Drosophila ezoana uses an hour‐glass or highly damped circadian clock for measuring night length and inducing diapause

Insects inhabiting the temperate zones measure seasonal changes in day or night length to enter the overwintering diapause. Diapause induction occurs after the duration of the night exceeds a critical night length (CNL). Our understanding of the time measurement mechanisms is continuously evolving subsequent to Bünning's proposal that circadian systems play the clock role in photoperiodic time measurement (Bünning, 1936). Initially, the photoperiodic clocks were considered to be either based on circadian oscillators or on simple hour‐glasses, depending on ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ responses in Nanda–Hamner and Bünsow experiments (Nanda & Hammer, 1958; Bünsow, 1960). However, there are also species whose responses can be regarded as neither ‘positive’, nor as ‘negative’, such as the Northern Drosophila species Drosophila ezoana, which is investigated in the present study. In addition, modelling efforts show that the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ Nanda–Hamner responses can also be provoked by circadian oscillators that are damped to different degrees: animals with highly sustained circadian clocks will respond ‘positive’ and those with heavily damped circadian clocks will respond ‘negative’. In the present study, an experimental assay is proposed that characterizes the photoperiodic oscillators by determining the effects of non‐24‐h light/dark cycles (T‐cycles) on critical night length. It is predicted that there is (i) a change in the critical night length as a function of T‐cycle period in sustained‐oscillator‐based clocks and (ii) a fixed night‐length measurement (i.e. no change in critical night length) in damped‐oscillator‐based clocks. Drosophila ezoana flies show a critical night length of approximately 7 h irrespective of T‐cycle period, suggesting a damped‐oscillator‐based photoperiodic clock. The conclusion is strengthened by activity recordings revealing that the activity rhythm of D. ezoana flies also dampens in constant darkness.     

The temporal ‘structure’ and function of the insect photoperiodic clock: a tribute to Colin S. Pittendrigh

In 1936, Erwin Bünning suggested that photoperiodic time measurement was a function of the circadian system. Colin Pittendrigh became an ardent supporter of Bünning's hypothesis, drawing parallels between photoperiodism and his own group's investigations of adult eclosion rhythmicity in the fruit fly Drosophila pseudoobscura. They developed several more modern versions of Bünning's general hypothesis based on the entrainment of circadian oscillations to the light cycle, including ‘external coincidence’, which is a derivation of Bünning's original model, and ‘internal coincidence’, which relied upon seasonal changes in the mutual phase relationship of oscillators within a multi‐oscillator circadian system. This review considers the experimental evidence for the central role of the circadian system in photoperiodic timing and, in some species, for both external and internal coincidence. Pittendrigh, however, pursued the idea of internal coincidence further with his analysis of the pacemaker–slave organization of eclosion rhythmicity in D. pseudoobscura and proposed a similar theoretical model for photoperiodism comprising a group of slave oscillators driven by a light‐sensitive pacemaker. In this model, the phase relationships of the slaves to the pacemaker were affected by (i) the relative periods of the pacemaker and slave(s); (ii) the strength(s) of the coupling between the two; and (iii) the dampening coefficients of the various slaves. Manipulation of these variables showed that the slaves adopted different internal phase relationships (both to each other and to the pacemaker) under the influence of changes in daily photophase, the period of the Zeitgeber and phase shifts of the entraining light cycle.     

Equivocal locations: being ‘red’ in ‘Red Bologna’

This article addresses a classic ethnographic problem in the study of Italy: how is it that people can subscribe simultaneously to seemingly contradictory ideologies, such as Catholicism and Communism? It does so by describing examples from Italy's ‘showcase city’ of the left, ‘Red Bologna’, in which to be ‘red’ is ubiquitous but each person's ‘red’ is a different thing: being ‘red’ (differently) is the idiom in which real political distinctions are expressed over issues like religion or immigration. In parallel, I discuss the relationship between the ‘field’ as a location and the ‘field’ as a conceptual topic. My account replicates internal ethnographic differences at the analytical level by highlighting the differences between being left‐wing in Bologna and its meaning as a concept in anthropology. Hence the ‘equivocal location’: a field‐site that is productively different, from what an inexperienced ethnographer expected from it, from conceptual discussions in anthropology, and from itself.     

