Motor simulation without motor expertise: enhanced corticospinal excitability in visually experienced dance spectators

The human "mirror-system" is suggested to play a crucial role in action observation and execution, and is characterized by activity in the premotor and parietal cortices during the passive observation of movements. The previous motor experience of the observer has been shown to enhance the activity in this network. Yet visual experience could also have a determinant influence when watching more complex actions, as in dance performances. Here we tested the impact visual experience has on motor simulation when watching dance, by measuring changes in corticospinal excitability. We also tested the effects of empathic abilities. To fully match the participants' long-term visual experience with the present experimental setting, we used three live solo dance performances: ballet, Indian dance, and non-dance. Participants were either frequent dance spectators of ballet or Indian dance, or "novices" who never watched dance. None of the spectators had been physically trained in these dance styles. Transcranial magnetic stimulation was used to measure corticospinal excitability by means of motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) in both the hand and the arm, because the hand is specifically used in Indian dance and the arm is frequently engaged in ballet dance movements. We observed that frequent ballet spectators showed larger MEP amplitudes in the arm muscles when watching ballet compared to when they watched other performances. We also found that the higher Indian dance spectators scored on the fantasy subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, the larger their MEPs were in the arms when watching Indian dance. Our results show that even without physical training, corticospinal excitability can be enhanced as a function of either visual experience or the tendency to imaginatively transpose oneself into fictional characters. We suggest that spectators covertly simulate the movements for which they have acquired visual experience, and that empathic abilities heighten motor resonance during dance observation.     

The Invisibility of Disability: Using Dance to Shake from Bioethics the Idea of ‘Broken Bodies’

Complex social and ethical problems are often most effectively solved by engaging them at the messy and uncomfortable intersections of disciplines and practices, a notion that grounds the InVisible Difference project, which seeks to extend thinking and alter practice around the making, status, ownership, and value of work by contemporary dance choreographers by examining choreographic work through the lenses of law, bioethics, dance scholarship, and the practice of dance by differently‐abled dancers. This article offers a critical thesis on how bioethics has come to occupy a marginal and marginalizing role in questions about the differently‐abled body. In doing so, it has rendered the disabled community largely invisible to and in bioethics. It then defends the claim that bioethics – as a social undertaking pursued collaboratively by individuals from different disciplines – must take much better notice of the body and the embodied individual if it is to better achieve its ends, which include constructing a moral and just society. Finally, this article considers how the arts, and specifically dance (and here dance by differently‐abled dancers), provides us with rich evidence about the body and our ability to respond positively to normally ‘othered’ bodies. It concludes that greater attention to empirical evidence like that being generated in InVisible Difference will help to expand the reach and significance of bioethics, and thereby its relevance to (and consciousness of) important questions about the status of bodies and bodily differences, which must be considered as central to its ambitions.     

The construction of ethnic categories: Discourses of ethnicity in The Netherlands

This article is concerned with the way ethnic and racial categories are achieved and sustained in daily talk. We argue against the notion of social categories as immanent cognitive structures whose existence and significance can be taken for granted. It is emphasized that categories are constructed in discourse. The construction and representation of ethnic categories are studied by analysing discussions held by some ethnically Dutch inhabitants of an inner‐city quarter in Rotterdam. There were two discussion groups (six and five participants respectively) and each group met one evening a week in a row in the local community centre for four weeks. All eight sessions were taped and transcribed and each session lasted approximately two and a half hours. Our goal is to describe in detail some of the discourses that are being used to achieve and sustain specific categorical representations. First, the nature of the different categorical constructs used is analysed. It is shown that people use different criteria for constructing ‘us‐them’ distinctions and that this multiplicity is rhetorically useful. Second, the ways in which categorical constructions are represented and vary in discourse are identified and outlined. Subsequently, the means by which these representations are achieved and sustained is examined. Attention is focued on comparisons that are being made, on the use of metaphors, and on the process of concretiz‐ation. Third, some of the cultural values drawn upon in legitimizing the representations are explored. It is shown how the taken‐for‐granted notions of freedom, merit, equality and tolerance are used to construct and legitimize ethnic representations. Finally, it is argued that a discourse approach can provide important additional insights into issues concerning ethnic relations and racism. For one thing it can help to develop strategies for reconstructing the predominant distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’.     

