Portlandia (Fridays, 10:00, IFC) has started its third season. Fred Armisen (Saturday Night Live) and Carrie Brownstein (Sleater-Kinney) continue to search the city for satiric targets. And because satiric targets are one of Portland's chief exports, the comedic opportunities are many: Bed and Breakfasts, knitting, pickling — and organic deodorant: See the full post here.  

MDS wrote: I have been frustrated in trying to figure out how to use verbal phrases consisting of a verb plus a preposition/adverb in an adjectival or noun context.  I'm sure I didn't use the right linguistic phraseology there, so let me tell you what I mean.  I'm speaking of verbal phrases such as "build out," "work out," "build up," "put in," "sell off," "sell out," etc., where the auxiliary word isn't really working as either an preposition or an adverb.  It's simply part of a verbal phrase.  When used as a verb, other words may either be placed in between the words of the verbal phrase or after it.   E.g., "sell it off" vs. "sell off your stock."  I would be interested to hear what the appropriate part of speech is for the auxiliary word in these verbal phrases. That much is easy: out, up, in, off, etc. are all prepositions, and in the cited combinations with verbs, they are simply intransitive prepositions. But MDS continues: However, that's not my main issue. My question pertains to how these verbal phrases should appear when used in the position of a noun.  Obviously, one doesn't continue the use of the two words separated by a space in such uses.  But what should guide our decision whether to use a hyphen or to jam the words together?  There isn't a single rule, obviously.  One talks of going to work out at a "workout," not a "work-out."  One looks to build up holdings in a "buildup."  But, one puts a canoe in the water at a "put-in," not a "putin." My particular frustration is with respect to building out broadband networks, as described in filings with the FCC.  Should one (excuse the jargon) refer to "buildout obligations" as part of a "nationwide buildout of infrastructure," or as "build-out obligations" as part of a "nationwide build-out of infrastructure," or some combination of those?  Obviously, one would not use "build out" in the adjectival or substantive versions, but are there reasons for hyphenating vs. combining the two words when using them as either a noun or adjectival phrase? Inquiring minds want to know. First, one more bit of syntactic terminology. English allows nouns to be used freely as modifiers of other nouns, in compound nouns and other complex-nominal constructions, and such nouns or noun phrases don't thereby become adjectives — they're still just nouns. This morning's news mentions "air support", "ground operations", "administration officials", "national security team", "terrorist sanctuary".  The phrase "buildout obligations" is a compound noun analogous to "treaty obligations" or "income-tax obligations", and buildout (in whatever spelling) remains a noun, just as treaty and income tax do. The spelling of such compound nouns — at least the question of space vs. hyphen vs. nothing — is one of the last unconquered bastions of English orthographic liberty. Particular publications may attempt to impose particular patterns for the spelling of particular compounds in particular contexts, but freedom stubbornly persists, even in the works of individual writers. Thus over the past year, Andrew Revkin's Dot Earth feature at the New York Times has used all three possible spellings for the noun [build+out]: [link] When you combine the kind of work Levin and others are doing with this global build out of connections (which is going into fast forward as smart phone prices drop), it’s hard not to be a rational optimist, as defined in Matt Ridley’s illuminating recent book. [link] A central point in the chorus of warnings from Bilham and other earthquake researchers is that the developing world (particularly the industrializing giants India and China) is more than replicating a similar build-out of cities in seismic danger zones. [link] As I’ve been asserting lately, with the buildout of the “Knowosphere,” we may be poised to surmount that barrier. I note this not to censure Mr. Revkin, but to praise him. We've lost the freedom to write "build" or "builde" or  "buyld" or "buylde" or "bylde" or "bilde" — let's not rush to abandon the few feeble little orthographic liberties we have left. That said, there are two factors that obviously play a role in our compound-spelling choices. First, more familiar combinations tend to be hyphenated or written solid — and as a compound becomes lexicalized, it is more closely combined more often. And second, there's a tendency for nominal structures of the form [[X Y] Z] to be written X-Y Z, in order to make the structure clearer to readers. Some similar issues in German were an important part of the ill-fated Rechtschreibreform of 1996, which was mentioned in a few LLOG posts back in 2004: "State-Ordered Dyslexia", 8/6/2004 "More on spelling unreform", 8/7/2004 "Many new rules a little meaningfully", 8/7/2004 "Superfluity and uselessness", 8/8/2004 "Update on the Germanspellingreformoppositionmovement", 8/21/2004 And compound-spelling issues in Dutch inflamed public passions at about the same time: "Spell simply and carry a big stick", 12/21/2005.

FINAL CALL FOR ABSTRACTS REMINDER: Closing date for abstract submission is on the 01 February 2013, please remember to go online and submit your abstract to meet the deadline. HOW to SUBMIT Submissions for abstracts will be available on ASSHH conference website www.asshhconference.org between 1 November 2012 and 1 February 2013.  Contact details of the programme organising committee and conference administration are available at www.asshhconference.org For the 2nd International Conference, for the Social Sciences and Humanities in HIV we invite papers that address the theme of ‘KNOWING PRACTICES’. This dual concept poses questions about the multiple practices that comprise the dynamics of the epidemic and how the practice of knowing itself, is engaged and operationalised. ‘KNOWING PRACTICES’ refers to: 1. The practices that produce, reproduce and transform the social worlds in which people live. This includes what knowledge we have of the forces shaping the epidemic – whether social, structural, geographic, historical, political or economic – and their connection to practice; and 2. The different ways of ‘doing science’ or knowing (and unknowing), that is, on the ways in which we as scientists claim to have evidence. We hope this theme will be sufficiently broad and, at the same time, nuanced in reference to the work of the social sciences and humanities to elicit papers on a variety of topics. Within the theme of ‘KNOWING PRACTICES’, we ask what sorts of knowing and un-knowing practices are assembled and enacted as ‘authentic’, ‘valid’, ‘verifiable’? What role is there for the social sciences and humanities in the increasingly biomedical vision of the future by science and its funders? Indeed, in what ways does the promise articulated at AIDS 2012 – that biomedicine will eradicate HIV and end the epidemic – put in place strategies that simultaneously evade the complexity of the everyday nature of living and working with HIV? How can the social sciences and humanities produce knowledge that has an impact on the many forces that shape the epidemic? While papers that address the conference’s theme ‘KNOWING PRACTICES’ are especially relevant, papers contributing to the advance of rigorous social scientific and humanities approaches to HIV and take other perspectives on the social sciences and humanities are also encouraged. Conference Papers/ Full Sessions/ Round Table Discussions We encourage papers/discussions at all levels of analysis and from paradigms and perspectives that address the following: • The biomedical claims of ‘turning the tide’ to end the epidemic • Novel knowing practices within science, social science and/or communities • Relationships among biomedical knowledge, social-scientific knowledge, local knowledge and community know-how • How social and humanities knowledge, perhaps together with biomedical knowledge, can be used to develop more effective responses to the epidemic • The performative work of knowing practices (for example in the use of racial, ethnic and gender categories) as they also involve not-knowing (for instance,    not knowing socio-economic difference through gender classification etc.) • Issues of collaborating with different knowing practices • The knowledge we have of the different forces shaping the epidemic and how we conceive their connection to practice • What we know of global disparities in socioeconomic and/or other resources, and how well this knowledge is actioned in responses to the epidemic • The ways in which notions of ‘the local’ and ‘the global’ inform each other and the implications of this for funding, policy and programming • If knowledge is not neutral and but generative in ways that enact and affect different interests, how knowing practices give shape to the local and global dynamics • The ways in which particular agencies or groups bring about changes in social, economic and political forces that shape the epidemic and/or responses to it • What we know about risk and care practices in different contexts and how we can ensure our methods of knowing are appropriate to local needs Submission of Abstracts and Session Proposals Individual abstracts and proposals submitted for full sessions or round table discussions should emphasize how they will make original and timely contributions to any of the themes listed above or how they demonstrate the contribution of the social sciences or humanities to any aspect of the HIV epidemic. Submissions are a maximum of 1500 characters. Spaces count as a character. Abstracts for individual papers (electronic submission of individual oral papers) Each abstract (maximum of 1500 characters) should include: title; the main arguments; methodology where appropriate; and contribution to the HIV and AIDS field. The title of the abstract should be followed by the author’s name or (where a collaboration) a list of authors’ names each with their institutional affiliation or status (e.g. independent scholar) and full contact details (postal and electronic). Please list five key words to assist the programme chairs to group individual papers into sessions. All presentations will be allowed 20 minutes, and each session will include time for discussion. Abstracts for full sessions (email proposal plus electronic submission of individual abstracts) If you wish to submit a full session, please send an email to programme@asshh.org that includes: 1. Title for session; 2. Brief abstract of the purpose of the session (up to 1500 characters) 3. Name of organiser; and 4. Name, title and abstract of each paper. Each abstract to be included in a ‘full session’ should be submitted as an individual abstract as above and should be a maximum of 1500 characters. It is necessary for the organiser/s of the ‘full session’ and each presenter in the session to register individually. Session proposals should be organized around one and-half-hour time slots. A typical session will contain three or four papers of not more than twenty minutes each, with a discussant/respondent and time for open discussion. The programme chairs may assign additional papers to proposed sessions with only three or fewer papers. Abstracts for round-table discussions: (electronic submission of single abstract) In addition to the abstract driven sessions, we are keen to hold round-table discussions on current themes being debated across the HIV research and policy fields or emerging through community action. If you are interested in organizing a round-table discussion/forum please submit an abstract of maximum of 1500 characters indicating the topic, names of participants and their likely contribution. If selected, the conference organisers will contact you with a request for further details, including the names of speakers for the forum. Time allowed is a maximum of ninety minutes. Queries Programme: programme@asshh.org (relevant queries will be submitted to specific Chair) Registrations: registrations@asshh.org Scholarships: scholarships@asshh.org General: info@asshh.org Visas: mkapfer@msh-paris.fr

