Another new country, and region of the world.  This time it is the country of Antigua, in the Caribbean where I am on vacation for 10 days.  Going new places assaults the senses, as you the old categories brought from elsewhere prove inadequate to frame what you hear and see.  That is why it is often interesting and important to write down thoughts when you first arrive, before the comfort of automaticity sits in, and even though, by definition, things are still “impressionistic.”  So here are some notes from the island nation of Antigua, population somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000.  The primary industry is tourism and offshore banking of various sorts.  According to Wikipedia, the island has a respectable gnp/capita of $18,000.  The population is 95% African or “Mixed” race, and 1.7% white.  The whites appear more, though, because of the tourism, which is concentrated around the ports and resorts.   Why on the public bus did the driver play the country-western music station?   Just outside the airport is the Stanford Bank Complex, owned by a rich Texan.  It was shut down a few years ago when the founder was sent to prison in the US for operating a pyramid scheme, and there was little activity in the complex.   There is a Russian-owned mega  yacht in the harbor off our balcony, known as Yacht “A.”  Presumably it has an all female crew of 42.  It cost over $300 million to build, and is registered in Bermuda.   Why is chicken produced in Georgia, USA, the national dish, and not seafood?   It seems that flights to Antigua are segregated by the time of year.  White northerners (mainly apparently Canadian and British) are on the flights now, which is tourist season, while later in the year, it will be Afro-Caribbeans, many of whom seem to have dual citizenships of various kinds.   There is little agriculture on an relatively flat island which has low rainfall, few rivers, but lots of really nice beaches which foreign tourists really like.   People smile a lot, and it is really easy to strike up a conversation in a place where the local language is English.  Antiguans speak English well, with a hint of Caribbean lilt.  But there is also a very strong dialect in the background which I cannot eavesdrop on!  The spicing in the food is nicely done, and my favorite is Conch Soup.   What are the “salient” social categories?  It seems to be Antiguans, Middle class boat people who skipper their own boats, really rich Yachties who have a hired crew.  Then there are the Cruise Ship folk from the north who come in and out for a day or two.   All these white tourists sunburn really easily.   Oh, and one final impression.  Humid weather really slows me down.

• Genocide trial in Guatemala Map of Guatemala An extensive article in The New York Times described how Guatemala’s justice system is changing: ” In a show of political will, prosecutors are taking long-dormant human rights cases to court, armed with evidence that victims and their advocates have painstakingly compiled over more than a decade — as much to bear witness as to bring judgment.”  Early on, victims were afraid to speak out, but the United Nations truth commission helped to break that silence. Evidence emerged from the work of forensic anthropologists who have been exhuming the bodies for 20 years. Fredy Peccerelli, the head of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation is quoted as saying: “This is terror…This is a strategy to make sure that anyone and everyone who is opposed to you is afraid of you; not only now, is afraid of you forever.” Peccerelli will testify at the upcoming genocide trial. • Follow the cheese The Boston Globe carried an article about the research of Heather Paxson, an anthropology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her recent book, The Life of Cheese.  Exploring the modern American artisan cheesemakers, “the book profiles people who make cheese and delves into the science, art, politics, and culture, as it were, of these artisan products.” Paxson is quoted as saying: “What attracts a lot of people to cheesemaking…is that it’s magical: the transubstantiation of fluid milk to solid food. A lot of people [I interviewed] described cheese’s liveliness and used developmental metaphors like ‘hitting puberty’ and‘maturity.’ They anthropomorphize the cheese.” • Autism numbers up or not up? Several media sources, including USA Today, covered a new study claiming substantial increases in the numbers of children in the United States with autism:  “Autism rates in the USA may be substantially higher than previously estimated, according to a new government report that found that one out of every 50 school-age children — roughly one on every school bus — have the condition. That’s dramatically higher than the one in 88 announced by a different agency last year.” Some experts say, however, that the higher numbers suggest that officials are getting better at counting children with autism. For example, “I don’t see any evidence that there’s a true increase in the prevalence of autism,” says Roy Richard Grinker, a professor of anthropology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. • Sotheby’s versus Mexican heritage claims Sotheby’s in Paris went forward with a sale of pre-Columbian artifacts despite claims by four Latin American countries that many of the 313 items had been illegally exported. Costly items sold were a ceramic Tarascan flying duck which sold for about $2 million and a ceramic Chupicuaro ”Venus” statuette which sold for about $2.6 million. Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and Archeology (INAH) had urged Sotheby’s to cancel the auction. Sotheby’s said that during the last six months it ”thoroughly researched the provenance of this collection and we are confident in offering these works for auction.” • Very old seaweed beds Michael Gibbons at the seaweed farm site at Aughinish (photo by Joe O’Shaughnessy). Archaeological fieldwork on south Galway Bay, Ireland, has uncovered a tidal complex of middens, cairns, quays and a late medieval seaweed farm, suggesting a thriving inshore economy for over some 7,000 years. The seaweed farm at Aughinish island is the largest and best preserved of its kind on the entire coastline, according to archaeologist Michael Gibbons. The long parallel banks of stone placed on the foreshore to encourage plants to grow indicate that Ireland might have been as advanced then as Japan and China were now in seaweed cultivation.  He believes the Aughinish beds to be of national importance, and warned they were “extremely vulnerable.” Some sites may date back to Mesolithic times, when Clare and Connemara were first settled. • Neanderthal genome updates Scientists in Germany completing the genome sequence of a Neanderthal report progress in making the entire sequence available to the scientific community for research. Svante Paabo and  colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig presented the first draft version of the Neanderthal genome in 2010 from data collected from three bones found in a cave in Croatia. • In memoriam Thurstan Shaw, an archaeologist whose pioneering work on the prehistory of West Africa laid firm foundations for the subject, has died. According to The Times, “Thurstan Shaw was probably the only man to have occupied both an African university chair in archaeology and the ceremonial throne of a Nigerian tribal chief. He was the first trained archaeologist to work in what was then British West Africa, and he devoted his long career and equally long retirement to teaching and research of the region’s prehistory. West African archaeology is, to a large extent, Thurstan Shaw’s creation, and it is certainly his legacy.”  

المساء برس- المساء برس التاريخ : 21-03-2013 أمة العليم السوسوة ظلت تبحث عن مكان للمرأة في الصفوف الأولى لمؤتمر الحوار الوطني فلم تجد أي مكان شاغر لها أو لغيرها حتى في منصة القاعة التي كانت مخصصة للرئيس ولرؤساء الأحزاب السياسية نواب الحوار الوطني . السوسوة لم تعترض على ذلك كما فعل البخيتي ولكنها أكتفت بتوجيه رسالة عبر وسائل الإعلام حول غياب المرأة عن قيادة الحوار وإختراقها لمستوى التمثيل وظهور بعض الوجوه الجديدة من خلال بعض القوائم . السوسوة كانت حرة في طرح آرائها ولم تنقاد وراء القوى السياسية وهذا ما جعلها تكسب إحترام الجميع وتقود قضية المرأة اليمنية بإمتياز فتاريخها يدل على ذلك فيما تسعى بقية المشهورات من النساء اليمنيات الى الصعود السياسي من بوابة الأحزاب ما جعلهن يتعرضن للنقد بسبب إتباع مواقف بعض القادة السياسيين ومراكز النفوذ كما فعلت توكل كرمان مؤخراً من إتباع لحميد الأحمر في الإنسحاب من الحوار بعد كانت تستجدي ضمها للحوار وهو ما جعل الرئيس في نهاية الأمر يوافق على ضمها في قائمة بعد أن تخلى الإصلاح عنها حتى أنها اشادت بقرار الرئيس وأعتبرت هادي أنه باقي في قائمتها . (more…)