Dancing with a Difference: Reconfiguring the Poetic Politics of Aboriginal Ritual as National Spectacle1

This paper argues that indigenous dance is a poetic politics of cross‐cultural encounter that engages Aboriginal identities with those of the Australian nation. I question the nature of this encounter in terms of a performative dialogue that is both musically and kinesically presented by indigenous communities and ‘translated’ into political discourse by the government. The sentiments of ‘translation’ raise questions as to how local ritual expressions of Aboriginal dance can mediate dialogue when presented as national spectacle. What is being meditated? What is happening in the process of evocation? In this performative nexus, I focus specifically on the poetic politics of Yolngu ritual as spectacle; the nature of performative dialogue in terms of shared dance forms between indigenous communities; the problem of the authentication of dance identities; and how corporeal dispositions of indigenous dance genres influence national sentiment by their symbolic power. I pursue these issues through an analysis of how ancestral dances have been repositioned in national performance venues, such as concerts, cultural centres and ritual arenas, as a means of asserting performative statements about indigenous positioning within the nation‐state. The nature of this dialogue raises questions of authenticity and processes of authentication. It highlights indigenous concerns to control representations of indigeneity as national event, as well as a desire to convey something of the sentiment and sentience embodied in the poetics of their ancestral performances.     

Listening to the Call of Dance: Re‐thinking Authenticity and ‘Essentialism’

A sustained and devastating critique has been aimed in recent years at a metaphysics of truth which understands truth and authenticity as essence, as fixed, self‐identical and persistent over time. So successful has this critique been that it is now possible to speak of authenticity only in terms of a certain ‘strategic’ or politically necessary engagement, on the part of subaltern groups, with an essentialist metaphysics. While the critique is a necessary one, taken on its own it has resulted in a reductionist presumption that we are only ever going to encounter versions of truth that we have already understood, for purposes of critique, as so many versions of ‘essentialism’. By contrast, in the ceremonial performances of dance described in this issue of TAJA, across a broad spectrum of cultures, we witness the striking persistence and centrality of references to virtuosity, appropriate ‘feeling’ and to the experience of a kind of integrity, coherence and ‘truth’ in a good performance. The commentary argues that these distinctions rest on traditions that move us quite far from an essentialism both of the spirit and of the body, requiring instead a fresh effort of understanding on our part. Utilising other traditions to develop a better, less reified understanding of truth criteria can help arrest a certain hyper‐expansion of ‘the political’ that threatens to leave no other terms alive with which to inform its own vision of the relation between past, present and future.     

Dancing into Being: The Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park and the Laura Dance Festival

Focusing on the connection between dance performance and the politics of identity, I explore the problem of human agency and interrogate the concept of a dualistic split between mind and body. I interpret dance as a form of corporeal politics and use the example of dance in two tourist arenas—the Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park and the Laura Dance and Cultural Festival—to illustrate Aboriginal agency in both participating in and resisting structures of state bureaucratic practice, and representations of cultural authenticity.     

The vibration dance of the honey bee. II. The effects of foraging success on daily patterns of vibration activity

Using a series of experiments that manipulated the ability of colonies to collect food, we investigated the possibility that daily patterns of vibration dance activity were dependent upon foraging success. We found that large peaks of vibration dance activity occurring early in the morning were induced if a colony experienced 3–4 days of successful foraging. In contrast, smaller vibration peaks occurring later in the day were found to be immediate responses (occurring within 30 min) to increased foraging activity. There was no indication that peaks of vibration activity were influenced by weather. The vibration dance therefore appeared to be sensitive to foraging success on both a long- and a short-term basis. Since previous research suggested that the vibration dance also regulates foraging on two time scales, the dance may operate as a two-level feedback system which allows colonies to adjust foraging activity to both long- and short-term fluctuations in food availability.     