Seriously. Think about it. I was half-convinced of it at the end of the first season (“Murder House”). I’m even more convinced now. I hope they keep it that way into the next seasons. I may have more later on this.

Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982) is a foundational work for anthropology, history, and global studies. I read parts of Europe and the People Without History my first year of college for a seminar titled “Imperialism, Slavery, and Revolution” with Shanti Singham. I tackled the rest over the summer when I returned home to Montana. Eric Wolf made sense of the world–I remained a history major, but I eventually studied anthropology because of Europe and the People Without History. Taking aim at portrayals of a world of relatively isolated peoples–accounts like Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture–Eric Wolf describes a world of connection: “The central assertion of this book is that the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality” (1982:3). That central assertion rests on recapturing the historical details of European expansion in the last 500 years. Even for “The World in 1400″ Eric Wolf explains that “everywhere in this world of 1400, populations existed in interconnections” (1982:71). The world from the 16th century knits together every continent, plying trans-oceanic linkages. The question is to understand how it was Europeans who directed this expansion, a question critical for world history and contemporary realities: An observer looking at the world in A.D. 800 would barely have taken note of the European peninsula. Rome had fallen, and no effective centralized power had taken its place. Instead, a host of narrow-gauged tributary domains disputed rights to the shattered Roman inheritance. The center of political and economic gravity had shifted eastward to the “new Rome” of Byzantium, and to the Muslim caliphate. Six hundred years later, in A.D. 1400, an observer would have noted a very different Europe and a marked change in its relation to neighboring Asia and Africa. The many petty principalities had fused into a smaller number of effective polities. These polities were competing successfully with their neighbors to the south and east and were about to launch major adventures overseas. What had happened? (1982:101) Starting in the 1960s, Eric Wolf was already asking what Jared Diamond in the 1997 Guns, Germs, and Steel called Yali’s Question: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” Answering that question, as Eric Wolf understood, means accounting specifically for how Europe went from being a land that in A.D. 800 “was of little account in the affairs of the wider world” (1982:71) to those effective polities that could launch overseas adventures. Diamond would have us believe that the answer lies in the shape of the continents, latitude and longitude gradients, and agriculture, particularly large domesticated animals. Although this much older story may account for the fact that many of the most powerful polities have been in Eurasia, it cannot account for the rise of Europe 800-1400 A.D. Everyone agrees that geography matters. Eric Wolf’s survey of the world in 1400 is full of maps, descriptions of terrain, and accounts of available resources. But serious historians reject Jared Diamond’s rationale for the rise of Europe. To truly get a grip on Yali’s Question, we have to turn back to Eric Wolf in 1982. The World in 1400: Political Geography, Agriculture, Empires, Trade By 1400 A.D., cities, states, and empires had already risen and fallen throughout Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas. In effect, there were surely hundreds of local varieties of Yali’s question: Why is it that you Turk – Mongol – Mali – Bantu – Indian – Chinese – Sriviyaya – Chimu – Inca – Chibcha – Maya – Aztec – Cahokia (to name a few) people developed so much and conquered us? Just as surely there were people and rulers who justified their power by invoking divine authorities, or claiming biological, cultural, intellectual superiority. There were also those who would marvel at the sometimes quite rapid rises and declines, the shifting balances of power. (See Rob Gargett’s short but potent Other Africas story of African kingdoms.) Geography is of course important. As Eric Wolf sets forth, “to understand this world of 1400, we must begin with geography” (1982:25). And undoubtedly agriculture, especially intensive agriculture, is important in this story. Agriculture may not be necessary for sedentary existence–the peoples on the Pacific Coast of North America had settled life through fishing. Agriculture may not have even been necessary for the rise of some of the first states. As textbook authors Robert Lavenda and Emily Schultz explore through their account of state formation in the Andes, “if the first complex societies on the Peruvian coast were based on a steady supply of food from the sea, rather than agriculture, the notion that village agriculture must precede the rise of social complexity is dealt a blow” (Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Be Human? 2012:208). Nevertheless, it seems difficult, if not impossible, to run an empire without intensive agriculture. There may also be geographical features which encouraged city and state formation. But this kind of large-scale geography cannot account for the rise and fall: Can anyone say that the present balance of economic and political power will be the same in 2500 as it is today? For example, in the year 1500 some of the most powerful and largest cities in the world existed in China, India, and Turkey. In the year 1000, many of the mightiest cities were located in Peru, Iraq, and Central Asia. In the year 500 they could be found in central Mexico, Italy, and China. In 2500 B.C.E. the most formidable rulers lived in Iraq, Egypt, and Pakistan. What geographic determinism can account for this? (McAnany and Yoffee, Questioning Collapse 2010:10) Moreover, it is important to note that although there could be shifts of power and rapid declines, this rarely meant a complete end to the social system: Over two decades ago the sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt wrote that societal collapse seldom occurs if collapse is taken to mean “the complete end of those political systems and their accompanying civilizational framework.” . . . More recently Joseph Tainter, after a search for archaeological evidence of societal “overshoot” and collapse, arrived at a conclusion similar to Eisenstadt’s: there wasn’t any. When closely examined, the overriding human story is one of survival and regeneration. Certainly crises existed, political forms changed, and landscapes were altered, but rarely did societies collapse in an absolute and apocalyptic sense. (Questioning Collapse 2010:5-6) Finally, and of extreme importance as we turn back to Eric Wolf, these places exist not in isolation but interconnection: Groups that defined themselves as culturally distinct were linked by kinship or ceremonial allegiance; states expanded, incorporating other peoples into more encompassing political structures; elite groups succeeded one another, seizing control of agricultural populations and establishing new political and symbolic orders. Trade formed networks from East Asia to the Levant, across the Sahara, from East Africa through the Indian Ocean to the Southeast Asian archipelago. Conquest, incorporation, recombination, and commerce also marked the New World. In both hemispheres populations impinged upon other populations through permeable social boundaries, creating intergrading, interwoven social and cultural entities. If there were any isolated societies these were but temporary phenomena–a group pushed to the edge of a zone of interaction and left to itself for a brief moment in time. Thus, the social scientist’s model of distinct and separate systems, and of a timeless “precontact” ethnographic present, does not adequately depict the situation before European expansion; much less can it comprehend the worldwide system of links that would be created by that expansion. (1982:71) In many introductory anthropology textbooks–even my preferred textbook for Introduction to Anthropology–there is a curious juxtaposition of the sections on the archaeology of complex societies and the state with a leap from there into cultural anthropology, the culture concept, and ethnography. Such juxtapositions perpetuate the view that cultural anthropology studies others as relatively isolated laboratories who can reveal something about human nature (and this takes us back to the first considerations of Anthropology and Human Nature). Yet 500 years before anyone who called herself an anthropologist arrived on the scene, these peoples were neither isolated nor static. Eric Wolf’s paragraph, or something like it, should be in every Introduction to Anthropology textbook. As should some account of the rise of the European powers that would eventually create anthropology as an academic discipline. Eric Wolf – Europe, Prelude to Expansion: Long-Distance Trade, Political Consolidation, State Making The first factor Wolf considers for explaining the rise of Europe from provincial backwaters to powerful polities 800-1400 A.D. is the shift in patterns of long-distance trade. Before 800 A.D. much of Europe was more likely to be conquered than to do any conquering: Islam expanded quickly from its center in the caravan city of Mecca, and in the course of the seventh century A.D. it overran North Africa. During the second decade of the eighth century, Muslim armies occupied most of the Iberian peninsula; in the ninth century Sicily fell to the Muslims. When the capital of the Islamic caliphate moved from Damascus to Baghdad in the mid-eighth century, however, the Islamic center of gravity moved eastward away from the Mediterranean, in a movement parallel to the eastward shift of Byzantium. Trade with the Caucasus, Inner Asia, Arabia, India, and China grew more important than trade connections with the western Mediterranean. (1982:103) [See also Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. Abu-Lughod (1991:40) calls Wolf's