Homicide and cultural evolution

Homicide rates are suitable materials for the study of “cultural evolution,” because they vary dramatically between societies (hence, are “cultural”) and change gradually rather than saccadically (hence, “evolve”).Sociological models of the sources of variation in homicide rates (“subcultures of violence”; demographic change; “legitimation of violence”; mass media effects) are criticized for inattention to the social context of violence and to the individual motives of the protagonists. Models of culture change that emphasize “transmission” are criticized for treating the culture-bearing person as a passive vessel rather than an active strategist. A satisfactory theory of the “cultural evolution” of violence awaits satisfactory theories of how people apprehend their interests and how they pursue them.     

A new descriptor of the dual character of the input-output behaviour of the cochlea,with implications for signal-to-noise ratio estimation of brain-stem auditory potentials evoked by alternating polarity clicks

The signal-to-noise ratio based on a plus-minus average for residual noise estimation has been systematically computed for brain-stem auditory evoked potentials (BAEPs) evoked by alternating polarity clicks from threshold up to 100 dB nHL in subjects with normal cochlear function. The plus-minus averages have exhibited a systematic dual behaviour in close correspondence with the “L” and “H” portions of the latency-intensity functions: from threshold up to 50 dB SL (“L” segment) they faithfully reflect the post-averaging residual noise. From 50 dB SL upwards the plus-minus averages are contaminated by a signal identified as the differential potential between rarefaction and condensation responses. The plus-minus average is therefore an unreliable indicator of the post-averaging residual noise when alternating polarity clicks louder than 50 dB are used. These findings suggest that for intensities corresponding to the “L” (steep) part of the latency-intensity function, when inner hair cell excitation is dependent on active amplification by the outer hair cells, no difference exists between rarefaction and condensation responses. By contrast, once levels at which the inner hair cells can be directly stimulated are reached, responses to rarefaction and condensation clicks become different.     

Women’s empowerment and rural revolution: rethinking “failed development”

One of the most frequently advanced explanations of the Maoists’ popularity in rural Nepal links dissatisfaction with the State to forms of consciousness and changes in expectations that are products and processes of development. Such theories often attribute popular support for the insurrection to frustrated desires stemming from “failed” or “incomplete” development. Against this, others suggest that it was the very “success” of empowerment programs which aimed to raise participants’ consciousness of oppression and its roots that inspired villagers to embrace revolutionary action. This paper argues that, despite their differences, both hypotheses reflect assumptions about gendered selfhood and political action that limit their recognition of what motivates Maoist sympathies. Extended research with women in Gorkha—a district where female support for the rebels is said to be especially strong—reveals that Gorkhali women’s support for the rebels is not inspired primarily by the desire for greater autonomy, choice or absolute liberation from social constraints, all of which ideals valorize a culturally specific vision of individual agency. Rather, women there report a sense of self that defines itself through social relations and commitments and which values the common good over individual self-interest, which they associate with an unjust state. The disjuncture between Gorkhali women’s own understandings of self and society and prevailing theories of what motivates people to rebel highlights the modernist assumptions that underlie—and potentially distort—otherwise diverse scholarly perspectives. Likewise, it implies that rebellions may be less about consciousness and more about morality than either “failed” or “successful” theories presume.     

Impact of the invasion of the imported fire ant

The impact of the imported fire ant (IFA) is complex, in large part, because several very different species of “Fire Ants” have invaded and one of these has two forms, all of which are hard to separate by the public, as well as, some investigators not focused on the ant. Each of these different “IFA” species and forms differ in their impact. Further, these ants impact a number of “things” ranging from the environment and wildlife (plants and animals) as well as people, their environment and infrastructure. In addition, they can not only lead to death of living things (including people), but they can destroy many aspects of our environment and infrastructure at the cost of millions of dollars. But there are some beneficial aspects and some people can make many thousands of dollars due to their presence. This is an attempt to look at these issues.     

