progressives. Like Jim Wallis and Ron Sider, many got their start in the 1970s, building institutions that are still around today (Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action, Bread for the World). The grandson of a Moral Majority supporter, I wasn’t exposed to this part of evangelicalism.  Like grandma, I assumed that most evangelicals “prayed Republican.” This began to change during my young adult years. Blessed with a well-stocked church library, my congregation owned a copy of The Cross and the Flag (1972). Edited by a trio of Christian historians, it featured a who’s who of reformist evangelicals, including Paul Henry, Ozzie Edwards, and Nancy Hardesty. Reading its indictment of Christian nationalism, I felt connected to a new kind of evangelicalism. Chapters on poverty, ecology, racism, and militarism outlined a different agenda from the one found in my grandmother’s Moral Majority Report. As David Swartz documents in Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, the autobiographies of other evangelicals reveal similar stories of inter-generational influence. More than any other book, Carl F.H. Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) inspired the evangelical activists of the 1960s and 1970s. While David Allen Hubbard kept a copy under his pillow at Westmont College, Samuel Escobar read about it as a student in Peru. It is easy to see why. Calling for greater social engagement, Henry ridiculed evangelicals for debating the morality of the card game Rook “while the nations of the world are playing with fire.” Henry’s generation called themselves the “new evangelicals.” By using the same label to describe today’s evangelicalism, Pally hints at this religious lineage. While grateful for her research, I wish she had done more to explore these connections. Many journalists and scholars believe that the evangelical left was a reaction to the religious right. So do many evangelicals. Like other religious communities, evangelicalism has experienced a break in its “chain of memory.” Suffering from historical amnesia, millions of evangelicals have forgotten about their tradition’s social witness. By telling the stories of “evangelicals who have left the right,” Pally’s book may help them to remember.

Students, get your hands on the AAA Career Toolkit with book The Anthropology Graduate’s Guide: From Student to a Career before it’s gone! We have four left in inventory and when they’re gone they’re gone. Buy yours today! Applied anthropologists Carol Ellick and Joe Watkins, authors of The Anthropology Graduate’s Guide From Student to a Career [...]

Hello all,It's always neat when the weekly link collection ends up with some kind of theme or thread guiding my collecting and commenting and hopefully your reading, too...I guess this week is all about some of the great (new) ways a diverse range of women are contributing to what it means to be professionally involved in 'development'. Rosalind Eyben contributes to the evidence and impact debate that is taking place at Duncan Smith's blog; Mary B. Anderson's new project on 'Time to Listen' is included, so is Alanna Shaikh's post on the current state and hopefully better future of aid coordination. Marianne 'Zen peacekeeper' Elliott talks about yoga, well-being and the power of narratives whereas Janine di Giovanni reflects on being a frontline war reporter. Last not least, Leila Janah shares some insights of managing a successful social enterprise-and why being 'the woman' on a conference panel may actually be a good thing...and there is more interesting stuff to explore-some of it involving men, too ;)Enjoy! New on aidnographyHow the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster (book review)To give my review a better focus, I will highlight three themes that I found particularly interesting and that made the book an engaging and very worthwhile read beyond the factual content of how post-disaster aid did and did not unfold. First, and maybe least surprising, Jonathan Katz highlights time and again that aid has always been political and that Haiti in 2010 and beyond is not different. Second, due to his professional lens as journalist he is in an interesting position to engage with the topic of celebrity activists and their involvement in Haiti. And third, as someone who enjoys reflective writing, Jonathan Katz’ style is an excellent example of how journalism and critical writing on the aid industry can be brought together with an involved, reflective approach that does not turn a critical journalist automatically into a ‘frontline hero’.  Evidence and results wonkwar final salvo (for now): Eyben and Roche respond to Whitty and Dercon + your chance to voteChris and Stefan suggest ‘the commitment to evidence has opened up the space fundamentally to challenge conventional, technical approaches to aid.’ We would agree, but it would seem that the exception to this is when it comes to addressing the power of donors such as DFID, being honest about the domestic political pressures they are under, and assessing the possibility that their behaviour (including how evidence-based approaches are managerialised) may on occasions be undermining processes of development and social transformation. Is DFID drawing upon anthropologists or ethnographic researchers, as the Police in the UK have recently done, to understand how its policies on, for example, results or value for money change behaviour in the agency, and its relationships with others?Unfortunately, the title of the post masks an excellent exchange over at Duncan Green's blog on the construction of 'evidence' and the politics of measuring development outcomes. Report calls on aid agencies to listen to, work with, beneficiariesThe general message was that if beneficiaries had been included in discussions, they could have helped make the aid much better - better targeted, less wasteful and more transparently delivered. If aid agencies and NGOs were more open about their budgets, recipients would be less suspicious that funds were being misappropriated. And if they knew when a project was likely to end, they could plan for the future and not feel abandoned. Brown and her colleagues found few people demanded more aid, and many asked for less. Recipients also wanted aid staff to return to see the longer-term effects of their work, both good and bad. Too often, projects are seen as finished once the last of the money is spent, and they are considered a success if they are completed on time and on budget, regardless of whether they lead to genuine development. The report dryly notes, “Just because something is measurable doesn’t mean that it is what should be assessed.” Maybe I needed an article about the 'Time to listen' project to realize that somehow, somewhere the idea of 'listening to people' still needs some kind of empirical 'proof' that it's actually useful which says a lot about aid discourses and organizations... Out of touchPeople I know who work in various aid sectors sometimes ask me: “What’s up with Nepal? Nothing ever seems to improve, but all that aid money keeps pouring in.” I usually tell them you could sum up the foreign-aid culture in Nepal by looking at the ICIMOD building at Khumaltar. It’s about the size of the royal palace, occasionally shows signs of life, but generally seems to get things done—generally. To me, it is the face of a big, top-heavy, foreign aid presence in Nepal. (...)This is the fatal flaw of Big Aid. Small to medium-sized local agencies with a good track record are not sought out as resources. Those seeking UN partnerships are given a gauntlet of bureaucratic obstacles before they can be considered acceptable under UN standards. The spirit of people wanting to help themselves is thus often squashed. For us, the act of simply getting someone to listen became quite a quest. These impressions from Nepal make an excellent 'reality check' why 'time to listen' is still not the norm and why large aid organizations need to be included and researched in the debates on how to measure policy, projects and impact. The Future of Donor Coordination, Part IIt’s entirely possible that the future of aid coordination looks exactly like the present. A lot of well-meaning actors trying very hard to coordinate in a system that undermines those efforts. There’s a chance, though, that we can do something different. Alanna Shaikh on 'coordination', one of the hottest buzzwords in the development lingosphere...The Truth About Disruptive DevelopmentThis local talent is gradually acquiring the skills, resources, and support it needs to take back ownership of many of its problems—problems of which it never took original ownership because those skills and resources were not available. Well, now they are.The ICT4D community—educational establishments, donors, and technologists, among them—need to collectively recognize that it needs to adjust to this new reality, and work with technologists, entrepreneurs, and grassroots nonprofits across the developing world to accelerate what has become an inevitable shift. Or it can continue along its present path, and become increasingly irrelevant. “Innovate or die” doesn’t just apply to the technologies plied by the ICT4D community. It applies to the ICT4D community itself.The death decline of big, Northern-based aid organizations that facilitate projects in the developing world has been predicted before. So has the involvement of international aid workers in local projects. Both trends are still very much alive and kicking and I predict that the ICT4D community will be around for a while, too (whether or not it will be 'relevant' is a completely different discussion...) A journey to do good “I’ve always been really attracted to narrative as a way to learn about the world – I’m much more likely to pick a memoir or novel to learn about the world than a non-fiction account. “Narrative to me is also at the heart of good legal work – if you can really tell the story of what happened to your client, that’s when people will be moved and things will shift. The power of narrative is a big thing I learned when I worked at the New Zealand Human Rights Commission – I learned that if you need to convince someone to get interested enough in a problem or an issue to make change you need to tell them a story."Sacha Kenny interviews Marianne 'Zen peacekeeper' Elliott. This is a fascinating discussion which really says a lot about development and well-being and how the purpose of aid work and dealing with it has been shifting and changing - and that these changes have been driven by women like Marianne. War stories: Read Janine di Giovanni’s powerful coverage of conflicts around the worldIn 2004, di Giovanni had a son. And in this talk, she explains why she opted to cover the war in Iraq despite having a baby at home. She also shares why, less than a week after speaking at TEDxWomen, she headed back to Damascus to continue covering the conflict in Syria. “I believe it needs to be done. I believe a story there has to be told,” she says. “What I see is incredibly heroic people fighting for things — like democracy — that we take for granted every single day … All I am is a witness. My role is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless … To shine a light in the darkest corners of the world.’”This fascinating Ted-talk, journalist Janine di Giovanni has a completely different take on the topic of 'how women are using different narratives to influence policy-making, peace and development'...Press Release: The European Journalism Centre Announces Journalism Grants for Innovations in Development ReportingThe Centre will provide a selection of innovative reporting projects with the necessary funds to enable journalists, editors, and development stakeholders to perform thorough research and to develop entirely new and experimental reporting and presentation methods. They will also be able to use multi-platform approaches and to think laterally across disciplines and techniques of journalistic storytelling. Award decisions, based on journalistic quality and merit, will be taken in complete editorial independence from the Gates Foundation. The programme will launch three rounds of open calls for proposals and, in parallel, proactively solicit proposals from eminent media outlets focusing on the eight European countries with the highest development spending, namely France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.And if you have the narrative skills to report on innovations in development in your European home country, Bill & Melinda may be able to help you.The essential social media for Kenyan journalistsI’ve also intentionally excluded a few groups. I didn’t include any politicians, though some maintain blogs, FB pages and Twitter streams. I figure anyone can select the politicians they want to follow. I’ve also not included any of the tech blogs, which are some of the most prominent blogs in Kenya. Still, I feel they are not necessarily essential to journalists. There are also lots of creative and intellectual blogs that – interesting though they may be – I wasn’t sure could be considered essential for journalists either. Perhaps I’ll add this list anyways.My friend Nic Benequista on compiling social media resources in Kenya-I'm not an expert, but if you have an idea, I'm sure Nic appreciates your comment!In search of ‘African redemption’At first glance their endeavor might seem pretty standard: three young westerners looking for an adventure. But a closer look reveals the initiative is in fact yet another product of the Western ‘sustainable development’ discourse. What better way to convince people of your message by having them watch and share YouTube videos of their peers meeting people on the ground affected by the ways of living in the West? African school children still proof to be the best prop. (...)Now that the trio has reached its final destination and a fresh duo is about to embark on a new journey, we wonder whether the trip will also answer why ‘first world’ Western documentary makers can’t stop using ‘Africa’ as a blank canvas onto which they can project their experiments/hopes of “finding themselves,” whilst reproducing the stereotypical image of a poor continent?From the 'reporting on development-you are doing it wrong, guys' department (and yes, this 'development' effort is led by two young men...).International development: big questions, small answersWhile the questions in development are getting bigger, the professional and intellectual scene has never been so fragmented. It will take a formidable alchemy to forge strong solutions here. One thing is clear: wasting years on a technocratic debate about goals which are for advocacy more than anything else – and likely drawn up without reference to such fundamentals as political rights – is not a serious response to the dysfunctional summitry, procrastination and missed targets of recent years.Five Lessons from Four Years at SamasourceUse what you've got. Every week I get a lot of requests to speak on panels and at conferences. About two years ago I finally realized that people weren't always calling on me because I had brilliant things to say -- they were trying to include more young women and nonprofit leaders in their events. I was a diversity card. This made me feel awkward, resentful, and tokenized. I briefly contemplated a conference hiatus. And then I looked at our sales deals -- ten of the twelve top contracts we've signed have been through connections I made at conferences. Does it matter why I was invited? Not really. What matters is the end result. I just had to get over it.Leila Janah's reflections from four years of running her nonprofit are another great and hands-on example to round off the unofficial 'women doing great stuff in development' theme and an somehow unofficial 'reply' to the challenges pointed out in the Guardian piece about 'small answers'...Piecing it Together: Post-Conflict Security in an Africa of Networked, Multilevel GovernanceHow do, could and should institutions responsible for security and the management of conflict in Tropical African societies respond to violent conflict? This IDS Bulletin is built on the observation that all governance (especially in Africa) is multileveled and networked – from the village to the international organisation, well beyond what is specified in formal government structures. Thus the focus must be not only on the ways in which key conflict-management institutions evolve themselves but also on the changing ways in which the networks where they are embedded actually operate. This issue is about post-conflict reconstruction and the rebuilding of shattered states and societies, presenting fieldwork from articles covering the Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Sierra Leone, Mozambique and Somalia.The great new IDS Bulletin is available as open-access publication, i.e. full articles can be downloaded for FREE!AnthropologyUpdate 23 January 2013 – Anthropology of Development & more!Great links curated by Jason Antrosio and I add as full disclosure that he included my 'Big Truck' review which I really appreciate ;)!AcademiaThe Neoliberalized, Debt-plagued, Low Wage, Corporatized UniversityThe goal of this site is to explore contemporary anthropology through essays, short articles, and opinion pieces written from diverse perspectives. A great collection of essays and excellent entry point into the current debates of for-profit higher education, universities as work places and the state of the academy-all in a very reader-friendly, jargon-light format.Why We Blog: An Essay in Four MovementsThis essay comprises four parts, each by one of the co-bloggers at In the Middle [www.inthe-medievalmiddle.com).] Karl Steel argues that the benefits of academic blogging outweigh its potential humiliations, and that academic conferences should post their papers publicly and allow for comments so that conferences, in a sense, never end. Graduate students and junior scholars should be encouraged to blog to help build a community and a trade in ideas, and to accustom them to the feelings of exposure and humiliation common to all writing, which will thereby train them to become more confident scholars. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen examines some of the difficulties posed by the age of e-medieval: an internet culture of negativity. Blogging entails finding strategies for man-aging harsh or off topic comments, as well as for coping with unwanted attention. Drawing on the pedagogical distinction Nancy Sommers makes between process and product, Mary Kate Hurley examines the role blogs might play in creating a communal space in which to share unfinished ideas. Blogs might be an ideal medium for the process of thinking, rather than the finished work of having had thought. Eileen A. Joy argues there may be more value in thinking and ‘‘working through’’ our scholarship online, in an ‘‘open’’ environment that promotes and invites democratic,catholic, and convivial support, as well as the accidental tourist and silent voyuer, than there is in the traditional ‘‘finished product’’ of a journal article or book. It pleads, further, for a better awareness of the fact that intellectual property is always co-extensive and communal.Great piece on academic blogging!