The Grooming Invitation Dance of the Honey Bee

The grooming invitation dance is a striking behavior in honey bee colonies that has not been extensively studied. The objectives of this study were (1) to describe the dance through video analysis, (2) to test the functional hypothesis that it is a grooming solicitation signal, and (3) to analyze the stimuli that cause its production. A worker bee producing the grooming invitation dance stands stationary and vibrates her whole body from side‐to‐side at a frequency of 4.2 ± 0.2 Hz for 9.3 ± 1.0 s. Sometimes the bee mixes bouts of body vibration with brief bouts of self‐grooming (average duration = 1.4 s). Bees that perform the grooming invitation dance have a far higher probability of being quickly groomed by a nest mate than do bees that do not perform the dance. Bees that had chalk dust puffed onto the bases of their wings produced significantly more grooming invitation dances than did control bees that received only puffs of air. This shows that it may be the accumulation of small particles at the bases of the wings that normally triggers the dance. We suggest that the evolutionary origin of this signal is self‐grooming behavior.     

The northeast Indian passageway: a barrier or corridor for human migrations?

The northeast Indian passageway connecting the Indian subcontinent to East/Southeast Asia is thought to have been a major corridor for human migrations. Because it is also an important linguistic contact zone, it is predicted that northeast India has witnessed extensive population interactions, thus, leading to high genetic diversity within groups and heterogeneity among groups. To test this prediction, we analyzed 14 biallelic and five short tandem-repeat Y-chromosome markers and hypervariable region 1 mtDNA sequence variation in 192 northeast Indians. We find that both northeast Indian Y chromosomes and mtDNAs consistently show strikingly high homogeneity among groups and strong affinities to East Asian groups. We detect virtually no Y-chromosome and mtDNA admixture between northeast and other Indian groups. Northeast Indian groups are also characterized by a greatly reduced Y-chromosome diversity, which contrasts with extensive mtDNA diversity. This is best explained by a male founder effect during the colonization of northeast India that is estimated to have occurred within the past 4,000 years. Thus, contrary to the prediction, these results provide strong evidence for a genetic discontinuity between northeast Indian groups and other Indian groups. We, therefore, conclude that the northeast Indian passage way acted as a geographic barrier rather than as a corridor for human migrations between the Indian subcontinent and East/Southeast Asia, at least within the past millennia and possibly for several tens of thousand years, as suggested by the overall distinctiveness of the Indian and East Asian Y chromosome and mtDNA gene pools.     

Piercing transfigurations: Representations of suffering in Cyprus

This paper explores representations of suffering in Cyprus, a divided island. It examines differences between Greek and Turkish Cypriots in their official publicity/propaganda photographic material in representing the issue of missing persons in Cyprus. It attempts to show that the differences are relatable not just to their different persuasive strategies, but also to different approaches to photography, to experience and memory. For the Greek Cypriots, the sacrifice of the person has to be represented as an absent body, the quintessential example being Christ. By contrast, for the Turkish Cypriots it is the presence of a (dead) body, the body of the dead hero/fighter, that signifies a sacrifice and transforms him into a shehit (martyr). Such differences can be related to differences between the two groups in the political fabulation of the past and its appeal to “memory” and “experience”. The Turkish Cypriots because of their pressing political problems, especially between 1963–70 when they tended to view their survival as being at stake, use photographs in a relatively “realist” matter‐of‐fact way although their aim is highly emotionally charged. Greek Cypriots use photographs as representations of what is in effect an iconic predicament: representation as participating in some fundamental way in that which it represents. After examining the predicament of depicting suffering through photography, the paper suggests that to respond effectively to suffering we may have to approach it not through the seductive realism of the photograph but through its means of representing the symbolic and the imaginary.     