In memoriam: Gustaf Bolinder 19/12 1888–16/7 1957

Veena Das's work on suffering suggests that the appropriate approach to the subject is one that grounds research in social experience. To honor this pitch of anthropology, I examine the global mediatization of the trauma of political violence and its moral implications. I also describe the professional appropriation of suffering that transforms political economic conditions into medical realities. Because social experience is itself undergoing a profound alteration in the present period of disordered capitalism, the very phenomenological conditions that we have assumed as an ‘existential’ basis for responding to human misery are also being ominously transformed.     

What's in a (Big) Name? The Art and Agency of a Bornean Photographic Collection

This article concerns the photographic collection of Paka anak Otor, the Bidayuh owner of a ‘mini-museum’ in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, and how it became entangled in his claims to status within and beyond his village. Superficially, the situation is easily apprehended via two analogous approaches within photographic theory and Southeast Asianist ethnography, which treat objects and images as representations or bearers of power and meaning. Here I suggest that such approaches end up eliding the action-centred nature of Paka's ‘big name’-making ambitions. In response, I approach his photographic collection through an analytical framework deriving from Alfred Gell's seminal theory, Art and Agency (1998), which has hitherto remained marginal to Southeast Asianist anthropology. I argue that, more than merely symbolising or bearing his ‘big name’, Paka's photographs were agentive image-objects that actively instantiated it. I conclude by asking how such an analytical shift might encourage a reconceptualisation of ‘power’ and ‘objecthood’ in Southeast Asianist anthropology.     

Beyond the senses: perception,the environment,and vision impairment

The ‘sensory turn’ in anthropology has generated a significant literature on sensory perception and experience. Whilst much of this literature is critical of the compartmentalization of particular ‘senses’, there has been limited exploration of how anthropologists might examine sensory perception beyond ‘the senses’. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with people who have impaired vision walking the South Downs landscape in England, this article develops such an approach. It suggests that the experiences of seeing in blindness challenge the conceptualization of ‘vision’ (and ‘non-vision’). In place of ‘vision’ (as a sense), the article explores ‘activities of seeing’ – an approach that contextualizes the visual to examine the biographically constituted and idiosyncratic nature of perception within an environment. Through an ethnography of seeing with anatomical eyes and ‘seeing in the mind's eye’, it articulates an approach that avoids associating perception with anatomy, or compartmentalizing experience into ‘senses’.     

Sickening Bodies: How Racism and Essentialism Feature in Aboriginal Women's Discourse about Health1

In the last decade there has been much interest in the concepts of ‘racism’ and ‘essentialism’ and the ways in which these notions have been appropriated by Aboriginal people to demarcate a specifically Aboriginal space (Cowlishaw 1986; Lattas 1993; Langton 1981; Morris 1988; Muecke 1992). Central to these concerns is the issue of black/white relations and the specificities of racial oppression. Following these concerns in this article I explore the nexus between the metaphorical dismemberment of self and the corporeal dismemberment of sickness which is reflected in the high mortality rates and disease patterns of Aboriginal people. I extend Fanon's concept that racism has the power to alienate ‘a man of colour’ from his own self-image to argue that it more than metaphorically breaks the human body (Fanon 1991). I provide a window into a much neglected area of research: how notions of illness and social relatedness are constructed in particular socio-historical circumstances. I explore the meanings of illness as expressed at the level of community and as a form of embodiment associated with unequal colonial relations. I focus on indigenous exegeses which articulate Aboriginal women's experience of illness and their sense of identity. I draw on the work of Leder (1990) to foreground a phenomenological view where selfhood is continually confronted by circumstances that make present the ‘body’ as a ‘sharp and searing presence threatening the self’. I also apply Sansom's (1982) model of illness and the significance of carers in an Aboriginal community to demonstrate a world-view of personhood that is diffused with other persons and things rather than a world-view that entails a highly individuated and bounded self. In this world-view adequate healing requires a reconstitution of social relations and a re-ordering of the racialised status quo.     