I am a software evangelist. I admit it. I get super excited when I find something that works for me and become convinced that the life of almost everyone I know could be improved if they adopted the same thing. For that reason, I expect that this post on software will be only the third … Continue reading →

Rachel Stonecipher SMU In 2012, a series of PBS investigations into Border Patrol abuses corroborated years of humanitarian volunteers’ reports, finding that the agency’s institutional culture cultivates a climate of medical neglect – and sometimes outright harm – toward migrant detainees. In July 2012, the PBS show Need to Know aired the second installment of its U.S.-Mexico border [...]

Still writing 2012 on your checks and paperwork?  For those of you already missing the year when we escaped another end of the world apocalypse, here is a retroactive look at some interesting journal articles published in the later half of 2012. American Anthropologist offered up an interesting revisiting of the anthropology of the body informed by scholarly work in archaeology, sociocultural anthropology and history in this essay written by Oliver J.T. Harris and John Robb. Multiple Ontologies and the Problem of the Body in History Oliver J. T. Harris and John Robb In this article, we return to a fundamental anthropological question: How can we understand apparently incommensurate perspectives on the human body? While applauding recent moves to place local people’s perspectives on an ontological rather than epistemological footing, we suggest that both of these approaches fail to explain how different ontological perspectives can ever communicate with one another and how historical change takes place. To understand this, we offer a different model of multiple ontologies that also makes room for physical materials; we explore this through the ontologies of Native America and Western Europe from medieval times to the present day. Two pieces in American Ethnologist explored the formations of subjectivities vis-a-vis multispecies and biopolitical encounters. Producing affect: Transnational volunteerism in a Malaysian orangutan rehabilitation center Rheana “Juno” Salazar Parreñas In a postcolonial economy of volunteer tourism from the Global North to the Global South, mostly British women pay thousands of U.S. dollars to travel to Sarawak, on Malaysian Borneo, to work in a wildlife rehabilitation center. There, in a program operated as a public–private partnership, they provide hard labor to maintain and improve the facility and assist subcontracted indigenous Iban men in caring for displaced orangutans. Through the concept of “custodial labor,” I argue that affect produced at the interface of bodies in the work of orangutan rehabilitation also produces an unequal distribution of risk and vulnerability among those involved, across differences of species, classes, nationalities, and genders. My findings contribute to understandings of how humanity is constituted through multispecies encounters, help demonstrate how animals can be treated as subjects in ethnography, and show how affective encounters produce human and nonhuman subjectivities. “Good individualism”? Psychology, ethics, and neoliberalism in postsocialist Russia Tomas Matza Psychologists working in Russia’s cities have found it both desirable and profitable to offer “psychological education” to the children of the elite. I examine two characterizations of this work—as a form of neoliberal subjectivation and as a post-Soviet project focused on progressive sociopolitical reform. Exploring the tensions between them illuminates the historical specificity of self-work in Russia, its relation to commerce and biopolitics, and its political ambiguity. I conclude that studies of governmentality that attend to both subjectivation as an ethical practice and social history can effectively render capitalist complicity and ordinary ethics in the same frame. Nikolas Rose recently published this piece in BioSocieties that has resonances for scholars working in science and technology studies and the anthropology of knowledge. Democracy in the contemporary life sciences Nikolas Rose In this article I reflecton the contemporary arguments for democratisation of science, in light of the work of the historian of the life sciences Ludwik Fleck. I explore some possible reasons for the current demands for ‘responsibility’ among scientific researchers, and briefly consider this in the context of the various arguments that have made a link between democracy and science, or considered the role of science in a democratic society. I conclude by considering some recent proposals for opening up the secluded spaces of scientific research and truth finding, and suggest that, far from destabilising scientific truth, such developments might actually address the well known failures of ‘translation from bench to bedside’, and make scientific truth claims in the life sciences more robust when they leave the lab and enter the world of everyday life. Body and Society offered up these two articles (and several others) in their joint September and December 2012 issue. Ageing, Experience, Biopolitics: Life’s Unfolding Brett Neilson In the wake of Foucault, the debate on biopolitics has focused on the tensions of bíos and zoé, community and immunity, generation and thanatopolitics. What remains obscure in these accounts is the experiential aspect of life – its unfolding and entanglement with the ageing process. This is true both of approaches that emphasize the ethical implications of the life sciences and those that explore the biopolitical workings of wider social processes. In the contemporary capitalist formation, life’s unfolding is caught up in global flows of information, finance and labour. The organization of the human faculties, the general preconditions for knowledge and communication, becomes central to value creation. And the human body, like fixed capital for Marx, becomes a cost to be amortized as quickly as possible. Investigating these processes with regard to transformations in practices of care provides a means for reassessing current debates regarding the ageing of people and populations. ‘Frequent Sipping’: Bottled Water, the Will to Health and the Subject of Hydration Kane Race This article examines how the formation of markets in bottled water has relied on assembling a particular subject: the subject of hydration. The discourse of hydration is a conspicuous feature of efforts to market bottled water, allowing companies to appeal to scientifically framed principles and ideas of health in order to position the product as an essential component in self-health and healthy lifestyles. Alongside related principles, such as the ‘8 × 8 rule’, hydration has done much to establish new practices of water drinking and consumption in which the consumer appears to be always at risk of dehydration and must engage in practices of ‘frequent sipping’. This article traces the emergence of the concept of hydration from its origins in exercise science and explores its circulation, contemporary uses and purchase. I argue that the appeal to biomedical languages and concepts found in the discourse of hydration connects with much broader ways of conceiving and acting upon the self that have become prevalent in contemporary society – what Rose and Novas call ‘biological citizenship’ – indicating how the ensemble of hydration participates in wider-ranging transformations in forms of rule. The story of hydration reveals how biomedical techniques of the self can be made to double up as ‘market devices’ by offering specific procedures for assessing the self and calculating the body’s needs. In order to grasp these developments, I position the health sciences, and health and fitness in particular, as a potent site of popular culture in which bodies learn to be affected by the procedures of scientific experiment. A critical grasp of this context is best enabled, I argue, by situating the producers and consumers of scientific principles and commercial products as embodied and looking at their interconnection in processes of emergence. Through these means, we can begin to develop a fully materialized account of the question: how have we become so thirsty? Cultural Anthropology published these essays recently.  Always a sharp roster of contributions courtesy of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.  Their previous virtual issue entitled “Ethnographies of Science” is worth consulting for readers working in and around science and technology studies. Dengue Mosquitos Are Single Mothers: Biopolitics Meets Ecological Aesthetics in Nicaraguan Community Health Work Alex Nading Nicaraguan Ministry of Health protocols for the control of Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that transmits dengue fever, hinge on an aesthetic ordering of the urban household, one in which mosquitoes, like garbage and dirt, do not belong. Management regimes such as this appear to rely on an alienation of people—and in the case of dengue, women in particular—from the urban natures in which they live. In this essay, I draw on eighteen months of research with Nicaraguan community health workers (brigadistas) for whom mosquito abatement involved an opening, rather than a closing, of the landscape. Brigadistas, especially female brigadistas, took deep pleasure in learning about mosquito-human lifeworlds, a pleasure I call “ecological aesthetic.” Ecological aesthetics—patterns of connection that are identifiable only through performance—contrasted to the more familiar aesthetics identifiable in the ministry’s ordering of the household. While the latter aesthetic has human control over life at its core, the former emphasizes entanglement, a relational knowledge of life. I suggest some implications of this idea for future anthropological studies of “the politics of life.” No One Wants To Be the Candy Man: Ambivalent Medicalization and Clinician Subjectivity in Pain Management Megan Crowley-Matoka and Gala True Pain, despite being an elemental bodily experience and the most common reason for seeking medical care, occupies a place of profound ontological and moral uncertainty in American biomedicine. Taking seriously the highly charged emotions – frustration, anger, even disgust – frequently expressed by clinicians regarding their patients with pain, this article draws on ethnographic research to explore both the origins and the implications of such anxiously ambivalent responses to pain and pain medications among the clinicians charged with treating it. Set against the recent history of pain medicine as an emergent specialty in the highly fragmented landscape of American biomedicine, we examine at close ethnographic range some of the key ways that U.S. clinicians frame the experience of contending with pain in their everyday practice. Emergent from these clinician experiences are the ways in which pain and pain medications remain both incompletely medicalized and ineffectively medicalizing in American biomedicine, as well as the threatening effects on what we term the pharmaceutical subjectivity of clinicians themselves of this persistently ambivalent medicalization. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry and Ethos foregrounded patient perspectives in two compelling pieces about cancer.  Their other articles demonstrated why these two journals continue to be important ones to consult on an ongoing basis. Remaking the Self: Trauma, Teachable Moments, and the Biopolitics of Cancer Survivorship Kirsten Bell As numerous scholars have noted, cancer survivorship is often represented in popular discourse as providing an opportunity for a physical, emotional, and spiritual makeover. However, this idea that cancer enables the self to be remade on all levels is also increasingly evoked in the field of psychosocial oncology. Exploring cancer survivorship as a biopolitical phenomenon, I focus on two concepts that have become central to understandings of the disease: the “teachable moment” and “post-traumatic growth.” Drawing primarily on representations of cancer survivorship in the clinical literature, I suggest that cancer is increasingly seen to present a unique opportunity to catalyze the patient’s physical and psychological development. In this framework, the patient can no longer be relied upon to transform him or herself: this change must be externally driven, with clinicians taking advantage of the trauma that cancer entails to kick-start the patient into action. Broadening my analysis to the concepts of “trauma” and “development” writ large, I go on to suggest that survivorship discourse seems to partake of a larger and relatively recent meta-narrative about development—both individual and societal—and the positive opportunity that trauma is seen to present to stimulate reconstruction on a grand scale. Cancer, Culture, and Individual Experience: Public Discourse and Personal Affliction David Perusek From folk beliefs about how cancer spreads within the body and why “they” have yet to find a cure for it, to the cultural dimensions of personal condolences, and the ideological dimensions of cancer constructions in the media, I examine the ways in which U.S. culture and culture bearers frame the experience of cancer for cancer patients and their families. Viewing cultural frames as resources to be drawn on in time of need and engaging in participant-observation in the life of a family simultaneously confronted with two cancer diagnoses, one of which was terminal, I conclude that contemporary cultural understandings of cancer in the United States may often work as antiresources threatening lived experience with maddening distortion. Health reminded us that the construction of clinical and biopolitical reality is something both healthcare professionals and ordinary actors actively shape. ‘I deal with the small things’: The doctor–patient relationship and professional identity in GPs’ stories of cancer care May-Lill Johansen, Knut Arne Holtedahl, Annette Sofie Davidsen, and Carl Edvard Rudebeck An important part of GPs’ work consists of attending to the everyday and existential conditions of human being. In these life world aspects, biomedicine is often not the relevant theory to guide the GP; nevertheless they are a part of GPs’ professional domain. In cancer care, previous studies have shown that GPs with a biomedical perspective on medicine could feel subordinate to specialists, and that doctors with a curative focus could see disease progression as a personal failure. The aim of this study was to explore in depth the experiences of being a GP for people with advanced cancer. Fourteen Norwegian GPs were interviewed about accompanying patients through a cancer illness. Their stories were analysed using a narrative approach. The GPs expressed a strong commitment to these patients, a loyalty which in some cases could be weakened due to judgements of distant specialists. In view of the GPs’ close knowledge of their patients’ background and history this subordination was a paradox, mirroring a hierarchy of medical knowledge. The GPs had an ideal of honesty and openness about death, which they sometimes failed. To reach the ideal of honesty, clinicians would have to abandon the biomedical ideal of mastering human nature through interventions and acknowledge the fundamental uncertainty and finiteness of human life. GPs may learn from being with their patients that bodily and existential suffering are connected, and thus learn implicitly to overlook the body–mind dualism. This practical wisdom lacks a theoretical anchoring, which is a problem not only for general practice. The moralization of healthy living: Burke’s rhetoric of rebirth and older adults’ accounts of healthy eating Philippa Spoel, Roma Harris, and Flis Henwood This article develops a rhetorical analysis of how older adults in Canada and the UK engage with civic-moral imperatives of healthy living. The analysis draws on Burke’s concepts of ‘symbolic hierarchies’ and the ‘rhetoric of rebirth’ to explore how participants discursively negotiate the moralizing framework of self-regulation and self-improvement central to healthy eating discourse, in particular. Working from the premise that healthy eating is a ‘principle of perfection’ that citizens are encouraged to strive to achieve, the article traces the vocabularies and logical distinctions of ‘guilt’, ‘purification’ and ‘redemption’ in participants’ accounts of what healthy eating means to them. This analysis reveals some of the complex, situated and often strategic ways in which they rearticulate and reconfigure the normative imperatives of healthy eating in ways suited to their lived experience and their priorities for health and well-being in older age. Finally, the International Journal of Social Psychiatry published this descriptive snapshot drawn from qualitative research surrounding mental illness in the United States. Subjective accounts of the causes of mental illness in the USA Marta Elliott, Robyn Maitoza, and Erik Schwinger Psychiatrists and advocates for persons with mental illness in the USA argue that the biomedical model of mental illness as a brain disease is both accurate and effective in reducing stigma. Few studies have queried individuals diagnosed with mental illness to determine the extent to which they define their condition as biologically based versus caused by social and psychological factors. Stay tuned for ongoing highlights from these journals and others in 2013.

