Adivasis,Communists, and the rise of indigenism in Kerala

Although the notion of the ‘adivasi’ has come under academic scrutiny and the ‘dark side’ of indigeneity discourses is increasingly criticized, there has been relatively little attention to the question of why, under adverse circumstances, activists have nevertheless started articulating their political program in the language of adivasi-ness while surpassing the particularistic politics of earlier tribal movements. Explaining the emergence of indigenist politics as a new democratic force is all the more pertinent for the case of Kerala since this state has the Communist movement as an obvious alternative for the articulation of such a transformative political agenda. This article therefore seeks to explore the forces that gave rise to the politics of indigenism. It begins with a discussion of shifts in the structural power context shaping subaltern activism in Kerala—particularly the impact of neoliberal restructuring and the new ideological environment created with the demise of the Communist block. The paper then moves to consider the political dynamics operating within this structural context that led indigenist activists to form a separate political movement. It looks particularly at the sense of both ideological and material disillusionment these activists feel toward the Communist party in Kerala.     

Species-specific probe,based on 18S rDNA sequence,could be used for identification of the mucilage producer microalga <Emphasis Type="Italic">Gonyaulax fragilis</Emphasis> (Dinophyta)

Brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) in Appalachia experience prolonged periods of poor feeding conditions, particularly during summer and fall. To determine which prey organisms are important in sustaining brook trout populations, we monitored the feeding patterns of a population of brook trout over the course of 2 years with an emphasis on seasonal change. We employed a bioenergetics model to estimate whether or not each fish had obtained enough energy to meet daily metabolic demand. As a result, qualitative comparisons between fish feeding above maintenance ration (successfully feeding fish) and fish feeding below maintenance ration (unsuccessfully feeding fish) were possible. With the exception of winter, brook trout derived significantly more energy from terrestrial organisms than aquatic organisms. During each season, successfully feeding brook trout fed on greater proportions of specific prey types. Terrestrial Coleoptera and Lepidoptera consistently proved to be important prey during warmer seasons, while large organisms such as vertebrates and crayfish appeared to be important during winter. Our findings suggest that terrestrial organisms are more important than aquatic organisms in sustaining brook trout populations. Further, certain large and abundant terrestrial taxa are critical in providing energy to brook trout.     

From "Rights" to "Ritual": AIDS Activism in South Africa

In this article, I investigate how the moral politics of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa is contributing toward new forms of citizenship that are concerned with both rights-based struggles and with creating collectively shared meanings of the extreme experiences of illness and stigmatization of individual HIV/AIDS sufferers. I argue that it is precisely the extremity of the "near death" experiences of full-blown AIDS, and the profound stigma and "social death" associated with the later stages of the disease, that produce the conditions for HIV/AIDS survivors' commitment to "new life" and social activism. It is the activist mediation and retelling of these traumatic experiences that facilitates HIV/AIDS activist commitment and grassroots mobilization. It is also the profound negativity of stigma and social death that animates the activist's construction of a new positive HIV-positive identity and understanding of what it means to be a citizen–activist and member of a social movement.     

“世博”背景下上海经济与环境的耦合演化

综合运用社会经济统计与环境监测数据,揭示了"世博"背景下,上海城市内部经济发展和环境保护关系的耦合演化特征。结果发现,2002-2010年各区县经济差异明显扩大。在总体差异中,主要表现为主城区内部和郊区内部差异,主城区和郊区间的差异较小;2006年后,主城区内部差异贡献进一步增加,郊区内部差异贡献开始下降,但各区环境质量有明显改善。2006年和2010年经济环境耦合关系都满足环境库兹涅兹曲线规律,但2010年拐点处的经济水平与环境质量都明显优于2006年,各区县分布格局差异较大。研究揭示了经济结构调整与全球化、多层次城市规划体系以及世博会影响是区域经济差异及环境库兹涅茨曲线演化的主要驱动因素。建议快速发展的城市应该加速产业转型升级、发挥产业布局与城市规划作用、抓住举办城市重大活动机遇,优化经济环境耦合关系,实现城市的可持续发展。     

Medicaid and the Mainstream: Reassessment in the Context of the Taxpayer Revolt

California''s Medicaid program—Medi-Cal—attempted to implement the ideal of mainstream medical care for the poor by giving program beneficiaries a “credit card” for use in the private health care marketplace. This exposed the program to the perverse economic incentives of the fee-for-service, costplus health care system, and contributed to a high rate of increase in program costs. Attempts to control costs have been equally perverse, resulting in low payment rates, the second-guessing of physician professional judgments, the probing of medical and fiscal records, and the use of computerized surveillance systems.Attempts to shift to the use of more efficient delivery systems have had small success. Attempts to attain cost containment through restructuring the Medi-Cal program have been rejected in the name of the mainstream ideal. Costs have continued to escalate, with annual increases as high as 20 percent in some years. Medi-Cal now costs $4 billion per year, the largest single program in California state government.The taxpayer revolt in California is creating a fiscal crisis that will force rethinking of the premises of publicly funded health care for the poor, and a restructuring of strategies for reaching that objective. In the short run, it appears that the issue may not be whether the indigent will have access to mainstream medical care, but whether they will have access to any medical care. In the longer run, the crisis should represent an opportunity for building a system of health care that can serve the financially disadvantaged at a cost tolerable to our society.     

