The Anthropocene narrative and Amerindian lifeworlds: anthropos,agency, and personhood

Based on the observation that the Anthropocene narrative signifies a departure from the Cartesian nature/culture division dominant within modernist science, this article explores notions of personhood and agency among Amerindian peoples in the Amazon, the Andes, and Mesoamerica in comparison to the corresponding notions in modernist discourses. We discuss the differences in conceptualizations in relation to diverging understandings of climate change and the Anthropocene, focusing on perspectives on agentivity both within our respective ethnographical fields and in modernist social sciences. This leads us to stress the significance of new materialists’ disregard for intentionality in relation to agency and the consequences this neglect has for understanding animist perspectives. We examine the different views in relation to their effects on morality and to perceived forms of accountability. In accordance, the modernist ‘global we’, prominent in the Anthropocene debate stressing the role of humanity as a species, is contrasted with what we call a ‘universal we’, which includes both human and other-than-human persons, in conformance with Amerindian animist perspectives on the world. This approach to the issue does not only mean that we challenge the obvious iniquity in blaming all of humanity for climate change but also that we point to the coloniality of reality implicit in the Anthropocene narrative.     

The politics and semiotics of sounds--Mayan linguistics and nation-building in Guatemala

This paper discusses the development Mayan linguistics as an authoritative field of knowledge in Guatemala. In particular, it links missionary linguists' and Maya linguists' activities with shifting nationalist agendas from the 1920s in to the late 1980s. It is argued that during the historical and intellectual moment that linguistics becomes an authoritative epistemology, phonetic analysis functions as a creative index that constitutes "expert" knowledge for particular semiotic and ideological reasons tied to competing versions of the Guatemalan imagined community.     

Avoiding the Personhood Issue: Abortion,Identity, and Marquis's ‘Future‐Like‐Ours’ Argument

One reason for the persistent appeal of Don Marquis' ‘future like ours’ argument (FLO) is that it seems to offer a way to approach the debate about the morality of abortion while sidestepping the difficult task of establishing whether the fetus is a person. This essay argues that in order to satisfactorily address both of the chief objections to FLO – the ‘identity objection’ and the ‘contraception objection’ – Marquis must take a controversial stand on what is most essential to being the kind of entity that an adult human being is. Such a stand amounts to a controversial account of personhood. To the extent that FLO's success depends on accepting such a controversial metaphysical view, one apparent attraction of FLO proves illusory.     

Stories of Gender and Ethnicity: Discourses of colonialism and resistance in Burma1

This paper charts the discursive shift between colonial and ‘post’ colonial discourses about gender and ethnicity in Burma, and attempts to counter such representations by offering alternative stories to those colonialist rumours which have established their status as ‘truth’. The first part deals with missionary discourses in colonial Burma; the second with ‘post’ colonial discourses on Burmese women; and the final section offers stories told by women involved in the political struggles of contemporary Burma. The aim of the paper is to attempt to de-territorialize Burma as a site of colonialist knowledge.     

Signifying the Pandemics: Metaphors of AIDS, Cancer, and Heart Disease

This article offers a symbolic analysis of the cultural construction and signification of three of the major "pandemics" of the late 20th century: AIDS, cancer, and heart disease. It is based on unstructured interviews conducted in Israel between 1993–94 with 75 nurses and 40 physicians and between 1993–95 with 60 university students. Two key symbols, "pollution" and "transformation" are shown to constitute AIDS and cancer within a symbolic space that I suggest is "beyond culture" where body boundaries are dissolved and cultural categories are dismantled. Heart disease, in contrast, is metaphorized as a defect in the "body machinery." The article concludes by arguing that heart attack is depicted as the pathology of the Fordist, modernist body, while AIDS/cancer are pathologies of the postmodern body in late capitalism. [AIDS, cancer, heart disease, semiotics, metaphorization]     

Translocation alters the activation rate of a trypanosome surface antigen gene.

We report here the characterization of the gene coding for AnTat 1.13, a very late variable antigen type (VAT) from Trypanosoma b. brucei. This gene is chromosome-internal and it is activated by the duplicative mechanism. Like in another case of late VAT expression (1), its expression-linked copy (ELC) is flanked by "companion" sequences. It was possible to convert the late expression of this VAT into an early one, by changing the location of the gene in the genome. This has been achieved by selecting an AnTat 1.6 clone among heterotypes arising in the AnTat 1.13 cloned population. Indeed, this particular derivation leads to the conservation of the AnTat 1.13 ELC as a new telomeric member of the gene family, and this conserved ELC (or ex-ELC) appears to be preferentially activable. The telomeric position and other factors possibly involved in early or late antigen gene expression are discussed; in this respect, we propose that some antigen genes are rarely activated because their duplicative transposition requires the presence, in the expression site, of "companion" sequences only shared by a limited number of other genes.     