On BoingBoing, Jason Weisberger posted this photograph under the title "Found Poem", but without any explanation: Justin McDaniel explains: They just translated the names of the fish literally! 1. phla krapong duat (saltwater catfish jerky or sundried saltwater catfish) 2. phla krapong phao lleua (saltwater catfish baked with salt) 3. phla krapong tot nam phla (catfish fried with fish sauce) 4. phla krapong samrot (three flavored catfish) 5. koong op woon sen (shrimp steamed with glass noodles). Nattha Chuenwattana renders these somewhat differently: 1. silver perch in boiled sea (or ocean) (boiled silver perch in brine) 2. silver perch burnt in salt ("baked in salt" for better translation) 3. silver perch fried (in) fish sauce 4. three flavors silver perch (maybe sour, salty, and spicy) 5. shrimp baked with mung bean noodle Perhaps Language Log readers familiar with Thai can adjudicate between the two sets of translations and explain the "estimates" and "thicket" misreadings. Equally puzzling are the "noodles made of green grams". [A tip of the hat to Amy de Buitléir and thanks to Joyce White]

Google Releases Transparency Report Showing US Surveillance Requests Up 33% in the Last Year from EFF.org Updates by Trevor Timm Two Out of Every Three US Demands to Google Come Without A Warrant This morning, Google released their semi-annual transparency report, and once again, it revealed a troubling trend: Internet surveillance around the world continues to rise, with the United States leading the way in demands for user data. Effects of the Internet on Legacy Institutions from The Meta-Activism Project by Mary The Internet is shaking the foundations of many of the institutions on which contemporary society is built.  Here’s a little chart I made that summarizes some of these effects (click image to view full-size). France Considering an ‘Internet Tax’ on Personal Data by Alex Fitzpatrick Should Google and Facebook be taxed for collecting your personal data? France thinks so by Harrison Weber Facebook Graph Search: Why This Could Be So important for the Future of Big Data from social media vb by RichardStacy This is a very important step, not just for Facebook, because it could come to be understood as one of the critical opening skirmishes in the Battle of Big Data. How it plays-out could have enormous implications for the commercial future of many social media properties, including Google. Google’s Page not worried about Facebook’s Graph Search, says he’s “confident of our core business” from The Next Web by Ken Yeung Swipp launches to take on Google and Facebook Graph Search with a new social intelligence search from The Next Web by Ken Yeung Transparency Report: What it takes for governments to access personal information from The Official Google Blog by A Googler Today we’re releasing new data for the Transparency Report, showing that the steady increase in government requests for our users’ data continued in the second half of 2012, as usage of our services continued to grow. We’ve shared figures like this since 2010 because it’s important for people to understand how government actions affect them. US government requests for Google users’ private data jumped 33% between 2011 and 2012 from The Next Web by Emil Protalinski Facebook and Google spent record amounts on lobbying in 2012, up 196% and 70% over 2011 from The Next Web by Emil Protalinski Google Says It Always Requires Warrants for User Email and Cloud Data from Mashable! by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai Free and Open Source Software from Global Voices Online by Tarek Amr We received an email from Richard M. Stallman (RMS), after publishing the article about the Egyptian demonstration calling for the government to adopt Free Software. I can’t deny that one of the motives behind writing this article is to show off that someone as important to the history of computers as RMS is reading what we write here. Nevertheless, the main reason for writing this article is the following: Hadopi Plans Large File-Sharing Warning Increase For 2013 from TorrentFreak by enigmax

    “BİLGİ PRCC KURUMSAL İLETİŞİM SOHBETLERİ” KURUMSAL İLETİŞİMİ MERCEK ALTINA ALIYOR   İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Halkla İlişkiler ve Kurumsal İletişim Yüksek Lisans Programı tarafından, Kurumsal İletişimciler Derneği (KİD) işbirliği ile hayata geçirilen “BİLGİ PRCC Kurumsal İletişim Sohbetleri” iletişim dünyasının dinamiklerini farklı perspektiflerle tartışmayı hedefliyor.   24 Ocak 2012, İstanbul- Halkla İlişkiler disiplininde akademik anlamda birçok yeniliğe öncülük etmiş olan İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi, Halkla İlişkiler ve Kurumsal İletişim Yüksek Lisans programı tarafından, KİD işbirliği ile düzenlenen “BİLGİ PRCC Kurumsal İletişim Sohbetleri” başlıklı konuşma dizisiyle iletişim dünyasının nabzını tutmayı hedefliyor. “BİLGİ PRCC Kurumsal İletişim Sohbetleri”, iletişim dünyasının uzman yöneticilerinin katılımıyla şekillenecek stratejik iletişimin güncel konularını gerek akademik düzlemde gerekse sektörün dinamikleri üzerinden samimi bir sohbet ortamında ele almayı amaçlıyor. 15 günde bir düzenlenecek olan “BİLGİ PRCC Kurumsal İletişim Sohbetleri”ne, özel sektörden, kamu kuruluşlarından ve sivil toplum örgütlerinden birçok üst düzey uzman iletişim yöneticisi konuşmacı olarak katılacak. “BİLGİ PRCC Kurumsal İletişim Sohbetleri”, karşılıklı diyalog ve bilgi alışverişinin ön planda olduğu, stratejik iletişim konularının farklı perspektifler üzerinden masaya yatırıldığı bir etkinlik olarak tasarlandı. Kurumsal İletişimciler Derneği’nin (KİD) de stratejik olarak destek vereceği etkinliğe katılım ücretsiz olacak. PepsiCo. Türkiye Kurumsal İletişim Müdürü Didem Şinik’le start alan “PRCC Kurumsal İletişim Sohbetleri”nin 31 Ocak 2013 Perşembe günü gerçekleşecek ikincisinde, T.C. Cumhurbaşkanlığı Kurumsal İletişim Direktörü Kemal İlter iletişimcilerle buluşacak.       Halkla İlişkiler ve Kurumsal İletişim Yüksek Lisans Program direktörü Yardımcı Doçent Doktor Erkan Saka PRCC Kurumsal İletişim Sohbetleri hakkında, “BİLGİ PRCC Kurumsal İletişim Sohbetleri’ni farklı alanlardan katılım gösterecek konuşmacıların yer aldığı dinamik bir etkinlik olarak tasarladık. Etkinliğimizin karşılıklı diyalogların ön planda olduğu, konuşmacılar kadar katılımcıların da önemli bir yer edindiği bir konuşma dizisi olmasını planlıyoruz. Bu kapsamda, ilk konuğumuz PepsiCo. Türkiye Kurumsal İletişim Müdürü Didem Şinik oldu. Etkinliğimizin sıradaki konuğu ise T.C. Cumhurbaşkanlığı Kurumsal İletişim Direktörü Kemal İlter olacak. Kendisi kurumsal iletişimi kamu perspektifi üzerinden ele alacak ve deneyimlerini bizle paylaşacak,“ dedi. İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Halkla İlişkiler ve Kurumsal İletişim Programı: 2012- 2013 akademik öğrenim yılı itibariyle ilk öğrencilerini almaya başlayacak olan İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Halkla İlişkiler ve Kurumsal İletişim Programı, öğrencilerine iletişim sektörü ve akademik dünyanın bir arada olduğu dinamik bir öğrenim modeli sunmayı hedefliyor. Program bu kapsamda İletişim Danışmanlığı Şirketleri Derneği (İDA) ve Kurumsal İletişimciler Derneği (KİD) ile yapmış olduğu stratejik işbirlikleriyle, donanımlı, sosyal konulara duyarlı, stratejik düşünce yetisi gelişmiş iletişim uzmanları yetiştirmeyi amaçlıyor.   Bilgi için: Anıl Sayan anil.sayan@bilgi.edu.tr 0 212. 311 76 09

