Managing the unmanageable: elderly Russian Jewish émigrés and the biomedical culture of diabetes care

In this article, we examine the apparent resistance of elderly Russian Jewish émigrés to the dominant U.S. biomedical model of diabetes treatment. Cultural competence on the part of medical professionals who make assumptions about Russian culture tends to be based on particularly American values of self-control and individual agency. The American consumer model of health care incorporating risk, individual responsibility, autonomy, and choice, when applied to elderly Russian Jewish émigrés, results in a reading of different values and choices as failed self-management or noncompliance. This article argues for a more reflexive understanding of U.S. biomedical culture as a replacement for the current "sound bite" model of cultural diversity.     

Dental Hygienists' and Dental Hygiene Students' Attitudes Toward the Elderly

Dental hygiene students' and graduates' attitudes toward the elderly were evaluated in two different countries representing two different cultures. Five dental hygiene programs in the U.S. and the only dental hygiene program in Israel were selected to participate in addition to graduates from both Colorado-U.S. and Jerusalem-Israel. A total of 180 dental hygiene students of which 44 were Israelis, 70 U.S. graduates, and 52 Israeli graduates, participated. Both American graduates and American dental hygiene students were found, based on the usage of the Rosencranz-McNevin measure, to have significantly more positive attitudes toward the elderly as compared to the Israelis. Israeli and American dental hygiene students had a mean score of 120.92 and 105.96 respectively, Israeli graduates scored 122.39 and American graduates had a mean score of 105.09. The differences in culture, geriatric education in schools, and response to the survey according to what is most socially acceptable in the U.S. were the main reasons for these differences. Yet, it is hypothesized that these gaps in attitudes would decrease with the years, following the slow but stable “Americanization” of the Israeli society.     

Cross-cultural comparison of women’s midlife symptom-reporting: a china study

Drawing on ethnographic and survey research conducted by the author in a general population sample in mainland China, this article presents findings on Chinese women’s midlife symptom reporting in comparison with pivotal studies conducted by Lock, Kaufert, and McKinlay in Japan, Canada, and the U.S. Analysis of the China survey data (N = 156 women, age 45–55) reveals for sixteen core symptoms a reporting frequency that is much lower than depicted in classic biomedical models of menopause. At the same time, however, the China data indicates problems with the popular extrapolation that midlife Asian women are virtually symptom-free compared to their North American peers. Finding the Chinese level of symptom-reporting low to moderate depending on the symptom, the article reveals important differences between Chinese and Japanese women in their level and pattern of symptom reporting, as well as substantial overlap with North American women in this regard. Referencing ethnographic materials on Chinese women and the cross-cultural literature on menopause, the article assesses potential explanations for the cross-cultural variation observed, including: local reproductive endocrinology, phytoestrogen consumption, aspects of East Asian culture, the nature of social change, the cultural acceptability of monitoring and voicing symptoms, and differences in dominant conceptions of midlife.     

Building the New Zion: Unfinished Conversations between the Jews of Venta Prieta, Mexico, and Their Neighbors to the North

In 1950, Raphael Patai published his research on Venta Prieta, a Mexican town in which some residents lived as Jews despite having little knowledge of Judaism. Like other visitors, Patai was perplexed. Why did they wish to live as Jews? While Patai never answered this question to his satisfaction, he believed the answer would be found by developing a psychological profile of the residents, an approach in keeping with culture and personality theorists of the day. The present article provides a different solution. Drawing on additional sources, and short visits, we argue that Venta Prieta was not only a stop on the Jewish tourist circuit by 1950 but also developed out of a unique exchange. While U.S. Jews, as evangelical Protestants before them, provided a model for upwardly mobile Mexicans, Venta Prieta enabled middle-class tourists to experience Judaism in a pastoral setting and to "repair the world" (tikkun). [Keywords: Judaism, tourism, dialogical anthropology, social change, social mobility]     

Old Efforts at New Uses: A Brief History of Chemurgy and the American Search for Biobased Materials