Thanks to Syria, it seems that Turkey and Israel can finally alleviate tension… The EU’s non-negotiations with Turkey (Opinion) from EurActiv.com The EU’s negotiations, or rather non-negotiations with Turkey, turned out to be tricks, jeopardising the EU’s reputation and respectability. What the Germans and others don’t seem to realise is that they expect more from Turkey than they do from themselves, writes Dr. Petra Erler.   Turkey sees accords with Israel, Kurds as first step to greater regional role from Yahoo news After two major breakthroughs in less than a week ? an accord to end a three-year squabble with Israel and a landmark step by a jailed Kurdish leader to settle…     Israel sorry for Turkish flotilla attack from FT.com – World, Europe Apology was brokered by President Obama and surprised analysts who had believed the two leaders were not flexible enough to reach a solution Israeli apology for flotilla deaths from BBC News | Europe | World Edition Israel apologises to Turkey for any errors that resulted in the deaths of nine activists during the raid on a flotilla bound for Gaza in 2010.   Israel-Turkey detente ‘vital’ for Mideast peace: Kerry from Hurriyet Daily News Israel and Turkey’s recent rapprochement is a vital factor in developing peace. Behind Scenes of Israel- Turkey Deal from Yahoo news The U.S. helped bring an end to a three-year feud between Israel and Turkey , but Obama didn’t broker the deal. Eli Lake reports. Israel and Turkey agree to restore diplomatic ties JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel and Turkey agreed to restore full diplomatic relations on Friday after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apologized in a phone call for a deadly naval raid against a Gaza-bound international flotilla in a dramatic turnaround partly brokered by President Barack Obama. Israeli apology to Turkey eases tensions between Syria’s neighbors President Barack Obama brokered a diplomatic reconciliation between key Middle East allies Israel and Turkey at the end of his visit to the Holy Land, thawing tensions that have complicated U.S. efforts to cope with regional issues including Syria’s civil war. Israel apologizes to Turkey : how Syrian crisis helped Obama make his case Behind President Obama’s surprise brokering of a mending of ties between Israel and Turkey Friday stands a deepening regional crisis – namely Syria – that suddenly trumped the dispute that had soured relations between two key US partners.   Obama brokers Israel- Turkey rapprochement By Jeffrey Heller JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel apologized to Turkey on Friday for killing nine Turkish citizens in a 2010 naval raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla and the two feuding U.S. allies agreed to normalize relations in a surprise breakthrough announced by U.S. President Barack Obama. The rapprochement could help regional coordination to contain spillover from the Syrian civil war and ease Israel assures Greece over normalization with Turkey: Report from Hurriyet Daily News The normalization of ties with Turkey will not affect Israel’s relations with Greece, Israeli Prime   Israeli apology to Turkey eases tensions between Syria’s neighbors from Yahoo News Photos President Barack Obama brokered a diplomatic reconciliation between key Middle East allies Israel and Turkey at the end of his visit to the Holy Land, thawing tensions that have complicated U.S. efforts to cope with regional issues including Syria’s civil war.   Turkey Accepts Israel’s Apology for Flotilla Raid TIMELINE: Crisis in Israel- Turkey relations From Prime Minister Olmert’s pursuit of Turkey ‘s help with direct talks with Syria, to the rapid deterioration in relations that followed the 2010 raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla, Haaretz brings you key events that shaped the ties between Israel and Turkey . Turkey says all main demands met with Israeli apology ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Friday all of Turkey ‘s fundamental demands had been met with an apology from Israel over the killing of nine Turkish citizens in a 2010 naval raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla. In a telephone call with his Turkish counterpart earlier on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu apologized for the killings and said Israel would pay Turkey says Israel has relaxed restrictions on imports to Palestinian areas ANKARA (Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his Turkish counterpart on Friday that Israel had “substantially” lifted restrictions on the entry of civilian goods into the Palestinian territories, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s office said. “Prime Minister Netanyahu … noted that Israel had substantially lifted the restrictions on the entry of civilian goods into With the Apology, All Stars and Suns Are Aligned. But Is It For Peace or War? by Emre Kızılkaya Israel’s U.S.-mediated apology from Turkey to mend relations after the Mavi Marmara incident is widely regarded as a “victory” in the Turkish media. Israel’s national security advisor felt ‘like a baby’ following apology: Report from Hurriyet Daily News The recent breakthrough in Turkish-Israeli relations was met with relief by some Israeli officials, especially those who contributed to efforts.   Turkish-Israeli diplomats to meet next week to agree compensation for Mavi Marmara victims from Hurriyet Daily News Now that Israel has issued a formal apology to Turkey. Netanyahu Regret and Apology from Mavi Boncuk by M.A.M Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkish Prime Minister Rejeb Tayyip Erdogan spoke by telephone on Friday, U.S. President Barack Obama said in a statement, in an apparent bid to repair relations between the two U.S. allies. ‘This is just the beginning,’ says Obama about Israel’s apology from Hurriyet Daily News “This is a work in progress. It’s just the beginning,” said U.S. President Barack Obama. With Israel’s apology Turkey’s demands have been met: Foreign Minister Davutoğlu from Hurriyet Daily News “Turkey’s basic demands have been met; we got what we wanted,” Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said.. US welcomes Israel’s apology to Turkey, emphasizes Kerry’s efforts from Hurriyet Daily News The European Union and NATO welcomed Israel’s apology to Turkey.. EU, NATO welcome Israel’s apology from Hurriyet Daily News The European Union and NATO welcomed Israel’s apology to Turkey Apology a political and diplomatic success for Turkey: Operator of Mavi Marmara from Hurriyet Daily News Israel’s formal apology over the Mavi Marmara raid is a political and diplomatic success, the head of the foundation. Netanyahu apologises to Turkish PM for Israeli role in Gaza flotilla raid from World news: Turkey | guardian.co.uk by Harriet Sherwood, Ewen MacAskill Obama brokers call between Netanyahu and Erdogan as Israel says sorry for role in 2010 naval raid that left nine Turks dead Barack Obama has persuaded Israel to apologise to Turkey for the loss of nine lives on board the Mavi Marmara – the lead ship in an aid flotilla trying to breach the blockade of Gaza – in a deal that paves the way for diplomatic relations to be restored between the two countries.   Les excuses de Nétanyahou au peuple turc by Acturca Le Figaro (France) no. 21348, samedi 23 mars 2013, p. 5 Laure Marchand, correspondante à Ankara Le premier ministre israélien a regretté vendredi l’arraisonnement de la flottille à destination de Gaza en 2010, causant la mort de neuf ressortissants turcs. Et ouvre ainsi la voie à la réconciliation entre les deux pays. Moyen-Orient. À défaut Un pari qui renforce la position régionale d’Ankara by Acturca Libération (France)  22 mars 2013, p. 7 Marc Semo En s’appuyant sur sa population kurde, Recep Tayyip Erdogan compte faire de son pays une plaque tournante pour les Kurdes irakiens et syriens. Un long et difficile processus commence pour trouver une solution politique à la question kurde en Turquie. Il y avait déjà eu durant With Obama as Broker, Israelis and Turkey End Dispute Over Ship Raid by Acturca The New York Times (USA) Saturday, March 23, 2013, p. A 1 By Jodi Rudoren and Mark Landler * Jerusalem — Under persistent prodding from President Obama, Israel and Turkey resolved a bitter three-year dispute on Friday with a diplomatic thaw that will help a fragile region confront Syria’s civil war, while handing the president In Bosnia, Turkey brings back a gentle version of the Ottoman Empire from Yahoo news Turkey conquered the Balkans five centuries ago. Now Turkish power is making inroads through friendlier means. Two Turkish-run universities have opened in Bosnia’s Ottoman-influenced capital in recent years, bringing an influx of Turkish students and culture to a predominantly Muslim country still reeling from a brutal ethnic war almost two decades ago. Read full article EU needs fairer system: Turkish deputy premier from Hurriyet Daily News The European Union must preserve its solidarity and come up with a fairer system, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan said. Practice key to normalization of Israeli relations, says Turkish PM Erdoğan from Hurriyet Daily News Prime Minister Erdoğan has indicated that the fence-mending announcement between Israel and Turkey is only a beginning in the restoring of bilateral relations Erdogan: No quick restoration of ties with Israel from Yahoo News Photos ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggested “normalization” of ties with Israel would take time, hinting that Turkey wanted to ensure the victims of a flotilla raid were compensated and Israel remained committed to the easing of restrictions of goods to Gaza before relations are restored between the two nations. With Obama as Broker, Israelis and Turkey End Dispute from NYT > Turkey by By JODI RUDOREN and MARK LANDLER; Jodi Rudoren reported from Jerusalem, and Mark Landler from Amman, Jordan. Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul. Israel’s apology for errors in a 2010 raid on a ship bound for Gaza thawed relations with Turkey and gave President Obama a solid achievement as he closed out his Middle East visit.   Turkish officials confirm FSA commander Asaad transferred to Turkey after blast from Hurriyet Daily News Colonel Riad al-Asaad, the founder of the Free Syrian Army, a rebel group fighting… Related posts: It seems that with Lieberman, there cannot be peace btw Israel and Turkey…. Turkey vs. Israel today. Naval diplomacy. Another roundup Erdoğan’s targets this week: Cyprus and Israel early stages of cold war between Israel and Turkey. Another roundup… Interesting: Israel PM apologised to Turkey PM over flotilla deaths…. A FP roundup…

Memes means, “unit of cultural transmission,” and that’s what designer and artist An Xiao Mina @anxiaostudio does in the Story to Action edition of Ethnography Matters. She moves from Ugandan chickens to Western Lolcat, from meme to meaning, deconstructing each meme with cultural analysis. The “action” in this case is a new model for internet culture analysis [...]

The online abstract submission system is now open for all proposals! Visit the Meetings page for complete details and to submit your proposal. Click here for details and submission requirements. The 112th AAA Annual Meeting will be held November 20-24, 2013 in Chicago, IL. This year’s meeting theme is Future Publics, Current Engagements. For complete [...]

CHAIRS: SANJEK, Roger (Emeritus) and TRATNER, Susan (SUNY ESC) SANJEK, Roger (Emeritus) Introduction: From Fieldnotes to eFieldnotes
 BURRELL, Jenna (UCB) Reviving the Armchair Anthropologist (renamed Through a Screen Darkly: On Remote, Collaborative Fieldwork in the Digital Age)
 SLAMA, Martin (Inst for Soc Anth, Austrian Academy of Sci) Filesharing in Contemporary Fieldwork: Examples from Indonesia CLIGGETT, Lisa [...]

  Anthropologist sees the world  as a world of extreme complexity or as a series of Big Data ( NP hard ) problems , hence, some field complexities could be described as“ botanic rarities of the most exotic kind “ by literary forms , whereas another complexities are ready for scientific computational analysis. As is known the first attempts to introduce systematic scientific analysis of culture as “ a set of mechanical devices “ ( Malinowski ) or  as a  sort of “computer software “( Leach )  were made by functionalists . In 1933  White émigré  Russian functionalist S.M. Shirokogoroff also used equations of statistical physics in order to describe self-organization effect of his “ethnoses theory “( used by Soviet ethnography, later ). In 1940s Levi-Strauss and Andre Weil attempted to use elements of modular algebra and becoming category mathematics in kinship classifications  in the terms of structuralism. At the same time Levi-Strauss had found simplification of this mathematics in the form of Jakobson ‘s binary arithmetic ( “system of phonological distinctive features “), generalized the first by “functionalist-structuralist” Edmund Leach. Probably, the best expression of becoming mathematical tradition in anthropology belongs Edmund R. Leach, Cambridge’ applied mathematician having engineering background. Some passages by Leach in this context are very impressive, indeed :      “ I tend to think of social systems as machines for the ordering of social relations or as buildings that are likely to collapse if the stresses and strains of the roof structure are not properly in balance. When I was engaged in fieldwork I saw my problem as trying to understand "just how the system works" or "why it held together."   “ In my own mind these were not just metaphors but problems of mechanical insight; nor was it just make-believe. To this day, in quite practical matters, I remain an unusually competent amateur mechanic and retain an interest in architecture which is much more concerned with structural features of design than with aesthetics “   “ I had learned to work with binary arithmetic before I had ever heard of computing or of Saussurean linguistics. I recall that when, in 1961, I first encountered Jakobson' s system of phonological distinctive features my inner reaction was: "Ah! I have been here before!" “   “ My engineering background also effected the way I reacted to Marxism “.   “ My concern with design stability does not mean that I am unmoved by the aesthetics of great architecture, but it adds a dimension which less numerate observers probably miss. My private use of the concept of "structure" in social anthropology is thus different both from the usage developed by Radcliffe - Brown and Fortes (where it simply refers to the skeletal framework of society without any consideration of design features) and from Levi -Strauss's transformational usage, which borrows from Jakobson's phonology, though my engineer's viewpoint is much closer to the latter than to the former.”    “ In terms of my engineering metaphor, Fortes describes the social machinery and its component parts but is unconvincing when he tries to explain how the system works . Firth gives us an instruction manual for operating the machinery,but he does not tell us what the bits and pieces would look like if we took it apart. Or to pursue my art and architecture model: it is wholly appropriate that Firth should be entranced by the highly decorated solidity of the Romanesque Cathedral at Conques and that Fortes should have been overawed by the symmetrical Gothic fragilities of King's College Chapel “   “ anthropologists are engaged in a scientific discipline which is capable of revealing facts of (social) nature in much the same way as experiments in physics reveal the facts of physical nature”   “ I never had the makings of a true mathematician, but I was mathematically literate. I learned about "transformational" theory (in the form of advanced algebra and the nineteenth century developments of projective geometry) several years before I entered Cambridge as an undergraduate. If some of my anthropological work is"structuralist" in style, it is for that reason”.   “ Another key point, about which I was also quite explicit, was that my use of "function" derived from mathematics and not from biology or psychology, as was the case with the followers of Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. Consequently, from my point of view, there was no inconsistency between " functionalism" and "structuralism" (in its then novel continental sense) “.   “ Human society was made by man, so man should be able to understand society, in an engineering sense, e.g. why it holds together and does not collapse. Behind this there is the further perception that all the artifacts (including human society) which man thus "makes" must necessarily be projective transformations of what the human brain already "knows." This implies, to use computer terminology, that social products are generated by "software programs," operating through but limited by the computer-like machinery of the human brain. The "software" comes from our cultural environment; the "hardware" derives from our genetic inheritance.”   “… being a functionalist and being a structuralist; I have quite consistently been both at once. But both my functionalism and my structuralism derive from my grounding in mathematics and engineering “.   “ Furthermore, I have an engineer's interest in design, in how local regions of complex unbounded systems "work ." Indeed, I have consistently maintained that the social systems with which anthropologists have to deal are not, in any empirical sense, bounded at all. To discuss the plurality of cultures is for me nonsense…”   [ “ Glimpes of the unmentionable in the history of British social anthropology “  Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 1984. 13:1-23 ]. Please see also : Interview of Edmund Leach by Frank Kermode in 1982 (film)    

In her recently opened exhibition "Refleksije vremena 1945.-1955.", curator Jasmine Bavoljak uses more than 300 art works, everyday objects, films, photos and documents to create an image of post WW-II Yugoslavia. The exhibition covers a wide range of themes through various media: the division of Istria between Italy and Yugoslavia; distancing from the USSR and establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement; the cult of Tito; labor collectives; industrialization; Young Partisans; education; social movements. While I appreciate the exhibition's monumentality, I also miss expressions from those who had actually lived through this period. Among all the films, posters, sculptures and paintings lie few tales of what this period actually meant for people. No oral histories, diary entries or letters written to relatives abroad. In this way, it is essentially a "top down" view of history rather than one focusing on personal experiences. Refleksije vremena 1945.-1955. will be shown at museum-gallery Sacred Hearts in Pula, Croatia until May 5th, 2013.

