Firewalking: Explanation and the Mind-Body Relationship1

With specific reference to the Anastenaria, a firewalking ritual performed in the North of Greece, this paper discusses the problem which phenomena such as firewalking poses for anthropological discussion. The relationship between the mind and the body and their existence in the social world is addressed, as I search for a way in which anthropological discourse can approach an explanation of an individual's ability to walk on burning coals unharmed. A brief look at the various explanations provided by different disciplines follows a more detailed review of scientific inquiry into this phenomenon. A critical discussion of the notions of trance, possession and altered states of consciousness introduces the subjective/objective dichotomy. The question is asked: How does the body exist in the world and to what extent does there remain a distinction between body, mind and object?     

Anthropology at Home in Australia

This introductory essay takes ‘anthropology at home’ to refer to the conduct of fieldwork and other kinds of anthropological research in or about communities which Australian anthropologists regard as culturally familiar. In that sense, anthropology at home raises two interrelated questions: 1) ‘What is an appropriate anthropological object?’ and 2) ‘What are the appropriate methods for studying that object?’ I argue that anthropology remains overdetermined by its colonial heritage and that it is still overly concerned with the study of ‘the other’ through long-term fieldwork. My feeling is that we should displace the idea of ‘the other’ in favour of an anthropological object construed in terms of self-other relationships. This not only implies that anthropology at home should cease to appear as an oxymoron, but also suggests that a more comprehensive employment of various study methods should displace long-term fieldwork as metonymic of the discipline.     

Perceptual categories for spatial layout.

The central problems of vision are often divided into object identification and localization. Object identification, at least at fine levels of discrimination, may require the application of top-down knowledge to resolve ambiguous image information. Utilizing top-down knowledge, however, may require the initial rapid access of abstract object categories based on low-level image cues. Does object localization require a different set of operating principles than object identification or is category determination also part of the perception of depth and spatial layout? Three-dimensional graphics movies of objects and their cast shadows are used to argue that identifying perceptual categories is important for determining the relative depths of objects. Processes that can identify the causal class (e.g. the kind of material) that generates the image data can provide information to determine the spatial relationships between surfaces. Changes in the blurriness of an edge may be characteristically associated with shadows caused by relative motion between two surfaces. The early identification of abstract events such as moving object/shadow pairs may also be important for depth from shadows. Knowledge of how correlated motion in the image relates to an object and its shadow may provide a reliable cue to access such event categories.     

Masterful words: musicianship and ethics in learning the ney

Unlike in some recent anthropological writings that show the insignificance of verbal or overt instruction in the process of skill acquisition, talk is, in vital ways, constitutive of the practice of ney (reed flute) learning that I discuss here. What is it about masterful speech that makes it such a compelling vehicle for musical education? To address this question, the article presents a number of key processes that sohbet (or conversation) is designed to facilitate in learners: new skills of hearing and musical understanding; extra‐musical sensibilities germane to becoming a skilled ney‐player; and communal affections between those participating in the listening act. It is argued that when all of these combine, certain ethical dispositions are fostered in learners’ moral selves, enabling new ways of relating to others and to the city.     

Active vision in insects: an analysis of object-directed zig-zag flights in wasps (Odynerus spinipes , Eumenidae)

Ground-nesting wasps (Odynerus spinipes, Eumenidae) perform characteristic zig-zag flight manoeuvres when they encounter a novel object in the vicinity of their nests. We analysed flight parameters and flight control mechanisms and reconstructed the optical flow fields which the wasps generate by these flight manoeuvres. During zig-zag flights, the wasps move sideways and turn to keep the object in their frontal visual field. Their turning speed is controlled by the relative motion between object and background. We find that the wasps adjust their rotational and translational speed in such a way as to produce a specific vortex field of image motion that is centred on the novel object. As a result, differential image motion and changes in the direction of motion vectors are maximal in the vicinity and at the edges of the object. Zig-zag flights thus seem to be a `depth from motion' procedure for the extraction of object-related depth information. Accepted: 31 August 1997     