The Anthropology blogosphere (including Ethnography.com, SavageMinds.org, anthropologyreport.com and even National Public Radio) has recently lit up with critiques of Jared Diamond’s new book The World Until Yesterday.  Jared Diamonditis seems to be a regular affliction of anthropology, re-emerging every time that the esteemed Professor of Geography (and Physiology) publishes a new tome of big picture history.  The manner that Diamond does this is something that anthros really don’t seem to like.  This is because besides his own field of Geography, Diamond borrows data liberally from all four fields of anthropology to make big generalizations in a manner a cultural geographer, comparative historian, or field ecologist might. But oh yeah, Diamond is a geographer by departmental affiliation, and a field ecologist by training and predilection. It also seems to bother anthros that Diamond also on occasion—though not always—wanders off the reservation and lets his political views seep into his analysis.  And since these political views don’t typically jibe with those of the anthros, particularly when it comes to oil companies, well you get the idea.  But then there is a counterpoint, someone finally ends up pointing out that since no anthro since Eric Wolf has done such big picture stuff in Europe and the People without History published way back in 1982, anthro has no right to complain.  And so it goes back and forth until the next big tome from Diamond comes out, and Jared Diamonditis flares up again. Ok, that’s my two paragraphs for the current “controversy.”  In response, I want to write about an anthropologist—an ethnographer actually—who I think is greatly undervalued in anthropology, Nigel Barley.  Barley describes well what anthropologists do best in The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut published in 1984.  This is the book I point students to when they want to understand field work, ethnography, and cultural anthropology.  As a sociologist, this is one of the anthro books I truly admire, because it reflects well on my own field experiences in Tanzania.  Oddly, I find few anthropologists who have read it, much less heard of it. The Innocent Anthropologist is a memorably written story of Nigel Barley’s experience doing fieldwork among the Dowayo in rural Cameroon in the early 1980s.  The strength of the book is that it includes the personal problems that emerge with the frustrations, boredom, tribulations, and mis-interpretations that inevitably emerge in the context of “doing ethnography.”  In this sense the book is much different than the dispassionate, theoretical, and methodologically rigorous ethnography typically assigned undergraduates.  In such ethnograpny in  the ethnographer somehow ends up erudite, insightful, and making references to Bourdieu and Baudrillard while drinking the local brew.  Nothing wrong with this, but let’s face it, it is not the sort of thing that a 19 year-old taking your Intro to Cultural Anthro course for General Education credit identifies with. Barley also does a great job explaining the nuts and bolts of doing ethnography in a remote Cameroonian village.  There are empathetic descriptions of coming-of-age rituals, ancestor cults, gender relations, the agricultural cycle, and a well-written nod to Malinowski.  There are also empathetic passages describing boredom, cross-cultural frustrations, and hilarious language learning errors.  And what students will really remember is Barley’s explanation of how the mechanic at the dentist’s office removed his two front teeth.  Such an account would never make its way into a standard ethnography (sorry, no spoiler here–you need to get the book!). And of course such tales, which are really the center of the ethnographic experience are left out by the likes of the ever-dignified Professor Malinowski. But the scene from Barley’s book I spend most of my time mulling about is at the very end, and has little to do with Africa, but everything to do with ethnography, culture, and the human condition.  Barley spent a year and a half in Cameroon being bored, sick, confused, and frustrated while ostensibly “doing ethnography.” Oddly though, after returning to England, he still wants to tell everyone he meets about this wonderful world he encountered in Cameroon—something that he quickly discovers no one really cares about.  Or worse, they treat him like a raving lunatic because he approaches everyday problems with a vigor and habitus appropriate to a Cameroonian village, rather than that of a staid tweed-jacketed English lecturer. So Barley returns to England, where he finds out that life is—as it had always been, despite his field work in the Cameroon. People ask him how Cameroon was, complain about the English weather, and then launch off into conversations about the more mundane things of life, like what was on television the previous evening, or the doings of the local football team.  Most mundane is the friend who complains because Barley left a sweater at his apartment some two years ago—could he please pick it up some time?  Like, who cares about a sweater when you have been dealing with ancestor cults, goat farts (sorry no spoiler on that one either!), shamanistic ritual, and have lost your two front teeth!?!? But this indeed is how the big adventures of life often end: In a question about a forgotten sweater.  This happens whether we are ethnographers, archaeologists, or any other kind of long-term traveler who becomes embedded in a new culture.  Certainly it happens to my undergraduate students who leave home for Chico State the first time, and then return to the parents at Thanksgiving or Christmas brimming with tales of college life, only to be told by their parents to be sure to eat enough lettuce and clean up their room.  Indeed such dissonance happens to anyone returning from a adventure in which they embed themselves in a culture different from their own.  And this indeed is the great ethnographic lesson Barley teaches my undergraduates.  What is more, it is a lesson every bit as big as what Jared Diamond makes with his massive tomes. Oh, despite his frustrations, whining, and moaning, did I mention that Barley returned to the Cameroon a few months later?  He was indeed hooked on field work and the need to experience new cultures, as we hope our students will—after all the complaining and lost teeth, he was back in Cameroon as quickly as he could. It has long mystified me that The Innocent Anthropologist is not a staple of Intro to Cultural Anthropology courses.  It is well written, funny, empathetic, theoretical, and easy to read.  And students are happy to read it—the whole thing.  Most importantly, it is a fantastic introduction to what ethnographers do, why they do it, and what an anthropological viewpoint has to say about not just a small place in Cameroon, but the human condition.  I have used this book in my undergraduate social science classes a number of times, and it has always worked well to get students dreaming about the possibilities of culture and travel—i.e. the things that I would expect a good Intro to Cultural Anthropology course to do.  And the neat thing is that it can do it by celebrating what anthropology does best—while leaving poor irrelevant Jared Diamond out of the story.

An open access review in Pacific Affairs of Deborah McDowell Aoki’s book, Widows of Japan: An Anthropological Perspective, says that this “…comprehensive study of Japanese widows brings into focus the complex, ambiguous, often tragic history of the impact of spousal death on Japanese women. Her eight years of research from 1996 included 58 interviews with women from urban and rural areas. She states the themes in the introduction: ‘the fetishism of female bodies to protect and embody family honor, the historical role of state formation in creating family and kinship systems, and the integrative functions provided by women…’ ”

The University of South Florida News carried an article about ongoing research into the consequences of new Latino immigrants, African Americans and working class Whites coming face to face at work in the U.S. South and how to better bridge differences. The project is led by cultural anthropologist Angela Stuesse, an assistant professor at the University of South Florida. Here are some excerpts, with some paraphrasing, from the article: Angela Stuesse accompanied leaders from a Guatemalan Mam immigrant community on a political education tour in Mississippi. Photo by Angela Stuesse Recent immigrants and people descended from earlier immigrants – whether voluntary or forced – often eye each other warily, sometimes finding themselves at odds. Making a connection can be as simple as knowing how to start a conversation – one that can become the basis for working together – rather than a fight. But as Stuesse has found, such conversations often don’t just happen. And if they do, they can be touchy. “Across cultures, knowing what not to say can be as important as knowing what to say and how to say it,” points out, and “Immigrants, too, may hold racial and other biases toward those they come into contact with. There’s a need to help groups understand each other. Ideally, they can work together and develop mutual respect.” Stuesse’s research has produced her forthcoming book, Globalization ‘Southern Style, which describes the transformation of small-town Mississippi when Latino immigrants begin working and organizing alongside African Americans in the area’s chicken processing plants. While working in Mississippi, Stuesse was a founding collaborator of the poultry worker center, MPOWER, where she drew upon her research to help facilitate structured dialogue and spaces for political education and cultural sharing among immigrant and U.S.-born poultry worker leaders. She has also developed Intergroup Resources, a comprehensive new online resource center that is becoming a national network. The user-friendly Intergroup Resources website built and designed by Stuesse’s research team offers curricula, dialogue guides, educational materials and descriptions of the efforts of various groups.

Marcia Pally’s post tracks the important fact that contemporary American evangelical social and political engagement is fragmenting. She rightly observes that such fragmenting is not historically novel, and is a self-consciously critical response to the power of the Religious Right. To read of “robust polyphony” among evangelicals was especially welcome to me, as I addressed this phenomenon in a recent ethnography, Emerging Evangelicals (NYU Press, 2011). As a cultural anthropologist, I explored the identities fashioned, practices performed, histories claimed, institutions created, and critiques waged among evangelicals influenced by the Emerging Church movement. Pally’s astute analysis returned me to a question I stopped short of fully developing: does fragmentation equal change? While it is clear that evangelicalism is diversifying, it is unclear what this amounts to. We see voting blocs split, financial donations broaden, volunteer labor disperse, and moral-political agendas expand. But, do these fragmentations signal tectonic, hard-wired, all-bets-are-off cultural change? Or, is it more superficial (which is not to say unimportant or not deeply felt) social change? Do electoral politics and other shifting forms of activism amount to fundamental change, or merely changing patterns of action? Briefly, consider one example: evangelical anti-human trafficking campaigns. This is not an example Pally cites, but it exemplifies her point about a diversifying consciousness. Evangelicals, in step with other faith-based and secular actors, are devoting increasing attention to the global problem of labor and sex trafficking. A thorough canvassing of evangelical anti-trafficking would be most welcome: how many organizations exist, how much money they raise, where in the world they work, and so forth. But, the more vital qualitative question is what cultural materials evangelicals use to conceptualize and conduct anti-trafficking activism. Consider a representative organization. Unearthed, a film ministry founded in 2009, culminates its lead documentary with: “Even if we were to rescue every victim of sex trafficking today, there’s still gonna be a demand for millions and millions and millions of new slaves tomorrow. Because at the root of sexual exploitation is a demand, and it’s driven by men. If we want to change this thing systemically, if we want to stamp it out at the root, what men want at the deepest level, like their hearts and their desires, have to be changed.” Does this hint at a profoundly different evangelicalism? I would say ‘no,’ because the organizing cultural logic is individualist, moralist, and male-centered. Unearthed relies on a thin model of agency. If men stop masturbating to pornography, going to strip clubs, and paying prostitutes for sex, then human trafficking will grind to a halt. Females – and, strikingly, a wide range of females – have little to no agency: an adult exotic dancer and a 10-year old sex slave are imagined as much the same. Moreover, the structures that create the conditions for and reproduce trafficking are systematically undervalued in the discourse of organizations like Unearthed. Global poverty, hunger, labor demands, punitive and legal policy, and transnational migration routes are scarcely mentioned or completely absent. The fragmenting of evangelical activism is undeniably important. However, we must be cautious in what we make of it. As the case of anti-trafficking suggests, it would be easy to mistake a “new” evangelical cause for a “new” evangelicalism. We need clear theories of cultural change to make proper sense of shifting ground. What kind of re- project are we witnessing: a re-organizing of existing evangelical culture, or a re-making?

Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile by Clara Han University of California Press, 2012 298 pp, US$26.95 paperback   Life in Debt is not an easy read. This ethnography of care and violence—intimate, political and governmental— in La Pincoya, a poor neighborhood of neoliberal Santiago, effectively draws the reader into the everyday rhythms of its residents. The book is ethnographically dense, brimming with insights and textures that Clara Han has collected over the course of thirty-six months of fieldwork, and it is precisely this ethnographic familiarity, this attention to the quotidian and the biographical that makes it difficult for the reader to get a break from the intensity of the described suffering and enduring. The ethnographic thickness also prevents any hasty attempt at turning La Pincoya into an example of neoliberalism at large in an economic periphery or of collective trauma and historical memory in the wake of human rights abuses of Pinochet regime—the two being most obvious narrative frames for the given site. Han offers empathetic account of the inexhaustible patience that her interlocutors exercise within home and neighborhood—caring for the dear ones who are abusive, violent, unresponsive, stubborn, or ill—and of excessive generosity that they sometimes practice: one mother borrows a neighbor’s department store credit card to buy a stereo for her daughter’s boyfriend, a cocaine addict with a complicated health history, because the music “soothes his nerves.”  Patience, care, generosity, as well as appetites for pretty things and dignified existence, discourage any reductionist attempts at medicalizing the condition of the poor or moralizing the urban poor’s consumptive appetites. Life at the economic periphery, as everywhere else, is messy and cluttered, animated by desires for commodities that make therapeutic, salvific, commonsensical promises and lie within reach, courtesy of credit instruments. And yet, life at La Pincoya is extraordinarily difficult. Excessive generosity and borrowed means ultimately purchase deferral. The boyfriend gets violent again, then pardoned, then expelled from the house; debts appreciate; neighbors lose patience with those who “shamelessly” complain about debts; accumulated possessions are sold to pay off installments; and relationships deteriorate. Life in Debt often attends to the temporal qualities of the “loaned life” (pp. 31, 38) and yet it is the ethnographic that speaks most compellingly, if subtly, about temporalities of debt that do not receive Han’s full theoretical attention. The short, rapid cycles of relative wealth and painful precarity, of splendid purchases, house renovations and divestment, displacement and starvation that mark the lives of the post-proletarian, intermittently employed are, after all, so predictably “neoliberal.” The quotidian clutter shows that economies are indeed lived richly, unpredictably, imaginatively, but the temporal dynamic is shared, transnational, and effectively choreographing the local existential domain. In short, Han’s remarkable historical account of neoliberal Chile makes no mention of capital. On the one hand, it is refreshing to read an ethnography that does not feel compelled to at least pay lipservice to the category that became emblematic of politically-minded scholarship. Instead of “capital” as a shorthand for a category that nests the presumably obvious power, looming and framing the contemporary existence, Han describes the ethnographically more salient economic forms: debt instruments, money, wealth and consumer commodities, real-estate, investments in ritual and reproductive futures. On the other hand, without a more comprehensive, and critical, analytic, the recurrent resonances between the lived economies at La Pincoya and the more structural, and global, dynamics and tendencies, may seem merely coincidental: there is the proliferation of credit instruments; there are shifts between under-employment and multiple-jobs with erratic work schedules; there is the cell-phone technology as well as antidepressants that facilitate job-searches and mediate deferrals of job opportunities; there is the insurgence of luck, speculation, and contingency (see Han’s excellent discussion of la polla, pp. 70-75); there is the ethos of self-help; and there is the structural, tight embrace with the most affluent Santiago neighborhoods where La Pincoya residents care for the homes, children, and the elderly. Han brilliantly, often quite beautifully, fleshes out the intersections between the existential and the economic, tending to various credit instruments as well as to historical shifts in the political imaginary that is recurrently framed by the logic of debt. And yet, Han’s subtle writing suggests a hesitance to theorize the kinds of bodies and subjects that she writes into the text. At times, Han tends to read her interlocutors’ hidden or unconscious motivations and inner thoughts or to interpret, symbolically or psychologically, their dreams, both of which tendencies leave this reader somewhat skeptical, not least because she does not articulate the conceptual grounds from which she issues claims to such privileged access and interpretation. While she is most vocal when it comes to disavowning certain biomedical models (e.g. antidepressant effects p.206) or commonsensical assumptions about economic, governmental, or medical subjects, she is mostly silent about the carnal realities, experiential processes, and affective events that make up the lived, embodied existence. Again, her ethnographic mastery lets the complex material realities and inter-subjective processes emerge from the text, suggesting a number of theoretical readings that Han herself may not be interested in venturing: the local medical complaints suggest quite a literal contiguity between bodies, economic forms or existential misfortune (see especially pp. 30, 125, 206-7); local remedies and practices paint physical and metaphysical domains that are unfamiliar to the ideal-typical biomedical or secular reason (soul 185; animo, spirit/energy 207-8; name potencies 103); multiplicity of therapeutic strategies and agents that La Pincoya residents mobilize suggest ontological fluidity while the prevalence of psycho-pharmaceuticals and global mental health categories point to the power inequality and epistemological colonization that expands beyond the reach of the public-private health clinics; and, finally, the medical alternatives that social workers and psychologists working with the public health outreach programs themselves invent or incorporate (from incense cleansing to Jungian categories to reincarnation pp.178; 185-193), call for some reflection on the more general form and terrain of biomedical knowledge in contemporary Chile. Life in Debt offers a very fine, politically-minded account of indebted existence. Han’s historically and biographically specific text raises stakes of the debate on moral economies of credit by offering intricate, memorable ethnographic detail about the embodied temporalities and relationalities of the under-employed, overworked urban population. This book has much to contribute to the global scholarship on debt, beyond the Chilean and Latin American context.   Larisa Jasarevic is a Senior Lecturer in the International Studies Program at the University of Chicago with a history of research interests in body, medicine, and economies of gift and debt. Her book manuscript on health and wealth in postsocialist, postconflict Bosnia is currently under review. Her new research project turns ethnographic attention to an archaeological and spiritual site in central Bosnia, where a local scientific project energetically gathers transnational community in an ongoing experiment with methods and values of knowledge production.

I just used the fascinating Up-Goer Five Text Editor, named after this XKCD cartoon, to write an abstract of my book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History, using only the ‘ten hundred’ most common words in the English language.  It was a bit of a challenge since I couldn’t use ‘history’, ‘numeral’, ‘system’, or ‘math’, but [...]