The American search for biobased and renewable raw materials has a long history of intermittent success and frustration. This article traces the history of the chemurgy movement-a precursor to what are now sometimes called agricultural "new uses" initiatives-from its context of the 1920s through its emergence as a political force in the mid-1930s, when chemurgy offered a strategy for industries and governments interested in reviving the agricultural economy and reducing dependence upon foreign sources of industrial raw materials. Chemurgists put pressure upon the U.S. Department of Agriculture to devote greater attention to crop utilization research, efforts that were operational in time to make important contributions to the U.S. economy during World War II. This article devotes considerable attention to the postwar era, a period not discussed in most histories of chemurgy. The article concludes with a tentative assessment of issues that caused chemurgy to falter in the past as well as precautionary lessons for the contemporary study of biobased materials.     

The Multiple Meanings of Jewish Genes

This article addresses contemporary social challenges created by new genetic research on Jews and by Jews, and its implications for the meanings of Jewish identity, on both the individual and the collective levels. The article begins with a brief overview of selective genetic studies of Jewish populations and the controversies they have generated. It continues with an examination of the emerging field of Jewish genetic demography, which employs genetic tests to identify lineages, claim kin, and support Jewish historical and political claims. Here the article explores how Jewish genetic demographers interpret genetic studies to reinforce oral tradition and Biblical prophecy about the origins of the Jews and their experience in the Diaspora. This research is then juxtaposed with debates that emerge from contemporary rabbinic deliberations over the appropriate uses of new reproductive technologies, debates that, contrary to the assertions of Jewish genetic demographers, suggest genes are believed to possess limited ability to confer or create Jewishness in the traditional rabbinic imagination. In the final section of this article, a debate is staged about contemporary biomedical practices that allow for the exchange and transfer of body parts and bodily substances, as a strategy for challenging genetic notions of Jewish identity.     

Aspects of Medical Care of Soviet Jewish Emigrés

Soviet Jewish emigrés are a recently arrived refugee group in San Francisco and in other cities in the United States. They have frequently been perceived as a demanding and complaining population, particularly the elderly, often chronically ill members. These behaviors can also be seen as positive survival mechanisms that have evolved in response to the Soviet health care system and cultural background. An understanding of that background and system, together with time, greatly improves the interaction between Soviet Jewish patients and American physicians.     

The story catches you and you fall down: tragedy,ethnography, and "cultural competence"

Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (Noonday Press, 1997) is widely used in "cultural competence" efforts within U.S. medical school curricula. This article addresses the relationship between theory, narrative form, and teaching through a close critical reading of that book that is informed by theories of tragedy and ethnographies of medicine. I argue that The Spirit Catches You is so influential as ethnography because it is so moving as a story; it is so moving as a story because it works so well as tragedy; and it works so well as tragedy precisely because of the static, reified, essentialist understanding of "culture" from which it proceeds. If professional anthropologists wish our own best work to speak to "apparitions of culture" within medicine and other "cultures of no culture," I suggest that we must find compelling new narrative forms in which to convey more complex understandings of "culture."     

Research in the ranks: vulnerable subjects, coercible collaboration, and the hepatitis E vaccine trial in Nepal

Concern over the diminished autonomy of members of the armed forces has resulted in the classification of these groups as "vulnerable" in many international codes of research ethics, a designation that places the onus on researchers to provide special justification for the inclusion of these persons in research. This paper examines the application of these ethical requirements to a recent trial carried out by U.S. Army researchers among soldiers of the Royal Nepal Army (RNA) and concludes that the requirements to justify conducting research in this population were not met. Furthermore, noting the human rights abuses rampant in the RNA, it is appropriate to question the choice of this institution as both a partner and a subject pool for U.S. state-sponsored research. This case study raises another important ethical question about the vulnerability to coerced collaboration of groups or institutions. In response, I propose the idea of "institutional vulnerability" as an extension of the idea of individual "juridic vulnerability." The recent military and financial assistance that the RNA received from the U.S. Army, in light of their partnership in this biomedical research trial, constitutes an appropriate and revealing context in which to ground this discussion.     