Consuming “the unfortunate”: the violence of philanthropy in a contemporary Chinese state-run orphanage

Following the Tocquevillian tradition and driven by a neoliberal concern, many China scholars interpret the rise of philanthropy in contemporary China as a sign of the growing “civil society” that will help to democratize the country and improve its citizens’ social well-being. However, this paper shows that philanthropy in the Chinese context works to reproduce social inequalities between philanthropists and the subjects they claim to help. My ethnography focuses on philanthropic activities in a state-run orphanage in southeastern China. In these activities, characterized primarily by donations and volunteer work, middle- and upper-class philanthropists label orphans as “the unfortunate” or even “the abnormal unfortunate” to create a clear-cut “they/unfortunate–we/fortunate” dichotomy that stigmatizes these children. Furthermore, they utilize this dichotomy as a tool to transmit class consciousness to their own children, “touristify” the orphanage, and even exploit the orphans for marketing or commercial purposes. The pragmatic rationale reflected in these representations and practices also provides an alternative to the current anthropological studies on humanitarianism, which have mostly focused on religious, ethical and moral motivations among philanthropic agencies.     

Fallenbewegungen fleischfressender Pflanzen

How carnivorous plants outsmart their prey The non‐muscular movements of plants, especially the fast traps of carnivorous plants, might appear as natural “wonders”, but they are all evoked by the interplay of functional morphological structures developed during evolution with well‐described biophysical and chemical processes. Hydraulic “motors”, which are based on water displacement in the respective cells and tissues, entail rather slow motions. Large and fast structures, as e.g., the snap‐traps of the carnivorous Venus flytrap, often depend on the release of stored elastic energy (relaxation) which acts as a speed boost and significantly speeds up the motion. The fast traps presented here and the deformation principles involved, including some mechanical “tricks”, can be rebuild in simple and low‐cost physical models which are especially useful for an application in teaching.     

The “Normalization” of Intersex Bodies and “Othering” of Intersex Identities in Australia

Once described as hermaphrodites and later as intersex people, individuals born with intersex variations are routinely subject to so-called “normalizing” medical interventions, often in childhood. Opposition to such practices has been met by attempts to discredit critics and reasserted clinical authority over the bodies of women and men with “disorders of sex development.” However, claims of clinical consensus have been selectively constructed and applied and lack evidence. Limited transparency and lack of access to justice have helped to perpetuate forced interventions. At the same time, associated with the diffusion of distinct concepts of sex and gender, intersex has been constructed as a third legal sex classification, accompanied by pious hopes and unwarranted expectations of consequences. The existence of intersex has also been instrumentalized for the benefit of other, intersecting, populations. The creation of gender categories associated with intersex bodies has created profound risks: a paradoxically narrowed and normative gender binary, maintenance of medical authority over the bodies of “disordered” females and males, and claims that transgressions of social roles ascribed to a third gender are deceptive. Claims that medicalization saves intersex people from “othering,” or that legal othering saves intersex people from medicalization, are contradictory and empty rhetoric. In practice, intersex bodies remain “normalized” or eliminated by medicine, while society and the law “others” intersex identities. That is, medicine constructs intersex bodies as either female or male, while law and society construct intersex identities as neither female nor male. Australian attempts at reforms to recognize the rights of intersex people have either failed to adequately comprehend the population affected or lacked implementation. An emerging human rights consensus demands an end to social prejudice, stigma, and forced medical interventions, focusing on the right to bodily integrity and principles of self-determination.     

When the refugee status becomes an economic asset: how Malians in a Burkinabé City negotiate the “refugee” category

ABSTRACT

Since early 2016, part of the Malian urban refugees living in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, have to “capitalize” on their refugee status to make ends meet. By examining when, why, and how the refugee status transmutes into an economic asset, this article shows how the possibilities to negotiate with the refugee category vary significantly within this group of forced migrants. Indeed, categories are not only imposed on people, but are negotiated by the actors themselves in their interactions and within their social and political economies. My article shows how the refugees’ ability or possibility to participate in the co-construction of their category is shaped by both the social and political context in which they are, as well as by wider intersectional and structural dynamics in which their lives are situated, such as socio-economic class, gender and race.     