The western psychic as diviner: Experience and the politics of perception

Divination has been a well‐studied subject in the field of anthropology. Yet diviners within Western societies have been curiously ignored. Van Dijk's and Pels’ (1996) concept of the ‘politics of perception’ is discussed as a means of under‐standing why this is the case. Redressing this gap, I study the practices and experiences of an American psychic. This ethnographic material helps to move us beyond the patient‐client dialogue to address the internal processes of the diviners themselves. The reflexive exegesis of Elizabeth, an American diviner, reveals the spontaneous, visual nature of her practice and also highlights the role of the senses and emotions in divination. Other examples of sensory experience, such as in cases of blindness, show that those senses deemed lower down’ in the hierarchy of perception can be accurate modes of gaining knowledge of the world.     

The reification of concrete work in Egyptian film production

The anthropology of cinema has been instrumental in describing the ‘unseen’ labour invested in making films. What has been less explored is film workers’ erasure of each other's concrete effort in a similar manner. This process is what I call ‘reification’. Extending Georg Lukács's reflections, I argue that the relations of production throughout the film-making process seem to be transformed into relations between things (images and sounds) in a recurring pattern. In Egypt, this transformation impacts every juncture in commercial film production, and film workers manage its continuous impact via conventional means of recognition towards their concrete work. The overarching project is to understand, on the one hand, how the serial erasure of concrete work contributes to creating the film as a commodity and, on the other hand, how workers find value in their work under conditions where their effort is consumed by the things that they produce.     

Anthropology in Disneyworld: Rapport,Gardner, and the ‘Discipline‘ of Social Anthropology

This article examines the response by Rapport to the critique made by Gardner of his book Transcendent Individual. Rapport eschews the idea of discipline in relation to anthropology. This is connected to his distaste for any hint of social determinism, and his eulogising of the essay format as the most suitable means of conveying human contrariety. His approach necessarily leads him to embellish his accounts of what the world is like with visions of what it should be like if only everyone adopted his literary and liberal stance. A contrary ‘manifesto’ is here presented: the job of social anthropology is to explain actual historical societies, and one cannot simply appropriate the subject so that it now becomes about a kind of never‐never land. Rapport's approach, far from leading to a glorification of individuality, leads only to a monochrome vision which paints all human beings as reductively ‘aesthetic’, ignoring, and rendering impossible the explanation of all institutionalised forms of belief and practice, not least those brutal forms which, says Rapport, inspire his work.     

Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good

In the 1980s, anthropology set aside a focus on societies defined as radically ‘other’ to the anthropologists' own. There was little consensus at the time, however, about who might replace the other as the primary object of anthropological attention. In important respects, I argue, its replacement has been the suffering subject. Tracing this change, I consider how it addressed key problems of the anthropology of the other, but I also suggest that some strengths of earlier work – particularly some of its unique critical capacities – were lost in the transition. The conclusion considers how recent trends in anthropology might coalesce in a further shift, this one toward an anthropology of the good capable of recovering some of the critical force of an earlier anthropology without taking on its weaknesses.     

“With AIDS I am happier than I have ever been before”

In her 2016 article Sherry Ortner discusses what she calls the rise of ‘dark anthropology’: that is, ethnographic work that analyses situations of domination, dispossession, and violence. She, like Joel Robbins ( 2013 ), posits as a counterpoint the emergence of ‘anthropologies of the good,’ which emphasise care and ethics. In this paper I put these two anthropological projects into generative tension through an analysis of HIV‐positive women's lives in Papua New Guinea. In the first part of the paper I demonstrate the ways in which resource extraction has created vulnerabilities to HIV—in part through the coerced marriages of women to powerful landowners. In the second, I discuss ways in which the antiretroviral era has made possible unexpected forms of kindness towards HIV‐positive women. I end the paper with a discussion of what HIV‐positive women mean when they claim that they are happier now than in their pre‐diagnosis lives.     

