Meteorite or gemstone? Dreaming as one end of a continuum of functioning: Implications for research and for the use of dreams in therapy and self-knowledge.

Is a dream a meteorite—a bit of material arriving from a distant place that needs to be carefully analyzed to give us knowledge about that place (outside or inside us)? Is it a strange text which has come to us in a foreign language, that needs to be translated into our own? This “meteorite view” is held by some religious and spiritual persons, by many orthodox psychoanalysts and other therapists, and implicitly by many researchers. They all see the dream as something alien, something totally different from our ordinary mental functioning. This paper presents a great deal of research favoring an alternate view—that the dream is an earth-stone, not an alien stone. It may be impressive and beautiful (gemstone), but it's still an earth-stone. The dream is part of our mental functioning. It is one end of a continuum, running from focused waking thought, through looser thought, fantasy, daydreaming, reverie and dreaming. We review reasons why dreams are often considered “totally different”: they're perceptual, not conceptual; they're bizarre; they are “so real”; they're so easily forgotten; they're involuntary; they occur in REM sleep—a totally different state. We demonstrate that none of these reasons are persuasive. In each sense, there is overlap between dreams and other forms of functioning. The continuum view leads to different kinds of research and a different style of dreamwork. It also helps answer questions the field has long struggled with including: Should we study “a dream” or “dreaming”? Are dreams meaningful or meaningless? (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ostracism,voice, and exit: The biology of social participation

A bewildering variety of social patterns can be described and analyzed as manifestations of ostracism and social rejection. Ostracism can be viewed as a coerced or involuntary rupture of social bonds, as distinguished from voluntary exit; both appear to be characteristic ways that animals use in relating to other members of the group. Based on Albert O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice and Loyalty, a general theoretical framework can be built on the realization that ostracism is far from a strange aberration—but that its excesses strike most moderns as uncivilized. This analysis presumes that active participation, flight, and bonding are general categories intrinsic to social behavior. It follows that, in different social contexts, the implications of ostracism vary greatly. Modern democratic systems, in which voluntary exit remains a possibility, resemble our hominid past more closely than authoritarian societies that place individuals in the unenviable position of being trapped in silence (with no legitimate right to exercise political voice, yet no possibility of escape). At the risk of Charges of valuative bias, the argument is made that democratic regimes may be—all things equal—closer to the center of our species-typical range of behavior than other kinds of centralized states or governmental systems.     

Use of wood energy in the United States — An opportunity

The use of wood for energy — including the burning of solid wood and black liquor from pulping — has been growing at a rate significantly greater than that for all other uses such as lumber, pulp, or particleboard. In the United States, the end of most wood is not lumber or pulp and paper but feed for energy. In 1983, 155·5 M Mg of wood were used for energy. This could threaten to increase the price of wood for those other uses, or it can stimulate us to seek more creative ways of using untapped wood resources for fuel.On the basis of estimates of heavy wood energy use relative to other uses for wood, and estimates of continuing high costs for fossil fuels, we suggest here the feasibility of meeting the demand for fuelwood through small-scale cooperatives. Such an approach can improve forestry practices and can avoid unduly increasing the cost of wood for other end uses.     

Heritability and social brood effects on personality in juvenile and adult life‐history stages in a wild passerine

How has evolution led to the variation in behavioural phenotypes (personalities) in a population? Knowledge of whether personality is heritable, and to what degree it is influenced by the social environment, is crucial to understanding its evolutionary significance, yet few estimates are available from natural populations. We tracked three behavioural traits during different life‐history stages in a pedigreed population of wild house sparrows. Using a quantitative genetic approach, we demonstrated heritability in adult exploration, and in nestling activity after accounting for fixed effects, but not in adult boldness. We did not detect maternal effects on any traits, but we did detect a social brood effect on nestling activity. Boldness, exploration and nestling activity in this population did not form a behavioural syndrome, suggesting that selection could act independently on these behavioural traits in this species, although we found no consistent support for phenotypic selection on these traits. Our work shows that repeatable behaviours can vary in their heritability and that social context influences personality traits. Future efforts could separate whether personality traits differ in heritability because they have served specific functional roles in the evolution of the phenotype or because our concept of personality and the stability of behaviour needs to be revised.     