Cross-Sectional Study of Characteristics of Owners and Nonowners Surrendering Cats to Four Australian Animal Shelters

Unwanted cats surrendered to nonhuman animal shelters are generally categorized as either “owned” or “stray.” This classification is misleading because “stray” cats may include many “semiowned” cats, for which people provide care but who are not perceived as being owned. This differentiation is important because effective strategies designed to reduce cat admissions to, and euthanasia rates in, shelters rely on accurate information about cat populations contributing to shelter intake; cat semiowners will likely respond to different strategies than people with no relationship with the cats they surrender. People surrendering cats to four Australian animal shelters were surveyed to identify factors associated with perception of ownership. Many self-classified nonowners had fed the cats they surrendered, often for a considerable period of time. The factor most strongly associated with ownership perception was an increasing association time with the cat. These findings confirm that enduring relationships between surrenderers and cats, consistent with cat semiownership, are common for cats surrendered to Australian animal shelters. This finding should be taken into account when planning education messages and cat population management strategies aimed at reducing cat admissions.     

Met and unmet needs of dependent older people according to the Camberwell Assessment of Need for the Elderly (CANE): A scoping review

In order to address the complexity of needs of dependent older people, multidimensional and person-centered needs assessment is required. The objective of this review is to describe met and unmet needs of dependent older people, living in the community or in institutions, and the factors associated with those needs. Selection criteria included papers about need asessment which employed the Camberwell Assesment of Need for the Elderly (CANE). A search through MEDLINE, SCOPUS, WOS and CINHAL databases was carried out. Twenty-one articles were finally included. Unmet needs were found more frequently in psychosocial areas (mainly in “company”, “daytime activities” and “psychological distress”) and in institutionalized population. In addition, unmet needs were often associated with depressive symptoms, dependency, and caregiver burden. Discrepancies between self-reported needs and needs perceived by formal and informal caregivers were identified. It is important that professionals and caregivers try to make visible the perspective of older people and their psychological and social needs, particularly when the person is dependent, depressed or cognitively impaired.     

A Precarious Passage: Aging Out of the Child-Only Case Load

Child-only cases,” minors who receive welfare benefits as individuals, lose their eligibility at age 18 but face the same challenges to self-sufficiency as other “emerging adults.” This study examines how 59 youth in 4 New York State communities thought about and prepared for the termination of their benefits. In 8 focus groups and 12 follow-up interviews they spoke of their aspirations for education, employment, relationships with people, and material possessions. The external supports they can rely upon appear to be inadequate to overcome their limited financial resources and other external obstacles they also identified. Recommendations are intended to strengthen community supports for these youth and others in poverty, which in turn could increase access to social capital and financial aid, as they undertake their precarious passage to adulthood.     

Unraveling Silence: Violence,Memory and the Limits of Anthropology’s Craft<Superscript>1</Superscript>

What are the ethical dilemmas that conducting anthropological on memory in South Africa poses to the student of violence? In the specific context of “victim support groups” in post-1994 South Africa, one of the most problematic issues relates to the interactions between “trauma experts” and “victims.” In the view of many survivors, the violence of voicelessness, an issue to which there is a particular sensitivity in the country, is re-inscribed in their life through the specific intervention of social scientists. One of the effects of this interventions, which determines the limits and possibilities of any research on memory as it connects to violence, is a widespread reaction against experts, whose work, the production and dissemination of knowledge about trauma on the basis of other people’s experiences, is often perceived by survivors as being part of a broader economy of subtraction where their “voices” have become commodities in a transnational network of prestige.     

