'He is the one who is providing you with everything so whatever he says is what you do': A Qualitative Study on Factors Affecting Secondary Schoolgirls’ Dropout in Rural Western Kenya

Education is an effective way to improve girls’ self-worth, health, and productivity; however there remains a gender gap between girls’ and boys’ completion of school. The literature around factors influencing girls’ decision to stay in school is limited. Seven focus group discussions took place among 79 girls in forms 2 to 4 at secondary schools in rural western Kenya, to examine their views on why girls absent themselves or dropout from school. Data were analysed thematically. Lack of resources, sexual relationships with boyfriends, and menstrual care problems were reported to lead directly to dropout or school absence. These were tied to girls increased vulnerability to pregnancy, poor performance in school, and punishments, which further increase school absence and risk of dropout. Poverty, unmet essential needs, coercive sexual relationships, and an inequitable school environment collude to counter girls’ resolve to complete their schooling. Lack of resources drive girls to have sex with boyfriends or men who provide them with essentials their family cannot afford, such as sanitary pads and transport to school. While these improve quality of their school life, this dynamic increases their exposure to sexual risk, pregnancy, punishment, and dropout. Evaluation of interventions to ameliorate these challenges is warranted, including provision of pocket money to address their needs.     

The Political Coherence of Educational Incoherence: The Consequences of Educational Specialization in a Southern Moroccan Community

This article is based on an ethnographic study I conducted in southern Morocco during 2004. I explore the historical, ideological, and cultural background behind educational specialization among Moroccan university students. I describe how French colonial educational policies and postindependence Moroccan national schooling ideologies have created a national system of double standards that: (1) privileges French-educated urban middle- and upper-class students, (2) emphasizes the Arabization of the national education system, and (3) discriminates against Arabized, largely rural students, which have exacerbated regional educational and socioeconomic inequalities. I finally contend that educational specialization in noncompetitive degrees such as Arabic language and literature, Islamic studies, geography, and general law is the result of an ideological matrix I have termed political coherence of educational incoherence. Political coherence of educational incoherence naturalizes the reliance of certain disfranchised regional groups on a traditional preschool Islamic education that is largely based on memorization and inefficient pedagogy and is unsuitable for the modern educational requirements.  [Islamic education, school ethnography, Arabization, school failure, minority education]     

Operationalising Contemporary Rural Development: Socio-Cultural Determinants Arising from a Strong Local Fishing Culture

A transition to programmes adopting a governance-based approach in encouraging value-added and innovation in rural economies is often described as offering new opportunities for marginalised rural communities that have not benefited from top-down development policies. In practice, however, it is noted in Ireland and elsewhere in the EU that traditional fishers and farmers have been slow to engage in economic activities favoured by contemporary policies. I discuss how traditional small-scale fishing communities can be estranged from contemporary rural development policies that are focused primarily on providing high value-added service-oriented and processed goods. I approach the problem of poor integration of fishing communities by focusing on how contemporary rural development programmes - though shrouded in language of local participation, governance, and indigenisation - can fail to actively engage with indigenous socio-cultural identity and resources. Exploring how intricate human ecological relationships involving custom and local knowledge of physical resources are not readily commoditised, I raise questions in relation to some of the central claims of the governance and rural development model, such as that it has the capacity to empower and generate confidence through locally appropriate economic activity.     

The Silencing of Latino Student "Voice": Puerto Rican and Mexican Narratives in Eighth Grade and High School

Narratives of 27 Puerto Rican and Mexican students, written first in eighth grade then again as juniors in high school, address the important question of "Who am I?" and illustrate school-sponsored silencing, with students' critiques of their educational experience ignored by both the elementary and the high school. The narratives also provide a window into the high dropout rates of Latino children, the reasons behind students' academic decisions, and interventions needed to change negative schooling processes and outcomes. By giving witness to these voices, we as readers help ensure that through their writing, these Latino adolescents do not just speak but that they are heard.     

The impact of childhood malnutrition on schooling: evidence from Bangladesh

This paper examines the impact of childhood malnutrition on schooling performance in rural Bangladesh. The results reveal that malnourished children are less likely to enrol in school on time and achieve an age-appropriate grade by 26 percentage points and 31 percentage points, respectively. Other important determinants of schooling outcomes include infrastructure and education level of parents. One major contribution of this paper is the control for the endogeneity of malnutrition status, which otherwise might lead to bias estimates.     