The Obsolete "Anti-Market" Mentality: A Critique of the Substantive Approach to Economic Anthropology

"Analytic work begins with material provided by our vision of things, and this vision is ideological almost by definition. It embodies the picture of things as we see them, and wherever there is any possible motive for wishing to see them in a given rather than another light, the way in which we see things can hardly be distinguished from the nay in which we wish to see them. The more honest and naive our vision is, the more dangerous it is to the eventual emergence of anything for which general validity can be claimed. The inference for the social sciences is obvious, antl it is not even true that he who hates a social system will form an objectively more correct vision of it than he who loves it. For love distorts indeed, but hate distorts still more."     

Between Knowledge And Technology: Patenting Methods,Rethinking Materiality

How does the law construe certain things and activities as knowledge that can become the object of intellectual property? When we look at the quantitative trends in recent patenting activities—more people patenting many more things—we tend to view that, in part, as an effect of the law's ability to construe new kinds of innovation (software, genetic sequences, etc.) in ways that conform to established legal concepts of patentable invention. The assumption is that what changes is not the shape of the box called invention, but the objects that are made to fit that box. But in fact while new technologies produce new innovations, the very concept of invention has not just expanded but undergone substantial qualitative change. The wave of inventive activity associated with the industrial revolution led to an unprecedented reliance on patenting, but as the law articulated ways to protect those inventions, it also took their emblematic form—the machine—as the template for the legal concept of invention. Analogously, the recent reinterpretations of patent law to enable the protection of living organism and biological entities have challenged and modified the traditional machine-inspired concept of invention, initiating a trend toward a more developmental one. The information-based inventions discussed here may elicit a reconceptualization of invention in yet another way.     

Food Value of Edible Mushrooms from Upper-Shaba Region

During our stay of several years in the south of the Upper-Shaba region of Zaïre, we observed that the consumption of wild mushrooms constitutes an appreciable food supplement for the local populations. It seemed of interest to us to try to determine the species consumed as well as their food value—this type of systematic study having not yet been undertaken in Central Africa. Our preliminary data have already been published in 1973 (Thoen et al.).     

What’s the matter with technology? Long (and short) yams,materialisation and technology in Nyamikum village,Maprik district,Papua New Guinea

Things are not just consumable, they are made so. They acquire their ‘materiality’ not only through engagements with them as finished products, but also through processes that make them material, i.e. technical activities. This field of study in anthropology, rejected by dominant trends because of its deterministic connotations, is a useful way to explore processes of materialisation and to investigate the ‘inbuilt’ relationality of things and activities. This paper focuses on yam gardening in Nyamikum, an Abelam village of the East Sepik. Once harvested, long (and short) yams emerge not solely as phallic symbols, but also as artefacts, representations, living beings, ancestors, artworks, valuables and, mostly, food. Starting observations at the beginning of the operational sequences (‘chaînes opératoire’, Lemonnier 1992 ) within gardening techniques, a combination of gestures, body, materials, energy, tools, knowledge and behaviours takes us across domains of experience (embodiments, transformations, sociality, narratives) to illuminate how yams are made into ‘relational’ entities. They demonstrate that techniques create a web that materialises social and cultural values, condensing networks of relations into things. As the results of these (known or imagined) processes, things can demonstrate the material validities of representational—or ideological—components of technological phenomena and may be used to generate sociality.     

Ranging behaviour,activity, habitat use,and morphology of the Malay civet (Viverra tangalunga) on Peninsular Malaysia and comparison with studies on Borneo and Sulawesi

The Malay civet (Viverra tangalunga) is found throughout Southeast Asia, but there have been very few studies on its natural history and ecology. We present here the results from the first radio telemetry study of this species on Peninsular Malaysia and compared our findings to similar studies on Borneo and Sulawesi. From August 2004 to August 2006, we captured 11 Malay civets in Krau Wildlife Reserve and radio-tracked seven adults (four males and three females). The mean weight of males (6.6 kg) was significantly higher than females (5.8 kg). Both sexes on Peninsular Malaysia were larger than their counterparts on Borneo and Sulawesi. There was no significant difference between the mean sizes of male and female home ranges on Peninsular Malaysia; the mean home range size for both sexes was 143 ha (95% MCP), which was larger than the mean range size recorded on Borneo and Sulawesi. We found that the Malay civet is a solitary, territorial species on Peninsular Malaysia: mean range overlap was 15% for males and 0% for females, and the home range of each male overlapped one or two females. Malay civets were mainly nocturnal, with some periods of rest during the night; daytime rest sites were within dense ground cover. Lowland forest is an essential habitat for this species; although Malay civets were sometimes found in plantations, they did not venture far from forested habitat.     

