Book Reviews*

Book Reviewed in this article Outline of a Theory of Practice. Pierre Bourdieu. Richard Nice Evolution and Ecology: Essays on Social Transformation. Edited by Julian H. Steward, Jane C. Steward and Robert F. Murphy Urban Anthropology: The Cross-Cultural Study of Complex Societies. Richard Basham The Economic Status of Australian Aborigines. Jon C. Altman and John Nieuwenhuysen ‘Whitefella Business’: Aborigines in Australian Politics. Edited by Michael C. Howard Aborigines and Change: Australia in the Seventies. Edited by R. M. Berndt Kulinma: Listening to Aboriginal Australians. H. C. Coombs Taim Bilong Mani: The Evolution of Agriculture in a Solomon Island Society. John Connell Agricultural Project Design and Evaluation in an Island Community. Alan Bollard. Zum Beispiel Samoa. Götz Mackensen Peasants and Politics: Grass Roots Reaction to Change in Asia. Edited by D. B. Miller. Edward Arnold Sherpas Through Their Ritual. Sherry B Code and Custom in a Thai Provincial Court. David M. Engel Thailand: A Rice-Growing Society. Edited by Yoneo Ishii Migrants of the Mountains: The Cultural Ecology of the Blue Miao (Hmong Njua) of Thailand. William Robert Geddes Farmers in the Forest: Economic Development and Marginal Agriculture in Northern Thailand. Edited by Peter Kunstadter, E. C. Chapman and Sanga Sabhasri Early Palaeolithic in South and East Asia. Edited by Fumiko Ikawa-Smith Advances In Andean Archaeology. Edited by David L. Browman Simulation Studies in Archaeology. Edited by Ian Hodder Evolutionary Models and Studies in Human Diversity. Edited by Robert J. Meier Aboriginal Sign Languages of the Americas and Australia Principles of Visual Anthropology. Edited by Paul Hockings Tiv Song. Charles Keil Coyoteway. A Navajo Holyway Healing Ceremonial. Karl W. Luckert Spider Woman Stories: Legends of the Hopi Indians. Selected and Interpreted by G. M. Mullett Folklore in the Modern World. Edited by Richard Dorson     

Cultural Encounters and Emergent Cultures in Australia

Warlpiri Dreamings and Histories: Newly Recorded Stories from the Aboriginal Elders of Central Australia . Kerry Brown and Sima Sharma.
Fighting Women: Anger and Aggression in Aboriginal Australia . Victoria Katherine Burbank.
A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being . Tony Swain.     

The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America

The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America. Jon Michael Spencer. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 169 pp.     

Adventures in the Bone Trade: The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression

Adventures in the Bone Trade: The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression. Jon Kalb. New York: Copernicus Books, 2001. 389 pp.     

The Prehistory of Food: Appetites for Change.

The Prehistory of Food: Appetites for Change. Chris Gosden and Jon Hather. eds. New York: Routledge, 1999. 523 pp.     

The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917

The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917. Jon Gjerde. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. 426 pp.     

Re-Searching Black Music

Re-Searching Black Music. Jon Michael Spencer. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996. 154 pp.     

Meanings of Violence: A Cross Cultural Perspective.

Meanings of Violence:. Cross Cultural Perspective. Göran Aijmer and Jon Abbink. eds. New York: New York University Press, 2000. 256 pp.     

Incidence and Prevalence of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease among Aboriginal Peoples in Alberta,Canada

Background

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a major respiratory disorder, largely caused by smoking that has been linked with large health inequalities worldwide. There are important gaps in our knowledge about how COPD affects Aboriginal peoples. This retrospective cohort study assessed the epidemiology of COPD in a cohort of Aboriginal peoples relative to a non-Aboriginal cohort.

Methods

We used linkage of administrative health databases in Alberta (Canada) from April 1, 2002 to March 31, 2010 to compare the annual prevalence, and the incidence rates of COPD between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cohorts aged 35 years and older. Poisson regression models adjusted the analysis for important sociodemographic factors.