book "a breath of fresh air in an otherwise self-centered literature."] In other words, the balance of trade and power was firmly in the East. Europe provided raw materials and even some slaves: “Europe furnished mainly slaves and timber, receiving some luxury goods in return. European slaves reached the Near East not only across the sea-lanes of the Mediterranean but also, along with precious furs and other products, down the Russian rivers into the Black Sea. They were brought by the Varangian Rus, a branch of the seafaring and sea-raiding peoples who had fanned out from their viks, or inlets, in Scandinavia to harass the European littoral and to carry off slaves to Near Eastern markets” (1982:105). One can imagine yet another perplexed European Yali, seeing a bustling Near Eastern city for the first time after being sold into slavery from a forest hinterland! The key shift would be the rise of the Italian ports, especially Venice and Amalfi, then later Pisa and Genoa: Through their success in trade and war, these Italian towns began to tilt the balance of exchange between the western and eastern halves of the Mediterranean in favor of the West. Largely deprived of an agrarian hinterland of their own, their frontier of expansion lay in sea-borne commerce. They were thus in a position to become the main beneficiaries of the new conjuncture of power and influence in the Mediterranean after the year A.D. 1000. By then, Byzantium had initiated a policy of military consolidation on land, relying on its armed peasantry to defend it against growing attacks on all sides. Venice became virtually the commercial agent of Byzantium and engrossed most of its sea-borne trade. (1982:104) The second factor Eric Wolf turns to is political consolidation. Here after A.D. 1000, there was an intensification and extensification of cultivation. This was particularly true of areas north of the Alps, where the introduction of triennial rotation by means of the heavy horse-drawn plow resulted in an absolute increase of the surplus product. Clearing of the dense forest cover of continental Europe and plowing up of the European plain expanded the arable from which surpluses could be taken. Both processes took place under the aegis of tribute-taking overlords, and both, in turn, increased the political power of the dominant class. Increased production of surpluses further enhanced the military capability of this class, which rested upon the ability to sustain the high cost of war horses and armor. (1982:105) Here Wolf is obviously discussing things related to Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: horse-drawn plows, agriculture, war horses and armor. And it is true that you need non-human animal muscle power and certain technologies to increase surplus production. However, Wolf explains this all under the heading of “political consolidation”: the key factors are political and economic. Plows, non-human animal muscle power, and armor were available across Eurasia. What needs to be explained is how they were coming together in the northwest part of the continent during this period, and under the aegis of relatively small-scale polities. Here again, the key motivations were political and economic–Wolf describes how these polities used war abroad, commerce, and enlarging the central domain. As Wolf outlines (1982:105-108), the war abroad tactic was important for the Iberian peninsula as they carried out a long Reconquista of Muslim Spain; commerce became important shifting north from Italy; France and England followed the expansion of the central domain: All the European states grew slowly, as composites of many different segments and accretions. Their boundaries might well have been drawn differently, creating a map of Europe quite different from the arrangement of countries that we think of today as inalieanable national entities. The map might have shown a sea-based empire, comprising Scandinavia, the northern seacoast of Europe, and England; a polity comprising western France and the British Isles; a union of eastern France and western Germany, or a state comprising the valleys of the Rhone and the Rhine intervening between German and France; a union of Germany and northern Italy; a state uniting Catalonia and the south of France; an Iberian peninsula divided into a northern Christian tier of kingdoms and a southern Muslim tier. Each of these represents a possibility that in fact existed at some time, and each suggests that the geopolitical boundaries segmenting Europe today require explanation and should not be taken for granted. (1982:108) Wolf proceeds to discuss state making and expansion. Interestingly, this seems driven in part by what has been called a crisis of feudalism around A.D. 1300: “Agriculture ceased to grow, perhaps because the available technology reached the limits of its productivity. The climate worsened, rendering the food supply more precarious and uncertain. Epidemics affected large numbers of people debilitated by a poorer diet. . . . The solution to the crisis required an increase in the scale and intensity of war” (1982:108-109). In other words, to a certain extent there were both internal strengths–and weaknesses–that spurred increased militarization and the search for new frontiers. Eric Wolf among the Historians – Why Europe? Eric Wolf was hardly the only one trying to explain, or better re-explain, the European transformation that set the stage for colonialism and global capitalism. In addition to the traditional histories, Wolf was in dialogue with Immanuel Wallerstein, and his work on The Modern World-System. He read Andre Gunder Frank’s World Accumulation which “details the global scope of the stockpiling of mercantile wealth, although he calls capitalist what I would, with Marx, treat as ‘the prehistory of capital’” (1982:408). Wolf also cites several books from J.H. Parry. In Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (2003:58-73), Patrick Manning nicely summarizes this scholarly ferment re-investigating the question of why Europe and why capitalism, in a global context. When I first read and taught Guns, Germs, and Steel, I thought Jared Diamond would be in some kind of dialogue with this earlier work. But search the text for Andre Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, Eric Wolf, even for John H. Parry. Nothing. Sure, one could claim all these arguments are irrelevant for this enormous time-scale, but that’s hardly an adequate answer, or even the beginning of an answer, to Yali’s Question. These scholars recognize the importance of geography, but this geography does not explain the reasons for European expansion. Contemporary historians broadly verify that Jared Diamond’s account in Guns, Germs, and Steel is inadequate. In an otherwise positive review, The World According to Jared Diamond, historian J.R. McNeill makes precisely this point. First, although he is generally quite appreciative about Diamond’s approach, McNeill comments that it is probably not so surprising to see the most formidable societies arising in Eurasia: The fact that Eurasia spawned the world’s most formidable societies does not pose a truly vexing question. Eurasia accounted for some eighty percent of humankind over the past 3,000 years, and probably well before that. Even if formidability were randomly distributed, one would expect to find it more often in Eurasian societies than elsewhere. Indeed because greater population ordinarily means greater interaction, more intense intersocietal competition, and the faster and more thorough acquisition of a broader array of disease immunities, the probability would be even higher than eighty percent that Eurasia should at any given moment have produced history’s most formidable societies. The deck was stacked even without Diamond’s biogeographical factors. So Diamond has proposed some excellent new answers to a less-than-perplexing question. Then McNeill goes on to ask “a more vexing question, and one more familiar to historians is, why Europe?” and investigates Diamond’s answer in Guns, Germs, and Steel. McNeill contends “that Europe’s emergence in modern centuries cannot be put down to geography” and states that Diamond has oversold geography as a substitute for history (my thanks to Patricia Galloway for the link). Other historians tell the same tale. There are several global histories of empire and attempts to account for the rise of Europe that do not even mention Jared Diamond. Neither The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, And the World Economy, 1400 to the Present by Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik nor The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (2003) by J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill mention Diamond. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper briefly discuss what they term the “steel and germs” explanation, only to dismiss it (Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference 2010:163; I’ll summarize the state of the research in the next post). The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century (2006) by Robert B. Marks includes minor references to Jared Diamond, but not for explaining the rise of Europe. I also turned to the November 2012 New Yorker review by Adam Gopnik, Faces, Places, Spaces: The renaissance of geographic history. Jared Diamond is unmentioned in this review of those seeking to reassert the importance of geography. Gopnik pans this renaissance, which is all about retrospective unfalsifiability: “If you compress and expand the time scale just as you like, you can make any event look inevitable.” Gopnik is rightly unconvinced: “Once the sight of a Viking prow coming down a river was as terrifying a sight as any European could imagine. Now the Scandinavian countries are perhaps the most pacific in the world. Whatever changed, it wasn’t the shape of Scandinavia.” In short, some historians cite Diamond’s ideas for the big Eurasian overview. It’s a safe citation, since the time-scale is outside their customary purview, and sometimes lends popular gravitas. Patrick Manning’s summary is apt: “Diamond’s argument, while it has been contested by other scholars, is an elegant simplification of a major issue in world history and an effective illustration of long-term trends in history. Yet when he attempts to use the same reasoning to explain the comparatively short-term changes of imperialism and racism in recent centuries, his results are far less satisfactory” (Navigating World History 2003:100). More bluntly, I don’t find any reliable historians who use Diamond’s work to ponder the truly more vexing question–for world history, for anthropology, for contemporary understandings–Why Europe? Eric Wolf and Yali’s Question As I stated in Real History versus Guns, Germs, and Steel, I am sympathetic to Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz’s interpretation that Yali’s Question was not actually about getting more stuff, but about being recognized as fully human, about being treated with dignity and respect: “Yali and many other Papua New Guineans became preoccupied with the reluctance, if not refusal, of many whites to recognize their full humanness–to make blacks and whites equal players in the same history” (Excusing the Haves and Blaming the Have-Nots in the Telling of History 2010:335). If anything, Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History could be criticized for a similar materialistic focus–of bringing an essentially Marxian political economy to the explanation of world history. While that may be the case, it seems nevertheless important to do the materialist answer to Yali’s Question–why was it the European peoples?–if only for the revised understanding of European power in the past 500 years. Eric Wolf did the spadework in 1982 for answering Yali’s Question. In 1997, Jared Diamond inexplicably dialed back our knowledge, in a book that still seems to captivate the world. But if anthropology wants to build on anything, wants to deliver a true understanding of the global transformations shaping our modern world, then Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History remains the best place to begin. Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s new introduction remarks that Wolf’s “perspective is even more sorely needed than it was when Europe and the People Without History was written in the early 1980s” (2010:xvii). I agree. Eric Wolf: Why Not More Influential? Eric Wolf’s book and work are extremely influential–many anthropologists mention him for Anthropology: The Landmark Books and his titles are still the source of inspiration for riffs like Humans and the Animals Without History. But Eriksen’s remark raises the question of why this perspective is more sorely needed now than in the 1980s. After all, I’ve suggested that Wolf could have been a key influence for Questioning Collapse–but he does not appear. Europe and the People Without History is also absent from the accounts by Burbank and Cooper, McNeill and McNeill, Pomeranz and Topik, or Robert B. Marks cited above. Eric Wolf gets a footnote for Charles Mann’s 1491 and 1493. What happened? Part of it may be the title–it’s difficult to pull off irony. I remember trying to explain Europe and the People Without History to friends in Ecuador–their first reaction was quite negative! Ulf Hannerz’s assessment of a title like Exotic No More could be equally applied: When the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland commissions a volume to present a more current understanding of the discipline, it gives it the title Exotic No More–once again providing above all a negative statement, which might at worst be taken to mean that anthropology has given up its attempt to understand human lives across boundaries and is now all “anthropology at home.” The wide-ranging contents of the book in question show that this is not the case, but I would have preferred a more positive formulation up-front. (Anthropology’s World 2010:48) The book also was a long time in writing: “The project for this book emerged from the intellectual reassessments that marked the late 1960s. . . . I began to write this book in the spring of 1974; the final draft was completed in 1981″ (1982:x). Obviously for a book of such magnitude, scope, and erudition–as well as trying to write histories for regions which had hardly received historical attention–it’s ludicrous to expect rapid writing. However, in the intervening years Clifford Geertz came out with The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), which helped revive the notion of cultural wholes. On this matter, Eric Wolf’s 1980 New York Times piece about the 79th annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, They Divide and Subdivide And Call It Anthropology, was a call for a new agenda, a call that may never have been answered (see also Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture: From Culture to cultures). Not long after Europe and the People Without History, the Writing Culture (1988) volume took a quite different tack from Eric Wolf’s vision. Anthropology seemed to be turning both elsewhere and inward upon itself, as the Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf Reply to Michael Taussig (1989) illustrates. The New York Times obituary for Eric Wolf headlines him as an Iconoclastic Anthropologist. For Manning, part of the issue was the book’s organization: The book is made hard to follow by the alternations in themes: a general introduction, a survey of the world in 1400 (ranging as much as several hundred years earlier), an analysis of modes of production in general, a survey of Europe’s prelude to expansion, and chapters of European impact elsewhere. While the work focused on the creation of the world community as a capitalist order, it provided no clear chronology on the creation of that community. . . . A stong concluding section underscored the need to examine the history of culture in the modern world. But the text itself looked mainly at economics and the influence of Europe beyond the seas. (Navigating World History 2003:69) This may help explain why the Wikipedia page on Europe and the People Without History is presently an unfinished stub. It could also have been the Marxian framework. Even though it was much updated and a fluid concept rather than a straitjacket, Wolf’s “Modes of Production” chapter–wedged between the two chapters I have discussed the most, “The World in 1400″ and “Europe, Prelude to Expansion”–may have served too much as an argumentative detour. In what is probably the most famous review, Are There Histories of Peoples Without Europe?, Talal Asad concentrates mostly on that modes of production chapter, with pages of arguments that seem more than a bit arcane today. Nevertheless, Asad’s ideas on history are instructive, especially given the ever-enticing idea that history can be mined as a science of natural experiments: I wish merely to question the utility of defining a precapitalist mode of production in terms of kinship–especially as that concept is taken (as Wolf explicitly takes it) as an heuristic device. I suggest that the history of noncapitalist societies can not be understood by isolating one a priori principle, that the important thing always is to try and identify that combination of elements (environmental, demographic, social, cultural, etcetera) in the past of a given population that will serve to explain a particular outcome–in the narrative (or weak) sense of “explain,” not in the natural science (or strong) sense, because the past of human societies cannot be tested, it can only be made more or less plausible as part of the same story as the present. If it is objected that such an approach would make a predictive science of society impossible, I can only agree. (1987:602) What the Histories of Peoples Without Europe Once Were “In 1968 I wrote that anthropology needed to discover history, a history that could account for the ways in which the social system of the modern world came into being, and that would strive to make analytic sense of all societies, including our own” (1982:ix). Almost a half-century later, it seems anthropology needs to rediscover history. Returning to Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History would be a good place to start. It seems fitting to conclude here with Asad’s call for another book by Eric Wolf: This is an admirable book–erudite, politically committed, thought provoking. Few anthropologists would have had the courage to write it. Many readers from a variety of disciplines will admire it. But another book remains to be written by Wolf telling another story, the story of transformations that have reshaped those conditions which are not of people’s choosing but within which they must make their history. We should not think of those conditions as though they merely set varying limits to preconstituted choices. Historical conditions construct those choices, just as distinctive choices constitute historically specific subjectivities. It is when we have anthropological accounts of what those constructions were, and how they have changed, that we may learn what the histories of peoples without Europe once were, and why they cannot make those histories any longer. We may then also understand better why and in what ways so many peoples are now trying to make other histories both within and against the hegemonic powers of modern capitalism that had their origins in Western Europe. (1987:607) To my mind, the two books that would most answer this call are Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History and Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World by Michel-Rolph Trouillot. At the same time, if I remember correctly, one of Trouillot’s comments about Eric Wolf was that he worked in Max Weber’s tradition of the ideal type–it was something that Wolf could pull off from individual brilliance, but so very difficult to emulate. Or as Manning notes, “over the longer run [Europe and the People Without History] seems to have been most successful in demonstrating the difficulty of carrying out a coherent analysis of the topic” (Navigating World History 2003:69). Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History – Geography, States, Empires Living Anthropologically