Waitangi Day,Okains Bay: Contest,Co-operation and the Construction of Place in a Local Commemoration of Nation in New Zealand

Local commemorations of nation, while indexing and taking place within the framework of a national imaginary, need to be understood within their own contexts and sets of relationships as these operate in specific places. This paper examines one such case, that of an annual Waitangi Day event at Okains Bay, a small rural settlement in New Zealand's South Island. Here, although the annual public ritual to mark Waitangi Day follows closely the model of the national commemoration at Waitangi itself, it has certain distinctive features and takes place within a context that gives it a specific meaning that is in some ways at odds with the meanings created at the national level. This has to do with the particular history of Okains and with the various relationships and interests associated with it, which the Waitangi Day event draws upon and enacts.     

When "humanitarianism" becomes "development": the politics of international aid in Syria's Palestinian refugee camps

In recent years, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has attempted to go beyond its role as a provider of relief and basic services in Palestinian refugee camps and emphasize its role as a development agency. In this article, I focus on the Neirab Rehabilitation Project, an UNRWA-sponsored development project taking place in the Palestinian refugee camps of Ein el Tal and Neirab in northern Syria. I argue that UNRWA's role as a relief-centered humanitarian organization highlights the everyday suffering of Palestinian refugees, suffering that has become embedded in refugees’ political claims. I show that UNRWA's emphasis on “development” in the refugee camps is forcing Palestinian refugees in Ein el Tal and Neirab to reassess the political narrative through which they have understood their relationship with UNRWA.     

The medicalization of "nature" in the "artificial body": surrogate motherhood in Israel

In this article, I draw on anthropological and feminist scholarship on the body and the nature/culture divide as a framework for understanding the place of surrogate mothers in a conceptual ideology that connects motherhood with nature. I explore links between the medicalization of childbirth in Israel and the personal agency of surrogate mothers as relayed through interviews. Taking the patriarchal context of the Israeli surrogacy law of 1996 into consideration, I underscore surrogates' imaginative use of medical metaphors as tools for the subversion of surrogacy's threatening social connotations. By redefining the surrogate body as "artificial" and locating "nature" in the commissioning mother's body, surrogates adopt medical rhetoric to transform surrogacy from a transgressive act into an alternative route toward achieving normative Israeli national reproductive goals.     

Role of education in reducing child labour: evidence from rural Bangladesh

This paper explores the hypothesis that the level of education of children and their parents plays a major role in reducing child labour. Data were generated from a sample survey of 3809 children aged 10-14 years living in 150 villages in two rural districts of Bangladesh. A significant inverse relationship was found between child labour and years of schooling. Age and education of children, parental education, land ownership of household and fathers' occupation were the determinants of child labour force participation. Child's years of schooling is the variable that has most influence on the probability of participation in the labour force, followed by father's and mother's education.     

The development of shoaling behaviour in the European minnow, Phoxinus phoxinus

The effects of development and disturbance on schooling and shoaling were observed in laboratory-raised minnows. Both behaviours were present at the onset of free swimming. Shoaling increased to become the most important behaviour by 3 weeks after emergence from gravel, while the main increase in schooling behaviour occurred at 4 weeks. These changes were accompanied by rises in elective group size and in the number of following responses, and by a decrease in nearest neighbour distance. The increases in social behaviour were observed at an earlier stage in the same minnows threatened by a standard net chase. The main increase in schooling in disturbed minnows took place between 3 and 4 weeks after emergence; after this time schooling became the dominant behaviour. Disturbed fish were also more likely to follow another minnow during an encounter.     

"Strong Women" and "Pretty Girls": Self-Provisioning, Gender, and Class Identity in Rural Galicia (Spain)

In this article I examine expressions of class and gender identity in a worker-peasant community in rural Galicia (Spain). While men who have worked for decades in migrant destinations define their own class positionality partly through reference to the unpaid, subsistence work that is performed mainly by women who remain in the community, these same women adeptly "code switch" between "strong woman" and '"pretty girl" demeanors through their work activities, dress, and use of domestic spaces. Using the example of ethnographic data from this one part of rural Europe, 1 argue for the broader importance of anthropologists considering how laboring bodies become gendered; the intersections between gender and class identities; and connections among mixed livelihood strategies, the continuity of self-provisioning activities, and resistance to fully commoditized consumption. [Key words: class and gender identity, Galicia, Spain, unpaid provisioning work, consumption]     

Literacy, Culture, and Politics of Schooling: Counternarratives of a Chinese Canadian Family

To counter the "grand narratives" of the model minority myth, this study unveils the stories of a Chinese immigrant family who are encountering difficulties with schooling. The study demonstrates a complex interrelationship between home literacy, culture, and politics of schooling. Findings suggest that cultural mismatch theory alone cannot explain minority schoolfailure. Rather, multilevel interactions, including cultural differences, modes of incorporation, and differential power relationships between school and home, result in minority students' school difficulties.     