One picture is worth at least a million neurons

How many neurons participate in the representation of a single visual image? Answering this question is critical for constraining biologically inspired models of object recognition, which vary greatly in their assumptions from few "grandmother cells" to numerous neurons in widely distributed networks. Functional imaging techniques, such as fMRI, provide an opportunity to explore this issue, since they allow the simultaneous detection of the entire neuronal population responding to each stimulus. Several studies have shown that fMRI BOLD signal is approximately proportional to neuronal activity. However, since it provides an indirect measure of this activity, obtaining a realistic estimate of the number of activated neurons requires several intervening steps. Here, we used the extensive knowledge of primate V1 to yield a conservative estimate of the ratio between hemodynamic response and neuronal firing. This ratio was then used, in addition to several cautious assumptions, to assess the number of neurons responding to a single-object image in the entire visual cortex and particularly in object-related areas. Our results show that at least a million neurons in object-related cortex and about two hundred million neurons in the entire visual cortex are involved in the representation of a single-object image.     

Who Says More? City Tales between Thought and Images

What is debated in this article is vision itself as a locus of knowledge, which is particularly challenging to comprehend as it cannot be compared to the discursive form of thought. What underlies the relation between thought and observation, the production of discourse and the production of images, the expository style and the narrative one, writing and filming, being a researcher and being a director? I will sketch a provisional and partial answer, comparing two examples of urban action-research. These gave rise to two different “video-researches” grounded in two different research epistemologies. In one case the audiovisual is programmed, employed (and thought) as a means (or device) for urban anthropological investigation. In the other one, conversely, the audiovideo is systematically anticipated as the final end of the research, that is, as a representation of knowledge in itself. The video-research format in fact raises a fundamental ambivalence between the function of the research and that of the direction in the production of “scientific” knowledge.     

Flexible representations of dynamics are used in object manipulation

To manipulate an object skillfully, the brain must learn its dynamics, specifying the mapping between applied force and motion. A fundamental issue in sensorimotor control is whether such dynamics are represented in an extrinsic frame of reference tied to the object or an intrinsic frame of reference linked to the arm. Although previous studies have suggested that objects are represented in arm-centered coordinates [1-6], all of these studies have used objects with unusual and complex dynamics. Thus, it is not known how objects with natural dynamics are represented. Here we show that objects with simple (or familiar) dynamics and those with complex (or unfamiliar) dynamics are represented in object- and arm-centered coordinates, respectively. We also show that objects with simple dynamics are represented with an intermediate coordinate frame when vision of the object is removed. These results indicate that object dynamics can be flexibly represented in different coordinate frames by the brain. We suggest that with experience, the representation of the dynamics of a manipulated object may shift from a coordinate frame tied to the arm toward one that is linked to the object. The additional complexity required to represent dynamics in object-centered coordinates would be economical for familiar objects because such a representation allows object use regardless of the orientation of the object in hand.     

Multi-scale lines and edges in V1 and beyond: Brightness,object categorization and recognition,and consciousness

In this paper we present an improved model for line and edge detection in cortical area V1. This model is based on responses of simple and complex cells, and it is multi-scale with no free parameters. We illustrate the use of the multi-scale line/edge representation in different processes: visual reconstruction or brightness perception, automatic scale selection and object segregation. A two-level object categorization scenario is tested in which pre-categorization is based on coarse scales only and final categorization on coarse plus fine scales. We also present a multi-scale object and face recognition model. Processing schemes are discussed in the framework of a complete cortical architecture. The fact that brightness perception and object recognition may be based on the same symbolic image representation is an indication that the entire (visual) cortex is involved in consciousness.     