Here is an essay on this topic. I would be interested in your comments, responses, reactions, etc.

Facebook Blocks Yandex, the Google of Russia from Wired Top Stories by Ryan Tate Facebook has locked out a mobile app from Russian internet powerhouse Yandex. It’s the latest examples of how social networks are increasingly hoarding their information and locking out potential competitors. 18 Facebook Fossils We’ll Remember Forever from Mashable! by Dani Fankhauser Facebook updates its Platform Policies to stop competitors from piggybacking on its social graph from The Next Web by Emil Protalinski Will the personalised Web destroy discovery? from The Next Web by Niall Harbison Appeals Court affirms state secrecy in Twitter/WikiLeaks case from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin Our appeal was denied likely due to ongoing FBI probe into #Wikileaks. The probe is wrong and must be dropped; it is an affront to justice. — Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) January 26, 2013 In Virginia today, a federal appeals court has ruled that the government can maintain secrecy around its efforts to obtain the private information of internet users, without a warrant. The appeal originated from a legal battle over the Twitter user records of three activists the government is investigating for connections to WikiLeaks: security researcher Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror), Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp (@rop_g), and Icelandic parliament member Birgitta Jonsdottir (@birgittaj). The ruling effectively says the three do not have the right “to know from which companies, other than Twitter, the government sought to obtain their records,” as Kim Zetter reports in Wired News:

I very much hope that my absence from your 'puter or mobile from time to time means that my unconscious is cooking something up of which I'm not aware until it pops into my head. O' course, I've pretty much covered everything at least once by now. Maybe I should hang up my spurs. Seriously. Who wants to hear the same blah, blah, blah every time they pop their head in? Let me see... *scratches head* Oh! Thanks, unconscious! Here's something.     Somehow or other this baby snuck past me back in '96. Hmmm. 8-month-old baby. Fieldwork. More fieldwork. Job hunt. Baby. I'm gonna cut myself a little slack for missing it. Besides, I've said plenty about similar somethings in the past. Surely I've covered this. *searches the SA for keyword Umm el Tlel* Nothing. Hmmm. Guess I have some work to do. *rubs hands together with obvious glee*     OK. Straight face. Published in Nature 380, 336--338, "Bitumen as hafting material on Middle Palaeolithic artifacts," by Eric Boëda et al. [I should mention that I'm acquainted with two of the co-authors---Hélène Valladas and Norbert Mercier. We met while I was working at Kebara Cave in 1989. Everyone treated me well that summer. But Hélène and Norbert were extra kind. I even shared a room with Norbert for a week or so while we were staying at a hotel at Zikhron Ya'aqov toward the end of the season. Which reminds me. Contemporary PhD students Michael Spiers, Steve Churchill, Dan Lieberman, Ann Délange, and Erella Hovers were also there that summer. Small world. Sort of.]     Anyway. Bitumen. Hafting. I've previously handled several insupportable claims for Middle Palaeolithic hafting---here, here, here and here, to name but a few... One more won't hurt.From Boëda et al., 1996.    According to the map Umm el Tlal is near the present-day village of El Kowm. It looks to be about 50 km from Bichri Djebel, in what's now Syria. In the uppermost Mousterian level the team found two lithic artifacts that are stained with bitumen. I have no argument with the chemists on this one. I'm willing to give them that much. These two [count 'em. Two!] bits of rock---one a convergent side-scraper [in the old Bordesian typology; one a 4-cm quadrangular flake---bear traces of bitumen in places where the authors want us to believe that bitumen would preserve if they'd been hafted to sticks. Have a look below. The solid black portions depicted in a are representations of traces of bitumen. As are the similarly solid black portions of the little flake shown in c, further down. [I have to say that the black bits on the smaller flake are kind of lost in amongst the very dark lines indicating the Hertzian ripples. Thus, it's difficult, really, to know what's bitumen and what isn't were c is concerned.]     I find it fascinating that, on the evidence, Nature even bothered to send this paper to referees. And the referees ought to be put in the stocks.From Boëda et al., 1996.With regard to the convergent side-scraper the bitumen remnant is interpreted thusly:The trace of bitumen is present on both faces of the side-scraper and, except at the point, it follows the curve of the right side of the tool, 1 cm below its edge. The left side and the proximal end of the tool were set into a handle. So, lemme get this straight. We have an intermittent streak of bitumen on the dorsal surface. No bitumen present on the proximal surface. No bitumen visible on the entire left side of the artifact. Yet, we're expected to believe the interpretation given in b, that almost the entire surface was buried in the haft. I think we must presume that the bitumen on the side not shown is less suggestive than what we can see in this diagram. Otherwise, why leave it a mystery. Regardless, I think it's a real stretch [based on the illustration, mind you] to infer, first of all, that the bitumen had once coated a substantially greater area. It's also difficult for me to accept that the mere presence of bitumen can be taken as prima facie evidence that this artifact was hafted.     Consider the distribution of the bitumen. I don't know much, if anything, about bitumen taphonomy, but if some bitumen is still adhering to this artifact, where did the rest go? Sure, the two linear patches near the distal end roughly parallel the retouched right margin. And it's true, the distal-most 0.5 cm of the longer patch appears to roughtly parallel the same margin. But the remainder of the larger 'stain' wanders away from the right margin, up to, but not across the medial ridge of a flake scar on the left half, and then turns abruptly back toward the right margin, but extends to the right margin---not stopping 1 cm from it, which is how the atuhors interpret the distal-most 1.5 cm of the bitumen stain. How are we supposed to know, from the distribution, that the stick wasn't hafted along the right margin and proximal end?     If the bitumen had originally coated the lefterly portion of the flake such that it cemented a haft to the majority of the artifact, why has it remained in certain places, but not others? And are we to believe that the tool-maker fashioned a haft to fit the side-scraper, then only smeared bitumen along the haft-flake boundary? I couldn't imagine that. Could you? Moreover, it seems to me that, if the authors can completely ignore the absence of bitumen elsewhere on the artifact, implying to me that there has been a random loss of bitumen over the ages, I'm feel that I'm well within my rights to suggest that the bitumen was never there in the first place!     As for the conclusion that the presence of bitumen can be straightforwardly inferred to mean that it was being used as hafting cement, I have to say that I find it implausible. I can say that unflinchingly, if only because the little 4-cm flakoid shown below would prob'ly be the last bit of rock that a sentient being would want to haft to make a handled tool. Were there no Levallois flakes to be hafted? There were some Levallois remains at Umm el Tlal. But, no Levallois points, either? No Levallois blades? Surely those late Neanderthals weren't so desperate to use this tiny, nearly useless piece of rock that they hafted it so they could get a grip! [So is the idea that anyone would haft over a perfectly good edge (i.e. the left margin of the convergent scraper). Likewise, who'd haft a side scraper lengthwise? Wouldn't it make more sense to haft it perpendicular to the long axis?]     I think it's the authors who should get a grip! It's, it's, scandalous to think that they could have gotten away with this! I'm completely flummoxed. Hey, maybe that's why Nature published it. Maybe they got confused, and were so embarrassed that the editor and the referees all let it pass. Yeah. That's it. That's the ticket!From Boëda et al., 1996.Geez, Dr. Science, how did the bitumen get there in the first place, if it wasn't put there by a Neanderthal? Hmmm. Let's see. I can think of half a dozen possibilities, none of which depend on a source of bitumen close to the Umm el Tlal. The authors point out that Bichri Djebel is the nearest known source of naturally occurring bitumen. However, the chemical signature of the Umm el Tlal bitumen isn't chemically identical with that of the nearby Bichri Djebel site, nor of the Hit site downstream. Not that it matters to me that we don't know the source of the bitumen. What difference could it possibly make?     The authors finish with the finding that the bitumen was heated to a high temperature before its putative use as a hafting cement. Hmm. Naturally occurring bitumen, meet naturally occurring fire.       Unknown source. Unknown process by which bitumen came to be adhering to two small lumps of rock. Not much to hang an argument on [I wouldn't have thought].     It should be fairly clear that this article, which claims to present evidence of an activity previously unknown among the Neanderthals, might just as well have claimed those same Ns were building rockets to the moon. There's just about an equal amount of support for that conclusion in the evidence from Umm el Tlal.My Gawd. Will it never stop???SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Here, I present my first infographic. I think it speaks for itself. What do you think? (Click here for the full size.)