Last evening, federal agency representatives, congressional staff and association affiliates welcomed AAA Executive Director Dr. Edward Liebow to his new position and to the Washington D.C. area. This gathering provided an opportunity for the AAA to continue to build a strong network amongst key players in the area. The event was hosted at the Sonoma [...]

In this long overdue installment of Incidental Anthropology I bring you a few examples of anthropology interest incidentally found in the media. First, the vexing question of how to handle to infant waste and some ingenious responses: here Second, how have tourists in American National Parks changed over the last 30 years? Not much: here Third, how do you test a method of building phylogenic trees without using actual organisms? With invented organisms called Caminalcules: here Finally, Jeff Bezos has pulled an F-1 rocket engine from the sea floor. Is this an act of respect for the engineers who built the engines or an act of “gonzo space archeology?”  Discussed, here

The lefty chunk of my Facebook turned red this week in solidarity with those supporting marriage equality, as I’m sure it did for many of you. For those of you for who want more more more of this, here’s a couple of things for your enjoyment: Courtney Milan’s very funny Truncated transcript from today’s SCOTUS argument … Continue reading →

Hello all,This week's review is quite an eclectic mix - including cats and sex (in the blog-appropriate form of ethnographic research on Ugandan Internet memes and a 'sex strike' of Indonesian women for conflict resolution). But there's more for the forthcoming long holiday weekend! New publications, how drones impact development work, the media's non-engagement with the conflict in Mali, what people think is the most effective tool to curb corruption, BRICS and the new global capitalist imperialism, lazy aid journalism around UK's Red Nose campaign as well as reflections on the precious work-life balance. I already mentioned that chickens and goats are the cats of the Ugandan Internet and last not least, some reflections on how 'post-publication' (peer) review can work through social media. And there's more!Happy holidays!New on aidnographyPaved with Good Intentions–Canada’s development NGOs from idealism to imperialism (book review)The book tells and important – and certainly not just limited to Canada! – story about the changing relationships between the state, civil society, NGOs and, depending on your political viewpoint, the professionalization/depoliticization/selling out of this growing sector of the global aid industry. The book attempts to, and often successfully manages, to bring together three narratives about the history of Canadian NGOs, neoliberal politics and a focus on the situation in Haiti where the authors were involved as a cross-cultural activists. Despite its minor flaws, Paved with Good Intentions is a stimulating and important book. Even if you or your organization disagrees with parts of the narrative of the book, it is still a valuable resource and entry point of coming together to discuss, reflect and potentially write down your own version of how change has (not) happened and add a more nuanced narrative to the bigger picture of what civil society and NGOs can do across Canada and in the world.DevelopmentImproving the Evaluability of INGO Empowerment and Accountability Programmes This CDI Practice Paper is based on an analysis of international NGO (INGO) evaluation practice in empowerment and accountability (E&A) programmes commissioned by CARE UK, Christian Aid, Plan UK and World Vision UK. It reviews evaluation debates and their implications for INGOs. The authors argue that if INGOs are to successfully 'measure' or assess outcomes and impacts of E&A programmes, they need to shift attention from methods to developing more holistic and complexity informed evaluation strategies during programme design. Final evaluations or impact assessments are no longer discrete activities, but part of longer-term learning processes. Given the weak evaluation capacity within the international development sector, this CDI Practice Paper concludes that institutional donors must have realistic expectations and support INGOs to develop their evaluation capacity in keeping with cost - benefit considerations. Donors might also need to reconsider the merits of trying to evaluate the 'impact' of 'demand-side' NGO governance programmes independently of potentially complementary 'supply-side' governance initiatives.As IDS opens its new Centre for Development Impact, this is an interesting first publication. Peacebuilding & conflict transformation : A resource bookWhen Katharina Schilling showed us the two compilations, resource book and methods book, she had painstakingly put together on the basis of her work experience and the challenges of working with many young people in Sierra Leone and Cameroon, we felt these tools should be made available to a larger public in Africa and beyond. An additional bonus is that the beautiful illustrations have been developed by her colleague Julius Nzang, a young Cameroonian journalist who participated in the facilitation of youth workshops. In our work with Civil Peace Service Networks in several African countries, we have come to realise that working with youth on and in conflict is one of the most important tasks for building a better future. Katharina’s colleagues and superiors in SLADEA (Sierra Leone Adult Education Association) and PCC (Presbyterian Church in Cameroon), as well as the many young people in the training sessions, have over the years supported and made this work possible and we can now all benefit from their insight and experience. These books address peace issues and conflict transformation at the individual, group and community levels. Many of us work in situations of violent or latent conflict that throw whole regions or countries into war or warlike situations. A comprehensive and openly accessible resource for teaching, training and learning around peace and conflict.Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowship 2013We’re training future data scientists to work on the world’s most challenging social problems. Fellows will work in small teams with mentors from the Obama campaign analytics team and seasoned data scientists from academia and business on high-impact projects in education, healthcare, energy, transportation, and more. This full-time program is selective, intensive, and hands-on: - You’ll work with nonprofits and governments to solve big problems with data.- You’ll learn how to apply statistics, machine learning, and big data technologies to problems that matter. - And you’ll work collaboratively with interdisciplinary teams. Although the Fellowship doesn't mention international development explicitly, it is probably of interest for some who work in development-the only issue I disagree with is that the focus is exclusively on the quantitative, mathematical, statistical side of things rather than encouraging debates between the qual and quant camps...Energize, Polarize, Mobilize! Human Rights, Participation, Activism, Internet. International Workshop ConferenceThe spread of digital technologies has given new opportunities to activists around the world. At the same time they can also be the cause of new threats to activists and people using digital media for political communication or mobilization. Successful campaigning and political action requires knowledge of digital technologies and social media, as well as skills in communication strategies and creative forms to express a message. The event will attempt to answer the question: "What are the tools and trends, the opportunities and challenges for activism in 2013?" both on a theoretical and practical level and also both online and offline. I started to listen to some of the audio recorded presentations and there's really some good stuff available.Analysis: The view from the ground: How drone strikes hamper aid“The public debate, rightly so, has focused on the transparency and targeting of drones, but for humanitarians, there are a whole set of much more specific concerns that we don’t necessarily have answers on and ought to be thinking about,” says Naz Modirzadeh, a senior fellow at Harvard Law School and a leading expert on the intersection between counterterrorism and humanitarian aid. In places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, strikes by unmanned planes are increasingly affecting humanitarian operations, aid workers say, necessitating a greater discussion by humanitarians on how to deal with the impact and a greater focus by US policymakers on how to mitigate it.Long and balanced post that outlines that drones are (and are likely to become even more so in the future) a development issue that deserves more attention and discussion.Mali’s War, UnseenDespite many correspondents’ repeated and sometimes risky efforts to reach the front lines, there are virtually no first-hand journalistic accounts of the fighting in Mali.(...)Even casual media consumers are now accustomed to and expect such images. More than a decade of compelling combat footage provided by embedded correspondents in Afghanistan and Iraq—and more recently from embattled Syria, although from there most often by citizen reporters or militia fighters—have convinced viewers that we can access on demand the latest horrific moments of faraway conflicts.French media organizations have publicized the restrictions on their reporting [as well as sometimes criticizing their colleagues’ offerings], complaining vigorously, as have press freedom groups. “The French authorities, supported by their Malian counterparts, have achieved their ‘zero image of the war front’ media objective for Operation Serval by strictly controlling access to information,” the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders stated in mid-February.A very detailed and interesting analysis of the media's (non-)engagement with the actual conflict in Mali (and on a side-note on how much we as media consumers have relied on the goodwill of armed forces and official entities when it comes to 'embedded' footage from Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria).Business People: Investigative Journalism Best Against CorruptionTI’s survey, Putting Corruption out of Business, gathered responses from 3,000 business people across 13 sectors that included real estate, banking, forestry and mining. The survey asked them to rank the effectiveness of six measures, from corporate due diligence to national anti-bribery laws to international treaties. What do you think came up on top, in country after country? Investigative journalism. Business people in 20 of the 30 countries surveyed chose investigative journalism as the most effective tool at fighting corruption. In 27 countries it was ranked higher than international agreements, and in 24 countries higher than national anti-bribery laws. Among the countries ranking it highest: Brazil, Chile, Poland, the Philippines, and Indonesia. In Brazil, 70 percent of the respondents called investigative journalism the most effective tool against private sector corruption. This sentiment was evenly spread, too, among different industries: oil and gas (58%), pharmaceutical and healthcare (56%), and transportation and storage (54%). (...)“It is clear that journalists are critical players in the anti-corruption fight,” wrote Deborah Hardoon, Senior Research Coordinator at TI. At the same time, Hardoon noted that a watchdog press is just one key ingredient. “To stop corruption, investigative journalists must be able to work in an environment where whistleblowers are protected… where citizens reading the news do not tolerate corruption and demand better from their society and their leaders (and) where anti-corruption legislation is adequate and effectively enforced.”Talking about transparency: Transparency International's latest study has some interesting food for thought for development-related journalism and other forms of writing, such as blogging, I think as they can be effective tools for communication and social change.Make love not war: sex and peacebuilding in Mindanao Confronted with a lack of food, supplies and the prospect of dependency on humanitarian aid, the women of a sewing cooperative banded together to withhold sex from their husbands until they agreed to no longer fight, bringing peace to a village in the Philippines. (...)Before conceiving the idea to organize a sex strike, the women of Dado Village had no say in the decisions for either army to fight. Precisely due to this marginalization, they were freer to think in more radical terms of possible solutions to abate the violence. This commenter fails to acknowledge both the cultural significance of the women’s strategy and the extraordinary risk the women faced. Failure to comply with demands for sex may have been answered with forced submission or abuse. The women of Dado should be commended for their ability to resolve conflict in a culturally unique way. They make the case that NGO’s working in conflict management should search for and build upon existing norms rather than simply bringing two parties in a conflict together. Furthermore, the women should be lauded for their courage and solidarity rather than put down for calling for a sex strike.Luckily, this story is backed by the UN and comes with more serious questions around women's participation in conflict resolution- in case anybody want to accuse me of going after the catchy headlines ;)! BRICS chafe under charge of "new imperialists" in Africa"We think there's too much back-slapping," said Patrick Bond of the University of KwaZulu-Natal's centre for Civil Society, who helped to organise an alternative "BRICS-from-below" meeting in Durban to shadow the BRICS summit on Tuesday and Wednesday. Bond and other critics of the BRICS' South-South pitch say developing countries that receive investment and assistance from the new emerging powers need to take a hard, close look at the deals they are getting. Beneath the fraternal veneer, Bond sees "incoherent imperial competition" not unlike the 19th Century scramble, saying that BRICS members are similarly coveting and exploiting African resources without sufficiently boosting industrialisation and job-creation, all much needed on the continent. This view has gained some traction in Africa as citizens from Guinea and Nigeria to Zambia and Mozambique increasingly see Brazilian, Russian, Indian, Chinese and South African companies scooping up multi-billion dollar oil and mining deals and big-ticket infrastructure projects. Many of these deals have come under scrutiny from local and international rights groups. More than a few have faced criticism that they focus heavily on raw material extraction, lack transparency and do not offer enough employment and developmental benefits to the receiving countries - charges often levelled against corporations from the developed West.