Tales of a stitched anus: fictions,analytics, and personhood in Kilimanjaro,Tanzania★

This article revisits the fiction explored by Sally Falk Moore more than forty years ago that initiation among the Chagga-speaking people of Tanzania's Kilimanjaro region involved men having their anuses plugged and stitched to ensure complete digestion. It combines historical sources and contemporary fieldwork material on which it deploys an anthropological analytic adopted from Marilyn Strathern's account of the partible person of Melanesia. The move makes room for the Chagga concept of horu and investigates how this life force is converted and conveyed by means of different parts of the body, which emerge as both effects of and means for its transfers and transformations. It renders the person a composite of social relations that are objectified in his or her body, and constitute persons as husbands and wives, and male and female. Gender categories and positions are thus modes of being that emerge as effects of particular relations. These also involve bodily alterations, like the stitched anus, that channel horu in specific forms and in certain directions for particular purposes. The result is not a partible person, but a vectorial person that is a conduit of life force.     

Aspects of the semantics of emotions and feelings in Dalabon (South‐Western Arnhem Land,Australia)

This article describes two of the principal roots allowing the expression of emotions and feelings in Dalabon, an endangered language of South‐Western Arnhem Land. The first root, kangu, ‘belly’, is depicted linguistically as the location of emotions induced by interpersonal relationships. The belly is thus presented as the locus of good and bad moods generally and of conflict more specifically. Furthermore, the material properties of the belly—its fluidity in particular—impact on one’s temper and ability to deal with others in an ideologically prescribed manner. Speakers describe ritual manipulations undertaken on the belly of young infants in order to shape their temper. Kangu‐no may thus be described as a malleable interface between the person and the outside world, principally other people. The second root, yolh, may at first sight translate as ‘feelings’, either good or bad, but also means ‘appetite’, ‘drive’, ‘pep’. Yolh‐no is associated with the most intimate part of the person, one’s own aspirations that are independent of interactions with others. Although yolh‐no connotes the core self and kangu‐no, the belly, connotes relatedness to others, they are conceived as physiologically connected, so that material properties of the belly impact on the self. Thus, the semantic analysis of Dalabon, along with related anthropological observations, unveils an explicit conceptual and cultural attention to the distinction between emotions and feelings (as respectively defined in the article) and to the autonomy of the person within a constraining social framework. The article shows how this concern echoes and challenges both anthropological and philosophical considerations.     

Potentiality and human embryos

Consideration of the potentiality of human embryos to develop characteristics of personhood, such as intellect and will, has figured prominently in arguments against abortion and the use of human embryos for research. In particular, such consideration was the basis for the call of the US President's Council on Bioethics for a moratorium on stem cell research on human embryos. In this paper, I critique the concept of potentiality invoked by the Council and offer an alternative account. In contrast to the Council's view that an embryo's potentiality is determined by definition and is not affected by external conditions that may prevent certain possibilities from ever being realized, I propose an empirically grounded account of potentiality that involves an assessment of the physical and decisional conditions that may restrict an embryo's possibilities. In my view, some human embryos lack the potentiality to become a person that other human embryos have. Assuming for the sake of argument that the potential to become a person gives a being special moral status, it follows that some human embryos lack this status. This argument is then used to support Gene Outka's suggestion that it is morally permissible to experiment on 'spare' frozen embryos that are destined to be destroyed.     

Color and communication in the dreams of hearing and deaf persons.

Research suggests that the experiences recollected from the dreams of persons who are deaf or who have hearing loss reflect their personal background and circumstances. However, this literature also indicated that few studies have surveyed the occurrence of color and communication styles. Individual differences in the perception of color and affect were especially noted. These differences appeared dependent upon whether the impairment was congenital or acquired. In this study, 24 deaf persons and a person with hearing loss who use American Sign Language (ASL) were compared to a sample of hearing persons regarding colors and communication occurring in their dreams. Both groups were found to communicate in dreams as they do in life, deaf persons and person with hearing loss by signing, and hearing persons by speech. The deaf persons and a person with hearing loss experienced more color and more vividness, and the time of onset for a hearing impairment showed differences among persons with hearing loss. The findings also suggest that utilizing dreams as therapeutic material when treating persons with hearing loss and nonimpaired persons may have clinical utility. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Disease

This paper examines what it is for a condition to be a disease. It falls into two sections. In the first I examine the best existing account of disease (as proposed by Christopher Boorse) and argue that it must be rejected. In the second I outline a more acceptable account of disease. According to this account, by disease we mean a condition that it is a bad thing to have, that is such that we consider the afflicted person to have been unlucky, and that can potentially be medically treated. All three criteria must be fulfilled for a condition to be a disease. The criterion that for a condition to be a disease it must be a bad thing is required to distinguish the biologically different from the diseased. The claim that the sufferer must be unlucky is needed to distinguish diseases from conditions that are unpleasant but normal, for example teething. Finally, the claim that for a condition to be a disease it must be potentially medically treatable is needed to distinguish diseases from other types of misfortune, for example economic problems and legal problems.     