La Lloseta : une grotte importante et presque méconnue dans l'ensemble de Ardines, Ribadesella

This summary on The Lloseta shows us a much richer reality that it had been presented through the precedent publications. To begin it is presented as an shelter environment decorated in all their extension whose decoration and parallel they find real sense if we put them in connection with the neigh boring Tito Bustillo. It possesses a prevalence of signs and old representations, a bad general conservation and an own and original internal organization. None of the caves of Ardines, including their main protagonist, she makes isolated significant sense, but rather they are and were supplemented in the past, for activities, occupation and use. We try to know the meaning of all and each one of the caves in connection with the other ones, because we think that their function should be collective and complementary.     

First report on the emergency dance of Apis cerana japonica,which induces odorous plant material collection in response to Vespa mandarinia japonica scouting

Previously, we observed several instances in which Apis cerana japonica performed dancing around the hive entrance and smeared plant materials there immediately after scouting of Vespa mandarinia japonica. In this study, we conducted a series of attack simulation experiments with three hornet species to investigate whether the hive entrance dance is a specific response to V. m. japonica scouting. We also tracked dancing bees and dance‐follower bees to observe whether they perform hive entrance smearing. Only V. m. japonica scouting induced dancing, and we confirmed that dancing and dance‐follower bees performed smearing behavior at the hive entrance. These results suggest that the hive entrance dance informs nestmates of a specific emergency and of the urgent need to collect odorous plant materials as a counter‐attack strategy.     

The National Struggle Museums of a divided city

The article compares the two National Struggle Museums situated on either side of Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus. Their differences, it is suggested, reflect the differences of Greek and Turkish nationalism while their similarities are an outcome of their sharing the same form of historical representation: the past as a narrative of national struggle. The structural similarities of the two museums are thus utilized in order to highlight the specific ‘syntax’ of narratives of national struggle, as well as to discuss some of their implications for multi‐ethnic states in which the past is primarily conceptualized in this way. It is suggested that the notion of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ should be supplemented by a notion of the nation as the central actor and moral centre of a historical narrative that gives meaning to the past and indicates future orientations.     

Spectacles of South Asia at the American circus, 1890–1940

This article examines how racial and gendered images of South Asia were played out in performance at the American circus around 1900. These representations reinforced the Anglo‐American construct of a racial hierarchy in which South Asians were depicted to be static, and unable to keep pace with the Anglo‐American “race”. American circus spectacles featuring Indian subjects glorified British imperialism and helped to popularize the common colonialist stereotype that a minority of English officials were needed to rule millions of Indians. The American circus, as the most popular form of American public entertainment in an era before movies and television, helped to form a constellation of racial and sexual stereotypes concerning South Asia which continue to this day.     

Vision and the representation of the surroundings in spatial memory

One of the paradoxes of vision is that the world as it appears to us and the image on the retina at any moment are not much like each other. The visual world seems to be extensive and continuous across time. However, the manner in which we sample the visual environment is neither extensive nor continuous. How does the brain reconcile these differences? Here, we consider existing evidence from both static and dynamic viewing paradigms together with the logical requirements of any representational scheme that would be able to support active behaviour. While static scene viewing paradigms favour extensive, but perhaps abstracted, memory representations, dynamic settings suggest sparser and task-selective representation. We suggest that in dynamic settings where movement within extended environments is required to complete a task, the combination of visual input, egocentric and allocentric representations work together to allow efficient behaviour. The egocentric model serves as a coding scheme in which actions can be planned, but also offers a potential means of providing the perceptual stability that we experience.     