(...)Warning Africa was opening itself up to "a new form of imperialism", Nigerian central bank governor Lamido Sanusi accused China, now the world's No. 2 economy, of worsening Africa's deindustrialisation and underdevelopment. "China takes our primary goods and sells us manufactured ones. This was also the essence of colonialism," Sanusi wrote in a March 11 opinion column in the Financial Times. "Africa must recognise that China - like the U.S., Russia, Britain, Brazil and the rest - is in Africa not for African interests but its own," Sanusi added.Interesting and important reminder that rather than focusing too narrowly on 'North' and 'South', global capitalism is driving the BRICS's engagement in Africa in similar ways than previous capitalist expansions. It’s an emotional subjectFirst of all relief among many participants to be in a collective space where it’s OK to talk about how they feel about what is happening to them – and to find that others were experiencing similar emotions of frustration of the impact of the results and evidence agenda on their jobs. ‘All I do now is write reports’ said one. ‘I make up numbers’, said another, bitterly. There is anger at the absurdity of ‘targetitis’ and the proliferation of tools and protocols. People mentioned being forced to develop Theories of Change that ignored the ‘politics of how’ and the sheer stupidity of a large global programme that has 300 indicators for measuring change. The long-standing anxiety was aired about how alternative pathways of change are ignored by the logical framework single linear cause-effect proposition. There is despair that mandatory approaches to design, monitoring and reporting are ‘ignoring the knowledge of those you are working with and for. ’ One evaluation specialist spoke of how his organisation is being obliged to do ‘objective’ evaluations, excluding interviews with a programme’s diversity of stakeholders because these are seen as biased points of view. Evaluations are increasingly ignoring ‘context and power relations, said another.There is a bit of a 'note the irony' moment involved when IDS inaugurates its new Centre for Development Impact when at the same time IDS Participation Fellow Rosalind Eyben reflects on her recent encounters with people who often seem to suffer from the objective-evaluation-impact-theory-of-change debate... Red Nose Day: Media short changes the poor with its soft-soap aid coverageIt is all seen as great fun for a good cause. But pause for a second. Why does the state broadcaster hand over huge chunks of its valuable schedules for fundraising marathons that promote so powerfully an increasingly controversial and outdated worldview?It is not just the toe-curling coverage of celebrities abroad, seen at its exploitative worst two years ago when a quartet of stars spent a week in a Kenyan slum and discovered that, hey, life's tough there. It is the underlying message that aid is an unalloyed good thing, something at odds with so much evidence and a swelling chorus of African and Asian voices questioning the west's right to meddle in their countries.This stance is evident across the BBC. News programmes, so admirable in their challenging approach to most issues, provide unquestioning platforms when covering the work of charities abroad. Feared inquisitors bowl bouncers at politicians, business leaders and even their own bosses, yet aim the softest of questions at aid workers as if they are secular saints.I agree to some extent with Ian Birrell that many mainstream media outlets are quite lazy when it comes to reporting on the complexities of aid and quite easily resort to traditional images of how charities help poor people in Africa etc. But fundraising is also 'big business' for a charity sector that can no longer rely on public money and private donations as countries like the UK are cutting back funding and many people cannot afford donations. It's complicated...REDD: a good idea donorised and projectised to death?To donors and other big aid sector players these multiple technical and social challenges must have appeared rather like stumbling upon a car crash scene for an ambulance-chasing lawyer. “Aha!” they said, “Here is a role for us.” Projects were created left, right and centre, the dollars flowed, and the consultants came and feasted. People were trained in analysing satellite imagery, whilst gender and indigenous peoples experts galore advised on how to ensure REDD delivered benefits to all. I expect there were even strategies drawn up for dealing with HIV/AIDS in REDD. But where are the carbon savings that all of this work would support? Here we meet what is both the great strength and the great weakness of REDD: it is almost impervious to fudged or sticking-plaster type solutions. In order to succeed in REDD one must not just conserve a patch of forest, but reduce the drivers of deforestation, so that another forest loss (and hence carbon emissions) are not simply displaced elsewhere. This is hard. Seriously hard. Most of the time someone will lose out, whether it is big business intent on industrial-scale logging or adding another oil palm plantation, or poor farmers pushing further into the bush in order to find more fertile soils. Such challenges are not susceptible to ‘projectisation’ in the standard aid model that works with mid-level managers plus advisers. Instead they require tough political decisions, probably at cabinet level. It is clear that in some countries (Brazil, Indonesia and Guyana come to mind) REDD has reached this level of serious political engagement, even if (in the case of Indonesia) the desired outcomes are not yet secured. However, elsewhere REDD appears stuck a rung or two lower on the government bureaucratic ladder, and thus the actual mechanism by which forest carbon savings will be generated remains either theoretical or entirely undefined.Bottom Up Thinking on how ambitious, big ideas get absorbed (or ignored) when they meet the political, social and technical realities of various complexities of 'development'The power of the ‘package’ in communicating forestry researchA multimedia package brings together a combination of text, photographs, video clips, audio, graphics and interactivity together on a website. At CIFOR we tend to create a platform or landing page, which features a number of the following: Online publications (drawn from our RSS feeds)Blogs (taken from our CIFOR blog site, posts created in WordPress)Videos (listed in Youtube)Photos or photo stories (featured on Flickr)Powerpoint presentations (from SlideShare)Infographics The aim is to use a variety of different media to tell a story of your research in a compelling and informative way. Think of every blog, video or photo as a ‘teaser’ intended to engage the audience and encourage them to explore your research further, for example, by downloading your policy brief or working paper. At CIFOR, we always ensure that our packages include links to relevant research papers, and we have seen a strong correlation between readership of packages, increased downloads of linked publications, and increased citations of these publications in scientific journals.(...)Deliver your ideas to policy makers the digital way, fast: With the proliferation of media channels and so many research organisations releasing a wide range of products, policy makers are saturated with information. A targeted multimedia package, containing strong and relevant content that is well promoted through social media and digital channels will undoubtedly stand out from the crowd. Whilst presenting at the U.N. climate negotiations in Durban, the Costa Rican Environment Minster commented on a ‘great map of REDD+ projects across the world’ that he had read about on CIFOR’s blog. The story was part of a package of stories to update policymakers with the latest news and research on forests – it shows that you never know who is reading. Interesting coincidence...I liked the post because of the communication aspects and then realized that the contents engages with REDD as well...Work life balance: How we can put “work” and “life” on equal levelsHaving been working in development since 2006 I, too, experienced the difficulties of bringing together one’s aspirations of “doing good” while ending up in an environment where many people holding junior positions (and not only those) feel enormous pressure. This pressure often resulted from aiming at being promoted to the next higher level (where there were fewer positions available), waiting for short-term contracts to be renewed or simply wishing to get positive recommendations for future applications. Maintaining relationships and friendships or thinking about having children often came second or third or hardly at all.(...)I am not suggesting this was a nice and easy task (and an evidence-based best practice collection yet has to be put together), but here are a few strategies I found helpful for improving my own work life balance.My colleague Claire Grauer on some of the all-too-familiar challenges that the 'Generation Y' faces in development life- and workstyles over at the great 'Women Working in Aid and Development'.AnthropologyThe Chickens and Goats of Uganda’s InternetCould internet culture be a bridge culture, much like hip hop and Hollywood films have done so successfully? Everywhere I travel, people know Michael Jackson and Arnold Schwarzenegger. These cultural references are driven by large companies, but internet culture is more bottom-up. It’s at once universal and at once highly local. Ugandans don’t have lolcats, and they don’t have lolchickens. Ugandan internet lingo doesn’t use the word “lol”; they have their own laughter words online like “*dead” (for dying of laughter). But we in the West can still relate to and understand Ugandan internet humor, just as they can understand Western cat memes. As more and more people join the internetz, we often talk about opportunities for politics, commerce, education and exchange of information. But I also think we shouldn’t forget about why most people come online in the first place–to chat with friends and share funny pictures. The internet is a highly cultural and creative space. Though prosaic on the surface, what we chat about and what we share will be quite different around the world. And perhaps that too is a vehicle for telling stories.No meme, cat, or Ugandan animal picture should be safe from ethnographic inquiry ;)! But seriously, this is an enjoyable Internet ethnographic contribution when local and global digital cultures meet.AcademiaBlogging as post-publication peer review: reasonable or unfair?The response by the authors highlights another issue: now that the paper has been published, the expectation is that anyone who has doubts, such as me, should be responsible for checking the veracity of the findings. As we say in Britain, I should put up or shut up. Indeed, I could try to get a research grant to do a further study. However, I would probably not be allowed by my local ethics committee to do one on such a small sample and it might take a year or so to do, and would distract me from my other research. Given that I have reservations about the likelihood of a positive result, this is not an attractive option. My view is that journal editors should have recognised this as a pilot study and asked the authors to do a more extensive replication, rather than dashing into print on the basis of such slender evidence. (...) Finally, a comment on whether it is fair to comment on a research article in a blog, rather than going through the usual procedure of submitting an article to a journal and having it peer-reviewed prior to publication. The authors’ reactions to my blogpost are reminiscent of Felicia Wolfe-Simon’s response to blog-based criticisms of a paper she published in Science: "The items you are presenting do not represent the proper way to engage in a scientific discourse”. Unlike Wolfe-Simon, who simply refused to engage with bloggers, Facoetti and Gori show willingness to discuss matters further, and present their side of the story, but they nevertheless it is clear they do not regard a blog as an appropriate place to debate scientific studies.The politics of research and peer-reviewed publication - and the emerging question of the value of non-traditional post-publication (peer) review through social media.The Commercialization of Academia: A Case StudyIn America, the concern is that the sector is being pushed towards a mission dedicated solely to the production of vocationally-equipped graduates with skill sets easily measured, all administered in a commercial framework driven by ever changing business models glossily packaged in the buzzwords fashionable to the day . We’re already there in Britain.(...)This has been the one constant in my experience. Each of the ten academic years I’ve been at my current institution has been subjected to some fundamental reorganization, to the point where my colleagues have a joke about it: it’s a Mao-esque permanent revolution. In this time, my department has been based in two faculties under four (soon to be five) deans, housed in three (soon to be four) “schools”, with four different heads of school, and my department has had five chairs. The university writ large has seen a massive building program, the consolidation of branch campuses on the main campus, the reduction in faculties from eight, to five, and then a year later four. Physically, my department has moved offices twice in two years, and for some three times. We’re facing yet another physical move in the summer of 2014, as our extant offices are redeveloped into on-campus housing for students. My own major has been reduced to a minor twice; once in 2005, for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious but corresponded with the sacking of two colleagues. Following the byzantine process of validation, which I’ve now achieved a certain proficiency at, it relaunched three years later, only to have it suddenly pulled on that Saturday morning, three years ago.A long essay for the forthcoming long weekend on how commercialization has become part of a 'permanent revolution' in academia, creating an ever-increasing dynamic of uncertainty and pressure, in this case in the UK.