The continuous and discontinuous person: two dimensions of ethical life

Whereas early liberal thinkers developed the concept of the ethically accountable continuous forensic modern European person in contrast to what they saw as the discontinuous and hence unaccountable mimetic person, I argue that forensic and mimetic are better understood both as ideologies of personhood and as dimensions of all persons rather than as fully distinctive kinds of persons. I present an account of persons as accountable for their acts but show that this is not limited to the maximally continuous and autonomous person of liberal ideology. I review other forms of personhood encountered cross‐culturally and suggest that the mimetic dimension offsets some of the problems inherent in an exclusively forensic model.     

Identification and isolation of soluble histones from bovine milk and serum.

An immunoassay for soluble histones as trace components of biological fluids was developed on the basis of the dual capacity of histones to bind solid-phase DNA and monoclonal anti-histone antibody. Application of this histone-capture assay to bovine milk resulted in a positive signal, and DNA-cellulose chromatography was used to isolate histone-like material in microgram quantities. Western-blot analysis using a panel of anti-histone antibodies demonstrated the presence of histones H2A, H2B and H4 in apparently intact form. DNAase digestion experiments indicated that at least a portion of milk histone was complexed to DNA. Bovine serum was analysed in the same manner on serial DNA-cellulose columns, and H4 and partially degraded H2A were detected by Western-blot analysis. The finding of soluble histones in bovine milk and serum may account for unexpected results when these biological fluids are used as blocking reagents in Western blots and other immunoassays and may have ramifications in the origin and significance of anti-histone antibodies in human disease.     

Postmodern personhood: a matter of consciousness

The concept of person is integral to bioethical discourse because persons are the proper subject of the moral domain. Nevertheless, the concept of person has played no role in the prevailing formulation of human death because of a purported lack of consensus concerning the essential attributes of a person. Beginning with John Locke's fundamental proposition that person is a 'forensic term', I argue that in Western society we do have a consensus on at least one necessary condition for personhood, and that is the capacity for conscious experience. When we consider the whole brain formulation of death, and the most prominent defense of it by the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, we can readily identify the flaws that grow out of the failure to define human death as the permanent loss of the capacity for conscious experience. Most fundamental among these flaws is a definition of human death that reduces persons to the capacity of the brain to regulate purely physiological functioning. Such a formulation would, in theory, apply to any member of the animal kingdom. I suggest that an appropriate concept of death should capture what it is about a particular living being that is so essential to it that the permanent loss of that thing constitutes death. What is essential to being a human being is living the life of a person, which derives from the capacity for conscious experience.     

Postmodern Personhood: A Matter of Consciousness

The concept of person is integral to bioethical discourse because persons are the proper subject of the moral domain. Nevertheless, the concept of person has played no role in the prevailing formulation of human death because of a purported lack of consensus concerning the essential attributes of a person. Beginning with John Locke's fundamental proposition that person is a 'forensic term', I argue that in Western society we do have a consensus on at least one necessary condition for personhood, and that is the capacity for conscious experience. When we consider the whole brain formulation of death, and the most prominent defense of it by the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, we can readily identify the flaws that grow out of the failure to define human death as the permanent loss of the capacity for conscious experience. Most fundamental among these flaws is a definition of human death that reduces persons to the capacity of the brain to regulate purely physiological functioning. Such a formulation would, in theory, apply to any member of the animal kingdom. I suggest that an appropriate concept of death should capture what it is about a particular living being that is so essential to it that the permanent loss of that thing constitutes death. What is essential to being a human being is living the life of a person, which derives from the capacity for conscious experience.     