Marcia Pally’s incisive essay on “the new evangelicals” highlights a relatively small but growing population of white evangelicals who appear to be embracing broader, less conservative visions of the common good, and public policy views (at least partially) more in line with Democratic politics than their recent forebears.  While her descriptions presumably are not limited to those who necessarily call themselves “new evangelicals,” she does invoke the work and ideas of public evangelicals who clearly self-identify as such. This points to an interesting observation worth considering here: to assume the mantle of newness is to make an ideological statement as well as a historical claim. Newness is a fascinating, and very loaded concept.  It expresses ideas of innovation and progress, as well as rupture and substitution.  Whether presented in the form of prophetic revelations, revolutionary ideologies, or consumer branding, “the New” is always wrapped in a combination of promise and threat – it promises to improve upon the old, while threatening to eclipse and even replace it.  Newness inspires hope as well as fear, with a provocative power that sometimes borders on the messianic. It is hardly surprising then that evangelical Protestants, for whom “authentic faith” is all about radical rebirth and regeneration, have historically placed so much stock in things new and improved, often against heavy resistance in their own ranks.  There were the “New Light” evangelicals, whose religious enthusiasm inspired mass conversions in the eighteenth century, but also led to historic schisms. In the nineteenth century, Charles Grandison Finney promoted “new measures” of revival, generating celebrity while drawing his own share of detractors. The 1940s saw the emergence of the “new evangelicalism” (version 1.0), a self-conscious effort by the likes of Carl Henry and Billy Graham to recover the evangelical brand from fundamentalists.  The “New Christian Right” of the 1970s was a reactionary juggernaut that redefined the arena where evangelical political and cultural activism took shape. The point is not to downplay the actual newness or significance of growing evangelical centrism—or as I prefer to call it, plasticity—in contemporary US politics and public culture, but rather to think about this shift in relation to evangelicalism’s long and fraught history of constant renovation. This is important because every new movement and shift in the field of evangelical engagement stands in tension with its densely layered past, and this tension can be felt most acutely by participants on the ground. Exacerbating the tension further is the fact that virtually all known varieties of evangelical religiosity, whether they are branded as “new” or “old,” rely on the common (but conflicting) belief among participants that what they are doing is closer in spirit to the ministry of Jesus, and truer to the letter of biblical law. Several years ago I did fieldwork among socially engaged evangelicals who sought to mobilize popular support for social outreach initiatives in predominantly conservative congregations. The resulting book, Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches, focused on individuals who would likely gravitate toward, or at least be sympathetic to the current “new evangelical” agenda. Yet my research also showed that socially engaged evangelicals occupy very complex positions in the wider milieu of white evangelicalism. They engage in ministry activities that many churchgoers admire and even valorize, but their efforts also bring out lingering disagreements, fears, and doubts about the future of evangelism, and intensify longstanding debates about whether the mission of the church is ultimately meant to be a proselytic or social one. Rather than representing one side of that debate, the socially engaged evangelicals I observed often found themselves caught squarely in the middle of it, seeking to draw both inspiration and institutional legitimization from multiple strands of Protestant tradition, from the defense of strict biblical orthodoxy and personal pietism to the millennialist optimism of nineteenth-century social reforms and the prophetic justice orientation of Martin Luther King. All of these influences make up an intriguing mélange of ideals and sensibilities that animate the moral universe inherited by today’s evangelicals.  They are the reasons we perceive evangelicalism as a field in constant flux, oscillating between paths of engagement and separatism, progressive reform and reactionary protest.  The reality is that much of the time these apparently polarized impulses are actually coexisting and overlapping throughout the evangelical subculture, even within the same denominations, churches, and small groups. For those evangelicals who stand committed to one path of engagement over another, the matter of newness is often unambiguous—in with the new, out with the old, the only way forward.  But for others, perhaps a more reserved majority of non-activists, newness is a motivational framework that is at once extremely attractive and problematic.  This is because any tradition that thrives on newness must also seek to protect the continuity of tradition, paradoxical as all that might seem. As we evaluate the potential long-term effects of evangelicals gradually (and partially) moving away from the religious right, we should remain mindful of the historical, cultural, and institutional forces that will fuel their movements and at the same time restrain or subvert them.  This is not just about a pendulum swinging back and forth from right to left, though this will almost undoubtedly occur over time. In a grander sense, it is about agonistic and heroic quests for newness, and evangelicalism’s enduring struggle to be continually reborn.