Results

Compared to a non-Aboriginal cohort, prevalence estimates of COPD from 2002 to 2010 were 2.3 to 2.4 times greater among Registered First Nations peoples, followed by the Inuit (1.86 to 2.10 times higher) and the Métis (1.59 to 1.67 times higher). All Aboriginal peoples had significantly higher COPD incidence rates than the non-Aboriginal group (incidence rate ratio [IRR]: 2.1; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.97, 2.27). COPD incidence rates were higher in First Nation peoples (IRR: 2.37; 95% CI: 2.19, 2.56) followed by Inuit (IRR: 1.92; 95% CI: 1.64, 2.25) and Métis (IRR: 1.49; 95% CI: 1.32, 1.69) groups.

Conclusions

We found a high burden of COPD among Aboriginal peoples living in Alberta; a province with the third largest Aboriginal population in Canada. Altogether, the three Aboriginal peoples groups have higher prevalence and incidence of COPD compared to a non-Aboriginal cohort. The condition affects the three Aboriginal groups differently; Registered First Nations and Inuit have the highest burden of COPD. Reasons for these differences should be further explored within a framework of social determinants of health to help designing interventions that effectively influence modifiable COPD risk factors in each of the Aboriginal groups.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
Jane McGary, Bulbs of North America
E. Charles Nelson, The Virtues of Herbs of Master Jon Gardener
Peter Willis, Charles Bridgeman and the English Landscape Garden
William T. Stearn, The Genus Epimedium and other herbaceous Berberidaceae     

Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond; New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere

Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond. Walter Armbrust. ed. Berkeley. University of California Press, 2000. 378 pp.
New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere. Dale Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson. eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. 213 pp.     

Aborigines and Tin Mining in North Queensland: A Case Study in the Anthropology of Contact History

Much of the 'new history'of Aboriginal contact with Europeans in Australia lacks an adequate socio-cultural understanding of Aboriginal society and its diversity. Attempts to produce overall models of contact have obscured, too, the diversity of European activity and its impact. The outcome has been too hollow and passive a view of Aboriginal responses to Australian colonial situations. The aim of the present paper is to examine, from an anthropological perspective, a particular contact relationship: tin-mining and Kuku-Nyungkul Aborigines in southeast Cape York Peninsula, north Queensland, between 1885 and 1940. Iargue that it is only through such case studies that we can gain adequate insight into Aboriginal perspective' on colonial history.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
Die Unambal: Ein Stamm in Nordwest-Australien . A ndreas L ommel
Adam in Ochre: Inside Aboriginal Australia . C olin S impson
Djanggawul: An Aboriginal Religious Cult of North-eastern Arnhem Land . R onald M. B erndt
The First Australians . R onald M. B erndt and C atherine H. B erndt
Arnhem Land: Its History and Its People . R onald M. B erndt and C atherine H. B erndt     

Categories of race: technologies of knowing and governing Australian aborigines†

This article documents the first decades of the work of the Aboriginal Protection Board in Victoria, Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, as it oversees the establishment of mission stations to gather up Aboriginal peoples and provide protection from settler violence. It augments existing accounts of white settler governance of Aboriginal peoples by examining the social and historical conditions for the emergence of separations and distinctions between Aboriginal peoples through shifting governmental versions of the ‘Aboriginal problem’. The production of race-based categories of persons is highlighted in the State's management of the Aboriginal children through the mission systems and their effects on Aboriginal ties to community and identity.     

Film Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
Emu Ritual at Ruguri. Filmed in 1966 and 1967 by R oger S andall , for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies with N icholas P eterson as consultant.
Walbiri Ritual at Ngama. Filmed in 1966 by R oger S andall , for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies with N icholas P eterson as consultant.     

The tail of the cardiac sodium channel

Addendum to: Human Heart Failure Is Associated With Abnormal C-Terminal Splicing Variants in the Cardiac Sodium Channel Lijuan L. Shang, Arnold E. Pfahnl, Shamarendra Sanyal, Zhe Jiao, Jon Allen, Kathrin Banach, John Fahrenbach, Daiana Weiss, W. Robert Taylor, A. Maziar Zafari, Samuel C. Dudley, Jr Circulation Research. 2007;101:1146.     

