Family Film: From Family Registers to Historical Artifacts

This article ¹ Thanks to Fabiana Rocha and Silvia Aguião, both social science students, who participated in the researching of public archives and Internet sites and in the editing of the film. focuses on the making of a family film and its transformation into a historical artifact. The conversations with my grandmother about her participation in the Gaucho Revolution (south of Brazil, 1923), which were recorded to be transmitted later on to our family, led me to research these historical facts in the public archives, sifting out documents from those days (newspapers, reports, and photographs) that could objectify her stories and her subjective images and especially allow the discovery of all possible relations between an individual memory and a collective memory. That implied building a speech and telling a story from only one family member's point of view, the grandmother's. More than that, it involved breaking with the family's inner-circle projections and presenting the film to a wider public, thus turning private images into public ones.     

Active Memory

Collective memory is a phenomenon that receives a different interpretation depending on the discipline within which it is examined. In my research, I will employ ideas and concepts developed within the framework of a sociocultural approach (Wertsch, 2002; Cole, 1996). In particular, I will proceed from the definition of collective memory developed by James Wertsch (2002), who treats collective memory as textually mediated memory, conditioned by various—mainly historical—narratives. Historical narratives (annals, chronicles, history textbooks, etc.) are considered to be cultural instruments promoting collective remembrance. A category I borrow from Wertsch's work (2002) is the concept of the "schematic narrative template," which I will apply as analytic tool in my investigation of the phenomenon of collective memory phenomenon.     

What is ‘post-race’ and what does it reveal about contemporary racisms?

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I will critically engage those aspects of Goldberg’s Are We All Postracial Yet that I found to be particularly generative for thinking about contemporary racisms. These foci include the place of post-racial mystification vis-à-vis liberal market capitalism, animalization and synchronic global relationalities. A case will be made for post-race being best understood in terms of how it both incorporates as well as exceeds the explanatory terrain already serviced by the concept of ‘Cultural Racism’ and/or ‘New Racism’. A unique connection to Chamayou’s recent Manhunts will also be advanced. I will read contemporary processes of post-racial animalization via Chamayou’s key contention that Power is always about who is to be the object of force, who shall do the enforcing and how is it to be enforced – a historically contingent force that results in particular technologies of classification, hunting, surveillance, internment, killing and fortification.     

Whiteness and loss in outer East London: tracing the collective memories of diaspora space

Abstract

This paper explores collective memory in Newham, East London. It addresses how remembering East London as the home of whiteness and traditional forms of community entails powerful forms of forgetting. Newham's formation through migration – its ‘great time’ – has ensured that myths of indigeneity and whiteness have never stood still. Through engaging with young people's and youth workers' memory practices, the paper explores how phantasms of whiteness and class loss are traced over, and how this tracing reveals ambivalence and porosity, at the same time as it highlights the continued allure of race. It explores how whiteness and class loss are appropriated across ethnic boundaries and how they are mobilized to produce new forms of racial hierarchy in a ‘super-diverse’ place.     

Public History,Private Memory: Notes from the Ethnography of Colonial Williamsburg,Virginia, USA

Colonial Williamsburg, and U.S. history museums generally, claim to transform public history into collective memory. That is, they convey an objective documented history to the public who, absorbing that history, acquires an appropriate collective or national memory. We argue that the emphasis on consumer (visitor) experience at such museums collapses the distance between the reconstructed past (the museum's history lesson) and the visitor's touristic or familial experience at the site. Visitors indeed remember their visits to Colonial Williamsburg, but their specific memories would seem to have little to contribute to any 'collective memory' of a 'national history.'     

Chinatown UK v. Colonial Hong Kong: An early exercise in transnational militancy and manipulation, 1967–1969

In the late 1960s, Hong Kong was hit by a wave of social and political unrest, an echo in the colony of China's Cultural Revolution of 1966–69. The unrest spread to parts of Britain's Chinatown, where a leftist movement emerged in sympathy with the Hong Kong agitation. Among the Chinatown leftists were former supporters of the Communist anti-Japanese guerrillas in Hong Kong's rural New Territories. The colonial authorities reacted to these developments in Britain by drawing up plans to protect and assist overseas Hong Kong residents in an attempt to win their political approval and stymie the pro-Communists. The Hong Kong Government Office [HKGO] in London started providing materials for Chinese-language schools and set up various other communal services. Later, it launched a campaign to foster the emigrants’ “Hong Kong identity”. The scheme was in many ways successful. Chinatowners were usually happy to make use of the facilities on offer. However, there is little evidence that the HKGO succeeded in winning their political allegiance.     