Boldoo ("DLOB") and DJ Munk. Photo by Lauren Knapp.[Read the rest of the article]: Sampling Mongolia’s Soviet pastAuthor informationLauren KnappResearch Fellow, Grinnell College at Fulbright - mtvULauren Knapp is a multimedia non-fiction storyteller based in Pittsburgh, PA. Her upcoming documentary, "Live from UB," explores the role of rock music in forming a post-Soviet national identity among Mongolia's youth. You can see here work here: www.cornfedmedia.org Original article: Sampling Mongolia’s Soviet past©2013 PopAnth - Hot Buttered Humanity. All Rights Reserved.

There were quite a number of interesting articles related to anthropology, science, and medicine in this month’s round up of journals including those from American Anthropologist, Social Science and Medicine, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, Science in Context, and Science, Technology, & Human Values. Happy reading!   American Anthropologist Of Foams and Formalisms: Scientific Expertise and Craft Practice in Molecular Gastronomy Sophia Roosth This article situates molecular gastronomy as a compelling example of how scientific practices and rationales sometimes percolate outside of professional scientific fields, where they can become aestheticized and fetishized, commodified and consumed. Roosth argues that molecular gastronomy is one case in which the explanatory ground usually occupied by anthropology hasbeen supplanted by science. She asks two critical questions: 1) how does scientific authority justify or invalidate quotidian practices and vernacular, practical, and embodied knowledge; and 2) what becomes of traditional objects of anthropological thought—things like foodways, nationalism, authenticity, nostalgia, and sensation—when scientists seek to explain them scientifically, and by explaining them, “improve” them? By surveying a social movement in which practitioners shuffle culinary, scientific, and anthropological expertises in talking about, making, and eating food, Roosth argues that French molecular gastronomists by seeking to formalize and scientize French cuisine, they also work to codify French culture. In short, culture is here an object of chemistry.   Social Science and Medicine Investigating the affordability of key health services in South Africa Susan Cleary, Steve Birch, Natsayi Chimbindi, Sheetal Silal, Di McIntyre This paper considers the affordability of using public sector health services for three tracer conditions (obstetric care, tuberculosis treatment and antiretroviral treatment for HIV-positive people), based on research undertaken in two urban and two rural sites in South Africa. The authors find that there were significant differences in affordability between rural and urban sites; costs were higher, ability-to-pay was lower and there was a greater proportion of households selling assets or borrowing money in rural areas. There were also significant differences across tracers, with a higher percentage of households receiving tuberculosis and antiretroviral treatment borrowing money or selling assets than those using obstetric services. As these conditions require expenses to be incurred on an ongoing basis, the sustainability of such coping strategies is questionable. Policy makers need to explore how to reduce direct costs for users of these key health services in the context of the particular characteristics of different treatment types. Affordability needs to be considered in relation to the dynamic aspects of the costs of treating different conditions and the timing of treatment in relation to diagnosis. The frequently high transport costs associated with treatments involving multiple consultations can be addressed by initiatives that provide close-to-client services and subsidized patient transport for referrals.   ‘We view that as contraceptive failure’: Containing the ‘multiplicity’ of contraception and abortion within Scottish reproductive healthcare Siân M. Beynon-Jones Within contemporary Scottish policy guidance, abortion is routinely configured as evidence of a resolvable problem with the healthcare provision of contraception. This article draws on interviews with Scottish health professionals in order to explore how, and in what form, realities of contraception/abortion are sustained within abortion practice. It also demonstrates how a novel conceptual approach could be used to develop existing social scientific analyses of the provision of techniques of fertility prevention. Mobilizing insight gained from STS studies of the complex socio-material practices through which realities are enacted (or ‘performed’), Beynon-Jones’ analysis illustrates the complex socio-material work required to enact abortion as evidence of a ‘problem’ with contraception that is resolvable within the healthcare consultation. This work renders visible the ontologically ‘multiple’ nature of contraception/ abortion, with important implications for both social science and policy approaches to these techniques of fertility prevention.   Putting knowledge to trial: ‘ADHD parents’ and the evaluation of alternative therapeutic regimes Claire Edwards and Etaoine Howlett The role of patients’ organizations in shaping (medical) knowledge about particular health conditions and illnesses sheds light on notions of informed patienthood and the dynamics of lay-expert knowledge in the context of medicalization. This paper considers dynamics of knowledge production in relation to a specific condition area, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), by investigating how parents of children with ADHD are intervening in knowledge creation about the effectiveness of different treatments for the disorder. It draws on qualitative research carried out with organizations representing parents of children with ADHD in Ireland, to explore how parents have commissioned evaluations of alternative interventions to medication. Drawing on analysis of interviews with both parents and professionals active in the arena of ADHD, documentary evidence, and observation at parent organizations’ events, the study demonstrates how parents’ interventions have sought to expand the therapeutic domain of ADHD beyond the exclusive realm of biopsychiatry, and the dilemmas they face in making their experiences count in a context where the need for evidence has become paramount in the governance of health.   Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Sabar: body politics among middle-aged migrant Pakistani women Kaveri Qureshi This article explores the relationship among suffering, Islamic moral concepts, subjectivity, and agency within a cohort of middle-aged women who migrated from Pakistan to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s as the wives or daughters of industrial workers. These women were preoccupied with their ageing bodies and complained about the cumulative assaults on their health they had experienced, and which they felt had been neglected by health professionals and family alike. By examining how these women bear chronic illness through a discourse of sabar (patience or silent forbearance), Qureshi shows how women were able to transform their illness into a selfless and virtuous consequence of shouldering the burdens of kinship. Sabar suggests passive acceptance or fatalism to some observers, but by attending to everyday contexts of friendship, family, and inter-generational relations and how women situate their illness in a religious and eschatological frame, Qureshi shows that there are tensions between self-sublimation and self-assertion in the practice of sabar and that women actively appropriate rather than passively imbibe the norm of sabar. Finally, Qureshi argues that ethnographic attention to subjectivity and reflexivity are crucial to understanding sabar as an agential capacity.   Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine Cardiovascular medicine at face value: a qualitative pilot study on clinical axiology Adalberto de Hoyos, Rodrigo Nava-Diosdado, Jorge Mendez, Sergio Ricco, Ana Serrano, Carmen Flores Cisneros, Carlos Macías-Ojeda, Héctor Cisneros, David Bialostozky, Nelly Altamirano-Bustamante and Myriam M Altamirano-Bustamante          Cardiology is one of the subspecialties in which evidence-based medicine is predominant but presents ethical dilemmas that are very unlikely to be solved solely based on the available clinical evidence. The ethical dilemmas specific include, among others, issues arising from the decisions to be made between what can be done and what should done related to chronic ischemic cardiopathy, acute coronary is chemic syndrome. Ethical deliberation is needed to decide whether to resurrect a patient in the case of a heart attack or malignant arrhythmia, the use of scarce resources in the case of organ transplantation, the process of informed consent and the role of the living will. In view of these dilemmas, an urgent necessity arises in cardiology to reinforce the pairing of values-based medicine and evidence-based medicine. By conducting qualitative analysis of the values and the virtues of healthcare professionals in a cardiology hospital in order to establish how the former impact upon the medical and ethical decisions made by the latter, the authors hold that the ends of medical practice (curing, healing and caring) encompass both evidence-based medicine and values-based medicine, and that clinical practice values are closely related to those of life history. They argue that this is important when developing the ethical formation of medical students, and healthcare employees, and that knowledge of the axiology of healthcare professions can be applied to the selection of candidates who seek to study and pursue these careers.   Should trainee doctors use the developing world to gain clinical experience? The annual Varsity Medical Debate – London, Friday 20th January, 2012 Barnabas J Gilbert, Calum Miller, Fenella Corrick, and Robert A Watson The 2012 Varsity Medical Debate between Oxford University and Cambridge University provided a stage for representatives from these famous institutions to debate the motion “This house believes that trainee doctors should be able to use the developing world to gain clinical experience.” This article brings together many of the arguments put forward during the debate, centering around three major points of contention: the potential intrinsic wrong of ‘using’ patients in developing countries; the effects on the elective participant; and the effects on the host community. The article goes on to critically appraise overseas elective programmes, offering a number of solutions that would help optimize their effectiveness in the developing world.   Science in Context Citizen, Academic, Expert, or International Worker? Juggling with Identities at UNESCO’s Social Science Department, 1946-1955 Teresa Tomas Rangil This article explores the links between the competing scientific, disciplinary, and institutional identifications of social scientists working for international organizations and the nature of the work produced in these establishments. By examining the case of UNESCO’s Social Science Department from 1946 to 1955, Rangil shows how the initial lack of organizational identification diminished the efficiency and productivity of the Department and slowed down the creation of an international system for research in the social sciences. She then examines how the elaboration of such identification resulted from a period of trial and error during which several national, academic, and scientific models were explored. Rangil concludes that only the discourse of “moral sensitivity” kept the Department together at a time when disillusions regarding internationalism, the destabilization of the meaning of nation, and suspicion towards some Western disciplines rendered unacceptable the universalization of a single international social scientific identification.   Biobricks and Crocheted Coral: Dispatches from the Life Sciences in the Age of Fabrication Sophia Roosth Roosth asks what “life” becomes at a moment when biological inquiry proceeds by manufacturing biological artifacts and systems. In this article, she juxtaposes two radically different communities, synthetic biologists and Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef crafters (HCCR). Synthetic biology is a decade-old research initiative that seeks to merge biology with engineering and experimental research with manufacture. The HCCR is a distributed venture of three thousand craftspeople who cooperatively fabricate a series of yarn and plastic coral reefs to draw attention to the menace climate change poses to the Great Barrier and other reefs. Interpreting these two groups alongside one another, Roosth suggests that for both, manufacturing biological artifacts advances their understandings of biology: in a rhetorical loop, they build new biological things in order to understand the things they are making. The resulting fabrications condense scientific and folk theories about “life” and also undo “life” as a coherent analytic object.   Science, Technology, & Human Values Special Issue: Entanglements of Science, Ethics, and Justice Why Justice?: Introduction to the Special Issue on Entanglements of Science, Ethics, and Justice Laura Mamo and Jennifer R. Fishman This special issue assembles papers that consider relations among science, ethics, and justice. The papers are drawn from a 2011 National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop that brought together interdisciplinary scholars to consider, incorporate, and attend to the meanings, uses, and social consequences of ethical questions and justice ideals in technoscientific projects. Mamo and Fishman argue that although science and technology studies (STS) has engaged justice as a matter of concern, it must go further to examine justice frameworks more explicitly and to participate in efforts that seek justice in ways that are associated with, yet distinct from, the study of ethics. They offer this special issue as a starting point for thinking about justice and ethics in STS and about STS in/of justice; for engaging with other scholars and activists yearning for analyses of how we might imagine and enact more ‘‘just’’ technosciences, scholarship and futures; and to align with STS projects committed to studying and understanding values embedded in technoscientific practices and the situatedness of those involved in their making, diffusion, and (intended and unintended) use. The papers included in this special issue examine public participation, the production of knowledge, what counts as consent, ownership of biomaterials, and others. Together, the papers raise questions about new directions and articulations of power, justice, and inequalities in science and technology studies.   On the Emergence of Science and Justice    Jenny Reardon Reardon examines recent developments in genomic science and personal genome scanning to consider the ways genomics offers a framework for universal notions of justice. It does so, she argues, by creating a space for thinking about and engaging collectives or ‘‘populations’’ instead of individuals. Reardon regards ‘‘ethics’’ as being far more tied to dominant institutional forms, including bureaucracy, audit cultures, and legal accountability. In contrast, she argues, the ‘‘justice’’ offered by companies such as 23&Me offers opportunities to transcend closed and constricting forms of bureaucracy.   Genomic Justice for Native Americans: Impact of the Havasupai Case on Genetic Research Nanibaa’ A. Garrison Garrison examines how the Havasupai tribe court decision has trickled down to the practices and values of scientists and institutional research board (IRB) committees in the United States. Through interviews with genomic scientists and chairs of IRBs, Garrison demonstrates how larger issues of justice, group consent, and open consent are considered by IRB members in light of the court decision and how this might affect research ethics in the future.   Justice as Measure of Nongovernmental Organization Success in Postdisaster Community Assistance Barbara L. Allen Allen leads her analysis of environmental justice by examining environmental justice activist efforts to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Concerned with how to measure the success of a self-proclaimed ‘‘justice intervention,’’ Allen directly engages with a normative question: in what ways can technologies, strategies, and techniques of postdisaster rebuilding be judged from an environmental justice perspective? And, specifically, how can their success be measured along lines of ‘‘justness’’? In posing this question, Allen examines what is meant by ‘‘justice’’ within the EJ framework and then applies this to the post-Katrina response and ways to measure and understand that response.   Changing Knowledge, Local Knowledge, and Knowledge Gaps: STS Insights into Procedural Justice Gwen Ottinger Ottinger asks what yardstick ought to be used to assess justice, and in particular, to describe the limits of those extant yardsticks. She uses insights from STS to describe the limitations inherent in using procedural justice—that is, the ability of people affected by decisions to participate in making them—as the goal for environmental social movements. Through empirical research of the perspectives of the residents of New Sarpy, Louisiana, she questions the sole use of procedural justice as a way of achieving environmental justice because it cannot take into account the necessarily partial nature of scientific knowledge. Ottinger thus questions the one-time only decision-making approach most commonly used in these cases and argues for ongoing opportunities for participation and to consent to local hazards, since both ‘‘scientific’’ and ‘‘local’’ knowledges change over time.   Justice in the Context of Family Balancing Michelle L. McGowan and Richard R. Sharp Michelle McGowan, a gender scholar, and her colleague, bioethicist, Richard Sharp, address sex selection practices in the context of assisted reproduction. McGowan and Sharp bring forward the voices of users of reproductive technologies of sex selection as they explain and defend their reproductive practices using their own working definitions of ethical/just sciences. The authors examine how to assess technoscientific practices using measures of ethics and justice. To do so, they place ‘‘expert bioethics’’ and feminist perspectives on reproductive inequality and power in conversation with one another by analyzing interviews with prospective parents about the meaning and use of sex selection technologies, and how they justify their choices. As an empirically grounded assessment of ethical tensions in a medical context of assisted reproduction, the article forces consideration of the materiality of practice in assessing justice and ethics as objects. Yet, as the authors demonstrate, these are not separate from many of the feminist justice concerns raised in reproductive justice statements.