Self-organized fish schools: an examination of emergent properties

Heterogeneous, "aggregated" patterns in the spatial distributions of individuals are almost universal across living organisms, from bacteria to higher vertebrates. Whereas specific features of aggregations are often visually striking to human eyes, a heuristic analysis based on human vision is usually not sufficient to answer fundamental questions about how and why organisms aggregate. What are the individual-level behavioral traits that give rise to these features? When qualitatively similar spatial patterns arise from purely physical mechanisms, are these patterns in organisms biologically significant, or are they simply epiphenomena that are likely characteristics of any set of interacting autonomous individuals? If specific features of spatial aggregations do confer advantages or disadvantages in the fitness of group members, how has evolution operated to shape individual behavior in balancing costs and benefits at the individual and group levels? Mathematical models of social behaviors such as schooling in fishes provide a promising avenue to address some of these questions. However, the literature on schooling models has lacked a common framework to objectively and quantitatively characterize relationships between individual-level behaviors and group-level patterns. In this paper, we briefly survey similarities and differences in behavioral algorithms and aggregation statistics among existing schooling models. We present preliminary results of our efforts to develop a modeling framework that synthesizes much of this previous work, and to identify relationships between behavioral parameters and group-level statistics.     

Changes in "template-bound" and "free" RNA polymerase activities in isolated nuclei from Xenopus laevis embryos

Nuclei have been isolated from Xenopus laevis embryos and incubated under conditions allowing RNA synthesis to proceed for more than 3 h. The RNA molecules synthesized on the endogenous template are stable, heterogeneous in size and correspond to the activities of the three RNA polymerases.In these in vitro conditions we have determined the extent of activity of the three RNA polymerases during the embryonic development from blastula to swimming tadpole. Our results on isolated nuclei are in good agreement with the changes in RNA synthesis which take place during normal embryonic development.We have measured both the “template-bound” and the “free” activities of each of the three RNA polymerases during development. Amongst the total RNA polymerase activities engaged on the template, the proportion of polymerase I increases as development proceeds: at the blastula stage, there is practically no RNA polymerase I engaged on the template, whereas in swimming tadpoles, RNA polymerase I amounts to about 90% of the RNA polymerases bound to the DNA. Conversely, RNA polymerase I represents the major part of free RNA polymerases in blastula nuclei.Autoradiography of incubated nuclei shows that, at least in swimming tadpoles nuclei, both “free” and “template-bound” RNA polymerase I are localized in the nucleoli.The evolution of “template-bound” RNA polymerase II activity during development is quite different from that of RNA polymerase I: RNA polymerase II activity represents 75% of engaged polymerase activity in blastulae and only 47% at the swimming tadpoles stage.The results suggest that part of the “free” RNA polymerase I activity might progressively become “template-bound” during embryogenesis.     

On Space As A Capacity

This article is about space and social relationships. More precisely, it is about the space of and in social relationships. It is also about the efficacy of social relationships in segregating their own contexts of meaning and value. The article also addresses the question of how agency comes about. This 'coming about' of agency, its swelling and appearance in a structure of meaning, is what I call 'capacity'. Social relationships have 'capacity'. That is, they have both spaciousness and potency. They accomplish things, and accomplish things 'somewhere'. In this respect, space (or the capacity of social relationships) is something very different from idioms that we have come to think of as forms of space, like landscape or place. This article is also, therefore, a critique of the way in which some anthropologists have recently theorized landscape and place. My argument is based on an ethnographic account of the dimensions through which people construct urban space in the Chilean city of Antofagasta.     

"In the Clique": Popular Culture, Constructions of Place, and the Everyday Lives of Urban Youth

This study focuses on two teens, Tony and Rufus, and how they used key popular texts to construct a sense of place in the small city where this research was conducted. These two teens mobilized these popular texts in very specific ways, both finding specific thematic links between and across them and also using them to index their relationships with biological and extended family in this city and "down South." This study highlights the complex, emergent, and messy relationships many young people have with popular culture.     