From the Ground, Looking Up: Report on the Video nas Aldeias Tour

ABSTRACT  This report compares two recent media events centered on the iconography of Amazonian indigenous peoples to highlight the cultural activism of the collaborative video project, Video nas Aldeias. [Keywords: Amazonia, Video nas Aldeias, indigenous media, cultural activism]     

Focus: Health Equity: Lung Disease in Central Appalachia: It’s More than Coal Dust that Drives Disparities

The population living in Central Appalachia is disproportionately impacted by lung disease. This is driven, in part, by occupational hazards and environmental exposures. However, it is more than coal dust that is driving the ongoing disparity of lung disease in the region. This review describes how the decline of the coal mine industry and subsequent rise of unemployment, poverty, and educational disparities have increased risk for worse pulmonary health outcomes in the region. Additional challenges related to healthcare access, substance use, cultural characteristics, and social capital are highlighted in their relation to pulmonary health within Central Appalachia. Lastly, the review describes strategies that hold promise to reduce regional health disparities. Several healthcare and community-centered initiatives are highlighted as successful examples of collaborative efforts working towards improving pulmonary health outcomes in the region. However, significant challenges related to social, economic, and environmental factors remain. Addressing these social determinants of health must be a paramount concern for healthcare, community and political leaders seeking to impact change and improve the health and well-being of this vulnerable population.     

Rethinking Europe, (anti-)austerity and political behaviour

Leah Bassel and Akwugo Emejulu’s Minority Women and Austerity offers an important and much needed contribution to discussions on austerity, social movements, race and gender in Europe. Centring their analysis of the interplay between the 2008 economic crisis and activism in Europe on minority women and using a critical race studies and a black feminist epistemological framework, they make a bold epistemological move since, as the authors extensively demonstrate, European political racelessness renders intersectional claims and activism invisible, inaudible and illegitimate, while dominant social movement theories tend to ignore important forms of collective action that minority women develop. Thanks to their epistemological and analytical framework, their qualitative study, although limited to three national contexts, offers a lot of room for thinking both generalization and differentiation across and beyond their case-studies. Bassel and Emejulu’s work will thus certainly be inspiring for scholars working on similar issues in other European countries.     

"Change yourself and the whole world will become kinder": Russian activists for reproductive health and the limits of claims making for women

This article views reproductive health activism as a fruitful site for analyzing the cultural logics through which legitimate claims for women's needs become expressed and circumscribed. It begins from the observation that in the United States and Britain, reproductive health has been a key arena for feminist political claims and struggles for women's rights, bodily integrity, access to health care, and demands for authority in relations with experts. These concerns and struggles have not, however, emerged in all postsocialist contexts, and new activism in Russia reveals strikingly different agendas. Innovative groups of health providers seeking to increase women's access to birth control methods and safe sex, home birth opportunities, and improved health services work outside of feminist perspectives and reject political paths for change. By examining the ideological inspirations, cultural logics, and political-economic constraints shaping the outreach work of Russian health practitioners, the article explains how and why health activism became a site for personal "spiritual" revival and the strengthening of nuclear families. It also explores how conditions following the collapse of socialism have further legitimized activists' rejection of political agendas for change.     

Activism,Bioethics and Academic Research

This article sketches a taxonomy of the activities in which bioethics academics engage, including activities that may make their own research more impactful, from little or no engagement outside academia to activism or extreme activism. This taxonomy, the first of its kind, may be useful in determining what obligations bioethics academics have in relation to activism and activities that fall short of activism.     

Bioethicists to the Barricades!

In this article I begin with an anecdote as a way of exploring just exactly what activism entails. Are we talking about the kind of activism every citizen ought to engage in? Should we confine our topic to activism in health care settings? Just what is activism anyway, and how much and what kind ought bioethicists to engage in? Finally, I consider the possibility that it’s perfectly permissible for bioethicists not to be activists of any kind.     