Over the years, we've often blogged about signs in China (and sometimes elsewhere) forbidding people to urinate where they're not supposed to, e.g., "Urination is inhuman", with references to earlier posts near the end. Now Morgan Jones has sent in what is probably the most unusual of all such warnings in this genre. This late 19th century papier mache teapot belongs to the British Folk Art collection of Compton Verney, the UK museum where Morgan works. The teapot is 77.7 cm (about 30 inches) high. Here's the gallery guide, with the teapot on the fourth page. It was probably made as an advertisement, perhaps for the window of a grocer's or tea shop. On the front side it advertises "Finest Yu-Tsien Tea" (referring to yǔqián chá 雨前茶 ["before rain tea"], I believe). More mysteriously, the back reads: zài cǐ bùkě xiǎobiàn 在此不可小便 ("it is not permitted to urinate [lit., 'small convenience'] here") — in the vertical column bái máo lǎo 白毛佬 ("white haired guy") — in a line to the right of the column bái máo 白毛 ("white haired") — upside down, in a line to the left. The somewhat odd calligraphy (connecting 在 with 此 and 大 instead of 土 in 在) looks like it comes from a later restoration. It seems possible (though not at all certain) that the Roman letter writing was put on with a stencil, so one suspects that the maker of the pot, trying to give it an exotic appearance, unwittingly had an inappropriate message added to it. Who the 'white-haired fellow' is supposed to be is a bit of a mystery. Nor is it clear why he is being invoked next to an injunction against urination. A member of the gallery staff at Compton Verney reported that a visitor once translated it rather freely as "beware the White-haired Spirit — no pissing here." Morgan says that he always found this rather unconvincing — at least until he read all the LLog entries detailing warnings for those who urinate where they aren't meant to. Compton Verney also has a large collection of Chinese bronzes, and this attracts visitors who are interested in these impressive vessels. A while ago a visitor from the Shanghai museum (which holds one of the world's premier collection of Chinese bronzes) said he thought it had been put there as a joke by some Chinese person to, in his words, "mà wàiguórén" 罵外國人 ("dis foreigners"). At any rate, Morgan hopes that we find this amusing, and if we have any comments he'd be very glad to hear them. At our convenience, of course!

Meet the Mezzena mandible, from five different directions. A is frontal. B is internal. C is right lateral, showing the mental foramen. D is superior. E is inferior. Credit PLOS ONE.Ka-ching! I got seriously lucky today. I've felt as if I were in the doldrums for---it seems like---weeks. Nothing new to grab my attention since March 21. Izzat all? Hm. Seemed a whole lot longer to me. Never mind. I want to give a big shout out to PLOS ONE. Where would I be without it?Condemi S, Mounier A, Giunti P, Lari M, Caramelli D, et al. (2013). Possible Interbreeding in Late Italian Neanderthals? New Data from the Mezzena Jaw (Monti Lessini, Verona, Italy). PLoS ONE 8(3): e59781. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0059781The keyword here is "POSSIBLE." This piece of mind-bending palaeoanthropological analysis concerns a partial mandible recovered in 1957 and assigned to Homo neanderthalensis. So far, so good. In 2012 five of the six authors of today's inbred inbreeding paper announced a newly acquired age estimate for this specimen. The radiocarbon-dated individual of whose skeleton only a fragmentary mandible remains was alive until 34.5 ± 655 ka [or more correctly 34,540 ± 655 14C uncal BP]. This and other so-called late dates for Neanderthals living in Europe have kept the interbreeding midnight oil burning late into the night in many places around the world. Italy was not about to be outdone! These six intrepid interbreeding advocates thought it'd be a good idea to get a genetic analysis, to see if, like others of its kind in recent years, it was correctly identified as a Neanderthal. And we have a BINGO! Apparently the Mezzena jaw is mitochondrially a Neanderthal. OK. Late Neanderthal. Check. Genetic Neanderthal. Excellent. But... where does the interbreeding come in? How are these authors able to make such a claim if what they have is temporally, morphologically and genetically a Neanderthal?Actually, there's a simple answer, but it involves a not-too simple argument, and the results are anything BUT conclusive. If you ask me, these authors willed the Mezzena mandible into being more like a modern human than the rest of its conspecifics. Believe me. Unhappily for me, Condemi et al. present some pretty sloppy [meaning no disrespect] data presentation, such that one is unable to "repeat the experiment" that they are reporting. So, once again, I'm faced with my own ignorance where Condemi et al's statistics are concerned. They're using Geometric Morphometrics based on Discriminant Function Analysis. [Is that anything like the cases before the Supreme Court of the United States this week?] I was initially in despair, thinking that I could never catch them playing fast and loose with the numbers. Believe me. I'm useless at complex algorithmical thingamabobbers. So, I did the next best thing, and the only thing I could do. I followed the argument as closely as I could, and I did what I could with the numbers that, as a reader, I was handed. I'll explain on the other side of this magnificent diorama starring Thog.This photo displays incredible realism, but to my way of thinking a total absence of verisimilitude. Credit: Discovery NewsThe table below gives the pertinent measurements of the fossil specimens that---odd thought it be---aren't used in the geometric morphometric analysis. [I apologize for the resolution.] The metrics given in Table 1 are used for a fairly course comparison of how robust the individuals are in relation to one another, which is presented fairly early in the article. What it has to do with the overall argument, I'm in the fog. We have 15 specimens identified as H. heidelbergensis, 22 H. neanderthalensis [including the mandible from Mezzena], and altogether 5 fossil specimens identified as H. sapiens. To beef up the modern sample they included 10 sub-fossil modern humans from the past 7,000 or so years. Alas, we're given no measurements of the recent people, so we can get no sense of how those ten measured up against the fossil population. [That is a serious shortcoming, don't you think? It's not the last.] The result puts old Mezzena right smack dab among the Neanderthal sample. That, for me, is odd.  This matter of robustness is treated as a sidelight to the real number crunching that comes later in the piece. The Geometric Morphometric Linear Discriminant Function Analysis, we're told, involves collection of observations for ten skeletal landmarks on the mandible. [I've never heard of some of them. Really. Google, for all its unbounded wisdom, turned up only one response when I inputted the term proeeminentia lateralis. I didn't recognize it mostly because it was invented by a man who literally wrote the book on Morphometrics. Hmmm. So I tried the next one. I can't remember a time when I've seen the following message whilst checking out what the Google has to say: "No results found for tuberculus margnialis superius."] I'm gonna go way out on a limb here and suggest that maybe these two, so-called landmarks are unknown outside of the Geometric Morphometric community because they're [close your ears] just so much bullshit. The remaining landmarks used are good old-fashioned anthropometric standbys. Nevertheless, that doesn't completely rescue the authors from the vortex in the white porcelain bowl. One measurement they employ is called the planum alveolare, which is illustrated below and labelled plan alveolaire, 'cause it's in French. In their article these authors freely admit that the condition of the fragment leaves a lot to be desired: "the alveolar rim is damaged throughout its length, in other words from the level of the first left premolar until the second right molar." Yet, in spite of the absence of the alveolar rim, they managed to figure out the angle of the alveolar plane. How they managed to get an accurate estimate of the planum alveolare from the Mezzena mandible's missing alveolar margin is a bit of a mystery. I imagine they'd have a good explanation if you asked them. Unfortunately for us, it's not obvious, and they give no indication. As for the use of those made-up landmarks---the proeeminentia lateralis and the tuberculus margnialis superius---it's an open empirical question if they are useful across species or not. Sadly, we're not provided with those raw observations on which they based their geometric morphometrics. It seems a shame, since, from what we ARE told about the robustness indicators, the authors needed to do a bit of guesstimation to acquire even those landmarks for their rough comparison. They repeatedly acknowledge that certain measurements were precluded, which one can see from the table above, where the Mezzena estimations are given in parentheses.Worst of all, the Mezzena mandible WASN'T INCLUDED in the discriminant function analysis along with the other specimens. The authors say that it was "included a posteriori." That means 'after the fact.' I'm therefore mystified. There's no statement as to what metrics the authors used such that this completely and inalterably Neanderthal individual fell well within the functionally discriminated group containing all of the 'modern' specimens. And this is the only datum upon which the authors rest their case for this specimen being a Neanderthal--Anatomically Modern H. sapiens hybrid.As old Sherman Potter used to say: "HORSE HOCKEY!"A final word. I've always been told that, if it looks like shit, and smells like shit, the prudent course is to give whatever it is a miss. That's my recommendation to you. Perhaps one of you with a bigger brain than I can see in this paper what I've been unable to.Thanks for listening! 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.