Unstable relations: a critical appraisal of indigeneity and environmentalism in contemporary Australia

The 1970s witnessed the emergence of a protest‐based environmental movement in Australia. We outline here the history of the unstable meeting of environmentalism and Aboriginal interests, before turning to Marcia Langton's recent critique of the progressive ‘green left’ in Australia. 1 We summarise Langton's argument: environmentalists would deny Aboriginal groups the benefits that flow from native title‐related agreements; environmentalists live at luxurious distance from the realities of remote and rural Aboriginal poverty and social problems; environmentalists exalt ‘noble savages’. We critique these claims on the basis that they pay inadequate attention to the structural inequities that underpin the market in native title interests and, further, deny the reality that Aboriginal groups often seek to form strategic alliances with green groups, arguing for conservation of their country on their own—or shared—terms. We argue that any appraisal of the present status of ‘green‐black’ relations needs to consider these factors seriously.     

On the Notion of Aboriginality: A Discussion

In the April 1984 Mankind we published a paper by S. J. Thiele entitled `Anti-intellectualism and the “Aboriginal Problem”: Colin Tatz and the “Self Determination” Approach‘ (Vol. 14:165–178). In December 1984 a reply from Colin Tatz appeared (Mankind 14:401–3). We asked a number of specialists in Aboriginal studies to comment on the views expressed in these two contributions: the five responses received appear in the following pages. Thiele and Tatz have added their reflections. (Ed.).     

Incidence and causes of end-stage renal disease among Aboriginal children and young adults

Background:

Although Aboriginal adults have a higher risk of end-stage renal disease than non-Aboriginal adults, the incidence and causes of end-stage renal disease among Aboriginal children and young adults are not well described.

Methods:

We calculated age- and sex-specific incidences of end-stage renal disease among Aboriginal people less than 22 years of age using data from a national organ failure registry. Incidence rate ratios were used to compare rates between Aboriginal and white Canadians. To contrast causes of end-stage renal disease by ethnicity and age, we calculated the odds of congenital diseases, glomerulonephritis and diabetes for Aboriginal people and compared them with those for white people in the following age strata: 0 to less than 22 years, 22 to less than 40 years, 40 to less than 60 years and older than 60 years.

Results:

Incidence rate ratios of end-stage renal disease for Aboriginal children and young adults (age < 22 yr, v. white people) were 1.82 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.40–2.38) for boys and 3.24 (95% CI 2.60–4.05) for girls. Compared with white people, congenital diseases were less common among Aboriginal people aged less than 22 years (odds ratio [OR] 0.56, 95% CI 0.36–0.86), and glomerulonephritis was more common (OR 2.18, 95% CI 1.55–3.07). An excess of glomerulonephritis, but not diabetes, was seen among Aboriginal people aged 22 to less than 40 years. The converse was true (higher risk of diabetes, lower risk of glomerulonephritis) among Aboriginal people aged 40 years and older.

Interpretation:

The incidence of end-stage renal disease is higher among Aboriginal children and young adults than among white children and young adults. This higher incidence may be driven by an increased risk of glomerulonephritis in this population.Compared with white Canadians, Aboriginal Canadians have a higher prevalence of end-stage renal disease,^1,2 which is generally attributed to their increased risk for diabetes. However, there has been limited investigation of the incidence and causes of end-stage renal disease among Aboriginal children and young adults. Because most incident cases of diabetes are identified in middle-aged adults, an excess risk of end-stage renal disease in young people would not be expected if the high risk of diabetes is responsible for higher overall rates of end-stage renal disease among Aboriginal people. About 12.3% of children with end-stage renal disease in Canada are Aboriginal,³ but only 6.1% of Canadian children (age < 19 yr) are Aboriginal.^4,5A few reports suggest that nondiabetic renal disease is common among Aboriginal populations in North America.^2,6–8 Aboriginal adults in Saskatchewan are twice as likely as white adults to have end-stage renal disease caused by glomerulonephritis,^7,8 and an increased rate of mesangial proliferative glomerulonephritis has been reported among Aboriginal people in the United States.^6,9 These studies suggest that diabetes may be a comorbid condition rather than the sole cause of kidney failure among some Aboriginal people in whom diabetic nephropathy is diagnosed using clinical features alone.We estimated incidence rates of end-stage renal disease among Aboriginal children and young adults in Canada and compared them with the rates seen among white children and young adults. In addition, we compared relative odds of congenital renal disease, glomerulonephritis and diabetic nephropathy in Aboriginal people with the relative odds of these conditions in white people.