Poverty,Disease, and the Ecology of Complex Systems

Understanding why some human populations remain persistently poor remains a significant challenge for both the social and natural sciences. The extremely poor are generally reliant on their immediate natural resource base for subsistence and suffer high rates of mortality due to parasitic and infectious diseases. Economists have developed a range of models to explain persistent poverty, often characterized as poverty traps, but these rarely account for complex biophysical processes. In this Essay, we argue that by coupling insights from ecology and economics, we can begin to model and understand the complex dynamics that underlie the generation and maintenance of poverty traps, which can then be used to inform analyses and possible intervention policies. To illustrate the utility of this approach, we present a simple coupled model of infectious diseases and economic growth, where poverty traps emerge from nonlinear relationships determined by the number of pathogens in the system. These nonlinearities are comparable to those often incorporated into poverty trap models in the economics literature, but, importantly, here the mechanism is anchored in core ecological principles. Coupled models of this sort could be usefully developed in many economically important biophysical systems—such as agriculture, fisheries, nutrition, and land use change—to serve as foundations for deeper explorations of how fundamental ecological processes influence structural poverty and economic development.     

京津唐城市生态系统能值比较

运用能值(emergy)分析方法,以京津冀地区的北京、天津、唐山为研究对象,建立了复合生态系统与可持续发展的能值指标,对3个城市1991～2005年自然环境与社会经济可持续发展状况进行了比较分析.研究结果表明:1991～2005年期间,由于北京、天津的本地资源能值对经济发展的驱动力不足,城市发展对外部输入能值的依赖程度越来越高;北京、天津、唐山社会子系统的能值指标均呈上升趋势,城市居民生活水平和经济发展水平不断提高;北京经济子系统的各项指标均优于天津和唐山,但环境子系统和能值可持续指标体现出,北京的环境压力最大、可持续发展能力低于天津和唐山.在此分析基础上,对北京、天津、唐山的可持续发展提出了几点建议,为制定城市发展策略和产业调整提供科学依据.     

The Social Life of Rights: ‘Gender Antagonism’, Modernity and Raet in Vanuatu

In the northern Vanuatu town of Luganville a small group of men have responded to social and legal changes engendered by women's rights activists by forming a male support group called ‘Violence Against Men’. Members of this ‘backlash’ movement argue that the insidious promotion of Western‐style ‘women's rights’ is leading to discrimination against men in divorce proceedings, child custody battles, and in domestic violence and rape cases. They directly oppose recent and ongoing legal changes aimed at protecting women from domestic violence, such as Domestic Violence Protection Court Orders, and the repeatedly tabled (but long‐delayed) ‘Family Protection Bill’. Such interventions, they argue, undermine Vanuatu's ‘natural’kastom and Christian patriarchal gender order and, in doing so, pose a serious threat to the socio‐economic productivity of the nation‐state. For other men, however, rather than opposing women's rights activism, such challenges have raised questions about how men might successfully negotiate their identities in ways that are sensitive to contemporary issues of gender equality without undermining existing paradigms. Thus, this paper addresses the value accorded to universalism and relativism in gender activism in Vanuatu, and especially in terms of the linked discourses of kastom, church and modernity. It therefore explores gender relations in terms of the contemporary entanglement of indigenous and exogenous epistemologies, and in doing so argues that the contextual analysis of ‘rights’ should consider the specific historical, political and socio‐cultural circumstances in which they are put to use.     

Beyond State Collapse: Rural History, Raised Fields, and Pastoralism in the South Andes

The underlying rhythms of peasant society play an important role in shaping rural traditions in the wake of political collapse. Such a view has been a prominent theme in rural history since its bold development by French historian Marc Bloch in the 1930s, and it has a valuable role to play in contemporary anthropology and in the framing of current theory on state collapse. As state societies never collapse completely, nor equally in all their parts, it is the tenacity of rural society for survival that helps explain the restructuring of earlier state-level systems in a post-state setting. The view taken here is that social evolution is not just a "top-down" phenomenon, but also a "bottom-up" development, wherein rural society develops a new means of coping with emerging economic problems after state demise. The specific case examined is the continued construction and use of raised fields in the Lake Titicaca basin after the collapse of the Tiwanaku state. Raised fields, a highly productive technology geared toward high annual yields, continued to be built into the Late Intermediate period of the South Andes. One must ask why such a technology was implemented in the wake of state collapse and urban life. The answer posed here is that raised fields were a means of subsidizing pastoralism in the region of Lake Titicaca, and that post-state economic restructuring, which occurred collectively, voluntarily, and within the context of reciprocal kin relations, was aimed at maintaining camelid wealth.     