21 marttan sonra 23 mart   Geçen Nevruz’un barışın milâdı olduğu giderek kanıtlanıyor. Allah “özbeöz Türklerden”, MHP yönetimi ile CHP’nin şahin kanadı gibi sorumsuzlardan korusun.   23 martta da İstanbul Politikalar Merkezi’nin himayesinde, Ömer Madra’nın başını çektiği, pekçok sivil kuruluş ve eylemcinin hazırlık çalışmalarında bulunduğu İstanbul İklim Manifestosu yayımlandı.   Şöyle bir ibare var: “İklim değişiyor ve sosyal adaletsizliği kat be kat artırıp derinleştiriyor.   Gezegen sürekli uyarıyor. Ama gözler kör, kulaklar sağır kalmaya devam ederse,kibir denen şeyin ne büyük bir felaket olduğunu yakında hepimiz öğreneceğiz… İşte onun için, vicdanı olan tüm yurttaşlarımızı, elde hâlâ çözüm imkânı varken, gezegeni kurtarma seferberliğinde kendi payına düşeni yapmaya, bu büyük sorumluluğu paylaşmaya çağırıyoruz.” İmzanız için www.change.org/iklimicin       En yeni “tek çare”   Barışı kurarken, onun temelini atacak olan anayasa yazımına neden yoğunlaşılamaz? Çünkü daima “tek çare”lerden medet umarız. Bir iş yaparken diğerine pek yoğunlaşamayız. Bir ara anayasa yazımı vardı, herkes ve en başta bugün “barış kendiliğinden her şeyi çözmeye kadirdir” diyenler o anayasa için uykusuz geceler geçirdi. Ama unutuverdiler, daha iyisini bulduklarını düşünerek.   Barış artık her kapıyı açacak tek anahtar… Kendiliğinden, demokrasi kapısını dahi… Açamasa da o kadar önemli değil, ileride bakarız, ya da bakmayız. Yer içer, tüketiriz. Eh, bu da az bir şey değil filhakika…   Halk, barışın başaktörleri Erdoğan ile Öcalan’ı başkan yaparsa da yapar. Geriye kalan ekalliyete de tahammül etmek, ya da çekip gitmek düşer.   Ama gidene kadar “bu halka bu kadar demokrasi yeter” diyen akıldaneleri teşhir ederek…       Anayasa cephesi   Bakalım anayasa ne kertede? Tamamen unutulduğu sırada TESEV’in Mehmet Uçum’a hazırlattığı “Nasıl Bir Anayasaya Doğru Gidiyoruz?” çalışması hem zamanlı hem de faydalı. Rapor yeni anayasa yapma iradesinin bütün çelişkilerini gözler önüne seriyor.  Bu iradî engele AKP’nin başkanlık dayatması eklenince iş külliyen yoldan çıkmış durumda. Cemil Çiçekdaha dün sistem tartışması tıkıyor demedi mi? Barış dinamiğinin anayasaya yansıması başka bahara. Arada AKP’nin başkancı anayasa önerisi dayatılmazsa…   Rapordan bağımsız olarak, barışla bağlantılı üç konuda Ankara’dan gelen bilgiler şöyle: Vatandaşlık tanımı konusunda, AKP ile BDP’nin teklifleri “Türkiye vatandaşlığı” kavramına vurgu yapar nitelikteyken CHP’nin verdiği teklifte Süheyl Batum’un ısrarı ile “Türk vatandaşlığı” vurgusu bulunuyor ama aynı cümlede vatandaşlıktan da bahsediliyor.   Türkçe dışındaki anadillerde eğitim konusunda AKP’nin teklifinde muğlâk bir “herkesin eğitim hakkına sahip olduğu” vurgusu yapılırken, CHP’nin teklifi carî anayasanın 42. maddesindeki Türkçe dışında kalan dillere getirilen yasakla başlıyor. BDP’nin teklifi tabii daha liberal.   Ademimerkeziyet konusunda AKP 1982 Anayasası’nın aşırı merkeziyetçi ruhuna sadık.   CHP idarî vesayeti hafifleten bir teklif getiriyor. BDP’nin teklifindeki “bölgesel ve yerel kamu idareleri”nin uygulanabilmesi için ise yeni anayasada idarenin ademimerkezî olduğu ilkesi, bölgesel idarelere kamu tüzel kişiliği ve idarî vesayetin alenen kaldırılması gerekiyor.       Rafi El-İssawi ve Irak’ın bölünme süreci   Henri Barkey yazmasa haberim olmayacaktı. Haber basında yok. Başbakan Nuri El-Maliki’nin gadrine uğrayan Cumhurbaşkanı yardımcısı Tarık El-Haşimi’den sonra Maliye Bakanı İssawi de Maliki’nin otoriter gidişatını protesto ederek aybaşında istifayı basmıştı. Haşimi için çıkarılan tutuklama kararından sonra Maliki’nin hedefindeki İssawi’nin yardımcıları terör suçlamasıyla tutuklanmıştı. Geçenlerde Maliki hükümeti İssawi’yi tutuklamak için helikopter takviyeli bir silâhlı kuvvet yollamış. Sünni Abu Risha kabilesinin koruması altındaki eski Bakan şimdilik kurtulmuş. Barkey bu son hamlenin Irak’ın bölünme sürecini iyice ciddileştirdiği görüşünde. ABD’nin de ne yapacağını bilemediğinin altını çiziyor.   Kürdistan Bölgesel Yönetimi ile Bağdad arasındaki yabancılaşma giderek derinleşiyor. Sünnî unsurun Şii ağrılıklı Bağdad hükümetine muhalefetinin sonunda Araplar arasında içsavaş ve bölünme yolda. Suriye’deki Sünnî muhalefetin giderek artan gücü bu gelişmeleri birebir etkiliyor. Akl-ı selim “federasyon” dese de Irak’ın muktedirleri çatışmaya hazırlanıyor.   Bu yazı ilk olarak Taraf’ta yayınlandı. Yazarın izniyle burada da yayınlanıyor… Related posts: Cengiz Aktar- Anayasa ve Barış Cengiz Aktar: Demokratik meşruiyet krizi berdevam Cengiz Aktar: Anayasa’ya süre gerekiyor Cengiz Aktar: Barışı anlamak değil kurmak Cengiz Aktar: Anayasa olmuyor Başkanlık verelim

By Qasim Rashid and Chris Stedman, Religion & Politics, March 5, 2013 Thomas Jefferson once wrote: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” For many of us, it’s easy to appreciate Jefferson’s eloquently stated advocacy of religious freedom of conscience, as well as the idea that all individuals should be able to express religious or nonreligious positions independent of others’ beliefs. Likewise, at the United Nations, both the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the binding International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights guarantee “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” to all individuals. But, in spite of international agreements and Jefferson’s beautiful words, the reality is that these tenets are often forgotten. Today, few corners of the world are immune from the oppression of conscience. Last year, Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai captivated the world after the Taliban viciously attacked her for promoting education for girls and women. Nearby, Pakistani Christian Rimsha Masih’s future and safety are still uncertain after she beat a blasphemy charge. In 2010, the Taliban murdered 86 Ahmadi Muslims on account of their faith. In Indonesia, Alexander Aan continues to languish in prison for the “crime” of professing his atheism, and atheist Alber Saber has been persecuted in Egypt for his lack of faith. In Iran, U.S. Pastor Saeed Abedini is serving an eight-year prison sentence for the alleged crime of preaching Christianity. And these examples are just a snapshot of what Pew reports as roughly 75 percent of the world—5.25 billion people—that live under some sort of social or governmental oppression of religious conscience. (more…)