Wood‐Associated Macroinvertebrate Fauna in Central European Streams

An overview of macroinvertebrates associated with wood debris is given, with the main focus on Central European fauna. In general, three categories of macroinvertebrate wood relations are distinguished: taxa frequently associated with wood but not xylophagous, facultative xylophagous taxa and obligate xylophagous taxa. The adaptations in the life history, ethology and physiology of species representing these three groups are reviewed. From literature and our own investigations, 15 taxa inhabiting Central European freshwater ecosystems are known to be obligate xylophagous, 22 taxa are facultatively xylophagous. From field observations another 41 taxa presumably feed on wood although no gut content analyses and laboratory experiments have yet been carried out. From 25 taxa other forms of close association to CWD are known (feeding on epixylic biofilm, use as a refuge, or as an attachment point). Possible pathways of xylophagy evolution are discussed and unresolved aspects of aquatic invertebrate wood relations are listed.     

The oxidative costs of territory quality and offspring provisioning

The costs of reproduction are an important constraint that shapes the evolution of life histories, yet our understanding of the proximate mechanism(s) leading to such life‐history trade‐offs is not well understood. Oxidative stress is a strong candidate measure thought to mediate the costs of reproduction, yet empirical evidence supporting that increased reproductive investment leads to oxidative stress is equivocal. We investigated whether territory quality and offspring provisioning increase oxidative stress in male snow buntings (Plectrophenax nivalis) using a repeated sampling design. We show that arrival oxidative stress is not a constraint on territory quality or the number of offspring fledged. Nevertheless, owners of higher‐quality territories experienced an oxidative cost, with this cost increasing more rapidly in younger males. Males that provisioned offspring at a high rate also experienced increased oxidative stress. Together, these findings support the potential role of oxidative stress in mediating life‐history trade‐offs. Future work should consider that reproductive workload is not limited to offspring care, and other activities – including territory defence – may contribute significantly to the costs of reproduction.     

Eric Michaels: An appreciation

… I got into media studies, as an anthropologist, because I believed the media were the belly of the beast, and because I thought television was central to the creation of the extraordinary contradictions that plagued the contemporary world. [Michaels 1983]

It would seem that Malinowski's stricture that the function of the ethnographer was to see the native's culture from the native's own point of view could at last be achieved—literally, and not metaphorically.

What would such a world be like, and more importantly, what problems have we to set before our students now that will, at the least, not hinder them from coming to an understanding of an age in which man presents himself not in person but through the mediation of visual symbolic forms… It is now no longer possible for the student of culture to ignore the fact that people all over the world have learned, and will continue in great numbers to learn, how to use the visual symbolic mode. Anthropologists must begin to articulate the problems that will face us in trying to understand others when their point of view is known to us primarily through movies distributed by broadcast television and cable. [Worth 1981: 94–95]     

The history of linguistic anthropology as a device for a new integrated perspective

The history of the emergence of linguistic anthropology helps us not only to reflect on the path-dependency of our own scientific categories, but also to enlarge our own perspective beyond these categories. The following paper tries to develop on the basis of Latour's network theory a new integrated perspective that reflects our own historical position in the network of constructing scientific facts, in the context of political problems, of social claims of objects that we are using in order to constitute our scientific field.     