Weak hierarchies associated with similarity measures—An additive clustering technique

A new and apparently rather useful and natural concept in cluster analysis is studied: given a similarity measure on a set of objects, a sub-set is regarded as a cluster if any two objectsa, b inside this sub-set have greater similarity than any third object outside has to at least one ofa, b. These clusters then form a closure system which can be described as a hypergraph without triangles. Conversely, given such a system, one may attach some weight to each cluster and then compose a similarity measure additively, by letting the similarity of a pair be the sum of weights of the clusters containing that particular pair. The original clusters can be reconstructed from the obtained similarity measure. This clustering model is thus located between the general additive clustering model of Shepard and Arabie (1979) and the standard hierarchical model. Potential applications include fitting dendrograms with few additional nonnested clusters and simultaneous representation of some families of multiple dendrograms (in particular, two-dendrogram solutions), as well as assisting the search for phylogenetic relationships by proposing a somewhat larger system of possibly relevant “family groups”, from which an appropriate choice (based on additional insight or individual preferences) remains to be made.     

The Female Advantage in Object Location Memory According to the Foraging Hypothesis: A Critical Analysis

According to the evolutionary hypothesis of Silverman and Eals (1992, Sex differences in spatial abilities: Evolutionary theory and data. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 533–549). Oxford: Oxford University Press), women evolutionary hypothesis, women surpass men in object location memory as a result of a sexual division in foraging activities among early humans. After surveying the main anthropological information on ancestral sex-related foraging, we review the evidence on how robust women’s advantage in object location memory is. This leads us to suggest that the functional understanding of this type of memory would benefit from comparing men and women in carefully designed and ecologically meaningful cognitive contexts involving, for instance, incidental versus intentional settings that call for either the absolute or relative encoding of the locations of common versus uncommon objects.     

Euclidean sections of protein conformation space and their implications in dimensionality reduction

Dimensionality reduction is widely used in searching for the intrinsic reaction coordinates for protein conformational changes. We find the dimensionality?reduction methods using the pairwise root?mean?square deviation (RMSD) as the local distance metric face a challenge. We use Isomap as an example to illustrate the problem. We believe that there is an implied assumption for the dimensionality‐reduction approaches that aim to preserve the geometric relations between the objects: both the original space and the reduced space have the same kind of geometry, such as Euclidean geometry vs. Euclidean geometry or spherical geometry vs. spherical geometry. When the protein free energy landscape is mapped onto a 2D plane or 3D space, the reduced space is Euclidean, thus the original space should also be Euclidean. For a protein with N atoms, its conformation space is a subset of the 3N‐dimensional Euclidean space R^3N. We formally define the protein conformation space as the quotient space of R^3N by the equivalence relation of rigid motions. Whether the quotient space is Euclidean or not depends on how it is parameterized. When the pairwise RMSD is employed as the local distance metric, implicit representations are used for the protein conformation space, leading to no direct correspondence to a Euclidean set. We have demonstrated that an explicit Euclidean‐based representation of protein conformation space and the local distance metric associated to it improve the quality of dimensionality reduction in the tetra‐peptide and β‐hairpin systems. Proteins 2014; 82:2585–2596. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Rereading the Gods Must be Crazy Films

Studies of Jamie Uys's Gods Must be Crazy films have tended to focus on his pseudo-ethnographic representation of “Bushmen,” from primarily Western perspectives, both anthropological and anti-apartheid. This study examines critically the wider corpus of Uys's feature films, especially those employing “Bushmen” characters, in terms of intertextual relations. The article offers the comments of many San viewers of the films and also conveys the perspective of Gao, the main Ju/'hoansi actor. Finally, the study examines responses from the anthropological community to the films.     

Maori hapuu and their History

Current research by historians and lawyers in Maori land and fisheries claims is broaching issues of Maori kinship calling for renewed social anthropological research. In this essay I review the history of social anthropological research in Maori kinship through 1975, a lapse in this research until the late 1980s, and a recent revival. A central problem of this research has been the conceptualisation of Maori hapuu (‘subtribes’) or cognatic descent groups. A critique of the recent analyses suggests that the early failure of social anthropologists to understand hapuu in historical context continues, although in different theoretical forms. The burgeoning research by historians and lawyers, while lacking fundamental anthropological insights, suggests that hapuu cannot be separated from their specific history.     