Templates and exclusions: victim centrism in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools

In this article I use an ethnographic approach to consider the causes and consequences of a focus on ‘survivor’ experience in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools. In this Truth Commission, the interconnected concepts of ‘survivor’, ‘cultural genocide’, ‘trauma’, and ‘healing’ became reference points for much of the testimony that was presented and the ways the schools were represented. Canada's Truth Commission thus offers an example of the consequences of ‘victim centrism’, including the ways that ‘truth‐telling’ can be influenced by the affirmation of particular survivor experiences and the wider goal of reforming the dominant historical narrative of the state through public education. Canada's TRC was limited by its mandate to a particular kind of institution and scope of collective harm. It was at the same time active in its creation of narrative templates, which guided the expression of traumatic personal experience and affirmed the category of residential school ‘survivor’ as the focal point for understanding policy‐driven loss of language, tradition, and political integrity.     

Framing the Loss of Solace: Issues and Challenges in Researching Indigenous Compensation Claims

The 2016 judgment in the ‘Timber Creek’ compensation case (Griffiths v Northern Territory of Australia (no. 3) (2016) FCA 900) signals an end to an era of extinguishment-related injustice and inequality, representing, as it does, the first litigated Federal Court award of compensation for the loss or impairment of rights and interests, under the 1993 Native Title Act. In this paper, I explore some of the methodological challenges and conceptual issues confronting anthropologists involved in researching compensation claims. In drawing upon my experience in researching two such claims, I discuss how the issues of gender, resource development, environmental transformation, the Stolen Generation, and the history of Indigenous-European relations in remote and rural Australia impact upon investigations into the loss or diminution of traditional attachments to land. In conceptualising this loss of connection, I discuss material relating to the ‘anthropology of emotions’, and I point to some of the obstacles encountered when talking about emotions cross-culturally. In conclusion, I explore research undertaken into the social and psychological impacts of ecosystem distress, loss of place, and environmental change, and I posit the value of Glenn Albrecht’s concept of ‘solastalgia’ (2005. “Solastalgia, a New Concept in Human Health and Identity.” Philosophy Activism Nature 3: 41–44) in framing research into the loss of solace, and in expanding upon the legal notion of this loss as ‘inconvenience’ and ‘injured feelings’.     

Production of total and stainable pollen grains in Olea europaea L

The production of the total and stainable number of pollen grains per flower and per inflorescence of 13 olive cultivars (Olea europaea L.) has been investigated. Grains stainability was evaluated by using the acetic carmine staining method whereas the production of pollen grains was calculated by using a Bürker haemocytometer. All pollen characteristics taken into account varied significantly among the cultivars. The number of flowers per inflorescence ranged from a maximum of 31.3 (‘Cipressino’) to a minimum of 13.0 (‘Leccino’), the number of pollen grains per anther ranged from 123?346 (‘Arbequina’) to 40?975 (‘Sant'Agostino’), and the pollen stainability from 97.6% (‘Cipressino’) to 48.0% (‘Cellina di Nardò’). The number of stainable pollen grains per inflorescence averaged 2?559?512, ranging from a maximum of 3?913?678 (‘Nociara’) to a minimum of 940?143 (‘Sant'Agostino’). All parameters were positively correlated, whereas a linear negative correlation was found between stainability and total pollen grains both per anther and per inflorescence.     

The Immanence of Transcendence: God and the Devil on the Aberdeenshire Coast

In Gamrie (a Scottish fishing village of 700 people and 6 Protestant churches), local experiences of ‘divine providence’ and ‘demonic attack’ abound. Bodily fluids, scraps of paper, video cassettes and prawn trawlers were immanent carriers of divine and demonic activity. Viewed through the lens of Weberian social theory, the experiences of Scottish fisher families show how the life of the Christian resembles an enchanted struggle between God and the Devil with the Christian placed awkwardly in-between. Because, locally, ‘there is no such thing as coincidence’, these Christians expected to experience both the transcendent ordering of life by divine providence through God's immanence and the transcendent disordering of life by demonic attack through the Devil's immanence. Where this ordering and disordering frequently occurred through everyday objects, seemingly mundane events – being given a washing machine or feeling sleepy in church – were experienced as material indexes of spiritual reality. Drawing on the work of Cannell (on transcendence), Keane (on indexicality) and Wagner (on symbolic obviation), this paper argues that attending to the materiality of Scottish Protestantism better equips the anthropology of religion to understand Christian experience by positing immanence as a kind of transcendence and transcendence as a kind of immanence.     

