A Guyon's canal ganglion presenting as occupational overuse syndrome: A case report

We report a case of severe weight loss secondary to anorexia nervosa causing bilateral superficial peroneal nerve entrapment in a young female patient who was treated successfully by bilateral surgical decompression.     

The Islam of anthropology

Research on ‘Muslim societies’ is a controversial topic in the present, particularly given the US army’s current employment of anthropological experts in war zones under military occupation. In 2006 the UK Foreign Office, too, sought to include anthropologists in its worldwide research project entitled ‘Combating Terrorism by Countering Radicalization’, with grants given outside the normal process of research funding and differently assessed. In this article, I immodestly argue for how the discipline of anthropology should apprehend and analyse Islam in the present political context. The paper claims that anthropological research provides an antidote to the Islamophobia of much talk about Islam in the Australian public sphere, an Islamophobia originating not only from the right but from some leftists and feminists as well.     

The reality of anthropology

The article concerns the continuity between anthropology and the reality it studies. Discovery and definition merge. This is substantiated by a discussion of ‘events’ and ‘worlds’. While the anthropologist becomes her own informant in the field, in the sense that her experience informs her ethnography, anthropology simultaneously shapes her discoveries. This simultaneity ultimately dissolves the distinction between subject and object, and from this point anthropology may recondition the conditions of science.     

The Etruscans: The physical anthropology of an ancient population

The Etruscans: The physical anthropology of an ancient population     

The anthropology of deep history

The history of anthropology reveals a discipline driven by fission and fusion. In this article I use the framework of deep history as an example of what might be achieved if anthropology resolved to travel the road of fusion rather than continue with atomization. I will illustrate the pathway by examining the fusion of interdisciplinary endeavour that is encapsulated in the concept of a social brain. By placing social life at the heart of the historical process we find common ground for all the fields of anthropology, and beyond to other disciplines. Here anthropologists have the opportunity to set the agenda. The social brain works in deep as well as shallow history. It unites experimental and historical science. And it marks a return to those core principles which Lubbock and the founders of our Institute established.     

The agent is right: when motor embodied cognition is space-dependent

The role of embodied mechanisms in processing sentences endowed with a first person perspective is now widely accepted. However, whether embodied sentence processing within a third person perspective would also have motor behavioral significance remains unknown. Here, we developed a novel version of the Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) in which participants were asked to perform a movement compatible or not with the direction embedded in a sentence having a first person (Experiment 1: You gave a pizza to Louis) or third person perspective (Experiment 2: Lea gave a pizza to Louis). Results indicate that shifting perspective from first to third person was sufficient to prevent motor embodied mechanisms, abolishing the ACE. Critically, ACE was restored in Experiment 3 by adding a virtual "body" that allowed participants to know "where" to put themselves in space when taking the third person perspective, thus demonstrating that motor embodied processes are space-dependent. A fourth, control experiment, by dissociating motor response from the transfer verb's direction, supported the conclusion that perspective-taking may induce significant ACE only when coupled with the adequate sentence-response mapping.     

The anthropology of science part II: Scientific norms and behaviors

A major consequence of seeing science as a cultural activity is the ability to distinguish formally between the normative and expressed behaviors of scientists. Science progresses often in spite of the constraints and conflicting goals imposed on scientists; therefore studying science and studying scientists are not equivalent. Nevertheless, what scientists do is a starting point for understanding how science functions in modern society. The eugenics movement of the 1920s provides a paradigmatic example of how science is invoked as cultural authority, and of the importance in distinguishing among good science, bad science, and pseudo-science. While this may be easy in retrospect, retrospect is too late. Straddling the sciences and humanities, anthropology is situated in a unique position to mediate the “culture wars,” by analyzing both the boundaries of science itself and the activities of scientists in society.