Drawing with a camera? Ethnographic film and transformative anthropology

Drawing has emerged as a recent focus of anthropological attention. Writers such as Ingold and Taussig have argued for its significance as a special kind of knowledge practice, linking it to a broader re‐imagining of the anthropological project itself. Underpinning their approach is an opposition between the pencil and the camera, between ‘making’ and ‘taking’, between restrictive and generative modes of inquiry. This essay challenges this assumption, arguing that these elements in drawing and filmmaking exist in a dialectical rather than a polarized relationship. It highlights particular insights that follow from a dialogue between written and film‐based anthropologies and links them to broader debates within the discipline – for example, debates about ways of knowing, skilled practice, improvisation and the imagination, and anthropology as a form of image‐making practice.     

Mind the gap: the minimal detectable separation distance between two objects during active electrolocation

In a food‐rewarded two‐alternative forced‐choice procedure, it was determined how well the weakly electric elephantnose fish Gnathonemus petersii can sense gaps between two objects, some of which were placed in front of complex backgrounds. The results show that at close distances, G. petersii is able to detect gaps between two small metal cubes (2 cm × 2 cm × 2 cm) down to a width of c. 1·5 mm. When larger objects (3 cm × 3 cm × 3 cm) were used, gaps with a width of 2–3 mm could still be detected. Discrimination performance was better (c. 1 mm gap size) when the objects were placed in front of a moving background consisting of plastic stripes or plant leaves, indicating that movement in the environment plays an important role for object identification. In addition, the smallest gap size that could be detected at increasing distances was determined. A linear relationship between object distance and gap size existed. Minimal detectable gap sizes increased from c. 1·5 mm at a distance of 1 cm, to 20 mm at a distance of 7 cm. Measurements and simulations of the electric stimuli occurring during gap detection revealed that the electric images of two close objects influence each other and superimpose. A large gap of 20 mm between two objects induced two clearly separated peaks in the electric image, while a 2 mm gap caused just a slight indentation in the image. Therefore, the fusion of electric images limits spatial resolution during active electrolocation. Relative movements either between the fish and the objects or between object and background might improve spatial resolution by accentuating the fine details of the electric images.     

Provocations of European Ethnology

What is the relevance of Europeanist ethnography for anthropological theory generally? Considering a region usually regarded as the source rather than an object of anthropology and colonialism alike, seven anthropologists reflexively address, inter alia, the implications of studying spaces already deeply explored by other disciplines, the potential of economic history to defamiliarize Eurocentric models and of recent events to illuminate such concepts as state and market, the meaning of "West" as a specific locus of power and reification, the limits of the "local" as the focus of ethnography, and the tensions among politically and culturally disparate entities within emergent ideologies of cultural unity.     

Optimal trait scoring for age estimation

What are the effects that genetics has had on Anthropological research and how can we think anthropologically about Genetics? Just as genetic data have encouraged new hypotheses about human phenotypic variation, evolutionary history, population interaction, and environmental effects, so too has Anthropology offered to genetic studies a new interpretive locus in its history and perspective. This introduction examines how the fields of Anthropology and Genetics have arrived at a crucial moment at which their interaction requires careful examination and critical reflection. The papers discussed here exemplify how we may engage in such a trans-disciplinary conversation. They speak to the future of thoughtful interaction between genetic and anthropological literature and seek a new integration that embodies the holism of the human biological sciences.     

Formats of image data files that can be used for routine digital light micrography. Part one

Failing to open computer files that describe image data is not the most frustrating experience that the user of a computer can suffer, but it is high on list of possible aggravations. To ameliorate this, the structure of uncompressed image data files is described here. The various ways in which information that describes a picture can be recorded are related, and a primary distinction between raster or bitmap based and vector or object based image data files is drawn. Bitmap based image data files are the more useful of the two formats for recording complicated images such as digital light micrographs, whereas object based files are better for recording illustrations and cartoons. Computer software for opening a very large variety of different formats of digital image data is recommended, and if these fail, ways are described for opening bitmap based digital image data files whose format is unknown.