Restructuring and Health in Canadian Coastal Communities

Environmental and socioeconomic restructuring has had profound consequences for coastal communities in Canada. The decline of traditional resource-based industries—fisheries, forestry, and mining—and the emergence of new economic activities, such as tourism and aquaculture, compounded by concurrent shifts in social programs, have affected the health of environments, communities, and people. Drawing on research conducted as part of the interdisciplinary major collaborative research initiative Coasts Under Stress, we examined the implications of interactive restructuring for the health of people and communities on Canada’s east and west coasts. The research is guided by a socioecological framework that identifies the pathways from interactive restructuring through health determinants to health risks and health outcomes. The utility of the proposed framework is exemplified by a specific place-based example in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and a case-based example from coastal communities in Newfoundland and Labrador. A focus on interactive restructuring draws our attention to the many challenges associated with promoting health in a context of rapid and often accelerating environmental and institutional change that is relevant to other areas and contexts.     

Anthropology,Politics and the Changing World of Aboriginal Australians

Essentialism has become a fundament of Aboriginal activism in modern Australia, with the result that informed, first-hand empirical observations of anthropologists who chronicle the deterioration of life in many Australian Aboriginal communities tend not to be taken seriously simply because their authors are not ethnically ‘Aboriginal’. This problem has contributed to a relative absence of analysis of the economic history of Aboriginal Australians, fostering instead an approach that prioritises the political and cultural rights of indigenous people above the kinds of life-enhancing circumstances that are necessary for them to participate in the economy and create wealth. This kind of essentialism has also resulted in a disregard for the rights of indigenous people as individuals, rather than as communities seeking self-determination, especially with regard to the rights of women and children. The work of Professor Ronald M. Berndt and Dr Catherine Berndt should serve as an example for today's anthropologists in encouraging broader expert participation in debates on indigenous disadvantage, despite the threat of admonishment or criticism by Aboriginal rights activists wielding the weapon of racial priority or essentialism.     

Whose crisis counts? Intersectionality,austerity and the politics of survival

Foregrounding the voices of minority women in England, Scotland and France, Minority Women and Austerity provides a rich and compelling account of austerity’s lived effects. Through its intersectional analyses and historically attendant frame, the book locates minority women’s experiences of austerity not as fundamentally “new” but rather as an extension and sharpening of conditions of “routinized crisis” and inequality. In doing so it compels its readers to ask: whose crisis counts? In this review paper, I summarize the book’s key contributions. In particular, I discuss the book’s theorizations of “political racelessness” to critique the erasure of minority women’s experiences and activism. I reflect on what this means for those researching austerity and its deleterious effects, and for those participating in anti-austerity activism. I end by discussing the analytical tools that the book offers for interrogating the Left’s response to on-going austerity within a post-Brexit Britain.     

Ectomycorrhizal characterization of an American chestnut <Emphasis Type="SmallCaps">(</Emphasis><Emphasis Type="Italic">Castanea dentata</Emphasis><Emphasis Type="SmallCaps">)</Emphasis>-dominated community in Western Wisconsin

Circa 1900, a farmer from the eastern US planted 11 American chestnut (Castanea dentata) seeds on a newly established farm near West Salem in western Wisconsin. These trees were very successful, producing a large stand of over 6,000 trees. Since this area is well outside the natural range of chestnut, these trees remained free from chestnut blight until 1987. In the West Salem stand, chestnuts are the dominant species of a mixed forest community, reminiscent of the chestnut–oak ecosystems of pre-1900 Appalachia. To identify putative mycorrhizal associates of chestnut in this unique forest, our approach was twofold: (1) an extensive fruiting body survey was conducted for four seasons that yielded approximately 100 putative mycorrhizal species and (2) a belowground molecular approach was used to generate DNA sequences of the internal transcribed spacer region from ectomycorrhizae. Unexpectedly, chestnut did not appear to be the dominant underground ectomycorrhizal-forming plant species. This study highlights the need to identify the plant host species when conducting belowground molecular-based surveys and provides preliminary identification of ectomycorrhizal fungi associated with a disjunct stand of American chestnut. Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

‘There are no chickens in suicide vests’: the decoupling of human rights and animal rights in Israel

In this article, I consider the shifting politics of animal rights activism in Israel in relation to human rights activism. I find that whereas in the past, human and animal rights activism were tightly linked, today they have become decoupled, for reasons I explore in this article. Although human and animal rights activism once shared social and ideological foundations in Israeli society, today much of the current animal rights activism is assertive and explicit in its disregard for human rights issues, such as the ongoing occupation of Palestine and the treatment of Palestinians. This decoupling has been heightened by the appropriation of animal rights politics by a right‐wing state for the purposes of ethical legitimation. This article considers the dilemmas of ethical responsibilities towards humans and animals as it plays out in one of the most vexed political environments in the world. I consider the shifting politics of human and animal rights activism, and demonstrate how they implicate and entangle each other in the context of the ongoing Israeli‐Palestinian conflict. I further consider what the decoupling of the human and animal rights movements might suggest regarding the ongoing academic critique of human rights and humanism.