Two years have passed since the outbreak of the revolution in Egypt. Today, there is no end in sight.Since more than a week (I returned to Egypt last week for the first time since the end of October), a tense mood of anticipation and preparation for the second anniversary of the revolution has prevailed. There has been a lot of anxiety that the protests might turn violent. At the same time, Egypt has entered a renewed economical crisis. After receiving an IMF loan, the government has allowed the Egyptian pound to lose much of its value against the dollar, and has started to cut public subsidies and to increase taxes (although many decisions, rapidly and haphazardly declared and implemented, have been quickly withdrawn again). Numerous train accidents (whereby tens of people have died) have shown in what terrible shape Egypt's infrastructure is. Supporters of the leftist and liberal opposition entered a sense frustration following the success of the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist allies in pushing through the constitution in spite of widespread protests in November and December. But today was their day, as they entered the streets again to revive the revolutionary movement against Egypt's new Islamist rulers. (The Brotherhood and their Islamist allies have abstained from demonstrations today, and the Brotherhood's press organ Freedom and Justicecalled citizens to celebrate the anniversary by building up the country.)It has been quite a day, and I'm not sure yet whether it has been a success or a defeat for the opposition.Quite a dayIn this sense of renewed anxiety, the second anniversary was expected to be a tense day, and a lot of people expressed the fear (and some expressed it as a hope) that there will be clashes. S., my host in Alexandria, originally wanted to demonstrate together with his wife R. and their children. But by this morning, R. decided that it was too risky to take the children to the demonstration, and stayed home with them. At noon, as I arrived at al-Qa'id Ibrahim, the customary starting point of demonstrations in Alexandria, I could see that a lot of people had thought likewise. Protests of the liberal/left opposition often have a high number of women, easily making up a quarter or third of the crowd. But today at al-Qa'id Ibrahim there were very few women and almost no children in sight. There were lots of people, but not as many as in some of the big protests against the Constitutional Declaration last November and December. Clearly many people had preferred to stay at home, fearing violence. No route had been determined for the protest march today. Instead, various marches departed from al-Qa'id Ibrahim and other parts of the city into different directions, trying to make the protests felt all around the city. I met R., one of the active protesters who go to almost every demonstration since 2011. She was with a group of other young women and told that they were going to the City Council to see if there are clashes. I walked around the streets of downtown Alexandria that were filled with different marches. One of them was also heading to the City Council and I decided to go there as well. The City Council is a located in the former security directorate in Kom al-Dikka quarter, between the Roman amphiteatre (one of the city's tourist attraction) and the railway station, and it is one of the few visible sites of the central government in Alexandria. Arriving there, I found a police line blocking the entrance to the street, and a few hundreds of protesters standing directly in front of them. Here the crowd was different from al-Qa'id Ibrahim square. The people were young, many of them wearing Palestinian kufiyas and masks for protection against teargas, and there were lots of women. Here was the gathering point of the hardcore revolutionaries experienced in clashes with the police and supporters of the Ikhwan throughout the past two years. They had headed for the place where it was most likely that troubles would happen. And very soon, they happened.The most recent group in the radical revolutionary spectrum are the black blocks which have very recently been established in Egypt following the example set by the autonomous radical left in Europe. They arrived on the scene in a moment when tempers were already rising after a protester had ripped off a part of the sign of the city council. Heading the march from al-Qa'id Ibrahim, tens of young people, dressed in black and carrying a large flag, arrived right in front of the police cordon and tried to push forward. From where I was standing I could only see the heads of the people, but a friend of mine who was in the first row told that between the protesters and the police, there was a line of thugs in civil who were taking orders from a police officer. According to my friend, it was the thugs who initially attacked the protesters who were pushing against the police line. From my point of view, I could only hear loud bangs and see that people started running. I ran with them for some ten metres and took cover behind a corner. As I took a look at the scene seconds later, tear gas was being shot from the side of the police, and rocks were flowing from the side of the protesters. (It was quite an aesthetic sight, I must admit). A street fight evolved, and I moved slowly backwards with the crowds as more tear gas entered the street, while bit by bit more people entered the streed to aid the protesters. On my way, I heard comments like: “Look at what Morsy is doing to us!” I took a different street to walk back to downtown where I met S. and K., an editor and cameraman who was there equipped with a high-end camera to take photos and videos. We headed back to the Roman amphitheatre were we found rapidly growing crowds of protesters. Otherwise, the protesters would have headed for Sidi Gaber, but as soon as the clashes began, everybody's attention turned to the City Council. By the time we returned to the amphiheatre, the protesters had been able to push back the police and occupy the street in front of the City Council. S., K., and I headed that way and arrived nearly at the point where the clashes had started, when tear gas started raining on the protesters again, and people started running back to the roman theatre. Shortly thereafter, clashes started in the side alleys between protesters and thugs in civil, stones were thrown both ways, and shots of birdshot were heard (whoever was shooting was apparently firing in the air, because all injuries reported were caused by teargas). The thugs on the side streets were pushed back, the numbers on the square increased and the radical revolutionaries with their kufiyas were joined by young men from popular quarters on motorcycles and armed with wooden sticks, as well as a big and mixed crowds of protesters, some of whom headed forward to face the police, while others stayed back to chant slogans against the government, and yet others carried bottles and spray bottles with medicine and vinegar to treat the effects of teargas. That treatment was urgently needed, because there was a lot of teargas, and it was sharp. According to people who had been regularly inhaling teargas in the past two years, this gas was sharper and worse than what they were used to. From then on, the clashes took a repetitive pattern: People would arrive on the square and push towards the police, teargas was shot (from quite some distance), and people were forced to retreat to breath freely, and as soon as the air was clean again, they would push forward again. At noon, the wind was blowing from the sea towards the police, but by the afternoon it turned so that the gas moved towards the protesters. While new marches kept arriving at the site, many people could not hold out very long in the gas and left again, and bit by bit the protesters were pushed back from the City Council to the square next to the amphitheatre. By 7 p.m. it was clear that the situation was going to stay that way, and we went to have a glass of tea with friends in one of the nearby cafés. In downtown of Alexandria most shops were closed, with the exception of snack food restaurants and cafés - and those were crowded with protesters taking a break.We took the minibus back to Mandara, and at home on television we could see that the situation in Alexandria was calm in comparison with Suez where several protesters and one policeman were killed later this evening, and late at night the army entered the city to restore order. And during the evening, also Tahrir Square and its surroundings have witnessed clashes, teargas, and shooting. In other cities there have been demonstrations and clashes too, and several offices of the Muslim Brotherhood and its political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party have been stormed.A friend of mine who stayed in the protest until the end, reports that late at night, as the numbers of protesters had significantly receded, the police started arbitrarily arresting people in downtown Alexandria.Oppositional attitudesToday's clashes did not come as a surprise. The demonstrations between the Constitutional Declaration and the constitutional referendum in November and December witnessed an increasingly sharp polarisation, as well as a growing amount of violence. However, that violence was mainly between supporters of the government and the opposition, and the police was rarely involved. Now it is between protesters and the police again. Since a few weeks, Egypt has a new Minister of Interior, invested with the power to make the police work again. And unlike in November and December, the police is now working hard in support of the government again, and the gestures of deescalation that could be seen in December, were quite absent today. The police is back very much in the shape in which it was seen during the first days of the revolution.However, the violence was partly also due to a change in the attitude of a big part of the leftist and liberal revolutionaries. These are the circles I know best in different social contexts, be it in the leftist intellectual scene, teachers in the poor suburbs, and supporters of the revolution in the countryside. Among people in these milieus whom I have met during the past week, there is a striking shift in attitude between last autumn and now. Critical distrust towards the Muslim Brotherhood has given way to outright hatred. And a lot of people have lost faith in peaceful action. H., a determined revolutionary from the village says that he is against the old system, and against the Brotherhood, and that he is ready to pick up a fight with both anytime. Another man from the village claimed in the heat of a debate in a café that the only real solution would be to