Selling with the san: Representations of bushman people and artefacts in South African print advertisements

This paper examines the use of visual images of the Bushman peoples (San) and their cultural objects in contemporary South African advertising. As an image is a site of meaning, the relationship between the people represented in the advertisement and the culture for which the advertisement is produced demonstrates strategies of subjection and power. Within the context of the advertisement, I explore the extent to which San people are appropriated by the consumer society and their ritual objects reduced or altered to a Western aesthetic dimension. The contexts and ideas of the producing society determine production of the visual object.

The relationship between the San “artefact” and the advertisement as a work of “art” reflects a dimension of South African social and political processes. Representations of the two juxtaposed societies suggest that the value systems and cultural attitudes of the dominant group present contested domains which are explored. Bushmen represent a malleable signifier which is used to promote an apparently/ ostensibly applied vision of an emerging non‐racial country.     

Breaking Through Disciplinary Barriers: Human–Wildlife Interactions and Multispecies Ethnography

One of the main challenges when integrating biological and social perspectives in primatology is overcoming interdisciplinary barriers. Unfamiliarity with subject-specific theory and language, distinct disciplinary-bound approaches to research, and academic boundaries aimed at “preserving the integrity” of subject disciplines can hinder developments in interdisciplinary research. With growing interest in how humans and other primates share landscapes, and recognition of the importance of combining biological and social information to do this effectively, the disparate use of terminology is becoming more evident. To tackle this problem, we dissect the meaning of what the biological sciences term studies in “human–wildlife conflict” or more recently “human–wildlife interactions” and compare it to what anthropology terms “multispecies ethnography.” In the biological sciences, human–wildlife interactions are the actions resulting from people and wild animals sharing landscapes and resources, with outcomes ranging from being beneficial or harmful to one or both species. In the social sciences, human–nonhuman relationships have been explored on a philosophical, analytical, and empirical level. Building on previous work, we advocate viewing landscapes through an interdisciplinary “multispecies lens” in which humans are observed as one of multiple organisms that interact with other species to shape and create environments. To illustrate these interconnections we use the case study of coexistence between people of the Nalu ethnic group and Critically Endangered western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) at Cantanhez National Park in Guinea-Bissau, to demonstrate how biological and social research approaches can be complementary and can inform conservation initiatives at the human–primate interface. Finally, we discuss how combining perspectives from ethnoprimatology with those from multispecies ethnography can advance the study of ethnoprimatology to aid productive discourse and enhance future interdisciplinary research.     

Shame,reputation and Egypt's lovers: A controversy over the nation's image

This paper addresses aspects of contemporary Egyptian nationalism by focusing on reactions within Egypt to a BBC‐produced documentary dealing with the life of a lower class Cairene woman. In particular, it explores how the notions of honor, shame and reputation are central to the construction and expression of this nationalistic voice, and how the concern over “Egypt's image” involves a contest over who is to represent the nation. This article argues that the contemporary nationalistic voice, championed by the urban middle classes, expresses an ambivalent attitude to both “the West” and “the Egyptian people”, and that it necessarily involves the hiding and undermining of subordinate social groups.     

At the Edge of Safety: Moral Experimentation in the Case of Family Therapy

“At the Edge of Safety” argues for thinking of structural family therapy as a “moral laboratory.” Borrowing a trope from Cheryl Mattingly’s recent book Moral Laboratories, the article reconsiders a therapeutic style that was once controversial by analyzing personal stories of supervision—i.e. professional training—in light of Mattingly’s suggestion that a social space in which people conduct experiments on themselves and their lives may be considered a moral laboratory. Family therapy is especially good to think with, because it is simultaneously a real and a metaphorical laboratory, physically lab-like in its use of visual technologies, yet moral in the way it puts the possibility for situational change in the hands of human actors. The technological apparatus stages evidence for sub-visible, interpersonal dynamics, while the provocative quality of not only therapeutic actions, but also of supervision, points to an ethos of experimentation. Stories of supervision reveal how personal of an experience being supervised can be. Trainees are pushed to become something otherwise, in learning to “expand” their styles. Sometimes the push is just right. Sometimes it goes too far. Whatever the case may be, the stories analyzed speak to anthropological questions concerning the uncertainty of human action and the many ways people can unknowingly injure one another with small hurts.     