by Sean Carey The London-based Africa Report recently provided a brief but excellent analysis of Mauritius’s three main political dynasties –- those of Ramgoolam, Jugnauth and Duval, whose family members are associated with the Parti Travailliste, Mouvement Socialiste Mauricien (MSM), and the Parti Mauricien Social-Démocrate (PMSD) respectively. Paul Berenger. Source/Wikipedia But the big news revealed at a press conference last Wednesday, is that Paul Bérenger, the veteran leader of the Mouvement Militant Mauricien (MMM), the largest opposition party, is suffering from early stage cancer in his left tonsil. He was widely praised by other politicians, the press and members of the public for his openness and candour. On Monday, he flew to Paris for what is expected to be three months of medical treatment. Bérenger, a Franco-Mauritian from a middle-class family, graduated from the University in Wales, Bangor in the mid-1960s. He then spent a period in Paris soaking up the student and union-inspired radicalism of the time. On his return to Mauritius, Bérenger became a trade union organizer before forming the MMM in 1969. In alliance with the now-defunct Parti Socialiste Mauricien (PSM) led by Harish Boodhoo, the coalition won all 60 seats in the general election 1982. Subsequently Bérenger served as finance minister. The absence of an effective opposition guaranteed that the government was short lived, however. Internal divisions soon surfaced and resulted in the dissolution of the National Assembly following year, before new elections were held. The former Prime Minister, Anerood Jugnauth, previously a close ally of Bérenger, left the MMM and formed the MSM, and in alliance with the Parti Travailliste, PSM and PMSD headed a new government. Bérenger returned to the opposition benches. But he did go on to serve as prime minister between 2003 and 2005 as part of a MMM-MSM coalition, and remains the only non-Hindu to have held the office since the country achieved independence from the UK in 1968. Bérenger long ago discarded much of his early hard left-leaning politics, tracking to the relative safety of the political center ground. Nevertheless, while being careful not to upset the so far successful and widely praised emerging economy model in his home country (Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calls it “the Mauritius Miracle“) the MMM remains associated with a certain degree of radicalism (Bérenger still sports a Che Guevara-style moustache) and a non-communal ideology, even if in practice that appeal to universalism is a difficult trick to pull off because of the cultural, social and political complexities in polyethnic Mauritius. But there can be no doubt that the MMM is extremely well-organized. Bérenger is also a charismatic leader, who has been key to maintaining the party’s political status and credibility among the electorate. The MMM continues to draw most of its support from urban voters, and many seasoned political observers thought, at least until last week, that it would remain the largest single party Mauritius for the foreseeable future – it has always polled over 40 per cent in general elections. The MMM’s deputy Alan Ganoo will take charge of the party in the absence of the 67-year-old Bérenger. Inevitably, that has led to speculation about the succession, including among party loyalists. “In my opinion, Paul Bérenger’s medical treatment will allow him to reflect seriously about the future leadership of the party,” commented Jooneed Jeeroburkhan, a founding member of the MMM. It also raises questions about future political alliances. Currently, the MMM is in partnership in opposition with the MSM of former Prime Minister and President Sir Anerood and his son Pravind Jugnauth. But there have been persistent rumours of a tie-up between the MMM and the Parti Travailliste led by Prime Minister Dr. Navin Ramgoolam. Difficult to predict the outcome? That’s for sure. But it’s the nature of coalition politics, where no party leader expects to have enough seats to form a government, and so enters into electoral pacts before the population casts its votes. Nevertheless, whether or not Paul Bérenger returns to active politics, a general election in Mauritius is not scheduled until 2015. One thing is certain amongst all the uncertainty: there will be plenty of time for more shaking of the political kaleidoscope in what is undoubtedly one of the world’s liveliest democracies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb0tCgNzbjk Dan Bull song tribute to Aaron Swartz Hacker group Anonymous downs US government site from Hurriyet Daily News Hacker group Anonymous said it disabled the US Sentencing Commission’s website.. Aaron Swartz didn’t face prison until Feds, led by Ortiz, jumped on case from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin Declan McCullagh writes at CNET News: “State prosecutors who investigated the late Aaron Swartz had planned to let him off with a stern warning, but federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz took over and chose to make an example of the Internet activist, according to a report in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.”   Remembering Aaron Swartz, Taking Up the Fight from DML Central by jbrazil Nishant Shah Globe and Mail runs loony screed against “hackers”, Aaron Swartz, logic from Boing Boing by Jesse Brown Democracy Now! on Aaron Swartz Clay Shirky: “Remembering Aaron by taking care of each other” from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin Author and NYU professor Clay Shirky writes about one of the imperatives he believes the death of Aaron Swartz should bring to life: “We need to take care of the people in our community who are depressed,” he writes. Aaron Swartz: A Fighter Against the Privatization of Knowledge from ORGANIZED RAGE Lessig: “A Time For Silence,” for Aaron Swartz from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin Lawrence Lessig Responds to Aaron Swartz’s Prosecutor from Mashable! by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai Wikileaks Says Aaron Swartz Was a Possible Source from Mashable! by Anita Li Part 2: EFF’s Additional Improvements to Aaron’s Law from EFF.org Updates by Cindy Cohn and Marcia Hofmann In our first post, we presented some initial thinking about how to fix the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and wire fraud law in light of the tragic prosecution of Aaron Swartz. Congresswoman: ‘Aaron’s Law’ to Honor Aaron Swartz Is Only the Beginning from Mashable! by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai 2600 radio tribute to Aaron Swartz from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow Archaeology, Open Access, and the Passing of Aaron Swartz from Digging Digitally by Eric Kansa I don’t post to this blog as much as I used to, but every once in a while there are some developments in the world of data sharing and scholarly communications that I think worthwhile discussing with respect to archaeology. This blog post is an attempt to gather my thoughts on the issue of Open Access in advance of a forum on the subject that will be held at the Society for American Archaeology’s (SAA) annual meeting in Honolulu in April. Vale Aaron Swartz from Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog by Rex The death of Aaron Swartz marks the end of an era — an era that had been slowly fading away until his passing gave it a terrible, sudden finality.

Call for Papers Disability and the Global South: An International Journal www.dgsjournal.org Globalising Mental Health or Pathologising the Global South? Mapping the Ethics, Theory and Practice of Global Mental Health   Guest Editors: China Mills and Suman Fernando Currently, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Movement for Global Mental Health, are calling to ‘scale up’ psychiatric treatments, often specifically access to psychiatric drugs, globally, and particularly within the global South. Amid these calls, others can be heard, from those who have received psychiatric treatments in the global North and South, and from some critical and transcultural psychiatrists, to abolish psychiatric diagnostic systems and to acknowledge the harm caused by some medications. Furthermore, voices have also been raised advocating the need to address social suffering, personal distress and community trauma in the global South in a context of poverty, political violence and natural disasters; and calling for people given psychiatric diagnoses to have their human rights protected by disability legislation. The Movement for Global Mental Health frames distress as an illness like any other, calling for global equality in access to psychiatric medication. However there is a growing body of research from the global North that documents the harmful effects of long-term use of psychiatric medication and questions the usefulness of psychiatric models (see Angell, 2011; and Whitaker, 2010). This raises concerns; about the ‘evidence base’ of Global Mental Health; about increasing access to psychiatric drugs globally; about the promotion of psychiatric diagnoses such as ‘depression’ as an illness; and changes the terms of debate around equality between the global South and North. What are the ethics of ‘scaling up’ treatments within the global South whose efficacy are still hotly debated within the global North? There are other concerns about Global Mental Health; that it exports Western ways of being a person and concepts of distress that are alien to many cultures, and imposed from the ‘top down’, potentially repeating colonial and imperial relations (Summerfield, 2008), and that psychiatry discredits and replaces alternative forms of healing that are local, religious or indigenous (Watters, 2010). Alongside this, many users and survivors of the psychiatric system argue for the right to access non-medical and non-Western healing spaces, and to frame their experience as distress and not to depoliticise it as ‘illness’ (PANUSP, 2012). Yet for the pharmaceutical industry – there is a huge financial incentive in both expanding the boundaries of what counts as illness, and expanding across geographical borders into the often ‘untapped’ markets of the global South. This marks a process of psychiatrization, where increasing numbers of people across the globe come to be seen, and to see themselves, as ‘mentally ill’ (Rose, 2006). This is the context in which this special issue is situated. We would like to invite contributions that are inter-disciplinary and that ground rich conceptual work in ‘on the ground’ practice. We really welcome papers that try to grapple with the complexity and the messiness of debates around Global Mental Health. We hope to explore a range of issues and address some difficult questions, including (but not exclusively); Issues over access to healthcare and the right to treatment in the global South, and how these debates may be different for mental distress compared to physical illness and disability Critical analysis of the evidence base of Global Mental Health and the ‘treatment gap’ in mental health care between the global South and North Global mental health as a disabling practice Examples of mental health activism and lobbying within the global South as well as resistance Dilemmas and accounts of ‘doing’ mental health work in the global South, notably in contexts of poverty The globalisation of psychiatry; accounts of how psychiatry travels, and of whether counter-approaches to mental health (alternative or indigenous frameworks) may travel too Accounts of alternative ways of understanding health, distress and healing – counter-epistemologies and plural approaches from the global South and North. Issues around colonialism, imperialism and psychiatry, and of possibilities for decolonising psychiatric practises The role of the pharmaceutical industry and its connections with psychiatry – the global production, distribution and marketing of drugs – how drugs travel globally. An exploration of the ethical dimensions of Global Mental Health, and who has the power to set the Global Mental Health agenda. Should wellbeing and distress be addressed by health policy and medical funding, or be understood outside of a medical framework? What are Global Mental Health interventions claiming to ‘treat’? Is there a role for psychiatry within Global Mental Health? Critical approaches to the Movement for Global Mental Health; can and should mental health be global? We particularly welcome contributions from those who have lived experience of a psychiatric diagnosis, or of distress, and those who work in the global South, or in contents of poverty, on mental health issues. Short reports and stories, are equally encouraged alongside longer theoretical papers. Papers should be no more than 8000 words, with an abstract of 150-200 words. Those wishing to submit an article or express an interest in contributing, please email China Mills china.t.mills@gmail.com. Manuscripts will be sent anonymously for peer review, and comments and recommendations relayed to authors through the editors. Instructions on formatting for the journal can be found here: [dgsjournal.org] All contributions should be submitted no later than: 21st July 2013