The moral challenge of natality: towards a post-traditional concept of family and privacy in repro-genetics

Modern repro-genetics is going to change the way we conceive our children, and will have a substantial influence on the family. Two concepts of the family have been present in the ethical debate: the traditional model and the care model of the family. The first one has been rightly criticized because it privileges form over function. I will show that the second model is also insufficient and does not answer to the moral challenge of human natality, particularly from a child's point of view. Instead, I will suggest a third, kinship model of the family as moral agent. In post-traditional and post-patriarchal societies, the family must be reconsidered as actor in the ethical debates. This poses a challenge for ethical theory. The family's interests are best protected by a concept of relational privacy.     

State ethnicization and the crisis of leadership succession among Israel's Druze

States often ethnicize ethnic groups for their own purposes. In doing so, however, they unleash contradictory processes. While the state facilitates the integration of individuals into modern state structures on the basis of personal achievement, it will also traditionalize collective identity by promoting a recognized leader or headman. Over time ethnic reformers will challenge such state ethnicization and attempt to organize the community to achieve more autonomy, using state legislation to achieve these reforms. Paradoxically, this attempt, if successful, will not only encroach upon state power but also curtail the choice of the individual in the ethnic group to define his or her own ethnicity. The following article analyses the Israeli Druze's relationship to the State of Israel and the controversy among the Druze over the group's international organization. It analyses at what point state ethnicization gives way to ethnic autonomy at the expense of state power, and explores its implications on the development of civil society within the ethnic community. The diminution of state ethnicization in a democracy need not necessarily entail the empowerment of the ethnic group but rather the individual who belongs to it.     

Chromatographic enantioseparation by poly(biphenylylacetylene) derivatives with memory of both axial chirality and macromolecular helicity

Novel poly(biphenylylacetylene) derivatives bearing two acetyloxy groups at the 2‐ and 2′‐positions and an alkoxycarbonyl group at the 4′‐position of the biphenyl pendants (poly‐ Ac 's) were synthesized by the polymerization of the corresponding biphenylylacetylenes using a rhodium catalyst. The obtained stereoregular (cis ‐transoidal ) poly‐ Ac 's folded into a predominantly one‐handed helical conformation accompanied by a preferred‐handed axially twisted conformation of the biphenyl pendants through noncovalent interactions with a chiral alcohol and both the induced main‐chain helicity and the pendant axial chirality were maintained, that is, memorized, after complete removal of the chiral alcohol. The stability of the helicity memory of the poly‐ Ac 's in a solution was lower than that of the analogous poly(biphenylylacetylene)s bearing two methoxymethoxy groups at the 2‐ and 2′‐positions of the biphenyl pendants (poly‐ MOM 's). In the solid state, however, the helicity memory of the poly‐ Ac 's was much more stable and showed a better chiral recognition ability toward several racemates than that of the previously reported poly‐ MOM when used as a chiral stationary phase for high‐performance liquid chromatography. In particular, the poly‐ Ac ‐based CSP with a helicity memory efficiently separated racemic benzoin derivatives into enantiomers.     

Drosophila learning and memory: Recent progress and new approaches

The processes of learning and memory have traditionally been studied in large experimental organisms (Aplysia, mice, rats and humans), where well-characterized behaviors are easily tested. Although Drosophila is one of the most experimentally tractable organisms, it has only recently joined the others as a model organism for learning and memory. Drosophila behavior has been studied for over 20 years; however, most of the work in the learning and memory field has focused on initial learning, because establishing memory in Drosophila has not been as straightforward as in other organisms. A major recent advance in this field has been the development of a training protocol that induces long-term memory in flies. This made possible experiments that implicated the Drosophila CREB gene as a critical component in the consolidation of long-term memory, and paves the way for future experiments utilizing the well developed tools in Drosophila. This review will briefly summarize what is known in the field of Drosophila learning and memory to date, and discuss why the unique aspects of this field make traditional approaches difficult and reward the use of alternative paths of experimentation.     

Occult return,divine grace,and saabui: practising transnational kinship in postsocialist Guinea

In the Republic of Guinea, where transnational migration has become a critical path to prestige among young urbanites, migrant success abroad is intimately connected to the cultivation of kin ties at home. For performing artists, who were the darlings of Guinea's Socialist Revolution (1958‐84), the experience of migration is uniquely linked to the fall of the socialist state and to the precarity of urban life in contemporary Africa. This article describes how Guinean artists manage distance and uncertainty through three practices: occult aggression, grace‐seeking, and patronage (saabui), which together illustrate the contours and limitations of kinship's efficacy in transnational space. By exploring transnational kinship as an intersubjective and productive practice that can extend beyond obligation or solidarity and into the realm of magic, this article proposes new ways of conceptualizing what it means for migrants to maintain significant connections across national borders.     

