A Framework for Australian Studies: Some Reflections on Community,Class and Culture

Community studies as a form of study in complex societies cart be unduly restrictive though this need not be the case. It depends on the criteria employed to select a field location, and on the types of social organization studied within that location. These themes are illustrated by reference to the Australian community studies of Ron Wild and Harry Oxley. Some limitations in their studies are noted only in order to illustrate how their work might have been linked profitably with debates in Australian historiography over issues of class culture, ideology and consciousness. I propose a framework for Australian community studies that would allow anthropologists to explore some of the themes introduced in this discussion.     

Shrinky-Dink Hanging Drops: A Simple Way to Form and Culture Embryoid Bodies

Embryoid bodies (EB) are aggregates of embryonic stem cells. The most common way of creating these aggregates is the hanging drop method, a laborious approach of pipetting an arbitrary number of cells into well plates. The interactions between the stem cells forced into close proximity of one another promotes the generation of the EBs. Because the media in each of the wells has to be manually exchanged every day, this approach is manually intensive.Moreover, because environmental parameters including cell-cell, cell-soluble factor interactions, pH, and oxygen availability can be functions of EB size, cell populations obtained from traditional hanging drops can vary dramatically even when cultured under identical conditions. Recent studies have indeed shown that the initial number of cells forming the aggregate can have significant effects on stem cell differentiation. We have developed a simple, rapid, and scalable culture method to load pre-defined numbers of cells into microfabricated wells and maintain them for embryoid body development. Finally, these cells are easily accessible for further analysis and experimentation. This method is amenable to any lab and requires no dedicated equipment. We demonstrate this method by creating embryoid bodies using a red fluorescent mouse cell line (129S6B6-F1).Download video file.^{(42M, mov)}     

Reflections on the Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health,Culture, Race,and Ethnicity

The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the Supplement to the Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health, with an eye toward informing future efforts to prevent and treat mental illness among racial and ethnic minorities. I first briefly discuss the historical background of the Supplement. I then present its strengths, which include the authority and visibility of the Office of the Surgeon General, the organization of the report by racial/ethnic group, the examination of the social and historical context of each of the racial/ethnic groups, and the emphasis on science. Last, I identify three major tensions within the Supplement, focusing on groups versus cultural processes, situating culture within individuals or social worlds, and examining differences between minority groups and whites versus examining conceptually informed processes. The Supplement makes a significant contribution to advancing our understanding of the mental health of racial and ethnic minority groups. The actions that follow (or don't follow), however, will determine the import of this document.     

Anthropology at the Edge: Essays on Culture, Symbol, and Consciousness

Anthropology at the Edge: Essays on Culture, Symbol, and Consciousness. J. Ian Prattis. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997. 311 pp.     

Odds and Ends: Risk,Mortality, and the Politics of Contingency

Medical anthropology's cogentrethinking of conventional biomedicalcategories has largely overlooked the coreproblems of one key concept of both biomedicaland social scientific analysis: risk. Inparticular, the use of the term in medicalanthropology (and the social sciences moregenerally) frequently rests on two assumptions:(1) that contingency necessarily constitutes athreat to individual experience or socialorder; and (2) that a risk management paradigmthat relies on a model of statisticalprobability is the ontologically preeminent wayof engaging chance. Other approaches which donot take risk as the starting point forunderstanding contingency also have problems;they too assume that contingency is necessarilycause for crisis. These problematic rootassumptions lead social analysts to miss howindividual actors and local communitiesvariously engage, rather than minimize,contingency. I suggest a new approach thatinstead aims to treat contingency asnormatively neutral and as arising in fourdomains of experience. Conventional approachesalso miss how attempts to account forunexpected events themselves involve strugglesbetween competing paradigms (or tropes) ofchance. This contest over accountability I callhere the politics of contingency, and Iseek thereby to signal the need to renovate ourlanguage of uncertainty in order to address itspolitical dimensions. I trace the literature toidentify some sources of these terminologicalproblems, and through an examination of thelife and death of a close contact in Chania,Crete, I explore his own approach to chance andthe different, competing interpretations of hisdeath. I thereby demonstrate the importance ofrevamping the conventional approach tounderstanding the contingent nature of humanlife.     

The Pastoral Tuareg: Ecology, Culture, and Society, vols. 1 and 2

The Pastoral Tuareg: Ecology, Culture, and Society, vols. and 2. Johannes Nicolaisen and Ida Nicolaisen. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997.488 pp.