Healing spirits of South Kanara

In South Kanara, India (formerly the kingdom of Tulunadu), an area stretching some 150 miles along the Arabian Sea and 25 to 50 miles inland, ancient forms of rural pageantry in honor of particular local Spirits are enacted yearly. These ritualized performances include elements of masked folk drama and epic recitation and serve a valued social role as a form of healing and counselling within village communities. Contemporary practioner-patient interactions are part of an intricate tapestry partaking of customs occurring since times long past, such as the kinship structure (aliya-santana or nephew inheritance), the geopolitical milieu and the myths of Tulunadu. The power of these healing Spirits lies in their ability to reproduce social form through the cultural idiom of therapeutic efficacy.     

Healing modes correlate with visuotectal pattern formation in regenerating embryonic Xenopus retina

After removal of the nasal or the temporal two-thirds of the embryonic (stage 32) eye, the remaining one-third sized fragment undergoes wound healing and then, in most cases, regenerates to form a new eye. Using gross anatomy and histology techniques, we categorized eye fragments into three healing mode categories over the first 24 hr after surgery (stage 37-38). Representative animals were reared through metamorphosis and their visuotectal projections were assayed using standard electrophysiology techniques. In the "rounded-up" healing mode, the cut edges of the fragment pinch to close the wound; retinal cell type layers (pigmented retinal epithelium (pre), photoreceptors, interneurons, ganglion cells) and a lens are present by 24 hr postsurgery. No extraneous or disorganized cells are present either internal or external to the fragments. These fragments regenerated to form normal projections 83% of the time and pattern duplicated projections only 17% of the time. In the "intermediate" healing mode, wound closure is not complete by 24 hr post surgery and groups of disorganized cells are present in the fragment and amassed between the healing cut edges. These fragments formed pattern duplicated projections 72% of the time. In the tongue healing mode, an ectopic mass of cells, contiguous with the main body of the fragment, forms a supernumerary retina in the region of the ablation. At 24 hr post surgery, the cells of the main body fragment form retinal layers; the cells of the tongue, excluding the presence of differentiated pre cells, remain undifferentiated, resembling ciliary margin. The cut edges of the main body fragment eventually fuse with the tongue to form a single eyeball. Tongue fragments formed pattern duplicated projections 100% of the time. In addition, pattern duplicated points derived from nasal fragments appeared most often in the posterior region of the tectum, the normal site of innervation of the nasal retina. This differed significantly from temporal fragment derived duplicated points which appeared more often in the front of the tectum, the normal site of innervation by temporal retina. Thus, the specificity of pattern duplicated innervation is related to the positional values remaining in the fragment after partial retinal ablation. The data indicate that cell movements during healing, whether overt as in the tongue healing mode, or remaining internal to the fragment as in the intermediate healing mode, are intimately correlated with pattern forming mechanisms which underlie pathological visuotectal duplication.     

New concepts and words in post-Soviet Russia

The research of Anglicisms in European languages is a part of the project supervised by the scholars from the University of Cologne. The adaptation of loan words in the Russian language possesses some social and cultural peculiarities in contrast to other European countries due to the drastic political changes and dynamic introduction of the market economy. The investigation is based on the linguistic and social analysis of Anglicisms, which were imported into Russian in the late 90-s and the beginning of the new millennium. The research focus is concentrated on the study of the most frequent terms circulating on the pages of professional (literary, business, political) and other mass media sources. Three groups of the latest borrowings are discussed: neutral terms, which have proved to be rather stable within 20 years; expressive fashionable neologisms with the restricted sphere of application and evaluative words revealing either Western cultural values or socially marked concepts, typical of post-socialism.     

Interior horizons: an ethical space of selfhood in South India

While interiority is typically associated with selfhood in the modern West, this article conveys the formation of an interior topography of selfhood in South India. A 'genealogy' of interiority, it is argued, would address the moral forces, ethical practices, and historical accidents through which such an internal space of subjectivity may be constituted. Focusing most closely upon the moral life of a single individual, the article charts a 'folding' inward of three forms of exterior life: collective histories of moral transformation, vernacular traditions of ethical conduct, and personal experiences of inhabited landscape, all of which work together upon the 'heart' as an interior terrain of ethical self-engagement.  