The reigning misperception about culture and Asian American achievement

ABSTRACT

Asian Americans graduate from college at higher rates than other groups, and evince educational outcomes that match or exceed those of their parents. They comprise about 25 per cent of the student body in Ivy League institutions, despite making up only 6 per cent of the U.S. population. While it may be tempting to reduce Asian American academic achievement to Asian culture, and Confucian values more specifically, we provide disconfirming evidence, both within the United States and beyond, to show the fallacy of this logic. Contemporary U.S. Asian immigrants are “hyper-selected”: they are more likely to have graduated from college than their non-migrant counterparts, and also more likely to be college-educated than the U.S. mean. Hyper-selectivity and its spillover effects explain the exceptional educational outcomes of Asian Americans. It is time that we laid to rest the reigning misperception that Asian American academic achievement can be reduced to Asian culture or Confucian values.     

Jewish identity and the meaning of community in contemporary Denmark

This article examines social, ritual and political structures in the Jewish Community of Copenhagen, Denmark. This community maintains great vitality despite profound fragmentation in its membership, as well as intensive interaction by its members with non-Jewish culture. It does so by providing flexible contexts for participation by its members, so that Jews with profoundly diverse understandings of group and self can engage with Jewish identity. The community does not foster a single model of ethnic identity, but rather provides a symbolic space within which individual members can construct their own understandings of self and group. Such symbolic spaces may become increasingly essential for ethnic groups in late modern societies, where it has become difficult to maintain the sorts of cultural consensus and separation that have historically grounded ethnic communities.     

Practice and Politics in Japanese Science: Hitoshi Kihara and the Formation of a Genetics Discipline

This paper examines the history of Japanese genetics in the 1920s to 1950s as seen through the work of Hitoshi Kihara, a prominent wheat geneticist as well as a leader in the development of the discipline in Japan. As Kihara’s career illustrates, Japanese genetics developed quickly in the early twentieth century through interactions with biologists outside Japan. The interactions, however, ceased due to the war in the late 1930s, and Japanese geneticists were mostly isolated from outside information until the late 1940s. During the isolation in wartime and under the postwar U.S. Occupation, Kihara adapted to political changes. During wartime, he developed a research institute focusing on applied biology of various crops, which conformed to the national need to address food scarcity. After the war, he led the campaign for the establishment of a national institute of genetics and negotiated with American Occupation officers. The Americans viewed this Japanese effort with suspicion because of the rising popularity of the controversial theory of the Russian agronomist, Trofim Lysenko, in Japan. The institute was approved in 1949 partly because Kihara was able to bridge the gap between the American and Japanese sides. With Kihara’s flexible and generous leadership, Japanese genetics steadily developed, survived the wartime, and recovered quickly in the postwar period. The article discusses Kihara’s interest in cytoplasmic inheritance and his synthetic approach to genetics in this political context, and draws attention to the relation between Kihara’s genetics and agricultural practice in Japan.     

The village clay: recursive innovations and community self-fashioning among Sinhalese potters

Capital-intensive technological change among petty commodity producers is often thought to increase socio-economic and gender differentiation. But among the Sri Lankan potters described here, this appears not to have happened. Instead, the community has harnessed the power of kinship and memory to maintain egalitarian and communitarian values and practices, and sustain a fragile but eminently practical balance between the needs of individual households and the interests of the community they comprise and on which they depend. Building on economist W. Brian Arthur's theories of origination and archaeologist Sander van der Leeuw's work on potter agency, it is argued here that culture and social organization comprise support systems that are as vital as capital to successful technological change.  