Snuggles,Cuddles and Sexuality: An(other) Anthropological Interpretation of May Gibbs's Snugglepot and Cuddlepie1

This paper offers an interpretation of May Gibbs's classic illustrated children's story, The Complete Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. Its inspiration was Annette Hamilton's 1975 anthropological analysis, ‘Snugglepot and Cuddlepie: happy families in Australian society’. Rather than effacing that account, my reinterpretation draws on and augments it, even as it turns it ‘inside out’. The paper argues that stories acquire mythic status by magnetising interpretation. In suggesting that questions of subjectivity, identity and sublimated obsession are central concerns of May Gibbs's story, it directs our attention to the authoring of culture, its creation, transmission and transformation. The ‘Mother of the Gumnuts’ emerges from her recurring depictions of kinship and friendship, marriage and adoption, twinship and mirroring, androgyny, ambiguity and ambivalence, as queerly contemporary. If the approach advocated here is correct, such a revelation (and the sense we make of its significance) will not only complicate, but also enhance, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie's enduring appeal and emblematic status as a national icon.     

Improved MPI collectives for MPI processes in shared address spaces

As the number of cores per node keeps increasing, it becomes increasingly important for MPI to leverage shared memory for intranode communication. This paper investigates the design and optimization of MPI collectives for clusters of NUMA nodes. We develop performance models for collective communication using shared memory and we demonstrate several algorithms for various collectives. Experiments are conducted on both Xeon X5650 and Opteron 6100 InfiniBand clusters. The measurements agree with the model and indicate that different algorithms dominate for short vectors and long vectors. We compare our shared-memory allreduce with several MPI implementations—Open MPI, MPICH2, and MVAPICH2—that utilize system shared memory to facilitate interprocess communication. On a 16-node Xeon cluster and 8-node Opteron cluster, our implementation achieves on geometric average 2.3X and 2.1X speedup over the best MPI implementation, respectively. Our techniques enable an efficient implementation of collective operations on future multi- and manycore systems.     

Health in China. From Mao to market reform.

After the Liberation by Mao Ze Dong''s Communist army in 1949, China experienced massive social and economic change. The dramatic reductions in mortality and morbidity of the next two decades were brought about through improvements in socioeconomic conditions, an emphasis on prevention, and almost universal access to basic health care. The economic mismanagement of the Great Leap Forward brought about a temporary reversal in these positive trends. During the Cultural Revolution there was a sustained attack on the privileged position of the medical profession. Most city doctors were sent to work in the countryside, where they trained over a million barefoot doctors. Deng Xiao Ping''s radical economic reforms of the late 1970s replaced the socialist system with a market economy. Although average incomes have increased, the gap between rich and poor has widened.     

Mechanisms of Cache Retrieval in the Group Nesting Southern Flying Squirrel (Glaucomys volans)

We examined the proximate mechanisms of cache retrieval in the group‐living, southern flying squirrel, Glaucomys volans, through a series of behavioral experiments conducted in a large indoor arena. The effectiveness of several retrieval mechanisms was determined including spatial memory, olfaction, random searching and a heuristic under different environmental conditions. Our goal was to elucidate the hoarding strategy of individuals in a nest group and to address whether food storing individuals possess a retrieval advantage over pilfering nestmates. A storer's retrieval advantage is necessary for scatter hoarding to be an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) within aggregations of unrelated individuals. Our previous work has shown that, G. volans lives in such groups, and consequently it was important to address the storer's retrieval advantage under a range of environmental conditions. Initially in our baseline experiment, we developed methods to eliminate olfactory‐based retrieval and to control for random searching. Subsequently, we experimentally determined the effectiveness of cache retrieval via spatial memory, a heuristic and olfaction. We examined the mechanisms of cache retrieval in three additional experiments using two independent subject populations and found that under dry, odorless conditions spatial memory was the most effective retrieval mechanism in support of a storer's retrieval advantage. In a fifth experiment we examined cache retrieval under wet environmental conditions and showed that olfactory‐based retrieval was effective and the storer's advantage was reduced. We interpret these laboratory results based on considerations of natural environmental conditions and game theory. We propose a conditional ESS strategy where animals store and retrieve their own caches as the primary food hoarding tactic and opportunistically pilfer caches as a secondary tactic.     