Familiarity with Interest Breeds Gossip: Contributions of Emotion,Expectation, and Reputation

Although gossip serves several important social functions, it has relatively infrequently been the topic of systematic investigation. In two experiments, we advance a cognitive-informational approach to gossip. Specifically, we sought to determine which informational components engender gossip. In Experiment 1, participants read brief passages about other people and indicated their likelihood to share this information. We manipulated target familiarity (celebrity, non-celebrity) and story interest (interesting, boring). While participants were more likely to gossip about celebrity than non-celebrity targets and interesting than boring stories, they were even more likely to gossip about celebrity targets embedded within interesting stories. In Experiment 2, we additionally probed participants'' reactions to the stories concerning emotion, expectation, and reputation information conveyed. Analyses showed that while such information partially mediated target familiarity and story interest effects, only expectation and reputation accounted for the interactive pattern of gossip behavior. Our findings provide novel insights into the essential components and processing mechanisms of gossip.     

‘The past is a promise to the future’: stories,persons, and the devil in Greece

Drawing on ethnography from central Greece, this article is about the way people narrate their encounters with the devil. Although it echoes the idea that life as told and life as lived are structured in the same way, it takes the argument a step further by suggesting they are structured through a narrative plot wherein the present and the future of the story-tellers pre-date the past of which their stories tell. It also foregrounds the link between this structure and a particular kind of morality which replicates the narrative logic of the stories, giving rise to an inherently relational personhood – a personhood that, just like the way in which its narration destabilizes the logic of before and after, destabilizes the distinction between self and other. Lastly, contextualizing the current economic crisis in the lives of such persons, the article suggests we need to think of it in relation to the devil and the stories people tell of him.     

Accessory cell requirement for activation antigen expression and cell cycle progression by human T lymphocytes

Stringent accessory cell (AC) depletion by a three-step procedure--plastic adherence, nylon wool adherence, followed by simultaneous treatment with two anti-AC monoclonal antibodies + complement--has allowed the demonstration of several AC-dependent stages in the T cell activation pathway. Simultaneous analysis of DNA content and cell surface immunofluorescence (correlation of activation antigen expression with cell cycle position) or DNA and RNA content (cell cycle position) of cultured cells was accomplished by dual parameter flow cytometry. AC-depleted, PHA-stimulated human peripheral blood T lymphocytes (PBTL) failed to exhibit "early" indicators of activation, including increased RNA content, expression of three activation-associated cell surface proteins (IL 2 receptor, transferrin receptor, and 4F2 protein), and the production of IL 2. The AC-depleted PBTL that failed to express these "early" markers of activation also failed to progress into the "late" phase of activation, DNA synthesis. All indicators of PHA responsiveness were fully replenished upon addition of AC but were only reconstituted to intermediate levels by addition of excess quantities of either highly purified IL 1 or crude AC-conditioned medium with lymphocyte-activating factor activity. These data suggest that the AC membrane plays a key and as yet undefined role in the stimulation of T cells by PHA.     

Inducements revisited

The paper defends the permissibility of paying inducements to research subjects against objections not covered in an earlier paper in Bioethics. The objections are that inducements would cause inequity, crowd out research, and undesirably commercialize the researcher-subject relationship. The paper shows how these objections presuppose implausible factual and/or normative claims. The final position reached is a qualified defence of freedom of contract which not only supports the permissibility of inducements but also offers guidance to ethics committees in dealing with practical problems that might arise if inducements are offered.     

The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and Its Consequences

Critiques of anthropology from within the discipline and from without have been a major feature of our intellectual life since the late 1960s. The theoretical and empirical bases of cultural and social anthropology have been under attack since the Marxist and New Left critiques of the 1960s to those coming more recently from poststructuralism, postmodernist and literary theory, and postcolonial and cultural studies. As a result, several academic generations have been educated by reading the attacks on the field but rarely dealing with the actual theoretical works and ethnographies of earlier anthropologists. This article deals with several of the most common charges leveled at anthropology, notably that it has regularly and necessarily exoticized "Others," has been ahistorical, and has treated each culture as if it were an isolate, unconnected to any other. It demonstrates how inaccurate and easily falsifiable such claims are and recommends a critical reevaluation of these unexamined and destructive cliches,     

Narrating Kidney Disease: The Significance Of Sensation And Time In The Emplotment Of Patient Experience

Drawing on research conducted among patients in Ireland, this article examines the narrative constructions of chronic kidney failure and explores the ways in which patient narratives cross-cut and subvert modernist medical constructions of transplantation as a therapeutic outcome, an endgame, a “gift of life.” In experience, patients dismantle this construction structure by emplotting their stories around the painful lack of an ending, ardently brought to bear by the lived realities of immunosuppressant drug therapy, the silent fears of graft rejection, and the isolation of recipiency. They articulate, instead, stories that disclose a multi-directional flow between past and future therapeutic interventions, between the altering nature of the renal body and personal experience. These storied dimensions are phenomenologically embedded in the sensory and temporal aspects of this condition as essential elements of chronic illness and as organizational properties of patient narratives.     