Résumé

Le changement technologique à fort investissement de capitaux chez les petits producteurs de marchandises courantes est souvent considéré comme un facteur de renforcement des différenciations socio-économiques et de genre. Il semble pourtant que cela ne soit pas le cas chez les potiers du Sri Lanka décrits ici. Leur communauté sait au contraire exploiter la force de la parenté et de la mémoire pour entretenir des valeurs et pratiques égalitaires et communautaires et maintenir un équilibre, fragile mais éminemment pratique, entre les besoins de chacun des foyers et les intérêts de la communauté qu'ils composent et de laquelle ils dépendent. Sur la base des théories des origines de l'économiste W. Brian Arthur et des travaux de l'archéologue Sander van der Leeuw sur l' agency des potiers, l'auteur affirme que la culture et l'organisation sociale composent des systèmes de soutien qui sont aussi indispensables au changement technologique que les capitaux.     

Karyological Differentiation of Northern Dolly Varden and Sympatric Chars of the Genus <Emphasis Type="Italic">Salvelinus</Emphasis> in Northeastern Russia

In many cases the taxonomic status of sympatric chars (with exception of white-spotted char Salvelinus leucomaenis) is not clear and is actively debated. We karyotyped three pairs of sympatric chars inhabiting the Russian Far East-northern Dolly Varden, S. malma malma, and Lavanidov's char, S. levanidovi, from the Yama River (northern coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, Magadan Region), northern Dolly Varden and Taranetz's char, S. taranetzi, from Lake Achchen (east Chukotka), and northern Dolly Varden and white char, S. albus, from the Kamchatka River (Kamchatka Peninsula). Three of them had similar chromosome numbers. But all chars studied had an individual and discrete set of karyotypic characters, which enabled reliable identification each of them by chromosome number, chromosome arm number, and number and location of active nuclear organizer regions.     

Symbolic Healing of Early Psychosis: Psychoeducation and Sociocultural Processes of Recovery

This article analyzes sociocultural processes of recovery in a Danish mental health service providing two years of integrated biopsychosocial treatment following first-episode psychosis. The study is based on ethnographic research in the service and person-centered involvement with 15 clients. The analysis applies Dow's [1986 American Anthropologist 88:56-69] model of universal components of symbolic healing to elucidate sociocultural aspects of therapeutic efficacy that are alternatively disregarded as placebo or nonspecific effects. It is demonstrated how staff engaged with clients to deliver "psychoeducation" that provided scientific and biomedical theories about mental illness, constituting a shared "mythic world" that was accepted as an experiential truth and used to explain clients' illness experiences. The analysis highlights the need to supplement attention in Dow's model to the healing procedure with consideration of variability in the healing process. Depending on individual responses to the intervention, the staff's professional backgrounds and staff-client relationships different recovery models were applied. One suggested "episodic psychosis" and full recovery, and the other suggested "chronic schizophrenia" and the necessity of comprehensive life adjustments to the mental illness. The recovery models influenced clients' perspectives on illness and self as they engaged in identity work, negotiating future plans and individual life projects by including also alternative systems of explanation from the wider cultural repertoire.     

American oncology and the discourse on hope

From the perspective of medical anthropology and comparative research, American oncology appears as a unique variant of international biomedical culture, particularly when contrasted with oncological practice in societies such as Japan and Italy. Based on interviews with 51 oncologists in Harvard teaching hospitals, this paper argues that American oncological practice draws on distinctive cultural meanings associated with hope and is infused with popular notions about the relationship between psyche and soma, the progressive efficacy of biotechnical interventions, truth-telling, and the nature of the physician-patient relationship.     

Localisation Intracellulaire et Caracterisation de Deux Types de Malate Deshydrogénase chez Trichomonas vaginalis Donné, 1836

RESUME. Deux formes d'activité malate-deshydrogénasique (MDH) ont été séparées après centrifugation en gradient de densité, chez Trichomonas vaginalis: une forme est soluble et l'autre est liée aux "grains denses'cytoplasmiques. Ces 2 MDH (NAD dépendantes) ont des pH d'activité optimale et des constantes de Michaelis différents; on peut les séparer par électrophorèse sur gel d'amidon ou de polyacrylamide (présence d'isoenzymes).
SYNOPSIS. Two forms (isozymes) of malate dehydrogenase (MDH) of Trichomonas vaginalis cells were isolated by centrifugation on sucrose density gradient. One form is located in the soluble fraction and the other is linked to the cytoplasmic "dense granules."
The optimum pH and K _m values are different for the 2, NAD-dependent dehydrogenases, which can be separated by starch or polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis.     