Pluralizing the Costeños—Reflections on Michael Schroeder’s cultural geographies of grievance and war: Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast region in the first Sandinista revolution, 1927–1934

In this response article to Michael Schroeder's contribution "Cultural Geographies of Grievance and War: Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast Region in the First Sandinista Revolution, 1927–1934", the author argues that Sandino's limited success in the region was not mainly the result of an erroneous view of the local situation. His main difficulty was the absence of a coherent Atlantic Coast society and culture. In view of the mosaic of heterogeneous groups involved in long-standing rivalries or recent conflicts immersed in the racist environment of the enclave economy, a political project that could have integrated all major population groups was impossible. Sandinista propaganda did not merely consist of lofty nationalist and spiritualist jargon. There were also efforts to address the concrete problems of the people on the Atlantic Coast, such as economic depression and unemployment, and the Moravian missionaries’ attempt to enforce strict sexual morals in indigenous and Creole settlements.     

A gene's eye view of epistasis,selection and speciation

In this mini‐review, I discuss the effects of gene interaction or epistasis from a `gene's eye view.' By a `gene's eye view' of epistasis, I mean that I will consider a single, bi‐allelic locus, A , whose effects on fitness result only from its interactions with alleles of another, unknown locus, X . I will show how changes in the frequencies of alleles at the background locus affect the relationship of alleles at the A ‐locus to fitness. Changing the genetic background changes the fundamental characteristics of the A ‐locus, such as the magnitude and sign of allelic effects on fitness, and, consequently, it changes the strength and pattern of selection. I consider each of the four kinds of pair–wise interactions between two loci and show that some kinds of epistasis are more sensitive than others to population genetic subdivision. Lastly, I show that some kinds of epistasis are more likely than others to affect the process of speciation and contribute to or be responsible for general genetic features of interspecific hybrids, such as Haldane's rule.     

Xenotransplantation,risk, regulation and surveillance: social and technological dimensions of change

Abstract

This paper examines xenotransplantation as one specific technique associated with the ‘new genetics’. The development of this particular technique is set within the context of emergent regulatory practices that simultaneously confront the national and global dimensions of the technique whilst balancing collective and individual risks and benefits. The adoption of an incremental, and arguably ad hoc, regulatory approach within the UK is assessed in relation to demands for active widespread social participation in the framing and assessment of risks. It is argued that there needs to be a full examination of the risks associated with the technique across a range of time frames before it can be adopted as part of the repertoire of modemmedicine. Moreover, the fullest possible mapping of the risk domains to be regulated and managed requires the active involvement of a diverse range of publics. By adopting an extended time-frame approach, it is argued that the claims-making of developers can be set within a more socially grounded context. Such a context requires the inclusion of situated publics, something currently lacking within the UK's approach to regulation.     

Scalable PGAS collective operations in NUMA clusters

The increasing number of cores per processor is turning manycore-based systems in pervasive. This involves dealing with multiple levels of memory in non uniform memory access (NUMA) systems and processor cores hierarchies, accessible via complex interconnects in order to dispatch the increasing amount of data required by the processing elements. The key for efficient and scalable provision of data is the use of collective communication operations that minimize the impact of bottlenecks. Leveraging one sided communications becomes more important in these systems, to avoid unnecessary synchronization between pairs of processes in collective operations implemented in terms of two sided point to point functions. This work proposes a series of algorithms that provide a good performance and scalability in collective operations, based on the use of hierarchical trees, overlapping one-sided communications, message pipelining and the available NUMA binding features. An implementation has been developed for Unified Parallel C, a Partitioned Global Address Space language, which presents a shared memory view across the nodes for programmability, while keeping private memory regions for performance. The performance evaluation of the proposed implementation, conducted on five representative systems (JuRoPA, JUDGE, Finis Terrae, SVG and Superdome), has shown generally good performance and scalability, even outperforming MPI in some cases, which confirms the suitability of the developed algorithms for manycore architectures.     

Hamilton's rule,inclusive fitness maximization,and the goal of individual behaviour in symmetric two‐player games

Hamilton's original work on inclusive fitness theory assumed additivity of costs and benefits. Recently, it has been argued that an exact version of Hamilton's rule for the spread of a pro‐social allele (rb > c) holds under nonadditive pay‐offs, so long as the cost and benefit terms are defined as partial regression coefficients rather than pay‐off parameters. This article examines whether one of the key components of Hamilton's original theory can be preserved when the rule is generalized to the nonadditive case in this way, namely that evolved organisms will behave as if trying to maximize their inclusive fitness in social encounters.