“The Theory was Beautiful Indeed”: Rise,Fall and Circulation of Maximizing Methods in Population Genetics (1930–1980)

Describing the theoretical population geneticists of the 1960s, Joseph Felsenstein reminisced: “our central obsession was finding out what function evolution would try to maximize. Population geneticists used to think, following Sewall Wright, that mean relative fitness, W, would be maximized by natural selection” (Felsenstein 2000). The present paper describes the genesis, diffusion and fall of this “obsession”, by giving a biography of the mean fitness function in population genetics. This modeling method devised by Sewall Wright in the 1930s found its heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the wake of Motoo Kimura’s and Richard Lewontin’s works. It seemed a reliable guide in the mathematical study of deterministic effects (the study of natural selection in populations of infinite size, with no drift), leading to powerful generalizations presenting law-like properties. Progress in population genetics theory, it then seemed, would come from the application of this method to the study of systems with several genes. This ambition came to a halt in the context of the influential objections made by the Australian mathematician Patrick Moran in 1963. These objections triggered a controversy between mathematically- and biologically-inclined geneticists, with affected both the formal standards and the aims of population genetics as a science. Over the course of the 1960s, the mean fitness method withered with the ambition of developing the deterministic theory. The mathematical theory became increasingly complex. Kimura re-focused his modeling work on the theory of random processes; as a result of his computer simulations, Lewontin became the staunchest critic of maximizing principles in evolutionary biology. The mean fitness method then migrated to other research areas, being refashioned and used in evolutionary quantitative genetics and behavioral ecology.     

Evangelism,Ethnography and Linguistics: Carl Strehlow and J. R. B. Love

ABSTRACT

This article considers the intersection of evangelism, ethnography and linguistics in the work of two missionaries living among Aboriginal communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carl Strehlow was one of several German missionaries working in central Australia in the 1890s and into the twentieth century. J. R. B. Love met Strehlow briefly in 1913, but did not become a fully committed missionary himself until the 1920s. This paper first considers Strehlow’s evangelical, linguistic and ethnographic interests in relation to some of his German contemporaries, before comparing his approach to that of the younger, Presbyterian, Love to elucidate the inter-relationships between evangelism, linguistics and ethnography in the 1890s and early twentieth century in Australia.     

Expression of alpha-lactalbumin, alpha-S1-casein, and lactoferrin genes is heterogeneous in sheep and cattle mammary tissue.

We used 35S-labeled cRNA probes to localize the sites of alpha-lactalbumin, alpha-S1-casein, and lactoferrin mRNA synthesis in sheep and forcibly weaned cattle mammary tissue. Expression of alpha-lactalbumin was absent in three of four "virgin" glands studied, present in some alveoli of "pregnant" glands but not in others, despite a similar histological appearance. In the early lactating gland, expression was high in those alveoli with few fat globules in their cells and lumen and was absent in alveoli with abundant fat globules. These observations suggest either that alpha-lactalbumin gene expression is linked to the long-term secretory activity of cells and falls once cells are resting or regressing, or that there are cyclical variations in expression, or that in the lactating gland some groups of epithelial cells are synthesizing alpha-lactalbumin and some are synthesizing fat. Expression patterns of alpha-S1-casein were similar to those of alpha-lactalbumin. Lactoferrin, in contrast, was expressed almost exclusively in the "fatty alveoli" of both species. Our results show that dramatic variations in milk gene expression can occur throughout the mammary gland of sheep and cattle and that at no stage of pregnancy, lactation, or involution can the gland be considered metabolically homogeneous.     

Nucleotide sequence of the EcoRI D fragment of adenovirus 2 genome

The entire nucleotide sequence of the Ad. 2 EcoRI D fragment has been determined using the Maxam and Gilbert method. This sequence of 2678 bp contains informations relative to late mRNAs ending at position 78 and for which an AATAAA sequence corresponding to their 3' ends is found at residue number 833. Position of the PVIII mRNA is determined thus allowing deduction of the probable amino acid sequence of the PVIII protein. The position and the sequence of the first leader of early 3 mRNAs is determined as well as the sequence and position of the second early leader of region 3 mRNAs, which also correspond to the "y" leader of the fiber mRNA. Following the localization of an open reading frame in which an ATG could initiate protein synthesis it can be predicted that 3a, b, c mRNAs code for the 16K early protein and the probable amino acid sequence of this protein can be deduced. The CAGTTT sequence frequently present at the 5' end of a leader or of a mRNA body as well as the GGTGAG sequence which is found at the 3' end of several leaders were used to postulate the position of various early mRNAs of region 3 and to suggest the existence of an additional splicing event during the processing of mRNAs 3a, b and c. They were also used to predict the position of the additional "x" late leaders. The imbrication of information concerning (i) the family of late mRNAs ending at position 78, (ii) the position of the "x" leader and the "y" leader and (iii) the beginning of early region 3 is also depicted.     