以生态景观构建乡村审美空间

乡村审美空间表层是非功利的,实质深层映射出人地关系本质的取向价值,是人地关系永久可持续发展问题。目前乡村研究多注重经济和土地利用,而以现实生态景观构建乡村审美空间还是有待于探讨的重要课题。近年来快速城市化发展,区域中的自然地理性质破坏对于乡村景观是致命的。立足地理生态环境架构乡村审美空间,分析乡村生态景观和审美空间对应的元素,以多尺度景观层面探寻表现在与之相映的景观空间形态结构、格局演化进程与机理响应,进而构建审美空间,组合形成现实的美丽景观体系。将生态文明和社会发展要求安排在景观空间格局配置的中,形成保持整体环境的景观网络。使得风景美的概念渗透在于城镇、乡村以至农田等更广阔的领域,从而建设具有风景画境界的"美丽乡村"。     

Mestizaje and Law Making in Indigenous Identity Formation in Northeastern Brazil: "After the Conflict Came the History"

In this article, I explore issues of authenticity, legal discourse, and local requirements of belonging by considering the recent surge of indigenous recognitions in northeastern Brazil. I investigate how race and ethnicity are implicated in the recognition process in Brazil on the basis of an analysis of a successful struggle for indigenous identity and access to land by a group of mixed-race, visibly, African-descended rural workers. I propose that the debate over mestizaje (ethnoracial and cultural mixing) in the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America can be reconfigured and clarified by broadening it to include such Brazilian experiences. I argue that the interaction between two processes—law making and indigenous identity formation—is crucial to understanding how the notion of "mixed heritage" is both reinforced and disentangled. As such, this article is an illustration of the role of legal discourse in the constitution of indigenous identities and it introduces northeastern Brazil into the global discussion of law, indigenous rights, and claims to citizenship.     

乡村地区生态系统服务权衡与协同关系——以湖州市为例

湖州是中国"美丽乡村"发源地,十多年来乡村面貌发生较大改变,从而对其生境维持、文化保护带来压力,定量评估湖州乡村的生态系统服务及相关关系对其可持续发展具有重要意义。基于Thornthwaite Memorial模型、Miami模型、InVEST模型、水量平衡法、Maxent模型等方法对该区域2010-2018年粮食供给、碳贮存、水源涵养、文化服务等四项生态系统服务进行时空演变分析,探究不同生态系统服务间的权衡与协同关系。结果表明：(1)在2010-2018年,湖州市乡村地区粮食供给在波动中下降,一级区以东、西部的平原耕地为主;碳贮存均值与总量年际变化极小,中、西部的高山林地碳储量最高;水源涵养均值呈现先增后减的小幅波动,空间分布特点与碳贮存相似;文化服务能力逐年增强,一级区向景点区域集聚并扩张。(2)在权衡与协同分析中,水源涵养与碳贮存、粮食供给之间以协同效应为主,文化服务与水源涵养、粮食供给、碳贮存之间以权衡效应为主,粮食供给与碳贮存之间由权衡效应向协同效应转变,各服务间相关关系总体逐渐增强且存在空间差异性。(3)热点区域识别研究显示,Ⅰ类热点区主要为提供粮食供给的耕地,占比多且略有增强;Ⅱ类热点区主要为提供碳贮存、水源涵养的林地,总体有所减少;Ⅲ类热点区主要为提供碳贮存、水源涵养,以及粮食供给或文化服务的林地和耕地,占比较多并不断扩大;Ⅳ类热点区、非热点区分别位于山地-平原过渡区、靠近城镇区域,均占比极少且变化小。研究结果以期为揭示乡村地区生态系统供给、调节、文化服务间的关系,优化乡村经济结构与发展模式,推进乡村的合理规划和可持续发展提供参考。     

Schooling behaviour of juvenile Pacific bluefin tuna Thunnus orientalis depends on their vision development

The effects of vision development and light intensity on schooling behaviour during growth in juvenile Pacific bluefin tuna Thunnus orientalis were investigated using both behavioural and histological approaches. The schooling behaviour of three age groups [25, 40 and 55 days post hatching (dph)] of juvenile T. orinetalis were examined under various light intensities. Subsequently, schooling variables, such as the nearest neighbour distance (D(NN) ) and the separation swimming index (I(SS) ), were also measured under different light intensities. Furthermore, retinal indices of light adaptation in juvenile fish at each experimental light intensity and visual acuities in six stages (25-55 dph) of juveniles were examined histologically. During growth, the light intensity thresholds of I(SS) decreased from 5 to 0·05 lx, and D(NN) under light conditions (>300 lx) also decreased from 9·2 times the standard length (L(S) ) to 1·2 times L(S) . The thresholds of light intensities for the light adaptation of retinas in juveniles (25-55 dph) similarly decreased from 5 to 0·05 lx with growth. In addition, the visual acuities of juveniles developed from 0·04 to 0·17 with decreasing D(NN) . These data clearly indicate that the characteristics of schooling behaviour strongly correspond to the degree of vision development. Juvenile T. orinetalis also appear to be more dependent on cone rather than rod cells under low light intensity conditions, resulting in a relatively high light intensity threshold for schooling. These results suggest that juveniles can adapt to darker conditions during growth by developing improved visual capabilities.