Drogues anciennes, drogues nouvelles, pratiques actuelles (1re partie)

Ever since homo sapiens let go of the hand of the ape to descend from the trees, endowed with a large frontal brain allowing projection and self-reference in the dry savannah, humans left, finally erect, the shaded quiet of those fruit trees for a scary world full of danger and unknowns. From that point on, people invented gods, myths, language, and war and would search in magical plants for ways to relieve suffering and anxiety, ways of escaping the enclosing world, or, by contrast, find the courage to confront it. For millennia, drugs have been the objects of sacred, magical, and therapeutic knowledge. The entirety of medical psychopharmacology is based on the same foundations as this “primitive” psychopharmacology and the technological and scientific revolution of the 19th century, which made it possible to isolate active ingredients and synthesize new molecules, facilitating the emergence of specific means of consumption, increased by the planetary-scale circulation of people, objects, and information. This mass consumption and trafficking, and the profits they generate, create major public health challenges for modern societies, as well as serious sociopolitical and economic problems. In terms of evolution, pure psychoactive drugs and the direct means of administering them are recent phenomena and pathogenic in that they short-circuit adaptive processes by acting directly on the circuits of the primitive brain, which controls emotions and basic survival behaviour. In this way, psychoactive multiple drugs seem to translate into an evolution toward the true chemical regulation of existence. In this first section, we will discuss tranquilizers and psychostimulants, true “analogue” drugs that act as volume controls for wakefulness andmood. Often strongly addictive, they raise widely recognised social, medical and psychological issues, secondary to addiction and its consequences.     

Investigations into the Adenosine Outflow from Hippocampal Slices Evoked by Ischemia-Like Conditions

Abstract: The characteristics of adenosine and inosine outflow evoked by 5 min of ischemia-like conditions in vitro (superfusion with glucose-free Krebs solution gassed with 95% N₂/5% CO₂) were investigated on rat hippocampal slices. The viability of the slices after “ischemia” was evaluated by extracellular recording of the evoked synaptic responses in the CA1 region. The evoked dendritic field potentials were abolished after 5 min of superfusion under “ischemia” but a complete recovery occurred after 5 min of reperfusion with normal oxygenated Krebs solution. No recovery took place after 10 min of “ischemia.” The addition of the adenosine A, receptor antagonist 8-phenylthe- ophylline to the superfusate antagonized the depression of the evoked field potentials caused by 5 min of “ischemia.” Five minutes of “ischemia” brought about a six- and fivefold increase in adenosine and inosine outflow, respectively, within 10 min. Tetrodotoxin reduced the outflow of adenosine and inosine by 42 and 33%, respectively, whereas the removal of Ca²⁺ caused a further increase. The NMDA receptor antagonist d (-)-2-amino-7- phoshonoheptanoic acid and the non-NMDA antagonist 6,7-dinitroquinoxaline-2,3-dione brought about small, not statistically significant decreases of adenosine and inosine outflow. The glutamate uptake inhibitor dihydrokainate did not affect the outflow of adenosine and inosine. Inhibition of ecto-5′-nucleotidase by α, β-methylene ADP and GMP did not affect basal adenosine outflow but potentiated “ischemia”-evoked adenosine outflow. It is concluded that ischemia-like conditions in vitro evoke a Ca²⁺-independent adenosine and inosine outflow, through a mechanism that partly depends on propagated nervous activity but does not involve excitatory amino acids. The efflux of adenosine is probably responsible for the depression of the evoked synaptic electrical activity during “ischemia” in the hippocampal slices.