zeph’s pop culture quiz #57 The public phone is ringing. Who is calling? And a scene from which book is cited thereby?     Simply leave a comment with your educated guess—you can ask for additional hints, too. [Leaving a comment is easy; just click the 'Leave a comment' at the end of the post and fill in the form. If it's the first time you post a comment, it will be held for moderation. But I am constantly checking, and once I've approved a comment, your next ones won't be held, but published immediately by the system.] share this post

Google Translate is so incredibly good — especially for typing Chinese and producing Pinyin (Romanization) with tones — that I rely on it a lot and am always afraid that, like so many software developers (e.g., Microsoft), they are going to add some unwanted bells and whistles or take away some basic features.  So today, when I turned on my Google Translate and saw a new wrinkle in the bottom left corner of the box into which you input Chinese, I was worried that it would lose the features that make it so easy for me to enter text. What I saw was a little button marked just pīn 拼.  Of course, I knew that must refer to Pinyin Romanization producing simplified characters, but I was concerned that the system wouldn't work the same way it used to.  Then I clicked on the button and it dropped down choices for Wubi (PRC shape-based inputting system), Bopomofo (Taiwan Phonetic Symbols), and Pinyin producing traditional characters. I thought to myself that the Wubi and the Bopomofo must have been added at the request of partisans of those systems, but that they are unnecessary for 99% of potential users of Google Translate.  In the whole world, there are probably no more than thirty million people who would be likely to use Bopomofo to enter Chinese, and the demanding, difficult Wubi ("Five Stroke") method is proficiently used almost entirely by professional typists in the PRC, so there are maybe another thirty million potential users of Google Translate's Wubi function.  (Of course, that is just a very rough guesstimate, but of the hundreds of Chinese I know who regularly input Chinese, only one can use Wubi fairly well and another one can use it rather poorly; all the rest use Pinyin, except for a tiny percentage who write the characters with a stylus or their fingertip; a relatively small number of people in Hong Kong [around seven million population] use Cangjie or other shape-based inputting system].) In contrast to the Wubi and Bopomofo entry methods, which are useless to me and to most people, I am very happy now to have the capability to enter traditional characters directly with Pinyin.  Before, I could produce traditional characters with Google Translate, but it required a somewhat time-consuming, round-about, cut-and-paste procedure. [N.B.:  I actually learned much of my Chinese by relying on Bopomofo, but that was long ago in Taiwan.  Nowadays there are very few people outside the island of Taiwan who are familiar with it.  I now am an ardent advocate of Pinyin-annotated character texts, which would fulfill the same function as the widely available Bopomofo-annotated character texts that I relied on so heavily during my first five years of learning Chinese.] All in all, the changes in the bottom left corner of the Google Translate Chinese inputting box are welcome.  There's probably no harm done by adding the Wubi and Bopomofo (so long as including them hasn't increased the complexity of the overall system to the point that it is less efficient than before) and doing so has likely made several million people happy.  Having direct Pinyin access to the traditional characters is definitely a boon for those who favor the full forms of the characters.

The album’s first track begins with a voice bearing clear pronunciation, tonal and inflectional marks of my stereotypic twenty-something, northern USan, college-educated, working class, urban, black male. “Hello? “Hello? “Can you hear me?  Is anybody in there? “I have no way of knowing if you can hear me.” Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau Albert Einstein: “I [...]

very exciting, another blow for anti-homophobic rap.--even if New Orleans' bounce music (a.k.a. sissy bounce) was not presented as a kin to rap--check out the interview with Big Freedia here.and be sure to view this vid:much love to New Orleans...

The Yaopi float glass factory hovers at memory’s edge, abandoned to ideology and chance encounters. In 1987, the Shekou factory represented the highest level of technology and float glass production in China. Today, it evokes nostalgia for the heroic romance

Syrian Woman at Zaatari Camp in August, 2012; Photograph by Rick Westhead/Toronto Star On Sunday, The New York Times a series of satellite photographs showing the increase in Syrian refugees at the Zaatari Refugee Camp in northern Jordan. There has been an increase from 92,000 in July, 2012 to 554,000 in January, 2013.

According to Article 2, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session. According recent decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, "the term 'the Recess' in the Recess Appointments Clause refers to the intersession recess of the Senate", so that this option is not available "during intrasession 'recesses,' or breaks in the Senate’s business when it is otherwise in a continuing session". The court's argument is a linguistic one: When interpreting a constitutional provision, we must look to the natural meaning of the text as it would have been understood at the time of the ratification of the Constitution. […] Then, as now, the word “the” was and is a definite article. See 2 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language 2041 (1755) (defining “the” as an “article noting a particular thing” (emphasis added)). Unlike “a” or “an,” that definite article suggests specificity. As a matter of cold, unadorned logic, it makes no sense to adopt the Board’s proposition that when the Framers said “the Recess,” what they really meant was “a recess.” This is not an insignificant distinction. In the end it makes all the difference. […] It is universally accepted that “Session” here refers to the usually two or sometimes three sessions per Congress. Therefore, “the Recess” should be taken to mean only times when the Senate is not in one of those sessions. The result is of some political consequence, since it invalidates decisions made by the National Labor Relations Board, on the grounds that several of its members were intra-session recess appointments. (These were recess appointments because some members of the Senate, opposed to the NLRB on principle, have made it clear that they will use Senatorial privilege and/or filibuster techniques to block any in-session appointments to that board.) After reading the opinion carefully, I remain puzzled by the "cold, unadorned logic" of the court's linguistic analysis. If there were always exactly two "sessions" and one inter-session "recess" per Congress, then the definite article might be taken to pick out the unique (per-Congress) recess. But given that from the beginning there have sometimes been three regularly-scheduled sessions per Congress, and sometimes special sessions as well, some other interpretation of the definite article is suggested. Edward A. Hartnett ("Recess Appointments of Article III Judges: Three Constitutional Questions", Cardozo Law Review 2006) observes that the Constitution itself contains an example of such an alternative usage, in Section 3 of Article 1: The Senate shall chuse their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the Absence of the Vice President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the United States. As Hartnett argues, Surely no one would contend that the use of the definite article and the singular form somehow means that there is some once-a-year, or once-a-session, absence of the Vice President that constitutes “the Absence” during which a president pro tempore can serve. Hartnett considers some other relevant linguistic questions as well, such as when a vacancy may be said to "occur", and how the Constitution uses the words recess and adjourn(ment). All of this is likely to come back into the news, as the circuit court's decision is appealed, and other similar cases enter the system.

The ↑Natural History Museum has put online ↑over 4,000 letters written or received by ↑Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913). via ↑entry at ↑slashdot share this post