The expression of person and number: a typologist’s perspective

The categories of person and number have been analyzed extensively, both from a generative/structural perspective and from a typological/cross-linguistic perspective. The goal of both approaches is to account for the diversity of human languages, but in practice both have a rather different take on the subject. One major difference between these approaches is the relation between language-specific and cross-linguistic analyses. This paper argues that it is crucial to strictly distinguish between the two. However, this plea is at odds with the generative/structural perspective, which attempts to deal with both kinds of analyses at the same time. In contrast, it is of central importance from a typological/cross-linguistic perspective to keep the comparison constant across the wide variation as attested among human languages, thereby often ignoring many language-specific details (for the course of the comparison). The final section of this paper summarizes some major results of recent cross-linguistic comparisons of the person/number categories in the world’s languages.     

Mimicry of food intake: the dynamic interplay between eating companions

Numerous studies have shown that people adjust their intake directly to that of their eating companions; they eat more when others eat more, and less when others inhibit intake. A potential explanation for this modeling effect is that both eating companions'' food intake becomes synchronized through processes of behavioral mimicry. No study, however, has tested whether behavioral mimicry can partially account for this modeling effect. To capture behavioral mimicry, real-time observations of dyads of young females having an evening meal were conducted. It was assessed whether mimicry depended on the time of the interaction and on the person who took the bite. A total of 70 young female dyads took part in the study, from which the total number of bites (N = 3,888) was used as unit of analyses. For each dyad, the total number of bites and the exact time at which each person took a bite were coded. Behavioral mimicry was operationalized as a bite taken within a fixed 5-second interval after the other person had taken a bite, whereas non-mimicked bites were defined as bites taken outside the 5-second interval. It was found that both women mimicked each other''s eating behavior. They were more likely to take a bite of their meal in congruence with their eating companion rather than eating at their own pace. This behavioral mimicry was found to be more prominent at the beginning than at the end of the interaction. This study suggests that behavioral mimicry may partially account for social modeling of food intake.     

A Defence of the Counterfactual Account of Harm

In order to determine whether a particular course of conduct is ethically permissible it is important to have a concept of what it means to be harmed. The dominant theory of harm is the counterfactual account, most famously proposed by Joel Feinberg. This determines whether harm is caused by comparing what actually happened in a given situation with the ‘counterfacts’ i.e. what would have occurred had the putatively harmful conduct not taken place. If a person's interests are worse off than they otherwise would have been, then a person will be harmed. This definition has recently faced challenges from bioethicists such as John Harris, Guy Kahane and Julian Savulescu who, believing it to be severely flawed, have proposed their own alternative theories of the concept. In this article I will demonstrate that the shortcomings Harris, Kahane and Savulescu believe are present in Feinberg's theory are illusory and that it is their own accounts of harm that are fraught with logical errors. I maintain that the arguments presented to refute Feinberg's theory not only fail to achieve this goal and can be accommodated within the counterfactual account but that they actually undermine the theories presented by their respective authors. The final conclusion will be that these challenges are misconceived and fail to displace the counterfactual theory.     

RECLAIMING THE PATIENT'S VOICE AND SPIRIT IN DYING: AN INSIGHT FROM ISRAEL

In the latter half of the 20th century, Western medicine moved death from the home to the hospital. As a result, the process of dying seems to have lost its spiritual dimension, and become a matter of prolonging material life by means of medical technology. The novel quandaries that arose led in turn to medico‐legal regulation. This paper describes the recent regulation of dying in Israel under its Dying Patient Law, 2005. The Law recognizes advance directives in principle, but limits their effect and form through complex medico‐legal artifices. It reflects a culture that places high value on both scientific medicine and the sanctity of life as such, and illustrates a medical culture that pitches battle against death. At the same time, the Law constructs the will of the individual in a medico‐legal language that is alien to the lay person. The paper suggests an alternative approach to advance care planning that is patient‐centred and addresses the psycho‐social needs of the individual in terms of her relational autonomy. From this perspective, advance care planning becomes an opportunity to extract the patient from the medical context and allow her to speak about her approaching death with close ones in her own terms of reference. To this end, there is a need for facilitation of an intimate encounter where patients can speak about their concerns with their loved ones. The paper also presents a methodological approach of attentive listening, which can be applied across diverse cultures and circumstances.     