go from house to house and kill the Brotherhood members. An artist from Alexandria, when asked whether he was going to demonstrate on 25 January, told: “I only go if there are clashes.” The failure of the opposition to force Morsy to make serious concessions after the Constitutional Declaration or to thwart the Brotherhood's constitution in the referendum has made many people feel that the only way to change things is through direct confrontation.This view is contested by many others in the revolutionary spectrum who argue that such confrontation will only lead to the loss of the popular support which the opposition has been able to mobilise since Morsy entered office in the summer. They are also worried that the polarisation between the Brotherhood and the opposition compels the revolutionaries to make alliances with the wrong people. In a meeting of teachers and poets in a café in Asafra some days ago, these were highly contested issues. One of the people in the round argued that we should criticise the Brotherhood for their real mistakes rather than spread wholesale enmity against them because such wholesale rejection would only make the opposition to the Ikhwan lose its credibility. Another person in the round accused the first for heeding sympathies for Brotherhood, which the first of course denied. A third argued to me that he was very worried that the National Salvation Front that was formed by various opposition groups in November was also accepting former NDP members candidates in the future elections. He believes that the revolutionaries alone will be able to gain sufficient popular support, but they have to do it the right way. For him, no enmity towards the Brotherhood would justify alliances with the old system: “I know the Islamists want to hang me on my feet and lock up my wife and prohibit my daughter from going to school. But the guys of the NDP killed our people. If it is the Brotherhood against the National Salvation Front with people from the NDP in their rows, I won't go to vote. If there is a clean revolutionary list with not a single person from the old system in my electoral district, I vote them.” And indeed, revolutionary opposition by peaceful means has not really failed. This was pointed out to me by N., one of the village revolutionaries, at a meeting of friends in a café in the village. As the discussion inevitably turned to politics, H. stated clearly: “We failed”, and added that while he was convinced that he was on the losing side of the battle, he would fight. Another in the round agreed with H.: “There must be a fight.” But they were contradicted by N., who argued that actually the campaign against the constitution had been very successful in the village. The outcome of the referendum in the village including the rurrounding hamlets was 47% no against 53% yes, and with the inhabitants of the hamlets voting largely “Yes”, in the village itself the “No” vote actually had a majority. Compare this to the 63% victory of the Yes-vote nationwide, and to many rural provinces voting “Yes” with more than 80% of the vote. For N. the question was not about fight, but about winning over people. Some people voted No just because they were against the Brotherhood, but even without them, the revolutionary current enjoyed sound support, he argued. And among those who voted “Yes”, there were people who could yet be convinced. Convincing the people – that was the task according to N. He was contradicted by H.: “Convince the people! You're joking!” N. replied: “Yes, I know how to convince people, seriously.” What emerged in the discussion between N. and H. is a split between two oppositional attitudes: One of a principled rejection and determined struggle for the sake of the right thing, even if one knew one was losing; and another of a search for ways to make partial gains in a struggle over people's minds and hearts. Getting high on teargasHowever, the split between principled rejection and pragmatics of persuation is not enough to interpret today's events and the shifting attitudes among the revolutionary spectrum. Had N. been able to come to Alexandria he would have joined the protests. For him, convincing the people in his village and fighting the government in the streets do not contradict each other. L., one of the teachers whom I met in the café in Asafra some days ago and who took a cautious and non-confrontative stance and rejected the idea of Egyptians fighting each others, was among the protesters today. Although he was critical about the way the escalation of the protests had made them less capable in gathering mass suport, he went and inhaled his dose of tear gas at the City Council as well: “My friend and I went as far into the gas as we hated Morsy. I hate him 75% so I only went so far, my friend hates him 200%, so he went further ahead.” Both those who search for a common ground as well as those who no longer believe in peaceful action were inhaling tear gas today, and described their doing so with a certain sense of enthusiasm. There is a sensual quality to protess and clashes that attracts and transforms people. And teargas is its most explicit symbol. (I wrote about the longing for the smell of teargas already in November 2011, but after inhaling a good dose of it today, I think there is more to be said about it) Shortly after the clashes began I ran into E., a musician from the intellectual leftist scene, his face already white from medicine spray against the effects of teargas. I offered him a sandwich that was left over from my lunch. He replied: “No thanks, I'm getting high on teargas.” Later the same day, another person commented: “Egyptians have become addicted to teargas.” Getting high on teargas is in fact a running joke that I have heard several times today. But inhaling teargas is actually very unpleasant. One's eyes and face burn, one starts to cough heavily and it becomes difficult to breath and see. All these unpleasant sensations are combined with a general sense of confusion as people start to run away to avoid the gas cloud, and one has to run along while coughing and trying to keep one's eyes open. Heavy exposure to teargas can be lethal. How could one get addicted to something so unpleasant?The first time one faces teargas, the reaction is to run. There is a sense of panic. Today, people were mostly walking away from the gas cloud in an orderly fashion and then walking back as soon as the air was clear. It becomes an annoyance rather than a hazard. And most importantly, getting exposed to teargas without being defeated by is part of the formative experience of protesters for whom demonstrations, sit-ins, and clashes are among the most beautiful and meaningful moments of their life. The people I met at the protest today were angry and upset, but they were not frustrated, not depressed, not cynical. They knew that they were struggling for the good cause, and they were surrounded by friends and like-minded people. While the protesters moved back and forth towards the police and then away from the gas, they were at the same time involved in countless warm-hearted encounters with friends, shaking hands and hugging, joking and exchanging news. Coming together in struggle makes life meaningful, and teargas is an olfactory embodiment of this experience.What comes in place of fear?However, even this is not quite sufficient. There is yet another aspect that is important in order to understand the escalation of the events today. And contrary to tear gas addiction, it is one that is shared by a much wider part of Egyptians: loss of fear. The by now proverbial “breaking of fear” that marked the outbreak of the revolution has been widely cited as one of the few true accomplishments of the revolution. It is not simply a condition of fear or no fear, however. Many people were afraid to join the demonstration today, while others were not, and yet others were looking for confrontation. S. who is not a hardcore protester like R., but who has nevertheless participated in numerous protests in Alexandria since 28 January 2011, noted to me today that back in the first 18 days of the revolution, he was much more afraid than now. “Today, we were standing in the middle of the street watching the fighting in the side alley. We heard several shots, and saw a guy on a roof with a gun. But we didn't think about running away or taking cover. We were tense and anxious, but we weren't afraid.” In the course of the past two years, a part of the revolutionaries have grown quite fearless, not only in demonstrations but in their lives. Many of them have started to live much less conventional lives, and have stopped to worry about what others say. But I also know of people who have turned violent in their domestic lives. And there can be a lot of trauma underneath the loss of fear. So things are rather complicated, and the loss of fear is not always a good thing. It breaks much of the reflexes of oppression people had once internalised, but it can also do quite some damage. Loss of fear is not an accomplishment in its own right. The question is: What comes in its place?After two years, fear has not simply been replaced by positive sentiments. Instead, the prevailing sentiments are anxiety and unrest, mixed with hope and emboldenment (See also my post from March 2011 where I thought about anxiety). If the first months of the rule of Muslim Brotherhood were marked by a period of certain relaxation, since November anxiety and nervous tension are in the increase again, and today has marked another moment of escalation. A question that remains is: Where will this escalation of anxiety and unrest lead to? Does it help the revolutionary opposition in excerting effective pressure, or are they losing support of all those people who do not want to be part of a destructive escalation and polarisation? Will it help the Muslim Brotherhood in presenting itself as the constructive power, or will it further undermine its already shaky legitimacy? Is it part of a necessarily antagonistic struggle on the way towards a better Egypt, or is it a destructive power that may eventually bring back the same kind of criminal rule that wrecked the country for decades?This morning, S. was sceptical. He said that all the talk about the loss of fear was in the end only serving the Muslim Brotherhood to conceal the fact that the revolution has changed nothing. But tonight, after returning home from the demonstration he said: “I'm certain that after all these struggles, Egypt will one day be one of the fines and freest countries in the world.”

Visited the Suzhou style garden in Huanggang Village today. The Village axis runs from the arch on Fumin Road via a main street and the central plaza to the ancestral … Continue reading →