Articulating silences: experiential and biomedical constructions of hypertension symptomatology

In this article, we explore the flexible configuration of a local knowledge system about hypertension symptoms, foregrounding it against prevailing biomedical assertions regarding the asymptomatic or "silent" nature of hypertension. The complex and coherent knowledge system held by older African Americans living in a southern, rural community stands in contrast to the current scientific discourse and local biomedical perspectives on hypertension symptomatology. The older African American participants in this study apply local knowledge of hypertension symptomatology to make health decisions nearly every day. Despite this, most biomedical practitioners maintain a distance from these lay sources of knowledge, often remaining stalwart in their refusal to recognize the existence or influence of symptoms. We conclude that authoritative knowledge ultimately lies in the minds and bodies of the elders, who have encountered symptoms as guideposts that direct action, rather than with a biomedical "reality" that is yet unresolved.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:
NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA: Observaciones sobre la alfareria de los Médanos de Colón. A ntonio S errano. (Memmorias del Museo de Paraná, No. 6, Paraná, 1933.) Las culturas protohistóricas del Este Argentino y Uruguay. A ntonio S errano. (Memorias del Museo de Paraná, No. 7, Paraná, 1933.) La estructura de los túmulos indígenas prehispánicos del Departamento de Guaieguaychú. H éctor G reslebin. (Apartado de la Revista de la Sociedad "Amigos de la Arqueología," Vol. 5, pp. 1–51, Montevideo, 1931.) Dos vasos indígenas—Hallados en Puerto Basilio. H éctor G reslebin.
NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA: Nueva hipótesis sobre el destino de las placas grabadas de la Patagonia prehistórica. H éctor G reslebin. (Physis, Vol. 9, pp. 223–33, Buenos Aires, 1928). Descripción de dos nuevas placas rectangulares grabadas de Patagonia prehispánica. H éctor G reslebin. (Physis, Vol. 10, pp. 8–16, Buenos Aires, 1930.) Instrumental lítico de Patagonia prehispánica. H éctor G reslebin.
NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA: La antigüedad del hombre en la región de Sayape, Provincia de San Luis, República Argentina ( Nota preliminar ). H éctor G reslebin. (Proceedings, Twenty-third International Congress of Americanists, pp. 305–12, New York, 1930). Las llamadas "botijas" o "tinajas" de la Provincia de San Luis ( República Argentina ). H éctor G reslebin. (Physis, Vol. 9, pp. 46–71, Buenos Aires, 1928.) Los "morteritos" de Cerro Varela. H éctor G reslebin.     

Trends and developments in physical anthropology, 1990–91

The 1408 members of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists were surveyed by mail regarding professional background, training deficiencies, opinions regarding areas of future importance to the discipline, and teaching/research specializations. A total of 544 responses (39%) resulted; 71% were from professionals in the United States and 16% were from U.S. students. Survey results are compared to surveys done in 1971 and in 1978, and are broken into three cohorts: pre-1971 Ph.D.s, 1972–1978 Ph.D.s, and post-1979 Ph.D.s. Statistics and anatomy continue to be common training deficiencies across cohorts. Molecular/cell biology and writing are new training deficiencies that reflect contemporary concerns and trends in the discipline. Anatomy, genetics, ecology, and paleontology are still considered important to the future of physical anthropology; statistics, computer science, and the biomedical sciences are also thought to be of importance to its future. The most frequent teaching/research specializations are growth and development, evolutionary biology, and population studies. Genetics and primatology appear to be losing popularity; biomedical anthropology, statistics, and ecology appear to be gaining it. The survey results have implications for the future training of graduate students and for employment opportunities in physical anthropology.