The Punjab crisis since 1984: A reassessment

Over the last decade there has been increasing scholarly interest in the ethnic character of the Indian state. This interest has coincided with the rise of the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP], nation‐wide clashes between Hindus and Muslims, and bitter conflict over affirmative action for backward classes. Simultaneously, the Indian state has been confronted by regional movements in Kashmir, Assam and Punjab seeking secession from the Indian Union. By focusing on the Punjab crisis this article argues that conventional explanations have concentrated on national political centralization and regional economic factors, to the neglect of Sikh ethno‐nationalism and its dialectical relationship with strategies for ethnic conflict management followed by the Indian state since 1947. Drawing on recent revisionist accounts, the Indian state, it is suggested, should be viewed as a form of an ethnic democracy in which hegemonic control is exercised over non‐Hindu ethnic groups. The Punjab case‐study shows that hegemonic control has characterized the relationship between the Sikhs and the Indian state between 1947 and 1984, and efforts to re‐establish hegemonic control after 1984 degenerated into violent control. The experience of the last ten years suggests that hegemonic control and violent control are unlikely to provide an enduring solution to the Punjab crisis. Rather, there is a need to address fundamentally the crisis of the Indian political system and how it has managed its minorities since 1947. Central to this reassessment is the viability of India's majoritarian political system in the context of an ethnically plural society.     

Cynocephalid dermopterans from the Palaeogene of South Asia (Thailand, Myanmar and Pakistan): systematic, evolutionary and palaeobiogeographic implications

Cynocephalid dermopterans (flying lemurs) are represented by only two living genera (Cynocephalus and Galeopterus), which inhabit tropical rainforests of South‐East Asia. Despite their very poor diversity and their limited distribution, dermopterans play a critical role in higher‐level eutherian phylogeny inasmuch as they represent together with Scandentia (tree‐shrew) the sister group of the Primates clade (Plesiadapiformes + Euprimates). However, unlike primates, for which the fossil record extends back to the early Palaeogene on all Holarctic continents and in Africa, the evolutionary history of the order Dermoptera sensu stricto (Cynocephalidae) has so far remained undocumented, with the exception of a badly preserved fragment of mandible from the late Eocene of Thailand (Dermotherium major). In this paper, we described newly discovered fossil dermopterans (essentially dental remains) from different regions of South Asia (Thailand, Myanmar, and Pakistan) ranging from the late middle Eocene to the late Oligocene. We performed microtomographic examinations at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF, Grenoble, France) to analyse different morphological aspects of the fossilized jaws. The abundant material from the late Oligocene of Thailand (Nong Ya Plong coal mine) allows us to emend the diagnosis of the genus Dermotherium and to describe a new species: Dermotherium chimaera sp. n. This species exhibits an interesting mosaic of plesiomorphic cynocephalid characters shared with Cynocephalus and Galeopterus, and as such, it probably documents a form close to the ancestral morphotype from which the two extant forms are derived (supported by cladistic assessment of the dental evidence). The discovery of Palaeogene cynocephalids is particularly significant since it attests to the great antiquity of the order Dermoptera in Asia, and besides, it provides the first spatio‐temporal glimpse into the evolutionary history of that enigmatic mammal group. In that respect, these fossils testify to a long history of endemism in South Asia for dermopterans, and demonstrate that their modern geographic restriction in south‐eastern Asia is clearly a relictual distribution. Cynocephalids had a more widespread distribution during the Palaeogene, which extended from the Indian subcontinent (the rafting Greater India) to South‐East Asia. Their subsequent extinction on the Indian subcontinent was probably mediated by the major palaeogeographic and geomorphologic events related to the India‐Eurasia collision (retreat of the Paratethys Sea, formation of orogenic highlands) that have strongly affected the climate of South Asia at the end of the Oligocene.     

The origin and early evolution of whales: macroevolution documented on the Indian Subcontinent

The origin of whales (order Cetacea) from a four-footed land animal is one of the best understood examples of macroevolutionary change. This evolutionary transition has been substantially elucidated by fossil finds from the Indian subcontinent in the past decade and a half. Here, we review the first steps of whale evolution, i.e. the transition from a land mammal to obligate marine predators, documented by the Eocene cetacean families of the Indian subcontinent: Pakicetidae, Ambulocetidae, Remingtonocetidae, Protocetidae, and Basilosauridae, as well as their artiodactyl sister group, the Raoellidae. We also discuss the influence that the excellent fossil record has on the study of the evolution of organ systems, in particular the locomotor and hearing systems.