A lot of good stuff coming out around cultural neuroscience right now. Here are the three main things up front, so people can have them. Then I’ll go over them in turn. And finally, a reflective comment at the end highlighting potential differences between cultural neuroscience and neuroanthropology. Cultural Neuroscience special issue in Psychological Inquiry, with a target article by Joan Chiao and colleagues and commentaries by leaders in the field. The inaugural issue of the new journal Culture and Brain, with Shihui Han serving as editor-in-chief A 2013 Annual Review of Psychology article, A Cultural Neuroscience Approach to the Biosocial Nature of the Human Brain, also by Shihui Han and a long-list of leaders in cultural neuroscience Cultural Neuroscience: Progress and Promise First off, the new issue of Psychological Inquiry has a target review article “Cultural Neuroscience: Progress and Promise” by Joan Chiao, Bobby Cheon, Narun Pornpattananangkul, Alissa Mrazek & Katherine Blizinsky. Like a BBS article, it comes with a series of commentaries by leaders in the field, followed by a response from the authors. As I write this, the target article is open-access, but the commentaries are not. Here’s the link to the entire special issue. The abstract for the Chaio et al. review: Contemporary advances in cultural and biological sciences provide unique opportunities for the emerging field of cultural neuroscience. Research in cultural neuroscience examines how cultural and genetic diversity shape the human mind, brain, and behavior across multiple time scales: situation, ontogeny, and phylogeny. Recent progress in cultural neuroscience provides novel theoretical frameworks for understanding the complex interaction of environmental, cultural, and genetic factors in the production of adaptive human behavior. Here, we provide a brief history of cultural neuroscience, theoretical, and methodological advances, as well as empirical evidence of the promise of and progress in the field. Implications of this research for population health disparities and public policy are discussed. Chiao et al. review a wide range of studies, which heartily demonstrates how this field is growing rapidly. Everything from “Individualism–Collectivism and the Serotonin Transporter Gene (5-HTTLPR)” to “SES and Neural Bases of Social Cognition”. This section comes closest to representing the core summary of cultural neuroscience provided by Chiao et al.: Our understanding of culture–biology interactions not only across the lifespan but also across evolutionary timescales has advanced with the discovery of culture–gene coevolutionary models of human behavior, including the cultural and genetic selection of specific traits in the production of adaptive behavior (Chiao & Blizinsky, 2010; Nikolaidis & Gray, 2010; Way & Lieberman, 2010). A neuro-culture interaction model was then developed to suggest a causal trajectory such that cultural practices reinforce values and tasks that become “culturally patterned neural activities” due to neuroplasticity or neuronal change, which then facilitates social survival via biological adaptation and reproductive success (Kitayama & Uskul, 2011). Culture–gene coevolutionary processes may also produce cultural variation in core cognitive and neural architecture (e.g., structure and function) across phylogeny and generations, due to geographical variation in environmental pressures (Chiao & Immordino-Yang, in press). For instance, environmental factors, such as pathogen prevalence, are known to lead to cultural selection of individualism-collectivism, due at least in part to genetic selection of the short (S) allele of the serotonin transporter gene (Chiao & Blizinsky, 2010). In other words, it’s an ambitious field. The approach aims to understand human variation across time and space, with a focus on the brain as the key site for research and for understanding difference. Genes and evolution as well as culture and environment shape the linked variation of brain and behavior. Individual/collectivism, for example, is not simply a cultural trait in this model; it has identifiable neural correlates, in part formed by past evolutionary history and in other part by the intersection of culture, development, and neuroplasticity. The commentaries on the article are really informative. I particularly recommend the one by Denise Park, Kudos and Cautions for Advances in Cultural Neuroscience. A pioneer in cross-cultural neuroimaging, Park brings a broad sense of the strengths and potential problems her field faces moving forward in both its research and its public impact. Park highlights important concerns and potentials: (1) that cultural neuroscience “does not inadvertently become enmeshed in variations of arguments that genetic endowment is primarily causal of neural activity, endowment, and behavior; (2) the need to distinguish clearly between a hard-wired approach and a processing approach in cultural neuroscience, such that task demands can drive differences in processing rather than being something placed immutably there by culture; (3) the importance of thinking about cultural saturation, where sustained experiences actually can generate structural changes in the brain, both within and across societies; and (4) caution about over-generalizing, particularly in such a young field that works with small sample sizes but which examines such broad questions that matter to so many people. Among the commentaries is one from neuroanthropologist Andreas Roepstorff, Why Am I Not Just Lovin’ Cultural Neuroscience? Toward a Slow Science of Cultural Difference. He applauds the comprehensive review by Chiao et al., but also highlights some of this discomfort he feels in reading the research as an anthropologist engaged in similar work, one who brings a more reflexive approach and who has a broader approach to culture than simply treating it as a broad trait that identifies difference. Here’s the finish to his commentary: In the nutritional realm, the slow food movement has been restating a simple fact: Food is not just something we consume, it is also something we produce. Of importance, they say, the way we grow it, cook it, and eat it is part of making us who we are. It is not so much a matter of “you are what you eat” but equally a matter of “you become how you cook.” Like food, culture is not just something that constitutes humans. Cultural differences are not just passive categories to be picked up, they are also distinctions that are made and used, and as such they are important vectors actively shaping our understanding of the world. This looping effect of human knowledge (Hacking, 1995) may be a critical part of that which makes humans cultural, and this seems to be a mechanism, which cultural neuroscience cannot escape. This is not a bad thing. In the years to come, cultural neuroscience may become one of the very important venues for identifying and reflecting on differences and identities within and between groups of people. Realizing this may call for a slow science of cultural difference. This is very different from a happy meal of fast facts that are more concerned with generalizing by the millions or billions than understanding individual differences, strategies, and identities. A slow science approach would care about how we grow, cook, exchange, and share knowledge about ourselves and others, and it would be interested in mapping out how that affects the world we jointly live in. New journal Culture and Brain The inaugural issue has four articles. Medial prefrontal cortex differentiates self from mother in Chinese: evidence from self-motivated immigrants In the present study, we examined the contribution of the MPFC to self and close other-referential processing of psychological traits in Chinese participants, newly arrived to the United States, in both their native language and in English. We predicted that, contrary to prior findings, the MPFC would differentially represent psychological traits for self and mother. Neural computing: the metaphorical, cultural roots of brain models While brain operations can be viewed as computational in nature, both the design and the properties of the brain deviate radically from those of man-made computers. This might be why brains, unlike computers, are capable of moral and esthetic judgment and of experiencing joy and sorrow, friendship and love and other human values. Cultural experiences reduce racial bias in neural responses to others’ suffering Manipulations of cognitive strategies and intergroup relationships in laboratory can significantly reduce the racial bias in empathic neural responses by increasing the neural activity to perceived pain in other-race individuals. The current study further investigated whether real-life cultural experiences with other-race individuals can reduce the racial bias in empathic neural responses to others’ suffering. Genotypes over-represented among college students are linked to better cognitive abilities and socioemotional adjustment Results showed that 24 loci showed Hardy–Weinberg disequilibrium among college students, but only two of these were in disequilibrium in the 1000 Genomes sample. These loci were found to be associated with mathematical abilities, executive functions, motivation, and adjustment-related behaviors such as alcohol use and emotion recognition. Generally, genotypes overrepresented in the college sample showed better performance and adjustment than under-represented or non-biased genotypes. Some fascinating research! I’m hopeful this journal will become a meeting place for this type of synthetic research, and encourage neuroanthropologists to consider it for publication. Cultural Neuroscience in Annual Review of Psychology A Cultural Neuroscience Approach to the Biosocial Nature of the Human Brain is a 2013 Annual Review article authored by Shihui Han, Georg Northoff, Kai Vogeley, Bruce Wexler, Shinobu Kitayama, and Michael Varnum. Cultural neuroscience (CN) is an interdisciplinary field that investigates the relationship between culture (e.g., value and belief systems and practices shared by groups) and human brain functions. In this review we describe the origin, aims, and methods of CN as well as its conceptual framework and major findings. We also clarify several misunderstandings of CN research. Finally, we discuss the implications of CN findings for understanding human brain function in sociocultural contexts and novel questions that future CN research should address. Han et al. recognize that most cultural neuroscience research so far melds cultural psychology with neuroimaging. Cultural psychology demonstrated differences in psychological process across societies; neuroscience steps in to document those differences at the neural level. Cross-cultural cognition meets cross-cultural neuroimaging. But their ambitions for the field are much larger. Here are how they describe the aims of cultural neuroscience. The goal of CN studies is to investigate human brain function and structure in diverse sociocultural contexts. Like cultural psychologists (Markus & Hamedani 2007), CN researchers have little interest in using brain activity as a way to classify people into groups. Instead, CN research investigates whether and how the functional organization of the human brain is shaped by culture and by the interaction between culture and genes on different time scales (Chiao & Ambady 2007, Han & Northoff 2008). In addition, CN research aims to investigate how neurobiological processes in the human brain contribute to the rise of divergent cultures in the world. Theories built on CN findings will eventually help to explain how cultural differences in human brain function mediate divergent social behaviors across cultures while at the same time pointing out the neural predispositions of psychosocial commonalities across different cultures. CN considers culture as a highly dynamic system of continuous interaction and exchange among individuals. This system of social interaction feeds back into social practices, values, and belief systems, thereby establishing circular, recursive, and reciprocal influences between interacting individuals and culture (Hacking 1999, Vogeley & Roepstorff 2009). The implications section of this review article are among the most interesting parts. Here they write a more existential piece that also points to substantive issues long engaged by anthropology. The human brain develops in a specific sociocultural context during interactions with others. Because there are large variations across cultures, how to fit into one’s specific society and how to cooperate with others efficiently is a challenge for each person. CN studies indicate that the human brain has the capacity to develop culture-specific neurocognitive processes that help an individual to function in a specific sociocultural environment. And they discuss two potential models for CN, something that I will also discuss in my commentary just below. The context-dependent nature of the human brain can be understood in two different senses. One possibility is that the culturally different stimuli merely modulate already preexisting neural activity that, as such, remains independent of any contextual effects. This amounts to what has been called modulatory context dependence (Han & Northoff 2008, Northoff 2012). Alternatively, the constitution of any neural activity is dependent upon the context; this amounts to what can be described as constitutive context dependence (Han & Northoff 2008, Northoff 2012)… In the case of modulatory context dependence, neuronal and social activities interact with each other while remaining independent from each other in their respective constitution. The brain is then purely neuronal and thus biological, whereas culture is social. This differs from the model of constitutive context dependence, which posits that, if the constitution of the brain’s neuronal activity depends on the respective social context, a clear-cut distinction between the biological domain of the brain and the social domain of culture is impossible. Rather than being exclusively and completely biological, the brain and its neuronal activity must then be considered to be a hybrid of both biological and social influences. In other words, our brains are biosocial. Cultural Neuroscience and Neuroanthropology: Two Models? The two fields have different historical origins – cultural psychology meets neuroimaging, and field research meets neuroscience. Such differences might push these approaches apart for institutional reasons. However, the similarities are more striking to me. Both fields are interested in questions of human variation and similarity across time and space, and both draw on evolution, culture theory, and neuroplasticity. That said, the issues of problem scale and of theoretical models can separate the fields. A rough generalization for problem scale could be that cultural neuroscience is examining more population-level variation and neuroanthropology more local variation. Or, cross-cultural differences versus within-culture differences. That said, neuroanthropology looks at field-based variations by drawing on anthropology, which has over a century of research on human variation extending back more than two million years. At times, that vast scope can only come into focus in one specific study – one time and place. Whereas cultural neuroscience’s more narrow scope comes through the laboratory methods, and using neuroimaging to try to understand patterns of neural structure and function. As for theoretical models, cultural psychology has generally taken a trait-based approach to culture – individualism vs. collectivism, for example. This approach, and its increasing use of genetics, has led to a more factor-based approach to explaining variation. The culture measure contributes this much to the outcome variable, and the gene marker this much. This discrete approach to measuring variables is both powerful and reductive. It generates results quickly, leads to better comparability across studies, and can provide broad outlines of what variables are at play with what sorts of problems. That said, the anthropological concept of “culture” is hard to reduce to just one measure, for that misses the immersive, interactive, and shared dimensions of culture – the really operative parts of the concept. This measurement approach is also hard to apply to the interactive, dynamic, and embodied approach to the “biosocial” brain that Northoff (with his colleagues) outlines in the Annual Review article. Neuroanthropology explicitly takes that approach, positing neurocultural processes as central to how brains operate, and that an embodied nervous system (and not just brain) is crucial to understanding how human variation gets produced. Some cultural neuroscientists surely agree with this approach. But given the history of their field, and the use of both neuroimaging and cross-cultural measures, they often haven’t taken this approach in the actual research. Thus, questions of theoretical models and of evidence can separate the fields. That said, the more determinist/computational model versus the more embodied/dynamic model splits cognitive science and neuroscience more generally. Both approaches have their uses. I think it’s useful to recognize how the scale of problems addressed, the theoretical models used to understand the patterning of human neural function and structure, and the measurement models and what counts as evidence are the pragmatic concerns that make cultural neuroscience and neuroanthropology different fields at present. They both broadly examine similar issues, and I believe greater collaboration will lend strength to both sides. But right now? The two fields started from different points, and have to figure out how best to find a common meeting ground even amidst those different historical dimensions of research.