Résumé

Bien que l'intériorité soit habituellement associée à la notion de soi dans l'Occident moderne, l'auteur décrit ici la formation d'une topographie intérieure du soi dans le Sud de l'Inde. Il avance qu'une « généalogie >> de l'intériorité tiendrait compte des forces morales, des pratiques éthiques et des accidents historiques susceptibles de créer cet espace interne de subjectivité. En examinant de très près la vie morale d'un seul individu, l'article trace les contours d'un « repli >> vers l'intérieur de trois formes de vie extérieure : histoires collectives de transformation morale, traditions vernaculaires de conduite éthique et expériences personnelles d'un paysage habité, qui se rejoignent au « cœur >> d'un terrain intérieur d'engagement éthique sur soi.     

Gender in the Muslim Middle East

Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. Margot Badran. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 352 pp.
Gender Politics in Sudan: Islamism, Socialism, and the State. Sondra Hale. Boulder, CO. Westview Press, 1996. 294 pp.
Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions. Marcia C. Inhorn. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. 441 pp.     

Study of alcohol-soluble lignin in cognac spirits

We studied the structure of alcohol-soluble lignin in cognac spirits from Spain (7-year aging) and Azerbaijan (15-year aging). Alcohol-soluble lignin was precipitated and refractionated by means of preparative high-performance liquid chromatography. Lignin was studied by the method of high-performance liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. Lignin hydrolysis products were assayed by the method of gas-liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. The structure of lignans was reconstructed from these fragments. Lignans from Spanish and Azeri alcohol were arbitrarily designated as sinapoconiferal triglycoside and glucoferulate flavone diglycoside, respectively.     

Children in the Muslim Middle East

Children in the Muslim Middle East. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.477 pp.     

Definitions of national identity,nationalism and ethnicity in post-Soviet Azerbaijan in the 1990s

This article examines the major political debates in post-Soviet Azerbaijan vis à vis the very assumptions of individual autonomy, equality, national culture and citizenship, and universalism upon which modern nation-states have historically been based. The information presented in this article is based on personal interviews conducted with the leading and influential members of the Azerbaijani political elite in 1998. The interviews were based on two broad themes. The first relates to the perceptions of the Soviet period and on what grounds the Azerbaijanis differentiate the new Republic of Azerbaijan from the former Soviet Azerbaijan. The second relates to their perceptions of both the outside world and themselves with regards to differing understandings of nationalism, national culture, and national/ethnic or local identities. The study of the Azerbaijani example of post-Soviet political culture may help us to understand the dynamics of nation-building on the basis of the major political debates and of conflicting national, ethnic and local identities in Azerbaijan.     

Naukan ethnobotany in post-Soviet times: lost edibles and new medicinals

Background

This study focuses on health-related plant use among speakers of the critically endangered Naukan language (Inuit-Yupik-Unangan family) in the Russian Far East. The Naukan people were forced, in 1958, under Soviet consolidation, to move from their original settlement on Cape Dezhnev, leading to significant changes in spiritual worldview, subsistence, social structure, and language proficiency in the years that followed. Here, we focus on changes that elders report in their edible, medicinal, and spiritual uses of local plant species since their childhood.

Methods

The authors worked from 2014 to 2016 in the villages of Lavrentiya, Lorino, and Uelen, in the Chukotskiy district of the Chukotka autonomous region, directly adjacent to the Bering Strait. We conducted structured interviews, using an oral history approach, along with participant observation and collection of voucher specimens from the local arctic tundra. Those with Naukan names and uses represent 42 species in 25 families.

Results

Participants reported a decrease of 13% in the number of edible species that people currently harvest, from what they recall harvesting in their youth. On the other hand, the number of local species considered to be medicinal has actually increased by 225%. Current and past Naukan medicinal practices diverge in some notable ways from those of neighboring societies on the Alaskan side of the Bering Strait. Most of the spiritual significance of local plants species is remembered by only a few elders.

Conclusions

Naukan elders explained the large increase in use of medicinal plants by noting that their original concept of medicine emphasized prevention and that illnesses were often assigned a spiritual rather than physical cause. Increased integration with ethnic Russians after moving from Naukan led to the adoption not only of new plant uses, but also of an entirely different, more naturalistic way of viewing illness and treatment.