Empathy beyond the conceptual level: core nonspecific factors of psychotherapy

The human mind contains much more than concepts. By only taking into account the conceptual level, a cared-for person may feel utterly lonely and abandoned, not deeply in contact with the caregiver, not deeply understood for who he or she really is. A chronic pain patient, for instance, may react to a purely conceptual-level communication, with its lack of deeper contact, by an increasing sense of loneliness. This in itself may substantially contribute to the suffering of chronic functional pain or even functional disorders in general. In dealing with chronic pain patients, as with any patients, it is therefore very important to develop a sense of empathy that goes beyond this, towards deeply understanding the patient as complete person. This sheds a profound light on the all-important nonspecific factors of psychotherapy, which according to many researchers form the only profoundly active principle in psychotherapy.     

Making the case for human life extension: personal arguments

In the close to medium future, the life sciences might permit a vast extension of the human life span. I will argue that this is a very desirable development for the individual person. The question whether death is a harm to the dying is irrelevant here. All it takes is that being alive is good for the living person and not being alive is not good for anyone. Thus, living persons who expect to live on happily are rationally required to want to stay alive. Eventual uncertainty whether it will be possible to be happy in the future provides no objection, but rather an incentive to try. This view, however, may be naive in assuming that persons are unchanging entities that exist separately from their psychological information. Objections have been derived from reductionistic views that value our future experiences in a way that declines with time, so that there will be a future point beyond which only negligible value accrues. If we adopt such a view, then we cannot now be concerned to have experiences beyond that point. I argue that these arguments fail to take into account all the reasons we might have to be concerned for the future and all kinds of such concern that come from them. The adoption of a plausible reductionistic account can arguably weaken our concern for the future and certainly change its quality in important ways. But this provides no objection to the desire to live forever, nor to live at all.     

Cross-Cultural aspects of bereavement. II: Ethnic and cultural variations in the development of bereavement practices

Despite a growing interest in bereavement in cross-cultural perspective, few reports have described a comparative analysis of bereavement. By examining the social contexts in the transformations of Western bereavement practices, structures common to bereavement in a range of cultures can be identified. The paper compares the contemporary bereavement practices of several ethnic and cultural groups in North America: Blacks; ethnic Chinese; Southeast Asian refugees; Haitians; Italians; Greeks; and Spanish-speaking groups. Consideration is given to the state of widowhood in different cultural systems. The impact of modernization among traditional societies demonstrates that even though Western technologies are incorporated into the procedures followed by these modernizing societies, the deep cultural code remains intact. Five questions require further clarification: is bereavement an illness, or a rite de passage and a normal life event? How widespread and useful are protective factors, such as group support, that facilitate successful resolution of grief? How effective are mourning practices of various ethnic groups in preventing “bad grief”, and might some of these practices be beneficial if taken up by other ethnic groups? How can the Western health practitioner know that a bereaved person from an unfamiliar cultural group is suffering “bad grief”? How acceptable is Western grief counseling to non-Western clients?     

甘肃省生态安全时空演变特征及影响因素解析

生态安全是维持经济社会与生态可持续发展的重要保障。西部大开发与"一带一路"倡议实施以来,西部城镇发展迅速,经济效益大幅提高,生态环境却面临极大挑战。因此,以西北地区重要生态屏障区甘肃省为研究对象,基于"省公顷"概念改进传统生态足迹模型,评价2005—2015年甘肃省生态环境演变特征和生态安全状况,定量解析其驱动因素。结果表明:(1)2005—2015年甘肃省人均生态足迹与人均生态承载力分别由0.51 hm~2/人和0.22 hm~2/人增加至0.69 hm~2/人和0.47 hm~2/人,生态承载力增加速度较快,但自然资源依旧呈"供小于求"的状态。(2)甘肃省人均生态赤字由-0.20 hm~2/人变化至-0.33 hm~2/人,生态恶化程度不断加深。生态压力也由2.07升至2.74,生态安全处于很不安全状态,总体"西北高、东南低"的格局与城镇化布局相一致。(3)各影响因素对生态安全变化的决定力存在明显差异,其中人均GDP对生态安全扰动最强,其余因素影响程度依次为"人均能源消费第二产业占GDP比重城镇化率人口密度科教支出占总支出比"。     

Rapid Screening for Cell Surface Binding Monoclonal Antibodies

A procedure is described which allows for rapid detection of cell surface binding or cytoskeleton binding monoclonal antibodies. At the same time this procedure ensures that selected antibodies will be useful in Western blot analysis. This procedure including the cytochemistry and Western blot analysis requires only 100 μl of supernatant and can be done directly from the original 96 well plates into which the fusion was plated. One person can easily assay several hundred supernatants in one day for the ability to stain both cells and selected proteins in Western blot analysis.