Changes in diacylglycerol labeling, cell shape, and protein phosphorylation distinguish "triggering" from "activation" of human neutrophils

Upon activation neutrophils release reactive oxygen intermediates such as superoxide anion (O2-) which are potent mediators of inflammation. Various agents elicit different responses; N-formylmethionylleucylphenylalanine (fMLP) (0.1 microM) provokes brisk generation of superoxide anion; leukotriene B4 (LTB4, 0.1 microM) is a poor stimulus. In contrast, phorbol myristate acetate (PMA, 1.6 microM) acting directly via protein kinase C is a potent stimulus for O2-. We compared the kinetics of appearance of various "second messengers" with the capacity of these ligands to elicit O2- generation. Kinetic analysis showed a two-phase response to membrane ligands; both an "early" (less than or equal to 15 s) and a "late" (greater than 15 s) increase in [3H]- and [14C]diacylglycerol (DG) was noted in response to fMLP. In contrast, LTB4 elicited only a rapid early increase in DG. The rise in DG evoked by PMA was late. Cytochalasin B increased the late phase of DG labeling elicited by all agonists. Moreover, comparison of increases in [3H]DG versus those of [14C]DG at early and late time points suggested that DG was not formed exclusively from the hydrolysis of polyphosphoinositides. Early increments of DG were also accompanied by addition of plasma membrane (ultrastructural morphometry); the ratio of surface perimeter to area increased rapidly (10 s) and persisted (60 s) in response to fMLP. Increments were more gradual in response to PMA. Kinetic analysis of protein phosphorylation was compared to the early and late increments of DG labeling. A 47,000 Mr protein was phosphorylated with kinetics consistent with the production of O2- and DG in response to fMLP (early and late) and PMA (late). In contrast, LTB4 provoked only early phosphorylation of this protein. The temporal pattern of the formation of diacylglycerol and the phosphorylation of proteins describe a dual signal. The data suggest that neutrophils require not only "triggering" (the rapid generation of a signal) but also "activation" (the maintenance of a signal) to sustain responses.     

Public reason in justifications of conscientious objection in health care

Current mainstream approaches to conscientious objection either uphold the standards of public health care by preventing objections or protect the consciences of health‐care professionals by accommodating objections. Public justification approaches are a compromise position that accommodate conscientious objections only when objectors can publicly justify the grounds of their objections. Public justification approaches require objectors and assessors to speak a common normative language and to this end it has been suggested that objectors should be required to cast their objection in terms of public reason. We provide critical support for such a public reason condition and argue that it would be neither too demanding nor too permissive. We also respond to objections that it unfairly favours secular over religious objectors and that public reasons cannot be held with the kind of sincerity thought to characterize conscientious objections.     

A splicing enhancer in the E4 coding region of human papillomavirus type 16 is required for early mRNA splicing and polyadenylation as well as inhibition of premature late gene expression

Successful inhibition of human papillomavirus type 16 (HPV-16) late gene expression early in the life cycle is essential for persistence of infection, the highest risk factor for cervical cancer. Our study aimed to locate regulatory RNA elements in the early region of HPV-16 that influence late gene expression. For this purpose, subgenomic HPV-16 expression plasmids under control of the strong human cytomegalovirus immediate early promoter were used. An exonic splicing enhancer that firmly supported the use of the E4 3' splice site at position 3358 in the early region of the HPV-16 genome was identified. The enhancer was mapped to a 65-nucleotide AC-rich sequence located approximately 100 nucleotides downstream of the position 3358 3' splice site. Deletion of the enhancer caused loss of both splicing at the upstream position 3358 3' splice site and polyadenylation at the early polyadenylation signal, pAE. Direct splicing occurred at the competing L1 3' splice site at position 5639 in the late region. Optimization of the position 3358 3' splice site restored splicing to that site and polyadenylation at pAE. Additionally, a sequence of 40 nucleotides with a negative effect on late mRNA production was located immediately downstream of the enhancer. As the E4 3' splice site is employed by both early and late mRNAs, the enhancer constitutes a key regulator of temporal HPV-16 gene expression, which is required for early mRNA production as well as for the inhibition of premature late gene expression.