The Practitioner of Science: Everyone her Own Historian

Carl Becker's classic 1931 address ``Everyman his own historian'holds lessons for historians of science today. Like the professional historians he spoke to, we are content to displaythe Ivory-Tower Syndrome, writing scholarly treatises only forone another, disdaining both the general reader and our naturalreadership, scientists. Following his rhetoric, I argue thatscientists are well aware of their own historicity, and wouldbe interested in lively and balanced histories of science. It isironic that the very professionalism that ought to equip us towrite such histories has imposed on us a powerful taboo that rendersus unable to do so. We who count ourselves sophisticated in describing the effects ofsocial forces upon past scientists have been remarkably unconsciousof the ways our own practices are being shaped by our need (and perhapsmore importantly, the needs of our teachers' teachers) to distinguish ourselves from scientists who write history. Our fear of presentism ingeneral and Whig history in particular is really a taboo, that is, anexcessive avoidance enforced by social pressure. It succeeds at makingour work distinct from histories written by scientists, but at the awful cost of blotting out the great fact of scientific progress.Scientists may be misguided in expecting us to celebrate great men,but they are right to demand from historians an analysis of the processof testing and improvement that is central to science. If progress in general is a problematic term, we could label the process ``emendation.' This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Genetic variation,demographic history and phylogeography of tire track eel,Mastacembelus favus (Synbranchiformes: Mastacembelidae) in Southeast Asia

The complex climatic and geological history of Southeast Asia has been hypothesised to determine the most important aspects of the current phylogeographical structure and distribution of living organisms throughout the region. To test existing hypotheses, the genetic structure of the tire track eel, Mastacembelus favus, was investigated using 823 bp of mitochondrial DNA cytochrome b from 469 individuals from 51 localities encompassing its native range. The results classified all haplotypes into two major lineages, Lineage 1, which was further divided into Lineages 1a (lower Mekong, eastern Gulf of Thailand and Malay—Thai Peninsula), 1b (Banpakong River), 1c (Chao Phraya, Gulf of Thailand and Malay—Thai Peninsula) and 1d (Khlang Yai River), and Lineage 2, the upper reaches of the lower Mekong and the middle Mekong. Strong genetic discontinuities dated approximately 5 MYA were discovered in the Mekong with limited geographical overlap, suggesting a historically dissected drainage between two sections and species colonisation via different routes. The widespread Lineage 1 showed a strong signature of population expansion during the Pleistocene climate oscillation. Haplotype characteristics in the Malay—Thai Peninsula are hypothesised to result from postglacial dispersal from the Mekong and Chao Phraya through an extended Pleistocene drainage network.

     

The Noble House in Colonial Puebla, Mexico: Descent, Inheritance, and the Nahua Tradition

Claude Lévi-Strauss's concept of the 'house" has proven to be a viable alternative to traditional lineage theory in the study of many societies, and this paper applies the house concept to a Mesoamencan case. The teccalli , or noble house, was an important aspect of Nahua (Aztec) sociopolitical organization in prchispanic and early colonial central Mexico, particularly in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley. It is often characterized as a lineage with rights in land and commoner labor, yet the nature of descent, succession, and inheritance are little understood. Late colonial wills and lawsuits from the (formerly) Nahua community of Santiago Tecali in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley provide valuable insights into these matters that can also help us to understand earlier periods. It is argued that the Nahua noble house can be better understood as a house than as a lineage, [house, kinship, inheritance, Nahuas, Mesoamerica]     

Synchrony as an Adaptive Mechanism for Large‐Scale Human Social Bonding

Humans have developed a number of specific mechanisms that allow us to maintain much larger social networks than would be expected given our brain size. For our primate cousins, social bonding is primarily supported using grooming, and the bonding effect this produces is primarily mechanistically underpinned by the release of endorphins (although other neurohormones are also likely to be involved). Given large group sizes and time budgeting constraints, grooming is not viable as the primary social bonding mechanism in humans. Instead, during our evolutionary history, we developed other behaviours that helped us to feel connected to our social communities. Here, we propose that synchrony might act as direct means to encourage group cohesion by causing the release of neurohormones that influence social bonding. By acting on ancient neurochemical bonding mechanisms, synchrony can act as a primal and direct social bonding agent, and this might explain its recurrence throughout diverse human cultures and contexts (e.g. dance, prayer, marching, music‐making). Recent evidence supports the theory that endorphins are released during synchronised human activities, including sport, but particularly during musical interaction. Thus, synchrony‐based activities are likely to have developed due to the fact that they allow the release of these hormones in large‐scale human communities, providing an alternative to social bonding mechanisms such as grooming.     