Primitivist tourism and anthropological research: awkward relations★

Many anthropologists dislike the tourism depicted in the film Cannibal tours (1988), which values visited people for their supposed embodiment of an archaic mode of life, isolated from capitalist modernity. Here I approach such tourism through how its participants relate to anthropology, based on research into encounters between tourists and Korowai of Indonesian Papua. I juxtapose three patterns. First, Korowai sometimes assimilate me to ‘tourist’ or ‘tour guide’. Second, tourists often embrace ‘anthropology’ as an adjunct to their primitivist goals. Third, certain tourists investigate their own primitivism, in ways that parallel my research on that topic. This diversity of alignments of tourist, anthropologist, and Korowai calls for an analytic strategy not of seeking out the ultimate basic relations between these character-types, but of understanding categorization as a practice of its own, through which categorizers grapple with broader historical conditions.     

Mediat(iz)ing Catholicism: saint,spectacle, and theopolitics in Lima,Peru

This article examines the annual public procession in Lima, Peru, of the Señor de los Milagros (Lord of Miracles) in relation to issues at the intersection of Catholic Christianity, media, and political authority. Through a theopolitical lens alert to the intermeshing of political sovereignty and authority with theological (Catholic) worldviews, I inquire into media and the Señor de los Milagros procession along three key intersecting themes that link scales of local and global Catholicism: performance, identity/belonging, and control. Key to my argument is the idea of the miraculous (lo milagroso), a culturally resonant register of embodied affective experience with compelling power, which points to how senses of belonging, authority, and ‘proper’ Catholic subjecthoods are intensified by Catholicism's diffusion through new mediatic forms, especially in church-generated productions. A consideration of media technologies, mediation, and Catholicism nuances theoretical assumptions within the anthropology of Christianity, and also suggests that the anthropology of religion should attend more closely to mediation and mediatization as newer media infrastructures – channelling flows of information, images, and affects – extend ‘the religious’ into other social spheres.     

The datafication of nature: data formations and new scales in natural history

In this essay, I consider the scales and connections lost and gained as natural history adopts digital data infrastructures. On the basis of ongoing work in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, I track the relations between insect specimens and their material and digital informational ecologies. Using Latour's notion of the ‘circulating reference’, I follow the insect specimens as they make their way into taxonomies, databases, and digitization apparatuses. In focusing on human-data mediations in museum practices of ordering, describing, and distributing specimens, I show how the datafication of nature makes present conventionally dissociated contexts, including German colonialism. Proposing the concept of a data formation, I suggest that ethnographers have much to contribute in bringing forward the sociocultural and historical specificities and contingencies within data.     

Death,Biography, and the Mapuche Person

The amulpüllün biographical oratory which takes place at Mapuche funerals in southern Chile is said to ‘complete’ the person. Such a perspective challenges the assumption that mortuary practices necessarily constitute a form of analysis, a division of the component parts of the social person. In this paper I explore what it is about the Mapuche person which needs to be ‘completed,’ and how funeral oratory achieves this goal. Utilizing Bakhtin's concepts of consummation and transgredience, and Ricoeur's concepts of emplotment and narrative identity, I suggest that it is only from the position of outsidedness that the necessary totalization of the deceased's person can occur. These processes of synthesis and totalization cast light upon an apparent contradiction between the importance which Amerindians place upon biography as an oral form, and theoretical approaches which stress the instability and divisibility of an Amerindian personhood predicated upon the incorporation of the other. Rather than viewing the totalization which occurs in biography as a critique of such an approach, I see it as a solution to the ontological problem which such an approach describes.