The complex history of a gene proposed to participate in a sexual isolation mechanism in house mice

Previous behavioral experiments showed that mouse salivary androgen-binding protein (ABP) was involved in interindividual recognition and might play a role in sexual isolation between house mouse (Mus musculus) subspecies. The pattern of evolution of Abpa, the gene for the alpha subunit of ABP, was found to be consistent with this hypothesis. Abpa apparently diverged rapidly between species and subspecies with a large excess of nonsynonymous substitutions, a lack of exon polymorphism within each of the three subspecies, and a lack of intron polymorphism in the one subspecies studied (M. musculus domesticus). Here we characterized the intron and exon sequence variations of this gene in house mouse populations from central Eurasia, a region yet unsampled and thought to be close to the cradle of the radiation of the subspecies. We also determined the intron and exon sequences in seven other species of the genus Mus. We confirmed the general pattern of rapid evolution by essentially nonsynonymous substitutions, both inter- and intraspecifically, supporting the idea that Darwinian selection has driven the evolution of this gene. We also observed a uniform intron sequence in five samples of M. musculus musculus, suggesting that a selective sweep might have occurred for that allele. In contrast to previous results, however, we found extensive intron and exon polymorphism in some house mouse populations from central Eurasia. We also found evidence for secondary admixture of the subspecies-specific alleles in regions of transition between the subspecies in central Eurasia. Furthermore, an abnormal intron phylogeny suggested that interspecific exchanges had occurred between the house mouse subspecies and three other Palearctic species. These observations appear to be at variance with the simple hypothesis that Abpa is involved in reproductive isolation. Although we do not rule out a role in recognition, the situation appears to be more complex than previously thought. Thus the selective mechanism behind the evolution of Abpa remains to be resolved, and we suggest that it may have changed during the recent colonization history of the house mouse.     

Meaning in Nature: Organic Manufacture?

The paper examines Marcello Barbieri’s (2007) Introduction to Biosemiotics. Highlighting debate within the biosemiotic community, it focuses on what the volume offers to those who explain human intellect in relation to what Turing called our ‘physical powers.’ In scrutinising the basis of world-modelling, parallels and contrasts are drawn with other work on embodied-embedded cognition. Models dominate biology. Is this a qualitative fact or does it point to biomechanisms? In evaluating the 18 contributions, it is suggested that the answers will shape the field. First, they will decide if biochemistry and explanatory reduction can be synergised by biosemantics. Second, they will show if our intellectual powers arise from biology. Does thinking use—not a language faculty—but what Marko? and colleagues call semiosis by the living? Resolution of such issues, it is suggested, can change how we view cognition. Above all, if the biomechanists win the day, cultural models can be regarded as extending natural meaning. On such a view, biomechanisms prompt us to act and perceive as we model our own natural models. This fits Craik’s vision: intellect gives us the alphanumerical ‘symbols’ that allow thoughts to have objective validity. For the biomechanist, this is explained—not by brains alone—but, rather, by acting under the constraints of historically extended sensoria.     

New molecular data favour an anthropogenic introduction of the wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus) in North Africa

According to fossil data, the wood mouse arrived in North Africa 7500 ya, while it was present in Europe since Early Pleistocene. Previous molecular studies suggested that its introduction in North Africa probably occurred via the Strait of Gibraltar more than 0.4 Mya ago. In this study, we widely sampled wood mice to get a better understanding of the geographic and demographic history of this species in North Africa and possibly to help resolving the discrepancy between genetic and palaeontological data. Specifically, we wanted to answer the following questions: (1) When and how did the wood mouse arrive in North Africa? and (2) What is its demographic and geographic history in North Africa since its colonization? We collected in the field 438 new individuals and used both mtDNA and six microsatellite markers to answer these questions. Our results confirm that North African wood mice have a south‐western European origin and colonized the Maghreb through the Strait of Gibraltar probably during the Mesolithic or slightly after. They first colonized the Tingitana Peninsula and then expanded throughout North Africa. Our genetic data suggest that the ancestral population size comprised numerous individuals reinforcing the idea that wood mice did not colonize Morocco accidentally through rafting of a few individuals, but via recurrent/multiple anthropogenic translocations. No spatial structuring of the genetic variability was recorded in North Africa, from Morocco to Tunisia.